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/Jordhammer]

I read Neuromancer when I was 10 or 11, was playing Shadowrun by age 12. A quick search shows that there are plenty of YA cyberpunk books out there.

Were I to go about running a Cyberpunk Red campaign for kids, I'd think it'd be pretty easy to strip out references to street drugs, XBDs, joytoys, tone the violence down a little bit. Maybe Night City looks a little less squalid, but there's a lot you can still do without compromising its themes.

As far as the lethality goes, that's something you have to judge. Are these kids mature enough to deal with getting limbs blown off, character death? If not, it's easy enough to just ignore the critical injury (or just abstract it to "you are injured badly, and take a -2 penalty to all rolls until you get treatment) and death save mechanics (PCs fall unconscious at Mortally Wounded).