So what the shit is so bad about Shadowrun?

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PrometheanVigil
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So what the shit is so bad about Shadowrun?

Post by PrometheanVigil »

I've read some of the posts on here and apart from some hilarious anecdotes, it devolved into bitter-bitch syndrome, mechanics-heartbreaker crapola. Made for tedious reading, just ended up skimming. Did not make abundantly clear the vitriolic sentiment against the game system. Not good all-in-all.

What the hell is wrong with the game in short? What are the legit gripes with it? This seems like a forum where people know their numbers so I'm interested to see where the system fails separate from implementation preference and to hear that from people far more experience than I with the series.
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Re: So what the shit is so bad about Shadowrun?

Post by hyzmarca »

The Matrix.


Literally everything about the Matrix, always, in every edition. It's supposed to be a third of the game, and it's the one that no one has ever, ever been able to do well.
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Post by Nath »

- Long, tedious, dreadfully burdening character generation. Shadowrun differs from a lot of other RPG because nearly all character options are on the table at chargen. You have to choose among dozens of skills, weapons, ammo types, augmentations or spells. And without any guidelines at all regarding what are the good pick and what is an appropriate rating. The fact that the rules punish you if you don't spend all your money at chargen is just icing on the cake. As a consequence, even the people who wrote the damn rules are not able to offer pre-made characters that are not garbage, which in turn makes character generation even more of an issue because you can comfortably default on them.

- Separate realms of play. Only full mages can visit the astral space. Only deckers/hackers can operate inside the Matrix. Augmented characters get between two-thirds and three-fourths of the action during physical combat.

- Non-reducible rules. A lot of situations require to remember and refer to multiple rules, possibly spread over several books, mostly lists and lists of modifiers. In theory, the solution could be to go for a mechanical shortcut and simply hand-wave an appropriate modifier based on an overall assessment of difficulty. But for some reasons very few people try do so, and the books never hint at such possibility.

- An annoying fandom (I oughta know, I belong to it).
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Post by Username17 »

There are five editions of Shadowrun, with some pretty radical changes in game mechanics between them. There are things that are overpowered in one edition that are essentially worthless in another edition. There are math fails of too many numbers and math fails of too few. Damage scales very differently in different editions and it results in a problem where an anti-tank rocket is unable to drop a character with enhanced blood clotting in one edition and a problem where armored vehicles pop like water balloons to small arms fire in another.

But one thing that is always and forever the same is that the Matrix is fucking unplayable. The rules for the Matrix get totally overhauled in every edition and also in expansion books within each edition and there are at least a dozen wholly different game mechanical frameworks for handling hacking in Shadowrun that have been trotted out since 1989. All of them are terrible to the point of invoking Poe's Law. I could tell you how terrible one of the particular iterations was and you would simply assume I was exaggerating for effect because your mind cannot handle how fucking awful the rules for the Matrix are in any particular edition.

For example: this is not a joke, but in several versions of Shadowrun's hacking rules, the rules-as-written method for finding a disguised system that you want to hack is to roll a pile of dice thirty thousand times. That's not me being sarcastic. That's not me making fun of the fact that there are too many steps involved in Hacking in pretty much every edition of the game. Thirty thousand isn't hyperbole because I think the actual number is too large and it might as well be thirty thousand. The literal actual number of times you are asked to roll a pile of dice and count hits is about thirty thousand. No person in the history of the world has ever conducted a single successful by-the-book hacking mission in those editions. It has never happened and it will never happen, because that shit is literally unplayable.

The rabbit hole is really fucking stupid and really fucking deep. Various problems from the subjective to the objective from the minor to the severe exist in various forms in various editions. But every edition's hacking rules have been significantly worse than not having any hacking rules.

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Post by Stahlseele »

The Magic.

Basically, it goes like this:
The less the GM knows about the magic rules, the stronger magic gets.
The less the GM knows about the matrix rules, the weaker matrix gets.
And the mundanes are left to be the targets of opportunity in between.

Also the current license takers of the IP are corrupt criminal religious nutjobs.
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TFwiki wrote:Soon is the name of the region in the time-domain (familiar to all marketing departments, and to the moderators and staff of Fun Publications) which sees release of all BotCon news, club exclusives, and other fan desirables. Soon is when then will become now.

