Differences between Cyberpunk 2013 and Cyberpunk 2020
Eero Tuovinen:
Quote from: Ron Edwards on April 13, 2010, 09:46:11 AM
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."
Guilty as charged, I have to admit. In the defense of the 14-year old, the literary cachet of Cyberpunk was rather more serious for me at the time than most of what other games we played had to offer. I was deep into classic scifi (Heinlein, whatnot) at the time, as well as the fresh Cyberpunk stuff; I had full understanding of the dramatic issues faced by a journalist in the cyberpunk setting, for example, which made the character class have specific, intriguing implications of the sort of content the game would have when played through the lense of that class. I still think that D&D is relatively weak juice compared to that, as the literary background is subsumed by the dungeon thing rather heavily - playing the game won't be any different no matter what class you pick, as they're all intended to go into the dungeon instead of doing the sort of interesting shit you'd expect of their type in a fantasy story. (In case anybody can suggest a strongly classed fantasy game where playing a cleric means that your game will be about missionary work, I'm all ears.) Call of Cthulhu, another game we played a lot at the time, had the same feature D&D has: while the character classes are seemingly different, they don't actually overcome the preset theme of the game; no matter which you pick for your character, you're going to be running after Deep Ones anyway. For us Cyberpunk did not read like this at all, although I do admit that I probably should dig up the old books and look at them with fresh eyes to see if it was just a local peculiarity that made us take those character classes so literally as story engines.
That bit about the different Empathy rules is interesting. I remember that in the 2020 version the Empathy rules were a relatively dead letter for us in that they only came up for the characters who intentionally skirted the borders of sanity. You had to work on making your character a monster to get there, really. This was probably just fine for us, I should note - cybernetics and human identity were not a very important part of the game for many characters, play was more about looking cool and having '80s-style action movie adventures; I often say that we "invented anime" on our own in our Cyberpunk play, which resembled Akira more than anything else a couple of years before anything like that was even available in Finland. This had plenty to do with my GMing method of the time, which was basically to transpose plots from classic scifi novels into Cyberpunk and Paranoia adventures.
Ron Edwards:
Hey Eero,
That's exactly what friends who'd played both told me: that the first game was gritty Blade Runner and Neuromancer, and the second was anime action. I can also attest to a widespread gamer reaction to the lethality in Friday Night Firefight, and the book's extremely blunt verbiage about that.
Jesse, I'm hoping these last couple posts are helpful to you. Let me know.
Does anyone know about the publishing sequence of the versions of Cyberpunk and the versions of Shadowrun, say from 1985 (the year R. Talsorian was founded) through 1994? I know that the first Cyberpunk is dated 1988 and the first Shadowrun is dated 1989, but "year published" is a thin variable and doesn't always match to actual release into either unofficial or official channels of commerce and use.
Best, Ron
jburneko:
This is EXTREMELY helpful and pretty much confirms my fear that I may have to go through the trouble of tracking down those three little black booklets. The sad things is that I'm pretty sure I still own them but damn if I can find 'em.
It sounds like you guys actually had a lot stronger "impulse" understanding of how to play based on your actual exposure to the source material. Ron is often talking about people who learned about fantasy via D&D rather than the actual source. That's pretty much me and probably doubly so for Cyberpunk because at least I'd read the Hobbit and some Greek Mythology where as I don't even think I *saw* a copy of Neuromancer until my early 20s. I kind of, for whatever, reason expected RPGs to be like mathematical Cliffnotes for genres.
As a result my short-lived and failed attempts to actually play the game didn't work so well as described in my original post. At the time I was just drawn to those cool pictures and weird objects and stuff like the 1930s skin you could put on your virtual world.... and then had no idea what to do with any of that.
Jesse
Gregor Hutton:
Ho, boy. I played a hell of a lot of Cyberpunk, mostly under blue lightbulbs in my last year at high school (the effect on your colour perception when exposed to "white" light afterwards is thrilling and weird).
At the time I thought the changes to Cyberpunk when it became 2020 made the game poorer. I probably still think the same way, much as I ran a metric tonne of 2020 (since that was the book that everyone then had and there was a large group of GMs and players for it then).
The main differences:
* The core rulebooks were (and I have them in front of me) "View From The Edge: The Cyberpunk Handbook" (effectively main rulebook), "Friday Night Firefight" (subtitled Interlock Man to Man & Weapons Combat System, which was the combat book) and "Welcome to Night City: A Sourcebook for 2013" (the "setting"). In 2020 that was all in one glossy colour covered book. The three books were low-fi and retro-edgy.
