One of my players has it and looks ok really. Im not seeing what the complaint is over? Whats supposedly wrong with it?

Quote from: tenbones;970207Hah! but it does balance out in it's own weird way. Johnny Silverhand gets slagged. Morgan Blackhand, the posterboy to Substance vs. Silverhands Style, is the one that survives. Even in their thin metaplot, reality asserts itself. But! Silverhand is the one that is still remembered most.

When I was first reading the core rules, I thought that COOL and Attractiveness would be more important to the game than they turned out to be-- especially the latter. The latter seems more like a charisma dump stat.

Quote from: Ronin;123782Yeah this is one I have struggled with my self. I never played a net runner, and none of my players every did either. I theory it should be just as high pace as any combat. (obviously depending on the situation)  But in practice I have not been able to achieve that myself.

Most of the time, my players made combat characters, but if I were running 2020 today, I think I would lean towards netrunners being like D&D thieves who use wifi to hack electronic locks and cameras and leave the matrix part out of it. Just make it a simple skill roll and move on.
Maybe put an ICE encounter on an important hack.

*Edit* I am not ashamed to fall for a necro!

We played a year-long game of CP2020 with PC cops (using Protect and Serve) and our four-man group was regularly losing characters. The game is plenty lethal.

Quote from: ArrozConLeche;970317When I was first reading the core rules, I thought that COOL and Attractiveness would be more important to the game than they turned out to be-- especially the latter. The latter seems more like a charisma dump stat.

Depends how you run your game. I've had players using the Rockerboy variant - the Rabble-rouser, start gigantic riots and all kinds of mayhem to cover the group's real criminal shenanigans. Media reporter PC's on the street creating their own news via the groups adventures and serializing it for guerrilla networks. The money he generated became a big part of the groups finances as well as enhancing their street-cred. It didn't stop the action, it gave rise to it.

Attractiveness originally turned out to be the big dumpstat. Because PC's, once they had the money, could raise their Attractiveness rating through surgery. So when a couple of players went that route, I treated them accordingly as 1-attractiveness people in a world that valued beauty and style. Making that money was a lot harder when no one wants to work with you because you're fugly as fuck. So in that regard, it made for interesting gaming. They got what they wanted. I got what I wanted. Fun stuff.

Cool is a stat that I used frequently for social situations. They used to have Cool checks in CP2016 when things got dicey. It affected your reactions (penalties) to represent fear, gunshock etc. People that dumped cool in my games did poorly in firefights. So that's how I reigned that in. Likewise I treated characters with high Cool ratings as just that - cool. Low Cool PC's were treated uncool. I never had much problems afterwards heh.

Quote from: Voros;970278I mostly remember the cyborg stuff, language and guns. Now that I have the Core book again I'm looking forward to revisting it. How did y'all find its netrunning/hacking rules? I don't recall them but they're usually the weak point of most cyberpunk RPGs in my experience.

Netrunning is really it's own thing. Basically you could go full-consciousness into the net. Your deck carried programs (they acted like spells), and interacted directly with constructs in the net, including other netizens, and even programs.

The key thing I found most people ignored was that people assume only Netrunners could actually do netruns. It's true Netrunners were far more powerful (they could access the Menu which was the tools that allowed them to hack the algorithms that governed the environment of the Net itself), non-Netrunners could still be useful. The key here is Netrunners could react much faster, use their programs. Granted non-netrunners with the Programming Skill could create programs. They could do anything most people assume only Netrunners could do programming-wise. They just can't use them as effectively.

Overall though the problem was that Netrunning was a game within a game. It sidelined most other players that weren't skilled at it. And it detracted from gameplay. While fun in itself - I always wanted to do a Netrunner-only campaign. I never got around to it. I chalk up the design to good intentions, bad unintended results, though there are redeeming qualities to it.

Quote from: tenbones;970357Netrunning is really it's own thing. Basically you could go full-consciousness into the net. Your deck carried programs (they acted like spells), and interacted directly with constructs in the net, including other netizens, and even programs.

I really liked that aspect of the setting and felt like a lot more could be done with it as a bizarre Dreamland setting that would draw in a big chunk of the populace. Was it CP2020 that had all the mods for customizing the VR appearance of the Net experience?

