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Author Topic: Cyberpunk Red analysis  (Read 2168 times)

Spike

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Cyberpunk Red analysis
« on: December 22, 2020, 10:40:06 PM »
This is not quite a review, as I do not own a copy of CP Red and thus did not spend the sort of time with it I would before making a proper review. I was able to peruse a copy of the game, enough to have some... thoughts... on the subject.

I'ma break this down with a bit of a disclaimer, followed by the TL;DR for the lazy  ;)   and then I'll cover the rules changes and finally the setting changes.

For those of you who are not aware, I have been one of CP2020's rabid fans on this forum for a very long time.  Not merely out of nostalgia for the 'bad old days' of gaming, but out of a genuine love of the game, and with plenty of respect for Mad Mike Pondsmith and his works. I, in fact, own most of the Mekton books, a goodly chunk of the Fuzion books (and a much vaster library of fan made PDF Fuzion books), as well as a mostly complete collection of Cybergeneration, on top of the Black Box cyberpunk, every issue of Interface Magazine, and even CPv3 with its doll art, though I have to admit that the last one almost broke me.    As an almost trivial aside, watching Mike Pondsmith talking about CP2077 on youtube five or so years ago actually helped me understand my curious relationship with the Pacific Northwest Accent (I had assumed that my ex, and several friends merely had lisps, but his PNW accent was so... clear (er...) that I finally got it was the regional accent!). 

So, as this is going to be a mostly negative commentary, understand that on some level it pains me to have to say what I'm about to say. 

The TL;DR is that Mike Pondsmith is less a brilliant game designer and more a guy who accidentallied himself into producing a work of genius.  All the weird, fumbling missteps ever since (along with his non-TTRPG successes) appears to be the simple revelation that the Emperor Has No Clothes.  CP Red is an idiotic little cash-grab repackaging of 2020 released in time for CP2077, only with hilariously missed brandings and tie ins.  If you have CP Red and CP 2020, you are better off playing CP 2020 and simply importing the things you like most from CP Red.  CP Red is mostly a poorly thought out setting update that happens to include a few rules tweaks, some good, some bad and mostly indifferent.


Let me clarify an observation I made back in the nightmare days of Doll Art.  Pondsmith has some interesting ideas of where his setting is going, but he doesn't seem to grasp the value of the existing setting to players, nor does he quite understand the success of the Interlock system, which helps explain why the cleaned up, improved Fuzion system has ever failed to catch on, despite his nigh obsessive attempts to push it over the proven (if dated) Interlock.

For reasons that undoubtedly have a lot to do with bio-,mechanics, humans are very comfortable with numbers that work on a decimal basis... you know: Rating things from one to ten, like Interlock does.  One of Fuzions more mysterious failings (in that its not an obvious failing, but I feel it has a great deal to do with WHY Fuzion never caught on...) is that Fuzion attempts to keep the FORM of the 1-10 rating system, while rebalancing the actual numbers to a much less intuitive 1-6.  That Pondsmith never twigged to the fact that Interlock's 1-10 ratings actually worked to his benefit does not speak to the man understanding why he was successful in the first place. Note: Teenagers from OuterSpace works fine with a 1-6 rating system, but then the system literally ends at six, and doesn't pretend to go higher, unlike Fuzion.  That sort of clarity in presentation is equally at play here.

CP Red, of course, is basically Interlock, unlike CPv3, which was Fuzion.  Mostly its a pure re-skinning, but there are some good (or good appearing, as I said, I merely perused the book, which is one of the reasons this isn't a review) rules and some bad rules and some frankly weird choices along the way. One of the good rules is how role skills were altered.  I can't say if its all good, but every change I noticed looked to be an upgrade from the older edition, be in the more complex (and fun looking) Combat Sense rules, to the fact that Nomads are now actually the 'wheelman' Role and not the 'summon biker gang' role, to Cops getting the Summon Biker Gang power vs their old  'extra intimidate' bullshit. 

On the other hand, rather than cleaning up the frankly bloated (even by 1989 standards of game design) attributes, he actually added Dexterity, while doing nothing to rob Reflexes of its role as THE UBER combat stat.  Sigh. I'm not entirely sure where Dex comes into play... it seems to exist to make Ninjas a bit harder to play, not that CP2020 was remotely the game of overpowered Ninjas in the first goddamn place, mostly due to how very very deadly combat tended to be.  Sneaking close to a group of badguys to knife them in the face wasn't exactly OP when you get one attack...   But maybe I missed all the massive Ninja-style CP games back in the day.  Also, this is a setting that has options for thermoptic camouflage, so sneaky sneaky can be as much tech as skills... 

