The Shadowrun Situation

[Fuchs]

SR could survive more stuff set somewhere the players won't want to go easily enough. That product won't sell well, but that doesn't prevent someone else writing a product which engages people.

What might kill IMO it is shit that breaks the suspension of disbelief like that Thera returning plotline that was proposed.

Definitely. Not to mention it's a bad re-run of the "Return of the Archwizards" plot from the Forgotten Realms.

[Ancient History]

I had to point that out to people! Repeatedly!

[Stahlseele]

Back in "Harlequin", our group's troll punched Ehran in the face, burning enough karma to knock him out. Fortunately our GM had missed the "and the IEs are invincible" page in the adventure, so we got to drop the trussed up IE at H's feet and finish the adventure there.

hah, i still remember you mentioning that on dumpshock once ^^

[adamjury]

The Layout is horrible, sometimes about 1/3 of a page is just plain white. The Cover Art and Layout of the front- and backcover of Corp Guide just don't fit with the other books, because they used a BT scheme.

Sounds like the loss of Adam is hitting them rather hard.

I designed the Corporate Guide cover, actually -- and while I didn't consider it "finished," apparently Catalyst did. We had started breaking out of the typical SR back cover style -- witness Running Wild, which I think Matt did a great job on -- and I consider Corporate Guide completely inline with Shadowrun, albeit without some last little bits of TLC.

(I just got my comp copies in the mail today, actually.)

[kzt]

Every time Jason talks about "The Ute" he is in fact talking about Mormons, because the only reason he or anyone else care about the Ute is because they include the LDS church of the SR future.

The total idiocy that seems to infect everyone involved in writing anything about that area in SR is astonishing.

Utah state government sued the state university system because the university banned people from carrying guns in class - and the university lost, one of the most famous followers of Brigham Young was Orrin Porter Rockwell, and some of the earliest LDS formal organizations were military units. So naturally SR depicts SLC as an oasis of gun hating pacifists.

[kzt]

Oh is that where they went? I thought either the Great Ghost Dancers strung them up (don't get me wrong but Native Americans and LDS are not exactly buddies right?) or maybe Ghostwalker ate them or something.

There are 1.2 million LDS members in Utah and (generously) 10,000 members of the Ute tribe, who are spread between Colorado and Utah. Oh, and magic effectively doesn't work in the SLC valley. And as 1838 and 1857 showed, threats without obviously overwhelming military force don't work as well as people might expect on the LDS.

Like I said, idiocy seems to infect anyone who writes a SR product that deals with the area.

[Neurosis]

FTR Adam I wasn't saying anything bad about those books, don't know if I've even seen them, just replying to Tycho.

@kzt:

Well if you run the numbers on Native Americans vs. not in GENERAL on that level it doesn't make sense that the Natives won/that the NAN was formed.

Don't know what you mean by "magic does not work in Salt Lake City". Does it say that somewhere in SR?

[kzt]

IIRC, Shadows of NA says that. It's not "doesn't work", it's a large background count.

[Stahlseele]

IIRC, Shadows of NA says that. It's not "doesn't work", it's a large background count.

Was there any reason given?
Any atrocities taken place there?

[Wesley Street]

According to SoNA the Ute didn't want SLC because the area was a massive mana ebb and the Ute shamans consider it defiled ground. No reason why is given.

I think Jason Levine pops in here from time to time. He wrote this section. You can ask him what his intentions were.

[Wesley Street]

Are you saying this just about fourth edition sourcebooks or about all campaign/event books (Renraku Arcology Shutdown, etc.)

Campaign/event books. It's not a new thing, obviously. Shutdown took place during the 2nd ed. years and after FanPro grabbed the license during the 3rd ed. years plot books took over as the primary source for adventure material in the game.

How do you avoid this? Which part do you remove? I mean besides the 'mortals sit on the sidelines' part. If you don't have the crisis, then there is (relatively) little going on except criminals doing crimes to make money which is not the most compelling narrative in-and-of-itself. But I'd rather remove the crisis than remove the return to status quo. Without that the universe is in constant flux and the game has to be rewritten every year or so. Something like Crash 2.0 can't happen every day.

