Shadowrun
Shadowrun Play => Gamemasters' Lounge => Topic started by: Gripper on <12-07-13/2218:32>
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I've been GM'ing a game the last few months, and ever once in a while I'll drop in details about the scarcity of objects readily available to us 2013'ers. For instance, meat, while not impossible to find, is sold at a premium due to its rarity.
In last weeks game, one of the players questioned the availability of whisky and paper. This got me thinking, and I'm not sure I'm running things right.
I'd like to classify the following items as either easy to find, sold at a premium, or impossible to find. Sources for the answers would be appreciated. If anyone else would like to add something to the list, I'll be happy to add it.
1) Meat
2) Paper
3) Alcohol from traditional sources (beer made with barley, whiskey made with rye, etc.) rather than soy substitutes
Thanks for the help!
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I should put the assumptions I've been working with in here as well
1) Meat: Sold at a premium
2) Paper: Sold at a premium. To reasons I think this to be the case. First off, there just isn't that much left, and with Amazonia going back to nature, logging rights are hard to come by (Anyone know what the former Russia's stance is on logging?) Secondly, everything is done by commlink's now, so there just isn't the demand for paper that there once was. I doubt most people write by hand.
3) Traditional Alcohol: As apposed to meat, there doesn't seem to be much advantage to using a soy/algae substitute. Meat needs time, room, and nuyen to grow, but rye/barley seems to be on par with the alternatives. I'd say these are easy to find and akin to today's beverages.
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Why hello Gripper! I'll try to give you how I see things.
Shadowrun has its origins in the 1980s cyberpunk literature movement. The idea back then was that technology and greed was sending the world on a downward spiral where the megacorporations were going to try to make themselves rich at the expense of everything else. People, the environment, etc. So there are some tropes involved with the genera. For example in Neuromancer they're traveling through Istanbul. One of the character says, "Do you see that? Its a horse man, you ever see a horse before???" The the Sprawl Trilogy setting horses went extinct due to a plague that wiped them out. My assumption would be some virus a corporation was working with that got loose, or used in their world war 3. So I will go about your assumptions and how, I at least, view the genera.
1) Meat: Sold at a premium
Ah real meat. Shoot, real food in general, that's the life. Most people eat soy based meals, or krill. Its cheap, its mass marketed and its what the corporations give to the masses. Real meat, for example takes a lot of work. You have to bio-engineer cows that are resistant to the various diseases, you want them to be lean, so they have very little fat. Then you need to feed them on specially engineered meal, because their system is just so precariously balanced that normal meal would kill them. Sure, you could use regular natural cows, but then you have to contend with mutations because of magic, polluted waters, toxins in the ground bleeding into their food supply. Really, its too risky and this stuff is meant for the social, and economic elites, better to go with something you can trust. Something made by one of one of your subsidiary companies.
2) Paper: Sold at a premium. To reasons I think this to be the case. First off, there just isn't that much left, and with Amazonia going back to nature, logging rights are hard to come by (Anyone know what the former Russia's stance is on logging?) Secondly, everything is done by commlink's now, so there just isn't the demand for paper that there once was. I doubt most people write by hand.
Paper, how retro! No one uses that stuff, for all the reasons you mentioned. Besides, that stuff sits around for a few years and it starts to go brown and crumbly. What you should be using is flimsyplas. Its like paper, only its made of a thin layer of plastic. You put a small block of that in your printer and it melts/etches it with whatever data you absolutely cannot send electronically. Really, get a comlink you luddite!
3) Traditional Alcohol: As apposed to meat, there doesn't seem to be much advantage to using a soy/algae substitute. Meat needs time, room, and nuyen to grow, but rye/barley seems to be on par with the alternatives. I'd say these are easy to find and akin to today's beverages.
No reason? Ha! Ever have a good Macallan 1946? Yeah me either, it sells for something like $460K a bottle. That's the thing. Its just whisky, I've got lots of empty bottles of whisky (don't ask) but mine goes for $30 a bottle. You control the production of the stuff, the world has given you near monopoly rights to it. You can charge whatever you want for it. If people ask why the real stuff costs so much, point to the damage that's been done to the environment due to your competition's careless treatment of the world. You can't just go out and plant potatoes anywhere. Sheesh just look at natural cows and how messed up those are! Don't get me started on the mutant banana I saw at a street vendor last week. But back to the subject of booze. You're not one of the social and financial elites, but you still want to live the good life. Well, we've got just the thing for you, synthohol. It tastes just like the real thing, we promise, in fact it packs three times the punch of the real deal. So really citizen UCAS-5048-1-M/37/NDA, why would you want to spend your money on that expensive junk, you can get the same taste, more of a kick to it at a fraction of the cost. Big Brother isn't just your friend, he's your drinking buddy.
