I dunno, I don't think that's something that can definitely be gleaned from what's on the Kickstarter page. The four "classes" they have listed seem to be there purely to illustrate the different ways a character can percieve the environment, not so much a description of intended skill architecture.
That's what I'm hoping for. The problem with these Kickstarters is that they sell dreams to people with money to fund them. There's no way of telling whether or not the dreams will become a reality.
This has been my thought all along. I'm just waiting for the inevitable string of terrible games funded through Kickstarter that kills the idea forever.
You'd have to pull the main Troika guys back together to make it happen. You got one guy at Obsidian, one guy working on Diablo 3, and one guy at inexile working on Wasteland 2.
Actually that guy left a year ago joining Turtle Rock. He did initial design for W2 while they were looking for publishers.
And Obsidian would be capable enough off pulling it off, IMO. Tim Cain was the main driving force behind it (and Troika) and while it was a team effort (Arcanum especially) there were other members beside those three.
Chris Jones is already at Obsidian and has pitched a sequel to Activision multiple times. Sadly, without luck.
I don't think Boyarsky will leave his job at Blizzard and its questionable if Anderson does as he rejoined some ex-Troika people at Turtle Rock. Except of course, if they suddenly get the urge to do "rpgs" again. Would be cool, though.
How are the new rules? I know they came out with that 20th Anniversary book that clarified some of the 4th ed. stuff, right? Is that worth checking out? Has anyone run (or played) a game with that ruleset?
Having never played 3rd I was told by the rest of the group that the rules were much more homogenized. However, having played D&D 4th Ed I found the book to be a complete mess from a mechanical point of view. Lore, brilliant, reading it to get the idea of the setting was fun as heck. Reading it to get the idea of how combat works on the other hand had me jumping between multiple sections repeatedly, just to get the complete picture of what was expected of me.
Oh, and whoever decided that using the "DV" acronym to mean "drain value" one moment and "damage value" the next should have been taken out the back and shot. That's 30 minutes of confusion trying to work out magic rules right there.
If you have more specific questions, I've been playing Shadowrun for over 20 years, in all 4 editions. I have nearly every single Shadowrun Sourcebook known to man (I even have a copy of DMZ back somewhere at my parent's house).
Would the 20th Anniversary Edition be a good place to start if I want to indulge in some nostalgia?
For Nostalgia (TM), you are better off with a 3rd edition rulebook. Most of SR4 covers the years beyond 2070, and a lot of radical world changes happen between 2060-2070. The Matrix crashes and is completely rebuilt (basically so they can retcon current wireless technology onto the game), for example. The world moves on, and the stories move on with it.
SR4 20th anniversary edition has a LOT of great stories in it, though. Every section is prefaced with a short story. It's still Shadowrun, but it's Shadowrun that has matured and pushed forward rather than wallowed in razors and chrome. Think more along the lines of Minority Report (slick and modern) than Blade Runner (dark and gritty).
Having never played 3rd I was told by the rest of the group that the rules were much more homogenized. However, having played D&D 4th Ed I found the book to be a complete mess from a mechanical point of view. Lore, brilliant, reading it to get the idea of the setting was fun as heck. Reading it to get the idea of how combat works on the other hand had me jumping between multiple sections repeatedly, just to get the complete picture of what was expected of me.
Oh, and whoever decided that using the "DV" acronym to mean "drain value" one moment and "damage value" the next should have been taken out the back and shot. That's 30 minutes of confusion trying to work out magic rules right there.
But Drain Value IS a Damage Value. They virtually mean the same thing. When you take drain, you resist against the damage listed, based on your spell's force.
The combat is complicated, but most combat involving modern firearms and lethal combat are complicated, especially when there's a cover mechanic. There's nothing stopping you from writing down your typical actions on cards, if you need a quick reference, and playing them like power cards in DnD.
FASA and its successors have always been terrible at book layouts, though. They are famous for tab stop errors like "PPC 10". There was a time that they had one piece of gear per page (the Street Samurai Catalog, Fields of Fire) with nice tables and additional rules in the back, and that worked well. Catalyst is sort of going back to that with their new mini-sourcebooks (not the major ones, but the smaller ones less than 100 pages) in 4th edition, but the early 4th edition books and nearly all of the 3rd edition books have poor layouts that make it difficult to look up rules. It's not as bad as, say, Arc Dream (I love ORE to death, but they have really bad rulebooks), but they could take some lessons from GURPS.
In that case take the person who thought giving the same thing different names for the sake of "flavour" out the back and have them shot instead.
