Revisiting Gibson's
Burning Chrome (the anthology, not only the titular story) what's more striking now than in my first pass years ago is that most of the stories are a contest between two competent opponents with tricks up their sleeves. Sometimes very literally in the case of implants, sometimes with preparation or tactics or positioning. What I remember of novel length cyberpunk fits in there as well, competent protagonists up against competent antagonists, and everyone has a plan and resources.
That's an important deep structure that's orthogonal to just chrome, implants and wallowing in moral ambiguity. Not in conflict with any of the latter, but separate from it, and still important in its own right.
But it takes some work to pull off in an rpg. Easier to go room to room or scene to scene, mowing down goblins or thugs than to face one roughly equal foe across multiple scenes before the PCs eke out a win by having just one more trick up their sleeves than their opponent(s).
Shadowrun and the Cyberpunk rpg's emphasis on heists is one solution. PCs do crime or mercenary missions not only for the moral ambiguity but because there's naturally an information gathering phase, a planning phase, a gearing up phase, an infiltration phase, a denouement/shootout phase, and a getaway phase. (Admittedly any of these phases can be skipped, and I've known players who skip intel, planning and infiltration to get straight to the gunfight but you take my point... the option is there.) So that gives you your prepared protagonists, up against an opponent competent enough to require that planning & etc. in the first place, and that approximates the source fiction.
Then secondarily, there's a hair more moralizing than I remembered. In
Dogfight the protagonist crosses a moral line to get the drug boost he needs to win, but loses everything by doing so. In some of the stories where the protagonist is dark, his opposition is darker. So there's an echo of pulp there, that a light grey "hero" in a dark grey world still have a glimmer of light around them. None of them are paladins, but some of them end up in the position of Conan killing the slaver/kidnapper over a card game - their minimal code of honor
sometimes redeems them into doing good despite themselves.
Or, when they don't, and they're willing to cross the line to win, they end up suffering for doing so after all.
All of which is to say...
The Cyberpunk genre isn't about the hardware or the Net. It's about the devaluation of humanity, it's about making a virtue out of greed, it's about hopelessness, hunger, and those brave enough to rebel against a system that offers no hope at all. It's about the transition from Man the Tool User to Man the Machine Tool.
Yes, but its not the only thing going on. Its not the structure of the adventure.
If it's played as William Gibson or Bruce Sterling intended it to, players should feel just a little bit guilty about the nasty crap they had to do to accomplish the mission.
This doesn't follow though. Its one option, certainly, but in some of the source fiction it goes the other way, that the "hero" pays the price for going too far.
