Cyberpunk F#

Last night I ran a sequel to the old Cyberpunk "MOC" campaign, using F# instead of the clunky old rules for CP2020. I really like F#, it scores highly in the flexibility, elegance, and collaborative story-telling arenas.

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Tone and Themes:
The setting aspects were:

• "Dark Comedy" would be the prevailing theme.
• Cold, harsh world where life ain't fair, the rich abuse the poor, and cybernetics is cheap and dirty.
• The PCs are crazy enough, or desperate enough, to join a gang that indulges in random mayhem.

It was a lot of fun, but didn't quite capture the feeling of the old campaign. I think that is because the GM doesn't have any real fangs in F#. The GM can give out negative aspects as a form of damage, but the rules strongly encourage only doing that once per session per PC, and you really can't kill off a PC at all. There's no fear of death, which for many settings is actually a good thing, but probably isn't in keeping with the tone of Cyberpunk. In the old campaign, when the big fight broke out at the end, the PCs would have run and probably scattered - heroism in CP2020 gets you killed. Instead, the PCs stood toe-to-toe with the badguys, and there was nothing I could do to really make them sweat. They had fun, and got to be courageous, so perhaps I shouldn't complain.

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Plot, such as there was:
Despite that tonal difference, the game was a lot of fun. The PCs were loser punks in a bizarre little gang that gets together for random mayhem rolled up on Morton's List. The List told them that this week's adventure would be to commit a major act of vandalism in another gang's territory. There were hijinks (involving the night city transit authority officers) on the bus-ride into enemy territory, a dead body in the park-and-ride, and then a big gang-vs-gang conflict at the soup kitchen.

The enemy gang was the Kennedy's Posergang. They faced off against cybernetically-enhanced duplicates of JFK, RFK, MLK, Jackie O (in pink), old Teddy Kennedy and Mayor Quimby. Okay, Quimby I probably never would have done in straight-up CP2020, but the improvisational nature of these light systems just takes me over the edge.

JFK had retractable head armor that (once deployed) was described as dinged up and chipped such that you could tell people liked to play Oswald on him. He was the gang leader, and eventually unleashed a very anime-style attack, where he shouted "CUBAN MISSILE CRISIS!" and launched a dozen micro-missiles. Jackie O had souped up Cyberlegs and did a ballerina attack. The "Vote Quimby" sash had a built-in monowire. Teddy's weight problem was actually enhanced Skin Weave. Etc. Governor Connolly was driving the get-away convertible. It was pretty stupid, but quite enjoyable at the time.

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Character Sheets:
F# gives PCs 6 Aspects, which I've found is probably more than you need. Most PCs end up with some that overlap, and since Aspects don't stack, there's not much benefit to be gained with it. I tried to mitigate this a bit, by restricting the Aspects into categories to encourage diversity on each PC. It also let me ensure all the PCs were properly CyberPunk. The blank character sheet looked something like this:

Rating	Aspect	Category
+2	This space left blank for the player to fill in.	Useful piece of cyberware, cool gadget, or bio-implant.
+2	This space left blank for the player to fill in.	Bizarre useless cyberware, or just something that defines the look of your character.
+1	This space left blank for the player to fill in.	What type of hoodlum, criminal, ganger or loser are you?
+1	This space left blank for the player to fill in.	Other background element or character backstory
+1	This space left blank for the player to fill in.	Catch phrase
+1	This space left blank for the player to fill in.	Your choice, this can be anything.

Most characters had one major piece of cybergear, some managed to squeak a second out of the bizarre / fashion category, and everyone had the option of using the last category for one more major tech bit if they wanted.

Savagepunk 2020

An aside: The "best" thing about Savage Worlds is how easy it makestitling blog posts. Just add Savage to front of things, or swap outwords for Savage. I'm so glad the game wasn't named "Buttweasel Worlds".

We used to have this MOC campaign... it was a Cyberpunk 2020 campaign withrandom craziness furnished via Morton's List. I loved that campaign,but it had one problem: the PCs had to be total freakin' cowards. Wewere a freakin' booster gang, and the sort of nutcases happy to puttheir lives in the hands of the Morton Boulder as a weeklysemi-religious experience - those characters shouldn't be cowards! Butwe were dirt poor gangers, and the CP2020 system isn't kind to thosewho can't afford armor, so we had to play cowards or die repeatedly. Wedidn't end up dying...

