Expanded Firearms Attachments for Cyberpunk Red

The Expanded Firearms Attachments Resource provides expanded homebrew weapon attachment items in the Cyberpunk Red game. This article provides explanations and details for those optional items.

These items are standalone, rule wise, and do not rely on each other to function. You can just ignore these items if you don't like them.

Weapon modding was absent in Cyberpunk 2020, because each weapon was unique and the whole system was much more granular. With the “flattening” of weapon into types, Cyberpunk Red provides a new way to make your character’s gun “YOUR gun” through weapon attachments.

This is a good system. However, I’ve seen many players who perhaps feel that Cyberpunk Red should have more gun attachments. I don’t think that this is because the system isn’t “deep enough” or lacking in options (in fact, it is already very deep, for a completely optional system). Rather, I just think that people like the fantasy of the hypermodifiable weapons that we see in video games. Guns are cool toys that are fun to customize, and that’s a fantasy that we like seen represented in our dark future/mad max TTRPG.

So, we want to have even more options to customize our weapons and, specifically to have most modern weapon attachments be available. However, I quickly came to realize that the reason that a lot of these attachments weren’t represented is that combat is already balanced on a knife’s edge.

As an attempt to avoid breaking the game AND as an attempt to tell you about the decisions I made to represent many modern weapon attachments, here’s my list of design decisions that I’ve made. My main goal was to avoid (as much as possible) to break CPRed’s combat

One of the first decision I took was to avoid recomplexifying the game’s weapons. u/CrestOfArtorias’ homebrew compendium, for example, introduces a lot of weapon attachments. The way they did so was by reintroducing concealability levels (like in Cyberpunk 2020), giving weapons locational attachment slots (barrel, top, grip, magazine, etc.) and creating more Single Shot DV Tables.

This isn’t a bad way to go about it if you have players who are really into gun customization and who are willing to deal with the crunch. This isn’t really to my personal tastes, however, so I instead went in with the philosophy that attachments should add fairly simple mechanics and shouldn’t be too heavily categorized.

In video games, weapon attachments are basically always used to improve your accuracy: they reduce recoil, they make you aim down the sights faster, etc. The way we represent accuracy in Cyberpunk Red is by rolling a weapon Skill Check, often against flat DVs based on the range of the shot. The problem with improving that roll is that it breaks the balance of combat.

All of that to say that, by adding just one or two +1 bonuses, you can easily make it that your character never misses… ever.

This is something I’ve already mentioned in my resource of variant and exotic weapons: Excellent Quality Weapons are already insanely powerful, as they grant you +1 to hit regardless of the combat situation.

In the game, currently, there are two attachments that grant bonuses to hit: the Smartgun Link (which requires an attachment, 2 attachment slots and cyberware) and the Sniping Scope (which gives its bonus only when firing at targets over 100m).

What I take away from this is the following: bonuses to hit are unconditional only at the cost of heavy investment in other areas. Moreover, I think that the SmartGun Link should be the only attachment that grants a flat bonus to hit.

It also needs to be impossible to have three different attachments that grant +1 to hit simultaneously, even conditionally, because this would mean that the player could just install those three attachments and completely avoid the heavy investment required by the SmartGun Link.

When I concluded that “+1 to hit” was a design dead end, I had to figure out other stats that the attachments could modify.

Granting improvements to MOVE, REF or DEX were not options. Creating a design that implies that holding an object would make you faster than holding nothing is kind of weird. Boosting REF is just giving the player a +1 to hit, but in a more convoluted way. DEX could be changed a bit, but, again, the problem is that it doesn’t make sense that your character would be better at a thing because they’re holding something than if they weren’t. Lowering DEX, MOVE or REF is also kind of nonsensical: how heavy would those weapon mods be that they end up with a similar drawback than carrying several pounds of body armor?

How, then, could we represent attachments that make it easier to manoeuvre in tight environments? Better grips, laser sights, lighter materials are all modifications that improve weapon manoeuvrability, especially in CQC Combat. It struck me: Initiative!

This system adds attachments that boost initiative when you are holding the weapon at the start of the turn.

Sidenote: if you use these attachments, your players should get used to calculate their Initiative with their weapon out and their normal Initiative, as they might need to switch between the two in combat. If they forget, they shouldn't get the benefits from the attachments. Adding cool toys with added mechanics should be done through teamwork at the table. I recommend that the GM make it clear that they aren't solely responsible for remembering this mechanic.

This comes with a few caveats. Like with weapons that increase chances to hit, there is a cap: attachments can only grant up to +3 Initiative, and this is only possible if you use a 2-slot attachment.

I feel like, while this does feel a bit gamey, increasing Initiative is a relatively conditional buff. Shooting faster doesn't necessarily mean that your players will win all the time (especially since, unlike in 2020, characters in RED can take a few more bullets before going down).

I’m sorry. I really wanted to include it, but I feel like it would break the system.

I’ve introduced a new scope with this resource, but, in a game where most fights happen in buildings or on city streets, adding an attachment that adds a +1 to hit in close range basically just means “add +1 to hit”. There is a case to be made that having a red dot sight on some weapons could be an interesting way to reduce the disadvantages of those weapons in close quarter environments (think of ARs or Sniper Rifles), but I think that such a condition is not, well, conditional enough.

If you want to justify it in-universe, you could choose to believe that red dot sights have become standard on all firearms: iron sights are a thing of the past, as cheap components have allowed manufacturers to ship weapons with integrated optical sights and holographic display sights. This is probably already the reason that R. Talsorian gives. A bit unsatisfying, but hey.

After saying all of this, I came to understand this expanded attachment system as a Triangular Chart with three axes: Efficiency, Speed and Utility.

Efficiency Attachments: Attachments that increase the chances to hit of the weapon or that help the weapon just be better. Maximizing this side of the chart means reducing your efficiency in close range and opting out of useful utility options. The most Efficient Attachment, in my eyes, is the SmartGun Link.

Speed Attachments: Attachments that improve your weapon’s manoeuvrability up close. Initiative boosting attachments go here. Maximizing this means reducing long-range potential to gain an advantage up close. The most Speedy Attachment, in my eyes, is the Short Barrel.

Utility Attachments: Attachments that give the weapons new useful tools and abilities. Maximizing this side of the chart means abandoning direct weapon upgrades to gain other abilities which improve your versatility in combat. The most Utilitarian Attachments, in my eyes, are the Underbarrel Weapons.

This way of thinking is useful because it shows how the different possible builds provide different options to players. Each Attachment comes with a rating I made up from 1-5 on how it rates in each of those categories.