I apologize. I realize I was implying that the status quo was a bad thing. In an RPG, there needs to be a status quo in order to achieve accessibility for new players. Most of the time. While the execution was debatable the end-result of Crash 2.0, the creation of the wireless Matrix, was very much a good thing. It changed the actual mechanics of the game for the better; it allowed hackers to become viable player characters again. But these kinds of events need to be rare and should only change things that don't work in the game. Not just the setting for the sake of changing the setting.

The biggest mistake Emergence made is that it tried to recapture Crash 2.0 by introducing an unneeded kink in the Matrix: the watered-down AI. So watered down it can now be played as a PC. By introducing AIs (and free spirits and drakes) as playable it turns SR into the D&D version of the "monster party." And that doesn't work in SR. There's no reason for an AI, free spirit or drake to even be a shadowrunner (other than for shits and giggles) so why introduce that element to the game?

Back to the question of actual adventures. A crisis isn't determined by scale, it's determined by emotional impact. A real crisis hits you where you live. The events of 9/11 were pretty upsetting for me (and everyone) but the death of my brother earlier that year and a break up with an ex-fiancée hit me much, much harder emotionally. And that's what an effective story in a game does; it puts the player in that place where their everyday life could change based on their decisions.

One of the most effective SR adventures I've run for my group was Tom Dowd's Elven Fire for 1st ed. The plot circled around solving the mystery behind an outbreak of gang warfare in Seattle to prevent the Metroplex Guard from rolling in and declaring martial law. If the players succeeded or failed in their task it didn't change the overall SR universe, but if they failed they would have to continue their lives in a metroplex that had been turned into a AAA security zone. Try breaking into a corp facility or running from the cops when there are tanks and military checkpoints on every corner!

That's what SR needs to get back to in terms of pre-plotted adventures. Stories that get the players in their home town and affect their lives there, not McGuffin retrieval that supposedly affects the entire globe (but not really because if they fail a third party will succeed). I think breaking & entering corporate lab stories are boring but watching killer trees and dragons eating each other from the sidelines is just as dull. It's also hyper-overkill which makes it harder to publish a lower-key but engaging adventure. The public is expecting the next big plot thingy instead of a good story.

[Stahlseele]

Well, AI's can have a SIN, but they can not take a day job, strictly raw at least . . but they need to get upkeep money for their home node, so they need to do something . . and seeing how they can't get money in a legal way, going runner might be one of the few ways to do it . . of course, they could simply try and work for a corp. too . . they'd probably get decompiled trying to figure out how they work, but they could at least try!

[Otakusensei]

The biggest mistake Emergence made is that it tried to recapture Crash 2.0 by introducing an unneeded kink in the Matrix: the watered-down AI. So watered down it can now be played as a PC. By introducing AIs (and free spirits and drakes) as playable it turns SR into the D&D version of the "monster party." And that doesn't work in SR. There's no reason for an AI, free spirit or drake to even be a shadowrunner (other than for shits and giggles) so why introduce that element to the game?

Drakes are easy to fit in. Equally as easy as a shifter, and they aren't much harder to fit in than a troll. The fact that dragons are very interested in them just makes the role playing aspect more interesting. I've never let a player go the Ryan "Working for a Dragon" Mercury route, and I never will. Drake players recently woke up in a cold sweat and it looked like someone had a bullfight in their bedroom. We start from there.

Stahlseele hit the nail on the head with AI. You gotta buy or steal new gear to live, and that sounds like most Shadowrunners to me. Could the stats and mechanics be better? Well, yeah.

Free Spirits have any number of reasons to be a player character, but are more difficult because they could just theoretically leave and go back to their home plane. Maybe they don't want to? I don't know, I'm dealing with a possession free spirit PC that wants to possess 12 cubic meters of animated bunker grade metal for a body.

