Welcome to RED, Choomba (Cyberpunk)

 

Source: Movieclips (Kino)

Source: Filmviewed (Rintaro)

I've been a Cyberpunk fan for a very long time. Back in the day I had most of the books and picked up the ones I didn't have second-hand at UK conventions. My collection's pretty complete now, but I haven't played in years. When they announced a new, revised edition (with Mike Pondsmith as a leading light, no less) I was all for it.

Cyberpunk 2020, for those who haven't played, can broadly be described as Metropolis plus Metropolis plus post-apocalypse, with a dash of William Gibson. Everything was shiny and new until it wasn't. Now you have to survive in a world where survival is the lesser of two evils. There are all kinds of fancy toys to make survival bearable - or at least achievable. Ultimately the larger question is, will you strive to make the world better, or bring the temple crashing down?

The game's credo could be boiled down to three sentences: style over substance, attitude is everything, and live on the edge. Cyberpunk wasn't about its mechanics. It was about its setting and its players, which made it significantly different from its peers. Its first edition was published in 1988; there was no Vampire then, nor was there a White Wolf, the big boy on the block was Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, and every other game system peeped about under its huge legs looking for dishonorable graves. Games then were all about stats, mechanics, dice; if you didn't have at least twenty complicated charts in the opening chapter, you couldn't call yourself an RPG.

Mechanically the old Cyberpunk was Skill plus Stat plus 1D10 versus a Difficulty number, and that Difficulty went up or down depending on circumstance and bonuses. Because of the sheer number of variables calculating that Difficulty could be tricky, particularly since you, as Referee, had to put it all together on the fly most of the time. However it wasn't a million miles away from the systems we use now in Gumshoe, where pool points plus 1D6 versus a Difficulty number means the vampires get you, or they don't. You can also have opposing rolls, where the enemy's die roll provides the Difficulty you have to beat, and if you don't you get smacked round the noggin. Or something along those lines.

The biggest difference, mechanically speaking, between Cyberpunk and the games that were published alongside it was this mechanic didn't really change, ever. No complicated tables. No feature creep. Whereas AD&D and Vampire made it their business to stuff in tables every other page and creep that feature with every new supplement; it was Dr. Strangelove on steroids, with new rules, new roles, new toys parachuted in all the time, everyone chasing the mineshaft gap.

If you bought a Cyberpunk supplement, on the other hand, you were getting about ten pages of setting and inspiration for every two pages of rules. Nor were these new character archetypes, new feats, new Disciplines. They were add-ons to the existing, changing little. You never had the Unearthed Arcana Cavalier problem, where some ill-thought-out idea dumped ten tons of heavily armed and armored horseshit into your campaign. If you pick up Home of the Brave, the US setting book, and start at the beginning there are about sixteen pages of text before you get to the first rules entry, and even that's just stats for an NPC - not new stats or new cyberware, just the basic stats everyone gets.

Artwise the old books - particularly the first ones - were pretty cheap. The cover was new color art, but the interior was, at best, pencil. Scattered among the pages were black & white photos meant to convey the setting through character portraits - i.e. the writers' buddies with shades on, or an old phone cord draped over their neck to look as if they were jacked into the network. 

Now CD Projekt RED's working on a video game release due to arrive at some point in the next X decades, and while it does look cool I've no real desire to play it. When it comes to RPGs I prefer tabletop, or at least Discord chat.

However the tabletop version came out on PDF yesterday ...

Setting-wise the game is pretty much as it was before. Details have changed, but broadly speaking the world went to hell in a handbasket back in the 1990s, the Middle East gets nuked flat in 1997-ish, and corporations begin asserting their authority through armed conflict. This all comes to a head in the early 2020s with what the setting calls the Time of the Red, where thanks to a combination of unfortunate circumstances the skies go crimson for two years. Things trot merrily along from that neo-Biblical event, and by the time the game's present day rolls around the corporations aren't as powerful as they were, Europe's licking its wounds, the Highriders up in space have declared themselves an independent territory and backed up this claim with lethal force, and the (dis)United States are pulling themselves out of the rubble. More or less. The rest of the planet is just trying to catch a breath, thank you very much. 

Yes, there are Artificial Intelligences. They don't like you. Move along, citizen.

Mechanically the game is very much as it was before. Skill plus Stat plus 1D10 versus a Difficulty number. This should make it easier to convert the old material to the new game, if you (like me) have a dozen or so of the old sourcebooks taking up space on your game shelf. 

Netrunning was one of the big features of the old game, and both in terms of mechanics and style it worked a lot like those slightly ridiculous sci-fi movies did back in the day: more psychobabble than technobabble.

Source: Movieclips Classic

Which is what gave hacking its charm, really. I mean, who wouldn't want to live in a world where Toontown is a thing, and you can go there in person? Problem being, this made Netrunners all but a solo class. The Referee'd spend half an hour or so resolving the Runner's many actions while the rest of the team sat around eating cold pizza, trying not to chew their own arms off in frustration.

Well, Netrunning has changed - except not really. The NET is dead - except not really. 

