Cyberpunk general I guess?

I have a good news for you. Since you're used to 5e, which is one of the shittiest system to have ever being designed, you won't have problems switching to another system.

Personally, I really like Cyberpunk 2020 because it's simple and straightforward. It's not the best system around, but I like how it balances simplicity and crunch. Character creation is fast. Characters are described by stats, skills and equipment - that's it. Gameplay is quick as there are no feats, moves, or quirks that will interrupt it. Like I said, the system is very basic (stat + skill + 1d10 vs. target number or opposite skill roll) and straightforward. There are no buzzwords to use, no playbooks, no dice pools. Everything you need is directly written on your character sheet, and you only need two types of dice. This makes the game very fluid. Finally, the system can be modded very easily and you can find house-rules on about anything somewhere for free.

GURPS Cyberworld was the official cyberpunk setting for GURPS 3e. It's kind of old school cyberpunk, but it's well developed. You can run it using GURPS, but nothing stops you from using Cyberpunk 2020, TriStat, BRP or Savage Worlds instead.

Why would you ever want a d20 version over TriStat dX?

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Probably because he comes from DnD and thinks that it's going to be simpler.

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the Veil sounds pretty cool, but that is a long rulebook damn. It is fit for kind of S.E.Lain / BLAM! type of games right? Can't find any youtube review, only some face-carrousel actual play.

If you're into narrative games, The Veil might be for you. Sprawl is the more classic cyberpunk PbtA game, though. Alternatively, there's also Remember Tomorrow, another narrative cyberpunk game, using its own system.

Check this excellent Shadowrun teaser: m.youtube.com/watch?v=_PnrIlyZpM8

Gonna ask here. What is a good universal or cyberpunk-specific RULES-LITE system that still covers cybernetic augmentations and power armors? I've read CP2020 and Zaibatsu. Anything lighter?

CYBERPUNK RPGS

Cyberpunk 2020
Interface Zero
GURPS Cyberpunk
ICE Cyberspace
Underground
Wyred
Technoir
Remember Tomorrow
Karbon
Hunter//Seeker
Zaibatsu
Ex Machina
Neuropolitan
The Sprawl
The Veil
Polychrome
Corporation
Kuro (horror)
Just Another Day
Nova Praxis
Wetwork: Sprawl Assassination

CYBERPUNK NOVELS

The Stars My Destination, Alfred Bester
The Shockwave Rider, John Brunner
Stand on Zanzibar, John Brunner
Hardwired, Walter Jon Williams
When Gravity Fails, George Alec Effinger
Fairyland, Paul McAuley
Synners, Pat Cadigan
Islands in the Net, Bruce Sterling
Schismatrix, Bruce Sterling

"Core Readings"
William Gibson (Neuromancer, Count Zero, Mona Lisa Overdrive, Virtual Light, Idoru, All Tomorrow's Parties)
Bruce Sterling (The Artificial Kid, Schismatrix Plus)
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"The Cyberpunk Movement"
Greg Bear (Blood Music)
Pat Cadigan (Mindplayers, Synners, Fools, Tea From an Empty Cup)
Marc Laidlaw (Dad's Nuke)
Tom Maddox (Halo)
Rudy Rucker (Software, Wetware, Freeware, Realware)
Lewis Shiner (Frontera)
John Shirley (City Come A-Walkin')

"Post-Cyberpunk"
Wilhelmina Baird (CrashCourse, ClipJoint, PsyKosis)
Bruce Bethke (Cyberpunk - where the term came from, Headcrash)
Simon Ings (Hot Head, Hotwire, Headlong)
Richard Kadrey (Metrophage)
Kim Newman (The Night Mayor)
Marge Piercy (He, She, and It/Body of Glass)
Justina Robson (Silver Screen)
Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash, Interface, The Diamond Age)

>2) What are the best splat books? used book store has all of the Chromebooks and idk if they are worth.

Listen Up You Primitive Screwheads is the best GM resource.
The Chromebooks are good for player toys, like guns, cyberware and gadgets.
The adventures are garbage.
Night CIty is a mixed bag: some cool stuff with a lot of lame stuff and very dated aesthetics. Make your own city, is my recommendation.
Eurosource and Pacific Rim are shit. Absolute shit.
Firestorm has some good shit but it's railroady and metagamey as hell, and it blows up the world at
the end.
Home of the Brace has some good bits and plenty of detail about America...most of it hopelessly anachronistic now.
Deep Space is supposed to be good but it's not my bag.

CP2020 is best when you roll your own joint.

The Sprawl and Technoir.
Hunter//Seeker is a streamlined version of CP2020.

Damn, Ruiner was great fun. I want to port some of the weapons and augs to a big splatterpunk game.

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The sprawl trilogy and mirrorshades. Id also reccommend playing Deus Ex (the first one) and watching both Blade Runner and Blade runner 2049. After doing these things youve basically read/played/watched all the highest cyberpunk achievements

For Cyberpunk 2020 and Shadowrun how do you guys recommend "fixing" hacking?

Seconding this

I like the modules system in Hunter//Seeker. Medium-crunch with some tactical options for the hacker without going full-cyberspace-retard.

Is this from a game or is this just concept art?

As someone who's new to cyberpunk tabletops I wasn't aware there were other systems other than SR, are any of them a little simpler?

Most of them are. About the only ones that aren't are GURPS if you use a bunch of supplementary stuff and Cyberspace (Rolemaster does cyberpunk).

In CP2020, netrunners can control remotely-controlled devices without doing the whole netrunning process, which is good and powerful. For classic hacking, just make them roll to find a backdoor and roll to do the hack. Failing triggers ICE.

I started my cyberpunk genre game career off with Shadowrun 4e and boy that was a mistake. Cyberpunk 2020's rules are kinda similar to SR but not written by a moron and had at least one paid intern editing the fucking thing.

