Alternative systems for a cyberpunk game

[Drakeburn]

Just out of curiosity, what rule systems can you use to run a cyberpunk game? (Besides the obviously cyberpunk systems like Shadowrun and Cyberpunk 2020)

[Cluedrew]

Token mention of generic systems (like FATE and GURPS) that can apply to a cyberpunk game just fine.

[Koo Rehtorb]

The Sprawl.

[Mechalich]

You can use Mage The Ascension for it as well, with players either as Technocracy characters or as Virtual Adepts/Sons of Ether/Technoshamans.

[JNAProductions]

The Sprawl.

Question mark?

[Fri]

if it's about heist it'd be interesting to use Leverage and refluff it in cyberpunk setting.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leverage:_The_Roleplaying_Game

[Koo Rehtorb]

Question mark?

http://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/184711/The-Sprawl----NOON?src=hottest_filtered

[daniel_ream]

Well, there's the legacy systems like ICE's CyberSpace (IMHO the only cyberpunk RPG to actually get the setting right, although the mechanics are painful), Cyber HERO, and GURPS Cyberpunk.

Since most cyberpunk stories are really technological neo-noir, something like Technoir or a reskinned A Dirty World might be a good choice.

[The Glyphstone]

A cyberpunk-skinned game of Fiasco would be interesting, for another take on the heist-style story (going horribly wrong).

[Zavoniki]

If you just don't use a bunch of the gear options and greatly limit the available morphs, Eclipse Phase should work very well.

[hymer]

If you're willing to come up with the cyberware yourself, d20 Modern could be an option. I'd make my own classes, too, if I were you.

[Mmagsgreen]

Just out of curiosity, what rule systems can you use to run a cyberpunk game? (Besides the obviously cyberpunk systems like Shadowrun and Cyberpunk 2020)

What kind of cyberpunk game/setting do you want to play?

[Knaight]

Blades in the Dark sounds like a pretty good fit. Hollowpoint could also work, but it's not as good of a system. Then there's the more in depth options, if you're willing to go with something a bit crunchier and put in the corresponding amount of time to make it work. D20 Modern has already been mentioned, GURPS is an obvious fit, and there's no real reason to use either of them because Nemesis will work better.

There's a few things that make Nemesis fit surprisingly well, fitting into two main categories: The sheer quality of the underlying system, and the genre parallels between cyberpunk and action horror. The first is pretty boilerplate - ORE systems in general have a rock solid core, Nemesis in particular is set in the modern day and thus has a substantial chunk of the cyberpunk aesthetic built in. It's where it moves towards action horror that it really gets a leg up - the characters are in a world bigger than them, dominated by hostile entities of extreme power, slowly mentally deteriorating in the face of these deeply impersonal and malevolent entities. That describes the various pseudo-Lovecraftian entities that pop up in Nemesis, but it also describes the megacorporations in much of cyberpunk. Then there's the particulars of that mental deterioration, and how Nemesis handles it in two ways - characters can become traumatized to the various mental stresses, or they can become hardened. The hardening makes them less relatable, and as it gets more and more extreme it makes them less human. That's a theme that transfers perfectly to cyberpunk.

There's also the little things, the detail work on stuff like damage systems, the sort of things implied about the nastiness of the setting from little details like explicitly listing human shields on the cover table, the way Nemesis shares a core engine with multiple games that have ways to go beyond the human norm while also including it to a limited degree in Nemesis itself because of the supernatural entities that can do so; this works well with cyberpunk where the ways to break the human norm aren't supernatural but are instead technological. Plus, it's free, so there's that.

[daniel_ream]

the characters are in a world bigger than them, dominated by hostile entities of extreme power, slowly mentally deteriorating in the face of these deeply impersonal and malevolent entities. [...] it also describes the megacorporations in much of cyberpunk.

It always amuses me the extent to which "cyberpunk" has come to mean things that don't appear in the source fiction.