Mechanically it's the same as ever, broadly speaking. Stat plus Skill plus 1D10 versus Difficulty, or an opposed roll, depending on circumstances. The better a Runner you are, the more net actions you have and therefore the more things you can do when jacked in. The old system used more fuzzy logic than mechanics to resolve this, so the change is welcome. 

Rather than enter some kind of fantasy land now the Runner puts on special glasses which allows them to see the real world's underlying technical architecture. The Runner has the choice between taking a Meat Action or as many Net Actions as her technical ability can provide. The language used, the ICE, is all much as it was before. That said, I suspect the old Netrunner solo game problem will rear its ugly head again, and the rest of the team will take a back seat while the Runner calls the play.

Without going through the whole shmear line by line, the Netrunning chapter - and most of the others - are a lot more rulesy than the old game. There are mechanics now where words were before. The rules are still pretty simple, but the ten page to two page ratio no longer applies.   

Stats are broadly the same. The original had nine stats bought and paid for with a points system. This has ten stats which can be generated several different ways. Attractiveness is no longer a thing; DEX and Willpower are. Generally as with all things in the new system this is more rulesy than before, but much better organized and probably easier for new players to understand. It feels less player-facing and more dice oriented, which may be a problem if you or your players prefer player-facing games. But that's a flavor issue, and your mileage may vary.

The Agent is your new cell phone. The old game had a lot of 1980s-era tics; the cell phone, for one thing, was still a massive brick. The new game has 2020s tics, which probably means than when 2030 rolls along we'll all be having a quiet giggle at how quaint the Cyberpunk RED tech is. Be that as it may, your Agent controls your life. It's your public face. It manages the media you watch, the social media you participate in, speaks in a voice of your choosing and has whatever face you desire. I'm sure nothing but good can come from that. 

There are still Data Terminals and Screamsheets, which means print media is still a thing in 2045. It all works a little differently than before, but fills the same function and can be accessed in broadly the same way. You can still buy kibble and guns, and they're still called kibble and guns. It's just that there are a lot more charts than there were before, so the Referee can determine most things by quick random roll. I suspect, as is the fate of most charts, once the Referee gets used to the system the charts will be ignored and the Referee will just decide on the fly what's available when. 

Cyberware! Ahh, the old reliable ...

Sourced from XGP OST.

Of course cyberware's a big thing in this game. What are you, some kind of fruit loop? Moreover it works pretty much as it always has. Buy tech toys, install tech toys, watch your Humanity melt away. Install too much and your brain goes bye-bye. But you have to install something, or you'll be at a disadvantage when the booster gangs come knocking on your coffin lid. So what's the harm? Everyone does it ...

While the list in the main book feels a little short, it is the main book. The old game had God alone knows how many supplements and Chrome books to add new Cyber. This is about the same list as before, with perhaps a few additions and subtractions. 

Since I touched on art, I should mention that the new book is (naturally) much prettier than the old one. More color inserts for one thing, and some of the new art is really gorgeous. It lacks the stylistic certain something of, say, Vampire the Masquerade; it feels a little paint-by-numbers, but that's the thing with a stylistic choice. People aren't always going to see it the same way. It's pretty, functional, and clean. So it works.

You know what I miss the most, oddly enough?

In the old book there was a bit of short fiction, Never Fade Away. It doubled as an introductory scenario, in that it provided stats for every NPC and potential PC, goons both basic and advanced, and so on. It was brief, to the point, and it did the job by conveying not only the plot but also the style and sensibility of the average game.

That's not how the new game operates. Sure, Never Fade Away is there along with other bits of fiction, like Black Dog. They don't fill the same dual function of being both a starter scenario and mouthpiece for the setting. It's a personal thing; I liked the other way, and now there's a new way. Such things are bound to happen.

Still, I miss it. Mike Pondsmith makes a point of saying in the introduction that his difficulty was balancing the need to keep ' Cyberpunk Cyberpunk, while at the same time moving the timeline forward and clearing out the deadwood. I also had to make the new version fit not just a tabletop roleplaying game but a AAA videogame title too.' When I first saw this game it was new, fresh, exciting, completely different from any other tabletop title of its day. It had bold ideas, like ditching mechanics for setting and style, using its fiction as an introductory game springboard. It's still great, but it's not new. It could never have been new. New was more than thirty years ago.

Scores on the doors. Is this worth getting?

If you're new to the system and looking for a Cyber good time, sure. This does what a main book is supposed to do: provide a simple introduction to the rules, and an advanced understanding of the setting and game philosophy. It's pretty to look at and explains itself clearly. It's solid.  

If, like me, you already have a weighty chunk of the old stuff, some of this will feel like old ideas warmed over. That's inevitable; this is the core book, after all. It's going to have to cover ground you've already travelled a dozen times before. It's not talking to you. It's talking to the new player.  

The new lore, the new Net, the updated mechanics are still worth the price of admission. I'm not sure I'd buy physical, mind you. The .pdf is fine by me, and that's not just because getting things shipped anywhere is a huge problem these days. 

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have boosters to kill, places to be ...