Glitch Awareness
I’ve occasionally thought of running a Managlitch City tabletop role-playing game. I’d probably use the Shadowrun system since it’s already technomagical urban fantasy, and because I know second edition backwards and forwards.
But this afternoon’s inspiration came from the Call of Cthulhu and Paranoia systems: rather than “Essence” (which is super problematic) characters would have two stats named “Glitch Awareness” and “Glitch Resistance”. The first is a skill players could use to detect whether a person or place is glitched (if it’s not obvious) and whether a glitch is pending. The GM would need to limit the number of times per session this skill can be rolled, to keep things from getting tedious.
But the fun part would be “Glitch Resistance”: a stat tracking how likely the character themselves is to glitch or be affected by one nearby. And the player is not allowed to know that stat, other than to suspect it is the inverse of their Glitch Awareness in some way. The more sensitive you are to glitches… well… the more sensitive you are to them.
I can worry about this math if I ever run this, and obviously a player who chooses to start their character glitched will worry less about this. But it’s a nice simulation of the City’s glitcher prejudice without having to just tell the player, “You fear glitchers, now role-play that.”
