Santo Domingo Edition>Cyberpunk 2020 vs. Cyberpunk RED?Cyberpunk 2020 is the second edition of the Cyberpunk TTRPG by R. Talsorian Games, set in a (then) future inspired by film noir and the dark science fiction films and books of the late 20th century. It focuses on simulationist gameplay and lethal near-future combat.Cyberpunk RED is the latest edition of the Cyberpunk TTRPG, set during the aftermath of the devastating Fourth Corporate War. It focuses on more balanced, streamlined gameplay and is currently supported by R. Talsorian Games.>Resources for RED:https://datapool2045.net/>RED has free DLC and extra content, including character sheets:https://rtalsoriangames.com/downloadable-content/>RED Easy Mode is available for FREE:https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/409912/cyberpunk-red-easy-mode>Errata Pages:https://rtalsoriangames.com/errata/>Previous Thread:>>97447101Feel free to discuss Shadowrun here as well, since I feel bad for those guys.>Thread Question:What's your character's neighborhood like?
My favorite character lives on the Moon, in Tycho. I guess it's pretty harsh due to habitats needing to be mostly underground since there's no atmosphere to shield the surface from falling objects. At least there's no loiterers. Last time he helped a dying miner by installing his brain into the Samson borg for maximum efficiency. All in day's work.
>>97553005>I don't think ganggoons get paidThey do. These are criminal organizations and sometimes the gangers even work regular jobs for the gang. Valentino barista, Animal bouncer etc. Maelstrom is said to have become a well oiled business machine. Real cartels and gangs pay their members too. However, it's never free money.
>>97554175>At least there's no loiterersTycho is big enough to have some gang activity however. Corpos make the place less safe as well.
>>97554123>What's your character's neighborhood likeStill in South NC's container village. At least the Slammer is nearby and she can sleep with her fans, sometimes in university conapts.
>>97554123still wondering what that big Aldecaldo building is supposed to be.
What are the top three houserules you have seen for RED or 2020?
>>97554123so that big building in the back is their camp or what? I thought theyre supposed to have a nomadic lifestyle and set up temp rest spots like tents and such
>>97555271radio tower probably. It'd fit RED canon too, R Tal made a bunch of nomad news reports for running post mission
>>97555271>>97556170>>97556184If the Nomads have become the defacto logistics infrastructure in Nusa, it'd make sense for them to have permanent outposts.
>>97553664>We've been running gigs so close to the 2020 old Mike Pondsmith baselineany collection of them? I've been looking for more adventures since RED oddly doesn't fit the punk style. They're useful for breaking up the constant aggressive and noir style of 2020 gigs, but I need more of 2020-inspired stuff and not FeelsGood Inc.
>>97556170with how important nomads are to the economy in RED, they're more prone to building up permanent camps to work as go-betweens for static and nomad society. It's not exactly a new thing either, corps and govts had to interact with nomads back in 2020 too. They're like halfway points. The nomads can come and go, while other family members stick around to help out their clans. Woodchipper, for example.
>>97556220They also need places for their vehicles in the city. In the outlands they can just camp out, but in a city they need some added security to avoid thieves going after those good cars.You've seen what a good guy like El Capitan does with cars - now imagine the villains!
Red does make characters quite invulnerable. However, this does apply to enemies as well if your players haven't been created around min-maxing the engine. Current issue I'm having is that I decided to roll a group with Edgerunner character creation, and now they all have handguns only.I now presumably need to put them into a meatgrinder so that we can truly begin with custom characters...
>>97556719If everyone has only pistols then all you need is gangers or corpsec with basic assault rifles who outrange them.
>>97556773That'll feel extra shitty for the players as they'll be killed by something they were forced to do (opt into a single weapon only) due to the character creation.Guess I'll have to offer them military combat implants (+3 skill) before I put them into such a situation.
>>97556224https://pastebin.com/VaLPSj5AHere are some of my favorite jobs. Tell me which ones sound the most fun and I'll either copy/paste my shitty MS Word docs or rewrite them from memory.
