What's up with Shadowrun?

Cafe Society
21

It shoudn’t have. Not unless they were both very poorly skilled in using the weapons and/or had defences far outstripping their offensive capabilities. Its also possible sometimes to get a really bad sequence of rolls, but this happens in every game.

There should have been basically this:
Initiative (for who goes first and how often)
Attack
Attack
Attack
Attack
…you get the picture

There isn’t any room for a lot of rolls in there, unless the characters were unable to hurt each other. And that’s pretty difficult to achieve.

I hate to say it, but you must not have noticed some things.

  1. If you want to kill things, then yes, a cyber-monster is probably the best way to go. Aside from that, you can have the explosion mage. So what? Some Shadowrun games have little place for mass murder. And in those that emphasize it, it can probably be expected to be everything. So what?

  2. It’s easy to create strong characters. But COMBAT ISN"T EVERYTHING! If you notice, only about half the pregenerated characters are actually any good in combat. And that’s because

  3. Street Sams (cyberware hogs) can start out with a bit of an ability edge of physical adepts (basically kung-fu monks). In the long run, the adepts have the advantage. And adept abilities lend themselves to at least as wide an array of tricks as cyberware, at least if you check out the Grimoire.

22

I probably should have stuffed a “it’s several years since I played Shadowrun”-disclaimer in my post - I hinted at it with my “I distantly remember”.

IIRC, the problem was that it took several combat rounds before the combatants were able to hurt each other. In close combat with mortal weapons, that doesn’t seem very realistic. I suppose it’s possible that the characters were created with exceptional defensive abilities or something.

I freely admit that there are lots of wildly unrealistic combat systems out there. Shadowrun is far from the worst one.

That’s entirely possible :slight_smile:

I do agree that combat isn’t everything, and of course the usefulness of combat skills will depend on the campaign. My main beef with character creation in Shadowrun - as I remember it - was mainly that it was pretty far from obvious how to create the character you wanted. You could start out wanting to create, for instance, a good fighter, and make choices that seemed to you to be optimal for that. And then when starting to play, you’d discover that your character was a wimp compared to the fighter created by someone who had studied the system closely, and knew how to get most bang for the buck. When I create a character, want to make choices about the character - his/her strong and weak sides, what (s)he has and hasn’t learned, and so on. I don’t want to spend a lot of time figuring out how to tweak the system parameters to tease out the greatest number of plusses.

23

I was halfway tempted at the time to purchase it on other recommendations. It sounds quite unlike the description of the magical world you described, wasn’t it more of a post-apocalyptic scenario?

24

Holy macaroni…

Jordan Weisman was one of the founding members of FASA. He left FASA in the '90s to work with Mircosoft who bought FASA Interactive, FASA’s videogame development arm. He later formed WizKids and made a lot of money on MageKnight. FASA wasn’t doing the greatest and he offered them a large amount of money for the rights to their games. WizKids then went on to use the rights to BattleTech to make their MechWarrior:DarkAges game and ShadowRun for their SR Duels. Then then lisenced the original RPGs out to Fantasy Productions, AKA FanPro who was the Germany company responsible for translating FASA’s games into German and adding some supplimental stuff of their own. Most of the development is beign handled by folks in the states and FanPro handles distribution.

That said, SR’s mechanics aren’t the easiest to learn, but they are fun. The source material is very rich and deep and lets you play up the parts that interest you the most, be it magic, cyberpunk or combat. The game is skill based, so moving it to a class-based d20 system really takes away from the freedom to make your character do almost anything you want.

25

Interesting to see this topic come up. I bought the 3rd edition a little while back and read through. Looked incredibly complex, but tremendous fun. So recently, our gaming group had a bit of a lull (usually boring Cthulu’s) and I brought SR along. Asked if they wanted to roll up or copy some characters out. One whole night of rolling and tweaking proceeded with the players just becoming more and more confused and myself becoming more and more disheartened. Anyways, one dropped out from the following week, I’d left him the rulebook to read (as a decker) and he said it was too much. Still have the mage to sort out and we haven’t even started…

So, it looks great fun, but I don’t even know if we’ll get there. Seriously considering ditching it until we’re in a better mood.

So in answer to the OP, its still very much available, clearly played by some, and complexity is open to debate (I think you know my thoughts on it)

26

I didn’t like the Shadowrun mechanics. (I think we were playing 3rd ed.) There were a lot of things that didn’t seem well balanced.

Street samurai would be really tough at first, but once they maxed out their cyberware they plateaued. Physical Adepts got really powerful once they picked up a decent amount of karma. And the whole cyberjacker thing meant that everyone else would sit around eating pizza while one character tried to break into a computer.
If you like the setting, and it is a cool setting, I would recommend taking the setting but using d20 Modern rules with some d20 Future rules (more advanced weapons and the cyber modifications). d20 Apocalypse is coming out this summer, and may have more cool stuff as well.

I like the d20 rules because they have clearly been well tested for balance and playability. I would rather spend time being my character than figuring out how many dice to roll.

