http://www.glixel.com/interviews/inside-the-classic-tabletop-rpg-behind-cyberpunk-2077-w464270
Cyberpunk also had an innovative combat system called Friday Night Firefight. "Most RPGs have really complex combat," says Appelcline. "Like, you'll play for four hours, and spend couple of those hours on a single battle. Pondsmith created a combat system that was really quick and bloody and dirty and gritty – really true to cyberpunk."
"I didn't want people to have to deal with a lot of numbers," says Pondsmith. "And I wanted to make it like a real gunfight. The average one takes place at 12 feet distance, and it's not like movies where every shot connects and guns never run out of ammo – most cops throw 30 rounds down line and hit with two of them." A bullet that actually connects in the game is very likely to be lethal. "In
Cyberpunk, you hoped you didn't get into a fight, and when you did, you tried to get out of it as fast as you could," says Appelcline.
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The
Cyberpunk sourcebook literally lays out the Humanity Cost associated with each bodily upgrade: "Say I add four new cybernetic devices for a total Humanity Cost of 36. I will lose 3 points of Empathy." When your Empathy score hits zero, you enter a state called cyberpsychosis. At that point, players no longer control their character – the referee takes over, and describes their descent into fits of rage, split personality, kleptomania, even cannibalism. Someone suffering from cyberpsychosis needs to be subdued by a Psycho Squad and undergo weeks of aversion therapy and braindance simulation before they rediscover the vestiges of their humanity. Quite how this will play out in video game form is – as with almost everything else at this point – unknown, but in
The Witcher series, taking too many combat-enhancing potions during a fight could lead to slowdown or even death for hero Geralt, so it's not impossible to imagine something similar in
Cyberpunk 2077.
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"My wife told me that these guys in Poland wrote to us and said they wanted to do a
Cyberpunk game," says Pondsmith. "They told me that the game was really important to them back in the Iron Curtain days – back then, they had
Cyberpunk and communism. What impressed us was not just their capabilities and their well-organized toolsets, but that they knew and loved the material. I said, let's do this thing."
"I go over there pretty regularly," says Pondsmith. "I'll probably go back in the next couple of months. I'm in a room with a hundred people, all firing ideas back and forth. We jump up and down on the systems and see how well they work. I really got lucky."
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There are rumors that Pondsmith is also working on a new version of the tabletop game that will be released alongside CDPR's
Cyberpunk 2077. "There will be more
Cyberpunk stuff coming, yes," he says cryptically. "One thing I've learned is that I don't talk about anything before it's ready. I pioneered some genres, and people started paying attention to what I say. I don't want to help the competition."