Reasons for DC's Greater Depression

[ReHerakhte]

If I'm remembering it right, the game doesn't offer much of an explanation for the Greater Depression, it's more of a "things happened and this is the state of the world now" brief explanation. And really, that's fine, because many people aren't so worried about overly detailed world history, they just want to get in and play the game.

But I got to thinking on this...
With the rather "interesting" behaviour of some members of the human species to COVID-19 and the more realistic responses from various governments, smaller organisations, shops/stores and the like I can easily imagine this virus with maybe a few other problems with resource supply and the behaviour of humans when infected by panic, causing the financial breakdown that leads to the Greater Depression.
To that end, I wonder if the new owners of the DC 4th Ed. licence have considered today's real world events for their background to the new game-world in the new edition?

[Linden]

I don't think it takes much - some kind of Black Swan type event and the whole thing comes crashing down. We had it in 2008 and government bail outs were perhaps able to mitigate the worse effects. What happens when the governments run out of cash? I can't see the present lock down situation being financially sustainable for long, not here in the UK anyway with all the guarantees being made (not that I'm saying it's wrong to do it).

What else occurs to me is a detailed game future history can soon end up looking dated and foolish. Best to be fuzzy about the details I reckon.

[ReHerakhte]

I pretty much agree with you on all points but I'll address the game world history point in particular. I've harped on about this in the past but I believe it bears repeating - many players don't really care about the details of the world history, they just want to play.
So in that regard, going into a lot of detail probably isn't worth the effort. Sure, there's a number of people who want a good breakdown of the world background but I think that's more for curiosity than "needing" to know and you can always argue that the GM probably should have knowledge of the world background so they can describe the current state of affairs etc. etc.

But I'm the curious type! I want more detail. However I do understand that relying too much on real world events often leads to the history looking dated and foolish (and sometimes outright "What the hell were you thinking?" responses!)

[Linden]

Those kind of timelines can be interesting and even useful for the GM, but yes I'd agree the majority of players aren't interested.

In terms of ones that haven't dated well GDW did a real blow by blow effort for Twlight/Merc 2000 which bore no resemblance whatsoever to reality or how the world works. As I recall Sir John Hackett's The Third World War was another one. Predicting the future is a mug's game.

[ReHerakhte]

In something of a follow up on this, I've been reading comments from a Discord server I'm on. The three main people in this particular conversation are from Sweden, Argentina and the third I think is either Canadian or American.
According to the Argentine, there's the equivalent of military checkpoints on the access roads out of Buenos Aires and you need a permit to travel between areas. If you don't have a permit and get caught, your vehicle is confiscated. For anyone ignoring the quarantine who is infectious and causes another person to contract the virus, they apparently get prosecuted like a criminal with, apparently, a 15 year prison term if the person you infected dies from the virus.

On the flip side, the Swede was saying the government and people in general there apparently refused to believe the reports that stated people showing no symptoms could be carriers of the virus and apparently Sweden made no efforts to enforce the quarantine.
I've said "apparently" a lot in those lines because everything they've said is unable to be verified by me and thus should be treated as entirely anecdotal.
But the claims paint an interesting picture.
A modern, developed, Western nation being lax in its quarantine and a less developed country enforcing almost draconian regulations to try and keep it under control. And the end result is still chaos for a certain amount of time.

I don't need to dream up reasons for DarkCon's Greater Depression, this stuff writes itself

[Linden]

On the flip side, the Swede was saying the government and people in general there apparently refused to believe the reports that stated people showing no symptoms could be carriers of the virus and apparently Sweden made no efforts to enforce the quarantine.
I've said "apparently" a lot in those lines because everything they've said is unable to be verified by me and thus should be treated as entirely anecdotal.

I think Sweden has gone with the "herd immunity" approach. There have been mixed reports as to its effectiveness. The UK was going to do the same I think, until it was pointed out that the number of severe cases in the short term would overwhelm the National Health Service. It's arguably a more realistic strategy in Sweden because it doesn't have the population numbers and density that the UK has.