Peculiar properties of spacetime ensure that the perception of the magnitude of Soon is fluid and dependent, not on an individual's time-reference, but on spatial and cultural location. A marketer generally perceives Soon as a finite, known, yet unspeakable time-interval; to a fan, the interval appears greater, and may in fact approach the infinite, becoming Never. Once the interval has passed, however, a certain time-lensing effect seems to occur, and the time-interval becomes vanishingly small. We therefore see the strange result that the same fragment of spacetime may be observed, in quick succession, as Soon, Never, and All Too Quickly.
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Post by Whipstitch »

A recurring Shadowrun problem is that the developers default to a late 20th century worldview and thus often fail to understand the implications and scale of the stuff they have written. For example, the Over 9000 problem Frank is talking about above has to do with the fact that the matrix rules are written as if the Shadowrun world has an absurdly small amount of 'net traffic going on and that it's OK to make people roll dice for each matrix object they want to check. Such an approach would be unwieldy even today--ffs, my phone can get bars from 6 routers right now and I live in the middle of fucking nowhere--but it's completely unworkable in the world of distributed computing they envision for wireless Shadowrun.
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Post by DrPraetor »

At least two people in the forum - Frank and myself - have been playing Shadowrun since shortly after it came out; we were children at the time.

Frank was serious enough about the game to write some sourcebooks for the previous edition, in a semi-professional capacity (I'm not sure if the company with the IP, Catalyst Games, ever paid him the money they promised, but: https://rpggeek.com/rpgdesigner/20970/frank-trollman )

So Frank and I - at least - love the damn game with the full force of misty-eyed childhood nostalgia.

Now, the current edition really is garbage, and the people responsible are garbage. If you don't enter the conversation already caring about the game, you legitimately ask, "why do I care about a detailed takedown of how skills are hysterically overpriced, the surprise rules produce absurd outputs, and the current chargen doesn't support such established starting concepts as former mercenary or wage mage"?

And, indeed, I expect you regard these detailed criticisms as tedious: they certainly aren't going to motivate you to care about the game enough to address the substance!

Here's why Shadowrun is intrinsically cool and you should care about whether it's good: Shadowrun combines a set of core conceits that supports collective storytelling with alter-egos who are superhuman anarchist mercenaries, doing an entertaining variety of spy missions in a more awesome version of the real world. Shadowrun can be a lot of fun, but this is a style of game that can fall apart easily from weaknesses in the mechanics, so those weaknesses become a major focus of the discourse on this forum.
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Post by Archmage Joda »

Stahlseele wrote:The Magic.
Also the current license takers of the IP are corrupt criminal religious nutjobs.
Wait, what?
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Post by ScottS »

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Post by Stahlseele »

@Archmage_Joda
What, exactly, did you not understand?

ScottS provided a link to the latter, are you still fuzzy on the former lad?
Welcome, to IronHell.
Shrapnel wrote:
TFwiki wrote:Soon is the name of the region in the time-domain (familiar to all marketing departments, and to the moderators and staff of Fun Publications) which sees release of all BotCon news, club exclusives, and other fan desirables. Soon is when then will become now.

Peculiar properties of spacetime ensure that the perception of the magnitude of Soon is fluid and dependent, not on an individual's time-reference, but on spatial and cultural location. A marketer generally perceives Soon as a finite, known, yet unspeakable time-interval; to a fan, the interval appears greater, and may in fact approach the infinite, becoming Never. Once the interval has passed, however, a certain time-lensing effect seems to occur, and the time-interval becomes vanishingly small. We therefore see the strange result that the same fragment of spacetime may be observed, in quick succession, as Soon, Never, and All Too Quickly.
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Post by Username17 »

On Shadowrun Magic: it has the most internally consistent set of magical physics of any game system ever made. You can have reasonable conversations with other players about what would happen if two different magical effects came in contact with each other and have in-world answers rather than having to carefully parse rules text like you were playing a card game. Shadowrun is almost thirty years old and I can still count on one hand all the things written into Shadowrun magic before 5th edition that didn't fit with the remaining whole.

