Cyberpunk 2020 is driving me crazy (Or, I Have Been Distracted)

Buckle up, this is a long one, but I need to get it out of my system.

I've been meaning to write up the next post in the roguelike toolkit system, but I've been distracted; my Wednesday evening game group has opted to play a Cyberpunk Red/Cyberpunk 2020 mix as our next campaign. I was (and still remain) super stoked! I love the genre, I have a love/hate relationship with Shadowrun, and I'm hype as hell for Cyberpunk 2077. I'd love to get an in-depth look at the setting and system that'll be the backstory/inspiration for the upcoming video game. Then I actually read the CP2020 rulebook.

(I also read the Cyberpunk Red quickstart rules--they're fine, if entirely quiet on the subject of making your own characters. The CPRed quickstart materials strike me as content designed for doing demos of the game at gaming conventions and hobby shops: powerful characters, simple scenarios, simplified mechanics, deliberately limited options. It evokes a deliberate aesthetic, and that's cool.)

We're gonna talk about CP2020, though. Hooooo boy. This is a game that shoots itself in the foot at full-auto; the summary of my feelings is that the game is tremendously frustrating, and not all of that can be placed at the feet of 1990's-era RPG design.

Combat is incredibly lethal. Getting shot once, even in a limb, can down your character immediately. Many enemies are likely to play for keeps and finish you off, because your dead body sold to an organ farm is worth at least a few months of rent + food + utilities in a big apartment in a nice part of town. (There's a chart. I did the meat math.)

It can't be that bad, can it? Consider:

• An NPC with average stats (5) and skills (5), shooting you with a cheap pistol (Sternmeyer Type 35, Heavy Autopistol, 3d6 damage) from about 30 feet away fires twice per turn and is going to hit you 60% of the time (1d10+10 >= 15). If you have average stats (BODY 5, BTM -2) and aren't wearing armor, you're going to take ~8 damage. 8 damage is a magic number.
• If you are wearing the best armor jacket that won't encumber you, replace "cheap pistol" with "any Very Heavy pistol, most Heavy SMGs, any Assault Rifle, Any Shotgun, Any Explosive, or a sledgehammer."
• You've been hit, so roll 1d10.
• On a 5 through 10, you were struck in a limb, which has been completely blown off. 
• If you rolled a 2 through 4, you were hit in the torso. You're under no risk of having your whole torso blown off (???) but you're still making a check with a 40% chance (roll 1d10 <= 4) of you losing your shit for the rest of your turn until you succeed on your subsequent turns or die. 
• If you rolled a 1 on that initial hit location d10, though, you've been struck in the head. All damage from headshots is doubled; if damage from a headshot hits that magic 8 threshold, you have had a skylight installed in your brainpan. RIP. Roll a new cyberpunk (and this time wear a helmet).
• Statblocks for most enemy goons in the book have REF scores that start at 10.

The game's premise, expository fiction, diagetic quotes, art, mechanics, and random encounter tables all imply or outright describe violence as an hourly element of the setting. So... fine. This is a game about fighting. The classes should all have ways to be good at that, right?

Well, one class out of the ten available does. Solos--professional soldiers and hitmen--are the only class with access to the Combat Sense skill, which adds 1:1 to your Awareness and Initiative rolls.

Going first in combat generally means you win. Even if you don't outright kill your enemies, the death spiral of wound penalties and stun saves is going to give them severe disadvantages. No other class gets something even close to this useful, and the book encourages the GM to stat NPCs up using player classes--you're going to face enemy Solos with points in Combat Sense. We end up with a system where combat is everywhere, but only one class out of ten is likely to survive it by ventilating everyone else on the field before they can skin their iron.

Okay, fine. "Combat is deadly and unfair, treat it like war, not like a sport, and generally don't get into fights" says Cyberpunk 2020. We've heard this before from many (if not most) OSR games. But you still want to have a good time, so what's the requirement to be competitive in combat and still have some character creation resources to spread around?

Wouldn't it be cool if, aside from GUN, you also had a laser microphone in your eye, or could track people by their scent? Maybe points spent elsewhere can make you more flexible, rather than increasing the vertical on this one aspect of your character...?

No. Your starting cash is determined by how many points you put into your special ability, and at 10 points, one role (MedTechs) gets the highest starting amount ($15,000/month). The second tier ($12,000/month) is shared by Rockerboys, Corporates... and Solos.

I could have just written "The game punishes you for not playing a min-maxed Solo" without the prior ~800 words, but it wouldn't have had the same pathos.