That "evil megacorporations with nigh-unlimited power run everything and abuse The Common Man" has become a trope reflects the influence of CP2020 and Shadowrun, I guess.

[Knaight]

It always amuses me the extent to which "cyberpunk" has come to mean things that don't appear in the source fiction.

That "evil megacorporations with nigh-unlimited power run everything and abuse The Common Man" has become a trope reflects the influence of CP2020 and Shadowrun, I guess.

CP2020 and Shadowrun pulled that from older materials. Class struggle has been a core part of cyberpunk from the beginning, and the megacorporations are among the major depictions of how that plays out, with the obvious class struggle embodied in the workers for these corporations versus their owners. I'll just directly quote the Wikipedia page on cyberpunk here:


Cyberpunk is a subgenre of science fiction in a future setting that tends to focus on society as "high tech low life"[1] featuring advanced technological and scientific achievements, such as information technology and cybernetics, juxtaposed with a degree of breakdown or radical change in the social order.[2]
Cyberpunk plots often center on conflict among artificial intelligences, hackers, and megacorporations, and tend to be set in a near-future Earth, rather than in the far-future settings or galactic vistas found in novels such as Isaac Asimov's Foundation or Frank Herbert's Dune.[3] The settings are usually post-industrial dystopias but tend to feature extraordinary cultural ferment and the use of technology in ways never anticipated by its original inventors ("the street finds its own uses for things").[4] Much of the genre's atmosphere echoes film noir, and written works in the genre often use techniques from detective fiction.[5]
Classic cyberpunk characters were marginalized, alienated loners who lived on the edge of society in generally dystopic futures where daily life was impacted by rapid technological change, an ubiquitous datasphere of computerized information, and invasive modification of the human body.
— Lawrence Person[6]


Cyberpunk can be intended to disquiet readers and call them to action. It often expresses a sense of rebellion, suggesting that one could describe it as a type of culture revolution in science fiction. In the words of author and critic David Brin:
...a closer look [at cyberpunk authors] reveals that they nearly always portray future societies in which governments have become wimpy and pathetic ...Popular science fiction tales by Gibson, Williams, Cadigan and others do depict Orwellian accumulations of power in the next century, but nearly always clutched in the secretive hands of a wealthy or corporate elite.[21]

[daniel_ream]

CP2020 and Shadowrun pulled that from older materials. Class struggle has been a core part of cyberpunk from the beginning, and the megacorporations are among the major depictions of how that plays out, with the obvious class struggle embodied in the workers for these corporations versus their owners. I'll just directly quote the Wikipedia page on cyberpunk here:

Ah, wikipedia. An unimpeachable source.

You might try reading the actual fiction CP2020 and Shadowrun claim to be based on. Of those works, "evil megacorporations that run everything" is only a feature of Walter Jon Williams Hardwired duology. It is not, for instance, present in any of the genre-defining Sprawl series by William Gibson, Effinger's Marid Audran series, or any of the stories in the Mirrorshades anthology.

RPGs (and their designers) have a long and storied history of getting literary genres hilariously wrong. It's certainly true to say that in cyberpunk RPGs "evil megacorporations run everything and abuse the common man" is a defining trope, but in the literature they're ostensibly based on it shows up rarely.

[Knaight]

Ah, wikipedia. An unimpeachable source.

It compares favorably to some person on a forum just asserting things.


[QUOTE=daniel_ream;21703505You might try reading the actual fiction CP2020 and Shadowrun claim to be based on. Of those works, "evil megacorporations that run everything" is only a feature of Walter Jon Williams Hardwired duology. It is not, for instance, present in any of the genre-defining Sprawl series by William Gibson, Effinger's Marid Audran series, or any of the stories in the Mirrorshades anthology.[/QUOTE]
Ah, the old "I'm going to imply that only I have read any source material and thus am an authority" gambit. As for the absence of dubious corporations as a classic part of the class struggle, in the Sprawl trilogy alone there's Tessier-Ashpool SA, there's Turner the corporate mercenary, there's Virek as an antagonist, as a ludicrously rich corporate owner, there's the massive toxic waste site which used to be a bunch of factories. Then there's Blade Runner, which has an entire class of intelligent robots made and then killed by the Tyrell Corporation.

