Cyberpunk Combat Zone Hardcover Rulebook

I recently got into the Cyberpunk Combat Zone miniatures game. It's fast and thematic, a fast-paced little skirmish game between small gang forces. Things I really love about it are:

• The Setting. I'm an oldschool CP2020 nerd, so I'm hooked on the setting and its lore. I love the minis, and they can do double-duty for the RPG as well, which is a big bonus.
• Hypermobility. It's NOT a game where the dominant tactic is to stand back and do nothing, it's a lot more engaging than that. Movement is really flexible, and you're mechanically encouraged to set up multilevel terrain and maneuver all over the play area. 
• No one-hit kills. Each hit downgrades the target's capabilities, and most characters take 3 or 4 hits to knock them out. When your character takes a wound, they get to react immediately, so even if the enemy focus-fires on your favorite mini, you'll get to do something with them before they go down.

I've been painting up a ton of minis, and building terrain. I picked up a few Vehicles and Full Body Conversions, too. The rules for them aren't in the slim rulebook that comes in the starter set, but there are PDFs available of the beta versions of those. But there's also a big hardcover rulebook you can buy for the game, and it wasn't clear to me if it was worth sinking the extra money into the fancy rulebook. I looked online, but couldn't find any good details about what was in the hardcover book. How much did it compile? Was it just a reprint, or did it have major updates and errata? So I decided to take the plunge, compare it to the starter set rulebook, and post a summary online of what's new or different in the hardcover rulebook. 

Rules Changes and Additions in the Hardcover Rulebook for Cyberpunk Combat Zone

In general, the paperback rulebook from the boxed set is written with a bit more character, color and flavor. By contrast, the hardcover rulebook is more to-the-point and generally clearer. It's better organized, and often better explained in the main text. Surprisingly, though, it has fewer examples. 

The result is that the hardcover book is a faster read, easier to learn from, and quicker to look things up during play. But, in the rare instance where you do encounter a rule in the hardcover book that isn't immediately clear to you, the lack of examples can potentially make it harder to puzzle out the proper meaning. I prefer the hardcover rules text, but if English were not my native language, I bet the boxed set's many examples would be really helpful.

In Summation: If you're just getting started, I recommend you learn the game out of the slim softcover rulebook that comes in the 2-player starter set as it has lots of examples. Then, if you like the game and want to dive in deeper, it's definitely worth getting the expanded hardcover rulebook. Once you've got it, the hardcover book is the one you'll want to bring with you to game sessions and reference it at the table.

In Detail: These are the notes I scribbled down while going through the book, page by page in order. It is an itemized list of the many clarifications, and a few changes, introduced in the text of the hardcover rulebook. 