Beyond this one of the things that actually made me face palm, was noticing how Pondsmith has functionally broken the meaning of Role Skill Ratings within the setting when you get to the 'down time income' tables.  A Rating 10 Rockerboy, a Johnny Silverhand at the very peak of his fame and ability is still opening for bigger and more successful acts for a whopping maximum of 800 bucks a week, not gig, week.  A solo who defines himself as a hitman and is operating at the very upper ranks of his profession slums it guarding strippers from stalkerish fans for 500eb a week, or not much more than twice was a noobish, fresh off the boat starting Solo earns (200 eb).   This is a minor gripe, but your ranks in skills, especially Role Skills, was a sort of proxy for your professional reputation. Now... not so much.  The entire 'downtime' charts section is lazy and poorly thought out, and considering that games inspired by Cyberpunk (such as Corporation, by Brutal Games) has done SO MUCH MORE with the idea of Downtime activities, its actually painful to notice how little thought went into this 'edition'. 

Another observation is that now we have very clear rules for overcoming Humanity loss for Cyberware via therapy. Unfortunately that means I have to talk about Humanity Loss for Cyberware. Lets be honest, this was always a 'Meta-Rule', included mostly because Players will happily do all sorts of weird perverse shit to their characters in the name of a bonus or two, and you have to include some sort of rule based penalty to check that shit. Also: Mad Mike likes Bubblegum Crisis, so he had to include some sort of cyber-pyschosis into his cyberpunk setting, and that's fine.  But Humanity/Empathy Loss was always a sort of ugly crap rule, and as much as it pains me to admit it, the Essence Rule from Shadowrun is mechanically superior in almost every single way... though not exactly something you can port into Cyberpunk.  It was perfectly reasonable to assume that some form of therapy might be available, but including the rules for it right there up front utterly negates the main reason for the rule in the first place, which was to check player madness.  Now you can cram EVEN MORE OP CYBERWARE into your body... just go to therapy for a few weeks to minimize the impact to your Empathy!  No Problems!!!

Though I'll note that the Cyberware list remains more or less the same, though with some tweaks. Fashionware is now Humanity Free, but Initiative Boosters cost MUCH MORE... hilarious because the rules of CP generally make the ability to 'act first' somewhat less consequential than simply using smart tactics (also, given how Solos could (Still Can?) more or less utterly negate the advantage of simple initiative boosting by simply being that much faster than anyone else....).   I didn't really read into the list that much, so I might have missed other tweaks to the default list.  Of course, bizarrely this is supposed to be twenty more years into the future of the setting... you'd imagine the cyberware would be a bit more advanced?

As a side note, Pondsmith felt the need to genuflect to the prosthetic community, apparently for woke points. I recall that, thanks to the Humanity rules the CP2020 fandom did always have a few obnoxious voices that were agitating for the differently abled, but Pondsmith has apparently lost any ability to accept that there will always be at least one asshole in any large group of people, so he bent over backwards in the Cyberware section to praise people for having prosthetics... then again where he apparently hired about a dozen or so of the Differently Abled to design his NPCs for the pre-packaged starter adventure. I'm happy for them that they were able to milk him for some dough (I hope they were smart enough to get paid to be his Token Differently-Abled Marketing Ploys), but damn its a bad look to see a man hand you his own spine like that.  I could comment more on the Woke-ism, but frankly this one is the most risible, and frankly I can't be bothered to care at this point.

I am extremely tempted to do deep dive analysis on each of the various rules mistakes, new or classic, such as exactly how the Attributes needed an overhaul, or why making Demolition (and other Technical skills) cost extra to buy and raise is a frequent but incredibly stupid mistake, and the enduring foolishness of the 'selling out' siderule,  and so forth, but frankly I just need to move on. 

The long and short on the rules is that this isn't really a new edition so much as a tweak to the old edition, and that the net effect is effectively neutral.  I can see taking the Role Skill changes and importing them wholesale, and leaving everything else.

