I have a love/hate relationship with Cyberpunk 2020. I love the incredible setting, which ties multiple classics of the genre together into one glorious whole. I hate the godawful system where combat has so many variables you're doing algebra to work out what's happened, is so subject to min-maxing that parties can easily end up wildly imbalanced, and where you can't play one of the genre's most important character types, the netrunner, because the system is so badly designed that most GMs won't let anyone play them.
But 30 years have passed and here's a new edition.
We started off with character creation and picked our roles. I went for a netrunner, since I'd obviously never been able to play one before, and dived into the life path generator.
The life path generator is probably my favourite thing about Cyberpunk 2020, and I'm glad to say that Cyberpunk Red is just as much fun. Some details have been changed, and notably the bits that made things less fun have been removed. With the possibility of getting unexpectedly shafted by your life path no longer on the table, it's a lot more reasonable to allow players to choose things off the lists if they don't like what they originally rolled.
So I rolled Eastern European as my ethnic origin, but since 2/3 of the CP2020 characters I've played were Eastern European I decided to make her Middle Eastern instead. She's also a flashy dresser, with wild hair and a fondness for wearing spiky gloves.
On to personality and background. Here things got a bit strange, as we rolled a group of antisocial and violent types who nevertheless think people are wonderful. This would be a good point to allow some choosing off lists, but my group are who we are, so we're running with it. I'm also a little confused where my character developed her netrunning skills, since she grew up homeless, but I'll find a way to work with it.
The family and relationships section has been trimmed down to a sensible level, with three rolls of 1d10-7 to determine friends, enemies and tragic love affairs. I rolled three friends, no enemies, and two tragic love affairs, both of which ended in the untimely death of my partner. The other players immediately gave my character her street name: Widow.
One completely new thing is a custom life path section based on your role. For my netrunner it filled out a few details like who she works with and for, and what her workspace looks like. This is a great addition and helps the roles to feel unique.
Onto stats and skills. There are various degrees of customisation available here, but despite the GM giving us options, we all agreed to ignore all that and take the 'street rat' route: roll 1d10 to select your stat block from a grid, then take a standard set of skills and equipment. While I wasn't entirely impressed with the stat blocks (I feel if you have a set of standard arrays like this that they should all add up to the same points cost) this was a quick way of getting things done, avoiding both min-maxing and choice paralysis, and made sure we were all at similar levels of competence in our respective roles.
It was a pretty prolonged character creation process, even using the pre-built lists, so I would definitely recommend a Session 0 to anyone running this without pre-gens. Amongst other things, the life path generator throws up a lot of backstory without fleshing out the details, and some time spent between sessions figuring out things like who my three friends are and why some of my former clients hate me would be useful.
We dived straight into an adventure, however. I picked up the jumpstart kit from DTRPG during a sale but never got as far as reading the adventure, so I sent that over to the GM so he could run The Apartment.
Things immediately became more complicated, as the GM hasn't actually GMed in quite a while now but has been running LARPs. When you've got 50-100 players involved, you need multiple storylines running simultaneously to keep everyone engaged. Not so much with a normal TTRPG party of 4-6 players. I'm not sure how far into The Apartment we've actually got, as we seem to have spent most of the session somewhere else.
What this did throw up is that it's important to talk about the setting, particularly if you're playing with veteran CP2020 players. CP2020 was a spectacularly 1980s image of the future. CPRed has been updated significantly, and things like pocket sized smart phones now exist, so there was a bit of adjustment at the start as we all got used to the fact that we were living in a more up-to-date future. This won't be an issue for people new to the setting, but for my group it was definitely an important thing to bring up.
We haven't had the chance to dive too deep into the system so far, but we did have a few skill rolls, and so far my impression is that the difficulty chart seems well put together. My netrunner does extremely well at her particular areas of competence, and is just about capable of success at something very easy in her weakest areas.
We also did a bit of practice combat at the end, just to see how it worked, and unlike CP2020, I actually understand it. Again it looks pretty well scaled. A weak, unarmoured opponent can be dropped in one good shot from a heavy gun, but a PC in armour is a bit more durable. Crits happen when you roll multiple 6s on the damage dice, and there's some nice tables to roll critical injuries on. While people aren't going to be shedding limbs all over the place like in CP2020 it's nice to see that it's still an option.
My only real qualm is that the game still uses the mechanic where cyberware implants decrease your humanity and take your empathy stat with it. My netrunner started out with only 5 empathy, and once the neural interface that she needs to do her job was installed, that was down to 3. The good news is that fashionware no longer has any humanity cost, so rockerboys can have their tech hair and light tattoos without suddenly becoming incompetant. All the same, it means that empathy retains its status as the 'how much cyberware can I fit in my body?' stat, which is the source of quite a lot of CP2020 min-maxing and the reason I would not allow people to use the point buy system for making their character statblocks.
There's still a lot about this game I've yet to experience, particularly the netrunning, but so far it looks like a solid improvement on CP2020 and I'm looking forward to getting to play more of one of my favourite settings without some of my least favourite rules.
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