Shadowrun deserves better

[MGibster]

Was CGL actually there? Or were folks just running Battletech? I could see both, but at least CGL not being there makes it seem better if not still bad.

CGL had a booth. I almost bought one of their Mad Cat models, not the regular sized one, but the larger scale version just for display. But I just wasn't in the market for anything Battletech that day. As I recall, they had Shadowrun in their booth, but it was mostly BTech.

 

[payn]

CGL had a booth. I almost bought one of their Mad Cat models, not the regular sized one, but the larger scale version just for display. But I just wasn't in the market for anything Battletech that day. As I recall, they had Shadowrun in their booth, but it was mostly BTech.

Yeah SR might have been reduced to step child status in the wake of the Btech renaissance. Problem is even BT isn’t getting much in the way of support for playing the game just new products.

 

[nyvinter]

Shadowrun Anarchy 2e did get better than the first edition but that one is also attempting to be more rules light in all areas. The main line is a mess of badly edited rules.

OR, hear me out, put all that aside, and hack Burning Wheel with life-path creation, artha that ties you to the setting and every "encounter" has intense stakes.

Hah, someone already thought of that a mere 18 years ago.

[Burning Wheel/Shadowrun] Beliefs and Instincts in Shadowrun | Tabletop Roleplaying Open

For those of you familiar with both systems, does anybody see any reason why I shouldn't retrofit the Beliefs and Instincts from Burning Wheel/Empires onto Shadowrun 4e? Essentially, just as in Burning Empires, players would create three beliefs and instincts. And when they let their beliefs...

forum.rpg.net

Even earlier than so as Burning Wheel did get made because of a few things making an idea spark and I believe Shadowrun rules were one of them.

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

It's a shame Shadowrun Anarchy hasn't gotten more support. I'm hoping that changes with 2e, but considering it's being outsourced to a third party, I suspect not. To my mind, it's been the best presentation of Shadowrun in decades.

I started with 1e, trailed of at 2e, came back for 5e and got frustrated by the organized play. I'm just starting to dabble with 6e again, hoping that they've fixed some of my kvetches with organized play.

These days, I'm much more into Cyberpunk Red, but I'll admit to having a soft spot for Shadowrun still. It's wild seeing the push Cyberpunk got with 2077 and Edgerunners (and a metric ton of associated media and merch), and Shadowrun just kinda sitting there.

 

[Thomas Shey]

As someone said, its essentially an impossible task. Some of the people who love the concept and setting want something much leaner, while for others that would kill part of what they appreciate about it. Even among the latter there's a pretty visible bifurcation between fans of 1-3 and 4-5 (I'm sure there are some fans of 6e out there, I but I don't seem to see a lot of them.)

 

[soviet]

As someone said, its essentially an impossible task. Some of the people who love the concept and setting want something much leaner, while for others that would kill part of what they appreciate about it. Even among the latter there's a pretty visible bifurcation between fans of 1-3 and 4-5 (I'm sure there are some fans of 6e out there, I but I don't seem to see a lot of them.)

Rolemaster is in the same boat I think.

It's an unappreciated risk of making a new edition that is substantively different or more complex than the previous ones; you make it very difficult for the franchise to continue afterwards as you have split the fanbase (or rather, you have replaced one fanbase with another).

 

[Thomas Shey]

Rolemaster is in the same boat I think.

It's an unappreciated risk of making a new edition that is substantively different or more complex than the previous ones; you make it very difficult for the franchise to continue afterwards as you have split the fanbase (or rather, you have replaced one fanbase with another).

Or even if you make it much simpler, as elements of the complexity may make it more valuable to some of the prior fanbase.

Its instructive to note that, though these don't tend to exist in other BRP derivatives, hit locations have been present in each edition of RuneQuest, including the three versions not done by the Chaosium. I'd suggest that's because its a simplification that wouldn't, by and large, be considered a virtue by much of the fanbase.

This is a thing I've noted about people who occasionally come up and want to get a new, much simpler version of the Hero System; its almost certain that some things would be lost along the way which would lose parts of the current aging fanbase, while the new game would find itself competing in a zone already occupied heavily by games like Savage Worlds.

