Cyberpunk as a genre seems to come and go in popularity. Right now it's firmly on the way up, with recent adaptations like Ready Player One and Altered Carbon, and the upcoming Cyberpunk 2077 video game, which I will absolutely be playing. So it's not surprising that more cyberpunk RPGs are appearing, although as yet I haven't played many.
Cyberpunk 2020
The second edition of the original cyberpunk RPG and apparently the only one people still actually play, this game is intended to let you play characters who've walked straight out of a William Gibson novel. The world is detailed and evocative, and the gear list includes pretty much anything you could want to carry or implant.
It's brilliant, and it's no surprise people are still playing it now. But, as I said after I played Shadowrun for the first time, it's no surprise it's nowhere near as popular as Shadowrun. Because this game has aged spectacularly badly.
The combat system, Friday Night Firefight, is apparently one of the most realistic systems out there for modern combat, using actual FBI data on gunshot injuries as the basis for damage levels. Gunfights have the potential to be extremely dangerous, and getting shot in the head without a helmet is pretty much a death sentence. Sounds good in principle, but in practice it means abandoning the principle of style over substance that's supposed to define cyberpunk as everyone either cowers in the face of danger or tools up to the max. And while the rules for armour and armour stacking might be realistic, they are absolutely not easy to understand. I've given up trying. I just make sure the GM knows what armour I've got, and refuse to engage beyond marking off however many hit points I'm told to. And I'm not stupid, or even particularly stubborn - I just can't get my head round this insanely complex system when all I want to do is wear cool cybernetics and destroy corporations.
Which brings me onto gear. Between the original rulebook and the giant pile of Chromebook expansions, there's a vast amount of gear available to a Cyberpunk 2020 character. And in a more narrative based system this could be amazing. Of course you'd consider getting the smart mirror shades instead of the smart goggles, even though they have fewer add-on slots and cost more, because they look cool and it's your signature style. But in the heavily stats and rules based world of early 90s RPGs, that just doesn't fly.
It gets even worse when you get to the cyberwear, because at that point you aren't just paying money, you're paying humanity.
My first Cyberpunk 2020 character was a Rockerboy. I wanted to give her a ton of cool looking implants, but once she'd got skinweave, a nu-throat and tech hair, she'd already lost enough humanity that adding many more implants was going to start tanking her empathy score. And with the rockerboy being Cyberpunk 2020's biggest face class, she really needed a decent empathy stat.
My second character was a Solo. This time I was going full min-max, with the empathy stat being the 'how much cyberwear can I fit in without going insane?' stat. She was tooled up with muscle and bone lace, corvette legs and mono wolvers. Her empathy was tanked - down to 4 by the end of the game, I think. But all her cyberwear was 100% practical, fully devoted to making her better in a gunfight. Read about Cyberpunk 2020 and there's all this cool stuff about creative uses of various implants - things like using implanted video screens to disorient your opponent - but I couldn't use anything like that because I'd rolled so much humanity loss on the practical gear there was no room left for anything imaginative.
In short, while the game wants you to be able to play cool William Gibson style protagonists, the rules constantly hinder your ability to do that.
The character classes are also a problem. Some of them, like the Cop and the Corporate, leave me wondering what on earth these respectable people with proper jobs are doing hanging around with a bunch of street punks. Fixers make far more sense as NPCs than as PCs. Netrunners are so badly designed most GMs won't even let you play them, as they're basically playing a whole different game to the rest of the party. Media and Rockerboy can both work as face classes but you've really got to design the campaign around them. There are some solid options in the Solo and the Med-Tech but overall if you're trying to create a coherent team it's just a mess.
As a 30 year old futuristic game, it's unsurprising the whole thing is smothered in zeerust. This isn't all bad. There is a certain charm to playing in the 80s version of the future, where phones are huge and wifi barely exists and somehow the only music is hair metal. But if you want to play a modern cyberpunk game, you're going to have to do some major updates to make the setting feel like the actual future.
So it should be obvious that the only reason I play this game is because I love cyberpunk as a genre so damn much I'll put up with this game's many drawbacks to make it happen. However, there is one thing that Cyberpunk 2020 does absolutely brilliantly. The life path.
