So guys what is the best system for a pure cyberpunk setting?

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Twilight 2000 has decent rules for combat on various scales and for survival, but it would make a miserable system for a cyberpunk game.

There is no best system for cyberpunk. Each system has good and bad things. Personally, I like Cyberpunk 2020, but I changed quite a few things that bothered me (about every CP2020 DM did a few changes). Apart of Cyberpunk 2020, I'd say that TechNoir is worth a look. It's very different from those medium to heavy crunch games like CP2020, Shadowrun or GURPS. Some people enjoy Savage Worlds: Interface Zero (and 2.0).

You guys are talking about cyberpunk 2020 right ?

Not this guy, but I can tell you a couple of drawbacks of CP2020:

- character classes (not a huge problem, though)
- skill experience system sucks
- armor is often overpowered leading to arms race (can be easily fixed)
- explosives are badly modeled
- netrunning is meh (luckily netrunners can do effective stuff without having to go through the whole datafortress hacking)

The game works best if you limit the power of the characters (I put a limit of skill level 7 at character creation). I also recommend to give a certain number of points to buy stats instead of rolling.

The system seems usable then.
I had to put restrictions on my gurps campaign anyway so I have some experience with it now.
Is the book hard to get?

>character classes

into the trash it goes

Just look in the PDF share thread.

Cyberpunk 2020 is so simple, I used it at conventions as introductory game for new players. It has some crunch, but it's simple and pretty fast since everything is noted on the character sheet - you just need to know what to use when. There's nothing esoteric about the system: characters are described by stats, skills and equipment - that's it. It has no advantage/disadvantage system, no buzzwords/adjectives to combine, no feats that interrupt or slow down combat, and it doesn't require pinpoint accurate mapping either. After a few sessions all you need to run the game is the GM screen and the price list.

That sounds nice.
Is it the 2nd edition because if so I could have found it .

I hate character classes, too. Just tell your players they have to take 10 professional skills of their choice with a maximum of two class skills, and that's it.

Could someone suggest me a game to run something like metal gear solid in?

The only one I ever found online was the edition with the art from the European edition - which is the latest edition.

Could this be legit?
Its the first link on google.
xarxasuportmutueixdreta.files.wordpress.com/2014/02/cyberpunk-2020-cp3002-core-manual-2nd-edition.pdf

It's this one. The difference between the editions is minimal. The biggest change is that 2nd edition features pictures from the Italian edition, which are pretty cool.

Ok nice I'll use this one then.

What I suggest you to do - but this is only a suggestion - is to lower the values of certain armors. Keep the heavy and hard stuff (MetalGear, Doorgunner's Vest, Flak Vest, Torso Plate...) as it is, but soft/flexible and concealable stuff (SkinWeave, Armored Jackets...) should be lowered by 30% to 50%. I did this, and in exchange I don't apply the stagged penetration system which I found to slow combat down.

I'll keep that in mind.
The damage types in GURPS did the same thing actually so I might use your suggestion but I have to read the manual first.

If you have any question, don't hesitate to post. I'm monitoring the thread.

Eclipse Phase, pre-fall night do the trick.
You'd have to fluff things out a bit since the setting is mostly detailed on the post fall stuff, but it's very cyberpunk before everyone has to get off earth

Alright thanks I'll ask if I come across something vague.

I'd pitch in a vote for IZ2.0 in Savage Worlds. The only thing that sucks is a lot of particulars are left up to the GM so you have to do some of the worldbuilding on the fly.

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Well, the thread is going in the entirely opposite direction, but I'd quite like to try The Sprawl. Less focused on the gadgets and more focused on the cyberpunk feel though.

What's the sprawl like?

If you're okay with predetermined setting, check out SLA Industries. System isn't the most elegant, but it's worth reading for setting alone. There is also a fan-made Savage Worlds conversion of SLA.
It doesn't have cult following for nothing.

It's a PbtA game. Very simple, narrative system. You actually create the corps along with the characters.

I'm in a South Korea game of Sprawl that was a lot of fun there. One of the 'Corps' that got created was a hawkish environmentalist political party on an anti-augmentation platform.

The setting is pretty cool, but OP was speaking about a pure cyberpunk setting - which SLA isn't.

