Combat In Cyberpunk Red: Basic and Advanced Tactics

[Music] what's up guys john john the wise here and i got another cyberpunk video for you guys and i've been wanting to make this video for so long but of course we've had an embargo because cyberpunk red had not been released well all things changed now if you're watching this that means cyberpunk red has released at least digitally on november 14th and now i can finally talk about this subject the subject of combat i feel like i've played enough sessions and read enough of the book to understand this subject and for most of you this is going to be your very first time reading anything of the sort so i wanted to give you guys my insight on the combat system this video is going to break down the cyberpunk red combat system it's changed it's different there are things to it that are nuanced and there are differences that make it amazing in my opinion and this is the first cyberpunk red video i needed to make because i just love this combat system so let me break down this cyberpunk red combat system for you guys and teach you some of the basics and advanced things that go into it first before we get into that make sure you guys join our discord community the link will be in the description below it's a cyberpunk red 2020 2077 and other tabletop game fan discord and we're all just a community helping each other out especially if you're new to this game there's a bunch of people there that are willing to help you out so don't be shy join our discord community second of all make sure you guys are following me on all social media i'm on instagram i'm on twitter i'm on twitch i'm on facebook you name it i'm there let's connect and don't forget to join my podcast subscribe to my podcast tabletop cyberpunk where i have all kinds of guests on we talk about cyberpunk we talk about gaming and it's just me rambling about cyberpunk our favorite game now if you go through the cyberpunk red system and you are a cyberpunk 2020 veteran you might think to yourselves they might have oversimplified things they might have gutted the systems but really i don't think that is the correct perspective what they've done is they've streamlined and they've made things a lot better by adding nuances and stuff that are not problematic that are not clunky and it's a modern take on what things can be now let's talk about the basics but before we get into the basics i just want to preface this by letting you guys know i'm not going to be talking about the exact numbers on most things i still think that you guys should read the book if you want to learn anything and my video is just a supplement to the rules and you reading the book so i'm not going to get too into detail about numbers and stuff like that unless it calls for it typically on your combat turn you can do two things one is you move the second is you do something or an action or whatever you want to call it this is a common thing we've seen in a lot of tabletop rpgs typically the thing that you can do is shoot do a melee attack interact with an object choke someone grapple somebody there's a whole multitude of things you can do but the idea is you go somewhere and you do your thing the cover system in cyberpunk red is very interesting out of the words of james hutt the game designer cover is binary you're either behind cover or you're not behind cover now what constitutes being behind cover the golden rule is your entire body has to be covered in whatever that cover is it has to be obscured by the cover it has to be behind the cover and that means that you're not targetable unless someone gets past the cover gets into line of sight or some other advanced things that we'll get into in the advanced section but the idea is there is no half cover there is no third cover nothing like that you're either completely behind it or you're not if you end your turn behind cover then when it is not your turn you're considered in cover this is important to note as the initiative rolls over and other people have their turn once your turn has passed it is known that you are behind cover when you end your turn now there's ways to counter counter that and to get around it and we'll get into it in the advanced section an important rule to understand is line of sight that has everything to do with cover the idea is if you do not have line of sight on somebody because they're behind a piece of cover or for whatever reason then you can't target them in the advanced section we'll go over your various options on how you can get line of sight how you can break line of sight and the things that you can do next let's talk about called shots at a -8 penalty to hit you can aim for targetable things like hands legs or the opponent's head where you'll be doing double damage there's it also is true for vehicle combat if you want to hit a back windshield or the gas tank or stuff like that a minus eight to hit is pretty hefty you might be missing a lot of times but that's what luck points are for and that's what skilled people can do hitting somebody in the head double damage hitting somebody in the leg you give him a critical injury hitting somebody in the hand they drop their weapon these are very important things that you can do in combat other than just moving and shooting next let's talk about three round bursts being out of the game in cyberpunk 2020 and