I've played Cypher! Our group played The Strange for a few months.
I didn't like it, felt too abstract and I really hate abstract RPG's. I like lists of things and picking things out of those lists and putting them on my sheet and using them later and having finite rules for how they work. I don't like playing make-believe but for adults, because my imagination sucks and I have no creativity.
I'm prepping a Genesys campaign for some IRL friends (will be played over Discord), and I'm considering including languages. I don't want it to be a binary "know the language or not", but still include languages for both lore reasons and to jazz up social interactions, at least at the beginning. The PCs, being exceptional people, will be able to communicate with anyone, but there is always the possibility for miscommunication if they aren't fully fluent in a language. So my idea is that the PCs will choose two languages in which they are fluent, and a PC that starts with ranks in a particular Knowledge skill, in my world it's a Knowledge (Culture) skill, is fluent in a third language. For those they aren't fluent in, they will add a number of Setback dice (determined by me, the GM) due to their unfamiliarity. Over time, these setbacks can be overcome as they become more comfortable in a language and they gain the ability to converse in the language, even if they might not be fully fluent. Basically, no one is locked out of conversation if they don't "know" a language, but there can still be hurdles to overcome.
I think it might be a neat mechanic, even if it might be a little bit of a hassle to adjudicate.
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StragintDo Not GiftAlways DeclinesRegistered Userregular
What is the difference between the new Shsdowrun 6th Seattle edition rulebook and the previous 6th version?
Can I DM Shadowrun on roll20?
And does anyone have any good guides for how to play Shadowrun? I bought the beginner box and I'm finally gonna play with this upcoming weekend or next but I want to be fully prepared as the DM for it.
PSN: Reaper_Stragint, Steam: DoublePitstoChesty
What is the point of being alive if you don't at least try to do something remarkable? ~ Mario Novak
I never fear death or dyin', I only fear never trying.
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NipsHe/HimLuxuriating in existential crisis.Registered Userregular
What is the difference between the new Shsdowrun 6th Seattle edition rulebook and the previous 6th version?
Can I DM Shadowrun on roll20?
And does anyone have any good guides for how to play Shadowrun? I bought the beginner box and I'm finally gonna play with this upcoming weekend or next but I want to be fully prepared as the DM for it.
I see a (German) Shadowrun 6E character sheet in Roll20, so the answer is Probably? Roll20's flexible enough you can probably run it, even without built-in character sheets. Just make sure you look at the roll syntax for dice pools; check Roll20's wiki.
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cj iwakuraThe Rhythm RegentBears The Name FreedomRegistered Userregular
The hardest part about running Shadowrun is the game's rule set seeming dead set on making it as unapproachable as possible.
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NipsHe/HimLuxuriating in existential crisis.Registered Userregular
Last I played was back in 3E, and that was always the same complaint about every edition up to that point. It was never that bad if you had a DM that knew the rules well enough, and then didn't get hung up on minutia (which, to the point, was why complaints about the system existed why they did).
I only have surface-level knowledge of 6E, and if the talk of streamline systems and whatnot is even half true it'll be a better time than Ye Old Editions.
That said, I agree that if I were running a cyberpunk-style game in this day and age, I'd be using a hack of one of Blades/Apocalypse World/FATE or other small-press game instead, mostly out of the level of investment required to get up to snuff with SR6.
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tzeentchlingDoctor of RocksOaklandRegistered Userregular
edited June 2022
Played a 1-shot of Brinkwood the other day at a gaming convention. Forged In the Dark style rule-set, you're using special primordial Masks given to you by fae creatures to battle the invading, aristocratic, industrial vampires that have come to take over and rule your lands. The contrast there, and similarities with real-world struggles against rich landed people, felt a bit on-the-nose for our session, but that may have been the DM and her interpretation of the story. I did like some of the mechanics of the game, including resisting consequences, and the Masks give you opportunities to turn failures into successes - at the cost of being barred from accessing part of your character or interacting with the world in some way. The Mask might Ban you from laughter or making merry, for instance, which would in practice affect your ability to roll to convince or gather information in some places.
I had one excellent moment where, when Consorting with a young noble to get information, ended up rolling (6,6,6) on my three d6. Given that two sixes in any size roll is automatically a critical success, this basically made her immediately my bosom friend for the next few scenes, giving my party a place to stay in a strange town and access to the vampire noble's manor that we wouldn't have normally been able to have.
tzeentchling on
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StragintDo Not GiftAlways DeclinesRegistered Userregular
Shadowrun definitely seems like a large scale thing to get into. The core rulebook is almost 400 pages and I'm not sure if it is like the 40K/AoS rulebook where most of it is lore and can be condensed down to like 50 pages or if all of it is relevant.
I also don't know what the difference between the 6th edition core rulebook and the 6th edition Seattle core rulebook is but the digital version of the rulebook I have automatically updated to the Seattle version.
I really like the setting and I'd really like to learn to play but I can't find anyone who has ever played 6th edition so I'm starting to wonder if it is just a really bad system that no one wants to play or if Shadowrun is just really niche. I always kind of assumed it was popular with it being a 6th edition.
PSN: Reaper_Stragint, Steam: DoublePitstoChesty
What is the point of being alive if you don't at least try to do something remarkable? ~ Mario Novak
I never fear death or dyin', I only fear never trying.
So if you have a dice pool of 12, you use: /r 12d6>5 and it'll report your successes (dice with a result of 5 or better).
If you used Edge and have exploding dice, you use /r 12d6>5! and it'll roll extra dice on 6's.
I haven't played 6E, I'm not saying 5E is amazingly good or anything, but I've heard nothing good about 6E at all. Some of the game designers who worked on it have been vocal about how Catalyst eschewed some stuff they had put together that were necessary for the parts that they kept to function properly.
Kinda like designing a car and eschewing the wheels but keeping the engine.
StragintDo Not GiftAlways DeclinesRegistered Userregular
Got ready to run the beginner campaign for shadowrun 6th edition and I immediately forgot the rules from the quick start guide and we ended up not playing at my decision.
Gonna give it another try in a few weeks after I read through the rules some more.
Rigging and hacking seem confusing as fuck.
Played a rpg called Honey Heist instead.
PSN: Reaper_Stragint, Steam: DoublePitstoChesty
What is the point of being alive if you don't at least try to do something remarkable? ~ Mario Novak
I never fear death or dyin', I only fear never trying.
Got ready to run the beginner campaign for shadowrun 6th edition and I immediately forgot the rules from the quick start guide and we ended up not playing at my decision.
