12 Homebrew Rules For Cyberpunk Red

foreign [Music] what's going on Tunes John John the wise here and I got another cyberpunk video for you guys this time we're going to be talking about my home brews that I use in my own games throughout the years cyberpunk red has come out it's been out for quite some time now and I think that I have enough home brew items to be able to make a video on the subject but before we get into that make sure you guys join our Discord Community the link is in the description below make sure you guys follow me on social media at John John the wise everywhere and subscribe to tabletop cyberpunk an audio podcast where I usually upload videos and I do interviews and such so you can be listening to the things that I have on the commute and last but not least if you want to support this channel the best way you can do that other than liking subscribing leaving a comment and sharing the channel is also to join the patreon patreon.com the wise is the best way to support this channel I really appreciate all YouTubes that help me out thank you so much I really really really appreciate everything you guys do alright let's get into the video now if you're watching this you might notice that some things have changed around me I got a 3D printer back here I got a new desk and and sometimes change can be hard and change can be difficult to get through but other times changes can be good as you can see I'm enjoying this kind of change and that's what the essence of Homebrew really is it's the idea of changing things that are not working for you or making things works for a better experience I think there's no shame in keeping rules as written and in fact I've kind of leaned into that category a little bit more throughout the years and I've really enjoyed my experience as I've said in past videos if you want to check out Homebrew versus Raw with binary dragon that is a great conversation that we have about this subject but I've learned that playing through rules as written it's given me better Insight on how I can properly balance my Homebrew items if I'm very familiar with the rules so for all of you rules as written chumbas out there don't worry I'm with you I support you this is a video for folks that want some changes and some insight and some ideas of things that they can do within their game to have their own kind of fun so the first item of Homebrew you guys might have seen this if you've seen any of the actual plays that I've done is called rolling under luck now when you guys do a death save in cyberpunk red what you do is you roll a d10 and you hope that the result is under your body stat and that's how you basically do death saves in cyberpunk red while taking that same philosophy and also taking some philosophies from from cyberpunk 2020 I've decided to use the Lux stat in something more than just a resource for helping your skill checks now the way that it works is you take one d10 you roll it and you hope the result is under your luck stat now when would you use this this I've used many times and it's mostly just for fun and for narrative issues and it's also helped us move the plot along think of this idea what if you're a nomad you have a vehicle and you get to a station and I say hey you guys have been driving being for a long time and you've run out of gas or you're running out of gas one of my players asked me well do I have like an extra canister of gasoline that's not something that's really made in character creation that's something that you have to buy as as gear and and those kinds of items but I think to myself logically if this guy has a nomad character then he's likely going to be he's likely going to have a canister of gasoline extra in the trunk of the car now how do we determine that do I just give it to them no I'd like for them to work for it a little bit maybe they luckily left it in their trunk and that's the whole concept of the idea is luck comes into play in some of the things that we do in our everyday life luckily you place the keys where they're supposed to be so the next day when you're looking for them you know exactly where they are and that's basically the essential idea of this luck check so if they pass the test then I give them that extra little thing if they fail the test then I let them know ah you're not lucky enough unluckily you didn't leave that extra canister in your trunk when you usually do and of course the next time we get to town the player is going to tell you I put a canister of gasoline in the trunk okay next up let's talk about rolling under cool it's the same kind of concept mechanically as rolling under your Lux that but this time you roll under your cool stat now why would you use this this is for narrative situations mostly and sometimes I'll even give my players a plus one bonus if they pass this test but let's say for example they want to do something really cool like jump over a car slide under another card like I can just go around and do a bunch of Athletics checks or I can tell them hey why don't you roll under your cool stat and let's see if your character is cool enough to have been able to do something like that so if they have a really high cool it helps them in that in that manner let me give you an example one of my my players once said I want to casually walk up to this guy and kick him through a window now that's obviously something a cool guy would do is casually walk up to someone and kick them through a window but what would that mean mechanically there's stealth checks there's perception checks there's evasion there's brawling there's all these things but that really bogs down they the rule of cool factor in the game instead what I do is I say okay