“THERE WAS A FIREFIGHT!!!!!!!!”
Now that I’ve got my inner Willem Defoe out, I can talk about the last book in the 1988 Cyberpunk boxed set, Friday Night Firefight. Previous to playing Cyberpunk, my exposure to RPG combat was D&D, Star Frontiers, and Marvel Super Heroes. Very abstract, very low lethality. FNFF prided itself on its deadliness, its precision, and its dedication to realism. They cite FBI statistics and other sources with plenty of warnings that guns will kill you.
The mechanics of this simple 24-page booklet are simple and pretty clearly explained. Your reflexes determine which phases you act in and you have one action per phase. Attribute plus skill over a Difficulty Chance give you success or failure. It gets a little crunchy when determining wounds and penetration but, compared to other ‘realistic’ modern combat systems, it’s a breeze. Compared to the other books, there isn’t a lot of extrapolating or rabbit holes to go down, so this is actually going to be a pretty quick conclusion to the look at the boxed set.
I decided to try out the system and see how deadly it was. I had a pair of goons try to ambush a lone solos. Within one turn (two phases), the goons were bleeding out. Granted, I didn’t armor the goons up or anything, but they didn’t lay a finger on him. Deadly indeed. Maybe there is a deep dive to be had comparing this combat system with Cyberpunk 2020 using the NPCs and situations from “Never Fade Away.”
In Summary
Looking at this original boxed set, I can see why it grabbed me and why I fell in love with the game. Even though it is dated mechanically, I can think of its contemporary context and remember how mind-blowing some of these innovations were. The source material, however, is where the money is made. The cyberpunk world of 2013 was exciting, prescient, dangerous, and stylish. The combat was gritty and unforgiving. It was a literal game-changer. I’m excited to see the world (and system expand) and I can’t wait to see where it takes me. I’ll have to do a side by side comparison of the combat systems (maybe a Wednesday entry in the future) to see really how they stack up against each other. I have a feeling I’m in a minority here, but I actually think that I prefer the architecture of the Net in 2013 over that of 2020. While I don’t particularly care for the different interface programs, I like that it’s narrower and more reminiscent of how computer networks can be. You can’t just walk until you find it, you have to know what you’re looking for. Ditto the flowchart model of networks over the crossword puzzle model of 2020. That’s probably another Wednesday post in the future.
Next week, we’ll look at the first in the series of magazine-style supplements, Solo of Fortune.
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