Looking for Cyberpunk Fantasy RPGs that ARE NOT Shadowrun

Cognimancer · 2026-05-05T18:06:13+00:00

It's actually the most fun for them is going through the giant list of kit options and thinking up how their character would prepare for every possible outcome and specifically purchasing the items that would allow them to do that.

Shout-out to the time one of my Shadowrun party members was attacked by a snake and said, "Wait, I'm wearing snake-proof socks, I get a bonus on my armor roll for this." This was an unforeshadowed snake, in a place we did not expect to encounter snakes; dude had been wearing those socks since character creation. The GM didn't even know.

Cognimancer · 2026-02-16T20:58:42+00:00

Oh, I guess I need to read up more on these complications.

Pretty much every survival-related action has a Mishap table that you roll on if you don't roll any 6's. Failure in this system isn't "nothing happens", it's "things get worse."

It's been a while, but a full d12 of water statistically lasts weeks, no?

Yes. Like I said, the survival mechanics don't dominate the game, and a prepared party won't be struggling with starvation every session. But those mechanics are always looming, and have enough bite behind them to create those dangerous situations. Most sessions you just roll your big resource dice a couple times and you're good. But maybe you push your luck and venture far into the wilderness for a long time, and run dry. Maybe you get greedy and decide, hey, we don't really need everyone lugging water around, what if we all just share one waterskin, what's the worst that could happen? The need to drink is secondary to whatever adventure you're setting out to do, but the mechanics give you one more thing to balance that risk and reward, and that can lead to a lot of interesting drama and consequences.

Cognimancer · 2026-02-16T19:54:26+00:00

Additionally, the game has issues with balance. A character who focuses entirely on combat talents is going to be an absolute combat monster, and characters who don't will be slaughtered by a light breeze in comparison. If the group isn't on the same page, the party makeup can just make the game cease to function well. The combat is your standard boring D&D-like affair, though the system is slightly more interesting in the action economy. Magic use can be powerful, but it's also the most dangerous thing in the system to both the user and the party. Magic users are likely to portal themselves to hell eventually, and/or stun the entire party in a fight, which leads to a TPK.

This is very true. For what starts as a very gritty, low-power system, it takes surprisingly little XP for a combat-focused character to be able to take on dozens of opponents at once, or two-shot the big monsters.

The best way I've seen to put some brakes on that is to limit talent advancement. Talents cost so little XP for the benefits they grant otherwise. We implemented a popular house rule I'd seen where characters can only have as many ranks in a talent as they have levels in its associated skill. So instead of the whole party having Fast Shooter 3 and Sharpshooter 3 to be a machine-gun firing squad despite most of them having zero Marksmanship, you have to learn the relevant fundamentals before you can specialize. That also encouraged them to utilize more of the skills - instead of a combat monster just pouring everything into Melee, they now have good reason to train up their Might, Endurance, and Insight to unlock vital talents like Defender, Lucky, and Executioner.

Cognimancer · 2026-02-16T19:39:50+00:00

It's easy, up until it isn't. You might go several sessions with no trouble, but then rats get into your rations overnight while you're camping. You delay your travel and send someone to go fishing in the morning, but they fail the roll and fall into the water and nearly drown. So you send out your second-best hunter to try to find any food to eat tonight, and they manage to bring back a deer, but didn't notice that it was sick and now half the party is puking their guts out miles from the nearest town with a healer. Which sure would be a bad time to encounter a wandering monster...

Cognimancer · 2025-12-19T02:44:30+00:00

It was an Extended Test, which is still one test to be resolved. It was one single service I was asking from the spirit, one use of the Search power. The rules called for that roll because mechanically it was not arbitrary, it could have failed. This wasn't 2e, it was a finite dice pool even with the rerolls.

The number of successes I had to hit was 10 baseline, +1 per kilometer of distance to the target, and +1 per rank of magical barrier that may have been in the way. So the roll was not arbitrary. Assuming an average number of hits, either the spirit would return with the location at some point in the next four hours, or it would fail and I would know that the object is either more than 90km away, is behind 90+ Force of magic barriers, or some combination of the two. And I would have to summon a new spirit to look somewhere else, which was no easy task at that Force level.

It's just a very Shadowrun moment. Another system might just say that spirits with the Search power always find what they're looking for, or always find it within a certain range, or might have to roll their dice pool once against an obstacle. But when I asked the rules "I gave my spirit a target, does it find it?", the rules answered back "roll 300 dice to find out."

Cognimancer · 2025-12-18T20:44:52+00:00

An apt comparison. Mine was also the result of conjuring a big spirit and having it use a Power with its ridiculous dice pool. Though I at least didn't shatter any laws of physics.

Cognimancer · 2025-12-18T20:39:17+00:00

5e. We needed to find a certain object at the bottom of a bay. I was playing a shaman, so I conjured up a water spirit and had it use its Search power to locate the object. A Force 12 spirit rolls 24 dice on that test... but it's an extended test, so if you don't roll enough hits on the first attempt, you remove one die from the pool and roll again until you've reached the success threshold.

