Next section is another fiction, since I'm still convinced they just copy and pasted it I'll mostly skip over it. Some art of Cyber Ghost Alt
Into mechanics! The game uses both meters and yards as the same thing because this is AMERICA and we use AMERICAN units here. It lists narrative speed for walking which..the units don't work out at all.
I think this is the problem with pretending meters and yards are the same thing. You'll notice that MPH doubles while KPH almost triples. You could just stick with Miles and tell the forigners to screw themselves, guys, this just makes everyone confused.
Move actions can make you move either one square or MoveX2 Yards/meters. So every point you put into Move is two yards. Initiative is based on REF (screwing over melee characters who use DEX for fighting lol). Its the usual roll, highest goes first. There are a list of actions but they arn't very detailed or complex, you'll mostly just be making attacks and moving as far as combat goes.
Skill rolls are 1d10 +Skill +Stat. Since the maximum a starting character can have is 14, they should auto succeed on anything with a DV of "Difficult" and almost always succeed on DV "Professional". Critical failures are a thing, but they arn't an auto fail. Instead you roll a second dice and subtract the results, so it is possible to succeed if your skills are higher than the DV. Critical success works the same way, you roll a second dice and add it to the pool. No exploding dice either way. Luck can be spent for +1 on a roll, up to your max Luck. Each of the skills gets a bit more detail here to what it does and what each skill level represents. They're basically all on the same formula, "At 10 you can do things OK. At 14 you're professional level. At 18 your world class.". I think most of them are just pulled over from the last game. It notes that someone with REF 8+ can use Evasion against bullets, which happens to be the starting max, but Evasion uses DEX as a stat since its a melee skill. Autofire tries to make it sound like hitting a target at 100 meters is 18 Base tier lol. It looks like I lied earlier when I said Cool was the only charisma stat, Conversation and Human Perception both run on EMP. Overall it gets fairly repetitive fast.
Now finally back to the ROLE ABILITIES! Again you start at rank 4. I was wondering why they even bothered to write anything under Rank 4 when the game helpfully explained that you can multiclass. As long as you are at least Rank 4 in your last class, you can pick a new class to put points into and get both abilities. You can't pick another new one until you reach at least rank 4 in that class but you get to keep all your old abilities. It seems a little overpowered and doesn't really make sense for some of them, but I guess there isn't a lot of room for growth otherwise since you start so far down the line.
Charismatic Impact(Rockerboy): Your abilities only work on fans. You get the ability to turn groups of people into your fans, and different abilities for what you can ask fans do as you level it up. Dice pool is Charismatic Impact +1d10, so you're rolling lower than you would a normal skill. At 3 and 4 you can seduce fans and sell merchandise. At 5 and 6 they'll help out in a fight, 7 and 8 they'll die for you, at 10 you are Rock and Roll Hitler except they don't reference Hitler anymore. Overall its a special charisma skill with some niche uses. Since you can turn people into fans with a roll you can use the skill on anyone who isn't actively or passively hostile to you, its basically a two roll brainwash at higher levels.
Combat Awareness(Solo): Totally changed. You get a pool up to your rank of points to spend on a number of abilities, which you can change for an action on the fly. You can reduce the first damage you take for two points per damage, ignore critical failures for 4 points, get +1 Init per point, +1 to attack for every 3 points, +1 to first damage for every point, or +1 to perception for every point. Initiative and Precision Attack seem to be the best, if you dump all your points into Initiative you'll almost certainly go first while PA works for all attacks you make a round. The others probably have niche uses and we haven't really gotten into combat rules yet :V. I'd imagine the damage option would let you defeat armor, +10 to one attack per round essentially lets you ignore whatever reasonable armor they enemy is wearing, and is a decent increase of damage regardless. It might be better than PA if you only get one or two shots in during a round. It is flexable but you only get a couple of the benefits at a time, if you choose to insta win Init than you can't add a bunch of damage to your attack. If you move half your points to damage and half your points to init its only a moderate boost to each. It seems strong but not super over powered.
