Part 1: What did I make and why?
A few years ago I decided to write a cyberpunk tabletop game. I had a few years of D&D under my belt and I wanted to explore the game space. So before I set off on this activity I watched for a few pitfalls:
- Is the setting wide-ranging and diverse enough to support a long campaign? Specifically, can you naturally make game shifts from difference in kind and difference in scale work?
- Is there already a dominant player in this setting? If Yes, is this different enough that there is an open niche for it?
- Is there a diverse range of choices/differences between characters?
- Do the players have a range of interesting choices to make?
The answers to these questions are not about how to make your game, but if you should make your game. I don’t see a ton of advantage in reinventing the wheel. The tabletop world is old enough now that many of the major players are on their 4th or 5th editions. That is a level of refinement you can’t match out of the gate.
So to answer the first question, cyberpunk in its strictest definition would not pass this test. Both hacking and gunplay can be good mechanics but are just not enough by themselves. So right out of the gate, we need a bit of a looser definition for cyberpunk. So which elements do we add to cyberpunk to create that diversity? I think there are a couple of obvious choices: post-apocalypse adjacent to the megacity, fantasy elements to twist the setting and play options a bit, general sci-fi element to create additional options ad-hoc, and bringing in dehumanizing/spiritual elements.
There are two major players in this field: The popular Shadowrun and the older and more niche Cyberpunk 2020. Both are very complex games with multiple hours to create a character, tables for massive lists of skills, and tons of different subsystems for different elements of the game. This is what lead me to create this game. I could not find a rules-light or simple Cyberpunk game so there is my niche. I would focus on quick character creation and straight forward mechanics.
Now both Shadowrun and Cyberpunk 2020 dealt with the settings lack of diversity in different ways. Shadowrun added in tons of the fantasy elements as well as some of the dehumanizing/spiritual elements. Cyberpunk 2020 leaned into the post-apocalypse elements. I plan to focus on large amounts of general sci-fi with a small amount of post-apocalypse and dehumanizing/spiritual. This is partially to create a different option in the current game space. I also think this is just a good mix overall. I plan to use the general sci-fi elements to ensure lots of interesting player choices and shifts in scope with the other two really focusing on a difference in kind elements to theme and play.
So character creation and character differentiation are where I wanted to make sure I could deliver on cyberpunk. In the current consciousness of the fantasy genre, there are iconic classes and character archetypes that players are comfortable both playing with, playing against, and just generally recognize in the other characters at the table. Playing into these troupes is actually super useful for game designers as it allows a very quick and efficient shorthand way to inform people about who does what at your table. If you are a Wizard playing next to a Knight, you don’t need to understand all the mechanics behind their armor, sword, marshal techniques, or their code of honor. You know they want to get next to the enemy, swing their sword, and they can take a few hits. The rough idea of the Knight lets you know how to play alongside a Knight. And the rough idea of the Wizard let the guy playing the Knight know to stand between them and danger even though the Knight player does not know any of their spells or magic mechanics.
This is trickier in cyberpunk as the genre is more niche, the iconic roles are fewer, and each setting is more unique because the lack of diversity in the setting is address differently in each specific setting. This lack of short-hand created both a problem and an opportunity. This allowed me to specifically build my character creation around both developing the short-hand, establishing the broad iconic roles expected in my players, and delivering on the goal of super simple character creation.
I tested a few different approaches here. My criteria for game design:
[(range of outcomes) x (the impact of outcomes)] / (complexity) = (elegance of the design)
… with my goal being to maximize (elegance of the design).
After a few attempts, I settled on a system inspired indirectly by D&D. D&D has a multifaceted and complex mathematics underpinning which is why that system is so math-heavy. Most tabletop games followed in their footsteps. Over the years, D&D has had various digital assistants and card decks to help players track the metric ton of details found on a character sheet and in spellbooks. I decided to skip the character sheet and go straight to the endpoints, the cards. I then set out to make a ton of interesting endpoints. Once I had a moderate amount of endpoints around a range of ideas, I started to split them into groups. These groups formed the archetype. There is no underpinning, just a scattered collection of endpoints.
Once I grouped these endpoints into collections, I then started to label those roles. This created an iterative process where the mechanics → theme → more mechanic ideas → more refined theme. As an example, I created some cards focused around defense. Some distracted the enemy for a turn while others just absorb a turns worth of damage. I called this “The Bouncer” as that idea is already recognizable to players. As I made more cards, this specialty got messy as I made both defense and melee abilities for the theme. I later redefined it to “the Bodyguard” with the melee abilities moving to another theme. The new theme still fits the original cards, gives that player a specific role they can lean into, and inspired a range of new cards.
This approached worked great for themes built around special abilities. I still wanted some specific additional themes that I thought worked for the world as a whole, specifically the Face, the noir detective, and the hacker. These were meant to flesh out the soft time between the combat elements in the game. As these were for soft RP kinds of spaces I kept them rules-light.
Making hacking a light system was the hard decision and I’m not 100% if it worked. The Face could leverage NPCs and I could use the Detective for exposition dumps, but the idea of the hacker has been in cyberpunk since Nerumancer as a core element. It is literally the cyber in cyberpunk. I looked at multiple games and how they handle it. All of them did so in an overly complex way. I then looked at incorporating elements of the card game NetRunner into the game, but that really slowed it down and was still highly complex.
Sean Witherspoon's Blog 