Show notes, Night City Secrets BONUS Episode 1

Interview with the REFEREE

Cover Art for the podcast from “Cyberpunk madness,” by the artist Eddie Del Rio.  

Intro and closing music is from Amoebacrew, called simply "Cyberpunk royalty free music.”  It is available on Youtube:

Background ambient music is from RoyaltyFreeSounds, called “Soundscape Ambient, Cyberpunk Music. Royalty Free.”

It is on Youtube:

 

TRANSCRIPT

INT    So hello, welcome back to Night City Secrets.  Today I’m going to interview our illustrious Referee.  How would you like me to refer to you.

REF    God might be a little pretentious, let’s just go with “Referee.”

INT    [laughing] All right Mister Referee.

REF    Sir.

INT    Sir, that… that’s always good.  So how long have you been playing Cyberpunk 2020?

REF    Ah, so I’ve been playing Cyberpunk 2020 since probably around 1989 or 1990.  Now, that’s not consecutive, I mean, there’s been a lot of off and on years, but, again, 89-90 timeframe when we were *really* heavy into role-playing.

    I’m sorry, I should probably give a little bit of context, too.  I’m 46 years old. So, eh, I was, 18, 19? I was young, right, and we were really heavy into role-playing at the time.  We logged hundreds of hours playing Cyberpunk 2020.  

INT    So you were in High School, I guess, basically, when you started doing this?

REF    Yeah.  Yeah, high school or right out of it.  

INT    What is it that you think attracted you all to table-top role-playing?

REF    You know, we were always kind of the fringe crowd.  We weren’t the jocks, we weren’t preppies, we weren’t stoners, we were always kind of a fringe crowd.  We got along with everybody, but we didn’t really belong to any specific genre of friend-group. Uhm, we were all very creative, very imaginative, we liked reading, we liked theatre, we liked music, we liked anything creative.  Uhm, Jamie is still an aspiring writer. You’re a writer, right? I mean it’s just the type of people we hung out with.  

    And back then, video games were… they were starting, I mean, we had them.  We had computer games, but they were still pretty new and still pretty remedial.  And so, if you wanted an opportunity to explore “strange new worls and seek our new life and new civilization,” your opportunity was role-playing games.  So that’s what hooked us.

INT    And you guys grew up in a pretty small town, right?

REF    Yeah, good point, Glenwood Springs, Colorado.  Uh, population at the time I think was about 7 or 8,000.  Very small, my entire school, my entire high school was around 400 people.  About 100 per class. So yeah, it was small. Didn’t have a lot to do. Your opportunities were: a lot of drinking, a lot of drugs, a lot of getting in trouble, and role-playing.  [laughing]

INT    So did your parents, did everyone know you were doing this role-playing stuff?

REF    No, I don’t know that they did.  You know, I can’t say it was anything I kept from them, I just, you know, my parents never really took an active interest in what I was doing when I wasn’t at the house.  So I never came to them said, like, “He dad, I’m playing D&D, and Cyberpunk,” it was just… I was out of the house and he never really asked.

INT    Well, I guess the reason I ask is because, around that time frame, it was maybe a little bit earlier than your time, but there was the whole… I’ve heard people call it the “Satanic Panic.”

REF    Yeah, the D&D scare.

INT    And so parents were hearing these bad stories and they were not wanting their kids to get involved.  That’s what happened to me. 

REF    OK, and that makes sense.  And you know what, funnily enough, now that you mention that, I can… I’m not sure that I can actually recall, but I do know that I was probably fairly adamant about not telling my mom what I did.  My mom is very religious and I probably omitted that from her. But my dad just never asked, so…

INT    Yeah I, I wanted to play role-playing games, but I didn’t know anyone that really did, and my parents frowned on that activity, they didn’t really want me doing it anyway.

REF    We would have been really good friends in high school, dude.  [laughing]

INT    I was in an even smaller high school than you.  

REF    No kidding?  Oh, that’s right, you were up in Steamboat, weren’t you?

INT    Uh-huh, yeah.  You want to guess my graduating class?

REF    OK, if mine was 100 in Glenwood, I’m gonna guess yours was probably what…. 30?

INT    14.

REF    Oh good god!  [laughing]  

INT    And we started the year at 20.  We finished at 14.

REF    Wow, that’s a pretty high drop out rate…

INT    Yes, well, it wasn’t drop out so much as kicked out.  Yeah, I was at boarding school, so…Anyway, enough about me.  So are there other role-playing games that you played? What else did you dabble in?

REF    So I think, probably most people - at least in that age - started with D&D.  Somebody said, “What the hell is this game, Dungeons & Dragons?” And so we sat down and played that for a couple years.  And then, actually, I think it did evolve into the next game being Cyberpunk. After Cyberpunk, we also played a game called GURPS, a Steve Jackson game: “Generic Universal Role-Playing System.”  93 or 94, probably 94, is when Vampire: The Masquerade first dropped, and, funny enough that was actually the game system we logged the most time with in total. Whereas we played maybe 100s of hours with Cyberpunk, I would guess 1000s of hours with Vampire.  It is also the one we played the longest. So where we did a couple years of Cyberpunk, I would say a decade of Vampire.  

    What else?  Trying to think, uh… Teenagers from Outer Space, Cyber Generation - which is kind of another iteration of Cyberpunk, I think those are probably the big ones.  And probably a couple other systems I can’t even remember.

    But yeah, a lot of games, a lot of different type of games.  

