Cyberpunk 2013

Less drunk now.

There is a quasi-random generation system. That is sort-of good. Like all divisions between random-roll and points-buy it feels like an uncomfortable child in a darkened room. The door a slant open, a yellow bar of light from the hall outside. Too scared to close the door, too ashamed to turn on the lights. Trapped between things.

There is a skill list. Not sure how I feel about that. If you don't know the game already then choosing skills is a hopeful grasp towards the kind of game you hope it'll be. But it might not be the kind of game it is, or will be. And there you are trapped in the dark future with your Dinosaur-hunting skill and fuck all to do.

Improving in skills looks like it takes fucking ages and its totally under the control of the GM. You can train yourself and be taught in-game but the rules for this are highly conservative. So, right now, it looks like the energy of the game is going to be generated between the almost-story-game encouragement of flair and style in the colour and the dark-bastard plan-or-you're-dead, “no you can't, you don't have the skill” have-you-been counting-your-ammo? mechanics.

The game tells you to play like a carefree cheeky bastard, the mechanic kills you if you do this. If this generates interest then it is a good game. If it simply annoys then it is not.

Resolution is based around 'tasks', so the GM has to go through the whole fucking world and try to decide how difficult everything is.

Story-game hippy bullshit I would to with this.

• Only self-created skills, start at zero or one. Advance like Mouse Guard when you have one success and one fail in each skill.
• Let players set their own difficulty level for tasks. If they set low and win, they get fuck all. If they set high then they get x-tra cool. (Not sure how this would actually work.

'You must roll lower than your education chance on 1D10 to enter the school of hard knocks' aaand I'm back in love with it. (And drinking again)

The lifepath tables are very cool. The enemies table has two nested sub-tables, the friends table is all on its own. The romance table has a tragedy sub table. The personal disaster table has more detail and is larger than any of the others. This tells you something about human nature. Or at least how we think about human nature.

But there is no table to link the players to each other! Why not?

I will do two things. I will create a lifepath thing to connect the characters to each other and I will add sub-tables to the friendship table. I will lend energy and creative power to the force of fictional friendship and thence bring balance to Cyberpunk.

I SHALL NOT BLOG AGAIN TILL TIS DONE!

NO-ONE CARES BECAUSE NO-ONE READS THE BLOOOOOGGG!