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Well, paper comes with the printer. It's vague about how many sheets come with but it's 25 nuyen for the disposable printer included.
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Meat is part of Lifestyle, by the way. A Middle Lifestyle eats real food half the time, a High Lifestyle all the time. So of that 10k, 2k goes partially towards real food+drinks, which puts it at max 60 nuyen a day. Divide by meals, subtract drinks, and we got what, 20 nuyen for a dinner including a real steak? A real meat decent meal in a restaurant will be anywhere between 100 and 200 nuyen.
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2) Paper: Sold at a premium. To reasons I think this to be the case. First off, there just isn't that much left, and with Amazonia going back to nature, logging rights are hard to come by (Anyone know what the former Russia's stance is on logging?) Secondly, everything is done by commlink's now, so there just isn't the demand for paper that there once was. I doubt most people write by hand.
Sorry but paper is not rare at all. Sheet paper to write on is outmoded, but paper is still widely used in many things like cigarettes, packaging, labels, toilette paper and such. There are still enough third world countries happy to sell logging rights and recycling has gotten a lot better too. Paper is just to important, cheap and flexible a material in too many products to simply vanish just because people don't write as much anymore.
Also, with growth acceleration methods having improved vastly over the past generation (just look at how fast they can grow bioware these days) logging isn't nearly as much a problem as it used to be. Magic might conceivably play a role here too.
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This is also a situation where fiction and genera take a divergent path than they would be were this a real life simulator game. Take something as simple as a latex mask. In the real world they wouldn't fool anyone within 5 feet or so, but in Shadowrun they work like the masks from the 80s Mission Impossible TV show.
Shadowrun, despite the efforts to make it transhumanist in more recent times started out as cyberpunk. So a lot of the "lore" is from its origins, not its behind the scenes retcon.
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They can probably make paper out of just about any plant fiber in Shadowrun. So what do you do with all those soy bean plants after you have harvested the soy beans => turn them into paper. As company you can even make more money by using a waste product and that's what counts, your bottom line.
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Like Vidnaut says, apparently the price of paper is so negligible it's not even mentioned: you get a "supply" with a 25¥ printer.
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Like Vidnaut says, apparently the price of paper is so negligible it's not even mentioned: you get a "supply" with a 25¥ printer.
I think it was more a question of is it actually paper, or do people use real paper, not "can someone afford it" ;)
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Like Vidnaut says, apparently the price of paper is so negligible it's not even mentioned: you get a "supply" with a 25¥ printer.
I think it was more a question of is it actually paper, or do people use real paper, not "can someone afford it" ;)
Printer: In case you need something in hardcopy
(perhaps if Mr. Johnson hired you through a time portal),
this full-color printer comes attached to a paper supply.
Book says it's paper. A better question would be: "Where do they get the cellulose fibers from to make the pulp?"
The tongue-in-cheek comment would probably lead me to believe the answer to the latter question would be, "Not very much." Of course, a niche is still a niche. Maybe the Azzies are using the wood they haven't burnt down in the Yucatan to turn into paper to sell in the Stuffer Shacks or one of their office supply subsidiaries?
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Trees for paper production are farmed. People don't go go about chopping down mixed hardwood tropical rainforests for pulp. That's mainly for timber and ground clearing for agriculture.
Would you want to process hugely inconsistent product, most of which is totally unsuitable for paper making, or would you rather handle lots of the same species of most suitable tree, all of the same age?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66-3v78oHtE
And
http://www.tappi.org/paperu/all_about_paper/earth_answers/EarthAnswers_GrowTree.pdf
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Meat is part of Lifestyle, by the way. A Middle Lifestyle eats real food half the time, a High Lifestyle all the time. So of that 10k, 2k goes partially towards real food+drinks, which puts it at max 60 nuyen a day. Divide by meals, subtract drinks, and we got what, 20 nuyen for a dinner including a real steak? A real meat decent meal in a restaurant will be anywhere between 100 and 200 nuyen.
True it says real food half the time. I would posit real food is not generally steak though. In SR terms, even the drek in a fast food burger is real food, compared to what everyone else is eating. It has 3 vegetable products, and real meat! Our version of fast food is a luxury for the majority of the sixth world.
Though I believe the official word is that it is purposefully left vague a lot of the time, so that GM's have a lot of control over how scarce they want things to be.
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You have to remember, as well, that just because the Advanced Lifestyle Rules haven't been translated over doesn't mean that you can't 'degrade' one aspect to better another (it's just a "fluffy" decision without them). Perhaps your character doesn't go out as much, has cheaper furniture or got a good place in a not-so-good neighborhood and can afford to have those real veggies and real meat as a result.
