Stat Bonuses. They only apply to a few specific things, like Bodytype's Bodytype Modifier for soaking up pain, or dishing out goodnight punches. Everything else is raw stat score + raw skill score + 1d10, against fairly reasonable Difficulties. This is where WotC's 3e got it the most wrong when they were cribbing off of Cyberpunk's homework in the late 90s, while they were publishing the Netrunner CCG. WotC just straight up doubled the values without checking the balance.
Health. It doesn't go up, unless you get chromed out, and even then, you still gotta get it fixed after it gets shot up or chopped up. Your tailored antibodies and healgood juice ain't doing shit for the Black & Decker jack-o-tron you call an arm. Hell, it can actually go down, if you did something stupid like caught cancer from radiation or bad genesplicing. Also, each increment of damage impacts your capabilities negatively. Sometimes, though, you're beefy enough where some stuff doesn't hurt you as badly as it does the average person, and real wimps get hurt by everything.
Luck points. Antsy about a roll? Spend a little luck. At the least, it'll save you from a critical failure.
Armor. It doesn't magically make you harder to hit. It just puts itself between you and the bullet, knife, punch, whatever, if that's where you got hit. You can protect your head, torso, arms, and legs, and some finicky sub-locations might have listed protection or lack of protection. Sucks to be you if you got hit by a critical or a carefully-targeted shot, though.
Difficulties(DC). From 10 to 30+. You only see 30+ on really impossible shit, like if you're trying to program some giga-program or cook up some hypermeth.
To-hit. If it's archery or hth/melee, you get to roll Dodge or a Martial Arts check against your attacker. If it's gunfire other than trying to get through a suppressive fire zone, the gunman checks against a range bracket's difficulty, modified by the target's size and movement. Trying to get through a suppressive fire zone? Divide the Rate of Fire by the area's width; that's your Acrobatics difficulty.
HtH/Melee vs Firearms. If you're just Brawling or using a chair leg, you're just brawling or using a chairleg. Just straight weapon/attack damage plus your melee damage bonus. If you're a trained boxer, or a trained swordsman, you get to add some of that skill's value to your damage output. Firearms? Each bullet hits for its damage, but each bullet also has to contend with the armor it hits, if any.
HtH/Melee, specifically Knives vs Baseball Bats. Knives have their own specific Armor Penetration type against Soft Armors.
Firearms, specifically ammo types. Hollow Points do shitloads against unarmored targets, Armor Piercing punches through armor, but also punches through meat without doing a whole lot, Incindiary burns, and then you get in to the wacky shit like Flechettes and combined types.
Firearms, specifically shotguns. Close in, it does a lot in a little space. Further out, it spreads its love across several yards. Beyond that, you're just annoying people.
Firearms, specifically automatic fire. Each one has a Rate of Fire attribute, based on cyclic rate and trigger squeeze. Sure, an M60 might have 600 rounds per minute cyclic, but that's per minute. Expect something more like 20-30 on its in-game rate of fire, over 3 seconds.
Boomex. Explody things. The first brick does what you expect. Additional bricks, barrels, etc, of boomy stuffs in the same area have diminishing returns.
What makes it a decrepit shitheap?
The second printing was printed of 2020 was when I was chasing my classmates with slugs I found in the playground.
Reflexes are the godstat. This can be adjusted/fixed easily. Spread the love over some of the less-utilized stats, like Bodytype for Brawling and strength-based Martial Arts(Boxing, Sambo, etc) or Movement Allowance for Dodging. Maybe even situational uses of other stats. Quick reflexive fire? Reflexes. Sniping? Technical Ability.
All the skills. You have about 44-60 skill points in RAW, plus whatever your Lifepath grants you(yeah, Lifepath, like Traveller, but with less risk of dying in character generation. It can just make you WISH you had died in prison from the plague and experiences that gave you a chihuahua's chill, while your off-and-on tries to kill you at every turn with the full backing of the Military Intelligence Community,) against about a hundred different skills that can get you into trouble if you try them with only a few points in them. Consider paring down the pointless ones and making all the really important ones into Traits or something that cost about the same as 1-4 ranks of a normal skill, but tied to their 'parent' skills(Pharmaceuticals tied to Chemistry, Accounting and Physics tied to Mathematics, etc,)
Skill points. As said before, in RAW, you have 44-60 skill points(40 from Career Package, INT + REF in pick-up skills), plus whatever you lucked into in Lifepath. Instead, consider just blanket-granting 60 skill points, especially if you're doing the Traits suggestion.
Humanity Loss and starting cyberware. I like the idea of cyberware having a psychological and a physiological impact. Imagine the junk electronics today, screaming into your nervous system, and the roid rage/troon rage of modern weirdos being granted access to powerfantasy-fulfilling augmentations and hormone-disrupting novel organs. That said, if choomba got his arm blowed off in the SouAm brushfire wars and got himself a chrome replacement, maybe he's had time to come to terms with it. Offer newly-rolled characters a bit of a buffer if the player can come up with some good storytelling on how and why they got their chrome. Maybe base it off their Cool, like how Bodytype grants a bit of damage reduction. Maybe include it as a Lifepath option, or a Trait; Coming to Grips with your Chrome.
and the other table I'm stuck as the forever DM of. And I've gotten pretty tired of forever DM'ing in the latter, so I've told my players that once this current game wraps up, I'm gonna be doing other things for a bit.
