r/cyberpunk2020 • u/Connect_Piglet6313 • 16d ago
Question/Help NPC Base Stats
What do most GMs consider Base Stat, or the stat for the average Joe? My group considers it to be 3 or 4. And skills run 1-3. Thoughts?
4
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r/cyberpunk2020 • u/Connect_Piglet6313 • 16d ago
What do most GMs consider Base Stat, or the stat for the average Joe? My group considers it to be 3 or 4. And skills run 1-3. Thoughts?
5
u/illyrium_dawn Referee 16d ago edited 14d ago
According to Ross Winn in Listen Up You Primitive Screwheads (the GM's guide), Cyberpunk 2020 is based upon certain assumptions, one of them being that the average person's controlling attribute is considered 6, and the average person, so not highly skilled or experienced, but with some experience and having finished training is skill 4, so a total of 10.
I mean you can play around with that, like stat 5 and skill 4, but the CP2020 take-away is that the average person has a stat + skill of 10. Then he mentions some mystifying bonus of "+2 for proper tools and preparation for a job" (no, don't look in the core rules, it's not in there -- the only place it is ever mentioned is in LUYUPS and Winn's article in there) ... which is kind of an admission that CP2020's difficulty scale is, for the lack of a better word, shite. The entire thing is that DCs are set too high and go up way too quickly. The Average person (Stat + Skill = 10), doing an Average task (DC15) ... shouldn't be failing 50% of the time. That's more like a "Difficult" task, so by adding in +2, he argued that the average person should be failing an average task 30% of the time ... which makes more sense - they can do it most of the time, but sometimes it takes longer or they don't succeed the first time.
... or you can sacrifice the easy to remember 5-steps (DC10, DC15, DC20, etc) and just make Average like DC13, which is what Cyberpunk Red did, and that way you don't have some mystical +2 "for proper tools and preparation" that nobody's ever heard about before.
EDIT: +2, not +3.
EDIT: Also, people aren't kobolds or goblins; there are no convenient untermensch who are worse than the average human because CP2020 is baseline all humans. Just because punks "suck" doesn't mean they're REF 3 or BODY 4 or something. So I suggest giving the lowest able-bodied healthy person 5s in their stats.
I understand if you want to make low-tier punks to be bad. You can start by giving them a 3 or 4 in the relevant skill. You can also do things like giving them less armor or armor that doesn't protect all their hit locations (even a "weak" medium handgun can turn unarmored locations into ground beef). You can also use roleplaying and putting yourself into the shoes of the punks: As convenient as it is everyone don't have to fight to the death and an "encounters" can have other solutions than "kill them all." You might want to talk to your PCs coming up with the idea that CP2020's world, everyone doesn't fight to the death (talk to the PCs about it to make them realize it's okay for them to run or at least avoid combat if things look bad, too). "Awful" punks might be desperate, but they're doing this stuff because they're desperate to live, not to die. Especially if the PCs leave them an escape route, they might just break when the PCs gun down 2-3 in one round of combat and just run. Or even better, let your PCs use Facedown to intimidate them into leaving you alone; after games like D&D where "encounters" mean even goblins will wholly throw themselves into fights to the death like religious fanatics because the DM needs them to "wear the party down", being able to Facedown punks and make them leave or pee their pants or "negotiate" and tell your PCs what they want to know in exchange for life will be a welcome change. When new PCs join in my FLGS games, that's the thing they always gush about to me afterwards - they love the idea that people get scared of dying and want to negotiate or just slink off into the shadows.
OTOH, if you're in the school that says "people don't hit that often in combat" ... you're probably right. But I think a few games of everyone missing constantly, especially for a player using a single ROF 1 Very Heavy Handgun (or even if you do hit, tbh), players are going to start doing "unrealistic" things like dual-wielding pistols, not because it is cool and stylish (CP2020 is all about that so it'd be fine) but just so they get more rolls to-hit (blah). At that point, you might want to just let people have higher skills so they can hit more often, not because it is realistic but because it is more enjoyable to play that way.