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Irreverent Fool
2008-06-03, 09:26 PM
Okay, so I was playing Cyberpunk 2020 (2nd edition) today and a couple questions popped up.

A character ended up in the blast range of a grenade. How does one determine location damage for a grenade?

Second, the rules state that you may fire up to your weapon's rate of fire as an action but that you can take multiple actions at cumulative penalties. Are you limited to your weapon's rate of fire in a single round or can you keep firing?

Tsotha-lanti
2008-06-04, 08:37 AM
There is no rules answer to either question - in the core book. Cyberpunk 2020 has really **** rules. (Incidentally, do you know what SKILL to use when tossing a hand grenade, and how it's resolved? I don't, and I've played the game for over 10 years.)

Looking at the expanded explosives rules in Listen Up, You Primitive Screwheads! may yield some clues for handling hand grenades...

Concussion damage: Damage from an explosion is treated as HEP; armor SP doesn't protect, half the damage is permanent and half is stun/blunt trauma, soft armor is damaged 2 SP and hard armor is damaged 1/4 the explosion damage. You go deaf without Level Dampers or similar aural protection.

Shrapnel Damage: Anything and anyone within two range bands (a concept from LUYPS!; each range band is equal to the base explosive radius) takes 1D10 damage to a random location, armor protects normally.

Looking in Maximum Metal doesn't really glean anything helpful; the closets thing to this is the section "Personnel Versus Anti-Vehicle Weapons", but it's not quite applicable. However, the rules there suggest using average SP (I guess you might weigh that by location, so head SP counts for 1/10th) rather than location SP, and since you don't track damage to locations separately except in cases of "X is blown off/severed by 8+ damage in one hit", it works out.

I'd go with average SP for anyone and everyone affected by a hand grenade, although I'm no expert on shrapnel; maybe it is realistic to only get hit in one location. (Or maybe you could roll 1D6 shrapnel hits with random locations.)


For the other question...

The way we've played is that you need one action per burst, whether 3-shot or more; to sweep that doorway with a 10-round burst is one action, to turn around and salt the guy on the roof with a 15-round burst is another action. You can't take a third 'cos your gun had ROF 25. If you've got another SMG in your other hand, you could take a third action to, say, lay 25 rounds of cover fire down the street.

Incidentally, get LUYPS! if you don't have it, and switch to the new combat rules.

Zorg
2008-06-04, 11:35 AM
I used Athletics for throwing and made a judgement call on a case by case basis for the effects (I use a more cinematic style so that does make it easier).

Irreverent Fool
2008-06-04, 03:40 PM
Thanks for the help and suggestions. Luckily I've got a copy of Listen Up, You Primitive Screwheads! laying around so I can check up on that. Since this is our first time sitting down and playing what is meant to be an extended multi-session campaign (we'd done a couple one-shots before), we decided just to stick with the core book and not bring in the ample supply of the splatbooks we have among us. Is it really a splatbook when it clarifies the rules, though?

As far as throwing a grenade, I assumed there was something in the rules covering it since they have deviation charts and whatnot in there. It's just crazy there isn't. The one that went off for our poor highway-pirate happened to be on the belt of the guy he was pumping for information so we didn't have to worry about throwing or deviation.

Athletics as compared to the normal difficulty for range seems to make sense.

I may have to propose we use LUYPS! to the Ref. (...once I get a handle on it, of course. I'm the in-house human rules-cyclopedia :smalltongue: )

I must say I'm rather disappointed in the way combat tended to play out. It was pretty much just the solo running in and 3-round bursting everyone's heads off. In previous games we'd gotten into a lot more strike-and-fade fights with nobody willing to put themselves out there like that.

Tsotha-lanti
2008-06-04, 04:17 PM
Cyberpunk 2020 doesn't have "splatbooks" - it has sourcebooks. They don't add player options so much as flesh out the world. (And, in some cases, add rules.) Maximum Metal lists a whole lot of really big hardware, but just the cost and the fact they're military equipment puts them strictly out of the realm of player acquisition. LUYPS! isn't even a player book; it's all about how to run the game, and is full of good advice for the Ref.

I guess the Chromebooks might be considered a bit "splatty", especially 4, since it adds the custom armor rules, but you can already craft the most overpowered characters using nothing but the core book. (Skinweave is the single most overpowered thing in the game; using the combat and armor rules from LUYPS! entirely removes the problem, though.)

There really is no rule for throwing hand grenades that I know of. The Athletics skill description suggests it's used for that, but there's no indication of the Difficulty, or of how to determine the distance of the deviation. Range is given (page 110 of the version 2.01 book), but no Difficulty or the like. No big deal to come up your own rule I guess; deviation is 1D6 times the number by which you missed in a random direction? That'd leave you with the exceedingly genre-appropriate possibility of blowing yourself up by screwing up your toss. But the book has no rule. (Hilariously, I don't believe 203X had them either. Pondsmith isn't just an awful graphic designer, but an awful system designer.)

Cyberpunk 2020 does not work very well out of the box. If combat isn't a big deal and everyone "gets into the spirit of things" by refusing to get weapons bigger than 9mm or Skinweave or cyberlimbs or... wait, it's just dull!

LUYPS! fixes some problems. The other thing you have to do is to get rid of all the Special Abilities (you'll need to retain MedTech, making it a regular TECH skill). The reason Solos dominate is Combat Awareness, which is the single best skill and the only one worth having. All the others are already replicated by existing skills - Charismatic Leadership and Leadership, Authority and Streetwise, and so on.

That's all you really need to change to make the game work. Oh, and overhaul the netrunning rules completely so they 1. can be used without everyone but the 'runner and the Ref going out for pizza and 2. aren't absolutely freaking ridiculous. (They're based on netrunning from Neuromancer - a book written by a man who had never seen a computer at the time.) ... yeah, easy-peasy.