[Game a Day 19] ShadowRun

[HellHound]

(sorry, my shortest game a day so far - I have very mixed feelings about Shadowrun)

My first exposure to cyberpunk gaming was through a custom MegaTraveller campaign. Shortly thereafter, CyberPunk 2013 was released, and I started buying anything cyberpunk under the sun. The most famous of the cyber-style RPGs is of course Shadowrun. I only ever actually played first edition SR, although I’ve made characters and run a few mock combats and so on with SR3. The arrival of the sexy new SR4 hardcover in the mail yesterday, however, reminded me of our old games.

For those who didn’t have a copy, First Edition ShadowRun tried very hard to be a cyberpunk RPG – it even had all the roles from the cyberpunk core book as character templates, without the special abilities. It had all the rest of traditional cyberpunk setting material – cybernetics, virtual reality hacking, smartguns, uber-corporations, and so on. But it also had all the D&D goodness of elves, dwarves, dragons and magicians.

(getting ready for the flames)
But it really wasn’t very cyberpunk in the end. Now I’m not saying it isn’t damn cool, but the resurgence of native magical traditions, the introduction of elves and dragons, and the awakened species taking over areas and healing the earth of the damage wrought by corporate western civilization just doesn’t have the flavour of cyberpunk for me. And it seems that at least one of the influential cyberpunk literary authors agrees.

So anyways, as a gaming group of ex-D&D players now converted to CyberPunk, we grabbed hold of Shadowrun with gusto. Characters were made, home rules introduced, and many a stuffer shack was shot full of holes. In the back of the core book, there isn’t an adventure for SR1, not even a bunch of plot hooks like in CyberPunk, but a simple combat setup at a convenience store. That was the example of play, go into the convenience store, and get into a shootout with some robbers, and get sprayed by the randomly-generated contents of the stuff on the shelves when shots miss (Mmmm… Maraschino Chowder!).

To the game world of SR, we added the skaven from warhammer, wolfen, goblins and changelings from Palladium and so on. In addition to a thousand stuffer shack massacres, a few serious games were played, including a one-shot where the party’s panzer gets shot up and they end up pulling into an Arcology in the desert to repair. Each player had two characters, one to stay back at the panzer and one to go out scouting as they try to figure out why there was no response inside the arco. Segue from Shadowrun to Aliens.

It was fun, but we got tired of the system pretty quickly, especially with firefights in the stuffer shack including scenes of shooting one person in the head repeatedly with an uzi to no major effect. So, my brother (who was the real SR junky in the group) and I went through the effort of converting the whole game to the CyberPunk system, magic and all.

Did I bother to rant about magic yet? Yeah, a wizard in SR1 was about as deadly as someone packing a minigun. Now, other characters COULD pack miniguns, so it was balanced, right? Except that in a roleplaying environment where you couldn’t carry a minigun into a bar, restaurant or corporate facility, you could still load in a few instant-kill blast mages without anyone knowing the difference.

In the end, we only ended up using the SR to CP conversions a few times before ditching SR completely and going back to the darker future of CyberPunk.

However, now that I’m playing with a group less intent on the feel of cyberpunk and more into D&D, I’m looking at SR4 with renewed interest. The essential story of cyberpunk (the dehumanizing effects of technology and the humanization of said technologies) can slip away and I can sucker them into the dystopian future of cyberpunk through the gateway drug of SR4.

 

[Crothian]

We had some fun with Shadowrun. I was never big on the cyberpunk aspect. We ran it like a near future group of PI's, Troubleshooters, and Mercs. We didn't play it for very long, only about a half of year. But it was a lot of fun. The magic system was just odd and I never fully mastered it. Some of the expansion bookms brought in wierd concepts dealing with places that relaly didn't fit well with the way we say the game. I haven't opened up 4th edition yet, but I'm looking forward to that read.

 

[Ruined]

We had a lot of fun with Shadowrun back in the day. Our GM ran us through most of the modules, but not much in the way of custom adventures. I always ended up playing the Decker, since I'm the resident computer geek. I remember when Virtual Realities came out, I knew more about the mechanics than the GM, which took a lot of the fun out of it. We had our fun, and I really enjoyed the way some of the modules were written (specifically Harlequin and later Dunkelzahn's Revenge).

