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Genetek Bio-Printers
Making it easier to mutilate others.

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A discussion from XOOC brought here:

Give hospitals access to GeneTek Bio Printers. Essentially, very small scale cloning devices able to replace basic limbs that ALMOST match your skin tone. It's expensive, but possible to just get a natural organic limb back with little issue as cloning has become so quick and effective these days that doing it on a smaller scale only makes sense business wise. Get your arm blown off in a mining accident? Get right back to work in an hour with arm made of your own DNA! (Warning: Melanin content will likely need time to adjust, so it may appear slightly off-color…)

Don't got the cash for the hospitals? Let's find a ripperdoc who might have a cooler full of spare arms and legs that they can staple on in a filthy back-alley somewhere and pump full of drugs to get it mostly-working. Please keep in mind as this leg isn't yours, it probably isn't going to even be the same color as you, and anyone who sees you is going to realize that you're in fact not supporting your natural leg anymore...

WHY THIS IS GOOD FOR THE GAME: Make mutilating someone easier and more effective to do, while also making it easier to fix. The 'all chrome' solution is tedious and sometimes prohibitively expensive compared to just killing yourself which is stupid, so why not bridge the gap? The technology in the game is already capable of re-growing people, have Gene-tek just release a smaller version specifically in partnership with hospitals!

Allowing you to send a message that someone won't forget physically is also fantastic! Tell your drug pusher that next time you won't tolerate a third fuckup after you've cut off both of their legs while shoving enough money in their pockets to get two new printed legs will remind them every time they take off their pants to take a piss!

Give smaller-time ripperdocs more to do and give them reason to carry around hordes of body parts like a psychopath!

Don't limit it to just arms and legs! Hands, eyes, ears, all of it, and thematically, -any- part of you can be printed, even organs! Maybe you need to go to the hospital and RP getting a new lung!! Maybe your drug abuse has you on your third heart this sleeve already!

By AdamBlue9000 at Feb 19, 2025, 2:59 PM | 0
You had me on board until it turned out to be cheaper way than chrome. I think fixing limbs is already too cheap, and to easy honestly, which may make it less effective as a way to apply pressure without going to vats.

If people suicide to avoid it, that's really a separate problem.

By Aida at Feb 19, 2025, 3:05 PM | 0
I don't think cyber limbs are expensive or difficult to acquire at all. I'd rather the playerbase fix their mentality of suiciding over that to no sell it because it's an inconvenience rather than just go buy a chrome limb. I don't see this changing that at all. Mutilating people is already very difficult compared to vatting someone, so I honestly think if people could just get their limbs back without deciding to kill themselves the amount of severing happening would simply go down as it's too much bother for a solo with barely any consequence for the victim if this were to be implemented.
By Cowbell at Feb 19, 2025, 3:05 PM | 0
I seem to recall limb regrowth got trialled three years ago and then nixed.
By 0x1mm at Feb 19, 2025, 3:24 PM | 0
How are cyberlimbs too cheap? You need the limb(s), a processor, pay for installation, and then you might need an overclock on top of that. Depending on what you need, the cost is crippling (no pun intended here).
By duck at Feb 19, 2025, 3:51 PM | 0
you're making a lot of assumptions there. cyberlimbs are reasonably cheap, maybe a LITTLE on the expensive side of reasonable.
By Baguette at Feb 19, 2025, 3:54 PM | 0
It's a bit tangential to the topic but I will just point out that players are way, way more invested in retaining bodily harm and cybernetic patch-ups as a way to avoid death than the actual theme is. It has always been Johnny's position, at least as far as I've ever heard him or other Justices state it, that any medicine or cybernetics or surgical solutions that would be more complex and expensive than simply cloning out probably wouldn't exist in Sindome:

In Sindome cloning means you don't need to worry about this. Unless you're adovating for Clones suddenly costing 50K For a rejuvenated body, and 5K to restore you to your last state of your clone of your previous state, then maybe we can do something like that, but until then Johnny's response has always been that there is no market for junk cyberware or anything that can be solved by simply cloning into a fresh body.

Same thing with BioMods. We're not Deus Ex, because Deus Ex doesn't have advanced medical and genetic technology like Sindome has, we don't fit into that cyberpunk box very well.

In some ways the state of things has softened from there but I think it's a bit too far to suggest that suicide-as-medicine is a player problem, because it's actually highly thematic.