This sounds pretty cool. In standard cyberpunk fiction the bad guys are usually corporations who manufacture some stuff (oil, food, cyborgs, guns, whatever...). There should be more stuff like multinational NGO's (Green Peace, Sea Shepherd, WWF on steroids) and powerful religious sects (what would be Christianity if Constantine I had not joined it?).

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>Wouldn't the lakc of magic fuck the balance and other things up?
Totally, yes. Not only is the whole world setting saturated with magic, but the only balancing factor for cyberware is magic (in the form of Essence). Chargen is balanced by magic too. Stripping magic out of Shadowrun is a huge amount of work and it's far easier to just use a pure cyberpunk system in the first place.

Hunter Seeker is a homebrew of Cyberpunk 2020 that removes the classes, reduces the skill list, tweaks the armor/guns, simplifies the cyberware list (making it like a feat tree) and completely alters netrunning.

hunter-seeker.obsidianportal.com/

Hunter-Seeker has more emphasis on religious groups, NGOs and politics.

The author made a good job and the booklet looks really nice. I don't agree with everything, but it could appeal to people who don't like Cyberpunk 2020 and don't want to modify it.

Another system that looks excellent is Zaibatsu. It has a very Gibsonesque vibe. You can get the system here for free: angelfire.com/games3/errantknight/zaibatsu/

Interface Zero is a pretty good setting in it’s various iterations (Savage Worlds, FATE, and I think there’s a Pathfinder version maybe?).
IZ basically doesn’t even bother trying to stick with just one schtick for it’s cyberpunk world and just throws in everything; androids, full-body replacement cyborgs, replicants (called simulacrum here), genetic engineering, splicing your genes with animals (Dark Angel/Batman Beyond style), psychics, flying cars, offworld colonies, all of it.
One of the things I appreciate on a minor note is that it’s backstory has been updated for changes in politics since 1985 (which a lot of other major cyberpunk settings haven’t much bothered to do), but that’s a very minor point overall.

Remember Tomorrow is a nifty Gibson novel simulator. Fairly lightweight.

gregorhutton.com/boxninja/remember/

For people who much prefer the mostly non-violent interplay of relationships, goals, double-crosses, politics and cultural battles of Gibson's novels.

If you like narrative games - The Sprawl
If you like crunchy games - Just give up all the options are garbage

Best I've found for a traditional Cyberpunk RPG is Savage Worlds with the Interface Zero 2.0 setting, but even that's ehhhh.

Seconding Interface Zero.
As a setting a lot of it’s traditional cyberpunk crappiness comes from an amusing update to traditional cyberpunk; rather then having everyone be jobless or having mindless office-drone professions (a remnant of the 1980’s), it says that IZ’s world used a mix of both nanofabrication and replicant slave labor to finally create a post-scarcity society where most labor jobs are taken or performed by machines.
Unfortunately rather then do the Star Trek thing where they revitalized their economy by adjusting it for it’s new post-scarcity state they left the economy EXACTLY as it was before, resulting in a world where the rich are fabulously wealthy but the middle class is basically extinct and the rest of the 85% of planet Earth are living on crappy welfare and bad food.

This is actually fairly believable honestly, because in lots of parts of countries we see a move towards more efficient machinery doing lower-grade jobs for them but zero effort to focus on training people for the jobs machines CAN’T do, leading to huge unemployment among most blue-collar workers.

Interface Zero is pretty good but has some bizarre tics that mar the setting (such as Africa becoming the global center of banking and genetics, haha, yeah right). The mechanics are mostly good for a medium-crunch game.

The economics are half nonsense, as in all cyberpunk games, because scifi writers don't know shit about economics. But that's okay, it's a fantasy genre.

Spotted the narrative-faggot who can't handle crunch.

I love crunch, just not poorly executed garbage like Shadowrun.

You just cannot handle a strong and crunchy system like Shadowrun. Real games have crunch.

What do you guys think of cyberspace/hacking in cyberpunk games? It seems to me that if one of the players was a hacker and went into cyberspace, the GM would have to deal with that while the other players twiddle their thumbs.

