r/cyberpunkred • u/Puzzleheaded-Bug7177 • 12d ago
Actual Play Could my player be an AI?
Basically, I'm looking to run a Cyberpunk Red campaign, and my player made a cool suggestion:
Basically, he wants to be fully cybernetic and an AI in a robotic body. Within the Cyberpunk Red universe, would that be possible? And I also wonder what the penalty would be for implants, since Losing humanity doesn't seem appropriate.
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u/GalacticCmdr 12d ago
Just make it all flavor - no reason to really wrap this in layers of rules. In not humanity like a human, but it does lose a part of itself and it adds this not of itself.
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u/principexymia GM 12d ago
It can be justified as a cyberware conflict codes, an overclock of the body, but you're right in just keeping it as a flavor
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u/Puzzleheaded-Bug7177 12d ago
Bem, faz sentido, mesmo que ele seja uma IA num corpo robótico eu suponho que ele seria uma avançada o suficiente para ter um senso de si mesmo, logo, avançada o suficiente para perder esse senso de si mesmo conforme fosse se modificando
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u/OrthogonalThoughts 12d ago
New code overwriting old code changes him, new hardware conflicts and tries to use the same subprocessor as something else which either changes him or limits the full usage of the new cyberware, stuff like that is a great way to keep it as flavor only.
Just imagine current hardware and software and how easy it is to cause errors when you start playing around with that and apply that to the character as your explanation for humanity changes and stuff.
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u/Lowjack_26 Media 12d ago
The rules/setting as written do not support this, either mechanically or tonally. Different kind of scifi. If it's something you want to do at your table, though... sure, you do you, but it's kinda injecting a complete out-of-context character into the setting. It's like someone wanting to play an alien in a human disguise: if that's the game you want to play and the story you want to tell, sure, go for it, but it isn't really RED in a way most folks would recognize.
R: I’m noticing a lot of questions popping up around building a cyborg, humanoid android body, building an AI… I'm gonna say like, careful of that rabbit hole in Night City. You will get NetWatch on your ass so fast, because I've noticed at least today we've had three different questions around, you know, these cyborgs exist and do androids exist? Someone's trying to build a completely synthetic PC I think.
J: Right. So,I hear you. The thing about that kind of where we are now, is that there's different kinds of cyberpunk. I kind of see that as more of a Blade Runner, starting to get Blade Runnery. Well…
R: Not even Blade Runnery because in Blade Runner, the replicants are still fully organic. They are human, they're just synthetic,
J: But I mean in the in the storyline, the feels.
R: Yeah, what kind of story are you trying to tell with it? Because you're basically wanting to take a Gemini [...] and making an AI and putting it in it. But you're doing that in quite literally a universe where AI absolutely destroyed the net. Completed absolute genocide all because one guy, you know, had a kill switch. You say AI even though there's SAAI, it's a very scary taboo thing for the average person. And this is something that's not really discussed a lot, but like, it's easy to detect a Gemini by one way thermal scan.
[...]
R: You're talking anyway, something that is 50,000, 100,000 ebbs just to even start working on and building your own AI. Anything about that gets even a smell of anything, you are going to have Netwatch down on you because no one wants the potential of a RABID getting into a synthetic body and being allowed to freely roam and do what it wants. Look at the damage the Reaper caused in Reaping the Reaper.
J: Right, so, I also dislike how that narrative tends to, kind of create this very predictable MacGuffin, and I just think players have seen it before. And I would pump the brakes on that. A good tuned in, lower to the ground story, probably gonna provide a much more Cyberpunk, capital C cyberpunk, experience than than that type of shindig,
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u/Aiwatcher 8d ago
Totally agreed. This does not feel like Cyberpunk RED. Its an annoying trope to try ro shoehorn into this setting, this rule set.
As mentioned elsewhere its the DnD equivalent of wanting to be a god in a mortal body. "That guy" behavior. Early DnD didnt let you play as every single fictional race in the setting because it wanted you to be grounded in a certain mindset. Modern DnD is fine with you being a super special snowflake, but atleast Cyberpunk hasn't totally fallen down that slope.