Sod this for a game of soldiers, you say. Fighting's for chumps. I'm going to be a HACKERMANS.

But hacking is wooooooooooooorse~

I'll spare you another 800 words. Cyberpunk 2020 is the game that gave us the hacker problem--the one player specialized in hacking plays a solo infiltration minigame for an hour while the rest of the players go get pizza. CP2020 produced it, Shadowrun repeated it, and it's been an ongoing struggle since then between the desire to design an efficient skill system and attempts to accurately represent an irreducibly complex skillset.

~ ~ ~

A Brief Digression On Hacking

This is because hacking is goddamned magical. Games tend to try to be fair about things; actions have reactions and counteractions, powerful moves have meaningful costs. Hacking is not fair; it is a skillset intended to circumvent the IRL action economy, and in a world dominated by computers and machines--our current world, and most of the modes in which we picture the future--it is the closest thing we have to Actual Goddamned Wizard Magic used for manipulating information, identity, digital relationships, and physical access and control.

Spend a few years--generally in your youth, often through reading the idiosyncratic writings of your peers--learning how to turn your brain inside out, speak in tongues, and read runic inscriptions, and suddenly you have the power to peruse the thoughts of others, wear their faces, go where nobody wants you to intrude, and enrich yourself. The authorities of the land frown on this, and often use their power to outlaw your methods, your knowledge, and eventually you as a person, rather than let these skills become common enough to subvert their hold on society. Sometimes they try to control you by hiring you, instead. Many people are afraid of you--they have heard wild stories of what you can do, they have seen the results of your work, but they have no understanding of how you do it.

A game that tries to make hacking fair is not going to accurately represent hacking. A game that tries to be fair while including a meaningful representation of hacking is not going to be fair. 

Contemplate this on the Tree of Woe.

GIVE ME BACK MY NEOPETS ACCOUNT

~ ~ ~

Back to dunking on a game from the comfortable vantage point of 30 years since it was published.

Even trying an end-run around the Netrunning information-gathering minigame and specializing entirely in subverting meatspace devices (doors, cars, robots) is an exercise in futility because it's too easy.

For roughly three times the cost of those cheap pistols I described, your doodoo-tier hacker--who has put a single point into their special class skill, Interface--can carry around a cyberdeck the size of a paperback novel loaded with a single program that can control any screen, microphone, speaker, door, elevator, vehicle, robot, camera, public newspaper printer (they're very specific about this), or cell phone with 100% reliability and no listed countermeasure.

A few cheap peripherals render the hacker immune to Black ICE that might fry their brain, and if their cyberdeck catches fire, they unplug it, throw it in the trash, and buy a new one.

LINUXDUMP THE RAMCORES

With all the skill points and money they saved using this technique, they can invest in self defense against the ever-present threat of Night City's HARD RAIN... except all the points they saved on their class skill mean their starting cash is a few thousand eurodollars at most, and even with another $10,000 of cyberware and guns, they'll still likely get pasted by the first Solo they face.

WHY ARE YOU STILL TALKING ABOUT THIS

I CAME HERE FOR ELVES AND QUESTIONABLE MATH

Because I want this game to stop shooting itself in the foot and be good, and I think there's something to be gained from exploring the places where Cyberpunk 2020 fails to achieve what it sets out to do.

1: Premise. I've read the core rules cover to cover--which should be enough to talk about this topic, but correct me in the comments if there's some huge revelation later in the game's publishing history--and there's no antagonistic force for the players to align against. Sure, there's a bunch of bad stuff, but in a distributed, nebulous way.

You can't shoot a city's drug addiction epidemic. You can't hack global warming. You can shoot boostergang members, but you can't solve the problem of gang warfare in Night City without non-trivially depopulating it, and we have names and The Hague for people who try that.

The Corporations might fit--but you can play as an officer of their institutional authority, and they're not described as universally, mustache-twirlingly evil so much as merely exploitative and opportunistic. Plus, there's a steady-state force holding down the corps in the form of the remaining nuclear-armed world governments. Shadowrun did better with this--CP2020's Arasaka employs a bunch of ninjas for hire, but Shadowrun's Aztechnology megacorporation practices blood magic and human sacrifice. Which one seems more likely to inspire a PC to tilt at windmills?

John Hancock Building in Chicago by u/spyromg

Alright, so perhaps the tools the game gives us are intended for stories centered on more personal interactions; after all, the Lifepath system (which is a genuine, unironic highlight of this game!) lists out a half-dozen siblings, your individual relationships with each one, and a string of mentors, friends, and enemies from the past decade of your life. I think this was the intent; the execution leaves far too much up to the GM, because you have a gauze-thin "Reputation" system, a few sentences describing what some interpersonal skill are (but few details on how they work)...and that's it.