Its the setting that gets my goat more than anything else.  Pondsmith has clearly wanted to have a proper Metaplot for his game for a very long time, which is why he evolved the Cyberpunk Setting to the Cybergeneration Setting, then the weirdly transhuman post-apocalyptic setting of v3. And since this is some sort of lateral tie in to CP2077, he had a damn good excuse to do so.

However: Rewriting a setting is almost always a terrible idea. People LOVE settings, even if they intend to tweak them. A fixed setting gives players a firm grounding, a foundation, from which to build. When you disrupt or alter that setting, especially drastically, it makes that foundation unstable. Look: this is a topic that deserves its own essay, m'kay?  And frankly simply pushing the date up twenty years or so but otherwise keeping the setting 'as is' is hardly a terrible idea, in fact its probably the only way to keep people on board for a new, updated edition, even if such fixity of settings don't actually make much sense in the real world (seriously: The idea of not one but two major lawless post-apocalypitic encampment zones (each themselves the size of a fully county) in Shadowrun right outside Seattle is already somewhat hard to swallow.. the idea that they've persisted as such for at least two, if not three, GENERATIONS is downright silly... but we love the Barrens anyway, because we don't really want the setting to change. Foundations, man...).

On top of the, the Two Book Stormfront Adventure that 'closed' CP2020 back in the day, years before WW tried the same damn thing, were... with a significant caveat... one of the best designed adventures I've ever bought.   

That Caveat is significant. Mike Pondsmith, the Game Designer, is very much in love with his own NPCs, and has long identified himself with the NPC of Morgan Blackhand.  In CP2020's core book there is literally nothing wrong with Morgan Blackhand. He's just a grizzled, experienced Solo who has written a book full of advice on being a Solo and tells amusing anecdotes (war stories) to bring the largely implied setting to life, and its great.  But there were warning signs as early as Listen Up, You Primitive Screwheads!, where there was artwork of Uncle Mike AS Morgan Blackhand.  By Cybergeneration Morgan had morphed into the godfather of the setting, the Solo who would not die and was personally leading the revolution of the Carbon Plague kids, though Johnny Silverhand and Alt Cunningham (of whom little should be said lest I smash my keyboard in frustration).  I'm sure he was important to v3 as well, but thank you I WILL NOT be revisiting that hellscape of a book just for research.

And that leads to the End of the Stormfront Adventure when the PCs are reduced to watching the NPCs duke it out as the campaign ends with a bang (literally: A nuke goes off and forever alters the setting. Also, the PCs never (As I recall) interact with said nuke in any way, up to and including not even knowing it exists until it goes boom.).  Rache Bartmoss proves they will forever be inferior netrunners as he, from the grave, personally alters the net architecture in 'amazing' ways, Morgan Blackhand faces off with Cyborg Supremist Adam Smasher as the PCs evacuate like the hostage in Predator being told to Get To Da Choppa!

CP Red doubles and tripples down on this trend. Despite twenty years passing the wheelchair bound 102 year old Saburo Arasaka still runs Arasaka Corp, somehow, but one of his granddaughters runs not only a rebel faction within Arasaka Corp, but ALSO has a major detective agency in Night City AND is a massive socialite AND her bodyguard happens to be the only Solo to go one on one with THE Morgan Blackhand and pull out a draw and shoot me now please.

When I first decided to write this, several hours ago after skimming the book, I actually made jokes about tracking down the Pondsmith and putting an arrow in his knee to end his game designing career. I decided not to because I was so goddamn pissed at this GNPC bullshit and how pervasive it is that I wasn't entirely certain it was a joke anymore.   It does not help that there are fake adds and I believe multiple pieces of artwork for this one 'minor' NPC and her detective agency ALL through the book.  I had this complaint about the Witcher RPG, but this is SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO much worse.

Hmm... still not enough OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO's....  but I don't want to run out of bits on the internet, so...



On top of that we have the utter stripping of the setting's finer points from the setting. I mean, sure, there are ads for imaginary products and if you hunt a bit you can find brand and model numbers for things like guns in the book, but mostly all the equipment is bland and generic 'heavy pistol', 'assault rifle'  and so on. This from a game that produced six motherfucking books (the four chromebooks and the two chromebook anthology sets) full of nothing BUT in setting gear porn catalogs, that produced not one but TWO in setting magazines for Solos with lifestyle articles and, yes, more gear porn!  How the fuck could Pondsmith fuck this up so very, very badly?

