Making a Shadowrun 4(ish) lite version

[unnamednpc]

Okay, let me preface this with a couple of qualifiers. This is probably going to be pretty rambly. You're not gonna walk out of this post with a set of ideas for some streamlined rules. More likely, you'll hate my ass for wasting your time. I'm mostly looking for a little discussion and input on how to implement some changes, coupled with an attempt to formulate why I think I need these changes implemented in the way I think I need them implemented.

The reason, mostly, is that I still love me some SR, but I have no real use for the current rules. They're fiddly, bloated, full of exceptions and contradictions, and overall much wordy. Even if you say you're only going to use the core book, you're still looking at 400 pages of effectively opaque writing that will restrict you and get in the way of your fun all the way from character creation to healing fatigue to buying a rope.
So, why use SR4 at all you ask? Well. I own a stack of 2nd edition books that constitute more or less the entirety of that game, and I could run an entire game pretty much without opening any of them. On the imaginary sliding scale of complexity vs accessibility, SR2 hits my personal sweet spot. And I like the old fluff better. But!
See, I'm in my early thirties, I work full time, I have a wife (who muses me and actually enjoys the occasional gaming session, but isn't a gamer, like, at all) and now I also have a tiny little kid. What I'm saying is, while my time may not be precious, it's certainly a rare commodity. When I get to game, it's either with my wife/extended family, or my friends and old gaming buddies, who're all in a similar place in life to me. So , again, why try to rework SR4, when I could run SR2 in my sleep, and stuff like Savage Worlds would offer a light, easier ruleset? Well, in the case of Savage Worlds, I've played that, and for such a low pagecount I find it actually quite clunky. And it doesn't feel like Shadowrun.
And SR2? Math. I dont say SR2 math is hard, but floating TNs are counter-intuitive and if you're dragging nongamers to the table for a one-shot, asking them to put up with having to seemingly arbitrarily roll entirely different numbers every time they pick up the dice will put a wrench in your funworks for players and GM. If there is one thing that's truly a step forward in SR4, it's the dicepool vs fixed TN mechanic. It's tangible, it's intuitive and I'd like to use it.

So, after wasting all those words and all that time, these are my design goals (it's mostly goals and not much actual design, of course):
- keep the dicepool vs fixed TN mechanic.
- keep the feel of playing Shadowrun intact
(what does that even mean?)
- strip out as many fiddly bits as humanly possible. For me, this includes:
Attributes! SR4 has 8. That's way too many, many of them don't do what you'd expect them to do, there's too many trap options for veterans and newbies alike. SR used to have 6 attributes, I'd be willing to go as low as four (rolling Body into Strength; combine Charisma and Willpower and maybe call it Spirit; and keep the old Quickness and Intelligence), though I can see some issues with that;
Skills. SR3 began the inanity of splitting all kinds of skills, and SR4 has taken that concept and ran with it. Basically, take all the bazillions of skills and roll them back into their respective groups, find room for the remaining skills.
-Combat: No. Dozens of pages citing hundreds of special cases and modifiers, and the only way to really run fluent, exiting combat is to say, no, fuck you, we're using Wushu or going full MTP. Everything that involves counting individual bullets has to go and be replaced. if at all possible, find a way to get rid of the reaction roll, while still finding a tactical applicability for wide bursts. Or just forget them and use some decent rules for suppressive fire. Autofire and Recoil? Go! Damage per bullets? Go! Frank's alt.War and After Sundown are doing some very interesting things, and I'd like to have something like that, only possibly even more accessible to people who are lazy newbies.
-The Matrix. I don't even. Personally, I'd prefer to reign wireless in a lot. Breaking the encryption of the enemy's radio and flooding their channel with 120db Glam Rock is in, switching off their cyber is either hard or right out, and remote-killhacking a brain is not an option (sorry Frank). Plugging a cable into a brain should let a hacker/decker fuck you in all kinds of ways, though. Apart from that, After Sundown Montages are an awesome concept and should be the template for all methods of information gathering. Forget Inwired and The Wireless World were ever written.
-Magic. Yeah. There's just too much stuff in general.
-Gear. Fiddling and tinkering are a big part of Shadowrun. That said, again, too much stuff. Have kits and suites that relate to roles (medic, surveillance, B&E, hacking programs) and that'd be it.
Go over cyber and bioware with a fine comb and throw out stupid traps unless they'd make sense to be used by mooks.

So yeah. Basically, I guess I'd like to combine ideas from After Sundown, alt.War, CPFH, and Franks 5th edition thread into a digest sized booklet not made by Catalyst and pay that entity 5 - 10$.

[unnamednpc]

Also, apologies for the wall of text, I rambled this motherbucket together on my phone during a commute.

[Stahlseele]

"You ain't playing Shadowrun if you are not rolling buckets of D6"

[unnamednpc]

"rolling buckets of D6"

- keep the dicepool vs fixed TN.
- keep the feel of playing Shadowrun intact
(what does that even mean?)

