Runner's Companion was Terrible

[Username17]

This is a review of Shadowrun 4th Edition's Runner's Companion. It's a bit late for this, because it was inflicted on us a long time ago, but I was doing other things at the time and didn't really get into it. This review is very negative, which is fitting because it was a book so bad that it made me stop paying attention to releases from Catalyst, a company I used to work for.

First, the structural parts: Runner's Companion is a 184 book with a moderately well drawn sexy lady on the front. It is billed as a pile of character options, optional rules, and tips for players. And it mostly lives up to that, since only about 24 pages get given over to fanfiction. So what's wrong with it? Lots. But before we go chapter by chapter to talk about what has been done wrong, we have to talk about stuff that wasn't done at all, whose absence really sours me on the book.

It's a book of alternate rules, especially alternate build options, so you'd think it would contain the most popular house rules from the boards, right? Cheaper Skills, KarmaGen, BP Advancement and such, right? Well, you'd be wrong. Of all of those, only a KarmaGn system makes it into the book. Frank discussions about modifying the costs of horrendously overpriced things (like Skills) does not appear. At all. Secondly, when they promised playable Free Spirits, you and everyone else was probably thinking that you were going to see some playable Inhabitation Spirits, since those are the only spirits that can interact with the world like a normal PC. Well, you'd be wrong. The conceivably playable spirits don't get rules and the ones that can't even read a computer screen do.

But now let's talk about the actual book's contents, rather than the things left insultingly on the cutting room floor for them. Which brings us to the first chapter, aptly named Starting Out. It's 15 pages long, and is basically just a list of ideas for making a character. There is some decent, if basic suggestions for making a character. It tells you that your character should have Infiltration, Etiquette, Perception, and Gymnastics. This is true and decently good advice. There is a discussion of roles and how to fill them that is only occasionally full of crap (Elemental Strike? Seriously?). But if you are anything like me, you didn't rally learn anything from this chapter, because it's all very basic information (like how people supplying magical support in combat should have Counterspelling).

The next chapter is called Survival Tips, and it's the first half of a decent discussion about how to not show up in social networking databases and such. I say it's the first half, because the actual rules section only has a couple charts on chem sniffers. The chapter as a whole is a total letdown. At first you're grooving on it, because it's exactly the kind of discussion that should have been in Unwired. But then you realize that it's all theoretical and they never actually made any effort to link a character's prominence to search difficulties in the rules. Very sad, and turns what could have been the best chapter in the book into a delayed "fuck you" to the reader. A sort of "look at all the cool stuff that we could have tied into the rules of the game and then decided not to!" section. 16 Pages. Mysteriously, the last page and a half is equipment that probably should have been in Arsenal or Augmentation.

And the major disappointment: Alternate Character Generation Systems. You know what you were hoping for: BP Advancement and KarmaGen. Well, you don't get that. You get a hopelessly baroque Priority System that misses the entire point of being less complex than a point system by being more complex than the point system. You also get a Karmagen system that is... not very good. Consensus on Dumpshock is that it is "broken" but really I think it's just a natural extension of how completely fucking underpriced attributes are across the board in the basic book. This chapter is a huge disappointment.

Next up: Alternative Character Concepts: This chapter is marred by some atrociously bad art. It's just really bad. No. It's tracendentally awful. The lineup of metavariants looks like it was drawn by that guy who did Giant Strength and Reverse Polarity for Magic, back when those were the worst card art samples. In any case, this chapter is ghastly. It starts with the metavariants. You can buy their super powers for BP as a build-your-own metavariant (using SURGE), and the metavariants do not add up to the price you'd pay for all of their modifiers. Some of them cost more for no reason since you could just buy the same powers and move on with your life. Some of them are good deals, the Ogre has only postive modifiers and pays nothing at all over an Ork. Also, the mods are in many cases totally incoherent. And it covers non-human stuff not normally playable in previous editions such as Vampires, Centaurs, Free Spirits, Sprites, and all kinds of other crap that it probably never even occurred to you to ask if it was playable (such as the Earthdawn Windlings that until recently were extinct, and only reachable through metaplanar travel to Avalon).

