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.