Oh, it gets worse. Technomancers in 4th edition (basically magical hackers) take "Fading" when they exert their abilities, which for all intents and purposes is magical Drain. They take this damage in ALL of the same situations that mages take Drain (summoning, using "spells", whatever), but for some reason, it's "Fading", not "Drain". We use the word "NotDrain" in our group.
There are a lot of things that Shadowrun players tend to house-rule. First is quicker combat by either ignoring certain rules, or coming up with simpler new rules... a common example is Cover and Barrier rules, which are important, but add to complexity. The second is the hacking rules. Our current campaign removes Extended tests and replaces them with simple Opposed tests similar to the Magic system, which works WAY faster at the expense of removing the suspenseful turn-by-turn blow-by-blow account of the hacking, which no one really cares about (at least, in our group).
I always liked the damage system in 3rd edition. Basically, you have ten "hitpoints" for physical damage, and ten for stun (non-lethal) damage.
Weapons would do Light, Moderate, Serious or Deadly damage, meaning (if I remember correctly) 1, 3, 5 and 7 points of damage each. If you take stun damage and fill your stun bar, it starts overflowing into physical damage.
A weapon could do 3M damage (3 Moderate). The 3 is your target number to hit when you resist the damage - if you had no body armor (that I can't remember the rules for anyway, it's been 10+ years damnit), you'd roll your Body stat versus the target number. With Body 6 you roll six dice. The target number is 3, so every two dice that result in a 3+ stage the damage down one step. Two successes stages it down from Moderate to Light, four successes stages it down from Light to no damage at all.
It was a fair bit of dice rolling (especially when our dwarven physical adept blew his entire combat and karma pool at once to make a roll and we had to go look in the kitchen for a small bucket), but I really liked the system.
I always liked the damage system in 3rd edition. Basically, you have ten "hitpoints" for physical damage, and ten for stun (non-lethal) damage.
Weapons would do Light, Moderate, Serious or Deadly damage, meaning (if I remember correctly) 1, 3, 5 and 7 points of damage each. If you take stun damage and fill your stun bar, it starts overflowing into physical damage.
A weapon could do 3M damage (3 Moderate). The 3 is your target number to hit when you resist the damage - if you had no body armor (that I can't remember the rules for anyway, it's been 10+ years damnit), you'd roll your Body stat versus the target number. With Body 6 you roll six dice. The target number is 3, so every two dice that result in a 3+ stage the damage down one step. Two successes stages it down from Moderate to Light, four successes stages it down from Light to no damage at all.
It was a fair bit of dice rolling (especially when our dwarven physical adept blew his entire combat and karma pool at once to make a roll and we had to go look in the kitchen for a small bucket), but I really liked the system.
Don't even get me started on sniping at extreme range. Our Face/Street Sam could do it well enough, but you had to go through four indexes and three tables to get everything down. Then you had dozens of dice to pour into the damned roll.
What was worse was our GM was an engineer who wanted to inject "realism" into the game, so we literally had tables and trig calculations for wind sheer and every freaking effect you could imagine on top of it all.
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Mostlyjoe13Evil, Evil, Jump for joy!Registered Userregular
edited April 2012
4E isn't much better for weird hangups. Most combat casters want to be trolls. Why? Because they can overdrive spells to do almost impossible to save damage. But need the stamina to cast it and not kill themselves They kinda errated it, but still the image of huge trolls running aroud overcasting spells pops up in games.
FASA and its successors have always been terrible at book layouts, though. They are famous for tab stop errors like "PPC 10". There was a time that they had one piece of gear per page (the Street Samurai Catalog, Fields of Fire) with nice tables and additional rules in the back, and that worked well. Catalyst is sort of going back to that with their new mini-sourcebooks (not the major ones, but the smaller ones less than 100 pages) in 4th edition, but the early 4th edition books and nearly all of the 3rd edition books have poor layouts that make it difficult to look up rules. It's not as bad as, say, Arc Dream (I love ORE to death, but they have really bad rulebooks), but they could take some lessons from GURPS.
Love Steve Jackson Games so much for their heavily indexed books. They are the kings of cross reference. Catalyst Games does okay, but man I HATED digging around in the appendixes for gear.
I dunno, I don't think that's something that can definitely be gleaned from what's on the Kickstarter page. The four "classes" they have listed seem to be there purely to illustrate the different ways a character can percieve the environment, not so much a description of intended skill architecture.
