The Unkillable CYBERPUNK Franchise
The Unkillable CYBERPUNK Franchise
What Every Writer Should Learn from Mike Pondsmith
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By now everyone already knows about the disastrous launch to CYBERPUNK 2077. The bugs, the recall from the the PlayStation store, the lawsuits, the T-Posing, the memes… my god the memes.
The sudden shift from the greatest high budget hype-train of all time (touted to go even beyond a triple A title and discover the new heights of S-Tier gaming) to perhaps the largest budget launch disaster of all time is now the stuff of gaming legends, dwarfing such earlier disasters as Fallout 76 or No Man’s Sky.
Of course like Fallout 76 and No Man’s Sky the game was patched and updated to a state resembling its promised original quality… some features were still missing, and it remained a CD Project Red game, not a Rockstar game… but fans of moody narrative focused eurojank RPGs came around to praising it and its style.
But the damage had been done. User numbers dropped and what had been the most hyped game of all time was a joke, made all the more so by Keanu Reeves memes.
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Then Cyberpunk: Edgerunners hit Netflix.
NSFW
The success of this Anime is hard to overstate. Becoming almost as praised as Netflix’s other animated videogame adaptation Arcane from last year, the success of Edgerunners (coinciding with a major update and expansion to 2077) caused an explosive revival of interest in the Cyberpunk franchise, so much so that for the first time Cyberpunk 2077 started cresting 1 million daily players, seemingly undoing the damage of its disastrous release.
How!?
No one expected anything from Edgerunners, even fans of the franchise had forgotten it was coming out… but the series was incredible. It might outstrip studio trigger’s earlier Kill La Kill. Aside from a, somehow simultaneously, slow and rushed pilot-episode complete with poor dubbing (outside of ep1 the dub is amazing) the show is an exceptional and damn near flawless story harkening back to not just western Cyberpunk stories, but old-school kickass Cyberpunk Anime like Akira or at points even Cowboy Bebop.
Its a shockingly strong story that’s garnered exceptional praise from some of the most prominent Anime commentators, and its impact has been almost perfectly aligned to revive the franchise.
How does such a exceptional turnaround happen? Franchises and properties flounder and die on vastly less. One poorly received book, film, or game can kill a franchise. Hell Billy Idol’s music career died when one album flopped, the name of that album? Cyberpunk.
But seriously countless franchises have been wiped out over vastly less… and vastly more promising franchises at that.
Just within the Scifi/fantasy/horror space no one seems to be able to get any Lovecraft adaptations off the ground, there’s 1 Heinlein adaptation of note (and fans contest that), out of the 400+ books Asimov wrote the adaptations can be counted on your fingers, Rodger Zelazny and Michael Moorcock have practically nothing… and then you narrow it down the Cyberpunk genre and there’s even less. The Judge Dredd franchise floundered with the Stalone adaptation, then miraculously got rebooted, had an EXCELLENT movie, then died again when no one saw it.
So how was the Cyberpunk the franchise able to revive itself? Why did this anime speak so much to people, and how did it drive interest back to the game? Arcane would not have had a similar effect for League of Legends had League been dying.
Well to answer these questions we need to go back to 2020.
No not CP 2077’s release in the Trump/COVID era… 1990, 2020.
The Future the 80’s Dreamed
The First time Cyberpunk Died
I ain’t your average sicko
I’m dead, just like disco
My bank account is zero, zero, zero
Oh No!
-Rat Boy & IBDY, “Who’s Ready for Tomorrow”
Mike Pondsmith’s first edition of the CYBERPUNK tabletop RPG, was released in 1988 and took place in the ultraviolent Dark Future… of 2013. Retroactively known as Cyberpunk 2013, it was a shockingly low budget affair consisting of 2-3 books that represent fewer than 100 pages total and maybe 2 dozen art assets across the whole thing, barebones in the extreme… but also really inspiring. Anything can become a billion dollar franchise.
There were a few modules and stuff put out for 1st edition CYBERPUNK… but it flew under the radar gathering buzz until the Iconic second edition:
Cyberpunk 2020
published on the 1st of January 1990 Cyberpunk 2020 is the iconic version of the the tabletop RPG, and in a lot of ways the final pinnacle of 80s Cyberpunk. Everything about it was so cool, over the top goofy and overwhelmingly charismatic in the way only a peak 80s artifacts can be.
this perfect blend of William Gibson fever dreams and peak 80s cheese. It absolutely should not work, and yet it does. It should have aged instantly but like Gibson it has a weird timelessness even the references to cassettes, fax machines, and bizarre limitations (“Digital Music Chip: 1 to 6 pop albums”) can’t puncture.
Somehow Pondsmith paints this ridiculously cliched unbelievably naïve world where daring earnest reporters risk life and limb going into the combat zone to break the story that reveals the corruption of a megacorp , or internationally renowned Rockstars not only openly talk about their politics, and have it not be cringe, but drive geopolitical events and start armed revolts which they lead themselves pistol in hand… where people get surgical augmentation to have their hair glow certain colors depending on their mood, and it only costs 200 dollars.
And yet somehow it works.
(well not the economics, that’s ridiculous, everyone house rules: x3 costs unless its cheaper on Amazon, x50-200 for anything bio-med, guns/vehicles at their IRL price, etc.)
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I mean Jesus I lived through the real 2020… you lived through the real 2020…. we all just lived through the IRL early Cyberpunk age where an upstart gameshow host became president, presided over a global pandemic, race-riots, and anti-lockdown protests , all before the whole thing collapsed into a question of election fraud for the highest office in human history, and an angry mob got within hundreds of meters of taking the US congress hostage a la the French Royal family, so as to keep said gameshow host in charge…
And from even that vantage the Cyberpunk world looks ridiculous.
Members of the media putting in literal leg work instead of propping up regime lies from their home offices? Superstars moving geopolitics by speaking the most extreme calls to their adoring fans instead of falling in line behind the most establishment causes like sending arms and Oscars to client states? (well I mean Kanye said “something” the powerful didn’t want people to hear… but that was just a retread of Marlon Brando’s and Mel Gibson’s scandals, I doubt he’s about to expose the Mossad or start an international incident)
And the techo-futurism… painfully optimistic. We just lived through an era where an alleged “gain of function” Lab Leak… Maybe? (NYT Citation) caused a global pandemic which could only be countered with a novel gene-therapy mRNA treatment… and yet the virus was so mild in the majority of the population had to be tested to know if they ever had it, and the vaccine was so minimally effective no one could actually tell if it was saving lives or killing people without digging into statistical analyses ( and no one can agree even after looking)…
No matter where you fall on any of these debates, these are not the wonders of futurist medical science we were promised in the 80s… miraculous or malicious. Nor the dangerous celebrities we were promised.
They’re just lame and boring.
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And yet CYBERPUNK 2020 is BELOVED! they made 34!!! add on sourcebooks, supplements, adventures, shopping catalogues! My god the shopping catalogues:
I first heard about Cyberpunk 2020 in 2008 while following gaming youtubers who were still raving about it, 5 years out from the 2013 original setting and 20 years after the 1st edition.
Hell this franchise from 1990 was picked up by CD Project Red, then videogaming darling in 2012. They were so infatuated with it they spent 313 million dollars on reviving a completely dead franchise with no proven reach.
Did I say dead?
I meant dead and buried.
1990’s Cyberpunk 2020 ran for 15 years. they did some updates around the edges, there was a V 2.0 and 2.1 with more artwork and some rule refinements, but vastly less than even D&D 3.0 to 3.5. They didn’t mess with a winning formula. Hell they’ve never stopped printing the Core Cyberpunk 2020 sourcebook… something that had to be pointed out after the Announcement of Cyberpunk 2077 when CDPR fanboys started buying copies of CP 2020 on ebay for 100s of dollars… only for it to be pointed out that new prints were on Amazon for $30.
So how did this franchise die?
