The Gaming Den

So I know there is a runner called Bull in Shadowrun, and a mod/dev/poster/etc. called Bull in the SR forums, and apparently the latter is a jerk, or something.

Any link here?

Bull on SR forums is the developer of current edition. Bull in Shadowrun is his orc hacker character from ye olde times.

It's nice to see Jason Hardy was able to fulfill his dreams of being a novelist. It's too bad those skills don't translate to good game development.

In slightly more amusing (or depressing, depending on your perspective) news, the Harmontown podcast regulars are now playing Shadowrun 5E. Or, as GM Spencer calls it, "a near future where magic has returned and there are high tech gadgets, like hand-held computers and small flashlights."

David Cross was the guest star for the first segment and thought that Shadowrun was a 1970s folk-rock ballad.

Silent Wayfarer wrote:So I know there is a runner called Bull in Shadowrun, and a mod/dev/poster/etc. called Bull in the SR forums, and apparently the latter is a jerk, or something.

The poster is an overweight jerk who gets off on seeing his charcater make it into canon. He's also the idiot who's responsibke for all wrongs in 5E.

Concise Locket wrote:It's nice to see Jason Hardy was able to fulfill his dreams of being a novelist. It's too bad those skills don't translate to good game development.

Jason Hardy was a Shadowrun novelist before he became line developer for Shadowrun. He just wasn't a good one. From all accounts I've read, this is still true.

Fucks wrote:He's also the idiot who's responsibke for all wrongs in 5E.

Now, now. I have no doubt whatsoever it was a group effort.

Bull was notorious for pushing for reverting the game back to a 2050s/1st edition status quo. Seeing as deckers are a thing again, I guess he got his wish.

What Shadowrun novels are good and worth reading, if any?

Only one I've read is Born To Run, which was pretty good. New Shadowrunner looking to find out what happened to her mom shows up in Seattle, Awakens, and gets involved in an elaborate plot to trigger a gang war, then idealistically moves to stop it and also make a ton of money by selling the goods being used to set it up. What I really like about it Shadowrun wise is the ending.

After the plan is disrupted, there's a cut over to the team Decker, who clued the protagonist in to the details of the plan and the target, and arranged to sell the stuff. The person they sold stuff to says it would have been unfortunate for her Megacorp if Ares had gotten the contract and it was clearly a wise decision to keep the Decker on retainer.

Longes wrote:What Shadowrun novels are good and worth reading, if any?

Burning Bright and 2XS are the two I liked most.

The Into the Shadows anthology is probably the best, even dated as it is now; followed by Bob Charrette's Secrets of Power trilogy and Nigel D. Findley's 2XS.

Some of the novels are simply quite bad. Black Madonna manages to be The Davinci Code before Dan Brown got to it, and Shadowboxer is a sin in the eyes of your deity of choice.

I read 2XS on a PSP on a bus from New York to Boston back when I was in my teens. And I still have crystal clear memories of that book and that ride, despite the intervening years of drug use. Basically, it's a great novel.

Longes wrote:Bull on SR forums is the developer of current edition. Bull in Shadowrun is his orc hacker character from ye olde times.

Not quite correct. Bull the person isn't "the developer of current edition", that's Jason Hardy. Bull edits the missions on their "living" product, called "Shadowrun Missions". I'm not sure what other role he plays within the line, but being a mouthpiece for SR in the forums is not a role he relishes, but does anyway. He often gets treated like crap there, as you might expect, and that might express itself in his personality online.

He is a longtime advocate for Shadowrun, and his personal character by the same name often gets written into the fluff of SR.

Check out the SR5 corebook and you know which oher roles he has.

True story: when 4th edition D&D came out, Bull was super excited about playing a Rogue with some multiclass feats to have some Wizard spells. I told him that actually 4e didn't really support that sort of thing because to make your Rogue powers work you needed your high stats to be Dex/Cha or Dex/Str, and Wizard spells needed you to have a high Int if you wanted to hit with them. And since the game only gives you level-ups in two stats, even if your DM was generous enough with stats to make that work at first level it wouldn't work at 15th.