But this chapter is so bad that it requires several paragraphs to detail its atrocities against sense. Remember that thing in Savage Species that totally fucking sucked where you could apply a template that cost several levels for free right away and then suffer because you could never advance again because you paid all your XP into a dark hole at interest to pay it off? Yeah, they went there. You can become all sorts of crazy shit once play begins and you get the power up front and then have to pay all your Karma into a dark hole at interest to pay it off. Spontaneous Drake Transformation gives you all the power upfront, but costs 120 Karma to pay off - which is the worst design I've ever seen on anything.

Numerous "playable" options are in fact not playable. The Free Spirit and AI are totally catastrafucked. As a Free Spirit it is actually beyond your starting limits to come into play as a Force 3 Fire Spirit. Remember those things that even a basic magician throws around like candy because they are cheap as free to summon and suck at life? Yeah, those. But it's beyond that. It's not just that it's nowhere near balanced, it's blatantly obvious on even a cursory read-through that the author didn't read the spirit rules and has no idea how they work (since the Author of this subsection is Aaron, this is almost certainly the case). For example, it tells you that all Free Spirits get Materialization or Possession, and also have Immunity to Normal Weapons. Which it doesn't need to say because both Materialization and Possession provide ItNW as one of their signature effects. The AI rules are just that bad except that they are also written in juvenile l33t (I'm not kidding). Underpowered to a surreal degree, these guys are not simply wasted space. They are worse than wasted space, because they represent "official" rules for things people actually want to play.

A special shout out needs to go to how completely fucking insane the rules for playing the Infected are. For some reason they decided to rewrite HMHVV as a proper Disease, but then I guess they didn't read the rules I wrote, or maybe they just didn't care. Anyway, when you get exposed to the virus, you explode. I mean, you are seriously set up with wound penalties of approximately -120 to all your dice pools for the next four months. That's not even an exaggeration. You also get to play a Bandersnatch! Which would require you to (I am not making this up) eat 15 kilograms of Sasquatch flesh a week. There are only 35,000 sasquatches in the whole fucking planet, and you need to eat 3 of them a year (assuming the GM will let you count Sasquatch bones and bodily fluids as "flesh," otherwise like twice that many). Seriously man, what the hell? This book continues a long tradition started in Bug City where every single mention of HMHVV has to make it more fucking stupid and unplayable than before. I remind you: there was a time when Ghouls were simply a super powered and super dangerous NPC-only Goblinization option, and every single time they fiddle with it, it gets worse. Seriously, wanna pay 80 BP to play a cannibalistic and non sapient troll? This section of the chapter probably deserves its own rant. Every part of it is wrong. From demanding that Vampires drink five liters of metahuman blood a week, to totally unaffordable prices to overpowered powers to batshit retarded pseudoscience, and of course the ability to acquire vast powers and three hundred points of fucking Karma Debt in play - this chapter section has it all.

I'm not even going to get into the dick in a pencil sharpener that is the rules for playing a non-human paracritter. Well, I will a little bit: at 50 BP and more to be a Shapeshifter, you'd think that the author could have done us the service of actually reading the original Shapeshifter writeups and realize that Shadowrun Shapeshifters have pointed ears, you lazy fucks! Arrgh.

