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I feel like the #Shadowrun #TTRPG misses the mark with the SIN (a digital identity used for all legal transactions). Player Characters are supposed to be SIN-less, on the fringe of society, and in real life, it would be debilitating. No access to the regular job market, housing, most shopping, banking, online services or even to corporation-owned public spaces.

This should provide interesting hooks for downtime activities between runs, but the nuyen tubes completely neuter this tension by providing players with a convenient tender they can freely conduct all their business with, leaving the punk out of the cyber.

#Cyberpunk

#ttrpg #cyberpunk #shadowrun
Hypolite Petovan
Hypolite Petovan  
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Huh, I expected to nerd-snipe @silverwizard about Shadowrun but apparently it wasn't as hot of a take as I thought!
@silverwizard
silverwizard
silverwizard  
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@Hypolite Petovan Posted on the day where I spent the whole day not processing things.

So I've often reimagined Shadowrun with cryptocurrency, SINs being digital wallets. Shadowrunners being forced to use credsticks (hardware tokens), and launder money constantly, using everything as an NFT makes the iea that security is basically worthless despite its ubiquity way easier to conceptualize. My current game uses rules we call "GAS", replacing the concept of Paydata with things called Gossip, Assets, Secrets, and GAS converts into lifestyle. Nuyen can buy fancy toys but it can be hard to buy things that *aren't* guns/whatever, so you need to pay your contacts in shadow currency to buy actual proper laundered money you can hook into the identity network and look like a real person.

I've also been working on a cyberpunk game where the currency is soy paste, and you literally are forced to eat one soy paste a day to survive, and gear and stuff is priced in soypaste, but the pool of available gear is randomized to determine what's on the market right now.

@Hypolite Petovan
Hypolite Petovan
Hypolite Petovan  
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@silverwizard Huh, this made me think of an RPG based on In Time (2011) and what do you know, it already exists apparently: https://oldskull-publishing.com/running-out-of-time/
@silverwizard
silverwizard
silverwizard  
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@Hypolite Petovan Oooh, I do like "dying slowly due to capitalism" games, but OSR mechanics are suspect
@Hypolite Petovan
elShoggotho
elShoggotho  
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In Shadowrun, cash is supposed to be illegal, but sticks around because the corps sometimes need to move money outside the prying eyes of governmental oversight, little as it may be. Most businesses aren't even equipped to accept cash. You have two classes of credsticks though. One is tied to an account, charges directly that way. The other is preloaded with a set amount of nuyen, becomes trash the moment they hit zero. The latter is the usual tender Mr. Johnson pays the runners with. In my campaigns, you need an ID tied to your cred for all the stuff you need a SIN for. Bit of hustle involved to keep fake SINs running and sometimes replaced. Don't keep many nuyen in your fake SIN account, because the moment the corps get suspicious, it gets frozen.
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