in the cyberpunk red jumpstart kit we've had three round bursts but it is no more it is single shot or auto fire those are your two options most of the time you're going to be using single shot that's the way it usually works in cyberpunk red if you decide you want to use auto fire that means that you have spent a lot of ip points or a lot of points at character creation to give yourself the auto fire skill it is now a times two skill which means you have to use double the amount of points to upgrade the skill auto fire has its own rules like you have to have 10 bullets in your magazine and you have to be able to roll it within a certain dv but you can do a lot of damage depending on what weapon you're using you can do a lot of damage similar to auto fire you also have suppressive fire and what that usually means is you roll you roll to hit and everybody within that area has to make some kind of will save and if they fail then on their turn they have to spend their move action to get behind cover and if they can't get behind cover using their full move action then they have to use the run ability which pretty much means that they wasted their entire turn running to a piece of cover this is great if you want to take control of the battlefield and stuff like that but we'll get more into stuff like that in the advanced section next let's talk about critical injuries so critical injuries are what replaced the hit location system in cyberpunk 2020 you used to have to be able to roll an additional die to see what part of the body you hit on a person and it had a lot of narrative purpose and it did a really good job well i think that critical injury did a much better job of keeping everything streamlined while still being able to tell a narrative story what happens is on your damage die if you roll two sixes you have committed a critical injury and you consult a critical injury chart to see what had happened whether it's a foreign object or you broke a leg crack the skull or something like that all of that stuff will be in the critical injuries what this means is your high fire rate weapons that do 2d6 damage won't be able to get critical injuries more often but your high powered very heavy pistols that do 4d6 5d6 damage have a higher probability of doing a critical injury while having a low firing rate now what's so awesome about critical injuries it gives the enemy a debuff and right off the bat it does 5 hp damage straight to their hb bypassing all uh armor or anything like that it gives them a plus one to their death save which that's not what you want you want to roll under for your death save so getting a plus one means that your higher likelihood of dying when you get to your death state i mean there's a way to spiral out of control and tell a really good story now let's move on to the role 20 interface where i'll be talking about advanced combat tips and tricks the first thing i wanted to talk about is splitting your actions now as i said before you can move and you can shoot but what you can also do is you can move shoot move and if you have a rate of fire 2 weapon you can shoot again and then you can move again as long as you go up to your entire move stat and you do not go beyond that you can move shoot move shoot you can do whatever you want and split all that it's important to note that when you do that you probably want to end your turn behind cover because remember if you end your turn behind cover you are considered in cover throughout this turn so this guy that was over here that moved he's now in cover and he might be exposed to the guy above him but he's not exposed to the guy below him now let me give you guys a little bit of insight on the cover system there is some nuance to it that isn't missing from the book or anything like that but you do have to extract the knowledge from it what i basically mean is you through theory crafting and understanding the system you can come up with this stuff yourselves my primary concern with my group was we hadn't come up with that idea ourselves and thankfully jay gray and james hutt were able to help us out with that they were able to give us the information we needed so we could grasp the cover system now let me tell you guys the problem that we came across so we're going to be using this guy on the southern area as an example right this southern combatant he is fighting the guy in the northern area and he is the southern guy is in cover we're just going to call him a booster the booster ganger is in cover considered in cover and it is his turn to act so he decides that he's going to pop out of his cover shoot the guy in front of him and pop back in on his turn and he's ending his turn behind cover now we saw that as some kind of exploit or some kind of loophole to pretty much make yourself invulnerable or make your enemy have to waste their turn destroying your cover or getting into line of sight putting themselves in a precarious position so that they can actually see you and what we did not realize is that's actually not correct combat takes place around the same time it's supposed to be three seconds per turn right in real time so everybody's doing their actions at the same time that means that if this guy pops out and shoots and then pops back in that split second where he had popped out he was exposed so does that mean i can target him on my turn