Now there have been five editions. There have been lots of things that were game mechanically problematic. Some editions had the "Force Independent Spell" problem where the cost to learn and cast certain spells was based on a quality that really didn't matter much for their in-game effect. One edition had "Bloodzilla" where a certain kind of spirit could increase its own cap for increasing its own power and just expand until it was able to devastate the entire planet. But while the results of those failures are kinda dramatic sometimes, those are also corner cases that are generally easy to houserule away.

The underlying costs to have access to magic of various kinds have gone up and down massively over the editions. Aspected Magicians were da bomb diggity in 3rd edition and completely worthless in 4th edition. Physical Mages were completely worthless in 3rd edition and totes OP in 5th edition. And so on and so on. It's very difficult to make balance statements about Shadowrun in general because various authors have made conscious attempts to rebalance portions of the game perceived as over or under powered several times over a period of decades.

One underlying issue that I would say is fairly consistent is that because the game runs on a "chosen one" model of "personal and internal" magic, that there is very little reason to go steal magical stuff from other people. And that in turn means a lot of chunks of the setting don't make sense as places for the player characters to want to go. And that hurts the storytelling. The game is a cooperative storytelling game with an ensemble cast of mercenaries, so setting areas like the anachronistic Elf Kingdoms are not actually places the players want to go. They can't steal or meaningfully benefit from the ancient Elf Magic, so motivating the players to get involved in stories in those areas is really hard. That's a fundamental issue with the game's magic physics and is persistent edition to edition.

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Post by Stahlseele »

Yeah, the magic system IN ITSELF used completely alone for an entire game would probably be pretty close to the most best game ever . .

Just how it interacts with the rest of shadowrun is the problem.
And if one whole third or more of your game clashes with the rest, then that deserves critique.

People complain about magicrun for a reason you know?
Because magic can do it all and in most cases even better than the alternatives.
And it can be combined with and stacked on top of all of the other stuff.
Including with magic itself.

And magic is not limited. Not by anything but karma cost.
And for some reason, KARMA is doled out like it is yesterdays bread rolls while money rewards and ways to actually aquire new gear for mundanes is like a chicken tooth . .

Furthermore:
NO GM minds stuff like having cyberwarescanners and random SIN-Checks every other corner of the street . . and of course all goons have guns and armor . .
But for some reason . . not a single GM i can ever remember having played with actually used background count as it is written in the rules.
If they did, all of seattle would be under a blanket BGC2 with spikes up to 6 all of the time. Also, magical security is usually a bad joke compared to the mundane security . .

And you do not even need to look all that far to go from smoke and mirrors to actually threatening devastation on a continental level.
My favourite thing to bring up that has not been changed in as long as i care to remember:
Great form eath spirit/elemental. Quake Power. Magic/Force kilometers radius of damage. So yes, a force 6 great form earth spirit/elemental(not actually that hard to aquire if i remember the bits of magic right and do not get the last 4 editions mixed up with each other again . . .) can go into the centre of Seattle. Say:"no more city" and it will be no more city in a 12km diameter circle around ground zero of where the spirit is materialized.
Put it in between of the renraku arcology and the aztech main compound and set it off. MILLIONS DEAD.
Last edited by Stahlseele on Sun Feb 04, 2018 11:22 am, edited 2 times in total.
Welcome, to IronHell.
Shrapnel wrote:
TFwiki wrote:Soon is the name of the region in the time-domain (familiar to all marketing departments, and to the moderators and staff of Fun Publications) which sees release of all BotCon news, club exclusives, and other fan desirables. Soon is when then will become now.

Peculiar properties of spacetime ensure that the perception of the magnitude of Soon is fluid and dependent, not on an individual's time-reference, but on spatial and cultural location. A marketer generally perceives Soon as a finite, known, yet unspeakable time-interval; to a fan, the interval appears greater, and may in fact approach the infinite, becoming Never. Once the interval has passed, however, a certain time-lensing effect seems to occur, and the time-interval becomes vanishingly small. We therefore see the strange result that the same fragment of spacetime may be observed, in quick succession, as Soon, Never, and All Too Quickly.
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Post by Grek »

How has nobody gotten around to talking about the problems with essence?

But basically, in Shadowrun you have six arbitrary units of points, which are spent to have cybernetic stuff attached to you. If you run out of these points, your character becomes unplayable, and every point you spent counts against your ability to do Magic. The idea is to enforce a soft class system where some characters do magic and other characters do tech. And as an in setting explanation, the named these arbitrary points of potential cyborgitude "essence" and described them as being fractions of your soul or life force or whatever.

