Quote:
Originally Posted by Icelander
That never made any sense to me. Why should a lack of pleasure centers prevent a character from deciding rationally that retribution is called for and then meting it out coldly and dispassionately?
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Oh, that's one of those weird alien concepts said to motivate some people who aren't murder hoboes right? "Justice" or something like that.
But no, Killjoy doesn't make very much sense. It exists to model a very specific cyberpunk trope that doesn't actually mesh up that well with the way brain works either - I've pointed out before that the reward system is both more distributed and more fundamental than required for it to work as written. You could not inflict this without doing much more horrible brain damage than just "you don't feel pleasure", and it's far, far more severe - in the experiments that inspired the idea the damaged rats don't bother to *eat*.
Several cyberpunk traits have been mechanical problems from the beginning - it's a list that included Alternate Identity, Zeroed, Secret, Social Disease, and Terminally Ill. Killjoy isn't even in the Disadvantages section - it's in a sidebar with a couple other kinds of intentional brain damage. But there were some slight problems with the Cyberpunk playtest, what with the Secret Service apparently doing the reality checking....