[Sotff] Some questions about the Diaspora book

[Kenneth Coble]

On Thu, Jun 4, 2009 at 12:24 PM, Brad Murray<bjmurray.halfjack at gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm delighted by this for a lot of reasons. Cluster creation is one of
> the chapters we are considering as the free "demo pages" to put up
> ASAP. It stands alone and is hackable to other games (I've already
> heard of someone using a variation to build an abstracted fantasy
> realm connecting city states with trade routes).

I think it's a great idea to break this portion of the rules out for
the demo - as you said, it makes it's own little mini-game, and
building a cluster myself has been fun (I imagine it's even more
engaging with an actual play group).  And like the fantasy-tuned
example you cite, it's a nice, elegant mechanism you could adapt to a
lot of gaming worlds. Using this system to crank out Gibson-esque
'Matrix Nodes' come immediately to mind, with the three stats to be
generated as, say:

1) Legality, ranging from 'aboveboard' public databases to a Yakuza data-haven
2) 'Value,' a nebulous criteria that I wish I had a better name for,
that governs the potential reward to the PCs for being able to crack
the system (either in 'storyline' terms or in simple resale/fenced
value)
3) Lethality, which covers the strength and danger level of the node's
defenses - which can run the gamut from leaving your password
defaulted to 'password,' to 'king-hell ICE, black as the grave and
slick as glass' and radio-dispatched cyberninja hit teams complete
with wargibbons.

[0,0,0] would be the local mall mainframe, or something else prosaic.
[4,4,4] would be something like the design team for the USAF's new
vacuum-adapted bioroid program; totally above-board, worth billions,
and defended by legally-sanctioned black ICE and the Pentagon's tame
sociopathic AIs as well as FCC/Secret Service tactical response teams.
A result like [-4,-4,4] would be an interesting one: how do you get
something totally illegal, brutally defended, and utterly worthless to
the PCs to make narrative sense? Maybe something like the system Bobby
Newmark gets conned into making a run on in "Count Zero:"

"What he does, he picks a base out in the Midwest that's
full of tax-dodge programs and yen-laundry flowcharts for
some whorehouse in Kansas City, and everybody who didn't
just fall off a tree knows that the motherfucker is eyeball-deep
in ice, black ice, totally lethal feedback programs There isn't
a cowboy in the Sprawl or out who'd mess with that base.
first, because it's dripping with defenses; second, because the
stuff inside isn't worth anything to anybody but the IRS, and
they're probably already on the owner's take."

The only edge cases I'm worried about are stuff that's like [x,4,-4] -
I can come up with one or two story-driven reasons why the PC's would
consider themselves hugely rewarded by something that's a total
walkover to snatch, but a whole slew of them would be hard to explain
away - presumably I could come up with a rule modifier like in the
Cluster rules where we push two planets up to Tech 2 if need be?
Maybe and option that if Value is more than 2 points higher than the
Lethality level, you can either push the Lethality up or pull the
Value down?  That feels like a kludge, but I'm too tired to refine it
at the moment.

In any event, here's a more random example: using an online FUDGE dice
roller, I just got a -1, 3, 2 result; fleshing it out we can describe
it as:
-a semi-illegal corporate espionage system (Legality -1), containing
stolen beta-test versions of their competitor's entire nerveware
upgrade line for next season; this could be worth a small fortune and
is commensurately well-defended (Value 3).  The ICE is standard corp
issue and totally legal, but the corp has a meatspace investigative
team assigned to follow up on intrusions off-line.

But it just as easily could have been:
-a street-level infobroker's 'drop box' (Legality -1), which happens
to contain this week's address for the mobile puppet-shack where the
PC's main antagonist gets his jollies and will therefore be easy to
blackmail/assassinate (Value 3); there's some pretty ugly ICE on the
box - even some war-surplus neurological hax - but the broker doesn't
have the resources to chase people down IRL (Lethality 2).

Now do this 8 or 10 times, include the connection rolls, and you've
got a nice little Matrix 'neighborhood' for your
netrunner/decker/whatsis to sleaze around in, complete with network
paths!

Again, it's such a clean little mechanic, it seems like it would lend
itself to lots of similar stuff, whenever you want to come up with a
set of 'units' (be they planets, or nations, or gangs, whatever) and a
web of relationships (physical, political, interpersonal) between
them!  I keep going on about it I guess, but it really is quite nice.
And again, in its originally presented form, it does a really nice job
of helping spark some really interesting thoughts about the planets
you come up with for your cluster.  I've still got access to my
old-school play group (or the two members who still live nearby,
hehe), and I think this will be an easy sell to them both when it
comes out.  I'm going to start preliminary propagandizing now, though,
to be safe....

PS: I just realized how long this is, and how it's only tangentially
related to Diaspora.  If this is going too far afield from the point
of the mailing list let me know, I certainly don't want to wear out my
welcome here or spam the list with stuff that's off-point.  I'm just
enthused about this project, and this bit of it in particular has lent
itself to me fiddling with it for the past few days!