I should have never gave him the idea...

[Ancient History]

I worked on Emergence, so I think of anyone here I can say the major mistake when writing the book was timing. It came out after the main book, where nary an unkind word is given about TMs, so the sudden technomancer hate in E caused brain backlash. We were writing the book in the dark with little idea of what the new rules were going to be.

[Fuchs]

The whole TM/AI issue had too much "Horizon media blitzed this" plot magic, and too little internal consistency.

[Stahlseele]

And let us not get started on Pixies and Centaurs.

[knasser]

The problem with the party of monsters syndrome is not that it's hard to find ways to make a drake or a spirit or an AI a runner. After all, it's no harder than the way you have to find justifications for a super-employable magician a runner. The problem is the ever-present risk of Realism Collapse.

I've said this before but the presence of elves and dragons doesn't make realism less important in Shadowrun, but more. Realism and internal consistency has always been a vital ingredient in making Shadowrun what it is. That's why I raised the Lone Star Cop on the Unicorn hypothetical to illustrate what I feared might happen to Shadowrun under a Line Developer inexperienced in the setting. In principle I wouldn't mind GMing a party that was nothing but weird and obscure types of character. But it would have to be done by players that knew they were playing weird and obscure characters. And that brings us on to an increasing problem with Shadowrun.

It is a *great* setting. One of the best I know. But it is now hard to get into. Part of that is the aforementioned Realism Collapse. Magic has returned - well and good because it's handled so excellently and with so much thought given to integrating it realistically. New meta-races: the same. Virtual Realities - still good. Dragon President - wait, what? Changelings. Eh? Ghostwalker. Giant AIs.... The last Shadowrun campaign I ran, I had five players, four were new to the setting, one was an old hand played since 1st. The four new players were no problem - I downplayed a lot of Shadowrun history. I didn't retconn it, but I put it aside for a while. What I wanted was to make it a setting they could believe in so we had dragons in the background (they did meet one after playing for about eight months), spirits slinking through the shadows, megacorps as towering behemoths of wealth and privilege. But not insect cults everywhere, a do-gooding foundation run by a sainted dead dragon president with magical hackers (how I despise Technomancers) and every other world-shaking detail. Of course the long-term player kept trying to correct me to the point where I was ready to slap him.

It's not so much a problem of the world having too much history for new players, as it is a problem that throw all the weirdness at players at once and suddenly the players think: "Oh, there's a dragon president? Right, my character concept is a rogue cop with a Unicorn mount and a magic sub-machinegun".

I quit running my Shadowrun game partly due to demands on my time, but mainly due to one player that I couldn't throw out of the group without causing too many problems for other members who were his friend or housemates. But I'm running Doctor Who for some different people now. Why? Well apart from it being a great game to run, the point is that I can grab any random person, sit them down and say: "Sontarans have invaded Yorkshire" and start a game. Shadowrun is a game written for people who are "gamers". For all that it's a great setting and (4th) a great system with some great writing, and for all that 4th reset things to a more believable level (source books like Vice are an excellent example, Emergence an awful counter-example), it's still not something I can pull off a shelf and say: "let's play, this is what it's about." That is becoming more and more of a problem these days.

K.

[Tycho]

I looked at the back-covers form RW and CG and I still think the back-cover of Corp Guide does not fit with all the other SR books. The Format is just too different.

I don't mind Drakes, IAs and all the other stuff as SC, if you play in a campaign that fits. I can easily imagine a great campaign with 1 SC as a Dragon, 1-2 Drake SCs and some metahuman SCs, if you focus on the character's personal story rather than vanilla shadowrunnnig.

What bugs me about AIs is, that they plain and simble suck against any decend hacker or Technomancer. AIs don't get any Bonus from Ware, they can only have 3IPs and so one, so every hacker worth his payment is way better than a AI. That is just bad, I mean, these things live in the matrix, they should have 5IPs from the start.

