The military should show up more often in cyberpunk settings/games. There's something really cool about corporation lackeys or street thugs getting BTFO by a whole other level of tech>but cyberpunk is about when the government is weakYeah but there's still going to be some kind of military and they ARE going to be way ahead 99% of corporations.
>they ARE going to be way ahead 99% of corporationsIn Cyberpunk world?
>>96533216CP2020 has umpteen rules, vehicles and pieces of equipment for that
>>96533216>Yeah but there's still going to be some kind of military and they ARE going to be way ahead 99% of corporations.Not even remotely true.
>>96533216>military shows up>have far better tech and training>party wipe before anyone can actYes, very cool and fun.
>>96533216>but cyberpunk is about when the government is weakI get this is a big premise of the genre, but I also get the impression that some reject every twist on it and I don't get that.What about a setting where the government and the corporations are in a cold war, for instance? That would still imply the government is weak enough, relative to the corporations, to be threatened by them.And what about a "state capitalism" cyberpunk setting, where the state does control everything but functionally works like a corporation rather than like a state?To be clear, I don't doubt such variants must already exist if you look deep enough, but what I'm curious about is how you can argue for orthodoxy when it's about a "-punk" setting - and when the twist that is offered still implies an oppressive system to criticize anyway.
>>96533231You live in a cyberpunk world. Who would you rather get in a gun fight with - the Pinkertons or Marine recon?
>>96533216Deploying the military against a domestic, civilian target? Don't worry about the corpo's security goons, do worry about their legal department.>>96533312>You live in a cyberpunk world.So memes like that and "military heckin cool" is all you have behind this? How surprised I'm not.
>>96533216Isnt that a thing anymore in the current version? Half the fun of the old Cyberpunk games I used to play was getting away with shit all sneaky like without getting identified by the WAY more powerful corporations and authorities/military. we blended in, tried not to stick out in a crowd, (no chome and neon hair) had escape routes planned, used distractions and diversions and usually a way of putting the blame on someone else. If we got IDed or caught in the act it was game over very very quickly.
>>96533306Yeah, that's how it usually works in Shadowrun and Cyberpunk. First time on /tg/?
>>96533306>I, shitass mcgee who lives in an alley and has cybernetics made out of recycled cans, should be able to go toe to toe with purpose-built murderborgs powered by Uncle Sam's walletYou think power fantasy is peak fiction, don't you
>>96533658Sorry John Wick, I just don't think>and then you all died the endis engaging gameplay.
>>96533816You have no concept of fun
>>96533658>peak fictionAh, I found your issue.You're thinking about it like a book, and not like a game.
>>96533216While the cyberpunk genre tries to convey a message, ultimately, it's still simplified in a number of ways.It's easier to treat the corporate as the primary power because trying to work out the interactions between the government and corpos is a lot more complicated. On the outside, it always look like a one-sided relationship when its the farthest thing from it. There are aspects of governance and responsibility that corpos don't want and convenient things that corpos can do that governments can't.But when your stories revolve around street scum that shoves tin cans into their body with turbo crack while wearing faux leather trenchcoats those sorts of details don't mean much.
>>96533216>Yeah but there's still going to be some kind of military and they ARE going to be way ahead 99% of corporations.Cyberpunk settings are predicated on the idea that the government fell, their military crumbled, and corporations with better tech, strong soldiers, and bleeding edge weaponry filled that gap and divvied up the remains of the country amongst each other by force.
>>96533658>>96533894>cybernetics made out of recycled cans>street scum that shoves tin cans into their bodyWhere the fuck are you getting this "literal garbage cybernetics" bullshit? That's literally no cyberpunk fiction or TTRPG ever. In quite a lot of these games, the players are usually kitting themselves with top of the line augs and implants and weapons, which is how they can get anything done at all.
>>96534012isn't the top tier stuff restricted for the military or high tier corpo dudes though? outside of mguffins for quests and such
>>96533216Tell me you’ve never read home of the brave without telling me you’ve never read home of the brave. At least in the OG cyberpunk 2020, the US military is still an extremely powerful and dangerous force. It has problems, sure, but its still the army, and it can kick the ass of all but the best equipped corporate mercenaries. Cp2020 also has stuff like Lazarus group, who are a legit paramilitary merc company.
>>96534031And yet, high end and black market cybernetics are the norm for runners and the like. No one is cobbling together robotic arms out of tin cans and then raiding the nearest corpo headquarters expecting to win. That's not a thing in cyberpunk fiction. Poor people with obsolete and self-repaired tech? Sure. The players and protags in these games and stories aren't "street scum that shoves tin cans in their body with turbo crack" though.
>>96533216Pretty common trope to Cyberpunk settings is that political and governmental control has waned giving to the rise of neo-feudal corporate despots.
>>96534788Then what's the turbo crack for?
Isn’t the militaries equipment created and supplied by the corporations in Cyberpunk? So realistically what they have isn’t better, just likely larger in scale.
>>96533216The only people who rhink "military grade" means top of the line are people who have never served a day in their life.
>>96533312>Who would you rather get in a gun fight with - the Pinkertons or Marine recon?I'd trust Raytheon before the Marines to make me a nice weapon, personally.