What's needed here?

Players need unstable situations to exploit and NPCs with specific agendas to oppose or support. I'd argue that you can't have a very good RPG--or tell a particularly engaging story in any medium--where the status is extremely quo and is expected to remain that way. Instability is the mother of change, and change makes for interesting stories.

"Every day, so-and-so did such-and-such...until."

(This idea is gonna show up in my upcoming roguelike stuff. Keep your eyes peeled.)

So we need to lean a little more monolithic and a little less distributed in the foundations of the setting's antagonism.

There are gangs, sure, but we should spend some time talking about what the gang leaders want. There are corporations, but we should spend some time talking about what their branch managers and CEOs want. We should have some idea of how these desires clash with the desires of other gangs and corporations, both local (another neighborhood gang; another coastal corporation) and remote (gang operations from across the nearest border; another corporation in the same areas of manufacturing or data processing, but separated by a continent or an ocean).

Probably the best and fastest way to do this is to grab Augmented Reality (plus free additional material) and roll most of this stuff up on the tables provided. Once you're happy with that, start making your own tables that are more suited to the context of your particular game.

2. Class Design.

All class Abilities need to be largely redesigned from scratch, especially Combat Sense. Netrunners need to be redone from scratch because hacking needs to be redone from scratch. Most of the classes could be merged into each other. (Solo, Nomad, and Cop; Rockerboy and Media; Corporate and Fixer; Tech and Netrunner)

...

...

...you know what?

I had notes on redesigning the classes, rewriting hacking, rewriting how equipment and cyberware works, but the hell with all that.

I'm just gonna write my own cyberpunk game. I'll call it NEON SUNSET.

I took a while to post this ramble; since between drafting this and today, I've got at least 60% of the system complete.

A solid cyberpunk TTRPG is a problem that can be solved. New posts as I progress through sections and drafts.

Cyberpunk Red character sheet and bathtub gin-tier Cyberpunk Red character creation notes

A brief aside from the usual fantasy/OSR stuff.

I'm gearing up for a Cyberpunk campaign that'll end up being a mix of CP2020 and the Cyberpunk Red quickstart material (at least until the CPR core rules come out...someday).

As I often do, I made my own character sheet. Feel free to give it a spin. 

Feedback is welcome in the comments! To get a copy of the sheet that you can edit, click File > Make a copy.

As for character creation:

Getting elbow-deep in a system like this is good practice for building knowledge of how both that specific system works and how the mechanical elements it uses can be recognized and used elsewhere.

I did a little math over my morning coffee toward comparing the Cyberpunk 2020 chargen process and Cyberpunk Red's quickstart pregen characters to see if I could reverse-engineer how the CPR pregens were built. Obviously this is all envelope math, since the quickstart isn't written at all toward making your own characters from scratch, so you'd do well to consider this all highly apocryphal.

That said, here are the results of parsing the six different statistics arrays for the pregens and counting their skill point purchases.

Cyberpunk Red Pregen Stat + Skill totals:

• Solo Stat Totals: 67, 69, 68, 67, 68, 71 (avg 68.333) / Skill Points: Basic 16 + 31
• Nomad Stat Totals: 70, 70, 65, 70, 76, 67 (avg 69.666) / Skill Points: Basic 16 + 33
• Netrunner Stat Totals: 65, 71, 74, 65, 67, 64 (avg 67.667) / Skill Points: Basic 16 + 32
• Rocker Stat Totals: 67, 69, 68, 67, 68, 71 (avg 68.333) / Skill Points: Basic 16 + 32
• Fixer Stat Totals: 62, 64, 63, 69, 65, 69 (avg 65.333) / Skill Points: Basic 16 + 31
• Tech Stat Totals: 66, 62, 64, 62, 62, 69 (avg 64.1667) / Skill Points: Basic 16 + 32

Stat Total Cross-Average: 67.25
Skill Points Average: Basic 16 + 31.833 (no pregen lists the 2 free points in Teaching)

Stat min is 62, stat max is 76, mean is 67.25.
Diff between min and max is 14; mean distance from min/max is 5.25/8.75

Conclusion:

(After I wrote this, I realized that CP2020 has a minimum of 2 for starting character stats, but CPR doesn't seem to have this limit. That might skew these conclusions, but not to the point of ruining them.)