The problem arises because once they settled on the names and the concepts for this system, they forgot about the original game mechanical point of it when it came time to assign essence prices. So now cyberware costs essence based on how 'spiritually unhealthy' it sounds like it would be to the writers rather than based on how much bang a player is getting for those essence bucks. Cyberlimbs get huge prices for no reason while cyberware that had no visible outer effects got to be very, very cheap. And things that were strictly cosmetic, like boob jobs and the implanted mirror shades from Neuromancer cost essence for no reason at all.
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Post by Stahlseele »

Yes, Essence . . which they tried to use as a limiting factor on magic . . and then promptly overruled with initiation . . and left the limiting factor for the mundanes of course . .
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Shrapnel wrote:
TFwiki wrote:Soon is the name of the region in the time-domain (familiar to all marketing departments, and to the moderators and staff of Fun Publications) which sees release of all BotCon news, club exclusives, and other fan desirables. Soon is when then will become now.

Peculiar properties of spacetime ensure that the perception of the magnitude of Soon is fluid and dependent, not on an individual's time-reference, but on spatial and cultural location. A marketer generally perceives Soon as a finite, known, yet unspeakable time-interval; to a fan, the interval appears greater, and may in fact approach the infinite, becoming Never. Once the interval has passed, however, a certain time-lensing effect seems to occur, and the time-interval becomes vanishingly small. We therefore see the strange result that the same fragment of spacetime may be observed, in quick succession, as Soon, Never, and All Too Quickly.
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Post by Username17 »

Earthquake is a big effect, but only on the personal scale. A 6 km radius earthquake is 113 square kilometers, but the Seattle Metroplex is 10,000 square kilometers. It won't level the city, it will cause a lot of structural damage in 1.1% of the city. It's not devastation on the scale of a nuclear bomb, it's just bigger than what you get out of any conventional man-portable weapon.

The Essence problem is complex, just like the Humanity problem in Cyberpunk 2020. The issue is that the restriction on borgification is supposed to serve a game mechanical role (that of limiting the amount of cheap augmentations you can get in both systems, and in Shadowrun to give a playspace for unaugmented mages and unmagical cyborgs), but also as an in-world roleplaying thing. So once you have laid out in-world logic for why Essence or Humanity costs are one way or another for specific implants, you've left the door open for people to make in character arguments for what the costs should be for augmentations that have different effects in game. And vice versa.

Both games strongly lead to the logical decision to have exo-enhancements, which isn't particularly in-genre for either game. So that's a failure point. But there's a pretty big pile of cyberware you can get off the catalog lists provided in-game and mostly you can get the kinds of bonuses you want at costs that aren't crippling or game breaking. There's a lot of useless gear in the lists, but I suspect that will always be the case in every game.

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Post by kzt »

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 mechanically. 4th better than 3rd, but 3rd works acceptably. I'm going to take on faith the reviews I've seen on 5th, which says it is much worse than 4th.

The computer rules just don't work in any edition. They are attempting to implement the computers of a setting that was written by a technophobe (Neuromancer and the other novels were written in the 80s by a guy on a mechanical typewriter - I wrote term papers on mac then) and have never worked - I'm not sure they can work. Frank's rewrite 'The Ends of the Matrix' comes the closest to seeming to work but I've never actually gotten a game going with them other then the chat game I did with Frank for a few months.

So otherwise we just handwaved the computer stuff. Mostly used NPCs who provided what was needed to keep the game running.
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Post by Ancient History »

Shadowrun had a basically awesome schizo pitch: cyberpunk + epic fantasy. Neuromancer meets Lord of the Rings. After you get your panties unbunched, it's a tremendously fun idea, and they ran well with it. YOU the player are a professional criminal in a cyberpunk dystopia full of elves and dragons and shit. It's the purest call to adventure since D&D said "You're an adventurer, go on adventures." And it had a long-runner of a setting that lots of people got deeply invested in.

Not all of the moving parts work. That's true of any game. Details of the setting are bizarre and don't make sense. That's true of any long-running collaborative universe.

But it broke my heart.
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Post by Archmage Joda »

Stahlseele wrote:@Archmage_Joda
What, exactly, did you not understand?