That's what I'm hoping for. The problem with these Kickstarters is that they sell dreams to people with money to fund them. There's no way of telling whether or not the dreams will become a reality.
This has been my thought all along. I'm just waiting for the inevitable string of terrible games funded through Kickstarter that kills the idea forever.
It's not like the innumerable bad investments throughout history killed the idea of investing. A game put out by a publisher failing didn't kill the traditional software publishing model, so I'm not sure why it would kill the kickstarter idea. I think if somebody just absconds with the money it will push us towards safeguards traditional in investing, with some sort of investor ombudsman monitoring the project. Unless you give that person the power to kill it and recoup whatever money is left that power's ultimately meaningless though. I think what you'll see is people will move towards smaller donation amounts because a larger donation has a huge exposure without the according authority one has in a traditional investment product.
I dunno, I don't think that's something that can definitely be gleaned from what's on the Kickstarter page. The four "classes" they have listed seem to be there purely to illustrate the different ways a character can percieve the environment, not so much a description of intended skill architecture.
That's what I'm hoping for. The problem with these Kickstarters is that they sell dreams to people with money to fund them. There's no way of telling whether or not the dreams will become a reality.
This has been my thought all along. I'm just waiting for the inevitable string of terrible games funded through Kickstarter that kills the idea forever.
It's not like the innumerable bad investments throughout history killed the idea of investing. A game put out by a publisher failing didn't kill the traditional software publishing model, so I'm not sure why it would kill the kickstarter idea. I think if somebody just absconds with the money it will push us towards safeguards traditional in investing, with some sort of investor ombudsman monitoring the project. Unless you give that person the power to kill it and recoup whatever money is left that power's ultimately meaningless though. I think what you'll see is people will move towards smaller donation amounts because a larger donation has a huge exposure without the according authority one has in a traditional investment product.
The public has a very exacting view of investing though. We're the same group that often voices the opinion that buying an already made game gives us a stake in what's supposed to be in it. If Kickstarter begins to churn out poor games, then people will begin to be very vocal about what they want in the games they fund, because, "hey, we paid for you to make the game, now you have to listen to us".
Alright, imagine the reactions to Mass Effect 3's ending. Now imagine that if people weren't just feeling entitled to get their way because they paid 60$ for the game, but that they actually had a lot to back that up because they actually put up the funds to make that happen. They could actually have a nice legal standing to say that they were invested in the process and the game designer didn't listen to them. This is a terrible situation, because once this becomes realized, the games made are going to be less creative and more bland because they'll have to listen to the demands of the funders.
To a designer is seems like a great way to get their fringe idea off the ground, to the funders it looks like a good way to have input into how the game is made.
I'm not really familiar with the Shadowrun franchise, from what I gather it sounds like Arcanum mashed up with Neuromancer.
That's a surprisingly on-point description.
Whereas Arcanum is a magical world that's going through a technological revolution, Shadowrun is about the modern world (+ some dystopian near-future-cyber-noir elements; e.g., international megacorps rule all!) having magic suddenly wake up again. It causes all kinds of people to mutate into elves, trolls, etc., and BTW dragons are real and you don't want to piss them off, even if you've got some high-tech hardware on-hand.
It's more like Arcanum mashed up with Snow Crash. But yeah, that's pretty much the right way to put it. I also updated the OP with more info, including a link to the Shadowrun wiki at the bottom which is fun to read.
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Ninja Snarl PMy helmet is my burden.Ninja Snarl: Gone, but not forgotten.Registered Userregular
I'm not really familiar with the Shadowrun franchise, from what I gather it sounds like Arcanum mashed up with Neuromancer.
That's a surprisingly on-point description.
Whereas Arcanum is a magical world that's going through a technological revolution, Shadowrun is about the modern world (+ some dystopian near-future-cyber-noir elements; e.g., international megacorps rule all!) having magic suddenly wake up again. It causes all kinds of people to mutate into elves, trolls, etc., and BTW dragons are real and you don't want to piss them off, even if you've got some high-tech hardware on-hand.
I remember reading somewhere that any major dragon in Shadowrun is supposed to be so beefed up that no amount of min-maxing will ever allow a player to overpower them. I like that sort of thing; Shadowrun isn't supposed to be about making ultra-powerful godlike characters, it's supposed to be about building characters that can survive the runs they undertake and potentially become someone pretty legendary.
Forget a dragon crushing you like an ant... Never sign a contract with one!
