There are a number of tropes that are specific to Cyberpunk-the-game1, but which many people end up thinking are integral to cyberpunk-the-genre. And “cyberpsychosis” is the one that annoys me the most by far.

Cyberpsychosis is Cyberpunk’s term for the general concept that cybernetic implants make you less human. This concept made the way into the game because its author Mike Pondsmith used the AD Police anime as one of his sources of inspiration, and the anime goes heavily into it.

You probably already know how it works in the game, but here’s a refresher: characters have an Empathy stat that determines how well they relate to other people. This gives them a Humanity score that’s equal to Empathy x 10. Each implant has a “Humanity cost” that gets deducted from that score when installed, and for every 10 points of Humanity you lose you also lose 1 Empathy. This makes it harder to succeed at social tasks. When both Humanity and Empathy reach 0, you become a “cyberpsycho” and an NPC.

I agree with the mechanical purpose of these rules, which is to limit how much cyberware a character can have. But this is heavily entangled with the “this stuff makes you less human” story concept, from the terms used to the in-fiction justification to the setting elements built around it.

Cyberpunk 2020 was particularly bad about this. Cyberpunk RED is much better about it due to thirty years of progress in popular thinking about mental health, but I still have issues with it.

In Which I Talk About My Issues

In CP RED, Humanity loss is more or less equated with psychological trauma. You can lose Humanity by experiencing traumatic events, and modifications that are purely cosmetic or therapeutic in nature don’t cost Humanity. Therapy helps you recover and restores your Humanity. And I’m happy to report it’s “merely” difficult and expensive instead of the sinister tracker-injecting conspiracy it was in CP 2020.

However, the mechanics remain exactly the same as before for cyberware that has game benefits. The explanation given is that the act of “going beyond the human baseline” is traumatic. Cyberpsychosis is the dissociative disorder you get when you do it too much, and makes you start seeing yourself and others as collections of replaceable parts instead of living, thinking beings. You can use therapy to partially recover the Humanity lost to cyberware, but to recover those final points, you need to get rid of the implants.

The concept of “human baseline” isn’t examined very deeply here. You know it when you see it, and your Empathy reduces when you move away from it. It’s the act of implantation that causes harm.

This feels really backward to me, because a theme I often see in literature or media I like is that cybernetic implants are more like the scars of trauma than its cause.

Molly Millions from Neuromancer has implanted mirrorshades because her traumatic past made her wary of opening herself up emotionally. The windows to her soul are shuttered.

Burton and his ex-Haptic Recon buddies from The Peripheral have a number of twitchy combat implants that mostly serve as symbols for the PTSD they got from their time at war. Flynne, one of the main protagonists, has similar psychological scars from her time playing realistic military simulations for money, but she has no implants because her trauma comes through in her viewpoint narration.

David Martinez from Edgerunners was already a reckless putz with a hero complex2 before getting his first implant. Each one he has installed is either a reminder of someone he feels he failed to protect, or a reflection of his desire to be strong enough to protect those who are left.

I’ve heard it said that someone who gets an implanted gun or blade is declaring themselves the kind of person who needs to be ready to kill someone at all times, and that erodes their humanity. But isn’t “feels the need to be ready to fight and kill at all times” a common trait to all Cyberpunk PCs, chromed or not? It’s a lot easier to find a PC with no implants than one with no weapons, armor, or combat skills.

It doesn’t really matter whether your gun is inside your coat or inside your arm. And since I don’t think a Cyberpunk character should lose Humanity for carrying a conventional gun, they also shouldn’t lose it for carrying an implanted one3.

What I’d Do Instead

Like I said above, I still agree that there must be some sort of rule limiting the amount of cyberware Cyberpunk PCs can get. A lot of it gives powerful abilities and you don’t want them to be able to install the whole catalog at once. That would make the game less fun in a variety of ways.

I want to base it on some stat other than Empathy, though, and I’m going to pick Body for that. I find it much easier to imagine that cyberware has concrete impacts on your body than on your mind.

Under this new rule, your maximum Cyberware Capacity (CC) is your natural Body x 10. “Natural” here means the base stat value before any modifications from cyberware. Cyberware’s “humanity loss” stat now represents its “capacity cost” instead. Your current Cyberware Capacity is the cost of all your implants added together. This represents both minor health issues caused by the implant’s presence and the increased need for maintenance.