Explicit design goal

[TheFlatline]

The 800 pound gorilla in the room you're gonna have to deal with sooner or later is that hacking blows goats, takes too long, and is filled with inconsistencies and flat out broken-ness. Add Unwired into it and the whole thing shits bloody flux into it's own pants.

I mean, you get shit like... all encryption is easily, and quickly, breakable. However, nobody fucks with electronic money (which is protected by encryption) and fucking with identification documentation is "difficult", even though there's no method of *securing* that data in a way that it remains accessible yet secure. And that's just dealing with general paradigms. There's specific rules examples of turning the matrix rules into your prison yard bitch and breaking them seventeen ways from Sunday. Not to mention the detailed example of how to hack in... I forgot what book it was... involved like 70 rolls for a quick, simple hack & smash job.

And until you deal with it, a full third of SR is nigh untouchable, even before streamlining.

You have a few options. Frank's Ends of the Matrix is excellent, but it's not streamlined. It's comprehensive. My solution was to adapt the chase/hacking/manhunt minigame from Spycraft 2 to Shadowrun and abstract shit out to Hollywood logic and never mind the underlying technology. Bonus: it was pretty streamlined and a fun little minigame. Cons: It's a separate frickin minigame that derives from a handful of stats and equipment shit. Frank's approach is the inverse opposite of that and sets up internal logical consistency (as much as you can hope for from an RPG).

Regardless, you need to figure out what you're going to do with the Matrix. Everything else should fall in pretty good once you fix that problem.

[unnamednpc]

I'm basically ok with just saying that after the Crash (the first one, not the one I'd probably just retcon out of existence) people decided that it's impractical or effectively impossible to keep a dedicated brain-machine interface from breaking your encryption, killing it dead with copious amounts of biofeedback actually isn't, so places that are infrastructurally or systemically sensitive just run a fucktonne of black ice and else just keeps its records in order.
So maybe you intercept, decrypt and edit some account data to make it look like you own a trillion dollars, but as soon as that data gets cross checked with the knowing Zutich Orbital, it will see these funds are nonexistent and call foul. And probably some assassins. That means if you really want to create new nuyen, you habe to hack the world bank,and that place has an entire building complex worth of VIs whose sole purpose is to pile enough cascading black ice on you to fry your brain into a state indistinguishable from krillsteak.

That actually fits the older fluff, where people were like "the Frankfurt hub is a glacier", but you wouldn't hear anybody talk about how Bank of Aztlan "totally uses state of the art heavy encryption algorithms".

[Username17]

You have a few options. Frank's Ends of the Matrix is excellent, but it's not streamlined. It's comprehensive.

Yeah. Things generally work OK if everyone agrees to network shit together, but as soon as people figure out the "Fly Eye" exploit, the game just slows to a crawl. The Fly Eye is when you don't network about four hundred bullshit cameras and just have each one do its own onsite storage. It's not that a dedicated hacker can't rape the shit out of it, it's that it would take 800+ die rolls to resolve, and who the fuck wants to do that?

If you wanted things to be really streamlined, I think you'd want to ditch all the Tron bullshit and go straight for an Agent Smith model in which hackers wandered around in a cloud of wireless chatter making uncountable billions of data requests of their surroundings all the time and simply passively compromised all electronics in their vicinity. It wouldn't be very much like Shadowrun, but it would be a lot like Ghost in the Shell, and I think you could do a pretty streamlined subsystem that way.

As long as you're supposed to be able to transmit your avatar to have virtual sword fights with other avatars in order to knock each other out like Snow Crash, I don't think problems like the Fly Eye are avoidable.

-Username17

[Fuchs]

There's always the "forget the matrix rules, just MTP, NPC or one-roll it" way.

[Username17]

There's always the "forget the matrix rules, just MTP, NPC or one-roll it" way.

Yeah, but those ways are just like not telling your players what the matrix can and cannot do, because you are explicitly not telling the players what the matrix can and cannot do.

-Username17

[Fuchs]

That works very well if the players do not want to play hackers.

[Lokathor]

That works very well if the players do not want to play hackers.

Which is to say, it doesn't work well for anyone because that's a third of the game's core character types right there.

[Neurosis]

I've been thinking about attempting my own fix for the 4E Matrix rules for a long time now.

[fectin]

Why is Fly Eye bad?

Either you can just hack everything at once, or massive redundancy is a totally viable way of assuring data.

Of course, you basically have three ways of handling a massive amount of cameras like that: network them, so they're hackable all at once, put them all on the same security, so it acts like a keycode, once you've hacked one, the rest are too trivial to role, or put them each on separate security, which is a pain but almost demands a McGuffin that acts like a keycode (password list, etc).

All of those sound fairly workable.

