Point in question is the group that I'm working with (those bar-steward Nightfall players ). Indeed the only thing that I'll push back against is the separation of "what" and "why", as you define them.
I wouldn't do that." Point in example was the Nightfall adventure from MegaTraveller where the PCs point-blank refused to going chasing after their Free Trader because stuff like that should be insured. I've had far too many experiences with my group when presented with "adventure logic" going, "Naaaaah. If something was really important then Ghostwalker, Harlequin or somebody else would have taken care of it.Ĭlick to expand.I might slowly be gaining speed. As a result, PC's are almost never on more than the periphery of big events. And that's my other big complaint, the setting has increasingly felt like it was written as fiction and was only converted to gameable material because the author was forced to. Sourcebooks are more likely to tell me what kind of tea Lofwyr likes to drink more than it is conditions on the street that my character will have to interact with every day. If the victories of the PC's are meant to be small and personal, then the setting needs to be presented that way but, IMO, it isn't. That gives no room for the PC's to do anything.
I see too many settings that want to do "shades of grey" reality but end up with "shades of black" where even the best people are dark grey. Every real advancement in technology can change our view of the future and the idea that you need to "jack in" to something to access information or high speed communication is long gone. It's something that I think cyberpunk has always struggled with. It's amusing to go back and read old stories about deckers never wanting to leave the Matrix because their body is just a "meat thing". By 2000, even Gibson wasn't writing about cyber-chrome directly, but rather about how society has access to all this information and what are we doing with it. By the time your average home had access to the Internet, many aspects of the older cyber stories felt dated. It doesn't help that aspects of the genre itself aged quickly and poorly. Somewhere along the way, the setting lost it's nuance. It's hard to be a good guy (on any level) when every possible employer is capital "E" Evil. The game became almost a self-referential parody. The plotline was so common that jokes were frequently made about it. Missions stopped being about accepting a job, and became about trying to screw over the Mr. Johnson was just there to twirl their moustaches.
By the end of 4E though, it felt to me that every megacorp was the same 'Evil just with a different name' and every Mr. The various megacorps weren't trustworthy, but they weren't the Empire from Star Wars either. In the early days of SR, there still seemed to be the idea that the PC's were the "good guys". In the late 80's and early 90's when I was reading William Gibson and the like, the world as presented seemed a little grey and a bit bleak, but it was never hopeless.