Differences between Cyberpunk 2013 and Cyberpunk 2020
jburneko:
So, I feel like this should be a legitimate Forge question but I'm uncertain how to ground it in AP. So I'll ask my question then share some experiences and maybe we can figure out how to marry the two.
What I want to know is are there any significant differences between the 1st (Cyberpunk 2013) and 2nd (Cyberpunk 2020) editions that would make it worth while to track down the 1st edition? The 2nd edition is available in .pdf form on sites like RPG now.
I ask because I've been wanting to take a second more "mature" look at the game. I first encountered the game at a convention when I was about 14 or so. The scenario was setup such that it was a mission/team based game that suddenly turned into an every man for himself PvP game in the second half. Basically what happened was we were told that we were after some McGuffin (I don't even remember what it was) but the GM took each of us outside the room one by one for a short private chat in which he told each of us what our character's private secret agenda for the McGuffin was. In the end my character died when another PC through a grenade in my car and it blew up. I thought that was really cool. And I thought the first act team/second act PvP element was really clever.
This made me want to take a closer look at the game. I think 2020 was already out at the time but for whatever reason I wanted the earlier box set with the three little booklets in it and that's what I got. I really had NO IDEA how to play the game AT ALL. Things I remember:
I was really fascinated by the Empathy mechanic and how you lost Empathy by taking on more cyberware. I was very enamored with the idea of cyber-psychosis. I think I began my very first game with an almost Terminator like cyber-crazed monster smashing his way out of the psych ward at a hospital.
The life path stuff was interesting and a source of endless discussion about character ownership with my friends.
I was really surprised at how deadly the combat was. I remember my players were driving somewhere and I had a biker gang attempt to carjack them. One guy put a chainsaw through the roof and basically instantly killed one of the PCs..... oops.
The third thing I remember is really liking the "dungeon crawl" aspect of computer hacking and the way you could have different flavored representations of the virtual world. I remember wanting to figure out how to set whole story lines just in there. I also remember kind of being obsessed with "bigger is better" and creating vast labyrinthine computer networks much like a 100 room dungeon in D&D. Looking back that seems really foolish and today I would be happy with just one or two little "rooms" for some neat hacking surrealism.
So yeah, that's my experience. So, is 2020 that different from the 1st edition?
Jesse
Eero Tuovinen:
I've never seen the first edition, and am also interested in this question because I think that Cyberpunk 2020 is a very, very fine game. Out of all the games we played through my teenage years I'd say that Cyberpunk got us the farthest in many ways.
Did the first edition have those character classes? Each character gets a class like Cop or Rocker or Journalist or Decker or Drifter whatever. That's my absolutely favourite part of 2020, seldom has there been a game that basically takes a bunch of dramatic settings, distills each into a character class and tells you to play it. For me, both originally and especially in retrospect, Cyberpunk is a game in which the character class you choose drives the campaign to such a degree that any GM-provided mission pales next to it; we didn't really do the expected team-based mission thing with this game simply because that didn't make any sense with these flavourful character classes, you know? It would have been like putting Dr. House and Vic Mackey and Spider Jerusalem into a team and telling them to go steal some corporation shit - why ever would those people, who each have their own lives and concerns and an entire genre of stories to star in go do a mission for hard cash, instead? Thinking about it now, the character classes were certainly a source of both inspiration and consternation; the game worked best for us when we had one strong character personage in whose case we allowed the genre expectations related to that character's world to reign fully, while everybody else would be diminished into sidekicks who basically tagged along because that's what you did at that time in gaming - no technology for non-party-based play, I might say.
(In hindsight it seems pretty obvious to me that the designer's intent in the game was not that we would take those character classes seriously. Being a journalist would mean that the character was a journalist once upon a time perhaps, and still has those contacts, but now he's supposed to be an unemployed street punk hungry for money and willing to jump through whatever hoops the GM provides with his friends, who just happen to be from all walks of life themselves, but similarly stranded. We just didn't have the context to understand that, so instead rockers rocked, drifters drifted, deckers decked and solos - well, Solos of course did the jump-through-hoops thing, because that's their job.)
Aside from that you list elements that are all familiar to me from the second edition. Doesn't sound like the game changed radically on the way from the first to second edition.
d.anderson:
In 2013, the character's Skills were mostly determined by the random-roll Lifepath; in 2020, they were mostly determined by the character's Career. This seemed to be a big deal. I don't remember very well, since I only played once in 2013 and a few sessions in 2020.
Darcy Burgess:
Hi Jesse,
2013 is probably my second-most played game, right after 2020.
