Here's what I would like to know:

When it comes right down to it, how do you really like to play in the 6th world?

I don't want this to devolve into a flame war, so please, just answer the OP for yourself, because I would like to see an actual cross-section of the people who are willing to respond.

The three categories I chose are for this are:

What character power level do you really like to play/run?
This can be a lot of things, but mostly includes starting BP/Karma, advancement rates, incidence of special powers/rare races, availability of special equipment as a matter of course (eg. APDS ammunition, lasers, nano-disassemblers, access to space).

What type (dificulty level) of game do you favor?
This really comes to danger: Do you like it so mages/virtuakinetics lose magic/resonance from healing? Worry about where you're sleeping? Pretty paranoid? Or do you focus on the 'runs? Maybe your characters are like those in Star Wars - immune from the beneficial bonuses their opponents might have gotten from wide bursts or tracers. Maybe you like playing primer runners where the dice are just an minor nusiance. Do you mix and match some more dangerous and limiting, while opening other things up? If so, what and why?

How much magic do you like in YOUR 6th world?
What sets the 6th world apart from the usual dystopian future/cyberpunk mileu is the presence of fantasy magic. How much do you like to explore THAT side of the universe, or do you really prefer to focus on the Cyberpunk side of things?

Ok, the forum is open, have at it...

Had to chose Average on all counts, because me and my group will go to both sides once in a while with everything.
Yes, the one time we did NOT have magical Backup did hurt like crap. But it was an interesting situation at least ^^

Pretty good poll. It's just got one flaw -- you called the highest level of magic "ludicrous." That skews you against accurate self-reporting, since there might be people who you would label that way, but they'd be more likely to label themselves as "prevalent," given the negative connotation of the last category. You probably should have called it "ubiquitous." Now, maybe nobody would pick that one either because it's such a gross violation of RAW, but thanks to the way you labeled it, we'll never know if it was because nobody plays that way, or because you wrote a non-neutral response for them. But I've seen worse polls, where pretty much all of the answers except the one that the poller wants are variations on "der me so stupid."

If it were the Case, i would have chosen the ludicrous choice. if only because it reminded me of Spaceballs Ludicrous Velocity ^^

I also leaned towards the middle, because I like to mix things up

on characters, maybe you should have asked more about style also. I like to run PCs who seem average, like many movie characters, who at the end of the day turn out to be some badbutt when the chips are down. I enjoy playing a character's flaws or unquiness. One PC/NPC, Ronin a cybernetic samurai I played up his sense of honor. Whenever he would walk into the underground bar in Denver, where you had to buy a round if you didn't put your weapon in the box, he would just put a credstick on the bar. That was because he was always armed, be it martial arts, the restreactable spur or the heavy pistol in his cyber arm.

An NPC I am running in my current game, is a human assassin and connected to one, or more, of the PC's background(s). I run him cool and mysterious, with hint of asian honor. And he drives the martial artist nuts by saying. "You're ok, for a human."

i enjoy running a gritty/cinematic games. one side where the players realize they may get serious hurt, while when they make make a good role play, or roll play it is big just like in te movies

magic is usually balanced, though right now my group is very heavy magic, with very little cyber

Powerful character for A. I like to play a cut above average; but not quite immortal cinematic stuff. Of course-I have varied moods for the extremes-sometimes I DO like crazy cinematic, others low-level. But Powerful is the average that I like.


Difficulty: again, average. I like there to be danger, but not so much where Im always in fear that everything could go to hell 100% of the time. I play to have fun, not be stressed. (Hey, for some it's fun-for me, it's not.)

Magic: again, average here. Not so many there's Hogwarts on every corner, but more than none.

Im kinda middle ground all around, except for the characters, which I like to have a manga-esque feel.

Where's the "wherever the GM sets it" option?

SR is a social activity, and varies massively by location. I've played in Seattle, Caracas, Denver, Lancaster (UK), Tokyo, Sydney. Each of those has a very different magical prevalences. My current game is set in a location that attracts talismongerers and student mages, so awakened elements of the setting are remarkably prevalent. At the same time, I've played in Caracas where Magic sometimes just doesn't turn up.

And asking people to self-report the difficulty?

