Fight Club Playtest

AlbaMoretz Eylül 25, 2022

So my friend A. and I ran a friendly little playtest match of Fight Club by email. It's fun. Cyberpunk 2020 combat is strategic and fun. Anyway, it got really out of hand really fast...

Dog Johnson(my character)

Smallish guy with inferiority complex
Fresh BJJ Bluebelt. Goes to every competition in the area. When he wins, he usually wins on points.
Wants to become the "Bruce Lee of BJJ" (whatever that means)
Body:4 Ref:8 CL:5 BTM:-1 SB:-1

Enter Clinch: 5
Takedown: 5
Improve Ground Position: 5
Grappling Counter: 4
Dodge Blow: 4
Joint Lock: 3
Strike: 2
Escape to Standing: 1
Choke: 1
Kick: 0

Scared Biff(A's character)

Body:5 Ref:10 CL:2 BTM:-2 SB: +0

Strike: 0
Dodge Blow: 1
Enter Clinch: 5
Escape to Standing: 0
Grappling Counter: 5
Improve Ground Position: 3
Takedown: 5
Joint Lock: 5
Choke: 0
Kick: 6

I knew I was in trouble when I saw his character was also a grappler, with better Reflexes nonetheless. Well, I also rolled poorly and it was a fairly short fight, but pretty tense, with a lot of strategizing before each die roll...

Round 1

Biff shot into a clinch
Dog attempted an arm lock but Biff countered it

Round 2

Dog tried another lock but was countered again
Biff threw Dog to the ground. He hit his head on the concrete but didn't lose consciousness

Round 3

Biff caught Dog in a joint lock and broke his arm. He was incapacitated due to the pain and also failed his COOL check for next round, so the fight was over!

Conclusions

It was fun and intense and strategically rich. Still felt like CP2020 combat despite the rule changes.

I made a rule tweak that throws only do damage on a hard surface.

Besides that, there were the standard CP2020 problems:

REF is too important a stat in combat

That said, maybe it makes sense that the best martial artists have good natural reflexes...

Cool still ended up being a dump stat

I thought about how to improve the situation without breaking CP2020's general mechanic. Cool could be made a little more important at he expense of body by making Stun Checks vs. Cool. But, body makes sense too, since a big guy is going to be less effected by a little guy's punch. That's a common problem when expanding CP2020: Which Stat to use for a particular check? Often times there are more than one stat that make sense, but you can only pick one of them, so I usually pick the one that I think has the stronger case.

Anyway, both characters were grapplers, so I'd like to see how other types would fare: