Blammo, have a thread (instead of accidentally derailing one that's supposed to be about Very Serious Grown-Up Things).  

From the other thread* where a question was asked about prosthetics and essence loss.

Quote from: Critias;775776Losing a limb and getting a prosthetic doesn't, or at least was never the "Essence" intent.  Essence is purely a game design conceit, a balance to keep people from just dripping in cyberware without any penalty or cost.  

You can get a bio-cloned, flawless, meat, full-of-blood, replacement leg to replace a grievous injury, at no Essence cost.  It's not losing and replacing a limb that's meant to cost you Essence.  It's replacing a leg with a combat-specced nano-carbon limb full of hydraulics and recoil dampening coils that's strong enough to kick through a car.  It's when you look at the "cyberlimb" chart and decide to pick one out with stats that replace your own, slap armor on there, etc, etc.

That said, Shadowrun is also one of the crunchiest, most detail-oriented, games around.  There's a bunch of cyberware and bioware in the core book, but then everyone clamors for gear books (seriously, "book full of guns" is something that's been released like five times in the last five years, and is always one of our best sellers, it's kind of weird) and nitty-gritty detail books.  So there's this tendency, and has been for literally decades now, for every tiny little augmentation you can get, to have stats for it.  Financial cost, nuyen cost, game fluff, mechanical effect;  folks want it all, for every tiny little thing.

So, sometimes, shit that shouldn't cost Essence, stuff that shouldn't lower your humanity at all...has an Essence cost.  Purely cosmetic stuff shouldn't cost Essence, IMO, and I've gotten into arguments about it (both backstage with devs, and on forums with fans).  

Essence has always been there as part of the checks-and-balances of the system, and I remain firmly entrenched on the "if it doesn't matter mechanically, don't MAKE it matter mechanically" side of things, personally.  If someone just wants some plastic surgery to get elf ears, why the fuck would that cost Essence?  If someone wants gold teeth, it surely doesn't, right?  If someone changes their eye color (not getting augmented eyes that see in the dark and shoot lasers, but just going from blue to brown)?  So in the same vein, I strongly think other purely flavorful, cosmetic, stuff shouldn't cost Essence.

Traditionally, it doesn't.  GMs are free to hand-wave to their hearts content and let someone get purely cosmetic changes, willy-nilly.  But then -- eventually, because fans clamor for it and it sells like hotcakes -- someday we'll put out a gear book with every teensy tiny little surgery possible, and depending on what freelancer gets the gig, a tit job or a penis implant will cost someone Essence (because, yeah, among other things we'll fucking stat up breast implants or vibrating dick implants or something, maybe because CP:2020 did it first, maybe because we've got a really detail-oriented guy working on the book, maybe as a joke, I don't know).

And the uproar starts again, because we're saying someone who wants bigger tits is inhuman, as is someone who wants to swap genders, as is someone who wants permanently dyed hair, etc, etc.

Now, all that said, I didn't mean for my arrival to turn this into a Shadowrun thread all nimbly-pimbly.  If y'all'd prefer, I can get a thread going up in the actual game discussion areas, and try to answer questions or whatnot?

* For completeness and because Cntrl-C, Cntrl-P is easy.

Shadowrun is one of the few major games I have never gotten to play. When I arrived in my current town, it pretty much seemed everyone had been playing it solid for about five years and had burnt out on it.

It remains the annoying hole in my RPG experience.

My Shadowrun experience:

~13 years ago, with a bunch of folks about 10 years younger than I am, in some tiny basement apartment where they all smoked. Feh.

Anyhoo, the GM rather optimistically told me 'play whatever you want, I'll make it fit!'

So I'm flipping through, and decide on a guy who used to be a geomancer (IE: Feng Shui), dragon shaman, and Tong member, who had decided to leave them for Reasons (which I forget).
GM should have told me 'neat! But no, you are unfamiliar with the rules for such an involved type of character and your background doesn't play well.'

But noooo.

So I ended up with a rigger and some other guy, both of whom hated me. Every decision I made, if I said the wrong thing, I'd be dead.

The Tong hated me, the Yakuza hated me, everyone around me didn't trust or like me.

