Drunken Review: Shadowrun 5

[Aryxbez]

Alright, the notion of animal survival plots DO sound pretty awesome, and it's a pity the SR writers focused on Man-eating Trees opposed to that.

Shadowrun is a game about spending two hours making elaborate plans and then kicking in the front door, guns ablaze.

I've always found that notion rather dumb, though I get that it's supposed to be ironic in that ye do all this planning...only to just charge head on. Since if you're doing any actual planning, going to infiltrate in non "front door" fashion, before things come to blades & bullets. Otherwise, I've wondered if it's meant to be an obvious saying to encourage players to want to actually NOT kick down the front door, and play it smart, so they feel they're being "smart" and defying the norm?

The suggested rewards for completing a mission are also in this chapter.

This was one thing I did like from 5th edition, even though it was counter-immersive, and paid terribly compared to prices of junk Sam's would want. I liked the notion that there was a system for generating cash and XP (4th kinda had one), so could get an idea of average rewards and not having to guess it constantly. "Suggested/average rewards in Shadowrun" or something of that nature is a rather common GM question for running Shadowrun.

While I'm at it, it's saddening they failed to provide any actual encounter system, or idea of average challenges, or whatever a measure to run appropriate battles. As Otherwise, like "point-based" games, need to look at PC capabilities, run numbers, and get an idea from there (ex:5 PC's, each can one-shot/double tap a guy, know that 5+ will allow for a likely longer encounter, if that is so desired). It seemed like "professional rating" of a foe should've been an indicator for this, especially a system where can generate statblocks of NPC's with X Pro Rating (then allow Internet to generate gallons of NPC statblocks for us never need a MM again).

[JesterZero]

It's very situational.

If Joe Security Guard shoots his twin with a gun, he can reasonably expect to do base damage minus 1 assuming this conflict takes place at point blank range, in good light, and everyone is naked. Most guns do somewhere between 8 and 12 damage, and Joe Security Guard will have 9 boxes on his physical condition monitor. So he'll be somewhere between 7/9ths and 11/9ths dead.

An armor jacket further reduces that by about 4 boxes of damage. So now you're between 3/9ths and 7/9ths dead. And then we all start hunting through tables for special ammunition and firing mode modifiers to find the One True Tactic (TM) that will get you all the way dead on our "one" attack action. Depending on how good we are at finding rules in sidebars, we could probably pull that off.

NOTE: Or we could throw a grenade; because in many cases, throwing one or more grenades is an "I Win" button. And you can buy a semi-automatic grenade launcher at chargen, which is...special.

The rules I was referring to were specific to hardened armor, which seems to flip the script around. Normally I would expect the whole arms race to be roughly proportional: the wound inflicted by Street Guy and his Street Gun vs. Street Armor would be roughly equivalent to the one inflicted by Military Guy and his Military Gun vs. Military Armor. But that's not the case, and so while street encounters are situationally lethal, Desert Wars are presumably padded sumo. The reason for this is that they changed the hardened armor rules, but kept the same armor values from SR4. So in SR4, the MilSpec suit was 20 armor, and that was worth 20 dice. But in SR5, the MilSpec suit is 20 armor, but in the right circumstances that is now worth up to 50 dice. That's goofy.

One last note: the hardened armor values for MilSpec armor are from the Run & Gun preview, NOT the SR5 corebook that Frank is reviewing, so my numbers regarding guns vs. armor come from there. As far as I can tell, those are totally valid. I made the assumption that vehicle armor functioned the same way, but that seems to have been a mistaken inference on my part, and Frank's comments about armored cars going down in two hits to anti-personnel grenades are spot on.

[Dean]

Oh so that's not actually in printed rules -yet-. So there may be a wonderful treat on the horizons where everyone goes from killing everyone in one hit to being completely incapable of harming anyone ever again when they publish a new book.

Fantastic.

[OgreBattle]

Normally I would expect the whole arms race to be roughly proportional: the wound inflicted by Street Guy and his Street Gun vs. Street Armor would be roughly equivalent to the one inflicted by Military Guy and his Military Gun vs. Military Armor. But that's not the case, and so while street encounters are situationally lethal, Desert Wars are presumably padded sumo. The reason for this is that they changed the hardened armor rules, but kept the same armor values from SR4. So in SR4, the MilSpec suit was 20 armor, and that was worth 20 dice. But in SR5, the MilSpec suit is 20 armor, but in the right circumstances that is now worth up to 50 dice. That's goofy.