Power Level: I like it high, but not insane. SR3 we played mostly normal 120 points, specialized but not hyperspecialized. There were pretty much no "dump-stats" for us, and we thought of real developement... but we always were pretty powerful. But since our Character really died much we became not so "godlike" as in other rounds. If someone got to say 100 Karma earned it was a wonder... i can think of... 5 or so characters in our group who made it to retirement (In at least 4 years of playing) *g*

Danger: If there is no threat it is no fun. We played it very very hard. The GMs never willfully killed someone off, but ONE stupid move on your side and you can die. Also we played with secondary effects and stress on cyberware/stats and essence loss. (That 0.15 essence guy of us... oh how he ran from that one vampire *g*). So i like it REALLY hard... its so much more rewarding to survive against really bad stuff, knowing that the GM WILL kill you if you make poor decisions.

Magic: We played Magic rare, but of course in concentrated amounts on both sides. (Runners and Security). So our team(s) often had 2 (of 4-6) characters magical. But some had none. (And another one had all but one). Magic defenses were rare, and when there were some, mostly passive (wards, watcher). But when something came down hard on us, they always had integrated magic in their troops (Swat-Magician, Elementals and such)

I am speaking in past tense because my new group will start only this month and i assume they will be much more.... nice in terms of dangerousness (They like to play a character for a long time in D&D). Which is not really that exciting for me. A Hero has to die young in a blaze of glory, or retire when he earned enough money. (If you can buy a perfect SIN and middle or high lifestyle... most people chose to end their career)

Apologies, but the top level is where the Awakened make up something like a clear majority of the total population in contravention of all the Fluff. In retrospect I could have chosen a better word, but I thought the contextual description summed it up pretty well, especially compared to the rest, but thanks for the feedback. I will keep that in mind for the next time. It should let me edit the thing so let me have a look-see.

im going to go ahead and say we play powerful characters because ill allow my players to do whatever and we ignore availability. are games tend to get very cinematic both being easy for unimportant matters and very difficult when itll make a difference. i would say we represent the magical demographic pretty accurately.

The games I play in tend to be very magic-heavy (GM's pet corp is practically a magical initiatory group of it's own), and our games tend to range from gritty to cinematic. Our cinematic end of the spectrum was realized with a group we ended up calling Omega, simply because there was nothing the GM could throw at us that hurt us. (SR3 characters, 2 physads, a hermetic that ran with no less than 4 bound Force 5+ elementals -- one of each type, and a cobra shaman comprised the group. On occasion, we hired an NPC troll gun platform)

What character power level do you really like to play/run?
I picked powerful, because to me, shadowrunners should be tougher than most people. They are in-demand specialists who do extremely dangerous work for a living. They should be good enough to reliably function at their jobs - so considering what their jobs entail, they should be tough.

What type (dificulty level) of game do you favor?
I picked cinematic. I like games where there is a real chance of death, but I prefer an action movie feel to "realism" that comes at the expense of playability.

How much magic do you like in YOUR 6th world?
I picked average, but that is for the world as a whole - I believe that both shadowrunners and some of their tougher targets should both have higher levels of awakened than in the general population.

Now that I see the results, I think a few of the other categories could have been better designed, too. There's a huge majority that uses "average" power characters, but also a huge majority that prefer "gritty" difficulty level. That doesn't make much sense -- assuming that gritty is easier than average, the majority of people would want average difficulty to go with the strength of their characters. I think the word gritty is simply too attractive, and it doesn't send the right message. It would have been better to call the categories "Very Easy," "Easy," "Medium," "Hard," and "Very hard." All of those are value neutral and are essentially quantitative, while words like "gritty" are attractive and lead to misreporting. I believe most people use average level characters and average difficulty level, they just prefer the word gritty, and weren't quite sure that gritty was supposed to be easier than average.

Also, the word cinematic is quite unclear. How is it that 7% play cinematic level characters, but 17% play cinematic level difficulty? That doesn't seem to jive. If cinematic is the highest difficulty level, you wouldn't expect characters below that level to survive it. I think it must be that people think that cinematic difficulty means something different from cinematic character level. If it was "very powerful" and "very hard," there might be more consistent numbers there.

As for my initial concern, with "ludicrous," I think it might have been unfounded. After all, there's no room anywhere in the fluff for magic being everywhere. It's going to be the very rare group that turns the magic dial up that high, because no matter how you slice it, that's way outside of RAW. No matter what language you used, you still probably wouldn't get many picks. Even if people do play like that, they'd probably self-report inaccurately because of the stigma attached to altering RAW so radically.

