Update: I found the rules for addiction saves! Naturally, they’re in CP2013 and never mentioned in CP2020.
Netrunner
This chapter is about Netrunning, the in-universe term for hacking, and it’s a doozie. It uses ~50 pages, which is 20% of the ~250 page book. The last 30% of the book is taken up with fluff and GM advice, so a normal chapter is 12-13 pages, 1/3 the length of this monstrosity. I’m glad I had the throwaway medical chapters to give me a bit of writing runway for this thing. Given the world’s track record of writing good RPG hacking rules, you may be unsurprised to find that this is mostly sound and fury.
Though the core mechanic isn’t revealed until halfway through the chapter (a terrible choice for a 13-year-old in a hurry to show how cool hacking is to skeptical friends), starting with it makes this much easier. In order to perform a netrun, you connect to the net and then move around a series of maps at a rate of five squares per turn. Turns are 1 second long and allow you to take one action in addition to navigating. Navigating the maps requires you to take the LONG DISTANCE LINK action several times to zoom in from a continent level view, to a city level view and finally to the specific system you’re targeting, which is referred to as a subgrid or a data fortress (if the subgrid is fortified against intrusion). The exact route you take while you navigate matters for determining how many internet police are hunting you and how hard it is to trace your location. Here are some pictures to emphasize how baroque this all is (spoilered for length):
You are free to start using other actions while you are in the city or subgrid levels of detail, and most of those will be RUN PROGRAM. This does what it says on the tin and allows you to invoke the rules associated with the program. The first program you’ll probably want to run is a stealth program, and things get a bit weird at this point. Stealth programs seem to have durations even though none are described in the text, the gameplay example sidebar (which is mixed with a lot of flavor text) describes a netrunner using stealth to avoid IC and then using a combat program while still stealthed. There also aren’t good rules for when you roll to detect stealth. You appear to roll to defeat stealth the first time a stealthed netrunner or program enters your range (20 squares) or when you run a detection program, which I guess is every turn that you’re not using a combat program since there’s no cost to using programs. (Aside: I swear I remember that programs had a “noisiness” associated with them that attracted intrusion countermeasures (IC, pronounced ice) to discourage their casual use, and there’s reference to the worm program breaking down data walls quietly in the text, but that statistic doesn’t seem to exist in this book.) It’s also not clear what’s stopping you from running invisibility again if you get detected.
Subgrids are comprised of data wall, code gates, hostile programs and stuff you might want to hack. You use programs to open up data walls and code gates, use different programs to hide from or kill any IC that show up, and wander around until you find the hackable thing you’re looking for. That means you spend essentially all of your run in combat time resolving attacks or detection attempts from IC (1d10 + INT + program strength opposed or 1d10 + program strength opposed depending on the type of test, which is not easy to remember). It’s wildly time consuming and there are many corner cases I don’t understand well.
One potentially interesting tactical note is that you can choose to target a netrunner’s programs instead of the netrunner, which could have been a promising mechanic for interesting duels in a better designed game. In fact, I believe at least one of the netrunner CCGs used that mechanic specifically, probably the earlier one that looked more like magic. While we’re on the subject, some of the discussion in “Designing Data Fortresses” later in this chapter clearly made it into the Android: Netrunner TCG.
The designers seemed to know there was a problem with the netrunning system. There’s a parallel (though tiny) set of rules, which lets a netrunner scan the local area for hackable things (purely up the GMs discretion) and roll to control them with 1d10 roll under control program strength. You can even remain ambulatory while doing so by springing for a (very expensive) cellular cyberdeck. Depending on how many things your GM lets you hack, this could be wildly powerful. At bare minimum, it’s very quick and doesn’t interfere with group play. Unfortunately, this is confined to a sidebar, a half column description in the section on the menu, and a blurb in the cellular cyberdeck description. A dueling author insertion? Hard to say.