INT    So you got introduced to this at a pretty young age, and stuck with it for quite a long time, off and on.

REF    Yeah yeah yeah, the first D&D game I want to say was something like 15 or 16.  And probably the longest gap in my adulthood was maybe 8 or 9 years of not doing any gaming.  And I don’t know why, it was just kind of one those things where adulthood, life, took us away from it for awhile, but then we realized, we’re like, you know what, we enjoy this, we love it so much, it is such a large part of who we are, and, here we are again.

INT    Well what is it for you, if you can elaborate, that makes it so fulfilling for you?

REF    Oh absolutely, so, I mean… you’re the neuroscientist here, right?  you could talk about the chemical and the biological reactions that are going on, but at a base, right, there’s a fulfillment in playing these games, right?  Video games, and don’t get me wrong, I love video games. I do. I love sitting down, I love playing a video game. But to me, the video game’s almost…you know, barring certain unique circumstances… it’s almost kind of a mind numbing, or mindless pursuit, right?  You’re following a script, you’re playing the game, you’re learning the system, you’re learning the movements, and then you just let your brain go and you go with it, right?  

    With table-top games, role-playing games, RPGs, you’re creating a story, and even if you’re not creating a story, you’re immersing yourself in somebody else’s story, and you’re playing a major role in that, right?  So, it involves a lot more imagination, it’s a lot more creativity, it’s a lot more action versus reaction. Or interaction, you know? It’s just, it’s stimulating on such a mental and visceral, emotional level for me.

INT    So the way you are describing, it sounds like it is cathartic for you, in a way.

REF    Yes, absolutely.  Not just cathartic, it is therapeutic, it is meditative for me in a lot of ways.  You know, my sleep has suffered, I’m not gonna lie. My sleep has suffered a lot since we started doing this, because I will sometimes lay in bad for hours just thinking through the different scenarios and the plot lines and the different character hooks, and the different ways that things could play out, depending on what the characters do, or what the NPCs do in reaction to the characters.  It is very cathartic for me.

INT    So you’ve been playing a long time, when did you really start getting into being a Dungeon Master or being a Referee, at that level?

REF    That is a good question.  I don’t… Actually, I do know, ok, I take that back.  I do know. I would say that I probably never really ran my own game up until Vampire.  Somebody else introduced me to the game of D&D. Somebody else introduced me to the game of Cyberpunk, or GURPS, or… whatever the other systems were, and so I was always just a player.  The first time I ever referee’d, or game mastered, or was the storyteller, was Vampire: The Masquerade. And that was because I was kind of the one who found the game.  

    I was like, wow, vampires! This is fantastic.  I always had a kind of fascination with the dark, the arcane, the occult, vampire mythos, and I saw this game on a bookshelf one time and I was super-intrigued by it.  So I was the first one to find it, no one else introduced me to the game, so I had to fill that role of storyteller. So when I had the opportunity of sharing my interests and my game, if you will, with a group of friends and a group of players I really enjoyed it.  It was just a completely different facet of the role-playing that I enjoyed.  

INT    Now how big was the circle of friends that would participate?

REF    Good question.  so the D&D, when we first started, I shit you not it was something like 10 people.  It was totally absurd. You experience right now is with the five of us, you can tell how chaotic it can become at times.  Imagine doubling that, right? But again, that’s what I was call a different style of game. We weren’t necessarily immersing ourselves in the flavor, we were just hanging out as friends.  Very little seriousness, very little actual plot, very little momentum or progression on story.  

    Then the groups started getting smaller.  So D&D was probably 10. We played a game called Rifts, which is kind of a futuristic, science-fiction slash magic game.  Also a very fun game, and I forgot to mention that one earlier. But we spent a couple years playing that one as well, and that group was anywhere from six to eight people.  And then Cyberpunk slimmed up to four to six, and over the years… I hate to say this, but some people grow up and they become adults. And along with their lives they don’t have the same interest with it.  But the core gaming group got smaller and smaller and smaller.  

    I think when we started doing or really deep, intense, long term games, it was probably a group of four, maybe five maximum.  

INT    So pretty tight-knit, I imagine.

REF    Yes, very tight-knit, exactly.

INT    And at what point did this evolve into video games?

REF    So that would have been probably… Maybe a decade ago.  Actually, I think it might have been even longer, probably 15 years ago now that I think about it.  I have to measure everything by my marriage, and by my anniversary.  

    My wife still laughs to this day that when I told her, “Hey, I’m gonna go hang out with my buddies,” she thought I was actually leaving the house.

    She didn’t realize I was taking my beer into my office, putting my headphones on, and logging on to the computer.  She said it blew her away. And she remembers that as one of the first conversations we had as a married couple. So year, 15 years ago.  We celebrated our 15th anniversary recently, and probably 15 years ago is when my online video game playing fascination started.  

INT    So you were doing the video games, I guess that was after you were out of your parents’ house?

REF    So the video games, ok, so, again, 46, it might have been as early as 29.  Our group of friends had a little bit of a falling out. I think all groups of friends do at some point, right?  People get bent over something, you get frustrated, you just go in different directions in life, so there was a period of time where we fell out.  We weren’t living together anymore, we all started to move on with our lives, we had respective girlfriends or boyfriends or spouses or kids and life, and the tight-knit gaming group we had was no longer available.  And so, I’m like… what the hell do I do?  

    And that was well before we had the opportunity for anything like Roll20, or any other kind of online RPG system, and we didn’t have meetups at that time, we didn’t have Facebook, there wasn’t anything to bring people together with common interests, so, I was like well, I got a computer, I like video games, and that’s where I really started focusing on those types of video games.