Gonna give it another try in a few weeks after I read through the rules some more.
Rigging and hacking seem confusing as fuck.
Played a rpg called Honey Heist instead.
Just play Cyber-Honey Heist instead. You're all Cyberbears. You just put cyber infront of everything and you're basically playing Shadowrun.
Rigging and Hacking and Astral Shit have always been confusing as fuck and about 50% of that is the rulebooks using confusing as fuck language to describe what the fuck is going on. Or just actively avoiding description entirely.
The new Hunter: The Reckoning is alright. The corebook clocks in a little content-light for my tastes, but it's a solid foundation if you like the V5 system and the general World of Darkness vibe.
I think the new Shadowrun 6E Seattle book may have a better layout? I haven't looked too deeply on it, but this is usually true when they repackage a core book.
There are specific things that Shadowrun 6E streamlines (which is good!*) but 6E also ADDS completely unnecessary mechanics to service a half-assed version of a narrative currency which they have shoehorned the old "Edge" attribute into. It also adds "Wild Dice" for no reason, which is a set of dice that doesn't work like ALL of the other rolls in the game. Some specific quibbles that I have:
1) Each weapon has 5 separate numbers that indicate how "good" it is at different ranges. If this value exceeds a different value by 4, then you get an Edge (the narrative currency). You have to make this comparison each time you hit something, and it's one of the primary methods of gaining Edge that doesn't hinge on Qualities or Gear or Magic or whatnot. WHY IS IT 4?? Why can't you just compare against a single number and see if it exceeds that number? Why not gauge that value so that you can do a straight comparison? And even then, why have the weapons down this level of minutiae? You don't need to have separate attack values for separate range brackets! This is one of the two things that slows down the already-slow Shadowrun combat to molasses.
2) The other thing is the way you can spend Edge, the narrative currency. Instead of giving you one or two easy to remember options, there are whole tables with varying values on how to spend one Edge or two Edge or four Edge or whatever. There's a huge amount of paralysis of choice involved with this, and that's not what narrative currency is supposed to be about.
This is on top of having ridiculous rules like exactly HOW much of a boom does a bomb make, or rules and tables for treading water.
If they hadn't gone whole hog on the Edge system and made it an optional thing that you could slap onto the basic mechanics, the base game would be a LOT easier and faster to run.
Shadowrun, in all editions, suffers from having three or four SEPARATE mechanics to deal with the various spheres of play in the game. You can break it down into "Astral/Magic", "Mundane/Physical", "Digital/Hacking", and "Vehicle/Drone", and each of those have completely different mechanics. It's like playing 4 different RPGs instead one cohesive game. I've been playing Shadowrun for nigh on 30 years at this point, and it's fairly easy for me to run now, but every other game seems easy by comparison to it. I will say that it's much easier to integrate hacking with the Mundane stuff in the 4th and 5th editions of the game than all of the other editions (in past editions, Hacking was its own minidungeon, and it sucked), and magic has always been "different rules, but 1:1 correlation with affecting the Physical plane" so it wasn't so bad (Magic is "What if I could do more versatile things than normal humans, but every time it hurts me a little?"). Vehicle/Drone stuff has always been a bear to integrate, though, and you're definitely going to be playing a separate game of "Vroom Vroom Cars" every time that portion of the run comes up.
EDIT: I LOVE Shadowrun, don't get me wrong. I have started up a 5E Shadowrun campaign recently, and I've been playing it off and on for most of my life. It's a very specific flavor that no other RPG touches. But you have to have a gaming group that is as invested as you are to play it, and among the editions, the one I can recommend for actual play is 5th edition. 6th edition just makes too many questionable non-optional decisions with its tacked on mechanics. And it wouldn't be so bad if they didn't balance all of their things around those added unnecessary mechanics and just focused on making a streamlined and playable game. I LOVE Narrative Currency games, but they did it wrong here by folding it into their crunch, and they don't understand why.
* Knowledge Skills, for instance, aren't discrete numerical values, but instead are "tags" that you slap onto existing skill or attribute rolls. This is AWESOME! You no longer have "Security Systems of 3", you have "Expertise with Security Systems", which means when you roll a Perception test, you can roll with the intent of scanning for Security based on your background knowledge of Security Systems.
The new Hunter: The Reckoning is alright. The corebook clocks in a little content-light for my tastes, but it's a solid foundation if you like the V5 system and the general World of Darkness vibe.
Any major changes/updates that aren't covered in V5?
I think the new Shadowrun 6E Seattle book may have a better layout? I haven't looked too deeply on it, but this is usually true when they repackage a core book.
There are specific things that Shadowrun 6E streamlines (which is good!*) but 6E also ADDS completely unnecessary mechanics to service a half-assed version of a narrative currency which they have shoehorned the old "Edge" attribute into. It also adds "Wild Dice" for no reason, which is a set of dice that doesn't work like ALL of the other rolls in the game. Some specific quibbles that I have:
1) Each weapon has 5 separate numbers that indicate how "good" it is at different ranges. If this value exceeds a different value by 4, then you get an Edge (the narrative currency). You have to make this comparison each time you hit something, and it's one of the primary methods of gaining Edge that doesn't hinge on Qualities or Gear or Magic or whatnot. WHY IS IT 4?? Why can't you just compare against a single number and see if it exceeds that number? Why not gauge that value so that you can do a straight comparison? And even then, why have the weapons down this level of minutiae? You don't need to have separate attack values for separate range brackets! This is one of the two things that slows down the already-slow Shadowrun combat to molasses.
2) The other thing is the way you can spend Edge, the narrative currency. Instead of giving you one or two easy to remember options, there are whole tables with varying values on how to spend one Edge or two Edge or four Edge or whatever. There's a huge amount of paralysis of choice involved with this, and that's not what narrative currency is supposed to be about.
This is on top of having ridiculous rules like exactly HOW much of a boom does a bomb make, or rules and tables for treading water.
If they hadn't gone whole hog on the Edge system and made it an optional thing that you could slap onto the basic mechanics, the base game would be a LOT easier and faster to run.