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Ninja Snarl PMy helmet is my burden.Ninja Snarl: Gone, but not forgotten.Registered Userregular
Yeah, it should always be pretty much a given that the dragon you're dealing with could just annihilate you if it so chose, so you shouldn't be worried about that so much as what kind of a game it's playing and why.
Basically, every encounter with a dragon should make the player paranoid about everything, even after the dragon is supposedly done with the player.
Wow this takes me back. About 3 years ago or so I got my wish fulfilled. I found every single Carrette Vol 1 Novel down in Portland Ore in that huge used bookstore. I might have to give them another readthrough now.
FS's base gameplay mechanics are actually fairly simple to get to grips with I'd say. The real depth to the gameplay comes from the wheels-within-wheels you start doing when you're trying to anticipate your human opponent's actions.
It's more like Arcanum mashed up with Snow Crash. But yeah, that's pretty much the right way to put it. I also updated the OP with more info, including a link to the Shadowrun wiki at the bottom which is fun to read.
Hey, I wrote that original Century Ferret article!
I remember reading somewhere that any major dragon in Shadowrun is supposed to be so beefed up that no amount of min-maxing will ever allow a player to overpower them. I like that sort of thing; Shadowrun isn't supposed to be about making ultra-powerful godlike characters, it's supposed to be about building characters that can survive the runs they undertake and potentially become someone pretty legendary.
The old litmus test for a bad Shadowrun GM: if he/she lets you kill a Great Dragon of any kind. That's when I stop listening to you babble about your Shadowrun campaign (not you, Ninja Snarl P, just people in general). Unfortunately, Great Dragons DO have stats (the munchkin rule: if it has stats, you can kill it), and under every rules edition, there is sufficient firepower to kill one if you have enough money and resources (especially if you abuse the explosives rules).
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EshTending bar. FFXIV. Motorcycles.Portland, ORRegistered Userregular
I remember reading somewhere that any major dragon in Shadowrun is supposed to be so beefed up that no amount of min-maxing will ever allow a player to overpower them. I like that sort of thing; Shadowrun isn't supposed to be about making ultra-powerful godlike characters, it's supposed to be about building characters that can survive the runs they undertake and potentially become someone pretty legendary.
The old litmus test for a bad Shadowrun GM: if he/she lets you kill a Great Dragon of any kind. That's when I stop listening to you babble about your Shadowrun campaign (not you, Ninja Snarl P, just people in general). Unfortunately, Great Dragons DO have stats (the munchkin rule: if it has stats, you can kill it), and under every rules edition, there is sufficient firepower to kill one if you have enough money and resources (especially if you abuse the explosives rules).
I imagine any dragon is going to have a network of informants who will let it know WAY in advance if anyone is planning on trying to kill it. Then it'll squash the runners like bugs. It's not a matter of just a 1-on-1 slugfest.
Yeah, I never understood the games where people could kill Lofwyr, etc. I mean, the novel runners are basically the legendary figures of Shadowrun, and the best they come out with is "Remember that time Lofwyr was involved in a run, and it looked like we were totally hooped, only then we lived? Man. Good times."
Of course, my GMed Shadowrun game became our group's 'let off steam and goof off' game. But hey, if a giant stupid troll who thinks Chicago is Toronto is wrong, hey I don't wanna be right. They sure as fuck never killed a dragon.
Also, I can't help but notice I'm getting a monthly bonus from work that's enough to get me the hardcover anthology kickstarter level... with enough left over to buy some 4th edition rulebooks. Hmm.
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KadokenGiving Ends to my Friends and it Feels StupendousRegistered Userregular
edited April 2012
If Earthdawn and Shadowrun is in the same universe, why was magic gone for so long?
I think Earthdawn is roman to renaissance.
Edit: let me retract that. Huh, I thought they were, but a trip to Wikipedia doesn't have a direct link.
The setting of Earthdawn is the same world as Shadowrun (i.e. a fictionalized version of Earth), but takes place millennia earlier.
Found it.
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AegeriTiny wee bacteriumsPlateau of LengRegistered Userregular
Man, this game is funded already?
So happy. So very, very, very happy.
I wonder if they will go for a Fallout, Jagged Alliance 2 or new XCOM (Move/Action) style of turn based combat. I am excited! So many great new turn based RPGs being made, I'm just in fucking heaven right now.
So happy to see this and that they are going with 2050. I like my future with mirroshades and chromeblades. Who needs wireless anyway? [handwave]A full Matrix projection cannot fit into a usable amount of wireless spectrum. Fiber optics are required.[/handwave] It also adds a dramatic element in terms of deckers being tethered to a location.