That being said I really dig Shadowruns mix of fantasy and Bladerunner, and the CRPGs are great.

Almost all other cyberpunk RPGs are simpler than Shadowrun.

Shadowrun's main advantage is that it features a fully-developped setting and system. You don't need to improvise, there is crunch and fluff for everything. GURPS, with Cyberpunk and Cyberworld is about the same. For people who insist on playing 100% by the book, those systems are a good option.

People who aren't scared of improvising or like to use their own setting will find those systems unnecessarily crunchy and restrictive. This kind of people will find games like Cyberpunk 2020 or Ex Machina more to their taste.

Savage Worlds: Interface Zero 2.0 is kind of a "in the middle" thing. It offers a full set of coherent rules and a developed setting. You can play it pretty much like you want - freestyle or by the book.

Those games are simple and free:
Wyred: chaosgrenade.com/games/wyred/
Zaibatsu: angelfire.com/games3/errantknight/zaibatsu/

CP2020's got a fairly developed setting.

It does, but it's so bad you don't even want to use it. The short background featured in the main book is enough.

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Anyone have cyberpunk images with a tropical flair? Basically looking for anything that has both neon lights and palm trees.

Who else is writing their own cyberpunk setting?
>How did you balkanize America?
>Who are the superpowers?
>Is there a POD, or is it genuinely speculative?

The big distinction is The Sprawl is based on Dungeon World, while The Veil isn't.

Probably Lain, but the weirdness is more... hrm... explicit in the characters, methinks.

Is balkanization necessary? In my opinion this is something where many cyberpunk games fail. The authors try to change the world radically, and the setting ends up being totally unrealistic and artificial.

The point of a cyberpunk setting is that the world has collapsed and nations have fractured tho

Not necessarily, you can tell a good cyberpunk story in a single city well separate from any international level conflict. Not GiTS though

Says who? There’s no correlation between a societal collapse and balkanized countries.

Russia, Balkans, China?

We've got an autist working on Shadowrun now. So far he's released a 39 page document that has basically every piece of tech from Drones to cybernetics to Smart Missiles converted to Genesys. He's supposed to release the Magic stuff soon.

>All that senseless autistic work just to convert a Flavor of the Month system
>In that time he might have invente--haha, no, just kidding;
>he'd only have binge watched 8 anime series
>I guess this is better after all

>How did you balkanize America?
By state. Not really balkanization, but more that America becomes more of a confederacy of states. Something about America being balkanized just feels off to me

The fuck is this Genesys system and why is Shadowrun being converted to it?

The generic version of FFG's Star Wars systems.

Flavor of the Month system that's popular among the kids now, just as Powered by the Apos was for the last 3 years, and FATE before that, and d20 before that...

Are there any games which are set in a setting that clashes cyberpunk and postcyberpunk?

China has been unified for 60 years and is cyberpunk as fuck.

The seminal cyberpunk novel, Neuromancer, does not have a balkanized USA. It's just a collection of cities without borders and the word USA is never mentioned, but it hasn't broken up into smaller republics.

You don't need to balkanize the USA in order to reduce its superpower status; merely economically ruin it and derive the consequent social/cultural decay while technology races ahead. Bruce Sterling's novel Distraction did just that.

Postcyberpunk?

Bump for art

We've got a dude doing that to Dark Heresy as well.

>turning a clunky, gritty game which feels like even the system is working against you into Star Wars
Not my cup of tea really.

The alpha, the omega.

Shadowrun

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Transhuman Space, if you like sci-fi with a cyberpunkish undercurrent.

THS is at best Post-Cyberpunk. It doesn't have any cyberpunk elements in it really.

In general, you're right. But the Broken Dreams supplement is basically THS: Cyberpunk Edition. It's all about how Earth is fucked by AIs, religion memetics and blatant misuse of shells, etc.

Broken Dreams is much more post-cyberpunk. It's not a dystopia, it's just places that suck.

Okay, help a poor misinformed user unfamiliar with the genre. In broad terms what separates cyberpunk from sci fi? Are they exclusive or can they exist in the same setting?

Two overlapping sets. Cyberpunk often has these elements:

>near-future, not far-future (like within the next 80s years)
>megacorporations in control
>cyberware/bioware
>cyberspace or advanced hacking
>AIs
>social elements, like punk rebellion
>street-view rather than middle-class or elite-view
>dystopian, negative
>destroyed environment
>advanced tech but society disintegrating
>mostly based on Earth, not other planets

But there is no agreed-upon precise definition because so many of the best cyberpunk novels, movies and games often break one or more of these elements.

On top of what said, or summarizing it a bit i guess, is that cyberpunk has a bit of noir tone, or a lot of noir tone, where other divisions of scifi don't necessarily.

agreed. there are cyberpunk novels where the megacorps exist, but they're essentially the remnants of the past, subservient to a more powerful government.

doesn't stop them from running entire countries on their own with lip-service loyalty to the government.

If cyberpunk doesn't mean "places that suck, also cyberware" to you, then can't help you there. Everyone has a different definition and that's how these threads die.

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seconding interface zero, it's faster, more efficient and free from the convoluted rules non sense that most cyberpunk rpg suffer

The Infinity RPG is pretty good.

America poisoned its water table and made itself uninhabitable. Everybody emigrated to Asia, Europe and Africa. This was the event that convinced everyone that national borders were no longer necessary, and allowed the corporations to take over in earnest. Going for a more military-oriented story in a classic cyberpunk dystopia. Little to no hacking, but plenty of body modding.

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>tfw we're finally getting to the cyberpunk aesthetic
>but also dangerously close to megacorp control as well

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Lots of contemporary photographs look pretty cyberpunk.

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