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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jürgen Hubert" data-source="post: 2108275" data-attributes="member: 7177">OK, let's take a look at it.First of all, Shadowrun has a completely different concept of "game balance". At character creation, you split your priorities five ways between Attributes (raw talent), Skills, Resources (equipment, money, cyberware), Race, and Magical Abilities (if any).In d20, the prime factor of game balance is the "character level". And this is where things start to get problematic. Race is easy to balance with effective character level, but how do you model an inexperienced character with lots of raw talent (=high attributes) verus an older character whose body has been ravaged by age or substance abuse (=low attributes), but lots of experience (=high skills)?Both are pretty typical cyberpunk archetypes, but hard to model in standard d20. You could do something like in Mutants and Masterminds, but that's a first major system change.Then there is Resources. Yes, it is possible at character creation to model cyberware by some sort of "cyberware template" - you "spend" one of your initial character levels and get some cyberware in return. But do you also require them to spend additional character levels on cyberware if they get additional cyberware in play? To me, this seems to be antiethical to the cyberpunk genre - someone who gets cyberware does become more capable than someone who doesn't, and does not magically cease learning new skills for a while.And that's only cyberware. Are you going to charge someone effective character levels because he has some very neat vehicles? Which might be lost or destroyed during the course of play?Magic in SR has quite a few differences from "standard" d20 as well. Standard d20 magic is rather mechanical - you expend your spell slot/energy point/whatever, and then the spell works. In Shadowrun, casting spells is always risky, the actual results of the casting are highly variable, and there are few spells that are permanent - and spells that are supposed last for a certain amount of time will need to be concentrated on constantly. Trying to capture all this with d20 would again require a major re-work of the d20 rules.In summary, I repeat my position: Yes it is possible to do Shadowrun in d20. But to capture the mood of Shadowrun properly, you would have to create so many new rules that it would be like effectively learning a new system, negating the advantage of using d20 in the first place.And I think the D&D-Shadowrun comparison is silly. Yes, you have magic and fantasy races in Shadowrun, and you occasionally break into buildings to loot them. But that's about it. I've played both Shadowrun and D&D extensively, and the mood in those campaigns couldn't be more different.</blockquote>

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