Not really. 3.0 had its problems, sure. People complained and they made it better for 3.5. Some stuff was still a bit off so when WOTC started over with something new, Paizo picked it up and perfected it. Pathfinder's combat rules are finely honed and pretty much perfect.
Perfect for what? Perfect for who? I quite despise the d20 system, what with its rules scattered over several books, a kajillion feats, classes, and prestige classes, it still uses hit point based levl prgression, hit points themselves are some wierd abstraction of fighting spirit where no matter how much damage you take you are hunky dory until you drop below zero, and many more things I despiise. And pathfinder is just the last grasp at trying to make it work, but so it's obviously not perfect for me. Hell it's not even in the running. It is better than 4E, but then so is pretty much everything but Rifts. Honestly, I don't even like d20 as much as I did Basic DnD.
Maybe you what you mean by perfect is that everything is explained? Which hey, is awesome, but somehow rules arguments still come up in Pathfinder....
Hell, there's even an index, so if you see a rule or term you don't get you can look it up
I will give you that.... lack of index in everything but the chrome books is, and always has been, a serious blow against R. Talsorian products. But it's one I can live with.
If the FNFF rules re so beautiful, please tell me exactly where it explains "Shooting from the hip"
It gives you a WA penalty for it, but outside of that table it's never mentioned again. What advantage is there that you're paying for with a penalty?
What about "Turning to face the target" how is facing your target less accurate than not? What advantage is there to not facing your target?
How big's a Small Target?
How big's a Tiny Target?
I agree shooting from the hip should be explained... or perhaps dropped, because while it's something people do in real life, and seems to be the default for shooting full auto in movies made before 2000, it's not something most gamers take the time to describe themselves doing, particularly if they know it imposes a penalty.
Much of the 2020 FNFF is truncated from the original 2013 FNFF where turning to face your opponent is fully explained. However, the explanation was likely dropped in 2020 due to the fact that's it's a pretty simple concept that really doesn't need the space required to explain it in order to make it work, as "Truning to face target imparts a -2 penalty" is really the only explanation most people need. However, to explain, There is no advantage to not turning to you face your target. It describes a situation where the target is not immediately in your line of sight, for example if he is behind you. A combat round in Cyberpunk is 3.3 seconds long, turning around to get a shot at the guy behind you imparts a -2 because it takers time and you have to orient yourself to the target. On the other hand, I guess the Advantage in not turning to face your opponent means you aren't stressed over the bullet thats going to kill you from behind, you die a little more peacefully.
A small target imparts the same penalty as an aimed shot at head or limbs... so logic dictates that a small target is around that size. Logically following this, a tiny target is smaller than a limb or head, something like an eye, groin, kneecap, etc... or the bullseye on a paper target. And yes, I agree that they could have listed examples in small text beside their entry in the FNFF modifier table, which is what I did with IU.
How do saves against poison and drugs work? Is it a straight 'roll under your bod' like a stun save, or is it a Bod+Resist Torture/Drugs check vs a specific Diff? The rules in the book don't bother listing any Diff numbers suggesting that it uses the straight 'roll under bod' mechanic...but is that affected by your current stun save modifier?...Every other piece of equipment outside of the main book that uses drugs or poison uses the bod+resist vs Diff mechanic though
I give you this one, and is probably something I need to address with the next IU revision.
How do poison darts work? Do you have to inflict damage with them to get the drug effect? Do they have some kind of AP? Why would you use one of those instead of a squirtgun or splatgun that doesn't need to go through armor? Is it harder to save against injected vs surface contact drugs?
What about drug prices? It just says 5x, but does that mean neurotoxin costs the same as tear gas? How about squirtgun juice? Only needles and splatguns are mentioned.
Darts are AP, it says that somewhere, however you are right, the poison section is laughably incomplete. It doesn't list costs for them, it doesn't lists duration, it doesn't list a lot of things it absolutely should. Though they do provide rules to build your own poisons in the drugs section. Realistically, there are a lot more poisons which must either be ingested or introduced to the bloodstream than those that can be applied topically. On a side note, I have owned a whole lot of squirtguns in my life, but I have never owned a single one that didn't leak... and paintball guns can make one hell of a mess... weaponizing either one always seemed like a horribly bad idea to me.
And the prices of drugs in CP 2020 are utterly ridiculous. They always have been. This is mostly due to Mike being rabidly anti-drug.
Ugly.
But maybe if we complain about stuff that doesn't work, the next version will work a little better.
This is assuming there will be a next edition. Mike has said nothing to indicate there will. The last new edition was Fuzion, which did nothing to fix any of the problems you listed here, and in fact mostly just copied and pasted the same tables from CP 2020. Fuzion really just kind of added some new stats, made all combat opposed rolls (letting you dodge bullets), and did away with roles. Which is why it as a rules system never caught on with most Cyberpunk players.
It is also why I spearheaded the Interlock Unlimited project. This isn't a plug, it's just an explanation of why it exists.
It's very true, Interlock and FNFF, the rules systems of Cyberpunk 2020 are not perfect. But then again no system is. It is the closest thing to perfection in terms of what I, and Sard, and most of the die hard fans of the game want in terms of a published system. And what is broken with it gets fixed by the community. In the heydey of the games online popularity, there were rules fixes for just about everything, often in multiple ways. Some were better than others, but the fixes, even IU, change relatively little about the core of the game.
When some people talk of perfection, they talk of it in terms of what they want the rules to represent, a measure of "realism balanced with fun" if you will, though realism doesn't really apply to any rules system. Other people talk of perfection of a rules system in terms of how well the rules are laid out, how well they are explained, and how well they are balanced against one another. I suspect you are the latter, while Sard and I are the former. There is no problem with either view, just a difference in personal game philosophy. And while Interlock/FNFF/Cyberpunk 2020 may struggle with the latter quite a bit, it excels at the former better than any game I have ever played.... and I have played a LOT of games...