Anyway, moving on before I have a ragegasm. The next chapter is a whole fuck tonne of Qualities. You have the usual suspects of qualities that provide unbalanced modifiers (would you rather spend 5 points for a capped +1 modifier to one skill or an uncapped +2 modifier to two skills?), some qualities that do not appear to have any effect (Perfect Time can be acquired by installing an atomic clock in your fillings), and of course qualities whose price is indeterminate (Fame is listed as 5 to 15, but the National modifier says it costs 20). The entire chapter looks like a brainstorming section, as the big list contains some incredibly bad ideas (like "will betray party" - which is actually in there). Also, a lot of them are conversions of old qualities from previous editions, some of which were never a good idea (like Borrowed Time), but some of which simply don't translate into 4th edition at all. For example: Hung Out To Dry crosses out all your contacts, but in SR4 you don't get Free Contacts, so that Quality doesn't actually have any effect (it just means you spend your BP on something that isn't contacts, you don't actually lose anything even though the quality description still says you do).

And then of course, there are the SURGE qualities. Oh my goodness, what the fuck?

-Username17

[Josh_Kablack]

Anyway, moving on before I have a ragegasm

Wow, I'd hate to see the review you write after you explode in rage.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Spontaneous Drake Transformation gives you all the power upfront, but costs 120 Karma to pay off - which is the worst design I've ever seen on anything.

Good god, that is so bad that I stopped reading your review.

[Orca]

Shadowrun Shapeshifters have pointed ears, you lazy fucks!

I haven't seen the original writeup - what's the significance of this?

[Maxus]

Anyway, moving on before I have a ragegasm

Wow, I'd hate to see the review you write after you explode in rage.

Truly.

Frank being snarky or acidic is one thing.

Frank being actually having a ton of rage? Eesh, man.

[Username17]

Shadowrun Shapeshifters have pointed ears, you lazy fucks!

I haven't seen the original writeup - what's the significance of this?

Whoever wrote the Shapeshifters section in the Runner's Companion gave them a human form and offered them the ability to spend points to have an Elf or Ork form instead. Problem being of course that Shadowrun Shapeshifters have a metahuman form that looks more like an Elf than a Human. So that whole section was written without regard for the single most important fact of the Shadowrun Shapeshfiter: which is that it does not at any point "become human" but instead stays an animal that acquires some human traits. It's not a human wit the soul of a beast, it's seal or jaguar that has the magic power to gain opposable thumbs.

-Username17

[Lago PARANOIA]

From demanding that Vampires drink five liters of metahuman blood a week, to totally unaffordable prices to overpowered powers to batshit retarded pseudoscience, and of course the ability to acquire vast powers and three hundred points of fucking Karma Debt in play - this chapter section has it all

I mean, honestly, is there really any point to continue reading the book after that? If a book throws out this amount of bullshit one after another, is there any reason to care what's printed before or after it?

I mean, three hundred karma points. With that kind of scratch you could make the most powerful mage on the planet. By the time you get out of the hole and learn, say, how to play an instrument your buddies are demigods.

[Koumei]

Oh wow, this review is awesome. This product is terrible. I am now willing to believe that Dresden wasn't firebombed, it immolated itself to avoid ever having to see this book.

Incidentally, I mentioned on IRC that you wanted to put forward a motion to have the SR/EP guys banned from ever writing up RPG rules for hacking ever again, and were sure you could get a number of member-states to sign it.

One person said they would, if that was put forward, start up their own nation and join the UN simply so that they could sign that.

I'm glad I've never read up on the SR hacking rules.

[Gelare]

I mean, three hundred karma points. With that kind of scratch you could make the most powerful mage on the planet. By the time you get out of the hole and learn, say, how to play an instrument your buddies are demigods.

Of course, Frank's point is that you don't get out of the whole, not ever, because according to the official rules you get like six karma a session and campaigns have a finite lifespan. So really you maxed out your credit card for real ultimate power and you're moving to Florida before the bill ever comes due.

[Korwin]

Well in the case of an Drake its not even near ultimate power.
For most Chars Drake would/should count as an Flaw.

[Kaelik]

Well in the case of an Drake its not even near ultimate power.
For most Chars Drake would/should count as an Flaw.