Quote from: Simlasa;970424I really liked that aspect of the setting and felt like a lot more could be done with it as a bizarre Dreamland setting that would draw in a big chunk of the populace. Was it CP2020 that had all the mods for customizing the VR appearance of the Net experience?

Don't think so on the VR part. CP2020 you could make your avatar look like anything you wanted. Same with Datafortresses. But yeah - otherwise it was basically a setting within a setting.

If I were to "fix" it - I'd give more options for non-Netrunners to go there. I'd include concepts from Interface Zero as well to "streamline" general hacking vs. doing the full datafortress infiltration that would require the more in-depth mechanics of the CP2020 netrunning rules. This would give Netrunners more stuff to do outside of the net (though they did have rules for doing mini-netruns to hack smart-guns etc. they were too cumbersome).

This might get into non-game interference and super-minutiae, the biggest contradiction for me was the economic reality of the game. Especially lensed through modern era economics. The reality is that the world of CP2020 would have imploded into far worse of a situation than it ended up being had the events of the setting happened in succession as they did.

- Limited nuclear exchange wiping out the majority of the middle-east and slagging instantly the oil-reserves?
- civil war in the US, leading to the economic collapse of the largest economy in the world?
- South American meltdown with brushfire wars
- International corporate warfare

These things *alone* would have plunged the world into a stagnant hellhole. Granted... that's most of the fun in how they surreptitiously replaced a lot of these things going into a quasi-post-scarcity society using hydrogen-based hybrid fuel. Either way, the setting is magnificent and fun as hell to play with.

Quote from: tenbones;970429Don't think so on the VR part. CP2020 you could make your avatar look like anything you wanted. Same with Datafortresses. But yeah - otherwise it was basically a setting within a setting.

Maybe I'm thinking of Cyberspace for Spacemaster... like, it had a mods that would interpret everything into film noir visuals or a shiny-glowy Tronland... and there was a blackmarket one that put a Lovecraft twist on it.

QuoteIf I were to "fix" it - I'd give more options for non-Netrunners to go there.

I kind assumed advances in tele-dildonics would have made it into a Second Life playground of VR avatars... green rabbits in orgies with chinese ogres and elaborate Furry games.

Quote from: Voros;970034Necroing this thread to let everyone know that Cyberpunk 2020 is up on Bundle of Holding.

Ooooh! :cool: Should I plunge? Is the How To DMG really that epic?

I already got black hack Mirrorshades and I am tempted to get this. You know, I can end up in full cyberpsychosis trying to chase the sublime experience that is the movie Nemesis. Is it worth it? :cool:

I'd say so, it is a bit crunch heavy as I recall like most 80s/90s games but there's lots to like too and the source books are good for fluff mining. I've heard good things about the GM book, from CKrueger I believe, but haven't read it myself yet.

I *highly* recommend the "How To GM" (Listen up, you Primitive Screwheads!) - it obviously is slanted towards Cyberpunk, but it is rock solid for GMing period.

My current players in Edge of the Empire mine the Chromebooks for cybertech (they also mine the Shadowrun books too - don't feel left out, Cyber-Elves). It's worth owning.

Gotta double down on that Listen Up! You primative screwheads!  Recommendation.  There is very little CP specific advice and hands down it is one of the best sources for GMing advice I've ever seen. One thing that it avoids is one-tru-wayism. There are some four or five authors, each gets a whole chapter, and they explain how they handle various issues rather than giving a list of proscriptions or, for that matter, claiming that certain types of players are 'trouble', as so many other games did back then (and I assume still do!).

Its like it takes the idea of giving advice seriously and it does just that, gives advice, and its peppered with examples from the writers own experiences.

Quote from: Simlasa;970439Maybe I'm thinking of Cyberspace for Spacemaster... like, it had a mods that would interpret everything into film noir visuals or a shiny-glowy Tronland... and there was a blackmarket one that put a Lovecraft twist on it.

I kind assumed advances in tele-dildonics would have made it into a Second Life playground of VR avatars... green rabbits in orgies with chinese ogres and elaborate Furry games.

In Shadowrun your cyberdeck could have a custom reality filter that imposed your own VR experience over the one of the system you connected to.