Why is/was Shadowrun more popular than Cyberpunk?

[MGibster]

I dunno, having stats on a d100 and lucking out on a ridiculously high roll for some things meant a character was (virtually) magically successful at things based on that stat/skill.

I thought Recon used the Palladium rules? Skills were percentage but stats weren't. And thanks @Voadam and @Ralif Redhammer for bringing up Recon and Dallas. Particularly Dallas. Any chance you have to remind people this product exists should be taken.

 

[billd91]

I thought Recon used the Palladium rules? Skills were percentage but stats weren't. And thanks @Voadam and @Ralif Redhammer for bringing up Recon and Dallas. Particularly Dallas. Any chance you have to remind people this product exists should be taken.

My experience with Recon was with the original rules. Stats and skills could vary extremely widely (they were all determined by d100).
The Palladium published revision to Recon did not use their house system but made some balance improvements to the original Recon rules to reduce that extremely wide spread of potential character abilities and skills.

 

[kigmatzomat]

Though you can make a different argument about D6 Legend.

But there are other things that resemble Storyteller in SR; the addition of successes to damage values, for example.

Though it's more appropriate to say storyteller resembles SR. Tom Dowd worked on SR mechanics in the late '80s and joined WW ~1990.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Though it's more appropriate to say storyteller resembles SR. Tom Dowd worked on SR mechanics in the late '80s and joined WW ~1990.

I don't think the arrow of time matters much for my point.

 

[Hand of Evil]

I don't think the arrow of time matters much for my point.

I don't know, thinking about it, there seems to be trends and fads that were playing out at the time. Designers were looking for alternate dice mechanics and hooks in games to catch the imagination of players and sperate their products from D&D.

 

[Velderan]

Having a big Netflix show and a popular video game means the Cyberpunk brand is probably doing better as a whole right now. Does that translate to the TTRPG though? There's certainly more interst in Cyberpunk then we've seen in years, they're even coming out with a 2077 supplment, but I don't know if this is just a flash-in-the pan or if it'll last a few years. My suspicion is that it won't last long because Red isn't a very good game. But then I think Shadowrun is nigh unplayable and they keep churning out books.

I wonder how many people buy SR books just to read them.

I bought the SR Sixth World Starter Set a few months ago and flipping through the books it just doesn’t look like a good game. I’ll eventually give it a try to see if my initial skimming was correct but the bits of lore were interesting to read. Having played quite a bit of SR 2e and spent hours playing the SNES and Genesis games, the material is very interesting to me. I’ve considered just buying more SR books to read for the lore even if I never play them. I'll probably flip through some of the books next time I'm at the FLGS in my area that carries them to see what they look like.

 

[Voadam]

I played a lot of Shadowrun 1e, 2e, and some 4e and had a great time with it. Universal Brotherhood was pretty great. I never really wrapped my head around the task resolution mechanics though and I don't think I would ever want to run the rules system. The character creation system in the various editions was understandable though and the world is fun. I have also read a few novels set in the world. I really like the narrative ideas in the magic system (astral, mana, totems, loges, etc.) and use some of it in my D&D games.

Never played any cyberpunk.

 

[Voadam]

Shadowrun had a bunch of adventures. While looking over the R. Talsorian Cyberpunk 2020 listings I don't see any. I know Atlas Games did a few for the cyberpunk system but Cyberpunk did not really seem to have stuff like Shadowrun's Harlequin or Universal Brotherhood or Dreamchipper that was ready to go if you tried out the new system.

 

[aramis erak]

I think that tracks with Dune's mini-renaissance.

Yeah, Dune's on the Fantasy side, but it's strongly in the socio-political sci-fi tradition.

• The Bene Gesserit are Pure «bleep»ing Magic (PF«»M).
• The Spice? P«»M.
• Ginaz Swordsmen? Super plausible. But the school itself is reliant on supertech - Holtzman Effect body shields.
• Mentats?
  • As training? BS.
  • As a separate genome? Plausible, but not Dune.
• FTL? Highly unlikely.
  • As a spice-fueled psionic talent? P«»M!
  • As a technological breakthrough? barely plausible. And present in Dune - both Pre-Butlerian-Jihad, and late- and post- God-Emperor period.
• other, non-FTL, Holtzman Effect Devices (HEDs) - Still very vaguely plausible, but pushing the envelope.
  • The interaction of Lasers and Holtzman fields? If we accept that HEDs are plausible (not a given), that lasers interact poorly with them, when other light sources don't, is problematic. P«»M due to plot need.
• Many, many, many inhabitable worlds? The more we look, the more the Copernican Principle (the principle that we're nothing extremely special in the universe) is looking to be in error. So the massively habitable universe of the Dune Setting is less and less likely.

The thing is, only the spice is key to the setting... Bene Gesserit and Mentats can be dropped with little effect; they're mostly to make Mua'dib less outlandish. The Ginaz? A probability if we accept the HED shields and their nasty interaction with Lasers.

And why does this matter? Because what's compelling for Roleplay in the Dune setting isn't what's story essential... it's all the other ephemera that surround the main story - that make it different from our own life experiences.

Cyberpunk (the genre, not the game), in the 80's and 90's, was predictive. It failed to predict accurately, but it has, largely, been accurate about what would be researched - totally unrealistic timescales in the fiction... but it's keys -- man-machine interfaces on a neural level -- are in fact one of Elon Musk's less advertised research projects -- Neuralink. We already have artificial hearing on a neural level: cochlear implants. Some cyber-eyes also are extant; not superhuman, not even good as human, but it's still early. If the optic nerve works, there's no reason cyber eyes can't exist. In fact, a few do. The first few cybernetic limbs which outdo natural human performance are out - spring based legs - and those look odd, but allow a significant increase in running speed for the ex-soldiers for whom they've been offered. Truly, the first superhuman cyberlimbs.

The problem? as I noted before, much of the tech in CP2013 and CP2020 was too clearly not going to happen in time. With Shadowrun, it's much easier to assume the return of Magic ends the major limitation of cybernetics - power sources.

Shadowrun also set itself much further away on the timeline - 2050 - vs CP2013 (aka CP v1) being set in.... 2013. CP2020 (aka v2) was in 2020... and we know it was totally wrong.

 

[Thomas Shey]

The thing is, only the spice is key to the setting... Bene Gesserit and Mentats can be dropped with little effect; they're mostly to make Mua'dib less outlandish. The Ginaz? A probability if we accept the HED shields and their nasty interaction with Lasers.

I think it'd be hard to make the setting make sense without FTL, and the significance Spice has for it.