• When rolling against the Obstacle Die, the active player is now considered the Defender (instead of the Attacker as it was in the starter set), making rolls opposed by the Obstacle Die a good bit easier.
• The 2^nd Printing of the boxed set introduced the Purple Die. The hardcover rulebook doesn't talk about it as much as the boxed set does, but what it does say suggests the possibility there may be other unusual dice added in the future.
• The “Card Supremacy” section now makes it clear that card effects trump not just rulebook rules but also scenario rules.
• Some of the terminology of the Battlespace are better defined in this book. It's not a major change (or really a change at all), but it is presented early in the book and might potentially make some Scenario setup descriptions slightly easier to understand if you've read this section.
• The “Card Anatomy” section is a little more detailed, and specifically notes that “Veteran” versions of Characters have 1 Star and “Elite” versions have 2 or more Stars. It feels like that terminology change could be useful, but I'm not sure it actually sees much use in the book.
• The “Gear Cards” section includes a brief clarification on how Universal cards stack with faction Rarity.
• Gonks cannot use or acquire Gear. This isn't a change, I'm pretty sure it said that somewhere in the boxed set rules, but it is more clearly stated in the new rulebook on the page where Gonks are first mentioned. It's kinda buried in the softcover rules, and would be easy to miss it.
• It's clarified that you don't have to use all the actions of a Model when you activate them, you can save some for [Re]Actions or split them across multiple activations. This was heavily implied in the boxed set rules, but is far more clear in the hardcover rules.
• There's a short but helpful section on how it works when an Influence Action or other ability allows you to take control of a Rival model. If you've been arguing with your opponent about how that works, the hardcover book can clear it up for you both. 
• There's some clarification that there is a “clean up” step at the end of Inspire Your Team, and that's when you get to remove Hacked Tokens, refresh exhausted cards, and when Difficult Actions become available again.
• In the “Taking Actions” section there's a number of minor clarifications on topics and terms such as Free, Easy, Difficult, and how Exhausting a card works. Nothing that constitutes a change to the game, I don't think, but just better organized and easier to learn or look up this way.
• It seems like the Basic Influence Action “Command” might function subtly differently in the hardcover rulebook. Probably worth taking a quick peak at page 17. Hard to describe the difference, and I'm not sure it wasn't just me misunderstanding a bit of vagueness in the softcover rules, but worth a look.
• It clarifies that Influence Actions are resisted by Influence, and Tech Actions are resisted by Tech.
• Clarification on how Torrent targeting works when used as a [Re]Action.
• There's a nice little section on Trigger Timing and another on how Control passes. No major changes here, but they're nice little clarifications of corner-case situations.
• The hardcover rulebook actually states clearly that you can bend the limiter for curved movement. The boxed set rulebook shows this being done in one example, but never clearly states in the main rules text that you can do this. In this book it's crystal clear that this is allowed.
• Clarification that models are not allowed to voluntarily fall. They can't just hurl themselves off a cliff into nothingness. Instead, you'd use the climbing rules to go down, or you might potentially attempt a long jump that you're likely to fail, but if you roll well you're then obligated to clear the jump instead. This plugs a bit of a rules-hole where characters on upper floors could otherwise effectively get bonus movement by just falling off instead of climbing down.
• Climbing up can now expressly be done by using the Limiter at a diagonal. This surprised me, as measuring the hypotenuse instead of bending the Limiter up a wall allows you to squeak out a little bit of extra movement. They eliminated cheap downward movement, while encouraging cheap upward movement.  
• Jumping Gaps also has a fairly major change. You can now jump further than you could in the boxed set, and if you are making a shorter jump the difficulty is somewhat lower. 
• There are numerous other minor clarifications in the sections on climbing, jumping, and falling. It's probably worth your time to read pages 24 to 25, including the examples as well as the main text.
• Attacking Into A Brawl has a clarification that non-attack actions don't get randomly targeted. So if you're trying to Command your ally, there's no chance you'll accidentally Command the Rival they are Brawling with instead. Seems like a sensible change.
• Weirdly, they changed an example in the section on shooting into a brawl on page 29, and the new example disagrees with the rules text of both the hardcover and the boxed set. I think it's just a goof.
• Netrunning now mentions that some Programs might have you roll a skill other than Tech, or might have the target resist with another skill instead. I think this is mostly future-proofing the rules.
• While most parts of the hardcover rulebook are better than the softcover boxed set rules, I will say that the Netrunning section is kind of an exception. The “Sample Netrunner Activation” section is missing, and I found it really helpful in the boxed set. Also, the “Drone” section is moved to a different part of the book (to the glossary of keywords) in a rare instance of the hardcover book being less user-friendly in its layout. It's not a huge problem, but it stood out to me.
• There's a new “Full Body Conversions” section, which is functionally identical to the FBC rules available as a PDF from the MFC website. It's nice to have it here in the book, but isn't a huge deal since these specific rules are available online for free.
• There's a new “Vehicles” section, and it is radically different than the Vehicles Rules Beta that you get as PDF from the MFC website. There's a full 8 pages of rules here, with many important functional changes from that PDF. If you've picked up any of the bikes or other vehicles that have recently released, this section is of great value. It fixes a lot of little rules-holes and corner-case situations that the PDF didn't address, and makes bikes and wheelmen much more flexible on the tabletop. If you're excited about the bikes and vehicle models, this section makes the hardcover book a must-buy.
• There's a new Beast keyword, with rules effects. I believe the dogs have been errata'd to have this keyword.
• When resolving a Blast, there is a clarification that the option to spend an Action to move out of the Blast radius is not technically a [Re]Action, so if you still end up taking a Wound you can also [Re]Act to that if you have another unused Action token available. So you can dive for cover and still return fire, if you've got 2 Action Tokens ready. 
• Pierce has an important clarification in regards to how it works when a Gear Card is providing your Armor.
• Torrent has a clarification and new example of how it works.
• New rules for another Campaign type are included, so you can choose to play a Starter Campaign, or a Legends Campaign,. They have somewhat different rules on how you build your warband, how progression works, and what Objectives you use. Strangely, despite this new mode, they neglected to put in this book anywhere the optional “Shared Market” mode from the boxed set rules. So if you have both the softcover and hardcover rules, you have 3 slightly different campaign modes to try out.
• The rules for team creation are collected in one place to make it easier. You no longer have to hunt down the rules for including mercs, specialists, robots, FBCs, universal gear, iconic gear, in a half dozen different places in a rulebook or PDF. I think this will go a long way towards preventing accidentally illegal gang rosters.
• New rules for Tournament play are added. If that's your jam, this is presumably really useful.
• Minor clarification that “Acting Model” and “Active Model” are not the same thing.
• And lastly, the Scenarios. There are so many scenarios in this book. How many...?
• 31 Competitive 2-Player Scenarios
• 14 Narrative 2-Player Scenarios
• 7 Vehicle-based Narrative 2-Player Scenarios
• 7 3-Player Scenarios
• 2 4-Player Scenarios
• 13 Prove Your Worth Scenarios
• A 3-Scenario Investigation Storyline
• A 3-Scenario Cyber-Up Storyline
• A 3-Scenario Revenge Storyline
• A 3-Scenario Block-Battle Storyline
• 5 Cyberpsycho Solo/Co-Op Scenarios (and a Cyberpsycho solo/co-op system for controlling unhinged NPC actions during play)
• Admittedly, 14 of the above 91 scenarios appear in the boxed set, and many of the Gang Starters have a Prove Your Worth scenario, and some of the other scenarios appear in PDFs on the MFC website, but clearly not all of them. Having this many collected in one place seems very useful and provides a lot of replay value to the game.