>(such as Africa becoming the global center of banking and genetics, haha, yeah right)
For reasons too annoyingly complex and boring to go into here, this isn’t as implausible as you’d think.
In fact it’s more likely then the US splitting into separate geographic regions again, which requires military logistics that each cultural region of the US frankly does not even begin to have.

That said Brazil is also a world power in IZ, and as someone who was born there and moved up here, trust me when I say that that is so unlikely as to be completely implausible.

There's not often any particularly good reason to have these big elaborate systems to hacking. Game designers just need to stop trying to emulate the hacking scenes from Neuromancer with mechanics, and instead let the GM's descriptions handle that and let the actual rolls be only slightly more complex than a typical skill check.

If I have to roll initiative to hack open a door something's gone horribly wrong in the design process, considering someone with some lockpicks can just make a single roll to achieve the same outcome.

Everyone on /srg/ admits that the current Shadowrun is one of the worst-made games ever, and it doesn’t even attempt to make it’s own fluff work for it anymore.
The fucking CEO embezzled the shit out of the company for fuck’s sake and drove out all the people who actually knew game design.
Only if the hacking mechanics has it’s own endless convoluted internal rules.
The only reason that that’s even a thing is because Cyberpunk 2013 did it first, and traditionalism is no reason to keep doing anything.

There's one edition of Pyramid magazine (3-21, if you want to look at it) that has a pretty good setup. You have a few types of programs, and when you run them you make a skill check using their rating. Timeframe is abstracted so that you roll about as frequently as everyone else is, and unless you've screwed up, the security is purely represented as opposed rolls, so no need for its own initiative. It's the first, and so far only, hacking subsystem I've liked, even though I dislike GURPS in general.

>The fucking CEO embezzled the shit out of the company for fuck’s sake and drove out all the people who actually knew game design.
Corporate greed destroyed the most successful cyberpunk RPG? That's beautiful.

Yeah, the irony is ridiculous.
What’s even more apropos is that CGL hasn’t fired the guy because that would tie up all the money he stole in court and effectively bankrupt the entire company, so the thieving prick is still in charge.

This is a good compromise for hacking.

Hunter-Seeker uses something similar, with firmware modules that you use for skill rolls to perform certain functions, like controlling a drone, overriding a security door or jamming an area.

Oh wow. That is a thing of beauty. The homebrew version of CP2020 I mean.

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I was about to make the exact same thread, kek.

Is Fate Core a nice pick? I've never played it, so I don't know how it handles hard boiled, serious games.

FATE in general is either a great system for literally anything you could ever want to play, or a complete train wreck.

At the end of the day, FATE can only work if you have a GM and a table full of players who "get" the narrative driven nature of the rule mechanics.

I'm not afraid to admit that I don't. So I don't like FATE.

FATE is not good for crunchy genres like cyberpunk that require details about cyberware, guns, cars, technology and hacking. It's just too simple a system to handle those without basically being handwaving.

ExMachina has an interesting take on cyberware. Instead of having a list of cyberware, you basically take advantages and describe how they manifest. So, if you take an advantage that makes you stronger, you could say that it's from a linear frame, grafted muscles or the character has a bioengineered body.

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>le GURPS meme

The Veil or Headspace. The Sprawl sounds a little uninventive.

Worth noting that, as cyberpunk is deader than disco, they kinda do it something different, especially the former.

I've always been content with Cyberpunk 2020 (2nd Ed). It's definitely showing its age by now, but it's still a solid system.

mediafire.com/file/r5zp80d36y89qs5/Rulebook, 2nd Ed.pdf

It gets the job done.

Never heard of that system until now. Looking into it it looks pretty cool. Might give it a go.

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And here I thought cyberpunk was all about the theme and setting...

Basically the only dedicated system you "require" is one for hacking, if you want to go in-depth with a Matrix of sorts. Shadowrun and Eclipse Phase have those. Other systems are more circumspect.

I don't see what kind of unique treatment cyberware would get. And cars and guns are approached by a million systems.

>And here I thought cyberpunk was all about the theme and setting...
It's SUPPOSED to be about theme and setting. But once again, most players eschew that in favor of getting their jollies off of all the high-tech toys described in the game that they can play with.