Now a few years later, I opted to run a campaign using 3rd ed. I consider myself a skilled GM, but Shadowrun was not the game for me. The varied elements of play: gunplay, magic/astral, rigging, and decking made it particularly difficult. You have to manage all systems well, and you have to spend extra effort to make sure that each specialist character had something to do. I knew well from decking that there were plenty of spots where I was useless or even worse, a liability. I liked the more streamlined mechanics at the time, but it wasn't my bag.

I wonder if 4th edition is more palatable.

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

Back in the day, we loved Shadowrun 1e. The world was a fascinating place (I think the inclusion of fantasy elements helped, as we were mostly used to straight fantasy gaming). But for all the details, we always enjoyed the massive firefights.

Although, I remember wondering what the heck a soy-burger was. Years later, I'm a vegetarian and firm convert to the ways of tofu.

 

[ColonelHardisson]

I only ever had first edition. Loved the premise and setting, didn't care for the system.

I dig the main conceit - that the Mayan calendar was essentially correct, and the real world and spirit world will merge together around 2014. The resurgence of magic and the reappearance of creatures once thought to be completely legendary was fantastic.

What I didn't dig was the "chummer" speak, which got to be almost as bad as Planescape's "cant." Everyone was hipper than thou, supposedly, but more often came across as trying way too hard to be cool, rather than actually being cool. This was pretty much embodied in Elmore's cover art - Elmore can do great work, but his covers for Shadowrun and Dark Conspiracy are among his worst. They simply don't capture the feel of the settings they're for very well.

Somehow the book managed to evoke a distinct feel. I was never a big fan of cyberpunk as a genre itself, but SR managed to add a new twist to it and make a genre unto itself.

I have a number of supplements for the game. The two monster books, Paranormal Animals of North America, and the one for Europe, are decent enough critter books, though they don't ever seem to spark into greatness. Sprawl Sites is a halfway decent collection of adventure hooks and mini-encounters, but the cartography pales beside what is seen in similar books more recently released.

Something I really dug about SR was a very simple thing - the stats for typical NPCs the PCs might encounter - talismongers, metroplex guards, etc - which could be tweaked to the GMs taste. They included more of these in some later supplements, like Sprawl Sites. As an aside, I was really happy to see d20 Modern included such stat blocks in the core book as well as the Menace Manual.

Speaking of d20 Modern, it seems like WotC tried to do something like "d20 Shadowrun" in Urban Arcana. In my opinion, it just doesn't quite work.

 

[Henry]

Shadowrun was the game that I've always wanted to love, with all my heart, but just couldn't. I even loved the "ABCDE" chart of character generation, because it was so DIFFERENT. However, the mechanics to me have been, despite revisions, very clunky, and very distracting, breaking my suspension of disbelief enough to count both successes AND number of successes, that it pissed me off a little.

Why? Because the setting was FANTASTIC. Its vision smote me in the way that Cyberpunk never did. It's the kind of blasé way I'd expect the real world to handle a real-life D&D world exploding into reality around it. Elves with Uzis, Cybered-up Orcs with super-weapons built in, mages with "happy-face-with-gunhole-in-head" T-shirts doing deals on streetcorners. The system, however, came off like accounting, not playing a fun game as seen in the story snippets.

I finally got the chance to actually play shadowrun outside of a few dry playtests, and while it was fun, I got the feeling that it was because the GM was glossing the hell out of the rules that weren't fun. I had fun with the people involved, but that would likely have been there had it been Shadowrun, D&D, or poker.

I've toyed with the idea of a conversion of system, I've kit-bashed other products, but nothing with quite the same feel.

Along comes Shadowrun 4e - and their changes to the flow of mechanics resolution (just straight number of successes, nothing fancier than that), combined with deckers and riggers that don't have to have their own separate missions, it makes me feel like I just might, MIGHT, enjoy playing or (more likely) running this system, because the only way I'm gonna experience it is if I GM it.

All of this is stated with the caveat that I have practically NO table-time with it; I can't find a single soul interested in running it, and in the prep-tests I've done, it bogged me down fiercely. I didn't get that with the prep-tests on 4E, so I'll have to see if I can get some players, and see how it goes -- probably late this year.

 

[Henry]

I wonder if 4th edition is more palatable.

To me, DEFINITELY. To a lot of the experienced Shadowrun gamers, DEFINITELY NOT. As noted, the biggest change is no variable target numbers; a 5 or 6 on d6 is a success, and you just count successes, not both. The second biggest is that scores are valued somewhat differently, and karma got changed to a much smaller "pool" called Edge.

