I got the Edgerunners Mission Kit for Cyberpunk because I am a big fan of the Edgerunners anime, as well as the video game Cyberpunk 2077. I do not like the current edition of the tabletop roleplaying game, Cyberpunk RED, at all. But I figured there’s enough stuff here to at least inspire me to finish my Cities Without Number take on Night City 2077.
I thought I could get over myself and just use the QuickStart rules in this box to play the game, being a fan of the source material. Upon close review of the rules, I cannot. I realize that this is a popular game, and I want to give you a little more than “I don’t like it” to go on.
Up next: breakdown of the rulebook in the boxed set.
RULEBOOK
The game uses simple skill checks for almost everything: stat plus skill plus D10 versus a varying difficulty value. This is a logical and easy to follow system, with three problems:
One, because the difficulty changes all the time, every roll has a cognitive load on parsing this specific roll’s target number.
Two, there is a lot of opposed rolling, resulting in just loads of rolling in general. I feel many of these opposed rolls could be set up against a static difficulty instead.
Three, while a D10 is less swingy than a D20, thanks to the rolls both exploding (tens are rerolled and added to the first result) and imploding (ones are rerolled and subtracted from the first result), and the amount of rolling in general, you’re going to see a lot of chaotically swingy rolls. Which may be fine, but my recollection of playing Cyberpunk 2.0.2.0 as a teenager is mostly of supposedly super skilled mercs hurting themselves with hand grenades thanks to unlikely fumbles. That system didn’t even have these imploding rolls, just a lot of rolling with fumbles on a 1/10 chance.
Overall, at this point I am reminded of why we houseruled the original game so much.
Skill overload
Being an old fashioned game, there are a lot of skills. This is a pet peeve of mine with old school games, and it is just not great. It’s not in genre – so many of these are pointless in stories about ultra violent mercenaries doing high risk crime – and it doesn’t make sense in terms of skill resolution – where the game spends mechanical attention on, and how much, and how is that in relation to the fiction the game is powering and enabling. There are far too many useless skills in a total of 46.
I’d include maybe 24 of these, rolling many skills into one, and altogether dropping a bunch of detail that doesn’t build the game. Because I can’t help myself, here are some that made me go hmm:
Accounting & Business & Deduction & Bureaucracy: I could see use for a single “this punk is good at leafing through corp papers and making sense of them” skill, sure, but even that might be better served as a background detail – because you used to be in a corp, you know what’s important in this pile of crap you found in the case you stole.
Autofire & Handgun & Shoulder Arms & Heavy Weapons, while melee weapons is just a catch-all skill. Small guns and big guns might be different enough to justify a distinction, but show me a fictional character who is only good at one type of gun. It’s always that you’re either very good at shooting, or you’re not.
Composition: won’t see use at the table under any circumstances. Tough to make the call on the most useless skill here, but this one is a strong contender.
Conceal/Reveal Object & Perception: why is this not just Stealth & Perception?
Concentration: only used as a resistance roll in the exceedingly rare circumstances of a Rocker deciding to distract you during combat with a surprise singing performance. Perhaps should be a passive resistance number instead.
Bribery & Conversation & Interrogation & Human Perception & Persuasion: a single “this punk is good at talking” skill would suffice. If you really want a distinction here, perhaps soft and hard talking, then.
Cryptography: won’t ever see use at the table.
Criminology: I realize that the base game has cop characters, but if you’re playing a cop in a cyberpunk game, don’t.
Dance & Play Instrument: won’t ever see use at the table. Sure you can be a Rocker, but that just means that you should succeed in being awesome, given a guitar or a stage. Why put pointless mechanics to it? What would a success or failure in these rolls ever bring to the drama at the table?
Endurance (when you have Body already) & Resist Torture/Drugs: three things to do the same thing, where a passive number derived from the stat would suffice.
First Aid & Paramedic, and no actual doctor skill, even while cooking your own drugs and installing cyberware, and all the complications of both activities, is a big part of the genre.
Local Expert, except it’s not localized – it’s all of Night City. Missed opportunity in emphasizing the identities and differences of the neighborhoods, and the rare case where I think more granularity would help the game.