Well, let's not be stupid here. I don't know what Drake does or doesn't give, but if a feat gives +20 CL to Wizards and -20 CL to Clerics, pointing out that it's a flaw to clerics isn't actually relevant to the question of it's balance.

If Drake is only good for some types of characters, and not others, that's fine, because the others can apparently do the same thing with Vampire or one of the 3-4 other creatures types that can be aquired in game in return for running up an imaginary karma bill.

[Ferret]

If Drake is only good for some types of characters, and not others, that's fine, because the others can apparently do the same thing with Vampire or one of the 3-4 other creatures types that can be aquired in game in return for running up an imaginary karma bill.

Yeah but...it isn't. Drake is -actively weaker- than any other race option (barring Free Spirits, possibly). Let me dig out my copy, here...

Aura:

a Drake's aura ALWAYS reveals it's opposite form (unless you pay to Initiate and take Masking to hide it); so any mage on the street can immediately see you for what you are with a trivially easy Assensing roll. Congratulations, you just became Capture Priority Number 1 as there are any number of corporations that would love to have you for vivisection.

Augmentations:
You can only be augmented in your Human form - so you pay full price for cyber/bioware, but it's only useful half the time. If you stay out of dracoform then why the fuck are you playing a Drake?


Bonuses:

Okay, it can't be all bad, right? What do you get?

Well. When you're in metahuman form...nothing. But, once you shift into a man-sized minidragon, you get:

A Magic stat of 1.

Dual Natured (hi i can perceive the astral but have only the crappiest of defenses there lol wee!)

Elemental Attack (Fire, by default. + 15 karma to change it to another Elemental variant)

Enhanced Senses (Hearing, Low-
Light Vision, Smell, Thermographic Sense): this annoys me, because Enhanced Senses never actually tells you WHAT it gives you. Is it bonus dice? Additional sense variants? If so, what is Enhanced Senses(Hearing) doing? Ultrasonic? Infrasonic? WHO KNOWS!?

Hardened Armor 4: This could be cool, except it's not. You ignore any attack that does not exceed 4 DV, except I can't think of any SR4e attack that does less than 4 DV by default. Maybe if a secretary stabbed you with a letter opener? Even holdout pistols do 4DV.

Mystic Armor 4: Okay, see Hardened Armor. This basically says you're armored vs. Astral Attacks, but it suffers the same 'too low to be useful' values here. Luckily, it's also hardened due to the Hardned Armor 4. At least they gave you that.

Natural Weapon: Str/2+2; probably in the range of 4 DV. Know what else gives you 4 DV melee attacks? A 150 nuyen set of forearm snap-blades.

The typical drake also gets stat modifiers: +1 Reach, +4 Body, and +5 Strength. (only in Drake form).

All of this costs you -65- BP, on top of your metavariant costs.

The BP you spend here could just buy you...well, all of this, but better, and cheaper. Because these powers are ONLY valid when you're in drake form. In a game where blending in and not drawing attention to yourself are espoused as the Way Things Are Supposed To Work.

[CatharzGodfoot]

Huh, so it's basically the retard cousin of a troll magician.

[Username17]

Ferret is underselling Drakeness somewhat. You could for example be a Magician who transforms into an Eastern Dragon, at which point you basically get super Astral Perception that comes with bonus Agility. It's not worth 65 BP or 120 Karma. But it's a fucking awesome deal for five BP and then you'll get the game to end before you actually pay back the 120 Karma.

Even one of the guys who worked on that book admitted that Runner's Companion was the worst Shadowrun book. It seriously might be a worse book than Tir na nOg.

-Username17

[Lago PARANOIA]

It seriously might be a worse book than Tir na nOg.

Oh, do go on. You know it gets me hot and bothered when people stick it to elitist authorwank races and daddy Lago needs his medicine after that Exalted thread ran its course.

