The Shadowrun Situation

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Tue Sep 20, 2011 10:18 am

raben-aas wrote:Thanks for the clarification! (See, that's one of the reasons I'm hanging out here ).

Anyone got a decent houserule for this? (My gaming group may be headed for S-K territory in Berlin some day, and just may encounter military vehicles there ).

That's a complex question. When I was working on alt.war, I decided to address this very issue. I began making a proportional damage system that would be capable of scaling to the higher ends of damage possibilities. The response by the dumpshock team was to go into apoplexy that I was... gasp... changing the rules. They demanded that I make working military gear without changing the rules. And since this is, as recently demonstrated, mathematically impossible, I told them to go fuck themselves and went on to concepting H:AT.

Now there are a couple of easy things you can do. The most obvious and simple is to convert Hardened Armor from the pile of crazy that it currently is to a straight set of automatic soak hits. That smooths the curve out and makes it so that it is possible to do small amounts of damage against heavily armored things. It also has the added advantage of making armor piercing values three times more valuable against hardened armor than against normal armor. That has the advantage of making a -3 AP different from a +1 DV, which in the basic rules it is not. That's a simple house rule and people can understand it and accept it - but by itself it leaves almost all the hardened armor values fucking insanely high. Spirits you can mostly fix by cutting their Immunity to Normal Weapons in half, but for the vehicles it isn't so simple. Quite simply: there is no rhyme or reason to vehicle stats. They are all over the map, and there is no simple transform that will give you decent numbers out of the random crazy numbers in the book. Those values are completely unsystematic and completely unplaytested.

In the bigger picture: actually fixing things so that players would ever take more or less than two bursts from an assault rifle to go down requires not only a full rewrite of the vehicle stats (which you have to do anyway), but of the basic damage calculation and by extention all the weapons and armors in the game.

It's a very integral problem. It manifests in magical and matrix combat too. The math was tweaked so that it took two bursts to the chest to drop a player character, but they never checked to make sure it was possible to be badass enough to drop someone with one burst or tough enough that it took many bursts to bring you down. And in so doing, they ended up with a game that had precisely that problem and also had a thing going where really tough things like major spirits, military ordnance, and dragons basically could not give you coherent outputs within the system.

-Username17

raben-aas · Post by **raben-aas** » Tue Sep 20, 2011 10:37 am

At the moment, I don't need a perfect system. Thus, your HR proposal in the ends seems to be working fine for the purposes I have in mind.

If I wanted a system that is simple and elegant and that you can easily tweak to be more deadly or less deadly, I'd always opt for CP2020. Interlock feels more straightforward and - I dunno - gritty and better "manageable" for me.

SR on the other hand always had to cope with several different rules sets (gunning, melee, driving/piloting, rigging, decking-now-hacking, magic) that ... often had difficulties working together, or working at the extreme ends of pool sizes ... and since it has been that way since SR1 I'm kinda used to that and don't mind it very much. Having a clunky rules system is somewhat of a defining feature of SR...

SR4 still is a vast improvement to all earlier editions for me, and until a better SR system comes along (and with better I mean "simpler") I'm a happy GM.

And for all probs that do come up: HR FTW!

TheFlatline · Post by **TheFlatline** » Wed Sep 21, 2011 8:37 am

It's actually kind of one of the things I miss about SR3.

Yes, the variable TNs are shit, and the odds of rolling numbers higher than 6 gets wonky as all shit, but the idea that soak difficulty was not necessarily related to damage output was a great idea, and if a simple way could be found to deal with that (some concepts come to mind immediately) it'd be cool to see that again.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Wed Sep 21, 2011 12:27 pm

TheFlatline wrote:It's actually kind of one of the things I miss about SR3.

Yes, the variable TNs are shit, and the odds of rolling numbers higher than 6 gets wonky as all shit, but the idea that soak difficulty was not necessarily related to damage output was a great idea, and if a simple way could be found to deal with that (some concepts come to mind immediately) it'd be cool to see that again.

It's what i did for After Sundown. It works.

-Username17

TheFlatline · Post by **TheFlatline** » Wed Sep 21, 2011 5:24 pm

FrankTrollman wrote:
TheFlatline wrote:It's actually kind of one of the things I miss about SR3.

