A game that I remember playing back in the 90’s is what I will be using for this entry in the 2025 #CharacterCreationChallenge. Cyberpunk 2020 that was published in 1991 by R. Talsorian Games. Past challenge entries using different versions of the Cyberpunk genre include Cyberpunk v3 in 2022, Cyber Generation in 2023 and Cyberpunk Red in 2024.
Section 1 on page 3 lists your Role (aka Class) and after reading the descriptions I really wanted to make a character that was a Fixer. This is a guy who can be a smuggler or information broker. Section 2 on page 25 is the statistics. There is an option for Character Points for the statistics depending on what type of game the GM wanted to run (Average to Major Hero games). But there was also an option to fast roll the stats by rolling a D10 (re-roll any 1 or 2 results) and place each score where you want it. I’m doing this. The Stats are Intelligence (INT), Reflexes (REF), Cool (CL), Technical Ability (TECH), Luck (LK), Attractiveness (ATT or ATTR on the character sheet), Movement Allowance (MA), Body Type (BT) and Empathy (EMP). I rolled these up and also wrote down the secondary stats based that were mathematically provided by the primary stats.
On page 34 is the first step of the Lifepath. Because Cyberpunk has a strong fashion sense (and I as a player do not) the first step is the Origins and Personal Style. I rolled a d10 to determine the clothes (Biker Leathers), hairstyle (Wild & All Over) and add-ons (Spiky Gloves). You can choose your character’s ethnicity or randomly roll it. Let’s see what the dice says. 0 = European. I narrowed this down to German just because.
Next step is the Family Background and this has an actual flow chart. The family ranking is Pirate Fleet (um… what?), both parents are still alive and the family status is OK. The character’s childhood environment is in a decaying, once upscale neighborhood. The roll for siblings resulted in this guy being an only child. I’m directed to move to step three: Motivations.
And here we are on the step three flowchart. This unnamed character is intellectual and detached. The person they value the most is a parent. What they value the most is power (insert Unlimited Power meme here). Using people like tools before discarding them is how the character feels about most people. And finally for the last random roll in Motivations, the character’s most valued possession is a piece of clothing. Onto the next chart.
Life Events is step four. I’m instructed to roll 2d6+16 for the character’s starting age of 27. This means for each year past 16 I roll 11 times on the Life Event chart. Oh boy, I’m going to my scratch paper and rolling them all up. Wow, there was a lot of rolling here. If you made a friend or an enemy you had to roll up their personal style using some of the earlier steps in this character creation process. Since there wasn’t really room for this on the second page of the character sheet, I just put down TBD on my notes.
The skills of my Fixer is next. There is a Career Skill Package and there are 40 points to use for these. There is also 13 points for non-career skills (as determined by INT+REF scores). I wrote down the skills I thought my Fixer would need.
Gearing up the character. The book says that the characters are mobile and you’ve got to keep your equipment portable. The starting funds are dependent on what level your special skill is for your role. And unfortunately I was running out of time for today. I had a few things written down, but I’d probably fill this out with several cyber enhancements and the like to make it more cyberpunkish. Oh, I don’t have a name yet. Consulting a random name generator I settled on Xenos.
Afterthoughts:
Turns out I had seen the lifepath first and thought it was the start of the character creation process. When it suddenly ended with no further steps I had to go back. That is when I realized that I started in the wrong spot, the lifepath was the end. So I was just a tad confused for a minute. I wish the organization from the lifepath had been used throughout the entire character creation process.
I liked how they gave examples using real life and fictional examples of what skill levels they had (example Ronald Reagan had a Persuasion of 7+, Sherlock Holmes had Awareness/Notice of 10+, etc.) on some skills. It helped when I was thinking about them.
I had quite a few good fond memories of playing this game. I wish that I could play it again. Even my wife was remembering a Cyberpunk 2020 game that we had played years ago with friends.
Additional Notes:
I had posted a link to the Character Creation Challenge entry for Shadow Ops on the publisher’s discord server. I wanted to share what the author’s response was in his own words.
“Thanks for doing this! I appreciate it! I think you were a little harsh on figuring out Combat Skills, though I will concede that I should have noted something about Combat Skills using score on p. 8.
I used Skill Set rather than Class because the term fit much better in the genre. In the fiction, people literally talk about their “skill sets.” Plus Liam Neeson has a particular set of skills, after all.
Overall, you didn’t seem to enjoy the process, which is unfortunate, but everyone has their own experiences and their own expectations about what the process should be.”
I thanked him for taking the time to explain some of his thinking to me. I could see where he was coming from with the Skill Sets vs Class line of thinking. I’m still planing to do a cover-to-cover read of the book when things are not so hectic later this year. But this is not the type of response I would have normally received from a larger publisher.
Coming Up Next:
Old School Essentials
This article is open for discussion on the TardisCaptain dot Com Discord server. You can also email me at Carl (at) TardisCaptain.com or click on my social media links with any comments.