>>97558210what the fuck these all sound so good, and hard choices to pickI'll pick these for now>Clemency Denied>The Alicorn>Heavy Metal Romance>Halloween>Homefront
>>97558346Clemency Denied https://pastebin.com/PUpFkWGZHeavy Metal Romance https://pastebin.com/2yNuq26QHomefront https://pastebin.com/s7qXUDpJ (this one got flagged for extreme content lol so I hope this works)I definitely wouldn't mind doing a write-up for Alicorn (I'm listening to Ace Combat memes right now) and Halloween if you like these 3.Also someday I'll make proper screamsheets. I just need to focus and stop fucking around playing Cyberpunk 2077.
So why does RED seem to be almost actively hostile to the idea of doing anything outside of Night City? That isn't minor one-off references to some random event, that is.
>>97558648It's taken 6 years to finally get a book about Night City. They can't handle writing about anywhere else, their little brains don't have the capacity.
>>97558648I would be fine with that if we had a more coherent and consistent picture of night city. I feel like several of the ideas are in tension with one another.
>>97558648>doing anything outside of Night CityBecause anything outside Night City is not protected by the Blackwall? And there are rogue AIs everywhere meaning that your augments are getting jailbroken and you become a techno-zombie enslaved to an AI that for lack of detail at the very least wants to destroy humanity. Not to mention that everything outside Night City is radiated to fuck. It's basically Judge Dredd out there except instead of mutants you have AIs that will immediately break any electronics smarter than a cell phone.I don't think these writers are smart enough to even understand the world they have built but that is certainly the world they have built. Why else is there a massive ring of desert around Night City - it's because it's a physical barrier to allow NetWatch to shoot down any robot that attempts to bring in some kind of wireless device that gives the rogue AIs access to the city.
>>97558768what the fuck are you talking about, there is no Blackwall in 2045
>>975587812040sEver since the DataKrash caused by Rache Bartmoss, humanity had been forced to sacrifice its access to invaluable resources and knowledge for the safekeeping of the Net. NetWatch tried to regain control against the rogue artificial intelligences, but to no avail. As an alternative, NetWatch — helped by the Transcendentals and the Ghosts — secretly started development in 2044 of a project called "The Black Wall" in order to keep the Net under control, while permanently sealing off old access nodes into the Net. The Blackwall's task was to secure an area of cyberspace for human use while holding at bay the threat of the dangerous rogue AIs that were released decades earlier into Net.The setting doesn't actually work if the Blackwall does not exist.
>>97558791It's being made but it's not finished and hasn't been made public. It's not doing anything to protect anything in 2045 because it's still in the early stages of construction.Also all the other shit you said was nonsense too. There wasn't a nuclear apocalypse, there are no techno-zombies, the NET is abandoned, and Night City is not some bastion of safety. It's not even non-radioactive.>Why else is there a massive ring of desert around Night CityBecause it's set in Californa and a over a third of California is desert right now in our world let alone the Cyberpunk world that has faced massive ecological destruction and turned swathes of America into a second Dust Bowl.>a physical barrier to allow NetWatch to shoot down any robot that attempts to bring in some kind of wireless device that gives the rogue AIs access to the cityThis doesn't exist and NetWatch doesn't give a fuck about Night City any more than any other place in the world. Even when there is a killer AI running around the city in the Reaper modules, NetWatch doesn't give a shit.Where did you get all this shit from? A fanfiction?
>>97558815I just finished reading Cyberpunk RED and I guess I made the mistake of thinking that Night City was a place that functioned like a city with the corpos maintaining the most basic infrastructure and isn't actually a barbaric hellscape like you describe.The way you describe the setting with rogue AIs running around like the birds makes the setting a million times more retarded than I thought it was. Why the fuck would anybody get augmented when getting within 30 meters of a wi-fi router breaks all your shit? Actually fuck it I don't care. This setting is clearly far beyond more retarded than I thought it was.
