I’ve taken an interest in TTRPGs recently. I want to say that it was the impact of going to PAX Unplugged, but I am fairly certain it started before that — after all, I have spent the past couple years working on a book about Magic: The Gathering (which I am working on finishing now) and attending a lot of physical games events.
The thing is, in terms of research, I am not exactly clear about what itch TTRPGs are scratching for me. There is a nascent something that I think is going on culturally in some of the turn from digital to analog games, especially post-2020. I think part of what is bringing me to tabletop games is actually quite old in my research; my first book, The World is Born From Zero, is about speculation and extrapolation and what happens in the moment-to-moment navigation of those two things via clicks and button presses. It is perhaps not shocking that rolling a lot of dice has me thinking about that stuff again. Also: doing a lot of card game research about ordering, aesthetics, produced chances, deckbuilding, etc (and the discourse around it).
All of this is to say that I recently picked up the Cyberpunk 2020 2.0 book, a 1993 tabletop game, and I read through it mostly out of curiosity and interest given that these are the months of cyberpunk. I was not hyper familiar with the blow-by-blow of Cyberpunk, and I was delighted to find that it has a lifepath system for character generation, which I have relatively little experience with other than a marathon reading session of the original Traveler documents.
Cyberpunk‘s lifepath system is relatively simple in that it guides you through character creation and then “makes” that character as a social person through your dice rolls. You roll for clothing, visual style, attitude, and of course the more numeric stats. Then you roll for their social connections — who are their parents, what is the relationship, who are their friends, who are their enemies, do they have siblings — and then you start rolling for the major events that have happened for each year of their life.
If you go into it with an open mind and are willing to follow the random generation, you can produce some really surprising things that nevertheless feel fully appropriate to the genre in front of us. What follows here are just some structured thoughts about how I felt while making the character and what I think Cyberpunk‘s achieving with its particular form of lifepath generation.
First, here’s the character sheet [Cyberpunk 2020 2.0 Character Sheet] [click to make bigger]:
With that fresh on your mind, let me walk through some things I found interesting about rolling up a character within this system.
Stat Line
I chose the character class of the Fixer before I rolled a single stat. I think that’s just the most interesting class in Cyberpunk, which is a game that is absolutely full of interesting character classes.
I am a strong believer in rolling for stats, and at this advanced age I think the notion of “point buy” for stats is damning yourself to an optimal mechanical experience that is hollowed out of all nuance and interest. Rolling the d10 for all the major stats is a very “all or nothing” design, given how low the floor is, but the book encourages a reroll of anything <2, so there’s some safety catch there. The character I came out with is brutally efficient, existing at the top end of a lot of stats and only lacking LUCK and BODY.
The borders that this gives for a character are really strong: able to think around any corner, warp their senses and reflexes around any obstacle with enough trial and error, but that’s all you get. Your body won’t save you. When the guns come out, you gotta hope that COOL carries you — LUCK won’t.
After rolling these stats, I named my character Tranq. That’s because I thought it was a cool name.
Lifepath
Any game can let you extrapolate numbers into realities. Cyberpunk‘s lifepath generator is where the special sauce is here. Presented as a series of charts and flowcharts, it presents you with the opportunity to simple let combinations and your own mind drive the bus of shaping reality. I have to confess that this is where most of the magic of TTRPGs lives for me, right at the interface of bounded chance and narrativization. It probably has to do with writing a whole book about speculation and extrapolation.
I’m just going to hit on some of the parts of the lifepath generator that I’ve been blabbering to people about for the last few days:
- I could not find somewhere in the generator where I made a decision about gender, and if you look at the sheet above you will see a conspicuous absence. As far as I can tell, a decision about gender is made when you roll for your style. If you go normative, “suits” and “miniskirts” signal a particular relationship to gender, but that’s about all the guidance you get on any of that.
- There’s one page on “Family Background” presented as a flowchart that is astonishingly productive for thinking through a character’s history. A few rolls gave me a strong background for Tranq: her family is from an Arcology, and their status is in trouble due to a betrayal. The Arcology itself was once the place to be, but now it’s falling apart, and Tranq has had to adapt to those conditions. She’s got a younger sister. There’s just a lot to build on here in terms of character: bridging old and new; getting revenge on a betrayer; protecting a sibling. Lots of pieces to grab onto and work with, and they are pieces that actually compose into something real. I have been thinking a lot about how affirming I think this kind of flow chart is and how pointless I think something like Mothership‘s patch system is.
- You determine your age and start rolling to determine what kind of event happened to you each year. This thing rules, and because Tranq’s age was relatively low, I only had three opportunities to roll. Each one rules, though, and provides a really strong context for creating an underground network — hunted by the cops for a year and saved a criminal’s life; met a relative who is the polar opposite of Tranq, whose personality rolls produced a pure operator who is in the streets for the eurobucks.
- Working through the skill system is fine and all, although I struggle to see how some of these would come up in gameplay, but the employment rolls are really great. Tranq was recently a sub lieutenant in a Fixer organization, and then something happened. What was it? Who knows! That’s a productive gap to fill in, and it might even be the perfect thing to spin the campaign up around. Of course, she is unemployed because of what is in the best paragraph in the book:
Buildability
I think what surprised me the most about Cyberpunk 2020‘s character creation process is that the whole mechanism of generation is spun up in this near-future world in which some things are cheap and some things are not. All told, most cybernetic enhancements to the body and most gear you might want to buy to use on a cyberpunk mission are easy to get and probably are not constrained by resources. What’s less cheap is humanity, the thing that measures your enhancements and how many you can have before you have a break from humanity (I’m setting aside the ideology inherent in the “tech vs human nature” thing going on in this game). Some cybernetic enhancements do not have a direct humanity cost, for example, but instead ask for a roll of the dice when you attain them. Tranq putting infrared in her eyes cost her very little in terms of her image of herself as a human; it cost her a huge amount to create a skin pocket for storing items in her flesh. The procedural storytelling in that resolution is delightful, and it, too, gives a way of portraying Tranq purely in terms of the page.
That’s It
This is mostly just a post that I wrote to collect some notes and thoughts, and I’m using it to refer back to later when I do more research about this. So there’s not a conclusion here of any sort other than this generator is very neat.