The future of Shadowrun 5e

[Lord Ruthers]

Originally Posted by Imveros

Group 1) People who have heard of Shadowrun.

What would it take to get you to take the leap and give Shadowrun 5e a shot?

Interesting question you got yourself there chummer! I found it in the Discord. When did Chatzy turn into Discord anyway?!

I've roleplayed before but I would definitely need a solo game. I've played some of the Shadowrun games on PC that originated on Kickstarter but that's where my knowledge ends, so I'd want quite a heavy chunk of character creation especially if you intend to move the graduated characters into games at the end of it.

Cheers

[Mister H]

Shadowrun as a setting is one that has always interested me. I've always had a weakness for Cyberpunk games, and certainly in video games have always been drawn to cyberpunk based games. Deus Ex, all three Shadowrun narrative games, Dex, you name it I've played it and loved it.

I would love nothing more than to play a PbP based game in the Shadowrun setting, and would likely give my right arm for such a thing.....but..... the thought of tackling a system as crunch heavy as Shadowrun is reputed to be and trying to learn it to the extent that I am able to put together a fully functioning and effective character is incredibly daunting and near on impossible for me whilst trying to balance the little free time I have IRL. Having created my own fair share of incredibly useless characters in the Shadowrun CRPG's alone I can attest to the fact of how little I know, and how easy it is to screw up, and that's just a CRPG.

To be honest even in the comparatively rules-lite D&D 5E I would struggle to create a fully min-max'd combat effective ready character the way others can. I would be terrible in arena or combat based games, I'm in this predominantly for the story and character development as part of the narrative.

In short, I'd love nothing more to be in a Shadowrun game, but I would just be completely incapable of tackling the system. I do wish there was a setting out there that could satisfy my cyberpunk cravings but without the rules-heavy mechanics.

[Phettberg]

Originally Posted by Mister H

In short, I'd love nothing more to be in a Shadowrun game, but I would just be completely incapable of tackling the system. I do wish there was a setting out there that could satisfy my cyberpunk cravings but without the rules-heavy mechanics.

It was tackled in this thread before: Some, if not the majority, of Gms would be happy to help you mechanically have a character come to life or maybe even do the whole sheet for you. You still have to come up with an interesting character, but you don't get around that even if you know the system inside and out. How to play you can learn as you go along, as in just have your character do what you think is appropriate, and the Gm can tell you how many dice to roll and where he got that number from.

As for other games like Shadowrun - A big contender I can think of is Cyberpunk 2020, but that's also somewhat crunchy. You do pick a role instead of building everything from scratch. Beyond that it is still skill based and not level based progression though, and you are missing out on the magic.

If you wanted to play in the Shadowrun setting but have lighter rules you have multiple options that come to mind: Shadowrun Anarchy, though I have no idea how that plays, Interface Zero 2.0, a savage world supplement (that has no magic either, but you can pull those bits from other savage world supplements or make it up yourself), The Sprawl (A powered by the apocalypse hack).

All three I think are easier to get into. Downside, nobody is running any of them on this site.

In any case - who knows when the next Shadowrun game will be recruiting. Even if you have very little time available, maybe it would be worth very slowly chipping away at what makes the game tick.

[BiBo]

Originally Posted by Mister H

To be honest even in the comparatively rules-lite D&D 5E I would struggle to create a fully min-max'd combat effective ready character the way others can. I would be terrible in arena or combat based games, I'm in this predominantly for the story and character development as part of the narrative.

D&D is a tactical war game with an RPG mask. You go out and kill the bad guys because they are on team evil with little consideration over such things as wiping out an entire town of orcs. They are evil orcs after all and evil orcs need to be made dead for reasons. If you take damage, you can go all the way down to 1 hp and still fight just as well as if you had 100. Healing is instant, resurrection is a thing and basically everything about the system revolves around getting you to your next fight as quickly as possible. Just about every ability you gain simply revolves around turning you into a better combat monster. Every experience point you gain and every treasure you find comes from killing a bigger and badder monster so that you can kill even bigger and badder monsters.