>>97558833What the actual fuck are you talking about? Did you actually read the book? Are you sure? Because you have drawn so many bizarre fucked up conclusions that I can't tell if you read the correct book.>Night City was a place that functioned like a city with the corpos maintaining the most basic infrastructure and isn't actually a barbaric hellscape like you describe.It's both. There's parts of the city that are maintained by corporations and kept functional and clean. And then there are parts that aren't, that barely receive any maintenance or civic protections, and are instead controlled by violent gangs and other criminal organizations.>The way you describe the setting with rogue AIs running around like the birdsI said there was one, you're hallucinating the rest.>Why the fuck would anybody get augmented when getting within 30 meters of a wi-fi router breaks all your shit?It doesn't you retard, vast majority of cyberware doesn't have wi-fi. What the shit are you on? Stop doing drugs or take your meds, whichever one is applicable.
>>97558768>>97558791>>97558833I've never seen the results of a critical fail in the reading skill in real life before, holy shit.
>>97558768Cyberlimbs can't be hacked until well after 2045. This isn't due to the rogue AI and Blackwall. It's the stupid holophones. If you step outside of Night City's citinet in 2045 you don't become a zombie you just can't play Genshin Impact (for Night City's personal server). So actually you'd become more of a real person. Also as far as netrunner hackers go: in Danger Gal Dossier 8 of the 160 NPCs are netrunners, so that means 5% are netrunners. This is probably biased due to people in DGD actually being worth something. I bet irl the odds of meeting a netrunner are one in a million. So the holophone vulnerability doesn't even matter to most people.Personally I'm disappointed that CP2077 cyberware with the backdoor isn't at least twice as effective as the crap from 30 or even 50 years ago. I'd consider being mindbroken by a netrunner dweeb if I could get Smartlink +2. Instead as far as the CEMK goes 2077 tech is just the same as 2045/2020 tech but with the backdoor. Maybe it'll get stronger like from some kind of arms race in the official 2077 book in 2027 but I just don't know.For the planet being nuked to shit I think this was a bad overestimation. The area around Night City is shitty because it was a huge battleground, and other major cities were fucked too (Chicago is a viral wasteland). But it's not that bad everywhere. Cyberpunk Red's core rulebook has eddy prices for organically raised chicken and pigs so farming has to be possible. Listen, I don't blame you because CPR's lore is nonsensical. On one hand it seems like they want to impress on us that everybody is poor as shit and gutterpunk. Then the first official jobs come out (Tales of the RED) and most of them pay 2,000eb/player (which in CPR would have been a suicidal Fort Knox gig). It's just tonally inconsistent which messes with playability. I guess just ask us since we kinda have a good idea of how things should be.
>>97558986I wish they had stuck to the idea of some more barter economics, and wrote mission rewards that were tangible items for the players to do whatever they wanted with, with some cash on the side just in case rent is due. There is some of this present in certain modules, but it seems like a concept they're trying to leave behind, along with the Exotic weapon category and strict Price Categories.
>>97558986>Cyberlimbs can't be hacked until well after 2045.Technically this isn't true, pretty much everything has been hackable since Guide to the Net introduced Micronets.
>>97558986>Personally I'm disappointed that CP2077 cyberware with the backdoor isn't at least twice as effective as the crap from 30 or even 50 years agoYou can get body 20 and not be a hulk.
>>97558648They are balancing multiple projekts. The next big video game will feature another city (the Plex or Chicago) so they can't go there yet. They need multiple confirmation layers to create anything.
>>97559011The real issue is that wealth should be a stat, not a resource in rpgs.
>>97555271Maybe early stages of megabuilding? There are 3 in Santo by 77
>>97560113>>97555271It looks like a ready building rather than a gargantuan construction site. Could be their local HQ, or even Woodchipper's place.
>>97559591I figured that was the case, and at this point it seems like Talsorian are subservient to the whims and wants of CDPR, to the point of basically just giving them their setting. Also explains why they both don't want to touch the rest of the world, but that a lot of CPR seems to exist to justify design choices in 2077.
