Always More Hats

I have actually started prototyping my Cyberpunk RPG. This is the furthest I’ve gotten on just about any personal game-related project since college and I’m happy to report that it’s kind of broken.

But that’s okay! It’s a playtest. I knew it was going to be broken (although I hoped it was less broken than it was). The point was just to get something out so I could at least start.

Here’s a list of likely features in the full game:

• Cool Augments to customize your character (and their rolls)!
• Hacking that makes sense!
• Social media combat and interaction with the game world!
• Super-fun Action-Point-based frantic combat!
• Personalized talents to really show where your character shines!
• Expandable abilities that allow for either Breadth or Depth in what you can do!
• Abstracted health system to reflect the wear and tear of combat with different damage types!

Here’s what was in the prototype:

• Some augments that boosted skill rolls.
• A skill labeled “Computers”
• “Hey, look, you can totally do some in-combat streaming. If you want. No? Okay.”
• Actually pretty fun and mostly balanced Action-Point based combat
• Vague rules for creating talents so I didn’t have to make a list ahead of time
• Some examples of potential abilities that didn’t make it into the testing
• A surprisingly functional abstracted health system to showcase different attack damage types.

So, of the 7: 2 actually got in and worked, 1 was totally absent, and the rest were partially implemented.

But how did the playtest actually go? Fairly well. The game is both fun and functional, but there are some problems with it.

What did I learn?

Numeric balancing

Just because the numbers are balanced against each other, doesn’t mean they are fun. Stats were far too strong, and it took me 3 playtests to figure that out. When your highest stat can give you a +7, and your highest skill proficiency can give you a +5, there’s really no point in boosting your skill that relies on a stat of +2. If you can summarize a character as peaks and valleys, all of the characters were basically three mountains sitting on some rolling plains.

Creativity is hard without guidelines

Remember that bit about the talents? Every playtest, someone suggested that I make a list of examples when players need to create something themselves. Which, admittedly, I knew I needed to happen. When your instruction is “Choose a skill to get a bonus is a narrow situation” the definition of “narrow” is poorly defined. Can I get a bonus to shooting while aiming? How about with pistols? What if there’s a guy with no one near him? Having some examples to show the standard “narrow” limit would have helped this problem immensely.

Changing the central roll mechanic

I had a cool idea. Each character had an essence die that gets added to all rolls which started as a d12. This would shrink one die size for every augment they took, but the augment would both give bonuses to 1 or 2 skills, and change those skill to use a more stable 3d6 instead of a more swingy d20. The idea being the machine would perform consistently where a human would have wildly different results, both good and bad.

This was a nightmare that I could never balance properly.

Sure, the mechanic was interesting, but it either was underpowered, and nobody took augments or overpowered so that people would take 1 augment and be sitting at insane bonuses plus a d10 to roll. Despite this, I still think I can get it to work.

The solution could be one of the following:

• Augments get a reverse-essence bonus, where the lower your essence die is the more powerful the augments get.
• Augments tag skills and instead give you abilities.
• Keep the system as-is and overhaul the numbers and re-balance based on the new numbers.

Just start. Anywhere.

I’d been hemming and hawing over whether or not this is ready, and then decided the best way to run it was to tell my friends that we were running a “Mystery RPG” (that is, an RPG that is a mystery and not a mystery-themed RPG) and just playing. A base system was created in about a week with other rules being created on the fly. Just running the game was the most helpful way to make progress. Even if it’s terrible (which it might be), even if it’s broken (which it will be), you won’t know until you see the parts moving and working with each other. A game you can play is always going to more fun than a game you can’t, so just make something and run it.