After 15 years of 2020, Cyberpunk V3.0 released set in the 2030s (No they didn’t just call it CP 2030, and no I don’t know why), and there’s some interesting stuff buried in there: Various interesting ideas and stuff taken from early 2000s scifi, (an era that gets buried in cyberpunk retrospectives)
Also Pondsmith’s eerie prescience is on full display:
There were some neat ideas in CP v3.0…ya there’s lots of it that doesn’t stylistically work or is awkward to incorporate into anything you’re mentally picturing as a Cyberpunk game, but none of this would have crippled the game… except for one thing that was completely unacceptable:
The Artwork.
Just look at this crap:
I’m not sure who decided the entire book should be composed of Matel dolls with a green matrix filter, nor why. I think maybe they were trying to make it look like stop-motion music video’s from early 2000s antiwar post-punk bands?
Metric managed to make this look evocative a few times back when they were a regional punk band, and Julie Taymore’s Titus opens with something similar.
But in both instances the innocence of the toys is purposefully contrasted through video motion with real violence… the succsexy music video is so evocative because its the most cartoonish war toys sudden moving like real soldiers performing trauma medicine in unnerving stop-motion. An effect that immediately disappears the second they’re not moving.
this killed the Cyberpunk rpg. There were lots of fond memories, I remember back in 2008-ish as a kid in the pre/early-YouTube days watching The Spoony Experiment’s videos on the game, and everyone had fond memories of 2020… but it was done, it was 1990’s vision of the future and it was cool, but this was long before Synthwave and Retrowave made the 80s cyberpunk aesthetic a retro-futurist fashion statement.
And then in 2012 CD Project Red announced out of nowhere they were going to be adapting it into a major Video Game… and then in 2015 they won every Game of the Year award for Witcher 3 and before you knew it they were spending 300 million dollars to adapt a dead RPG from 1990 and Keanu Reeves was going to star, and the hype was insane… and it kept on getting pushed back to the real 2020… and you know the rest of the story from there.
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WTF!?
Before we were just explaining how this franchise revived itself from its 2020 release to 2022… Now we learn it had an even more massive, seemingly impossible, out of nowhere franchise revival!?
How the hell do you go from being a dead and forgotten table top RPG to having 300 Million spent on you on faith alone!
Disney waited six films before they spent that much on a pg-13 Marvel movie they could sell to kids and had 60 years of comic and cartoon sales behind it… and Pondsmith’s franchise gets that much budget for its first foray into a non-text medium 15 years after it stopped publishing anything!?
And then when that flagship relaunch of the franchise went up like the bloody Hindenburg complete with lawsuits and literally being pulled from the PlayStation Store… It revived itself yet again off an anime spinoff that somehow revived the video game as well?
HOW!?
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What the hell is PondSmith’s secret? Nothing gets this much effort and budget poured into it on faith. And certainly not after repeated failure. One flop is consistently enough to kill almost any franchise, is there any precedence?
Well… there is one type of property that gets second chances this large:
Great Literature
The annals of western letters are filled with “Unfilmable” and “unadaptable” masterpieces which have been public domain or beyond profitability for decades if not centuries … and yet every so often a passionate team gathers seemingly stupendous amounts of money from remarkably daring investors and they manage to do the impossible… or fail spectacularly, whatever the case may be.
Frank Herbert’s Dune had a legendarily messed up adaptation in the 1980s which killed the franchise… only to be revived by genius director Denis Villeneuve in 2021. All’s Quiet on the Western Front just got a new adaptation 40 years after its last miniseries adaptation and almost 100 after the first film adaptation… Hell the entire costume drama genre is one long adaptation of largely forgotten books (Stanley Kubrick might have been one of a dozen people alive to have read Thackery’s Barry Lyndon when he adapted it (its not even the most prominent Thackery book, my university only one copy)).
These properties motivate massive adaptations entirely on speck based on the incredible passion their creators have for the source material.
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“But come on” I hear you balking. “Surely you’re not saying Cyberpunk 2020, a tabletop RPG, is great literature?”
Ya. I think it might be.
Orphans of a Bankrupt Culture
Have you ever noticed the disproportionate role orphans play in pop-culture?
King Arthur? Orphan.
Frodo Baggins? Orphan.
Conan the Barbarian? Orphan.
Goku? Orphan.
Yugi Moto? Orphan.
Spiderman…
Superman…
Batman…
Robin…
the baudelaire orphans…
Oedipus…
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I remember as a kid raised off TV in the early 2000s bursting into tears one day convinced my parents were going to die suddenly in the next 3-4 years because I was 7 and your parents usually die before the plot starts around 11-12 right?
Hell orphan’s are so stupendously common in pop-culture that its gotten to the point one round of orphaning isn’t enough.
often a character will be an orphan, their parents will be long dead and buried, only for their surrogate parent to be killed off so the next stage of the plot can continue and they can pursue the story with the appropriate dispositions, motivations, training montages…Etc.
Hell Luke Skywalker is a triple orphan!
His real parents are long gone, he only vaguely knows his father’s but not his mother’s name.
Then Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru are killed.
Then his recently acquired space wizard father figure is killed before his eyes a week later (though he shows up as a ghost to deliver useful plot points)
You’d think this’d be some kind of record… but no!
Harry Potter is Orphaned, then his godfather is killed before his eyes right before he might have gotten custody and provided a home. Then Dumbledore is killed, again before his eyes, right as he’s the major source of stability in Harry’s life… which is sorta replaced by Mad Eye Moddy… DEAD. Which leaves Remus Lupin as a last father fig… DEAD.
But you know Harry still has the Dursleys… I’m sure that’ll be a comfort.
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Of course there’s a reason for this: parents are inconvenient (from a storytelling perspective)
they provide structure to a life: philosophical, social, even career direction. obligations that tie one to a place, and they can usually be depended upon to provide at least moral assistance…
All of this is incredibly inconvenient for a writer. You create this big interactive world and a vision for how a series of adventures are going to go… then your character is tied to one corner of it interacting with some boring people who love them and are constantly making demands on their (ie. screen) time.
This is why double orphaning is so shockingly common. You don’t want to just give them parents, establish them as characters, then kill them. THAT’s a big commitment!
Having your parents killed affects a person! you might have to burn an entire chapter on that! It might effect the emotional tone of the entire story. You just have this sad orphan who’s lost their parents… Yuck.
So what you do is you establish right at the start the character’s an orphan, you leave it vague in case you hit the wall and want to write the parents or a mysterious McGuffin they might have left back into the story… but at the start they’re fucking dead and almost forgotten, you don’t have to deal with holidays, phone calls, worries about the dangerous & cool life of adventure your protagonist is entering… none of that bullshit.
Then you establish a surrogate parent that you can easily write out of the story the second they’ve outlived their usefulness. Maybe this is a kindly uncle who gives one good piece of advice, maybe this is a mentor accountable for their combat abilities or special powers, maybe they’re a drunken blacksmith who gets one line of dialogue and they only exist to explain how your main character got from age 11 to age of adventure whilst still learning to use a sword (Pirates of the Caribbean).
The beauty of the surrogate parent is that they can fulfill any role you want out of a parent… but they only fill that role. They die instantly, your character is under no biological or social obligation to care about them anymore than you want them to (can always add a line about neglect) and they can be, or do, just about anything without effecting your character in any way you don’t want, or creating awkward obligations.
Can you see why some characters collect parental figures like trading cards? You’ve got your surrogate parent to establish humble origins, another surrogate parent to lower expectations or establish a history of abuse, your surrogate parent to teach you the way of the blade, your surrogate parent to teach a sentimental lesson, your surrogate parent to introduce you to a new social strata…
On and on.
This is especially true of tabletop or videogame RPGs where players are trying to Min-Max their backgrounds to give them maximum freedom… If you have actual parents or an actual past, those are things that create busy-work obligations and that the dungeon master can use against you “Oh no the villain has kidnapped your mother and is demanding the return of the gems” “oh your sister’s in trouble and now you have to complete this questline to help her instead of being murder-hobos and stealing from goblins”… all better avoided.
Whether you’re playing an adventurer or writing an adventure story, you create your background to maximize the interactivity of the world to the characters, and minimize the friction the world will cause the characters..