Same with Free Spirits, why are the special rules for SC Free Spirits.

Speaking from the background:

Emergence was not good because it read like "btw: nobody knows about Technomancers and when the become public knowlegde, everybody wants to kill them."

I really like ghost cartels, it is a dark campaign and you need to fit it to your group, but it is good written and makes sense most of the time.

In DotA i don't like the whole Mary Sue Situation with Frosty and some of the enemy stats are just way off: Bloodmage with Mag 12, 6 Initiations, Shielding, Counterspelling 7, Counterspelling Fokus 6, in a MilSpec Armor with bound Greater Form Spirits is not streetlevel to me. And I don't no how a Runnerteam is going to beat that guy.

cya
Tycho

[Username17]

There really isn't anything wrong with cops running around on unicorns. While the SR unicorn specifically is allergic to cities and that wouldn't work, it is entirely reasonable for someone to have a griffin mount or something similar. In the Shadowrun world, thirty fucking percent of animals have some sort of meta expression. Even restricted to powerful shit that has real power, it's still more than 1%. Seriously. This is a chicken farm:


Now, imagine that more than one in a hundred of those can turn things to stone or breathe fire or affect your mind. That is why people don't eat real meat in SR, because it's fucking dangerous to farm or ranch. Today, the average American eats like 40 kilos of chicken a year. That simply can't happen when on average half a kilo of that would have come from something that had a very good chance of escaping the farm and killing the farmers.

Magical beasts simply are not rare in the Shadowrun world, and they should be showing up way more than they do in any published story. It is flat unrealistic for the only use of metabeasties to be additional guard dogs in dungeons corporate facilities. This is the modern fucking world, and resources are fucking used. You're damn right that people would be riding around on Slepnirs and Perytons. Because those things exist and humans exploit every resource available.

It doesn't even strain believability once you drive home the simple point: humans aren't the only fucking animal. Accepting elves and accepting griffinfs can and should be the exact same logical leap. Yes, all the crap with the Draco Foundation is more stuff piled on to people's bullshit meters, but Orks and Chimerae is the exact same sentence if you word it right. The lack of critter face time in SR products to date is excusable in each specific case, but overall is shoddy.

-Username17

[Stahlseele]

Well, wasn't that one of the reasons for people to go to the cities?
Strength in numbers against the awakened nature claiming space?
Most seen critters are the rats. and don't start with sewers.
there's packs of awakened dogs hunting in the barrens.
there's ghouls hunting in the barrens.
there's stuff with more arms than anything else down there.
stuff that will eat your face while you are still alive.
and then wear your lifeless corpse as an adornment for it's husk.

[adamjury]

I looked at the back-covers form RW and CG and I still think the back-cover of Corp Guide does not fit with all the other SR books. The Format is just too different.

I knew I shouldn't have left the circuit-board off it ...

[Otakusensei]

I looked at the back-covers form RW and CG and I still think the back-cover of Corp Guide does not fit with all the other SR books. The Format is just too different.

I knew I shouldn't have left the circuit-board off it ...

Needs more circuit board to be Shadowrun. And a Jackpoint.

[Centurion13]

I looked at the back-covers form RW and CG and I still think the back-cover of Corp Guide does not fit with all the other SR books. The Format is just too different.

I knew I shouldn't have left the circuit-board off it ...

Needs more circuit board to be Shadowrun. And a Jackpoint.

So... you got a fever and the only prescription is... more circuit board?

Just askin'

Cent13

[Neurosis]

How do you avoid this? Which part do you remove? I mean besides the 'mortals sit on the sidelines' part. If you don't have the crisis, then there is (relatively) little going on except criminals doing crimes to make money which is not the most compelling narrative in-and-of-itself. But I'd rather remove the crisis than remove the return to status quo. Without that the universe is in constant flux and the game has to be rewritten every year or so. Something like Crash 2.0 can't happen every day.

