Second, initiative was rerolled every turn, which made it more difficult for parties to plan actions more than one turn ahead. Friday Night Firefight alleviated the issues with turn taking in two ways: First, characters in combat were taken out of combat very quickly. This is a Cyberpunk game, though, and grids and maneuvers aren’t going to give us the feel we want. In D&D, especially later editions, it’s fairly clear that turn structure is one of the elements that compounds the ‘bag of hit points’ problem with combat, and only Fourth Edition, where movement and maneuvers are abstracted equally, really solves that in any satisfactory way. Turn-taking has been, since D&D was new, a compromise between simulation and gameplay.

In each case, the goals for what the game should feel like as well as the work already done on the skill mechanics will inform how we go forward. In order to evaluate combat for the Cyberpunk Chimera, we’ll take a look at how structured combat time works, how actions work, and how damage works. Cyberpunk 2020 succeeded in this respect, though not without its own weirdness. The other is to design a combat system which imparts a fair and realistic amount of risk. One is to provide more options with an equal amount of mechanical depth, something I will attempt to do in later installments. There are two things needed to break up the primacy of combat in a role-playing game. The unified system in Genesys, though, isn’t going to be the best choice for the feel of Cyberpunk 2020. Now, in this Cyberpunk Chimera, we’re going to want to give more love to both of these situations, and probably move closer to a system like Genesys where social, physical, and digital conflicts all get more equal treatment in the mechanics. The issue with Cyberpunk’s conflict systems, really, is that combat is much more ‘baked’ than the other conflict system, netrunning, and the only semblance of a social conflict system is the ‘facedown’ mechanic, which is one die roll for one specific situation. Quirks aside, what made ‘realistic’ fun was that the system played quickly and had enough detail to mean that player choices in terms of tactics and weapons mattered.

This did mean that some of the “imbalance” in the system, namely the overwhelming power of a high initiative roll and the destabilizing impact of armor, were based on reality. Cyberpunk 2020 had a combat system designed with realism in mind, and, thanks to a statistical basis in actual criminal activity using guns, did very well in terms of combat verisimilitude. The one subsystem that all traditional RPGs bolt onto their core resolution mechanics is a conflict system and, like it or not, the most popular iteration of a conflict system is one for physical combat.

Chimera tool hack