What fictional Dystopia do you think our future will resemble?

[Addendum_Forthcoming]

Corporations and governments will always exist, the paranoia against the losing their humanity might be justified but is definitely overused. I'll rather have humanity have a future in space than deny the possibility in sake of irrational fear.

It's not overused, however. Niger Delta. Once the most verdant place on Earth. Now it's a nightmarish toxic wasteland. If we can barely trust corporations not to fuck with the lives of millions now, why exactly can we trust them not to police our access to resources solely on manufactured scarcity? Also as they do now... might I add.

Frankly I'd rather wait until the need gets so great rather than simply turning the planet into paupers... well even worse of paupers.

 

[Addendum_Forthcoming]

Pff, now look at you silly. Comin' in here with your logic and stuff. I want cybernetic arms and i want them now! How else am i gonna lift trucks and punch people through walls?

I would imagine to do all of that you'll need a steel spine, steel hips, steel legs ... basically an entire body :/

To the edit: chromed mages can actually be really friggin scary, but it needs lot of minmaxing. I've played multiple such characters. Mages with higher grade reflexboosters or just payin' 1 essence to cram your head full with utility upgrades can be more than worth it.

Plus: Dafuq, since when are cybernetics shit? Except for super broken technomancers (depending on the GM) the cybersam is probably one of the strongest archetypes. Though i agree magic has need tricks but is pretty weak in many battles. You're to slow, to squishy and keepin' up with the +20 dice from the start cyberdudes or adepts is usually not possible.

Cybernetics is horrible. And so are technomancers. Honestly, I'd rather keep my magic value as high as possible. Drain is horrible enough in a firefight and magic is already pretty crap, so why chance your spells failing, or having to lower spell damage/hits solely to get something like a skill wire? I will go half way and say summoning gets you the best bang for your buck. Spirits are pretty useful. And about the best thing about being a mage is always going to be astral space. Might be MPO only, but technomancers strike me as simply less interesting, less useful deckers.

Sure you don't have to worry about other deckers shorting your CD, while you try to do the same, but at the same time the only restriction to a decker doing more than a technomancer is the quality of their cyberdeck and just how smart the PC is when they are decking and how they configure it on the fly, predicting what they need to do ahead of time rather than just forgetting about it.

Also, cybernetics have always been crap. Fopr the price of getting the lowest E costs the money you spend would be better off spent getting better equipment, or scoring and affording that luxury apartment so that you can fill it with a library, or perhaps dedicate space to doing spell research in ytour downtime.

In a low nuyen campaign where life is cheap, and even raiding a AA rated corp research facility only nets each player a few thousand nuyen, you're totally better off putting that money elsewhere. Hell, we all agreed to let the decker take an additional 30% loading on top just so they could afford a basic rig upgrade to better their role as our tech support and troubleshooter. Despite the upkeep and cost values attached to adecker ... totally better than a technomancer.

Deckers can simply do more.

 

[Satinavian]

Cybernetics is horrible. And so are technomancers. Honestly, I'd rather keep my magic value as high as possible. Drain is horrible enough in a firefight and magic is already pretty crap, so why chance your spells failing, or having to lower spell damage/hits solely to get something like a skill wire?

Depends on the rules used. E.g. 3rd had bioware that lowered karma costs for skills and other bioware reducing mental damage (even from drain). Those were things to give up a point of magic, that you gould still kind of keep by accepting a geas. Body enhancements for stats were also were far cheaper in esssence as in magic for Ki-Adepts. So overall some mixing was usually the most powerful way to go.


At topic :

I don't believe in dystopias. There are as unrealistic as utopias. That is one thing i like about Post-Cyberpunk : the tendency to go for a more realistic middle way.

But then again, a lot of stuff is perception. Some of the "dystopias" are basically only about changing societies and values. Look at the examples in this thread : A society with a loose sex moral ? How horrible. People using shallow electronic entertainment a lot ? What a big step down the from shallow non-electronic entertainment we had before. And so on.

 

[Zen Bard]

This one:

Sure it's kind of cliche and someone might call me out for being "unoriginal".

But it's so. Goddamn. Accurate.

 

[Mr.Mattress]

Definitely Brave New World.

People are already obsessed with drugs that don't actually improve their lives, so we have that.

People also think that the family unit is outdated and pointless, in the future we probably won't have them.

And finally, sex as an exclusive act has utterly died out completely, everyone just wants to have sex with everyone.

We have a brave new world ahead of us.

I haven't read the book, but your description of the "dystopian" society sounds pretty chill!

