[Game a Day 19] ShadowRun

[Nomad4life]

Shadowrun was the game that I've always wanted to love, with all my heart, but just couldn't.

Same here. Man, that was one AMAZING and imaginative setting! I got really into it in 2nd edition. Over time, though, the flaws of the system mechanics started to show and could no longer be ignored.

One early problem I remember having while running the game was with Deckers- Decking was this long, involved (and somewhat confusing process.) Well, I never imagined it would take the party's decker sooooo loooooong to get though the part of the adventure where he had to hack through a security system. In the time it took him to do it, the other players had pretty much fallen asleep and lost interest in the game. There should have been a faster, easier way to resolve such things IMO.

That being said, I still have many fond memories of playing that game. Never saw 3E or 4E.

 

[painandgreed]

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.

Nope, those were all 1E books. I'm pretty sure that by 2E they had settled for the ABCDE system. I find it funny because I bought it the week it came out yet got the 0,1,2,3,4 system but later saw the "Total of 10" system in another player's book that was obvisouly an earlier printing and system. I remember checking and they all said 1E with no indications that they were ever anything other than the exact same set of rules. I remember they cut something else because the ABCDE book had a full page artwork mine didn't but can't remember what rules it was they had cut.

It was if they had corrected the errata each time before doing another print run of the same edition. Not that I'm complaining, I sort of wish more game companies would do that.

 

[Henry]

One early problem I remember having while running the game was with Deckers- Decking was this long, involved (and somewhat confusing process.) Well, I never imagined it would take the party's decker sooooo loooooong to get though the part of the adventure where he had to hack through a security system. In the time it took him to do it, the other players had pretty much fallen asleep and lost interest in the game. There should have been a faster, easier way to resolve such things IMO.

That being said, I still have many fond memories of playing that game. Never saw 3E or 4E.

3E was largely similar to 2E, but they change initiative slightly and fixed that problem in 2E where the heavily-cybered or phys-adepts could blow away the enemy before the uncybered guy could lift a finger. You try having a fun combat with a Gumshoe when he takes one turn to the street samurai's 4. (!)

As for decking, a lot of experienced SR gamers gloss over decking and rigging completely, for the reason you mention. There are more riggers than deckers (and they're all called "hackers" in 4E) but fewer of either than Street Sams, Skill-users, Mages, or Troll or Ork Heavies.

 

[kigmatzomat]

I guess I'm an SR grognard. A buddy bought an SR1 BBB (big blue/black book) as the store clerk was unpacking the first case from FASA. We played later that night. Our game was quite a bit more grim'n gritty than Hellhound's; our GM's first action was to review character sheets and make sure every player who forgot to buy ammo's gun go )CLICK(. Much fun ensued and whenever we weren't sure how the world worked, we thought "Hey, what would Edison Carter see?"

SR1 was a nightmare of dice. The initiative system was kludgy, damage had variable thresholds and stagings, autofire was like pulling teeth, and I seem to recall every character had like 4 different combat dice pools. We almost killed the GM when he let the sammy pick up a minigun. magic was kinda fluffy since it was so....different from what anyone else knew. But gawd was it fun. Nothing by RTal was stocked in our game stores (I didn't know it was a game until a friend introduced me to CP2020 in the 90s) so it was our only cyberpunk other than Gamma World.

SR2 was beautiful in comparison. Autofire was streamlined, staging was simplified, and the combat pool was a much more elegant system. It was also anime. You could load on the armor and combat wares to be a living tank and we did so. Physads were kicked in the crotch and then gelded but otherwise magic was a much more comprehensible beast. The skill system was simple...perhaps too simple. Characters tended to quickly become powerful. Possibly too powerful, too quickly. They seemed to run headlong into the freaky statistical events that occur in the "exploding d6" system.

SR3....is the AD&D 2e to the AD&D 1e of Sr2. It had the same base mechanic but tried to nerf the rampant overkill that was present in Sr2. Not a bad system on its own but a bit too granular after the simplicity of Sr2. SR3 characters seemed to improve like CP2020 characters: virtually never.