Cyberpunk 2020 does the exact opposite.
Lifepath
Life’s short,
Why does it take so long?
We’re only here once…
Why blame yourself?
-Health, “Major Crimes”
The Lifepath system is 1 of 2 utterly unique aspects to the game that forces you to play Cyberpunk differently from every other tabletop RPG.
Instead of yada-yadaing your background, or actively writing your past out of the story, Cyberpunk forces you to have a past, and forces it to affect you:
This is one page of SEVEN in the Lifepath chapter of the book.
Now: You get the choice to pick what you want of most of the major stuff… but there’s a lot in there that’s straight up involuntary and you have to roll for, and if you want you can absolutely just let the random numbers generate an entire character for you.
I set out to just create a fully randomly generated character… i started with 30 dice rolls off an online app thinking “Ya that will be more than enough”… I had to roll 30 more because I ran out of results half way.
Ayaan
Origins
Ayaan is a shy and secretive 20 year old.
Maybe its the ever so slight African accent, maybe its the clash of her high fashion clothes with her short spiked hair, or maybe its the fingerless gloves she always wears, but there’s something deeply guarded about her.
Of course those few who know her history could see the story painted in these elements.
Her parents were corporate technicians, ambitious immigrants to Night City with dreams of social climbing. They had come to the fractured remnants of the USA, 8 kids in tow, imagining their American Dream … what they found instead was a nightmare.
The details are sparse though some of Ayaan’s siblings accuse her of knowing more than she lets on… but both parents ambitions got away from them, they were arrested and imprisoned after being on the losing end of a corporate power struggle far bigger than them. Their 8 children wound up in the sparse barely resourced foster system on the edge of the city
Traumas rarely bond even mature families… and these Young children cast out in the world on their own immediately fell into faction. The older siblings knew middle child Ayaan had some secret she wasn’t sharing, her two older sisters came to ignore this… her oldest brother guessing she was protecting their parent’s memory, held her in high esteem for it… but her second oldest brother blamed Ayaan, and her younger brother and sister followed his lead.
Maybe this guilt is what motivates her forward into action? Some sense of responsibility and need to restore all they’ve lost… one could call it admirable. One could also call it folly.
Life Events
Ayaan’s first attempts to escape her family’s ruin ended in disaster. At 16 a fraud scheme failed spectacularly and left Ayaan 60 grand in debt to cartels. If she starts missing payments, they’re going to come for her and sell her off for, what!? Entertainment? Parts? She doesn’t want to find out.
At 17 another scheme almost cost her her life… a crash in a stolen car left her miraculously unharmed, and able to escape the wreckage and arrest, but left her with almost daily nightmares about what might have happened… the terror of winding up in a cell like her parents.
At 18 Ayaan finally caught a break… one of her criminal enterprises finally paid off and she made 20 grand… if she could just repeat the success twice more she’d be free of her payments, and maybe could have a future again.
At 19 however disaster struck. Her seven siblings were all living out similar stories… some struggling against all odds to try and advance through education, some trying to find a lower rung form of employment, some seeking some angle or scheme, and some wallowing in failure and addiction…
Her younger brother had always hated her, and now she’d never get to make up with him. He and her sister were pursuing some low level theft, when a security system they thought was disabled went active and the autoturrets opened on them.
Her younger brother was dead. And her baby sister, in hospital with hundreds of thousands in medical bills and needing cybernetics organs she can’t afford.
Ayaan had thought she had found a safe pace for escaping her financial trap… but now she needs to get into the big leagues fast. She doesn’t want to have to go back into the penitentiary and tell her parents about another dead child.
Jesus
Have I mentioned Pondsmith is from Detroit?
The vast majority of professional writers could not produce characterization and emotional entanglement this complex, nor created such a pressing sense of scarcity, and Pondsmith created a system to randomly generate it!!!
the only thing I really changed was the costs of things. Multiply by 10 to 100 for costs. The 90s were remarkably optimistic and just assumed healthcare, housing, necessities, etc. would get cheaper in the future (as if we lived in some sort of efficient free market)… so house rule it to add a zero or two. A surgery or major debt should cost 10s to 100s of thousands, not mere hundreds or single digit thousands (unless its cosmetic, then it might be a few hundred to few grand). Likewise anything you can get on the internet today just costs what it is on Amazon… don’t make your players spend 2 grand for a Fax machine or 200 for a tape player because this was 1990’s vision of the future.
Hell, There are 2 entire pages i didn’t use because the die rolls just never happened to direct to them: One that revolve around making friends and enemies, and another that generates narratively compelling love affairs complete with conflicts, slightly too real quirks, tragic entanglements, and generates the entire style and character of the lover.
Every outcome is vague enough you can read into them tons, or they’ll suggest new exiting angles when interacting with each other.
But what’s really remarkable is how they constrain your characters:
its a very rare character who won’t have some horrible debt, trauma, set of regrets, an enemy or institution that’s after them, a lover they can’t stand but can’t quit…
The desperation and a scarcity just oozes out of these characters you generate… even if you roll high and get some preppy upper-class rich kid American Psycho, the sheer weight of the competition around them, the consequences for all their actions the hunger of everyone just an inch below them, the distain of everyone just an inch above, the rivalry of their peers… its palpable.
Note: There are some home rules I recommend… just some obvious stuff CP 2020 leaves out. at the start Roll 1d10, 1-4 your biological parents are together (before family background, life events, and other effects), 5-9 they’re separated, 10 you were created via IVF donor or otherwise don’t know the father. if separated roll 1d10, 1-7 your mother got custody. Then proceed through family background.
Also VERY IMPORTANT RULE. Name every single character who becomes part of your background via a lifepath rule/roll. Every parent, sibling, friend, lover.. give them NAMES (no I didn’t in my example… Shutup!).
Also optional: every background character roll 1d10… on a 1 they have an addiction or other mental issue. if so Roll another d10:
1 Cannabis
2 Alcohol
3 Opioids
4 Amphetamines
5 Proscriptions
6 Halucinogens
7 Schizoaffective
8 Eating Disorder
9 BPD
10 Depression
Then roll 1d6 for severity: 1 they’re high functioning, just occasionally embarrass themselves/ the constant stress of risk to career or health damage. then increasing severity til 5 (life threatening): 1d10 any given month, 1 they’re hospitalized (or should be). and 6 (Catastrophic): 1d10 any given month… on a 8-10 they’re NOT hospitalized or having a major episode, or equivalent.
Whereas so much of the rest of pop-culture creates these frictionless avatars of adventure, orphans without grief and wanderers without hunger… superheroes without anxieties or any needs they might selfishly use their powers to relieve…
In Cyberpunk you’re painfully aware of all the stresses and desires that high-tech Cyberware could save you from… you feel the temptation around those “No money down” financing options for the latest superpower granting bionic whatevers… and you also sense the repo men just 3 payment free months away, ready and waiting to take the cyberware back along with one or both kidneys as interest.
You feel the consequences and entanglements your character is living under… and you feel danger they’re in.
Friday Night Firefight
Get plenty dreams, in the bigot dreams
In the Friday firefight
Wait to sit and kneel, it's just a Friday night
When the wolves are sittin', lookin' way too friendly for you
-Aligns & Rubicones, “Friday Night Firefight”
Cyberpunk’s combat system, Its core gameplay loop going back to 1st Edition Cyberpunk 2013, is the Friday Night Firefight system.
There’s some 90s jank to it, but mercifully by 2020 (2nd edition) they’d gotten rid of almost all THAC0 (AD&D) inspired elements and its only the saving throws where you’re still trying to roll Under a certain value. But even there you’re free of the confusing absurdity of bouncing back and forward between wanting to increase one stat but lower another… trying to have the lowest armour rating but the highest attack.
Seriously I have no idea how AD&D players got groups of 5 guys together who all simultaneously understood what numbers they wanted to be high, what numbers they wanted to be low, and under what phase of the moon a low roll is good vs. a high roll.
Instead in Cyberpunk its simple. Big number = Good.