ScottS provided a link to the latter, are you still fuzzy on the former lad?
I was referring to the latter bit about the criminal religious nutjobs thing.
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Post by Trill »

IIRC Coleman, Hardy and another one in the staff are Mormons. And Mormons have a rule that forces them to prefer dealing with Mormons against non-Mormons. And which also prevents them from speaking against a fellow follower. Which is why they supported Coleman even though he embezzled about a mil.
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Post by Stahlseele »

It's really as simple as that . .
In any kind of fiction, that would have been so unbelieveably bad writing nobody would have bought it . . but reality has no such needs i am afraid.

Also, i think it was Frank who once summed this whole topic of discussion up with one sentence:
Nobody likes playing Shadowrun, but everybody likes the idea of playing Shadowrun.
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Shrapnel wrote:
TFwiki wrote:Soon is the name of the region in the time-domain (familiar to all marketing departments, and to the moderators and staff of Fun Publications) which sees release of all BotCon news, club exclusives, and other fan desirables. Soon is when then will become now.

Peculiar properties of spacetime ensure that the perception of the magnitude of Soon is fluid and dependent, not on an individual's time-reference, but on spatial and cultural location. A marketer generally perceives Soon as a finite, known, yet unspeakable time-interval; to a fan, the interval appears greater, and may in fact approach the infinite, becoming Never. Once the interval has passed, however, a certain time-lensing effect seems to occur, and the time-interval becomes vanishingly small. We therefore see the strange result that the same fragment of spacetime may be observed, in quick succession, as Soon, Never, and All Too Quickly.
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Post by Koumei »

I thought people did like playing (one edition of) Shadowrun. I'm going to hazard a guess that it was 4th, because that's the one that came before Coleman's Personal House Building Edition, Thank You the Curtains are Lovely! And it can't be literally every game where the third edition is the best, although that would be a nice easy rule to remember.

Now, I've learned you literally cannot play it effectively on PbP because you're supposed to do planning and such, which means it could be over a year of real time between "We have a job" and "So now we arrive at the destination and begin doing things". Which knocks out my main form of gaming. And even IRC can be iffy, it really seems like the thing where you want to lock all the players in a room together for the duration, without distractions.

So there are some hurdles there, now that we're all old and have busy lifestyles and move away from gaming groups and all that. But I'm pretty sure a lot of people played Shadowrun a lot and liked doing it and even looked forward to doing it.

Because if you didn't like it and just liked the "Cybernetics AND mages!" aspect and thinking about maybe playing the game one day, you'd just go full teenager and add Dinoriders and Lava Warlock Mutant Ninja Wolverines Piloting Mecha... From the Moon.
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Post by OgreBattle »

Mages only having natural boobs is a neat setting detail.

But can breast size/firmness be enhanced with magic permanently?
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Post by PrometheanVigil »

Thanks for the responses everyone -- I've still had to parse through it all a little (seems unavoidable due to a completely broken system...) but otherwise pretty insightful.

I should also mention I've got 5th MI Ed version of the game in hardcover. Got it. Read it cover to cover. Planning to host it in the near future. Full disclosure on that front.

This is not my first system so I noticed... just odd things, really. Wondered if it was just me -- guess not.
Nath wrote:- Long, tedious, dreadfully burdening character generation.

- Separate realms of play.

- Non-reducible rules.

- An annoying fandom (I oughta know, I belong to it).
I never pay attention to sample characters. They're usually shit regardless of the system. It's even worse when companies try to sell them.

The character creation section was not clear on little things like the numbers in parentheses being used to buy Rez and stuff. You have to intuit that. That's a fucking killer for most people -- how did that not get flagged?

Also, Trolls and Orcs get fucked over. Hard. Trolls the worst (that low LOG and CHA... fuck). And Elves are once again held up as the best thing since Tolkein shat out Mordor in a three-volume series. They get the stats that actually allow them to be effective at the shit you really want to do... but don't want to be a fucking elf to do it and shouldn't have to be to do it.

Mages can be Initiated. I read that a few times earlier in the book and it was built up to be this "the next level" shit. Cool to know. My question is: why don't Technomancers get an equiv? Something like "Restructured" or "Reformatted" or whatever. Even from chargen, I could tell they were getting ready to be shafted later on in the book power/features-wise.