I found that the hardcover rulebook was well worth my money. It's got some important updates to the game, and tons of scenarios and campaign material. Some of it is available elsewhere, but collecting it in a single volume to haul to the game is really helpful. The expanded rules for vehicles are unique to this book, making it a must-buy if you're into those. 

2026 has been crazy

I haven't posted since January. This year has been crazy, zipping by at times painfully. Honestly, it's been a really good year for me, just stupidly busy at the same time. Let's see if I can summarize:

I'm still GMing two ongoing regular RPGs, each of which has a session ever-other-week. So I get to GM once a week. I have two campaigns rolling along so when writer's block hits me, I can just pivot to the other campaign for a bit, which helps keep me on task and over-prepared. 

Those two games are: 

• Amber Diceless Roleplay, were on year 6 of this campaign, there's a ton of backstory and history, a huge cast of NPCs, and we've seen multiple universes get built and destroyed. Epic, metaphysical, character-driven, lore-rich, heavy emotional stakes. 
• Cyberpunk Red. We're about 20 sessions in to this, and it's stylistically nearly the exact opposite of my Amber campaign. The PCs are a combat ambulance team, so it's frantically paced, dice-heavy, arbitrary emergency-of-the-week, tactical play on a virtual table-top. 

And then I'm playing in two RPGs:

• A D&D game that I can only attend about half the sessions, so as I mentioned at the start of the year, I'm playing a Dao-Genie-Patron Warlock and I'm just trapped in my bottle in the weeks I have to miss.
• The other campaign is a Star Trek game. I'm the Andorian Captain of our Miranda-Class exploration vessel in the classic "TOS" era. 

I've been traveling to game conventions and trade shows for work a lot this year. This has been common for me for more than a dozen years, but this year has seen even more trips than normal. Several local conventions in the Seattle area, plus events in Kentucky, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Indiana, and Quebec. There was one convention in particular where I kept track of how many games I played or ran, and it was 25 sessions of 9 different games with 50 different people. Mostly RPGs and RPG-adjacent Story Games at that one.

Early this year I broke up with the girlfriend whom I'd been dating for about a decade, and moved out into a new apartment. That upended a lot of the normal daily and weekly patterns of my life. It meant my long-term D&D game that I've been running a few weekend-long sessions of every year for the past 8 years has come to an end, because it just didn't make sense to continue that storyline without the character my ex was playing. The rest of the group and I are gearing up for a new rambling Spelljammer campaign that we'll do a few weekends a year. 

I have also tried a few new miniatures game this year. I've played a couple games of Alpha Strike (the faster-playing sister-game to Battletech), a half dozen games of 5 Men In Normandy, and just since Gen Con I've been diving in deep into Cyberpunk Combat Zone. I've got dozens of little cyberpunks sitting next to my desk in various stages of undercoating and painting, and a burgeoning new collection of near-future terrain to support it. 

Turn-Based Wrestling

A friend went to a Pro-Wrestling event in New York. She shared this link afterwards, because she's playing in my Ambulance-based MeatWagon/TraumaTeam-style game of Cyberpunk Red.

