The problem with hacking is this:

In SR2, a Decker was a highly-specialized professional with highly-specialized (and expensive) gear who would go to a secure site, hook up (physically!) with the computer system, and do amazing things, e.g. disable/re-route security cameras, steal data etc). However, the decking part of the game was separate from the normal part of the game, and split the party. And a decker can't bw with the party in battle and hack in the same time, at least not easily.

In SR4, a Hacker was less specialized and had cheaper gear, and could hack anything anywhere over wi-fi. He can get integrated into regular play and combat, though, and hacking no longer splits the party.

What you need is hacking which is the work of a highly-specialized professional with highly-specialized gear BUT who can participate in regular play activities and combat.

Quote from: Mark Plemmons;768719You make me think of the newer Battlestar Galactica and the last few Star Trek: Enterprise novels that focused on the Romulan War (no wait, I'm going somewhere with this).

To 'explain' why the prequel series has better special effects than the original ST series, the novels gave the Romulans the ability to electronically hijack starships. This could be avoided by sort of going backward with tech - so it's why the experimental NX has digital screens and touchpads, and the later NCC has flip switches and buttons.

Of course even TOS Trek had fliptop communicators and other devices that we can at least recognize now in our technology.  On the other hand, the only reason they had transporters was because the series couldn't afford to prep the models and sets for the shuttlecraft every week...

JG

Quote from: James Gillen;768840Of course even TOS Trek had fliptop communicators and other devices that we can at least recognize now in our technology.

Yes, although that's the tail wagging the dog. The people who designed those phones were geeks who wanted a working TOS communicator...

Quote from: Mark Plemmons;769089Yes, although that's the tail wagging the dog. The people who designed those phones were geeks who wanted a working TOS communicator...

As opposed to the cyberpunk genre where virtual reality is in some sense LESS user-friendly than what we have now.

JG

Thank you to everyone for your ideas!

Lots to think about! Keep it coming.

Quote from: golan2072;768050Just watch out for the flavour.

This is unbelievably important for me. As I want to achieve their flavor without their IP, the goal is try to create my own tasty gumbo from the original ingredients (Cyberpunk + Fantasy), but my own recipe.

Quote from: golan2072;768050Smartphones are OK, but you should be very careful with ubiquitous wi-fi and ubiquitous hackability. Maybe just say that people who have important information keep it off the grid in offline servers for safety, so you need an actual hardware link to access it.

That's my big focus for hackers - you have to Break & Enter to get the data. Nobody important puts anything valuable on the wi-fi. It's an endless cybersea of junk (which makes it great to hide some things actually).

While there are corporate hackers who sit in server farms safe from the action, that's not the role of the Hacker on a mission. The hacker's there to use his talent behind the walls where nobody is ever supposed to be and quickly hack into secured off-line systems.

I'm thinking D&D Thief - he's there to pick the unpickable locks.

Quote from: golan2072;768050Japanese high-tech and Zaibatsu corporate culture are major cyberpunk tropes.

Absolutely and this worries me.

Even if I use BRIC instead of Japan, I don't know how to sell "next gen high tech" coming from Brazil? Russia? India? China?  To most people Brazil has soccer and boobies, Russia has vodka and corruption, India has call centers and dance numbers, and China has eggrolls and giant factories making everything in Walmart. I know that sounds horrible, but Japan as high tech threat worked because most Americans knew jack shit about Japan except that their products were invading the shelves...and they had samurai and geisha girls who ate raw fish.

As for Zaibatsu culture, that's another sticky point.

I am actually looking at the Keiretsu concept as a post-Zaibatsu - I am unsure it is valuable or usable as yet. Need to do more research and thinking.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keiretsu

Quote from: golan2072;768050Maybe also make Korea (united under the South?) a high-tech substitute for Japan, they got the tech and the corps needed for this.

I'm thinking about if "united under the North" has traction. A high tech insane dictatorship?

Quote from: Jame Rowe;768454Honestly, I believe that Shadowrun works better with its current system than with a d20 system. Partly because of how it adds to the flavor and partly because it allows it to be more free-form and less CR dependent.

I'm aiming the crunch based on OD&D so there will be plenty of free-form and non-CR dependent play. In fact, I'm utterly unsure how I plan to help GMs determine adventures with appropriate level threats.

There is no doubt that the Shadowrun system is part of the Shadowrun flavor. My problem is that I find the mechanics getting in the way of actual play. So for years, I've dabbled with trying to marry Shadowrun with a fast and dirty OD&D-ish system.

Hey there everyone.  I think this is virtually my first post here post on these forums despite signing up quite some time ago. I actually popped in following a link from some 5E chatter and fortuitously stumbled on this thread!

I, too , am slowly tinkering at a cyberpunk/shadowrun OSR game, based mostly on B/X (well, Lab Lord and Mutant Future makes it easier) so finding this discussion was pretty interesting. My POV is SR 2E.

