Any pointers in running an effective cyberpunk game? What makes a good heist...

Any pointers in running an effective cyberpunk game? What makes a good heist? What "flavor" of cyberpunk do you usually go for? Lots of action and neon, or something with more of a noir feel?

I tend to focus on world building and some sort of conspiracy lurking in the background that unfolds throughout a series of adventures. I straddle the line between big and small picture type stuff by involving the PC's back stories in the large scale plot, and make what I am throwing at them imminently relevant to the PCs. I like to leave combat to a few extremely brutal instances, it is unusual for my players to get in a fight without a PC getting seriously injured.

In my opinion, for a Cyberpunk campaign you want them to feel danger and paranoia. You want them to be forced to chose what they they the lesser evil is. Give them agency, but make sure they realize the immensity of their enemies ( gangs, corps, governments, etc) Also, the available technology should have some sort of tangible social effects that the PC's directly experience.

Also, I'm a big fan of "80s in the future" styled settings myself.

Various crime dramas and noir type settings with the appropriate levels of augmentations and technology.

Yesterday I had no internet, so I was forced to amuse myself with reading PDFs.

I had the PDF of the game Cryptomancer that I had not really given anythought of before.

It's Tolkein-esque fantasy world that was transformed when the dwarves discovered the "shardnet" basically a fantasy internet.

I don't think I'd run the game, but the philosophy it has is great; everything is networks, cryptography is handled realistically but still fun, there's lots of ways for players to be clever, and there's also an oppressive shadow government hunting the players. It legit does cyberpunk better than most cyberpunk systems.

>What makes a good heist?
It can't go as planned - all the best heist movies have some kind of flaw.

I'd say a big part of picking the game is with your group - if you've got a group that does social stuff well, then you can go something a bit more intrigue-y - the murderhobo mindset is less useful in cyberpunk, but it still has a place at very low-level stuff (actual murder hobos) and some in the mid-high levels, if you accept that in cyberpunk you are not the most powerful dudes out there, not by a long shot.

You may also want to put serious thought into the hacker-pizza problem before you start.
Things like combat-hacking, needing direct access, and everyone having their own versions of prep and spadework before the operation all help

>Any pointers in running an effective cyberpunk game?
We live in a cyberpunk dystopia. Go to a big modern city, look around, go look at the nightlife.
I got a shitton of inspiration for my next Shadowrun campaign from a trip to London. I discovered somewhere to meet a Johnson, and somewhere to highlight just how fucked-up subcultures can get.
And then I wrote the first run while waiting for a train; being a sunday, it was a LONG wait.

>What makes a good heist?
Hitches, screwups, and prep work. Watch Ronin and Heat. Play GTA5 single player.
> Go find thing
> Go find other thing
> Get guns
> Do reconnaissance.
> Plan approach
> Execute
> Something goes wrong
> Compensate
> Engage plan B (alternate escape route), or plan M (for murderhobo), or bully through with plan A because your plan can handle it
> Escape, either with loot or without

>What "flavor" of cyberpunk do you usually go for? Lots of action and neon, or something with more of a noir feel?
I switch between the two. Grimdark gritty cynical realism in the daytime, running gunfights through neon lights at night.

Normally I always roll my eyes when people say "We cyberpunk dystopia nao", especially the dystopia part, seeing as how cyberpunk is near-future science fiction based on actual IRL trends so of course some of it will ring true with reality, and life, for a lot of people, has always sucked.

Saying that, you seem to have put some thought into it, and I'm pretty intrigued to hear more about the things that you saw on the trip and the run it inspired.

pic possibly related

>I'm pretty intrigued to hear more about the things that you saw on the trip

My shadowrun campaign is going to be set in London, since I live fairly close and hang out there every so often.
The trip itself was fairly uneventful apart from the writing; I wandered around, grabbed lunch at a slightly out-of-the-way place near a bookshop run by witches, and went drinking/clubbing later.
London is actually cyberpunk as fuck. You've got centuries of history all jammed together, modern shit going up everywhere and sharing skyline space with the ancient things, and tourists EVERY FUCKING WHERE.
Ever-present public transport, advertising on every single surface, even the city itself has corporate branding, and there's centuries of coal/diesel soot in every crack. There's also billboards everywhere, mostly electronic.
In the poorer areas, the poor and disenfranchised risk being run down by fancy fast cars driven by rich fucks, mostly because nobody looks for red lights or cars.