Brave New World is definitely one of the better Dystopia's if you are in the Upper, Genetically Modified, Classes. You hardly work while all the Genetically Modified Grunts do the hard stuff, you basically just distract yourself with leisures (both real and electronic), sex and drugs. And if you don't like the society you're in? Then you will most likely end up in a Reservation that, while agriculturally poor, is filled with people just like you.

Brave New World is basically the most realistic Dystopia, and the Dystopia that our Future will most resemble.

 

[Parasondox]

I'd say we're well on our way to Demolition Man, which sucks because I fucking hate Taco Bell.

*BZZT* YOU HAVE BEEN FINED ONE CREDIT FOR VIOLATION OF THE VERBAL MORALITY STATUTE!

Remember franchise wars, artificial meat, no physical contact, no sex, no swearing, no disobeying orders.

Jesus Christ! IT'S TUMBLR AND REDDIT!!

 

[aegix drakan_v1legacy]

Probably something like Deus Ex 1 but with pure corporate power instead of the illuminati, and without any of the cool nanobot or cybernetic technology. :s

 

[Addendum_Forthcoming]

So what? Some people are murderers, are we gonna blame all people of being potential murderers? The problem today with corporations is that nearly no one in any level inside them is willing to stand up, and rather point upwards and say "I was doing what my boss told me, I'm not to blame".

No, you can blame many of the world's largest companies now for seeking to maximise profits at the cost of environmental impact or social costs. I can totally see the same largest companies from fucking up, cutting costs on, say, a antimatter production plant. I can also see the flipside of that whereby they merely quote 'safety reasons' why they can ill afford to harvest more materials. Allowing them to manufacture scarcity and hold the world hostage over natural resources for which they probably have no right to access without the entirety of humanity benefitting and being seen as owners of it by default.

Depends on the rules used. E.g. 3rd had bioware that lowered karma costs for skills and other bioware reducing mental damage (even from drain). Those were things to give up a point of magic, that you gould still kind of keep by accepting a geas. Body enhancements for stats were also were far cheaper in esssence as in magic for Ki-Adepts. So overall some mixing was usually the most powerful way to go.

Bioware and alphaware is ridiculously expensive. Getting the highest rated kit costs exponential amounts more. Sure, there are a handful of things you can buy that might justify the loss of a point of magic ... but I've always found that since 3rd, it's simply better to flash out and buy better equipment or put money towards better accommodation for which you can do things like spell research.

Also, you could make the same argument for maximising magic and spending the same nuyen you would have spent in order to maximise the spell foci you can bond to, which will actually give your magic teeth which will require less force, or amp up your weapon damage, to make what you do more effective. Not only do you have one more point of magic to work with, you can also make spells more effective that you DON'T need to risk so much drain to begin with simply to overpower their capacity to meet with willpower or other resistance/dodge rolls.

In 5e specifically, being a killer mage involves killer foci. Not only that, but the higher your magic, the higher force potential foci you can hold. That one dot of magic transforms a mage to only being able to hold 5 foci, and a force potential bonding of all foci to 25. Not only are foci awesome to customising what you can do with magic, the higher your magic, the more you're able to resist foci addiction and increase drain resistance.

Each point of magic loss exponentially reduces everything that makes your spells worthwhile.

 

[Saulkar]

Most likely the novel The Invitation to the Game. Robots do everything so everyone is forced to live in a deliberately underfunded welfare state with no freedom of movement. Your ID dictates where you can and cannot wander thus preventing you from hopping on a tram to visit the countryside or another part of the city; One reason I am against making manual vehicles illegal.

Microphones and cameras permeate every interior and exterior area for a total surveillance blanket with the military able to deploy on criminals in seconds at which point they disappear for good. At the very least the libraries go unmolested.

 

[Thaluikhain]

Not a few people have spoken about the rise of politically powerful corporations. While this is a concern, surely this is not a few thing? The rich have always had more than their share of political power. A few hundred years ago it was the nobility, later it became rich business owners, now it's people that run (but don't usually own) corporations.

There's certainly room for all sorts of problems there, but they are the old ones we've seen forever. Such a dystopia would likely be "same but worse", rather than anything new and exciting.

 

[ExtraLexical]

We're basically half way to cyberpunk anyway. I reckon we're destined for a dystopian cyberpunk future where corporate control is absolute and everyone is just a number. I mean, that's basically the world now. We just need the sweet/dangerous technological advances!

Either that or red buttons will be pressed and we'll live in a post-apocalyptic wasteland akin to Fallout, assuming we're lucky and actually survive the bombs.

 

[McMarbles]

Idiocracy.

Oh, wait, we're already there.

 

[mardocOz]

Idiocracy.

Oh, wait, we're already there.

Gah! Beaten to the punch!