Salutations, Chooms!
At Gen Con this year, we got to show off John’s latest labor of love, an enormous (for miniatures) 7' cargo ship with a fully stocked dockyard full of containers. He even had a functional loading crane. One of the fun things about gamer brains is that we see toys like that and just wanna write rules for ‘em. After all, in a miniatures game, special rules are what give the players permission to do the over-the-top action shenanigans. Shenanigans like squishing my Street King with a cargo container… twice.
I always want players to feel empowered to tell a story, and one feature of the Cyberpunk RED: Combat Zone rules is that it doesn’t have to be restricted to the basic actions in the rulebook or the special actions on cards. You can just make new ones up on the fly if you’re playing in a casual or narrative environment. Obviously, this requires you and your opponent to be of like mind, and you’ll both need to be open to your rival pulling shenanigans on you!
So here are three examples of optional actions we made up while playing on that big ol’ container yard table.
Opening the container: If you want to open the container doors (it's a great place to hide from an Oyabun with a vendetta), the acting model just needs to succeed in a Tech action from within reach of the doors.
Flipping the container: If you want to flip a cargo container over, you have to be in contact with the middle of a long container side. But if you succeed at a Melee action (it represents strength), you can roll the cargo container away from you onto its next face. Any model under its new position must immediately test Reflexes or suffer a wound. Then, that model is moved so that it isn’t under the container's new spot (success or fail).
Popping out windows: The windows on our buildings and ruins can be pop’d out and reinserted. So when one of our models wants to smash a window (either to jump out or set up a sniper position), we have that model take a Dangerous Melee action. Obviously, this one requires permission from the owner of the terrain.
Those of you with our 2-Player Combat Zone starter game box will already have one of our cargo containers along with some ruined building terrain, so these examples can be easily replicated at home. By using these optional rules and others you make up on the fly, you can splash some of the chocolate of role-playing into your peanut butter of tactics!
Mack
