(Note: This is an old review from when I was writing for the now sadly lost Australian Tabletop Gaming Network. It came out just before covid went boom, and it's interesting reading back over it knowing that this guy had no idea of what was just about to happen; hoo-boy!
Apologies for the poor copy/paste effort and any issues with the pix. I have still yet to check out Cyberpunk Red, but I do have 2077 sitting on my video game to-play pile.)
The great
thing about the year 2020 is the fact that we don’t have to see all those
people making memes joking about not knowing what they’ll do next year because
they don’t have 2020 vision. But it does seem somewhat appropriate to look back
on the past, and an equally appropriate subject for such hindsight is that
classic staple of sci-fi roleplaying futurism, Mike Pondsmith’s Cyberpunk 2020.
It’s been
many years since I played any “see-punk” as we used to call it and the books on
my shelf haven’t seen daylight for far too long. And though I know there was a
third edition produced in the mid-’00s, a fourth edition called Cyberpunk Red released
last year, and an upcoming digital game which has been pushed back to
September, it is these second edition books published by R. Talsorian that
became iconic and formed the game into one of the big guns of the RPG world.
(The original box set released in 1988 is hard to find but is notable in that
it was set in 2013, many of the rules were different, particularly combat, and
hardly anyone played it after the second edition came out.)
Enough preamble! Time to jack in,
chombatta, and dive in to the dark future of the distant year 2020.
The Year 2020
It is naturally amusing and
somewhat quaint to see what people thirty years ago expected the future to be,
and humbling to remember that I was there at the time. Reading through the
timeline of the imagined intervening period is incredibly entertaining; African
nations controlling the Moon and the intervening space seems laughably
idealistic, and a major US war with Central American powers has the strong
scent of the ’80s. And the technology so important to the setting veers wildly
between hyper-advanced (cybertechnology is commonplace, cars no longer burn
petroleum, AIs can prove to be powerful personalities) and practically archaic
(characters will need to get to a fax machine to get a note from their
employer, calling a friend in another country may require several minutes as
you are transferred between phone companies, most people will need to plug into
a wall to get internet, and getting an upgrade so your cellphone can keep a
digital list of contacts is a pricey luxury.)
But
reading through Cyberpunk 2020 now and noting how it
diverges from reality doesn’t change the fact that it would be unfair to change
it (apart from a few glaring social justice concerns) even though a modern
player’s mindset would still need to be more retrofuturistic than bleakly
speculative. The rulebook claims to be set in a “dark future” and it has all
the hardwired, blade-running, snow-crashing neuromancy one can expect of a game
based on the near-future digital dystopias of the time. The irradiated highways
are ruled by outlaw nomad families, and cities are urban hellholes where wars
are fought for control of streets, boardrooms, television audiences, and the
virtual reality of cyberspace.
Players
take on the roles of the eponymous cyberpunks who are prepared to step into
these wars hoping to make a change, or at least a profit. Most Cyberpunk games
follow either criminal heist or detective/conspiracy story tropes, so
characters tend toward those who’ll get their hands dirty or those who’ll try
to uncover the truth. Of course, such tropes rarely result in a happy ending
for the protagonists, who are lucky if they come out of the tale with their
skin or soul intact.
Cyberpunks, the game helpfully
points out, live by only three rules; style over substance, attitude is
everything, and live on the edge. However, these principles are purely cosmetic
because the real rules give only a passing nod to these themes.
System Shock
Cyberpunk 2020 uses
R. Talsorian’s Interlock System (which would later be
blended with Hero Games’ HERO system
to make another generic system called Fuzion, which
itself would go on to be used in many other games.) Characters have core Stats
(Attributes) and Skills ranked up to 10. Roll 1d10 + Stat + Skill and hope the
total beats the Difficulty Number. With most difficulties ranging in the teens
you can fairly solidly expect that you’ll succeed on most challenges you’ve
tailored your character to specialise in.
And yes,
you will be specialising because at heart C-punk is
a class-based system. After rolling or allocating Stats (GM’s choice) you’ll
pick a Role covering one of the classic archetypes of the milieu (Cop, Fixer,
Netrunner, Techie, etc.). The Role comes with a package of Skills available to
you to spend a set of points on, and from there you are free to spend some more
points on Skills from outside your package to round them out a bit.
Aaaaaaaand
here’s where we can point out the first of Cyberpunk 2020‘s flaws,
which is the standard one common to ’80s system design; too many bloody skills.
You can find this problem in many games of the period (looking at you, Call of Cthullu) and it
certainly continued into the ’90s. These days, broader skills and fewer of them
have proven their worth, but back in the day the mentality was that more
specialisation gave more definition and showed that you’d attended to detail.