This seems like a good model for a medieval warfare game where plate armored knights are fighting to incapacitate with bonks to the head for noble ransoming, while shit covered peasants use shit covered daggers to stab each other through their shitty jerkins.

I made the assumption that vehicle armor functioned the same way, but that seems to have been a mistaken inference on my part, and Frank's comments about armored cars going down in two hits to anti-personnel grenades are spot on.

....so if you had a power armored soldier who 'wears' his armor rather than 'riding' in a vehicle so he gets the advantageous armor rules to use... you have a battlefield ruled by mecha!

[JesterZero]

....so if you had a power armored soldier who 'wears' his armor rather than 'riding' in a vehicle so he gets the advantageous armor rules to use... you have a battlefield ruled by mecha!

That seems to be where we're heading. Because wearing MilSpec armor means you get to use the rules for being a dragon, but riding in an armored car means you get to use the rules for being a troll wearing a bulletproof coat. At least according to the preview material.

Keep in mind this is the same material that describes a 2,100 nuyen suit giving you a better social bonus than a 31,000 nuyen piece of bioware...but only if you enable the wireless on your suit.

I'm not joking. You can compare the Vashon Island clothes to Tailored Pheremones if you don't believe me. It's just absurd.

Now it's possible that CGL could edit some of the material in the preview before publication, but to the best of my knowledge they haven't done that before. Currently, the first wave of errata doesn't seem to show up until at around the third printing of a given book.

[Username17]

Personally, I expect that somewhere in the expansion books, they'll negate all their padded sumo work and we'll be back to having heads explode without the use of he broken grenade rules. Bringing back narrow bursts could plausibly increase DVs by nine. Called shots to negate armor would take the entire military armor suit and circular file it. There are simply too many "advanced combat options" that they could bring back that would turn people into a fine red mist.

It would take a tremendous amount of discipline to actually veer SR5 into padded sumo territory, and I don't believe they have it. Of course, I don't think people are willing to give me enough free liquor to have me read Run And Gun at all, so I'll have to take other peoples' word for however they end up fucking things up even more.

-Username17

[Stahlseele]

don't stand near the bullet-sponge has always been a thing in shadowrun . .
the problem with this is, that many combat engagements take place inside of buildings, so you generally have less space available to you to step away from the bullet sponge at all . .

[Username17]

Final Thoughts

Writing and editing in this book are worse than you can believe. Even when you're reading it, your mind rebels at how much is left unsaid and tries to fill it in with mind caulk. Literally while reading this book you will simply not believe the editing is as bad as it is. You'll be reading along and things will reference a rule, and you'll just assume it's in there somewhere and that you'll get to it when you get to it, but by the end of the book you'll never have gotten there because it doesn't fucking exist.

Consider the discussion Jester Zero and I just had. He hadn't even noticed that non-critter hardened armor rules don't exist. It wasn't until I started searching the text for called shot rules that I realized that the armor bypassing called shot rules are referenced but nonexistent. It's like fractal and shit. The harder you stare at any section, the more gratuitous errors you'll find and the more puzzling omissions you'll stumble over. A lot of things from older editions are not in the book and I genuinely do not know whether this is the authors forgetting to mention something they knew implicitly because they are old Shadowrun hands who can't write their way out of a paper bag - or massive and deliberate changes to the rules and/or the setting. It's really impossible to tell.

There are a few positive rules changes. Spirits don't get to molest people with ridiculous Edge scores, Adepts don't have to pay premiums on combat skills, probably a third thing that will come to me eventually. But none of these feel deliberate. This is not part of a larger system of reigning in overpowered spirits, nor is it part of a meaningful attempt to create a playspace for Adepts. It feels like pure entropy. That it is simply a quantum reality that if you make this many fiddly changes that there will be some number which would be positive changes in isolation. But even viewed in that light, the ΔG here is apparently amazingly unfavorable for the production of good rules changes.

It's not just that the presented game rules are horrible beyond belief, it's that sentence by agonizing sentence the actual writing is incredibly bad. It takes a really long time to get to the point and leaves out key information constantly, but it doesn't feel well written. This is the longest core book of any edition of Shadowrun, and by most ways you might count such things it presents the least information to the reader. But this isn't like War and Peace or something, where the journey and not the destination is what's important - this is jsut supremely terrible the entire time.

