If you're a Cyberpunk RED player, please skip this post - it contains spoilers for Tales of the Red: Reaping the Reaper.

I GM'd the Drone Fight scene in Reaping the Reaper (Tales of the Red, p94) last session. Here's my set up and thoughts on the module:

Background

The players are picking up a mcguffin for their Johnson in a container port. The opposition is an evil AI called the Reaper. It is aware of the pickup and attacks the party with a handful of drones. The drones are fragile but very mobile.

The module doesn't state the reason for the scene, but I'm guessing it's to show off the Reaper's green skull symbol.

As written, the scene happens after the players pick up the mcguffin, but I moved it to before. Why? I'm not sure - I think I prefer a reward at the end of a fight.

Setup

For a battlemap I used New Atami Container Port - it's large, and I wanted to be able to have some strategic play from the drones. Here's a free alternative, but it's tiny.

The drones only have 15 or 20 HP, and no SP, so I added another Drone Swarm. For the tokens, I used PeaPu's Cyberpunk vehicles. The three drone swarms only have a melee attack, while the heavy air drone has a ranged attack.

I added a friendly security guard that was taking the crew to the mcguffin. He was mostly there for colour.

Rules Adjustment

I allowed players to hop onto containers with a DV 12 Athletics check. Success got them onto the box at the cost of one movement, failure left them on the ground and cost two movement.

Play

I played the drones carefully: the drones have a MOV of 8, so they used the containers as cover and swung around to try and catch the players when they came out of cover. The lack of range weapons on the drone swarms sucked: they couldn't hit a player and get back under cover.

Halfway through the encounter, I ended up giving the drone swarms a light handgun (2d6 damage, ROF2) to present more of a challenge.

The players were able to mostly stay under cover. One of them screwed up and stayed out of cover, taking a few hits.

Analysis of Play

Good:

• the map was great for the ranged drone: it was able to (mostly) stay under cover and land a couple of shots.

• the mechanics of jumping up onto the boxes was nice - it gave the players a way to extend their vision, while jumping off got them into cover. The combat optimized character essentially got the jumps for free (they could only fail on a critical failure), while the other characters failed once, so that added some nice differentiation.

• the friendly security guard presented some colour

Analysis of Module

• The drones don't have enough HP/SP to challenge the players. If I hadn't buffed them, the scene would have been over in a round or two.
• There isn't a plot reason for this encounter: it presents the Reaper's green skull, and uses some of their HP/SP/ammo, but it doesn't move the story forward. It feels like a D&D attrition fight.
• There's a NetArch in the ranged drone. But with a MOV of 8 it's not clear how a Netrunner would maintain contact.

If I ran it again

The scene needs a reason to exist. I'd give it three reasons:

1. The drones are trying to kill the friendly security guard, since he knows where the mcguffin is. They focus him in the fight. If the friendly dies, then the players face a complication to find the mcguffin.

2. The drones should be a threat. I'd have one drone per PC. When they can't hit the friendly, they fire on the players. I'd make each drone a heavy air drone and give it 7 SP on top of 20 HP. Alternatively, buffing the MOV on the swarm from 8 to 12 could give them enough range for melee attacks.

3. Introduce the Reaper (beyond the green skull): give it some dialog from the drones. Troll the players. The Reaper seems like it would troll its victims.

I'd been planning on the Reaper possessing a couple of cranes in the terminal and using them as an environmental weapon. Something like a single attack on the players per round, with a DV 15 Evasion check to avoid 2d6 damage as the magnetic hook drops on them (players can disable the cranes with an aimed shot on the crane's camera that's 25 meters away). But I got carried away and forgot.

Conclusion

This is a poorly designed encounter: it has no reason to exist, the opposition doesn't challenge the players, and there isn't a player goal beyond kill all the ~~goblins~~ drones.

I didn't put much effort into rewriting this encounter, because I'm coming off of Agents of Desire (also Tales of the Red) which is great and needed no extra GM work. I just assumed this one would be good.