Cyberpunk Red Is Up

I know that the guy who wrote it said that all weapons come integrally suppressed, and I am pretty sure that one will be appearing in Black Chrome. (their chromebook). I think they took out silencers since everyone treats them as total hollywood things, that just end up making a gun have no noise at all, which is almost funny because they want their combat system to be more hollywood action type, rather than the bit more 'simulationist' FNFF of 2020. With their choices on cover, I think they wanted to try to get rid of the constant flim flam arguments between player and GM regarding cover. "No. im in 99.9 percent cover, but I can still fully shoot out of it fine!!!" and "well I think you're only in 2 percent cover, so it really isn't going to help you. " It comes down to, I think, the author just wanting to make things TOO easy for the GM. Armor piercing ammo, shotguns, the cop ability to just pull backup out of their ass in mere seconds like a summon spell, and the idiotic tiered economy (the guy who wrote it is an economist, and I get the feeling he just wanted to justify his thesis paper on the scarcity economy in an RPG) are all things that REALLY weigh this edition down. One of my biggest gripes however, is that they integrally tied their storyline/metaplot into the rules. The fixers are now married, by rules, to their scarcity economy fetish. So much in it is now integral to their setting. In 2020, you could really rub the brand names off of anything and play the game in one's own completely devised setting, but that's SO much harder in RED now as so many of the setting ideas, are baked into rules now. Thanks again for posting this vid. I'm glad to see that many of my complaints with the game aren't just me and are shared by others.

Terrafan

I dug it. I especially liked that it was ultimately a tragedy. Most cyberpunk fiction is. I like they way it showed the evolution of Cyberpsychosis as being gradual, and eventually dissociation from reality. That made it feel more natural. We saw it coming for our hero from miles away and that's what made the tragedy work because everyone could see it coming but him. Cyber, like Mythos Tomes in Call of Cthulhu, is one of those things that's a double-edged sword. It gives your character an advantage. It helps you survive longer in the short-term, but ultimately the cost can become the character's undoing in the long-term. I like how they showed that. Something the video game didn't do a good job of showing. I'm sure the droves of people who watched it and rushed out to buy the game were also very disappointed to see a Sandavestian isn't the world-changing badass Flash superpower that the show made it out to be.

I don't have a problem with them not having street-level NPC personalities. I rarely, if ever, see that in a game. Maybe if they do a re-make of the old Nightcity book. One of my hurdles in reviewing it was having to compare Corebook to Corebook between the editions, because I have every CP2020 supplement and it wasn't a fair comparison the weight a single corebook versus a library of supplements. They do have short blurbs for the gangs, but very short. No gang signs or colors. Again, I'm holding judgement of trying to compare it to the old Night City book. The corebook is already huge enough. The Combat section is where I felt deflated. I get that they had to streamline it. We'd house-ruled the old one drastically, and that's because it had some problems. So I get that they had to change it, and there would be the loss of some things I liked in the old edition in exchange for ease of use and play speed. But it just kept cutting and cutting until much of what made me love the old system was gone, and many of the changes I thought made less sense. I was told by a very reliable source that the designers did those changes knowing and expecting that players would just house-rule it anyway. I think I was told that as a way of comforting my initial reaction to reading the corebook, but I pray that was only speculation and not true. Designers making a game with the expectation that players will houserule it to make it work bothers me. I've played the old games where every group had to houserule a game to make it playable. That used to be standard. But game design and expectations have changed. A group should employ houserules because they want to make it better, not because they need to make a flawed system playable.

Got it. Thanks.

I felt the same way! The rule set seemed solid and streamlined enough, especially compared to Shadowrun, but the lore seemed real thin... No info on gangs or various kinds of tech or cyber-implants, very little on people of interest beyond the heads of corporations. No street level info or more granular stories that could ground you as a street level thug in night city, just big picture stuff.

Ian

Just a heads up, there's a typo in the description in the sentence "Set in 2045, the game take plave between"

I have mixed opinoin about Red. I was really looking forward to it, but I can only sum it up that some things they streamlined too much, while other too little. For example we have very simple and generic combat and pricing, but still 10 attributes and almost 100 skills.

Michal

BTW: Any opinions on Edgerunners series? I really enjoyed it.

Michal

Oh nice! Was wondering when I was going to see this one pop up

Grey Wolverine