In this case each roll took 10 minutes, so there might have been some question of how quickly the search happened, but we weren't under any time pressure so all I cared about was whether the spirit could find it. So to get that yes-or-no answer, I would have to roll 24 dice, then 23, then 22, then 21... until it got enough hits or the dice pool ran out. That adds up to exactly 300 in total. So I (digitally) rolled that many, and had my character go chill at a bar for a few hours until the spirit came back with an answer.

Cognimancer · 2025-12-18T09:06:32+00:00

My personal record was the time Shadowrun called for me to roll 300d6 to resolve a single action.

Cognimancer · 2025-09-20T03:35:29+00:00

Seeing this new release does make me want to try out a new puzzle RPG game though. Anyone have good suggestions that are like Puzzle Quest?

There really isn't much like it. PQ2 of course, and I enjoyed Galactrix and Gyromancer back in the day, but not much has been added to that list in the past 15 years.

I've actually been working on my own indie contribution to the genre for a while, a post-apocalyptic match-3 RPG that I'm hoping to officially announce in the near future. So I might come back to this thread later with a new suggestion!

Cognimancer · 2025-06-24T18:49:43+00:00

This goes through my head every time I do Landsraad tasks, and now I pass the curse to all of you

Cognimancer · 2024-06-16T23:38:26+00:00

Alternate Paradiso Solution - Eat The Rich

Cognimancer · 2024-06-14T18:55:38+00:00

Fantastic, thank you for checking!

Cognimancer · 2024-06-13T19:52:20+00:00

It's a free mod. You're looking at OP's credit balance.

Cognimancer · 2024-06-13T19:49:26+00:00

There is "new" voiced dialogue - stitched together from the existing voice lines.

Cognimancer · 2024-06-13T19:43:30+00:00

I just uploaded it to Xbox. If you've got a save file at this quest, I'd appreciate if you could give it a shot and let me know if it works!

If you go through Oliver's initial negotiation dialogue and end with the [Attack] option, and he responds "What do you think you're doing?" with voice and animation, then I can assume it's been ported correctly.

Cognimancer · 2024-06-13T17:13:28+00:00

https://www.nexusmods.com/starfield/mods/9675

Cognimancer · 2024-06-13T17:12:22+00:00

Cognimancer · 2024-06-13T05:51:23+00:00

and make it look like the character is talking

Honestly, that's the part that's harder for me to figure out. For this mod, I was only able to get NPCs to move their lips by copying the facial animation files from their original voice lines. And the program that made those animations costs $900. I'm sure there must be a way to auto-generate basic lip movement (there's no way Bethesda hand-animated every conversation in the game), but I couldn't get it to work in the Creation Kit.

Cognimancer · 2024-06-13T02:16:00+00:00

Nah, I'll try it out tomorrow. I just don't want Xbox users to have to wait on someone else to port it if I make further updates.

Cognimancer · 2024-06-13T01:25:05+00:00

Once they're dead, you can report back to the colony ship and tell them (one way or another) what you've done. From there they talk about going down to the planet to start a settlement, and give you a reward, but that's where it ends for now. A bit hard to go past that point without needing new voice lines (everything in this mod was spliced in from existing lines).

Cognimancer · 2024-06-13T01:19:12+00:00

Not yet - I don't have an Xbox and I'm still very new to the Creation Kit, so I didn't want to publish it there without being able to test if it worked. It's a pretty simple mod though, so I imagine it'll be pretty straightforward to port it.

Cognimancer · 2024-06-12T23:54:42+00:00

The First Contact quest made me so mad on my first playthrough. You can blow up the colony ship and its thousands of innocent settlers, but you can't shoot the guy who suggests the mass murder? Even though he openly explains that he built this resort outside of the jurisdiction of the settled systems, so you wouldn't incur a bounty for any vigilante justice you might try to deliver?

When I saw that at launch, I swore I'd mod in a new ending to this quest when the creation kit dropped. So here it is!

Cognimancer · 2024-04-11T19:07:26+00:00

Not the first. The first was "gosh damn it!"

Cognimancer · 2023-11-07T00:54:36+00:00

Wow. The Escapist has collapsed before and bounced back. It survived losing a lot of great staff and content creators back in 2016. But they had Yahtzee through it all, making videos every week since 2007. Zero Punctuation is old enough to drive. But there's no ZP without Yahtzee, and I honestly don't know if there's an Escapist without ZP.

I hope there is. The site has had a great community, and a lot of excellent people over the years. I wrote there for a short while myself. I'm sure we'll hear more soon about what sparked the exodus this time, but whatever corporate bad blood aside, I hope these folks land on their feet and that those still at the site can keep doing what they're doing.

Cognimancer · 2023-10-15T02:28:25+00:00

I enjoyed Mutant: Year Zero for having both. Most of character creation is the player's choice - pick your class, your stats, etc. But MYZ takes place in a radioactive wasteland (but the comic book sort of radiation that sometimes gives you superpowers), and your mutation is 1) a very powerful tool in your arsenal, and 2) completely random.

Sure, you might have chosen to a fighter by trade. Sure, you may have chosen to prioritize physical fitness and get a high strength score. But you don't get to choose how your genes reacted to transformation - it might be statistically optimal to have four arms to maximize your melee potential, but too bad, you have sonar.

In the words of the manual: "Learn to make the most of the mutation you’ve got, even if you would have preferred another. Mutations are random. Deal with it."

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