While talking today, Sarah and I lamentedthe passing of that game, and she mentioned that it bugged her that wewere such scaredy cats. In her experience, she maintains, CP2020 ain'tthat lethal. But she'd played mostly in high school, with power gamersand munchkins, where subdermal armor, skinweave, and metalgear wouldfrequently all end up on the same PC. Short of that kind of abuse ofthe layering system (which our poor gangers couldn't afford), headshots are nearly always lethal in CP2020, and 10% of hits areheadshots. Bravery gets you killed in Cyberpunk.

The otherproblem with CP2020 is how long it takes to build a character (PC orNPC). Even if you just need the random chombatta in an alley, he needscyberoptions, weaponry, and the SP values for every limb. It's a fun,gritty system, but it's a big pain in the ass to improvise.

Aswe discussed those truths, our eyes collectively lit up. Savage Worldscould get us back the MOC campaign concept without having to playcowards or deadmen. We've got recent experience with a very flexiblegeneric system, with low PC lethality and very simple NPC statimprovisation.

MOC Sequel: The Sequel

Last night I ran the second session of the MOC sequel. Totally improv. Players rolled up a Morton's List challenge was very quiet, homey and intellectual - they were supposed to explore artful writing. They, of course, gave this the MOC-gang spin, breaking into a building along the moderate zone / corporate zone divide, and reprogramming the businesses big digital sign so as to make it deliver a 30-foot tall message that would no doubt end in general mayhem and some level of fiscal disaster. And then there was this improvised sideline miniplot about a passing courier and the Solo who jumped him.

3 players (plus GM), with 2 out of 3 playing (someone else's) premade characters from the original campaign back in Albuquerque. Normally, we would have played Scion, but Kevin had a crappy day at work, and needed something short, fast-paced, and carrying no long-term consequences if he just blew off steam, so MOC it was. An hour or two into the game, I'd had the PCs witness a hit/shooting just to reinforce the random violence of the 2020 setting.

Instead they turned it around and visited some random violence on the shooter. Kevin played Jeff(who'd only shown up for one or two sessions of the original)'s old fixer character, "El Gato", and nearly got the cat killed. I rolled minimum damage on the head shot. If he'd been one range category closer (and therefore taken a second die of damage) it would have been "game over" for El Gato. Instead the grenade stayed focused on the NPC solo he picked a fight with.

The Courier's Briefcase: After the PCs kill the Solo, they decide to loot, not just him, but also the bleeding-out Corp courier he'd ambushed. The Corp had a briefcase chained to his wrist, and the Solo had blasted it free. The Corp also had a baggy of chocolate candy in his jacket pocket, which the PCs took as well. They make off with the briefcase, and trying to open it, they set off it's alarm and gas-dispenser defenses. Whatever was inside must be important. They crack it open, and find it just has more bags of the identical candy.

Now, in any other Cyberpunk campaign, the fixer would contact a scientist he knew and have them run a full suite of tests on the candy in the briefcase vs the candy in the jacket. That would be the lead-in to a clever mystery plotline about the dastardly schemes of some corporation making addictive / brainwashing / poisonous / nanite-laced / microfilm-filled candy. But this is MOC we're talking about, so instead, the PCs just pigged out.

"I'm a sub-poverty-level hoodlum. I don't care about corporate corruption, and this is better chocolate than I could ever afford!" How true.

2020 last night

Despite the EDIT, 2020 happened anyway. MOC, with two players. Sarah was playing a totally new character. Amy played Face, the character Jenn had made (but never played) for the original MOC campaign.

Two old gang members were portrayed as NPCs: Capt. Chaos (Eddie's Netrunner) and Ruby Cham (Jeremy's MedTechie). I used a die roll to determine which old PCs showed up. Chaos was pretty much just a cameo, whereas Ruby Cham was in every scene.

(Tangent: Ruby had a really distinct and thus replicatable personality. His presence really added a lot to the game in the old days, and thus I was able to act/fake him well enough for this. Please don't take that as saying Jeremy was replaceable, when what I actually mean is that his character was so entertaining and memorable I was able to emulate him a year later. Jeremy would have done it better, but I caught the flavor passably well.)