I found the only way to have deckers not make the game suck is that they have to do stuff simultaneously with the meatspace crew. For example, get this door open while the samurais hold off an overwhelming ambush. Or mcguffin that they will only have a handful of minutes to connect to the run site (the satellite will only be at the right azimuth then; or you can only be undetected while nightly backups are run) during the same time of which the runners go in. Basically, treat it as an overlay world where the decker affects the runners and the runners open up possibilities for the decker.
Colt Manhunter for life.
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cj iwakuraThe Rhythm RegentBears The Name FreedomRegistered Userregular
So happy to see this and that they are going with 2050. I like my future with mirroshades and chromeblades. Who needs wireless anyway? [handwave]A full Matrix projection cannot fit into a usable amount of wireless spectrum. Fiber optics are required.[/handwave] It also adds a dramatic element in terms of deckers being tethered to a location.
... which sucks in face-to-face games, but should present absolutely no issue when designing a single-player RPG.
AegeriTiny wee bacteriumsPlateau of LengRegistered Userregular
Yeah, things like that are huge issues in a PnP game but in a SP RPG? Who cares: You're just letting the player do what they want. Although I would be careful of making entire subsystems that the player never has to use or experience. So hopefully party members will be able to do that, but give you control over it so it doesn't feel like the CPU is doing something important for you.
I'm not really familiar with the Shadowrun franchise, from what I gather it sounds like Arcanum mashed up with Neuromancer.
That's a surprisingly on-point description.
Whereas Arcanum is a magical world that's going through a technological revolution, Shadowrun is about the modern world (+ some dystopian near-future-cyber-noir elements; e.g., international megacorps rule all!) having magic suddenly wake up again. It causes all kinds of people to mutate into elves, trolls, etc., and BTW dragons are real and you don't want to piss them off, even if you've got some high-tech hardware on-hand.
I remember reading somewhere that any major dragon in Shadowrun is supposed to be so beefed up that no amount of min-maxing will ever allow a player to overpower them. I like that sort of thing; Shadowrun isn't supposed to be about making ultra-powerful godlike characters, it's supposed to be about building characters that can survive the runs they undertake and potentially become someone pretty legendary.
In the game, a real great dragon will never let you get close to killing it. Dragons in Shadowrun aren't just powerful physically, they're supposed to be smarter than the runners and better connected. Even the least dragon has entire corporations under it's control and more shadowrunners in it's pocket than you can imagine. If your DM lets you kill a dragon, they're doing the race a disservice. Dragons only enter into a plan if they have all their bases covered. Which means leverage on the players as well as physical deterrents, and most often just being hard as hell to find.
These are the guys who build and destroy megacorps just to act as dummies for their actions, and they so many resources at their side that they might as well be unlimited to the standard player's POV.
If Earthdawn and Shadowrun is in the same universe, why was magic gone for so long?
I think Earthdawn is roman to renaissance.
Edit: let me retract that. Huh, I thought they were, but a trip to Wikipedia doesn't have a direct link.
The setting of Earthdawn is the same world as Shadowrun (i.e. a fictionalized version of Earth), but takes place millennia earlier.
Found it.
The world of Shadowrun and Earthdawn goes in cycles like the Mayan calender (and yeah, they were doing it before it was cool, but much better!). Mana, or magic, rises and falls in waves, never staying around for too long but way longer than we'll ever see. The periods work a bit like soundwaves, but with wavelength measured from the median of the waves rather than the peaks (amplitude 0). So, for instance, as mana raised at the advent of Earthdawn and passed the level where partially mana based beings could live on Earth, a new "World" began. Specifically the "Fourth World". As it dropped past the point where mana based beings could no longer live the in the world and had to either die out or retreat to the Astral Plane, Earth entered the "Fifth World" containing the vast majority of known human civilization. Shadowrun starts at the advent of the "Sixth World" happening actually around 2011, not 2012, as the mana levels rise to the point where mana based beings return.
It's worth pointing out that Dragons and Elves are not necessarily mana based beings but certainly influenced by it physically. They choose to hide themselves due to the loss of mana greatly reducing their ability to defend themselves. There are also mana spikes and dips that happen all the time, in all worlds, which create areas of magic in non-magical worlds, create magical null zones in worlds of magic, and can create havoc when the spikes and dips line up with the type of world they happen in causing rampant and uncontrolled mana in magic using worlds and huge gulfs of negative mana in worlds without magic. There are elves that are born into our mundane world during these mana spikes, creating clinically immortal time travelers who live through much of history forced to hide themselves.
