| From: | Mark Kalvin <Sahtori@***.COM> |
|---|---|
| Subject: | Re: Mage bias (This is a long one) |
| Date: | Mon, 3 Apr 1995 03:52:05 -0400 |
The various for- and against- postings regarding street samurai that have
cropped up lately seem to illustrate a point about the whole cyberpunk gemre
ala Gibson: barring a lot of interesting explanation, street samurai are sort
of anti-dweebs---people who are like the people you can sometimes find in
karate classes and always find in weight-rooms. Think of someone you would
really want next to you in your squad in the army or the Marine Corps but the
very last person you would want with you on your chess team.
Shadowrun is derived from action/adventure fiction set in a nasty vision of
the future and the samurai name and archtype are drawn from Neuromancer where
the only example street samurai we get hear from is Molly who is a remarkably
complex and well-explained person, a deeply hostile person who fights in
order to fulfill some deep, personal need. What we have in the game that we
play is an extension of this idea but the shadowrun version doesn't take the
exceptional nature of Mollly's character into account. Molly was an
exceptional Samurai; a vicious thug with a sense of justice (she poisoned
Riviera out of hatred for what he did to women in Turkey) and the moves of a
dancer. This is a bit more than you would expect from the way street samurai
are rendered in Shadowrun: The model of street Samurai in the game is more
like Marvel Comic's character, Wolverine than anything that William Gibson
wrote---basically, the street samurai is about enhanced physical power and
has no reason to be neccesarilly good, noble, or overly smart. Another thing
about them is that they are, by nature, less fundamentally human than other
player characters in that their abilities derive from having lots of
mechanical parts stuffed into them. Their lifesyle is essentially a denial of
and a turning away from basic, straightforward humanity---unlike mages and
physical adepts who have to maintain their physical integrity in order to use
their power. Mages in particular >must< be intelligent and complex of soul in
order for them to cast hermetic spells while physical adepts are often
portrayed as being the ultimate martial artists---people who study the
martial arts as ways of physically and spiritually perfecting themselves even
as it makes them deadly fighters.
When you think about street samurai, you are thinking about poeple who are
willing to undergo piles and piles of surgery to become stronger and faster;
to have claws pop out of the backs of their hands and to be fast and
accurate pistol shots. You don't expect anyone like this to have the
complexity of personality that you would expect of most of the people playing
the game and posting questions and answers on this board (think about
interviews with professional boxers for an example of what you might imagine
street samurai to sound like). The game is so well put together that it is
almost a meaningless question to ask wether physical adepts or street samurai
are better: the game is too well-balanced for anything but detailed computer
analysis to give a final answer. Mages however are another story. A mage
standing behind a barrier spell strong enough to stop bullets isn't even in
the debate. Despite what anyone might have to say about it, I really do think
that a mage will clean up on both samurai and physical adepts who lack
magical protection---without direct magical protection, there is no good way
to fight off a fire elemental. This truth is more than just the wishful
thinking of munchkinism: this flaw is common to all the role-playing games I
have ever played that involve magic. Eventually, the magicians overwhelm all
other characters in their ability to do damage.
The whole debate about Samurai vs the other fighting character classes can be
understood from the idea that the machanically enhanced street samurai may be
as powerful as the physical adept and, when it comes to physical prowess,
much faster and more powerful than any mage, the complexity and subtlety of
character is not built into them from the beginning and they more dependent
on complex implant/prosthetic technology than any of the other classes.
Without being written by writers with the talent of a Willaim Gibson, it is
very possible to see Street Samurai as enhanced football players; the sort of
thing that makes people turn to the next page in the manual when starting up
new characters. It is much easier to devolope interesting and powerful
characters using the other character classes and it might just be more fun.
Good luck!
Mark <Sahtori@***.com>
=================================================================
From a conversation with
Dr. Thomas Thornton
Hunter College, 1984
"....No, I think we can agree that there are actually three great themes
then: Love, Death, *and* Power"
=================================================================
Geek Code:
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