Jury-rigging the system: Houserule collection

+
Jury-rigging the system: Houserule collection

So, CP 2020 being and old game with some minor hiccups, I'd like to propose that we'll list all the issues people have had with the system, and the hotfixes to those issues not listed in here or elsewhere on the net.

Wishful thinking and speculation on the possible new ruleset has it's own thread, this is for alternate 2020 rules.

So, dig up your notebooks and tell us what didn't you like in the system RAW, and how did your group fix that? And if you have any thoughts on the ideas posted here, share and discuss.

For example: Despite having full appreciation to the gritty and brutal damage system, my group wasn't happy about the "8 points of damage to a limb and it's gone"-rule, so we tweaked it a bit for the sake of narration and less ludicrous amounts of meat confetti; 8 points of damage gives the character a death save against limb loss, and we make a note of that save until the damage has healed, in case the character does something strenuous enough to warrant a second save for that limb. The new "no save allowed"-limit is double the original, at 16 points of damage, because if one shot is enough to send you straight to the end of Mortal 1, whatever that hit is not there anymore.
After the change, characters actually have a chance to get out of a firefight gone bad without having to replace half their body mass. Therefore, wearing trenchcoats capable of stopping an anti-vehicle round (to which I call bullshit) is not strictly mandatory.

Speaking of which, how have you people handled the absurd power creep regarding armor? I have trouble accepting bulletproof T-shirts with two-digit costs, so do you have any balaced suggestions to fix the issue with too much SP on essentially inconspicious street clothes, buyable with pocket change?
 
Special Ability
In one campaign players could buy multiple Special Abilities as long as they made sense and the total ranks in all SAs didn't exceed 10. It seemed to work fine. In another campaign that one more or less a tactical campaign I restricted Combat Sense up to 4 or 5. I think it worked well, too because of how CS works and I kept this in mind when assigning CS to NPCs.

Damage
This idea was first introduced in Hardwired and later expanded in a Challenge magazine article. I think that one site has it even further expanded. The idea is that various bullet types have different penetration values and different armors have their protection values. Depending on which is bigger etc. the victim will suffer all of the damage, some of it or none of it. But what I did (I am no longer certain if this was introduced in any of the previous versions) was that all the damage that was not delivered as a lethal damage was converted to stun damage. This caused me to use two parallel damage tracks, one for normal damage and one for stun. Every time that normal damage was taken, stun damage was also taken but stun damage didn't cause the normal damage track to go up.

For example a guy is shot with 16 points of damage and only 3 points is normal lethal damage. So he is lightly wounded, but he also has 16 points of stun damage forcing the player to make a stun save as if the character had 16 points of damage in RAW. The effect is that gunplay is a bit more survivable, even a bit more realistic if I dare to say so but still dangerous. I will have to write down a little story about this to another thread.
 
I have plug and play with rules often based on campaign needs.

But over all one rule I also had on the table my players liked to call Ugly Luck.

basicly in the point based character gen I forced all players to have a min of 3 ATT and LUCK to keep them from being complete dump stats.
 
I converted Cyberpunk 2020 at some point to West Ends D6 system since I really liked that system. It was streamlined and I preferred how the skill rolls had clear probability curve due rolling multiple D6 dice. Too bad I never got to really flesh it out due my regular rpg group moving all different parts of the country. Never really liked Interlock and always had problem with skill systems where the probability of rolling awesome success was the same as probability of rolling mediocre result. D6 handled that really well since ie. 4D6 shows clear trend towards average results.
 
I converted Cyberpunk 2020 at some point to West Ends D6 system since I really liked that system. It was streamlined and I preferred how the skill rolls had clear probability curve due rolling multiple D6 dice. Too bad I never got to really flesh it out due my regular rpg group moving all different parts of the country. Never really liked Interlock and always had problem with skill systems where the probability of rolling awesome success was the same as probability of rolling mediocre result. D6 handled that really well since ie. 4D6 shows clear trend towards average results.

Did you include the Wild die rule with that?
 
Did you include the Wild die rule with that?