The Shadowrun writers like to reference back to Earthdawn in an in-joke sort of way. For instance, much of Dunklezhan's will referenced back and forth between established Shadowrun lore and Earthdawn.
Oh, and if you don't know Dunkelzhan?
The Big D as he's known to Shadowrunners on the Shadowland BBS. When magic started "coming back" a lot of confusion was happening, at first Elves and Dwarfs were being born to normal humans, strange animals started to appear, the USA was shattered politically and physically by a retaliatory act of the native american people known as "the Great Ghost Dance", people were suddenly able to do real magic with ceremonies that used to do nothing...
...and dragons started to appear!
Nobody knew what was going on! The world went into a panic, there were riots, arrests of normal citizens, a lot of innocent deaths were caused by the shear terror the emerging metahuman world caused. Then a dragon appeared near Cherry Creek Lake, Denver.... and he just stayed there. Eventually a reporter named Holly Brighton had the guts to go up to him and ask questions, to which he, presumably through his first "translator" answered. This interview went on for an amazing 12 hours straight with Dunkelzhan, that was the dragon's name, answering every question he was asked and trying to calm to confusion over this new world. After this he became famous, he started his own radio show to answer more questions, he was able to gain citizenship through a special act of congress, and eventually, he put himself up for president as an independent when an election year came 40 years after first appearing. And he won!
I should point something out though, since you probably just got all sorts to weird images if you're hearing this for the first time, Dragons can take a "metahuman" form, so you can stop imagining a several story tall dragon doing a press conference in a cramped room.
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This has been my thought all along. I'm just waiting for the inevitable string of terrible games funded through Kickstarter that kills the idea forever.
Actually that guy left a year ago joining Turtle Rock. He did initial design for W2 while they were looking for publishers.
And Obsidian would be capable enough off pulling it off, IMO. Tim Cain was the main driving force behind it (and Troika) and while it was a team effort (Arcanum especially) there were other members beside those three.
Chris Jones is already at Obsidian and has pitched a sequel to Activision multiple times. Sadly, without luck.
I don't think Boyarsky will leave his job at Blizzard and its questionable if Anderson does as he rejoined some ex-Troika people at Turtle Rock. Except of course, if they suddenly get the urge to do "rpgs" again. Would be cool, though.
Oh, and whoever decided that using the "DV" acronym to mean "drain value" one moment and "damage value" the next should have been taken out the back and shot. That's 30 minutes of confusion trying to work out magic rules right there.
SR4 20th anniversary edition has a LOT of great stories in it, though. Every section is prefaced with a short story. It's still Shadowrun, but it's Shadowrun that has matured and pushed forward rather than wallowed in razors and chrome. Think more along the lines of Minority Report (slick and modern) than Blade Runner (dark and gritty).
The combat is complicated, but most combat involving modern firearms and lethal combat are complicated, especially when there's a cover mechanic. There's nothing stopping you from writing down your typical actions on cards, if you need a quick reference, and playing them like power cards in DnD.
FASA and its successors have always been terrible at book layouts, though. They are famous for tab stop errors like "PPC 10". There was a time that they had one piece of gear per page (the Street Samurai Catalog, Fields of Fire) with nice tables and additional rules in the back, and that worked well. Catalyst is sort of going back to that with their new mini-sourcebooks (not the major ones, but the smaller ones less than 100 pages) in 4th edition, but the early 4th edition books and nearly all of the 3rd edition books have poor layouts that make it difficult to look up rules. It's not as bad as, say, Arc Dream (I love ORE to death, but they have really bad rulebooks), but they could take some lessons from GURPS.
There are a lot of things that Shadowrun players tend to house-rule. First is quicker combat by either ignoring certain rules, or coming up with simpler new rules... a common example is Cover and Barrier rules, which are important, but add to complexity. The second is the hacking rules. Our current campaign removes Extended tests and replaces them with simple Opposed tests similar to the Magic system, which works WAY faster at the expense of removing the suspenseful turn-by-turn blow-by-blow account of the hacking, which no one really cares about (at least, in our group).
Weapons would do Light, Moderate, Serious or Deadly damage, meaning (if I remember correctly) 1, 3, 5 and 7 points of damage each. If you take stun damage and fill your stun bar, it starts overflowing into physical damage.
A weapon could do 3M damage (3 Moderate). The 3 is your target number to hit when you resist the damage - if you had no body armor (that I can't remember the rules for anyway, it's been 10+ years damnit), you'd roll your Body stat versus the target number. With Body 6 you roll six dice. The target number is 3, so every two dice that result in a 3+ stage the damage down one step. Two successes stages it down from Moderate to Light, four successes stages it down from Light to no damage at all.
