Differences between Cyberpunk 2013 and Cyberpunk 2020
Ron Edwards:
Now you've done it, you fuckers. Look what you made me do.
As a preamble, I was wrong about the errata; they're included in the last couple pages of the book itself. Also, I remember that the player reference sheet, also very near the back, was the only place to find the Humanity Cost of cyberware, which puzzled the hell out of me the first time I read the rules, trying to find some prominently displayed list.
I decide to make a Media character, so that's starting Credibility automatically at +2. My first rolls on the Personal Style tables inform me that he wears normal clothes and has tinted hair and weird contact lenses. He's friendly and outgoing, values a piece of jewelry (seems to fit, he's striking me as a pretty boy already), values a public figure (interesting for a Media guy), and values power (whoo!).
Well, already, I'm seeing someone who's not really the hard-core anti-establishment rebel, but maybe establishment-involved, quite likely even idealistic ... and that can be the most extreme form of disestablishmentarian of all. Cool! I'm getting some ideas for his handle, but nothing quite gels yet, at least not enough to match his hair. I leave it for inspiration to strike along the way.
OK, on to the numbers. I choose the 30 + 6d6 option for character points, rolling a neat 30 for 60 total points. I allocate like so: Intelligence 8, Reflexes 4, Cool 8, Tech 5, Luck 10, Attract 8, Movement 4, Body 5, and Empathy 8. Notice the importance of starting Color: if I hadn't rolled such a twink in the initial Personal Style tables, I would have put more points into tough stuff like Reflexes for a more street-hitting journalist type.
I choose the Normal Childhood because I can't see this guy being either street or nomad even a little bit. That gives me Awareness +2 and I allocate 6 points for Athletics 1, General Knowledge 2, Teach 1, and Language 2.
The errata tell me that I don't have to roll on the Military or Street lifepaths if I don't want to, which is good, and I roll on Higher Education and make it. So I choose Human Perception 2, Seduction 2, Interview 2, Awareness 2, Photo & Film 2, and Compose/Write 2. Solid journalist stuff, plus a guy this cute has to know some romantic moves too.
I decide to go for another four years in Higher Education, and make my roll again. This time I choose Interview +2, General Knowledge +2, Language +2, Human Perception +2, Awareness +2, and Compose/Write +2. Basically boosting the whole professional thing into a functional realm.
I like this guy at 24 - he strikes me as young. So I don't opt even to try for another lifepath roll. I choose my pickup skills: Wardrobe & Style +2, Persuasion +2, Specific Knowledge +2, and Streetwise +2. Why Specific Knowledge isn't available from Higher Education, I do not know.
Life Events and Problems, next! He's 24, so that's 8 rolls, one for each year over 16.
1. You Get Lucky. Matches his Luck 10 very nicely. Turns out that he has powerful city connections, to the police chief. Well, now we know who the "public figure" he values most (as a person) is.
2. Disaster Strikes. More than one kind of luck out there, eh? He has a mental breakdown, resulting in a nervous disorder and -1 Reflexes (whoops - so much for hitting anyone, any time, any where). But this also matches nicely with him being basically a sensitive soul.
3. Lose a Friend (female). One of us betrayed or deserted the other, and the injured party avoids the other. I file this way for "develop later," but note as well that it could be combined with the Disaster above.
4. Make a Friend (female). A partner or co-worker. Cool, nice and straightforward. It's starting to look like women hang out with this guy a lot.
5. Romantic Involvement (finally!): a love affair with problems; one of us is insanely jealous. Probably the other person, given all the babes draped all over him and calling up with their problems and so on. Interesting, incidentally, that this rolled result does not include a roll for the partner's gender, unlike Friend and Enemy.
6. Romantic Involvement again! I instantly choose not to combine this with the first one, but rather that he has two current lovers. That works with the "jealous" part too. And heavens to Betsy, I get "a love affair with problems" again, based on one of us having a romantic rival. That sews our triangle together nicely.
7. Make an Enemy (female). It's a person I work for; one of us humiliated the other; the injured party verbally attacks when they meet. OK - do I combine this with other established NPCs or hold off? I hold off and wait.
8. Make an Enemy (male). It's an ex-lover. I bless the gods of lifepath dice. I muttered "not gay enough" at least twice so far, and at last my patience is rewarded. Metrosexuality and Glam R Us. Interestingly, the source of enmity is not romance but that we are professional rivals, and the injured party ignores the other.
He's not employed, which instantly gets hooked to the #7 event - clearly the boss lady fired him.
Moving on to my starting cash stash of $2000, I make a wish-list for cybertech. As a media guy, he has to have a phone link, an ECM scrambler, and a microrecorder. I see him very much as an interviewer, relationship-oriented investigator, not a clickety-click eyeball-camera type, so I go with a totally audio-oriented setup. I also think he needs chipware, specifically memoryware for knowledge chips - on the job, they handed him relevant chips to plug in while he worked on specific projects.