>Basically the only dedicated system you "require" is one for hacking, if you want to go in-depth with a Matrix of sorts.
And you DON'T. Well, not unless you want to put only one player in the spotlight for entirely too long while all the other players forget about what's going on and fuck around on their smartphones.

>It's SUPPOSED to be about theme and setting. But once again, most players eschew that in favor of getting their jollies off of all the high-tech toys described in the game that they can play with.
See: /srg/

>Implying rampant corporate consumerism at the cost of everything else isn't cyberpunk as fuck.
Not giving a shit about the rest of the world because you NEED that new ultrawideband radar enhanced smartlinked thermal scope for your kickass new rifle is cyberpunk, Anons.

Just like all those punk bands in it for that rare Gibson.

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The Sprawl is flawless but only has mechanics for when your crew is on a run.

I personally found The Veil incoherent enough to be unplayable and I love The Sprawl to bits. The latter’s recent book on example cities was amazing, especially their takes on Brussels, Lagos, and Paris.

TechNoir if you want a hardboiled campaign with (relatively) short arcs. If you keep up the same characters over time it's more like a series of novellas than a singular story.

>at the cost of everything
It's literally just phone up your local black market dealer and say "hey I need a one of these, how long and how much?"

If you go with FATE, it's worth checking out the Atomic Robo RPG; it's more pulp than punk, but it has some nice ideas.

He might have meant "at the cost of everything" in a grander scale: The environment, human empathy, social stability, etc.

>It's literally just phone up your local black market dealer and say "hey I need a one of these, how long and how much?"
If you RP black market like this, then you're doing it wrong.
The black market is not a supermarket or mail order catalogue where you can place orders and get what you want at a fixed price. You need to make connections, usually through a middleman (fixer), with guys who might have what you're looking for - usually they don't, but they will have something similar (ex. you're in Europe and looking for a full-auto M4A1, but the fixer only has a Vz.58, a RPD, a CETME-L or an AMD-65). If the stuff is very rare, you might even have to go and get it by yourself, the contact only selling you the location of where the stuff is stored (army base, collector, etc.) - how you get it is your problem. Sometimes the contact might not want money but has a favor to ask from you (retrieve money from a guy who owes him some, kill a guy who double-crossed him, steal some stuff from a competitor...). Then, there are also a lot of counterfeited products and honeytraps set by cops or corporations - you don't know the quality of what you get (some gangs were dipping their weed in glass dust to make it look better).

>jerk your players around for 15 sessions every time they try and buy a gun
If that's doing it right, I think I'll stay in the wrong box.

Unless you're a shitty GM, this shouldn't take 15 sessions, and it adds a lot of cyberpunk flavor to the game - you get to use those contacts, you have to meet shady people you cannot trust, etc.

Minor stuff, like common guns or armor can be obtained relatively easily from low-key dealers. In a classic private contractor (aka. mercenary, guns for hire, street ops) campaign getting the equipment needed is an important part of the "mission" - watch the movie Ronin for example, or read Dogs of Wars from Frederick Forsyth. Restricted/rare items are difficult to procure, unless you're a corporate hit team or governmental spec ops who have access to whatever they need. Note that the characters' employer might also provide them with mission critical equipment (ex. Sarah in Hardwired receives weapons training and surgery from her contacts).

I'm not going to waste everybody's time making them roleplay most purchases. If I'm going to give them the runaround on something I'm going to go full Chaser-trying-to-get-to-Mars with it and make it an important part of the game.

The meat of the game is in the execution, not the preparation.

I'm not going to argue with you about philosophical differences. We're still in free countries, and you can do whatever you want with your players.

For me, the preparation (recon, planing, equipment procuration) and exfiltration parts are just as important as the execution itself.

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For people who are interested in Cyberpunk 2020, here is a life path generator I found: moosh.net/cp2020/

And here's directly a whole character generator: ericdorsey.info/cp2020/index.html

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This one.

Before people start accusing me of shameless trolling, here are some supplements for it: ekizo.mandarake.co.jp/order/ListPage/serchKeyWord?keyword=Metal head TRPG&lang=en

And here's a website about the D20 conversion: hobbyjapan.co.jp/metalhead/main.html

Best Cyberpunk is Japanese Cyberpunk!