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.
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| 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.
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| 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?
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| 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.
