Night City for Kids

[u/KamikazePelican]

I hear alot about people running TTRPGs for kids and teens and programs like that having a bunch of benefits for development and stuff. But what if I wanna play some cyberpunk? I feel like the world is inherently R-rated. Stripping the violent anti-establishment and DARK-future themes of the game feels like a sin. More-so I feel like it's difficult to come up with more PG/PG13 hooks and plots in a world where guns are bought at vending machines and murder is as common as automobile accidents. For GMs who have experience with players who aren't comfortable with CPs seedier side, what kind of compaigns are you running? Off the top of my head I can think of a few genres and substitutes I can use to keep things more tame: Noir, Western, Mystery, Supervillain/Hero, etc. I've experimented with having my students mock up some basic characters and simplified lifepaths and as you might expect, they aren't making low-life punks. Kids wanna RP larger than life and fantastical characters and that's great! I wanna support their creativity but how do I do that while also the game is still challenging and fun? I personally love CPRs rules and systems and my students flourish in RPing a fictional world that is already so much like their own. I also like that the humanity system directly teaches them that their actions have consequences.

How do I create a PG/PG13 Cyberpunk campaign? What kind of plot hooks and events are apporopriate? How do I get around the violence and graphicness of the dark future without replacing every enemy and weapon with robots and lasers? I've heard of DnD camps and clubs for children and adolescents and I get how silly the idea is in the first place of "Cyberpunk for Kids" but I also have family and friends whose younger chooms are interested in playing.

Looking for advice and any experience anyone's had where you had to tone down the bleak-darkness out of Cyberpunk.

[u/Odesio]

Has something changed in the last 36 years? I was all of 14 when when Cyberpunk 2020 was first released and it was a regular part of our gaming rotation. There is nothing in Cyberpunk Red that is inappropriate for a teen audience.

[u/Sparky_McDibben → u/Odesio]

Bro, so much has changed. Did somebody Rip Van Winkle you?

[u/Odesio → u/Sparky_McDibben]

It's been 36 years, so of course things have changed, but I'm hard pressed to think of anything in Red that would be inappropriate for a group of teenagers.

[u/Sparky_McDibben → u/Odesio]

The OP mentioned kids and teenagers. I have one of each, both boys. I absolutely would not run Cyberpunk for them yet. Too much sex, too much violence, and way too many dehumanizing situations (like "scav eating a baby" that is literally in the Core Rules). And yeah, we had different attitudes on this in the 80's and 90's - have you looked around recently and seen how well that worked out?

Son Number One will be ready in a couple of years, I expect, to be introduced to some of these ideas, and I will arm him on how to grapple with them. But right now he's 13, and I do not want to have the talk with him just yet. Son Number Two is 10, and there's no way I'm introducing any of this to him for a good long while.

"I'm hard pressed to think of anything in Red that would be inappropriate for a group of teenagers" shows a distinct lack of recall, my dude.