I'd never really thought about it before, but it occurred to me while watching that clip, that Pro-Wrestling definitely has the pacing of turn-based combat systems. "Hold on, it's not your go yet. You need to stand in that space until I'm done moving and have made my attack for the round." 

Popping In and Out of the Genie Bottle

I am going to be playing in a new D&D campaign that my friend Mark is running. He invited me to join his campaign that's launching in a couple weeks. I'm excited at the prospect, because he runs really fun games, but there was a schedule conflict. His game is every Monday, but I have a commitment that will keep me away every second Monday. The existing event is my Amber campaign I run twice a month, and neither game could easily be rescheduled.

So it seemed I was going to have to decline the invitation. Having a player miss 50% of D&D sessions is pretty rough. Either somebody else would have to play my character half the time, or we'd have to just kind of handwave/ghost my presence. It would be quite the narrative headache.  Unless...

The solution I hit upon was that I'll play a Warlock with a very demanding Genie Patron. (This Warlock subclass is in Tasha's Cauldron of Everything.) In the sessions where I (the player) am not there, my character will have been drawn into the Lamp, and is performing some task for the Genie. One of the other Party members will pick up the Lamp, and hang it on a loop on their backpack. Then start of the next session, I pop out of the Lamp, and grab it off their loop. "Hey guys, I'm back! Sorry about that, the Patron insisted I help them out, but I'm totally free now. What did I miss?"

It's bending the rules a bit, as per the Genie Warlock rules you can only be in the Lamp for an hour or two, but that's the PC's limitations. It's a small and harmless house rule for the Patron to not be limited the way the PC is. 

So now I just have to figure out what flavor of Warlock to be. We'll be starting with 3rd Level characters, and we'll be in Faerun using the 2024 rules, but the GM is pretty permissive about what books you can use. So I've built a couple variations, and am still trying to figure out what I want to play. What I'm theorycrafted thus far includes:

Idea #1: A gentle water-giant, native to the Moonshae Isles, but wandering about seeking places of natural beauty and power. 

• Species: Firbolg. (From Mordenkainen's Monsters of the Multiverse. An 8-foot tall Fey who can talk to animals, and cast disguise self or turn briefly invisible)
• Genie Type: Marid. (Water genie. Lots of weather spells on their list. Fog. Cone of Cold.)
• Background: Moonwell Pilgrim. (From the recent Heroes of Faerun book. Druidic Magic Initiate, specific to Moonshae Isles region of Faerun)

The "Lamp" might be a canteen, which I open and submerge whenever I find a really special body of water, so that the Genie can draw some in to add to their collection. I see this as a really chill, zen character, cataloguing sacred springs and the like for the Marid's inscrutable reasons.

Idea #2: Someone who died in a rockslide or earthquake that a Dao created or felt responsible for, so they unearthed him and used a Wish to restore his body to life. (Or, maybe the Dao is a bastard who just wanted a pet, so they crushed someone to make one.)

• Species: Reborn (From Van Richtens Guide to Ravenloft. Basically, this is a non-evil Undead, with some memory-issues / plot-hooks. Kind of like "The Crow".)
• Genie Type: Dao. (Earth genie. Standout early spells are Sanctuary and Spike Growth.)
• Background: Rune Carver (From Bigby Presents Glory of the Giants. Gives access to Comprehend Languages and then a smattering of other 1st-level spells.)

The "Lamp" in this case might be some sort of runestone or stone tablet. Or, it might be an Urn, since I'm reborn. 

Rune Carver seems like fun from a roleplaying perspective as being another thing the Genie taught me, and/or an explanation of what I'm doing when I'm in the Lamp being busy in the off-weeks: carving runes for the boss. 

That said, I'm not 100% convinced Rune Carver (or rather the Rune Shaper Feat it includes) is worth it mechanically. It gives you more spell variety than Magic Initiate, and even gives you 2 spells per day. It's just that one of those two is Comprehend Languages, which might well be irrelevant all campaign. I think the two Cantrips of that more-common Feat are probably going to be more generally useful in most some campaigns. It's a strange trade-off, hard to weigh against the other option, which does admittedly make for interesting decisions. I worry Rune Shaper will result in recurring negative play experience. "Hey guys, technically, if we take a Long Rest now, I could have the right spell for this situation tomorrow" Thing is, that better spell is still just 1st level. It seems like a tall order to convince the rest of the party to camp down early so you can swap out a 1st level spell. Ironically, this would be a better choice if we were playing from 1st character level instead of starting at 3rd level, as the extra spell is proportionally bigger the lower your character level. I'm probably worrying about nothing, as the overall package has a lot of upsides. I keep going back and forth about it.  EDIT: The more I think about it, the more I think it's probably actually really strong.  

