[Game a Day 19] ShadowRun

[Thanee]

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.

What makes you think that? FanPro has severe trouble to get enough books printed to fulfill the demand, they are already in the 4th printing run or something like that AFAIK.

That doesn't really sound like it's running bad to me.

And I really doubt there is such a huge crowd of SR3 hardliners out there. It's just the usual online phenomenon, I suspect, with a few folks making themselves appear more numerous than they really are.

Bye
Thanee

 

[Henry]

What makes you think that? FanPro has severe trouble to get enough books printed to fulfill the demand, they are already in the 4th printing run or something like that AFAIK.

That doesn't really sound like it's running bad to me.

And I really doubt there is such a huge crowd of SR3 hardliners out there. It's just the usual online phenomenon, I suspect, with a few folks making themselves appear more numerous than they really are.

You may well be right; I'll admit to not following the 4e situation lately. At first, it looked like a HUGE pool of online detractors; on the other hand, the base of "Joe Gamers" (the majority of players who don't spend a lot of time on messageboards and who are more casual gamers than active hobby-followers) who play Shadowrun may be larger than I anticipate.

However, I also know that the game seems to have more popularity in Germany than Stateside, and that a print run for Fanpro may not be a huge number -- without hard numbers, a 4th print run might be "5,000 books", making it 20,000 sold. Hard to say without more info. I hope it is a success, because it'd be a shame to see it fail.

 

[Clueless]

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'll take that as a compliement, and will expect you at my table for part 2 if you can make it.
To be honest re: the system - yes - i was glossing it a little, mostly around the magic system. I gloss even *heavier* around decking but I'm a programmer in RL, so I can do that without loosing the 'techy' feeling.

But you'd be surprised how much I wasn't glossing it for the staging up vs. staging down of damage. In SR (at least the way I run it), one success is enough to hit. It's just wither or not they 'save' in absorbing the damage where you need more than X number of successes. I just play fairly fast and loose because I don't want to bog things down in the middle of a con game like that - I can get more detailed in games where I've got the *time* to do that.

 

[Clueless]

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.

Aye - I adore that myself. If you read enough of the books you can pick up on the backstory of the world as well. And plot hooks. Any writer that can make a book that consists entirely of a *mere list of equipment* into an interesting read - wins a prize for me.

 

[Henry]

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.

One of the subtle touches that I liked: Most of the other deckers/commenters would have the normal date & time stamp on their posts, and Fastjack had hacked his/hers to read entirely differently.

 

[kigmatzomat]

I loved the story and evolution of the Shadowlanders. For instance: Neon Samurai first showed up in Street Sam Guide 1 in 1990 with a beef against a megacorp that wasn't explained until Fields of Fire in 1994. For 4 years the guy ranted and only later did they pull out the "death of his father" story. It even makes sense in how it was done as it would have taken him that long to be enough of a nuisance for the corp to make a "public" comment on it.

Dang, they better keep the commentary in the new stuff. I miss it, I miss it so.

You don't get that from other books. Heck, I've got friends in the medical field, one of whom is a genetic engineer, who points at Shadowtech as one of the reasons they got into it. He's just so happy that there was research. Okay, it's research that's now fifteen years out of date, but still, research!

 

[Clueless]

If I could figure out how to do that sort of commentary in a fanatasy setting - I would - I *so* would.

 

[kigmatzomat]

I find it amusing that the commentary is basically a wiki. Of all the things the FASA guys did wrong, they got wiki/web right.