“The way we played it — the way my teenage friends and I read ourselves into the world — was as small-time operators, always. The corporations were behemoths, the system so massively corrupt and powerful that no one could win against it. You fought to survive around the edges of it, living off the scraps. “High stakes, low impact” — that was our house rule. Because punks don’t save the world. Ever. They just try to live another day.”   — Jason Sheehan @ NPR

That little bit from a review of the new CP 2077 computer game drew my attention because it both mirrors how we also played the Cyberpunk RPG back in the day and because it captures so well what I’ve noticed in the current crop of cyberpunk releases.  So many of them seem to hew strongly towards the cyber and the glitz and the machine gun prophecy, while steadfastly avoiding the punk and any deeper implications or explorations.  More than one of the games I’ve read even begins with their premise as “you are elite mercenaries, plying your trade for the endless corporate wars.”  CP 2077, at least as as Jason’s review describes it, also seems to push towards that side of things.

But the essential bit to our old Cyberpunk campaigns was always being on the edge of being quashed.  And of the perils and impact of living within a complete corporatocracy.  As we got older, ideas of the dehuminising aspect of it all got incorporated into our games, a subtext to the more foreground and obvious reduction of one’s humanity through cybernetics or braindance.  Along with the questions that comes from being under that constant state of duress:  what is considered winning to us, what does family or friendship mean, to what levels are you willing to go, is there an escape of sorts, and so on.  That was the vital bit that made our cyberpunk games cyberpunk and therefore different from our other games.

Here we weren’t the mighty adventuring party, or the team of elite spies, or the superhero group, or the gritty commando unit, or mecha pilots, or slinging around in a space opera.  (And to note, we played those games too and loved them!)  In Cyberpunk, we were local, caught in the cogs, and eking out what we could, step by small step.  And rather than just grabbing the neon and the cyber for the aesthetics, that to me remains the essence of what a good cyberpunk game should embrace.

I played a tonne of the Cyberpunk RPG back in the day.  My friends and I picked up the first edition (retroactively named/referred to as the 2013 edition) pretty much as soon as it came out, and it became one of our games of choice almost instantly.  When the 2.0.2.0 edition came out, we eagerly snapped it up and kept right on playing.  And even as I I headed off to university and beyond, new games were started with new groups.  I’ve enjoyed it aplenty.

With the newly released Cyperpunk computer game comes a new edition of the RPG rules, this time titled Cyberpunk Red.  Intrigued, I gave it a quick read through (hence the pun title for this post) and wow, is it ever a blast from the past.  In that it feels as though it is from the past.  In that the rules haven’t really changed all that much.  In that it is as if 30 years of gaming and RPG rules and concepts growth hadn’t happened.

To be fair, the Interlock System that underpins the rules was (and still is) a pretty solid core.  At the time of the first Cyberpunk game, it felt especially streamlined and fresh and a nice implementation of a skill+attribute based system.  But with the reflection of having played so many other systems in the intervening years, the inelegant and sometimes even kludgy edges of the ruleset as a whole now show through for me.  In addition, it hasn’t added any narrative hook support, something that’s intriguing me more these days.

And as someone who is a bit of a fanatic about character sheets… I find the one for Red quite painful to look at.  (Maybe it’s meant for someone with cybereyes?)

All in all, reading the rules I was left with a sense of meh.  I’m still keen on cyberpunk (in the full exploration of its genre, not just the aesthetic), but depending on the type of campaign we were going to play there’s a few other rulesets I’d gravitate towards instead.  Rope in the good background info and world lore from Cyberpunk, yes, but upgrade to a keener operating system.