So I'm supposed to guard some place. I didn't realize I should have had spirits on watch because this was my first time playing.

Yakuza attack, I'm over-run. The GM decides to 'take it easy on me' and have the Yaks cut off my arms.

To 'teach me a lesson' the guys I work with give me cheap prosthetics rather than bio replacements, so I'm down a bunch of Essence so can't do a lot of magic.


Yeeeeah. Fuck that game in particular.


Anyhoo, one thing I'm glad about SR is that reading descriptions of the 'decker problem' highlighted an important issue of game design and theory from early on; being able to integrate the actions of players has long been on my mind.

(Fate, in particular, has ideas that would make a great lighter version of Shadowrun.)

I bought 5e, but I would be very surprised if we ever wind up playing it, due to how massively complex it looks (My more casual group was looking at it, but we have a player who genuinely can't remember how rolls in FASERIP work, so it would be awful for her).

I suspect chargen would be better than 4e, due to going back to priorities (I hate big-pool-of-points chargen), but my more serious group - which includes a lot of veteran shadowrunners - already has a couple of games lined up for the next couple of years, and it would still be too heavy for our midweek club.

(I know this isn't your fault, and you're unhappy about it as well, but I'm somewhat upset about the state the hardcopies have ended up in, re: errata. I've got no interest in spending another £40 for a corrected copy of the book because the publishers screwed up the first time, and it would make me very hesitant to buy anything else for the line if I was actively playing.)

ON THE GOOD SIDE, I'd really like to play a campaign picking up the lives of our team from our last (3e) campaign, ten years on - now they're too old and wise to really be in the shadowrunning game any more, but circumstances have dragged them back, etcetera. I've been trying to convince our GM to run this game for a while now, but he can't think up anything good for it, so it's cool. I'll wait.

Shadowrun Returns videogame is good, though.

Kind of returning the copy-paste favor, here, but...

Quote from: Bren;775786Critias, I take it from your use of "we" that you are affiliated with Shadowrun. Is that correct? (Obviously just ignore my question if that's something you don't care to share.)

Yup.  For the last four years or so, now (and I'd been playing it, and sometimes playtesting a little bit, for...uhh...pretty much forever).  I've got a couple dozen contributions under my belt, a few of which haven't quite made it to print yet (but might be GenCon releases, last I heard).  Some solo sourcebooks, a bunch of adventures I did solo, a few times I submitted multiple chapters to a larger multi-writer book, once or twice I just contributed intro fiction, lots of behind-the-scenes stuff prior to SR5, some goodies in our recent boxed sets, and -- most recently -- stand-alone fiction.  Neat, my novella has been out for a while now, and I'm plugging away at a novel atm.

So there are times I've been a "crunch" guy directly, hands-on, and done what I can with new rules and gear and stuff.  Most of the time I've been more of a fluff guy, but often fought tooth-and-nail to influence the crunch from behind the scenes (especially with SR5's core book).  

If folks have questions or whatnot, feel free.  I'll answer what I can, as NDA and professionalism allows.

I love Shadowrun's setting, I am not overtly fond of the system. I use 4E these days, but houseruled a bit. Mostly because I simplified the rules for hacking and a few other things.

I tried 5E's system and found most of their fixes caused more problems than they solved for me. Nothing wrong with people who love it, but for me, I didn't care for it.

Critias, it looks to me like you are missing what seems to me to be an appropriate opportunity to plug your work by linking or citing which items you worked on. If that is intentional that's cool, but if not, don't be too modest.

And if this is inappropriate in this forum here, I'd appreciate it if somebody who understands this place better would please point it out. I'm verbose but not especially knowledgeable on the netiquette for this site.

Quote from: Silverlion;775810I love Shadowrun's setting, I am not overtly fond of the system. I use 4E these days, but houseruled a bit. Mostly because I simplified the rules for hacking and a few other things.

I tried 5E's system and found most of their fixes caused more problems than they solved for me. Nothing wrong with people who love it, but for me, I didn't care for it.

