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Just checking to see which cyberpunk genre rpgs folks here have played and what you thought the strengths and weaknesses of the individual games were. I've only really ever played various editions of the big two (mostly Shadowrun and the occasional Cyberpunk 20XX) so my experience is limited. I've been looking at others like The Sprawl, Neon City Overdrive, Carbon 2185, Eclipse Phase, and the various Genesys cyberpunk settings but I'm very superficially aware of others like both Altered Carbon and CB/Modiphius' Infinity games. While I prefer more traditional structured games/campaigns, I have played some moderately narrative sessions in Shadowrun Anarchy and am open to new experiences beyond the super crunchy 80's style games I'm used to (hence why I'm looking at minimalist rules light games such as Neon City). Feel free to post others and discuss others that Imay have missed as well.

I'm pretty old-school, only played Shadowrun 2nd ed.

I started with that one as well (in terms of Cyberpunk rpgs at least). I've been finding out about alot of newer ones in other sources that I wasn't aware of like Lowlife 2090 and Genefunk (two more 5e/SRD games like Carbon 2185). I'm not sure how crunchy vs abstract I want to go yet though and I'm hesitant to go d20/SRD with cyberpunk as I kind of feel it deserves a bit more grit than typical dnd hitpoint sponge combat.

There is the new 'Cyberpunk Red' ruleset - it's probably pretty good if you want a simple and lightweight system for a narrative style game.

Not for 'crunch' players though.

A.T. wrote:
There is the new 'Cyberpunk Red' ruleset - it's probably pretty good if you want a simple and lightweight system for a narrative style game.

Not for 'crunch' players though.

I think the Cyberpunk Red ruleset is pretty solid and definitely less crunchy than the main Shadowrun editions it overlapped but I wouldn't call it lightweight or narrative personally as it does have a good amount of tastey crunch still. That's not a bad thing or meant in a negative way. If it came out in the 90s I'd probably say it might classify as such but rules lite and narrative have had a very severe swing to abstracted one size fits all rules in the past decade or more. YMMV.

 warboss wrote:
...but I wouldn't call it lightweight

I guess it depends on where you draw the line. It's has a lot of charts, stats, upgrades... but actually playing it seems to end in rolling the same few tests with little way to vary them

There is no difference between Adam Smasher leaping from the rooftop with a katana and a child smacking you in the shins with a rusty metal pipe for example, they even pay the same for their weapon.

It's certainly not lightweight in the same sense as something like In Nominie but it's also nothing like oldschool cyberpunk.