The club was normal enough, but the music was strange. I wandered into a black metal gig; one act was vibratory bass all over the place, another was almost indistinguishable from someone having a seizure on stage, the next was just fucking awful with screaming and no talent whatsoever (but oh god the aesthetics), and the headline act was shy. So shy they performed behind a haze of smoke machines, occasionally backlit by strobe lighting, and wore red headlamps the entire time. Most of the band just stood there, aside from one guy headbanging like he was in a power metal band. Naturally, one of the headlamps broke partway through, and had to be traded for the drummer's, who then spent the rest of the gig invisible as a result.

There's a shitton of areas that are devoted to niche subcultures, and subcultures within that. I go to Camden fairly often, and I'm recognisable enough that the stallholders and shopkeepers will stop me and offer me the latest catalog, or try to sell me stuff.

>and the run it inspired.
The run was fairly simple. Snatch a package being transferred from a train in Paddington station, and get it to a drop. The package was being taken from the train to the airport, and attempts to seize it would have caused the courier to flee. That would have led to a dramatic chase over the elevated sections of motorway out of London and to Heathrow, pursued by various agencies along the way. Fairly simple stuff, just to get the party used to the city, to cyberpunk, and to Shadowrun.
The Johnson would have been met in the club I went to, just with more cyberpunk crap; fibre-optics everywhere, more smoke, more strobes, cosmetic cyberware and bodymods EVERYWHERE, for dancing and just to be able to breathe in a basement full of dry ice smoke.

After that, data fishing on the Tube, as done by someone I used to know back in the early days of bluetooth.

I like my cyberpunk how I like my coffee: short, black and without sugar.

This means, not set in a too distant future (I'd set a new cyberpunk game around 2040-2050), dark (lots of human misery, pain, corruption, injustice...), brutal (no compromise) and without ridiculous stuff like crappy theme-park gangs/nomads and furries. The main colors would be black (night, shadows, toxic smoke, elegance, death), light grey (concrete, metal, fog, depression), khaki (dust, desert, dry earth, hunger), pigment red (blood, redlight district, violence) and white (hospitals, laboratories, cleanliness, purity, hope).

>Pointers
Establish it's easy to die. Especially with players that in most cyberpunk games, you don't get 100 HP and battles taking up entire sessions like Pathfinder or D&D. My players had a big problem with this. I could have wasted the entire party but chose to just leave them with an arm and a leg to share between the three of them. Let them know the stakes are bigger.

Play up paranoia like everyone else is saying. Yeah you're doing this run for the money they need bad, but whats going on behind the scenes? Why are you doing this? For what gain? And who's lose? Are they secretly disposable?

And create a world. Explore it through news vids, conspiracy theorists or just everyday banter. I built my campaign in the aftermath of a war on Mars that left Earth largely demilitarized and highly indebted to the Orbitals who won the war. Everyone is tense and angry, the poor got poorer and the rich stayed afloat in their gleaming towers.

Also a saying by one of the fathers of cyberpunk is "High tech - low life". Take a look at what advanced tech can do for life, I mean everyday life, night life, 9am-5pm life, the regular human shuffle. Then juxtapose it with the sinister side. What does it do for the slums, the gangs, the serial killers, the poor who can no longer maintain their cyberlimbs or suffer from cyber-psychosis,

>Flavor
Noir is just my go-to cyberpunk feel. The firefights don't happen too often but when they do it's life or death.

Mystery and conspiracy are just core to cyberpunk itself. I would often take the party to the desolate and forgotten/uncared about areas of the US where firefights wouldn't result in the militarized police showing up and then made frequent roleplaying excursions to the wealthy areas of the city. Walled neighbourhoods, mallplexes, or corporate meeting rooms 170 stories in the sky.

Everything is disposable. Characters cannot have close friends out of fear of being sold out. Even aquaintenances might be dangerous (is that call-girl really who she claims to be or is she an undercover cop, and what about that bum who sleeps at the entrance of your coffin hotel?). The PCs might not like each other, but as all are deeply involved in criminal activities they won't rat each other out. Characters have to be on the move and leave nothing behind. This means no favorite gun, no favorite car, no favorite phone, no house or apartment (unless it's purchased/rented by some straw man), no main city - once things get too hot, PCs have to move to a different location. Assets must be hidden or they might disappear. Communications must be crypted or they will be read.