It was a fair bit of dice rolling (especially when our dwarven physical adept blew his entire combat and karma pool at once to make a roll and we had to go look in the kitchen for a small bucket), but I really liked the system.
What was worse was our GM was an engineer who wanted to inject "realism" into the game, so we literally had tables and trig calculations for wind sheer and every freaking effect you could imagine on top of it all.
Love Steve Jackson Games so much for their heavily indexed books. They are the kings of cross reference. Catalyst Games does okay, but man I HATED digging around in the appendixes for gear.
Then I got home and watched the video on that page. Trying to decide exactly how much of my money is going to be thrown at this now.
lulz
It's not like the innumerable bad investments throughout history killed the idea of investing. A game put out by a publisher failing didn't kill the traditional software publishing model, so I'm not sure why it would kill the kickstarter idea. I think if somebody just absconds with the money it will push us towards safeguards traditional in investing, with some sort of investor ombudsman monitoring the project. Unless you give that person the power to kill it and recoup whatever money is left that power's ultimately meaningless though. I think what you'll see is people will move towards smaller donation amounts because a larger donation has a huge exposure without the according authority one has in a traditional investment product.
The public has a very exacting view of investing though. We're the same group that often voices the opinion that buying an already made game gives us a stake in what's supposed to be in it. If Kickstarter begins to churn out poor games, then people will begin to be very vocal about what they want in the games they fund, because, "hey, we paid for you to make the game, now you have to listen to us".
Alright, imagine the reactions to Mass Effect 3's ending. Now imagine that if people weren't just feeling entitled to get their way because they paid 60$ for the game, but that they actually had a lot to back that up because they actually put up the funds to make that happen. They could actually have a nice legal standing to say that they were invested in the process and the game designer didn't listen to them. This is a terrible situation, because once this becomes realized, the games made are going to be less creative and more bland because they'll have to listen to the demands of the funders.
To a designer is seems like a great way to get their fringe idea off the ground, to the funders it looks like a good way to have input into how the game is made.
Whereas Arcanum is a magical world that's going through a technological revolution, Shadowrun is about the modern world (+ some dystopian near-future-cyber-noir elements; e.g., international megacorps rule all!) having magic suddenly wake up again. It causes all kinds of people to mutate into elves, trolls, etc., and BTW dragons are real and you don't want to piss them off, even if you've got some high-tech hardware on-hand.
Steam: Elvenshae // PSN: Elvenshae // WotC: Elvenshae
Wilds of Aladrion: [https://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/comment/43159014/#Comment_43159014]Ellandryn[/url]
I remember reading somewhere that any major dragon in Shadowrun is supposed to be so beefed up that no amount of min-maxing will ever allow a player to overpower them. I like that sort of thing; Shadowrun isn't supposed to be about making ultra-powerful godlike characters, it's supposed to be about building characters that can survive the runs they undertake and potentially become someone pretty legendary.
Basically, every encounter with a dragon should make the player paranoid about everything, even after the dragon is supposedly done with the player.
FS's base gameplay mechanics are actually fairly simple to get to grips with I'd say. The real depth to the gameplay comes from the wheels-within-wheels you start doing when you're trying to anticipate your human opponent's actions.
I imagine any dragon is going to have a network of informants who will let it know WAY in advance if anyone is planning on trying to kill it. Then it'll squash the runners like bugs. It's not a matter of just a 1-on-1 slugfest.
EDIT: Looks like the Kickstarter for Shadowrun just got a green light on FARK.com.
Funny related meme from that thread...
Of course, my GMed Shadowrun game became our group's 'let off steam and goof off' game. But hey, if a giant stupid troll who thinks Chicago is Toronto is wrong, hey I don't wanna be right. They sure as fuck never killed a dragon.
Also, I can't help but notice I'm getting a monthly bonus from work that's enough to get me the hardcover anthology kickstarter level... with enough left over to buy some 4th edition rulebooks. Hmm.
I think Earthdawn is roman to renaissance.
Edit: let me retract that. Huh, I thought they were, but a trip to Wikipedia doesn't have a direct link.
Found it.
So happy. So very, very, very happy.
I wonder if they will go for a Fallout, Jagged Alliance 2 or new XCOM (Move/Action) style of turn based combat. I am excited! So many great new turn based RPGs being made, I'm just in fucking heaven right now.