Now that we’re armed with context, we can take things from the top. The chapter starts by explaining what the net and netrunners are, the former of which feels trite 30 years after the deployment of the world wide web. However, the essay establishes that netrunners interact with virtual worlds, can steal and sell valuable data, often support physical infiltration, and can be severely penalized. The text is verbatim from CP2013 again. This is followed by an essay about the visual representation of objects in the net, and oddly enough the specific made-up algorithm, Ihara-Grubb, used to render them is named and expounded upon.
The next subject are the different continent-level regions that you have to traverse to reach the specific computer that you are trying to hack. Many are insulting. For instance, the Midwest and East coast grid is referred to as “Rustbelt.” Even worse, though “Kingdom” is apparently common slang for regional grid, the first time the term is applied in the text is for the “Afrikani” gird, which is further described as “a chaotic wasteland of antiquated systems, shifting alliances and fanatics.” Both these descriptions and the cities in the grid above are disappointingly Western centric when it’s not outright racist. The descriptions do have one historical gem though: “The USSR nominally holds control over [SovSpace], with control gradually shifting to NetWatch and the European Economic Community,” none of these things exist anymore! (Another editing gem, NetWatch hasn’t been defined in the text before this.)
Discussions about how long distance links, offline computers (ominously called Wilderspace in keeping with the early 90’s idea that the internet was a wild west to be explored by console cowboys), Net Watch (internet cops, some corrupt), and Bulletin Boards (which often are virtual realities) follow. After that are discussion of interfaces, which are programs that determine how the net is perceived. They should not be confused with interface plugs, which connect your nervous system to the internet, or the interface special ability that netrunners have. They discuss the CP2013 interface rules as a historical interlude and invite you to make up your own icon skin.
The next four pages invite you to design your own cyberdeck. You spend exorbitant amounts to decide if your deck a combat assault deck or a cellular deck, and then spend even more to improve cyberdeck attributes like memory (determines how many programs you can take with you), speed (an initiative boost) and data walls (a negative to-hit modifier of bad-guy programs). This is, of course, all introduced before the combat rules that make use of these statistics. Some cyberdeck character sheets are provided in the middle of the book.
After this we’re treated to five pages of programs, which are all gibberish to us at this point. We know that each program has a strength, an amount of memory they consume, a price, and a block of special rules. Those blocks contain a lot of the meat of the netrunning system, but there is no context to read them at this point. An aside: I do think every program in the book has some unique combination of price point and functionality, to the author’s credit.
The book spends another page talking about phone bills. You need a phone line to go hacking, and the phone company will hand over your trace information readily or scramble a team of solos to kill you if you miss a payment. This is in line with my Comcast experience. This is also consistent with the early 90’s roots of this system: being able to make free long distance calls was a really important consideration with dial-up modems.
At this point we finally get to the actual netrunning rules discussed above, but still in a weird order. 5.5 pages are spent explaining that you move five squares per turn (I’m counting the maps from I included above in those five pages). Next the available net actions are explained in a section titled “The Menu,” which makes a really big deal about netrunners having a separate “hacking menu” available to them at all times in the net. The 1/2 page alternate hacking system is tucked in here under the LOCATE REMOTE and CONTROL REMOTE actions. We’ve already discussed RUN PROGRAM and LONG DISTANCE LINK. The remainder of menu entries are simple file manipulations (create, destroy, etc.) and rules for LOG OFF (1d10 roll under 8), which can be contested by some programs.
Finally, we get to the meat of the system: combat. Initiative is listed as computer’s INT + 1d10 vs. netrunner’s REG + DECK SPEED + 1d10. Why would you make this depend on REF?! That forces your netrunners to be good at shooting and is explicitly bad role protections. Net runners, as mentioned above, get one action per turn while computers can get 2-4 depending on how much money was shelled out for them, so it’s easy to be overwhelmed by a big system. This incentivizes bringing teams of hackers to kill the rapidly spawning programs, which is the only hacking system I’ve ever seen that encourages teamwork. Other attacks and stealth attempts are confusing nonsense where the rolls vary by target as described above. It’s worth noting that your interface skill and INT only appear when dueling other netrunners, so you could probably make a pretty effective script kiddy.