Let me take a moment with a very little mini-essay.

Cultures are defined in large part by their tools. Ask any Anthropologist or archeologist.  One of the things that creates such rabid fans for anime tv shows that you rarely see for American TV shows is their use of writers bibles that includes artworks and technical specs, creating a sort of false realism. Look at the way Star Wars is treated by our culture even after half a dozen increasingly hacky films from the House of the Mouse!  It isn't 'good enough' that Han Solo uses a Blaster Pistol, we LOVE that he uses a DL-44 Blaster Pistol (er... don't quote me on that, I'm too lazy to walk six feet to a bookshelf and research... or google in another tab...). That MEANS something, and not just to 'rabid fans'.  The pulse rifle in Aliens has stats and rules that reflect how it is used On Screen, and that level of detail is part of why that is considered a 'good movie' and not merely popcorn fare quickly forgotten.   Cyberpunk is not OUR WORLD. It looks a bit like where our world might go, but it isn't Our World.  There is something DEEPLY unsatisfying by declaring that all guns are the same generic gun, that all cell phones are the same generic Cell Phone, that all cars are the same Generic Car.  Despite having maps of Night City, despite an entire chapter of the various Corporations and their Public Face NPCs (complete with art), we have had a fundamental element of our Imaginary Culture, our Setting denied to us, in favor of generic lists of generic catagories of generic items, coupled with a vast swath of art that fails to link itself indelibly to the setting because none of the artists are drawing items we can recognize as distinctly Cyberpunk 2020/Red. Look: Its generic Sci-Fi armored Guys with Generic Sci-Fi rifles of... some sort.

Yay?

I can literally swap any random piece of art from this book with a random piece of art from, say, Eclipse Phase, and who would fucking know the difference?  It could just as easily be from Carbon 2185, from Starfinder Interface Zero, or any other of half a dozen similarly themed books on my shelf from the last five to ten years.  I could take a still from the live action Ghost in the Shell and apply a paint tool effect to it and get damn near identical art.

I can only conclude that to Uncle Mike that 'Setting' means 'My Favorite Characters' and little else. 

For fucks sake, Chromebook 4 had an entire gooddamn chapter on motherfucking Fashion!  FASHION!!!!!

How the hell did he miss this mark so badly?   How did he take a bare bones concept of a setting and turn out a living breathing wonderland of gear-porn and fashion templates and yet still manage to turn it all around and produce the UPC code white label setting of CP Red?   Did Jon Hamm lobotomize him between dance numbers while we weren't looking?
For you the day you found a minor error in a Post by Spike and forced him to admit it, it was the greatest day of your internet life.  For me it was... Tuesday.

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Ghostmaker

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Re: Cyberpunk Red analysis
« Reply #1 on: December 23, 2020, 10:40:48 AM »
All bad signs of a creator starting to fall in love with his own farts and his creation. Sadly, not uncommon.

I wanted to comment on the 'humanity vs Essence' limiting mechanic for cyberware. I once ran a homebrew game which incorporated cybernetics, using d20 Modern as a base. Instead of humanity loss or Essence, I used Constitution as the limiter. My reasoning was that healthier people could endure that kind of invasive surgery better and recover quicker from it. I won't say it was -perfect-, but I thought it made more sense for the setting I was using.

HappyDaze

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Re: Cyberpunk Red analysis
« Reply #2 on: December 23, 2020, 11:57:31 AM »
All bad signs of a creator starting to fall in love with his own farts and his creation. Sadly, not uncommon.

I wanted to comment on the 'humanity vs Essence' limiting mechanic for cyberware. I once ran a homebrew game which incorporated cybernetics, using d20 Modern as a base. Instead of humanity loss or Essence, I used Constitution as the limiter. My reasoning was that healthier people could endure that kind of invasive surgery better and recover quicker from it. I won't say it was -perfect-, but I thought it made more sense for the setting I was using.
Shadowrun had that for Bioware and once called it Body Index. It worked a little differently from Essence loss from Cyberware, but both fucked up the ability to do Magic. Now (4e and on) they have just done away with Body Index and put it all back into Essence.

Darrin Kelley

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Re: Cyberpunk Red analysis
« Reply #3 on: December 23, 2020, 01:47:35 PM »
Spike. Thanks for the analysis. It is definitely going to play a big part in whether I get Cyberpunk RED or not.
 