But While the rest of the combat system from a game design perspective is fairly descent, from a storytelling perspective Friday Night Firefight might be the best combat system ever put in a tabletop RPG:
There’s a lot of vague ideas and theories about modern weapons encounters—most of them from the Hollywood Never-Empty-Six-Gun School of Armed Combat. These misconceptions have crept on little flat feet into the design of many roleplaying games, leading to characters who can be repeatedly shot with large caliber handguns until they run out of “hit points” and who can fire Ingram MAC-10’s one handed and hit with every bullet.
In otherwords, good, clean fun.
FNFF is not good, clean fun. Most of the data here in has been completed from ballistic reports, police data, FBI crime statistics [no comment] and other not-clean fun sources. These sources tend to point to a couple of basic truths about firefight combat.
80% of most gunfights occur between untrained amateurs at a range of 21 feet. 40% of these raging gun battles happen within 8 feet or less! Most (60%) occur in dimly lit and difficult conditions —dark rainy alleys, with both participants panting and out of breath, pausing momentarily to snap off a badly aimed shot at a fleeing shadow then ducking back for cover. Hits are surprisingly rare. When they do occur (assuming a large caliber weapon’s involved), the victim is usually hors de combat on the first shot from a combination of wound-shock and terror.
-Cyberpunk 2020, Pg 96-97
Cyberpunk’s combat is fucking LETHAL!
The only comparable systems I’ve found are Call of Cthulhu, a horror game where you’re not supposed to fight, but run away from danger. And the unofficial D&D 3.5 Grim-N-Gritty ruleset, a ruleset designed to turn Dungeons and Dragons 3.5 into a realistic highly lethal low fantasy setting.
Aside from those, you basically have to go back to the 70s/early 80s when nothing had been balanced, TPKs (Total Party Kills) were the norm, and every veteran player carried a 10 ft pole to prod for traps.
But whereas DMs run Call of Cuthulu or Grim-N-Grity because they want to discourage combat… In Cyberpunk its a core part of the gameplay loop! and yet its also a game where your Character can go into shock from taking a single point of damage.
Melee has its own rules which are fairly comparable to most RPGs (not accounting for the lethality), so we’ll focus on ranged weapons.
A ranged attack is a pure skill check against the range a target is at… If your reflexes are over 8 and you’re aware they’re aiming at you, you have a chance to dodge… but you really have to have reflexes cybernetically augmented to hell for it to work.
You can also duck behind cover or run like hell and that will add a penalty to their hit chances… but again you have to be aware its happening and have time to do either of those… If you’re ambushed or lose the Initiative roll you’re just a sitting duck.
So moving on to taking damage: Cyberpunk uses a Health Bar (above) that’s really just tracking accumulated damage… maybe a full-borg freak with a fully replaced combat optimized circulatory system could stay alive down to mortal 6… maybe.
But even then, you’re mortally injured and making death saves every singe 3 second round after 12 points of damage, and that will only end when someone (hopefully medically trained?) stabilizes you, also the bar only has 40 slots total.
Have I mentioned a single round of .556 does 5d6 (5 six sided dice) points of damage? Average 17-18 points! And you can fire three round burst at a BONUS to hit under medium range? Or that you could even fire full-auto at close range and mag dump 20-30 rounds in a single round of combat?
And this isn’t even getting into stuff like auto-Shotguns that attack conic meters of space and get separate attacks per round fired against all targets within that arc of fire. So if you face 10 enemies in a crowded 1meter wide hallway, somehow get the drop on them, and unload 5 rounds of full auto shotgun fire on them, then you’re making 5x10 (FIFTY) attacks that turn at 4d6 (average 14 dmg) each.
(Yes 12 gauge buckshot does less damage than .556, it wind up making sense when you’re calculating the damage with armour penetration and accounting for pellets that miss, etc.)
Cross-country Caravan
Night City Aliens
I pull the trigger and I feel nothing
-The Armed & Homeschool Dropouts, “Night City Aliens”
Pondsmith isn’t joking when he says most of the mechanics are designed to reflect real combat (or rather real combat if you could augment yourself to have a chainsaw arm or an eyeball that shoots poison darts).
This completely changes the kinds of narratives that can exist in the game… you get stories out of Cyberpunk you just don’t get out of any other game, or really any other franchise in general.
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The Harvester Job
Ayaan donned her armoured jacket (SP 18) with the slight awkwardness of its Kevlar and ceramic sections hanging on her. Her team mocked her for her lack of chrome and augmentation, but at her age she still had the natural beauty of youthful “innocence” that even chrome couldn’t quite capture, and she wasn’t about to waste that edge.
Plenty of time for synthetics once she became an old hag at 25.
Not that the jacket or armaments will be needed anyway.
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The Job:
They’d been hired to steal a Biotechnica dataset that’d fallen into the hands of The Harvesters, a low level booster gang. Asimov, The hapless assistant who’d tried to abscond with the data was long dead, sold off for parts, but the records he’d had on him were something else. The gang clearly had no idea what had landed in their lap and were basically advertising it looking for a buyer.
The price they were asking was obscenely low, but of course, price wasn’t the issue for the client. It’d maybe take a week on the long side for Biotechnica’s agents to track down the Harvesters, torture the full story out of them, and then come after any purchaser they could name… so it was important whoever they named didn’t point back Ayaan, her crew, or their client.
Secrets are like art, they’re worth more stolen.
.
The plan was simple:
A defector had been able to draw a detailed map of The Harvesters’ hides and territory in exchange for some cash and 2 tickets a thousand miles out of Night City. They knew exactly where to hit and what they were up against.
Their heavy hitters and some heavy weapons would create a distraction at the Harvesters’ primary stash, maybe even get lucky and make off with some of the goods (harvested cyberware), meanwhile Ayaan, Case their Netrunner, and Molly one of their Solos would sneak in and hit the secondary stash once all the muscle ran to reinforce their comrades at the primary stash.
Things had gone perfectly when,
“Not here!” Case shouted.
“It has to be here. what’s in Azimov’s file?” Ayaan shouted back.
“Nothing. His drives never held the dataset, not even a deletion record.”
“That’s not possible!? unless… Wait. who owns his Neural-link?”
“Biotechnica”
“Hah! The man didn’t trust his own skull.” Interjected Molly, “Its a physical media, search the place. It’ll be a chip or disc or something”
They started tearing through the abandoned warehouse’s office when Ayaan turned to check a small closet.
[Roll Initiative]
Molly was too far, and had her back turned when the chill ran up her wired spine [failed awareness check, can’t act]
Case remembered seeing the door open in slow motion, as if the world were suddenly submerged in water [successful awareness] (roll 3 + 5 REF = 8 initiative)
Ayaan felt a sudden catch, like her heart skipped a beat [successful awareness] (roll 6 + 4 REF = 10)
Then the young punk pulled the trigger he’d already had pointed at the door before Ayaan opened it (roll 5 + 6 REF + 2 readied weapon = 13)
.
Now, On paper this could have been vastly worse, the punk was clearly the most junior of the booster gang, and was barely armed with an old semi-auto 9mm (probably why they left him behind). Even without Cyberware, rappers and teens shoot each-other with these all the time and come away mostly fine, an individual 9mm shot is only fatal on average 1 in 6 times (there’s a reason most shooting classes teach you to keep shooting til the target goes down)… hell rapper 50 Cent has been shot NINE times with equivalent rounds and is walking around today… but in Cyberpunk, like in life: 1 can be enough.
.
At point blank range it wasn’t a hard shot [DC 10] and he made it easily [4 Reflex + 3 Handgun + 5 ambush + roll 6 = 18]. He got two rounds off [per the pistol’s rate of fire: 2] but only one hit [coin flip] for the impact of a single 9mm round [2d6+1 = 5 in this case]
Now Ayaan has a Body score of 4, or weak, which has a modifier that reduces the damage by 1 point if it gets through… But wait! she has that armoured jacket on! We have to roll to see where the bullet hit, if it hit the arms or torso it’d be easily absorbed.
