Good read overall, though I'd point out a couple of things, even as a Cyberpunk fan, the life path thing is interesting, but was all the rage back in the day. In Traveller (1977) you could infamously die during character generation as you would roll for what happened in your various service related lifepath tours which could range from learning skills, being maimed, going to jail for 20 years (and potentially thus being unavailable for the game) or indeed dying. There was also an old swords and sorcery game I think Chivalry and Sorcery (also 1977) where you would randomly generate your background that then informed your attributes and could mean your idea of a noble knight ended up being a clubfooted exile born under the wrong star sign.
You can compare this with things like the more modern 7th Sea where you can create your own narrative hooks in your backstory and then earn XP when the GM uses them as another way to encourage creating whole backstories.
Combat back in old school RPGS was also noticeably more deadly in general. Early Shadowrun (my personal preference for cyberpunk rpgs) was very deadly where a non combat specced character could often be taken out in a single shot and even OWoD (old World of Darkness eg Vampire et al) combat was dangerously swingy even for people prepared for it. Call of Cthulhu you mention but there was also the knock off Chill (my physics professor character was eaten by a sentient 4th dimension tesseract, way back in 89, as there was no actual way of fighting back) and Kult (come to think of it, another Cthulhu knock off) in which dying was very easy. Alien, the Roleplaying game was so lopsided you would be lucky to get a single player out the other end as well. Delta Green (again a spin off from Cthulhu) would have your soldier pretty overmatched. I think Gamma World was the one where character gen was almost entirely random meaning you could end up being a sentient tree with the ability to mind murder people, or being a near normal human who can breathe underwater which had pretty big implications for survivability in a post nuclear wasteland.
I think Cyberpunk is excellent but I'd submit luck also played a pretty big role in it's resurgence as there are lots of rpgs that did mostly what it did as well. Perhaps the biggest thing is that Pondsmith largely kept control of it so it didn't get hobbled with things like the FASA and TSR collapses.
That and the resurgence of 80's/90's aesthetics and nostalgia probably helped. I'd second that Cyberpunk 2020 is the best tabletop version, just as Shadowrun 2nd was the best it ever got (even if they mostly failed to predict wireless connectivity so you end up having to manually plug computers together).
Edit and how can I forget Rolemaster? Critical hit tables so bad the joke was that most characters died from tripping and receiving an E class critical. At least there was more variability than in Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay - you did hear "Death from shock and blood loss is almost instantaneous" a lot in that game.
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Notes -
You're in my house now Kulak cracks my knuckles
Good read overall, though I'd point out a couple of things, even as a Cyberpunk fan, the life path thing is interesting, but was all the rage back in the day. In Traveller (1977) you could infamously die during character generation as you would roll for what happened in your various service related lifepath tours which could range from learning skills, being maimed, going to jail for 20 years (and potentially thus being unavailable for the game) or indeed dying. There was also an old swords and sorcery game I think Chivalry and Sorcery (also 1977) where you would randomly generate your background that then informed your attributes and could mean your idea of a noble knight ended up being a clubfooted exile born under the wrong star sign.
You can compare this with things like the more modern 7th Sea where you can create your own narrative hooks in your backstory and then earn XP when the GM uses them as another way to encourage creating whole backstories.
Combat back in old school RPGS was also noticeably more deadly in general. Early Shadowrun (my personal preference for cyberpunk rpgs) was very deadly where a non combat specced character could often be taken out in a single shot and even OWoD (old World of Darkness eg Vampire et al) combat was dangerously swingy even for people prepared for it. Call of Cthulhu you mention but there was also the knock off Chill (my physics professor character was eaten by a sentient 4th dimension tesseract, way back in 89, as there was no actual way of fighting back) and Kult (come to think of it, another Cthulhu knock off) in which dying was very easy. Alien, the Roleplaying game was so lopsided you would be lucky to get a single player out the other end as well. Delta Green (again a spin off from Cthulhu) would have your soldier pretty overmatched. I think Gamma World was the one where character gen was almost entirely random meaning you could end up being a sentient tree with the ability to mind murder people, or being a near normal human who can breathe underwater which had pretty big implications for survivability in a post nuclear wasteland.
I think Cyberpunk is excellent but I'd submit luck also played a pretty big role in it's resurgence as there are lots of rpgs that did mostly what it did as well. Perhaps the biggest thing is that Pondsmith largely kept control of it so it didn't get hobbled with things like the FASA and TSR collapses.
That and the resurgence of 80's/90's aesthetics and nostalgia probably helped. I'd second that Cyberpunk 2020 is the best tabletop version, just as Shadowrun 2nd was the best it ever got (even if they mostly failed to predict wireless connectivity so you end up having to manually plug computers together).
Edit and how can I forget Rolemaster? Critical hit tables so bad the joke was that most characters died from tripping and receiving an E class critical. At least there was more variability than in Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay - you did hear "Death from shock and blood loss is almost instantaneous" a lot in that game.
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