Cyberpunk RPG idea: yeah, it has an Essence/Humanity/Empathy stat.
It's drained by /money/, not cyberware.
Feb 2, 2026 00:09In universe it's common knowledge that cyberware eats your soul, but it's based on conflation: the /rich/ are the ones that /can/ chrome the hell out of themselves, and none of them were even remotely human to begin with.
Regular people who get chromed (usually as puppets for the rich, sort of like Molly Millions in the Sprawl series) are just people, but since they're often coming from disadvantaged backgrounds with the trauma and psych baggage that entails, any negative traits they have are blamed on chrome
Thinking about this some more: the rules would have to be explicit in that having low Empathy due to wealth or whatever doesn't mean that you're some edgy '90s antihero who lacks the capacity to feel.
It means that you're fundamentally estranged from basic human morality.
You have no filter on your deranged desires because you've never been limited in your damned life, thanks to the money, and you're surrounded by terrible people who will *literally* fuck their own family to make line go up, again thanks to the money.
You have to make constant Acting checks to pass as human, in pretty much ANY interaction where there's a definite and obvious human response. Make rolls to _not_ say things like "it's only a banana, how much could it cost, $10?" and "that 12 year old *is* pretty hot, I can arrange something for you"
Like all these other systems, Empathy/Humanity isn't recoverable. Once you've done the sorts of terrible things that money can buy, there's no coming back with it.
And if you _start_ with 0.01 Essence in Shadowrun terms?
You've /been/ a monster that should be shot in the street for public health.
And, unless your Acting is really good (or you have a contracted and complicit media working to whitewash your image), you _will_ be at some point.
I mean, this basically recreates the Mechanized from /Galaxy Express 999/.
Which is correct, more or less. The Mechanized aren't evil because they're mechanoids; they're evil because they're ludicrously powerful.
Continued thought: there's an implication here
Getting rich through gameplay risks your Humanity. It exposes you to temptations no mortal man should know, but of course it doesn't make you a monster overnight. It builds with small bites, little slips, little sins, that set the stage for bigger ones
Vices are resisted by anything else. The difficulty lies in the delta between your Empathy and the vice. If you've got a normal Empathy, it'll be really easy to resist a huge vice like going to Pedo Island. But it won't be so hard to use money to gain an unfair advantage, twist a law.
And so, _so_ many players might _take_ the failure to make their lives easier. To get the job done, to do the Lord's work with the Devil's methods. And the damage is done, and the next step gets harder to avoid.
These vices can affect anyone, but it's easier to fail with money because money lets you do so much.
And maybe by the time a left-hand-path character finally gets to a point where they can finally square up against the worst vices, to smash them and save the world...
...they mechanically CAN'T
I think the resistance against these sorts of things will be against a stat called Programming, representing the baked-in cultural biases of growing up in the setting. Not the explicit values, but the implicit ones, the ones that are _really_ rewarded and everyone knows but never admits.
Extension of this thought:
If you make it rich, the right call is to go MySpace Tom and disconnect from greater society. Go take pictures of birds and pretty places.
It's like being a monk: physically isolate yourself from sources of temptation. And that's how you're a Good Rich.