Shadowrun, in all editions, suffers from having three or four SEPARATE mechanics to deal with the various spheres of play in the game. You can break it down into "Astral/Magic", "Mundane/Physical", "Digital/Hacking", and "Vehicle/Drone", and each of those have completely different mechanics. It's like playing 4 different RPGs instead one cohesive game. I've been playing Shadowrun for nigh on 30 years at this point, and it's fairly easy for me to run now, but every other game seems easy by comparison to it. I will say that it's much easier to integrate hacking with the Mundane stuff in the 4th and 5th editions of the game than all of the other editions (in past editions, Hacking was its own minidungeon, and it sucked), and magic has always been "different rules, but 1:1 correlation with affecting the Physical plane" so it wasn't so bad (Magic is "What if I could do more versatile things than normal humans, but every time it hurts me a little?"). Vehicle/Drone stuff has always been a bear to integrate, though, and you're definitely going to be playing a separate game of "Vroom Vroom Cars" every time that portion of the run comes up.
EDIT: I LOVE Shadowrun, don't get me wrong. I have started up a 5E Shadowrun campaign recently, and I've been playing it off and on for most of my life. It's a very specific flavor that no other RPG touches. But you have to have a gaming group that is as invested as you are to play it, and among the editions, the one I can recommend for actual play is 5th edition. 6th edition just makes too many questionable non-optional decisions with its tacked on mechanics. And it wouldn't be so bad if they didn't balance all of their things around those added unnecessary mechanics and just focused on making a streamlined and playable game. I LOVE Narrative Currency games, but they did it wrong here by folding it into their crunch, and they don't understand why.
* Knowledge Skills, for instance, aren't discrete numerical values, but instead are "tags" that you slap onto existing skill or attribute rolls. This is AWESOME! You no longer have "Security Systems of 3", you have "Expertise with Security Systems", which means when you roll a Perception test, you can roll with the intent of scanning for Security based on your background knowledge of Security Systems.
Yeah the second I heard that Edge was super complicated and wasn't just, "I'm spending one of my 4 points of Edge to roll a bunch of extra dice and let them explode because I think this roll is important to me" I was super duper not interested in 6th at all.
I will say that the Vehicle/Drone stuff in 5th is complicated as fuck, but you can offload that responsibility onto the player to figure out and then just tell you what's going on without wasting your time. When I've played a Rigger, I didn't annoy the GM with all the details of my nine spider drones running in Swarm, I just gave him a brief, horrifying description of what was going on, gave him an attack roll, and told him damage and AP.
However, I will point out that the way our usual SR GM runs things, he applies little to no modifiers at all to anything unless we ask for it, and as you can imagine that's a double-edged sword, but it's worked fine for us. When we looked at 6th and the new Edge system, we were kinda horrified and ran away.
I just really wanted them to fix the skill system so that being a Decker didn't require that you pick up a million skills plus Resources A to be able to do your job, or having so many little skills in the game to pick up and then the GM asks for a weird skill nobody's taken. I also wish Technomancers weren't so bad in 5th. I played one (Freshmaker, he applied marks that were slightly wet Mentos that would stick to the target) that I built via the Catalyst optimization threads because I knew it was impossible to build a Technomancer that was on a Decker's level, and he was....okay? But you still have to ask the GM for a lot of leeway. Like hey please let me and my sprites do teamwork hacking. Please let my machine sprites give bonuses to this guy's smartgun system or this drone or this van. Can you really do that RAW? Unclear!
And then 6th gave us this terrible fucking Edge system and it's like, welp guess it doesn't matter if they fixed them or not!
NipsHe/HimLuxuriating in existential crisis.Registered Userregular
edited June 2022
So now I'm curious to know from you guys that have played a lot of the different SR editions: Which single edition gets the most right? In whatever terms you'd pick, be it easiest to play, easiest to onboard new players, best system integration, however you'd have it. Having only really played SR3 for any real length, I've always been curious about what came before and after.
The new Hunter: The Reckoning is alright. The corebook clocks in a little content-light for my tastes, but it's a solid foundation if you like the V5 system and the general World of Darkness vibe.
Any major changes/updates that aren't covered in V5?
Depends on what you mean - it's basically a new take on Hunters in the World of Darkness context, with the V5 metaplot (i.e., the Second Inquisition is up and running). Mechanically it just provides support for player-character Hunters that have Creeds, Edges, and some other bits that put them at slightly less of a disadvantage than mortals made with the V5 rules.
So now I'm curious to know from you guys that have played a lot of the different SR editions: Which single edition gets the most right? In whatever terms you'd pick, be it easiest to play, easiest to onboard new players, best system integration, however you'd have it. Having only really played SR3 for any real length, I've always been curious about what came before and after.
SR5, by far, at least for me. After you get over the loss of variable target numbers (which isn't a huge one, IMO, and actually greatly simplifies the resolution mechanic), 5th is a refinement of 4th that walks back some of the bad stuff in 4th edition and simplifies it.
I also wish Technomancers weren't so bad in 5th. I played one (Freshmaker, he applied marks that were slightly wet Mentos that would stick to the target) that I built via the Catalyst optimization threads because I knew it was impossible to build a Technomancer that was on a Decker's level, and he was....okay? But you still have to ask the GM for a lot of leeway. Like hey please let me and my sprites do teamwork hacking. Please let my machine sprites give bonuses to this guy's smartgun system or this drone or this van. Can you really do that RAW? Unclear!
Technomancers are pretty overpowered in 5th edition. They avoid Convergence (which is the auto-timer before GOD descends on your location) on a lot of their actions, and Complex Forms and Sprites do a TON of things that you can't do as a Hacker. Submerged Technomancers can even find data that supposedly has been lost or deleted. 4th edition was the edition where Technomancers could move as fast as a Street Samurai, rolling more dice to hit than a sniper, and also hack better than a Decker, so I guess that they over-corrected in 5th edition, but they are still pretty overpowered with anything to do with the Matrix. The Convergence thing is pretty huge... Deckers have to essentially reboot every 30 minutes, losing all of their marks.
So now I'm curious to know from you guys that have played a lot of the different SR editions: Which single edition gets the most right? In whatever terms you'd pick, be it easiest to play, easiest to onboard new players, best system integration, however you'd have it. Having only really played SR3 for any real length, I've always been curious about what came before and after.
SR5, by far, at least for me. After you get over the loss of variable target numbers (which isn't a huge one, IMO, and actually greatly simplifies the resolution mechanic), 5th is a refinement of 4th that walks back some of the bad stuff in 4th edition and simplifies it.
I also wish Technomancers weren't so bad in 5th. I played one (Freshmaker, he applied marks that were slightly wet Mentos that would stick to the target) that I built via the Catalyst optimization threads because I knew it was impossible to build a Technomancer that was on a Decker's level, and he was....okay? But you still have to ask the GM for a lot of leeway. Like hey please let me and my sprites do teamwork hacking. Please let my machine sprites give bonuses to this guy's smartgun system or this drone or this van. Can you really do that RAW? Unclear!
Technomancers are pretty overpowered in 5th edition. They avoid Convergence (which is the auto-timer before GOD descends on your location) on a lot of their actions, and Complex Forms and Sprites do a TON of things that you can't do as a Hacker. Submerged Technomancers can even find data that supposedly has been lost or deleted. 4th edition was the edition where Technomancers could move as fast as a Street Samurai, rolling more dice to hit than a sniper, and also hack better than a Decker, so I guess that they over-corrected in 5th edition, but they are still pretty overpowered with anything to do with the Matrix. The Convergence thing is pretty huge... Deckers have to essentially reboot every 30 minutes, losing all of their marks.
Deckers tend to have much higher limits though, and can shift their stats around.
I guess if you're not using the default priority chargen system that Technomancers come out pretty good but we never used anything else, and it's pretty rough trying to shift around Resonance, Ability Scores, and then the massive number of skills you need (Technomancers have even more skills they need than Deckers, hooray!)
The fade codes for their complex forms were really punishing, too. Like, outright too damn harsh.
NipsHe/HimLuxuriating in existential crisis.Registered Userregular
Now y'all got me curious, so I went to see what the core rulebooks for SR5 look like, and came across this wiki list:
Core Rulebooks
Books providing basic and expanded rules for Shadowrun.
Shadowrun 5th Edition - Core rulebook. Released 11 July 2013.
>Shadowrun: Fifth Edition Core Rulebook (Master Index Edition) - Second printing with updated rules. Released October 05, 2016.
Run & Gun - Extended combat rules. Released 2 July 2014.
Street Grimoire - Extended magic supplement. Released 30 June 2014.
Run Faster - Extended player character rules. Released 18 December 2014.
Data Trails - Extended Matrix rules. Released 26 May 2016.
Chrome Flesh - Biotechnology supplement. Released 29 June 2016.
Cutting Aces - Extended social rules. Released 9 December 2016.
Forbidden Arcana - Advanced magic rules. Release 2 May 2017.
Kill Code - Advanced Matrix rules. Released 22 August 2018.
Street Lethal - Advanced combat rules. Released 22 August 2018.
Eeeeee-ooooph, that's a pile of books. As much as there's a part of my (terribly broken) brain that would want to dive down this rabbit hole (I looooove the SR setting and lore) there's another part of that brain screaming "Just find an Apocalypse World or Forged in the Dark hack!".
Does the ruleset sufficiently justify itself in just the core rulebook, or does it feel like many of those Extended or Advanced rulebooks are "necessary" to make the system work?
I've played Interface Zero (Savage Worlds) and it was a lot of fun. A quick shadowrun conversion and you've got the best part (the setting) and none of the worst shit (the system), while also maintaining a healthy dose of gear porn.
A lot of those extra books aren't necessary, but they improve things quite a bit. You don't need to buy every book you see there, though, some quick googling will tell you what rules you should incorporate from those books. Run & Gun probably has the most?
tzeentchlingDoctor of RocksOaklandRegistered Userregular
I feel like you could run a very-close-analogue to Shadowrun using the Genesys system, at least in terms of flavor and roles. Throw in some equipment and skills from the Android:Netrunner supplement and you're basically there.
I feel like you could run a very-close-analogue to Shadowrun using the Genesys system, at least in terms of flavor and roles. Throw in some equipment and skills from the Android:Netrunner supplement and you're basically there.
Someone on this forum posted a list, a few years back, of all of the different conversions people have made for Shadowrun to other systems, and I wish I could find it. It was an impressive list, I wanna say at least 20 items long.
And I would not be surprised if there's one for Genesys.
I’ve never run or played Shadowrun but I’m tempted to just grab a dozen kinds of tokens and pretend I know the rules and run a game as a social experiment. See if a group of people can just make a Shadowrun that works on the fly.
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cj iwakuraThe Rhythm RegentBears The Name FreedomRegistered Userregular
The new Hunter: The Reckoning is alright. The corebook clocks in a little content-light for my tastes, but it's a solid foundation if you like the V5 system and the general World of Darkness vibe.
Any major changes/updates that aren't covered in V5?
Depends on what you mean - it's basically a new take on Hunters in the World of Darkness context, with the V5 metaplot (i.e., the Second Inquisition is up and running). Mechanically it just provides support for player-character Hunters that have Creeds, Edges, and some other bits that put them at slightly less of a disadvantage than mortals made with the V5 rules.
Surprised they went that route, since I thought Vigil was universally considered the better system.
Now y'all got me curious, so I went to see what the core rulebooks for SR5 look like, and came across this wiki list:
Core Rulebooks
Books providing basic and expanded rules for Shadowrun.
Shadowrun 5th Edition - Core rulebook. Released 11 July 2013.
>Shadowrun: Fifth Edition Core Rulebook (Master Index Edition) - Second printing with updated rules. Released October 05, 2016.
Run & Gun - Extended combat rules. Released 2 July 2014.
Street Grimoire - Extended magic supplement. Released 30 June 2014.
Run Faster - Extended player character rules. Released 18 December 2014.
Data Trails - Extended Matrix rules. Released 26 May 2016.
Chrome Flesh - Biotechnology supplement. Released 29 June 2016.
Cutting Aces - Extended social rules. Released 9 December 2016.
Forbidden Arcana - Advanced magic rules. Release 2 May 2017.
Kill Code - Advanced Matrix rules. Released 22 August 2018.
Street Lethal - Advanced combat rules. Released 22 August 2018.
Eeeeee-ooooph, that's a pile of books. As much as there's a part of my (terribly broken) brain that would want to dive down this rabbit hole (I looooove the SR setting and lore) there's another part of that brain screaming "Just find an Apocalypse World or Forged in the Dark hack!".
Does the ruleset sufficiently justify itself in just the core rulebook, or does it feel like many of those Extended or Advanced rulebooks are "necessary" to make the system work?
You have more than you need to run the game without splatbooks. Really. All of the splatbooks just add options, but aren’t necessary to run any portion of the game. There’s a condensed “superbook” pdf out there that has all the relevant gear porn if you really want to have those options.
The new Hunter: The Reckoning is alright. The corebook clocks in a little content-light for my tastes, but it's a solid foundation if you like the V5 system and the general World of Darkness vibe.
Any major changes/updates that aren't covered in V5?
Depends on what you mean - it's basically a new take on Hunters in the World of Darkness context, with the V5 metaplot (i.e., the Second Inquisition is up and running). Mechanically it just provides support for player-character Hunters that have Creeds, Edges, and some other bits that put them at slightly less of a disadvantage than mortals made with the V5 rules.
Surprised they went that route, since I thought Vigil was universally considered the better system.
Vigil is for the Chronicles of Darkness, not the World of Darkness. The Chronicles of Darkness is the setting and game system formerly known as the New World of Darkness, back when what is now the Classic World of Darkness was considered the Old World of Darkness, before it switched to being the Classic World of Darkness and the new World of Darkness, contained in V5 and H5, became the World of Darkness.
No there's no consumer confusion involved in any of this, why do you ask.
So now I'm curious to know from you guys that have played a lot of the different SR editions: Which single edition gets the most right? In whatever terms you'd pick, be it easiest to play, easiest to onboard new players, best system integration, however you'd have it. Having only really played SR3 for any real length, I've always been curious about what came before and after.
Personally?
SR2 - best lore/flavor, mostly solid rules (generally the same as SR3 rules)
SR3* - best rules
No SR - best for new players. Seriously, SR is not a newbie friendly ruleset. But if I had to pick I'd say SR2, but use the matrix book ruleset for that.
* - some house ruling/throwing back SR2 stuff onto the main SR3 ruleset
I feel like SR2 and the entirely hardwired matrix is just fucking weird with where we are now with computers.
I also know lots of folks hated SR3's change to the initiative system but it is probably for the best as far as the game being playable goes.
It is, but wasn't totally nuts at the time - they got alot of stuff right, but that wasn't one heh. SR3 was the same, but introduced wireless stuff towards the end.
I agree on the initiative, it was a needed balance change.
So I'm preparing to run a Genesys campaign for some friends. We're currently in session 0 territory, currently just over Discord text chat. We won't really be getting anywhere close to starting until the end of July due to scheduling. But we're brain storming character ideas and I'm sharing some of the world lore so they can figure out what they want to do. I gave them a survey I made in Google Forms (something my buddy GMing the Genesys game I'm in did that I liked) to gauge what type of game they're looking to play. Basic stuff like where do you want the narrative agency to lie (GM or players) or do you want guided or sandboxed exploration. Stuff like that.
However, one of the things that came up from the survey is that the players are wanting combat to be dangerous, which I admit is going to be very interesting for me. As a GM, I like to think that I try to challenge my PCs, because heroes are at their best when they overcome adversity. But, I also recognize that as a GM I am my PCs biggest fan and that I want to see them kick ass. I don't see the GM PC relationship as adversarial, but as cooperative as we all tell a story together. Even if I'm trying to make my combat dangerous, I don't think that will change, I'm still going to want to see my PCs triumph, but I've gotta make sure to bloody their noses a bit along the way. That along with the fact that I haven't GM'd a Genesys game before (though I have plenty of experience with the system with both having played Edge of the Empire and playing in our current Genesys game that's been going a couple of years now), it's going to take me a bit to get into the right spot. I don't doubt that I will have issues with balancing combats, either making them too easy or too hard.
But, while thinking about that kind of thing, I realized that a combat being dangerous doesn't necessarily mean dangerous only to the PCs. Combat can have severe narrative consequences that can hurt the PCs efforts, even if they get through it relatively unharmed. So things like time restraints or having to protect NPCs or other objectives can make a combat feel harrowing and make it have high stakes.
But, ultimately, I'm looking forward to the challenge since I've never been explicitly asked to up the difficulty level. I'm looking into other GM houserules to make combat more lethal, but haven't decided if I'd use any yet.
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webguy20I spend too much time on the InternetRegistered Userregular
So I'm preparing to run a Genesys campaign for some friends. We're currently in session 0 territory, currently just over Discord text chat. We won't really be getting anywhere close to starting until the end of July due to scheduling. But we're brain storming character ideas and I'm sharing some of the world lore so they can figure out what they want to do. I gave them a survey I made in Google Forms (something my buddy GMing the Genesys game I'm in did that I liked) to gauge what type of game they're looking to play. Basic stuff like where do you want the narrative agency to lie (GM or players) or do you want guided or sandboxed exploration. Stuff like that.
However, one of the things that came up from the survey is that the players are wanting combat to be dangerous, which I admit is going to be very interesting for me. As a GM, I like to think that I try to challenge my PCs, because heroes are at their best when they overcome adversity. But, I also recognize that as a GM I am my PCs biggest fan and that I want to see them kick ass. I don't see the GM PC relationship as adversarial, but as cooperative as we all tell a story together. Even if I'm trying to make my combat dangerous, I don't think that will change, I'm still going to want to see my PCs triumph, but I've gotta make sure to bloody their noses a bit along the way. That along with the fact that I haven't GM'd a Genesys game before (though I have plenty of experience with the system with both having played Edge of the Empire and playing in our current Genesys game that's been going a couple of years now), it's going to take me a bit to get into the right spot. I don't doubt that I will have issues with balancing combats, either making them too easy or too hard.
But, while thinking about that kind of thing, I realized that a combat being dangerous doesn't necessarily mean dangerous only to the PCs. Combat can have severe narrative consequences that can hurt the PCs efforts, even if they get through it relatively unharmed. So things like time restraints or having to protect NPCs or other objectives can make a combat feel harrowing and make it have high stakes.
But, ultimately, I'm looking forward to the challenge since I've never been explicitly asked to up the difficulty level. I'm looking into other GM houserules to make combat more lethal, but haven't decided if I'd use any yet.
One nice thing about Genesys is the crit system allows for longer term repercussions from combat and other stresses that games like D&D don't model. Start stacking those crits and see what happens when the first player loses an arm or something.
So I'm preparing to run a Genesys campaign for some friends. We're currently in session 0 territory, currently just over Discord text chat. We won't really be getting anywhere close to starting until the end of July due to scheduling. But we're brain storming character ideas and I'm sharing some of the world lore so they can figure out what they want to do. I gave them a survey I made in Google Forms (something my buddy GMing the Genesys game I'm in did that I liked) to gauge what type of game they're looking to play. Basic stuff like where do you want the narrative agency to lie (GM or players) or do you want guided or sandboxed exploration. Stuff like that.
