I’m curious about the narrative of staking cred when taking a mission. I get that cred is money and reputation. How does that factor into taking the mission?
If the mission is completely secret outside of the client and your team how do you lose cred if you hid your identity? Sometimes the cred stake could be the middleman’s cut, but not always.
How does staking different amounts of cred work in the story? How does staking 3 cred cause the narrative effects of the clock advancement?
1) I’m okay with it being entirely a meta-game conceit.
2) If you really need to ground it, then I think about it as the players investing in their standard assumed gear. Acquiring ammo, calibrating their programs, getting an oil change on that van, paying off minor inconsequential debts to their contacts, etc.
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Jesse Burneko I think it mostly works only as a meta-game conceit. Sure, you can provide some partial justification for it – but that explanation doesn’t explain why staking more (e.g spending on standard gear) doesn’t actually give you anything more for the mission, but somehow increases the payoff you get at the end. For me, it’s meta-game, pure and simple… which is fine, but it doesn’t easily fit the narrative of the game.
It bugs me a bit because in PbtA things are supposed to tie into the fiction aren’t they?
Matt Petruzzelli I can’t speak for Vincent Baker but given the things he’s written I get the impression that the “core” of PbtA is more abstract than that. I can’t find the actual post but I remember a conversation where he said writing a move completely based on which player brought snacks to the game that day was still in scope for a PbtA game and that was in response to me providing example moves based on the players real world emotions. So, I think meta-Cred staking is WAY closer to the fiction than either of those things.
I’m of the belief that there is not complete secrecy in cyberpunk. If humans are involved there are going to be a leaks/trails somewhere even if they are hard to find.
Beyond that a runner wouldn’t want to be completely anonymous anyway. Runners have their own brand and the bigger it is, the more money they can charge, the more people they can impress/intimidate people, etc. That notoriety is probably attached to a public persona. Just like now we can join social networks with fake names/avatars to shield our real info, so too can a runner.
Let’s just assume that future Yelp has reviews for runners. Who is going to get the big jobs, some anonymous runner with no reviews or the public persona with a ton of referrals?
Staking three cred is like when Babe Ruth pointed to the center bleachers during the 1932 World Series of Baseball. Babe was already a really good player who hit a lot of home runs. He didn’t have to point to the bleachers but the fact that he did indeed hit a center field home run on the very next pitch helped to grow his legend beyond that of his piers. If he had just struck out after that it could have been a tarnish on his legacy or at the very least made him appear to be VERY foolish.
Credit gain represents becoming a big shot in the Sprawl, IMHO (Since you can get access to more of everything when you purchase things with cred) and the loss of cred represents the “falling star” / “What have you done for me lately?” celebrity culture that is present in real life.
Omari has it. The Sprawl works on the assumption that people will find out about what you do. You have a reputation in the shadow world that is linked to things you have done. There may not be any legal evidence that you did something. The Corps might not be sure that you did something. But the guy who sells you the spiffy new wingsuit two days before the daring wingsuit heist knows. The girl who digs a clip of flechettes out of your arm knows. The mobster you paid back with all those funds you just “found” knows.
That actually makes a fair degree of sense when you work backwards from the mechanics. When somebody stakes 3 Cred, the clocks advance, which makes the job more dangerous and more high profile, so more people will hear about it–therefore retroactively explaining and justifying how you’re able to gain or lose so much social and material currency depending on the job’s outcome.
So staking Cred is as much about determining as a player how big you want the job to be as it is about deciding as a character how tightly you want your name associated with the job and its fallout.
Thanks!
Wait…if you stake 3 or more cred you advance a clock? I some how missed that on my read through. I am glad we only had one mission so far.
Riley Crowder Action Clock for the first person, then the Legwork Clock for the second, etc. Alternating back and forth until everybody that staked 3 cred is accounted for.
Yeah I found it in the book afterwards. Id just missed it before.