In some iterations yeah. Basically it depends on how heroic you want your campaign to be. But it was easy since it's simple on/off decision. I kinda liked since it didn't really affect higher skill levels much, if only 1 dice is wild dice, since really skilled characters were around 5d6 or more but gave low skilled characters bit better change for average/semi-hard stuff. But again, depends on the campaign and how gritty you wanted it to be.

But I never got to play much with it since my group dispersed when I was working on it. It was actually quite simple conversion. Some fiddling with armor values etc. and health system but the skill system was almost throw in. Never got to finish it really. It was in working order but needed constant fiddling with stuff. Cybernetics and weapons was easy though, for every +1 skill bonus you just added D6 +1pip (+3pip was +1D6 etc) so players could convert most weapons and enchantments themselves.

My original idea was to convert the 1D10 skill roll system to 2D6 or 3D6 roll (Which gives you trend towards averages on rolls) and just adjust the difficulty goals but of course it went to full conversion. 2D6 would have probably worked with the interlock system with very small changes but when you start changing stuff you always find something more to change. :p
 
Skill points
I wanted to give players as much freedom with character generation as possible. To do this I decided to go with 50 + 2d6 skill points instead of the normal formula where you have 40 points to divide between role skills and INT + REF + age above 16 (2d6) for other skills.
 
As I'm not part of a game (I have nobody to play with, nor do I currently have access to books) I probably can't really call this a true houserule, but...

Were it up to me, cosmetic cyberware that wouldn't really have effect ("fluff" addons like built-in video-screens, color-shifting eyes, etc., not offense/defense stuff like weaponized cyberlimbs or subdermal armor) either wouldn't have a humanity cost at all, or one so low as to be negligible in most cases. Why? Because it never really made sense to me that, with rules-as-written, that one person could install a wrist-mounted chaingun and take less of a blow to their humanity than the guy who got a glowing mohawk, all because the latter had tougher luck with the dice than the former.
 
Our house Rule for multiple special abilities ran like this: You have to pick a primary skill and the second had to make sense with your character concept (which had to be better than I want to min max the shit out of my character). Your secondary special ability could never be greater than 1/2 + 1 of your primary special ability's level and had a x2 cost multiplier. We also commonly used armor ablation where SP dropped by one in a location every time it was penetrated, with layered armor you can lose 1 SP without taking damage or lose 2 SP and take damage though if you want to modify this with a hard/soft armor rule you can say that hard armor ablates on every 3 penetrations or not at all. The drawback to these rules are that they add more bookkeeping to the game and can slow down play quite a bit and I only use them with experienced players (both with role playing and the 2020 system). The most common house rule that we use is an abstraction of net running so that the rest of the party is not stuck as observers while the net runner is doing whatever it is he has to do. As to how we abstract it is usually determine how secure you want the fortress to be then have the runner make "stealth rolls" based on the strength of the applicable program and "pick lock" and "search/spot" rolls in the same way, fail these or as always "save vs plot device" and they are in combat which is resolved as normal. all of this is done without mapping a data fortress, we save those for the really important hacks. Also encourage liberal use of the utilities programs, these can be used in combat and there is nothing more fun that running a robotic garbage truck into that ripper gang trying to jack you or blinding those corporate douche bags with their own ad screen.
 
Also if your players cant find game mechanic altering effects for cosmetic cyberware, in most but not all cases, they aren't trying hard enough. There is a happy medium between playing the game just for combat and full immersion into character driven interaction. I have found that looking at the cyberware and other elements that sometimes seem frivolous, and trying to find a way to make them the "I win button" and then introducing that situation into the game in such a way as to illuminate the potential value of that item, encourages lateral thinking in my players. I always have the most fun on a "scramble defense", when my players do something that is imaginative and legal and damn near wrecks my scenario.
 
I would let my players make ATT and LUCK as low as you want but like you at 3 and below you are increasingly ugly or unlucky, and I let them know that you are basically giving me license to mess with your character in nasty and amusing ways if you choose to have one of these stats that low. Conversely, I rewarded the 8 and above LUCK characters as having a four-leaf clover in their cloaca implant. The benefits of having a very high ATT were there, past just better related skill rolls, but less than LUCK because ATT can be increased via cybernetics.