One thing about Shadowrun that a lot of people who come in from a D&D background have a hard time figuring out is that Shadowrun is not a combat based game. You don't gain anything from fighting. Killing someone gives you no exp or treasure (usually) and in fact brings a host of legal issues if you get caught. On top of that, healing is difficult, death comes easily no matter how powerful you are, and even if you don't die in a fight, a wound makes it more difficult to do anything else. You only get Karma and money for accomplishing the mission for the most part.

Now if you talk to a lot of people online, they will say your character is useless unless it's min-maxed to crazy levels (and they will say the same for just about any other system as well). That is completely untrue. The stats of most NPCs in the books really aren't equipped to handle the level of min maxing a lot of players do and each edition of Shadowrun they seem to introduce new ways to try and tone down the min-maxing which players always find ways to work around. All this does is put the players and GM in an arms race where players want to make characters that will dominate in everything and GMs want to have NPCs that serve as a challenge for these overpowered characters. You do have to invest somewhat in a skill to be able to use it, but you can easily get by with sub optimal when the GM isn't cranking out heavy threats to keep up with min maxed characters.

Combat is only a small portion of Shadowrun and if you make a character who can only fight, you'll be great when fights happen, but you'll be doing nothing for a large portion of the game. Most of it is about investigation/infiltration and trying not to get in trouble as best you can. In play by post in particular, things always go a lot quicker if you avoid fights if you can. Shadowrun combat takes particularly long. Given that there is literally no benefit to fighting most of the time, you are far better off avoiding every fight you can than blasting your way through everything.

[The Rat Queen]

Originally Posted by BiBo

D&D is a tactical war game with an RPG mask. You go out and kill the bad guys because they are on team evil with little consideration over such things as wiping out an entire town of orcs. They are evil orcs after all and evil orcs need to be made dead for reasons.

I disagree. D&D is simply a mechanics tool. The world that exists is what you make of it. Yes, as a race the goblins are "evil", but D&D makes it quite clear that the stats are a generality, the "typical" member of the society in the generic world D&D assumes. D&D also openly invites new worlds, with new rules, races, etc. where you can create whatever justifications and philosophies you like.

Originally Posted by BiBo

If you take damage, you can go all the way down to 1 hp and still fight just as well as if you had 100. Healing is instant, resurrection is a thing and basically everything about the system revolves around getting you to your next fight as quickly as possible.

Not accurate. Yes, mechanically having 1 HP is "the same" as having 100. But, the driving force behind D&D, which they fully state, is the Game Master. And GMs will reinforce the hurt. Not to mention that at 100 HP, you know you can take plenty of damage, and plan your attacks accordingly. At 1 HP, the mechanics shift. ANY damage will drop you, and you act accordingly. This, of course, is ignoring roleplaying completely, and I have yet to encounter any player who will treat being at 1 HP the same as being at 100 HP. D&D is storytelling, but with game mechanics, and any GM or player worth their salt will enforce it.

Originally Posted by BiBo

Healing is instant, resurrection is a thing and basically everything about the system revolves around getting you to your next fight as quickly as possible. Just about every ability you gain simply revolves around turning you into a better combat monster. Every experience point you gain and every treasure you find comes from killing a bigger and badder monster so that you can kill even bigger and badder monsters.

Also inaccurate. I'm sorry, it just seems like you either haven't played D&D much, had bad experiences with it, or just have a grudge.

Originally Posted by BiBo

Combat is only a small portion of Shadowrun

As someone who has played about as much Shadowrun, at this point, as D&D, I would say there is an equal amount of fighting in both. Combat is certainly not a "small" portion of Shadowrun, unless you specifically design an adventure that is combat light. You could design the same scenario in D&D, with equal success.

Shadowrun isn't more roleplay-based than D&D, and D&D isn't more stat-based than Shadowrun, in my admittedly-limited experienced. Maybe I've been blessed with great GMs in both cases (yay me! ). But to me, they're just different tools used to accomplish the same goal.

