# On Cyberpunk Re: Cyberpsyschosis and the Disabled tags: #thoughts/disabilities Once again, *Twitter* feeds us new content, but its one I can get heated about.  You know, while we're having this discussion again, it's actually a good time to point out the one thing in TTRPG design that has always irritated me as a physically disabled person. It's the one thing, ever. Now, to provide a little context, I have been a writer in the field and an aficionado of the field for decades. I literally live in an RPG library. Well more than 40 feet of shelving, full of TTRPGs, and that's just the ones ready at hand. I can never really be accused of being a tourist. Realistically. The one thing that has always gotten up my ass within RPGs and within the larger genre is the way that cyberpunk treats people with physical disabilities and the interaction with cybertech. In specific, it's the idea of cyberpsychosis as descending from the differentiation of the physical being from a state of assumed physical coherence to the augmentation and change of the physical being. That the psychotic break is triggered by being *different enough* from others. https://talsorianstore.com/products/cyberpunk-red I understand entirely as a writer. It's an element of cyberpunk as a genre. Like a lot of noir, [[cyberpunk]] is closely connected to the feeling of alienation from those around you, despite their omnipresence and interrelations. The cyberpunk is alien in his own city. His capabilities are inherently differentiated by his choice of occupation and motivation. A key point of the cyberpunk ethos is that emotional connections are few and hard-won, and they are easily broken. Additionally, technology itself acts as a negative pressure on those bonds and connections between people, despite their theoretical improvements to the ability for people to connect. That is seen as a desirable thing to represent within Cyberpunk. I get it. I really do. But it has certain follow-on implications, which are not significant enough in the scope of stories as they are traditionally told in cyberpunk but which I think fail to capture some opportunities for story that could illuminate people like myself as both heroes and villains. The best kind of illumination. If we take the base assumptions as they are expressed in the core literature, then being physically disabled should almost always trigger a state of cyberpsychosis in those so affected. Not just in those who lose a limb later in life, but even more strongly in those who are born physically different from the norm, no matter what that difference is. I've always thought that there was a hole in the middle of the cyberpunk ethos where it failed to cover that particular patch. Some revisions of some games actually made some inroads toward talking about that in a useful way… …suggesting that if you lost a limb in an accident or war, the replacement of that limb with something roughly equivalent to a human arm wouldn't have any effect on cyberpsychosis at all. As well it shouldn't. But I don't think it goes far enough for more interesting opportunities. And this is not me as a physically disabled person wanting to put myself into the game and force people to be like me or take me into account. This is just me looking at the environment and saying, "How could we do something even more cool with this?" It always struck me that the first people to be given cybertech early in the evolution of the technology should be the most physically disabled that the creators could find. That should be relatively easy as well. Medical technology being advanced, but more expensive than you can get living down toward the bottom of the social stack, there should be plenty to choose from. Corporations, not particularly being interested in ethical choices, should be absolutely thrilled to offer parents good money for the use of their children for experimental implantation technology. And having been exposed to it early, while absolutely requiring it for the rest of their lives, these should be some of the most talented users of all. What does the world do when the most stable users of full-body conversions are effectively child soldiers on the front lines of full-body replacement technology? How does that affect what they can do in life? How does it affect how they see themselves and their relationships? Do they resent the very things that allow them the freedom to be able to resent them? Do they revel in those things, possibly beyond the limits that others who would be tied to a more conventional idea of the physical self would not? Do they become worshippers at their own temple of self, with the maintenance requirements another hymn to sing in order to give glory to its creator or to its operator? Plenty of really fascinating and juicy story bits kick off from this line of thought, still compatible with the core cyberpunk ethos that requires alienation and how that alienation affects the characters thematically. **[[Shadowrun]]** gets a bit of a lucky break when we talk about **[[Cyberpunk (RPG)|Cyberpunk]]** RPGs because the mix of magic drags in things which are unrelated to the physical state of someone who gets implantation. It's a matter of how much that connection damages your core self, your spiritual self by its mechanical taint and the requirements that it has for your consciousness, for your way of thinking. And if they cost essence just because that's the way it is, then that's just the way it is. As long as the in-game cost of cyberware is really limited by the mismatch between what the character can do and what the character should be able to do by some measure. You can get the far more awkward version and outcome. There is a version of this where people with physical disabilities actually have a much greater cost for cyber implants because they have so much further to go even to get up to normal operation. And then anything beyond that is yet more alien. If you interpret it like that, then things just get really odd because those characters start as effectively cyberpsychotic. Even without any cybernetics at all. And then up to the level of functionality plus a little bit, they become more normal citizens. Then after that, as the number of implants grows, they become less stable again. Kind of a pain in the ass, really. My favorite way for any setting to handle cybernetics and how they affect you as a character is probably the Space Marines Dreadnought. https://warhammer40k.fandom.com/wiki/Dreadnought You want to reduce me to my core central nervous system? Put that in a heavily protected case? And then put that into a giant war machine bristling with weapons? Turn me loose on the battlefield and let me destroy the enemies of humanity (or whoever)? Then you let me sleep until the next major party or next major killing field needs to be put together? Oh, and incidentally, I'm considered a true elder and probably have been kicking around for 10,000 years at the outside. Yes, yes. Just go ahead, put me on in, even in death, I still serve. There are some other games which are particularly good for this kind of thinking about self as machinery or machinery as self. I appreciate that in **[[Ironsworn - Starforged|Starforged]]**, you can have the Permanently Wounded trait, which has some negative effects, but also you can pick up very free-form Augmented traits, which represents cyberware, that you have to counteract part of the effect of that wounding. It's a pretty good flow, and I like it a lot. https://www.ironswornrpg.com/product-ironsworn-starforged Overall, this is a really tiny thing to gripe about in the greater context of the genre of game we're talking about. If I really wanted to bitch, I would get started on unloading about how poorly their idea of how computers connect to each other and how people work with computers that connect to each other work with anything. You want realistic deckers that gets a bit more complicated. But this is at least reasonably easy to deal with. You might even need less than a full house rule, depending on how you're already playing things. I'm going to take it as a win. There had to be one thing in the field of disability across the wide, wide world of TTRPGs. It just so happens that there is one, just the one. What to do about it in a reasonable way that keeps the sensibilities of the genre while still allowing what I foresee as being better? that's a little more complicated. Perhaps even impossible. And I would have to accept that it's impossible to do it well if it's not - I can bite the wax tadpole. And I would.