Episode Details

How to play CY_BORG. Hi everyone, this is a special how to play episode of Firebreathing Kittens. I’m the game master for an upcoming session using the rules for CY_BORG. This episode is a summary of what I learned after reading the rule book. Hopefully this will be a handy guide for how to play for my players, will help me organize myself, and will be useful for you listeners, too, who are looking to play your own CY_BORG game.

I’ll organize this how to play guide into sections.

1. Game category

2. Combat rules

3. Zero hit points

4. Abilities

5. Apps

6. Nano powers

7. Glitches

8. Building an example character

Game category. CY_BORG is a game where you the players are pitted against the corp, the cops, and the capitalist system. There are mechanics for your character to implant cybertech, for you to hack tech using apps, to experience glitches online via your retinal com device that transfer to reality, to use drugs, for your character to become colonized by alien bacteria riding nanobots, or to become infected with the less helpful infestations of alien crabs, gills and tubes. The class you play as will impact your abilities, and include a shunned nanomancer, a burned hacker, an orphaned gearhead, and more. CY_BORG characters have five stat abilities: knowledge, agility, presence, strength, and toughness. Ability modifiers are added to your roll on a twenty sided dice, also called a d20, to determine if you meet to beat the difficulty rating to succeed. The difficulty ratings, or DR, range from 6 for a simple test, to 12 for normal difficulty, to 16 for really hard to accomplish tasks, to 18 for hurdles that are almost impossible to overcome. Roll the dice, add your ability modifier, and see if you meet to beat the difficulty rating to hack your way through the world of CY_BORG.

Let’s talk about combat rules in CY_BORG. If you’ve played Pirate Borg or Mork Borg, how to attack and defend will sound familiar. The core combat rules for the Borg games (Pirate Borg, CY_BORG, and Mork Borg) are pretty much the same. Here are the shared combat rules. I’m going to just like, read the summary of these, and then if that doesn’t make sense don’t worry, because I’ll do an actual example.

All the dice rolls in the Borg games are made by the players. That includes initiative, when players attack an enemy, and when players are defending against being attacked. The game master doesn’t ever have to roll dice.