As my old Senior Chief used to tell me: Better lucky than good. Basically if you aren't good at something you better be lucky or you end up dead, that is why he still had all of his fingers after 12 years in EOD.
 
That is very true even in Interlock making a natural 10 explode was a radical change in game play and lead to some pretty ridiculous results, headshots with a pistol from 500m away without cyberoptics and the like.
 
In my campaings we use LUCK as a fate points in WFRP and action points in d20 Modern.
1. If something really bad happens to your character you burn one point of LUCK permanently and avoid most of the harsh stuff. Ifnstead of getting 12 DMG to the head and die you and up unconscious with 7 DMG. You still in real trouble and if you play a fool your LUCK runs out really quick.
2. You can use your luck normally but instead of getting +1 one bonus (seriously, you rarelly need just +1 bonus) you get +d6 bonus. But there will never be any "critical".
3. If you are hit you can use LUCK to lower potential damage. You roll d6 for every point used and then you subtract the sum from the damage rolled by the enemy. But you roll BEFORE the damage is rolled. So if you get shot for 5d6 you can use all your LUCK roll some 30 points and be happy. But then the enemy rolss a total of 5 damage and you just wasted your luck.

The trick is that the important NPCs also can use LUCK in that way :) And no one prevents your NPS from having LUCK 10 :)

Ammo/Damage
We are using a custom table of damage from different ammo. Every ammo has a value of DAM and two penetration values. Soft armor and hard armor. The penetration can be a positive value in which case it is added to armor - some armors are just harder to penetrate for certain types of ammo than others.

Multiple Special Ability.
You can have multiple SA but it have to make sense in the first place. The number of SAs you have is a difficulty multiplier for advancing the abilities. So, usually, having three SAs on low levels practically stops you from leveling in those.

Martial Arts.
Skill increases your damege by one point for every 3 points of skill instead of one. So karate master with skill 10 does not cause 11-13 damage with his bare hand but 5-7.
Only max damage are real damage. The rest is fatigue only. Thats because people doesn't really die during a hth combat.

Damage.
It's a little tricky to explain in words. If you get 8 damege you don't get 8 damage. Sounds vague? Instead od ticking 8 boxes in your damage track you just tick the 8th box. And you suffer the consequences. So if you got a serious damage (8 is serious) and you got a hole in your chest you are pretty fucked. But in normal rules a subsequent "arrow to the knee" or knife to a hand would kill you. Now you just tick related box and suffer the most serious consequences. If you got double 8 damage you tick 8th and 9th box. As simple as that. And characters no longer die becouse of hitting their fingers with a hammer during house renovation.

Rule of 10 and rule of 1.
You roll 10 you reroll and add. You roll 1 you reroll and subtract. Simple.
 
Here are some of my house rules for CP2020:


Special Abilities Modification

I found that my player liked the roles but didn't like the special abilities. Jury Rig for example required as a Referee to have it come up often. So for most Special abilities I would allow a player to add there Special ability to two separate skills if it they were Non-combat Role based skills. Solo's had to keep the initiative bonus but could change the Awareness/Notice if they wished.

For example A Techie could add their special ability to a particular tech skill making them pretty much an expert on that skill. Fixers could add Streetdeal to Persuasion to talk themselves out of anything. A Cop would add Authority to Intimidate to really scare people off or influence them though threats. My favorite was a Rockerboy who had Seduction and then convinced me to allow them to have Endurance so they could "party like a rockstar".

Point Blank Combat Modification

After horrible abuse from both my players and myself I added the stipulation that if a player went for Point Blank Shot with a firearm the defender could attempt an opposing dodge or martial arts skill check. This was under my experience that if someone had a gun in their face that they would react by trying to get the barrel away from them.

Alternate Cyberpsychosis Derrangement


I had a player come up with this one. If player began their dark rode to Cyberpsychosis instead of killing others they could attempt to convince others to become more like them. Had a player who was a Medtech gain Cyberpsychosis and she used this modify other people with cyber. She was always pushing Cyberware and giving people and players deals to let her install it.

