The Culture: Yes, The Big Two Cyberpunk Games Are Wargames At Their Roots Also

The two cyberpunk tabletop RPGs that matter are Cyberpunk and Shadowrun. Both are brainchilds of the late 1980s that didn't truly break into popularity (compared to the all-mighty AD&D) until their early-'90s second editions.

Both of them, therefore, are capable of being run as wargames in the usual Braunstein model and you can go full Kriegspiel campaigning with them. The reason that this didn't happen is because neither publisher made it obvious where that level of play was going to fall, despite it being in the face of users from the start: the very parties that hire the street-tier adventurers who do the dirty work for dirty money.

The wargame level--the faction level--is based on the top-tier of play, which is the Megacorporate/Government Agency level.

That's where the Faction Play rests in a typical cyberpunk campaign and its city-state regionalism style of campaign milieu, be it Cyberpunk's Night City or Shadowrun's Seattle. The obvious secondary level of Faction Play are the gangs, syndicates, etc. that act as the intermediaries between the big factions and individual PCs running in the streets.

Why not take full advantage of this? It's not like the rules of either game forbid it. Nor do they go out of their way to make it bothersome to perform. As with AD&D1e, all that a Referee needs to do is to hand off control of these parties to interested players and let them wargame it out.

Their plots are guaranteed to provide all of the playable scenarios necessary to keep a campaign interesting for years on end. You can finally toss all those modules and their terrible metaplots into the trash heap; you start at 2020 (or 2039, or 2050, whatever) and what happens thereafter is for the players to determine through some combination of guns, Black Ice, and socio-financial fuckery.

And yes, as CDPR's videogame adaptation (itself derived from the tabletop game's materials) show those street-level characters can become serious players in the Faction Game in due course if they are hard and lucky enough to do so.

No, Setting This Up Is No Different

Get players to run the big boys first. Let them have a couple of rounds of actions. Stuff they do become the first sets of street jobs for Runners to take up.

Then you get players to play Runners, and they run the jobs that the big boys want done. (Want to stand out here? Don't be a typical stupid Mr. Johnson; honor your end of the contract with Runners that hold up their end.)

If you want to expand such a campaign, have each Referee take control of a different city or city-state region. Both of the above games make this easy to do, and you'll find others with this genre aesthetic operate in the same manner- including when it's part of a multi-genre game like TORG's Cyberpapacy.

The more you bother to look at how tabletop RPGs actually play, the more obvious this pattern becomes- and with it the remedies to all of the problems so often complained about.