I think that these pregens were made more powerful than normal starting characters, at least compared to starting-tier CP2020 characters, which use 9d10 (avg 49.5, SD 8.62, so generally 41-58 stat points spread across 9 stats for an average stat of 5.5). CPR pregens use 10 stats with an average of 67.25 stat points for an average stat of 6.725.

For skills, CP2020 characters get 40 points to put into their list of 10 Career skills, then REF+INT points to put into pickup skills (any skill that's not in their career skills list). CPR doesn't mention anything about career skills packages or pickup skills derived from stats, but it does give a total of 18 skill points for free + an average of 31.833 additional skill points.

I think starting CPR-pre-gen-based characters get stat points equal to 2d8+60 to spend on their 10 stats (mean 69, SD 3.24, min 62, max 76).

I think starting CPR-pregen-based characters get 18 points in basic skills plus 30 + 1d3 skill points.

I'm writing a system-neutral roguelike tabletop RPG toolset

It seems strange; roguelike video games are the descendants of Dungeons and Dragons, not the other way around. What would a roguelike TTRPG even look like? Why make one? It's important for me to able to answer those questions for myself; I figure others might be interested in the answers, too.

• A roguelike tabletop RPG looks like a series of nested tables that efficiently establish a descriptive framework of prompts for the GM to fill in either during pre-game prep or through ad-lib at the table.
• I want to make this game tool because it supports my personal GMing style--I love having the dice present me with a prompt that I can riff on, either at my leisure outside of the game or immediately at the table within the context of the situation. I figure others might enjoy this mode, too.

This is a project I've been kicking around in various forms in my head for well over a year. It comes from the reason why I do most of my game design these days--I want both players and GMs to be able to share in the joy of surprise.

Some of the fun of running a game comes from seeing how the players react to and interact with your material, but traditional prep rarely has the GM surprised in the way that the players get surprised by the developments of the action. The GM has written it, spent hours or days pondering it, and all that remains is to wind it up and see how it flies.

Contrast this with the examples of emergent gameplay, both in tabletop RPGs and video games. A game of Dwarf Fortress never has a script or a plan, but the story that emerges from the behaviors of creatures, natural effects, and reactions can be magical. Likewise, there's no predetermined plot to a run through Stonehell or Barrowmaze or Undermountain or the Veins of the Earth or The Gardens of Ynn; the joy of it comes from what emerges as players, their characters, their plans, their foes, and the dice come together.

You might ask, isn't all gaming like that, or at least most OSR gaming?

Well, no.

twitter.com/dmitrydeceiver. I would love to hire this person.

There's a reason all of those examples are dungeons--the format of a dungeon crawl inherently limits the directions players can go and the means by which they can meaningfully interact with their surroundings. Sure, they can spend six hours licking the bare stone walls, but when they want to actually have something interesting happen, they start opening doors and pulling levers and readying their pseudomedieval SWAT team ambuscade upon the feasthall full of goat-headed moon cultists.

(Moon-headed goat cultists?)

The temptation to wander off, go shopping, invest in a business, rob from the shopkeepers, or set fire to the inn is lessened by the conceptual distance from civilization. Maybe your players want to do all that stuff as the majority of their gametime? This is not badwrongfun, but...mine usually don't. I tend not to enjoy games summarized as "faffing about in town for several hours IRL."

The dungeon is ultimately where the good stuff happens. The place beyond the wall where civilized, sane people won't tread.

You can run games that take place within civilization, but that's not what the majority of the rules we use are meant to support, be it OSR stuff, 5e, or things further afield. Half of almost any given RPG book is about combat. D&D is fundamentally about kicking monsters in the teeth and taking their stuff, and anything based on D&D is going to have that DNA deep inside it, too. Even the adventures which take place within civilization are about the intrusion of nasty crap from beyond the edge of night into the hearthspace. Shapeshifting invaders, monsters in the sewers, fiends among the courtiers--the underworld has invaded what should be a safe place, and what is dangerous must be driven out. Order must be restored.

If it's the home of our characters, there's enough motivation for them to do it to protect their own. If it's common space shared by all, or distant lands, full of distant peoples, then the morally lax among our PCs require recompense--cash, goods, property, promises, power.

But we keep coming back to the same idea--excitement, novelty, and surprise happen on the razor's edge, even when those things come to us rather than waiting for our explorations.

Adventure is found in the mythic underworld. The dungeon is where the good stuff happens.

