#I might just be a big CBPR simp

[gorillastraylight]

I promise I play other games than Blades in the Dark and Cyberpunk RED, but I keep thinking about the similarities between the two of them. Something I've found myself enjoying about them as a GM is how much potential there is for emergent narratives. Both games have mechanics set up that really firmly involve the characters in the world - in Blades, this is stuff like entanglements, faction reputation, and faction clocks. The world will change around the PCs over time, in the process of doing Scores they will make allies and enemies (which the GM can track super easily), whole new storylines open up explicitly as a result of mechanics! There's so much for the GM to work with, to expand on, to tweak. Doskvol feels *alive* in Blades RAW. Cyberpunk is less expansive than that, but even the simple fact that PCs need to pay rent and living expenses every in-game month is huge. It immediately creates both motivation (I would like to eat and keep living), but also goals - make a big enough score, and you could jump up from living in a shipping container to an actual apartment. But then, of course, you also have to consider buying new ammo, keeping your gear maintained, getting better gear - the Edgerunner hubris death spiral is built right into the game: if you want your character to advance, you need to take riskier work that pays more eddies, and to do that riskier work, you need better stuff, and that better stuff costs eddies. The way characters don't really level up in the traditional sense, with a lot of their big power jumps tied to cyberware and whatnot, ties into this too. The Black Chrome supplement takes this even further with stuff like expanded rules for Night Markets, gear crafting - it's so, so good, it cries out for a west-marches style game. Applying a kind of faction tracker mechanic, like in Blades, to cyberpunk would really be the final puzzle piece to make that game nearly perfect for me, IMO. There's something very special about games where the mechanics work with the players and GM in writing the story.