Interface(Netrunner): Just controls how many Netrunner actions you get per turn. We'll talk about it later, apparently! So much for covering all these now >_>
Maker(Tech): When you level up, you spend two points to add points to specialties. Field Expertise lets you add your points to fixing skills and allows you to force an object back to full health instantly, for 10 minutes per skill (long enough for a firefight). You'd probably want one point in this just to access jury rig given that some of the more expensive items can take months to repair. Upgrade Expertise lets you give bonuses to items, like lowering the Humanity cost by 1d6, increase a quality to Excellent, +1SP, or add something you Invented. You only get to pick one upgrade per item but they're all pretty great choices, a team with a Tech with some spare time should be a bit stronger than one without. It doesn't look like you really get anything from more than one point in Upgrade specialty, except a bonus on the roll that is already Stat+Skill+1d10. Fabricate specialty lets you build items for one price category less than normal, or items that you invent. We haven't really gone over price categories yet :V. Invent lets you create whatever the GM lets you get away with. Overall Upgrade is the most practical for most teams, Field Expertise is good if you need to fix something now, and Fabrication is a good way to trade time for money. The extra points don't really do much so you're best off putting a single point into everything than focusing on something else.
Medicine(Meditech): One point to spend on a specialty with each upgrade. Surgery gives you 2 points in the surgery skill and lets you do surgery. I believe it was specifically said earlier that this is the only way to get the surgery skill, so its not really a ripoff. It skips ahead, but this lets you steal cyberwear from dead people and install it on not dead people. Medicine gives you the ability to use medical equipment, also locked to Meditech. It also lets you make some pharmaceuticals with minor healing effects (Antibiotics is +2 HP per day, Speedheal is Body+Will HP immediately but only works once per day, Rapidetox cures poison). They arn't super good at combat healing, someone with BOD 14 WILL 10 would get a decent heal from Speedheal but the max starting character 8Bod 8 Will would only get 16HP once per day. Which is a good two assault rifle bullets worth if you have armor on, but if you think of it as turning a 50HP character into a 66HP one its basically slightly better than just buying a shield. Finally Cyro speciality gives you access to Cyro equipment. One point gets you a pump, two gets you 24 hour access, three you just own one. At five points you own six and can cyro your whole team if you wanted. We'll find out how powerful this is when we know what a cyrotank actually does.
Credibility(Media): First you get the ability to look into rumors. They get the ability to pick them out passively twice a week, but can actively look for them using the same table. Passive DV is lower but you don't roll skill. Like with some of the earlier ones the rest of the benefits are on a tiered list. Believably is laughably low, a starting character with Rank 4 has a 3/10 chance of being believed. You are supposed to bring evidence to make it higher, +1 for one piece, +3 for more than four, so if you have a mountain of evidence your starting character has a whopping 60% chance no Luck of people actually believing what you say. If you do manage to make people believe you at this level, you might get one guy arrested! Each rank after this basically increases the believably rating +1, lets you have access to better sources, and has a greater effect from succeeding. At rank 10 you can overthrow nations with 100% if you have four pieces of evidence. The power scaling here is kinda silly lol. Compared to Rockerboy its more information gathering focused, with the news broadcast ability basically being more plot related than Rocker's direct manipulative charisma.
