Quote from: silva;470863By formalizing and structuring the old formula "old man in the tavern with a mission looking for adventurers" in a authentic and verossimile in-setting way, and creating mechanisms to advance and widen that premisse in the form of a "mercs underworld" (as characterized by the players´s Contacts network), and the mechanical/gamey subsystems that come with it (reputation, notoriety, legworkings, fencing loots, contacts loyalty/connection ratings, etc) Shadowrun made that old/cliched/potentialy repetitive/lame premisse into something fresh and many times more (re)playable.

This is all true.

OTOH, a 'run is not as robust an adventure form as a dungeon crawl. It has neither the simplicity of "draw some walls" nor the surety of execution which the walls provide.

And although Shadowrun does lend itself to a basic open table (easily allowing a different team of runners to tackle each job), that open table is not as robust as D&D's original megadungeon form. (You can leave a half-completed dungeon and it will self-evidently wait for you -- or somebody -- to come back to it. How do you leave a half-completed run? And what happens to it while you're gone?)

Shadowrun also features a more involved method of character creation which requires a deeper understanding of the game in order to meaningfully complete it.

So there are several areas where Shadowrun falls short of what I would describe as the D&D "perfect storm" of robust accessibility.

Wait, Frank wrote for Shadowrun? Wow.

Quote from: Géza Echs;471372Wait, Frank wrote for Shadowrun? Wow.

Anytime anyone makes any sort of claim to fame on the internet, I bring out the saltshaker.

It's amazing how there's no checkout counter workers or shelf restockers on the internet. Or even accountants who haven't worked for someone famous.

Quote from: Narf the Mouse;471438Anytime anyone makes any sort of claim to fame on the internet, I bring out the saltshaker.

It's amazing how there's no checkout counter workers or shelf restockers on the internet. Or even accountants who haven't worked for someone famous.

He's a credited developer on Augmentation and Street Magic for Shadowrun 4th Edition.

Quote from: CRKrueger;471452He's a credited developer on Augmentation and Street Magic for Shadowrun 4th Edition.

Well, that's evidence. I still stand by my salt-shaker statement; some people on the internet with a claim to fame != everyone on the internet claiming same actually being able to back it up.

Quote from: Pseudoephedrine;471131Perhaps you should open the core rulebook and read its contents sometime, as you will discover that damage is calculated from the number of successes in your dice pool. Dice in the pool are chiseled down by range, cover, motion, light, and if the person dodges. Having more dice means you can take riskier or trickier shots, are less likely to have your dice pool reduced to zero by chance factors, and means you do more damage.

It is shocking that you cannot understand how in a game where combat involves rolling dice pools and comparing the outcome, one would not want to ensure that one's dice pool is as large as possible.

D&D 3.5's pun pun comes to mind. His modifiers on STR and CON are so large, it's not even funny anymore. They are way over and above anything a player character would remotely require to defeat the highest CR statted antagonist in the game. Which is why pun pun is a pure exercise in math, it's not about a character anyone would want to play for a conceivable length in an ongoing campaign.

A similar point pertains here. Frank and you are not talking about bigger numbers being better, you are disputing the break off point when the size of a dice pool becomes so large it is pointless within the constraints of the game setting. The numbers volunteered were 26 dice (you), and 17 and 12 (Frank). Your argument is to point out how multiple penalties can reduce a dice pool, so that a default dice pool of 26 remains a good idea. Frank says it isn't. Well, I think the only way to show us which of you is right is if one of you could kindly quote the relevant set of negative dice pool modifiers. Then we have the concrete numbers, and then we can think of how likely it is that these penalties are co-instantiated in a game with a frequency that merits investing in having the dice pool in the first place.

Sorry for the long post, but I actually believe there's a vaguely relevant point to be made in the dickwaving contest between Frank and you. Just whip out the numbers and get it over with.

More specifically, show us the exact difference between 26 and 17 dice when shooting from a moving vehicle, at night, in the rain (you know, the conditions of 90% of Seattle Runs.)

The difference isn't between 26 and 17, it's between 26 (or 17) and 12 in Frank's view.

Here's an example based on a real shot a character of mine made as I leaned out the window of our Turtlevan to hack a clip off at some douche manning a Panther Cannon on a boat while my buddy (in this case, our orc melee monster guy) juked and weaved the van around the parking lot of the marina / warehouse on the approach to the dock.

For my first attack in each phase, I would roll:

Attacker is in a moving vehicle: -3
Attacker is in cover (the vehicle): -1
Target has good cover: -4
In Partial Light with Thermographic goggles on: -2
Firing my jacked FN HAR with 4 points of recoil comp. Full Auto: -5
Target is at Long Range: -2
Tracer Rounds w/Full Auto: +3
Smartlinked Gun: +2
Aiming for the guy's head to avoid his armour jacket(called shot):-6ish IIRC

So that's -23 on that shot (I blew Edge to zero my pool out and take a chance roll IIRC). His dodge pool was 6 or 7 dice, and his armour had about 6 points IIRC. Because I was firing wide bursts, I knocked his dodge pool down to zero.