Special Ability Stat = Average of Role Skills

After having too many players with Combat Sense 10 getting killed because the tanked their other skills I required the players to have a Special Ability to no higher than the total average of that role's skill package.
 
House Rules . . . .

Well with over 25 years, dozens of GM's I've played with and hundreds games/chronicles I've run, there have been a lot of house rules.

Here is character creation:

My Character Creation:

Stats: {see chart} Points (2-10, each) - I dare you to have any stat of 2 or 3.

Skills: No Role Skill Packages!!!!, No Points Spent on Special Abilities. {See Chart} Points for Career Skills (minimum of 10, maximum of 15)- Make your own Role. Pick-up Skills (divide each Stat by 2 round-down, and gain that many points for the skills in the characteristics list - no points assigned to your career skills). Then true freebie skill points add Luck & MA and divide by 2, round-up, add any pick-up points that could not be assigned (i.e. both ATTR skills are part of your career package) and add 1 additional for each lost point when dividing by two and round-down in the stage bellow). Those pick-up points can go anywhere (even career skills)

Based off of the Career Skills you've chosen and the background (both rolled and designed by the player) I will assign 1-3 special abilities and give you their values.

Cinematic Level / Stats / Career Skill Points
Street Urchin / 40 / 30
Street Punk / 50 / 40
Rebel / 60 / 50
Cyberlords / 70 / 80
Cybergods/ 80 / 100 (I've only ever allowed 2 groups of players to try this and everyone died, quickly)

I have a complicated and not completely written up starting funds system.
 
Here are some of my house rules for CP2020:


Special Abilities Modification

I found that my player liked the roles but didn't like the special abilities. Jury Rig for example required as a Referee to have it come up often. So for most Special abilities I would allow a player to add there Special ability to two separate skills if it they were Non-combat Role based skills. Solo's had to keep the initiative bonus but could change the Awareness/Notice if they wished.

For example A Techie could add their special ability to a particular tech skill making them pretty much an expert on that skill. Fixers could add Streetdeal to Persuasion to talk themselves out of anything. A Cop would add Authority to Intimidate to really scare people off or influence them though threats. My favorite was a Rockerboy who had Seduction and then convinced me to allow them to have Endurance so they could "party like a rockstar".

Point Blank Combat Modification

After horrible abuse from both my players and myself I added the stipulation that if a player went for Point Blank Shot with a firearm the defender could attempt an opposing dodge or martial arts skill check. This was under my experience that if someone had a gun in their face that they would react by trying to get the barrel away from them.

Alternate Cyberpsychosis Derrangement


I had a player come up with this one. If player began their dark rode to Cyberpsychosis instead of killing others they could attempt to convince others to become more like them. Had a player who was a Medtech gain Cyberpsychosis and she used this modify other people with cyber. She was always pushing Cyberware and giving people and players deals to let her install it.

Special Ability Stat = Average of Role Skills

After having too many players with Combat Sense 10 getting killed because the tanked their other skills I required the players to have a Special Ability to no higher than the total average of that role's skill package.

Your ideas. I like them a lot.
 
Oh boy....house rules.

A friend and i created a rulebook which replaces many

- Skill packages removed, assign points as wanted (40 plus an age bonus similar to ocelots rules)
- Fumble charts, removed and reworked. Hard to describe but harder to mess up if youre really skilled.
- Combat : Actions reworked...2 Combat and 1 non Combat actions in 3.3 seconds.
- Martial arts / Melee Combat : A chart version that is based on a skill contest still but the better your roll is vs thiers it can be advantageous. (Example : defender beats attackers roll by 10 he can counter the attack, attacker beats defender extra hit, or damage etc)

There are many other house rules but most require way to much description, these are some examples.
 
It's funny how many of these rules, or similar rules fixes are present in Interlock Unlimited...

EDIT: I apologize everyone... I sounded like a complete asshole with that statement. I was not accusing anyone of anything, nor did I want to sound even remotely snarky.

What I mean to imply was that it's funny how so many of us have come up with similar solutions to the same problems... In other words, great minds think alike...

Damn... I am sorry again...
 
Top Bottom