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Author Topic: Conceptually Tweeking Shadowrun to taste  (Read 2308 times)

Stephen Tannhauser

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Re: Conceptually Tweeking Shadowrun to taste
« Reply #15 on: May 20, 2022, 03:21:09 PM »
I don't think cyberpunk is about the world being fantastic for the normies with "some" internal corruption. Maybe its in way more other cyberpunk literature, but I always thought it was about a shitty state of the world with fallen standards for the value of life. All the dystopic elements of today with machinery replacing life, but ratcheted up to dystopic levels. Things being good with evil below the surface I didn't think fit.

Well, that's true, but I think the thing about dystopias is that they only survive because most people in them accept them as the best they can get (and the people in charge of them always spin them to be better than they are). That, too, is part of noir and cyberpunk: the resigned acceptance by most of the "normies" of "the way things are" has a strain of both superficial, hypocritical public support and unspoken cynicism and dissatisfaction.

Neither Shadowrun, Neuromancer nor Blade Runner ever painted much of a picture of what it was like to live in the middle class of those societies, that I know of; it was always the clash of the wealthy elite vs. the criminal underclass.

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In Shadowrun magic has been a 99.99999% bad thing for the world anyway.

There I will agree that the worldbuilding definitely took an unnecessary fail. There are so many ways access to the powers of Shadowrun-style magic could improve society -- and so many cultural attitude shifts it would logically produce as well -- that assuming they have never done so simply trips my suspension of disbelief. (I have the same issue with The Walking Dead as a universe: the length of time it took our heroes to find/build a post-Walker society that wasn't psychotic in some way finally broke my ability to buy into that world.)

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Metaplots are always a bane. It established the world: as being moved by NPCs you will never interact with or play.

That's the basic difficulty of non-shared world iterations: PCs who want to change their world can never change more than their local copy of it, but PCs who want to feel like part of a world that has an independent changing reality of its own have to accept that they themselves will never make those big changes. (I think that may be part of the appeal of MMORPGs.)

The setting of Harn, for example, explicitly terminates all setting products as of the start of the year TR 720, so that all PCs have their own version of the world to play in where they can be the movers and shakers; the downside of that is that nobody gets to know what the "official" version of Harn's future would look like, and the popularity of metaplots does indicate some demand for that.
Better to keep silent and be thought a fool, than to speak and remove all doubt. -- Mark Twain

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Shrieking Banshee

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Re: Conceptually Tweeking Shadowrun to taste
« Reply #16 on: May 20, 2022, 03:48:01 PM »
Well, that's true, but I think the thing about dystopias is that they only survive because most people in them accept them as the best they can get (and the people in charge of them always spin them to be better than they are). That, too, is part of noir and cyberpunk: the resigned acceptance by most of the "normies" of "the way things are" has a strain of both superficial, hypocritical public support and unspoken cynicism and dissatisfaction.

Having lived in eastern europe I understand that. What I mean is that, if things are by and large 'fine', being a rebel in such a system makes you look like a jackass. And unless there is some guy to directly punt for it to get better, then punting people also makes you a nitwit. And playing a nitwit jackass that calls themselves a 'Shadowrunner' is extruciating when not in a comedy game.

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Neither Shadowrun, Neuromancer nor Blade Runner ever painted much of a picture of what it was like to live in the middle class of those societies, that I know of; it was always the clash of the wealthy elite vs. the criminal underclass.
I assumed the idea of such settings is a collapse OF a middle class. There is also a large degree of irreversable calamity in the setting responsible to prevent some degree of normalization. Except Shadowrun, which doesn't logically consider the consequences of its worldbuilding under a degree of serious scrutiny. And throws in some new minor calamity every once in a while so that things can't normalize while still trying to be poe-faced serious. There has to be a new hotness to be racist-at every decade or so.

