"The Big Short" and Cyberpunk XP

I just finished watching Adam McKay's The Big Short, which I hadn't seen before. It's pretty good; I thought it was way better than Vice or Anchorman.

There's a scene at the end where Steve Carell's character—Mark Baum, based on Steve Eisman—has this conversation:





For context, Baum & Co. have just successfully shorted the American housing market betting against bad debt—they thought that the market would crash, it did, and they all got rich.

It's a great scene; the whole movie, Baum is railing against Wall Street and its cronies for being stupid, corrupt, arrogant, greedy bastards. He—along with a few others—realize that the market is going to crash, and so they bet against it in a gigantic short (hence the movie's name) and then come out with truckloads of cash.

Throughout the movie, there's a sense that Baum is making money off of Wall Street, that he's ripping off the bankers. It's what makes the movie comedic, watching all of these characters realize that every stockbroker in the US is a moron, bet all of their stock on their beliefs, and then come out on top. On some level it's a heist movie, where instead of bank vaults and security cameras, it's housing data and S&P assessments. It's fun, it's awesome, it's good TV.

This scene, though, hammers home for the characters what the movie has been telling us, the audience, throughout, but has never quite seemed real for the characters: all this money isn't from Wall Street, it's from ordinary people. Subprime loans hurt the banks, yes, but more importantly, they hurt taxpayers, and that's before the bailout.

This is, I think, my issue with a lot of cyberpunk RPGs. I've been tinkering with one for a while now, and XP has been gnawing at me.

In almost all the cyberpunk games I've played, you play some manner of professional criminal, a small fish in a big world. The exact way you get there varies, but you'll almost always end up making money off of the megacorps: maybe they pay you for off-the-book jobs, maybe you're being paid by their contractors, maybe you're just stealing money from them directly. It's easy money in the corporate dystopia—there's no guilt to be felt, since you're stealing from the oppressors.

I'm sure you can see where this is going.

Except that isn't really true. If you broke in Jeff Bezos' house and stole $100 million in gold bars or whatever, you aren't really stealing from Jeff Bezos. Sure, you are, you had to sneak past his Amazon drones loaded with guns, but that isn't Jeff Bezos's money.

Capitalism is bad because it exploits the workers; they don't see equal benefits as the result of their labor, since it's being siphoned by the bosses. If you, a random person off the street, steal from those bosses, you're really just stealing from the workers with extra steps involved.

In cyberpunk games where you steal from megacorps, you're depriving the rich of their wealth, yes, but that wealth just transfers to you. You don't fight the system, you actively benefit from it.

A couple of caveats and exceptions to this:

1. Not all cyberpunk games care about money, you get XP in different ways or have item pickups or whatever. This is true, but I think those games are cowardly for doing so: cyberpunk is about a capitalist dystopia—not centering currency is sidestepping the issue.

2. Some games acknowledge that you're playing as the villain. This is cool; forcing the players to be Mark Baum is a good position to put the players in. Alternatively, some games let you just work for the corps and play extrajudiciary supercops; kind of horrifying when they glamorize doing so, but sure.

3. Occasionally, you are the worker stealing from your bosses. This is cool, too; it centers the classism directly and means that you're fighting capitalism in your own backyard.

Still, most of the games I've played don't do this.

My tentative proposed solution to this problem is as follows:

Making money earns you XP, but only if you give that money away to people or causes that need it.

It centers cash-as-XP, which is good for a grimier, lower-down cyberpunk kind of experience, but still forces the players to think about what they're doing. They can still spend their cash on cyberware and guns and chromed-out cars or whatever, but they sacrifice both some potential XP and the moral high ground as they do so.

I think it'll work.

The question that still remains, unfortunately, is what XP actually does, but that's a question for another time.

Thanks for reading.

Super-hot-but-not-actually take in the post-script: all of this is true in D&D once the dragon is dead.