I found the only way to have deckers not make the game suck is that they have to do stuff simultaneously with the meatspace crew. For example, get this door open while the samurais hold off an overwhelming ambush. Or mcguffin that they will only have a handful of minutes to connect to the run site (the satellite will only be at the right azimuth then; or you can only be undetected while nightly backups are run) during the same time of which the runners go in. Basically, treat it as an overlay world where the decker affects the runners and the runners open up possibilities for the decker.
Colt Manhunter for life.
http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=469268
(Unless you all think it deserves its own thread.)
So I guess prejudice against gay people still exists even in the future
....(thinks about it for a minute)..Oh! Now I get it. Heh heh, homocide.
... which sucks in face-to-face games, but should present absolutely no issue when designing a single-player RPG.
Steam: Elvenshae // PSN: Elvenshae // WotC: Elvenshae
Wilds of Aladrion: [https://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/comment/43159014/#Comment_43159014]Ellandryn[/url]
In the game, a real great dragon will never let you get close to killing it. Dragons in Shadowrun aren't just powerful physically, they're supposed to be smarter than the runners and better connected. Even the least dragon has entire corporations under it's control and more shadowrunners in it's pocket than you can imagine. If your DM lets you kill a dragon, they're doing the race a disservice. Dragons only enter into a plan if they have all their bases covered. Which means leverage on the players as well as physical deterrents, and most often just being hard as hell to find.
These are the guys who build and destroy megacorps just to act as dummies for their actions, and they so many resources at their side that they might as well be unlimited to the standard player's POV.
The world of Shadowrun and Earthdawn goes in cycles like the Mayan calender (and yeah, they were doing it before it was cool, but much better!). Mana, or magic, rises and falls in waves, never staying around for too long but way longer than we'll ever see. The periods work a bit like soundwaves, but with wavelength measured from the median of the waves rather than the peaks (amplitude 0). So, for instance, as mana raised at the advent of Earthdawn and passed the level where partially mana based beings could live on Earth, a new "World" began. Specifically the "Fourth World". As it dropped past the point where mana based beings could no longer live the in the world and had to either die out or retreat to the Astral Plane, Earth entered the "Fifth World" containing the vast majority of known human civilization. Shadowrun starts at the advent of the "Sixth World" happening actually around 2011, not 2012, as the mana levels rise to the point where mana based beings return.
It's worth pointing out that Dragons and Elves are not necessarily mana based beings but certainly influenced by it physically. They choose to hide themselves due to the loss of mana greatly reducing their ability to defend themselves. There are also mana spikes and dips that happen all the time, in all worlds, which create areas of magic in non-magical worlds, create magical null zones in worlds of magic, and can create havoc when the spikes and dips line up with the type of world they happen in causing rampant and uncontrolled mana in magic using worlds and huge gulfs of negative mana in worlds without magic. There are elves that are born into our mundane world during these mana spikes, creating clinically immortal time travelers who live through much of history forced to hide themselves.
The Shadowrun writers like to reference back to Earthdawn in an in-joke sort of way. For instance, much of Dunklezhan's will referenced back and forth between established Shadowrun lore and Earthdawn.
Oh, and if you don't know Dunkelzhan?
The Big D as he's known to Shadowrunners on the Shadowland BBS. When magic started "coming back" a lot of confusion was happening, at first Elves and Dwarfs were being born to normal humans, strange animals started to appear, the USA was shattered politically and physically by a retaliatory act of the native american people known as "the Great Ghost Dance", people were suddenly able to do real magic with ceremonies that used to do nothing...
...and dragons started to appear!
Nobody knew what was going on! The world went into a panic, there were riots, arrests of normal citizens, a lot of innocent deaths were caused by the shear terror the emerging metahuman world caused. Then a dragon appeared near Cherry Creek Lake, Denver.... and he just stayed there. Eventually a reporter named Holly Brighton had the guts to go up to him and ask questions, to which he, presumably through his first "translator" answered. This interview went on for an amazing 12 hours straight with Dunkelzhan, that was the dragon's name, answering every question he was asked and trying to calm to confusion over this new world. After this he became famous, he started his own radio show to answer more questions, he was able to gain citizenship through a special act of congress, and eventually, he put himself up for president as an independent when an election year came 40 years after first appearing. And he won!
I should point something out though, since you probably just got all sorts to weird images if you're hearing this for the first time, Dragons can take a "metahuman" form, so you can stop imagining a several story tall dragon doing a press conference in a cramped room.