Some folks have touched on some major differences: the skill points, the lethality of 2013 (holy crap, yes!) the netrunning (2013's dungeon-crawl netrunning had much quicker in handling time, and could be executed in parallel with meat-world actions pretty effectively).
Another big difference was that 2013's Solos' Combat Sense added to all of the Solos' combat rolls. To hit. To dodge. Ew. 2013 Solos were seriously in a league of their own.
Oh yeah, in 2013 you could dodge gunfire, just like dodging a sword.
Those are the biggies.
D
Ron Edwards:
My play-experience is solely with the first edition, which we didn't call "2013" at the time, only "Cyberpunk." I think it's worth describing it physically, too. For a game which billed itself as the leading conceptual edge in setting and vision of play at the time (and not a totally vain claim either), it was presented in a radically retro package: three extremely low-tech black stapled pamphlets in a black box. The toner smeared off the covers of the booklets if you rubbed them too hard. My copy is from the first print run which not only had some significant errata, but lacked the errata insert.
I've talked with people on and off over the years about later versions of the game and can provide the generalizations they've told me, or that we arrived at through comparison.
1. There was only the barest implication that characters would be a mercenary team working for a corporate employer. The most significant corporation in the setting, Arasaka, was posed almost exclusively as an enemy for player-characters. One nod toward "the party" was the suggestion that the players be on the same Trauma Team squad, basically a small flying M*A*S*H unit that was supposed to land in some kind of open confrontation like a gang war and try to help the downed people while killing the ones still standing. The merc-team idea gets floated here and there in the setting book, but the most consistently stated or implied "way to play" was that the characters were nonconformists, punk not only in look but in attitude, who would consistently combat the oppressive corporations and conformist society ... albeit being themselves wholly committed to fashion, profit, and technology, absent any critical reflection about that.
My God, even writing that and trying to recapture its ethos as we perceived it at the time ... I feel so eighties all of a sudden. Anyway. My point is that the idea of the characters as a "group" was consistently assumed, but what that group was in in-setting terms was not consistently presented, and certainly not in practical terms of how to arrive at that status either before or during play. If you weren't attentive to that (even if in the most simple sense of having the same NPC trying to kill everyone), then the colorful and content-backed backgrounds would be at odds with the planned "adventure for the group."
A lot of the supplements I have, including a set of canned short scenarios, presented a different working assumption, the basic Traveller notion, and Shadowrun too, that the group is a freelance team of mercs working for corporate or government powers. Somehow, in those scenarios, they were also supposed to be sort-of moral voices in the story too, which is probably why their employers were so consistently fixated on killing them about two-thirds of the way through each one.
2. The Empathy rules for cybertech were stringent. Characters had to beware loading up too heavily, because only a few points lost led to radically limited behavior constraints. My understanding of 2020 is that characters could sport a lot more implants and limb replacements and skill-chips and stuff like that. In the first version of the game, two solid bits of cyberware were about as far as you could practically go.
3. The Lifepaths produced very neurotic, soap-opera ridden characters, delightfully so if that's what you were looking for. And my play-partners and I definitely were. I tentatively speculate that the later editions lifepaths were somewhat less emotionally grubby, but I have not compared them directly. I could well be wrong about that.
Other comments
Eero, your post reads like you were channeling your 14-year-old self! Are you really so enthralled by character classes? You wrote,
Quote
... seldom has there been a game that basically takes a bunch of dramatic settings, distills each into a character class and tells you to play it.
Um ... one of those games was called "Dungeons & Dragons." At least for those of us who read the Fafhrd & Mouser stories before encountering role-playing, what you're describing is exactly what "Assassin" or "Thief" or "Magic-User" did, or really any of the character classes except "Cleric."
Less critically, you make a good point which reveals that we have three working-models for playing Cyberpunk which I suspect were never really worked out in the text, rather than the two I was thinking of.
- the implied malcontent, rebellious model, which the game text implies would produce a short story along the lines of Johnny Mnemonic or Burning Chrome; how you actually did that in terms of prepping play was spotty at best
- the ragtag band of strapped, but spunky teammates from diverse backgrounds, looking for money and adventure or thrown together through common adversity, which I think of as the practical default model of play in the first game, at least via omission of any other useful options that respected the backgrounds
- the Shadowrun model of the crack freelance mercs dealing with complicated missions and untrustworthy employers *; the textual Trauma Team suggestion seems to fit this model as well; both of these seem to downplay the diverse backgrounds
* I'm using Shadowrun here for reference only, not making any claim at all about whether the model originated with it (it didn't) or had a specific directional influence on later Cyberpunk publishing, which I don't know, yea or nay.
