Thread 96220588

What would you like to see from a Cyberpunk RPG system that other systems of the genre lacks?

>>96220588 (OP)
Gameplay.

>>96220650
What is it about the gameplay current systems are lacking?

>>96220700
The systems lack an actual game.

A ruleset that's not an impenetrable clusterfuck.

>>96220588 (OP)
I mean, I found one that ticks all the boxes I want already, but a lot of them are hindered by trying to make hacking or gunplay convoluted affairs instead of fairly straight forward things that should move the plot along.

It's like, instead of offering more freedom by having a lot of options, designers instead become more restrictive to punish you for not taking those options instead of those options just making something easier.

Here's a hypothetical, so you get what I mean. Assuming everything is connected via wireless systems to some degree, and a hacker themed character wants to take over or shut down automated drones harassing the players. A good system just has the player make a couple of checks (access the drones, then a separate one to override or shut down) while the other players are dealing with other shit going on. Simple, straight forward. Maybe make taking control a harder check as opposed to shutting them down. If you got the stuff to do so, it just makes the check a little easier for either or outcome.

Bad games have convoluted rules for cyberspace shit that drags the game to a crawl while one player does their mini-game stuff and they just outright cannot take over the drones or shut them down because that's a level 4 program and their deck can only run level 3 programs.

>>96220588 (OP)
Fun.

Cyberpunk games are, without a doubt, the most convoluted, poorly-organized, non-functional rulesets out of any genre of TTRPGS. None of them are EVER fun to actually play. I'd rather play D&Dogshit than any cyberpunk system I've seen.

>>96220588 (OP)
Fast-paced action, vehicle and movement rules. Social conflict rules that are actually good. No sloggy combat.

>>96221448
I want to have fun.
Can you tell me the name of your fun game, so that I can have fun, too?

>>96220759
Cities Without Number does this, however

>>96221503
Why do you desire different rules for vehicle movement?
I can understand having a skill related to vehicle handling for something besides driving in ideal situations, but why go deeper than that?

Social conflict rules? I agree that most don't handle them well, in fact I only know of one that actually handles them pretty well. The question is, what do you hope to get out of them?

>>96220588 (OP)
Cyberpunk just doesn't have much to it considering the times we live in, the tropes just down land or work anymore.

Try something different or be shameless in attitude and execution.

>>96222309
Given what we know of AI now, do you think a fictional representation of rouge AI that just immediately nukes Israel then becomes nothing but a benefit to mankind will happen?

>>96222296
>Why do you desire different rules for vehicle movement?
I don't want different rules. I want simple ones that do a good job of integrating vehicles into standard combat. Four combatants, two on foot, one in a car, and one on a motorcycle. I want the rules for the characters in the car and on the motorcycle to mesh perfectly into the same rules for the two people on foot. I dunno, something like how Rifts handles mecha and MDC, where vehicles and armor are extensions of your own attack/dodge rolls and your hit points. No hassle, no fuss. You just put a car on same as you'd wear a helmet. Does that make sense?

>Social conflict rules? I agree that most don't handle them well, in fact I only know of one that actually handles them pretty well. The question is, what do you hope to get out of them?
I find urban/modern/near-future games generally require a LOT more social interaction than sci-fi/fantasy. Just because we all understand how that world works better, and we're more prone to feeling like we understand the cultural norms around what's going on. So we're just more likely to talk shit out, in my experience playing games like VtM. So I'd like good social combat rules that are engaging and fun.

I have it on my mind because I've been playing 2nd edition Star Trek Adventures, which has social combat rules that genuinely excellent, engaging, and I swear to god? Actually fun.

>>96222296
>Social conflict rules?
Yes!

>>96220757
Explain, in detail, how Cyberpunk Red or Shadowrun 5e aren't games. Not that they're bad games (because they are bad games), but how they lack gameplay.

>>96220588 (OP)

Clear design objectives and sticking to them. Methinks the "genre" (forgive me Gibson, I know you guys didn't want it to be a genre) is more varied than RPG gamers and especially deisigners think it is: Snowcrash has not the same melancholy and anguished action of Blade Runner. Hell, consider that an hypotetical GITS game would be hard pressed to do the movie, the manga and SAC at the same time.

Of course, it's a genre that is mostly retro. We live in a post-cyberpunk world, even if the awareness of that is not omogeneously distributed (ahem). It's not exactly the same thing, but doing a cyberpunk... thing projected in our future can be seen a little like doing a Verne's inspired thing in the sixties of last century. Gotta think of that as well.