INT    Like, what kind of games pulled you in to start, and what kind of platforms were you playing on?

REF    So I actually like everything.  First-person shooters were probably the big ones.  I did a lot of Battlefield, Duke Nuke’em when it first came out, Halo, all the kind of standard, well known first person shooters.  Beyond that? I dunno, I think my interested back then were pretty narrow.  

INT    Pretty narrow in what way?  The games you sought out to play?

REF    Yeah, I mean, I didn’t recognize the breadth and depth of the types of games out there.  I never went really really deep into video games. When I started, I played Battlefield: Vietnam, like I said, those first person shooters.  And then, when I found a group of friends to play with, we almost immediately went into World of Warcraft. So my whole online gaming experience was really those 4 or 5 first person shooters and then almost a decade or more of World of Warcraft.  

INT    Did you guys collectively decide to get into World of Warcraft?  Did you find that it reinvigorated or filled a kind of need for community and playing with other people?

REF    So, sadly, I can barely remember what I did last week, much less what happened 15 years ago.  I believe it was probably the latter. I do know that when I first started playing World of Warcraft, it was more reminiscent of everything I love about role-playing games.  It was the character creation, the character story, the character advancement, it was the opportunity to play with a group of people. To do quests together, to progress and level together.  So it kind of hit all the major checkboxes for an RPG, without the imaginative aspect of creating the world yourself. I think that was the one key piece that was truly missing.  

INT    That’s a great answer.  That’s a great segue into what I wanted to discuss, was, the difference between table-top RPG and online MMORPGS like World of Warcraft.

REF    OK, and that’s it, right?  I mean that is truly it. So, if you’re playing a MMORPG, or an online RPG game, you’re participating in someone else’s imagination.  You’re subscribing to their creative license, their creative intellect, their story. And there’s nothing wrong with that, there’s brilliant, genius intellects out there creating these online games.  But at the end of the day, it is still a scripted story. It can only be so iterative, it can only be so reactive, and I don’t want to say imaginative — there’s a lot of imagination that can go into it.  But it is still a scripted story.  

    And your reactions to that are also limited.  With a table top game, there’s no limits. I mean it is totally pure imagination.  You can make things up on the fly, you can react to situations as they come at you, both as a storyteller and as a player.  I mean you can truly do anything, and I think that’s part of the fun of it, right?

    I wanna say, it’s not a competition, but it is definitely mental gymnastics with the storytellers and the players, as the players try to figure out where the story is going and how to react to it, and the storyteller of the referee is conversely going, “What the hell are they doing?” and trying to react to that to keep the story going.  

    It is just a wonderfully, dynamically, evolving creation, that you can’t get from a MMORPG.  

INT    Right, I think of it as, there’s a lot more negotiation that happens between the players and the referee, right?  

REF    That’s a good way of looking at it.

INT    It’s kind of like, for me, you know, I like movies.  But I don’t like movies as much as I like reading. And it’s the same thing for me, if I’m reading, there’s a kind of primacy given to my imaginative engagement with the product.  But if I’m watching a movie, I’m kind of on the rails. I’m visually seeing what they want me to see. I find this kind of engagement with the narrative and with the storytelling aspect to be really really fascinating.

REF    I agree.  That’s what calls me to it, is that aspect of it.  It truly calls to me, that part of, the dynamic nature of story creation.  It is truly, sky’s the limit.

INT    There is a, I’m going to give a quick plug here, there is a great book … you remember watching Star Trek: The Next Generation, yes?

REF    Yes.

INT    And the holodeck, and what it provided on the show.  There was an episode where Data was - you know, he’s always exploring what it is to be human and what it means to be human - and he was fascinated with the Sherlock Holmes stories.  And I think it was Geordi La Forge asked the holodeck to come up with a challenging story for Data. And the computer combined different stories about Sherlock Holmes. And Data figured it out right away, right.  And then he said, “No no no, it has to be something unique. You can’t just takes bits and pieces of the different stories and mash them together, because Data knows all of the stories and he’ll figure it out. It needs to be something that will challenge his intellect,m challenge his imagination.”  And they ended up creating a independently thinking creature. The holodeck created intelligent life, basically, and it became a morality story in the episode, where Captain Piccard had to figure out…. do I shut this guy off? Do I turn him off? Or do I allow him to live?

    Anyway…. what I wanted to get at with that line of thinking was there’s a book called “Hamlet on the Holodeck,” I’m forgetting the author.  I’ll add it into the show notes later. It was written sometime around the time of Myst. Do you remember the Myst video game? It would have been around, late 1990s, early 2000s.  But the author wrote about narrative space in video game and story telling. It’s a really great book, it’s very prescient for its time.  

    But let’s get to our little clique, because I met you through World of Warcraft.  I was brought into that, you guys had a groups of friends and a guild, and I was just playing by myself at the time.  And I met one of the people in our group and he brought me in and introduced me to you guys and… so we met virtually for the first time.  So do you remember, how long have we been playing together?

REF    15 years.  Yeah. I’m trying to think exactly…. because you came in on Battlefield: Vietnam, right?  Or were you, did you start with WoW?

INT    No I started with WoW.

REF    Okay, so again, I measure everything by the anniversary, so, if it’s not 15 years, it’s probably 13 or 14.  

INT    That sounds about right to me.

REF    I know it was shortly after I got married.