27

That’s a player thing. Most games have that problem. If you want to spend your skills widely, do so. And then make situations where you can use them.

Try the Genesis version. It’s a top notch game that I still play today.

The books weren’t terribly well-written, at least not in the combt section. it looks vastly more complicated that it really is.

My advice? Throw it all out.

It is, but everyone has to understand that there is no game balance. It’s not supposed to be balanced - it’s supposed to be realistic (well, sorta). Every character should be equally useful. But they will rarely be equally ueful at the same time. Sams and Adepts (sometimes spellcasters) will max out in combat, deckers and riggers in the set-up.

Betaware is your friend. And they actually do go up nicely, concentrating on skills and attributes. A well-developed Sam is as useful as when the game started.

Yuppers. And they weren’t too bad at the start.

My Advice? There’s a very good way to run the Decker. Make him run Matrix overwatch or have him break into the site with the team. Then, he has to

I don’t mean to be mean by this, but: :rolleyes:

d20 has no balance. They lied totally about that. The only time it’s ever balanced is when everyone’s so powerful they’re all off the charts or just starting out. The only game balance things they ever had were done at the expense of any logic to the system.

28

Wow–I go away for a couple of days and a topic comes up that I can actually contribute to! :slight_smile:

I take exception to the fact that nobody wanted Shadowrun, in the first place. There’s a thriving community of SR players over at dumpshock.com, and Fanpro (to which the game is licensed from WizKids, who owns it) is producing material at a reasonably good clip, considering the fact that Fanpro USA is basically one guy who’s working very hard with a dedicated group of freelancers to put out a quality product. How do I know this? I’m proud to be one of 'em. For a “dead” game, here’s the list of new books that have come out since Fanpro took over from FASA (and this isn’t even including updated versions of previous books like SR V3.0, Rigger 3, and Magic in the Shadows.

Year of the Comet
Target:Awakened Lands
Threats 2
Shadows of North America
Target: Wastelands
Wake of the Comet
State of the Art: 2063*
Survival of the Fittest
Dragons of the Sixth World*
Sprawl Survival Guide*
Shadowrun Character Dossier
Shadows of Europe
Mr. Johnson’s Little Black Book*

Announced and coming down the pipeline in the not-too-distant future (announced at last year’s Gen Con) include:

Shadows of Asia
Shadows of Latin America
Loose Alliances*
Running Wild*
System Failure

(*FWIW, I worked on the asterisked ones)

Pretty good for a dead game, huh?

Sorry about the passion, but I’ve been playing this game since 1989 and love it. Okay, I agree some of the mechanics can be combersome and difficult to deal with, but the reason I’m there is because of the setting. I love what the writers have been coming up with over the years, and IMO Shadowrun is one of the most vibrant and changing (and downright interesting) game worlds around.

Oh–and in addition to producing new product, Fanpro has also recently made quite a few of the older FASA sourcebooks available in PDF form on over at drivethrurpg.com.

Also FWIW, Shadowrun is really big in Germany, which is one of the reasons why FanPro got the rights to it. Since FanPro took over there’s been a much larger European presence in the canon, with a lot more Euro-freelancers getting involved in the production of the books.

29

Umm…have you EVER seen a system where a player who doesn’t know the system can make as effective a combat monster as someone who doesn’t know the system?

If so, I’d love to know which one.

-Joe

30

Damn, I hate it when I double-post. Ah well.

Anyways, I have to ask Winterhawk on this one…

How good are the Fanpro books? I’ve been through most old Shadowrun books one way or another. Take a look at Threats as an example. Now go ahead and compare it to Threats 2.

I’m sorry, but IMO Threats 2 sucked in comparison.

One thing Fanpro has done is take all the interesting decker comments out of the texts. That really hurts the books.

Then again, that’s just the books I’ve seen. I could be wrong.

-Joe

31

Well, I might be biased since I’ve only worked on stuff in the FanPro era, but I do know that quite a few of the FanPro books have been very well received among fans–the ones that come immediately to mind are Dragons of the Sixth World, Shadows of North America, and the Sprawl Survival Guide. I have yet to see one that has been panned by the fanbase–sure, everybody is going to like some things better than others, but all in all the new books have been well received and AFAIK have been selling well.

A lot of folks (me included) agreed with you there, and FanPro listened. The decker comments (called “shadowtalk”) have been back in the books for quite some time now. In fact, my memory might be spotty on this but I believe they were removed in the latter days of FASA and restored shortly after FanPro took the helm.

32

Hey winterhawk11, nice to see another Dumpshock denizen here.

Shadowrun is a seriously quirky game. It has many, many, many elements all shoved together, and the result can get chaotic if you’re not careful. The rules are tricky, especially if you’re used to a unified-mechanic system like d20 or GURPS (or Hero even), and especially especially if it involves an interaction between the magic and tech rules. As a novice SR GM, I found myself making up reasonable-looking rulings on the fly far more often than I ever did in GURPS, and it’s not just a familiarity issue: there are reasonably common situations that the rules as written do not cover, or cover in ways so painfully absurd as to break the suspension of disbelief.

