Quote from: Opaopajr;909176Great advice! Thanks everybody! (ADW sounds like a dip into lush narrative. As long as it doesn't go all FATE economy, or "sharing the speaking stick," on me it may be ok.)

Now I'm left wondering, 'why the hell no one reprinted CP if it is such a solid property?' The system sounds way more robust and resilient than it looks, with easier to spot weak points when tinkering, and it already looked like a hoss. I sorta want all that time back futzing around with FASA's well-intentioned flubs, or Catalyst's abortions.

Because Mike Pondsmith and R.Talsorian Games have never let the property go.  They still sell some books, and they've let one site go ahead and rework a sort of OSR-generic system for Interlock.  They're reputed (although Mike has heavily disappointed me in the past on this) to be working on a new RPG tie-in with Cyberpunk 2077.

QuoteSo... Bolting on magic: how would you do it? And same thing, going B-movie Explosathon! nuts: how so?

Explosions are bad in CP.  They're the great leveler.  Explosive weapons ignore soft armor entirely (including things like some specialty explosive rounds with fairly low damage) and rigid armor only counts for 1/2.  They're indiscriminate, large, with big numbers  and vast potential for "woops" factors.

If you're just looking for mooks, they made it easy with a quadrant mini-sheet for them.  Roll 2d6 for each stat (adding appropriate cyberware if they roll over the norm), throw down a couple guns and some armor, decide if you want cyberware, and put a skill level to them and you're done.  If they live, you can roll for some distinguishing features and maybe give them a name.  If they keep living, then give them a character sheet around the 3rd or 4th time they come out the far side.  They've earned it by then.

Quote from: Opaopajr;909176(ADW sounds like a dip into lush narrative. As long as it doesn't go all FATE economy, or "sharing the speaking stick," on me it may be ok.)

It doesn't.  It's bog standard One Roll Engine.

One thing to remember about CP2020:  R. Talsorian made the common mistake of assuming that because something calls itself "cyberpunk" that it is (or more accurately, that it has anything in common with the seminal and iconic works of the genre).  Early CP2020 release drew heavily from the genre pillars, but the later releases pretty much pulled from anime.  Bubblegum Crisis and Appleseed aren't cyberpunk in any meaningful sense.  I think Ghost in the Shell S.A.C. is on the fence.

Quote from: daniel_ream;909193I think Ghost in the Shell S.A.C. is on the fence.

I agree.  They kind of deal with transhumanism and relations to humanity, but honestly... I always felt like it was more Shirow Gun porn.  Black Lagoon felt more like cyberpunk to me.

Uh oh! Genre Purists!  Someone get me my flamethrower!!!!

Man, I should really find a SR table to give it a spin some day.

It was one of the first RPGs to get a Portuguese translation and release here in Brazil, but I never got to play it for some reason.

Remember that post where a GM tried to run Star Trek and couldn't because all the players wanted to play some kind of SF Tom Clancy Federation instead?

Genre conventions matter.

Naw, GM's gotta just roll with it. You can look up on this forum and others my old Tiwesdaeg (pseudo Saxon Britain) games, and there might even be some traces of the Osere (modern espionage) ones. They were thoughtful, serious stuff.

Nowadays half my players just have their characters jump off eighty foot towers pursuing foes. It's not ideal, but it's a game, fuck it, I roll with it. If they want Tom Clancy, give 'em Tom Clancy.

Quote from: The Butcher;909219Man, I should really find a SR table to give it a spin some day.

It was one of the first RPGs to get a Portuguese translation and release here in Brazil, but I never got to play it for some reason.

Id love to point you at the amazing SR port to a MUD whole cloth. But its run so horribly by the admin and their buddies that theres no one left playing it but them. The source code may still be on the site. But I never could get it to run.

Genre is defined after, not imposed before.  Everyone tries it the wrong way round, and we wind up with a bunch of boring, cliched, derivative crap.

Quote from: Spike;909241G[...] we wind up with a bunch of boring, cliched, derivative crap.

All RPGs are boring, cliched, derivative crap.  We're not making great art here, we're eating Cheetos and attacking the darkness.

What genre definitions do in RPGs is provide a shorthand for players and GMs to describe what kind of game they're expecting so everyone's on the same page.  If I say I'm running Call of Cthulhu, I don't have to "roll with" somebody who shows up with a thief, a reaver, a slayer, with gigantic melancholies and gigantic mirth, to tread the jeweled thrones of the Earth under his sandalled feet as a character.

QuoteIf I say I'm running Call of Cthulhu, I don't have to "roll with" somebody who shows up with a thief, a reaver, a slayer, with gigantic melancholies and gigantic mirth, to tread the jeweled thrones of the Earth under his sandalled feet as a character.