[AwesomeEli]

Originally Posted by Phettberg

If you wanted to play in the Shadowrun setting but have lighter rules you have multiple options that come to mind: Shadowrun Anarchy, though I have no idea how that plays, Interface Zero 2.0, a savage world supplement (that has no magic either, but you can pull those bits from other savage world supplements or make it up yourself), The Sprawl (A powered by the apocalypse hack).

Another thing worth checking out is the host of direct Shadowrun hacks for other systems, such as Karma in the Dark (based on Blades in the Dark). I do suggest investigating your options though - I've heard that SR Anarchy has many of the same issues of SR5 while ignoring some of the good parts, for instance, but whether or not any one person finds that true is up in the air. Your mileage may vary.

[Phettberg]

Originally Posted by The Rat Queen

As someone who has played about as much Shadowrun, at this point, as D&D, I would say there is an equal amount of fighting in both. Combat is certainly not a "small" portion of Shadowrun, unless you specifically design an adventure that is combat light. You could design the same scenario in D&D, with equal success.

Not trying to get into the comparison of systems here, just trying to weigh in on the Shadowrun side of things: I can see where the idea is coming from, because in terms of attitude towards gameplay I have met a fair amount of players who felt like they already failed a little bit after their perfect plan fell apart and they had to shoot their way out of a situation - regardless of whether they still completed their objective in the end.

But that's just what you make of the system, and how you want to play. I would not say the Game inherently makes you pick one over the other, considering there are intricate combat rules on all layers of play - meat, magic, matrix. Up to the Gm and Player what kind of stories you go through and which runs you take, so you can just talk about that beforehand if you have particular wishes in what to do and how to do it (thought the threat of violence is very real in the setting). There might be some missions where going in guns blazing is actually the best option, but those are maybe not the most common type of run. And if a group has the choice, again in my experience, I feel like most will try to do thing silently. So that I guess leads to a conception that shadowrun is not about the combat.

[BiBo]

Originally Posted by The Rat Queen

Also inaccurate. I'm sorry, it just seems like you either haven't played D&D much, had bad experiences with it, or just have a grudge.

Not at all. I've played almost every edition of AD&D quite extensively. Primarily 2nd and 3rd editions, but with a fair amount of 4th, 5th and even a little D&D. I've nothing against the system per se (well, except 4e, which went far too deep into tactical combat even by D&D standards). I just acknowledge that it is primarily focused around fighting. That's where you get the majority of your experience points and treasure. When you level up, what do you get? Improved fighting stats (primarily in the form of hp and to hit bonuses) and abilities that help you fight better. There are a handful of fluff things here and there, sure, but the meat and potatoes of AD&D has always been combat. It was an evolution from a tactical combat game called Chainmail which itself was based on other war games of the time. The company that initially published it was even called TSR, which stands for Tactical Studies Rules. It was always meant to be combat first, and RP as either filler between battles or a way to make those battles more interesting.

Now that's not to say that it HAS to be that way at any given table. Every table plays every system differently, and you'll never get the same feel with different GMs at the helm, or even different players. But that's what the system is designed around. If you avoid a fight, you are missing out on treasure and experience points. You're heroes and you're supposed to be vanquishing evil.


Conversely, Shadowrun awards karma and money for completing whatever task you've been given to do. If you kill everyone in your path or avoid conflict altogether, your reward for the mission is usually the same. Sometimes you may even get a higher karma/money reward for avoiding fights than you would have for having them as your client tends to be happier when you complete their job without making a lot of noise (unless that was the purpose of the job they hired you for, of course). Not to say you can't have a whole lot of fighting, but life goes a lot smoother for you when you don't.

Again, it's not that I like or dislike either system more than the other. I have many fond memories with various editions of both systems as well as many other systems. They are just different games with different feels. They aren't really at all comparable to one another and the only reason I am doing so is because AD&D is by far the most popular of tabletop RPGs out there and therefore is likely the first and only game a lot of people have experience with. It is also the format that a huge chunk of video game RPGs are based on, so people going into Shadowrun have certain expectations that the system doesn't support well.