I’d say that as a game, it demands far more of the GM than any other system that I’ve ever run games with*. You have to understand the rules well enough to extend them in sensible ways, and you have to understand the setting well enough to not step on the rest of game continuity too badly (unless you want to throw it out, of course). You have to make sure that the computer hacker doesn’t take over the game (I usually run the decker’s breakins in parallel with the rest of the party’s legwork, or intersperse interactions with contacts/the environment, but again that increases the load on the GM). You have to make sure that the drone rigger with his bog-standard Strato-9s don’t overshadow the samurai, and that the mage doesn’t make technological security worthless.

And yes, high-resource characters take forever-and-a-day to create. If you want to create a character in a hurry, low-resource mage or ganger is probably your best bet.

With all of that well-understood, I’m running an SR game and playing another and I love them both. There’s so much stuff in the game rules (decking, spellcasting, cybernetic control of vehicles) and in the game setting (voodounista, the horrors, cyberzombies, Bug City, sprawl life, Dunkelzahn’s presidency…) that it’s easy to find a tone your like and run with it. As a GM I struggled with this at first, because it seems like there ought to be a built-in Shadowrun mood the way there is with Vampire or WorldTree, but there’s so much stuff that there a exists a subset of that stuff that well-supports any kind of game at all. Mine right now is sort of reverse X-Files: in the course of their adventures the characters keep running across weird technomagical drek, which they ignore as much as they can in favor of doing the job for which they were hired. This inattention is about to shift the game’s tone into survival horror (the game date is August 20, 2055, and their home city is Chicago… :D).

*[sub]D&D basic through third, thirty million GURPS settings, Ironclaw, WorldTree, and Vampire.[/sub]

On preview: Merijeek, I have SotA:2063 and think highly of it, but I didn’t grow up with Shadowland comments and may be undervaluing them.

33

Wait…I’ll bet you’ve been paid for two of them. :slight_smile:

34

Oh, hush, you. :slight_smile:

35

Well, “Prince Valiant” springs to mind. Admittedly, it’s an unusual game - extremely simple, and thus quite demanding of the game master, as it leaves a lot of desicions to the GM’s discretion.

For a more mainstream example, I’ll give you D&D. If you’re creating a first level character, you’ve a limited number of choices, and thus there’s a limit to how much you can screw up. In most games knowing the system does give an extra edge, of course, and that’s OK to me. What I really, really hate is a game where someone creating a character for the first time is likely to end up with someone who’s useless. Ars Magica 3rd edition is horrible in this regard.

36

Which reminds me… I believe I stated my intentions (Hey, Smiling Bandit is never shy!). Perhaps you might mention to me whom I should speak with, aside from sending proposal emails to Fanpro, though they do look at those.

(distanthorizons9@hotmail.com)

I’m thinking up ideas for the ad campaign right now, and I think I know who I’d talk to about negotiating for Fanpro to license the game to a software company, assuming Microsoft’s deal ended (and assuming they care: they had the license for a decade and haven’t used it).

37

I’d like to see Blizzard take it on…

38

I dunno: Blizzard has not really shown an interest in actual Role-playing games, and the kind of game I’m doing would be more appropriate for Bethesda. Of course, we may not be able to deal because of financing, but I would consider myself a negotiator with no monetary gain except indirectly.

The actual premise was somewhat close to Morrowind:

Here you are, a beginning character beaten up and dumped into the Barrens’ garbage dump, and nursed back to an approximation of health by an old Rat shaman. With no SIN, the character can’t go back to normal society (assuming that you say you were “legal” before being dumped) can negotiate his/her way through the process of becoming a Shadowunner. You’ll start by knocking off convenience stores, carrying messages, or (if you talk the wrong people) running drugs. As the character develops and completes the story missions, he/she’ll get fake SIN’s and find somewhere to live.

Unlike Morowind, you can get several places to live. Even better, there’s a good reason to use them, as you can be attacked there, and there are good reasons to hide your heavy gear somewhere safe (not, y’know, in your high-rise with AA security and Lone Star using metal detectors everywhere) like the Barrens with the appropriate gangs paid off to protect it.

I’m working my way through the mysterious art of making design documents, when I have the time.

39

Eh. One one person’s opinion is one person’s opinion. Doesn’t mean mine is any more valid than anyone else’s.

Good to know. The next big question is, is the decker talk any good? The stuff I remember (Target: Weird places (outer space, underwater, etc), Threats 2) had minimal decker talk, and the stuff that was in it didn’t actually contribute a whole lot to the world or the content.

That doesn’t mean it hasn’t gotten better or anything. Just my opinion.

-Joe

40

Eh. One one person’s opinion is one person’s opinion. Doesn’t mean mine is any more valid than anyone else’s.

Good to know. The next big question is, is the decker talk any good? The stuff I remember (Target: Weird places (outer space, underwater, etc), Threats 2) had minimal decker talk, and the stuff that was in it didn’t actually contribute a whole lot to the world or the content.

That doesn’t mean it hasn’t gotten better or anything. Just my opinion.

-Joe