>>96222335
Isn't it weird that the idea of a non-human entity gaining the ability to think and act like a human immediately decides to kill all of Humanity in almost every instance where the trope is applied?

it makes the idea of suddenly have free will and agency pointless.

>WOT IF A LIBTARD WAS A ROBOT
>BLOODY MENTAL INNIT

>>96220588 (OP)
Hacking rules that don't suck.
For one, it needs to be something that almost every PC can participate in.
Don't know the magical computer hacking skill? Use mundane computer skills to exploit OS loopholes and write/run intrusion software, electronic bugs and surveillance devices to snoop on user communications, hardware skills to crack open the case, research skills and contact groups to find documented security holes.
Don't have any technical skills? Use social skills to get official users to reveal passwords accidentally, leadership skills to motivate your hacker team to focus, scrounging skills to dumpster dive for discarded manuals, passwords, etc.
Don't have any useful skills that aren't combat skills? Fine. The decker/netrunner jacks you in with a trode net and boots you up in a custom-made VR avatar that can literally punch enemy computer programs into submission. Does this make any sense? Hell no! But it's fun as fuck and lets the muscleheads not be deadweight during netruns. It's fantasy internet anyways.

>>96222522
eh, there shouldn't be any bloated mechanics for hacking, period. just a single skill check, assuming you've got the right hardware and soft. the rest should be handled with a loose framework, a narrative scaffold so both players and gms know what's happening in broad strokes. something like:
1) reconnaissance - passive (ip registries, open source intel) or active (mapping exposed apps, fingerprinting services)
2) initial access - phishing, outdated libs, supply chain fuckups, rogue hardware drops
3) privilege escalation / lateral movement - pivoting once you're in
4) payload - exfiltrate data, implant daemons, mess with systems, go persistent

it's not some quantized level ladder, it's qualitative, like: an abandoned legacy system no one's touched in 10 years, like 4chan? go nuts.
is it a honeypot, spun up by an ai that mimics a live system, tracking your every move and profiling your behavior for black-ops sockpuppets? bad luck.
airgapped system? you need physical access. maybe a drone drop, or convincing a janitor to plug in a payload.
need an exploit? maybe you scrape it from some darknet repo, or get it from a corpo's stolen research drive.

that's where the story is. not in rolling "hacking +2" five times until ICE spawns.

>>96220588 (OP)

At least a vague understanding of the actual genre

>>96222432
NotAGamefaggot is just salty that they don't utilize the Gnu C Compiler.

>>96220757
Dude, this is no/tg/games. Where we discuss ttrp(n)gs, tabletop war(not)games, board (not)games and the like. If you want to talk about proper low-level programming go to /g/ames.

>>96229007
I refuse to acknowledge any form of cyberpunk beyond the 1995 Ghost in the Shell movie.

>>96230139
What the GitS release date in 1995 also the last date you worked on your art?

>>96230139
That's not even the best GitS adaptation.

>>96230304
It's not the best adaptation of GitS in the context of reflecting the original work. But, as its own film it's a pure and simple masterpiece.

>>96230669

Overrated and verbose, as Oshii tends to be since... since probably Beautiful Dreamer, actually.

>>96220588 (OP)
Hacking that is actually integrated with the rest of the game.

>>96230731
Oshii grows on you as you rewatch his films.

I didn't even really like the GitS movie when I first saw it, with the same assesment you're voicing, but subsequent viewings have really helped me appreciate how much he's trying to say but knows the general audience won't understand.

After a perfect, wordless sequence of Motoko diving that lasts only a minute, he then has to spend three minutes of dialogue (really awkward dialogue in the dub) to try and scratch 1% of the various thoughts and emotions that went into the scene that reveals so much about Motoko's character and even foreshadows the film's resolution while opening up questions of the meaning of that resolution.

Oshii is an awkward guy who makes movies like Angel's Egg and refuses to elaborate. He's a genuinely deep thinker whose movies reward you if you let them roll around in your head for a bit, because he spent hours or even days thinking about each frame.

>>96230899

I did. In fact, I liked him better back in the days.

Seeing something so terrible like Sky Crawlers didn't help.

A thought just came to me. In spite of the themes of technology and its affects on the Human condition, the idea of willfully cutting off a perfectly good limb is often incentivized in lore and in the mechanics of the system to a degree.