I apologize. I realize I was implying that the status quo was a bad thing. In an RPG, there needs to be a status quo in order to achieve accessibility for new players. Most of the time. While the execution was debatable the end-result of Crash 2.0, the creation of the wireless Matrix, was very much a good thing. It changed the actual mechanics of the game for the better; it allowed hackers to become viable player characters again. But these kinds of events need to be rare and should only change things that don't work in the game. Not just the setting for the sake of changing the setting.

The biggest mistake Emergence made is that it tried to recapture Crash 2.0 by introducing an unneeded kink in the Matrix: the watered-down AI. So watered down it can now be played as a PC. By introducing AIs (and free spirits and drakes) as playable it turns SR into the D&D version of the "monster party." And that doesn't work in SR. There's no reason for an AI, free spirit or drake to even be a shadowrunner (other than for shits and giggles) so why introduce that element to the game?

I agree that AI PCs are a mistake for basically the same reason. Same with free spirits...not sure about drakes. Drakes are essentially elite mooks, no reason they shouldn't be playable.

Back to the question of actual adventures. A crisis isn't determined by scale, it's determined by emotional impact. A real crisis hits you where you live. The events of 9/11 were pretty upsetting for me (and everyone) but the death of my brother earlier that year and a break up with an ex-fiancée hit me much, much harder emotionally. And that's what an effective story in a game does; it puts the player in that place where their everyday life could change based on their decisions.

In total agreement. I run a game of my own design and have for five years. Without getting into details, after the third year of in-game events (like SR in-game years and real life years coincided) and the completion of the first, massive, epic, meta-plot focused story arc I made the conscious decision to move away from the game being about THE END OF THE FUCKING WORLD (!) and in the direction of being about the characters and their lives.

I am not sure if this is a conscious change that Shadowrun has to make. Shadowrun has always been about the characters and their lives. How world events interact with PCs is...complicated.

One of the most effective SR adventures I've run for my group was Tom Dowd's Elven Fire for 1st ed. The plot circled around solving the mystery behind an outbreak of gang warfare in Seattle to prevent the Metroplex Guard from rolling in and declaring martial law. If the players succeeded or failed in their task it didn't change the overall SR universe, but if they failed they would have to continue their lives in a metroplex that had been turned into a AAA security zone. Try breaking into a corp facility or running from the cops when there are tanks and military checkpoints on every corner!

Tom Dowd is amazing. My favorite published Shadowrun ever written was Harlequin, FTR.

That's what SR needs to get back to in terms of pre-plotted adventures. Stories that get the players in their home town and affect their lives there, not McGuffin retrieval that supposedly affects the entire globe (but not really because if they fail a third party will succeed). I think breaking & entering corporate lab stories are boring but watching killer trees and dragons eating each other from the sidelines is just as dull. It's also hyper-overkill which makes it harder to publish a lower-key but engaging adventure. The public is expecting the next big plot thingy instead of a good story.

I have to say I like breaking and entering corporate labs. I like dragons eating each other. I like dragons fighting fucking helicopters because I like Shadowrun.

Anyway, your ideas in general are pretty interesting and I need some time to parse them--"The public is expecting the next big plot thingy instead of a good story."--one does not imply the other, I agree, but they aren't necessarily mutually exclusive.

More in edits.

The problem with the party of monsters syndrome is not that it's hard to find ways to make a drake or a spirit or an AI a runner. After all, it's no harder than the way you have to find justifications for a super-employable magician a runner. The problem is the ever-present risk of Realism Collapse.

Agreed. As a GM I'd be very reticent to include more than one 'weird' thing per party. To avoid Realism Collapse.

I've said this before but the presence of elves and dragons doesn't make realism less important in Shadowrun, but more. Realism and internal consistency has always been a vital ingredient in making Shadowrun what it is.

Again, agreed. And pretty perfectly stated.

Edit: Damn, other things I wanted to comment on but I didn't even have the time to read them. g2g. I'll revisit some of this stuff later.

Fixed broken quote tag --Z

[Stahlseele]

Gah! Post broken!