Photography/Film: zero applicable use at the table. If your background includes shooting with cameras, you should just be able to do it the one time it comes up in the game.
“Wardrobe & Style”: the one skill I genuinely like! If a punk doesn’t put points here, they don’t know how to dress, and everyone is going to give them shit for it. I love the arms race around this skill, always did!
Mechanics
Almost every rule made me wonder what’s going on here. What’s next is a rundown of all of it, because there’s a lot, and no real logic to it beyond “why is this built this way?”:
Complementary skill checks adding +1 in a system with a D10 base and both imploding and exploding dice is inconsequential. Same for taking extra time: x4 time for +1. Elsewhere in the system all penalties come at -2/-4, which is meaningful. Why are these not +2?
Luck needs to be spent in advance. How is that “lucky”? Sounds more like determination, and not the way luck is perceived.
There are three combat actions dedicated to grappling: Grab, Choke, Slam. It’s a given that an old school, simulationist system has pointlessly complex grappling rules, and this game does not disappoint. The complexity doesn’t add anything in the way of interesting choices, except for choking, which feels overpowered: choking anyone for three rounds (9 seconds) makes them pass out regardless of their condition. I guess that’s one way of making people use your overtly intricate unarmed combat rules.
I like it that the game explicitly says that for the purposes of the game, yard is interchangeable with meter.
Ranged Combat difficulty values are an interesting relic from the past – guns being most accurate/useful at different ranges. The ranges are very granular and weird! Illogical intervals at 0-6, 7-12, 13-25, 26-50, 51-100, 101-200, 201-400, 400-800. Odd to cap it at 800 when the horizon is 4.8km out and we’re shooting science fiction guns with “smart” targeting.
Aimed Shot is always to the head. Weird, but doubling the damage sounds appropriate. The -8 to your attack roll is so severe, though, I’m not sure why this is even an option.
Power Weapon has ricochets that are dumb and fun. -4 isn’t as crippling as an Aimed Shot, so these might actually see use at the table. There’s also a +5 to critical damage. However, they pale in comparison with the other scifi guns.
Smart Weapons giving just +1 to hit is lame, but the Improved Smart Ammunition getting a reroll on misses of up to 5 is fun, except for having to do math on how much did you miss by. This then being a flat 14+roll is a weird rule – why not just use the attacker’s stat & skill? It’s not explained at all.
Tech Weapons help with cover and halve armor, but they need a Move action to charge up.
Smart Weapons with Improved Smart Ammo are clearly the winner’s choice here, unless you expect to go up against heavy armor or hate doing math for your rolls, in which case Tech (still math, but only if you hit, and just a single operation). Can’t see a use for Power weapons at all.
Autofire rules are weird. Instead of doing normal damage, you do 2D6 damage, multiplied by the amount you beat the DV by (again, adding to the resolution complexity), up to your gun’s Autofire Multiplier (x1…x4). And again, there’s that separate skill for Autofire.
Shotguns are so weird that you really have to apply video game logic to them to make sense of it. Unlike in every other game in the world, they damage everyone in a 3x3m area right in front of the shooter. No, you can’t shoot further out than that, extreme close quarters only.
Thrown explosives are likely going to miss a lot with these DVs. There are no rules for deviation, it’s left on the GM. In a system this detailed, this seems like an odd (if easy to amend) choice.
Melee weapons halve armor. That’s an interesting choice, and should lead to more PCs opting to carry some. You also typically get two melee weapon attacks per round, making melee quite appealing. Weirdly, the only thing that affects the damage you do is how big you are (BODY) and whether you have a cyber arm.
Thrown Weapon DV is 16 or 15, depending on if the target is 0-6 or 7-25 meters away. There’s a table for determining this! Why these thresholds, I don’t know, and surely it should be just a single target number. 25 meters is also the maximum anyone can throw a weapon, no matter how skilled or cybered up you are, which doesn’t feel very in genre.
In an ambush situation, you don’t get any kind of aid on your initial to hit rolls. Game says that actively evading targets are as easy to hit as unaware, likely stationary targets.