>>96535253>military-gradeIs a common misnomer but generally refers to the idea that there are certain weapons that only the military can afford and/or has unrestricted access to. For instance, fully automatic firearms are illegal for civilians to own under US laws (except historical collector's items). For an example of the budget side of things, very very few individuals could afford to purchase a main battle tank, let alone the cost of hiring a dedicated maintenance staff and the garage of specialized equipment and replacement parts you would need to keep it running smoothly. When people say military-grade, they're not saying "higher quality" compared to civilian gear so much as "this is the shit that the military uses to solve big problems fast."Of course I've said all this but there's still instances of people using the term quite incorrectly as if one should expect military factories to produce at a higher quality assurance factor than something like a luxury grade civilian institution would sell.
>>96533216Most of the military tech is provided by corporations. These things don't just mysteriously emerge from the ether, they pay civilian manufacturers and developers to design these things. Do the civilian manufacturers hold all the cards? No, but most of the cards they don't have are WMD-type devices that only appeal to large government bodies.Even when the design and development is done by the government, that implies that every government researcher and bureaucrat is dutifully and faithfully keeping everything classified, and are not at all engaging in the sale of state military secrets. Much as corporate researchers could occasionally be found selling out their company, so too could state researchers be found handing out military blueprints.The main thing the govt. has going for it at any point in time is the general acceptance of it's right to utilize force against others. Your typical cyberpunk world is more accepting of individual violence than RL (probably due to the absurd criminality of those sorts of settings), so that elevated acceptance of government violence doesn't really exist.
>>96535253To further elaborate:>military troops show up to deal with a problem>they occupy a few blocks, kill a few civilians and easy to shoot troublemakers, and fuck the local whores until the brass declares they've successfully instilled peace and fucks offIf the PC party are low-level street shitters then they're not going to get Cyberseal Team 6 spec-ops forces are also massively overwanked and could be fairly easily taken out, especially if the GM plays them as arrogantly rerarded as they are IRL but that's a conversation for another day they'll be dealing with equally low-level military grunts. The underpaid, the undermotivated, the jist there to collect that sweet sweet hazard pay. So long as you avoid them you'd be fine. To salvage this retarded thread concept, you COULD make a fun encounter out of part of the city being under martial law. Maybe you get a job that requires you to skulk through the locked down part of the city, maybe your party tries to gank a patrol because their weapons will be better than typical streetscum affair even if not as good as high end black market wares (this will definitely get them motivated to hunt your ass down), or maybe your party stumbles upon some highly classofied macguffin that's the real reason for the military stepping in and finds themselves dragged way out of their depth into geocorpopolitical conspiracy. There's plenty of interesting ways you can use government intervention in cyberpunk, but "you are likely to be eaten by G.I. Grue" isn't one of them.>>96535290And 90% of the restrictions that make "military grade" a meaningful distinction are nonexistent in your average cyberpunk setting
>>96535199Fun, of course?
>>96535367>And 90% of the restrictions that make "military grade" a meaningful distinction are nonexistent in your average cyberpunk settingThey're usually only nonexistent for the corpos. They can run fully militarized rent-a-cop brigades complete with APCs, tanks, artillery, combat drones, etc. MAXTAC is an example of what happens when all the corps in a cyberpunk setting pool resources to create a private SWAT force to keep uppity commoners down. They literally clown on military-enhanced veteran cyborgs from the wars. For civvies, the kinds of implants and weapons that the military uses are extremely illegal. It's just that Shadowrunners and Edgerunners both dodge the law thanks to being grey-area mercenaries that are quietly funded and protected by the megacorps as disposable hired guns to do wetwork that won't get them in trouble with the other megacorps. Even Shadowrunners and Edgerunners still look at the kinds of tech the military gets access to with hungry mouths. But the corps always keep the best shit to themselves, the military in these settings is always working with lowest-bidder contract shit
>>96535403>It's just that Shadowrunners and Edgerunners both dodge the lawWhich is who we're talking about, yes.
>>96535454Dodging the law doesn't mean the law doesn't exist. The legal ramifications of the gear they try to acquire for their jobs is very real and a constant source of potential trouble if they accidentally buy from undercover cops or a regular they buy from gets arrested and snitches on his customers to cover his own ass. Military-grade is still a meaningful distinction even in these cyberpunk settings for that reason, it means you're leaving the civilian market and either buying things that will get you thrown in buttfuck prison forever or you're shifting enough bills to buy whatever it is that it represents a massive investment for your team.
Problem is the usual corpos vs state idea is not really believable, so this kind of question is not even wrong.
>>96535493What I always find so difficult with suspending belief and immersion is the fact that they are still walking around everyday with these "military" grade upgrades.I suppose if it doesn't visibly turn you into something like Adam Smasher then going to get coffee from a cafe doesn't look as weird with your weaponized body unless it's all conveniently made so you still look like a person but built like a tank.
>>96535290when people say military grade they're usually implying its more durable, like cordura stuff
>>96533216>they ARE going to be way ahead 99% of corporations.Not really. The premise of Cyberpunk is that corpos have insane amounts of power. The megacorps are the ones researching all of that fancy tech that the government would be paying contracts for. And because the government is weaker, that means they don't have unlimited funds to buy the best bleeding-edge tech from every corp.If they did, then you wouldn't have a cyberpunk setting, because any megacorp that tries to go against the government wouldn't be able to stand up to a military cyborg raid. Which is precisely why the megacorps don't sell their best stuff to the military in cyberpunk, so that they can continue to do shit with impunity.
>>96535493>Dodging the law doesn't mean the law doesn't existIn terms of gameplay/worldbuilding, it functionally does if everyone who matters isn't beholden to it
>>96535577If some Adam Smasher-tier killborga walks into your local recaff dispensary to buy a synthlatte, are YOU going to tell him he's illegal?
