Don't hate the game, hate the players, nit-pickery about the nit-pickery Options

[Black]

This is just a quick question, but does anyone on dumpshock even like shaddowrun??? in any form??? I mean SR 1,2,3 or 4?
I mean even for dumpshock I think picking the rules apart has reached an all time high. Isn't it enough to just enjoy the game anymore?

sorry i think I'm just crazey :rotfl: but hell...
I'm not gonna bother making this post too long cause I'm prolly just gonna get flamed but does anyone feel me here???

[Toptomcat]

Shadowrun, as a ruleset, is only slightly less complicated than nuclear physics.

As such, the only people who will play it are of a somewhat finicky, detail-oriented mindset.

[hyzmarca]

We nitpick because we love. We're like domestic abusers that way.

[Mr Cjelli]

Actually, we all play SR because of how painful it is. It's a game that appeals to masochists.

[Kagetenshi]

Nitpicking is just another game, and one that's easier to arrange time for than playing.

~J

[toturi]

[Toptomcat]

Maybe without the gear...

[Shadow]

I love SR3, can't stand 4 so I don't even discuss it anymore. I don't really like to nitpick the rules so much as set others strait when they go wrong :)

[SL James]

I hate Shadowrun so much I only play it every day.

[hobgoblin]

i guess most of the time you can boil it down to:
love the setting, hate the rules...
or atleast the part of the rules that are closest to their rl hobby or job (thats why you see people take apart the weapons, computing and vehicle rules but leave the magic ones alone).

[Austere Emancipa...]

[SL James]

I hate the setting, love the rules.

Austere: To quote Family Guy, "Holy freaking god...."

[hobgoblin]

[Ophis]

Hey I love both, I just think there are a few minor teaks to be made...

[hobgoblin]

minor seems to turn into major quite fast on this page...

[Critias]

I like SR3 enough to have...well...played it quite a bit. But they've been working on changing my mind for a good six months now.

[nezumi]

Yeah, I hate shadowrun. What a load of hooey. I mean, come on! Those crazy dwarves don't live in mines, sometimes the elves are neither rich NOR beautiful (and occaisionally even heterosexual), plus there are no vorpal swords.

Seriously, I love Shadowrun. I love the setting. I've played CP2020, which aims to directly draw upon the great novels by Gibson, but despite having so much material available, their description of the world is, frankly, crap. I've glanced at GURPS, which seems to at least be consistent, but again, the setting of Shadowrun blows either of those away. You can run *ANYTHING* in Shadowrun. Space games... Horror games... Hunting dragons games... I really can't think of any genre the SR setting doesn't at least touch on, and with a little minor tweaking, can fully exploit. It grabs the creativity and newness of fantasy, with the cool toys and realism of modern-setting games.

I love the mechanics. SR3 is terrific, and really, the basic dice mechanic can be pulled out and applied to most any other setting (again, with minor tweaking. Pools become more difficult if no one has initiative enhancers.) There are some aspects that could use work (rigging, most certainly, and decking in a few aspects), but for the most part, it's a beautiful piece of work. The variable TN, variable number of die adds a logical and consistent way of adjusting the difficulty of a task very easily, and with a high level of control.

I haven't played SR4, but I'm sort of in a love-hate relationship with it still. I love some of the things they've done (unified the system! Brought in wireless!) but hate others (dropped variable TNs and pools). The latter I think makes the game easier to play, but there's a level of detail there that's naturally lost.

I daresay that everyone on this board loves SOME aspect of the game. We don't have to love it all (thank goodness FASA's Game Police initiative fell through), just enough that we come away enjoying the game (with however many houserules you've pinned onto it).

[Clyde]

I love SR 2, 3 AND 4! Never got to play one :(

[PlatonicPimp]

Love the setting. Thats the Key here. We love teh setting. So much so we hate to see it abused. We nitpick metaplot and other issues because we want the setting to actually be as cool as we imagine it.

SR3: from a gamist perspective, I loved the rules. They were great simulations, accounted for so many things. Sure, the damages were wonky, but the basic skill tests invloved variable dice pools, variable target numbers, and variable thresholds, as well as strait and opposed tests, and all of those effected the probabilities in different ways. If only the rule of 7 were better worked out.

Trying to actually play this beauty of a system was a pain in the Ass, especially with all the expansions.

SR4: Fixes a lot of the issues with SR3, but with so many issues of it's own it hardly seems as though Fanpro paid an editor. I want it to work, desparately, but as written it doesn't. So I'm fixing it. We are early enough in the game taht Fanpro could actually fix a lot of the issues we are bringing up in errata or future sourcebooks. They probably won't, but they could.

[Kagetenshi]

[SL James]

[Roadspike]

Love the setting (love, love, love the setting), really enjoy the rules (3rd or 4th, doesn't matter to me, I like 'em both). They're wonky enough to be quirky and let me fiddle, but once you've got them down, they're intuitive enough (at least to me) that you can let the game flow around them.

[Critias]

I like the basics of the setting, but it seems like the more detail they put into it (and the more they fuck with the timeline), the more it sucks. Give us broad strokes (or, better yet, broad strokes that make sense), and then let individual games fill in the details -- that's what I'd like to see.

And no more retroactive timeline BS. The beginning of the slippery slope towards crappiness started -- in earnest -- when I read the TT chapter of SoNA (and it mentioned all this crap that'd happened in recent years, without any of that same crap being mentioned in any other book at the time).

[SL James]

There's a lot of that in Shadows of North America, but yeah, TT got assraped. Probably an outcome necessary to make events in System Failure even remotely believable.

[PlatonicPimp]

What we're saying, basically, is that we are geeks. Look at star wars fans. Thew movies and the setting mean so much to them that they spend endless amounts of time analyzing and deconstructing it. It's more than fiction, it has a reality to it for them (Though their takes on it's reality don't always agree.) When they feel that their reality of the setting is violated, they get upset.

Or look at comic book geeks. They will remember things about continuity that the authors of the comics themselves have forgotten, and catch them in mistakes and incongruities that they make as a result. They will complain bitterly that the story isn't "right" or even 'realistic", though the setting involves people running around in spandex and anti-gravity boobs. It doesn't mean they hate the comics. In fact, they love them. They love them too much, they are too important to them and they should relax. But having fans who don't relax, who bring this stuff up, and who try to correct things instead of abandoning the setting for something more like what they want. is the mark of a great, compelling setting.