The Psychology of Cyberware

Authors Notes

First and foremost I would like to thank Soris, a good friend and confidant from the #shadowrun channel on Undernet IRC for reading through this article for me before publication. I’ve been fighting off a rather nasty bout of pneumonia this week and it’s made it a bit difficult to concentrate. Soris was kind enough to give me his perspectives on the article and make certain it made at least a modicum of sense before it was published.

Some of you may have noticed that last week’s article mentioned in the prologue that this week’s article would discuss permits and end-user certificates. While this is certainly a worthy topic of discussion, and one I do indeed intend to cover, I’ve decided to switch gears a little bit and discuss the Psychology of Cyberware instead.

I would like to say that the artistic muse struck, causing me to write an article so amazingly insightful that it simply would not wait another week for publication. I’d also like to say that this is a topic of such tremendous import that it seemed more vital to publish than permits and end user certificates. While I’d like to be able to say either, neither of them is true. The simple truth of the matter is the Matrix Guide for Dummies article took a great deal longer to complete than I had anticipated. Not having the time left to properly research permits and certificates, I opted instead to publish this article first. This having been said, I hope you enjoy this week’s article.

Introduction

As a Shadowrun gamemaster it is only a matter of time before you run across one of the most common, and least attractive character archetypes in the campaign. An archetype I lovingly refer to as The Street Twinkie, a subset of the Street Samurai archetype. What makes a Street Twinkie different than your average sam? Simply put, attitude. The street samurai is a consummate professional, who is confident but not arrogant. The Samurai will use the minimum force necessary to accomplish his objective, and is usually a loyal and stalwart member of the party. The Street Twinkie, on the other hand, is usually little better than a psychopathic killer with a major chip on his shoulder. He feels that he is far too experienced and powerful to listen to anything as trite as the voice of reason. He will do as he pleases, and kill anything that gets in his way.

Does the Street Twinkie sound familiar to you? Well, I’ve heard a lot of GMs grumble about them over the years. Lord knows I’ve had my share of them pass through my various campaigns since the introduction of Shadowrun. You even see one published in the Cybertechnology book, under the archetype entitled 6 million nuyen Street Samurai.

The problem with the Street Twinkie is, how did they come to exist? What you have here is someone with the attitude of a street punk and close to a million nuyen worth of cyberware. The only logical source of this cyberware would be a megacorporation or other powerful organization. The question is, why would any organization, particularly a megacorporation, put that much money into someone with an attitude like that of your average Street Twinkie? The only logical answer is, they wouldn’t.

Before a corporation or any organization spends that kind of time and nuyen on cyberware for an employee, the first thing they would do is a psychological profile of the individual in question. The profile is a negligible expense when compared to the cost of the cyberware and the surgery involved. The corporation or organization in question would undoubtedly be looking for various personality traits evident in the subject’s profile. If these traits were not evident, the cyberware would not be installed. It isn’t cost effective for a corporation to spend several thousand to nearly a million nuyen on an employee that is unreliable, unwilling to follow orders or worse yet a nutcase with a gun fetish.

As such modern megacorps, and even criminal organizations such as the Yakuza and Mafia, would rely on psychological testing to weed out undesirable candidates before spending large sums on cyberware. This article details some of the various personality traits that each organization would look for, and the resources they might be willing to expend in each category.

One other important thing to note about psychology and cyberware is the relation of essence verses personality. Under the first edition of the SR rules, it was mentioned that the lower someone’s essence dropped the less human and more machine like the person in question became. This was removed from the second edition. I think perhaps one of the reasons it was removed is that it was used as an excuse by many players to explain why their street samurai was a soulless killer.

While the addition of cyberware certainly has some psychological effect on the recipient, I certainly don’t see it as being so drastic or specific. Different people will react to the loss of essence differently, according to their personality. Since the corporation or organization installing the cyberware is also aware of these factors, they will test specifically to weed out those that would become extremely depressed or anyone that would have a severe reaction to the ware installed.

Examples of Personality Indicators

Loyalty Index

The Loyalty index indicates how loyal and trustworthy a person is in regard to the corporation or organization they work for. Since a shadowrunner is assumed to no longer work for the corporation or organization that installed their cyberware originally, they must sufficiently explain why their character decided to leave the corporation in question. The higher the score on the loyalty index, the more drastic the incident needs to be to explain the change in career.

Only those with extremely high loyalty scores would be eligible for extremely expensive or intrusive modifications. As a corporation I certainly wouldn’t want to put Wired Reflexes Level 3 or Muscle Augmentation Level 4 into someone that I didn’t trust to stay with my corp for the rest of their natural life.

People with high loyalty scores have a tendency to be very loyal to an organization, cause, ideal or person. Even after this person begins running the shadows, he or she will naturally bond with either another individual or often the entire party, and become a very loyal member. This means that he will put the parties needs ahead of his own, and often risk life and limb for his friends. Your average megacorp is not going to spend a lot of money putting very expensive modifications into someone with a very mercenary attitude. They make very poor employees overall.

