Cyberpunk 2020 was the top of the game

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Post originally by Kensan Oni at 2004-12-17 11:01:40
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In my mind, there has only ever been two games that handled the near future very well at all. The first one was Car Wars (And I think we are almost at the point where we can be expection somekind of national riots any day now. ;'D), and the second one was Cyberpunk.

I can not really explain the appeal of these games, really. I always just felt that they were the right ones, and that was how things were suppose to go.

While I liked Shadowrun a little, it never felt right to me. My options were not the same as they were in Cyberpunk. Shadowrunning was so... corperate. It wasn't a rebellion against the system, it was buying into the system, becoming a part of it. Shadowrun had all the cyber, but none of the punk.

The closest think that has popped up since was Mage: The Ascension... and that is only really quasi-punk. But it's all there, too.

Someday, I'll probably get around to using Cyberpunk to do the Appleseed universe, but Cyberpunk was the first, and still the best one of the Punk/Cyber Genre out there.

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Post originally by Jethrow at 2004-12-21 00:03:02
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Right on. Well said. As I said in an earlier post, I have played a lot of Cyberpunk 2020 and of late (well, in the past five years) have played it converted to Gunmaster (Harnmaster). I could have just used Gunmaster and made my own setting but CP 2020 has a superior setting due to its... I don't know exactly how to put it, its feeling maybe. Its definitely about style. I retained much of the CP 2020 lifepath generation system because it is so cool (but my conversion was influenced as well by the first edition Twilight: 2000 and old Megatraveller character generation systems). The wierd hybrid lifepath system that resulted I have since used with several other game conversions, and my players love it. Sure, it makes character generation take a while longer than most other systems, but the resulting characters are so rich in detail. No two characters have been remotely alike in my latest CP 2020 campaign, because the players have really run with the concept of true individuality in characters. Examples: The organiser of the first character group was Vasco Martinez, a former Night City street kid and drug dealer who, following a drug-induced breakdown received braindance therapy and hated drugs thereafter, so moved into consolidated exports gun sales for Militech; Jean-Paul M'Bassa, a mega-rich orbital space fighter jock and EVA marine orbital war hero turned mercenary (also known as BIJ, short for Brain In Jar, because of his voluntary full borg conversion); Naiche Aldecaldo, a full blooded Apache nomad trained as an assassin by OTEC, whose sense of style was so honed he had a range of clothing named after him by a fashion clothing company; and Pipe Hittin' Joe, an enormous back-street brawler whose favoured melee weapon was a three foot steel pipe capped at either end and filled with concrete. The CP 2020 setting is so rich and stylish it seems to bring out the best in my players. Its the shit.