Bull became so angry that I had delivered this news to him that he used his Dumpshock mod powers to temp ban my account and send me an internet toughguy rant. And this is not an isolated incident. And it's not even limited to his online persona. He has told stories of killing peoples' characters or throwing people out of his games for the simple crime of thinking of solutions to problems he hadn't thought of.

Bull is an insecure manchild who resorts to bullying and threats as a second or even first resort whenever he feels uncomfortable. And that's very often because he also isn't very smart. He holds many opinions which are stupid, and when confronted by their counterfactuality he lashes out at people who bring him bad news in aggressive and unproductive ways.

Bull is a terrible person. But he's also a laughably terrible person to be chosen as the face of anything. He's like the Chris Christie of cyberpunk fans.

-Username17

I believe he likes pink mohawks. Make of that what you will.

Since we are talking about Bug City, which places in the SR universe are actually worth visiting for the team of runners not native to those places?

i appear to be legible for a shadowrun with a VIP on SRO because i kickstarter backered it enough . . i am half way between not bothering at all and chosing hardy just to grief him the entire time . .

Didn't SRO get cancelled/rebranded? Last I heard they fucked up so hard it's an offline game now.

It's named Shadowrun Chroncicles (I think) and Steam downloaded large patches recently.
But I did not look into the game, to see how it looks now....

I've had alpha access since pre-Chronicles, and boy, did they ever fuck up. First they promised us an MMO/X-com style squad game, using 4th ed rules. I was excited. Many people were excited. Then as development went on and SR:R came out, it became clear that we were getting none of the sort, but really, just a straight rip-off of SR:R. Fine. Of course, then they rebranded to hide the fact that they had no idea how to do an MMO, so now all the interactivity is through 'inviting people into your Hub area' - there's no chance for spontaneous interaction at all outside of chat, a bit like D3. And like D3, the chance that any sane person will choose a random partner is all of zero.

Basically, it's a shitty SR:R ripoff with chat functionality. Oh, and it is still not done. The tactical depth really isn't there, the skill tree system is laughably simple, and the 'online' parts are worse than a joke.

SR:O (now SR:Chronicles) doesn't live up to the expectations, but they did a surprisingly good job of salvaging a decent game out of the mess.

The first alphas were pretty terrible. The mood was nice, but the gameplay was very limited. It was SR:R combat with even less tactical depth: go behind closest cover, use best ability, hope for a good roll, repeat.

The last alphas show a huge improvement in the gameplay. It's still pretty basic, it's not a great game, but it's enjoyable and that's more than I expected from the first alphas.

I took a look at the Steam page and the talk about "alpha this, alpha that" here makes me look gleefully towards release next week.

Haha, yeah. It isn't near done. Not by a long shot.

SR5 is just depressing. I'm sure everyone knows that Street Grimoire featured adept powers with prerequisites that will be printed in future books. But apparently it also included a "Commanding Voice" power. "Commanding Voice" power, which has been already printed in Stolen Souls supplement. With completely different mechanics. Critas had this to say about it

FWIW -- and I can understand the frustration, here, trust me -- some of us are wanting to get a backstage discussion going to try and figure out what went wrong, here, and how to fix it. Plenty of people still got eyes on the product before it went to publication (just check the credits), but some of us that kind of wanted to help out (I like to think Way of the Adept established my interest in that character archetype, for instance) never quite got the chance to. Summer's crazy busy for a lot of us, it's convention season which gums up the lines of communication even more (lots of folks are out of town when they wouldn't be, production schedules don't have as much flexibility when you're trying to get something out in time for a con, etc)...and the end result is that lots of us were as blindsided by this as your average customer was, and we're not too thrilled with it, either.

So, anyways. We're doing what we can to get a conversation going about how to smooth over some of these rough edges, and how to make this book as playable as possible. We've got to work with it, too, for instance, and right now we don't know what version of "Commanding Voice" to give an NPC we try to stat up. So we're shaking the tree and seeing what falls out.

Also Magician's Way signature power now gives you bonuses to performing stage magic. Magician's Way is a quality for Mystic Adepts, showing their split between magician and adept, and has absolutely nothing to do with stage magic.