INT    I’m sure I could… I could place it at the time, I think it was WoW’s first expansion,  Because that’s when they introduced blood elves to the Horde and paladins.

REF    That’s right, and that’s what you were playing.

INT    A blood elf paladin.

REF    Yep.

INT    And I remember you guys having no idea - you had always played a Horde guild, so you had no idea about the mechanics of a paladin.

REF    Exactly!  We’re like… What is this?  Holy crap, you can tank AND you can heal?  That’s invincible! And, yes it was.

INT    So we played WoW together for a long time.  And I used to refer to it as my poker night.

REF    Yes, my wife used to refer to it as date night.  “Gonna go hang out with your girlfriends?”

INT     And we played that together for a long time, you know, I think the peak was like we were doing the raids in Karazhan, and we would have like 10 people on at a time, maybe at our peak.  And then we kind of drifted away from that, right? So talk us through that, your perspective on how that kind of evolved into getting us back to Cyberpunk, because you were the one who recommended that game to us.

REF    So, like you said, we played WoW for a long time.  I know I ended up taking a break for a long time, I just realized how all-consuming it had become for me.  And I don’t mean in a good, healthy, creative way. I mean almost in an alcoholism, narcotic addiction-type way.  I was spending way, way too much time on World of Warcraft, and I needed to take a break.

    And so after a couple years of break, I recognized that I still need this social, creative outlet in my life.  And I, don’t remember, I think you might have still been playing, I think Adrian might have been dabbling, and same thing with Jamie, just dabbling.  But I was looking to get back into a game, we’d played WoW for awhile, and we enjoyed it, don’t get me wrong, I know I had a blast with it where we did another year maybe two years of WoW with the current expansion, leveling up the characters.  But there was something that was still missing for me in WoW. And I don’t want to speak for you, but I think you kinda had the same experience in that it was just the same thing over and over again. It was the grind, it was the similar stories, it was watered down plot lines, and it was not holding my attention.  

    So after about a year of that, maybe two, we ended up trying some other games.  We did Guild Wars 2 for, honestly I think it was another year. I spent a lot of time on Guild Wars, too - I know some of the other guys in the troupe were not as excited about it and probably didn’t take to it as quickly or as well as I did.  But I probably spent several hundred hours on Guild Wars 2, and really enjoyed the game, but, after a period of time, we kinda burnt on that. I would almost say that the biggest gap, for me, was it was not ever really about the game. It was about the time that I got to spend with you guys.  

    When were were playing WoW the first time around, when we were leveling characters together, running dungeons together, it wasn’t about the end game content.  It was about how stupid and how silly and how much fun we could have. We would laugh and laugh and laugh and do crazy silly stuff. You know, training hundreds of mobs and try to kill the characters off, putting each other on follow and trying to jump people off cliffs.  Just the stupid shit that came out of our mouths and the dumb stuff we did and just the absolute fun of the experience.  

    And that stopped for some reason.  I couldn’t even remark on when it happened.  We just stopped having fun with WoW and so we tried Guild Wars 2, and we never ever got to that same level of fun or engagement with Guild Wars.  And then it was just a matter of trying to find a game that would work for us, you know. We bounced around on Diablo 3, we were looking at one called… I don’t even remember what it was!  Some other MMO and I personally was kind oa at my wit’s end, probably everyone in the Group was. Like, What game do we do? We’re done.  

    And then. I don’t know what inspired me, I just know I was looking for something that would inspire me.  Something that we could do together, that would help facilitate that interaction - truly interacting with each other, talking, laughing, having fun, being creative, and I’m like, well, shit… So the best years of my childhood, the best years of my young life, were spend in a group with my buddies role-playing.  Why can’t we have that now?

    And that was kind of the line of thinking.  You know, we have a lot of fun with online gaming, but honestly, I think we can have more fun sitting down playing a role-playing game, a table top game, creating the story together, creating characters together, progressing the storyline together, and laughing our asses off.

INT    Now, back then, there wasn’t a platform.  You mentioned this before, like, a Roll20, to enable this gameplay to happen remotely and in an online setting.  And I wasn’t even familiar with it until you mentioned it. You know, I think there was one time when we all got together, and even  the wives and kids were involved and we were doing a D&D session. And I think that was the first time I becamse aware, I think Jamie mentioned something about these online platforms that were available to help us look up information quickly, do the dice rolls, but I didn’t know about roll20.net until you mentioned it to us as a way to play Cyberpunk.  So how did you discover it, and what has it meant for us and how we play now?

REF    Oh it’s fantastic.  I think part of the reason I went such a long time without role-playing was simply because we didn’t have an online platform.  I mean, life takes us all indifferent directions. And instead of all living together and being able to play every night from 5pm to midnight, we had to schedule around it.  How about Sunday, Monday, Tuesday? Now you have to count in travel time, you have to count in dinner, all this other stuff in a very adult-schedule breakdown way.

    So I’d been looking for some kind of online system.  I remember finding some early systems that were really immature, didn’t like it, looking a few years later there were some apps you could try, but not very evolved and not very user-friendly.  And maybe a year ago, I looked again and found Roll20. But I didn’t have much time to try it out. I didn’t know anyone who might try. Jamie is always interested, you know, but it you just can’t do much when it is only two people.  You need a little more diversity in that community to make the game really pop and make it fun. And at the time we just didn’t think there was anyone else who would be interested.

    So we had awareness of this platform but never really had the opportunity to try it.

