I Cast Gun!! Dungeons and Dragons and Cyberpunk Red

By Frankie-Robbin Cooper

If you’re a former Dungeons and Dragons group looking to try something new and settle on Cyberpunk Red, all I have to say is good luck. You are now entering a world where all of your gods are dead and Adam Smasher exists. As one of those poor gonks that was roped into a Cyberpunk Red campaign with strangers shortly after finishing a Dungeons and Dragons campaign with friends, allow me to share with you what I’ve learned.

First things first: abandon any hope of a happy ending. Unlike Dungeons and Dragons which is based off of the works of J.R.R. Tolkien and other romantic works of fantasy, Cyberpunk Red is based in a world very tellingly dubbed “The Dark Future.” Every bad thing that you can imagine happening in the real world has happened. Fast food is ridiculously overpriced, and death is rampant and unglorified. Your character will most likely die.  I’m not just stating this fact from the perspective of the genre itself–the mechanics of this game make it incredibly easy for your character to die. The implementation of “critical injuries” makes your previous strategy of sending the barbarian in first to take all of the blows entirely unusable. Your health is no longer just the amount of HP you have to burn, but where you have been attacked and how. Damaged vital organs are a very real possibility.

If your character is mortally wounded, you must roll death saves. Unlike in D&D where you can make up to three failed saves before your character is lost forever, in Red you only need to make one fail before your character looks like David Marinez’s mother (sorry). 

These saves only increase in difficulty every time you make one, and you can only stop making them if you are stabilized. And it goes without saying that resurrections don’t exist in the world of Cyberpunk (Relic biochips aside…). Once a character is dead, they are dead. It doesn’t matter if their tragic backstory hasn’t reached its conclusion: their story is over.

These dynamics in the tabletop game reflect the dynamics of Cyberpunk 2077, especially in the “secret” ending of the game “(Don’t Fear) The Reaper”. If V can’t decide who to call upon for help at the end of the game (i.e. the player waits 5 minutes when the option is presented) Johnny Silverhand will suggest breaking into Arasaka Tower alone. This mission is intensely difficult, with V’s HP being cut by 25% at the beginning due to “Relic Malfunction” and decreasing further at certain points. Enemies and mechs at max level spawn, and to top it all off, V will face Adam Smasher at the end of the raid, newly improved in the 2.1 update to reflect his more powerful Edgerunners depiction and use of the Sandevistan. If V dies during the mission, the credits of the game roll and the video messages  from their friends at the end mirror those of the suicide ending.” No matter the incarnation, Cyberpunk does everything in its power to bar the player from a happy ending, manipulating mechanics whenever possible.

However, keeping a character physically alive is not the hardest part of Cyberpunk Red. They are no longer a goldfish that just needs to be fed daily. The player has to take into account mental and emotional damage as well. Along with Body, Dexterity, Cool and Luck stats, your character will also have an Empathy stat. This stat dictates how good your character is at skills such as conversation or human perception, but it also does something far more important–it helps calculate your character’s Humanity stat .The Humanity stat in Red is the buffer against Cyberpsychosis. According to Cyberpunk Wiki Cyberpsychos are “individuals who have existing psychopathic tendencies, enhanced by cybernetics, and as a result have lost their sense of identity as a person, either to themselves or others.” Essentially, your character will lose themselves to their cybernetic enhancements and could possibly go on a violent rampage.

Mike Pondsmith, developer of Cyberpunk Red talks about Cyberpsychosis on Reddit: “In some ways, I tend to treat cyberware as an addiction–heavy anabolic steroid use being my favorite model. Not everyone who juices ends up crazy mad with roid rage. But those who are more susceptible to the need to take more steroids are more likely to hit a point where they do flip into roid rage.” Your character’s humanity stat  determines just how susceptible they are to Cyberpsychosis. Installing cyberware decreases this stat, as does going through anything stressful or traumatic.  Once your character’s humanity slips to becoming too low, you’ll be rolling against cyberpsychosis. At that point, you might as well have a dead character once MaxTac shows up. There is treatment for Cyberpsychosis, but it takes anywhere from weeks to months, and retraining a cyberpsycho is difficult.  In Dnd, your player become more likely to succeed when they gain stronger and obtain more spells. In Cyberpunk Red, the opposite is true. The more cyberware you add, and the more powerful you become, the more likely you are to meet an untimely end.

So, what’s the point of this game, again? Most RPG players who enjoy narrative, roleplay, and character development are easily discouraged by the idea of their character dying so quickly and unceremoniously.  I’ve found that the Cyberpunk world, though grim, is still a wonderful place to tell great stories. Anyone who disagrees with that statement will be immediately referred to Netflix’s Cyberpunk: Edgerunners.  Notice that I used the word grim, and not hopeless.  Cyberpunk is merciless, but it poses an important question: If everything goes to shit, if the world was crumbling around you, if everyone you love died, then what? Would you still be able to build relationships, solve problems, find meaning? Dnd and the fantasy genre in general serve as a tool for escapism. Through it, people can escape to a world that is dangerous but romantic and meaningful. Cyberpunk forces you to jump to the worst case scenario and make the meaning yourself.