The Gaming Den

Except for, you know, Russia. And China. And France (dropped a bit but never went negative). And a crapload of other countries. But neither of those spoke english as their primary language, so of course their economies don't count for your "world" view. Like when the Sovient Union collaps...

My opinion is that melee with weapons is SR should be horribly deadly. Because swords, axes and maces are really good at breaking and killing people, particularly people not wearing heavy melee armor. But it should also typically be suicide to try to close on someone with a gun unless you are able ...

What I recommend is to clearly identify what are the requirements in each of the scheduled events, and what is just a matter of look and feel. Who are the protagonists and who are spectators? Where and when should the protagonists be? Where and when the spectators can be? What are the reasons for th...

The fact that being Boar clan means you like to dress in black and tan, look ethnically Zhuang, and have relatives who do flood control maintenance, and are proficient with the war spear is all to the good. It means you can get all that information across with just the sentence fragment "Boar ...

So I'm trying to figure out fundamental philosophical incompatibilities that drive each of these four pairs to fight one another, and while they don't have to be the kinds of philosophical differences that would drive non-crazy people to violence, "there's not enough hours in the day" is ...

It's easy to write conspiracy background. With minimal skills, it's trivial to get a write-up that looks great on paper. It's full of mysteries and secrets you uncover as you read them. The problem is, it is hard to write a conspiracy in the foreground of a story. You need to pace how protagonists w...

Also, Darth Vader was originally supposed to be some elite agent of the Emperor, tasked with retrieving the Death Star plans. Grand Moff Tarkin clearly was higher in the food chain. The character already got immensely popular when they wrote him in Empire Strike Back promoted to be in charge of the ...

It lacks substantial canon backing, but the French France sourcebook, hinted the Horrors were not hidden in a metaplan, but just above in spaaace, waiting for the Gaiasphere barrier to break. France was written by local authors, but FASA originally planned to translate it and provided early in the d...

This actually bothers me. I always considered Shadowrun to an alternate reality, an Earth 2, where split between 'us' and 'them' happened around 1989. This explain why SR history doesn't follow real world history up to 2011 and we don't need to move awakenin up a year every year. But towards the en...

Related to that, SR material frequently mentions that no one wants to run against Saeder-Krupp because it's ran by a dragon. But, seriously? Is there seriously a real danger that Lofwyr will drop everything else he's doing and will go hunt down some criminals that attacked a lab he owns? To me, tha...

Sadly, that is the best way to save yourself from people simply using necromancy as an effective tool. need some knowledge? Have the people who know killed. Nobody suspects that you are after knowledge if you kill all the people who know. Then wait a few days, dig up their graves, do your necromanc...

Pretty much all great dragons - and other immortals - are pointless as characters . It is next to impossible to interact in a meaningful way with any of them. They can get whatever they want either by brute force alone, brute force and Mindprobe or brute force and Influence. That's already be a prob...

Sooo that's pretty much like video game development worked here ten years ago. Then this whole fund yourself thing happened. Why the same didn't happen with rpgs? Everyone can write a game. You did it, i did it, my friend does it for a living right now (well, mostly translating other games, but sti...

Frankly, I'm not convinced many had a good grasp of shamanism and totems either.

From Edition One, Shadowrun fucked up with the elven nations. The authors wanted to make a plot point out of immortal elves bringing back a several millenia-old culture to establish a fantasy dictatorship. They had no idea about how it could be done, and it shows. No one seemingly ever noticed the o...

You'd have eight clans - The Congress, The Pentagon, The House, Langley, NSA, CDC, FEMA and Goldman-Sachs - with absolutely no reason given for people from different clans to do something together. Then a sourcebook would suddenly points out there is a world outside of North America and introduce a ...

B) Some kind of despair track, where people start to give in to the hopelessness of the situation and it basically encourages people to carefully choose their approach (with failures leading to more despair, and even small successes pushing it back, versus "how much more fucked does the world ...

More important than the mechanics is the gameplay. We don't talk about it much, but Cthulhu is a classless system, but beyond that it's a system that lacks a strong sense of player character roles. D&D is so combat centric, you can almost build it like a MMO raid: lancer, tank, healer, etc. Sha...

And then we get to the so called "qualities" . . Which have been called edges and flaws up untill SR3. This change was introduced in the fourth edition. I guess they really wanted to name the special attribute they added "Edge," which required renaming what previously were calle...

Just fucking settle on what you want the message to be. Is it: A: Your an awesome punk and you can make a difference! or B: Your utterly worthless, and just sit and watch us jerk off our favorite characters. Cyberpunk settings are supposed to state "You're utterly worthless." Period. Mega...

My (possibly own particular) understanding of SR metaplanes was they resulted from the merger of everyone's thoughts and feelings in the astral plane. Carl Jung's collective unconscious if you prefer. There is a metaplane of fire or forest because those concept are shared by billions of people in th...

It possibly was printed in Spain, but three authors - Julien Blondel, Marc Prudhomme and Fred Le Berre - are French (the others being I think USer), as is Yeti Entertainment S.A. From what I can find on the Internet, the French edition had four extension books released in 2001: Univers (288 pages, a...

I mean, the Character Templates are in the back of the book, though I have no fucking idea why, since they'd be much more useful near the character generation section. As far as I understand, it was originally expected the GM would photocoy the templates and hand them to the players for character c...

Plus, the skills are in no-wise balanced between the attributes - all the combat skills are under Agility, Strength has a grand total of four skills (Climb/jump, Lift, Stamina, and Swim), Psionics has three (Energy, Influence, Self-Control), and I don't understand the difference between Technical a...

Flashbacks are a pretty common thing in vampire and heist fic, and I'd love to see one that worked. Off the top of my head, I could see something like "make a relevant roll, if you succeed, spend a point of Edge and say what you set up, if you fail, you actually didn't arrange a distraction&qu...