    Now about three months ago, I had a buddy of mine move back from California.  I’ve known this guy for some 20 years. And he’s been in California for 17 of those 20 years.  And he moved back to Colorado, and was kind of the same way, missing that online gaming group, missing that community, decided that he wanted to run a Vampire game.  And again, here we are all adults, with lives and children, and adult stuff. And we were like, let’s do this. He tasked me with being a Co-GM in his game and made me in charge of figuring out how it works, learning the intricacies and nuances, and I just absolutely fell in love with it.  Because you can create character sheets for all your games, make your rolls directly from your character sheets, you can make maps on the fly, you can make them in advance, it’s truly infinite opportunity. It’s everything that hex maps and sitting down in front of people is… online.

INT    I’ve been really happy with it.  It feels really engaging and useful.  I’ve enjoyed it quite a lot. So, getting more directly into Cyberpunk the game.  so you guys played this a long time ago. This is the one you recommended to us, we jumped into it, we started making our characters, and you now had the task of building this environment, creating this narrative, making the gameworld.  So walk me through some of your thoughts in weaving this tapestry. I mean most of used just random rolls, we used the fast NPC creator system to come up with a character, and then we rolled whatever our backstories were. So building this world, choosing to put us in Night City versus in Seattle or New York City or somewhere else… walk me through your though process when you were doing this.

REF    So, I dunno why I picked this game over any other.  I think it is the perfect blend of cinematic, realistic, complicated, and simple.  It’s like a perfect balance. I’ve played a lot of games and I know what systems are good for what.  And this is a really good system for one, new players, and two, just for a general mix of role-playing and combat.  Secondly, I think the storyline itself is great, right. We’re all creative types. We all really enjoy maybe a fantasy genre, and I think had we gone with a fantasy genre we would have enjoyed that just as much, but there’s something about the kind of a dystopic future, the blend of raucous, lawlessness, technology, careless abandon, and societal breakdown that is just a fun world to play in.  So that’s probably why I picked the Cyberpunk game.

INT    Well I have to imagine that the announcement of Cyberpunk 2077 by CD Projekt Red was in our minds either consciously or subconsciously.  I’d never heard of Cyberpunk until BT had posted something in our group chat about how excited he was that the Cyberpunk video game was coming out.

REF    That is true.  Now that you mention it, it probably did have something to do with it.  I am super-excited for that game. I think it brought back such beautiful memories of the fun times we had playing that game.  So it was probably in the back of my mind, too.

INT      Subconsciously or metaconscisouly in some way, yeah.

REF    Metaconsciously, yeah.

INT     So this game world.  I mean, there’s a lot of flexibility in building the game world or Cyberpunk.  What kinds of things did you, what sources of inspiration did you have in coming up with the world we were going to play in?

REF    First of all, Night City is the quintessential Cyberpunk city in all the original source material.  So you’re going to find more material on Night City versus Seattle, or Denver, or… we could have picked any city.  But there’s the most content on Night City, and it is also what I remember most is… the great thing about Night City is that it is not something anyone is familiar with.  So people don’;t have preconceived notions about what Night city is, or where it is, or how it looks like, and you can create it as you want. That was one of the things.

    The other thing was in terms of game style of play style, I just kinda defaulted back to what I enjoyed as a player.  I really, really liked Cyberpunk 2020, I liked the Night City, I liked some of the stories and color and the flavor of the world as I remember it 20 years ago.  So it is a comfortable setting for me. It is an easy setting to fall back into and pick up.

INT    Now describe a little bit the characters, the cast we have in this, and how you started to look and them and how you started to craft a story for them.

REF    Now that was probably where I have had the most fun.  I mean truly most of my fun. You took to it quickly. I just dropped the source material and said, here’s what we’re going to work with.  And before I could blink, you had your character figured out. And again, I gotta say I was so unprepared for the direction you went. Corp probably would have been that last character concept I would have picked for you, or for anyone for that matter.

INT    It would not have been the one I chose, either, but like I mentioned to you, I just went completely random with it.  And I said, ok, I’m going to take whatever the dice roll, and now I’m going to have fun trying to build a story around this character and flesh it out, right?

REF    I love it.  And that’s what I love about Cyberpunk.  That is is exactly. The game system is designed around randomly creating this ridiculously fun and flavorful character.  They have dice rolls for everything. They have dice rolls for your style, for how you look,. what your ethnicity is, what your language is, what your family is, who your friends are, everything.  It is all random, and it’s all super involved. And so the fact that you did that and had fun with it is exactly what I did with the world.

    So we have your character, Antigone the Corporate, the corporate middle manager, slightly maybe senior director, who is trying to take her autonomous independent sovereign state corporation primetime in the Night City area.  I mean, that’s just a random dice rolls that we got that, right? We’ve got your giant Greek/Polynesian family, with your four sisters your two brothers, your parents, and everything that came out of that, just with random dice rolls.  And once you get those broad strokes then the ability to craft the story beyond that is endless.

INT    So what about some of the other characters?

REF    So, Jamie knew what he wanted to play.  He knows what’s going to be a good fit, what does he wanna do?  What’s going to be of benefit to the group. So he is like, ok, fantastic, I’m playing a Netrunner, the futuristic cowboy hacker, straight out of Neuromanver and Johnny Mnemonic, and Ghost in the Machine, the cowboy Netrunner.

    And Brian?  Fixer, the streetdealer, he knows everybody: the social street dealer, info-broker, weapons dealer, drug dealer, someone who knows everybody.  Brian loves this type of character. So he knew exactly what he wanted to play.