Roll 1d10, 2-6 it hits an arm or torso and she’ll takes no damage… 1:
The Head
Ayaan is wearing no armour on her head, no helmet to obstruct her sight or further constrict her, no skinweave or augmentations, nothing. As established her body type reduces the damage by 1 point to 4… but there’s another rule: The head rule.
Damage to the head is double, for obvious reasons, raising the damage to 8 points.
But there’s another another rule: The Limb Loss Rule… 8 points of damage delivered by any one hit to any limb automatically destroys or severs the limb. If this happens to the head it is instantly fatal. No saves. Game over.
.
Is Ayaan just fucking dead first hit from the lowest level enemy with one of the lowest level weapons?
Which rule applies first? The head double damage rule or the Limb Loss rule?
Obviously if it was 8 points of natural damage (something even a single 2d6+1 9mm could totally do) there’d be no argument, she’d be wasted.… but as there’s the ambiguity and its in that grey zone of just barely being 8 points after doubling it , there’s room for a sentimental GM to fudge it:
Ayaan’s head is non-fatally destroyed. Wait… what does that even mean!?
.
Ayaan was turning to look into the closet just as the gunshot rang out, and she caught the round square on the jaw. The room echoed with a deadening CRUNCH as bone, teeth, braces, and bits of tongue erupted across the room. Her Jaw… her teeth… her tongue… they were gone.
An unimaginable nightmare realized in an instant… perhaps the pure surprise at its suddenness explained what happened next:
Shock is a funny thing, men have died from shock sitting in an ambulance after taking a perfectly survivable gunshot wound to the foot (no FNFF isn’t quite that ruthless, though Pondsmith explicitly reminds you of this possibility), Whilst in other cases police reports account drugged out men continuing to fight, almost unslowed, after taking 20, 30, even 40 gunshot wounds… seemingly only collapsing, Wile E. Coyote like, when some part of their mind finally notices they’ve been dead for several minutes.
Ayaan didn’t go into shock [BODY 4 - stun 2 = 2 or under to save from shock…. roll 1 [1d10]], she didn’t collapse, for a brief moment she seemed not to even register that a shot had been fired. She merely raised her sawed-off in a cool efficient manner, her mouthless face betraying no emotion except adrenaline, she leveled the shotgun one handed, flicked both hammers, and pulled the trigger. [DC 10, 4 ref+ 4 handguns +roll 5 [1d10]= 13]
Both shells hammered into the punk’s chest and his light Kevlar vest [SP 10] was cut to ribbons as the majority of the pellets imbedded in his chest [8d6=27 dmg -SP10- 2 for body type [6] = 15 dmg]
the punk lost consciousness instantly [Stun save= Body 6 - stun 3= 3 or under, roll 7 [1d10]].
.
The splash of blood sprayed across Ayaan’s open face, and reality finally returned as she began to gurgle at the surprise… and the taste…
She began turning about the room, and let out an ear-splitting mouthless scream.
.
Unnoticed behind her the punk’s chest stopped moving.
holy hell!
You might be thinking: “Come on that’s so ruthless. You’d really do that to your players?”
But the thing is: I was pulling my punches.
A semi-auto 9mm is one of the lowest level weapons in the game. Realistically the vast majority of booster gangers would have a heavy pistol like an Armalite 44 [4d6+1 dmg] or a submachine gun. 1990s to Early 20th century Glocks and Berettas are usually only owned by old ladies, who obviously need a gun, but want something that won’t be bulky in their purse.
It would have been perfectly reasonable, if not more plausible, for him to be sitting there with an Uzi, panic, and mag dumb 30 Rounds through the door, point blank, the second Ayaan opened it.
Plus there’s the fact he’s a Booster Ganger. Where are all his cybernetic enhancements!? That’s what these people steal for a living! Sure maybe’s he’s the most junior and they’re paying him crap/giving him little… but 9 chances out of 10 a random booster would be augmented up to have body rating 8 or 9, or maybe even super human levels like 12 or 13… in addition to skinweave [SP 12], or another form of subdermal armor like body-plating visibly pressing under the skin [ SP 25]…
Its unlikely any of these (short of subdermal plating) would have actually saved him… armour isn’t additive [a Kevlar vest [SP 10] + skinweave [SP 12] only has a combined SP of 17 ,not 22]
But any of these factors could have kept him in the fight another round or two to cause more damage before he lost consciousness… could Case have gotten to him before he fired again? Would Molly’s wired reflexes have won the initiative for round 2?
Who knows.
You know it feels so good
When you fuck them all like we should,
Count the bodies one by one
Our reign of terror has just begun.
-Le Destroy “Violence”
Cyberpunk is a game that forces you to think genuinely strategically and tactically… not spending minutes optimizing the perfect positioning of your character to get the perfect set of attack bonuses in what’s supposed to be a 3 second round… but during the realistic social/preparatory part of the adventure. Ayaan’s gang’s plan worked, their distraction and retreat at the main stash really did draw 10-20 heavily armed boosters away from the side stash… but its not just immediate tactics like that.
Buying the right kit matters. Deciding what jobs you do or don’t take matters. Whether you let information slip about what you’re doing matters.
The things that kill you won’t be gamer bullshit like sub-optimizing your backstab score… it will be things you said in dialogue hours before hand, or careless decisions you made when you thought you were safe… combat will either be a meticulously planned trap that goes off perfectly, or it will be an unpredictable shit-show where your accumulated decisions are finally put to an unforgiving test.
The Most Important Part of World Building
This place is a
Trauma
This is depicted like drama
Jiu Jitsu impact this shock
I dig the danger, I'm about it, it's part of life
Witness this danger, excitement is part of life
I'm into this danger, it's part of me all my life
-Aligns and Rubicones “Trauma”
Behind all the 80s cheese and meme material… underneath the ridiculousness of Rockerboys trying to lead revolutions whist waving sidearms at their audience; behind the wolverine claws, and glowing Tiger Sripe skin mods… Cyberpunk 2020 is a game and world that’s remarkably grounded and consequential.
This makes it shockingly unique.
Tabletop or videogame RPGs are called “Role playing” games… but the average “RPG” is almost the opposite of role-playing.
Whether you’re playing Dungeons & Dragons, or Mass Effect, or Dragon Age… you aren’t actually going to be doing much playing of a role or acting within a world… your social and personal decisions as a fictional character are not going to have critical effects on that character.
Every mechanic of these games exists to set you apart from the “NPCs” (Non-Player Characters) inhabiting the world and get you onto the big heroic adventures that only you can do… for some reason.
Sure the other characters in the world might be farmers who have to work back-breaking hours to get enough food to eat, or mercenaries who are constantly on the edge of being broke, entangled in intrigues and betrayal plots to avoid dangerous assignments while still getting paid…
But your character or party doesn’t have to deal with that bullshit. If you’re low on money just find a quest giver or hell a jobs board. There will be some monster that needs slaying or damsel that needs rescuing, and you’ll be paid handsomely for it!
“Wait” you might think, “ if its paying so well and no one’s already done it… doesn’t that imply its stupidly dangerous and probably unadvisable?”
Well ya… for a peasant! But you’re a Player Character. You’re basically a super hero! Now roll over that ogre, collect the money, and stop pretending there’s scarcity or money matters. You’re holding up the plot!
I could be a saint, It won't make the news,
I could rob a bank buy a crown and jewels,
make a bit of money on the side line,
sell little drugs for a shot time,
I could be an addict it wouldn't matter,
I used to have dreams but then they were shattered
-Rat Boy & IBDY, “Here’s a Thought”
RPGs aren’t going to wait around for this roleplaying thoughtful acting bull… You need to start throwing yourself into the geostrategic intrigues of this world and start entering the wars and hidden conflicts of good vs. evil.
Plan out your moves? Give it thought? Hell no! You’ll play a wild card faction who has no backup and knows the least about what’s going on, but won’t stop entering maximally dangerous scenarios, one after the other, until you’ve single handedly changed the geopolitics of the world and fought multiple Gods in single combat.
I swear to God, Bioware actually invents job titles for this character role: In Mass Effect they’re “Specters”, in Dragon Age they’re “Grey Wardens”… in KOTOR they’re “Jedi”.
