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If they can't feel pain, he gets no sustenance from them.
Hence a pain editor, which makes you unable to feel pain, would render you unable to be fed upon by Artificer.
And if everyone gets one, Artificer starves to death.
and what if it's his purpose? why you think, that the ways of the otherworldly entities are as plain and simple as the minds of mere mortals are? what if the pain is something like dragons? :]
Reverse-thinking: if you want be Racter's avatar of transhumanism now maximize your cyber-affinity (limited by race and Body) then load yourself with chrome until Essence drop to 1 virtually being none at all because affinity works as bonus essence. I will try it for my next playthrough.
Are you seriously calling themes of cyberpunk and transhumanism are trite and uselessly derivative for a character in a SHADOWRUN GAME? That's .. kind of what the whole game and everything in it is about. The evolution of mankind, merging with machines, all that jazz. No duh it was written about long ago, but that doesn't mean that having a character in a game about transhumanism who believes that merging with technology will be the way forward is automatically a badly written character.
As for the serial killer manifesto stuff, that's kind of BS too. Racter doesn't justify hunting people for sport because they are weak or anything like that. If anything he is remarkably restrained given his condition and life story, and he even excised his base impulses to put them into a robot. He doesn't kill for pleasure, only when he feels he has to. As a relatively amoral psychopath he has no empathy, but his killing seemed more utilitarian to me - a means to an end like every other character in the game. And I say relatively amoral because he obviously lives by certain codes and acquiesces to social convention to some degree, even stating he sees the value of other people's feelings (for instance about friendship and loyalty) even if he can't process them empathetically, only intellectually.
He didn't seem like a stock psycho/sociopath, either. He's a mad scientist, but not a simple grinning maniac bathed in blood. He never kills anyone the main character doesn't want him to kill, either. That's another issue I have with your reply. Once again "any killer or psychopath is basically a ripoff and you should feel bad for thinking it's good writing" is what I got from that, which is definitely wrong. As far as those sorts of characters go, I thought he was an interesting version. His portrayal was IMHO more true to the psychological condition as opposed to what you usually see. He becomes a sympathetic character in a way these characters almost never are barring some fairly recent examples. Actually out of those of which I am aware he is the most sympathetic psychopath character I have seen, more a tortured soul than a mindless slasher.
I thought he was a cool character and I liked the writing and character design for him. Then again, I'm one of those people who feels like the HBS Shadowrun games are very well written in general in terms of style and content. I would totally go to a movie based on Dragonfall. Playing that, I just kept being hit by that feeling "this would totally be a great movie, it would be cool if someone actually did it. The story in HK is good, too, but I think Dragonfall might be a more popular movie if it ever was made.
In any case, every character and everything ever written is derivative of something else if you are going to take it that far. Themes, archetypes, even the story structures are repeated over and over. Writing about something someone wrote about before is definitely NOT bad writing. It's called writing. Sheesh you may as well say the whole cyberpunk genre is derivative of Nietzsche and may as well be scrapped, if you're going to go that far. Then you can say Nietzsche was derivative, too, of earlier philosophical works and throw him under the bus with the rest.
He's not particularly murderous from what I remembered reading, he just figured being a shadowrunner fit his lack of empathy and reservations about killing, though he did say that eventually anyone who resisted his "ideal" transhumans would have to be dealt with but he didn't seem to particularly want to kill those people.
Racter's (and Gaichu to a lesser extent? I haven't not killed him yet...) also an interesting character in that he's probably more in line with the type of team you might actually run with or hire in a shadowrun game, he doesn't have any real stake in the Kowloon situation getting resolved, he's just running with you because it's convenient for the time being.
It's kind of funny how once people started some real conversations the people from the start of the thread just vanished. Basic indeed.
And Racter's suggestion that his psychopathy, an absence of empathy, could be a natural adaptation to accept augmentation was intriguing. It seems more people are in this spectrum of anti-social to social-incapable these days.
And I think he is correct that it could also be the course of human evolution. We are a violent culture. The building of empires is how the world's knowledge, technologies and other resources have managed to be collected into concentrated areas. Without empires science and technology probaly would not have progressed or come to exist.
Racter is probably the best embodiment of transhumanist thinking I have encountered in fiction so far. For one thing, he essentially become transhuman in 4 different ways. His psychopathy, his accident, the experiment and through his drone. Essentially birth, fate, force and choice. I wanted to say I would support him but settled to say I would not get in his way because I played as a shaman who never got any augmentations.
Overall, I think Racter is a decent character. He is a realist. I am sure plenty of us here eat meat or at least something alive. Either way most of us buy it from the store already dead. The fact we take life to preserve our own is not lost on Racter. Maybe in real life I would not agree so much with someone like him.
And I find it funny some the first posters on here would attack Racter fans for Racter being a white male imperialist. Ok, he is a white European and is ok with murder and conquest. But the guy settles for his specific needs and does not get greedy like some people in real life that want 'ful spectrum' dominance. Racter just wants to solidify and perserve his own kind. And yeah, Hitler started out like that but by the same logic you would condemn Malcom X.
When we got his tech back he was happy and completely ok we did not get a chance to bump into his old friends and torture them. I do not regard him as evil for these desires because for Racter this tech is his progeny, 'his kids' basically.
But back to the Racter haters FYI Racter is asexual. So male, NOPE. The idea who he is comes from the gentials between his legs is weird because he has neither. My favortie title to Racter though is the achievement after your final talk with him. Racter is beyond your double standards ya haters. He is everything you claim to be and more. So go ahead pick at his 'white male' facade. If you play the game and talk to him without making all the judgemental choices he will tell you his story and give you something to think about.
And I do not see how running the shadows (to pay the bills when you are polygot/enigneer) while mantaining a lab/workshop in a ship illictly is a 'privileged' existence.
yep I really liked him as a character, but I also really glad he isn't real :D.
He doesn't just have legs. He has everything below his chest as artificial.
Racter is a eunuch but he is still male. Losing genitals does not cause loss of gender.
By the way in the Cyberpunk RPG they listed Mr. Studd and Midnight Lady genital replacement cyberware. I would imagine that in Shadowrun something similar would exist even though it isn't explicitly mentioned. So, I think Racter could have male genital cyberware.
Since it is Racter though perhaps he has experimented with some transhuman creations between his legs that deviate sharply from human physical norms. I don't really want to think about where that might lead.
I only read a few comments and tried not to bother with the complains.
Here's my 2 cents:
Racter and Ripshot are opposites. Many have not realized it but they have similar backgrounds but different attitudes.
Ripshot wants to cling to his essence despite his condition. Racter wants to achieve transhuman status.
Racter revealed a few moments ago his psycopathy and I don't consider his lack of empathy a bad thing. That doesn't make him less human.
The need to rise up, to overcome the limitations that were imposed you; to improve your social-economic condition; to be the best. Those are things we all feel in different places in a "spectrum". ;)
Ambition is a very human thing. Racter is far from a monster right now.
"My name is Daniel Lugo and I believe in fitness."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rA64dwSFzic