Shadowrun 4th Edition: Helpful Hints?

[DogBackward]

Well, a friend of mine's just recently given me a couple Shadowrun books for 4th edition; the main rulebook and Street Magic. Since I'm one of those guys that "gets" new systems easily and tends to learn rules and such quickly, I've been tagged as our first Shadowrun GM.

So, I'm wondering if there're any major things I should know for trying to run my first Shadowrun game, besides the rules themselves, which I'm deep into at the moment as it is. Any wierd rules I should watch out for, or odd and obscure things I should keep an eye on? I know a classless, point-based system can be fairly easily abused; how easy is it with this one?

One qualm I have, especially after spending the last month getting used to D&D 4e, is the involved nature of the system, combat being the biggest offender with upwards of three plus rolls involved for each attack, and a disgustingly huge list of modifiers and such. How hard is it to actually keep track of all that stuff while the game is running? I can see comabt bogging down being a problem with some of the guys in my group.

Anyway, just looking for some of those obvious tips that people tend to get aftera while anyway, to help things get started. Thanks in advance, guys.

 

[delericho]

I had a really bad experience with Shadowrun 4th edition, and so won't be attempting to run it again. However, I suspect that might just be my bad experience, so I'll stop short of warning you off. Unless, that is...

I know a classless, point-based system can be fairly easily abused; how easy is it with this one?

If you have the sort of players who will seek to abuse the game system, Shadowrun is probably a game to avoid. It definately seems to be built on the assumption that players will 'play nice' with the system.

My particular problem was an armoured troll who would routinely walk through firefights and punch his enemies to death. His agility was such that he almost never got hit, and the combination of toughness and armour meant that he took a grand total of one point of stun damage over the course of the game.

 

[Andor]

I had a really bad experience with Shadowrun 4th edition, and so won't be attempting to run it again. However, I suspect that might just be my bad experience, so I'll stop short of warning you off. Unless, that is...



If you have the sort of players who will seek to abuse the game system, Shadowrun is probably a game to avoid. It definately seems to be built on the assumption that players will 'play nice' with the system.

My particular problem was an armoured troll who would routinely walk through firefights and punch his enemies to death. His agility was such that he almost never got hit, and the combination of toughness and armour meant that he took a grand total of one point of stun damage over the course of the game.

Oh I don't think so. I've never played 4th edition, but in 1 through 3 it was assumed the players were going to tweak the hell out of the system. And it just doesn't matter.

You can, absolutely, make a heavily Armoured Troll who is nigh immune to small arms. However your foes are not limited to small arms. If you go in with the subtlety of a Main Battle Tank they will call in a weapon suitable for a main battle tank. Any corporation worthy of the name can call in military class support in minuetes. The PCs want to be good enough to end a firefight quickly and get the hell out before the real guns arrive. They don't ever want to go in starting fights. Stealth and speed are your only ways to survive long term.

 

[Fenes]

Check here for more info - it's the forums the SR4 Devs post on.

 

[delericho]

You can, absolutely, make a heavily Armoured Troll who is nigh immune to small arms. However your foes are not limited to small arms. If you go in with the subtlety of a Main Battle Tank they will call in a weapon suitable for a main battle tank.

Well, it was a while back, but IIRC I checked the book and found that there was nothing short of anti-tank weapons that could harm the character, except with excessive numbers of successes on the to-hit roll, and there were no NPCs in the book who could even reliably hit the character, never mind getting those extra successes.

Deploying anti-tank weapons to threaten the character would have destroyed the virsimilitude of my game. So, I wrapped up the game, and won't be going back. (My other big objection was that it took us six hours to create three fairly basic PCs for use. That's too much of an investment for a system that was never going to be our game of choice long-term. This also means that our elapsed play-time was less than the time taken to create characters.)

My assertion that the system was intended for players who would 'play nice' comes from a check of the pre-built archetypes, where they had deliberately gone out of their way to avoid maxing out attributes, equipping heavy armour, or similar things. Had we used those archetypes, the game would have gone very differently. But my players rightly pointed out that the game-book also said that armour was both commonly available and highly effective, and so no sane character should be seen without it.

Anyway, as I said, my bad experience should hopefully not be your bad experience with the game. But it was enough to prevent me considering running it ever again.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

Biggest problem in Shadowrun:
Coming up with an interesting story that can motivate the typical Shadowrunner. In my experience, Shadowrunners are not D&D heroes that are out to save the world. They want to make money. And sometimes it is about their style and their reputation (common way to appeal to that seems to be: Let the Johnson try to screw with them - they will get angry, and will want revenge. Gets boring if 80% of the adventures feature this "twist", as they always seem to...)

I found it hard to create new and varied story-lines. In D&D, I can have a murder mystery followed by some dungeon-crawling with over-land travel and a political intrigue. The types of adventures in Shadowrun seem far more limited and usually involve infiltrating some corporate building and getting something out or in.