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There are so many ways access to the powers of Shadowrun-style magic could improve society -- and so many cultural attitude shifts it would logically produce as well -- that assuming they have never done so simply trips my suspension of disbelief.
It wouldn't be such a problem if the game didn't take itself so 'tax-filing' seriously. Megacorps owning fleets of aircraft carriers in a light tone game? Is over the top and cool. But in a setting that wants you to take it seriously, its LUDICRIST.

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That's the basic difficulty of non-shared world iterations: PCs who want to change their world can never change more than their local copy of it, but PCs who want to feel like part of a world that has an independent changing reality of its own have to accept that they themselves will never make those big changes.
Again, what makes it worse is that the metaplot ends up taking priority in generating material over generating cool hooks and places for PCs to do things.
Chaning independant realities happen in larps. Just when its published literature it sucks.

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I think that may be part of the appeal of MMORPGs.
It isn't because narratively its assumed that you 'Did' those changes. A NPC generally isn't critical for change: you are. And even if it isn't king boss of bosses, then you played a MAJOR role in making it happen. The major appeal of MMORPGs is addictive social conditioning.

Stephen Tannhauser

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Re: Conceptually Tweeking Shadowrun to taste
« Reply #17 on: May 21, 2022, 01:51:45 AM »
What I mean is that, if things are by and large 'fine', being a rebel in such a system makes you look like a jackass. And unless there is some guy to directly punt for it to get better, then punting people also makes you a nitwit. And playing a nitwit jackass that calls themselves a 'Shadowrunner' is excruciating when not in a comedy game.

Well, there's a difference between "actually objectively fine" and "fine enough for most people to grudgingly accept for lack of an alternative". But yes, rebels do generally tend to look like jackasses and criminals to most non-rebels, right up until things in general get bad enough that they don't -- and part of being a rebel is to push the situation to that point.

From this perspective the problem with Shadowrun is the existential difficulty of all "-punk" art, in that it's inherently about defying established orders without actually proposing any viable replacement, or even believing that a viable replacement is possible or desirable -- it's defying the system solely because it is a system. For those who choose it as a vocation, shadowrunning isn't about overthrowing the megacorps, it's about carving out as free a life for yourself as you can before the inevitable end -- maybe, at best, enjoying the chaos that would come from being able to somehow set corp against corp ("chaos is a ladder," as Petyr Littlefinger said). But as a mindset that way of life is very difficult to sustain, and the tension between those who embrace the shadows and those who are trying to get out of them would have been another rich source of roleplaying drama.

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There is also a large degree of irreversable calamity in the setting responsible to prevent some degree of normalization. Except Shadowrun, which doesn't logically consider the consequences of its worldbuilding under a degree of serious scrutiny. And throws in some new minor calamity every once in a while so that things can't normalize while still trying to be poe-faced serious. There has to be a new hotness to be racist-at every decade or so.

Agreed, although to some extent that's a product of the medium and the marketing; you can see the same effect bedevilling the Forgotten Realms with every edition shift in D&D. Novelty sells.

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Again, what makes it worse is that the metaplot ends up taking priority in generating material over generating cool hooks and places for PCs to do things.

True, although the flip side of that is that the more rigorously the consequences of the PCs' actions from cool hooks/locations Set A are followed -- especially if they are epic and setting-changing -- the less likely the cool hooks/locations from Sets B and C are going to be available. Just to pick one of the classic gags of the setting, if your PCs somehow assassinate Dunkelzahn the Dragon before he even begins his campaign for President, every hook based around that expected campaign immediately becomes useless.

(And lack of ability to effect meaningful large-scale change for the better is, in its own way, another hallmark of noir fiction, so one could argue for it having a place in cyberpunk as well. But this is one of the ways in which I think RPGs differ fundamentally from literature; in a game, player actions have to make critical differences to outcomes, or it stops feeling like a game.)
Better to keep silent and be thought a fool, than to speak and remove all doubt. -- Mark Twain

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Shrieking Banshee

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Re: Conceptually Tweeking Shadowrun to taste
« Reply #18 on: May 21, 2022, 02:26:44 AM »
For those who choose it as a vocation, shadowrunning isn't about overthrowing the megacorps, it's about carving out as free a life for yourself as you can before the inevitable end -- maybe, at best, enjoying the chaos that would come from being able to somehow set corp against corp ("chaos is a ladder," as Petyr Littlefinger said).
And Shadowruns biggest problem is that it makes it look glamerous, and then saddles you with the paperwork instead. In both mechanical and lore-terms.