Can I afford all that? Why yes, I can. Jumping ahead a bit, I turn out to be over budget when I buy some more gear, so I cut back the Specific Knowledge chip to +1, for a total cost of $950. The Humanity Cost totals 4d6 +3, I roll a 15, for 18 Humanity in the hole. You lose Empathy for every 10 points of Humanity Cost, so I drop my Empathy to 7.
Speaking of other gear, I buy regular clothes for $75, an armored t-shirt (the jacket was too pricey so I cut it back), a cell phone (fucking $400?! this is the most expensive ordinary-use thing on the whole list! this phone better perform oral sex, man!), a portable bed and sleeping bag, a portable TV with recording device, a pocket computer, and a vinyl bag to put my toothbrush and grooming utensils in. With that last purchase, leaving me a whole $50 to my name, I arrive at said name all of a sudden: Pretty Butch Bryce. I figure he was played up on the job as the funny color man, the young guy who got to present the human interest bits. Until he got serious and stepped on some toes.
I do a little more thinking and diagramming about all the NPCs. First, there's the stuff with being connected to the police chief (whom he values over all other people, including all these lovers and friends!), having suffered a debilitating trauma, and being abandoned by a friend (or maybe being forced to abandon her). I can work with that a little, a real gut-wrenching dirty crime situation and maybe with a police chief who really wants to do some good and feels bad about what happened to this cub reporter, whatever it was. The friend is still around, and he avoids her; I should probably work with that a little too.
Second, there's the current romantic triangle, with the two women, one of whom is insanely jealous and the other being annoyed about having a rival. I figure he has lots of sex and lots of arguments with both of them. The older romantic relationship is with the guy, and my take is that Bryce thinks nothing of same-sex and different-sex issues - it'd all be the same to him if the various genders of his various partners were switched or all the same or whatever.
Third, there's the professional stuff. He has this co-worker female friend, and a deeply angry enemy in the female boss. For that latter, obviously she fired him in a humiliating way when he got too serious about his job, and he's ready to rip into her verbally at any opportunity. And his other enemy, the ex-lover, is a rival Media - the interesting thing again is that it's not the romance that causes them problems, but the business, and I figure that must be a matter of ideals vs. success too.
Bryce looks 100% playable to me, although he's heinously useless in a fight, so with any luck the GM takes note and doesn't prep a SWAT team game. Since he has those police connections, it'd be great if one of the other player-characters was a cop. The co-worker friend could be a Solo rather than another Media, too.
And notice another point: in reality, punk was more than half glam. This character jacks that point up to 11, and I think he fits the genre beautifully, perfectly.
Best, Ron
P.S. Gregor, that blue-bulb/white-bulb thing is the sorriest excuse for not actually getting high on real drugs that I ever heard of.
P.P.S. I forgot to finish one of the sentences in my post above. Ken threw a sock at me when he found that an important NPC to meet next was his character's ex-girlfriend. The point was that every damned NPC so far had fit into a player-character's life-path, and he was reaching his personal, fellow-author limit on how tightly the scenario had been constructed. Oh, memory flash: the ex-girlfriend's name was "Silverfox."
Gregor Hutton:
Fantastic. The first two characters that I ever GMed for in Cyberpunk were "The Deliverator" (or something) who was a Full Body Plated Solo and "The Board" a skater-punk Netrunner. Their stories in game were tied pretty much to their backgrounds and NPCs they'd made up their, rather than a "party" mentality. Later games with 2020 had much less of that it was more missions of stuff, normally against a "big bad". I think the earlier games were more personal and raw.
If you had 2020 Ron then for lifepath there might not have been much change: they renamed the "Life Events & Problems" in Cyberpunk as "Lifepath" in 2020 and did some re-ordering/changing.
They rolled in the Clothes, Hairstyle and Affectations stuff to be at the start of the Lifepath (along with a new Ethnic Origins table) as (1) Origins and Personal Style. In Cyberpunk that lived just after the Roles and "Fleshing Out Your Character", i.e. before any mechanical character creation. They changed some options too: "Battle Armor" in Cyberpunk became "High Fashion" in 2020 and "Hippie Threads" became "Bag Lady Chic", while for Affectations "Spiked Wristbands" became "Spiked Gloves".
The other stuff from pre-mechanical character generation stays in 2020, but is moved to (3) Motivations in the Lifepath. And they added "How Do You Feel About Most People?"
In 2020 they also added a whole sections missing from Cyberpunk: (2) Family Background. This has family type (called "Ranking" going from Corporate Executive through Pirate Fleet to Urban Homeless and Acrology family, then options), Parents, Family Status, Family Tragedy, Something Happened To Your Parents, Childhood Environment, Siblings. All new meat that wasn't in first edition.
All the Make a Friend/Enemy, Lose A Friend, Romantic Involvement, Disaster Strikes and You Get Lucky carried over to 2020, but they added more detail. For Enemies they added "Who's Fracked Off?" (They hate you, You hate them, Feeling's mutual) and "What Can He Throw Against You?" (Just himself, Few friends, Entire gang, Small Corp, Large Corp, Entire Government agency).
For "Disaster Strikes" they added "What Are You Gonna Do About It?" (Clear your name, Live it down, Hunt them down, Get what's yours, Save what you can).
