The Shadowrun Situation

[Copper Helm]

Hey, just throwing that there. Wouldn't it be easy to take SR4's rules and make a revised version bootleg out of it? It would certainly beat whatever Catalyst could churn at this point.

Or did they got any new competent blood in their crew?

[Lokathor]

That was being worked on: http://tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=52792

But the Cthulhutech Heartbreaker is getting a lot more attention at the moment.

[Username17]

Hey, just throwing that there. Wouldn't it be easy to take SR4's rules and make a revised version bootleg out of it? It would certainly beat whatever Catalyst could churn at this point.

Or did they got any new competent blood in their crew?

Writing things using the rules to Shadowrun4 is not particularly difficult. It's time consuming though. A "let's remake Shadowrun4 into something that isn't terrible and being driven into the ground by Catalyst" was started up Here. That project folded. Here are are the difficulties I perceive:

• Shadowrun is a registered trademark of TOPPS. Without getting the license from them, you can't get any funding or revenue stream.
• Everyone with sense agrees that Catalyst has shat the bed with their carnivorous trees and international coverup of dragons devouring people by the tens of thousands and stuff, but no one really agrees what point to roll back the story to. Let's face it: there have been insultingly terrible books in canon for a Long Time.
• Once you roll back to a point on the timeline, you're going to want to roll it forward. Even without the SR4 timejump, the Shadowrun clock would currently stand in 2074, including it the clock should be at 2078. That's a lot of future history to write and you don't have the officialness stamp to keep people from being pissed off.
• While the core system of Shadowrun works very well, many of the sub system pieces are shitty afterthoughts. Vehicles and Matrix especially do not really work out of the box and require a massive overhaul.
• These actually have knock down effects. Shadowrun 4's combat system works alright at the level of random dudes shooting SMGs at each other, but it doesn't scale up or out, like at all. The result is that the Matrix and Vehicles really need some core changes to the combat system to take place so that they have room to exist. But even though it is necessary to go to a proportional damage system in order to fit in tanks into the system, this offends a bunch of idiots who insist that because the SR4 damage system pretty much works at the gang fight tier that you should be able to pick some numbers to input that would make it scale up to the tank fight tier. And then they storm off the project when you tell them they are fucking wrong.

-Username17

[Korgan0]

Frank, if you don't mind me asking, are you still working on Asymmetric Threat, which is what that project eventually became?

[Username17]

Frank, if you don't mind me asking, are you still working on Asymmetric Threat, which is what that project eventually became?

Yeah, the CthulhuTech Heartbreaker's hit location damage system is something I was working on for Asymmetric Threat. I decided that AT wanted something less wargamey and that having to abstract battles with giant robots or dragons was simply OK. But it fits well for R'lyeh Rangers, so I put it out there.

For AT a major theme is supposed to be providing cover for people to hack computers or perform magic rituals, so there's no emphasis on battlemats and centimeters and facing. Instead there are abstract "challenges" which someone on your side has to "accept" to prevent your people who are doing other things from getting overrun.

-Username17

[Copper Helm]

But Frank, didn't you already made "Alt.War" and "End of the Matrix"? All that we have to do is to make a Synthesis with was was brought in the "What if" thread of Shadowrun 5th where everything is just simplified.

As for the metaplot, fuck metaplots. They're rarely that good anyway; any DM worth their their weight of salt have their own homebrew metaplot.

But yeah, I can see how much time consuming it would all be. Oh well, I really liked that franchise. It's funny how Shadowrun became what it satirized: an corporate piece of crap product churned to fleece money out of a system to enrich corrupted businessmen. Or maybe it was just the logical result of the kind of fucked savage capitalist system we're living in where everything is done only for profit.

Bummer.

[sabs]

alt.War fell apart pretty hard core.
One of the reasons it fell apart, is that we asked the moderators to move it to it's own folder, and the moderators were nice enough to block it from non-registered users.

It also fell apart because it's a huge undertaking and while theres some good stuff to find in there, it never really got a good editorial group. At best, Alt.War is 1/4 finished. Now, it's still vastly better than actual War from Catalyst.. but

[Stahlseele]

ends of the matrix
alt.war
style over substance
states of latin america

4 fanmade books . . yeah, SR4 has dropped the ball on it's head pretty much . .

[Copper Helm]

Was that sarcasm? I honestly can't tell , I'm relatively a newb to Shadowrun's Fanstuff. I only played a bit of SR3 in highschool before going back to the franchise.

On another tangent: Is SR3 better than SR4? I don't remember. Is it more playable? Could it be more easily updated or adapted?