Teamwork(Exec): First, you get free clothes. Second, you get free housing - it was listed earlier that you save $500 a month and live in good conditions compared to everyone else. We'll have to see if this has any mechanical effect later. Third, you get free Trauma Team coverage. You get better houses and better coverage as you move up in rank, but both basically mean you start of richer than everyone else. The mechanical part comes in with the minions. You get one at rank 3, one at rank 5, and one at rank 9 for a max of 3 (and one at start). They can't level up like PCs, they can't wear heavy armor, need to make Loyalty rolls, and they're controlled by the GM. If a minion dies you get a new one next session for $200 (and you can't loot their equipment). Loyalty is a 1d6 roll to get under their current loyalty (which maxes out at 10 "between sessions). If they roll over, they'll screw up the task you gave them despite their skills. Loyalty is pretty easy to raise just by acting like a bro. Spend $200 on them and it goes up by 4, making it so they'll never fail. Give them a game session off and it goes up by 6. Compliment them and it goes up by 1. Risk your life and it goes up by 8. Use them as a human shield, ignore them, or be a jerk and it goes down. So ironically the most effective corpos are the ones who are kind and compassionate to their workers. Each minion has stats roughly corresponding to a starting character and are rolled like a Template character. So a Body Guard will have either 7 or 8 Ref and +6 handgun skill, making him roughly as competent as a combat-focused character not counting their Role Ability. Actually everyone seems to have 7 or 8 REF and handgun skills. They're all clearly supposed to help fight. Anyway they look like a good way to fill roles that arn't covered by the rest of the team, if you don't have a driver or netrunner they can have one on hand with roughly the same dice pool as a starting player and some basic equipment and cyberwear. Otherwise turns you into a leader of a 2-4 man squad, each individually weaker than a Solo but with more expendable minions and the tactical advantage that numbers gives you.
Backup (Lawman): Copomancer Summons Cops. Roll under your Backup rating as an action, roll 1d6 to see how many rounds it takes for them to actually show up. Compared to Exec, they're typically higher in number but not always around. At starting rank 4 they'll be 4 cops with a dice pool of 10 and 7SP, compared to the Exec's One dude with ~14 dice pool and 11SP. Higher Backup increases the chance of success, increases the stats and equipment of your backup, but generally decreases the amount of backup you get. Backup 8 is one guy with 16 dice pool 15 SP and an assault rifle. Backup 9 is a Psycho squad of two guys with rocket launchers and assault rifles, 15 dice 18SP. 10 is actually weaker with 14 dice, 11 SP, 2 dudes, but they'll stick around longer to help with the actual investigation and if you roll crit here than you get two squads instead of one. Overall they'll hit harder than the Exec's dudes, but can only really be used in combat, might not show up, and might show up after the fighting is done if they do show up at all. And they take an action to summon.
Operator (Fixer): Mostly contacts and shopping, they're support oriented like the techies, with some contacts and "blending in" abilities as a side show. They'll always be able to buy items of a certain rarity depending on their rank regardless of other circumstances. They can competitively roll to haggle for different things, at rank one you'll get 10% more for things you sell or 10% less for things you buy if you succeed on the roll, at rank 4 you can buy five get one free, 7 and 8 let you pay half now half later for expensive things, 10 lets you double the pay for a dangerous job (every job a PC will take lol). Overall you'll get things quicker with this compared to Tech, especially for big and expensive things. It will be cheaper than tech if the bonus is less than 10/20%, but one of Tech's skills gives you half price on super expensive things so I'd doubt it. Might stack well with tech if you can make cheap things to sell for more.
Moto (Nomad): First, you're really good with cars. Add your rank to any skill checks involving driving anything (so a car-maxed nomad would have 8+6+4 or +18 at creation). Second you get to borrow a family vehicle. If the vehicle gets destroyed, $500 for a new one in a week. Its cheaper to buy a new life than a new car. At rank 10 you become a leader and can take all the vehicles out at once, add to the vehicle pool, and buy upgrades. You can buy upgrades separately for money, for much cheaper if you have Moto. The upgrades are basically the car version of cybernetics. Add a machine gun, make the glass bulletproof, add ejector seats (with special rules if you added this in a helicopter), turn a ground vehicle into a hoverer, dodge bullets on a bike,
Overall, they are much more mechanical than what I remember from 2020s. That is probably a good thing. Media suffers a bit from being too close to its previous version and weird power scaling, as written you have a 70% chance of ending any encounter by making a blog post that says "The leader of this enemy corporation is actually a clone of Adolf Hitler with all of his memories, arrest him for war crimes!" and have the entire world believe it and topple the enemy corporation/nation in one roll. Its...hard to use in game. I think the design is supposed to be for an end of mission thing, the idea being that the media and the rest of the group has to go on a mission to find evidence before taking them down, but at higher levels the consequences of success are so much higher as are the chance of success it is just kinda overpowered. At lower levels you'd have the opposite problem where your mission doesn't really accomplish anything since you failed a roll. Rockerboy has a fairly similar problem with being hard to work with, but it now has mechanical backing for single/small groups/large groups and the "large group" option is the only one that will be hard to deal with at most levels.