Sometimes my characters show up with fully formed backstories. More often, they don't. But in Cyberpunk 2020 you can grab your dice and generate yourself a full character background, detailing their origins, family status, siblings, sense of style, and significant life events from the age of 16.
Which meant that Requiem, the solo I mentioned above, wasn't just a practically tooled up solo. She was the child of Hispanic gang members who sent her away at a young age for her own protection. Scarred by this, she grew up eschewing human company beyond befriending members of law enforcement for her own protection and training in combat. Embracing this background meant that even with the game's rules constantly getting in the way, I had a well realised and unique character to play, and I still have happy memories of the strange tale of love and obsession that played out in that game.
I suspect Cyberpunk 2020 holds out more due to nostalgia than anything else, and while I'm interested to see if the new Cyberpunk Red rules fix any of the enormous problems, I'm not holding my breath. But the life path generator? I'd use that any time.
The Sprawl
I immediately loved The Sprawl, because this Powered By The Apocalypse game strips away so much of what I don't like about Cyberpunk 2020. No spending ages trawling through Chromebooks to try to work out what equipment you're going to have - your playbook gives you a few options to pick from, and you decide for yourself which corporation's branding is on your gear. No concerns about tanking your empathy - your cyberwear comes with other, more narratively interesting drawbacks. Combat is the usual PBTA combat - fast and narrative driven. And with the game only a few years old, there's nothing dated here, although at the same time there's nothing to stop you playing it in the 80s future if that's what your group enjoys.
Digging a bit deeper though, I still found problems, and one of them is the playbooks. The Sprawl could really have done with taking less inspiration from Cyberpunk 2020 here.
The Media character is still here, as the Reporter, and once again doesn't really fit in unless you structure the campaign around them. The Rockerboy is also back, as the Pusher, and has the same issue. The Fixer, again, makes a better NPC. What the game really could do with instead of these is a solid Face class like Shadowrun has.
Over-specialisation might be a theme, in fact. The Hacker is a vast improvement on the Netrunner, but in the game we played the Tech was able to do plenty of hacking without dominating the session and still having other options. The Driver doesn't have the flexibility of Shadowrun's Rigger.
There are some solid options in the Infiltrator, Soldier and Tech, but overall a smaller number of more flexible playbooks would make for a better game.
I also wasn't entirely sold on the planning and action phases. While I can see that the planning phase that consists pretty much entirely of making some dice rolls to acquire the Gear and Intel currencies is intended to prevent the game turning into a strategic planning meeting, the way Shadowrun seems prone to doing, it's difficult to get your head around as it doesn't seem to involve any actual roleplay, and isn't that why we're all here with our pencils and dice? The way Blades in the Dark handles this with flashbacks is in my opinion a much better way to avoid extended planning sessions.
All the same, a well run game of The Sprawl can easily hit all the cyberpunk notes and tell a fun story without the rules getting in the way too much. It brings some of the Cyberpunk 2020 nostalgia with significantly less mathematics to work out if you're dead or not. A lot of love has been put into this game. It's just not as good as it could be.
Conclusion
I love cyberpunk enough to overlook the flaws with both these systems, and would enthusiastically sign up to play The Sprawl if I saw it offered at a convention. What I'd actually recommend though...
There's not a huge amount of cyberpunk games out there. I've never played Corporation or GURPS Cyberpunk (although I am familiar with the story of how the latter was the target of a Secret Service raid, and if that's not a plot hook I don't know what is.) The only other game I've played is Shadowrun, and while I'm not personally a fan, if you don't have the same, "Ew, you got elves in my dystopia" reaction to the urban fantasy elements of Shadowrun, it's a better game than both of these.
But the cyberpunk game I really want, the one that I hope is going to fix everything that's wrong with every other cyberpunk game I've encountered, is Null Vector. It's the cyberpunk hack of Blades in the Dark that everyone and their dice have been waiting for since 2015. It was apparently in alpha at the end of 2018, and according to people who can see the backer-only kickstarter updates there's going to be a preview available in November.
While I've had a bunch of fun with PBTA games, for mission-based gaming I've found the Forged in the Dark system to be absolutely superior, and I can only hope that John Harper won't keep us all waiting too much longer.
But that life path generator? Still gold. Use it.
No comments:
Post a Comment