[sabs]

sr4 core has better mechanics. Even if the matrix stuff is still lame, and they really dropped the ball in other areas.

[Stahlseele]

SR3 has by far the most rules for anything ever in SR.
So if it were to use a computer to do the rules stuff, it'd be better than SR4 i think.
But the fact that you NEED a computer to utilize all rules of SR3 is simply put bad for playability . .

[Username17]

SR3 has by far the most rules for anything ever in SR.
So if it were to use a computer to do the rules stuff, it'd be better than SR4 i think.
But the fact that you NEED a computer to utilize all rules of SR3 is simply put bad for playability . .

Having more rules is very much not the same thing as having good rules. Simply put: the core system of SR3 is rotten. The variable target number thing does not work. The thing it is supposed to do is not a thing it does. All it does make the odds terrible to calculate. But once you do calculate them, you find that the odds of things are stupid beyond belief.

Because of the weird and bullshit way that target number shifts work across increases in dice pools, simple arms races are fucktarded. Adding +X to each side does not have predictable effects. At all. Depending on where you are on the sin wave of advancement, requiring that your opponent roll twice as many dice to get the same average number of hits might require an increase in target number of +3 or +1. Seriously. Adding +1 to the TN may require your opponent to roll twice as many dice to keep parity. Alternately, that same level of difficulty increase may correspond to a +3 TN shift. That is horrible. Listed modifiers are meaningless because their actual effect varies unpredictably in a sinusoidal fashion growing and shrinking by a factor of 3. The math on that is shitcockfuck.

SR3 has some specific traps of SR4 that it doesn't fall into, but fails so hard at having a core mechanic that isn't a poo-flinging atrocity against god and man that I cannot in good conscience recommend it to anyone.

-Username17

[Schleiermacher]

So, tell me about this Storm Front thing I hear about! Does anyone have it yet? And... Shadowrun 5E? Really? Are there any odds at all that Catalyst is going to aim the revisions where revisions are needed, or can we expect a 4e-style fiasco?

[Stahlseele]

nobody i know admits to having Strom Front as of yet . .
somebody here probably can point to a pastebin or mediafire or something like that though . .
as for 5E . . i would not hold my breath from everything i have read about it as of yet . .

[Username17]

So, tell me about this Storm Front thing I hear about! Does anyone have it yet? And... Shadowrun 5E? Really? Are there any odds at all that Catalyst is going to aim the revisions where revisions are needed, or can we expect a 4e-style fiasco?

We're not talking a 4e style fiasco. We're talking more of a Paranoia 5th edition or Champions Fuzion style fiasco. Jason Hardy has absolutely no idea how the rules work. He has unveiled a new plan that would limit the number of hits you could achieve on a mundane task by the quality of your mundane equipment. His example is that if you have a shitty pistol, you have a low hit-cap, and if you have a well tuned sniper rifle you have a large cap. Think about that for a moment.

Shooting things that are far away, tiny, in the dark, or fast moving is all handled with penalties to your dice pool. As your dice pool shrinks, the hit cap is less and less meaningful. If your pool falls all the way to 1 die, then no hit cap is capable of meaning shit to you - even a hit cap of 1 has no relevance.

On the flip side, shooting enemies that are fighting you in close quarters is handled with an opposed roll. That sets a variable and potentially large threshold, which in turn means that hit caps matters a whole lot. If the defender rolls as many hits as your hit cap, then you miss, regardless of how many dice you have or how well your dice roll.

So in Jason's example: a rusty pistol is actually just fine for sniping tiny flying objects in the dark; but well tuned sniper rifle is absolutely essential for close combat against armed opponents. That's completely backwards of course, but the mechanic in question cannot be salvaged to give out coherent answers for any circumstance you can imagine.

Jason Hardy is basically passing the rules of shadowrun through a mechanical mad libs filter, because he never understood how they worked, how they were good, how they needed work, or why any choices were made at the time. If he produces a single good idea it will be because of the Hamlet Typing Monkeys Effect and not because of any design or insight on his part.

-Username17

[Copper Helm]

I'm confused. Someone, on another forum, told me that Coleman wasn't in charge anymore. I that true?

*Edit*

Sorry if I'm a slowpoke about that one. But I found nothing on the internet.

[Username17]

I'm confused. Someone, on another forum, told me that Coleman wasn't in charge anymore. I that true?

*Edit*

Sorry if I'm a slowpoke about that one. But I found nothing on the internet.

He's a majority owner and principal and sole contact of InMediaRes Productions, LLC and Catalyst Game Labs is still just an imprint of IMRP. And his church-friend Randall Bills is still tweeting on their site. Loren L. Coleman isn't talking to the public much right now, but he's totally "in charge".