I made both characters, but I'm not sure yet if I'll play one of those, or take a third stab at it.  I do really enjoy making characters.

One thing that came into clarity for me while making these characters is that I'm really not a fan of most of the Backgrounds in the 2024 PHB. It's a little weird that they bug me as much as they do. Because they include a combat-relevant Feat, they are indisputably stronger than the identically-named Backgrounds they replaced, but the rarely used social connection mechanics those 2014 Backgrounds had were what made me love the Backgrounds when 5e first came out. 

When I mentioned my character ideas to the DM, Mark said he's open to most 3rd-party content. So I'm now a little tempted to break open Crooked Moon, because I feel like it had some really weird Species to play in it.

Gaming at Dice Fest 2025

 Dice Fest 2025 wrapped up yesterday.  Over the weekend, I ran 9 sessions of a custom Shadows of Brimstone mission on a fancy 3D Board. I also played two games of 1,000 Blank White Cards while I was there, and one game of the The Score (a micro-RPG that takes about 20 minutes to play). 

And I also I helped create, organize, host and judge a miniatures event called the "Bitz Box Brawl" where 20 people received a box of random miniature parts and one hour to design and glue together their own chimeric monster. 

I taught all those games above to new players while I was at it.  I really enjoy sharing my favorite games with people I'm just getting to know, and conventions are great for that. It was all immense fun, but I am truly exhausted today.

Some random Andor thoughts

If you haven't seen it yet, Andor is well worth the watch. It's a little slow at the beginning of the first season, but builds into something amazing, and is one of the best TV shows of all time (not just Star Wars TV shows). It's also the most relevant Star Wars has ever been to our real world.  Every time I re-watch Andor, it makes me want to go to a protest rally and speak truth to power, then come home and play a Star Wars game. Great show.

I was watching a youtube video today about Andor, where someone was talking about not liking that one particular Andor story arc never really reaches a conclusion. But I feel that this particular story line needs to NOT have a clean answer, as that unresolved emotional tension is critical to the main character's journey and development. So I wrote:

Cassian's character arc requires him to not find his sister. He starts out only caring about his people, his family, and will do anything for them. He fights the empire because of the horrible things they've done to his family, and he's trying to prevent more awfulness from happening to them. But with every story arc and time jump, his "family" gets larger and larger. First Maarva. Then his adopted hometown, and that circle of friends. The Aldani Heist gives him a choice of how large his "family" is going to be. That's why Skeeve's false backstory is about a lie about family. Cassian's not quite ready to admit that the whole universe is made up of families that are actually as important as his own, but he glimpses it in Nemik's words, and steps away from that realization despite protecting Val and the Rebellion in the crucial moment. Then the Narkina prison solidifies it, as his fellow convicts become his family. He returns home to his first familial extensions, and in that aftermath is when he really embraces that the galaxy deserves the same protection he wants to give his family. But he's still struggling with it, often (understandably) prioritizing his own family over the big picture. That's why Bix leaves him, so he can choose "all the people" over "his people" and stay on task. And that's why he can't find his sister. The family-shaped hole at the center of his being is less important than his mission to save all the families everywhere from tyranny. If the story had involved him finding his sister, Bix's sacrifice might have been undone, and Cassian's development might well have reverted to just focusing on those closest to him, undoing his growth from "looking out for me and my own" to "fighting to protect everyone, at great personal cost". She could be out there anywhere, so even in the moments when he'd rather just help his in-group, he has to operate from the assumption it's better and smarter to help everyone everywhere.

Recent Gaming (spring 2025)

Lots of gaming lately. Here's some highlights:

My Amber Diceless Roleplay campaign continues to go strong. It's rolling on 5 years now, roughly twice a month, so we've recently crossed our 100th session with the same characters. Dworkin/Oberon's universe was destroyed, and the action now takes place in Corwin's universe and another universe that Fiona created, plus the occasional scene in the tiny islands of primal matter in the Abyss that were left when the old universe imploded. Those are basically the only place where Brand can exist without the "immune system" of the other universes trying to destroy him.

I just wrapped up my Feng Shui 2nd Edition campaign about a week ago. The players foiled a really major push by the Ascended to conquer 2 of the 3 Junctures they didn't already control. This caused a Critical Shift (the second one of the campaign) and after a truly epic battle we ended with the PCs stepping into a portal to a future they don't know.

