Doing game-design-but-not-mechanics this morning, and I haven't really ranted about that into the void in a while, so, congrats, here's some of that.
Gotta say, one of my biggest issues is simply making a world that is, in a lot of ways, an improvement over our own, while still making the central conceit that players should be blowing up and breaking parts of it.
To contextualize: one of our main inspiration points was Shadowrun. Now, Shadowrun has this specific issue where because it's a very, game-first mechanical system (and not even an especially good one but that's an entirely different rant), it actually implies a lot of things about the world that go totally unaddressed by the actual writing. And one of those points is that Shadowrun is, rules-as-written, an actual medical utopia. Within the context of gameplay, it is effortless and affordable for your character to more or less rebuild themselves into, anything they want. Beyond just, the obvious result of players pointing and going 'gender', the world just totally doesn't explore this possibility at all, which is a shame cuz I find it fascinating.
And now I'm here trying to summarize what I want it to be like for my game and world, and I'm staring down the barrel of, how do I make near-universal healthcare and augmentative/cosmetic surgery, provided by the power groups the players are generally supposed to be opposing, sound like it's not... a pure good?
My ADHD commands I clarify this is mostly rhetorical, I have plenty of ideas, and it's easy to point out that in our modern world, just because certain groups do good things does not net-out the bad they also do. And this game, despite existing in a dystopian corporate panopticon suffering through the climate crisis while space is full of monsters of our own creation so there is no 'planet B' that lets us wash our hands of Earth, is still supposed to be a game about punching up, and making an impact on the world. Because it's my game and my power fantasy that I'm writing hundreds of pages about.
But it's just, an interesting thing to struggle to reconcile. How do I describe a world where certain aspects of life are quite literally utopian (In execution as well as capacity, not like, the comedy answer of "oh technology is perfect but only for the 1%" as is the standard cybergrim motto), and likely something player characters are direct beneficiaries of, but still done in such a way that the net takeaway from the setting is still that they should want to tear it apart.
The part of me that actually GMs says that this kind of illogic is good, actually, it's a thread to pull on from both directions. This is a game where players are expected to spend a fair bit of their downtime waxing philosophical about if they're doing the right thing at all. The world isn't perfectly or even partially logical, and despite my best efforts that's probably not going to be true of my fiction either. The problem of designing a whole game is that my role as the designer is to provide a framework to hang a plot from, not necessarily the plot itself, so the more dangling things, the more there is to hook onto.
Still, just a fun bit of thought to chew on, trying to balance that careful bit of believable irrationality.
