JcDent

A T-55 experience

Military history, video games and miniature wargaming.

RPGs, single player FPS, RTS and 4X, grog games.


Passionate about complaining about Warhammer.


Catholic, socialist, and an LGBT+ ally.


FORUM SIGNATURE:
THIS USER IS A GIRL KISSER

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JUST POST


Fortified Niche: a podcast covering indie miniature wargames
www.anchor.fm/fortified-niche
Grognardia: the current place to order my t-shirt designs [until I find a better one]
www.zazzle.com/store/grognardia

The ideal of a TTRPG is to have all core aspects of the game to run on the same system. Unfortunately, most RPGs put all their stats into Combat, and the rest of the systems are an afterthought. The perennial example is DnD, obviously.

For cyberpunk games, another stumbling block is usually hacking/cyberspace rules, which take the hacker on a magical adventure away from the rest of the group - not great when the common wisdom is that players will rapidly lose interest if the current scene doesn't involve them[^1].

Me, I have been lazily toying with the idea of also making a cyberpunk game with security levels which would impact stuff like guard suspiciousness and such, as well as somehow applying the same system to social situations.

But those queer folks[^2] at Weird Age Games made it all at once with Hard Wired Island. Not only does this game remember what "punk" stands for in "cyberpunk,"[^3] it is also very snazzily designed.


Social, Stealth, Hacking, Combat - all of them run on extremely similar systems. Granted, not all of them are reskins - the moods for Social are different from Security Levels are different from Combat arena trains - but all of them are defined by lists of Actions, and those lists are roughly equal in length.

Sure, this makes combat less crunchy than, say, Shadowrun, but there's no good edition of Shadowrun, so it all evens out in the end. Plus, with actions like Flush Out, Pin Down, and Take Cover, Hard Wired Island covers realistic shootouts without getting caught up in trying to adjudicate whether 9mm or .45 ACP deals more d6 in damage.

And while I haven't played the dang game yet, Hard Wired Island has impressed me enough as it is!

[^1] Personally, I only lose interest when people start discussing gameplay math or whatever. Generally speaking, I'm desperate for attention and thus always cracking jokes.

[^2] As far as I know, all three of the main authors are LGBT+ - see, queer folks are a boon to the craft of RPGs while us straights keep churning out 5E modules and OSR heartbreakers.

[^3]Some reviewers are extremely red, mad, and nude about this and cart out the old gotcha of "you claim to be communist, but you also charge money for your game? I am very smart"


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in reply to @JcDent's post:

As someone running Shadowrun, Hard Wired Island has been on my radar for the past couple month, since someone else mentioned it to me on here. Keep putting it off, but it sounds rad as hell.