RPGaDay: Want

There's not much I want, RPG-wise.  I only tend to want things when a new thing becomes available.  But there's one thing I do want, and that's a good cyberpunk game.  Because there are no good cyberpunk games.

When I say this, people tend to mention Shadowrun.  My limited exposure to it suggests that it's certainly a decent game, and the multiple editions suggest people are actually working on it.  But for me it falls down as a cyberpunk game in that it's clearly an urban fantasy game with a bunch of cyberpunk stuff pasted on.  Urban fantasy is one of my all time favourite genres, but mashing it up with cyberpunk doesn't work for me, so ultimately my reaction to Shadowrun has always been, 'ugh, get your elves out of my cyberpunk'.

So no, not Shadowrun.

The big daddy of the cyberpunk RPGs is of course Cyberpunk 2020.  I have a love/hate relationship with this game.  I love the setting.  I love the concept.  I love some of the wild and wacky cyberware options it provides.  I love the entertainment factor of playing in the incredibly 80s future it depicts.

I hate the rules.  Especially, but not limited to, the combat system and the effects of cyberware.

The combat system, Friday Night Firefight, is apparently very realistic in how it portrays the effects of getting shot, and is based on FBI data on shootings.  I don't doubt this.  Getting into a gunfight is one of the most dangerous things you can do in CP2020.  I think it's a solid combat simulator.  What it isn't, is any fun.

So when you shoot someone in CP2020, you've also got to determine in which body part you shot them, and sometimes what sub-part, e.g. if you shot them in the head, did you shoot them in the face?  Then apply the effects of armour, which includes hard armour, soft armour and implanted cyberware armour, all of which are going to be different on different body parts and which also stack to different degrees.  Then there's the matter of whether you were using armour piercing bullets, although frankly there is no reason in CP2020 that you would ever use anything other than armour piercing bullets.  And then there's criticals, and frankly I've no idea if criticals have any actual effect in the game, because when I play I just give the GM a damage number and wait for them to do the required algebra and then come back and tell me if the target is dead or not.

This kind of combat system works rather better in a video game where there's a computer to do all the number crunching for you, so I remain optimistic about Cyberpunk 2077 where I'll get the awesome setting but there's a layer of abstraction between me and the system.

And then there's the effect of cyberware.  Each piece of cyberware you give your character decreases their humanity, and by association, their empathy stat, until eventually you succumb to cyber psychosis.  This is both rather annoying when you look at the real world which is not plagued by roving bands of murderous amputees and pacemaker patients, and also drastically limits what you can do in game.  There's a bunch of basically cosmetic implants available, but they all mess with your humanity in the same way as the practical, stat-altering implants.  You might want your street samurai to have fibre optic hair and light tattoos, but once you've added sub-dermal armour, synth muscle and power wolvers, you might not have enough humanity left for anything decorative.

In short, Cyberpunk 2020 sets up this amazingly cool setting, then weighs it down with a set of rules that actively work against telling the kind of stories that it's made for.

So not Cyberpunk 2020.

Carbon 2185 uses the D&D 5e rules, and while I'm not a huge fan of 5e, it does have a decent combat engine.  It's the cyberpunk game I'm most keen to play at the moment, especially after having picked up the city source book.  But while one of my complaints about CP2020 is that there is massively too much equipment ("Why is there an entire page just for marginally different hats?") Carbon 2185 is actually rather light on the equipment options.  Maybe that will be fixed in a future source book, but right now it's a bit on the sparse side.  And while I appreciate that they've changed the hacker class from the CP2020 Netrunner than no sane GM would allow you to play, I'm not sure making it basically a wizard is what I really want.

I'm looking forward to playing it, maybe even running it.  But I also need to be able to sell it to the rest of the group, and that's not happening with a 5e hack, making this not the cyberpunk game I want.

Out in the wilds of PBTA there's The Sprawl, which I like a lot and is my current go-to cyberpunk game when I'm GMing, but which suffers from being too strongly influenced by the previous two games.  It tries to avoid the tendency of Shadowrun games to turn into a strategic planning session, but does it by abstracting too much into dice rolls and hold, and some playbooks like the Reporter have all the same 'you basically need to build the campaign around this character' issue as CP2020.

The other big PBTA cyberpunk game is The Veil, which is post-modern cyberpunk and focused around an augmented reality overlay, which sound pretty cool and interesting while at the same time entirely not the classic cyberpunk I want to play.  Similarly, the Forged in the Dark game Hack the Planet has a focus on climate change, and while it's interesting and I'd like to give it a shot, I don't think it's going to be what I want.

A more conventional cyberpunk Forged in the Dark game was one of the stretch goals for Blades in the Dark, but it hasn't appeared yet and I won't believe it until it actually happens.

In amongst the many games in the itch.io bundle for racial justice is a game called Cyborgs and Cigarettes.  This game imagines cyberpunk style technology showing up much earlier in the wake of WW1, and sets the game during the American prohibition era.  I like it better than I expected.  The high tech/lowlife theme fits right into the setting.  It has a well chosen set of classes and an unusual dice mechanic and I'd like to give it a try some time.  But again, it's not classic cyberpunk.  Maybe if the rules work well, it could be reskinned into the classic future setting, but as-is, it's not the game I'm looking for.

The same goes for Eclipse Phase, a game I do want to try out because why would I ever not want to try out a game in which you can play an octopus?  But sleeving is not the cyberpunk I want, and that means Altered Carbon isn't on my radar either.

Right now my hopes lie in Sweden.  Helmgast brought out an updated version of Neotech last year - but unless they do an English translation some time I'm never going to be playing that.  Fria Ligan's Year Zero engine should translate well to cyberpunk, and there are various fan projects working on it, but nothing official is publically in the works.

I could make my own cyberpunk game, of course.  And in fact, I have: a Lasers and Feeling hack that I call Cyber+Punk.  For a light-hearted one-shot, it does the job.  But I want a full RPG, not a one-page hack.

There are other games that I've yet to have a look at, including Corporation and Black Code.  Maybe one of them will turn out to be the cyberpunk game I want?  While I claim that there are no good cyberpunk games, I very much want to be proved wrong.