My brother has a friend who's developed a sudden itch for RPGs. He's never played them before...

My brother has a friend who's developed a sudden itch for RPGs. He's never played them before, even in video game format, and I'm one of the only people with any sort of experience with this sort of thing. I want to play to his tastes so that his first real exposure to RPGs is more palatable. My GMing is rusty, but I'm willing to take the plunge once again if it means getting someone interested in the hobby.

In particular, the friend has interest in modern or possibly cyberpunk settings. Bonus points if it can match the theme of, say, Hotline Miami.

What are my options, and how can I make this as painless an introduction as possible, for both our sakes?

I don't think her arms are long enough to fully draw those swords.

It's one of those things where you don't think about it too hard.

Full disclaimer: I think playing cyberpunk is problematic. People didn't catch on that we live in a post-cyber society already, not only technologically (no one dared to dream about your and mine smartphones), but regarding the genre assumption. Especially the genre assumption like these of 2020. Which are mostly sociopolitical, at their core.

That being said if you want to have operators operating with a not-that-incredible technology (no massive transhumanism), basically GITS:SAC but from frelancers' point of view The Sprawl would almost surely be alright. Check out the PBTA trove in Da Archive.

make a heist scenario. a smash and grab that can be either done guns a blazin OR sneaky beaky like. or the third rout go full CHEEKI BREEKI and tactical the fuck out of it

A system would be appreciated.

>The Sprawl would almost surely be alright. Check out the PBTA trove in Da Archive.
Where would I find that?

Start him with evens up risus.

Heck it's free

>In particular, the friend has interest in modern or possibly cyberpunk settings. Bonus points if it can match the theme of, say, Hotline Miami.
GURPS

>evens up risus
As opposed to what other kind of Risus?

Pdf share thread.

You could try out Savage Worlds with the SciFi Companion, and potentially also the Supers Companion.
The base system is piss easy to learn for noobs if you just hold their hand a bit through character creation, and they get to roll a lot of different dice.

I've not played a Powered by the Apocalypse game. Are they any good?

FATE is so easy as an introductory system, while aspects and stunts still give you that feeling of creativity during character building that heavy systems are great for. It's the heaviest rules-lite I can think of, and I was able to teach a full group of newbs how to play, build well thought out characters that are well connected, and pay a complete and interesting scene. They're so excited for the next session.

But if it's the miniature combat specifically which is interesting him, I'm not certain. I'm currently learning HERO System as an outlet for all that nitty gritty shit, but I can't say yet whether it's good.

He doesn't know what he would like.

Any tips in general for new introductions to the genre? I imagine there's things like "use premade characters" and "try not to frontload them with much, if any, reading."

...

It's the Steam Early Access of game systems. There's about 5 good PBTA games in a ocean of garbage, Apocalypse World. Blades in the dark. The Sprawl, The Veil and Masks are good. Every other PBTA game I've seen has been irredeemable dogshit.

>It's the Steam Early Access of game systems.
I thought that was open-license d20 or Japan's "Standard RPG System" (SRS) that a bunch of their games are based on.

That too. Steam was in regards to so many PbtA hacks being the RPG equivalent of "This is my survival block game made with all open source software, it doesn't work but gib 15$ plz"

If not, I wouldn't suggest it to you, would I?

I'd say 1 in 10 is bad (i dunno, tremulus is shit, for example). Quite the contrary with traditional derivate rpgs, in which 1 in 10 is interesting enough, the rest is just discardable rules with perhaps a tiny veneeer of doable if boring setting

GURPS, but that's crunchy, give it to him as an aside for something to build up to, like, "Shit dude, if we want to do all the things and have the answers on how to do it, this is it, but let's get you into the swing of things first."

After that...Leverage is well suited for cyberpunk, or at least the crafty end of it. So Cortex plus? I know it's possible to shit out something bare bones of the system real quick.

FATE...uh, I like it? But it doesn't seem suited for cyberpunk.

Disclaimer: didn't play fate and generic systems are always kinda meh to me.

It might depend on what flavour of cyberpunk. Not really good if you try to be the coolest operator after the Major, might be good if you want to have the "rebel without a cause" thing that was more or less the therotical point in 2020.

>Arms already extended
>Swords not even a quarter out of the scabbards

That seems like a bad setup unless she can unhinge and extend her arms like Reed Richards

>Le cyberpunk is now memes
Boy remember when World war 3 happened, new York got nuked, America lost half of its population, Japan became a superpower, areas of cities became combat zones, mega corps asserted their rule as monolithic eldritch entities that can take on even the strongest nations, and real food became replaced by fucking dog kibble

Are you really thinking this is all necessary fron "cyberpunk"?
That this is what Gibson was about?

Kids these days. You probably believe fantasy needs an imaginary realm separate from Earth, I bet.

No my point is that cyberpunk is a lot more dystopian than our world