As for combat, that's the next section but it looks like the ranking will be Solo, Exec, and Lawman. Solo might switch around depending on the level everyone's at and how multiple combatants mixes things up. They're abilities are strong and versatile, but shouldn't be at the "everyone else is worthless!" level. Execs basically double their attack power by having someone who starts out about as strong as they do. They're locked into being lightly armored and relatively lightly armed (Very Heavy Pistol at 4d6 is what they all come with and the best handgun you'll get, and while there arn't any rules against upgrading their weapons and cyberwear they don't have any skills for anything better. You could probably talk your GM into getting them skill chips for stronger weapons, but then you're reducing your attack dice pool by three dice if you manage that). Lawman's ability brings in some more heavily armed backup but takes too long to do so, at an average of Three Rounds +1 for the action the cop uses to trigger it. With a chance of failure. It would be significantly more useful if you use it before the fight.
We get more details now here in the combat rules. As I said before there is a list of actions, but the only ones that will come up consistently are "move" and "attack". Actions can be split, so you can move part way, shoot once, move the rest of the way, then use the second shot of a two ROF weapon. The only two ROF guns where, as you remember, the lighter handguns. Practically I'd use this to move in close to the bad guy, shoot them, then move back or into cover.
Aimed shots get nerfed a bit. Its -8 to any of them, with three options as head (double damage that makes it through armor), held item (disarms the target), and Leg (gives them a broken leg). Head shot being the obvious best choice here. DV of an attack is based on weapon and range, they're trying to balance the weapons by making it harder to hit close targets with a sniper rifle or assault rifle than it is with a pistol. DVs range from 13 to 35, so at your gun's best range you'll almost certainly make a hit unless you crit fail or the bad guys are skilled enough to dodge bullets. At the best range you'd have a DV of 21 for a headshot, your starting character of 14 would have to roll an 8,9, or 10 giving them a 30% to hit for double damage. They could use their luck on the shot if they really wanted the guy dead. Since the movement is 2XMOVE, you should be able to jump to your ideal shooting position in most close range fights before shooting if you have a couple of points in it.
Autofire has a rule change. Now its one roll, using 10 bullets with its own DV range table that doesn't actually change anything but only goes up to 100 meters/yards. They use meters/yards for everything. Its kinda annoying. Anyway, it ignores the weapon you're using aside from the range table. It does 2d6*The amount you beat the DV by up to max (so sub machine gun with autofire 3 gets 2d6*3, an assault rifle with 4 gets 2d6*4). This means you'll always break even for low caliber submachine guns, but you'll have to roll at least 3 over the DV to make assault rifles better than just shooting them with one bullet. Autofire can't be aimed. It seems pretty powerful, I think this is calculated as one hit for armor making it a good way to bypass it. Autofire 3 has 21 damage average, autofire 4 has 28 (the same as hitting them with a rocket)....as long as you can consistently hit X over the target number.
Defenders can choose to roll Evasion+Dex+1d10 instead of using the weapon/range chart if their Ref is 8+. This bizarrely means that you'll be much easier to hit if they're making a bad shot since you don't get a bonus to range. Apparently someone standing still at 100 meters is an almost impossible target for your pistol, someone pretending to be Neo at 100 meters is just asking for the bullet to hit. Maxed out character could bring their average to 14+1d10, essentially making it a 50/50 chance for another maxed out starting character to hit them. This is an average of 19, so you'd be smart to use it when you're inside the enemy's kill zone but you'd be better off not trying to dodge if you're in their weak distance. The more skilled you are, the harder it will be for poorly skilled enemies to hit you, but the critical rolls mean you'll never be truly untouchable.