Damn near every character in western media is a superhero, Disney just called our bluffs and made it explicit.
Indiana Jones and James Bond aren’t an archeologist and a spy respectively. Jones isn’t coordinating with other academics and representatives of various governments to try and preserve these earth shattering archeological finds in the face of the geopolitical instability of the 1930s… Bond isn’t managing covert assets to try and achieve an intelligence coup over the Soviets or other threats… (or at-least he isn’t outside From Russia With Love and Casino Royale (best Bond films))
They’re superheroes with better fashion sense (or at least Jones has a better fashion sense), they throw themselves into highly dangerous scenarios with no sense of any personal stake or gain, act entirely on a personal ethic that the audience just accepts because they’re told to, and then suffer no consequences for repeatedly doing the most dangerous possible thing in every scenario, seemingly for no reason other than that’s the decision the audience will question least.
“Role Playing” Ha! if you want to play a role, you’d be better off with literally almost any other genre than the modern role playing game. A strategic simulator with a dynamic campaign say, such as Highfleet or UBoat has vastly more actual playing of a role with consequences embodied in the world than anything Bioware has put out.
I can start complaining about this and take things a little too far… saying stuff like “The only real RPGs are arthouse fair like Disco Elysium or brutal Roguelikes like Cataclysm or Dwarf Fortress”, but by god… CD Project Red’s Original Witcher game was one where you had to navigate a day-night cycle and appropriately prepare to fight a monster, all for a paltry sum of money that really sold the blue collar travelling eastern European pest control mood of the game… only for the second game to open with you playing a pivotal role in a massive battle between two kingdoms. So this is a problem that effects even good franchises with talented writers who aren’t hacks.
As soon as the world stops restricting and confining your characters, as soon as its limitations, scarcities, and dark realities stop effecting your main characters personally, in a way they can’t just shrug off… it stops being a meaningful world.
This honestly might be why Harry Potter of all things made billions of dollars… sure Harry can somehow survive multiple showdowns with the most dangerous wizard in a thousand years, and his 15 year old friends somehow don’t get slaughtered facing down teams of trained killers… but for 90% of the books they are dealing with nightly curfews, essay and exam schedules, the interpersonal dramas of living at a boarding school, and navigating pre-existing social hierarchies, the embarrassment and rivalries of being tweens or teens, and all the attendant love triangle stuff, seasonal changes and traditions…
Tolkien had to invent multiple languages, write 20+ poems, and several thousand years of detailed history… and honestly his world building probably hasn’t had as big an impact on the public as Rowling’s. They haven’t spent billions making theme parks out of Rivendell.
Because the reality of the world, the part where the characters we care about actually have to live in it and be part of it and deal with its limitations, its scarcities, its challenges… that’s just vastly more real in Harry Potter than it is in Tolkien… Harry’s mortal perils might be ridiculous, but his run ins with detention or crunch time aren’t… meanwhile Aragorn or the hobbits might be some of the best written heroic figures in fiction, with real meditation on the nature of bravery… but you never feel any of their financial, or resource strains, you never feel Aragorn’s decisions might effect, or have ever effected, where he can or can’t range. where do Aragorn, Gimli, Legolas, or Gandalf even live when they’re not in the fellowship? Do they have houses with rooms full of furnishings? Or is what we see on their backs all they have? What do they spend their money on? How do they earn it?
When Aragorn said “You have my sword” was he gesturing immediately to everything he owns?
The job was a bust
They could already hear the Harvester’s rushing back at the sound of gunfire.
“Bail!” Moly shouted, as she and Case helped Ayaan out the window they had crawled in through.
They ran and Molly laid down suppressive fire from her Militech Ronin as they all piled into the car.
Case slammed the gas and Ayaan let out another gurgled scream as the car tore away. Molly fired the last of her shots hanging out the window before they rounded the corner.
Ayaan was rolling and gurgling as the car rushed through the Night City dusk.
“Rocco get out of there, Its a bust, we couldn’t get it. Ayaan’s been shot. hurt bad. We’re burning it to the Doc’s” Case shouted throughout the car in spite of his neural-link. Ayaan’s head pounded from the noise, as Molly tore through antiseptic wipes and bandages in the first aid kit…. she finally found some morphine and shot it into Ayaan.
“This will hit you in a second.”
Just at that moment they hit a pothole, and Ayaan shot up, shoved her head out the window, and vomited out her jawless maw.
“Fuck. She’ll get an infection” said Case, as Molly started to clean her with the antiseptic wipes.
.
They made it to the Doc’s after what felt like an eternity, and he finally got some stiffer Anesthetics into Ayaan.
The jaw was completely gone. What remained was unsalvageable, she’d need a full cybernetic replacement.
There was a problem however…
The crew, and Ayaan in particular, were broke. Even a decade old defunct jaw and associated facial kit would cost close to 10-15 grand before installation.
Rocco had gotten in touch with the client, and he wasn’t paying for a dataset they didn’t have.
Their credit was equally non-existent.
Was Ayaan just fucked?
“Ha! I just remembered…” Said the Doc with a malicious laugh, “I might just have something more in your price range.”
.
Ayaan woke with a rush of pain and nausea.
She collapsed off the bed and tried to vomit… only to find she couldn’t. She felt the fluid rush up her throat and past the un-tasting thing she thought was a tongue… only to stop. Her mouth wouldn’t open. She didn’t have one.
She started to panic. She had no mouth and she needed to vomit!
She’d drown.
Molly rushed to her, “Its ok! Its ok! You have to hit the release.”
.
Molly and Case had carried her to her apartment after the surgery. Ayaan lay in bed rolling from a pain and splitting headache… she flinched at the bizarre sensations, struggling to speak as her larynx made sounds but the alien machinery fumbled to form them into words.
“Bring me a mirror”, Ayaan managed awkwardly. The look on Molly’s face told her it wouldn’t be good, as Molly sighed and pull the mirror off the wall.
.
1998.The Chrome they found was fucking older than her!
It was a relic of the second Soviet-Afghan war, barely a prosthetic, let alone proper Cyberware. how the hell it ever found its way to the Doc’s storage room…They had to look up the instructions online, then run the Cyrillic through a translator.
She stared at it in the mirror. One flat piece of hardened plastic from her nose to her neck, broken only by the air intake, the release tabs, the port for liquid food… and the cigarette holder.
Obviously its garish medical pink didn’t match her dark African skin, but she pictured whatever poor Russian had worn it first, and can’t have imagined it matched his skin any better.
“His Skin”…. The pressure on her remaining jaw, the pounding of her headache wouldn’t let her forget. It was sized for a man.
.
“Go.” Ayaan struggled, shoving a painkiller down her intake port.
Molly tried to object, but Ayaan chased her out… she needed to be alone, she needed to sleep…
She eased herself back into bed, then saw it on her night stand.
It was right after her parents had gone to prison… Her brother had stolen their foster father’s car and taken them to the beach, she was maybe 14-15? She had been so miserable, they all had been… yet that day. It was like magic. The way he just stole the happiness back for them, if only for a moment. Her smile was so big.
She had wanted to be just like her older brother.
“Stupid fucking girl!”
She threw the photo across the room and the hanging mirror shattered.
.
The pain… god.
She wouldn’t last like this. She was already contemplating her sawed-off. [10d6 humanity loss +1d6 per week]
It’d take months of ordinary work to buy a replacement jaw, and runner jobs… they could be weeks or months between gigs.
.
The next day Rocco announced the Harvesters had sold the dataset to some naïve startup Biocorp. The client was still following its progress… he was still willing to pay for its theft.
Ayaan didn’t have to think twice. She was in.
The Tragedian of the 21st Century
Cyberpunk isn’t about saving the world, its about saving yourself.
-Mike Pondsmith
The genre conventions of Cyberpunk had all been basically defined by the time Pondsmith published 1st Edition Cyberpunk (2013) in 1988. Phillip K Dick’s 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep had already been adapted into Bladerunner in ‘82, Judge Dredd had become an established franchise in the late 70s, and William Gibson’s revolutionary Neuromancer had already won the scifi triple crown, and had two sequels in 86 and 88. By the time the updated final version of Cyberpunk 2020, 2.0 was released in 1992 Neil Stephenson and other writers were already putting out works like SnowCrash dubbed “Post-Cyberpunk”.
