This past weekend, my gaming group had a bunch of people who were out, so I ran a one-on-one Cyberpunk Red mission for one of my players who’s been playing a lot of Cyberpunk 2077.My own Cyberpunk knowledge comes from reading Snow Crash and Neuromancer, and from years reading through the short fiction in and game mastering Shadowrun across two different editions (20th Anniversary 4th and 5th Editions in my case).With my previous cyberpunk game being Shadowrun which often revolves around grabbing every d6 in your house and rolling them once for your roll, then for your opposition, it may come as no surprise that among the realizations I had is that Cyberpunk Red runs really fast. Like the d20 system most tabletop gamers are familiar with, Cyberpunk Red revolves around a single formula for rolling checks both in and out of combat. You roll a d10, add the relevant skill and relevant stat, and boom you have your result. This gets compared to a difficulty value for the thing you’re doing, and now we know whether you succeed.There are still a few opposed rolls for things like being perceived while attempting to sneak, or being chased while attempting to escape on a cool neon covered, alcohol fueled motorcycle of the future, but by and large, d10 plus stat plus skill versus difficulty gets you where you’re going.But where the static difficulties really show their speed is in combat. Cyberpunk Red doesn’t individualize difficulty to hit a target through role abilities or gear, instead the difficulty to hit is based on the range between the attacker and defender and what weapon the attacker is using. So your player who knows their distance can then have their individual range chart and know their likelihood to hit from a given range and tell you if they’ve hit and move on to the damage. Which speeds up combat so much. With our game, I’d put two definite combat scenes in and expected them to eat some time. They chewed up some of the clock, but not nearly as much as I’d planned for.Lastly, there’s an app, either in your respective app store or online at cyberpunkred.com, which can help make character creation even faster for players, or give assistance and look up tables and a combination initiative tracker and pseudo-Virtual Table Top for game masters. The player tools are free until you go into specific supplements, the GM-specific stuff is a one-time fee of $4.99. The ability to pop up a map and information about districts and roll up a bunch of NPCs with a click, complete with randomized names and personalities. It was well worth the purchase when I ran a game that went heavy into improvisation.The GameInspired by the current reread I’m doing of Snow Crash, I decided that the basic mission would be a delivery. Just get this box from Point A to Point B. Then I took some stuff from the Beat Chart section of the core book and thought about which beats could add interesting stuff to the mix.So our Edgerunner ends up taking a job to carry a package from the Danger Gal Offices in Little Europe to Totentanz in the hot zone in the Old City Center. No questions asked, but paying enough to cover the next several months rent. Deal.Trouble is, some jerks had caught wind of the courier coming, so a couple set up right outside and decide to take some shots at our Edgerunner. She dispatches them while using the engine blocks of cars as cover. (GM Note: Cover can be ridiculously powerful, make plans about where it is, and where it isn’t). This was our first taste of combat and we were surprised how quickly things went.The Boostgangers dealt with, our Edgerunner heads on foot across Little Europe toward the Hot Zone. While she’s doing this, she notices that a ricochet popped her safe box a little open. She secures it to protect the cargo, but not before realizing she’s carrying a whole bunch of heavy pistols.Our gang issues aren’t over yet, though, as bikers in the same colors show up following our Edgerunner. She ditches them down a pedestrian path. But they double back to try and catch her. But here came my favorite roll of the game as she rolls a perfect 10 on her Stealth while the pursuers roll a 1 on their perception. So, as the gangers make their way up the pedestrian path, our Edgerunner just steps right through their group and they run off in the opposite direction she’s going.And so she arrives at Totentanz, the famous club. Just as a Cyberpsycho has decided that this is where they make their stand. She ducks around to a back entry and makes her way through the evacuating crowds and up to a catwalk. From a high vantage point, she starts trying to make head shots on the Cyberpsycho to distract them from the people fleeing. The minus-8 modifier for aimed shots turns out to be just a little too much for her to overcome, so she soon switches to just popping out from behind some thin steel signs to fire at her foe and then duck quickly back.This is also where we learned, through the Cyberpsycho, that auto fire at anything beyond a few meters’ range is a bad idea. Our Edgerunner’s cover mostly lasted so long because she was being targeted by an SMG and being missed altogether. That changed when the grenade launcher came out. That dealt close to half of the Edgerunner’s health, destroyed her cover, AND she lost her hand (critical injuries are NOT fun).Eventually, my prerolled clock for Max-Tac to show up passes and they enter in to end the fight and our Edgerunner made her delivery. A good chunk of her payment goes toward a new chrome hand. Guess she’ll need to take some more jobs in the future to pay that pesky rent.ImpressionsThis game was a whole lot of fun to run, and the app tools made managing combat a breeze for both me and the player. Honestly, the math and comparisons wouldn’t have been too difficult without it, but it definitely reduced my effort. And I love things that lower the effort of running mechanics so that I can focus on running everything else.The game ran really fast, with us ending in about half the time I’d planned for. If you have a smaller group, know that the half hour per beat suggested by the book is probably more than you’ll use, in case you’re worried about how many beats to have planned in your game.But simply, the system is fun. The setting is fun, especially if you have players in your group, like I do, who are still playing 2077. I’d put Cyberpunk Red on my list of systems I’d like to run in 2026 a few weeks ago and now that I have, it’s definitely staying there. The one thing I might sit down with the book and make for myself is a sort of “Mission Generator” like Shadowrun 5 has in the back of the core book. Write down some of the suggested hooks, then some of the cliffhanger beats as complications, and tie them to a d10 so that I can prep the idea for the mission a bit easier. (And making more work for myself is definitely a sign I liked the system!)
