You best not miss...

Guns don't kill people, murderhobos kill people! Specifically, when they engage ED-209 in a firefight for control of the strategically vital playground in the middle of an oil refinery, and miss.

Below is a random generation table for determining what happens when player characters in a modern or cyberpunk roleplaying-game miss what they're shooting at. The table is designed to be rolled when a character misses a shot with a projectile weapon in a dangerous area. Or a crowded one. Or rolls a critical failure. Or the GM is feeling particularly vindictive. 

The collateral damage table is very much inspired by the Ship Collateral Damage table in the Rogue Stars wargame. It's much shorter, because neon slicked streets lack some of the exciting options for catastrophe a spaceship possesses - atmospheric leaks, artificial gravity failures, that result which causes the ship to burst into flames and kill anyone who can't get to an escape pod...

This table should also be rolled if the PCs leave a loaded gun with a toddler or take lots of drugs before the run or decide to go into a night club with their helmets on and their assault rifles loaded (every Cyberpunk 2020 party has done this, without cause. Every Shadowrun party has done this, as a survival necessity).

The dice rolled varies depending on local conditions.

For a region free of bystanders, roll a D10.
For a region with a few non-combatants nearby, roll a D12.
For a crowded room, a crowded theatre or a crowded crowd, roll, a D20.

The GM decides exactly where in the environment the effect applies. Remember bullets frequently, like, pass through walls.

APPALLING COLLATERAL DAMAGE BELOW THE JUMP:

Power Dressing! Linear Frames Revisited

Linear Frames. Metal Gear. Power Armour. Powered Spacesuits. Powered Sportsuits! Deep Sea Pressure Suits. Articulated Smartgun Harnesses. Iron Man...

We might not have our flying cars yet, but Cyberpunk 2020's linear frames are just around the corner - there's Lockheed Martin's HULC, the Japanese Hybrid Assistive Limb, the Raytheon Sarcos, to name a few. These things have so many potential uses, I imagine they'll be fairly common within a decade. I imagine them serving dockworkers, construction workers, search and rescue crews, line infantry soldiers, fire fighters, EMTs...

I've been intermittently engaged in a sisyphean task to expand and update the CP2020 equipment lists whenever I have the time and inclination (which isn't often, to be fair!). Powered suits of one sort or other keep coming up - linear frames, but also space suits, environment suits, "metal gear" and others. Each of these systems seemed to require separate rules, so I've decided to condense them. I'm always in favour of reducing everything down to a short statline! 

The rules below cover everything from Vasquez's smartgun harness in Aliens to the Knight Saber suits in Bubblegum Crisis to the deep sea hardsuits in Blue Planet. Personally, I intend to use them as a much simpler alternative to the ACPA rules in Maximum Metal, treating PA suits as Shells with massive SP values and lots of internal option slots. 

In general, I've erred on the side of simplicity. I absolutely did not want to apply any kind of technology assumptions to the rules - they should be able to handle anything from vanilla CP2020 technology through Crysis through Starcraft - or change the rules according to the designed function of the suit. That last decision is down to ideology: as far as I'm concerned, the street finds its own use for things, and that "sports" harness could become an "assault" harness in the hands of a techie very quickly!

It's for all of those reasons that I've decided to ignore the "power question" altogether. The technological variables determining how long a frame's internal batteries should last make my head hurt, frankly. There's an argument for adding an extra segment to the statline - "Power," a number indicating how long a frame will run on a full charge. If you want to, add that with my blessing. As far I'm concerned, a PA's internal batteries last as long as necessary, or until an exciting narrative demands otherwise!

Anyway, I hope you enjoy the prototype rules below (and in this googledoc)! I've included a few sample suits at the bottom, and might just manage to create a follow-up post with more in the next few days...
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ARTICULATED FRAMES

LINEAR FRAMES, SPACESUITS, POWER ARMOUR

Alienation: the Thingification!

Last week's Alienation post - an alternative cyberware "humanity" system for Cyberpunk 2020 - has received some great feedback which I'd like to answer here. I'm going to save questions about the maths in the Rejection guidelines for a different post, but otherwise i'll try to cover the big stuff here...

The big things in this post:

• Should INT be the main attribute in the Alienation roll?
• Expanding the table - including sense/memory loss and more...
• Different tables for different cyberware. EDIT: forgot to do that. Will deal with it in another post...

For those who missed it, the original rules googledoc is here. 

To recap:

• The aim of the rules is to replace cyberpsychosis with a more setting neutral system. "Metal turns people into inhuman monsters" is such a defining idea that it becomes central to a cyberpunk setting. It doesn't fit a game based on Neuromancer or Ghost in the Shell or Deus Ex, let alone a more optimistic "transhuman" game. 
• These rules give cyberware a Rejection rating. When a character installs new cyberware - or has heart bypass surgery, or suffers a serious malfunction, or or - s/he makes an Alienation check. If the check is "failed" s/he rolls against a table to determine the negative effects of the installation.
• "Alienation" effects represent adaptation problems caused by the discrepancy between the user's new capabilities and physical form and her existing mental architecture/social relationships, etc. A person who dedicates time and energy to adapting - to being "mindful" of his new cyberware - can use the Transhumanism skill to mitigate the risk of Alienation tests.
• As a side note, these rules don't apply any kind of value judgement to cyberware installation or "metal." A metal robot installing fleshy parts a la The Bicentennial Man would take Alienation tests just like a cyborg...

I'd like to thank a variety of people for looking these rules over, particularly VFTE types Mort, Senior Officer Mikael Van Atta and Malek77, along with Nathan Hawks on G+. Classic artwork in this post from Cyberpunk 2013 owned by R Talsorian Games, used without permission.

So, to get down to responding to and applying feedback:

Alienation - alternative "humanity loss" rules for Cyberpunk 2020

Humanity Loss needs to go!

The following post contains an alternative system for Cyberpunk 2020 cyberware, designed to reflect the psychological effects of cyberware without the hard, arbitrary limits of the humanity loss system. It's designed to be flexible and player facing - presenting the possibility of significant psychological costs while giving the player the choice of determining exactly how they manifest in her PC. 

In addition, these rules don't come with a major setting assumption. This could slot into a game set in the early years of Transhuman Space or Cyberpunk 2020 or even Traveller 2300. It reflects any world where the pace of technological change is determined by corporate competition, where people are filling themselves with prototype gear before the psychological implications are understood or where 'runners find themselves loading up on heavy metal simply to survive. It doesn't force the GM into assuming cyberware has any one effect on people. The negative consequences are based on universal addiction and body image narratives that everyone is familiar with, even if they've been lucky enough not to experience them for themselves.

This post contains the rules - with a link to a googledoc for easier access - and then some designer's notes and philosophical nonsense. I'd love some feedback!

EDIT: A follow-up post full of people's feedback is here.