Yes, the variable TNs are shit, and the odds of rolling numbers higher than 6 gets wonky as all shit, but the idea that soak difficulty was not necessarily related to damage output was a great idea, and if a simple way could be found to deal with that (some concepts come to mind immediately) it'd be cool to see that again.
It's what i did for After Sundown. It works.

-Username17

Nice. I also dug from SR3 that you could kill people with a .22 if you were good enough (okay probably not a troll but whatever), and you had the option that you could make shit absolutely get through armor and hurt but still deal a controllable amount of damage.

Kot · Post by **Kot** » Mon Oct 10, 2011 4:42 pm

It's really quiet here. C'mon, where will I get info on what's going on around the carcass of SR4?

Stahlseele · Post by **Stahlseele** » Mon Oct 10, 2011 9:55 pm

Maybe they are finally dead? O.o

Kot · Post by **Kot** » Tue Oct 11, 2011 10:05 am

I wouldn't count on it yet. There's still money to squeeze.

Otakusensei · Post by **Otakusensei** » Wed Oct 12, 2011 4:44 pm

There's nothing left to hate.

What could they do at this point that could get anyone's blood boiling? And not even in a bad way; they are simply unable to produce anything or remarkable quality and there is nothing sacred left to incite the rage of those who remember when Shadowrun was good.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Wed Oct 12, 2011 5:45 pm

Otakusensei wrote:There's nothing left to hate.

What could they do at this point that could get anyone's blood boiling? And not even in a bad way; they are simply unable to produce anything or remarkable quality and there is nothing sacred left to incite the rage of those who remember when Shadowrun was good.

This.

I mean, what's left for them to do? They already screwed with the magic, the tech, the plotline, the timeline, the world, and the game system in ways that are not good. If they produced a book that was all about horse sex or power gamed magic options, so what?

I don't even read their production schedule anymore, because there is nothing they could put on it that would make me happy or sad. Just to put this to the test, let's go look at what they produced recently:

Runner's Black Book. It's another gear book, somehow different from Arsenal, Milspec Tech, and This Fucking Drone. Um... so what? I'm sure the gear in there is poorly written and broken and shit, but I don't care enough to even look at it.
99 Bottles. It's a short story with rules writeups for the characters in it. So it's like Street Legends and a bad story at the same time. I wouldn't care about that even if they had a team that could write good fiction and produce usable game text for characters.
Anarchy Subsidized. It's an adventure where the players are supposed to be working for Horizon to ruin the reputation of singers. Don't care.

-Username17

TheFlatline · Post by **TheFlatline** » Thu Oct 13, 2011 3:17 pm

Heh. Heh heh.

SR is becoming a browser-based MMO.

http://www.cliffhanger-productions.com/ ... ails/id/65

And they claim they're working with current and previous developers... anyone on the board get contacted?

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Thu Oct 13, 2011 3:40 pm

No one here is or was a "developer". Developers include Rob, Peter, Tom, and sigh... Jason.

Honestly, there really haven't been many developers, so to make that statement true they'd only have to talk to like 2 people. And since one of those people is the current license holder of the digital rights (Jordan Weisman), it's basically true by definition if they pick up a phone and give Jason Hardy a call.

-Username17

TheFlatline · Post by **TheFlatline** » Thu Oct 13, 2011 4:36 pm

Apologies I used "developers" in a loose sense. Here's the actual quote:

"a group of current and previous editions writers and artists and Shadowrun alumni who have worked on the pen and paper game or had their hands in Shadowrun Mods or community work."

Otakusensei · Post by **Otakusensei** » Thu Oct 13, 2011 6:53 pm

Frank's comment still stands. They can claim that just by working with the current license holders for the table top and digital versions because both Jordan and Jason wrote for the game.

The fact they haven't said who they've worked with is a pretty clear sign they haven't reached out too far. To do anything note worthy either they get the original FASA band back together or they reach out to the writers that fueled the Renaissance in the setting and mechanics. Apparently, they didn't do any of that which tells me they either don't know about the current state of the game or don't give a shit.