Much of my interpretation of these rules is guided by in-game hacking example that is also florid in-universe fiction (located in a sidebar up by The Menu for some reason). The example raises more questions than it answers. In one paragraph, the protagonist invokes a killer program in response to a system-controlled killer attacking his imp program. Is it assumed that the system missed on its first attack attempt? Or are they working on some alternate system in which actions are declared simultaneously? The problem, as usual, is that this was adapted directly from a CP2013 example with a minimal new coat of paint, but though CP2013 bore a superficial similarity to CP2020 – there were long-distance links and funny system maps to traverse – it’s rules were much different (and, upon inspection, better). A netrun was a series of die roll-offs between programs picked by you and the target system where only the winning program took effect. Initiative rolls are notably absent. So that standoff where you pick a program in response the system still reflects CP2013 rules. To reiterate: they wrote an example for the wrong rules!
(Digging around in CP2013 more also reveals a more sensible set of invisibility rules: you can try to invoke it to bypass IC in each “defense frame” you enter. Some are immune.)
Next up is a 13 page (a normal chapter!) interlude about how to design a data fortress. These are probably intended as GM facing rules, which makes their inclusing between two player facing sections a frustrating decision. However, it’s nice for players to price out how much they have to save to make a data fortress of their very own. The section is unusually well written for this book, with step-by-step instructions accompanied by a sane and informative example. I have no idea what happened! The prices it spits out are also interesting, business-scale expenses in the economy established by the universe thus far.
An amusing gem: there is a step in creating data fortresses called “Create Key Files,” which gives interesting examples of types of data on a system and the salable dirt that might be hidden in it. Some examples both date the author’s conceptions of what impressive memory looked like and are great over the top cyberpunk.
Hundreds of thousands of pages!
Next up is programming, which uses essentially the same rules as cooking drugs with fewer options for addictive side effects. You select a program function, which mercifully gives a player a very little freedom to define new programs, and a set of programming options to give it fancy features. Impressively, they demonstrate how to build one of the example programs, the iconic Hellhound, using these rules. Surprising self-consistency! Teamwork is comically easy when programming, you just add the INTs and programming skills of all participating netrunners, which means a team with two netrunners could kit themselves out with the best software for free.
Finally, there are rules for creating virtual realities. It will probably not surprise you at this point that there was a comical editing failure and this is the second time these rules have been stated: creating data fortresses included a subsection called “Virtuals Are Their Own Reward,” which had rules for calculating the memory of virtual realities and an abbreviated version of many of the descriptions in this section. The lore is oddly specific, all virtual realities are made by a program called CREATOR which makes reality creation as easy as visualizing stuff in your head. The details about how much memory virtual realities fill, which influences the kinds of data fortresses they need to be stored in; how much they cost; and how much labor goes into making them, which has much less forgiving teamwork rules, are interesting bits of world building. However, the example virtual reality they use to explain the rules is not: The Hunt Club is actually just a virtual reality manor where rich people talk to each other – no robot sex or refugee AIs or secret illuminati meetings to be found! Historical note, a side bar references a GOSUB routine, which is a throwback to BASIC.
OK, this chapter’s a mess. It can’t even decide what rules it wants to use, only that it wants netrunners wandering around online dungeons to mock D&D. It falls short of the bar, which is SR3s hacking. The SR3 system was dull as dishwater, but it made sense (if you assumed no one ever got into cybercombat): you rolled tests against a system and your failures accrued over multiple tests, alerting the system to scramble more IC against you. It actually resembled the CP2013 system in some ways, specifically that it was a naked dice throwing contest between the GM and the player with some elements of pushing your luck. (Caveat Emptor: I think Ends might be pretty good, but I haven’t managed to grok it all, mostly because I’d need to read it in one sitting.)
Conveniently, the last picture in the chapter is an accurate summary of how I feel after finishing this section of the review.