I don't know how I can get that last point across, really. After all, I am known to be a biased source. I am known to think that Russell Zimmerman is a choad. I am known to be openly disdainful of Aaron Pavao as a writer, a rules guru, and as a human being. If I posted a writing sample from this book, it would seem logical that I had simply cherry picked a poorly written paragraph or a piece of writing that only made sense in the original context which I had stripped away from it. But the truth is that it's all bad. Even the parts that are literally copy pasta from the previous edition are terrible because no effort was spent making them fit with their new textual environment.

So anyway, various people thought that we should have a thread about how to make Shadowrun be less bad instead of more bad, or how to make Dickensian cyberpunk work, or stuff like that. I think making such a new thread is probably a good idea.

-Username17

[John Magnum]

Oh god, the tags.

[Username17]

Oh god, the tags.

Posted: 24 Mar 2014 02:56 pm Post subject:

Last edited by FrankTrollman on 24 Mar 2014 02:56 pm; edited 1 time in total

That was quick of you.

-Username17

[mlangsdorf]

So as someone who played a tiny bit of Blue Book Shadowrun 23 years ago and is vaguely curious about playing again:

What's the best edition/set of rules expansions to play? Apparently 5th edition is a complete no-show. 1st edition had severe problems that only got worse with Awakened. When did the Shadowrun rules hit their peak?

Assume for the purposes of the questions that I have access to everything ever printed for Shadowrun in PDF form and I don't want to use any house rules, no matter how clever they happen to be.

[Rawbeard]

Going back to wireless bonuses, silencers are amazing. They either check nearby guards twitter feed ("checking weird sound #lol"), or break the 4th wall and force the MC to reveal NPC perception rolls. either way they seriously tell the shooter if someone heard his gunshots.

[Rawbeard]

So as someone who played a tiny bit of Blue Book Shadowrun 23 years ago and is vaguely curious about playing again:

What's the best edition/set of rules expansions to play? Apparently 5th edition is a complete no-show. 1st edition had severe problems that only got worse with Awakened. When did the Shadowrun rules hit their peak?

Assume for the purposes of the questions that I have access to everything ever printed for Shadowrun in PDF form and I don't want to use any house rules, no matter how clever they happen to be.

4th is overall the most playable edition so far.

[Longes]

Frank, thanks, that was very interesting to read.
Can you do the OSSR of one of the 3- Shadowrun corebooks?

[silva]

So as someone who played a tiny bit of Blue Book Shadowrun 23 years ago and is vaguely curious about playing again:

What's the best edition/set of rules expansions to play? Apparently 5th edition is a complete no-show. 1st edition had severe problems that only got worse with Awakened. When did the Shadowrun rules hit their peak?

Assume for the purposes of the questions that I have access to everything ever printed for Shadowrun in PDF form and I don't want to use any house rules, no matter how clever they happen to be.

None. Just pick your favorite ruleset and use it with shadowrun world. Shadowrun rules are a bloated, slow and unnecessarily complicated mess, no matter the edition. The game popularity is due to its setting and premise, not its rules.

As a matter of fact, I've seen Interesting conversions to Gurps, BRP, Savage Worlds, D20 modern and Apocalypse World. I would just pick one of those if were you.

[Korwin]

Final Thoughts

Did I miss the review of the new things?
(Only Alchemy comes to my mind)

[Longes]

According to the devs, the magical tradition system will be changed from SR4, to have bigger distinctions between traditions. It hasn't been changed yet, but it will be.

[kzt]

So either 100 nuyen grenade does nothing against a 300k nuyen armored car, or an investment of 200 nuyen is enough to obliterate one completely. (Which is in line with the numbers Frank ran). You pick.

Grenades under armored limos should be a problem for the average armored limo. A rocket to the drivers window should make it a very bad day for the driver and probably everyone in the limo.

If it works this way in SR5 I'd expect its strictly by chance.....

[Username17]

So either 100 nuyen grenade does nothing against a 300k nuyen armored car, or an investment of 200 nuyen is enough to obliterate one completely. (Which is in line with the numbers Frank ran). You pick.

Grenades under armored limos should be a problem for the average armored limo. A rocket to the drivers window should make it a very bad day for the driver and probably everyone in the limo.

If it works this way in SR5 I'd expect its strictly by chance.....

Grenades next to an armored car in an alley turn the armored car in compacted trash.