---

Gameplaywise, these are my issues:
- Reflexboosting is king. If you are not reflex-boosted, you're not only in-effective, you get bored in combat, since where the boosted street samurai gets of 3 actions (possibly killing 3-4 enemies in 3 seconds), you get of 1.
- Hacking and Astral Projection are single-player mini-games. The hacker is a very intersting and compelling archetype - but very disruptive since his player is the only one interacting with the GM for a long time when making a matrix run. Astral Projection is similar - the Mage explores, the rest sits back and waits.
- Complex sub-systems - Hacking, Rigging and Magic always feature complex sub-systems and this often helps to increase the problem of the previous.

---

Powergaming is not such a big issue. You might be able to become "unkillable" by common guards, but the DM _could_ pull out the big guns, and very often you require considerable amounts of subtlety to pull a Shadowrun, and big guns alone don't help.
Being prepared, organized and having a good plan is usually more important.

And not Anti-Tank weapons are used against trolls, but mages. Security mages are still a little more common then tanks in corporate facilities, and a stun bolt bypasses your constitution, armor and your agility. Hope your spell defense and your willpower is high enough or be prepared to be taken prison and stripped of all possession before being put into a corporate jail. (The most humilating defeat for any PC, I think. Death is far better...)

 

[Thanee]

Well, it was a while back, but IIRC I checked the book and found that there was nothing short of anti-tank weapons that could harm the character, except with excessive numbers of successes on the to-hit roll, ...

Well, a character that is built for combat would probably roll something like 18 dice on an attack (AGI 9, Skill 6, specialized, smartlinked). Now give him a decent weapon, like an Ares Alpha Assault Rifle with Gas Vent, APDS ammo, Long Burst, aim to a vulnerable spot (-4 dice / +4 Damage)...

That's 15 dice with a base DV of 15 and -5 to armor.

Assuming the attacker gets 5 hits and the target gets 3 hits on the Reflex roll to dodge the attack (average results, assuming a very high Reflex of 8-9), you would need 56 Body+Armor in total to soak that completely (on average). I don't think even the toughest troll can really do that without obscene luck, or spending lots of Edge (the attacker might do that, too).

And that's just one burst...

Now use an average gunman with just AGI 5 and a skill of 4 (also specialized and smartlinked), no aiming, no APDS, and you are still looking at 13 dice rolled (4-5 hits so should hit on average) with a DV of 11 and -1 armor. The target would still need 34 Body+Armor in total to soak that away.

Pistol shots will probably just bounce off him, though. But automatic fire really hurts in Shadowrun.

Bye
Thanee

 

[Andor]

- Hacking and Astral Projection are single-player mini-games. The hacker is a very intersting and compelling archetype - but very disruptive since his player is the only one interacting with the GM for a long time when making a matrix run. Astral Projection is similar - the Mage explores, the rest sits back and waits.
- Complex sub-systems - Hacking, Rigging and Magic always feature complex sub-systems and this often helps to increase the problem of the previous.

This can be a problem. Personally the last few times I ran/played Shadowrun we used an NPC decker and the GM simply declared what happened. We all thought this was much better than actually using game time to deal with the decking.

 

[DarkKestral]

One technique that may work a bit better if you have a PC who wants to be a classic decker, rigger, or Astral'd mage, but you don't want the rest of the party getting ticked off is simply to have "dead zones" where they can't use their mojo remotely, and to keep individual security systems fairly "light" so it's possible to have the specialist's turns take place in the same place as the combat guys. It also provides some extra incentive to get in and out stealthily, or at least quickly as the specialists will be sitting ducks in combat when they're doing their schtick... unless they're willing to take heavy penalties to somehow attempt to jack in and out repeatedly or to keep track of both what's going on with the VR and with the real world. If there's some weird rule like 1 turn real world = 10 turns VR/Astral world, then I'd kill that and make the ratio 1:1. (If you need any justification, just say that human reflexes are limited and so they're limited somewhat, unless they have specific things which automate specific responses, similarly to how reflexboosting and some mage spells might work.)

 

[Fenes]

Biggest problem in Shadowrun:
Coming up with an interesting story that can motivate the typical Shadowrunner. In my experience, Shadowrunners are not D&D heroes that are out to save the world. They want to make money. And sometimes it is about their style and their reputation (common way to appeal to that seems to be: Let the Johnson try to screw with them - they will get angry, and will want revenge. Gets boring if 80% of the adventures feature this "twist", as they always seem to...)

I found it hard to create new and varied story-lines. In D&D, I can have a murder mystery followed by some dungeon-crawling with over-land travel and a political intrigue. The types of adventures in Shadowrun seem far more limited and usually involve infiltrating some corporate building and getting something out or in.

I don't understand hat. In SR; I can have a murder mystery, followed by a smuggle trip overland or over the ocean, followed by some hunt for gouls in the sewers, and then followed by meddling in mafia politics, or corp politics, or politics...

I can't imagine a plot I cannot run in SR.