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You have to remember, as well, that just because the Advanced Lifestyle Rules haven't been translated over doesn't mean that you can't 'degrade' one aspect to better another (it's just a "fluffy" decision without them). Perhaps your character doesn't go out as much, has cheaper furniture or got a good place in a not-so-good neighborhood and can afford to have those real veggies and real meat as a result.
They may not be translated but the pricing for each "tier" of lifestyle still remains the same (0/500/2k/5k/10k/100k) so it's not that much of a stretch of the imagination to hack the meat/potatoes of those SR4 rules to SR5 compared to other examples of translation woes.
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even the drek in a fast food burger is real food
I guess you're a glass-half-full kind of person. :)
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In SR terms, even the drek in a fast food burger is real food, compared to what everyone else is eating. It has 3 vegetable products, and real meat! Our version of fast food is a luxury for the majority of the sixth world.
I dont know about you but The Beast™—triple soyburger with processed cheese-flavored food and fried egg substitute makes my mouth water, and i cant even think about The Beast Deluxe™—The Beast™, now with three strips of bacon substitute! without my stomach grumbling
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I dont know about you but The Beast™—triple soyburger with processed cheese-flavored food and fried egg substitute makes my mouth water, and i cant even think about The Beast Deluxe™—The Beast™, now with three strips of bacon substitute! without my stomach grumbling
(http://mysteryoftheinquity.files.wordpress.com/2012/12/mystery-shill.jpg?w=950)
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Meat would be expensive. Low lifestyle you eat meat on your birthday. Middle life style you get a steak on payday(and some other luxuries, like real coffee on Sunday morning and some fresh produce now and then). High life style or better you get fresh, real food frequently.
Paper? Not commonly used for writing, but probably not expensive. They likely don't make it out of timber any more, but I am sure there is an engineered hemp that grows in hydroponics bins like crazy. You can make textiles out of it as well.
Whiskey? Most likely a huge price range. Low end corn whiskey is almost an industrial byproduct. At the upper end its artisan barley malts aged in charred oak barrels made from wood grown on a special preserve in North Carolina. Price goes from 5 nuyen per bottle to 500+.
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1) Meat
Meat is something that has traditionally been available only on rare occasions for the non-super-wealthy. Society goes through cycles between what we want and what we can sustain, and in the 80s we thought that was going to collapse. It was actually just a down-slope that we're still on and probably won't come off until a new balance is achieved. In the Shadowrunverse, it's become something that should be available on a monthly basis easily, but the companies that can aren't putting enough effort to fill demand. Raising chickens and rabbits indoors was considered impossible two hundred years ago but can be done in a modest-sized flat now. Now that's not saying that everybody's eating steak every night, but you could get an expensive, mostly-real meal with steak every month if you wanted to save up through that month and splurge on your food expenses. Or you could buy organic food every meal and have real meat once every couple of weeks and steak twice or so every year.
2) Paper
Paper hasn't been the crude wood construct people learn about in school for years, as technology improves we're only finding new ways to get more paper out of less (and different) materials. As J. Michael Straczynski wrote in Babylon 5, "Every time someone says we're becoming a paperless society, I get ten more forms to fill out." Despite promises of removing hardware and hard copies, we're just too attached to the physical aspects and objects and I don't think paper is ever going to be ousted. Successfully doing away with that is more of a utopian than dystopian idea in my opinion.
Paper is just too important, cheap and flexible a material in too many products to simply vanish just because people don't write as much anymore.
ImaginalDisc already went over everything else I was going to say.
3) Alcohol from traditional sources (beer made with barley, whiskey made with rye, etc.) rather than soy substitutes
Alcohol is not very difficult to manufacture, hence why America had such difficulties in its poorly planned and executed "Prohibition Era". Alcohol is part of almost every human culture on earth and many are selective about the source matter (rice, hops, wheat, etc). Orson Welles and Aldous Huxley both predicted plausible societies that both still relied on alcohol to help control the populace. I think that it may be difficult for everybody to be selective about it, but I doubt that any general kind is going to be out of any individual's reach, particularly after the globalization we've already achieved and will never go back from.
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You could go the other way with paper and say that it's become a cheap all purpose printed material like in a couple of cyberpunk novels like Virtual Light and Heavy Weather. Paper frame bikes, paper refugee clothing, paper frame housing... it's cheap, can be made fairly durable with the right treatment, strong, and easy to recycle! (this post brought to you by the Paper Advertising Committee, apparently...)
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The comedic dystopian novel "Hard Sell" had almost everyone wearing paper clothes.
The main character becomes so broke he has to go naked as he can't afford a day's clothes out of a vending machine.