However, one of the things that came up from the survey is that the players are wanting combat to be dangerous, which I admit is going to be very interesting for me. As a GM, I like to think that I try to challenge my PCs, because heroes are at their best when they overcome adversity. But, I also recognize that as a GM I am my PCs biggest fan and that I want to see them kick ass. I don't see the GM PC relationship as adversarial, but as cooperative as we all tell a story together. Even if I'm trying to make my combat dangerous, I don't think that will change, I'm still going to want to see my PCs triumph, but I've gotta make sure to bloody their noses a bit along the way. That along with the fact that I haven't GM'd a Genesys game before (though I have plenty of experience with the system with both having played Edge of the Empire and playing in our current Genesys game that's been going a couple of years now), it's going to take me a bit to get into the right spot. I don't doubt that I will have issues with balancing combats, either making them too easy or too hard.
But, while thinking about that kind of thing, I realized that a combat being dangerous doesn't necessarily mean dangerous only to the PCs. Combat can have severe narrative consequences that can hurt the PCs efforts, even if they get through it relatively unharmed. So things like time restraints or having to protect NPCs or other objectives can make a combat feel harrowing and make it have high stakes.
But, ultimately, I'm looking forward to the challenge since I've never been explicitly asked to up the difficulty level. I'm looking into other GM houserules to make combat more lethal, but haven't decided if I'd use any yet.
One nice thing about Genesys is the crit system allows for longer term repercussions from combat and other stresses that games like D&D don't model. Start stacking those crits and see what happens when the first player loses an arm or something.
We just had that happen in the other game I'm in. Gnomish alchemist lost an arm just recently. My tanky minotaur is sitting at 3 crits, but also has Durable 3 now, so a flat roll next time he's crit.
The players opted for a more intrigue based game rather than more traditional adventuring stuff. So I have the option to Game of Thrones them at times, which should keep them on their toes.
I've read through several editions of Shadowrun rules over the last 20 years (but please understand that Shadowrun has so much rules that "read through" means that I only retained like half the information at best), and my main takeaway is "why the hell does this have so many rules?!"
My feeling is that the Shadowrun designers - and, I mean, it's been many different teams over multiple decades, but they seem to have the same core guiding principle - try very hard to be as simulationist as possible, down to minutia that I consider to be utterly irrelevant. When I was reading the 5E rules, I ran across a section on "Memory Tests". This makes sense in a game that centers data and intelligence and tries to simulate the real world, but I just... that was the point at which I realized that I, personally, have no desire to ever play a ruleset where you have to roll dice to see if your character remembers something.
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webguy20I spend too much time on the InternetRegistered Userregular
So I'm preparing to run a Genesys campaign for some friends. We're currently in session 0 territory, currently just over Discord text chat. We won't really be getting anywhere close to starting until the end of July due to scheduling. But we're brain storming character ideas and I'm sharing some of the world lore so they can figure out what they want to do. I gave them a survey I made in Google Forms (something my buddy GMing the Genesys game I'm in did that I liked) to gauge what type of game they're looking to play. Basic stuff like where do you want the narrative agency to lie (GM or players) or do you want guided or sandboxed exploration. Stuff like that.
However, one of the things that came up from the survey is that the players are wanting combat to be dangerous, which I admit is going to be very interesting for me. As a GM, I like to think that I try to challenge my PCs, because heroes are at their best when they overcome adversity. But, I also recognize that as a GM I am my PCs biggest fan and that I want to see them kick ass. I don't see the GM PC relationship as adversarial, but as cooperative as we all tell a story together. Even if I'm trying to make my combat dangerous, I don't think that will change, I'm still going to want to see my PCs triumph, but I've gotta make sure to bloody their noses a bit along the way. That along with the fact that I haven't GM'd a Genesys game before (though I have plenty of experience with the system with both having played Edge of the Empire and playing in our current Genesys game that's been going a couple of years now), it's going to take me a bit to get into the right spot. I don't doubt that I will have issues with balancing combats, either making them too easy or too hard.
But, while thinking about that kind of thing, I realized that a combat being dangerous doesn't necessarily mean dangerous only to the PCs. Combat can have severe narrative consequences that can hurt the PCs efforts, even if they get through it relatively unharmed. So things like time restraints or having to protect NPCs or other objectives can make a combat feel harrowing and make it have high stakes.
But, ultimately, I'm looking forward to the challenge since I've never been explicitly asked to up the difficulty level. I'm looking into other GM houserules to make combat more lethal, but haven't decided if I'd use any yet.
One nice thing about Genesys is the crit system allows for longer term repercussions from combat and other stresses that games like D&D don't model. Start stacking those crits and see what happens when the first player loses an arm or something.
We just had that happen in the other game I'm in. Gnomish alchemist lost an arm just recently. My tanky minotaur is sitting at 3 crits, but also has Durable 3 now, so a flat roll next time he's crit.
The players opted for a more intrigue based game rather than more traditional adventuring stuff. So I have the option to Game of Thrones them at times, which should keep them on their toes.
I wonder if there is a homebrew crit table for mental stresses. Like if you get too many you become paranoid and stuff like that.
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I didn't like it, felt too abstract and I really hate abstract RPG's. I like lists of things and picking things out of those lists and putting them on my sheet and using them later and having finite rules for how they work. I don't like playing make-believe but for adults, because my imagination sucks and I have no creativity.
Still looking for more than one player for this, by the way. If you've got time around an EST Sunday afternoon, why not stop by?
Sign ups are open for a Play-by-Post game of 'The Quiet Year', if anyone is interested in joining in. Click Here
PSN: TheBrayster_92
I think it might be a neat mechanic, even if it might be a little bit of a hassle to adjudicate.
Can I DM Shadowrun on roll20?
And does anyone have any good guides for how to play Shadowrun? I bought the beginner box and I'm finally gonna play with this upcoming weekend or next but I want to be fully prepared as the DM for it.
What is the point of being alive if you don't at least try to do something remarkable? ~ Mario Novak
I never fear death or dyin', I only fear never trying.
I see a (German) Shadowrun 6E character sheet in Roll20, so the answer is Probably? Roll20's flexible enough you can probably run it, even without built-in character sheets. Just make sure you look at the roll syntax for dice pools; check Roll20's wiki.
I only have surface-level knowledge of 6E, and if the talk of streamline systems and whatnot is even half true it'll be a better time than Ye Old Editions.
That said, I agree that if I were running a cyberpunk-style game in this day and age, I'd be using a hack of one of Blades/Apocalypse World/FATE or other small-press game instead, mostly out of the level of investment required to get up to snuff with SR6.
I had one excellent moment where, when Consorting with a young noble to get information, ended up rolling (6,6,6) on my three d6. Given that two sixes in any size roll is automatically a critical success, this basically made her immediately my bosom friend for the next few scenes, giving my party a place to stay in a strange town and access to the vampire noble's manor that we wouldn't have normally been able to have.