Shadowrun seems like it probably already mortally wounded itself by the combination of the editing problems with 4e and 5e (which to make it clear, I prefer over the earlier and later editions but it'd be foolish to not suggest the layout and errata problems didn't matter) and the lackluster nature of 6e, and for many of its fans Anarchy is not a meaningful substitute. There's no one else who's really grabbed that market, but I think it may well have been shattered beyond repair.

 

[GrimCo]

I fell in love with Shadowrun as a setting, read all the novels, played Shadowrun Returns, Dragonfall director's cut and Hong Kong extended and i think those are excellent tactical isometric rpg-games. I would be first one to fork out some cash for new title in that format.

One thing that always sucked, at least for me, is ttrpg rules. What i ultimate did was take all the fluff, dropped all the crunch, and just ran GURPS Shadowrun.

Other big problem, which is shared with Cyberpunk, is hacking. It's solo minigame on it's own. While hacker does his thing, rest of the players are sitting doing nothing. While hacking is integral part of genre, i have yet to encounter game that does it in both fast and interesting way while capturing danger of it.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Other big problem, which is shared with Cyberpunk, is hacking. It's solo minigame on it's own. While hacker does his thing, rest of the players are sitting doing nothing. While hacking is integral part of genre, i have yet to encounter game that does it in both fast and interesting way while capturing danger of it.

That actually largely changed as of 5e (maybe 4e too) because it became usually impossible to do important hacking remotely, so the hacker has to do his thing while his allies are keeping the local security off his back.

 

[Cergorach]

I'm one of those people who think 3E is the best of the main line and quality has gone hill sinse. 6E is one of the worst edited and error prone RPG books I have ever owned. The sheer amount of errata is staggering.

Have been a fan since 1e, still have all the 1e/2e/3e books, and have most of the PDFs via bundles for 4e/5e/6e. The setting for me is 1e-3e, I didn't like the direction 4e-6e took the setting into. So whatever the system is, I'll always play the 2050-2070 era.

But, from my perspective SR 1e/2e/3e/4e/5e/6e are all a flawed horribly organized and edited mess. I just think that many folks are looking at older SR through rose tinted glasses called nostalgia. Fasa, FanPro, and CGL aren't the best companies when it comes to organization and editing... And it helps that back in the day, if you wanted to play SR, you had to swallow a LOT! So folks have already gotten used to those editions due to necessity, for new players they would be a horror imho!

Anarchy 1.0 was the other end of the spectrum for me, too rules light. Anarchy 2.0 looks a lot better, but as with most lighter rules implementation, there is something lost in translation. So I'm not yet sure that when/IF I ever run another game of SR, it will we Anarchy 2.0 or one of the SR rules sets.

As we currently play in (Foundry) VTT with our group, I think, with a LOT of work. I could get any SR edition to run a LOT more smoothly by just organizing the rules better and editing for consistency. My biggest gripe with SR was the piles of books I had to lug around, with essentially core systems distributed across many, many books. When you get the references sorted out, things would run a LOT smoother.

Things I learned, while Catalyst has the publishing rights for the TTRPG, SR is owned by Microsoft and they don't give a naughty word.

As far as I know MS only owns the SR computer game rights, just as with Battletech. And I can understand why MS doesn't do anything with it. When MS did something with it (Shadowrun 2007), the last game of FASA Interactive (a MS studio since 1999), most SR fans hated it with a passion, me included. Boston Lockdown looked good, but disappeared after the studio closed. Besides the old console games, the only successful SR games are imho the three made by HBS. And you saw what happened to that studio, they sold themselves to Paradox and the SR/BT fansbases were just too small niches (look at the KS revenue for each title). Paradox made it clear they wouldn't be making games of IPs they didn't own, so no SR/BT games from them, since then HBS was 'released' from Paradox, without any of the games they made. And most of the people that made the SR games no longer work at what's left of HBS...

I only see small studios ever making a licensed SR/BT game in the future and then only if they can make it relatively cheaply with tooling for a rather small niche. The moment the studio wants to grow, it'll drop the SR/BT IP in a heartbeat. Something like Cyberpunk 2077 and CD Projekt Red are extremely rare imho. I also suspect that the Cyberpunk IP was a LOT cheaper then the SR/BT IP to license, and you wouldn't have the licensing mess when you want to do animations and board/card games based on the IP.