no you can't because when he ends his turn he's behind cover so that means people on the lower end of the initiative ladder have such a disadvantage they cannot shoot anybody they cannot hit anybody because everybody's in cover that's how we saw it now like i said in the past that was incorrect that's people in the lower area of the turn order yeah they're still going to be shafted a little bit they're not going to be able to act as soon as other people but it doesn't give them such a terrible disadvantage that it's game breaking now let me talk to you guys about how you can counter cover the first most important revelation that was told to us is the hold action in the rules it states that you can tell your game master that when you are holding your turn that you specified to them a certain event is going to take place and that is when i'm going to reactivate my turn again and to be able to use my shoot action or my melee action or interact with object action or whatever you want to call it in the context of cover what we would say is this guy right here that is behind cover he'll say on his turn i'm going to hold my shoot action i'm going to overwatch the battlefield as soon as a combatant pops up to shoot i'm going to take my shot and what that does is that negates the cover making this combatant over here invulnerable on his turn he's going to pop out to shoot get shot then if he survives he'll shoot somebody else and then he'll get back into cover so what's going to happen is when you guys are playing your game one of you guys is going to decide i'm going to be overwatching the battlefield probably someone that's higher up on the turn order will decide i'm gonna lock down on this battlefield and i'm gonna be watching it if anybody pops up to shoot i can hit them whenever i want now the second thing you can do and we talked about it before is line of sight you have to get line of sight on the enemy combatant if he's technically ducking under this counter then that means that this guy has to get into a position maybe over here maybe even over here it would be under the gm's discretion to figure out but this is the area where he would need to get into line of sight to be able to target the enemy combatant the next thing you can do to counter cover is to destroy it and in the book in cyberpunk red there's a whole rule system on exactly how much hp something would have determining what kind of material it's made out of if it's made out of wood if it's made out of metal it has a certain amount of hp and maybe your example isn't exactly there like we're looking over here on this map and this looks like some kind of porcelain metallic wooden counter we'll just have to make a judgment call let's say it has 30 hp right so this guy over here he'll have to do 30 hp of damage to this cover to render it useless and to expose the combatant behind it now speaking of destroying cover let's talk about the greatest way to counter cover and that is explosives according to the rules if an explosion damage exceeds the total of hp of a piece of cover then the combatant behind the piece of cover takes full damage for example we talked about this right here it's 30 hp let's say this guy up here throws a grenade he throws a grenade like right around this area and it's a five by five square so that means here let's take out the ruler five by five is right here five squares by five squares that's huge that's giant this whole area will be hit with that grenade and what that means is if the grenade does 35 damage remember this is 30 hp the cover if it does 35 damage then the combatant behind it takes how much damage they take 35 damage the cover that they are behind turns into shrapnel it gets destroyed and they take full damage so the grenade is literally the best way you can destroy cover and do damage to hurt somebody so as you can see through though the cover system seems very skewed in one direction there's so many ways to counter cover there's the hold action over watching the battlefield get line of sight on your enemy destroy their cover or throw a grenade you throw a grenade and they're gonna have a really really bad day what this does is now this entire battlefield and this battle map is has become a tactical playground we know exactly where we want to be where we want to have in cover and the the things that we can do how many grenades we have do we want to do suppressive fire as we talked before where suppressive fire would make a combatant let's use this as an example this guy's out in the open mr guy up here does decides to do suppressive fire in this entire area this guy has to make a will save well he failed his will save so he's going to spend his entire move action to get behind a piece of cover away from the shooter to be safe because he failed his will save and what we've pretty much done is we've we've forced this guy into a different position we forced him out of there maybe he was a melee only attacker maybe he didn't have a gun on him we've just made him waste his turn getting behind a piece of cover so as you can see there's so many tactical things you can do in combat now especially with the shooting and on top of that i'm going to give you guys some more advanced tips let's move on to melee combat because armor only ablates if you exceed the stopping power or sp of a piece of armor with the damage that