And yet the only video game adaptation of Neuromancer was in 1988, and everything to do with the franchise has been failed projects since, Neil Stephenson has had no projects get off the ground for any of his cyberpunk or post-cyberpunk works… and other legends in the genre have likewise had little pop-culture penetration.
This would be as if a tabletop role-playing had come out after Star Trek, Star Wars, and the great scifi authors, just calling itself Space Opera, or Science Fiction, and billing itself as the generic RPG form of those more popular properties, only for its brand to almost entirely supplant those legends of the genre.
And honestly… Pondsmith earned it.
Cyberpunk’s primary characteristic as a Science fiction genre is how close to the present it is, how recognizably continuous all its trends are with current social, political, philosophical, and technological issues. Whereas stories set in the far future or distant past are safe subjects mostly free political or social implications today, Cyberpunk is the opposite…Its punk. It leans into everything that’s uncomfortable or taboo about the topic today and then turns it up to 11 with all the escalation and loss of subtly that can happen in a decade or two.
And it does it not from the eyes of benevolent competent authority figures or a sympathetic middle-class professional , but from the eyes of the punks who polite society and said figures are already ignoring, and who are happy to tell said society exactly how full of shit they are…
And it does all of that, ideally, without becoming cringe and leaning into some self-righteous political ideology that clearly wants its acolytes to become (or remain) the next set of self-righteous authority figures.
That’s really hard to do!
Think of just an ordinary person, or hell, a tier one exceptional writer, setting down to write about the hot button politics of the day but extrapolating a few decades into the future, with the explicit instructions “Lean into the offense, don’t hold back, make it extreme”
I mean Christ! have you seen Stephen King’s Twitter!?
Some of the most successful writers in history can’t write 280 characters that aren’t cringe or insane… about the present! When they’re already provided the technology, the politics, and can observe how people are already reacting…. You want them to project all their neuroses 20 years into the future!?
And yet Pondsmith consistently did it while focusing on the harshest most unforgiving aspects of life…
He looked at the crack epidemic in the midst of the late 80s early 90s, and instead of saying something cringe or insane… you know like most every commentator and politician to this day… he accurately predicted synthetics like Fentanyl and and all the weird letter-number drugs. Pondsmith looked at politics in 2005, and somehow picked out the early discussion of memes and the culture war as important, understood both, and wrote fairly intelligently about both (like honestly, his takes on both were vastly more intelligent than stuff you’d read in The Atlantic 10+ years later).
Pondsmith looked at guns, gun-culture, and gang-violence in 1988-1990, and his take on it… his summary of the nature of modern gunfighting… for a bloody tabletop RPG! was so on point that you could go on YouTube today, look up the best modern firearms experts, and you’d have to get damn specific to find disagreement (modern firearm experts probably wouldn’t be as impressed with auto-shotguns).
There’s a very common concept in writing “The Rule of Cool”… That if something is cool or entertaining then you don’t really have to go out of your way to justify it, the entertainment value will shore up the implausibility, and the audience will suspend their disbelief because they’re having fun.
Whether its Cyberpunk 2020, 2077, or Edgerunners Pondsmith’s world does the opposite… It lets you get get sucked in by everything that’s cool and edgy and implausibly over-the-top fun… and then lets you realize the very plausible and grounded consequences are accumulating around you…
Aside from maybe Bladerunner, Pondsmith’s Cyberpunk franchise is the one that understands the tragedy and social realism that flows through the heart of the wider cyberpunk genre… the elements of horror, the elements of romanticism, the balance of beautiful youthful idealism with horrific world-weary cynicism.
In Conclusion
This franchise isn’t one that’s going to fade away into irrelevance… and the wider Cyberpunk genre, and I think a lot of fiction in general (in the 2020s and beyond) is almost certainly going to slowly converge on Pondsmith’s aesthetics and storytelling ideals.
Hilarious anachronisms couldn’t kill the franchise, a completely failed 3rd edition couldn’t kill the franchise, and one of the most legendarily failed Video Game launches of all time couldn’t stop it from reviving itself within 2 years…
I’ve avoided talking about the plots of Edgerunners and Cyberpunk:2077 for fear of spoilers, but they’re amazing… Some of the plotlines buried in the 40-100 hours of the game are God-damn masterpieces. the Joshua Stephenson, and Arasaka stories are incredible… “The Devil” ending is Dystopian SciFi to give Phillip K. Dick or Orwell a run for their money, and a William Shakespeare royal tragedy to boot.
Pondsmith has put himself up there with the great theorists of Tragedy. With figures like Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristotle, and Nietzsche…
He’s come up with a set of aesthetic rules, and empathetic commitments that are able to elevate the common tragedies of scarcity, social deprivation, youthful rebellion, impossible dreams, and political corruption into really beautiful heroic (In the classical sense!) stories.
Cyberpunk isn’t about saving the world, its about saving yourself.
This quote from Pondsmith was everywhere in the promotional material for Cyberpunk 2077 and was used to sell the GRITTY, MATURE, EDGY world of the Dark Future…
This was going to be hardcore real gamer shit.
What no one suspected was how deeply, meaningfully, philosophically (even theologically) it was going to push itself to really interrogate what it means to “save” oneself or just how ruthlessly and deeply one’s “self” can be jeopardized…
If you think I was cruel on Ayaan, you’ve seen nothing… NOTHING.
I’ve known people who’ve endured stuff comparable to what happened to Ayaan in our little let’s play. I’ve only vaguely heard of people who’ve endured what CD Project Red and StudioTrigger put most of their characters through, and I’ve heard nothing comparable to what CDPR does to some of its characters depending on the ending.
“Manmade horrors beyond your imagination?” Someone a CDPR imagined it. And its somewhat closer than you might imagine.
.
Pondsmith didn’t invent any of these ideas, every scifi concept or piece of tech inevitably has some precedent in some brilliant author’s now largely forgotten stories from ‘82, or ‘74, or 61’, or ‘53, or 1818… Asimov, or Dick, or some contemporary, or predecessor has certainly thought it up or thought up something comparable, or raised the same questions…
What Pondsmith did was formalize and theorize how to tell the often harrowing stories of people from all walks of life when they interact with these scifi concepts… how to create stories of people dealing with these high concept technological, economic, politcal, and social problems, that won’t be cliched or pure hack scifi, because the actual stress they’re under will feel real.
Only one story can be the first to hit on a scifi concept… but the thousandth story to feature it can be powerful with compelling characters and drama.
Pondsmith has created a system and a set of ideas that can be codified by a nerd in Detroit in the late 80s early 90s, be picked up by polish game devs in the 2010s who’ve only told the story of eastern European monster slayers, can further go to Japan and be picked by a company most famous for a show about teenagers with magic lingerie…
And Pondsmith’s ideas were so well conceived that all these people from vastly different cultures and now nerds across 5 decades (80s, 90s, 00s, 10s, 20s) have all been able to tell kickass stories in the horrific dark future that is California in the 2020s.
We are almost certainly going to get more stories out of the Cyberpunk franchise, sequels, new series, new games (an expansion is already about to release for CP 2077) and between this and other Scifi properties that have come out recently, its very likely we’re going to see a widespread revival in Cyberpunk the genre… And I’m really looking forward to it.
Questions:
“How should I get into the Cyberpunk Franchise”
Unless you are just constitutionally incapable of watching any anime…100% watch Cyberpunk: Edgerunners on Netflix… Its a 10/10 masterpiece.
The first episode is much weaker than the rest, but every episode doubles in quality til you hit episode 6 and it might just be one of the 10 best episodes of television ever made.
Edgerunners is especially great if you want to play Cyberpunk: 2020 the tabletop game because its plot is just the perfect CP: 2020 campaign.
