cyberpunk-machinations

[cyberpunk-machinations]

It begins

My first Cyberpunk: RED campaign is starting today! Titled "Pick your Poison" it focuses on a group of edgerunners working for the Wraiths, a Raffen Shiv gang, who are desperately trying to find the truth behind a disease called Neuralware Degeneration.

Stay tuned for updates!

The banner of the campaign, done by yours truly! Those able to decipher who the left silhouette is will also easily find my main source of inspiration!

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This principle has reached its maximum potential for intra-Crew conflict before my very cybereyes. Out of a Crew of six, two have sold their souls. The best part? Each one's sold it to the enemy of the other's benefactor. One's sold it to the Wraiths, the other to the Maelstrom. These gangs went to all-out war over a smuggling route in my version of Night City and have only managed a non-aggression agreement after suffering losses so heavy they were at risk of both being destroyed by any third party capable of mobilizing more than a couple dozen troops.

I think I don't need to spell out the fact that I just engineered an inexhaustible source of tension, conflict and drama within my Crew. GMs, make selling your soul a per-player decision. You will not regret it

"Selling your soul" being a Crew decision is a wasted opportunity

There's so much more room for drama if it's a per Player decision. What will your benefactor ask you to do, I wonder? They heard that Fixer you're working with klepped some real sensitive info and spread it across the Data Pool and into the Night City streets. How convenient that you're there to take care of the problem... What? You don't want to hurt a fellow PC? Too bad, doomba! Command Kill!

[cyberpunk-machinations]

I understand how people get God complexes now. All that's needed is to write a campaign that's literal peak

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"Selling your soul" being a Crew decision is a wasted opportunity

There's so much more room for drama if it's a per Player decision. What will your benefactor ask you to do, I wonder? They heard that Fixer you're working with klepped some real sensitive info and spread it across the Data Pool and into the Night City streets. How convenient that you're there to take care of the problem... What? You don't want to hurt a fellow PC? Too bad, doomba! Command Kill!

[cyberpunk-machinations]

UPDATE: THEY SOLD THEIR SOUL!!!

Explaining the "Sell your Soul" mechanic to new players is so much fun every time

New player wants 3 full-to-the-brim Cyberarms to switch between with Quick Change Mounts. Real well thought out gear, I gotta admit.

"Not something you can do at Character Gen, but very feasible through the course of the Campaign"

"How about 2, with one not being quite full yet?"

"2 Cyberarms with Quick Change Mounts will set you back 1200. Popup Shotgun's 1k. It's doable, but you'll make sacrifices.

Now if you sell your soul..."

[...]

"What if I sell my soul and my backstory's me running from my debt collectors?"

You sweet summer child

"You won't be running away. You wouldn't be alive if that's in your backstory. When you sell your soul, you sell your soul. They have total control over you."

Every time it just fills me with a glee. Awww, you wanna be Faust 2.0, choom? Look at you, not knowing what you're getting yourself into, it's so cute!

And then when you tell them exactly what they'd get into and they have that moment of realization...

Things like this is why I love this game so much

[cyberpunk-machinations]

Explaining the "Sell your Soul" mechanic to new players is so much fun every time

New player wants 3 full-to-the-brim Cyberarms to switch between with Quick Change Mounts. Real well thought out gear, I gotta admit.

"Not something you can do at Character Gen, but very feasible through the course of the Campaign"

"How about 2, with one not being quite full yet?"

"2 Cyberarms with Quick Change Mounts will set you back 1200. Popup Shotgun's 1k. It's doable, but you'll make sacrifices.

Now if you sell your soul..."

[...]

"What if I sell my soul and my backstory's me running from my debt collectors?"

You sweet summer child

"You won't be running away. You wouldn't be alive if that's in your backstory. When you sell your soul, you sell your soul. They have total control over you."

Every time it just fills me with a glee. Awww, you wanna be Faust 2.0, choom? Look at you, not knowing what you're getting yourself into, it's so cute!

And then when you tell them exactly what they'd get into and they have that moment of realization...

Things like this is why I love this game so much

[cyberpunk-machinations]

PSA: There's no such thing as a Rockergirl

The role's name of "Rockerboy" comes from Rockerboy Manson, legendary (you guessed it) Rockerboy of Night City.

If you play in the 2070s this misconception is purposefully sidestepped by calling them Rockers, but up until the 2040s, at least, Rockerboy is a gender-neutral term

Y'all really need to read the damn rulebook, sometimes.

(The above statement is obviously made in jest, TTRPG lore is fluid by definition and if your Night City's linguistics produced the term Rockergirl, so be it.)