    Adrian, a little more difficult.  Like he didn’t really…I think he’s into it now but I don’t think he really took to the idea at first.  And he wasn’t really excited about spending a lot of time or investing a lot of time into looking into the rules or whatever, and he decided he wanted to play a Solo.  Like, Han Solo.  

    And this is a dark future, you can be anything you wanna be.  That’s a great fit right there, so he’s Han Solo, the dazzling, charming, charismatic pilot smuggler with a blaster, right?  

    Now, the characters themselves started out, as do all characters, single dimension.  There’s no really depth to them until you start fleshing out that lifepath. And once your start, when you roll what happens to you on a yearly basis, and in one year hey I had this job, I made this money, all right well… who was the job against?  How did you make that money? Next year, you made an enemy. What did you do to make that enemy? Oh, I made a friend. Well, how did you make a friend? I mean, you start fleshing out these details and… these characters are young, right? These are supposed to be up and coming edge runners, the up and comers in their field.  So they’re, 20 -25. But you start your lifepath at 16, so you have 5,7,8 years of events that you are filling in backstory for. And a lot can happen in those years.

    So, what I did intend to do, I intended to create a story and just you guys evolve that story.  But as I started looking at your lifepaths - and you all seemed to be really into it - I started really… you know, if you made an enemy, how did you make it?  And I started kinda mapping this out. This is an idea I stole from Vampire 5th edition, which just recently came out, is the idea of a relationship map.

    We don’t exist in a vacuum.  Every person we touch or who touches us has some sort of significance to us.  And, not only that, it is a small world, and things are very interconnected. So as you start mapping out this relationship map and you start seeing, all right, so Surany make an enemy at age 17 and huh, you roll a couple details of that enemy and you realize that this really fit’s well with Hako’s friend that he made at 18 for something similar. So you start to see these relationships map out and this net get woven.  And that presents some of those amazing plotlines and storylines in and of itself. That makes my job very simple.

INT    This is really my first foray into real roleplaying with a group, but I gotta say that, from my experience, I think you’re doing a fantastic job interwaeving all of the stories that we have.  Creating these… you know, in writing, we talk about Goal, Motivation, and Conflict. When you’re making a character, it has to have a goal, a motivation, and a conflict. To be compelling in some way.  And I feel like you’re doing a really good job of interweaving those randomly rolled backstories we have to create those relationships.

REF    Well thank you, I gotta say, that’s been the most fun for me.  Looking and that and going, OK, how can I take that factor from Antigone’s life and interrelate it with Surany, or Hako, or Han.  I can’t wait…. we have content that we’re probably not going to get to for another 6 months. But when some of these connections come out, it is going to be absolutely hysterical.  A ton of fun.

INT    So our group - it is probably not a unique problem - we play once a week.  We have a set time that we generally do it. but life happens. And every now and then someone has to be at work, or there’s a family emergency, right?  And you came up with this really interesting system that we ended up calling, or you ended up calling it, the Extended Rolls Tasks. Can you describe what that is and why you came up with it and what it does for us?

REF    Yeah, actually, it was more… [laughing] You’re gonna laugh.  It was more, I think, to satisfy your enthusiasm for this game.  Like I said, I would never have picked a Corp for you but, you rolled it, you took it, you embraced it, and I wanted an opportunity of letting you explore what it really meant to be that Corp.  So, instead of being a single edge-runner character out there with your own myopic and selfish motivation, your character was part of something bigger. A corporation. Not only is it a corporation, it’s a family corporation.  This is what your family does. Your very very deep motivation for this corporation and what the corporation is trying to accomplish in the world. I kept thinking like, how do we do this? There’s going to be the game, and in the game, you’ve gotta have a good mix of plot line, a good mix of character interaction, there’s gotta be a good mix of social aspect.  Because characters have to be able to do what they’re good at in game. So like if I throw your character in a situation where all we do is combat, you’re gonna die, first. But even if you don’t die, you’re not gonna have much fun because you’re not very good at it.  

    We gotta have a good blend of social aspect AND combat AND net-running to keep the characters engaged.  But, the aspect of being able to play with your company and your character’s resources, and also be able to further your corporations reach into Night City and to achieve the goals of the company was not something we’re going to be able to play out in character.  One, because it would take too long, two, because it would be boring as shit, and I needed to figure out some way of doing it.  

    Here’s what the team does, and in the down time — mind you we haven’t actually had an opportunity to have any down time yet — but in the between sessions where you guys are not actively blowing shit up or getting blown up, what are you doing to further extend or expand PPC’s goals?  So it was really an opportunoity one, give you a budget that is indicative of your company and your personal resources - you’re pull within the company - then take your skillset and the skillset of the team to further expand PPC’s resources or PPC’s overall marketshare… it’s an opportunity to fuck with your competitors, it’s an opportunity to play the game at kind of another level than simply sitting down and rolling dice.

INT    Now, what I thought was interesting was that when we were rolling our characters, three of us rolled Pacific Islanders.  And thats part of why I… you know, you and I kind of negotiated this Paupau Collective concept, and I was taking inspiration from the Neal Stephenson Snow Crash novel which has this concept of “The Raft” that is kinda of floating around the Pacific islands.  And I kind of modified that to think that, well, if we’ve got all these Pacific Islanders, maybe there’s this… after the drug wars, after everything had happened in the Cyberpunk 2020 universe, I can see a very similar type of thing happening. But it’s not core to the Cyberpunk 2020 manuals.  So you worked with me to help create this environment to allow it to occur, right?