In Huntdown you play bounty hunters. The very introduction of the game makes it clear that its people trying to live by their own rules. Not joining the gangs or the corpos. But throught the game, you work freelance for a corpo, hunting down gangs making trouble, and even turning down lucrative offers from your targets. And while the gangs are evil, the hunters themselves are bloodthirsty sociopaths, and there is little to show the corpos to be anything but corrupt and ruthless.
Spoilers:At the end of the game, your stiffed of your money by the same corpo you where working for, and a bounty is put on YOUR head. And then even your employer is also axed off for being a loose end!

But the critical, CRITICAL difference, is that Huntdown makes it all super cool, with a large amount of black humor, and doesn't like to hear itself talk. It gives JUST enough information for the basics of a fleshed out world, but focuses on being cool and YOU being cool, not the setting wanking itself off with tons of minutia. Things in the setting focus on being really imagination catching, and cool to be in, even in a relatively toned down way.

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True, although the flip side of that is that the more rigorously the consequences of the PCs' actions from cool hooks/locations Set A are followed -- especially if they are epic and setting-changing -- the less likely the cool hooks/locations from Sets B and C are going to be available.

Except thats the issue: the hooks SUCK, and the locations BLOW. Linear adventures can at least offer the promises of really powerful set pieces that free-structured adventures can't provide. But Shadowrun doesn't even trust the players with that.

Its idea of a 'Adventure', is you MAYBE being a bodyguard to the REAL movers and shakers, and just observe as they do stuff. The PCs are there just to stand around and see stuff unfold, maybe shoot a bloke every once in a while. Even as linear storytelling material, that is WANK.

And I don't believe that Shadowrun really wants to be about cynicism and you loosing all the time. In its videogames, its literature, its always an exceptional crew making a large difference. Saving the world once. But thats because they just have self contained villians to be defeated. And thats the stuff people walk away with the most pleasing memories of and compliments of.

And I wouldnt demand that. You don't need to save the world, or a city, in order to make RPG play meaningful. The general writers for Shadowrun just suck, and have sucked from the very start.

Omega

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Re: Conceptually Tweeking Shadowrun to taste
« Reply #19 on: May 21, 2022, 02:37:18 AM »
I'd trim back the ubiquity of 'you can't fight the megacorporations' bullshit.

I like SR, but damn, sometimes it feels like the designers got married to 'status quo is god'. The closest they've come to upending that was Dunkelzahn's death (and subsequent will).

I would put out a sourcebook giving ideas on 'How to let your runners flip the table', figuratively speaking, regarding the current metaplot. Blowing up Z-O, for example.

Is it my inner Grognard or did the Shadowrun metaplot feel like it went off the rails when FASA lost control of it?

Felt that way to me. Or at the very least it felt like it lost its vision with each new edition and as the original writers left.

Theres some good stuff in the later books but it seems more and more megacorp oppression oriented and less and less magic and wilderness as time went on.

Chris24601

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Re: Conceptually Tweeking Shadowrun to taste
« Reply #20 on: May 21, 2022, 11:13:47 AM »
In Huntdown you play bounty hunters. The very introduction of the game makes it clear that its people trying to live by their own rules. Not joining the gangs or the corpos. But throught the game, you work freelance for a corpo, hunting down gangs making trouble, and even turning down lucrative offers from your targets. And while the gangs are evil, the hunters themselves are bloodthirsty sociopaths, and there is little to show the corpos to be anything but corrupt and ruthless.
Spoilers:At the end of the game, your stiffed of your money by the same corpo you where working for, and a bounty is put on YOUR head. And then even your employer is also axed off for being a loose end!