[ReHerakhte]

Interesting! Thanks for the clarification.
I haven't seen any news from Sweden, the news here in Australia is unhelpful because much of it has focused on the impact in Australia and while that's understandable, it's also created a "panic buy" mentality for various items because the news media and social media wailed about how we were all going to be stuck in our homes for weeks on end and unable to go to the shops.
There's been shortages in the shops here of rice, flour, beans of all sorts, pasta, bottled water (because apparently the herd believed the water would be cut off or something?), toilet paper, hand sanitizer and facial tissues.
People are buying supplies for a two-week period that they wouldn't be able to consume in two months. One prat bought so much toilet paper he tried to sell his excess back to the supermarket when he realised he didn't actually need it.

And because panic buying is a contagious disease, it's more than just food and toiletries.
Some Australians have been panic buying other items that are certainly not necessities.
My computer monitored died on me last Wednesday. On Thursday I went to four big retailers to get a new one and not one of them had any monitors left under a price point of Au$800. Some of them were sold out of all monitors.
By way of comparison, you can buy a decent, 24-inch, wide-screen, gaming monitor here for anywhere between Au$230 and Au$450 if you don't want/need all the bells & whistles and if you want a typical home use wide-screen monitor, you can get them for as little as Au$160. Specialty computer stores have a higher price tag because they can't buy in the bulk quantities that the big retail chains can so they often (but not always) charge a few dozen to a few hundred dollars more for the same product.
I lucked out by going to a specialty store and they had one (yes, just one) monitor left in my price range (which was Au$200-300). That decent, 24-inch, wide-screen, gaming monitor I mentioned above? Yeah, it's what I'm using now.

But let's be clear, there are NO shortages of any of those items in the country. The problem is that demand has made them a sold out item on the store shelves and now the transport industry is struggling to handle the increased need to resupply shops.

These are interesting times here in Australia and like that old Chinese saying, it's not obvious yet whether it's a blessing or a curse.

[Linden]

There's been shortages in the shops here of rice, flour, beans of all sorts, pasta, bottled water (because apparently the herd believed the water would be cut off or something?), toilet paper, hand sanitizer and facial tissues.

We had the panic buying at the start of the crisis. It seems to have fizzled out now. Supermarkets and other shops that remain open are operating a one-in, one-out policy in order to maintain social distancing and it also seems to have helped dissuade people from stripping the shelves (fixed quotas of goods were in effect at one point, not sure if that remains the case). The toilet roll frenzy still has me scratching my head in puzzlement - I understand that...ahem..."tummy troubles" are only a symptom in a very small percentage of C19 cases.

[Morthrai]

As an aside, I accidentally got ahead of the toilet roll thing. At the end of February I was down to one roll so grabbed some when I went to the local shop for a few fresh items. Couple of days later I was doing a big grocery run and automatically picked some up, as usual. For once my terrible memory was an asset

[ReHerakhte]

While on the same general track, I've been considering another angle to the Greater Depression although not about how or why it happens.
For some insight into how people make use of older tech (in DarkCon terms, retro-tech), I've been watching videos of Cuban society and how they have created a sort of sub-industry to keep older tech items running.
The most famous example would arguably be the 1950s-70s era cars that can still be found on Cuba's streets.

This attitude of keeping old cars, old radios & TVs, old washing machines and so on, in usable condition was dictated by the restrictions Cuba faced over the decades. They simply could not get new items so they had to make do with what they had and developed the skills needed to repair and maintain these older items.
Obviously a modern Western country is not going to have cities full of old tech but they do have junkyards, second-hand shops, OpShops and so on where some older devices can be found. Even so, during the Greater Depression those few sources are not going to be able to supply the needs of all the Proles and Mikes so perhaps, similar to Cuba, cottage industries were created to keep these older items running and over time, those cottage industries expanded.

Expanded enough to become small scale manufacturers rather than just repair & maintenance shops. Never big enough to supply much more than the part of the city they're located in and certainly never big enough to threaten a corporation, but large enough to actually manufacture items of lower tech levels so that retro-tech can be explained in a reasonable manner. It would also potentially spur the creation of new careers (or expansion of older ones), for example, a Scavenger type would be someone who spends their days locating old tech items or materials for use in the manufacture of older tech items. They might be a one or two person group sifting through the rubbish of the past for vacuum tubes and transistors, old tyres and the like or an entire company themselves who locate large amounts of scrap metal, scrap fabric and so on.