NWOD's fandom is worse, dude. Far. Worse. From a bit of reading on Catalyst's own forums, they seem pretty well composed in comparison.
FrankTrollman wrote:There are five editions of Shadowrun, with some pretty radical changes in game mechanics between them.

But one thing that is always and forever the same is that the Matrix is fucking unplayable.

No person in the history of the world has ever conducted a single successful by-the-book hacking mission in those editions. It has never happened and it will never happen, because that shit is literally unplayable.

The rabbit hole is really fucking stupid and really fucking deep.

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DMG looked fucked when I starting reading the combat section and health and just anything fighting related. The values seemed really high compared to the stats starting characters are going to have. Not even that it was lethal, just seemed kinda stoopid to me. My own system S.I.T.R.E.P is lethal but that's becuase it's been designed from the start to actually do a shootout the way a shootout plays out in real-life -- i.e. lots of bullets flying and back and forth but it's that one that gets ya that hits you hard, concetrated attrition essentially. Arms Race style stats just break down and that's what SR seems to be doing.

If it's anywhere near as bad as WH40KRP's system or the GMC update, I can deal, don't worry, hah hah. I highly suspect you're gonna drop a nuke-level example just to put me in my place though.

What I can't understand is why they've just shit the bed when it comes to Technomancers and then it seems like (keyword: seems. Have only read 5th Ed!) they've "retro'd" the Decker in some way to make them still "the way" to be a computer guy in the game.

From my understanding of the spirit of the Technomancer concept, they are the worst thing a modern building or street just by itself could face. They can not only hack but quickly, effectively and intuitively blow lights by looking at them, disable cameras, open secure doors, cause cars to speed off etc... They're supposed to be the tech Shaman (another archetype not well explained in this book but one I picked up on) but they're... not. It sucks.
Now, I read some shit about Catalyst on Dumpshock (didn't even know what the site was, just caught up in reading the drama, lotta drama in RPGs back then) like a couple years back but... this. Holy. Shit.
FrankTrollman wrote:On Shadowrun Magic: it has the most internally consistent set of magical physics of any game system ever made.

Now there have been five editions. There have been lots of things that were game mechanically problematic.

The underlying costs to have access to magic of various kinds have gone up and down massively over the editions.

One underlying issue that I would say is fairly consistent is that because the game runs on a "chosen one" model of "personal and internal" magic, that there is very little reason to go steal magical stuff from other people.

-Username17
Seems like anything that isn't straight spellcasting isn't really encouraged by the system. Even summoning is written and built in a way as to quasi-discouraged specialization in it. Enchanting seems pretty limited and the whole business with Loci seems stupid. Mage The Awakening kept it simple with the former and Werewolf The Forsaken makes Loci a surprisingly fun King Of The Hill mini-game at Tier 2 and above.

Oh shit, only Elves can really use the magic items? Oh no, that HAS to go. Like right now. How the fuck did that not get flagged during design?

Also, I kinda get the whole Aspected Magician thing but it seems... it seems like you'd be facing way more Aspected than actual Magicians in the game. 'Cept its written like you'd be facing the opposite. Even though as in real-life, inborn talent is rare and like in the Ravenor novels, not everyone gets to be a Delta Psyker like titular character. Wagemage was mentioned in the flavor section at the start of the book sooo... how can they not be Aspected?

I liked Mage The Awakening's system for magic, played and run pretty legit across the board. Why do you think Shadowrun's is potentially better?
Grek wrote:How has nobody gotten around to talking about the problems with essence?

But basically, in Shadowrun you have six arbitrary units of points, which are spent to have cybernetic stuff attached to you.

The problem arises because once they settled on the names and the concepts for this system, they forgot about the original game mechanical point of it when it came time to assign essence prices.
If you had to sacrifice Morality to get Endowments in Hunter The Vigil, no-one in their right mind would have used them. So why are they doing it here? I mean, I get it but I don't get it.