You don't have to, but it'll be more fun if you do.

But be honest: How often does that happen? Most players try to co-operate, more or less, as best they can. Most people do not want to piss in your cornflakes.

You mean Cornflakes aren't meant as a piss sop?


Damnit! Now I gotta go clean out the toilet! Someone shudda said somethin' earlier!

I like that the system so far sounds pan-ambi-fluid-sexual flexible, while not starting that way. From grit-to-glam is a bit more easy for my DIY tinkering than glam-to-grit.

Quote from: Kyle Aaron;909259You don't have to, but it'll be more fun if you do.

No, it really won't.  Probably because I play RPGs for different reasons than you.  And that's okay.

QuoteBut be honest: How often does that happen? Most players try to co-operate, more or less, as best they can. Most people do not want to piss in your cornflakes.

All the time?  There's a reason so many people here and elsewhere advocate playing only with friends you know well.  And even then, Tigger Syndrome is a serious problem at many tables.

A little later to the game here, but wanted to chime in as I ran Cybperpunk 2020 for years.

Speed of combat
At first, not fast, not slow. A decent group with experience in running combats and keeping things moving will start combats moving slower than you would like. As you get a few sessions under the belt, it will rise to medium, and creep closer to "fast" as players know their options, and you (the Referee) stop worrying about making your opponents super varied. By the eighth and ninth session of my home game, the group was quite capable of running through a combat with no book references, and I was only occasionally glancing at my Ref Screen for a few details. It flowed nicely.

Hacking
I ended up making the netrunner an NPC, because the group was more interested in playing a group of Solos. I did run a mini-netrunner side campaign, it was not awesome. Not terribad either though. I would suggest, if my memory serves me, that the Netrunning rules in the Cybergen game were a lot cleaner. See my notes below about Cybergen.

Gear
You had gear for those who wanted it. My group had the core books, all three Chrome Books, the "mech" book (waste of fucking ink), and one or two other supplements. We had all the gear we ever wanted. Players would flip through them during down time or other character's scenes to look for ideas on what to get. A word of warning, basically lifted right from Mike Pondsmith - do not let your players horde gear and turn into gear titans. Don't just throw Euros at them and let them shop like fiends. Make them work for their crap, because a well funded solo is a nightmare to hurt and resist. It can get out of control. This is not hard to limit though - just don't give more euros than people deliver, make them pay for their lifestyle (and punish the nimrods who claim they just live in cardboard boxes to avoid rent, eating nothing but kibble). Make gear acquisition matter!
I would also perhaps just ignore the "sell out" option. Anyone who thinks they want to play a sell out to a corp is either going to be a nuisance for the rest of the group (how do you trust them) or whine when their corporate masters remind them that they are, in fact, property of Arasaka.

Cybergen
This was a seriously fun offshoot of Cybergen, but also began (as I see it) the beginning of things going seriously wrong in the narrative. For one, it developed a narrative. Cyberpunk might have been a cyberpunk-genre game with a specific world, but that world was very toolkit in approach. It was not defined by the NPCs. In Cybergen, you had the big names of the CP 2020 era (previously just iconic characters) turn into the actual movers and shakers. Don't get me started on some of the insanity that the nanite tech developed would imply for that world. But if you kept on looking at this game, and Cyberpunk correctly (games meant to emulate a genre and still be fun), it worked. What followed, from what little I read of the subsequent R Talisorian stuff, has about the same quality as the ShadowRun overplot (inspect your toilet after your next BM for a visual).
What I liked about Cybergen was that it made a more streamlined version of the Interlock combat engine. Damage was rated in Damage Codes (DC), and while you did have to reference a chart to use the DCs, it took some of the nitty gritty crap out of the combat engine and sped it up. I used the Cybergen rules for some CP2020 games and liked the results, a lot. BTW, there were two Cybergens - a supplement for CP2020, and later it's own game. The latter is the one to look for.

Final Notes
My friend and I found that the Cyberpunk game worked better when you really upped the aptitude on the cyberpunk elements you liked. The base setting was something of a personal, "realistic" approach by Pondsmith (he even criticized, kindly, the aesthetics and practicality of Bladerunner and some other cyberpunk properties). It was something of a love letter to Gibson and Snowcrash, IIRC. We created a more dis-topic setting that took the scrapyards from Battle Angel Alita and the mega spires from Bladerunner, made it constantly rain, and had a frickin' ball with the entire thing. Figure out your dials on the cyberpunk stereo, and tweak the presentation to fit. The great thing is the underlying rules will mostly work. I'd also recommend creating more capacity to "multi-class", and even decouple the Role Abilities entirely from Roles - it creates a stronger long term playstyle.