For the same group (as played Feng Shui), I'm now prepping a Cyberpunk Red campaign. Scroll down to my last post, from earlier this week, to read about that. 

It was a bit of a toss-up among the group whether we wanted to do Cyberpunk or Pendragon, so in the next few months I'll be reading The Great Pendragon Campaign and the Book of Uther and doing bits and pieces of light GM-prep for that, so that when Cyberpunk wraps up, I'll have that in my pocket and ready to go. But, given that the last two campaigns for this group ran multiple years each, I'm not too worried about getting Pendragon ready in a hurry.

I'm also now playing in an RPG as well. A friend of mine is running Night's Black Agents, aka spies vs vampires. In NBA designs their own vampires and determines whether vampirism is supernatural or superscience or literally infernal demon hell-powers. Our campaign is taking place in the 1980s, so in the two sessions we've played thus far, we've had to sneak across the Berlin Wall three times now. Our characters have rescued a journalist, and the goons who were holding her captive had weird mysterious creepy stuff going on, but we haven't really connected that they (or their leader) is a vampire yet. There's one of them that makes us instantly nauseous when we get near them, but we haven't really figured out why. A different one jumped on top of our car and ripped the roof open trying to kill the journalist, but the roof-rider burst into flames when we shot the heck out of her. We're not at all certain what to expect, or what we're up against. Unraveling the mystery is pretty fun, and the uncertainty makes it easy to tap in to the fear and bewilderment our characters are experiencing. 

This weekend I got together with some friends and played the card game Innovation and the board game Thunder Road.

Innovation is really good, but kind of overwhelming the first time you play.I had really good early turns, or so I thought, as I was in the lead in points and achievements.  Unfortunately, in the mid-game I just could not manage to draw cards with any synergy at all. Well, really the problem was that I had a great hand, but I foolishly commented on it, so someone Melded a card that they could then use via Dogma to steal my hand. I didn't even know that was a possibility... but, duh, I should have, it's not like this is the first game to ever let you steal cards from another player. I just never recovered. Good game, but boy does it have a ton going on.  It's sort of a civilization-builder, where every card is an invention or cultural breakthrough. You start in the stone age, and end in the far-future. Every card in the game is unique, and they all have multiple unique ways to play them. So while I liked it a lot, I imagine its' not going to be good match for everyone.

Thunder Road is much simpler. Just good chaotic Mad-Max style shenanigans. Sort of like if Gaslands or Car Wars was a streamlined racing boardgame. We played with the Chop Shop expansion, which adds cool asymmetric super-powers to your cars via a drafting mechanic at the start of the game. I enjoyed it a great deal, and may end up buying the game and that expansion. Based on just one play, it seems like the core game without that expansion is very light beer-and-pretzels without much depth, but that expansion made every turn interesting and unpredictable. 

I continue to play the occasional solitaire-RPG or solo-skirmish miniatures game when I have insomnia. For the solo-RPG I've been mostly running D&D, with one PC (a Satyr Circle of Stars Druid) and a rotating cast of lower-level NPC sidekicks. When I started I had to lean a lot on the Solo Adventurer's Toolbox and its sequel. I'm a little more freeform of late, but that book is great for getting you started and comfortable with solitaire play.  

And every once in a while I boot up Cyberpunk 2077 or Baldur's Gate 3, but I have to be careful with those because man can I ever lose an entire evening just rearranging my darned inventory. When that happens, I feel like I've wasted a resource (my life, my time) that I'll never get back... and yet, I love both those games so much.

Meatwagon In The Time Of The Red

Starting a new campaign soon. It'll be Cyberpunk Red, with the PCs being the crew of an REO Meatwagon Combat Ambulance. If you've consumed any flavor of Cyberpunk, you've probably heard of Trauma Team, the premiere combat ambulance medical extraction company. REO Meatwagon is the low-budget disreputable version. 

I'm setting it up like an episodic TV show. Every session will have an A-Plot and a B-Plot. 

The A-Plot is "this episode's story" that's usually going to be an emergency call, where the PCs show up in the middle of a terrible situation and have to try to get their client out alive. Often this means going in guns-blazing, but sometimes it will be more of a puzzle or require subtlety.

The B-Plot will be a few roleplaying scenes around the edges of that, which tie in to one PCs backstory or personal arc each session, or perhaps advances "this season's simmering meta-plot" in the background.

I've done something similar to this in a one-shot before, and it worked great. Now I'm going to find out how well the idea holds up for a longer campaign.