-Username17

[Stahlseele]

he just does not seem to do much of anything, which is either a blessing or he has learned to hide it better . .
Hardy is still the one actively messing stuff up over there most of the time.

[Korwin]

SR5 war auf der PAX für Demo und Spieltesten:

http://forums.dumpshock.com/index.php?showtopic=38627

Hi guys, I just got back from PAX East today. I unexpectedly got a chance to use a friend's extra ticket and went mainly to check out the Catalyst booth and get in on some sweet SR5 action! To a lesser extent I was also interested in Crossfire, however there was a bit of a line and I never actually got a chance to play it. I did see that it seemed to be popular and always had at least 5 people playing it- good sign.

Anyway I did get a chance to play some SR5, although it was only a half hour playtest and only really covered combat rules. We chose from archetypes which were copied straight from the SR4 rulebook with no changes (notably only combat characters and magic characters, with no matrix or riggers, so I'm assuming they aren't ready to show those systems off yet.)

Each character had "limits" handwritten on the character which I think were based on attributes somehow. There were Physical limits, Mental limits, and Social limits, and they each dictated the maximum number of successes that counted towards various tests. My Street Samurai's Physical limit was 10, Mental was 4, and Social was 3. Physical limit counted towards melee attacks and also was the max damage that could be taken before automatic knockdown. For some things, notably shooting, a "gear limit" is in place, the accuracy mechanic that has been mentioned before. The Catalyst rep said that "for the purposes of this playtest all firearm accuracy is 4", so I'm assuming that might not be set in stone. Edge can be spent to break limits so I did have one situation where I got 8 successes with my Ingram Smartgun and spent edge to use all of them.

Initiative has been completely redone - instead of initiative passes you get one dice for each level of initiative boost your character has (so mundane is 1 dice, wired 1 is 2 dice, wired 3 is 3 dice, etc.) then you add the sum of those dice to your reaction + intuition. After each character has gone you subtract 10 from the initiative score and if any character still has a positive initiative you go again. Wound modifiers now also immediately affect initiative score and if your initiative gets reduced to a negative number before your turn you can lose your action.

Reaction + Intuition is now a universal defense against all attacks, even ranged. A character can declare full defense at any time and subtracts 10 from their initiative when they do so, so it's possible to declare a full defense and still have actions left if your initiative score is high.

Recoil now carries over between passes and even combat rounds, "as long as you're holding down the trigger" the Catalyst rep explained, so you need to take a break from shooting to reset your recoil score.

Magical characters can now cast spells as simple actions with a mechanic called "reckless spellcasting", but add +3 to their drain when they do so.

Anyway, it was a very brief playtest but I liked new mechanics. I would have hoped to get more information about the Matrix side of things because that's what I'm most interested in seeing change, but it seems like they're not quite ready to make the reveal on that yet. I'm probably leaving stuff out so ask me anything, that might jog my memory. rotate.gif

I also got to play the demo at PAX. Only thing I really have to add is something the guy running it mentioned. He said that while at character creation the limit for skills is still 6, the maximum has been increased to 12. Basically so that as a new character you wouldn't be the best in the world at whatever.

He also mentioned that they hoped to be able to release it at one of two different cons this summer. I think the two he mentioned were Gen Con and Origins, but don't quote me on that. I played first thing Friday, so PAX overload has made a lot of things fuzzy in my head.

[sabs]

Since when is 3rd edition initiative a new mechanic?
The dicepool cap sound terrible.
I understand that 'speed kills' and getting 3x the actions a round as other people was really big.

But now, why would I spend 80% of my essence to get on average 1 extra action? And wired one gives you on average one extra action.. what 7% of the time?

[Seerow]

So is there one place where I can see all of the currently known info on SR5? Or is the last few posts here pretty much it?

[Rawbeard]

Recoil now carries over between passes and even combat rounds, "as long as you're holding down the trigger" the Catalyst rep explained, so you need to take a break from shooting to reset your recoil score.

The hell?

[Stahlseele]

@sabs
it goes in leaps of 10, so if you can get your minimum roll to be 11, you have an automatic 2 turns. and on a good roll, 3. if you don't get damaged, which reduces that again.

@Seerow: nope, dumpshock postings are the closest you are going to get.

@Rawbeard:
seconded. THE FUCK?

[Korgan0]

I'm sure simple action spellcasting won't make mages overpowered. Not in the slightest.

[Seerow]

I'm sure simple action spellcasting won't make mages overpowered. Not in the slightest.

I wonder, is multicasting still a thing?