The Gaming Den

The other problem nobody's mentioned yet about Shadowrun when I ran it (4th Anniversary Edition) is that throughout the whole game the PCs are expected to be operating stealthily because of the threat of discovery by corps or police forces and yet when they are or are not discovered is pure MTP. Ev...

I successfully went full on Predator with a Troll armed with Bow and Arrow in Shadowrun. Had a mage cast improved invisibility on me. Had a distraction going on, shot out the lights and just walked right through a warehouse and at ranges of less than 10m nailed enemies to the terrain with arrows. I...

I did do an amusing sub-plot where the 10,000 Utes are trying to control the 350,000 Navajo and maintain their monopoly on power as shown in the books.

The original writers were careless idiots about a whole lot.

Japan is the most likely to be able to bring their corps to heel, most likely time would be after they sponsored the mutiny in the bay area. They would need to partner with another top tier corp to pull it off fully.

Fantasy ranged attacks are just simulated as way too powerful. From a sufficient range, a single target can sidestep arrows pretty easily. It's only the volley of arrows from a unit of archers that is devestating to other troops becauser it covers a large area, or the sniper shot on an unmoving and...

Do people even still run games like this today? Every single game I've been a part of has been a "protect the innocent, defeat the BBEG, make the world a better place" sort of thing. Yeah, pretty much. People want to be the hero of their stories, and there are thing that heroic characters...

I was about the 150th person in line at Gencon to buy SR 1st edition. It was very cool conceptually but pretty broken mechanically, basically unplayable without lots of what Frank refers to as 'mind caulk'. I skipped 2nd edition, but played a lot of 3rd and 4th. 3rd and 4th edition work the best mec...

A pet peeve with Shadowrun was that they put in new rules options and capabilities that basically rewrote the entire magic, computer or combat section, but would never just print up a "here's how combat works now, ignore all the rules in book 1 chapter X" thing. Which I really wish they wo...

He rocks. I thought that was self-explanatory. Ha Ha. But what is his function in an actual game? What does he bring to the game other than a hangover and removing the need for the targeted corp to have to do any detective work to find the characters after the job? It's like an archetype of "a...

The motto of the FASA owner was, per the marketing guy at FASA, 'sell the sizzle, not the steak'. So nothing needed to make sense at second glance, much less deep analysis.

That's why it's totally OK to go up on a stage and use your powers to delight and extort money from a few hundred or thousand rubes, but it's totally not OK to use your powers to show up the police. The police are getting fucking mine-resistant vehicles bought for them, to fight threats that only t...

Because creative types that produce games rarely have passed a statistics course and just don't understand how to model the results that the mechanics they propose will produce? Or even why that is important.

You can't run some of that stuff because there is a lot of no there there. It's all sizzle without the steak. Which is exactly what the guy running FASA wanted. And besides, you can't be allowed to interfere with their metaplot on rails and their "we are so much better than you" developer ...

Not sure I agree with this one wholly: - Subjecting your magical powers to peer-reviewed university research. Have you seen parapsychology 'research'? The credulous have been trying to do 'science' on their purported magical powers for literally decades now, and publishing 'research' that's about a...

So the Vampire Conspiracy clearly has access to an effective and reusable system of getting rid of people or bodies that are inconvenient. What's one more dead dude in today's mass shooting? Or as is frequently the case, today's other mass shooting? But there are also some pretty severe limits: Wel...

With Dresden, human magicians tend to cause "issues" with technological gear just by being near it, and the effects get stronger and larger if they actually do magic. Firearms are fairly reliable even with major league sorcerers, but not completely. Cell phones and integrated circuits are ...

And then you need to come up with an explanation of how humans survive constant 500g acceleration . . The human body can withstand surprisingly big accelerations, given that they are only very very short. Basically gravity control was the answer in that universe. Which makes a lot of other things p...

You just aren't going to be able to do the Red Dog Mine strategy of having people work for 4 weeks and then send them back to Anchorage to spend some weeks in a city of 300,000+ people to work out their loneliness and lack of blow jobs. Or if you can , then transportation across the solar system is...

I don't think there are many world-class swimmers who could also be world-class linebackers, for instance. And I would be surprised if there are many former Olympic athletes who, after their careers, go on to do well even in sports that are relatively tolerant of age (like, say, golf). The skills o...

Irish wrote:What are some good choices to make when creating a magician in 4A so that the character can contribute to the party without making them feel small in the pants?

Have everyone else also be a mage.

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 t...

Reading the book... yeah, we have a winner. While the way Hero Points are granted could be better, Klug seemingly invented the "edit-a-scene" use of Hero Points, and was careful enough to write ways to keep players protected from misuse of them, and that's all I need to know. That is the ...

In MOST Gaming Universes it is best to powergame and do silly stupid funny shit and not give a rats ass about what the world thinks. Because once you start to think about what the world should - and i hate to use this word in this context - realistically think . . it simply all starts breaking down...

It's my opinion that you can create sufficient differences to make people who are not attempting to break your game happy without going to different races with magical abilities and odd mechanical advantages. The differences in appearance, background, skills and worldview between a 15th century Samu...

If you come up with an "option" that is pretty obviously superior to every other option or is critical to the validity of the character going forward you should just give that to the players instead and then offer some more colorful and less impactful options for them to take. Because othe...