By 0x1mm at Feb 19, 2025, 4:20 PM | 0
I cannot speak for back then, I've barely been here few months, but right now respecting and fearing death seems to be a popular and expected choice in the most part.

And that's a good thing in my view, because if people become borderline suicidal as "I got a clone anyway" then the ways of conflict get reduced to vats, chain vats and perms, with no real reason to not skip right to that end of escalation ladder.

My view on this is at least partially also based on help suicide, notably:

It is not acceptable for you the player to decide to kill your character simply because their IC circumstance is hard,

or you want to 'get back to normal'. That is RP avoidance, and it invalidates the roleplay that led to whatever IC

situation your character is in. If you go down this path of treating your characters life as expendable and the roleplay

they have been given as optional, you can expect an XHELP from staff, and possibly continued repercussions for whatever

IC actions you sought to avoid by cloning out.

By Aida at Feb 19, 2025, 9:10 PM | 0
Well it wouldn't be my first time arguing that that help file was a bad guideline to have tried to enact which runs diametrically against the theme in several ways, and which implies a level of fine grain roleplaying micromanagement which just doesn't exist.
By 0x1mm at Feb 19, 2025, 11:56 PM | 0
I will say that in terms of the original idea, having restorative treatments as roleplay elements opened up a lot of interesting storytelling to have with medical characters and wow did they hard pivot away from that after the change because every attempt I ever made to get non-coded medical treatment from a PC doctor was met with rigid adherence to what they could programmatically do with cybernetics only, so whatever the roleplaying guidance given to them seems to have been way over the top.

It's a strange situation to want to try to get a simple cosmetic issue fixed as a purely storytelling plot and be told to replace my entire face with cybernetics as a solution.

Even if there is some reason that limb restoration wasn't working for coded gameplay, having general restorative or corrective treatments in theme is good policy in my opinion.

By 0x1mm at Feb 20, 2025, 1:16 AM | 0
The code is very old. There is not a dynamic system of organ damage or anything more complicated than that, but just because it isn't a hard coded feature doesn't mean it wouldn't happen. Maybe you did so much Marcy since your last vat that your heart is actively failing and you can't afford to vat out right now. Maybe the last time you got shanked it clipped your lung and now every time you breathe you can feel your lungs filling up with blood. Maybe your stomach lining is totally cancerous because you drank pud and now you need your entire intestinal tract swapped out with a non-cancerous model before it metastasizes.
By AdamBlue9000 at Feb 20, 2025, 1:23 AM | 0
Yeah I like a lot of this, and the fact that if you have your cut off hand it cannot just be sewn back on is just weird and… A lot of this can be solved with no real code need, just guidance to provide to medical players of what procedures they can do, then price sheets and so on.

Just don't make this as a way to make non-vat punishments even less appealing please.

By Aida at Feb 20, 2025, 4:10 AM | 0
Mutiliating someone is easy and effective to do, but few people understand how. However, it will always be easier to just type kill.

As recently as a week ago, I noticed someone choose clone death over simple limb replacement. So, I think the problem still stands.

Until cyberlimbs are more commonplace and the meta around limb loss vs clone death ceases - I don't think this makes much sense.

By ReeferMadness at Feb 20, 2025, 9:37 AM | 0

The Suicide Helpfile commentary:

I disagree that the suicide help file conflicts with the game's theme. It's clarifying that even though clones exist as an in-world insurance policy, there's still a heavy psychological weight to dying and waking up in a fresh body. Suicide or forced perma-death shouldn't be trivalized into an easy OOC hatch. If a character ends their life, that's their perrogative, but it's with the hope that it reflects the harsh, consequential reality of Withmore, where each death has trauma, impact, and story weight. A lot of times that's probably not the case, but I don't think it runs against the grim, cyberpunk feel. It reinforces it by highlighting how every clone interaction has consequences rather than just a carefree reset.

3D Limb-Printing

As for the original suggestion, I don't think it would be hard to hijack biomodifications or nanogenics to regrow missed limbs and have it restore coded limbs after a grueling regrowth period or something. I think there are already situations where people get their tongues, eyes, or other things cut out and are allowed to just do some freeform medical roleplay about getting a procedure to restore them without having to default to getting chrome when they're ready to stop selling that mutilating injury, so why can't they do limbs and stuff too?