TheFlatline · Post by **TheFlatline** » Thu Oct 13, 2011 9:01 pm

Otakusensei wrote:Frank's comment still stands. They can claim that just by working with the current license holders for the table top and digital versions because both Jordan and Jason wrote for the game.

The fact they haven't said who they've worked with is a pretty clear sign they haven't reached out too far. To do anything note worthy either they get the original FASA band back together or they reach out to the writers that fueled the Renaissance in the setting and mechanics. Apparently, they didn't do any of that which tells me they either don't know about the current state of the game or don't give a shit.

That's what I figured. I mean, I don't expect much for a browser game.

Which is a shame, because if there's any IP that could support a heavily player-driven environment it'd be Shadowrun.

Blade · Post by **Blade** » Fri Oct 14, 2011 10:27 am

From what I've seen and heard from a dev, they seem pretty serious about delivering something good and respectful of Shadowrun.

I didn't expect much when I first about it, but it looks like we might get a pleasant surprise.

Fuchs · Post by **Fuchs** » Fri Oct 14, 2011 10:43 am

Browser games also mean you could play it mobile more easily.

Blade · Post by **Blade** » Fri Oct 14, 2011 1:15 pm

Keep in mind that it's a Unity powered browser game.

Unity is a graphical engine made to work inside a browser through a plugin.
It won't give you last-gen graphics, but it can get pretty nice and even though it's more used by "little web games" right now, there's nothing preventing you from doing a professional quality game with it.

Seerow · Post by **Seerow** » Fri Oct 14, 2011 1:56 pm

Yeah I've seen a few unity games on Kongregate. I've been generally unimpressed as the graphics are usually only slightly better than Flash, while running significantly slower (though this could as easily be my computer's age showing more than the Unity engine itself)

ModelCitizen · Post by **ModelCitizen** » Fri Oct 14, 2011 2:51 pm

Unity seems like a weird choice. I don't know much about it, but I've never seen a Unity game do anything you can't do with Java and that way you don't have to prompt people to install a plugin they've never heard of.

TheFlatline · Post by **TheFlatline** » Fri Oct 14, 2011 6:33 pm

Blade wrote:From what I've seen and heard from a dev, they seem pretty serious about delivering something good and respectful of Shadowrun.

I didn't expect much when I first about it, but it looks like we might get a pleasant surprise.

That's what Microsoft said about that horrible Shadowrun online FPS they released.

Actually the game itself wasn't bad, it just had zero to do with SR.

Fucks · Post by **Fucks** » Thu Oct 20, 2011 2:58 am

It's available:

Four artifacts have been found. Some of the most powerful people in the Sixth World have been after them, and many people have died in the globetrotting hunt to bring these objects together. Now that they have been recovered, their powers can be unleashed—or the artifacts can be scattered, lost again until another generation summons the courage and the knowledge to dredge them up.

Artifacts Unbound concludes the Dawn of the Artifacts campaign in a way that makes gamemasters and players free to determine many events of their campaign. Filled with plot details, adventure seeds, basic setting information, and NPC statistics, Artifacts Unbound lets gamemasters select the elements that would work best in their campaign and design a thrilling story for their game. Easy to use and flexible, this book can be used with players who have gone through the entire Dawn of the Artifacts campaign, or with players just learning about the artifacts and their effect on the Sixth World.
Artifacts Unbound is for use with Shadowrun, Twentieth Anniversary Edition.

TheFlatline · Post by **TheFlatline** » Thu Oct 20, 2011 6:48 am

Did anyone else read that as "We end Dawn of the Artifacts by making you actually write the ending"?

Blade · Post by **Blade** » Thu Oct 20, 2011 8:06 am

That's not necessarily a bad idea. At the end of a campaign where a lot can happen and the PC can go completely off the rails, it's better to have a complete explanation of what's going on, who does/wants/knows what and what they can do, give a few examples of things that can happen and let the GM act from this.

The problem is that, from what I've seen of the first part, the campaign seemed very railroady with absolutely no explanations of what was behind the scene if the PC ever strayed from the path. Maybe the next parts of the campaign were more open, but if they weren't, then it doesn't make much sense to let the GM decide the ending.

And then there's the problem of establishing canon: if the events have some kind of influence on the Sixth World as a whole, then there need to be a fixed canon situation to base the work for future books...