I’ve always been an avid game collector. I have piles of games I’ve never played and never will simply because they make for good reading and inspiration. They also constitute a gaming research library — before writing rules, I often consult as many as ten games to see how others have covered similar ground before me. There are a lot of gems buried in forgotten games.
I’ve said that the primary inspiration, ruleswise, for CP0000 is Cyberpunk 2020, and that’s true. But there was a third edition of Cyberpunk released a few years ago. It departs significantly from the theme and setting of 2020, following very different transhuman themes and presenting a very implausible future. It features a lot of rehashed and half-baked ideas. It’s an eyesore (with action-figure art). And it was publicly reviled upon its release.
But I bought it anyway.
I’m adding the game to my library purely for research purposes. I want to see what the designers did with their own system after a decade of evolution, and I want to see how they’ve made it suit a different setting. Beyond that, I know there are some innovations in v3.0 that interest me — the greatest of these being the introduction of meta-characters.
Meta-characters are entities other than individuals that act in the game — organizations, corporations, gangs, etc. They’ve got attributes, abilities, and descriptions, and they use characters to perform their functions — both as “troops” and as the meta-character’s “hands.” It seems, on my first glance, that they serve as a concrete, game mechanic-based way to represent more nebulous entities that are nonetheless vital to the game and the setting.
And I’ve yearned, for a long time unknowingly, for some sort of mechanic like this for a long time. It would be much easier to use groups and to have them play a meaningful role in a background if there were some ground rules for them, rather than playing out the visible, important actions they take through their characters and narrating the rest. And it’s a vital part of the cyberpunk genre — I now wonder how it is that we got as far as we did without ever coming up with real rules for the behaviour of those great giants, the corporations.
I was already thinking of making rules for this sort of thing when I remembered that v3.0 tried to cover it, as well. As I’ve not read the game yet, I can’t speak to how well the rules work. It could be that they’re unworkable or silly. Even if they are, I’m sure I’ll find something I can use and some ideas I can mine — and, after all, that’s the point of having a research library.
Next up: thoughts on core mechanics and character generation — real stuff about the guts of the game!
Tags: cyberpunk, inspiration, research, rules, talk