Empathy Index

The empathy index shows how well a person relates to other people. A person with higher empathy is more likely to consider the feelings and opinions of others before acting. Since heavy duty cyberware modifications make a person very fast, and very deadly, an organization would have to be very short sighted indeed not to consider how empathic a person is by nature before installing such modifications. A high empathy score means that a person is more likely to consider the ramifications of his actions. He is more thoughtful an less prone to snap decisions and judgments. It also means that he has control of his temper, and will not act in a rash or undue fashion.

Association Profile Index

The Association profile index is an indication of how well defined a person’s self concept is, and how prone he/she is to depression or destructive behavior patterns. People with a high Association Profile Index are confident without being cocky, self assured and not prone to being pessimistic or depressed. They generally have a much more optimistic outlook on life. A high Association Profile Index is necessary to endure the loss of large amounts of essence. If the person is not a confident and self reliant person to begin with, the effects of large essence loss generally means that the person will become despondent and commit suicide.

Authority Reaction Index

This measures a person’s ability to take orders, and for lack of a better term work and play well with others. No corporation or organization is going to spend large amounts of money on someone with the attitude of an anarchist street punk. They are looking for people that are willing to follow orders and work with a group.

Putting it All Together

Keeping all of these factors in mind, the first thing to do is read the characters background. I’ve included a few brief samples to illustrate my point.

Example 1: Character background indicates someone that is paranoid, self absorbed and basically selfish. This person’s primary motivation in life is money, he cares very little for anyone or anything. He doesn’t care for authority, and will not generally involve himself in any matters that he is not getting paid nuyen to resolve. The character also prefers to use loud, heavy, messy weaponry and kill as many people as possible.

Psychological Profile : This person rates very low in all categories. As such, his starting level resources are limited to no more than Priority D. No corporation is going to spend money putting expensive modifications in someone with this type of profile. Any cyberware he has managed to obtain is probably through a street doc, and most of it was probably purchased with his own funds.

Example 2: Character background indicates someone that worked for a corporation or organization and left of his own accord. He got tired of how they did things, and decided to make a life for himself outside the corporation. He is basically a nice guy, and can work with others well enough. He is not afraid to follow orders, and is willing to place himself at some risk for his friends.

Psychological Profile : While this type of profile is certainly more attractive to an organization than Example 1, it does indicate a loyalty index that is only about average as far as a corp is concerned. As such, the starting level of resources would probably be limited to C, possibly B if you get the sense that they were very loyal to the corp at one point. The corp would be willing to expend some funds on this person, but not so much that this person could possibly become a large threat to them at a later date, or a large loss of revenue if they decided to simply change careers one day.

Example 3: Character was nearly fanatically loyal to the corporation or organization in question, and only the most drastic of circumstances occurred to cause them to leave. Even now the person displays extreme loyalty to his friends and companions, and is far more likely to place his trust in people than others in the shadows. He is self assured, but not arrogant. He dislikes using excessive force or methods, and has a very calm nature overall. He almost never losses his temper, and would certainly never attack someone without a very, very good reason - this generally being self-defense. He will always try to find a way to handle a situation with the absolute minimum of force necessary. He prefers subtlety and persuasion to brute force.

Psychological Profile : This is one of the few character types that actually qualifies for Resource Level A. They score high in all categories, and are the type of people a corp looks for to install the really expensive cyberware in.

Once you’ve read the background and assigned a resource level, allow the character to spend his/her nuyen and purchase his cyberware. If the character is pregenerated, then do not allow them to play until they have made the requisite changes. It is up to you to adjucate the types of personality that you feel a corp would be willing to spend vast sums of money in enhancements.

One other quick note, you may have a player claim that they are independently wealthy to avoid the personality testing involved for cyberware. Rather than objecting to this, I generally allow them to be independently wealthy and spend the 1 million nuyen. Of course, since they didn’t get this from a corporation all of the street indexes apply even at startup, which places most of the expensive ware far out of their reach anyway. I also force them to roll availability for every piece of ware they want installed. In the end they don’t end up with as much as they would have if the corp had installed it in the first place.

I hope this helps in putting some life back into your street samurai. I have had a few others ask me about how to control what the types of players that are referred to as “munchkins”, “twinkies”, or a relatively new term I heard recently “magpies”. These are players that focus so much on crunching numbers and optimizing the characters stats that they simply don’t put any personality of worth into the character.

Over the years I’ve found only one effective method of dealing with these types of players, and that is to not let them generate their own character. They write up a character background and submit it to me as the GM. I read the background and generate the character from it. If the background is insufficient or illogical, it is given back to the player and he must make revisions until the background fits within the scope of the campaign. This allows the player to play the type of character he wants, but takes the emphasis off the numbers involved.