I also don't know what the difference between the 6th edition core rulebook and the 6th edition Seattle core rulebook is but the digital version of the rulebook I have automatically updated to the Seattle version.
I really like the setting and I'd really like to learn to play but I can't find anyone who has ever played 6th edition so I'm starting to wonder if it is just a really bad system that no one wants to play or if Shadowrun is just really niche. I always kind of assumed it was popular with it being a 6th edition.
What is the point of being alive if you don't at least try to do something remarkable? ~ Mario Novak
I never fear death or dyin', I only fear never trying.
Rolling is a little interesting.
So if you have a dice pool of 12, you use: /r 12d6>5 and it'll report your successes (dice with a result of 5 or better).
If you used Edge and have exploding dice, you use /r 12d6>5! and it'll roll extra dice on 6's.
I haven't played 6E, I'm not saying 5E is amazingly good or anything, but I've heard nothing good about 6E at all. Some of the game designers who worked on it have been vocal about how Catalyst eschewed some stuff they had put together that were necessary for the parts that they kept to function properly.
Kinda like designing a car and eschewing the wheels but keeping the engine.
Gonna give it another try in a few weeks after I read through the rules some more.
Rigging and hacking seem confusing as fuck.
Played a rpg called Honey Heist instead.
What is the point of being alive if you don't at least try to do something remarkable? ~ Mario Novak
I never fear death or dyin', I only fear never trying.
Just play Cyber-Honey Heist instead. You're all Cyberbears. You just put cyber infront of everything and you're basically playing Shadowrun.
There are specific things that Shadowrun 6E streamlines (which is good!*) but 6E also ADDS completely unnecessary mechanics to service a half-assed version of a narrative currency which they have shoehorned the old "Edge" attribute into. It also adds "Wild Dice" for no reason, which is a set of dice that doesn't work like ALL of the other rolls in the game. Some specific quibbles that I have:
1) Each weapon has 5 separate numbers that indicate how "good" it is at different ranges. If this value exceeds a different value by 4, then you get an Edge (the narrative currency). You have to make this comparison each time you hit something, and it's one of the primary methods of gaining Edge that doesn't hinge on Qualities or Gear or Magic or whatnot. WHY IS IT 4?? Why can't you just compare against a single number and see if it exceeds that number? Why not gauge that value so that you can do a straight comparison? And even then, why have the weapons down this level of minutiae? You don't need to have separate attack values for separate range brackets! This is one of the two things that slows down the already-slow Shadowrun combat to molasses.
2) The other thing is the way you can spend Edge, the narrative currency. Instead of giving you one or two easy to remember options, there are whole tables with varying values on how to spend one Edge or two Edge or four Edge or whatever. There's a huge amount of paralysis of choice involved with this, and that's not what narrative currency is supposed to be about.
This is on top of having ridiculous rules like exactly HOW much of a boom does a bomb make, or rules and tables for treading water.
If they hadn't gone whole hog on the Edge system and made it an optional thing that you could slap onto the basic mechanics, the base game would be a LOT easier and faster to run.
Shadowrun, in all editions, suffers from having three or four SEPARATE mechanics to deal with the various spheres of play in the game. You can break it down into "Astral/Magic", "Mundane/Physical", "Digital/Hacking", and "Vehicle/Drone", and each of those have completely different mechanics. It's like playing 4 different RPGs instead one cohesive game. I've been playing Shadowrun for nigh on 30 years at this point, and it's fairly easy for me to run now, but every other game seems easy by comparison to it. I will say that it's much easier to integrate hacking with the Mundane stuff in the 4th and 5th editions of the game than all of the other editions (in past editions, Hacking was its own minidungeon, and it sucked), and magic has always been "different rules, but 1:1 correlation with affecting the Physical plane" so it wasn't so bad (Magic is "What if I could do more versatile things than normal humans, but every time it hurts me a little?"). Vehicle/Drone stuff has always been a bear to integrate, though, and you're definitely going to be playing a separate game of "Vroom Vroom Cars" every time that portion of the run comes up.
EDIT: I LOVE Shadowrun, don't get me wrong. I have started up a 5E Shadowrun campaign recently, and I've been playing it off and on for most of my life. It's a very specific flavor that no other RPG touches. But you have to have a gaming group that is as invested as you are to play it, and among the editions, the one I can recommend for actual play is 5th edition. 6th edition just makes too many questionable non-optional decisions with its tacked on mechanics. And it wouldn't be so bad if they didn't balance all of their things around those added unnecessary mechanics and just focused on making a streamlined and playable game. I LOVE Narrative Currency games, but they did it wrong here by folding it into their crunch, and they don't understand why.
* Knowledge Skills, for instance, aren't discrete numerical values, but instead are "tags" that you slap onto existing skill or attribute rolls. This is AWESOME! You no longer have "Security Systems of 3", you have "Expertise with Security Systems", which means when you roll a Perception test, you can roll with the intent of scanning for Security based on your background knowledge of Security Systems.
Any major changes/updates that aren't covered in V5?
Yeah the second I heard that Edge was super complicated and wasn't just, "I'm spending one of my 4 points of Edge to roll a bunch of extra dice and let them explode because I think this roll is important to me" I was super duper not interested in 6th at all.
I will say that the Vehicle/Drone stuff in 5th is complicated as fuck, but you can offload that responsibility onto the player to figure out and then just tell you what's going on without wasting your time. When I've played a Rigger, I didn't annoy the GM with all the details of my nine spider drones running in Swarm, I just gave him a brief, horrifying description of what was going on, gave him an attack roll, and told him damage and AP.
However, I will point out that the way our usual SR GM runs things, he applies little to no modifiers at all to anything unless we ask for it, and as you can imagine that's a double-edged sword, but it's worked fine for us. When we looked at 6th and the new Edge system, we were kinda horrified and ran away.
I just really wanted them to fix the skill system so that being a Decker didn't require that you pick up a million skills plus Resources A to be able to do your job, or having so many little skills in the game to pick up and then the GM asks for a weird skill nobody's taken. I also wish Technomancers weren't so bad in 5th. I played one (Freshmaker, he applied marks that were slightly wet Mentos that would stick to the target) that I built via the Catalyst optimization threads because I knew it was impossible to build a Technomancer that was on a Decker's level, and he was....okay? But you still have to ask the GM for a lot of leeway. Like hey please let me and my sprites do teamwork hacking. Please let my machine sprites give bonuses to this guy's smartgun system or this drone or this van. Can you really do that RAW? Unclear!
