I have a profound love of Cyberpunk which is based, I think, on very selective vision. There are lots of pretty lame things about it (most notably that’s it’s basically the suburban white kid vision of urban decay and socio-politics) but for me the beating heart of megacorps, corruption, the divide between the haves and have nots and the disruptive influence of technology really grab me.

The specific chrome (as it were) of cyberblades and mirrorshades doesn’t really do much for me, and this is where I end up at a disconnect from a lot of RPG cyberpunk stuff, especially where it becomes an excuse to really get into extensive weapons catalogs. Now, don’t get me wrong – the D&D model with ninjas, hackers and machine guns is good fun, but it’s not why cyberpunk interests me.

That divide colors a lot of the RPG space surrounding cyberpunk. The reality is that a lot of cyberpunk ideas are feeling uncomfortably close to real life these days, and that’s uncomfortable. It is no great shock that the most successful cyberpunk RPG, Shadowrun, is the most divorced from reality (through the introduction of magic) and historically the most tied to the D&D model of play.[1]

So I got to thinking about what I really would want in a cyberpunk game, because the answer is explicitly not long lists of guns and cyberware, or even extensive rules for virtual reality netrunning.[2] I was surprised to discover that the answer came very quickly, because it (and its source material) already exists in the form of Leverage. Setting aside the color bits, the structure (team of professionals, hard target, emphasis on smarts and planning over resources and overwhelming firepower) hits very close to the mark for what I would consider “ethical cyberpunk”.

Perhaps even more telling is what changes I feel would need to be made.

First, there is an obvious change to the color of things, so as to make it near future. This is largely just a function of changing clothes because the actual mechanics require almost no changes. Thieves, Hitters, Grifters and Masterinds are much as they have always been. It might look like Hackers would need to change, but the reality is that the Hacker role is timeless – changing the technology changes what it looks like, but not how it works.

Second, there would probably need to be some cyberware rules. I just accept this. But they’d be mechanically trivial to support, so this is more of an exercise in “What’s cool?” than anything else.

Third, there might be call for some resource rules, but only if it makes things more interesting. The default Leverage model skips this – the PCs have sufficient resources – but scarcity of supplies and the street finding a use for things are sufficiently key cyberpunk ideas that I’d want to reflect it. Most likely it would be part of scenario design rather than a real rule, so to speak. That is, an additional step for a job would be identifying the resources needed and acquiring them.[3]

This actually introduces an interesting complexity into play. Leverage basically starts from “you have made enough money to retire, so why stay in the game?” which allows skipping over a lot of RPG baggage in favor of purposeful action. If that is removed, a similar check would need to be put in place – in the case of cyberpunk, it would probably be “Here is how much money you could make if you quit this crap and got a day job. So why haven’t you done that?”

The fourth change isn’t a change at all, and revolves around the role of violence. There are already great games that use cyberpunk as an invitation for gunplay, but they do so with a kind of hand wavy thinking about the role of violence in society, the impact of the spread of weapons technology (and counter-technology). All of which is to say that I don’t think cyberpunk should not be violent, but rather, that the violence exists in a context, and context is critically important to the tone.

Leverage has already wrestled this particular bear. It is understandable why Elliot doesn’t use guns in the show – it’s a personal quirk – but why would every other Hitter do the same? Especially when the archetypical RPG badass has twin desert eagles (and katanas) under his trenchcoat. Leverage’s take on this is straightforward – guns escalate problems[4] and while they may be an option, they are very much an option of last recourse because the consequences are much more profound.

Cyberpunk won’t be exactly the same – there are place where the cheapness of life is the point – but that idea of actions (violence in particular) having consequences is part of what makes it cyberpunk for me.

The last change is not a mechanical one, but it’s probably the trickiest, and that has to do with the opposition. In Leverage, your target is a bad person, doing bad things, and taking them down is a positive step towards stopping (and maybe fixing) those bad things. In cyberpunk, the problems are systemic. There might be occasional corporate stooge who is worse than other corporate stooges, but its not like taking him down will drastically improve things. Even if you land a major blow, enough to hurt a corp, then it will just be other corps stepping in to fill.

In short, cyberpunk does not offer the same clear goals and victories that Leverage does, even if the activities are similar. This is dark, appropriately so, but it also demands that the players take a different view on their accomplishments and, perhaps, take a longer view on things. It raises the question of what the endgame is, which is a tough but essential question. Without that, incremental victories may not be enough to get by.

So, if it’s not obvious, I have a lot of love for this kind of game in my heart, and once the cortex plus licensing settles out, I may write a little bit more about the mechanical side of this, but it really doesn’t require much in the way of mechanics at all. It’s all in the clarity of the ideas.

And by extension, cyberpunk may mean something totally different to you. So much so as to make you go “Leverage? Really?” and that’s totally cool. These things happen with made up words. But for me, this is the heart of what I’m looking for.

Also, Riggers turn out to be super prescient, as dumb as I thought they were in the early 90s.