SR4 is a mas muy bueno system and is the d20 of the SR systems. A total rewrite but pretty much the same in spirit. It seemed the longer it had been since a person had played SR2/3, the smoother the transition to SR4. Six people made characters, learned the system, and ran a simple scenario using just two books in a couple of hours. We've played several different scenarios since then, but not a serious campaign.

The setting has been tweaked so that the megacorps are still powerful but that the governments are stepping up to the plate. In a way, they are competing with the Megas and helping to setup a fractured Orwellian state. Someone is probably watching you at any given time but who that someone is varies from block to block. The Crash 2.0 that destroyed 90% of the world's databases on citizens makes it feasible for so many fake IDs to be floating about; industrious scammers registered hundreds, if not thousands, of personas with a multitude of nationalities and left the paperwork in some snafu'd state that they untangle as they need to create a new ID.

he system works well and without some of the statistical "edge cases" that a few of us could exploit. the wireless network enables hackers as party-centric characters now, riggers can be useful without their cars, drones are now inexpensive RC devices with great electronics but light armor, and mages don't burn excess amounts of karma on learning spells at different forces. There are a few problem points as certain aspects of the matrix rules seem inconsistent with core mechanisms and PC-owned AIs seem to futz things up, but overall it is a solid system. It would be nice if they would RELEASE SOME FREAKING SUPPLEMENTS but hopefully that blood-pressure reducing event will occur at GenCon.

Hackers, the old deckers, now crack into systems fairly quickly, or at least simply. They eseentially try to "sneak" into the device without being noticed. They need a certain number of successes to get access and the target's system tries to "spot" them getting in. Once they are in, even if spotted, commands tend to be much more streamlined and affect a larger array of devices. In short, if you log onto a corporate network as an Admin, you can do anything he does (move/copy/delete files & users, run network attached devices, etc) without that irritating TRON-like node hopping.

Since lots of combat gear is now computerized (smartguns don't need cyber, contact lenses can provide HUDs, trode-nets for internalized voice/audio, etc) a hacker can try to break into a security guy's gear or hack the enemy's tac-net.

 

[Nomad4life]

I gotta say, seeing this thread and reading about the improvements made in 4E has made me pretty tempted to find a copy and pick it up. From out of nowhere, it's like I've got these great SR plot hooks all of a sudden.

And (of course) right after my big rant to my gaming group about how I would never GM anything outside of True20 conversions again.

 

[Wik]

2E And 3E used the priorities (ABCDE) system. I don't know about 1E or 4E (haven't played them). Mechwarrior (another FASA) game used a "you get ten points" 0,1,2,3,4 system for character generation.

I liked shadowrun, and it stands out for me because it was the first non-D&D game I ever played, and one of the first times I was the player, not the GM. Me and my friends inherited a bunch of SR books from my friend's brother, who had had enough of the game (moving on to Vampire, I think, although he later became a BIRTHRIGHT freak).

Most of our games were violent bloodbaths... in fact, my all-time favourite adventure had our group (there were only the two of us, and the GM) inside a gun superstore (think Wal-Mart, but only selling firearms) that was attacked by a corporate structure. So, we're running around, grabbing the guns we need, and then running to find ammo, so we can blast these squads bursting through the ceiling. It was a lot of fun, if a bit cheesy.

We made a few decker characters, but we didn't focus too much on the decking or rigging rules, simply because they divided the group too much (and our games were a little simplistic for that). Nowadays if I were to play, I'd jump all over the role of rigger, but I doubt I would have felt that way then.

Mostly, we made cybered up characters, or magical characters (typically hermetics; the pacific northwest is filled with native american references, and we were sick to death of it - we didn't want to play a native in our games)

My favourite character wasn't one of my own (I don't remember them very well) but with a friend's - a Racoon shaman. The character was noteworthy simply because he was more RP-oriented than combat, and it was the first time his player had ever played a character that wasn't a gun nut. The only character I remember playing was a physical adept who would kill you in two seconds flat if he got next to you.

