Cyberpunk Red's lifepath in action: Armala's backstory

I love a life path system.  It was by far my favourite thing about Cyberpunk 2020 and I'm delighted that Cyberpunk Red has one too.  I randomly rolled my netrunner's backstory, and used it to write the following backstory incorporating everything I rolled.  One of the other PCs rolled the same childhood background living in a megabuilding, so we decided that was how we knew each other and I've incorporated some of the details of his story into mine.  In particular, the megabuilding in question, owned by a corporation with a particular fondness for alternative facts, whose residents are indoctrinated with capitalists beliefs and the values of America's greatest ever president...

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Armala Suda was born into a homeless community in Night City.  Several families lived together under a bridge until one day they finally managed to find a way inside one of the city's megabuildings.

They hoped to find work and maybe even a home there, but the residents of Eric Trump Plaza turned out to be oddly suspicious of anyone even slightly brown.  They tried to escape the building, but their original entrance point had been cut off and attempting to leave via the main entrance without documentation resulted in a police shooting.  The only survivors were Armala, her parents, and Armala's friend Kamala Singh, thanks to one of the residents, a janitor, who risked his own life to snatch the two girls out of the line of fire.  The four of them went into hiding, making their new home in the dumpsters, constantly on the lookout for the building's authorities.

Finding she had a knack with machines and computers, Armala began to practice making the security cameras look the other way to make their foraging a little easier.  The residents were a little harder to hide from, but soon realised Armala could be useful to them too, and soon she was trading her skills for food and clothes for her family.  Dean, who worked at the gun range, started sneaking her in after hours so she could learn to shoot.  It wasn't long before they were in love, but their plans for a life together were tragically cut short.  Dean was killed when one of the range's customers accidentally shot him dead.

Armala attempted to channel her grief into something positive, answering an advert for someone to play synthesizer in a new band called Gen Sys.  While she was forced to leave when the rest of the band's infighting started to attract too much attention, it did allow her to catch the eye of a local netrunner collective.

They were working to take down the corporation owning the building from the inside and looking for a new member.  They offered to get her neural link installed in exchange for her working with them, and she accepted.  One of the first things she did with her new abilities was to hack the door code of an apartment in the hab block that she knew had recently been vacated, to give her parents and Kamala their first real home.

Initially her work for the collective was to pay off her cyberware, but soon she became friends with one of her fellow netrunners, Arch.  While she wasn't convinced when Arch insisted on setting her up on a date with her younger brother Bobby, things went better than anticipated and soon they were dating.

Life with the netrunner crew was going well.  Arch and Armala made a good team and their services were in demand.  It all went wrong one day when they started picking up chatter across the megabuilding's networks suggesting that a riot was imminent.  They tried to contact Bobby to get him away from the danger area, but by the time they got through it was too late and Bobby was killed in a fight with the police.

As a known associate of Bobby, now officially declared a terrorist, Armala (now going by the name Widow) knew it was time to get Arch, herself and her family out of Eric Trump Plaza.  Help came from an unlikely source.  Staff Sergeant James Ford had been part of the police squad that had attacked them when they first tried to leave the megabuilding.  He'd seen the corporation for what it truly was that day and finally had the chance to try to make things right, risking everything to get them out of the building.  Unable to ever return safely, he took the fake ID Arch offered him to begin a new life outside the building.

Out of the building, Arch and Widow set up a new team of freelance netrunners catering to local nomads and fixers.  Unfortunately they'd had to abandon all their old clients in the flight from the Plaza, and some of them have taken this as a personal insult.  Widow doesn't intend to let them get the better of her though.  After everything she's been through, anyone attempting to cross her had better watch out.  One day she'll get the janitor who saved her and Kamala out of there and into a better life.  And then that building's going down.

First Time Playing: Cyberpunk Red

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.