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Comment by hajile | Hacker News Reader

GURPS Cyberpunk is still available as a PDF and interestingly, is still the best generic cyberpunk toolkit ever printed.

http://www.warehouse23.com/products/gurps-classic-cyberpunk

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It was translated to Portuguese by Devir in the early nineties, and I distinctly remember a sidebar discussion on whether separate wide-area networks would eventually join to become "the Net." It was the first time I saw the word Internet.

I've become increasingly interested in collecting RPGs this past year and I've noticed that Portugeuse seems to be one of the next biggest translation targets, though mostly from people in Brazil, not Portugal. No idea why, just something that's become apparent.

> mostly from people in Brazil, not Portugal.

In Brazil and Portugal, Portuguese is the highly dominant language, but Portugal only has about 11M people and Brazil has about 207M. More people means more creative output (generally)

people just don't understand how big brazil is. the area is only a half million sq mi smaller than the continental us or china.

1 Russia 6.6 million square miles 2 United States 3.8 million square miles 3 Canada 3.8 million square miles 4 China 3.7 million square miles 5 Brazil 3.3 million square miles 6 Australia 2.9 million square miles

Creative output as well as revenue stream. A saturated 11m market of Europeans (that have a birthrate lower than 2) is nothing to a thirsty 207m that is mostly young people. Especially with games that are cheap to play (pen, paper, book) instead of a CPC6128.

But Portugal is a pretty developed nation, which also usually equates to greater creative output.

Ancient Greece is an interesting counterexample to this. A few thousand artists, poets, playwrights , mathematicians and philosophers managed to create the foundations of western civilization, arguably more cultural output than subsequent civilizations that had 100x or 1,000x the population.

Knowing that, it’s easy to see why the fascination with that time period has been so widespread and long-lasting.

How does it compare to Cyberpunk 2020? I wanna run a cyberpunk campaign for my friends next year and wanted to understand which ruleset and setting is most fun. We already play a lot of DnD.

GURPS for me is the quintessential cyberpunk role playing experience. Its gritty realism suits the genre way better, in my opinion, than systems like Cyberpunk 2020. The bionics / cybernetics systems and point based character creation really opens things up for creating the kind of character you want versus being stuck in an archetype that the genre defines. GURPS is an amazing toolbox for simulating a lot of gritty and deadly combat. A lot of people don't like that you can calculate what you need to roll in order to shoot a person in their left eye as you drive past at night on your motorcycle and prefer a more abstract system. In that case, I'd move towards the Apocalypse World system. It's a much more modern role playing experience without a lot of the issues that GURPS or D&D style games face.

http://apocalypse-world.com/pbta/games/title/The_Sprawl

GURPS is way to crunchy (numbers focused) for me, personally, but I'm seconding the Sprawl recommendation.

Hack The Planet is another great modern cyberpunk RPG, based on the Forged in the Dark rule set.

I like my RPGs crunchy enough to not be a barrier to role playing or abstract enough to not be a barrier to role playing. I feel like I've never been limited in what I can do or what I can create in GURPS. Games like D&D are the worst of both worlds for me. Not abstract enough to do what you want, and not crunchy enough to have rules for all you want to do. To me D&D is more like playing a board game than a role playing game.

You could look into Pathfinder, it's very crunchy with lots of options so it should fit.

On the other hand, how you experience D&D depends heavily on the GM. If social solutions to problems are not rewarded, players may feel like playing a board game. Same for GMs that railroad the story too much.

Seems interesting. Why can't I find it on boardgamegeek.com?

The game, or one like it, is on RPG Geek: https://rpggeek.com/rpgfamily/335/cyberpunk

Its sold directly from Steve Jackson, who is still in business and still making (very good) games.

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