And then 6th gave us this terrible fucking Edge system and it's like, welp guess it doesn't matter if they fixed them or not!
Depends on what you mean - it's basically a new take on Hunters in the World of Darkness context, with the V5 metaplot (i.e., the Second Inquisition is up and running). Mechanically it just provides support for player-character Hunters that have Creeds, Edges, and some other bits that put them at slightly less of a disadvantage than mortals made with the V5 rules.
Technomancers are pretty overpowered in 5th edition. They avoid Convergence (which is the auto-timer before GOD descends on your location) on a lot of their actions, and Complex Forms and Sprites do a TON of things that you can't do as a Hacker. Submerged Technomancers can even find data that supposedly has been lost or deleted. 4th edition was the edition where Technomancers could move as fast as a Street Samurai, rolling more dice to hit than a sniper, and also hack better than a Decker, so I guess that they over-corrected in 5th edition, but they are still pretty overpowered with anything to do with the Matrix. The Convergence thing is pretty huge... Deckers have to essentially reboot every 30 minutes, losing all of their marks.
Deckers tend to have much higher limits though, and can shift their stats around.
I guess if you're not using the default priority chargen system that Technomancers come out pretty good but we never used anything else, and it's pretty rough trying to shift around Resonance, Ability Scores, and then the massive number of skills you need (Technomancers have even more skills they need than Deckers, hooray!)
The fade codes for their complex forms were really punishing, too. Like, outright too damn harsh.
Eeeeee-ooooph, that's a pile of books. As much as there's a part of my (terribly broken) brain that would want to dive down this rabbit hole (I looooove the SR setting and lore) there's another part of that brain screaming "Just find an Apocalypse World or Forged in the Dark hack!".
Does the ruleset sufficiently justify itself in just the core rulebook, or does it feel like many of those Extended or Advanced rulebooks are "necessary" to make the system work?
https://www.reddit.com/r/Shadowrun/comments/fcho08/shadowrun_conversion_for_interface_zero_30/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3
I've played Interface Zero (Savage Worlds) and it was a lot of fun. A quick shadowrun conversion and you've got the best part (the setting) and none of the worst shit (the system), while also maintaining a healthy dose of gear porn.
A lot of those extra books aren't necessary, but they improve things quite a bit. You don't need to buy every book you see there, though, some quick googling will tell you what rules you should incorporate from those books. Run & Gun probably has the most?
Someone on this forum posted a list, a few years back, of all of the different conversions people have made for Shadowrun to other systems, and I wish I could find it. It was an impressive list, I wanna say at least 20 items long.
And I would not be surprised if there's one for Genesys.
Origin ID: Discgolfer27
Untappd ID: Discgolfer1981
Surprised they went that route, since I thought Vigil was universally considered the better system.
Vigil is for the Chronicles of Darkness, not the World of Darkness. The Chronicles of Darkness is the setting and game system formerly known as the New World of Darkness, back when what is now the Classic World of Darkness was considered the Old World of Darkness, before it switched to being the Classic World of Darkness and the new World of Darkness, contained in V5 and H5, became the World of Darkness.
No there's no consumer confusion involved in any of this, why do you ask.
Personally?
SR2 - best lore/flavor, mostly solid rules (generally the same as SR3 rules)
SR3* - best rules
No SR - best for new players. Seriously, SR is not a newbie friendly ruleset. But if I had to pick I'd say SR2, but use the matrix book ruleset for that.
* - some house ruling/throwing back SR2 stuff onto the main SR3 ruleset
I also know lots of folks hated SR3's change to the initiative system but it is probably for the best as far as the game being playable goes.
It is, but wasn't totally nuts at the time - they got alot of stuff right, but that wasn't one heh. SR3 was the same, but introduced wireless stuff towards the end.
I agree on the initiative, it was a needed balance change.
However, one of the things that came up from the survey is that the players are wanting combat to be dangerous, which I admit is going to be very interesting for me. As a GM, I like to think that I try to challenge my PCs, because heroes are at their best when they overcome adversity. But, I also recognize that as a GM I am my PCs biggest fan and that I want to see them kick ass. I don't see the GM PC relationship as adversarial, but as cooperative as we all tell a story together. Even if I'm trying to make my combat dangerous, I don't think that will change, I'm still going to want to see my PCs triumph, but I've gotta make sure to bloody their noses a bit along the way. That along with the fact that I haven't GM'd a Genesys game before (though I have plenty of experience with the system with both having played Edge of the Empire and playing in our current Genesys game that's been going a couple of years now), it's going to take me a bit to get into the right spot. I don't doubt that I will have issues with balancing combats, either making them too easy or too hard.
But, while thinking about that kind of thing, I realized that a combat being dangerous doesn't necessarily mean dangerous only to the PCs. Combat can have severe narrative consequences that can hurt the PCs efforts, even if they get through it relatively unharmed. So things like time restraints or having to protect NPCs or other objectives can make a combat feel harrowing and make it have high stakes.
But, ultimately, I'm looking forward to the challenge since I've never been explicitly asked to up the difficulty level. I'm looking into other GM houserules to make combat more lethal, but haven't decided if I'd use any yet.
One nice thing about Genesys is the crit system allows for longer term repercussions from combat and other stresses that games like D&D don't model. Start stacking those crits and see what happens when the first player loses an arm or something.
Origin ID: Discgolfer27
Untappd ID: Discgolfer1981
We just had that happen in the other game I'm in. Gnomish alchemist lost an arm just recently. My tanky minotaur is sitting at 3 crits, but also has Durable 3 now, so a flat roll next time he's crit.
The players opted for a more intrigue based game rather than more traditional adventuring stuff. So I have the option to Game of Thrones them at times, which should keep them on their toes.
My feeling is that the Shadowrun designers - and, I mean, it's been many different teams over multiple decades, but they seem to have the same core guiding principle - try very hard to be as simulationist as possible, down to minutia that I consider to be utterly irrelevant. When I was reading the 5E rules, I ran across a section on "Memory Tests". This makes sense in a game that centers data and intelligence and tries to simulate the real world, but I just... that was the point at which I realized that I, personally, have no desire to ever play a ruleset where you have to roll dice to see if your character remembers something.
I wonder if there is a homebrew crit table for mental stresses. Like if you get too many you become paranoid and stuff like that.
Origin ID: Discgolfer27
Untappd ID: Discgolfer1981