Morton's List spit out directives for the gang to go give a motivational speech. They chose to go to a factory and try to rally the workers. They brought some picket signs and molotov cocktails. An incredible forgery roll (tens explode, and Amy rolled two of them on one skill check) allowed them to produce a faux corporate memo "from the home office" indicating that the plant was to be closed. A riot ensued. All in all, it was a lot of fun.

The hardest part was dealing with the police response to the riot - I knew rubber bullets would bounce off Ruby's metal-gear, but I wasn't sure of the impact on the PCs. I improvised and, as a result, went way too easy on them.

While I want to keep the improvisational nature of things (especially the plot), and don't relish the notion of having yet another full-production game on my plate, I will definitely do a little prep work between now and the next time we do this.

• If I'm going to use the item decks from the old campaign, I need to make item cards for the things the new PC bought.
• I need a couple of basic NPC sheets/templates. Rival gangers. Typical cop. Average civilian. Maybe even 2 different versions of each of the above.
• A list of 20 (or 50) cool "in a nutshell" character descriptions I can apply to those templates. It's cyberpunk, so those descriptions can be strange/memorable cyberware/techbits in addition to the usual mannerisms, personality traits, etc that I might consider. The reason I need a list is because the 'ware will have rules, and I don't want to go looking cyberstuff up in chrome books mid-session.

My favorite part of the session: The ridiculous picket signs they made.

1. "You deserve better pay!" (As opposed to 'we')
   
2. "Bring down the Man and he will comply"
3. "MOC fo' Prez"
4. "Workers in fact***inkstain***
   need to eat ***inkstain***"

2020 Tonight

I'm running a cyberpunk game tonight. It's actually a bit of a reincarnation of my wife's old MOC campaign. It may prove to become a regular thing, or it may be little more than a one-shot. Either way, it should be fun.

The entire thing will be improvised - I've done no prep work other than helping with character creation, and fishing out the old decks.

We'll be rolling up a task on Morton's List at the start of the session and sending the gang after it. I'll be flying, as they say, "by the seat of my pants". Wish me luck!

EDIT: It'll have to be rescheduled, other issues have come up.

MOCking one's self

"Ears" Petrov was the CP2020 character of mine that Jeremy mentioned at his blog. To Quote Jeremy:

"Rolfe's character has less social skills than the fence, no real combat skills to speak of, and didn't otherwise stand out in the crowd."

The following will be as painful to write as that was to read, but I'm pretty sure it will be cathartic.

My concept was actually quite the opposite of how it played out. His back story was that "Ears" Petrov was the guitarist of a band called "Eyes, Ears, Nose and Throat," which had a number one hit as recently as a year ago and then broke up suddenly when the lead singer went cyberpsycho and killed the drummer. He had failed to invest in his brief flash-in-the-pan, and was now slumming it while trying to figure out how to make a name for himself again. The other band members had been the ones with ambition - he had oodles of talent but no taste for marketing.

This could be seen as an obvious parallel to my situation in regards to the gaming industry - I'd been a bit of a force for the last six months to a year before Wargames West Distribution suddenly went out of business (due to emotional complexities on the part of owner), and then I vanished completely. My work was emulated (and in at least one case plagiarized) by other Distributors, but my name was no longer associated with it. Despite having been really good at marketing games, I was a total flop at marketing my own talents once that Industry Giant fell off it's beanstalk.

The dice then conspired with Rob and Sarah to completely hammer this metaphor home.

My character, Ears Petrov, was intended to be the face man, since no one else had any such desire during the big character-creation session. I was a Rockerboy with totals of (attribute + skill) of 16 to 18 on Charismatic Leadership, Wardrobe & Style, Social, Perform, and Human Perception. I could solve most difficult tasks in that niche by rolling a 3.

Sarah, as GM, felt it was important Charismatic Leadership (exclusive to Rockerboyz) not replace skills such as Leadership, Oratory, or Streetwise. Sadly, she told me this several sessions after character creation. I ended up rolling Charismatic Leadership once in the entire campaign. She also favored Persuasion / Fast Talk over Social, and favored rolls of Personal Grooming over Wardrobe & Style. This all cut into my character's effectiveness. Sarah had yet to establish her style as a GM, and her self-confidence was lacking, as such I wouldn't question her judgment or rules calls, not even in private.