In practice, though, its a mess.
Consider Endurance. This is “the
ability to withstand pain or hardship, particularly over long periods of time”
but no number of points you have in it will help once the thumbscrews come out.
No, for that you’ll need the Resist Torture/Drugs skill. Rockerboys have
Wardrobe & Style, but only Corporates manage to combine it naturally with
Personal Grooming. Persuasion will allow you to convince people to do what you
want, unless you want them to open up and tell you an anecdote whereupon you’ll
need Interview (which is different again to Interrogate, of course.)
Combat skills have similar
amusement. Having ten points in the Submachinegun Skill will leave you
flummoxxed when someone hands you an ordinary pistol unless you’ve invested in
Handguns as well. The Melee Skill covers all weapons from baseball bats, to axes,
to whips, but it doesn’t cover swords (for that you’ll need Fencing which
covers all swords ever made) nor does it cover weapons used in Martial Arts.
The Martial Arts table. Too early for MMA or krav maga, no Brazilian jujitsu, but most egregiously no sumo wrestling.
Ah, yes, Martial Arts. The rules
for martial arts were seemingly written by a group of teenagers who spent far
too much time arguing about whether Steven Seagal could beat up Jackie Chan, or
if Mike Tyson could last against Bruce Lee, and if Chuck Norris could bash up
your uncle Bob. Unlike Brawling (basic street fisticuffs) Martial Arts gives
you access to a slew of different moves, each with bonuses applied depending on
what style of Martial Art you’ve trained in. Wrestling will give you bonuses to
throws and grapples, but boxing will help with strikes. More expensive forms
give better bonuses and in more fields, with Thai kickboxing and Tae Kwan Do
being the ones that finally won the R. Talsorian office circle jerk. Honestly,
it’s pretty sad, and anyone who’s had to endure martial arts fanboys arguing
over which discipline is “best” (especially at the gaming table) will roll
their eyes at it. It’s the “katanas are the coolest sword evah” argument all
over again.
But of all the Skills the most
important one is your Special Ability, which is a Skill that only your Role can
take. It is basically the first thing you’ll throw ten points into as it
determines how good you are at your role and nobody wants to be the Solo with 2
Combat Sense. In short, making this aspect of your character a Skill was a poor
move as you’re gonna have it at a high level or not at all and having an
alternative system (rerolls or rolling a second d10 and picking the highest)
would have made it more interesting.
Probably
the most entertaining part of creating a Cyberpunk character
is using the optional “Lifepath” tables, where you can roll up all kinds of
details about your character, including their personality, family members,
their clothing preferences, their friends, the political causes they care
about, and even the hurdles they are facing in their love life. In a hobby
where “building” the character you want has become the norm, “casting” yourself
into playing a randomised concept is refreshing.
But in
spite of these Stats, Skills, and Lifepaths nothing is as important and
distinctly Cyberpunk as the final and most important step in
creating a character…
Lets Go Shopping!
Without the cyber you’re just a
two-bit punk. Many games make you buy some starting equipment (sword, armour,
horse, rations) but in this game your gear literally defines you. The gun you
carry isn’t just handy for killing folk, it is linked to the software you use
to help you target, which in turn is tuned to the wires connecting your trigger
finger to your nervous system and again to your artificial right eye. You don’t
just wear armour, you have it woven subdermally into your flesh and have it
highlighted with glowing neon gang tattoos. Your laptop and software are not
just tools of your trade but extensions of your brain and a virus out of
control can see your own body violently thrown into seizure.
Passing
the book around so everyone can get their shopping done is undoubtedly the
longest part of Cyberpunk character creation, but it is arguably
the best as well and it certainly isn’t a step you want to hurry.
And you
won’t want to either because the equipment is an area where the designers have
spent a lot of time and effort, no moreso than in the exceptional “chromebook”
expansions which are designed to read just like a shopping catalogue filled
with glorious ads for all kinds of various goods and services. The chromebooks
are Cyberpunk‘s game design at its best and you can easily
allow players to treat them as an in-world item, letting them leaf through it
in quiet times, showing off pictures of desired augmentations and firearms
greedily to their fellows, and saving their pennies for that new piece of
hacking software.
Of course
all of this cyberwear has a cost, and it isn’t all financial. The more your
character adapts their body the more likely they are to fall into the madness
of cyberpsychosis. At best this means spending a lot of money on therapy. At
worst it means turning into an NPC murderbot. Which is just like being a PC
murderbot except you’re more likely to kill your friends. It’s very much
like Call of Cthullu‘s sanity mechanisms in that the
more your character gets too close to the edge the more likely they are to fall
into it and never return.