Actual play
In the late 1980s, my friends Sonia and Ed and I played the Space version of Rolemaster, adapting in technology and various thematic content from sources like Neuromancer and Blade Runner. My character was a tough Mexican guy named Rico, with venom sacs built into his foreams that exuded drugs and poisons from his fingertips. I spoke OK Spanish and traveled around in Central America back then, so was really into the look & feel. Ed basically tried to kill us with some corporate-political NPC guy and then engineered a path of clues to a fight in an abandoned office building or apartment block or something, where we blew the guy up.
But then Cyberpunk was published, and I started running it as much as possible, combining players from the two Champions games I was in (one as GM, one not). Ed made up a bearded Rocker with a broad English accent and a crucifixion tattoo on his always-bare chest. Geez, I just flashed back on some player dialogue. Ed's character had just survived a desperate fight of some kind in a bathroom, where he then took a piss. "Did you wash your hands first?" asked Ken, another player. Ed said no. "Then you have blood on your dick." Ed replied, I thought quite brilliantly, in-accent, "Wouldn't be the first time." You didn't get this dialogue in D&D and Champions play without disrupting play, or at least I didn't. Sonia played a Solo hot babe with cyber-type vampire teeth, which again was before all kinds of Goth Vampire Gaming obsessions became widespread and hence was pretty cool. (Also, Sonia had special SF-intellectual cachet having read Neuromancer ages and ages before any of the rest of us had heard of it.) Ran played Malcolm (the only character name I remember), a Media punked-out rogue reporter type, who had the same monowire slice-your-head gadget as the heavy in Johnny Mnemonic, except that it was his middle finger. Ran took the new LARPer ideas relatively seriously and wore his mirrorshades, black jacket, and fingerless gloves at every play session. Ken played a Fixer, very ganged-up and mobbed-up with a lot of complicated romantic baggage, and he made the character especially effective by playing him with a mild, even slightly wimpy voice in front of some good rolls and consequential actions.
I really want to emphasize how down & dirty these characters felt to us. This was perhaps my first game where every single person in the room came to play, for this very game and system, for this very setting, for this particular combination of people, in that Ed and Sonia on one hand trusted me to have brought similarly-minded people from "the other group," and Ken and Ran did likewise. We knew from the start that nailing our characters and the genre was our immediate aesthetic goal, or rather pathway, toward making stuff happen in a sense beyond simply "observing an adventure from the inside."
I learned a lot from running the game. First, since I totally threw out the "team" notion, I did something I'd thought about but never tried before, which was to begin by having all the characters wake up in the back of a van with bags over their heads. I was influenced in this by the famous fourth adventure in the AD&D Slave Lords series, "In the Dungeons of the Slave Lords," where all these pretty-tough mid-level characters begin naked and almost spell-less in the bottom of a dungeon. My point was not to disadvantage the characters so the players couldn't refuse an upcoming offer of employment. Instead, I said to myself, they're in the shit, and I have some foes and a lot of back-story, but I really really do not have any planned notion for how they're going to get out of their immediate crisis, or for what they'll do next. I think it may have been my first major GMing leap without a plot-oriented safety net.
Second, I dug deeply into each character's back-story for nearly every component of the scenario, using almost every NPC in the histories and generally not having hardly anything in the scenario except for them, meaning the player-characters. I'd done similar things with Champions, but here I dialed down my intended plot a bit more than usual. The first news is good, in that it worked. But I also discovered that there's a hard limit to how much linking-in a viable story can stand. If every player-character related NPC is used, and if every NPC is one of them, then play begins to feel too tight, too contrived. I learned this when Ken groaned aloud and threw a sock at me when he found that the crucial link in the information chain they were investigating was
Third, I tried to avoid the climactic fight showdown, and if I remember correctly, the climax was actually a musical performance/assault sent out over satellite, raw rock passion pitted against advertising glitz and disinformation. Although some kind of personal violence was involved too, to be sure, although I can't recall what.
Playing the first version of Cyberpunk was liberating, although not free of some problems and older habits in my case. It played an enormous role in designing Sorcerer, which I began to do within the next few months. Hold up that box of booklets, the first edition of Over the Edge, and the very old original Wizard from 1978, and you are looking at Sorcerer's system-lineage. (Add the original Stormbringer and some notions from The Whispering Vault and Zero for other influences, too.)
Best, Ron
P.S. Editing this in: All references to the story Johnny Mnemonic in this post are specifically to the short story by William Gibson, nothing to do whatsoever to the movie of the same name.
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