For example, people expect that a healer can touch someone in combat and fix their fallen comrades instantly, but instead find that they are sitting there for an entire combat turn for each point they want to heal, which might as well be an eternity in combat time. Oh, and you only get one chance at it. If you flub it, they are just gonna have to heal naturally, which can mean days of rest. In older editions of Shadowrun, if you were injured badly, you could spend a month in recovery, even with magical healing to help you, and still have permanent injuries besides that. That resulted in lost stats (some of which you could never ever recover), lost body parts, etc. More recent editions have become a bit kinder as far as that is concerned, but it's still a fairly punishing system for damage. So, it behooves you to avoid getting hurt in the first place, which is often best done by avoiding combat entirely.

[RainyDayNinja]

I've been looking into the various Shadowrun "Living Communities" on Reddit, and one of them is trying out a PbP format for the first time. It got me thinking: What would people think of forming some kind of Living Community like that on here for PbP? Not necessarily coming up with a metaplot or anything like that, but standardizing houserules to the point that characters can move from one game to another with different GMs easily.

[Imveros]

It would be interesting to have some kind of Westmarches type deal for Shadowrun. Complete with living city and interconnected plots and runs.

It just feels like we need to grow the community a little more first. So that we can make sure we have a few sets of teams and associated GMs to run them.

It would also be beneficial to make the runs shorter to maximize runner team mingling.

As for standardized rules, I'd suggest we just use the Shadowrun missions rules. That's their convention games and as a rule, does a good job cutting most of the easily abused stuff as well as the stuff that's tough to RP in a short term game.

Now if I could just wrangle my schedule enough to get that SR NPSG off of the ground ~_~

[AwesomeEli]

I’m not sure if any one ruleset could get enough GMs to agree on it to really push for a standardized thing, be it Missions or otherwise. That would only get more divisive as more is attempted to be standardized, and you’d have to do a lot if you wanted a full living world type thing to work well.

[Phettberg]

I guess if you incorporated the mission rules into a yet to be drawn up guide to shadowrun rules it could work well enough. If you have it as a separate thing to be read after you've learned the RAW then you're just adding "homework". But yeah, if a person stepped up to write a guide they have the power to "curate" some of the information a little to keep rules abuse low for the people having been introduced to the game through the guide.

And about the westmarches style game - that's sounds like not a bad idea in general. I guess it would only ever be for a few gms and players and not a catch all deal though. You need to agree on a city first, and then some people will not be feeling it, preferring to do their own game. Then you need Gms to also be alright with the fact that there needs to be some coordination between gms if there is to be a sort of metaplot and if you want the consequences to the actions of individual groups to carry over. Might not be everybodies cup of tea. In fact it would not be for me.

[RainyDayNinja]

Yeah, I'm not talking about doing a metaplot, or extensive house rules. I was thinking more along the lines of "What is the minimum coordination we need to get GMs to let PCs from other games to join theirs?" It might lower the barrier of entry for GMs, since they can commit to just a single run, rather than a whole campaign, without the players having to abandon their characters when it's over.

[Yamaneko]

In pbp I find laying out my expectations as a GM helps immensely. Also asking players to lay out their expectations when they request to join is something that should be done. In essence, it is the beginning of a Session Zero, that gets all parties involved thinking about it and finding ways to come to an accommodation or compromise toward any differences. As often it is frustration building from unrealized expectations in any game that can cripple it. But without communication from the start this tends to happen.

Another issue is SR needs far more player participation in moving things forward and that can be difficult if you come from a background in gaming that is more directed or set out. Old School D&D would be one example.

I am slowly planning a game for this site for SR though I will likely get involved first as a player for a bit before I jump all the way in.

[Yamaneko]

I'd also add that I almost always use pre-gens when introducing new players to any game system. That way they get a feel for the game, its universe, how the mechanics flow, and what things may be important that they never would have considered building a character blind.

Some keep the pre-gen but I offer at the end of a certain point, in live games usually three scenarios in SR or two levels earned in a level based game to be able to make a new character at base generation then apply the earned karma and money or additional levels so they can build something that interests them while having a deeper understanding of how it all fits.

We then work out how the former character exits and the new one enters if it is a campaign.