“I didn’t become a clown because all the serious roles were taken. I became a clown because all the serious roles were tainted.”

In all my years of role-playing, no character became as fully formed, as vivid in my mind, as Tickles the Clown. Tickles was a Rockerboy, a charisma-based character class from the Cyberpunk TTRPG. Tickles demanded that the world take him exactly as seriously as he intended, no more and no less. He raged against the canon ‘boostergang’ the Bozos, who used clown makeup for violence and to hide terrifying cybernetic augmentations. He drummed and sang in a band called Clown Town, becoming the house act and face of the game’s setting, a squatter bar called The Alleyway. Tickles knew what he wanted to be, and earned grudging respect across Night City for his antics and his talent.

Tickles is also the only character I have prematurely retired in 25 years of gaming. By being a Rockerboy he was uniquely unsuited for the combat-centric setting, a myopic play restriction that was never truly solved over four editions of Cyberpunk game mechanics and honestly hobbles an entire swathe of mainstream RPGs. He was not a team player; my understanding of Tickles and my choice to stay in character any time he was on screen irritated most of the other players at least once, either in ways I didn’t particularly care about when they were trying for mechanically optimal play, or ways that I’m a bit more sorry for when he was hogging spotlight and being his smartass self while talking over other players.

No longer playing Tickles in the game I wrote him for, a game that is still ongoing, was likely the right choice. It is a choice, though, that has highlighted in my mind a bright line across the sky for the way I intend to play tabletop roleplaying games going forward. On one hand is the route that generated Tickles: RPGs are about characters, RPGs are about stories. When you take the structure of a modern traditional RPG at face value, though, it is about a group of contract killers murdering their way to their goals. It sounds insane, but it’s true: Traditional RPGs are descended from wargames and the most refined mode of mechanical engagement is combat. Lucky for me and the entire hobby, there are many RPGs that aren’t like that, and if I want to ever write a character like Tickles again, it will be in one of those games, games that center who the character is and what they can do broadly instead of in a statistical simulacrum of killing.

There is another route, one that is loyal to the traditional mechanics of a TTRPG but approaches the inherent wargame problem more holistically. The movement with the most exposure and critical work done in this space is known as the OSR, standing for either Old School Revival or Old School Renaissance, depending on who you ask. The movement itself isn’t without its problems; any movement as revanchist as the OSR is with respect to its hobby would definitionally attract a whole tasting menu of problematic attitudes. But there is something at the core of the OSR which is uniquely appealing to me, and something that I will without a doubt incorporate in any traditional RPG I run going forward. Although there are many commentators who have written something similar, Yochai Gal’s Basic OSR Principles is both succinct and uses a phrase I quite like: Combat is war, not a sport. It encapsulates exactly the problems I have with how most RPGs structure combat, and with the primary design choices in Cyberpunk Red (the edition which birthed Tickles the Clown) that made it objectively worse than its predecessor, Cyberpunk 2020. There’s another one, a few bullet points up, that further puts a point on my issue with how most traditional RPG campaigns are structured: Violence is not the goal.

Tickles the Clown is, on paper, a mediocre Cyberpunk character. Although I’ve said before (and I still mean it) that Cyberpunk Red has much better mechanical writing for a lot of the non-core character concepts (as opposed to classes like the Solo, the Medtech, and the Netrunner which have definitive core roles), its trip off to ‘balance town’ to make the combat “fairer” was exactly the wrong direction for the game in terms of its place in my personal library. Now, because I’ve defended the mechanical decisions here in the past, I should say: there are a lot of reasons that the choices were correct ones for Cyberpunk as a ‘product’, and Cyberpunk Red is successful in ways Cyberpunk 2020 simply wasn’t in part because of this pivot to be just a bit more D&D-like. In my experience, though, it did to Cyberpunk the same thing that the Third Edition of D&D did to that franchise: It removed the plausible deniability that the game mechanics could be about anything other than combat and combat character optimization. Ironically it did that by making combat more survivable; the reasons that OSR games typically focus on low power and high lethality are encapsulated in Adam (pen name Rutskarn) DeCamp’s brilliant essay ‘Boot Hill and the Fear of Dice’. By combining the almost comically lethal Boot Hill cowboy RPG with a fully populated wild west town with families, factions, and feuds, DeCamp had an experience that led him to state that “Boot Hill is the best political intrigue system I’ve ever used”. This wasn’t a game without combat, mind, just a game where every combat, whether it involved the players or not, mattered. There were always stakes. It is fair to note that while before I said that Yochai Gal stated Violence is not the goal, I should provide his full sentence: Violence is fun but also not the goal.

Tickles the Clown would be a much more interesting character in a more old school Cyberpunk game. A clown is obviously going to fight dirty, and a Rockerboy controls the narrative; hell, that’s half of what made the Cyberpunk 2077 version of Johnny Silverhand’s story so interesting. Having to allocate character resources to keep Tickles alive in a wargame-cum-RPG diluted the character, and even with those compromises the character basically made it to the end of his time onstage alive by the mercy of the GM. When I wrote Tickles’ replacement, I made a dedicated support character who drives and fixes vehicles, and while his personality is more subdued and backstory downright anodyne, he’s actually more fun to play in the ‘play’ parts of the game. You know, because he actually can do things, and doesn’t suck at most of the mechanical bits. Is he a “better” character than Tickles? Absolutely not, but as it turns out, trad RPGs like Cyberpunk Red aren’t exactly the USA Network.

At the same time, a more narrative game could also give Tickles some juice. Tickles was a very driven character, and his lofty (if self-serving) attitudes about clowning would work great in a system where character progression is administered by Drives or Beliefs. It could also open the stage to the fact that Tickles was a very damaged character, something I alluded to constantly during the game but never elaborated on. A game like The Veil would be a perfect place to expand on Tickles and all of his inherent contradictions, without needing any more violence beyond what would fit with the character.

If I had to choose? Old-school Tickles would probably work best for me. That does mean that there’s a version of Tickles’ story where he dies a premature, messy death, but man if that isn’t a completely reasonable end for a clown in a cyberpunk dystopia. Win, lose, or draw, the story of a clown in Night City would just work better if the city was as dangerous for its player characters as it implies it is for the rest of its inhabitants. And this really drives the point home to me at least that Cyberpunk 2020 needs a place somewhere in the OSR. Whatever game that comes out of it won’t be Cyberpunk 2020, and that’s OK; Into the Odd isn’t D&D either. Still, taking the Boot Hill vibes that exist in Cyberpunk 2020 and marrying them up to some good prep systems like what you see in something like Electric Bastionland and you’d really have something. At the absolute least, you’d have a better game in which to house Tickles the Clown.