So, I think that stuff is an improvement (well, there's more of it) on Cyberpunk, but...
...you allocate your skills as a mass of 40 points amongst 10 skills that your Role has, so you get more min/maxing I think.
In Cyberpunk the order is Role, Handle, Dress/Style, Who You Value, Personality, Valued Possession, What you Value. Then character points, Lifepath for skills: Childhood (up to 16), then Street, Military, Higher Education (in 4-year terms like Traveller and GDW games), Pick-Up skills (4 at +2). Then Life Events and Problems that map to those years you were doing stuff that gave you those skills. Buying Cyberware, stuff and Running Out Of Cash.
In 2020 the order is Role (they never tell you to take a Handle even though it's on the Character Sheet...), Character Points, Lifepath, Skills (40 amongst 10 Career Skills) and Pick-Up skills (INT+REF on any that aren't Career Skills) that don't map to specific years of Lifepath, Cyberware (with no RoboCop option), Gear and Running Out of Cash.
So, it's not so different, but the origins stuff where you picked your grotty start to life and that set how successful you were at getting Street, Military or Higher Ed, was switched to pick or roll background it as just colour, and pick skills from a big pot of points, same for pick-ups. And these skills are rarely linked to the years of Lifepath (only when you get a +1 from a Sensei, etc.)
Oh, and to clarify/correct something I said earlier. Cyberpunk _did_ have Medtechies but their Special Ability was still Scround like other Techies. In 2020 Scrounge was purged and became Jury Rig and Medical Tech.
Eero Tuovinen:
It's interesting that the first edition doled out skills based on the lifepath randomization. That's a big change, one that seems to be to the worse in my eyes. The 2020 system of distributing points freely caused character designs that were rather mechanically one-sided in hindsight: usually you'd just put in ten points into your class specialty (especially for Solos; insanely powerful class skill) and high points to a few other skills that'd back up the narrow specialization. After all, who wouldn't want to be the best there is at what he does, right?
d.anderson:
This was very much my experience, though at the time I definitely didn't think the later edition worse - the 2013 game session I participated in was 20-30 minutes of rolling up all the backstory and making a Solo with the +2, which required lowering important attributes (reflex, cool, something else) to increase, then getting aced in the first firefight. I sat around for the rest of the session. Contrasted to 'Goldenrod/Vlad the Impaler', my 'Rockerboy' in 2020 (I rolled up a romanian or something, saw the Mr Studd implant, and assumed in the utterly depraved future, a porn star was not much different from a rock star; sue me, I was like 14 or 15), who had the special celebrity skill at +9. While we never, ever rolled it, it heavily contextualized all the rolled-up background relationships and all the downtime activities, when this ultra-macho thrill junkie wasn't shooting at things with his mercenary buddies and their hardholder, fixer, manager, Hannibal, whatever it was called.
The cache generated by keeping things interesting (such as it was for us) kept the character alive in what should have been deadly situations, which was, again, important at the time and in that style of (admittedly very juvenile) play. I may see if anyone I played with remembers more details of the actual sessions.
Gregor Hutton:
That's a good point about wanting to start with a higher Special Ability and being able to do that in 2020 but not Cyberpunk. It's a great lure for players, but I'm not sure it ends up with a better game.
Special Abilities only began at +2 in Cyberpunk but you could put it up to +5 if you traded points from REF, CL or INT (only) on a point-for-point basis. (Doing it with INT was mostly stupid, except for Solos since you rolled INT + Special Ability to use it.) So, you mostly were kicking around +2 to +4.
The best Solo I ever saw played in a game of Cyberpunk was called Cagney (named after Cagney & Lacey rather than JImmy!). Stephen who played Cagney only fired 31 bullets in a nine-month campaign (he kept a track of them!) and he worked up her Combat Sense from +2 to maybe +5 over those nine months, and all her other skills went up IP by IP in line with it. She was hard as nails, legit, across the board when she was at +5 Combat Sense.
Then I compare that to 2020 Solo characters that (typically) had Combat Sense +8 to start... this meant they had 32 points between 9 other core skills to start the game (...Awareness, Handgun, Brawling, Melee, Martial Arts, Rifle, Athletics, SMG, Stealth). Those skills at an average of 3.5 does not really sit well with a +8 Solo, y'know?
I think the 40 point damage track also kept any PC around long enough in 2020 to be more robust out the door. And its rather expected Trauma Team saving any character "socially" important enough (in the group of players) to be saved also helped.
Whereas in my first game of Cyberpunk one of the two characters died in the first session. He had an Average Body Type, so 5 points of damage was a Serious Wound, a further Critical Wound (only 9 points) killed him off on the Cumulative Wound chart. Ouch! He just "resurrected" the character when we played it the next week having been thrilled with our first session. So The Board became The Board II. We just started off again, writing that first week off as a "learning experience".
I learned to put the bullets into Alan's Deliverator who took Structural Damage (!) and to keep my brutal beatings on the Board to when he was in the Net using his "Mega City" interface - his "girlfriend" was his Killer IV program and she got him in trouble.
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