In Shadowrun, after the defender dodges, you take whatever successes are left, add the damage of your gun (6 for the FN HAR firing regular bullets) and subtract Body and Impact armour (10).

I had multiple attacks because I was wired, but the penalties just got worse from there.

Once I stopped trying to duck his armour, it went down to "only" -17 - enough to zero out the pool Frank considers more than adequate to kill people.

I think that example pretty clearly accounts for why you'd want absolutely huge pools of dice on your side, and it's drawn from a real incident in a real game of Shadowrun I played.

Edit: Tactically, it was the full auto that was really tearing into my pool, so I dropped down after the first round (which is multiple attacks long) to long bursting, which only gave me a -5 (-6 for any further attacks in the round), recoil compensated to a -1 (-2). So I went to a -13 (-14), stopped trying to duck his armour, and jumped up to -7(-8), then splashed off his armour and cover for a round (plus a round or so of reloading) until we were at "short range" for my gun, which allowed me to long burst, called shot his head off.

Further edit: All this subtracting and adding sucked, and required a bunch of GM calls each round to determine lighting, our position, the position of his cover (a steel shield on the gun), whether he was dodging or not, and so on.

I thought it was pretty common knowledge that Frank wrote for Shadowrun.  JongWK did too.

RPGPundit

Quote from: RPGPundit;471561I thought it was pretty common knowledge that Frank wrote for Shadowrun.  JongWK did too.

RPGPundit

Sorry, dude - Got into RPGs with D&D 3.5 and not really plugged into any sort of "scene". Here and the Hero Boards are as close as I come to that. I'm pretty much the peanut gallery in this thread - As evidenced by my first post.

I have a *looong* list of games I'd like to try at least once, though, and Shadowrun is on it.

Basically, Shadowrun is a better cyberpunk game than most published cyberpunk games, and a better fantasy game than most fantasy games. As for mixing the genres in play, well, it is a stretch. But what makes it work is realizing that Shadowrun is basically about memes. It's not just Neuromancer + elves, although it may have started that way. It's also urban genre fantasy, with its shamans and surreal city spirits. It's an unironic commentary on racism, throwing humans against orks, whites against reds, North Americans versus Japanese versus South Americans, and so forth. As a mash-up of cyberpunk and epic high fantasy, it has definite relationships with other grim-but-heroic settings like Elric's Melnibone, Gamma World, many of your classic Westerns, and so forth. For that matter, it's all boundary encounters between cultures and genres, with elements of horror, eco sci-fi, Westerns, wuxia, and virtually anything else. It also has a family resemblance to "magic-in-the-real-world" stories like Waldo and Magic Inc., The Case of the Toxic Spelldump, and so on.

Essentially, it glorifies people who see all these elements, this mad world of cyber and magic and politics and so forth, and who view them principally as tools. PCs in Shadowrun are tool-users. At the same time, the game was born with and has evolved with the idea of lifestyle-as-ideology. Are you a high-roller? A tribesman? A bit of both? A scholarly autodidact? A "street samurai?" The idea being that when you put your life on the line for something, that something defines you.

You could play it as a Piers Anthony-inspired cutesie-poo fest, but it's never struck me that way. You're playing a drug-addicted former hitmage who's losing his magic, and then you encounter an AI that thinks it can become a god.

Quote from: RPGPundit;471561I thought it was pretty common knowledge that Frank wrote for Shadowrun.  JongWK did too.

I haven't read any supplements for Shadowrun in years and years. Like, since the Universal Brotherhood era. I've read bits of the fourth edition core rules, but that's it. Shadowrun isn't to my taste. I'm really just surprised that Frank worked on SR because of his claims about the writing of a seminal cyberpunk author; it strikes me that a SR author should know more about the influential works than that.

I didn't know that JongWK wrote for Shadowrun either, but I haven't seen JongWK say anything weird so my ignorance isn't banished with a shock.

On the topic of games with crappy mechanics, the nWoD cyberpunk conversion is shit too. Me and my buddies actually came up with a better system for nWoD cyberpunk while getting stoned after a session, though it's too involved to explain here.

Really, what Atlas Games ought to do is get its act together and publish an Unknown Armies cyberpunk adaptation.

Pawsplay's post of 4:09 above nIls it ione for why our group played the he'll out of 1e.  The mechanics were, odd, the setting incomplete, but it hit the sweet spot on all the right tropes for us.

To be honest I haven't played it since and no longer have any of the books.

I can see how either you would think it's the coolest thing since powdered toast or just wouldn't see the appeal.

QuoteYou're playing a drug-addicted former hitmage who's losing his magic, and then you encounter an AI that thinks it can become a god.

damn, I want to play this right now.