Planning to assign IP a little differently than the books suggest. 

• Making any serious attempt at the A-Plot scores everyone on the team 50 IP, even if they fail. 
• If they save one or more paying customers, and deliver them safely to a Hospital (or other place the customer says is safe, provided the customer's not bleeding out or KO'd) the group +10 IP per customer saved. 
• Engaging with the B-Plot in any way (e.g.: not just hanging up on the NPC) scores an extra +5 IP for the team.
• If that B-Plot scene is a real dirty suckerpunch that seriously complicates the character's life, hits you in the feels, or someone's roleplaying really impresses the GM, everyone gets +10 IP bonus (beyond the usual +5 from the B-Plot)

The intention then being that the PCs gain 50 to 75 IP per session, which is a little higher than the average the book assumes, but not crazy high. Doing it this way to motivate the players to engage with the plots in particular ways, so there's just a little extra push to try to save a customer. Also to give you a reason to include NPC friends or family in your backstory so it's not just "I'm an orphan and a real loner" as many people seem to love to do with Cyberpunk. I find there something about dystopian futures that really make folks want to create dysfunctional lone-wolf bad-asses by default. 

The Way of the Weredodo

 Back in December, I wondered aloud about the Wereraven stats in the 5e Ravenloft book. It was, at the time of publish, the only official Lycanthrope that could regenerate. It had a Regeneration ability instead of the Resistance to non-magical Slashing, Piercing and Bludgeoning damage that all other Lycanthropes had in 5e. As I mentioned in that post (Transitive Property of Gaming: Wereraven Throwbacks) this made the Were-Raven much more powerful than most Lycanthropes. They're really hard to kill, in a way that none of the other lycanthropes are, and that seemed odd to me.

Since then, I picked up the Deck of Many Things set, which included stats for a Werevulture. This Werevulture was almost identical to the Wereraven. Identical except for more hitpoints and higher damage. The mimicry power is removed, but there wasn't anything added to make it more like a vulture. 

When I noticed that Werevulture about a month ago, I wondered if maybe the upcoming 2024 edition of the Monster Manual was going to give all Lycanthropes a Regeneration power instead of Resistance. There'd been rumblings for a while that Resistance to non-magical weapons was going the way of the (were)dodo. So I suspected that Regeneration was going to be added to all the Weres as a way of making them feel like the dangerous hard-to-kill shapeshifters that they are in the lore. 

Well, now I've got the 2024 (aka 2025, aka 5.5) Monster Manual, and I can see that no, there's no new Regenerating Lycanthropes. So, I guess just bird-based lycanthropes can regenerate, for some reason. I don't understand why. I suspect it's just a case of "the left author doesn't know what the right author is writing".  

There's no lycanthrope section in the new Monster Manual, but there are stats for Werewolves, Weretigers, Wereboars, Wererats, and Werebears (and Jackalweres in the "J" section). The rules for contracting Lycanthrope are abridged heavily, and just shoved into the individual monster stat blocks. Overall, they are a lot less likely to turn you into a Lycanthrope, and I think it's a bit of a shame as that downplays the most interesting thing about them. On the other hand, if you don't make the initial save, and they also manage to reduce you to zero HP after that failed save, then you transform and become an evil lycanthrope instantly. On the rare cases where that first save is failed, you'll now really be sweating, assuming you know how the rest of the power works. That scariness is kinda cool... but it does make fights very swingy, as a PC going down is a double-whammy to the action economy when they get back up and join the enemy. 

It's also unclear from the Monster Manual whether or not its possible to restore the newly-evil newly-NPC character to their original status. The MM doesn't make it clear if Remove Curse works or not after you've transformed. It's pretty clear Remove Curse works between when you get the Curse from the first bite to when you fall to 0 HP, but once you've been KO'd you "become a werewolf under the GMs control". Is that new status an ongoing symptom of the curse, or is it a permanent change of status? Is "you're now a werewolf" the equivalent of "you're under an enchantment" or is it the equivalent of "you died"? I could make see an argument for either interpretation. 

Nothing in the Monster Manual takes a stance on it, and the Remove Curse spell in the 2024 Player's Handbook is vague as well. So I went looking in the DM's Guide, where it says: 

"Some monsters are associated with curses, whether as part of their origins or due to their ability to spread curses—werewolves being a prime example. You decide how a spell like Remove Curse affects a creature with accursed origins. For example, you might decide that a mummy was created through a curse and it can be destroyed permanently only by casting Remove Curse on its corpse."  