* FNF was lethal. F'rex: 1-2 Damage against Body Type Very Weak was a Serious Wound.13-14 and up against Very Weak was Dead. 21 up against Very Strong Body Type was Dead. You had this cross-reference chart. Oh, and multiply Head damage by 2. It was lethal and cynical. I loved it. 2020 had 40 boxes of health and everyone was a bullet blanket. Sigh.
* FNF gave the E/flbs data for weapons! .44 Magnum Pointblank & Close 971 f/lbs for 4D6 damage. A meagre (!) 608 f/lbs at Extreme range for 2D6+3. This was gun porn frothing at its finest. Think .44 Automag from the Terminator melded to RoboCop and that's where we were at. 2020 was more "universal" and "mainstream RPG like" -- I mean it's weapons tables were almost interchangeable with Call of Cthulhu, Hero and so on by then.
* FNF actions were in Phases based on Reflex. 2020 had initiative from top down. I need to scan in, or photo, my FNF combat pages just to show the annotation I put on them.
* View From The Edge: almost all 2020 Roles are there. Rockerboy/girl, Solos (Combat Sense just adds to Awareness and Athletics, NOTE there is no Initiative in FNF, so no bonus), Netrunners, Techies (Scrounge NOT Jury Rig), Medias, Cops, Corporates, Fixers, Nomads. No Medtechs.
* Skills points came solely from Lifepaths. Stuff like Higher Education that got dropped when going to 2020, right? [Roll a d10. Normal 7 or lower, Streetkid 4 or lower, Nomad brat 3 or lower. If you succeed spend 4 years in College and get +2 to 6 skills of your choice... list of skills follows]
*Cyberware. Less of it in Cyberpunk than 2020, BUT... you could get Full Body Plating in Cyberpunk (you didn't get that in 2020, well, not at first and not as well when it did appear in later supplements). You really could be RoboCop. Alan Henry, one of my players did exactly that shtick in our first game.
*Really encouraged to sell out to the "man" in Cyberpunk, so if you rejected it you knew what you were up against. It's a brilliantly cynical page about running out of cash and offering you 2k of cybernetics for joining the Military, The Mob, "Selling Out to a Corporation" and then listing the "Catch": Hostages, Blackmail, Sabotage Chipware, Monitored, Command Kill, Company Safeguard. This was in 2020 too, but buried in the rulebook. The shorter books made this stuff stick out more.
* Netrunning was more like real-life hacking, sort of. And you had an "interface" that interpreted this "dream" world. In play my netrunner players ended up with virtual worlds, and we ran them alongside the Solo. In 2020 it was all more regulated, and less edgy to me. It also took up so much more of the 2020 book explaining it.
*Drugs. Holy Christ, the drugs page was great in Cyberpunk. Really encouraged you to use them and then warned you that you were fucking yourself up, just like real life. 2020 has the same stuff but it wasn't as stark in presentation so, um, it was much more like shopping for bonuses. But the content was almost the same.
*Welcome To Night City had characters with no stats at the back with gaps for you to fill them in. I did. No metaplot then.
*Random encounters in Cyberpunk and 2020 are almost identical.
The version I have has Errata at the end of FNF and View From The Edge. My books and boxes are scuffed and well used. I have, umm, a lot of copies of 2020 in its various versions, including one mint 2020 and one mint Cyberpunk.
Gregor Hutton:
Regarding publishing history... The R.Talsorian website says "since 1987" (http://www.talsorian.com/AboutUs.php) which says to me that's when they started writing it? I don't recall it being out there that early. The version I have is (c) 1988, but I'm sure I got my books in early-1989. Shadowrun came out after Cyberpunk but before 2020 I'm sure.
Previously R. Talsorian had done Mekton (87?), which uses Interlock and Teenagers From Outer Space (1987 too?). Those games got put to one side once Cyberpunk hit, though Mekton II and supplements like Roadstrikers tapped into the Cyberpunk market, and ultimately the 2020 stuff became more anime and less Gibson.
It is weird looking back that Shadowrun nabbed the word Matrix from Gibson, so Cyberpunk went with "Net". I remember thinking at the time that Net was lame compared to Matrix and who would take "The Net" seriously.... um, everyone these days it turns out! Shows what I know.
Navigation
[0] Message Index
[#] Next page
[*] Previous page