I now find it confusing because you'd think having to tend to high tech hook hand or peg leg now comes with a bunch of problems like medical and mechanical maintenance and care but these concerns are often brushed over.

This is not me saying cybernetics and prosthetics arn't cool but if some manner of transhumanism is being explored as a way of showing you have to really step up your game to make it in society I don't think replacing a single arm you didn't need to chop off is going to help you climb the ranks of the corpo empire you work for.

>>96232079
There's an anime specifically about this called Texhnolyze.

>>96230731
>Overrated and verbose
Like anything Shirow
He had an impeccable sense of aesthetics though, I won't contest that

>>96220588 (OP)
I dunno. I'd like a system for running games in the nu-com setting after the elders are defeated. It's cyberpunk-ish, with aliens, naturally, and routine biomodding as well as cyberware.

>>96232079
It tends to be brushed over because these are games about excitement, adventure, and danger, no one wants to worry about washing their cyber balls or robo-arthritis in their tech-knowledge-knee.

>>96233703
GURPS tends to give you the Needs Maintenance disadvantage for those but nobody plays GURPS

I love GitS, I don't quite understand the movies but they look cool

>>96232532
>Texhnolyze
It's about a bit more than just that anon.

>>96230139
>My head is firmly inserted up my own ass and I suck my teeny ingrown penis.

>>96220588 (OP)
A hacking system that actually integrates well into the combat and such.
>>96222522
I remember reading through a GITS D20 Modern hack that had an interesting approach of giving every player class access to hacking, the dedicated hacker class was just better at it and more "slots" for combat hacks, which anybody could change out relatively quickly but required enough downtime to not be doable mid-combat.

>>96223089
Hunter//Seeker does this and has simple hacking rules.

>>96222335
>AI has been know to make up studies whole cloth
>lawyers have been reprimanded for using AI to write out their arguments, citing case law that does not exist (https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jun/06/high-court-tells-uk-lawyers-to-urgently-stop-misuse-of-ai-in-legal-work)
If AI were to run our nuclear systems, it would probably go like this
>a fishing vessel sails into a 500 km radius of a US naval base
>"Israeli ICBM detected, launching retaliatory nuclear strike on their capital: Paris"
>the map shows the coordinates of Lagos, Nigeria
>actually ends up airdropping Reese's pieces on top of a Chinese military base
>Chinese AI detects this as a sign of internal dissent, nukes Stockholm in retaliation
>African countries start launching shitty missiles in the general direction of America in hopes of "accidentally" triggering a food airdrop, leading to a radical increase of childhood obesity in Montenegro

>>96245011
I find it funny that there are people who honestly believe if you give AI enough computing capacity it will become sapient or that some chatbot they create is actually talking to them like its a person.

>>96223089
>eh, there shouldn't be any bloated mechanics for hacking, period. just a single skill check
Then what's the point of having a damn hacking skill at all? Cyberpunk is all about extremely detailed cyberspaces where hacking is like being a virtuoso of music, if you boil all of that down to just a single dice roll it loses all the interesting aspects and SOVL. Yes it can bog down the game if it gets too involved, but how else do you simulate the key genre aspect of the hyper-immersive cyber world?

>>96245159
To be fair chatbots have been more help to me than any therapist I've ever seen, though that says more about the incompetence of therapists than the competence of AI.

>>96245190
so i checked out a bunch of rulesets, the lightweight ones (hard wired island, the sprawl) don't have enough chrome, there's nothing to chew on. the heavy ones (CPR, cities without number) end up turning it into an abstract boardgame, and in a bad way. it's kinda like with combat rules - at the core it's people trading numbers until one drops, but what makes a fight cool isn't in the rules, but in the shit you pull off because of context: ambushes, improvised weapons, environment stuff. cyberspace should be the same way, should let players get creative.

ideal would be something like CPR (with all the apps, gear, lingo) boiled down to just 3 stages: 1) recon (figuring out what the system is, what protections it has) 2) access (remote exploits, social engineering, physical infiltration) 3) exploration/exploitation (actually doing something, exfil, chaos, whatever). each part should be a plot point, not a mini game. all the prep that goes into it - the gear, the scripts, the social angles, those should matter. with separate "quickhacks" (like cy_borg has) for handling IoT junk on the move: locks, cams, implants, etc.

the real issue - most players and gms just don't know how to run or play out a hack. everyone's seen a vault heist in a movie, but almost nobody has an intuitive model of what a hack looks like step by step, what meaningful decisions they can make. so the whole thing gets either dumbed down or abstracted. what's missing is the scaffolding, enough shape so people can improvise inside it.

