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Role Playing (Games)

Cyberpunk 203X Coming Soon 42

Posted by Zonk from the one-of-them-tabletop-games dept.
Pax00 writes "R. Talsorian released Cyberpunk 2013 and 2020 in the 90's, and it quickly became one of the most popular sf roleplaying settings of all time. There has been talk of a new version for years. The new version is almost out and there is a pdf preview from R. Talsorian, along with an interview with Mike Pondsmith on the forthcoming book." From the interview: "Shelf date is February (I hope). What you can expect: Cyberpunk with the gain turned up. Night City is now the largest City in the world. The Net has collapsed, but there are new net things even cooler. Rival groups (including the megacorps) are vying for world control. There are new cybertechnologies that reflect the changes in the genre. New weapons, new tech, new characters, new goals. Netrunners, rockers and solos will still be around, but in multiple forms depending on the altcult."
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Cyberpunk 203X Coming Soon More

Cyberpunk 203X Coming Soon

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  • For those of you asking WTF... (Score:4, Informative)

    by forkazoo ( 138186 ) <wrosecrans AT gmail DOT com> on Saturday January 08, 2005 @05:18PM (#11299687) Homepage
    A little googling brought me here, http://www.cyberpunk2020.de/

    This seems to be a pretty informative site aboute the current release. Any players care to talk about the previous CyberPunk games, and what makes them so special?

    • Re:For those of you asking WTF... (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Only ever played the 2020 release. It was nice - one of the only cyberpunk rpgs at the time, and in my view, a pretty damn good play.

      Shadowrun was a little too fantasy-mixed for my tastes, and I had no experience of the GURPS cyberpunk system - so I'll ignore that :)

      It was simple, but with all the cyberpunk elements you'd expect from books of the same genre. It had a dark sense of humour to it, and at the time was a nice break from the AD&D cycle of constant revisions and expansion books...
      (Though it
      • Except the system was invariably unplayable because of the stacking armour system.

        You could easily and cheaply buy and wear enough armour to make you invulnerable to any weapon smaller than a 7.62 calibre round, and even then it would take several clips from such a weapon to seriously hurt you. They do not appear to have modified this in the new release.

        I recommend D20:Modern, and possibly the Blood and Guts:Modern Military books.

    • Re:For those of you asking WTF... (Score:5, Informative)

      by Bishop ( 4500 ) on Saturday January 08, 2005 @07:27PM (#11300559)
      Cyberypunk2020 has a great back story. The world is dark and dangerous. The writers did a good job of capturing the feel of William Gibson's early cyberpunk works (Neuromancer and related short stories), elements of Blade Runner, and bits of Max Headroom. The world had most of the elements needed for a good RPG. Characters have to struggle against staggering opposition, but characters had the potential to become minor gods. There was one missing element that I will discuss below.

      The mechanics of the game were not very good. I never had a chance to see the original rules, but I did have the v2 rules. I was told that the v2 rules were a major improvement, which does not bode well for original. The rules were combersome and as I recall some parts felt tact on. I will freely admit that I only played the game briefly. Perhaps experience made the mechanics work more smoothly. There was a "port" of Cyberpunk 2020 to GURPS.

      GURPS is well refined set of game mechanics. However I am not sure it was an improvement. In all RPGs the game mechanics have a large effect on the style or feel of the game. The mechanics must be crafted to reflect the game world or the game won't work. All games I saw based on GURPS felt like GURPS. Some element of the game world was lost.

      Despite the problems I don't think that Cyberpunk 2020 v2 mechanics were that bad. There are worse systems. As a game I think that Cyberpunk was only missing one element that prevented it from being a great game: Cyberpunk 2020 was not a fantasy RPG. Nearly all RPGs set in present-day and future worlds suffer from the same problem. It is hard to be a hero when anyone can pick up a Desert Eagle or equivalent and take the hero down.

      The Cyberpunk 2020 game world was special. It captured the essence of the bleak cyberpunk dystopia. As a game Cyberpunk 2020 was not that special.
      • This has me intersted. As I said just minutes ago, the biggest turn off for me with RPGs was not they gameplay, which was enjoyable, but the fantasy setting, which isn't my cup'o'tea. Seems almost cliche to be a dwarf lord, or now, post WoW, a dark elf.
      • Cyberpunk 2020 was not a fantasy RPG.

        You may have better enjoyed CyberGeneration, which I've heard described as "Cyberpunk Light" or "CyberKids". There was less concentration on death (not that it was entirely without death) and more on getting caught. Less on facing the dominance of megacorporations and more on figuring out what the heck's going on. I thought the classes were a bit silly, but they helped for me put a lighter edge to the darkness.

        Unless by "fantasy" you mean that more experienced char
        • "fantasy" you mean that more experienced characters can walk through a mob that would once have killed them ten times over

          That is one aspect of fantasy and it is an element that is missing from Cyberpunk2020. I would not say that adding this element to cyberpunk is impossible. It is just very hard.

          I agree that in cyberpunk life is supposed to be cheap. It is central to the theme. The game mechanics should reflect that with a deadly combat system. From a theme point of view I like the Cyberpunk2020 combat
      • There was a "port" of Cyberpunk 2020 to GURPS.

        GURPS Cyberpunk was an entirely different product from Cyberpunk 2020; GURPS Cyberpunk was a typical GURPS genrebook, and was not a conversion of Cyberpunk2020 nor a licensed product.
      • It is hard to be a hero when anyone can pick up a Desert Eagle or equivalent and take the hero down.