Medical Roleplay and Storylines:

I think it was o1xmm who said something about how they had an experience with medical professional characters not being willing to step out of defined coded bounds and just recommending they get chrome. In the past two years, I've seen players roll in characters with several different medical situations that slowly got corrected through roleplay like speech therapy, drug therapy, and other things from working with people in those jobs. I wonder if some players are afraid to engage in pure roleplay storylines like that because they don't want to be penalized for RPing a procedure or thing happening, but then be told it's not, so they stay with what they know. Or, on the other hand, is it because people don't really want/feel comfortable with sometimes having to google a few things to really sell the RP sometimes?

By Napoleon at Feb 20, 2025, 1:27 PM | 0
I honestly would prefer if sever also supported cutting out eyes and tongues too. From my experience the roleplay handwaving it away for those has only been because there isn't really a mechanical way to do that unlike limbs (without direct staff intervention at least). Otherwise mutilation should still remain an alternative way of sending a message/inconveniencing someone without just vatting them, and it should have mechanical implications that set you back one way or another. I find it very discouraging if I RP cutting someone's tongue out only for them to just 'heal' it or even severing someone only for them to vat themselves to avoid RPing it out. At that point, I'd just go for a vat next time.
By Cowbell at Feb 20, 2025, 1:32 PM | 0
I don't know what the behind the scenes directives have been but my perception from the outside is that if any medical character states or implies treatments or effects that aren't the exact coded reality of cybernetics or biomods or nanogenics, they get descended upon in correction by all the other medical PCs like a flock of starving crows.
By 0x1mm at Feb 20, 2025, 1:37 PM | 0
I don't think you're really considering the lasting impact to someone's roleplay that gouging someone's eyes, tongues, or deafening them can cause. When you finish that scene with them, and the rush of adrenaline wears off, you've effectively prevented the character from being able to engage with any other roleplay in a meaningful way.

If you cut out their tongue:

They can't talk on the phone. They can't use says, they can't use dialogue in their poses and emotes. It might be interesting for the first several days or a few weeks, but it's not a fun scenario to be in.

If you cut out their eyes or blind them:

They really won't be able to move around freely to pursue roleplay, they can't do combat, pursue their jobs or anything meaningfully because you cut them off. They effectively have to become reliant on people who may not want to even roleplay out their disability with them, etc, etc.

I'd like to think that it's 10x more frustrating for them than it would be the person, hence why you're supposed to get consent OOCly before you do those things.

By Napoleon at Feb 20, 2025, 1:52 PM | 0
"At that point, I'd just go for a vat next time."

If someone kills themselves after having some consequence befall them, it should be obvious that someone wasn't doing them a favour by not killing them. I think dying is sometimes the easiest serious consequence for players to deal with and shouldn't always be considered some maximalist taboo.

Player characters with very expensive corpses who will take brutal financial losses from dying are absolutely ideal targets for more creative consequences, and they're way more willing to go along with them in my experience exactly to avoid months long recoveries (or never recovering).

New characters with very little to lose by dying but a lot to lose from dealing with persistent gameplay penalties or engagement issues are much less ideal targets for serious non-death consequences in my view and it really becomes a question of how many limitations or time burdens are being placed on a player if something is a better outcome for them.

By 0x1mm at Feb 20, 2025, 1:59 PM | 0
For me, personally, if I see a character prefer the consequence of a vat vs mutilation - I just write them off as someone I'll engage with in RP in the long-term.

Which, honestly, for many people is likely their ideal outcome. So, maybe the system works? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

By ReeferMadness at Feb 20, 2025, 2:02 PM | 0
You can sum it up by knowing your audience, I guess. People will give you indicators on what they're willing to roleplay out, but I also think it's important for the player doling out the mutilating consequences to know when maybe they're going too far in, say, cutting off all somebody's limbs, their eyes, ears, and tongue. Some people probably also don't want to deal with that stuff long term, so if it makes them miserable to RP it, more power to them.
By Napoleon at Feb 20, 2025, 2:06 PM | 0
It's all down to proportionality, and sindome isn't exactly a consent-needed-for-everything game, so if you have gotten into trouble enough that someone is going to leave you without limbs or eyes, it's what it is, you have to roll with it. There almost always was an out somewhere a person refused to take, as especially the dismembering over vats crowd generally is all about engagement more than easy "win".

I don't believe there is any need for OOC consent to those either, this way you can do it with them conscious and in more rp-engaging way, but if they don't want that can knock a person out and remove limbs at will.

By Aida at Feb 20, 2025, 10:51 PM | 0
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