[cyberpunk-machinations]

Martial Artists should be able to throw opps without grappling them first

Needing 2 Actions to deal your BODY in damage seems, frankly, insanely underpowered and undermines a very foundational part of "soft" martial arts (as the game calls them). You're really telling me that Judo practitioners can only throw someone when they've dodged their attacks and use Counter Throw? That Aikido practitioners wouldn't use a sweep to knock a doomba head-first into the high-quality Night City concrete?

I believe that practitioners of soft Martial Arts should be able to use a Martial Arts Special Move Resolution DV to be able to throw or sweep an opponent. Now, this by itself would be a bit overpowered (and considering Martial Arts Attacks are already very powerful, a pure buff to Martial Arts is straight-up lunacy) since being able to consistently deal your BODY (which should be at least 12 for a Martial Arts build) is some real good damage, so it's worth it to think of a balancing mechanism. For example, Judo practitioners might have access to the Tomoe Nage, being able to throw an opponent but ending up Prone themselves. Aikido practitioners, who rely on the opponent's momentum for their very energy-efficient techniques, might have stricter requirements for their throws, like needing their target to have moved towards them or only being able to throw someone who has their back turned on them, etc.

With Interface Vol. 4 and the absolutely ridiculous amount of Martial Arts content R. Talsorian promised us, there'll surely be some submission-based martial arts like Jiu Jitsu. That type of Martial Art is a lot more suited to the Grapple -> Fuck 'em up mechanic. With something like an armbar in your moveset, yeah it'd make sense to need to have someone in a Grapple and then use a Special Move Resolution to cause a Broken Arm Critical Injury. Moves like that do need certain conditions in regards to your hold of your opponent and, considering the nastiness of some Critical Injuries, should balance out nicely with the harm they deal and the 2-Action model.

[cyberpunk-machinations]

Trauma-induced Humanity Loss

The core rulebook of Cyberpunk RED doesn't really explain Humanity Loss due to traumatic events all that well, considering how often R. Talsorian expects GMs to inflict it in their other works. Like, apparently trying to save someone and failing, watching the life drain from their eyes is grounds for Humanity Loss; which obviously isn't unreasonable but it would have never crossed my mind to do that in a dystopia.

And tbh the community seems to agree, typically I see Humanity Loss being more of a last-resort balancing measure. PC living in the streets and eating kibble for 6 months straight 'cause the player's stingy? Some good ol' Humanity Loss will get 'em back in line. Wanna escape consequences by biosculpting a random doomba to look like you? That's some nasty shit, roll 1-2d6 Humanity Loss. But it seems like Humanity is supposed to be treated like "Mental HP" (which, yeah, duh) and be interacted with as often as that would entail.

I think newcomer GMs to the system would really benefit from having a more detailed explanation of how Humanity connects to the rest of the balance of a character. Through the CEMK we've found ways to restore some Humanity without needing to spend so many eb on therapy, but using only the rules of RED it seems like there was an attempt at a deliberate imbalance of losing and restoring Humanity meant to tell a story. However that vision wasn't shared well enough for that to actually be the case. Here's what I think was meant to happen:

An edgerunner's life is not for the weak, of body or of mind. Horrific sights define your work and you're meant to be able to bear and push through. But even for the toughest, baddest motherfuckers in Night City, it's gonna start eating away at you. What I think R. Talsorian were trying to play here is something that is barely unsustainable. Like if you map out a cyberpunk's Humanity across many years, it'll be very, very slightly decreasing over time (assuming they get therapy at reasonable frequency). I think it was meant to be used as a device to tell the story of people slowly starting to be less like people by the sheer volume of trauma and not be able to afford the maintenance that's needed to be "human". A deliciously cyberpunk theme told entirely through mechanics and the economy.

Handling Humanity as a GM is very much a numbers game that needs experience to properly balance and/or modify, which I can't claim to have, so the answer to the questions that this post might raise are left as an exercise to the reader. Be sure to send your answers my way, too, I'd love to hear how every table handles this!

[cyberpunk-machinations]

Oh my god the Night City Atlas is such a cool DLC

Now I won't have to think of 10^32 places of interest for each region and they're actually gonna be cool instead of "uh.... um... so it's like a bar... but like... the barwoman's got 4 hands"

God Bless R. Talsorian

[cyberpunk-machinations]

Making a Cyberpunk RED campaign is so fun 'cause one moment you're haphazardly thinking about how Biotechnica would store their accounting logs for their secret deals and the next you're writing a 10 page story about a faction of exiled Nomads and how they pretend to be together just 'cause of mutual benefit while very clearly valuing the bonds and rituals more than the Families that rejected them, how a new Raffen Shiv (exiled Nomad) came to join their ranks and drawing from personal experience with being a reject finding your people and being, unbeknownst to you, drawn into a group by rage instead of comradery.

