I’d like to point out that the water fountain is, in fact, not on the network.
You can thank the decker for that.
It’s been hacked
How distracting!
We were playing a game and my players wanted to release a bunch of bees into the airducts to clear out a public space and I asked where they would get a bunch of bees; you’d need some sort of special contact or something. One of my players pulled out his phone, and sure enough we could just buy bees that day on Amazon. Now any seemingly contrived plot is met with “we can just buy bees on the internet today”
Friend of mine was playing Cyberpunk 2020 and needed a shotgun in-game. He decided that since his character didn’t have a record yet, he would go buy one at wal-mart.
It’s the dystopian future. Of course there’s wal-mart.
No one foresaw that wal-mart would stop selling firearms.
And they haven’t. They reduced selection and the number of stores, but my local Walmart still sells shotguns
Huh. I thought they stopped selling 'em.
Can confirm, two the Walmarts in my city sell shotguns and bolt action hunting rifles
Oh hi Phil
“Oops, looks like the packing step is taking a week again!”
Phil’s not wrong that it’s fucking stupid.
Phil was wrong in thinking that corps wouldn’t make such blatantly stupid choices and products
I remember there was this whole period where tech savvy Shadowrun GMs on Dumpshock were grappling endlessly with the “unrealistic” gameplay concessions that riddled the hacking rules and trying to come up with solutions that allowed for a balance of good gameplay and believable IT design.
And then reality just YOLO’d itself off a cliff of utter insanity and it turned out the rules were right all along.
The one thing none of us had accounted for was how incredibly stupid businesses are capable of being.
this article came out just after I started GMing shadowrun. I let our decker do damn near anything he wanted after reading it: https://www.forbes.com/sites/leemathews/2017/07/27/criminals-hacked-a-fish-tank-to-steal-data-from-a-casino/
Art imitates life, and sometimes, life looks at art and says “hold my beer”
The “good” coffee machine at my workplace was updated, so you have to use your phone to select the coffee
Mind you, it has buttons. And a full color screen. It worked fine before. But now you need to scan a fucking QR code that opens a slow ass website, just to press a button
Age verification for that cupa joe.
Citizen, we need to know it’s you for the social demerits. Caffeine is a vice, and costs social cridt points, citizen.
My home coffee machine has a resistive heater for its water cylinder and no other electronics. It’s an otherwise fully manual lever machine
Though I use an electric kettle to heat the water and an electric grinder to grind the coffee beans
Literally saw someone at my work scrolling through their phone for like 5 minutes trying to get one of these "smart " coffee machines to work. Like bruh. It has buttons, just push them.
Cool guess I’m quitting coffee in that case.
Yeah, that basically was my reaction when I saw it the first time
At least it’s not an app. yet
Reminds me of when we had a free and paid snack area when I was at Lowe’s. No camera in the break/locker room, a nice private place to put your stuff in your locker and eat in peace.
Then they ‘upgraded’ so instead of tap pay you had to go up to a facial recognition camera, sign into an app, buy shop cash, and buy your snack through their app via the ‘aided smart teller’ where you scan your items and do a self checkout situation that took 4x longer than before and kept your change since you have to buy their cash.
Snacks started rotting in place, the once busy room was almost always dead save the few seats outside the camera field of view.
Most folks went in the door harder to be seen from but there were only two slim corners and three seats where you weren’t watched the whole time.
That’s… Disgusting. I’m so sorry.
It was vandalized a bit after I left, and associates used to cut people discounts all the time. They paid in others ways, the staff in general started quitting around then too.
I won VIP tickets to a music festival and the bathroom had screens connected to a network to show up the show. It wasn’t working, so it had this IT guy with a notebook connected to the uniral trying to fix it, while everyone else was trying to piss
Originally I thought Watch_Dogs was super unrealistic with how its hacking worked and what it worked on, but pretty much the only thing you couldn’t do right now IRL is make a grenade explode remotely. At least for now.
I’m honestly no longer convinced that some California tech company couldn’t sell the US military on a wirelessly connected grenade.
Is it an objectively stupid idea? Yes, absolutely. But then so is using Claude to run your strategic planning and they’re doing that, so I guess everything is on the fucking table now.
Thanks, I hate it
PS, that the water fountain is internet connected
I would just say #cyberpunkisnow
https://mastodon.social/@muhanga/116410824461315165 (For context, see the parent of this post/toot)
Everything in Shadowrun should be online, spying on you, and prepared to kill you. Or for it to try and scuttle away to get time to upload to motherbase.
Let the man try, if he rolls a nat 20 the fountain not only overflows but also starts a bunch of different music at the same time with the fountain trying to match the different beats. A nat 1 turns on all the lights making it much harder to hide.
Not a fan of the “lol natural 20 zaniness happens” trope. That’s 5% of the time.
Also Shadowrun doesn’t even use d20s
Every RPG is D&D and every D&D game is a marvel movie.
I dont get it, dont you find zany outcomes fun? Not that theres anything wrong in that just trying to understand :), for me, its like winning in a slot machine + creative problem solving (how do i make this insanity sound somewhat plausible). Lowkey many of my groups most memorable moments arose from embracing a series of audaciously bad or good rolls.
I don’t find “lol 5% of the time something WACKY happens!” very fun very long, no. That is too high a frequency for freak events. Actually, it’s 10% because people do wackiness on natural 1s and natural 20s. That’s too much! That’s so much it’s distracting.
I outlined the dice system I liked from nWoD in another comment. You can get some wild outcomes there, but it’s not the absurd flat “10% of every roll is insanely good or bad”. You get the occasional “I can’t believe I rolled three tens convinced the vampire I was a wizard!”, still.
Alright, fair you feel that way, makes sense. Seems to be an unpopular opinion i have on that, judging from the vote count. Good thing we all get to decide for ourselves, which rules to implement in our games haha
Phil will never hear the end of this, and that is the righteous and just outcome. Few things in life provide the satisfaction and pleasure of being able to say “I told you so!”
My go-to for players is that in any remotely realistic setting, sufficiently cobtrived abd stupid bullshit is always possible.
I love to shit on IoT but we have these Bevi dispensers at work. You can add flavoring, carbonation and vitamins to your drink. The network connection is probably to let the vendor know what they need to refill
The network connection is probably to let the vendor know what they need to refill
…and waste perfectly good user telemetry and that whole screen devoid of ads?! In
<current year>???:p
Even if all they’re doing is tracking the flavor preferences it will guarantee that the weird flavor I like will be discontinued.
How could they be playing Shadowrun in 1999, when the XBOX 360 didn’t come out until 2005? Hell, the game itself didn’t come out until 2007…
The first Shadowrun video game came out in 1993 for the Super Nintendo. And before that, it had been a tabletop RPG like D&D since 1989.
They’re talking about the Shadowrun TTRPG that the Xbox 360 game is based on. The TTRPG came out in 1989.
In the long ago times, it was a hardcover RPG book
I am so fucking old. Thank you, you bastard.
I played a version of Shadowrun on the NES way back in the 90s. It existed in other forms even before that too.
![The Water Fountain [Shadowrun]](https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/pictrs/image/040dfccf-757e-4040-a4e7-36a235322c8c.webp){kind=link}