Hey Cyberpunks!

6 thoughts on “Hey Cyberpunks!”

1. For missions based on finding people you need to think more carefully about where the line between Legwork and Action lies. In Blade Runner, the Action Phase starts when he enters JR’s apartment building at the end. Everything before that is legwork for the final confrontation. This is a good example of how action scenes can take place in the Legwork Phase.

   Of course, this is with hindsight. During play, it might not be so clear that any given confrontation will be the final one, but thinking about what the Legwork and Action Clocks say at each level should help you. In certain situations you might need to switch back and forth between them. I’ve never done that, but I could see a use for it. But don’t switch to the Action Phase simply because there’s a short action scene.

2. As for that move. Did you try it out? I would drop the specific 7-9 costs and flip it.

   Choose 1:

   – Your vehicle breaks down.

   – You are stopped by “toll” collectors.

   – You are ambushed.

   That gives you three starting points for potential story/conflict. As it stands, 7-9 hits them with costs and leaves the story stranded. You’ve been wounded or robbed… what now? If you don’t want to add and extra set of travel scenes, change the 10+ to 7+. On a hit you get there, on a weak hit, there’s a cost.

   That said, I think those costs are very high. I doubt anyone would ever choose the cred hit.

3. Yeah, 2 Cred per PC is a lot of dosh. Those toll collectors better have like 30 fools backing them up. (And the PCs can still have a Mil Spec Killer on draft.)

4. I second Hamish’s suggestion for changing the move. The move as written is kind of… well, I like to imagine any move ending with the phrase “…what do you do?” to picture how well it works for keeping the game fun and interesting.

   So, the destination is what things are about, right, and the complication here is to make things atmospheric? The car breaking down isn’t supposed to be critical to the narrative, or else 10+ wouldn’t avoid it altogether. So, let’s look:

   1. The cred and harm moves are really hard compared to “your vehicle breaks down.” You can try to fix the vehicle; baddies might converge on your location. What do you do about it, right?

   “Suffer harm” and “lose cred” aren’t set-ups: they’re conclusions. You lost that cred. You got f’d up. “A bunch of guys jumped you and beat the snot out of you, what do you do?” is a really hard move on a 7-9 – a successful roll!

   This is usually the sort of thing you get not just on a 6 or less, but usually as a result of several 6-or-lesses, in which a situation spiraled downwards until harm-as-established is dealt. That the characters had no chance to buck this also suggests overwhelming force. So, what do they do in response to overwhelming force? Some variant of “run away or die.”

   That’s (a) not fun as an intro move, and (b) derails the “this is just a complication on the way to getting through this territory” thread.

   2. 2 cred/head will never get picked. It’s really expensive. Consider that a character will generally net 2-3 credit back for a mission to begin with (I mean net, right, ’cause they get back double what they staked), never mind any costs that arise. Paying up 2 cred up front is “Best case scenario, you might break even.” Given we need cred for fixing weapons and buying special ammo and etc., well… it’s an unlikely choice. I’m going to ignore it, on that basis. (Also, who’s rolling +cool to determine if everyone in the party loses 2 credit each? And what does cool have to do with any of these outcomes?).

   Again, as an “set some atmosphere on the way to the replicants” move, “you’re f’d on this mission” is a really heavy outcome, particularly for a roll the players couldn’t avoid/mitigate.

   3. This leaves us with “your vehicle breaks down.” It’s the best of the bunch but, unless I misunderstood your description, narratively problematic. My impression is you want an atmospheric complication on the way to the meat of the story – replicant hunting – not a story about people trying to keep their heads down and quietly make it through a warzone. If it was about the latter, the 10+ result wouldn’t be “skip all that shit.” It’s optional. So, “an optional complication” just became “we’re going to take a huge detour from the themes and elements this mission is really about, because the car broke down in the middle of a war zone.” This criticism is obviously a lot less problematic than the first two: taking a bunch of game time to focus on the “wrong” thing can end up making your themes not land, but it won’t screw up anyone’s experience. It’ll just make it a “surviving in a warzone” game instead of a “bladerunner game.” Ironically, the fact that this is by far the least-bad outcome means the roll for “I need to get to the replicants; do I get there safely?” will pretty much always end in some version of “I don’t get there.” (Or, they do, but only after much detouring.)

   I’m pointing this out so that it’s clear specifically how Hamish has fixed the move. So, now the outcomes are:

   Choose 1:

   – Your vehicle breaks down.

   – You are stopped by “toll” collectors.

   – You are ambushed.

   They’re clearly much softer, right? You haven’t gotten harmed or lost cred – you’ve been put in a position where you might be harmed, or you might lose cred. Now there’s a really valid moment to ask the players, “What do you do?”

   They might fuck up and end up losing cred/health. They might talk their way out of it. They might negotiate safe passage. They might negotiate an alliance, or hire out a local gang to act as spies for them. They might have a killer on hand that wipes out the entire group of “toll collectors”. That is, there’s room for the narrative to grow in interesting ways. Now there’s room for interaction that allows you to showcase a little bit of the setting. And there’s room for the PCs to be proactive, rather than just victims.

   There’s still something I don’t like about how the moves end up distinguishing between “we get where we’re going in a timely fashion,” vs. “we end up spending a lot of time slogging through a warzone.”

   The latter still feels like a huge distraction that’s not key to the narrative. I think I’d probably include something along the lines of saying “we’re just zooming in on how you handle this one thing, and then you get where you’re going.” I wouldn’t leave the PC’s stuck in the middle of dangerous territory, regardless of how this one roll goes – it seems like it gives one roll for “warzone atmosphere” too much ability to derail the story.

5. Great expansion of my point, J Stein, and a really great final point too.

   With any custom move, think about what you want it to do, then look at it again and ask what it actually does.

   In this case King in yellow, if you want to replicate Blade Runner, I would think you would want a bunch of outcomes that replicate things that happen in the movie (or the book if you want to bring that in too). Deckard’s car doesn’t break down, he doesn’t get mugged, and he doesn’t get caught in random street violence (per se). But he does encounter replicants by coincidence, he has a police supervisor/employer breathing down his neck and hauling him into the police station, and he does get his hubcaps stolen by a street gang of little people (or at least someone does, I forget if it’s Deckard).

   Also think about the odds. How often do you want all this stuff happening? 7-9 is the most common result, so this stuff is going to happen on most rolls. Is that what you want? It’s all about the story you want to tell.

6. Thank you guys.

   The Mission was a full success. Really Bladerunnerstyle and the PCs where Badass Pros. Everybody had fun on the table.

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