In my group’s current Cyberpunk 2020 game I play “Dove”. He’s a Solo: a hired gun, assassin, and all-around non-pacifist. Physically, I based him on Brian Cox from Manhunter, then the whole group told me he looks like Scotty from Star Trek. Thanks, guys.

Dove is a product of the European corporate system. That means he’s the best of the best, an alpha predator. If he can get close to his target, guns are clumsy and messy compared to what his hands can do. Give him a gun and it’s one shot, one kill. Playing Dove, I’ve never had to reload during a firefight. He’s a killing machine.

Now where’s the fun in that?

I don’t like playing high-powered characters and I hate playing combat monsters. Cyberpunk 2020 is a violent game so if you want plenty of “screen time” a Solo is the choice. If I was going to enjoy playing Dove I was going to have to subvert the archetype to make him interesting.

First of all, I made him older than usual. Most CP2020 characters are young; mid-twenties. Dove is forty. He’s the old man of the group by a wide margin. I’d just watched John Wayne in The Shootist and I’d have made him older if the GM allowed. The idea of the Aging Gunfighter appeals to me.

The GM downloaded some add-on rules for advantages and disadvantages so I stocked up. I went down the list and picked anything that sounded fun, especially if it was a bad choice from a min / max standpoint.

First I picked Severe Nightmares, Flashbacks, and Masochism. Later it hit me: this guy has post-traumatic stress disorder. Dove spent the last twenty years as an elite soldier of fortune. All the death and pain he’s experienced, and caused, has worn away at him emotionally. One of the themes of Cyberpunk 2020 is the dehumanizing effect of technologically transforming the body through cybernetics. It never mentions the dehumanizing effect of transforming the mind through violence, maybe because the characters, and authors, are typically young and indestructible.

I also chose the disadvantage of Sadism. In addition to his operational expertise, Dove is an interrogation specialist. The trauma he’s experienced has eroded his connection to his own emotions; his work as an interrogator has eroded his empathy for other people as a simple defense mechanism. People are either targets or noncombatants. He knows this is wrong. That doesn’t stop him from believing it.

The last disadvantage I chose was Overconfidence. Dove is the best and he knows it. He takes incredible risks and wins because he’s the best. Every day he pushes it closer and closer to the edge and he never falls because he’s the best. He’s getting slower and slower, older and weaker, but he’s still the best. He’ll be the best right up to the moment when someone better than him blows his brains out.

That’s more like it! Now there’s a character I can get interested in. He is interesting because his is a profession in which old age is a rare exception. Every day he gets older and slower and weaker and there is never a shortage of hungry wolves circling in the dark. Any chance of a normal relationship slips away. He feels the chill of mortality and he walks the razor’s edge of denial. He knows he is losing control. He is in a dark tunnel and there is no light ahead, only death or insanity.

Can he be saved? Death is inevitable but can he find some brief moment of redemption? What about his colleagues? They’re partners now but tomorrow they might be his targets, or he might be theirs. Can there be friendship between predators or is it, at best, a temporary ceasefire? How can you turn your back on violence when enemies of your own making want to kill you? Is repentance possible when a man dedicates his life to killing? Are some men destined to be damned by their own hand? Is our fate preordained? Is evil something you do or something you are? Why are we here? These are the questions I was looking forward to addressing through Dove.

That was the idea anyway…

Unfortunately for me, the GM only runs published adventures. He’s good at what he does, no fault there, and the rest of the group are good role-players, but if it’s not in the adventure it doesn’t get played. That means Dove is destined for the standard Fighter / Tank role in the party and all those advantages and disadvantages are only modifiers to die rolls. Lots of adventures call for heavy-hitting combat types; few require burned out emotional husks in search of redemption.

I don’t object to this kind of play. I believe that if you’re having fun (and so is everyone else) then you’re doing it right. It’s just a case of mismatched expectations. On a personal level, this is one of the best groups I’ve played with. Everyone is friendly, experienced, and mature, and the game never bogs down. They share the spotlight and there’s a shocking level of party cooperation. It’s great.

Still, I’m not a fan of published adventures. It’s no secret that railroading is endemic in gaming. The measure of a good GM has become how well they hide the railroading and give the players a convincing illusion of freewill. Published adventures railroad even the GM. They limit the descriptions he can read, the NPCs he can use, the settings, the goals, the themes, everything. If he takes the tiniest detour after plot point #3 it all has to funnel back on track for plot point #4.

Another problem is that Cyberpunk 2020 doesn’t actually have any rules for dealing with the themes I built in to Dove. The rules define how to play but they also limit what can be played. If English had no word for “love” we wouldn’t have so much poetry (Unless someone threw together some homebrew vocabulary converted from another language. Zing!).

These are a couple of the reasons I’m designing a new system. If you put in a lot of rules for combat, play will be combat heavy. I’m putting in rules for the kind of play I want. Another design goal is a system in which railroading is impossible. I don’t want much, do I? Look for more details in my, that’s right, manifesto. Coming soon.