Also, any attempt to modify your body like that, in such an invasive manner (which is what bio-mechanical augmentation is at the end of the day) should cost, regardless of utility. Same amount regardless but you do a benefits v drawbacks cost-up like the R&D system from HTV. Makes much more sense.
Stahlseele wrote:Yes, Essence . . which they tried to use as a limiting factor on magic . . and then promptly overruled with initiation . . and left the limiting factor for the mundanes of course . .
See, why the fuck did they do that? Like above, why isn't there an equiv for TMs because it very much seems like they are two sides of the same credstick wafer.
Ancient History wrote:But it broke my heart.
Awwwwwhh...
Trill wrote:IIRC Coleman, Hardy and another one in the staff are Mormons. And Mormons have a rule that forces them to prefer dealing with Mormons against non-Mormons. And which also prevents them from speaking against a fellow follower. Which is why they supported Coleman even though he embezzled about a mil.
What in the actual fuck...

That's on that shit where Asian only deal with other Asians. Keep the money within the people 'n' all that shit. I respect it but fuck me if that didn't backfire badly on them at Catalyst.
Koumei wrote:I'm going to hazard a guess that it was 4th, because that's the one that came before Coleman's Personal House Building Edition, Thank You the Curtains are Lovely!

Now, I've learned you literally cannot play it effectively on PbP because you're supposed to do planning and such

So there are some hurdles there, now that we're all old and have busy lifestyles and move away from gaming groups and all that. But I'm pretty sure a lot of people played Shadowrun a lot and liked doing it and even looked forward to doing it.

you'd just go full teenager and add Dinoriders and Lava Warlock Mutant Ninja Wolverines Piloting Mecha... From the Moon.
I see what you did there. You must be out of your mind because no man could EVER pick a good set of curtains, please darling...

I've done PBC before briefly when I was helping out with the WODCodex, doing wiki shit here and there. Discord had been recently introduced by the guy who scratchpadded the site and he liked the idea of having games on there so I said what the hell and GM'd for it. Got a pretty successful group going but fairly shortly I got a real-life game going on top of running my club and since I prefer real-life nerds I dropped it like that. Main point: just like Skype games, it attracts a certain crowd that, fortunately, is not my primary source of gaming peeps. Some of these dudes could transfer over, shame they're an ocean and states apart.

I'm mid-20's and I already feel old, hah hah!

I'm pretty fortunate because I just seem to attract the kind of nerds that want to played pretty grounded games. We have a laugh but we keep it on point the whole way. I imagine my Shadowrun games will continue this legacy. One of my players once had his PC, dressed in like a vest and cargo shorts and sneakers, just straight walk into a vape shop out of an SUV wearing a kevlar vest and wielding an M4 and scare the shit out of the guy behind the counter into letting him into the meth den basement. It was amazing: literally amazing. This happens a lot.
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Stahlseele
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Post by Stahlseele »

I don't know what you are on about . .
TM's(ex Otaku) get to do something like initiation.
I do not remember what it is called (edit, turns out as soon as i hit submit my brain gives me the info i needed while writing . . it is called submersion i think), but it uses almost the same mechanics as the magic initiation does. That was the main intent behind SR4.
Take what was (to most people) bad about SR3 (RULES FOR EVERYTHING AND FOR EVERYTHING A RULE! AND EVERYTHING IS DIFFERENT!) and make that mostly go away by trying to make as many things as possible use the same mechanics, only with different labels on them.

Yes, Elves are and always have been the Homo-Superior in Shadowrun . .
Orks were point for point the Homo-Superior of SR4 and in SR3 Trolls were the single best combat monstrosity you could make . . after a Mage of course . . Which is where GEEK THE MAGE FIRST comes from.

Also . . Summoning spirits is the single best thing to do as a mage.
That shit is such a huge force multiplier, it ain't even funny.
Same for actually making good use of drones.
Last edited by Stahlseele on Mon Feb 05, 2018 1:29 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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PrometheanVigil
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Post by PrometheanVigil »

Stahlseele wrote:X
Submersion is Awakening. TM's have no (at least, from my reading) comparative procedure to Initiation which is akin to a second coming. If Initiated is shorthand for "supa Mage", there should ideally be an equiv for TMs.

I didn't know they called TMs Otaku. What a stupid name and ref.

How does one make good use of drones?
S.I.T.R.E.P from Black Lion Games -- streamlined roleplaying without all the fluff!
Buy @ DriveThruRPG for only £7.99!
(That's less than a London takeaway -- now isn't that just a cracking deal?)
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