Shadowrun 3rd Edition

[Deceitfulelf]

My group and I are going to start a Shadowrun 3rd Edition campaign and I was wondering if anyone knows where a good forum and/or information webpage for Shadowrun would be. Also does anyone else here play Shadowrun? What are your thoughts? Some people I've talked to think the Cyberpunk genre is dead and just an 80's thing, but with all the telecoms merging to form even bigger corporations, the Microsoft monopoly and the unstoppable Wal-mart I think its still very much a viable and relevent genre. Granted we've missed the '99 food riots in NYC, but the goblination could still happen . What are your thoughts?

 

[GlassJaw]

Also does anyone else here play Shadowrun?

Yes.

What are your thoughts?

It's whiz chummer.

if anyone knows where a good forum and/or information webpage for Shadowrun would be

www.dumpshock.com
www.shadowrunrpg.com

SR is definitely not dead. Far from it. The SR community is going strong and FanPro has done a great job with the system since they obtained it from FASA.

 

[Khorod]

I've played a half dozen games with two characters, and I can say its a great game. Its a particularly nice change of pace to D&D.

In a sense everything I find wrong in D&D is right in Shadowrun, and vice versa. That's why I've been working on a hybrid system of the two. Maybe I'll even go public with it one day.

When I played, it was with other people whose characters were significantly more advanced than my starting out fellows. Furthermore, between the particular players and their extended circle of friends, the version of Seattle we ran in was full of history. All the old characters were either buried somewhere, or owned an eatery or a repair shop or something. That kind of history makes you really feel like you are a part of something.

It adds something when the time comes to set off the explosives.

 

[Geron Raveneye]

Shadowrun definitely sets a different pace than D&D, and it can be a damn refreshing one, no matter which incarnation of the game you play. GlassJaw already gave you the two best places to look for SR forums, too. All I can recommend is to look our for some 1st and 2nd Edition supplements on a lot of the places, as the 3rd Edition variants are a bit low on flavourful descriptions compared to their older counterparts.

Oh, and don't get too caught up in all the options and gadgets SR3 is offering by now...otherwise you might as well play D&D again.

About Cyberpunk bing dead...I don't think that quite hits it. I think it simply has been overtaken by reality, and people see that the truth is far from being as bad as Cyberpunk loved to paint it. Doesn't man you can't play it that way, though...because, if you look close enough, you can see those few screws that would have to be twisted to make our world much more like that of SR 2050...excpt for the magic part. So go ahead, start in the street and let them climb higher by the gums of their teeth. I can recommend using the point-buy method out of the Companion, and lowering the points you give them. Will start them out as street characters, not as underpaid professional mercs from Day 1.

 

[danbuter]

I am playing in a Shadowrun campaign currently. It's one of my favorite games. Like others have stated, be very careful which/how many additional rules from stuff like Man and Machine that you add into the game. They give more options, but also complicate the basic system quite a bit.

 

[ruleslawyer]

I must confess that I do find SR3 a bit weak. For one thing, because cyberpunk is a bit too '80s. The likelihood of an economic world order being so strongly Japanese-influenced is probably the biggest suspension of disbelief issue (realistically, the megacorps should be Chinese, South Asian, European, and North American, in that order). The likelihood of cyberware mods vs. nanotech/biotech mods is another. The flavor of the hip (noisy electronic music, weird hairdos, etc.) I think is hopelessly outdated as well. I don't think it's about pessimism vs. optimism. The SR flavor on toxic zones and secessionist/racist/religiously divisive politics matches a lot of what I see in the real world, f'rinstance.

However, I do think that SR 1 and 2 just had better source material AND, even, better rules in SR II's case. (I find that SR3 goes overboard in "balancing" magic characters, and I really dislike the removal of Threat Ratings in favor of NPC karma pools.) That said, I do like the game in general. The main rules issue I have with SR, though, is the weird probabilities that result from the Rule of Six. I'd love to see a ruleset that doesn't, say, yield exactly as much likelihood of getting a 7 as getting a 6.

 

[Geron Raveneye]

The main rules issue I have with SR, though, is the weird probabilities that result from the Rule of Six. I'd love to see a ruleset that doesn't, say, yield exactly as much likelihood of getting a 7 as getting a 6.

That's pretty easy...for every reroll of a die, you subtract 1 from the final result, e.g. one reroll, subtract 1, for two rerolls, subtract 2, etc. Tends to eliminate the 6th reroll, but I have yet to see somebody reroll one die 6 times. Makes high TNs a tad more difficult, but in SR system, a 7 is already jack-damn hard anyway, so you shouldn't have that many occasions where you go above 10, except for somebody trying to catch an assault cannon shot with his bare chest.

About the cyberpunk-isms...remember that the history of the game was created in the end-80's, hmmm? West Coast US being taken over by Japan was even more likely than magic returning and the NAN rising up. All the techno-gear looked strange and threatening 16 years back, too, while nowadays nobody minds all his personal data being stored on a small chip on a card, cell phones being small handheld PCs and fingerprint-payment being accepted at local supermarkets instead of cash. The rest...big corporations becoming nations in their own right, the pollution growing so strong it gets alive if you don't watch it, and racism/unemployment/organized crime rising...well...we're not THAT far away from it anymore, are we? Just different locations, but the music's the same, basically.

 

[Axegrrl]

I'd love to see a ruleset that doesn't, say, yield exactly as much likelihood of getting a 7 as getting a 6.

One thing I tried for a while when I was running SR2: When you roll a 6, you add 5 to your next roll. Effectively, the die is numbered 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, roll again.

 

[Aust Diamondew]

I love shadowrun. It's a great game.

Cyberpunk will never die!

 

[Sholari]

It's popularity really started to die out after they released their third edition.