You can pick up arrows and bows never need to be reloaded, if you're a loser who still uses bow and arrow. Suppressing fire seems to be mostly useless, it takes 10 bullets and lets you roll to force everyone to run to cover using their next move action. Move actions are separate from other actions, so they can just shoot you before running to cover like they should have done anyway. Shotgun shells can load shot which has an AOE effect and lowered damage to 3d6. Explosives have AOE damage and scatter rules if you miss. Scatter rules make it sound like you can never miss with explosives? Like if you roll under, it still lands within 10 meters, and the explosion is still 10 meters.
Melee weapons automatically ignore 50% of the enemy's armor just to give this game an excuse to use them. If you have BOD 8+ you can wield two handed weapons one handed. The defender always rolls Dex+Evasion+1d10, meaning it will be easier to hit weak enemies than with a firearm, harder to hit medium tier, and equal once you get to people who can dodge bullets. Punching people does damage based off your BOD and can be Very Heavy Pistol tier if you get past BOD 10. There are some grappling rules that let you strangle someone to ignore armor and deal BOD damage, and auto KO someone in 3 turns even if they don't get their HP down enough. They can totally fight back and use a gun with a small penalty, so you'll probably just get shot before then if you didn't already grapple their gun away.
Martial arts have the same base damage as Brawl. Each type has special moves with some requirements to use, usually with two per school. Some of the better ones are Bone Breaking Strike: automatically do a critical injury if you hit (Req 8 WILL), either Broken Ribs or Cracked Skull. Judo has Counter Throw, which gives you a free Throw if you managed to dodge all melee attacks. Taekwando gets pressure point attacks that break spines.
There are rules for fire, drowning, space exposure, and electrocution. A fall can be avoided with a DV 15 athletics check or automatically with grappling hook, otherwise its 2d6 per 10 meters and a critical injury if you can't roll a second DV 15 athletics check.
Poison ignores armor and does 1d6/2d6 on a failed save. So even the weakest starting character can drink down a biotoxin without dying. Radiation "might give you cancer if the GM says so", intense radiation acts like a fire.
Cover rules changed too. You now have to put yourself 100% behind cover, and cover takes 100% of the attacks for you. Like I said earlier it means you have to poke yourself in and out of cover with your move action, but if your behind cover and they can't poke themselves around you're in a good spot. You can shoot through cover, and it is oddly easy to break. A tree will have 20HP, as many as the weakest starting character. A thick steel support beam will have 50HP, as much as the strongest starting character and it doesn't go higher. Explosives can bypass cover if they do more damage than it has HP, but other attacks will be stopped by it. It doesn't have any armor, so it will probably go down much easier than the guy sitting behind it regardless of how squishy they are. Shields act as mobile cover with 10 HP. People also work as cover with their HP as HP, and their BOD as HP if they're dead. It leaves open headshots just in case you want to pull that anti-hostage taker move they always do in movies.
We already went over armor, so it just kinda gets reposted here. Did I note it doesn't stack? It doesn't stack.
You take wound penalties when you're lower than half health, starting at -2. When you reach 0 HP you arn't dead, just dying - you can still make actions but you've got to beat a Death save to not die. If you keep getting damaged you take critical wounds and the death save gets harder.
Critical injuries automatically deal 5 non-reduced damage. I don't think I've mentioned it before, but all shots that arn't specifically aimed at the head hit the body. The game definitely brought that up earlier. Critical injuries always happen when two or more dice end up 6. So if you rolled a 4d6 and get 2, 2, 6, 6 you'll deal a critical injury. Since Critical Hits don't actually help your damaged, this is the critical hit version that will help you get past armor. Its specifically noted that you don't have to beat SP for the critical damage to hit. They range from "You lose an arm" to "you have a torn muscle", with penalties that range from debilitating to annoying. Weirdly the separate critical hit chart specific for the head isn't significantly better, some of the effects are worse while others are duds (I broke his jaw! He won't be able to talk well, that will teach him!"). Death saves are 1d10 under BOD, instant death if you roll a 10. If you fail you die. If you succeed you get to still do things, but get a progressively bigger penalty each turn until you die. Your doctor is going to have to come in and stabilize you if you don't want to die.
. No eubonics as a first language. Wokeness has ruined the game officially.
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