Rob, missing the first session and character creation, asked what roles we had, and then built a fixer. Having never played cyberpunk before, I thought fixer was some sort of techie, so I didn't speak up about already being the faceman. Via cyberware and a more efficient distribution of points (stemming from years more experience at CP2020 in high-school campaigns where point-weaseling was encouraged) had totals of over 20 in Human Perception and Persuasion / Fast Talk. To further strip me of my spotlight, every time we both rolled for either of these skills, his die would be a 9 or 10, and I rolled far more than my fair share of 1's.

Despite the fact that I'd known and gamed with Rob for 5 years and never known him to be at all dishonest, I started getting irrationally paranoid. Eventually I started asking Sarah after sessions "did you see any of his dice rolls tonight, or just hear totals after modifiers?" which didn't help the situation at all. My being so accusatory of her high-school chum was rude, even if it was behind the scenes. I was pissing off my wife and GM, by repeatedly making an ass of myself out of jealousy over Rob's dice karma. Sorry. Had I just asked to revise my character to match the skills she found pertinent to social interactions, she probably would have said yes.

I feared the dice, and tried to avoid rolling them. This was doubly true for things my character should have been good at. After about 4 or 5 sessions of that, I was so fed up with it, I just changed my character concept to match my die-rolls. It was easier for me to play a burned-out loser than to get yet another critical failure on a skill I was practically maxed out on. I started cracking jokes about how bad his band was, and how he was nothing now that Eyes and Throat were dead. When Sarah asked me to make some item cards for cool low-value stuff we could find as random loot, I presented her with the card on the right.

I even badgered an NPC to shoot me with my own gun at one point. Everybody was shocked, so since it was my gun I claimed OOC that I knew what I was doing and the math of it guaranteed she couldn't hurt me. This was a lie - a critical hit on a head-shot would have meant a new character and a great tale about fateful last words. Yet despite all this, I really loved that game. I am a truly complicated individual.

MOC-Age

At this point, I must talk about Cyberpunk. Sometime last year my wife ended her very odd Cyberpunk 2020 campaign. The PCs of that campaign were members of a booster gang. Not just any old booster gang, we were the unambitious loser goofballs of a gang called MOC. Nobody really knew what those three letters stood for, but we tagged them everywhere. We even got experience points for doing so.

We weren't a gang that tried to make money, or win some nasty turf war. No, we were just hoodlums. Creative, random, hoodlums. The game owed as much to Morton's List as it did to Cyberpunk. At the end of every session, we'd (in- and out- of-character) roll on Morton's List. That would tell us what next weeks session was going to be all about. Bizarreness and hilarity ensued.

The game flew in the face of anything I'd RP'd before. I'm a big narrativist, with strong method-actor motivations. But this campaign was primarily quasi-simulationist with a touch of gamist thrown in. Each week, we'd partake of some randomly-determined and totally unpredictable hijinks in or near Night City's downtown war zone. There was no ongoing plot (unless you count the endlessly foreshadowed but never appearing Red Dragons gang, or that Haunted House we just couldn't leave alone) no goal (beyond the random broadly-defined task of the week) and really no story at all. It was inspired chaos. To get an idea of how completely unheroic most of our scenarios were, download Morton's Lite, a free pdf demo version.

Behaving like a Hero in cyberpunk gets you killed - it's a very different paradigm than most RPGs. But in this campaign, behaving like there was a point or a plot cost you fingers (repeatedly), yet acting like a self-righteous gun-toting idiot-savant slacker paid off in spades. There was a big frightening world out there, and we were the most insignificant minor characters in it's tale. Unlike most CP2020, there was barely any combat. We responded to any threat in the most ridiculous and cowardly fashion. Wetting yourself was almost a badge of honor.

Sarah experimented as a GM, making strange playing-aids and unusual (often intentionally anti-climactic) situations. Sometimes it paid off huge, and once or twice it cost her players. But I really admire her courage and innovation, even when I was falling in to her unintended traps. There's material in that campaign for at least a dozen posts here, most of them painfully humorous.

I mention all this to give credit where credit is due. My whirlwind tour of the Continuum setting for the short-bus spanners would never have happened if not for the inspiration I drew from Sarah's CP2020 MOC campaign. I would have stuck to the plot of Phase I, and never diverted to Ancient Rome, Troy In England, Sumerian Orgies or the like. But that MOC game showed me (reminded me?) that sometimes RPGs can be fun without a narrative or plot. Once the players are established in their characters, you can just let them coast and everyone will have fun without ever accomplishing a damn thing. Bravo, Sarah!