I FEAST UPON THE SOULS OF MY ENEMYS!


Wait..This isn't the what I had for lunch today thread? darn,

Average to gritty seems to be our usual playstyle, but I've seen hells a lot of fun come out of the powerful games, most of which I missed out on. And I'm not just talking ShadowRun, the last overpowered game I was witness to (I was unable to play because I had class until 8 and the game went from 6 to 11...or later) was a Scion game.

Scion, the game where the players are the bastard children of gods.

With godly powers.

There are three levels of play, Hero (you're Hercules....ish: you're stronger than one man, but not quite 10), Demigod (you ARE Hercules, or Gilgamesh), and God (you now rival Thor and Baron Samedi).

Each level of play has an experience bracket, that is to say, to move up into a higher experience bracket costs a bucket load of EXP, but you can do it eventually. Whole campaigns have been known to run for two years or more without anyone moving up a bracket, oh sure, they get new powers and get stronger and stuff, but no one saves up the EXP to advance to the next bracket.

Now. Condense the entire game into 11 weeks; Hero to Godhood (EXP doleouts were, IIRC, about 250 a person, advancement from Hero to Demigod (and Demigod to God) were free when the GM said it happened).

Sire some bastard children of your own, save the world, gain followers, break the rules, destroy the world, and duke it out with Titans.

Most epic game I was ever witness to.

GMed by the most epic man I have ever met.

A man who also happens to be an Ultraviolet in Paranoia. And he got that way by playing the game. He also ran some amazing Paranoia and ShadowRun one-shots (one of which consisted of a party of about 6, 2 of which were inside agents--one for lonestar, someone else managed to get the highest body count by releasing a nerve agent into the ventilation system of a nearby hotel).

One of the other epic games--on in which the aforementioned GM was a player in--has been since referred to as the "I can't believe we're not epic" campaign. D&D 3.5 where the party managed to cutscene 37 Balors and their minions after having demonstrated that they could kill one (and the minions) before any of them got a singe action and did so without spending any consumable resources (spell slots, scrolls, potions, etc). They were level 14.

Cinematic, Dangerous, Special. I mean dangerous assuming it is the highest difficulty level. If I screw up, despite being able to wade through people, hip deep in blood, I want to die.

I wouldn't mind more.. magic "tech" for lack of a better term. Where Magicians are rare, maybe even Hen's Teeth, but magical technology is not. I might try and convince the GM (when we finish our current game od ED, anyway) to let us do some research for stuff like DH's power weaponry, or armour that corresponds directly to your magical abilities in exchange for some god awful downside.

Ok, here is why I separated the questions: it is possible to have "Jane Q Public" characters with little or no special abilities, but they go on cinematic adventures accomplishing incredible goals and things of that nature. On the other side, some people like their characters amped up a couple notches, but want things hard and gritty and to have to worry about who's popped their latest fake SiN or scoped their diggs. I don't see them as irreconcilable at all. And I chose to order the three questions in ascending order, from hardest on the characters (1) to easiest (5) each time. A gritty game implies that there are more ways to die than just on a 'run, that you DO have to worry about the details of your place of residence rather than just the entry "medium" and your choice of travel is important (cab? bus? train? personal vehicle?). I think most people got it pretty well, I was trying to be descriptive, and my post clearly stated what I meant in each category. Or at least I THOUGHT it did.

Regarding magic, it sounds from some of the posts I have seen that some people think it should be more or less prevalent in their worlds either because they like it or dislike it and seek to emphasize or de-emphasize it respectively.

I prefer characters who are a cut above the crowds. After all, most people aren't Awakened, can't afford the impressive cyberware, and don't have the contacts for heavy and illegal loadout. That makes characters powerful, I suppose. And the difficulty the characters face should be variable. Sometimes prime runners go on milk runs. In fact, they should do it as often as possible: it pays the bills and doesn't eat your pay with hospital fees. But the characters should also face grueling challenges sometimes. Hitting that top-level difficulty is fun.