roll under your cool stat and if you pass then yeah you definitely are able to do that uh they're not able to dodge out of the way you kick them through the window if they fail then everybody looks at you you look like an idiot they know what you're trying to do the guy easily Dodges out of the way and in fact he might even throw you out the window so that's the risk and reward of doing these kinds of skill checks alternatively I might also say okay you passed your cool check I'm going to give you a plus one to whatever skill check you were trying to form after that for example one of my characters once was flirting with a an NPC and they said I want to coolly grab a drink without looking from one of the passing waiters and serve the drink to the person while locking eyes with them now if you're cool and you pass you do exactly that you're you're you don't have to do an Athletics check but if you fail then I'll say do an Athletics check at a minus two or you automatically fail an Athletics check you smack the waiter in the face by accident and they spill all the drinks all over the place on top of you and the NPC completely failing that flirt encounter next up let's talk about adding additional damage to weapons now I've toyed with this kind of thing I've looked at autofire I've looked at single shot I thought about bringing burst fire back into the scene But ultimately I've tried this thing and it seems to have not broken the game completely and has added some fun new elements to it so what you do is you take a weapon like let's say a heavy pistol that's a 3d6 rate of fire 2 weapon and you say this is a melorian arms DVR 50 and it does 3d6 plus four so the minimum damage for that weapon has gone completely up it's no longer a three damage item per bullet it is now up to seven damage per bullet minimum which is really awesome it's a cool way to give a weapon a kind of unique flavor and to make it different from all the other ones and also I've used this for like heavy weapons if it's like an auto Cannon items in the game like assault rifles do 5d6 we know explosives do 66 but there's an in-between where it's not a rifle and it's not an explosive but it's a really big round that maybe even be more powerful than an explosive like a grenade so what do we do with that well we'll do 5d6 plus eight five D6 plus five plus three it's all up to you and what what you decide is going to be the right numbers for the situation but that always adds a unique thing to the game where the players don't know what they're going to come up against and it's also great ways to give your players additional loot in the game now is this a foolproof thing no of course there's probably going to be some op builds out there that are going to take major advantage of this but these are items that I give my players outside of character creation we go through the campaign they kill a boss the boss has this crazy vibro Katana on them that does this crazy amount of damage and now the player has it so it's definitely like a player progression type of weapon to help them through combat situations through the campaign next up local expert the skill now if you look at the local expert skill the way it's designed is you take the skill and you pick a location and then you become the expert of that location the place that you you call home or or the local area that you know about I have made this more of a skill that is a general local expert of the area so that way if your character is coming from another campaign or narratively your character grew up in a different part of town or this part of town I can determine how high that level of expertise will be and I don't want you to be an expert of night City and then you come and you play in my game which takes place in Texas and all of a sudden that local expert that you put six points in means absolutely nothing so the way that I like to play it is I'd like for all of my players to have a local expert skill and that is going to determine how well they know the area around them if they know the if they're from the place that the characters are playing then I might actually give them two extra points in that skill just that character creation because I'm like yeah you're an expert of the area this will make things more logically make sense when you're doing skill checks now remember I've done all kinds of videos on what the difference is between local expert and StreetWise if you check out my skills video I actually talk about how the two are different from each other so I would take a look at those and you can determine which of those two skills can work perfectly for you all right the next one is a really small minor one it's just something that I threw in the game because I wanted to throw my players a little bit of a bone but it's 1d6 healing outside of any speed heal or Hospital healing whatever the rules is written is in addition to that you get one D6 healing per day once per day if you just rest and relax so it gives my players a chance to narratively sit down tend to their wounds have a little bit of chatter and maybe get grab something to eat and I determined that you know that all helps with the healing process of getting better so it's not going to significantly heal you unless you roll maybe a six but you know one D6 on average is going to give you a little bit of more of a boost throughout the day alright next up is excessive damage causing a stun save stun saves are something that were from cyberpunk 2020 and they removed it from cyberpunk Red because it was one of those things that just bogged down the game with crunch like you know hit locations and then you had stun saves and stuff like that but the idea behind stun saves