Gun-free Cyberpunk

>>47216427
>Mirror's Edge
>Enemies literally have guns
>You take said guns from the enemies

But seriously, just do a setting where firearms are illegal (without getting into /pol/-tier arguments about whether legality actually stops guns from being around or not. It's a fantasy game, so the law just works here, OK Steve?).

>>47216427
Illegal possession of firearms, life in jail without chance for parole, shortening, or pardoning. Selling or smuggling firearms is instant death penalty, government controls production and distribution. Permission to own or carry firearm virtually impossible to acquire.

Deus Ex Hong Kong had a good system for it.
All over the city, there are microphones that are tuned specifically to pick up the sounds of gunfire and immediately alert police fast response teams to its exact location.

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>>47216427
Who needs guns? GUNS ARE FOR WUSSIES

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World has gone mad like in Mad Max, and everyone is too busy LARPing knights with cyber-blades to listen to voice of reason.

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Oor everything is a digital reality. Players are in the computer simulation, where no reason to do stuff has to exist - we are neon knights because why the hell not.

>>47216722
That's a good one.

Are gun-less games still fun to play? I know, depends on the group, but does anyone have experience doing this? Any stories?

>>47216427
Don't make it gunfree.

Make it near-gunfree.

You play in Cyberpunk Denmark, or Cyberpunk Japan or Cyberpunk England, and the culture combined with the laws combined with some faux history just happens to make guns rare.

The police (probably) has them, and you can find people who've been shot, but simply make it so most crimincal organizations on the ground level do not employ guns.

Explain it away with control and consequences - if they did employ guns, police and government would start noticcing more and getting worried. And, their rivals would escalate. Right now there's a teneous peace underscored by the fact they've agreed to keep guns to a minimum.

And also, it's the future. Imagine the kind of awful, awful weapons-grade destruction you could bring to bear if sufficiently motivated. Armor piercing self-correcting exploding rifle slugs, rifles that eat through buildings like they were paper, so on, so on. No one around /wants/ that kind of weaponry available on the street.

Thirdly, those guns people do use are home-made or put-together, and body-armor and defenses actually work against them on a much higher level than is the case now. At least if you use a sword or a bat or a knife you can target weak joints or bypass the defensive elements.

>>47216427
Society Australia'd their older guns. Most firearms are now heavily restricted. Megacorps do not sell firearms, they simply manufacture them and distribute them to their private militaries. Firearms have bio-locks that prevent people without the right signature from operating them. Fucking with this system or removing it somehow is the sort of thing that gets you blackbagged, as is owning or operating a firearm. Zip guns and black powder muzzle loaders, while hard to regulate, don't quite have a lot of sustained combat viability. What few black market firearms can be acquired require a lot more than money to get ahold of, meaning only those already in power have any real access to them. The PCs assume this happened gradually before their characters' time, succeeded and now guns aren't a huge part of the civilian culture of their world, so they grew up being less fetishized or romanticized as they are in modern America.

Besides, even the cops rarely bring their sidearms out, preferring the batons that short out cyberware and shock organic matter, shields that block civilian carried swords and maces well enough, and the compromise laws which made the ownership and carry of melee weapons lax enough for swords and shit to make a market comeback means pretty much anyone has at least a moderate degree of personal protection, which is magnified tenfold by having a few buddies with you even if only one or two of you are trained to use your shit. That's just how things are in 20XX.

Players will usually just accept that this is just how the game world works and ignore guns until the GM starts bringing them out this way more often than not, and accept that the point of the setting includes not having guns be the focal point of combat. The That Guy in training might get a souped up musket or something, but then you just occasionally throw opportunities for him to pick off a couple VIPs while the party lets him deal with the escalation of force he brings on himself.

Make drawing a firearm such a detriment to the PCs that it precludes their use in just about every setting.

For instance, the PCs can carry a gun on them, but getting caught in an automated security checkpoint with it instantly brings down tons of law enforcement on them... and the checkpoints are ubiquitous like security cameras. When you're sneaking into that office building, you'll ditch such gear because its more dangerous to carry than to not and not likely to make enough of a difference anyway.

Trying to use a loud weapon like firearms in more private territory might also invoke police presence to the point where suspected shots fired cause them to enforce curfews and searches on everyone, absolutely requiring conflicts to be resolved as discretely as possible for the safety of every criminal there. Single gunshot would have SWAT swarm the position, and a loudspeaker informing everyone that quarantine is in effect, return to your homes, anyone caught outside after X minutes will be considered a criminal or combatant.