But the critical, CRITICAL difference, is that Huntdown makes it all super cool, with a large amount of black humor, and doesn't like to hear itself talk. It gives JUST enough information for the basics of a fleshed out world, but focuses on being cool and YOU being cool, not the setting wanking itself off with tons of minutia. Things in the setting focus on being really imagination catching, and cool to be in, even in a relatively toned down way.
To be fair, you’re comparing the feelings you’re getting from a single-player run-and-gun video game with pregen characters and a linear plot to the feelings you get from a tabletop rpg and everything that entails.

Of course that video game has a tight interesting plot filled with cool moments and witty quips… its all scripted and your twitch reflexes are as meaningful to the plot’s progress as turning the page of a novel (even if it does require more coordination and effort).

I suspect you’d be having the exact same problems with a HUNTDOWN tabletop rpg because it too would have to balance the canon and status quo of the on-rails video game with the ability of ttrpg PCs to go totally off-script… which also requires building up enough of the setting so when the PCs do go off the rails there’s actually something to see and, because the GM is now having to improvise dialogue and plots based on unscripted PC actions, suddenly all that cool black humor dies because the GM is nowhere near as witty in real time as a script writer with hours to craft perfect moments can be.

I mean, I stand by my “metaplot is a problem” statement, but I think part of the problem too is you’re just wanting things from one genre (on-rails video games) that just don’t cross into the ttrpg genre very well (even one roll to resolve a combat takes longer than it would to resolve a mook fight in a video game).

It reminds me a bit of the discussion over in the Star Trek game without time travel thread about how the genre conventions of scripted television/films don’t necessarily translate well at all to ttrpg play. Shadowrun’s main problem seems to be that it’s veered hard towards enforcing the events of its non-ttrpg media onto the rpg.

Shrieking Banshee

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Re: Conceptually Tweeking Shadowrun to taste
« Reply #21 on: May 21, 2022, 12:37:37 PM »
I suspect you’d be having the exact same problems with a HUNTDOWN tabletop rpg because it too would have to balance the canon and status quo of the on-rails video game with the ability of ttrpg PCs to go totally off-script… which also requires building up enough of the setting so when the PCs do go off the rails there’s actually something to see and, because the GM is now having to improvise dialogue and plots based on unscripted PC actions, suddenly all that cool black humor dies because the GM is nowhere near as witty in real time as a script writer with hours to craft perfect moments can be.

Possibly. I don't expect A-tier quips from book writers, and I don't compare all my TTRPG elements to videogames 99% of the time. I just brought it up because it was the most comprable plot wise: Bounty Hunters/Shadowrunners.

But the black humor was more then just written quips. 40K had this sort of humor as well about its setting, until it started taking itself seriously and justified all of its humerous elements within setting, killing the joke and becoming self indulgent.
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I mean, I stand by my “metaplot is a problem” statement, but I think part of the problem too is you’re just wanting things from one genre

I agree with that, I just say that is not its main issue. Thats the deflection of the main issue because the world itself isn't designed around interesting hooks of stuff to do. The only thing that was a highlight was the metaplot, so the writers kept working it up and ignoring everything else.

BoxCrayonTales

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Re: Conceptually Tweeking Shadowrun to taste
« Reply #22 on: May 21, 2022, 05:24:32 PM »
So where the PCs are can have a big impact on the tone.
The PCs cannot have a large impact on Shadowrun because its demi-gods and Corporations are the writers actual pets. They are its Drizzt. So they don't want your annoying PC messing up what they have going. They will spend books detailing data that the PCs don't interact with, and doesn't really interact with them. "Well what do the Shadowrunners do in this?" is number 357 in priority.

