Cyberpunk 2020 holds a special place in my retro-gaming heart. I grew up in a gaming household, playing D&D and Rolemaster, and all manner of board games. It was pretty great, for sure, but there’s this quality of discovery with roleplaying that a lot of my friends had that I just didn’t have; It was all given to me. It wasn’t until I played Cyberpunk 2013 at GenCon/Origins in ’92 (I was like 14) that I really found MY game. It didn’t match the tastes of my parents and it certainly wasn’t a family game. It was gritty, irreverent, sexy, and it spoke more to me as a genre than stuffy D&D.

The Rules vs. The Setting

One of the cool aspects of Cyberpunk that, in my mind, set it apart from everything else I was playing was the distinction between the importance of the rules versus the setting. It took the rules seriously, anyone who used their combat system will tell you, but it placed much more importance on the genre and setting. It was about playing a character that lives in a world where high fashion and “being cool” were currency. Where the street-smart setting was its own character.

Characters and Lifepaths

There was a lot of good in this system. Like, a lot. It used the Interlock System, which later combined with the Hero system to become Fuzion. Most of the rules were simple and got out of the way. It felt very complete. It introduced a lot of cool character ideas, like hackers and media personalities, and made them important. Probably the coolest addition was the Lifepath mechanism, which used dice rolls to steer your character creation to a meaningful, and generally rich character. A lot of games use things like this now, but at the time, it was pretty great. When you finished, you had a character that had a history that would directly impact the gaming group’s future.

Friday Night Firefight

The combat system, Friday Night Firefight, was a bit cumbersome. It was meant to be deadly, and it succeeded. It was well conceived, from a rule standpoint, but from a gaming standpoint it was just too heavy.  It was one of the things that I always stripped out and replaced or just fudged around. I think it was simultaneously the coolest part of the ruleset and the number one thing that drove people away.

I always opted for a simplified version – I used the base skill checks with crits and fumbles, and I borrowed from the Rolemaster/Spacemaster Arms Law style crit charts for storytelling. Combat was deadly, as intended, but didn’t consume the majority of a session.

What’s next?

Going back is a bit weird and whatever is next has to deal with that. Some of the really edgy technology and concepts are either common-place or a bit dated. Some of the world events were strangely prophetic, while some just weren’t as chaotic and horrific enough as real life ended up being. That’s why most of the updates happened, though, like 2020 and v3, to update the timeline. I’m excited to see the MMO come out, though. I think a lot of the cyberpunk genre narrative stands up… it just looks different, now. I think that’s true about roleplaying games, too.