There are quite a lot of differences from the core books in terms of rules, prices and availability.
Some notes and reasoning:
Firstly there is an assumption in the printed material that you are an ex 2020 player and familiar with Friday Night Firefight. Most of my players are not.
Secondly, there were what I viewed as inconsistencies in the system that was trying to be a streamlined version of FNF – some things were more complex, some things just not explained.
So I went over it and straightened things out – putting a definition for what grappling and holds actually mean and what they give you, by making moving and shooting separate things so there is not always the temptation to use the “take multiple actions” rule (and increasing the penalty for those that do)
Full automatic was mad “resolve damage separately for each round that hits the target” – get to close range with an SMG and let fly and you are back to the 2020 days of rolling a dozen dice.
There are basically no rules for healing and stabilisation in the core material, so I invented some.
I changed armour to make armoured clothing much worse, larger handguns rarer because of escalation. 2027 tried, but is not able to get away from cyberpunks bigger guns, higher numbers. There were a lot of choices that are just numerically better, when all the players and bad guys are in SP 5 armour, you need heavy pistols, SMGs and rifles to do any damage, so anything less becomes redundant, but at that point you reach the stage where a lucky 10 will kill an unarmoured juve outright.
So the idea is to de-escalate – armoured clothing is SP2 max and always lets through 1 point of damage, anything higher is obviously body armour and going to get questions asked. By the same token, with people not walking around like the terminator anymore, the authorities have scaled back their firepower – smaller callibre weapons are smaller, lighter and cheaper. The idea being to keep things like punching a megaviolents lights out a viable option.
I removed ATTR and Genspeak as they are often dumpstats. ATTR is covered by empathy which becomes a more D&D like charisma skill, genspeak by int rolls.
Carry weight, lift weight and throw distances were ridiculous. I have lowered the multipliers to things that are a bit more sensible for a reasonable spread of BODY values. I haven’t defined “standard” carry weight, GMs can pick a number.
Cybergeneration, Cyberpunk 2020, many of the images are copyright R Talsorian Games. Used under fair use policy for the purposes of running the game.