[oudeis]

Ah, wikipedia. An unimpeachable source.

You might try reading the actual fiction CP2020 and Shadowrun claim to be based on. Of those works, "evil megacorporations that run everything" is only a feature of Walter Jon Williams Hardwired duology. It is not, for instance, present in any of the genre-defining Sprawl series by William Gibson, Effinger's Marid Audran series, or any of the stories in the Mirrorshades anthology.
I'll have to ask you for clarification on this one, because Neuromancer, perhaps the seminal and definitive work of the genre, was about just that. Or at the very least that's how the world of the story was portrayed. Same with Burning Chrome, Gibson's book of short stories.

[daniel_ream]

Ah, the old "I'm going to imply that only I have read any source material and thus am an authority" gambit.

I'm not implying anything other than that I've read most of the source material.


As for the absence of dubious corporations as a classic part of the class struggle

I said no such thing. I said that "evil megacorporations that run everything" is a trope not present in the source literature. Tessier-Ashpool is a family consortium more akin to Venetian merchant princes than the stereotypical corporate behemoth. They're also scared of the government's rogue AI investigation branch, which rather implies that they're not quite as mega- as the usual CP2020/SR cartoonish depiction.

Yes, Turner's a corporate mercenary who specializes in extractions, but again - the corporations he works for an against are in no way depicted as being as all-powerful and above the law. And that's one brief segment at the beginning of one of three books and a a collection of short stories.

Your argument is akin to saying "Every character carrying around a sword larger than their own leg is a core part of fantasy", I'm pointing out that it's really only present in a subset of JRPGs, not most literary fantasy, and you're doubling down on the original assertion and claiming that because lots of people carry swords in fantasy literature, that's totes the same as your original assertion.

I'm not going to chase the goalposts as they gaily frolic downfield.

[Knaight]

I said no such thing. I said that "evil megacorporations that run everything" is a trope not present in the source literature. Tessier-Ashpool is a family consortium more akin to Venetian merchant princes than the stereotypical corporate behemoth. They're also scared of the government's rogue AI investigation branch, which rather implies that they're not quite as mega- as the usual CP2020/SR cartoonish depiction.

"Evil megacorporations that run everything" is your description. My description is "hostile entities of extreme power" and "deeply impersonal and malevolent entities". Tessier-Ashpool is undeniably hostile, and that they're worried about a government when they're blatantly going against one of the things the government is most willing to use their power to suppress hardly prevents them from being extremely powerful. As for them being deeply impersonal and malevolent, they're a gigantic corporation and impersonal by nature; as far as malevolence goes I'm just going to point out that they're the antagonist for a reason.

Shadowrun and Cyberpunk 2020 have megacorporations that are powerful by megacorporation standards (although I'd argue that it's not as cartoonish in that regard as it's being depicted, given the historical precedent in the various East India companies, United Fruit, etc.), but they hardly have a monopoly on the concept.

[Cluedrew]

There are definitely powerful meta-corporations... well franchises in Snow Crash which I consider to be one of the iconic texts for cyberpunk. Mind you last time I brought that book up I good yelled at because someone claimed it didn't even count as cyberpunk. I think that is just because it supported my argument though. Is it cyberpunk?

[The Glyphstone]

Snow Crash is absolutely cyberpunk, yeah.

[Milo v3]

Demon the Descent is pretty cyberpunk-y being a game about techno-organic spies, but it goes full cyberpunk if you use the optional Altered States setting which has the main characters as cyborg agents of a sentient city inside of a pocket universe.

[GungHo]

Torg has three cyberpunk domains... one light and megacorp focused, one a little more cyber and Orwellian, and then a final one that's technomagical Cenobites from Hellraiser.