I should preface this by saying that while I have played both in years-long Shadowrun campaigns and newer games like Remember Tomorrow, Technoir, The Sprawl or Eclipse Phase, I have never actually run a long-term Cyberpunk game.

Thinking about how I would go about that, picking a system seems like the easier part. I'm fairly set on Classic Traveller or using (at some point) my own system.

Because I have long fallen out of love with any kind of pre-plotted, arc-driven game, it would have to be a sandbox campaign for which there are quite a few tools and table-collections by now.

The main problem, as far as I see it, is figuring out the core gameplay loop.

My base requirements are as follows:

• A city-setting.
• Iterable gameplay.
• Non-trivial gameplay.
• Freedom of choice.

Iterable gameplay: This is what enables long-term play in a sandbox environment. A rinse-and-repeat activity that player characters engage in. Dungeoncrawling or exploring wilderness-hexes in D&D, planet hopping-patron searching-mission accepting in Traveller. Note that a progression system (XP,...) is explicitly not required. Traveller has amply proven this since 1977.

Non-trivial gameplay: If the main player-character activity doesn't require the players to think, plan ahead and engage with the game world, if any action is just a sequence of – however narratively embellished – die-rolls, pure narration in the absence of tangible obstacles or aimless "Tavernenspiel", I don't see it carrying long-term sandbox play.

Freedom of choice: As Zedeck Siew puts it, doing the right thing should be "a moral decision, [not] a mercenary one" (Lorn Song of the Bachelor, p. 46).

How well do established and more experimental Cyberpunk game loops fit these criteria?

Shadowrunners: The player characters are hired to go on missions as deniable assets operating outside the law. They break into places and digital systems to steal technology and information, extract people or sabotage competition in other ways.

PRO: Highly iterable. As evidenced by rules for lifestyle costs including hospitalisation and missing payments the player characters go on runs again and again because they have running costs. Compare this to a ship's crew in Traveller that must keep paying off the debt on their ship and avoid having to skip payment. In its simplest form, a run can be a building plan pulled from the Internet and annotated by the GM. This kind of modern dungeoncrawl is notorious for grinding play to a halt as players meticulously plan out the run having to account for the dynamic city environment as well as different security layers. Non-trivial gameplay thus goes without saying. Doing the right thing is certainly possible. See for example the glorious Actual Play described here.

At this point, given it checks all boxes, why not just use the Shadowrun loop?

CON: It feels contrived. Especially in a modern setting, a world of nation states, the idea of freewheeling, heavily-armed adventurer-types is even more ahistoric than in faux-medieval fantasy settings. Shadowrun assumes a future where megacorporations replaced nation states, so they might need people to do what militaries, secret police or intelligence agencies used to do. But such a future seems very unlikely today. And even then: Why not throw influencers, lobbyists and lawyers at competition? Why not just have a competitor's employees do the industrial espionage? Why not have a troublesome journalist or climate activist disposed of by cheap killers or local thugs without even having to give explicit instructions? I just don't buy the idea that capitalism is not predatory enough without armed retainers. Opposed to, say, government-use spyware, securitising refugee camps, the impact of social media or disinformation campaigns, hiring Shadowrunners seems like a cartoon-version of evil.

Organised crime: The player characters are actual criminals.

PRO: As opposed to Shadowrunners, cartels et cetera do exist.

CON: Not iterable. Since the player characters are tied to one organisation instead of contractors for everyone who pays, it would seem weird to hand them the same or similar missions again and again. It seems to me that a criminal organisation would prefer quiet, long-term logistics over repeated, individual hits. And given their involvement in trafficking, prostitution, forced labour and all sorts of abject human misery, play would not be much fun either unless in a safe and sanitised form.

Gangs: As opposed to criminal gangs which late 80s US-Cyberpunk is obsessed with as antagonists, Mike Pondsmith suggests the players might be interested in portraying "gangs [...] created for positive purposes - neighbourhood defense, to stop other more violent gangs, or to resist a major invasion by Government or the Corps. In this context, you could look at Robin Hood or the WWII Resistance as gangs." (Cyberpunk 2020, p. 188).

PRO: This appears very different from classic mission-based gameplay. Acquiring resources, fixing problems, settling conflicts within the community, dealing with outside threats could be rinse-and-repeat, non-trivial activities. A recent example of this, building on Blades in the Dark, is A/state 2E in which the player characters build up and defend their corner of the city.

CON: If the gang does not expand outwards, it becomes harder to provide fresh content. A threat-of-the-week mode would get boring at some point. Also, again, this loop removes interesting, technology-impacted features of modern society, the state, corporations, the legal system, civil organisations and reduces their influence to the point where a gang, commune or neighbourhood committee could freely take over their functions. This is more postapocalypse than near-future. For less of a genre shift, the focus could be explicitly on out-groups like the replicants in Blade Runner or 964 Pinocchio's runaway cyborgs. It could be argued that these are just safe stand-ins for real-world dehumanisation, though.

Dissidents: As a game that supposedly wants the player characters to "start the rebellion" (Cyberpunk 2020, p. 4) it is at least a bit odd that none of the teams Cyberpunk 2020 suggests as adventure hooks is straight up politically motivated. As a game loop, political struggle would see player characters organise people, distribute information, agitate, protest, target corporate or government installations and personnel while staying alive and out of prison.

PRO: The activities listed above seem iterable and non-trivial enough. Despite the fact that successful political revolutions - let alone social ones - seem less and less likely in the future, and doubly so in an urban setting, political struggle still makes for a very realistic campaign frame.

CON: This loop assumes proactive players coming up with ideas of how the player characters may further their political goals. They can not simply be handed the next mission, no questions asked. Freedom of choice is a very difficult problem here. If players agree on playing people who have already chosen to do the right thing (or believe they do), the characters never face that choice in play. There are other choices (over selling out or the means of resistance), but it still seems limiting. Maybe that is the reason why Mike Pondsmith does not offer it as a campaign frame.

Cops: Cyberpunk 2020 does suggest playing cops or a corporate team. The game Corporation is focussed on playing corporate agents who acquire licenses for all kinds of extralegal activities up to and including the killing of civilians as they rise up through the ranks. Less violent examples would be playing corporate lobbyists like in Miss Sloane or Infomocracy.

PRO: While it seems a little harder to prepare and justify missions for both cops and corporate personnel than for all-purpose adventurers like Shadowrunners, it should still be iterable enough while feeling more grounded in reality. The characters certainly have the freedom to turn against their state or corporate masters.

CON: This is hardly -punk.

Journalists: Media teams are mentioned in Cyberpunk but like touring rock bands and paramedics this seems like a niche option.

CON: Research, conducting interviews, occasional break-ins et cetera do not seem iterable in the long-term. Similar to personal drama, I expect the GM would have to do a lot of heavy lifting to get this to work.

Personal drama: A lot of advice for running Cyberpunk, the game, says that it is really about the characters personal issues, relationships, enemies and so on. Given the life path character creation, I can see where that advice comes from. Shadowrun also has a reputation for slice-of-life play.

CON: This does not carry long-term play on its own. GM and players have to constantly tie the characters into the action and slice-of-life play is by definition trivial. Personal issues will inevitably come up and develop alongside a simpler gameplay loop.

I don't have a conclusion other than that I am kind of unsatisfied with all of these options.