Our Iron Kingdoms game is wrapping up so I need to start preparing for next year's campaign (and figuring out what pickup games to run in the meantime). The lads want me to run Cyberpunk 2020, in 2020, so I intend to make it a dark, sci-fi take on the real world. Here's a few random thoughts on it.
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#share2steem share2steem cyberpunk 2077 ttrpg
I love cyberpunk as a genre, it's one of my favorite environments in which to tell stories. And I was a very long term R Talisorian Games fan, which means I have an intimate familiarity with the mechanics of Cyberpunk 2020.
And I say to you this – don't do it.
Or rather, don't use CP 2020's mechanics, because they don't work for the genre and of the storytelling that you are going to want to do. It is, at heart, a problem with explicit Stat + Skill systems with fine-grained skills. To do interesting things, it always takes way more skill checks and way more skills than a character can reasonably be built on mechanically.
If you want to do Cyberpunk 2020 stories, I suggest using either Wushu or Over the Edge, with the preference leaning more toward the first. Wushu even has an entire text about integrating cyberpunk tropes and character types into live play, including the most difficult one – the Net Runner. As a side effect of the fact that the means of mechanical engagement come from the player's narrative detail, you can have the hacker engaged with ongoing activity and actively threatened by it without necessarily being there in person or engaged in a lengthy, so below pre-session set up. They can actively narrate things that happened before the current scene as part of the current scene and get mechanical advantage to use as part of engaging. This works for a lot of cyberpunk story, because there tends to be a good amount of footwork and preplanning in the execution. (And that's not to say you can't do preplanning scenes in Wushu, because there are also mechanics for going through those scenes and banking successful dice to be used later.)
OTE has the advantage of extremely broad skills which allow for a lot of flexibility in application because they don't shackle you to a very narrow band of effect and the game itself encourages you to apply your limited number but very broad skills in creative ways. Simple and straightforward mechanics for resolving die rolls help out, too.
And both systems are free and open, which reduces the complication of wondering whether you should be able to retro-clone Cyberpunk 2020.
From a political point of view, as long as you can resist the urge to create a near future setting where people who agree with you are obviously right and people who disagree with you are obviously wrong, you can get a lot of mileage out of the issues. The problem with most politically engaged RPG authors these days is that they are completely unable to separate their own personal desires from what makes an interesting story and thus end up in some sort of Manchiean nightmare where their own text provides validation for their beliefs. You get a lot more mileage out of subverting that urge and it ends up being a lot more interesting for the player base.
I love cyberpunk as a genre and I definitely encourage you to make next year devoted to the genre, but if I can keep you from making it harder on yourself by picking appropriate mechanics, I'm absolutely bound to.
(One day get me started ranting about the idea that implanting technology/cybernetics/genetic modifications makes you "less human" and what that says about authors' attitude toward the physically disabled. I've got a good six or seven hours of absolute frothing ready to go at a moments notice on that one.)
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