>>97558627>brought Nazis and Communists together by laughing at rich retardskek>Homefront>Error, this is a private paste or is pending moderation. fuckAlso these are very good, gonna snap up Clemency. Already used Staying Vigilant recently so I'll wait for some time to pass before throwing HRM as a sequel at my group with some changes. Give me Alicorn and Halloween
>>97560113a dev confirmed it's not a megabuilding so idk>>97561547RTal is definitely CDPR's bitch now
want to do a detective puzzle, but I'm not sure how I can present facts to the players so that there is some difficulty involved.I want this to be a pure logic puzzle. I don't want to hide clues behind skill checks. I just want the players to slowly gather information on their own and come to a conclusion.Here's the scenario:There's a small shop/factory, and an important, very hard to replace mechanism has been stolen. Nobody knows who did it, but there are about 6-8 suspects, who are the employees of the shop.They work in shifts, and none of them were alerted to the mechanism being missing until much later. I plan to make them take statements from the suspects, and narrow down the employee(s) who did it from that. Initially I was thinking of doing a "who ate my cheese?" Type deal where the culprit has two accomplices, but it's kind of easy to find the culprit using that game anyway.What would you do to make this puzzle work?
>>97558815It's fascinating how some people can be exposed to all the same media and content, but come away with a completely different understanding of what they saw.Makes you think, is everyone's opinion like that, just another valid 'perspective' or is the guy you're talking to just particularly stupid and actively wrong about everything?It's hard to say. My own point of view is that these people are zoomers and they're likely literally illiterate. As in, I don't think that guy can read very well, he probably understands like every second word. Instead of actually reading the books he probably just skims through things and lets his imagination fill the blanks.The most annoying part is how common this is. Half the time I talk to people on /tg/ anymore they seem like a fucking whackjob living in a fanfiction fantasy land that has no real relationship with real, verifiable facts. They do it with every setting, including the real world which is why it's so common for people to have panic attacks about politics constantly. I refer to facts, quotes, actually relationships between things that can be substantiated. Other people refer to their gut intuitions and emotional hysteria as their "facts" even despite the fact that they're always fucking wrong about something. Some people interpret real life in the same mindbogglingly wrong and retarded way this guy is interpreting Cyberpunk. That's a real depressing thought, isn't it? Human nature.
>>97564112Do you know the method by which the mechanism was stolen? That's the first thing to work out, exactly how they did it. Then figure out where the fucked up and didn't cover their tracks.
>>97564298I mean, I have a friend who has a very intense case of ADHD, which he hasn't ever done anything to treat outside of a couple of months when he was on meds. I watched in him, in our recent session zero, start to read a paragraph, stop reading, decide what the rest of the paragraph said, and then argue about his made up interpretation of the paragraph he didn't read for the next 15 minutes. And we're very nearly in our 40s, I imagine that the younger generation could only be dealing with this even more.
>>97564324that's fucking horrifying
>>97564330It's frustrating. He's actually a really intelligent dude, but his inability or unwillingness to deal with his disability really fucks him over.
>>97564314Yes, which is where I'm having trouble.So the place is a bakery, and the thing stolen is a very unique heat regulator. It is small enough to be hidden and stashed anywhere.I'm thinking that the people work in shifts in 3 rooms of the bakery (the front, the back, and the oven- where the regulator is kept) I want to say that the regulator being stolen wouldn't be clocked until the bread coming out started to look bad, so there is more ambiguity on who did it There are no time cards so we have to go by witness testimony to corroborate who was where.What do you think? Could you improve on this?
>>97564324Worst part is, fantasy roleplay is just small-fry. If he can't even read a fucking non-biased textbook without warping it into nonsense, realize that these people also build little nests on X or Reddit or /pol/ and they just sit and listen to grifters and propagandists brainwash them. They do the same thing with news and current events. TTRPGs are just the tip of the iceberg, just a microcosm of a much bigger issue going on with our mentally ill populace.
>>97559591I don't understand why a company that employs maybe a handful of people is working on like 3-4 different game lines atm.Like who is Shadowscar or Fossilized Violence even made for besides the designers themselves? Working on a new Witcher game I understand, but why put your cash cow on the back-burner for these unknown lines?Who is the boss at R.Tal? Does anybody put their foot down and veto bad ideas?
>>97565242>it's not the big moneymaker so they shouldn't work on itwhat kind of bullshit wotc attitude is this?they had ideas, they made product. Maybe it succeeds, maybe it fails, that's the market in action.
>>97558768nigga you thinking of game of thrones