Just read Neuromancer, it has everything you need.

>What "flavor" of cyberpunk do you usually go for?

I like more of an "airport bookstore novel" kind of feel with my cyberpunk. Black suburbans, tacticool gear, SWAT teams, that kind of thing.

Noir is something everyone loves and talks about, but rarely does.

Usually as you say, the game becomes a series of heist films. Even if that wasn't originally intended, and yes even if it's not Shadowrun.

If you're going to do a heist (and those are fun games) then at least make sure to follow the rules of a heist film. I'm not going to list them here, but it's a well-known formula. Ocean's 11 does it very well, as does Inception (which pushes the boundaries of what you can call a heist film), and many others.

If you want a twist, then use genre specific abilities like "All According to Plan" powers to account for mastermind player characters who thought of things that even their players didn't anticipate. That makes movies like The Sting possible without spoiling the ending for the players.

>Any pointers in running an effective cyberpunk game?

Virtually all the good advice from D&D carries over. Keep a small group. Be prepared or be amazingly good at improve. Let your players know what sort of game they're playing. Be descriptive when it's needed and to set the tone. Remember that it's a game to have fun. It's not you vs. the players, and that's MORE true in most cyberpunk settings where there's typically a plethora of actors who could go kill the players at any time if they felt like it.


>What makes a good heist?

Things going wrong. There's always a catch. A door that doesn't open. A guard that looks over their shoulder. A bad blueprint. A dog. A fumbled key.

One time I tried a really simple catch which they simply bypassed. The whole run went according to plan and they simply walked out. It was a little shocking, but all in all the night was pretty boring.

>What "flavor" of cyberpunk do you usually go for? Lots of action and neon, or something with more of a noir feel?

I aim for noir, but it always ends up with explosions, gunfire, running, and things burning down. Sometimes that's the plan. Sometimes players happen. I had a three-parter where they had to go recover some compromised cyber-arms. One of them was from a SR4 prime runner. I was expecting them to cut it off, but they simply asked to buy it off of him. He named a price and after some extreme squirming from the cheap-skate members and some haggling, they agreed. (The catch was that their johnson couldn't ACTUALLY pay them, but they had a streetdoc that would work for free the rest of his life).

One big falacy of the noir/serious style: Don't let the players plan to much. I shit you not, they will spend 4 hours planning and end up with "we kick in the door and shoot everyone".

>One time I tried a really simple catch which they simply bypassed. The whole run went according to plan and they simply walked out. It was a little shocking, but all in all the night was pretty boring.
That's when you pull the good old Employee Betrayal -trick.
Alternatively you can have a third party attack when party goes to collect their payment.

>We live in a cyberpunk dystopia.

If you're poor.

If you can't afford it, I see no reason people wouldn't pirate all their games, programs, movies, music, and ISP connection. If you're poor, the telcoms give you shitty service and there's nothing you can do about it. The cops see you as unwanted hostile surplus. The big companies have either already replaced you with a robot, a foreigner, or handed you the workload of 4 peers. If they DO still pay you, you're expected to be on welfare and they'd pay you less if it wasn't illegal but they sure as shit won't give you 40 hours but expect you to be on call all the time.

The "Just in Time" workforce carries around a phone that let's them now when there's work to do and where to be. You don't even need an office. They aren't really employees, they're "independent contractors" that signed up with fUbar.

And EVERYTHING you ever do on company time will be recorded and used against you.


Now... If you're well off. Like you've got an engineering gig or something. You could screw around as much as you want at work making Shadowrun campaigns. Your phone works more or less for you and if some service doesn't make you happy, the customer is always right. Because you spend big government contracting money on ludicrously expensive artisian water and gourmet bagels.

If you're actually wealthy, your investments earn you all the money you'd ever want and you're good to go.

You do know that in (almost) every dystopia there are people who are well off and live good lives.
Even in cyberpunk often most people are totally happy in their ignorance, acting as cheap labor and endless consumers to fuel the machines that are megacorporations.

There's rich people and poor people in medieval Europe too. But nobody want's to roleplay a 6th century turnip farmer.

Usually fantasy adventurers are the kind of people who are willing to risk their lives for some gold.
Which means, it's not the rich people who strive for that job.

serfpunk?