        Did you ever play the game? With armour stacking rules, you've made some seriously foolish choices if you could be hurt by something as small as a Deagle. D20 modern is much more lethal.
        • hmm, the revised version i have sitting on a shelf here contains some (optional) rules to combat this problem. the first one makes more armor lowers your reflexes. the second one basicly limits you to two sets, one hard and one soft...
          • Yep... unfortunately in the game, some soft armours go up to at least 20 and hard armours are of course higher than that. Lower reflexes are not penalising enough to balance out the fact that someone can empty a clip from an M16 into you and you can shrug it off.

            Essentially RTals tried to make Cyberpunk like a fantasy game, where the heroes are very hard to kill. In Cyberpunk, life is cheap, money is priceless.
  • since the basic premise for the game:
    Night City is now the largest City in the world. The Net has collapsed, but there are new net things even cooler. Rival groups (including the megacorps) are vying for world control.

    seems pretty much like what I read on the news [cnn.com] every day, you know?

  • Netrunner was a cool game (Score:3, Interesting)

    by xenocide2 ( 231786 ) on Saturday January 08, 2005 @06:39PM (#11300278) Homepage
    Netrunner was pretty cool. It had a great style and theme, and the game was well balanced (mostly), despite the fact that the two players had vastly different goals, and means of achieving them. No side is ever out of the runnnig and at a huge disadvantage. What Netrunner boiled down to is taking risks and bluffing, whereas Magic comes down to rules lawyering, buying expensive cards, and painstaking attention to deck contruction principles.

    The true barriers to mass market appeal is that it had to compete with Magic, and there weren't many obvious multiplayer rules. I'd be interested to see the Netrunner concepts turned into a game somehow, but I can never get my head around how to drop the card concept.

    • Re:Netrunner was a cool game (Score:4, Insightful)

      by funkhauser ( 537592 ) <{zmmay2} {at} {uky.edu}> on Saturday January 08, 2005 @07:11PM (#11300485) Homepage Journal
      I agree with you in regards to Netrunner. It was a fantastic game. But your complaints about Magic are rather off base.

      In all three cases, if Netrunner had become an extremely popular game with an established competitive scene, you would see that (1) rules lawyering would be necessary to ensure legitimate competition (2) the cards would end up as expensive as Magic cards and (3) to maximize ones competitive chances, theoretically sound deck construction principles would have to be developed and "painstaking" attention would need to be paid to them.

      Other than that, yeah. It's a shame Netrunner failed. It really was a brilliant game in my opinion.

      • Netrunner did have an established competitive scene, and the most popular decks were largely rare void. "The Digger" sought to make a run on R&D so deep that it found 7 points worth of agenda in a single run. The deck is based on uncommon and commons, mostly R&D chips and moles. The corp decks are usually take one of two tactics: tag n bag, and turbo agendas. Neither of these need rares to survive. The only killer rare that I can recall is Loan from Chiba, and that got banned pretty quickly (there's
        • Interesting insight into the upper levels of Netrunner strategy. Admittedly, I never played it at anything more than a casual level.

          Nevertheless, I think my points hold. Netrunner's competitive scene certainly never grew to the point of Magic's. If it had, I think you would have seen the key uncommons (and to a lesser extent commons) have the same kind of value inflation as key Magic uncommons.

          Take for example the Magic card Fact or Fiction. It was just an uncommon, but was an extremely important card i

          • Its not that the rares are useless, they're just not vital in light of the heavy deck searching mechanisms available, especially for runners. Most of the rares have interesting or unusual (like a wall that does damage) side effects that are difficult to plan for and occasionally unreliable (Quest for Catakin). That doesn't make them unplayable, but you might want to keep in mind that sealed deck play is considered an equally challenging and worthwhile tourney format. There's still plenty of "shit rares," bu

  • Hmm. (Score:1)

    by Tragek ( 772040 )
    I've never been a big RPGer, however, the main reason behind that was that I was never huge on the fantasy setting. Perhaps this RPG is for me...
    • there is more to rpg then fantasy. lately wotc have been produceing a line of books based on the d20 system used in d&d but set to around modern times, called d20 modern. add to that d20 future and you have everything from spaceships to mecha and cyberware. they are allso working on a d20 past, one that i guess will cover everything from the age of gunpowder on up.

      there is allso gurps, a generic system where you can play anything from fantasy and horror to sci-fi and similar. recently came out in a 4th
  • They require a set of friends, physically in the same place as you, all of whom enjoy cyberpunk AND RPG's AND have time to spend with you.

    1. I have no real friends.

    2. Everyone where I work is not only not a hacker or interested in hacking or sci fi, but in fact is completely, hopelessly square. As in "they only work in IT because the pay is good, they're actually just the business-major crowd from college" square.

    3. Even if anyone from work wasn't square, they're all old and married, and around HERE that
  • Sorry you are going to have to RTFA to get that one and know Traveller :The new era backstory
  • Sorry you are have to RTFA to get this one and know the backstory for Traveller:The new era
  • I've played both the original "2013" rules (set 25 years after when it came out in 1988) and the 2020 edition. I vastly prefer the look and feel of the original. It had a certain "DIY" attitude that fit well with the world, and the combat system came in it's own slim volume (Friday Night FireFight), and were a lot grittier and more realistic than most games (though it did have it's flaws, you couldn't ever kill someone with a .22 caliber gun). The 2nd version had some cool graphics (though I saw the cover a

  • Must be time for Cyberpunk roleplaying to come back on the scene. After playing the first Cyberpunk, CP2020, and GURPS Cyberpunk, fairly voraciously I dropped the genre around the time I left college.

    Anyone else notice that after cyberpunk, most genres got a "punk" suffix? I mean Gothic, Steam, Diesel, Splatter, Cthulhu, and probably others have all be *punked. Anyhow, after spending plenty of time running other *punk games, I went back to FRPGs. And now, after years since running a cyberpunk game, I just

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