Speaking
of Call of Cthullu… and murder…
Now We See The Violence
Inherent In The System
I
remember first asking a friend of mine years ago about Cyberpunk and
his pithy one-liner was, “It’s like Cthullu – take a spare character sheet.” He
couldn’t have been more correct.
Cyberpunk‘s combat
system (called Friday Night Firefight) is brutal. Characters that don’t dive
for cover immediately will soon end up very leaky bags of meat. The health
system comprises of ten ranks of severity and it’s rather telling that seven of
them are various degrees of “dying” with the main difference being the speed at
which it’s happening.
The
lethal nature of combat in Cyberpunk gives
it incredibly high stakes. Characters will always be on edge when approaching a
suspicious situation and wary of getting into a firefight. If they must resort
to violence, they’ll want to get the drop on their enemies and have a solid
plan to work with.
And when that fight does happen,
it is exhilarating in the way that only roleplaying games can be. I recently
asked a mate of mine who played a lot of it back in the day what he liked about
it and it was the drama of combat that he first mentioned.
In his words:
“Cyberpunk was
the first game where I really felt the thrill and fear of danger. Being in that
position where you’re pinned under fire all out of ammo and your friend slides
a clip across the floor to you… and you know that’s their last one, too. It was
tense. It was a life and death situation for the characters and it totally felt
like it.”
The Hacker Problem
When
discussing Cyberpunk, there’s one key issue that most players
recognise as a big problem; the internet is a nuisance. House rules generally
stated that netrunners would be NPC characters. That’s because diving into the
virtual world was its own completely different game, and one where nobody else
was invited.
Unless you were custom built to
deal with the Net (ie. had chosen the Netrunner Role) you were pretty much
helpless in cyberland. So in the event that your crew were hired to steal some
files, for instance, only the player of the Netrunner would get to step up and
have some fun while the rest of you twiddled your thumbs. “See ya later,” would
say Nethead. “The GM and I are gonna go into another room for a while. Catch
you in an hour or so.” When all is said and done, Netrunning as written forced
you to break one of the cardinal rules of roleplaying; don’t split the
party.
Naturally the game tried to
counter this. Maybe the Netrunner would have to be actually on-site while
hacking, leading to the classic split scene of having to hold off a squad of
armed goons while your hacker is doing their thing. Sounds like a pretty solid
scene until you’ve done it for the twentieth time. And even worse when you
realise that action rounds in cyberspace run on a totally different timeframe
to realspace combat rounds. Yup, easiest just to outsource it to an NPC.
A sample data fortress
Which is
a shame because the actual Net rules are really quite interesting. Loading up
your software combinations is a customisable treat and the crossword
puzzle-based data fortresses are novel and full of possibilities. For GMs who
love designing dungeons, floorplans, and other environments for their games,
the Net of Cyberpunk offers a fascinating different spin on
the method.
Certainly
you could run a game consisting entirely of ‘runners, and you could have a lot
of fun with that. Indeed, the rules explicitly state that most data fortresses
require multiple Netrunners to attack them simultaneously. But once you start
focusing the game in that direction you might as well play the card game Netrunner, which
was originally designed for the Cyberpunk world.
In fact, I’ve heard of some GMs who replaced the hacking rules with the card
game for their campaigns but I’m unsure how apocryphal such claims are.
More
recent games in the genre (including Cyberpunk Red) have
made moves to counter this issue, and it is well appreciated. But in these
classic editions it was a glaring problem.
The Experience
The remainder of the core book
deals with the setting and running the game. Night City, the iconic fictional
metropolis custom made for the setting, and the various megacorporations are
detailed. A good handful of “screamsheets” are supplied, which are nifty
newspaper-like handouts for the players each with a mission for the GM to run
for them on the back.
And of course like every game in
the ’90s there were sourcebooks. I’ve already mentioned the Chromebooks but
there were many, many others. Location guides for Europe or the Pacific Rim.
Megacorporation “reports”. A more complete guide to Night City, another going
further into the Net, and yet another focused on the irradiated highways of
what’s left of the USA. A book for Cops, another for Medias, and naturally one
for the one-man army Solos. And of course as all these supplements came out the
game inevitably changed.
A game designer friend of mine was running it at the time and noticed the shift.
In his words:
“I was
initially drawn to the “punk” aspect of Cyberpunk.
However as more supplements come out the super slick “Euro” feel, that was
initially supposed to be alien to the ugly streets of Night City, became more
and more the norm. The game became more about extremely professional super
soldiers armed with mega-weapons taking on full borgs, hover tanks and powered
armour. The weird gangs featured in Night City source book became odd curios of
a by-gone era as players embraced an over-correction in the Cyberpunk 2020
gaming style.