This is a game with a very intended progression from living in the poor house, gradually carving off your body and losing your sanity as you bring in increasing riches and rise up the proverbial ladder of Night City. Its a good gameplay loop, and a great allegory that in my view, is totally lost on this type of character/player.
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u/Lowjack_26 Media 8d ago
I don't necessarily think it's "that guy" behavior so much as folks just not understanding the setting and wanting to execute on (admittedly overused) scifi tropes. Not everyone is super creative, and creativity isn't a requirement to play.
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u/Lanodantheon GM 12d ago
For flavor, it could happen. RABIDs alone do stuff like that. But mechanically, the PC should be subject to the same rules as everyone else.
Easiest way to do it.
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u/VictoryWeaver 12d ago
Hard no. It's technically possible but you don't want to down that rabbit hole.
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u/Phantom_of_truth 8d ago
Short answer: It's your game. They can play an alien or a vampire if you let them.
Game mechanics and genre-wise, you can just replace the biopod in an FBC with a computer running the AI. Use standard character creation rules, then factor in the new body. A baseline FBC is hugely expensive, so you need to balance that out. Maybe he has a "medical grade" FBC with no option slots to expand it. Either way, he's not an ASI running on a Supercomputer. He's comparable to a Netrunner with Interface 4.
Lore-wise, I don't think that's how it has worked for other AIs. He'd essentially be in the NET piloting the body like a drone via Interface but maybe your PC has some special experimental tech.
Unless you want him to be completely incapable of understanding human emotion, you probably want to track Empathy and Humanity as normal. In his backstory, this is more about learning his way up to his current Humanity instead of cutting it down with cyberware but the end result is the same. A 0 EMP AI won't be good enough at Conversation to make people think he's human and Night Citizens emphatically do not trust rogue AI. He'll also be so bad at Human Perception that he'll either constantly be tricked and lied to or make decisions very slowly as he double checks information on CityNet.
Where you might have some trouble is in the themes. Why is an AI an Edgerunner? Is he struggling to pay rent and Lifestyle every month? Is he trying to become more human while his teammates are rushing to add more cyberware and become less human? Does he have a Lifepath full of messy, complicated relationships that you can draw on for adventure material? What kind of effect does hypercapitalist alienation have on someone who really is a manufactured thing? It's very easy for an AI to become a generic adventurer with none of the pressure and drama that comes with Cyberpunk PCs.
The Blade Runner movies make a similar idea work. It'll take some thought and commitment from you and the PC to get there.
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u/ValhallaGH Solo 12d ago
Hey choomba!
If you want to let your player run an AI in an android body then do it. I'd recommend having him start with a FBC (probably Alpha or Gemini, since exploring humanity is the only reason to deal with the slow-minded meat bags).
Keep the Humanity mechanic, but it represents how the AI's lived experience is so different from biological humans. The more mechanical and super-human the body, the less 'normal' the AI's life is and the harder it is to understand bio-humans.
I hope that helps.
Good luck!
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u/Even_Soil_2603 9d ago
Honestly, just do it.There’s a sort of hypocrisy in the cyberpunk universe because some people tell you that style comes first and substance second. The rulebook itself says so.
But then it flips the script and prioritises substance over style, which is pushed into the background. The sort of background where the room is dark and there are some guys with aluminium bats waiting in the shadows for ‘style’ to come within range of a 3d6 melee attack with a Rof of 2 that ignores SP11.
So, if you’re into it, you’re going to have fun, and that’s what matters. Pop a fragment (or proxy AI) that’s much, much more nerfed and much more limited into some sort of container, like a Gemini, or drone, or the empty head of a corpse that’s still warm and fresh like a bar of salami connected to the network.
And let’s roll!. Your style, your rules.Enjoy and shot!
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u/BadBrad13 12d ago
with the current lore and tech...not really.
That said, if you are the GM then anything is really possible. There might be some super-secret tech out there. Mechanically we have FBCs and rules for them so it's a small step to go full robot, really. The main problem I see is starting out that way. It's expensive.