REF    It is always fun to create your own… but it is far more fun when people collaborate with you.  I could have easily just said Hey, here’s what we’re gonna do. But the fact that you were so engaged, intrigued, and had created such a beautiful and intriguing backstory — it made it easy.  

INT    I’m loving it.  It is so engaging for me.  Are there other sources of inspiration for you?  You mentioned Gibson, and you mentioned Johnny Mnemonic.  Are there other sources of inspiration for you when you’re trying to create this world?

REF    Yeah, so most recently… I loved the Cyberpunk genre, I loved science fiction so I read Heinlen and Orson Scott Card, but most recently Richard K. Morgan’s Altered Carbon.  I heard about the series and I heard it is a book series as well, so, I read the series first and then watched the television show. And thoroughly enjoyed both of them. And that also kind of reinvigorated my interest in the Cyberpunk genre, and I am also taking a lot of inspiration from that series.

INT    So we’ve covered most of this already in the comments you’ve made, but, just to put it to a more specific question, if anybody is interested in migrated or getting their friends involved in moving from video games to table top role-playing games, any kinds of tips or any kinds of advice you might give to people?

REF    Yeah.  So, honestly, I don’t think the system matters.  Actually, scratch that. go back and edit out what I just said.  The second it came out of my mouth I knew it was wrong… the system DOES matter.  But only insomuch as it supports the genre and what you are trying to do and who you are as a person.  

    I think the most important thing is to find a genre that you are interested in, truly, because that will inspire the most creativity, you’re gonna have the most fun with it, you’re gonna have the best stories, because it is going to be of interest to you.

     You know, I really, really like Vampire, and that’s kind of where I spent… I cut my teeth on storytelling and that’s where I spent the most time.  I thought about doing that, but I didn’t think you guys would enjoy it as much. So I went with my next favorite choice, which was Cyberpunk. And I was comfortable enough with it, I love the genre enough that I was comfortable getting into it.

    Beyond that, the next thing is what kind of a system do you want?  Are you looking for something with a lot of complexity, a lot of rules, a lot of depth and flexibility, or are you just looking for some kind of generic framework?  And there’s no right or wrong answer, but that is what is going to really drive it. A good example is the Vampire game. It has a super deep rich mythos with a lot of content, backstory, flavor, color, but it is a very light rules system.  That’s not the focus. For Vampire, the focus is the story. Whereas on the Cyberpunk side, again, very very rich world, lot of culture, flavor, variability, and a lopt of content. But it is a far more rules-intensive system that allows you to perhaps satisfy that more linear rules-mechanics need.

INT    Now something interesting I’ve seen on roll20.net, for instance, is there’s almost like a brokerage.  There’s a way that you can kind of broadcast that you are looking for a game, or that you’re wanting to host it.  So people can advertise that they want to join. Thinking about our group of friends, we met — I met Adrian in person, but I met the rest of you guys online.  And it turned out that we were all local, and we all met each other in person. But for — I’ve seen some posts when I was browsing around roll20, there’s some younger people who are out on roll20 who are searching for friends.  And they are advertising that they want to find other people that are interested in what they are doing, and interested in joining a game with them. So a little bit different way that when you and I experienced. Do you have thoughts about how younger players, for instance, might be seeking out communities of interest?

REF    You know, it was so long ago, I’m trying to remember where I was at that age.  It was a completely different world 20 years ago when I was that age. I already had the group.  We had a community and it was something we already enjoyed doing. so I don’t think I can put myself in that same frame of mind.  But what I do recognize is how much role playing and that online commhnity fills or could fill such a nice in peoples’ lives. It is all those things, it fills all the boxes and it is all those things that perhaps fringe type people like ourselves need.  I’m not, I come across as gregarious, but it is still hard to me to make new friends. I’m good at keeping the friends I have, but making new friends and getting out there and meeting new people is socially a very difficult thing for me. I really like that creative aspect, the imaginative aspect of role playing.  Akll those things I don’t get in my day to day life. If I didn’t have this kind of a friend group or social base, I think I would be very attracted to the idea of online gaming and RPGs just by virtue of what I think it could fulfill. 

    I don’t think I was even aware there is a community of younger people out there looking, but it makes sense, and I think it’s brilliant, and I think it’s a wonderful and beautiful thing that some of the younger generation are looking for this kind of interaction, this kind of social community.

INT    The resources available to them are so much different than the ones that we had, right?

REF    I was thinking about that too, like, holy crap man, what would it look like if 20 years ago we were trying to do this stuff?

INT    Right, you might prioritize remote friends over somebody that’s local.  And I don’t think there’s anything that’s wrong with that. I think the enabling of that possibility is quite extraordinary.

REF    I agree.  I mean, we came in kind of on that first crest of that wave, so to speak, and again, I’ve known Jamie and Brian most of my life.  But I’ve still known you and Adrian for years. And there’s nothing to make me believe it will not go on for another 20-30 years of friendship.  And to think about that, that just came from an online gaming community. The right people finding the right interests at the right time, and those friendships are just as deep and … maybe even more deep, and more powerful than some of the friendships we make in person, in physical space.

INT    So it is possible, it is believable, you absolutely can connect with people.  

REF    This is where we insert the “I love you man’s.”

INT    So let’s wrap this up and get a little more personal.  If you’re not gaming, what other kind of stuff do you do?

REF    Uh… think about gaming.  