The setting is by and large incongrous and doesn't stick together. My best Shadowrun experiences had been the videogame, and my best Cyberpunk experience was Huntdown. So im thinking out loud about its manic energy.
This is my problem with pretty much all long-running well-established trpg settings. It’s just the writers’ fanfiction masquerading as game fluff and isn’t actually designed to played in.

That’s why I have a preference for interstellar scifi settings where the focus is on the PCs going on wild unpredictable adventures ranging from pure pulp to pure horror. One week they might rescue a princess and stop an interstellar war, the next they might investigate a ghost ship and fight horrible space parasites.

Hypothetically you could do that for any genre, such as paranormal investigators. These long-running franchises don’t do that tho and I’m sick of it. I’m sick of bloated irrelevant overbearing creativity-sapping lore/metaplot.

Omega

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Re: Conceptually Tweeking Shadowrun to taste
« Reply #23 on: May 21, 2022, 11:45:58 PM »
The SNES Shadowrun game did a good job of capturing the feel of the setting and some of the mechanics. It has a better feel of tech meets magic.

The Sega Shadowrun feels slightly more tech and less magic in some ways. But I never got far with it so maybe shifts later?

And from what I saw the Sega CD SR game bore little resemblance to Shadowrun and would have been better titled Cyberpunk 2020.

The SR arena game was just some arena game with the Shadowrun title slapped on and some of the avatars tweaked to be more SR-ish. The Shadowrun action figure game from WizKids feels more SR than that thing.

Havent seen the PC games yet. Curious how those will feel.

Think that over time its felt like the setting itself has felt less and less Shadowrun with each edition.

Mishihari

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Re: Conceptually Tweeking Shadowrun to taste
« Reply #24 on: May 22, 2022, 02:58:42 AM »
The SNES Shadowrun game did a good job of capturing the feel of the setting and some of the mechanics. It has a better feel of tech meets magic.

The Sega Shadowrun feels slightly more tech and less magic in some ways. But I never got far with it so maybe shifts later?

And from what I saw the Sega CD SR game bore little resemblance to Shadowrun and would have been better titled Cyberpunk 2020.

The SR arena game was just some arena game with the Shadowrun title slapped on and some of the avatars tweaked to be more SR-ish. The Shadowrun action figure game from WizKids feels more SR than that thing.

Havent seen the PC games yet. Curious how those will feel.

Think that over time its felt like the setting itself has felt less and less Shadowrun with each edition.

I have Shadowrun Hong Kong, Shadowrun Dragonfall, and Shadowrun Returns on PC.  They were free releases on Epic some time ago.  Of those, I can only speak to Dragonfall as I haven't tried the others yet.  The combat system is pretty much Xcom, which is a good thing, and the story and dialogue are not bad.  I'd say it feels pretty solidly like Shadowrun to me, except perhaps for a few characters that are a bit too virtuous for the setting.

Spinachcat

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Re: Conceptually Tweeking Shadowrun to taste
« Reply #25 on: May 22, 2022, 09:38:36 PM »
Think that over time its felt like the setting itself has felt less and less Shadowrun with each edition.

This is a common issue with many settings.

It's one of the reasons I stick with first editions, even if they are mechanically flawed compared to later editions, invariably first editions have a raw power in their settings that often lacking in future renditions.

Godsmonkey

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Re: Conceptually Tweeking Shadowrun to taste
« Reply #26 on: May 24, 2022, 09:26:46 AM »
Does the BurgerKrieg visit here? Some good thoughts on the subject.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I3f8087Vz9U

BoxCrayonTales

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Re: Conceptually Tweeking Shadowrun to taste
« Reply #27 on: May 24, 2022, 12:31:39 PM »
Think that over time its felt like the setting itself has felt less and less Shadowrun with each edition.

This is a common issue with many settings.

It's one of the reasons I stick with first editions, even if they are mechanically flawed compared to later editions, invariably first editions have a raw power in their settings that often lacking in future renditions.
I've noticed this too. It's like the writers take for granted that players are already familiar with the fluff and don't bother to be as evocative and creative in their descriptions as they used to be.