“There was an attempt to steer it
back with Nomad-focused narratives of quasi-techno barbarian biker gangs, which
I enjoyed far more than mega-corporate warfare. I saw a couple of GMs flounder
when it came to their storytelling ability and, partially in the latter stage
of the game, with so much source material of really cool, massive, overpowered
tech, struggle to find a reasonable threat level in their games.
… words elude me…
“The
supplement Listen Up You Primitive Screwheads was
a bit revolutionary, in that it attempted to move RPGs away from the murder
hobo style of play that is across the RPG genre both then and to this day. It
does add in some really good points, however it occasionally comes across as
the author preaching to those beneath him that are ruining his game.
“
He makes
a valid point with Screwheads (or to give it its full title, Listen Up, You Primitive
Screwheads!!!!: The Unexpurgated Cyberpunk Referee’s Guide. This
somewhat divisive supplement is effectively a collection of articles by
the Cyberpunk creative team on how to run games.
Though some of it is tailored to the Cyberpunk game,
much of it can be considered general GM advice.
But some of that advice is indeed
rather patronising, preachy, even occasionally obnoxious. One chapter, written
by the illustrious Mr Pondsmith himself is reminiscent of the bad old
days of adversarial GMing as the author takes great delight in detailing how he
has engineered the deaths of multiple groups of characters.
Indeed,
by the mid-’90s Cyberpunk had become a game of attrition and
one-upmanship, less inspired by detective and heist storylines than ’80s action
films. The Rockerboys, Medias, Corporates, and Cops became sidelined as crews
became strictly Solo/Fixer/Tech/Nomad affairs (with the occasional NPC
Netrunner associate to round out the party.) The last supplements for the
edition were released in 1996 and then the game seemingly just jacked out and
entered into the haze of gaming nostalgia, waiting for its time to be rebooted.
Legacy
The
upcoming digital game stars Keanu Reeves, so they tell us
Probably
– no, definitely the game that Cyberpunk is
most compared to is Shadowrun, which was released in 1989 and thus is only
slightly younger than it. Shadowrun‘s huge
notable setting difference is that it blends the Cyberpunk model
with fantasy rpg tropes including elves, dragons, and magic. Most people had a
preference between the two, but it was essentially a matter of taste. Shadowrun fans
claimed their game was more fun and had more variety available. Cyberpunk fans
claimed theirs was more pure and had a sharper edge.
Looking
back on it, it’s hard to say if there was a winner between the two. They both
seemed to lose out when the World of Darkness line
turned up and kicked everyone out of the contest for a decade (until Wizards of
the Coast released D&D3 and flipped the market on its head.)
But rereading this classic old
game and discussing it with veterans also reminds me that it was also one of
the most “min/maxing” games around. With the likelihood of character death so
likely, players naturally tried to find a way to survive and this invariably
meant optimising your character for best performance. The nature of the game
system even encouraged it. Your character’s Role determined exactly what Skills
you would be maxing out, especially your chosen weapon, which in turn would be
influencing what equipment you’d be taking to synergise with them. Reflex and
Body were essential Stats if you were considering going into combat (in that
order) but every character was expected to boost Empathy otherwise there was no
way you’d be able to rock that oh-so-important cyberwear. After all, you’ll be
choosing as much cyberwear as you can because it also provides a host of funky
bonuses, and if we don’t modify our PC as much as possible aren’t we playing
contrary to the spirit of the game (or, even worse, just asking to be killed?)
The
latest edition, Cyberpunk Red, seems to have made an attempt to curb some
of these issues. Fewer Skills clog up the sheet, Netrunners now seem to be a
valid character choice, and the new combat system (Thursday Night Throwdown)
seems to require far fewer ranks of “knocking on death’s door.” The setting has
also been updated to 2077 and a jumpstart kit and a boxed set are available in
stores right now.
But I get
the horrid feeling that the game will simply once more degenerate into a
dungeon-hack in skyscrapers with assault rifles and software standing in for
claymores and spell scrolls. In this regard, I guess Shadowrun won
one round in the fight because it at least wasn’t pretending to be more
sophisticated than D&D in mirrorshades.
A final
point. I’m really surprised that they bothered rehashing the old Interlock system
at all. If you really wanted to have a class-based system whilst emphasising
‘Style over Substance’, where ‘Attitude is Everything’, where you are living on
the ‘Edge’, why wouldn’t you choose Powered by the Apocalypse?
After all, that’s what the cool kids seem to be playing.
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