INT    Well I know you do that at work…

REF    I have such a hard time with that question!  My interests include animals and… veterinarianism…. I, seriously, I couldn’t think of anything… if I’m not gaming right now, my interests include thinking about the gaming.  Planning it out, researching, yeah, that’s kind of where I’m at right now. I’m in an interesting phase right now where I used to really enjoy going to breweries. And brewing, and I love, or loved, … love alcohol.  But I’m not drinking right now. It was time to take kind of a break, and it was almost like… a lot of what I would do in my spare time is no longer what I’m doing in my spare time. So, I’m looking for other interests.  But again, I’m not feeling any loss by any stretch of the imagination, but I’ve taken such an awesome interest in running this game, in addition to running the cyberpunk game, I’m also running a Vampire game with my buddies, and as we talked about before, sometimes life takes us in different directions and we have to be able to… as a group, maybe try that Vampire game out with us.  I’m hoping we do anyway. There’s a lot of different gaming opportunities that are consuming my time. So that’s what I do when I’m not gaming. I’m thinking about gaming.

 INT    Well, you do a lot of cooking, too, yes?

REF    I do, I do.  I suppose to be fair, barbequeing we do a lot of that, and pizza making.   We’ll have to have another pizza party soon.

INT    Right, that house you moved into recently has that pizza oven in the back.

REF    Oh yeah, we have a blast with that.

INT    And you guys came up with that gluten-free crust that just tastes delicious.

REF     Yes, thank you, good stuff.

INT    And you definiteley do brewing.  And you have… video game devices, you have an X-box, is that right?

REF    Yeah, I notice that I’m not playing that as much.  I’m enjoying the intellectual and the creative processes of the RPGs right now.  But I do, I have an X-box and in fact I just finished a couple weeks back, Red Dead Redemption 2.   

INT     Oh yeah, I bought that at an end of the year sale for cheap, but haven’t done it yet.

REF    If you haven’t played it yet, play it.  

INT    That was one I thought we could actually play together, because there is an online multiplayer version of that.

REF    Well if our characters die and we need a another game.  As soon as we stopped doing the WoW and the Guild Wars, I haven’t been playing on my laptop any more.

INT    So here’s an interesting story for you.  When I was in grad school, for this degree I was doing computer science.  So Microsoft used to come every year, you know, to recruit people for new hires. They came one year showing off their new Visual Studio development platform, their IDE.  And they had a raffle, and I won the raffle, which was for a Sega Dreamcast. It was game-changing at the time. So I heard a story, I don’t know, this might be apocryphal, but they had a football game, an American football game that was so good that EA came and bought it out and basically buried the tech because they wanted to procuce their own NFL Madden franchise program.  So I’m not sure that’s entirely true, but that’s what I heard. It was a very very good game. But I won that at the raffle, and that must have been year, 2000 or so. And it had a sticker on it that said powered by Windows ME. Do you remember Windows Millennium?

REF    I do.  We all try to forget that one, don’t we?

INT    And I was like… I know this device is not actually running on Windows.  This is a completely different operating system. But it was interesting to see that at that time there was a strategic interest at Microsoft of getting into games, and they were initially going to try to work with this partnership program, and they were gonna try to work with Sega and it was shortly, not too long after that they came out with the X-Box.  Which if you remember, it was originally on the IBM PowerPC chip. The only chips that were running PowerPC were the Apple’s back then. So there were some famous pictures back then of Microsoft loading docks, they were bringing in hundred… maybe dozens…. of Apple PowerMacs because they needed that chipset to develop games to run on the X-Box.

REF    That was the start of the actually corporate wars, right?

INT    So this question is an homage to one of my favorite podcasters named Sam Harris, he runs a podcast called Making Sense, and it is focused a lot on meditation and neuroscience, political philosophy and current politics, economics, anyway, he always asks this question.  “If we could bring back the Tyrannosaurus Rex, should we do it?”

REF    Yes.

INT    Unequivocally, yes?

REF    Unequivocally yes.

INT     You’re not worried about any of the consequences?

REF    Oh no I’m terrified of the consequences, but I’m not saying we shouldn’t do it.  There’s that fine line between can you do something and should you do something. But I’m of the mind that if you can do something then you should do something.  I feel that sometimes not taking the risk and not trying things out is a recipe for stagnancy.  

INT    So, same answer for things like the wooly mammoth or the blue-footed boobie?

REF    Yeah.  I think I would.  I don’t know that it is the right answer, but it is my answer.  This is kind of our family motto: “Let’s see what happens.” Sometimes you have to take risks and do crazy things.

INT    Any final thoughts?

REF    Thank you?  That’s my final thought.  I don’t know if I remember it, but when you initially proposed the idea of recording our gaming session, I was a little nervous.  Kind of a knee-jerk reaction. But then I started actually listening to it… and it took me awhile. You put out the first one and it was like two weeks before I even thought about listening to it.  And my wife said, “He’s putting actually time and effort into this, you owe it to him to at least listen.” And I was like, all right…

    And from the get go, I was hooked.  I’m like, I sound stupid, I hate the sound of my voice on recording.  But even that wasn’t enough to deter me. You do a great job of wrapping the whole thing in a very digestible, presentable bow, making it intriguing and exciting, even though I know it’s going to happen, I’m still sitting on the edge of my seat going, “What’s going to happen!?”  I appreciate the time and energy, I appreciate the output, I appreciate you sitting and asking these questions.

INT    Well thank you so much for answering these questions, and I really hope someone has fun with this, because we’re having a blast.

REF    Shit’s just gonna get bigger and badder and funner and hold onto your shorts.