[OSSR] Cyberpunk 2020

[OgreBattle]

Thanks for the review,

so Movement being a core attribute, is it super crucial or do you just leave it at average and just assume everyone is within range of stylish cover dashing? Strict measurement of movement sounds like a chore especially when there's helicopters and tanks firing a kilometer away.

The shredding system sounds intriguing but I don't really get it. Is armor ablative HP or more like AC or soak?

[pragma]

My experience was that movement wound up abstracted. It only really came up in foot chases or other non-combat environments. Though I wasn't using maps when I ran CP2020, so maybe it would matter more in that situation. That said, lots of firefights degenerate to "find cover, then shoot until it's done," which means movement isn't super important.

Armor is like damage reduction, but every time you take damage the value of your armor is reduced by 1. So you become gradually more vulnerable to damage as you take fire. Melee weapons "fire" twice as fast, and therefore wear down armor twice as fast. Choking damage bypasses armor entirely, but takes a few rounds to apply (grapple, then keep taking the choke action until the target stops moving). This makes choking king against bosses and on stealth missions, but of little use in a normal firefight.

[WiserOdin032402]

Well, from what I ran of it, Melee Weapons were often slower than guns due to a lower ROF and the ability to headshot someone was fairly easy to get if you had a proper high skill and a high ROF weapon.

Movement was abstracted unless you used a grid, which the game didn't really encourage, but you'd probably spend your first action of combat running for cover if the Solo didn't whip out a sawed down assault rifle and headshot all of the enemies present in the combat.

[pragma]

Well, from what I ran of it, Melee Weapons were often slower than guns due to a lower ROF and the ability to headshot someone was fairly easy to get if you had a proper high skill and a high ROF weapon

This is totally consistent with my CP2020 experience, but a bunch of this has been slightly altered in the CP RED rules. I'm not convinced it has been altered enough to make melee anything other than suicidal, but they have played with ROF rules, accuracy and armor values.

[WiserOdin032402]

I heard they're going to take a page from Witcher and allow dodge rolls against firearms if you have 10 reflexes, so maybe it'll be a bit better? I do know they're going to HP rather than the wound track.

[pragma]

The dodge option is kind of dumb because it replaces the target number that your opponent would have from range and cover. That means it isn't a strict improvement on your defense number, and it is possible to make yourself easier to hit by dodging. Deciding whether to dodge requires you to correctly guess your enemy's DV, which seems like a fiddly nightmare to play right.

They are going with HP, which isn't that big of a change. They just do away with shock saves and hold off on death saves until you run out of HP.

The Quickstart guide didn't have synthskin, reflex boosters or the combat awareness skill, so lots of the dumb solo tricks of CP2020 aren't available yet. Everyone's just rolling d10+REF for initiative and wearing armor that tops out at 15.

I listened to a real play run by Pondsmith himself, and the world is apparently supposed to be a jokey pastiche of dated pop culture references in nonsense robocop land. Not my favorite worldbuilding!

[WiserOdin032402]

Oh wow, I didn't know that. Sounds like it's gonna be rough.

I'm just waiting for the full thing to come out so I can low-effort hack it into Shadowrun for a friend of mine.

[OgreBattle]

I listened to a real play run by Pondsmith himself, and the world is apparently supposed to be a jokey pastiche of dated pop culture references in nonsense robocop land. Not my favorite worldbuilding!

You mentioned there were less concretely defined characters than the fingers in one hand, so perhaps that jokey pastiche angle lets players insert more of their favorite thing? His other games are Mekton (Real Robot mashup, mostly Gundam)n and Teenagers from Outer Space (Lum and other teen comedy manga pastiche)

Say with Palladium RIFTS the first set of world books were broad and tsuffed in "everything you saw about England in 80's Excalibur", but once they did continuous stories with specific characters is when the pastiche shattered into a forgettable specific novel.



On choke damage... that sounds oddly great for setting up Metal Gear Solid mook slaying + hand to hand combat with named bosses.

[pragma]

Yeah, I really like the choke mechanic. It's great for enabling tactical stealth without overshadowing combat. I've been stewing on a (nominally system agnostic) heist minigame, and this choke might have a place in it.