Mishihari

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Re: Cyberpunk Red analysis
« Reply #4 on: December 23, 2020, 04:16:51 PM »
I feel your pain, man.  While I'm not a CP player, you seem to feel the same way about CP Red that I did about the final Star Wars trilogy.  An interesting read nonetheless.

soundchaser

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Re: Cyberpunk Red analysis
« Reply #5 on: December 23, 2020, 05:03:21 PM »
I am a newb trying Cyberpunk with teenagers (my three boys). Thus, no history baggage. I may get a 2020 pdf, but the RED thing seems fine to us thus far.

Spike

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Re: Cyberpunk Red analysis
« Reply #6 on: December 23, 2020, 05:18:59 PM »
I'll note that last I checked (October...) all the 2020 books were for sale like evergreen products in my local game store. If CP Red is doing it for you, you can always just pick up supplements from the 2020 line, like the Chromebooks and whatever else strikes your fancy. I myself patched some holes in my collection, such as the police supplement, the rockerboy supplement and a few others (the UK supplement... what else?)

I did notice a lot of books appear to have been produced with no apparent involvement of the Pondsmiths, which would have shocked me once upon a time. Not sure if it means anything, but there you have it.
For you the day you found a minor error in a Post by Spike and forced him to admit it, it was the greatest day of your internet life.  For me it was... Tuesday.

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CTPhipps

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Re: Cyberpunk Red analysis
« Reply #7 on: December 24, 2020, 07:24:23 PM »
Well I liked it.

Ratman_tf

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Re: Cyberpunk Red analysis
« Reply #8 on: December 24, 2020, 07:55:39 PM »
Well I liked it.

I like it too. I agree with Pika's critiques, just not as vehemently.
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Spike

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Re: Cyberpunk Red analysis
« Reply #9 on: December 24, 2020, 09:26:23 PM »
Well I liked it.

I like it too. I agree with Pika's critiques, just not as vehemently.

I've been trying to collect pithy quotes for times like this, but since I'm still new at the pithy quoting shit, you'll have to accept that you get a half-assed paraphrase of a poorly remembered quote.  If you have to love, love passionately, if you have to hate, hate passionately. Half-hearted emotions are meaningless piffles.  Or something. By someone smarter than me.
For you the day you found a minor error in a Post by Spike and forced him to admit it, it was the greatest day of your internet life.  For me it was... Tuesday.

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myleftnut

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Re: Cyberpunk Red analysis
« Reply #10 on: December 24, 2020, 09:30:27 PM »
I agree about the art.  Nothing special. 

Shawn Driscoll

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Re: Cyberpunk Red analysis
« Reply #11 on: December 24, 2020, 10:21:55 PM »
Where is CyberPunk Red?

consolcwby

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                                                                                  https://youtu.be/ShaxpuohBWs?si

Shawn Driscoll

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Re: Cyberpunk Red analysis
« Reply #13 on: December 26, 2020, 01:44:39 AM »
Where is CyberPunk Red?
For Digital: https://www.drivethrurpg.com/browse/pub/13/R-Talsorian-Games-Inc

For Physical ~
Currently sold out: https://talsorianstore.com/products/cyberpunk-red
Jumpstart kit is here: https://talsorianstore.com/collections/cyberpunk/products/cyberpunk-red-jumpstart-kit
Thanks.

I saw ads for Cyberpunk Red. But couldn't tell if it was a coffee table book with just game art in it, or if it was the tabletop RPG. Amazon had horrible descriptions on it, with bad clip art. I never thought to go to Talsorian Games. I'll go to YouTube to see if there are reviews of its game system.

ADDED:
Ok. It looks there really was an art book. The 2077 setting book that could be used with the RED book ruleset. So the RPG book I was looking for was sold out before its release. Wish Amazon made it more clear, rather than removing the item.
« Last Edit: December 26, 2020, 06:34:10 PM by Shawn Driscoll »

Opaopajr

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Re: Cyberpunk Red analysis
« Reply #14 on: December 26, 2020, 08:44:59 AM »
I read the whole OP, including ALL the 'O's, and had much fun.  ;D

9.66/10 (-1/3 for breaking format) Would read again!  8)

Also yeah... I can't do Shadowrun as Catalyst makes me wanna sceam. So CP2020's subtle genius will have to tide me over until the heat death of our star.  :-[
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