All in all, I have a lot of fond memories of the game. I bought 3E a few years back with the hopes of running a few side games for my D&D group, but upon opening the book, I realized just how complex the rules were. I had no problem with dividing the group up (there are easy ways around this, if you use "primary" and "secondary" PC's - you play your decker while the rest of the group plays members of a decker group helping out the main PC; meanwhile, the player of the decker plays a low-level runner with the PCs on their main run... it help keeps the "troubleshooter/specialist" feel of cyberpunk, anyways... you'd never see Case going on a combat run in Neuromancer, right?).

No, my big problem with the game was that I found myself thinking "There's no way I can keep track of all these rules", so I put the book on the shelf. Every now and then, I take it down and read the whole thing, and dream....

I'm actually thinking of running a shadowrun-like game using the d6 rules system, although my version would nix the races, re-work the magic system to something a bit more sinister, and up the cyberpunk feel (I agree with hound that the cyberpunk feel of the game is pretty much gone).

 

[Wik]

Oh, and one thing I LOVED about SR's supplements -

the comments by characters such as Hatchetman and Fastjack. Seriously, it was such a COOL thing to read the corporate info on a weapon, and then have the various runners explaining what they liked/disliked about the gun. I really loved it when they would describe a weapon's failing that wasn't evident in the rules - The weapon might be finicky when wet, or the ammo clip might have a catch that could make it difficult for a newbie to unload. Those supplements really made me love the universe so much more... especially Cybertechnology, which I bought simply because it was all about Hatchetman, my favourite of the in-game runners.

 

[kigmatzomat]

SR4 hackers go on runs with the combat guys. Heck, they help the combat guys!

Lots of SR1/2/3 cyber is now an external device. Smartlink, vision mods & HUDs are options for contact lenses, sunglasses, and helmet displays. Audio filters can be added into earbuds. The bulk of gear required to be a rigger is now an external trode net that plugs into your Comm (Pocket Sec 2.0) and a special program does the heavy lifting.

But being external devices means that a hacker can use your radio/telephone link, crack into your Comm, and start futzing around with your gear. The simple thing would be use the smartlink to eject clips but I prefer reprogramming the audio-filters to hide my footsteps, altering the smartlink's calibration so it is off-target, and screwing with GPS coordinate data feeds so the guards go to or aim at the wrong place.

Hackers also make decent drone riggers using the insect-sized ones as scouts, spies, signal-boosters, and distractions. Since they are only about 1,000Y each (cheaper than a handgun) they are close to disposable.

 

[Graf]

God, Shadowrun.
I loved that game.

Shadowrun 2nd ed. was just a brilliant gaming experience. Other than Earthdawn it was one of the only long running campaigns that we played in HS that really worked.

I agree that the creativity of the setting was key. The writers really took the setting and made it their own. Paranormal animals and a lot of the setting books were just brilliantly well written, they made you want to run a game.

The rules –were- exploitable. But this was before d20 and the bar was lower.

Since there were multiple layers to the world (i.e. not just the cyberpunk layer but also the re-impowerment of traditional societies resurgence of racism and so on) it stood the test of time better than a lot of other games.

And the character archtypes were brilliant: the burned out mage? The orc samurai (the one in the suit who had almost no cyberware)? Classics.

The system was totally abusable, nobody ever decked and everybody wanted to play mages/shamans. But other than that it was brilliant.

 

[Henry]

I gotta say, seeing this thread and reading about the improvements made in 4E has made me pretty tempted to find a copy and pick it up. From out of nowhere, it's like I've got these great SR plot hooks all of a sudden.

And (of course) right after my big rant to my gaming group about how I would never GM anything outside of True20 conversions again.

We're sorry, and you're welcome.