So, officially, the answer is "it's up to the DM". This is actually a bad answer. Everything is always up to the DM. What's a Werewolf's AC? How many HP does the werewolf have? Those are also things that a DM can (and often will) choose to change, but having a default answer is really helpful. It makes DM-ing prep run faster, and provides a default the DM can use if they want a baseline experience. If the Monster Manual said "AC: DM's Call" and "HP: Whatever the DM things is appropriate" we'd be annoyed that this monster entry was incomplete. Being vague, and not providing a default lethality setting for a werewolf's curse is lame. But this is worse than saying "Damage: DM's choice", because they don't even say in the monster description that this is up to DM fiat. They talk around it, thereby implying that the rules must be somewhere else. A new DM could well throw a werewolf encounter at their party without having thought this through at all, and then get stuck with a situation where a PC turns mid-battle. That player will naturally be curious as to how final/fatal this new condition is, and the DM's going to be caught checking two other books (like I did) only to find that in the end there's no guidance offered at all. 

I'm also not happy that their vulnerability to silver went away. I get that a design goal of 2024 was to try to bridge the martials vs spellcasters gap. Monsters that have Resistance to non-magical weapons makes them much harder for low-level non-caster PCs to battle, in a way that benefits spellcasters. Which is a shame, because spellcasters already have some big advantages especially later in the campaign when high-level spells do crazy things. So closing that gap is a noble goal, and I understand why that was something 2024 edition leaned into hard (see Weapon Mastery for another example), but I'm still not happy with the impact here. Silver weapons though were a really cool thematic element, so their removal detracts from the lore, and makes lycanthropes just a tiny bit less interesting. 

What makes a lycanthrope a lycanthrope? What separates them from other monsters now? Two things:

1) They can transform as a Bonus Action, but those different forms have identical stats, so this is kind of meaningless. It's narratively cool, and I'll certainly use it in play. But it doesn't do much, and since only Weretigers have anything else they might do with a Bonus Action instead, it's not meaningful.

2) If they kill you, there's a 50% chance you'll get up instantly as an NPC Lycanthrope and attack your fellow PCs. That's certainly interesting and meaningful, but it's got serious potential to cascade into a full TPK. Even if it doesn't do that, it's likely to ruin a player's fun, and/or result in an argument that boils down to DM's fiat after you've searched in 3 books for a rule. And the implications of what this means in-universe are kind of crazy. Because there's no delay now, any Lycanthrope ought to be able to convert any village into a full-on wolf's den faster than you can say "One-Night Ultimate Werewolf". I mean I guess it's good that you don't need silver to damage them, as now its possible that the villagers could get lucky and kill the new werewolves as fast as they are made. 

Lycanthropes in previous editions (including 2014 5e) were very hard for commoners to kill, so the scenario of "we need to hire the PCs to save our village" was very believable. At the same time, those older rules delayed the onset of lycanthropy until the next full moon or other trigger, so the PCs had some time to get hired and conduct an investigation. Now there's less need for the commoners to hire the PCs, and it takes the werewolf a lot less time to co-opt the entire town. I'm not a fan of any of those changes. 

Session-Based Advancement vs XP from Combat RAW

 It's really weird to me how completely disconnected the main level-up options in the Dungeon Master's Guide are.

Here's the text from 2014 DMG about leveling up your characters based on how many sessions you'd played:

A good rate of session-based advancement is to have characters reach 2nd level after the first session of play, 3rd level after another session, and 4th level after two more sessions. Then spend two or three sessions for each subsequent level. This rate mirrors the standard rate of advancement, assuming sessions are about four hours long.

The 2024 DMG adds a couple little sentences about adjusting this for length of session and accomplishment, but sticks to the general formula above. 

So how does that compare to XP gained from combat encounters, which I will note is the default system that the game largely assumes you are using, and which the various rulebooks (2014 and 2024 DMGs, and also Xanathar's Guide To Everything) spend a lot of time and word count (and math) hashing and rehashing.

I'd say that if you're tracking XP by combat it will take you at least 2, and more likely 3 sessions to get to level 2. I've also seen it take a lot more than that, especially with cautious players, or with those still learning the system or playing a new class for the first time. 

I'm not saying it's in any way a problem that the recommended progression rate for leveling-up by session is two to three times the speed of advancement if you did the XP math, but it is odd to me that this wide a gap exists without them mentioning it in any of the books that present that math.

Supporting XP math and book references can be found below the fold, along with a fair amount of rambling.