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!
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.
