Cyberpunk 2077 quest director fell in love with Night City after playing the TTRPG and deciding traditional D&D was "just a bit too generic" for him

gamesradar.com:

Cyberpunk 2077 quest director Pawel Sasko says he originally fell in love with the Night City setting after playing the 1988 TTRPG and finding "traditional D&D" a little too "generic" in comparison.

In an interview with TheNeonArcade, Sasko spoke at length about the early games that sparked his love for the Cyberpunk universe, the kernel of which was a TTRPG series that started in 1988. Sakso explained that his initial interest in TTRPGs came from playing the 2000 RPG Vampire: The Masquerade - Redemption as a teenager, which inspired him to pick up the original Vampire: The Masquerade pen-and-paper book. After playing through that, he moved to the Cyberpunk TTRPG and found it "inspiring, intriguing, and different."

"This is what I loved about [Vampire: The Masquerade]: the dark world, all those powers you can have. Same for Cyberpunk. For me, fantasy, let's say the traditional D&D, was a bit too generic; a bit too, I would say, normal. I always felt like it's Lord of the Rings, it's Tolkien, it's this fantasy-ish story about so many books that I've read about some kind of a fantasy. I read the majority of Conan the Barbarian books when I was a kid because I really liked them.

"I read a lot, really a lot of fantasy at that time. I absolutely loved it. But a lot of it just felt like generic fantasy. Because of that, both Cyberpunk and Vampire were huge things that stained my memory. This is how I remember that time. This is when I was introduced to that. Trying to figure out building the sessions for my players, figuring out what they do. They always have to do everything that I didn't assume they would do, I had to improvise and figure out how to do that. So this was my introduction actually."

Sasko, who was lead quest