At this point, when my personal group kicks up a Shadowrun campaign (which will theoretically happen shortly after GenCon, as one of my last excuses of "waiting for a badass GM screen" may no longer be valid), my own plan -- personally -- is to house rule in the things I like from SR5 but run a SR4 game.  There are things I like from the new edition, and I want to steal those ones, but there are things, fundamental things, I still disagree with.  I think it will be easier to bring in the stuff I like than to get rid of the stuff I don't.

Combined with the amount of stuff that's out for SR4, compared to the new-edition-blues handful of stuff that's out for SR5, and it just becomes easier that way.

So, yeah.  Don't feel bad.  You're not the only one who's (a) favoring the setting while feeling frustrated at the mechanics, and (b) still sticking with the prior edition instead of jumping over.

QuoteCritias, it looks to me like you are missing what seems to me to be an appropriate opportunity to plug your work by linking or citing which items you worked on. If that is intentional that's cool, but if not, don't be too modest.

And if this is inappropriate in this forum here, I'd appreciate it if somebody who understands this place better would please point it out. I'm verbose but not especially knowledgeable on the netiquette for this site.

Meh.  I just figured I'd hold off and just set up a signature or something, like I normally do, instead of shamelessly plugging in-thread.

In sig sounds like a good approach.

Back in the day I bought a bunch of Shadowrun books to mine for ideas and maps for 'straight' cyberpunk games... but never had much interest in actually playing it because the trad-fantasy elements didn't appeal (though I liked the bugs).
My old group did play 5e for a bit and I didn't really care for it... it seemed like I had to roll a bazillion times for anything I tried to do.
Also, at least with our group, it was just one Mr. Johnson run after another while chasing after better gear.

Quote from: Simlasa;775879Also, at least with our group, it was just one Mr. Johnson run after another while chasing after better gear.

Yeah, that's often how it goes.

What I try to do is have a few jobs like that (just a smattering of random, or at least random-seeming, 'fetch the MacGuffin' gigs, like everyone expects), but then they'll maybe start to get jobs from the same Mr. Johnson, or they'll notice a theme, or something will tie in to a character's background...and after 3-4 pretty generic sessions, an actual story can start to take shape, and the shadowrunning becomes the backdrop.

I've never played Shadowrun so I'm genuinely curious.

Can Shadowrun be made into a sandbox? What is there for shadowrunners to decide, if anything, other than from which Mr. Johnson they're taking a job this week? Not a knock on the game, honest question.

I think the campaign I was in, the other guys were trying to help out the common man and doing a whole Robin Hood rebellion sort of thing.

Which is a cool direction.

Yeah, it's actually even called "Hooding" in-universe.  A common theme (to most cyberpunk, not just SR, don't get me wrong) is trying to stick it to the man, to somehow not just navigate the cracks in the system, but to exploit them, and try to make the shit-sack dystopian future a little better.  Shadowrun has always had a soft spot for the Neo-Anarchist movement, going all the way back to some of the very first sourcebooks ever printed.

Probably the best example of it right now is in Dragonfall, the Shadowrun Returns expansion, actually.  In it, you kind of step up to become the leader of a neighborhood, able to invest money and time in fixing up a metahuman shelter, and improving the street doctor's black market clinic, and arranging a friendly partnership with various other factions, etc, etc (trying to stay vague, here).  

Sure, you're all a bunch of off-the-books street rats living in the shadow of the huge megacorporate titans and immortal dragons and their schemes and shit, but you try to make things better for this block, you try to make it so that kid doesn't starve tomorrow, so that it isn't today that gang of cyberpsycho punks takes over the neighborhood.

The problem -- as is so often the case in gaming -- is getting everyone on board.  Every time we've tried to make adventures go in this direction, we've gotten complaints from gamers feeling railroaded and wanting to be black-hearted sellouts who maximize their profits, instead.  And then, of course, the vice-versa is also true.  Every time adventures have catered to the soulless monster/sociopath crowd and tried to cater to that, we've gotten complaints about the game not having a heart any more, yadda yadda yadda.  I don't think the game's published materials have ever really gotten it right (and I'll concede that), but in part I think that's because it's the sort of thing that is really tricky to get right.

It's a tough tightrope to walk in published adventures, so it's the sort of thing that I think, like so much else, works best as part of the social contract of a given campaign, around a given table, played with a given set of friends.