And... gone is my beloved ABDCE chargen, replaced with a point-buy. *sniff*

But it's a very (pardon pun) runnable system, from a lot of the fans I've read online. It's about a 60/40 split though, dislike vs. like, unlike what happened with D&D 2e/3e, and it bodes very badly for the future of the game. On the other hand, they picked up quite a few new players, but it doesn't look like as many as who stuck with 3e and didn't move on.

 

[painandgreed]

Bought SR 1E once it came out. Since then, I've held in my hands at the same time three different versions of 1E with at least different artwork and character creation rules*. Later bought 2E and even later 3E at the insistance of people who really wanted to play and I was the only one willing to GM. Once I contnued my vampire game into the future but gave it the SR backstory. The last time I converted WW oWoD Vampires and Werewolves into SR mechanics to have some well fleshed out monsters and NPCs that the characters, big SR fans, wouldn't expect.

In almost all the games I ran, the characters were either a gang or small merc group that preformed odd jobs. Very little corporate affairs really and lots of gang warfare, kiddnapings, smuggling, delivering messages, and theft. Nobody ever wanted to play a decker or rigger.

I liked the character system and had a few favorites that I tried to break out of the stereotypes with. I had the fixer character where I just took lots of money and spent much of it on every contact I could ever want. Another I liked was the burned out mage archetype out of the 1E but without the cyberwear, which made a better mage than the mage archetypes after you spent his money on fetishes instead of cyberwear. I also wanted to do a rigger/decker who only interacted with the other PCs via drones and electronic commuication but only got to do him as an NPC.

I generally liked the system itself but had my issues with it. Too many dice pools for one. Too complicated in places and too simple in others. Some things, like magic, tended to break in situations but that seems to be mostly fixed with later editions.

I really didn't get into the Metaplot with Bug City and all that. Whenever I play, you get the 1E world using a modified 1E Seattle sourcebook. It is so obvious that whoever wrote that book has never been to Seattle. Things are stuck here and there that looks nice on a map but not in person. They really just didn't get the feel of Seattle. Even then, I have my issues with the backstory. Number one being that I think if magic came back into the world, there would be more heavy metal satan worshipers that would tumble onto it through experimentaion and dumb luck, than there ever would be native americans that would remember the old ways.

*IIRC one, the original AFAIK, gave you ten points to divide between stats, skills, money and magic. All was good if the numbers all added up to 10. Number two gave you ten points but it had to be divided up 1, 2, 3 & 4 points between the four groups. A third changed it from numbers to A,B,C, & D.

 

[Henry]

*IIRC one, the original AFAIK, gave you ten points to divide between stats, skills, money and magic. All was good if the numbers all added up to 10. Number two gave you ten points but it had to be divided up 1, 2, 3 & 4 points between the four groups. A third changed it from numbers to A,B,C, & D.

I don't recall that second one in the 2e book; the 2E did have an ABCDE chart, as well as 3rd, but there may have been a 1,2,3,4 system, it's been a while since I owned the 2E book, as I gave it away when I got the 3e book.

 

[delericho]

I have some fond memories playign Shadowrun 1st Edition. As with D&D, a very fine DM made my first game in the setting really come alive.

However, the game has some serious flaws that would prevent me from ever playing it these days.

In the 3rd Edition, the rules in the core rulebook had become impossibly Byzantine. It was just too clunky to make work.

The 4th Edition cleaned up the rules massively, which was a huge improvement (even if I failed to get through the rulebook). Switching to a fixed target number was a big step forward, but the fact that all the combat rolls are opposed checks must slow the game down a lot - the D&D method of single dice rolls vs fixed target numbers is just better.

The problem with the setting is that they haven't retconned the history of the setting, meaning that wierd things are now past due to have happened to the world at large. That doesn't so much damage my suspension of disbelief as shatter it into a million pieces. That said, the use of Crash 2.0 to 'fix' the tech level is inspired - Shadowrun tech once again looks like it might be plausible. (I still don't think the setting really works - the 80's notion of big government disappearing and megacorps taking over doesn't really work for me any more, but I can't say any more than that without violating the politics rules here.)

But the biggest problem with the game is that the characters are too specialised. In a combat situation, the Street Samurai does his stuff, while the other players basically wait it out (the Samurai might get 3 actions for every one they get). In astral space, the Mage does his stuff, while the rest of the players literally wait it out. In social situations, you turn to the Face, and so on. This means that everyone gets their time in the sun, yes, but it also makes for large portions of the game when people can't meaningfully contribute, which is a problem IMO.