We like telling stories where we take fire into the darkness and return with riches and knowledge. We've been telling that story for a long time; it hasn't gotten old yet, and I suspect we'll still be telling it even after we've put our boots on alien soil. It takes tremendous effort to tell stories that aren't about this idea, and the results of this effort are as discomforting to endure as they are difficult to create.

So why not aim your entire game at what happens in the dungeon and use some simple systems to get through all the parts where you're not in the dungeon?

Unfortunately, it's kind of a pain in the ass to quickly put together a good dungeon, let alone a whole bunch of them. Drawing a dungeon map is straightforward enough; drawing a good map that supports open-ended play is somewhat harder. Filling out every room in that dungeon can be done quickly enough, but quick methods often yield nonsensical results.

Perhaps nonsensical isn't the right word; I mean the equivalent of the uncanny valley, but for experiences. You can have a well-jaquayed dungeon, but as long as we expect that our PCs are in a real place, made by real people, it's gonna be jarring to find the torture room directly adjacent to the sleeping quarters, which is directly adjacent to an open sewer, which itself contains 13,000 GP in assorted gems and a +3 billhook.

You don't get a good cake if you just take all the ingredients that go into a cake and smash them together in a large bowl. Using purely randomized dungeon generators gets you these pseudodungeons, game places that have all the ingredients but none of the elegance of construction. You use them for expediency, and you either rewrite half the material as you find what doesn't make sense, or you hope you can justify these strange extrusions on the fly. I think we can do better than that.

Why did you make me read all of that?

So we could get here: I'm going to write a system-neutral framework based entirely around the crux of roguelike video games: contextualized pseudorandom dungeon generation and the mechanical systems that support and extrapolate on their exploration. Each major feature of the system will get a blog post as I define it and work on it, and I'll write about the difficulties and triumphs I have as I move through the creative process.

I'll post up playtest material and invite feedback, and I'll also post about the process of turning this system into a physical book--editing, proofreading, layout, art, etc. I want this to be highly functional and a joy to use.

An aspirational list of posts to come on this project include:

• Unstable Settings: Why geopolitics matters to dungeon crawlers.
• Peaceful Retirement (Or, Why Are We Even Doing This?)
• Dungeon Context: Who built this place? Why? What happened? Who's here now?
• Dungeon Generation: Creating a 5-floor, 60-room complex in about 20 minutes.
• How and Why the Dungeon Changes Over Time
• Magic: What's Necessary for a Roguelike?
• Nested Systems: Pressing One's Luck with Inventory, Food, Water, and Light
• Treasure: Less Paperwork, More Novelty
• Continuity Through Morale, Retreat, and Rivalries
• Black Doors and Deep Horrors: Challenges for Powerful Delvers

~

There's a lot to do. I've been marching through the muddle in the middle on this one for a few months; I'm sure there's more to come, but I'm excited and eager to more formally put pen to paper on this project.

Maybe it's still too big of a project? I already cut out the entirely whole-cloth combat and class system. I suppose we'll find out together.

Thanks for reading all of this--I hope you'll come along with me for the ride. For now, I'll leave you with my first draft of a back-of-the-book blurb.

This is a game about exploring dangerous places in search of fortune and glory. You will risk life and limb to seek out vast rewards within domains others dare not tread. The luckiest among you will survive to retire on your earnings; the rest will suffer death or worse.

This is not a game about grand, sweeping sagas. The stories you will tell in this game will be picaresque--vignettes describing brief, intense encounters, wherein the decisions made describe the doer as much as the deed. There are no predetermined plot arcs, nor any particular end toward which your stories will bend. Your choices are the chapters, and their order will only be discernible as narratives in hindsight, after the blood has been wiped from your blades, the coins and gems stacked and counted.

Your characters will die frequently. This is by design. The life of a dungeon crawler is filled with ten times the usual dose of hardship, but promises those who can endure it thousand-fold rewards. You will face dead ends, rotten food, broken equipment, dirty tactics, brutal traps, and preposterous misfortune. Your rewards for surviving these challenges may sum to blindness, broken bones, and the scars of fire and sword on both body and mind...

...but you might also find rubies the size of a child's tight fist, silver enough to hobble an ox--treasure to beggar any prince or pasha in comparison--and perhaps even a key to the gates of mortality itself.

Of course, you could always continue to farm turnips for the uncertain remainder of your years.

But if the glint of glory still shines in your eyes--then lace your boots. Take up your notched swords and hidden knives, your craggy hammers and battered shields, your hide-wrapped grimoires and dizzying censers. Gather your wits, your courage, and your companions, and descend...

INTO THE DEPTHS.