Runner's Companion was Terrible
Posted: Sat Feb 13, 2010 9:48 pm
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
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