Facedown: Cool vs Cool. Weirdly there are no bonuses or penalties to this – surely dressing to kill or having a bad rep should be a factor? Nonetheless, this is what social interaction should be in this game, not the useless skills in the skill list. Probably could’ve benefited from more options as results of the facedown.
Quickhacking
Quickhacks: the system I was most looking forward to. Disappointed that it’s limited to one character class, the Netrunner.
Do not like each Quickhack initially requiring two rolls: one to interface and another to avoid being noticed. The latter roll is opposed, too, so it’s actually three rolls which don’t even achieve anything in the fiction!
Let’s look at the quickhacks:
Impair Movement being just Move -1 is ridiculous. That is never going to be used.
Sonic Shock sounds useless, but at least the movement is more impaired than with Impair Movement.
Setting dudes on fire sounds like fun. Not very techy, but fun.
Short Circuit and Cyberware Malfunction are going to be hell on cybered up enemies, in a good way.
Lure is very video gamey and fun.
Slow sounds useful, but being a Difficult Quickhack, won’t see use.
Puppet is scary and fun.
Shard Ejection is the sort of dumb fun I want in my games.
System Reset is too straightforward and something you wouldn’t want to play on the PCs – a 20 round stun!
Overall, these are not very imaginative, but they sort of deliver on the netrunner as wizard trope from the video game. There are three quickhacks (out of just ten!) to slow an enemy, a condition that has next to no relevance in a gun centric game. I wish there was more meat on the system, like tracking hostile hackers, writing programs, and playing with RAM limits. It’s a shame there are no rules for hacking items.
The rest
Lifepath: this is the only system I liked when reading Cyberpunk RED. It’s still good here, even if I would’ve liked a little more depth. It’s essentially the same as in CP2020. All PC/PC connections are left to the players to figure out, even if they are encouraged.
Conversion rules to move the base game to 2070s: great to have. Not loving the specifics as they deal with systems I don’t care for – RED’s Netrunning and class specific skills.
Humanity loss and gain: I like it that there are mechanical incentives to try to get nice things for your PCs. The details are too weird: gaining a true friend gives you 1D6 Humanity. Partying hard for a day gives you 2D6 – or 3D6 if you blow at least 10’000 on drugs. This implies that rich people are very happy, which is not in genre at all.
Basically all the gear and drugs seen in the anime get rules. That is wonderful! Almost none of it is illustrated, which is a real shame.
EDGERUNNER’S HANDBOOK
This is an intro to world, and the thing I was most looking forward to in the box.
Roles have been changed a bit, and to my satisfaction no longer include cops. Medtechs still seem like an odd inclusion – these are always NPCs in the fiction – but otherwise it’s a decent list: fixers, netrunners, nomads, rockers, solos, and techs.
World history is commendably concise in just a few pages, but all over the place in terms of resolution and weight at the table. You do get the broad strokes without being buried under detail. The notion of the old internet being an AI-ruled no man’s land, walled off from the modern Net, is fun. The modern net runs on CitiNets, which are essentially limited to a single city. There is nothing quite like the contemporary world wide web.
The cybertech overview is markedly different from the previous versions of the game, explaining why everyone has a thing in their head that makes the world look and behave like the videogame. It’s new and different. There’s a paragraph on the next, fourth generation of cybertech, with nothing to go on: just that it’s coming. What is a player supposed to do with that?
You get an updated take on cyberpsychosis, basically saying that not all cyber is bad for your mental health, but cutting away perfectly functional body parts and replacing them with implements of violence can be, especially if you’re indebted to whoever purchased the gear for you. This is a welcome revision, keeping the old mechanic, but bringing it to a more contemporary world view.
The net section is confused. The attempt to explain what’s going on is nonsense. There’s the Old Net behind the Blackwall, and AIs are on the prowl. Cities are sort of isolated, but not quite. I wish they’d have included something on these AIs and what they’ve been up to, but it’s kept a mystery.
One page on other technology, primarily weapons, rounds out the tech section. There an attempt is made to explain videogame logic guns. I don’t think this adds anything beyond what you get in the gear listing. The detail on most of the world’s remaining farmland being used to grow biofuel for internal combustion engines is fun, but does underscore how weird it is that everything doesn’t just use electrical engines.
