I got the starter kit in PDF when it came out and I cannot believe how little value it actually had, and I am a serious fan of CP2020.
I want to say deep and meaningful things about Mad Mike and where he is going wrong and why, but honestly... honestly I think the problem is me and my nostalgia for 2020.
I agree with all the above or at least I had thought I did. After the starter set came out I found it...lets just say it's in the basement with a much larger then I want to admit collection of books I'm slowly donating to the local library. I went and picked up a new copy of 2020 (My old one was lost in a move years ago) and after rereading the book and running a couple of sessions I realized I just don't like it nearly as much as I thought I had.
I always loved the way that Cyberpunk 2020/Interlock handled task resolution and “classes” (which are more like starting templates with one special ability, rather than straightjackets), but I always felt it had way too many attributes and a few more skills than were necessary. I mean, the game has THREE freaking social attributes (one of which doubles as willpower), two intelligence attributes (one for actual thinking, a separate one for tech) a movement rate attribute and a luck attribute. None of that crap is necessary.
Attributes should just be one attribute per core function. ONE interaction attribute is enough (charisma-type attributes are already weak enough without splitting them into three) and you don’t need a specialized attribute to deal with tech—that’s just an intellectual task. Movement rate does NOT need a stat. Everyone should just get the same base movement rate and higher movement rates should just be an Advantage/Feat/Talent type of thing (which don’t exist in Cyberpunk 2020, but should) and/or handled as cybernetic enhancements. And I’m not sure Luck should exist as an attribute and I always thought it was barely useful compared to basically every other attribute—even the split up social ones. That’s just too much crap to spread your stat points over.
Then the game suffers from the same issue as most skill-based systems, which is specificity. Every tiny, uber specialized task is its own separate skill, which you have to level independently of every other skill that’s essentially the same thing, but a different specialty. Like half a dozen piloting skills to cover what’s essentially driving vehicles, so that if you max one but don’t spread every single skill point you have available learning the rest you turn into a complete retard whenever you hop into anything but your chosen vehicle.
I love skill-based systems and consider them superior to class-based systems, but implementation like this is crap. As I heard someone say before, uber specific skill-based systems like these turn more into being about what you don’t know than about what you do. There’s just too much interrelated crap that’s really just variants of each other to spread your points around. They should just be general skills with specialties as a bonus thing to cover the specific stuff.