[Korwin]

Ferret is underselling Drakeness somewhat. You could for example be a Magician who transforms into an Eastern Dragon, at which point you basically get super Astral Perception that comes with bonus Agility. It's not worth 65 BP or 120 Karma. But it's a fucking awesome deal for five BP and then you'll get the game to end before you actually pay back the 120 Karma.
-Username17

The problem is you dont see the difference at the point the 120 Karma points are paid of.
You see your Char. fall behind after 10 Karma points...

Btw. whats so great at the astral projection of an Drake?



Its interesting that the only playable (= I mean cheap enough) Infected Variant is the one with fluff saying they are intelectuell a little above animals. (Gnome-Goblins for the win)

Huh, so it's basically the retard cousin of a troll magician.

But only in Drake form, in Human form its an retarded cousin off an human magician.
(if you didnt buy an metavariant)

[Username17]

It seriously might be a worse book than Tir na nOg.

Oh, do go on. You know it gets me hot and bothered when people stick it to elitist authorwank races and daddy Lago needs his medicine after that Exalted thread ran its course.

Tir na nOg was at the time of it writing the worst book in the Shadowrun line. It may even now hold that title because it is very very bad.

Here's the basic premise: unkillable fourth wall breaking super elves gained immortality in the previous age of magic and continued on throgh the ages doing Highlander bullshit, being involved in every major historical event EVAR, and collecting powers and skills beyond reckoning or comprehension. They are even very good at cutting edge computer programming because they were alive in Ancient Egypt. Or something. Anyway, what some of them decided to do when the new age of magic arrived was to get a bunch of the newly born elves together and stage a teenage rebellion that actually conquered the island of Ireland, and then create a new religion where the worship past reincarnations of powerful elves, by which they really mean that they are worshiping the previous fake names that the immortal elves used back while they were guiding history and fucking Katherine the Great. And now they have made th entire island of Ireland unified and racially pure and made it a MYSTERIOUS totalitarian theocracy that is cut off from trade with the rest of the world.

And it's super hard to run there, because society is extremely insular, the government watches everything you do, and everyone has mighty fucking magic coming out their ass. Unfortunately, they forgot in all this masturbating to the power and prestige of super elves to bother coming up with a reason for any player character to ever go there or care about acquiring anything that the nOgians have.

I'll get to all their SPESHUL crap in a moment, but let me remind you of some key facts: Tir na nOg is a country with 3 million inhabitants that has no borders with any other country and does not have any convertible currency. Thus, anything you smuggle into the island with great difficulty will be purchased with... non convertible script from a bullshit theocracy no one cares about. Furthermore, I note that Magic in Shadowrun is a personal and non transferable ability. So however good some guy happens to be at magic, there's nothing to steal, nothing to have, and nothing to trade. It's like someone being handsome or fast, good for them I suppose but of literally no consequence to smugglers and thieves.

So what is this special shit they have? Well, lots. First of all, they have an arbitrary super magic tradition that allowed them to summon bound and unbound spirits back when everyone else had to pick one or the other - but only if they stayed in their appropriate county on the island. Furthermore, they got these path modifiers which were kind of like Totem modifiers but bigger. They had one group whose modifier was literally "+1 to everything" which is of course completely indistinguishable from being generically higher level, and completely meaningless therefore because they were only available as NPCs and they were supposed to be used as high level NPCs at that. So all that really did was make them completely uninteresting because they had no discernible differential modifiers in the face of their already high skill ratings. Also, the queen of the island could commit human sacrifice to summon The Wild Hunt, which was a pile of spirits ranging from Force 5 up to Force 12 (back when that wasn't as big of a deal, think of the old Force 12 like you'd consider a Force 8 spirit in SR4 - definitely a "holy shit" moment, but not the end of the world). This was supposed to be equivalent to London having access to nuclear and chemical weaponry, but it really obviously wasn't. Like, not even close.