You get like a dozen different missions that happen, you get every part of the tone from the fun, to the laughable, to the hardcore, to the tragic… you get the interplay of the various character types and a great crash-course on the world of Night City, you learn who fixers, netrunners, MaxTac, Trauma Team, and a good chunk of the major players are…
Like if you’re running a game with someone who knows nothing about Cyberpunk and you know wouldn’t read the book if you gave it to them, Edgerunners is just a great introductions…
Also its just one of the best shows ever put to Netflix.
“Should I play Cyberpunk: RED?”
Ugh… do you have to?
No actually that’s a serious question… if you’re buddy went out and bought the book and wants to play it… well its not a betrayal.
Cyberpunk: RED isn’t D&D 4.0 where you’ll actively be fighting against the game to experience anything resembling the classic RPG…
But its not the classic experience either.
First off the art is passable, not super cool, but not cringe like 3.0:
But lets focus on the heart and soul of what made Cyberpunk special…
If I were to describe the problem with RED in one word it’d be “Abstracted”
The lifepath system is there, it actually takes up vastly more pages… but the uniqueness is gone… EVERYONE has a family crisis…no one has siblings… friends and enemies are a straight role…
The original lifepath system you rolled for your age, then had life events equal to the years you’d been alive… Some of these would give you friends or ex lovers, but some would kill off an established character in your story or saddle you with debts, or problems… It actually told a story of your character.
You could get a character with 8 biological siblings who’d all been raised in foster homes. You could get a single child of wealthy corpos who were together… you could get someone who’d had a new disasterous love affair every year for 10 years… Hell you could say “I’m going to be a 60 year old addict!” And roll up a hobo with 44 life events, who’s seen everything, has dozens of enemies, is millions in debt, and has repo men gunning for at least 8 kidneys when he only has half of one… Ya, You could play as Frank Gallagher from Shameless… hell you could play as Peter Griffin.
RED just doesn’t lend itself to high level play like this.
And then there’s Friday Night Firefight…
They still call it FNFF… but its not.
Remember what Pondsmith said about combat in modern settings:
There’s a lot of vague ideas and theories about modern weapons encounters—most of them from the Hollywood Never-Empty-Six-Gun School of Armed Combat. These misconceptions have crept on little flat feet into the design of many roleplaying games, leading to characters who can be repeatedly shot with large caliber handguns until they run out of “hit points”
His entire combat system was built around not being like this, around having realistic wound ballistics, where you’d need to be cybered up or skilled to enter repeated gun fights and make it out…
Well Cyberpunk: RED uses a hit point system where characters can be shot multiple times by large caliber handguns until they run out of “Hitpoints”.
Now to be fair, your basic human doesn’t get a lot of hit-points… maybe 20-40 on average, and a heavy pistol does 4d6 damage… which is 24 max.
But, there is no scenario whatsoever where a single small caliber 9mm 2d6 could kill a character… You can repeat the scenario of you character getting shot point blank by a 9mm 10,000 times and there is just nothing the dice could do that would kill your character.
Now to be fair again… they do have a critical injury effect… anytime 2 d6 both roll 6 while dealing damage, the character suffers a critical injury… And LOOK right there #6: Broken jaw!
So what do you know, you could get the Ayaan storyline out of CP: RED… except the fact she almost died seems like a really important part of the story… You know as it should be when we’re talking about an ordinary human being getting shot point blank in the face.
Also… is a broken jaw the same thing as having the whole Jaw ripped off? The CP:RED critical injury table for limbs refers to dismemberment in some of its effects… but the fact that its 100% not potentially lethal really limits what you’re going to imagine…
In CP:2020 Ayaan having her jaw ripped off is the DM being merciful and coming up with a way to spare her a potential fatality… in CP:RED its being vastly crueler than what the rules state.
Now don’t get the wrong impression CP:2020 has a million and one ways to keep your character alive… hell you can invest in combat kit, skills, and good planning and you could probably do it without Cyberware… Invest heavily in your combat skills, buy a full MetalGear suit, get a nanokatana, and you could absolutely do an organics only run like Sam from MGS:Revengeance (no the CP:2020 metal gear suit and Kojima’s Metal Gear are completely unrelated)
CP:2020 isn’t some super hard killer game… but there’s real risk to everything. Sure you’ll almost certainly win the gunfights that you’re set up to… but there’s always the chance that a cascade of bad die rolls will kill you, or destroy a leg just as you need to run away.
So ya I definitely recommend 2020 over RED… maybe home rule the setting or use the RED setting, or a CP 2077 world guide to move 2020 into the future (or hell just play CP:2020 set in your nearest city in the world of 2020 they never retconned it… 2077 has flashbacks to 2023)
But ya CP:2020 is the real masterpiece and you’ll get vastly more out of it than you will out of red.
Two years later
The harvester Job was a success.
Then there was the matter with the Forlorn Hope, the business with the Osiris Chip, the entire affair with the Night city stalker, the Infocom Extraction…
Ayaan was rich now… or at least what she considered rich.
Her little sister was doing well, she’s even been on speaking terms lately.
Ayaan messaged her siblings trying to keep tabs on them, get them all together for a family meal… she was trying to get custody of the few who were still under 18 and at the foster home. She had the money for the legal work, and she had the right people owing her favours… it just took so much time.
Her father was set for parole in 6 months to a year and Ayaan was trying to get that moved up… getting a real legal guardian out would speed things along.
Her mother on the other hand had been moved to ad-seg. Another inmate had jumped her with a shiv and tried gut her like a fish. Her mom had basically won the fight… just a few dozen stiches, nothing life threatening or that’d fuck up her organs. But it moved things back.
The lawyer said it was open and shut self-defense, there was no way it’d extend her sentence… but her sentence still had years left on it, and parole could be missed and missed again over things like this.
Whoever had put her parents away fucked them good, no matter how much Ayaan earned it seemed mere money couldn’t get them commuted to time served… someone had either paid the right people very well or was still watching the file.
It’d take the right pull with the right person to solve this… and Ayaan thought she had found just the person. A Night City Councilor had an issue with a Millitech VP, and had contacted Rocco to get it resolved…
Ayaan stared at herself in the mirror, puckered her lips, wiggled them back and forward… they felt so real.
Her babyface was gone, she had the high cheekbones of a fashionista, the kind that made her eyes pop. She ran her hand over the perfectly clear synth-skin and could barely detect the Kevlar skin-weave underneath… It’d take far more than some low caliber relic to break the skin now. Not that it’d matter if it did.
She used her neural-link to activate the release, and pulled the jaw structure from her face. she set it down on the mantle and flexed her cheek muscles. She watched the lips in front of her pucker as she reached forward with the lipstick.
Just one last job.
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Wasn't expecting a longform post on the value of verisimilitude in RPG worldbuilding from you, but here we are. I agree that it's the mundane stuff that cements a fictional place as one you can mentally inhabit without suspending disbelief to the point that the imaginary world around you looks like PS1 graphics, so to speak.
With that thought and what I gather are your tastes in mind--take a moment to check out the Mothership RPG, and specifically the setting/adventure book "A Pound of Flesh".
Thanks for that trip down memory lane. CP:2020 was by far my favorite RPG when I was a kid ... less cumbersome than D&D, and it felt more real than Shadowrun, for all that the latter had its moments. I always felt like CP got overlooked - no novelizations like Shadowrun or the various D&D worlds, just the rule books. But there was something so deeply compelling about it, the way that world seemed just around the corner, for better or for worse ... simultaneously horrifying and seductive.
As those milestone years of 2013 and 2020 came, I found myself checking back in with the game timeline, to compare. Obviously, we don't have the cool tech, nothing even close to it, and society hasn't collapsed entirely. Yet in so many ways it feels prescient. We're nowhere near people deliberately becoming cyborgs (RFID chips notwithstanding), but some of the prosthetic hands out there are getting remarkably good. Paralympic athletes are sometimes outperforming those with fully organic bodies. Cybereyes are being developed. Our security services are full of juicers with physiques training alone can't create ... and mercenary armies are becoming larger and more terrifyingly competent. It often feels like Pondsmith wasn't wrong, he was just a little premature.