On to Night City!
The next part in the book dives into the world itself, taking you to the streets of Night City. There’s a list of notable locations for each neighborhood, familiar from the videogame, but they’re one to two sentence drafts, with very little to play with. What’s neat is the way each neighborhood is explained in the context of Night City’s history. Very little connects, though, and trite cliches suffice in place of real character.
If it wasn’t for the rich worldbuilding in the videogame, this wouldn’t work at all. It would’ve been massively preferred to spend more space on material you could bring to the table as now the bulk of space is spent on the admittedly intriguing history, which will still bring very little, if anything, to the table.
None (!) of this is illustrated, which is a real shame, as the 2077 worldbuilding in the videogame is stellar. You can get the Dark Horse book, seen above, to fix that. Or indeed fire up Cyberpunk 2077 and go on a tour yourself.
Then we get a lowdown of the players of Night City – the megacorps, gangs, fixers, nomads, and NCPD. The problem with all of these is the utter lack of material to build your game with. You’d think at least the fixers would include clear calls to action, but no dice (with one tiny exception). Something good in the very end: the delightfully privatized and utterly corrupt cops, and REO Meatwagon, the budget option to Trauma Team’s high tech, special operations doctors.
Nobody in Night City is doing anything, nor do they want anything, or have a problem to solve. It’s weird how static this comes off as.
Then a section on everyday life in Night City. It paints a vibrant picture of overcrowded urban life tasting of worms and soy.
As a compelling detail, there is nothing like the internet or social media of contemporary world: everything you see online is controlled by two news corps. This is hard to believe in a high tech world with advanced wireless technology and everyone carrying a HUD in their head – surely private, pirate networks would be springing up everywhere.
Radio is very much still around, and on both radio and television waves/cables, pirate stations do abound.
Because the CitiNets are privately owned and controlled, communication outside of Night City is far from trivial, which has lead to the resurgence of the physical mail courier.
There’s a good, short streetslang glossary. It is scary how many of these I still know from the 2020 original (1990).
The book closes with profiles of characters from the anime. They’re pretty evocative, and paint a much livelier picture of the sorts of lives you could have in this world than the rules or the setting description do.
THE JACKET
This is the adventure in the box, continuing the story from the anime. It’s meant to be played with the pregenerated Edgerunners in the box. The quickstart rules don’t include character generation.
What’s cool is that you’re encouraged to pick a pregen, and then run through Lifepath together, cementing the barebones characters together. This is a great approach, giving players room to get creative, without having to get into the mechanical depths of chargen. While meant for new players, I could see seasoned players get a kick out of this, too, as you avoid a lot of mechanical drudgery many might not appreciate.
I won’t spoil the adventure here, but it does a good job of tying together parts of the setting and putting the players in the middle of it. You’re rubbing shoulders with characters from the anime from the get go, you’re in locations you know from the videogame, and the story is a fun way to connect to David’s story from the anime. The adventure proper is players picking their way through a number of investigative scenes, standoffs, and chases, high on action, and enough player agency to feel like a proper adventure. Downtime is built in, and this is meant to be longer than a single session, which isn’t typical of a quickstart adventure, but very welcome. It never goes up to eleven, though, and I’m left wanting for more memorable scenes.
I don’t like the way the adventure is written, with a lot of detailed “if/then” setups in every scene that make it hard to use at the table. Perhaps that’s good for a beginning game master so they can see all the ways a scene might play out, but I think I’d be intimidated by feeling like I have to memorize all this. A more concise presentation would help usability.
OVERALL
While I don’t really like any of the mechanics, nor the setting presentation, the box has got me excited to run a game in the Cyberpunk/Edgerunners 2077 setting. The maps are useful props, if not very high in production value. If you don’t need the Cyberpunk mechanics, just getting The World Of Cyberpunk 2077 book would serve you better, unless you want the adventure. It’s a fine adventure, and I believe I’ll run it one day, if using another game system.
If you, however, already like Cyberpunk RED, this is a great way to jump into the 2077 setting.
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