I agree with a lot of what I see here regarding what you need to get that true SR feel and the IP is a HUGE part of that.  Ideally, I can come up with something fairly generic that lets you pick up a SR sourcebook or adventure and use it for the fluff. I'd rather try to keep the rules lighter at first and avoid the long lists of guns and cyber when, cool as they are, mechanically  there are only minor differences once you distill the system to a B/X rather than 3E D&D level.  

Will be following along to see what other ideas pop up, and checking out Corporia and the systems suggested by CRKrueger too.  Thanks!

QuoteThat's my big focus for hackers - you have to Break & Enter to get the data. Nobody important puts anything valuable on the wi-fi. It's an endless cybersea of junk (which makes it great to hide some things actually).

While there are corporate hackers who sit in server farms safe from the action, that's not the role of the Hacker on a mission. The hacker's there to use his talent behind the walls where nobody is ever supposed to be and quickly hack into secured off-line systems.

I'm thinking D&D Thief - he's there to pick the unpickable locks.

Hackers should be like Hardison on Leverage yes he can do a remote hack but more likely he either breaks in or is working with a pure burglar type to get into high security areas or offline sites to do his thing.

Quote from: CRKrueger;768685How much of the Shadowrun Feel can be captured without any of the Shadowrun Setting?

That's the crux of the issue. Unlike OD&D or RQ or Traveller, much of the feel of the game is translated from the rules as the settings are implied through the mechanical choices by the designers. This project however is like retrocloning Dark Sun or Exalted, where its not the rules, but the setting.

Settings are protected intellectual property, but Shadowrun like many interesting IPs are combos of genres. There is no copyright over the idea of combining Cyberpunk + Fantasy and thus I hope to capture the lightning a bottle, but avoid threading on Shadowrun's ground - not just due to legal issues, but also deep respect for their work.

Quote from: CRKrueger;768692One of the problems I see is the source of magic.
Shadowrun weaved cyberpunk into fantasy via the Earthdawn cosmology and the cycle of magic.  Why are magical beings from our myths reappearing?  

I'm going with Officially Undefined and making several theories and ideas as major rumors/beliefs in the setting and the GM can choose what is real and what is false. That question of WTF? is a big issue in my setting which I am going to put in the early days of the transition.  I'm thinking of starting the timeline 7 years into The Big Change so society is still in major flux and "New Day, New Weird Shit" is still being discovered. The PCs will be on the cutting edge of discovering the unknown.

I actually prefer Chaos Earth to Rifts - I like the energy of being inside the apocalypse, or in this case The Big Change and its immediate aftermath instead of in the future when nobody blinks at an Elf casting spells.

I'm thinking Shadowrun: First Generation.

Quote from: CRKrueger;768692That constant societal friction of the old game was changed.

It's front and center in my setting. I am going for social upheaval, not just friction.

Quote from: CRKrueger;768692Magic and it's expression, I'm convinced, is the key to the Shadowrun Feel.

I will think more on this. What do you (all of you) feel is unique about how Shadowrun expresses magic in its setting?

Quote from: CRKrueger;768692The nature of decking, of the consensual hallucination of the Matrix is as alien to the thought process of someone who's never experienced it, as magic is.

Agreed. Both Magic and Matrix must be Weird/Cool and not Mundane.

Quote from: CRKrueger;768692Cyberware - yeah you need lots and it needs to be cool, but again it needs to be alienating in some way.

I always liked the rule in Cyberpunk 2020 that cyberware had a random cost to your humanity. AKA, you don't know how hard the inhumanity of the embedded tech hits you until AFTER the operation.

Quote from: CRKrueger;768692When your mage or shaman looks at him, he looks dead, he can't be magically healed, and something that drains life force, will kill him in a fraction of the time it would a normal person.

Definitely need to figure out how I want to express this mechanically. I'm thinking negative saves to magic and penalties to magical healing and even "anti-saves" for helpful magic - aka, you need make a save just to get the benefit of a helpful spell.

Quote from: CRKrueger;768693It's not really pleasing to say this, but after writing the above post, another aspect of the Shadowrun Feel is, like all the games of the 90's, what people would probably call today Special Snowflakeism.

I'm cool with Special Snowflakes...as long as the everyone knows we're descending into hell with no kid gloves.

I'm happy for PCs who are cool and unique and stand out in the setting, but chargen will be fast because combat will be deadly. OD&D deadly, not Friday Night Firefight deadly which was really nutball.  

Quote from: CRKrueger;768693You might want to take a look at Daddy Warpig's Shadowrun analogue, or even Trollman's for comparisons.

Any links?

Quote from: Marleycat;770340Hackers should be like Hardison on Leverage yes he can do a remote hack but more likely he either breaks in or is working with a pure burglar type to get into high security areas or offline sites to do his thing.

Leverage is actually a pretty good model for this genre.

JG

Quote from: CRKrueger;768697Shadowland.

Hell yeah, that's gonna be a nightmare to imitate / recreate / re-originate.