WFRP begs to differ

So Nexus? That book is Cyberpunk and Airport bookstore Kino

Play up your descriptions to cover a lot of sins. The players aren't visiting a crazed back alley technician. They're walking in to an explosion of oil and metal, chaotic and haphazard. The man is sitting in the rear, stirring a pot of heavy water as he dips cables running from the rear of his skull to an outlet on the side of the pot. The players aren't sitting in the car going through a lawless area. They're pressed up against the windows, weapons ready. People are eyeing the conspicuous wealth of a working vehicle, and the endless expanse of brown decay is broken up only by the glowing spires of corporate skyscrapers in the distance.

>After that, data fishing on the Tube
Neat.
Seems like a good way to generate a lot of plots without much effort - especially if you're going through the City or something

I'd say this is good, as long as you don't get annoying/obnoxious with it, and know when it's not needed (action, conversation)

I'm not just signing up to the meme, though. It makes sense.
> Cyberpunk
I have 90% of a Shadowrun commlink in my pocket. I spent the day moving shit around a warehouse controlled by a computer system, to deliver online orders, while streaming music from my phone over bluetooth to a speaker on a shelf glued to the wall, while downloading updates for my games at home.
On my way home, I passed through computer-controlled traffic lights that recognise when a bus is there and stop all other traffic, and ones with a set timer. I have my commutes planned out to the second due to this; get it right and it's plain sailing all the way through. Get it wrong, and it's red red red red literally every 50 feet.
I had to go around someone parked in the bus lane I was using, because my motorbike is allowed to zip past the stationary traffic in them. I considered stopping and calling the police on their ass, but decided to let the traffic cameras do their thing.
I've been digging through old cartoons streamed by the same company that delivers my CDs.

> Dystopia
Someone I work with is trying to start a career as a rapper, rapping about how shit it is working for a living.
The news is filled with dead celebrities to cover up a multitude of small wars, political upheavals, Russia is going for another corrupt election, there's a refugee crisis caused by a civil war that's flooding Europe with migrants that's going to cause another goddamn war, and there are GODDAMN PIRATES off the coast of Somalia, which are being cracked down on by nearby nations. You have armed pickup trucks being kerbstomped by tanks built in the 60s, because both sides are poor as fuck but one is less poor.
People everywhere, the US election ended in mass outcry over the guy they elected, stupidity is at an all-time high, and the US president is a goddamn reality TV host. Policies aside, he's a goddamn caricature of himself.
And the media's response to all this is celebrity bullshit and more reality TV.

>especially if you're going through the City or something
That's exactly where the former friend of mine did it. Back in the early days, everyone left it on and nobody bothered securing it. A little palmtop computer could rip data from everything else around it.

Bumping this.

I wholly believe in the cyberpunk part. The present has caught up to the past's future. We're there.

I was arguing about the dystopia part.

>Someone I work with is trying to start a career as a rapper, rapping about how shit it is working for a living.
Notice that he's a poor working shlub.

>The news is filled with...
The rich live in a bubble and only hear the news they want to hear. Children have been starving in Africa forever. Do you give a fuck?

>You have armed pickup trucks being kerbstomped by tanks built in the 60s, because both sides are poor as fuck but one is less poor.
Those poor bastards. Emphasis on poor.

>People everywhere,
Not for the wealthy where they give out reminders to check every room in the house at least once a week in case something is amiss. And the customer to service ratio is at least 1:5. Hate to wait for tee off.

> the US election ended in mass outcry over the guy they elected,
>and the US president is a goddamn reality TV host. Policies aside, he's a goddamn caricature of himself.
Stocks are up. The EPA, OSHA, and Net Neutrality are all on the chopping block. That sounds bad, but to the wealthy it's good news. These things costs their companies and investments money.

>stupidity is at an all-time high,
Maybe for the wealthy, but the well-to-do knowledge workers like engineers and anylists got there on their smarts. It's pretty nice.

>And the media's response to all this is celebrity bullshit and more reality TV.
Oh my word, how many wealthy people do you think watch reality TV? No kiddo, the wealthy have entirely different entertainment than the proles.

Now a dystopia can certainly have a rich upper class that uses and abuses the lower class. Their existence doesn't make it less dystopia. But it's not a dystopia from their perspective.