I don't see cinematic as quite belonging on the same axes. Cinematic is letting the characters attempt or get away with things that aren't realistic but are cool. Trolls with bows shooting down attack helicopters are cinematic. The armored sam charging machine gun emplacements and shrugging off long bursts to take them out is cinematic. It's not about the characters' power, really, and it's not about difficulty. It's more about pace, I think. Cinematic is anti-gritty in that many "threats" are minor inconveniences that just make your characters look good without really breaking a sweat. But when they face their real challenges, well, cinema demands that they work hard for their victories.

Really a cinematic game is one in which karma/edge is spent constantly from large pools, or perhaps one in which things are done all the time that would require such expenditures in a grittier game.

I really don't care about the powerlevel of the players and game, as long as the two match. As far as magic, what i like and what i normally get in a game are two DIFFERENT beast. I like to have sometimes one awakened character per game or less... but every game i run or get into the table is about HALF Mages. Which is what spurred my new long term character, my Mage geeker... which is a mage.. kind of himself (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wink.gif)

Ok, so I think the problem is that the difficulty levels are completely subject to interpretation. What's more dangerous, "Gritty" or "Powerful characters?" That might be interfering with the results. It's not clear whether the difficulty scale goes from most to least, or least to most, or what any of the terms mean, really... Not that it matters. I'm just interested in inferential statistics, and I like to comment on helping people create polls that actually test opinions, rather than manufacture skewed results with confusing questions.

I didn't find this poll confusing at all. How could one think they are? (rethorical question). Also you can easily mix these up. (Yes weak characters can play play in a dangerous or a cinematic game, and a "cinematic Hero" can still be challenged. (Also i had no problem with "ludicrous Magic level"... it's name describes that it goes against the intended set ofrules and descriptions in the books. (But we all know you don't HAVE to do as they say)

Well, it's not much of a rhetorical question, because it has a definite answer which does not confirm the rhetorical point being made. For one thing, "Cinematic" is the most powerful kind of character, but also the easiest run difficulty? The power level of characters goes from weakest to strongest, and then the power level of games goes the opposite direction. Cinematic is not synonymous with "weak," or "easy," so it's easy to assume that, like with characters, Cinematic means strongest. It's easy to conceive of a difficulty scale where "dangerous" is the easiest level, and "cinematic" being crazy difficult, like ninjas rappelling down every other vertical surface, and hideous monsters from beyond popping up in every adventure. That's why it's confusing.

It was a rhetorical question (sorry for the typo before), because i didn't want an answer. Doesn't matter if you may have one. (That's pretty much is the point of a rhetorical question... you use it to get people thinking, or at least thinking YOUR way *g*)

I tried to use it to imply that people should read given options, carefully think about them , assess logical structures and patterns (and if unclear assume likely stances of the original poster)

I think "cinematical" implies the feeling of movies overall: That you know the heroes will win. It is all about the presentation. Which means: Heroes are strong, will overcome their obstacles. If they are not in their world, cinematical heroes (say in a gritty/dangerous setting) are still powerful and will pretty much succeed and exceed expectations in their tasks, but the world itself presents them with unfamiliar obstacles. (Like hard social ones for a ever-cool no-talk-gunslinger) This makes it hard, but does not take the overall "mega-coolness" of the characters.

DAMMIT... did i just argue on the internet? Sorry... But well, i just wanted to imply: don't hang so much on words; at least TRY to think what the others mean, not what they say/write.

I shut up now... bye

You can call your question rhetorical, but you can't forbid people to answer it. A rhetorical question has to be something where the answer is implied by the question, and it makes a point. Your question did not suggest an apparent answer, but rather invited one, because the answer was not obvious. I think I explained clearly why the poll is confusing. There is more than one way to read it. That's why it's confusing, because people could look at it, especially if they only take a brief look, and misunderstand it. If you haven't taken any collegiate level statistics classes, you might want to step down here. In order to be accurate, polls have to be very carefully written, and this one is full of errors that could easily render it useless in terms of finding out peoples' actual opinions. Not that it really matters, it's an informal poll. But I assume that Dumpshock pollers want to know peoples' real opinions, and not some skewed version based on a flawed set of questions. So whenever I see a problematic poll I like to drop in and suggest how it could be better, for future reference. That's all.

You've got some non choices in this poll - you can have powerful characters in a gritty, tough game. But you've got 'powerful characters' as a difficulty choice.