>>96220588 (OP)
>>96221503
Cyberpunk Western, somehow.

>>96244675
actually looks pretty great

>>96249929
I actually did figure this out because I wanted to mix cyberpunk with early SF:

The corps developed wormhole tech (think Stargates, basically), connected Earth directly to multiple alien worlds, and thought for sure they were on the ground floor of the next big gold rush - then the bubble popped, there was WAY more real estate to buy than anyone was interested in developing. Big corps went bankrupt, and the colonies were left fallow.

Now, the landscape of Kolga (Epsilon Eridani c) is littered with decaying mining equipment in leftover company towns, native xenos (if you want proper Indians), and so on. The corpos think they own your characters (long-lasting noncompetes, indentured servants, bioroids, androids, bottle babies, etc) so you ran out here to be free - and the slavecatchers WILL come after you.

>>96222522
I think hacking should basically be spellcasting. You have programs (spells) you can use that Just Work. You use Open Door on a locked door, and it opens. You use Suborn Turret and the turret attacks your enemies. You cast Blind and the person's cybereyes feed them static.

You come up with some in-universe explanation why you can't spam your hacks at everything, and that also sets up the rules for what actually limits your hacks.

>>96220870
The thinking is that hacking should be as complex as gunplay because a specialist will be doing for of one or the other and they should both get as much "gameplay" (rules to learn). Except that shooting is a shared scene and hacking is a solo scene, they should not last the same amount of time.

I think that hacking can be simplified without hurting it too much, the one I've never seen properly done is driving. I wanna play a driving autist and I want it to be fun with everyone. I haven't found a system that convinces me, cyberpunk or not.

>>96222296
>but why go deeper than that?
There have been movies that are 90mins of driving since the 50's. There are different racing sports from F1 to cross continent rally with consumer cars. You can tell a lot of stories just wtih driving, there's a ton of choices and potential nuance and drama.

But most systems with a dedicated driving role makes you sit out of most of the action and then the rest have to sit out of your part. It sucks.

>>96250284
chases? no clue.
surveillance needs at least two vehicles, staggered positions, clear roles, mapped routes, constant comms, and fallback plans if the target changes behavior
counter-surveillance - spotting patterns, testing routes, staying unpredictable, catching people watching without letting them know you saw

you can make driving interesting for the whole group, but it's less about having the right rules and more about being able to play it out.

>>96250284
woah, at some point I deleted a chunk of my first paragraph
The point was that they wanted to make single player segments as complex as party wide segments, and shooting is stupidly complex in most cyberpunk systems so hacking is even worse.

>>96250570
Chases and hijacks are easy to get, surveillance is rare in my experience.
The problem is that you need to trust the GM to do the work, and they have to do it on their own. A system is supposed to give the GM tools that standarize elements.
For example, FL's Blade Runner has chase mechanics that include opposed movements that might counter each other and requiere specific rolls. Those rolls are pretty evident, roll agility to dodge or roll strength to throw heavy shit on the way, but having them on paper lets the player know they have options with an agreed effect and the GM doesn't have to be always in top form to imagine every possibility.

I mean, games are writen by people. In theory the designers could be making the whole game on the go. But when they wrote it they took months to think it through, test, compare, discuss, and so on. The point of a system is to have someone already do all that slow and caeful work so you don't have to.

>>96249739
agreed on all points

>>96220588 (OP)
A functional economy.
One of the writers being an economist, one of the writers being a criminal.

>>96250669
that's what i mean by loose terms like "framework" or "scaffolding" - like rules naturally set those in place, but they can exist outside of rules too. like, Blade Runner, for example, has checklists for players, of things that should happen, like how to process a crime scene or handle internal department procedures

it's a curious system, pretty slick at a glance. haven't playtested it, but in the rulebook they even seem to explicitly encourage splitting the party to cover multiple locations at once during the same shift. kinda curious how that’s gonna play out in an actual session.

>>96250885
If you want 100+ pages of solid world building you probably want more than one writer

>>96249929
Uniornically, the OG Starcraft setting before the ayylmaos invade is this.

>>96249929
Westerns are pretty much a foundational element of punk genres so this isn’t that hard of a conversion

>>96256463
>Westerns are pretty much a foundational element of punk genres so this isn’t that hard of a conversion

Intrigued, please explain