So as someone who played a tiny bit of Blue Book Shadowrun 23 years ago and is vaguely curious about playing again:

What's the best edition/set of rules expansions to play? Apparently 5th edition is a complete no-show. 1st edition had severe problems that only got worse with Awakened. When did the Shadowrun rules hit their peak?

Assume for the purposes of the questions that I have access to everything ever printed for Shadowrun in PDF form and I don't want to use any house rules, no matter how clever they happen to be.

You can't really use the Matrix in any edition as-is. Once you've made the concession to either house rule the Matrix or just not have any PC Hackers, then 4th edition is the best system. silva is, like always, completely full of shit. The very idea of translating Shadowrun to fucking GURPS on the grounds that Shadowrun combat was too complicated and combat ran too slowly, is insanity. GURPS has fucking 1 second combat ticks.

-Username17

[kzt]

If you use Chunky Salsa does the shockwave from the grenade under the limo bounces off the armored limo floor, hits the functionally infinitely tough concrete street and then bounces back to the limo, then bounces....?

I can see them doing something this absurdly stupid, but did they?

[Username17]

If you use Chunky Salsa does the shockwave from the grenade under the limo bounces off the armored limo floor, hits the functionally infinitely tough concrete street and then bounces back to the limo, then bounces....?

I can see them doing something this absurdly stupid, but did they?

They do mention rebounding off of "six surfaces" in a small room, meaning that all grenades functionally do 36 damage for bouncing off the ground. Even at AP +5, an armored car is only rolling 41 dice and has a condition track that is 17 boxes long. So it takes 22 boxes and is scrap. If there is a wall of a building within nine meters of the target, the damage is amped up even more. You don't even have to land the grenade under the Roadmaster, just near it.

Now the street making you explode with back blast is kind of weird, but it's almost the only thing that does. Blasts only rebound if they don't blow through the wall on first intention. "Heavy Material" rolls 19 dice to avoid getting knocked down by a fragmentation grenade, and gets blown up if it fails to soak six boxes. So fragmentation grenades knock down hardwood walls six meters away. If you throw it at a dude in a house, you actually won't get chunky salsa effects from anything but the ground, because the grenade will seriously splinterize the entire building.

The barrier rules are also completely insane, which partially mitigates the explosion rules being completely insane in some instances.

-Username17

[Stahlseele]

This is especially worse if you care to remember, that they did the preview idiocy they are doing with run and gun for the SR5 corebook as well.
They got basically shit loads of free errata from dumpshock alone.
Where many of these things were pointed out.
And THEN they told the world, that the book had already gone to the printers with it being exactly like it seemed from the previews . .
Because, of course you ship it off to the printers.
Then release previews. Not the other way around. No.

[A Man In Black]

Because, of course you ship it off to the printers.
Then release previews. Not the other way around. No.

SR5 is apparently terrible but this isn't really a fair complaint. Everyone does this; you use the finalized text for previews, to help reduce future confusion caused by rules tweaks between preview and final print.

Previews aren't playtests.

[Stahlseele]

BUT WHY NOT?
WHY THE HELL NOT?
YOU GET FREE ERRATA FROM THIS!

[Username17]

BUT WHY NOT?
WHY THE HELL NOT?
YOU GET FREE ERRATA FROM THIS!

Ideally, you have proofreaders. Also, you're releasing previews to drum up enthusiasm for the book. Physical printing takes time, so you want to be sending out preview texts during the printing.

Now it does make sense to put out some test balloons early for weird ideas to judge fan reaction. This is why, for example, Wizards of the Coast released an article early on in the production of 4th edition D&D to discuss the direction they were going with magic items. But they did not release chapters of printing proofs so that fans on message boards could tell them about typos. Because that would be stupid.

The reality is that Catalyst doesn't proofread or edit their shit. Throwing printing proofs at a bunch of howler monkies forum posters to find typos in is just a less efficient system than submitting the printing proofs to a small team of actual proofreaders. You'd have to have someone comb through forum posts looking for error reports, and that same person could be reading the fucking book looking for errors there instead.

Free labor is simply too expensive in this instance. Catalyst's lack of proofreading isn't because they are too proud to listen to fans or because they are in too much of a hurry to get feedback. It's because they just don't fucking do editing. It's not that they are being assholes by ignoring the voices on dumpshock, it's that they are being assholes by not doing their fucking jobs. Ignoring the people on dumpshock is just a normal part of business. And will continue to be so even if printing proofs turn around much much faster than they do now.

-Username17