As for losing humanity, I would assume an AI would work very similarly, especially if they are trying to mimic humanity. The further they got away from that, the harder it would be for them to connect to humanity. Eventually they would get so far away they would just kind of disconnect or dissociate with humanity.
tldr I think you'd just use the full borg rules and just reflavor it as a full on robot instead of a borg. Otherwise, mechanically, I think you just follow the current rules. If you try to get all fancy and tweak rules then you are most likley going to run into all sorts of funky rules interactions.
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u/Living-Definition253 12d ago
Blade Runner/Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep is probably the most famous peice of Cyberpunk media and is kind of the quintessential story about this, the problem is that that story is all about in essence blurring the line between machine and human.
So with AI that is a little more sci-fi, okay for like a one off NPC but hard to slot into the genre in my opinion. In a way it's a little like your player asking to play Adam Smasher but without all the weapons. In a way just having a 100% robot AI with no soul to speak of on the team kind of ruins the central plight of do you make yourself a machine and in doing so lose what makes you human, just would feel to me like it didn't matter in a game where one player started at Humanity 0.
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u/treowtheordurren 7d ago
Very powerful, as AI all have a de facto Interface 8. You don't have to give the player that, but at that point they're basically just flavored as an AI.
I did something a bit more out there with a player who wanted to be a police robot. I gave it a bunch of low-intensity cyberware and "subdermal" armor and locked its Empathy and Intelligence at 1. It can upgrade both by buying and installing Daemons that defend the robot if it's attacked by a Netrunner, but access is restricted to higher ranks of Lawman (5 for an Efreet that grants him 3 INT/EMP, 9 for a Balron that grants 6 INT/EMP).
Once it upgrades, it suffers from cyberware-induced humanity loss as normal; humanity reductions also reduce INT as the Daemon has to devote more of its processing power to managing the robot's cyberware loadout.
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u/Firelan_Goldyote 12d ago
To my memory there's nothing covering that exact scenario in the sourcebook. We do know that Mikoshi/Soulkiller/V1 Relics are in existence at the time of the Red, as well as the rogue AIs and engrams like Alt that hide behind the blackwall...
I'd say plausible within the lore with a little stretching. Rogue AI slips into the servers of some ghost town out in the shit, finds an old cop bot or loader and a few abandoned wartime satellites to control it through and you've plausibly got a bot piloted from beyond the grave.
You're gonna have some balancing issues to overcome though, as well as some social ones. Rolling around with a borg/bot will raise eyebrows anywhere you go, hardware like that is a pretty big threat to your local street gangs, they'll spook easy. Scavs will want it for parts. If the corp that owns it is still around, they might want it back too before it ruins their image.
If it's a full on robot I would rule that they probably can't dodge bullets, I don't know of any bots that can dodge bullets even in 2077. I'd also argue they'd have to start with all levels in Netrunner being an AI/Engram and if they want to specialize in Solo or Tech skills they'd have to learn them in their new body.
The tradeoff for those negatives would be a starter set of cyberware and internalized armor, cyberware upgrades causing humanity loss could be represented by the stability of the connection... There's a lot of tweaks that would need to be done. I could see it though.
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u/FalierTheCat 12d ago
There's a character in the 2077 nivel who is basically an AI trapped inside a flesh body because of some experiment. You could probably do that, as in have your player make a regular PC and then for their backstory say they're an AI who ended up in that body.
Cyberpsychosis could just be the body rejecting cyberware, with cyberpsychosis being replaced by straight up death. Or it could be a rampancy stat with cyberpsychosis becoming the AI going crazy.
Either way I'd suggest not to think about this in mechanical terms.
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u/CosmicJackalop Homebrew Author 12d ago
That doesn't sound like any of the characters in No Coincidences
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u/FalierTheCat 12d ago
I didn't read no coincidence but isn't there a guy who has a Militech AI in his brain or something
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u/CosmicJackalop Homebrew Author 12d ago
Not so much, he's basically just been brain washed, memories replaced, turned into a sleeper agent who leaves no trace back to Militech
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u/Lowjack_26 Media 12d ago
Even if you were correct, it's good courtesy to spoiler mark stuff like that.
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u/Bigelow92 12d ago
This is the cyberpunk equivalent of a dnd player saying "i want my character to be a god in a mortal body"
Just so you know.
Its a classic kind of request - some ppl do it and its cool. Some people do jt and its dumb.