Just think of the reasons why you don't carry a gun on your IRL and how police react to active shooters (Which is by assembling a team ASAP and going in heavy since there's less hostage situations and more indiscriminate attacks now). To use a real life analogy, it's one thing to walk in to the vault area as a confused citizen in a bank, it becomes an entirely different matter if you accidentally walk into one and are packing heat.

>>47216427

Hard, but not impossible. I personally like the idea of something like GUNM/Battle Angel Alita where guns are hard to come by and usually modified so they only work for the agents of the powers that be on official missions.

Having a martial arts renaissance based around cyberware modifications could also be pretty cool. If you frame it up as a martial arts/cyberpunk game it might be easier to swallow with no firearms?

A harder thing would make a cyberpunk weapon free (PS: england style of weapon free)

>>47216427
Yes, stop asking dumb questions like this were the answer is always yes. This is tabletop you can do anything you want, the question is how well.

>>47216427
No, it's absolutely impossible.
>GM makes game
>player says "I want gunz"
>GM says nogunz
>player says "I has gunz"
>GM cries but has to let player have gunz because player said he had gunz

>>47217553
Are you having a stroke?

>>47216427
Makes perfect sense for there there be no gunz in a cyberpunk world. A dystopian society would remove all weapons for its populace first and foremost so they are easy to control. Which is why the protagonist is always an outlaw or law enforcement officer. Because they would be the only ones with gunz and all the sheep get shit on endlessly.

So yes, you could have a cyberpunk game with not gunz but you would be the one getting shit on endlessly. If thats your thing.

>>47217990
Guns are really just an extension of power anyway. The standard protags in a cyberpunk setting already sit on the far side against monolithically strong enemies, so taking away their guns changes nothing -- in either case, they're still going up against odds far beyond what they should have any hope of winning against.

Really, the lack of a gun only changes how you fight and where your battleground is. Just because I can't gun down corporate security doesn't mean I couldn't infiltrate an office and spy on an executive officer or hack into databases and release a bunch of corporate data to news agencies and the population at large. Or garrote someone on a board of directors or blow up some warehouse full of goods. I'm just not going to be duking it out with security forces at every turn.

And what a lot of settings forget anyway, unless you're running as pink mohawk as you can, guns and combat should pretty much always be a last resort. Going loud brings down overwhelming forces on you and puts everything on lockdown mode.

It could be like China, where it's hard to get guns. Everyone would use knives and clevers and pipes and shit.

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>>47218181
But ultimately violence is the final solution. So you will have tools for dealing death, guns just happen to be the most common.

>>47216547
>You take said guns from the enemies

but mirror's edge practally encourages you to not use them though.

>>47220459
It does nothing of the sort

Guns are expensive.

Bullets are expensive/outlawed/heavily regulated (Going after manufacturers is easier than individuals)

Tightened gun laws and buy backs. There are fewer firearms to pilfer and the rest are registered.

Police presence. People above have already mentioned some stuff, but even if you manage to kill your target, they'll work on tracing the bullet/weapon, so getting away is even harder.

Social mores. If the people chose not to have guns, it'll be harder to get them and easier to track.

Better armor. Don't cheat the player and make some skin tight stuff completely bullet resistant, but a guy in heavy armor being escorted around won't fall to your common ammunition. Anything hat can pierce it gets everyone on your case, because they are afraid.

>>47220584
>>47220459

it challenges you not to use them, which isn't quite the same thing

>>47220459
>>47220584
>>47220836
Yes, BUT in Mirror's Edge 2, the guns go sliding down conveniently placed rain gutters or off buildings so you LITERALLY CANNOT use them in this one.

>>47216427
Go with Dune's approach. Personal high velocity shields are so common that guns are functionally useless. It's not that everyone has a shield, there's just enough people with one that no assassin, militia, police force, mugger, or criminal wants to risk bringing a gun to a fight where it it just a useless hunk of metal. Soon, guns are no longer mass produced and only exist in extremely narrow circumstances (like hunting, in places where that is still a thing).

>>47216427
see fates worse than death

>>47216427
Basically, you are going to have to make a gentleman's agreement with your players, and have fucking brilliant chase/conflict resolution mechanics to keep the numbers guys entertained.

In fact, I'd consider looking into a more storygames system, find something that has the mechanical crunch on nethacking or whatnot and do all the game-y stuff there.

>>47216427
Given the archetypal cyberpunk protagonist is a hacker, I don't see how it'd be at all difficult.

>>47220870
lol that's ridiculous

>>47220987
People who beat up cops get a lot of time in jail.

People who kill cops get hunted down forever. Emphasis on hunt, since they usually get blasted.

So from a story perspective, you can down play the heat easing up on you that you can go from one part of the city to another without being hassled.