you do that means that sometimes you'll be firing your bullets and they'll just be ping ping ping bouncing off of people and that leaves you with an opportunity to get into melee combat because remember the rule that melee combat ignores half of a person's armor half of their sp that's a really good way to number one do damage and number two ablate their armor so your other buddy's guns can start working a little bit better so a great way to bypass somebody's high armor is to be using a melee weapon and to make sure that you put some kind of skill points into a melee weapon and melee attacks whether it's a martial art brawling or using some kind of cyber limb or using a big old baseball bat with a spike on the end of it have a melee weapon with you handy so you can also ignore cover you can put yourself in a position where cover is irrelevant because you're all up in their face another advanced tip i can give you guys is grappling and human shield sometimes you want to just grab somebody and use them as a shield there's all kinds of really cool rules about you being able to take them your full move action on your turn if you win the grapple check you can throw them you can choke them remember that it's not all about shooting and bashing somebody over the head it's also about grabbing somebody controlling them making sure that they do your bidding you can take them anywhere you want it's great for extracting hostages extracting somebody that is not a willing participant or just quietly putting someone to sleep when you don't want to be known or seen or some kind of stealth attack move and yes you heard me correctly human shield there's actually rules for how you can use a human shield what you need to do whether they're a corpse or a live person there's a way where you can literally hold somebody they can eat the bullets while you're shooting back at them now this next section is a little bit more nuanced and you'll be needing the support of your game master when you're talking about environmental damage you have to be asking the game master exactly where there's environmental stuff remember there's rules for fire there's rules for electricity damage poison damage all kinds of stuff and your game master will be able to tell you whether those things are available to you on the battlefield maybe you want to start a fire maybe you want to make sure that there that electrical outlet arcs and hits the enemy next to it there's things that you can do to use that to your advantage on your turn to make it a little bit more tactical now in the beginning of the video we talked about how things are simple you move and you do an action but as we're getting into this advanced section you guys can see that there's so many things you can do on your turn no matter what role you play no matter what kind of character you are and what kind of weapon you carry on you you have a lot of options for things you can do you want to shoot somebody you want to destroy their cover you want to grab them you want to grapple them you want to choke them you want to throw them off a 10 story building it's really up to you the possibilities are endless and don't even mention net runners who can do their own net running thing on top of all the other things that they can do you have a netrunner on your team that's another tactical advantage that you can have so as you can see while the cyberpunk 2020 system had a lot more crunch it had a lot more dice rolling roll this consult this chart move this many d6 and you hit his eyeball and his leg and his arms and btm and all kinds of other stuff that were in cyberpunk 2020 it didn't it added to the narrative and it added to the game but it took away from the process of having fun for a lot of people in cyberpunk red i can tell you that this is not an issue there is so many tactical fun things that you can do with your buddies you're going to be sitting there on your turn thinking together how you want to work synergize with things that you can do to make sure you can eliminate the enemy and the game master will be playing their own kind of skirmish game with their bad guys against the players and when you guys are done with combat you're going to be going back and thinking oh remember that time where you cracked your ribs but then you shot that guy in the head and cracked his skull and that other dude's legs got blown off oh man those were the days those are real stories that you'll be making with a critical injury system and all the new things are in cyberpunk red well guys i hope you guys enjoyed that video i'm going to be making more cyberpunk red content obviously i'm loving this game i cannot wait to talk more cyberpunk if there's any questions you have about combat and stuff like that make sure you leave it in the comments join our discord community and let's exchange ideas this is a beautiful new time cyberpunk red has been released congratulations to artelsorian and much love to everybody that is involved in the cyberpunk red community we'll see you guys on the next video make sure you like and subscribe and take care bye [Music] you

Channel: JonJonTheWise

Views: 78,433

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, combat, cyberpunk combat, cyberpunk red combat, cp red combat

Id: 5tYIGgjTI0M

Length: 21min 52sec (1312 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 13 2020