are great it's the idea that you took so much damage that you might have lost your footing and you've fallen on your face so the I it's just like a kind of realism simulator now I don't usually do stun saves in cyberpunk red but if I determine that the players did a giant amount of damage to an NPC or they took a giant amount of damage I'm talking like 25 plus damage then I might have them roll a resist torture drugs to see if they are able to withstand the pain and the velocity of the round or or attack next up is something I've seen a lot of people do is not dead not do anything death saves for NPCs that's definitely something that I do unless it's a big important boss like a last you know level kind of Boss thing then yeah I'll do a death save because it adds to the narrative it's it's like oh my God you guys threw everything you had at him but he kept saving his death save and he got out of there safely but you know for like low low level moocs and stuff like that if their HP hits zero they're goners and I don't really want to waste time rolling death saves for them next up I've introduced critical successes and critical failures now that's not existent in this game in the way that we're used to in cyberpunk 2020 there is a fumble chart when you roll day one which determined a lot of bad things that would happen to you like a grenade falling at your feet or you hit your buddies or with your with your bull your stray bullets and stuff like that and even in games like D and D we have rolling a one or a natural 20 meaning really really amazing things but in cyberpunk red it was determined that a 10 chance which is what a one out of 10 chance is for failing something critically is a little bit too high for a d10 game so they've just decided to take critical successes and failures pretty much out of the game and it's like you know you could still succeed even though you're all the one and you can definitely you know you you just super pass and that doesn't mean anything if you critically hit two tens in a row well I didn't really like that and uh and I've tried many things what I've generally determined is if the result of a role is five or below that it is a critical failure and if a result of a roll is 25 or higher then it is a critical success now that this is all just narrative you know there's no double damage there's no uh free critical injury or anything like that this is just my way of giving my players a little bit of a reward now narratively for doing the thing that they were supposed to you know if you roll a 27 when you're persuading somebody then that person is is engulfed by whatever you're saying they're they're enthralled by whatever you're saying so that's it I'm just gonna give it to my player they rolled a 27 it has to be a critical success inversely if there is a four or a three result I've even seen negative results from my players and we're just sitting there thinking like shouldn't this mean something when there's a negative result you know and that's where critical failures always make sense and and I've used this Homebrew in those situations and the players all think to themselves like yeah yeah it makes sense I got a negative too on my role of course I broke something you know significant with this skill check so toy around with that toy around with the numbers and see what works for you guys all right next up is a lore tidbit and that is cars cars and their availability is is actually almost nothing in cyberpunk red if you look at the pricing for vehicles the idea is they're so hard to find that you're not going to be able to afford one you know obviously with more DLCs and uh and supplements coming down the road we're going to see more options for Edge Runners and for regular folks to get vehicles because you know Humanity always finds a way but for now with with what we have in the core rule book cars are a scarcity item we're living in a kind of post-apocalyptic cyberpunk it's an in-between period where the lore says that that last corporate War really shook things up and and there's like a real scarcity with items obviously if you played cyberpunk 2077 you you know that we eventually get back to the 2020 Glory Days maybe even more with the availability of things out there but for now in cyberpunk red that's not the case in my games though it is the case I don't want to play in that kind of universe I think it's uh detrimental to the fun it's detrimental to the the way people enjoy playing cyberpunk so when they're in cities there's cars and they can steal cars and they can drive cars they can buy cars I like for them to be available I like them for them to be differently priced and for some to be affordable while other ones are luxurious so that's definitely something that I introduce now what does that mean for The Nomad not much really The Nomad still has their vehicle they just don't really have to work as hard as anybody else for it and they can get upgrades more easily than anybody else so that's what I think makes Nomads more important is you can just ride off the bat have a really powerful Nomad with a cool car alright next up is the three goon method I'm sure you guys have probably seen that video If you haven't uh people out there like it you know it's not a crazy New Concept I actually took the the combat number concept from drones and demons I believe and basically implemented that into three sets of NPCs where easy medium and super hard or Elite and those three are the levels of these NPCs in combat I make one roll for each one of them and that determines whether they pass or fail the skill check there's all types of ways for anybody to do things I found this three goon method moves combat along really