[Username17]

Why is Fly Eye bad?

EotM assumes a model where each network is an actor. By network segregating a series of cameras (or whatever), you make the actual game crawl to a stop. EotM breaks Shadowrun Hackastacks for data collection, combat beat-downs, icon medicine, denial of service, and a whole bunch of other crap. But Hackastacks still exist to protect data.

And while "off network backups" do make sense in a very intuitive fashion, they are not handled in EotM rules in a particularly elegant way. It's at least one die roll for every single off network data backup that exists, and like all Hackastack uses, that number can be arbitrarily large.

That was the last bit of the Hackastack I couldn't kill without also killing Shadowrun sacred cows.

-Username17

[fectin]

I get all that, but am stuck on why it's bad for the game.

Sure it's tedious and time consuming to go through them, but it's much, much more resource intensive to have them in the first place. If you have 800 separate, individually secured, off-network cameras, someone has to go through and individually pull footage from each of them, then individually check that footage. It would literally be cheaper to just post a guard, and you can always skip the whole thing by paintballing the lenses, because no-one will know until after the fact anyway (because they're not networked).

[Fuchs]

In over 20 years of Shadowrun, I only had one player ever play a hacker - called a decker back then.

[kzt]

I get all that, but am stuck on why it's bad for the game.

Sure it's tedious and time consuming to go through them, but it's much, much more resource intensive to have them in the first place. If you have 800 separate, individually secured, off-network cameras, someone has to go through and individually pull footage from each of them, then individually check that footage. It would literally be cheaper to just post a guard, and you can always skip the whole thing by paintballing the lenses, because no-one will know until after the fact anyway (because they're not networked).

No, you just have each stream the data to the secure site(s) somewhere else, plus store it away locally. Oh, and they send an alert any time something "interesting'" happens in the FoV.

[fectin]

Then they are networked, and you can screw with them through that network.

[kzt]

Then they are networked, and you can screw with them through that network.

Sure. One at a time. Just like Frank said.

[fectin]

The Fly Eye is when you don't network about four hundred bullshit cameras and just have each one do its own onsite storage.

Looks like it's different from what Frank said.

[Ice9]

They're not networked to each-other, each one is connected individually to the secure site. Also there's the issue of one-way connections - like having the cameras able to send messages but not receive them. While this kinda makes sense, it seems like it leads too much to "Set Hacking = No" scenarios.

[Aryxbez]

There's always the "forget the matrix rules, just MTP, NPC or one-roll it" way.

Yeah, but those ways are just like not telling your players what the matrix can and cannot do, because you are explicitly not telling the players what the matrix can and cannot do.

-Username17

Well, that's pretty much how my local Shadowrun group does it, is via rolling the applicable skill, like any other skill test in the game. Course, odd thing is, GM said he had read the Matrix rules and "found nothing wrong with them"...

That works very well if the players do not want to play hackers.

Which is to say, it doesn't work well for anyone because that's a third of the game's core character types right there.

Well I'd imagine most people don't want too involving of a minigame for Matrix/Hacking, get something all too complex, and people just rather do a skill test, extended if need be even. I know in the sense that our Hacker player can't be bothered to know of any the actual hacking rules, and probably wouldn't want to, once be forced to play it once or twice.

That said, it concerns me that Frank's Matrix rules aren't that streamlined, if they're about as complex and otherwise unappealing as the original, then imagine just be something that doesn't get used. However, I trust they work rather well, and not too hard to understand, even for someone new to running a Shadowrun game, or it in general.

[TheFlatline]

That said, it concerns me that Frank's Matrix rules aren't that streamlined, if they're about as complex and otherwise unappealing as the original, then imagine just be something that doesn't get used. However, I trust they work rather well, and not too hard to understand, even for someone new to running a Shadowrun game, or it in general.

When I said they aren't streamlined I was talking within the purposes of this thread, where the OP was talking about eliminating stats and shit (why I don't know but whatever).

SR4's Matrix rules literally are bloatware. It takes something like 40 dice pool rolls to do a simple cybercombat (the rules statted example of the narrative in... fuck I don't remember... unwired? Core?)

If it takes 8 dice pool rolls do to it under Frank's system, it's pretty fucking streamlined.

[Username17]

EotM is not streamlined by the standards of the OP, but compared to the official rules, it is slick piece of work indeed.

-Username17

[Lago PARANOIA]

This is sort of tangential to the thread's point, but, one thing that would be really fucking helpful would be to know the average police response time for certain areas. A thing where the GM had to secretly roll the dice after someone called the cops or alerted the corp's security team would be amazingly helpful. And suspenseful.

In the previous Shadowrun thread, we got into a pissing match about whether throwing around Force 9 Mana Bolts was a bad idea. I still think that it is, because 9 hours seems definitely more than enough time for a marginally competent forensics team to get a bead on your astral signature. But it's hard to say for sure.