But it wasn't just magic that you couldn't acquire and wouldn't care about anyway since most of it only affects things within the confines of an island you don't care about. They also had super cybernetics! They had Delta Grade Cyberware back before that was generally available. But more importantly, they had it back before it did anything coherent. So what they had was this nominally Delta Grade ultra sniper rifle that interfaced with your whole body so that you could totally become the sniper rifle. And it hit super hard. And it used up most of your Essence even after being Delta, because it was that hard core. Except of course, it wasn't. If you were perhaps wondering if you could take several million nuyen less and invest in regular over the counter Alpha grade Vehicle Control Rig and internal smart link and shoot people harder and better d more often in a combat round with a regular high powered rifle on a drone across fucking town... yes. You could totally do that. For all the fawning over the Tir na nOg super biotech weapons manufacturing... the numbers just were not there. It was a piece of incredibly expensive crap that you would literally pay people to not install into you.

Not that it made any fucking sense for a nation the size of Minneapolis tat has no discernible natural resources, an agrarian bent, and a steadfast refusal to trade or travel to or from any other nation or corporate territory to be ahead of anyone in any technical field. But after you went through the pages and pages of elf science dick sucking, you found out that all their supertech was apparently garbage you wouldn't wipe your ass with. I'm not sure if that's better or worse.

-Username17

[Lago PARANOIA]

Tir na nOg was at the time of it writing the worst book in the Shadowrun line. It may even now hold that title because it is very very bad.

Got any links to negative reviews or angry customer backlash or authors apologizing to the audience or editors resigning in shame?

[endersdouble]

They are even very good at cutting edge computer programming because they were alive in Ancient Egypt.

Please tell me you're making a Yugioh joke, and that they aren't seriously pharaonic hackers.

[Fuchs]

No, Frank is correct. The immortal elf worshipping cult among SR devs and fans was really bad. Even the latest matrix breakthrough was somehow related to an IE.

It's only (possibly) topped by the dragon cult.

Seriously, "It's MAGIC" is thrown out far too often to explain why some author's pet character or race tops a superpower.

[Korwin]

(such as the Earthdawn Windlings that until recently were extinct, and only reachable through metaplanar travel to Avalon)
-Username17

Thats new to me. There is Avalon on an Metaplane in SR?

[Username17]

Avalon is one of the metaplanes listed in the SR4 book. It's just a name. The Windlings were available as "Sprites" in Paranormal Animals of Europe, and they were phase-in residents of a metaplane that was at that time unnamed.

There has never been an exhaustive writeup of what is actually in Avalon, just an assurance that it is one of the places you can go.

-Username17

[Lago PARANOIA]

What I want to know is, has there ever been any immortal elf backlash from game developers, either in official books or or in off-the-record remarks? I'd love to read a passage that opened with Tir na nOg getting a bug swarm or something.

Also, Tir na nOg is the stupidest name ever. It sounds like it's an attempt by Nog to make his name Xtreme and Kool to puff up his importance even though all of the other Ferengi laugh at him.

[Ancient History]

Yeah, just recently in fact. Crimsondude/James Meiers killed off Aina...or was going to, I dunno. Because of some scheduling snafu (read: someone published a book before they were supposed to) it got leaked and there was the slightest of shock about it.

Also, Tír na nÓg is Gaelic, not just a random bunch of syllables strung together to fuck with you.

[Critias]

Yeah, just recently in fact. Crimsondude/James Meiers killed off Aina...or was going to, I dunno. Because of some scheduling snafu (read: someone published a book before they were supposed to) it got leaked and there was the slightest of shock about it.

In this instance, it's actually that Street Legends got published right on time, but other books are getting published after they're supposed to. I don't know all the reasons for the delays 'cause I'm not doing any major writing for either of the late ones, but basically some wires got crossed and Legends references shit that happens in a later book.

Also, Tír na nÓg is Gaelic, not just a random bunch of syllables strung together to fuck with you.

"Land of the Young" or something, isn't it? "Land of Youth?" Something like that.