quickly I don't have to mix that blocks I can just on the fly if there's a combat situation all I need is a scratch paper and we're going I don't need to know you know what do they have in handgun what do they have an evasion what do they have in blah blah blah I could just make one General number and we'll make a general result from the different things that they do next up police response according to the game when you have a Lawman the law man will do a back up role and basically if they pass then they roll one D6 and that's how many rounds it will take for the police backup to arrive in time and that actually if you think about it at the max it will be 18 seconds for the pull for help to arrive which is crazy fast if you think about it in real life but it's crazy slow in terms of combat where combat are three second rounds that's where I got that number you roll a six on the result that's multiplied by three seconds per round that means it takes 18 seconds for the police to get there and we all know six rounds in cyberpunk red is a really really long combat situation that's like over an hour of combat in my experience so we're in this weird place where you know a narrative number for the time of their arrival versus a a mechanical level doesn't really match up all that well and if you change it then you're kind of changing what makes the law man what the law man is so instead I do you know half the time I do one D3 instead of one D6 and that's when the police arrive they arrive even sooner uh and you know this has always worked for me the the police if they're coming the players need to know a sense of urgency so if they're not coming within three rounds there is no sense of urgency the the combat is gonna is taking far too long in my experience five or six rounds is the maximum amount of combat that goes on with players that are making really hardcore characters even a non-hardcore characters I just did a One-Shot Adventure where people used pre-generate pre-generated characters and the big bad was dead within three rounds so obviously there's some tuning I could have done to make it more of a exciting combat encounter but that's just the reality of cyberpunk red combat in my opinion is it is fast and it's deadly and it does doesn't last very long so we need to appropriately adapt to it so in conclusion the police in my game come a lot sooner they come and there has to be a sense of urgency so my players will feel that they're coming uh in 1d3 rounds instead of one D6 and the last thing on this list is the economy of cyberpunk red if you have seen my economy video with James Hut then you know that a lot of folks in the cyberpunk community have a lot of questions about the economy and how it works the way that the game is set up is a trade economy there are fixed pricing for items a 500 assault rifle is worth 500 everywhere be even though it's used because of the scarcity problem that's going on in cyberpunk red the idea that you have an assault rifle in the first place is what makes it so amazing it's not that whether it's broken or doesn't work or is used or or what or brand new none of those things matter there's quality that will change it you know if it's a poor quality thing then obviously it'll be determined that it's cheaper if it's excellent quality then it's a little bit more expensive and there are fixed prices for everything in my games you know personally I like to use those fixed prices as a guideline of plus or minus around that area is what this thing is worth uh what's it been through what kind of condition is it in forget about poor quality medium quality excellent quality I'm not talking about anything mechanically I'm just talking about whether this thing is repairable is it something that is going to break within uh its first three uses is it something that is scarce is it a luxury brand is it a very powerful weapon you know these are all things that determine the price of an item and it's not just the category that the item is in so I like to be flexible with the economy and use the various pricing as just points of reference for my own Homebrew and I found major success with it I've seen that my players they can relate with it because when you go to the store you see four different types of sugar on the Shelf and you know you know exactly why most of the sugars are different quality you see the generic store brand is the cheapest one up to whatever bougie sugar is out there I don't know I don't know why I chose sugar as an example but yeah that's basically it Tunes I hope you guys enjoyed that video I hope you guys enjoyed my insight on Homebrew items I know this video is a little long but I had a lot of stuff and I just kept adding things little by little as we went on throughout my life um and I hope you guys enjoy it I hope you guys work it out definitely let me know your various homebrews in the comments I love to hear from the community and if there's anything that you guys really liked let me know in the comments as well I love connecting so thank you have an amazing year we'll see you guys next year thank you for all the support all the Care all the love your dreams are amazing I really appreciate all of you and I hope you all have happy games alright take care bye foreign

Channel: JonJonTheWise

Views: 18,073

Keywords: cyberpunk, cyberpunk tabletop, cyberpunk 2020, cyberpunk red, cyberpunk 2077, character creation, cyberpunk character, tabletop rpg, ttrpg, jonjonthewise, rtalsorian, r talsorian, mike pondsmith, talsorian, converting to cyberpunk red, cyberpunk 2.0.2.0, cp2020, cpred, cdpr, cdprojectred

Id: TlFY1gTfqt8

Length: 24min 21sec (1461 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 29 2022