Cyberpunk 2020 generates its Social Sandbox on its own

Cyberpunk 2020 has a built-in social sandbox generator in its character generation:

You pick a role, which tells you how to run your character, what they're good at, and for a lot of these, there's some built-in motivation too. A Media is interested in information. A Nomad has a family they want to keep safe as much as they'll rely on them. The Corporate and Cop may be disgraced and need to clear their names OR trying to climb the ranks and gather influence and power (the dice will let you know later). Picking your role is already a statement of intent as to what you want the game to be about. A Solo wants brutal violence and slick chrome, a Rockergirl wants to rage against the machine and be loud as fuck. A Netrunner wants to focus on the "cyber" and the Matrix. Yes these are not mutually exclusive, because we here FKRs do not suffer shit rules, we bend, handpick and select for our needs. And so CP2020 is good again.

The stats are the least interesting part for our purposes but here you go, point-buy or random roll, whatever. I favor "roll 9d10, re-roll 2s, and assign each value to a stat". Take it or leave it, it's not essential but can provide some color.

Career skills give you a better idea at what your character can do, and while spending 40 points between them is a bit much for me, I do think there's an awesome concept behind what can initially be perceived as "poor balancing". One of your career skills is your Special Skill, which is unique to your Role. Media have Credibility. Corporate have Resources. Etc. Not only does this establish how good you are at your job, from amateur to world-class, the table that tells you that also tells you how much money you make per month when employed as whatever your role is. You basically pick your "level" and the stakes yourself. A top level solo is still only so good in combat situations and will be ruined by overwhelming firepower. Even a cyberpsycho will be taken down by MAXTAC. There's nothing that says every character has to be a top level or an amateur, they can mix and mash. You can have a rookie who was taken in by a more experienced crew. You can have a legendary rockerboy and his posse of understated but essential specialists.

Also if you picked a poorly-paying role and/or have a low level in your special skill, you're probably broke, and since you need to pay for lifestyle and probably want at least a lil' bit of chrome (it's Cyberpunk after all), you might like to know there's an option to start out with a fat, flat bonus of 2,000 eurodollars for the modest price of being Owned by a corporation, gang or other patron. Which is great cause it gives you more structure and immediately sets up some more tension in addition to needing to pay the rent. Or maybe the rent is the least of your concern because you have a cortical bomb in your brain and need to do jobs for the mafia or they'll blow it up killing whoever is with you when it happens in the process! Yes, like in Neuromancer except more 'splodey!

There's also origins tables which give your character more style, it's all very flashy and silly and a product of its time but if you embrace it it's awesome. My friend rolled a Japanese 20something Ex-Trauma Team MedTechie who wears her hair long hime-sama style, miniskirts and packs a heavy revolver. It's stupid but it works and if the whole crew generates their characters like that you've got a super colorful, 80s anime type crew of quirky weirdoes.

And the best part is the Lifepath, which btw you can automate here (scratch that, the whole CharGen can be done via this software html page now!). Lifepath gives you 1 to 20 years worth of randomly generated events, including romance (drama!) and friends/enemies, which overall gives about a 50% chance per year that you can add an NPC in your life, which the book suggests the GM generates the details for too, you're meant to use the same random tables for these.

So if you have 3 players, that's at the very least a dozen, possibly dozens, of NPCs in a web of relationships that should develop fairly organically and intuitively through the rolling or at least just discussing the random results together. Session zero of CP2020 essentially builds a soap opera powderkeg for you. Players have incentive to find work, if they don't already have a job they're supposed to do. That means maybe the first session or three are mission-based and by then you should have enough tension on that social web of people (who you should mostly base in Night City, but I'd say mix it up a bit and have a handful of NPCs be based elsewhere like Chiba, Lyon or Rio so you can have people you know abroad and travel the world at times) that the campaign runs itself.