Two of the roads with the most traffic to Cyberpunk RED are, naturally, players of Cyberpunk 2077 and players of older tabletop editions like Cyberpunk 2020. However, once arriving at their new carmine destination there are naturally going to be a few disconnects, and one of the biggest is in the nature of combat. The smart Cyberpunk 2020 party wanted to blast their opponents to chunky salsa as fast as possible and often could, and V eventually becomes a cybergod capable of mowing through entire gangs on their own. Cyberpunk RED characters are themselves tougher in turn than their 2020 counterparts, but they simply can’t go through their enemies that fast. Aaron pondered changes to the combat rules but found that, as with anything else, fiddling with the wiring that already exists can pose a lot of challenges. I’m not fiddling with the wires, so much as I’m adding an attachment (much like the Cyberpunk RED Luck Deck from that same article) – and I’m stealing from a galaxy far, far away to do it. 

Well, that and Genesys. 

The problems with Mook-grade antagonists in Cyberpunk RED, from my perspective anyway, come in three flavors. First, they’re often going to have close to the same number of hit points as a player character, so if they’ve got any sort of decent protection they can take quite a bit of punishment. Yes, CabbageCorp’s first big fight was a ‘steamroll’ – but from my perspective as the Media what stuck out the most is that one of the downed NPCs was the majority of the party pouring two entire rounds worth of fire into the same guy until our melee fighters got into it. A pack of solos we were not.

Second, they’re just… not that good? If the party has high REF+Evasion and/or grabs the Reflex Co-Processers out of Black Chrome the attacks of a Mook are going to struggle to hit anything, and as Aaron found even without going up against those kinds of player characters a Mook is going to often have problems. Hardened Mooks are certainly a thing, and a useful one, but then you run into the issue of them being intended for an entire party of combat-specced players. 

Thirdly, at a recommended 1:1 ratio of Mooks to Player Characters, they’re simply not very dynamic. There is only so much you can do with a constant 6v6, and it’s even worse at a smaller number. 

So, what I’ve pulled out and modified from the Star Wars Narrative Dice Roleplaying Games and Genesys are the Minion rules. Here’s how they work in Cyberpunk RED:

• Take or create a Mook-level NPC, but reduce its HP to 5.

• A Minion can be in a Minion Group, consisting of up to 5 Minions. 

• A Minion Group acts together on the same initiative, and rolls once for any Action.

• For every Minion in a Group after the first, add +1 to a die roll. 

• For every Minion in a Group after the first, add +1 to any damage they deal. Addendum: This works the same way as the Solo’s Spot Weakness ability when it comes to Autofire, i.e. you add the damage after multiplying before applying SP. Thanks to R Tal Discord member Katja for pointing out this use case!

• When the Minion Group takes damage, apply it to the first Minion as normal, reducing damage by SP and dealing the remainder to HP. If that Minion is killed, remaining damage is applied to the next Minion in the group, repeating until all damage has been applied.

• Rolling a Critical Injury automatically kills a Minion, with the damage from the attack being applied to the next Minion in the Group.

• Minions do not suffer penalties from being Seriously Wounded. 

• Damage that affects an area, like explosions or gasses, can affect multiple Minions in a Group at once.

So, what do we gain from Minions in Cyberpunk RED? Well, first of all, it’s about the vibes. 4 Road Ganger Mooks against four player characters? Okay, sure, sounds even enough. 20 Road Ganger Minions? Alright, now first of all that’s a bit more intimidating, and second of all when they get mowed down after putting a few rounds in our nominal heroes it’s going to be more satisfying.

Just as important, however, is that we gain a much more precise dial with which to modify the difficulty of an encounter, or rather a series of dials. First you determine how many Minions you want to throw into the mix, and how many are going to be in each Minion Group. Generally speaking I’ve found five Minions in a Minion Group, with one Group per 1-2 player characters, to be a good starting point. From there, though, you can adjust in a number of different ways. A solitary, non-Group Minion can be useful as an obstacle outside of the strictest definition of combat, like a guard you need to approach and take out without being seen. When Grouping Minions you can challenge the party with the action economy by keeping the same total number but in smaller more numerous groups, or make each group more dangerous by maxing it. Fifteen solo Minions is very different from three groups of five Minions is very different from five groups of three Minions.

The next dial on the board is armor. With the same amount of Hit Points, which armor you put them in is going to not only be a difficulty marker but also a clear indicator to the party of how they might want to proceed. The weakest weapon that a player character is liable to start with is a Heavy Pistol, 3d6 damage. That means that with just some average luck your Heavy Pistol user is going to be able to one shot a Minion wearing Leather armor. Put your Minions in Kevlar? The 4d6 Very Heavy Pistol will probably do the trick. Start getting into Armorjacks, and you’ll want to break out the 5d6 Assault Rifles and Shotguns and so on. What’s extra good about this is that we’re simply talking in averages, here your H. Pistol-carrying Media could still one-shot an Armorjack-wearing Minion if they get very lucky on the dice – actually, given the rules above, they might even pop two. Even if they don’t get one-shotted, you’re probably not going to have to hit a Minion more than twice or so to drop it. 

The greatest asset of Cyberpunk RED Minions, then, is the ability to adjust difficulty in such a way as to challenge every kind of player character while also making nearly every player character feel useful. A full Minion Group is more likely a threat to characters skilled at Evasion, but are not too much more dangerous to nor immune to non-combat-focused characters, and losing their bonuses to action checks and damage rolls gives a clearer sense of making progress and rewards picking them off. Aside from the dial for how many and how many per group, you can also make them more dynamic on the fly – say you have a group of five engaging the party’s Solo and the Netrunner who has just downloaded the data they need, and the ‘runner makes a break for it. You could keep the Minion Group as a whole on the same initiative order, but send two of them after the ‘runner and keep three on the Solo to pin them down.

Now, there’s an obvious weakness of the Minions (aside from being blown up, which is a weakness for any clustered group of enemies), even if they’re in a Group of five – since Minions very often have more SP than they have HP, Melee and Martial Arts-using PCs that halve that SP are often going to only need below average luck on their damage dice to not at least drop one. This is somewhat balanced by the fact that the vast majority of Minions are not going to be able to dodge bullets, but they are going to be able to try to dodge melee attacks, with their bonus to Evasion representing the pressure of a player character rushing into a group. Still, you may want to consider ditching the halving-SP rule if you find things being, ahem, cut too short.

Of course, off of this page one should always use their best judgment – actually running 15 separate Minions will probably be a pain in the neck, there might be circumstances where you don’t think the bonus to rolls applies, or you might decide to turn up the difficulty by Minionizing Hardened Mooks or even Lieutenants. I’ve been stress-testing them pretty hard as I run my own game. I opened the campaign with an attack by many five-man squads of Security Operative Minions. I sprinkled a few solo Road Ganger Minions on motorbikes to beef up a cargo truck escort. I sent some solitary Minionized Fools from the Danger Gal Dossier to try and sneak in to trigger a Mass Addiction Event, before sending another twenty of them in groups of five hurtling towards the party on a punknaught, accompanied by Tomfool and Dunce from the same book.

They’ve been gunned down, blown up, had a stair tower dropped on them, punched, run off the road, and in a few notable occurrences eaten – but they’ve also sent the player characters scrambling both to avoid harm and to stop them from completing objectives, dealt out a fair amount of damage and even a few Critical Injuries, and given everyone at The Alleyway something they can handle in a Friday Night Firefight.

Throw some Cyberpunk RED Minions at your own party of edgerunners, and let me know how it goes!