Dunno how I feel 'bout using personal experience to build a faction of hateful terrorists, raiders and rapists...

[cyberpunk-machinations]

The Sandevistan

Through the "2070s" versions of Cyberpunk (which is to say, the Edgerunners anime and CDPR's Cyberpunk 2077) many feel that RED's Sandevistan is... disappointing. I'm of the opinion that those people are correct, through incorrect means. Frankly, a Sandevistan in the 2040s and a Sandevistan in the 2070s are gonna be vastly different simply because of the time difference. I will agree, however, that +3 Initiative at the cost of an Action is kinda boring in comparison to other cyberware (I mean, come on, you have things like the Vampyres or the Popup Grenade Launcher and you're telling me you found this and the Kerenzikov so incredible you made them a category and made them incompatible with one another?).

So what's a GM to do if they want to give their players (or their NPCs) something truly deserving of the term Speedware, while not making it break anything and everything around combat? Let's take a look at the Sandevistan's description:

"short boosts of highly improved reaction time"

This may just be me, but the moment I read it, I thought: "Oh, increased REF". Well, why not do that? Not +3, of course, but increasing REF sounds a lot cooler and more in-line with the actual description. It also further proves a point that Cyberpunk RED as a system really pushes: you can train almost any skill, but you can't make your body better (aka your STATs) without chrome. But all we've seen from that is increases in BODY. Does that mean that transhumanism is dead for anyone not looking to become a high-ranking member of a Arnold Schwarzenegger poser gang? I propose Speedware would be the tool to increase bodily stats like REF and MOVE. Frankly, having the Kerenzikov give +1 REF and the Sandy give +2 for a minute before the cooldown doesn't seem all that broken to me. I plan to change them to be as such in one of my campaigns and document the results. Maybe it will be absolutely broken, I can't claim to know.

Small note here: In my vision of the Sandevistan, activating it would recalculate your Initiative with the new REF STAT but the existing d10 roll, so it still serves its original purpose of ensuring you're in the upper echelon of the Initiative Queue, albeit slightly worse to account for the extra flexibility that moving the bonus from Initiative to REF provides.

One other change you can make is whether activating it costs an Action. During the cyberpsycho encounter of David Martinez and Co. we see his Sandevistan be activated as a reflex, while he was stunned by the horrific sight. Doesn't sound like he was taking an Action to me and having something that boosts your reaction time require you to be aware of a threat and react to it sounds a bit counter-productive. Now, of course, David's Sandevistan isn't an ordinary one, but doesn't having an emergency bullet time button implanted in your body, ready to be triggered if someone trips the tripwire, sound cooler than something you activate in advance? It's like what you implanted is a way to never be caught by surprise again. Another problem that comes up more in the roleplay side of things with having it cost an Action is... what Action is the PC taking? Are they pressing a button? Meditating to proc some internal trigger? Are they just standing there, menacingly? It's true that by not having it cost an Action you turn it into a Kerenzikov but better, but since we're willing to play harder on the Sandy's strengths, we can play harder on its weakness: the cooldown. Sure, it's not an Action, but you can only use it once per day, rather than once per hour. This also allows for a modification that a Tech could make: removing/reducing the cooldown, and receiving the consequences of removing a safeguard. Ok, you made a 1/day Sandy into a 1/hour Sandy, but every activation that goes beyond the original 1/day limit will deal Nd6 damage, with N incrementing by 1 for every "illegal" activation, resetting when the PC gets 6+ hours of sleep. That limit was there for a reason and you bypassed it. There are consequences. If you accept them, hell yeah your chrome's significantly more powerful. If not, just use it as normal and you'll have that extra activation for emergencies.

But what if we forget about balance and seek pure power?

Behold, the point allocation system. Say your Crew got their hands on some shiny mil-spec chrome. A Sandevistan only given to the elite of the elite of the NorCal military, SAS-style operatives. In such a profession better reflexes aren't enough. So, NorCal R&D modified the design to allow for a better variety of chemical injections and neural pathway optimisation. When activated, it allots 5 points to the user. The user can allocate these points between REF, DEX(by having faster motions and more time to make exact movements) and MOVE, with a minimum of +1 to any STAT. Is it used by a gunslinger that hides behind cover? +3 REF, +1 DEX, +1 MOVE. Now THAT's some preem Speedware. Martial Artist that gets up close and personal? Here's the depth: either +1 REF +2 DEX +2 MOVE if they have trouble closing distances and hitting targets, +1 REF +3 DEX +1 MOVE if they're already next to the target and want to make sure they hit 'em OR +2 REF +2 DEX +1 MOVE 'cause they'll now have the ability to dodge bullets by reaching REF 8. Slap a nasty cooldown or other cost on the sombitch and you've got some real cyberpsycho chrome.