OgreBattle wrote:Does Asymmetric Threat already have playable rules? I've only seen the megathread on it cover concepts like races and technology but not a playable rules set.
Nope. And realistically, it's not going to get them until after I have my residency sorted. Although at this point, I am willing to let Shadowrun just go away. Catalyst is running Shadowrun into the ground of course, but now that it's after 2012 and no Awakening happened, I think it's probably time to let the setting as-is go and do a full reboot. Basically, I see Shadowrun today as about where World of Darkness is - the current official line is clearly off its meds, but that doesn't mean that we should revert things to the nineties. A reboot is necessary, just not by the people who currently own the license to the property. That means that the way forward is to in fact make a new property that happens to use many of the same core conceits. D&D can be (nearly) timeless because it happens in a fantasy world. But games that happen in our world have to change with our understanding of our world.
Now, how much of Shadowrun's original 80s aesthetic or 4th edition's iSthetic you want to adopt is a matter of taste. Certainly, I don't there's actually anything wrong with popping in a Battle Beast CD, turning up the volume to 11 and hacking out some 80s futurism. But personally, I think I was done with the 80s by 2003 at the latest. I'd like things to go in a more Ghost-in-the-Shell direction. Modern cyberpunk shares several key conceits, but isn't actually all that much like 80s cyberpunk in several other key aspects. More climate change, less acid rain.
Balancing archetypes is one of your core missions as a game designer, and your big hurdle obviously is the magician/cyborg divide. There are a lot of ways you can tackle it, but historically there have been basically two problems: that of mages being able to do the things cyborgs do and still have a protected role as a magic user; and that of the magic having high end effects that the cyborg has no equal to. Ideally, the whole Essence loss
thing was supposed to address both problems, but it really didn't. In editions 1-3, you're mostly looking at mages being able to cover the entire Street Samurai's shtick while still having invaluable and irreplaceable astral skills, and in 4th edition that's much harder but magic is uncapped and agility is capped and at higher levels the mages make cyborgs feel small in the pants.
There are a lot of ways you can handle that. In 3rd edition, they tried to split the Street Samurai's skills up to make it more expensive for the mage to horn in on street samurai territory. This is actually exactly backwards, as it makes Street Samurai more narrowly focused and thus easier for mages to Chinese Room. Splitting
magic skills would make it such that mages had less ability to metastasize into other roles. But the power level issue is a lemma with multiple solutions. Basically, you can keep everyone "street" or you can allow everyone to advance into superheroic territory. If the street shaman never grows past the stage in which shooting a dude with pistol in a "very fast and accurate manner" is impressive and valuable to him, then it's OK if that's all a street samurai is about. If, on the other hand, the mage runner becomes powerful enough to change the weather and influence battlefields... then the street samurai needs to become a super soldier capable of influencing whole battlefields as well.
-Username17