I have been playing around with cyber-slang and thinking about what voices are going to speak in the sidebars. The interesting thing about the Rise of BRIC is the chance to steal catch phrases and slang from those nations.

Quote from: CRKrueger;768697The USA is now 7 nations, what the hell happens to the NFL?

They're a multi-national corporation and there's a World Superbowl with teams from 17 countries competing...and now teams have shamans and mages. There's World Football League trademarked in-game spells and rules on what spirits can be summoned in the 3rd quarter.

It's not Blood Bowl...that's played illegally. Remember the 80s B-movie obsession with underground cage fights to the death? We got those on pay-per-view if you know where to go.  

I want game shows like the original Robocop too.

Quote from: CRKrueger;768697or what GW did with Dark Future.  There's more flavor and soul stuffed into that friggin' carwars game then half the 4th splats.

Holy hell, I forgot about Dark Future. Definitely going back to that well for ideas. I've already decided to drag some Car Wars kicking and screaming into my game.

Quote from: CRKrueger;768697I dunno if this is something you're thinking of publishing or not.

I've been farting around with various drafts for years and years. I have been bizarrely obsessed with how OD&D and Gamma World can blend for 3 decades now and I have 8 games - some just a few pages, a couple a few hundred pages - and over the years, one of them has been morphing into a OD&D / Shadowrun and RPGPundit's thread about what non-OSR game would you retroclone? got me thinking about this project again.

So now I'm farting around more seriously with the goal of making something worth playtesting. If the playtests are fun, then I will go the Kickstarter route and see if there is any interest.

Quote from: Mark Plemmons;768734Yeah, you have to set clear boundaries between what the tech PCs can do vs the magic PCs.

Definitely. Technomancy / technowizardry is a rough spot. My thinking is for technomancy to be more focused on power / electricity as it interacts with devices. It can short out a camera, but not reprogram it.

I am also thinking about techno-spirits and ghosts in the machine. Actual ghosts.

Quote from: golan2072;768784In SR2, a Decker was a highly-specialized professional with highly-specialized (and expensive) gear who would go to a secure site, hook up (physically!) with the computer system, and do amazing things, e.g. disable/re-route security cameras, steal data etc).

This is my vision for the Hacker.

Quote from: golan2072;768784However, the decking part of the game was separate from the normal part of the game, and split the party.

And decking has its own unique mechanical subsystem...which drove some people crazy but was really flavorful. Unfortunately, it took too long.

Quote from: golan2072;768784What you need is hacking which is the work of a highly-specialized professional with highly-specialized gear BUT who can participate in regular play activities and combat.

That should be easy!

Quote from: Koren n'Rhys;770329I, too , am slowly tinkering at a cyberpunk/shadowrun OSR game, based mostly on B/X (well, Lab Lord and Mutant Future makes it easier) so finding this discussion was pretty interesting.

It's pistols at dawn for you buckaroo.

...and I'm chipped and wired.

Quote from: Spinachcat;770262I'm aiming the crunch based on OD&D so there will be plenty of free-form and non-CR dependent play. In fact, I'm utterly unsure how I plan to help GMs determine adventures with appropriate level threats.

A lot of the runner's opposition is going to be basically the same types of people, but who are on the other side of the fence. You could perhaps have corpsec that are the equivelant of, say, lvl 2 characters, lvl 5 characters, lvl 8 characters, etc; so that lets players see their characters start off weak, advance, see themselves break into the next "tier" of work, etc.

You've also got the advantage that shadowrun and osr players both never expect to be going into a fair fight, always expect to have to work around the targets.

Quote from: Spinachcat;770481I'm going with Officially Undefined and making several theories and ideas as major rumors/beliefs in the setting and the GM can choose what is real and what is false. That question of WTF? is a big issue in my setting which I am going to put in the early days of the transition.  I'm thinking of starting the timeline 7 years into The Big Change so society is still in major flux and "New Day, New Weird Shit" is still being discovered. The PCs will be on the cutting edge of discovering the unknown.

If there were a bunch of elements in the magic system that could each be used to "prove" magic is THIS THING, but were also all mutually incompatible, that would be fun.

Quote from: Spinachcat;770547It's pistols at dawn for you buckaroo.

...and I'm chipped and wired.

When and where? Your dead tech is no match for my mad phys ad abilities!

Unfortunately,  I seem to spend WAY more time reading other games, forums and blogs than I do wrting anything. It sounds like you have all sorts of stuff in semi-playable form, so cheers! Can't wait to see some of it someday. More choices are always better for the hobby, IMO.
In any case, I'm aiming for small scale, free and mostly fun for me. Write what I want to play, tinker and add over time, and enjoy the process.

Re: Hacking, and the genre in general, I see Leverage as a great play model too, as well as Burn Notice. Rules wise, I'm leaning towards a mechanic based on the clerics turning table. Systems, AIs, etc have an HD rating you roll against there, as opposed to a more modern DC mechanic. I do like the idea of a critical sucess/failure though. Still thinking on how to implement that.