If you exceed your maximum Cyberware Capacity, you die. The good news is there are no other game penalties until you get to that point. Note that medical exams to measure your CC values are standard pre-op procedures even at mall clinics. No ethical ripperdoc will ever agree to perform an operation that would kill the patient. Not all of them are ethical, though.

Body-scultping (including full gender transition), medical-grade replacements, and cosmetic mods continue to have zero cost4. The implants involved in all of these processes are designed to be minimally invasive and to require near-zero maintenance.

Cyberware Maintenance (Optional)

GMs who wish to make a commentary on the cruelty of capitalism might institute this optional rule.

When it’s in effect, you need to pay a monthly cyberware maintenance cost equal to your current CC x 10eb. This represents anything from periodic check-ups and implant cleaning to a regime of targeted immunosuppressors at the high end.

If you skip a month, your current CC increases by 1d6. If you’re also living under harsh and unsanitary conditions during that time, such as from being lost in the desert or having to sleep in the gutter, it increases by 2d6 instead. If it goes over your maximum, you die as above. And yeah, this extra CC also increases your maintenance costs next month. Field-expedient maintenance and a Medicine roll might reduce the increase from 2d6 to 1d6, at the GM’s discretion, but there’s no reducing it to zero without making that monthly payment.

Excess CC from neglected maintenance can be removed through treatments that cost and work the same as the psychological therapies from page 229 of the core book: 500eb (or 100eb and a DV15 Medicine roll) to restore 2d6, and 1000eb (or 500eb and a DV17 Medicine roll) to restore 4d6. These consist of extensive drug courses, therapeutic surgery, and physical rehabilitation.

As a further optional rule, the GM could also use these stats for “tune-up” treatments to reduce Cyberware Capacity to the minimum values described in the book: 2 per piece of cyberware, 4 per piece of borgware. Gotta spend money to save money.

What About Humanity?

Empathy and Humanity continue to exist in a game where Cyberware Capacity rules are in play. Since we’re renaming things anyway, let’s rename Humanity to Stability because suffering from mental trauma doesn’t make you less human either.

You can still suffer Stability and Empathy loss when you suffer actual mental trauma, as described in the CP RED core book. The same therapy options are still available and they can help you as described there. Reaching 0 EMP will cause a breakdown that will leave the character unplayable until they can recover, but this will not necessarily be violent.

The one case where cyberware still causes Stability loss is when a victim is forcibly implanted. The Maelstrom gang in CP 2077 loves doing that to random civilians, and it definitely qualifies as a traumatic experience. In that case, recovering from the trauma follows all standard core book rules, including the one where you need to remove the offending implants for a complete recovery.

What About Cyberpsychosis?

Again we follow CP 2077’s example here. Cyberpsychosis is a myth, a label without any science behind it that gets thrown around by corps and media as an easy explanation for a number of tragedies. Corporate strike team shoots an activist, well, that was a cyberpsycho who had it coming.

People can have real mental breakdowns, and these can get ugly when the victim has a predisposition towards violence and a few combat implants and/or some weapons on hand.

However, violent breakdowns are never caused by implants. They’re always a consequence of the inherently traumatic nature of life in the shit future of Cyberpunk. I bet a lot of “cyberpsychos” turn out to have very few or even no implants. Just easy access to guns and no access to mental healthcare.

  1. The original edition was named “Cyberpunk”, and it was followed by Cyberpunk 2020 and Cyberpunk RED, with a couple of extra editions that were considered “non-canon” between those last two. If I capitalize the word I’m talking about this game line. ↩

  2. A condition also known as “Shonen Protagonist Syndrome”. ↩

  3. A game where owning a weapon brings you closer to becoming a monster is a perfectly valid concept, but if that’s what you want to play you’re better off moving away from action-oriented systems like Cyberpunk RED. I suggest Wanderhome, which does implement that very concept in one of its archetypes and is otherwise a non-violent game. ↩

  4. This also applies to stuff that has no tangible game benefits but still causes Humanity Loss in the core book, like the “sex booster” implants or the color shift cybereye option (which is purely cosmetic like shift-tacts but costs Humanity in the book). ↩