>>47216427
I kiiiiiinda had an idea for a setting that takes place in a quarantine/asylum community where guns (and explosives, drugs, hazardous chemicals, etc) were not allowed with the area. The idea was that the everyone living in the quasi-city had contracted a disease of extraterrestrial/extradimensional origin, one of the symptoms of which was spontaneously running amok. The issue was that those who broke would always die of heart failure after some indeterminate amount of time (minutes or years), but would have insane luck during the duration of their rampage, possibly escaping the asylum and spreading it to the rest of the population. This was just used to justify the player characters and enemies fighting with Rad Martial Arts in a modern setting.

It wasn't a very good idea, but there may be something here that you can use, op

>>47216970
And if you DO find a gun, well golly gee, you might as well just have found a ring of wish.

Suddenly, a gun turns into a coveted death wand it's SUPPOSED to be, instead of a lead hose that you have a billion of on your person at all times.

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>>47221187
>you might as well just have found a ring of wish.
True, though it kind of has a curse - when even most of the cops don't have a gun, they tend to react strongly to firearms incidents

Any and all of these >>47220820 also apply, and most urban areas will be likely to have a CCTV presence

>>47217459
Martial arts, knives, and improvised weapons - if you drink and smoke and you've got a glass bottle and a lighter.
Running away is also important

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>>47223908

>>47216722
That's not from a videogame. It's called ShotSpotter and it's a real thing. The prototypes were developed in the early 90s. Gunshots have a specific signature that is pretty easy to recognize and locate. Military humvees have portable versions to locate snipers.

>>47218199
Depends on where you are in china, a farmer way out in the middle of nowhere can get firearms from the government for dealing with pests and its tightly controlled.

>>47216427
that would be the most retarded setting ever.

>we have electro swords
>nope no guns
>NO GUNS
>I SAID NO FUCKING GUNS
>AHHHHHH KATANA DOMO ARIGATO MR ROBOTO

>>47216547
even in a fantasy setting there is going to be criminals with complete disregard for the law.

>>47216427

Dune style personal shielding is your best bet.

Basically just make it so that everybody has access to functionally perfect shielding to projectiles going over a certain velocity.

You could go the Metal Gear Rising route and make guns pointless because some opponents are drugged or cybered up to the point where they can dodge/parry bullets without even trying.

Alternatively, incentivize your players to go along with the feel and aesthetic you're hoping for. Give them bonuses for cool melee weapon designs. Have a pink mohawk count as whatever helmet they want. Make gun-wielding enemies total chumps they wouldn't want to emulate. Essentially, the gentlemen's agreement mentioned above.

>>47224262
Then you make a grenade launcher that fires under that velocity and uses the targets shield to limit the damage to him even at close range.

>>47216427
I'm running a Shadowrun game where one of the PC's is a chucker Adept. She doesn't need guns because she throws pencils hard enough to punch through body armor. Don't even get me started on her actual knives.

Shadowrun can absolutely do this - You use adepts instead of street sams, or street sams with a tone of melee 'ware, the Rigger is a wheelman instead of an armed drone pilot, the decker's role doesn't change at all, and the mage is still the same too.

It's a mildly interesting challenge, but doesn't change much.

>>47225669
Yeah but shadowrun's answer is just magic, which is shit

>>47216970
>>47216991
>>47217298
Best answers by far. Thanks.

>>47216427
Just run a Jedi campaign with Shien experts and fill it out with a lot of counterintelligence and sabotage.
Alternatively, play superheroes but make all the enemies evil corporations and rogue intelligence elements.

>cyberpunk is all about inhumanity and how society can lean towards focusing on technology over morality
>abandon one of the most obvious ways to get that across
lol no

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>>47216427
>Cyberpunk
>Gun free

>>47216427
I have a setting based on the cornetto's trilogy having happened at the same time.

Psychic powers

>>47216427
>gun-free
You mean only guns, or other kind of range weapon?

Depends how cyber everyone is. If bodies are a consumable and consciousness is spread across the net, shooting someone might be akin to denting his car. A minor expense and annoyance.

>>47225669
Ha, I did the same thing in times past with throwing forks

Fun as hell character, but a bit too easy mode for me to do again

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How about pic related? Cyberpunk, very few guns. You sneak past everything.

>>47224188
>because of this, integrally silenced firearms become ubiquitous and low weight calibers fall out of favor
I can dig it.

>>47216881
>Are gun-less games still fun to play?
Sure:
Kung fu fights
Knife duels
Rooftop/market street chases
Car chases

Plenty of action to be had. if you think the fights last to long, just make it more realistic. If you throw somebody on their head or neck they can die instantly. A knife wound in a major artery kills you in seconds.

Or sod fighting altogether. Everyone is a hacker of some description. Got caught in the meatspace, ded.