SR4 in play experience, very pleased Gm and players Options

[MaxHunter]

The team has just finished a multi-session run in Amazonia.
(Some people might remember about the overprized Ares Alpha discussion)

Well, in that Amazonian run the team was bodyguarding a group of six scientists with no combat experience. They had the company of a former US. Marine who lived in the jungle and worked as the local guide.
The itinerary was quite complicated and the runners and their clients ran into awakened anacondas, corporate spies, giant leeches, magic tropical storms, poison-using indians, itchy spiders, angry nature spirits and some more.
The most climatic fight included an aztlan-sponsored guerrilla the size of a platoon (20+) plus an Azzie shaman and a Leopard Guard Sniper.

Please notice that in most combat encounters there were four runners and seven "good" NPC taking actions, plus the opposition.

This means that in the guerrilla warfare scenario there were more than 32 active characters involved!!

Even in that occasion combat went smoothly and the scene was finished in about three and a half hours. I am quite a resourceful as a GM, but even the players said that this would have been just impossibly long under the old rules.

By the way, the four runners survived (one in overflow, the rest wounded), and two scientists.

Just wanted to share.

Cheers,

Max

[Cain]

[Synner]

[mfb]

you can't like SR4! it's bad!

[Grinder]

Thanks for the example, mfb :D

MaxHunter: was one of the runner magically active? In the games i run magic seems to be a bit overpowered. What had been your experiences with it?

[Oracle]

In my opinion the new magic system makes it much more important to have magical cover using "dispelling" (I hope that's the right English term for the German word "Spruchabwehr".) However I don't see it as overpowered.

[Grinder]

It's Counterspelling.

In my games the mages usually had twice the number of dices (magic + spellcasting) than the target/poor victim.

[Synner]

I've found enforcement of cover and visibility modifiers brings the dicepool down significantly although a magician still averages significantly more dice than a mundane defender.

[Grinder]

Exactly :) And that's what made spells deadlier than in my SR3 games. I killed 4 runners with a single manaball (magic 5, spellcasting 5), more by accident. This never happened in SR1-3, at least not accidently.

[Azralon]

[Grinder]

My player didn't have combat monster (what really surprised me), so we only had one firefight with heavier weapons than SMGs. It was a light MG and indeed really lethal.

[Butterblume]

[Cain]

[MaxHunter]

In this adventure the mage was not unbalancing, nor any of the other players, but there was magical opposition, some spirits and the azzie sniper did take the mage out on round two of the big firefight.

I do not think, nor have experienced, that mages have a more unbalancing effect than a recoil compensated Ares Alpha with grenades and XX ammo.

Spirits are complicated, but the drain for both summoning and binding can be horrendous. (The azzie shaman died trying to banish an attacking beast spirit)

I think it is a good idea to keep the players on their toes and not let them take anything for granted. A simple goon can kill you if it takes on you unaware, some spirits could interpret orders in malicious ways, and the opposition may be using the same tactics that you do, or worse.

This particular group of runners was composed of the shaman (more into conjuring than anything else), one street samurai (REALLY maxed out), one gunslinger adept (vanilla, with some good infiltration skills) and one close combat adept (also quite normal)

In the end the gunslinger adept turned that fight because of good tactics and some fortune. (He accidentally ran into the sniper's position on round 3 and won the surprise roll, then he got hold of the rifle, moved to a concealed position and then started taking out the most troublesome soldiers of the enemy squad)

Dear Cain, The whole SCENE lasted 3 and a half hours, that included like 45 minutes that were dedicated to roleplaying and walking into the fight. Combat went smoothly and felt quick but reallistic. Also, take into consideration that at least 7 characters had one or two extra passes and that the jungle environment didn't allow for much use of area damage strikes. (spells, grenades) We have practice using the rules, and that counts too.
Most of the times the players could make out only a fraction of the opposition, shooting from among the trees.

I understand that other systems are quicker, though.

Cheers,

Max

[Azralon]

[Waltermandias]

Glad to hear your game went well. My group has had very similar experiences with big combats, all in all things are running much faster than in SR3. Of course we primarily played old World of Darkness before, so any combat system that doesn't completely suck fills me with joy. Yay five hour fights that were neither realistic nor fun. We were always encouraged to find non-violent solutions just because the violence was so dreadfully boring. :dead:

[Cain]

[Grinder]

[Synner]

[GuyofDoom]

[Azralon]

[Butterblume]

[Cain]

[FrankTrollman]

The speed of resolution of a role playing system is only a small component of what makes a game holistically good or not. The fastest resolution system or course, is Cops and Robbers in which characters simply describe their actions and those actions take place. Unfortunately, that game system can become very contentious with the age old action resolution problem where one player insists that a shot hit while another insists that the shot missed.

Similarly, Warhammer 40K is pretty fast, resolving battles with hundreds of participants on each side in an hour and a half. Of course, each character feels pretty regimented and there's little in the way of room for descriptive or heroic actions. Characters have only general locations on the battlefield and the locations of individual trees are likewise lost in quantum uncertainty. It's not really a game system where you can meaningfully rescue a princess or set booby traps on a flight of stairs.

Savage Worlds likewise involves the rolling of just a single die. Sure, it's some crack assed ppolyhedron, but it's still a single small-die resolution system. Which means that like Warhammer it can accomodate the activities of perhaps hundreds of characters in a battle, and none of them can especially do anything specific or creative so the flow of battle moves along at a pretty fair clip. Yay.

---

But among more traditional RPGs - one in which characters are allowed to take specific and imaginative actions and have that actually mean something - Shadowrun 4 gets compared with D&D and NWoD, and comes out looking pretty good. The D20 comparison is a pretty difficult one, D&D is firmly rooted in melee combat and Shadowrun largely glosses that over in deference to projectiles and explosives. D20 is also based around the concept of the Level, in which even a character's Diplomatic abilities rise predictably until they achieve god-like status. Shadowrun runs the power gamut between incompetent humans and highly skilled humans - so no god-like existence ever comes into focus for PCs. Both games have a problem at the low end, but a house cat is much more threatening to an untrained civilian in D&D than it is in Shadowrun, so I guess that goes to SR. Combat resolution is slower in SR if everyone stands there with swords and takes turns stabbing each other, but much faster if mages come out of the woodwork and start casting strange magics.

Net result: If you want to have a bunch fo axe wielding guys run around hacking on dinosaurs in an apartment complex, play D&D. If you want to mix in intrigue or lots of magic, you should probably play Shadowrun 4 instead.

The NWoD comparison is much more obviously favorable for SR. The future/modern with magic marshmallows setting is so similar that the one can be effortlessly ported into the other. The combat system is also pretty similar with comparable levels of detail thrown in on either side. NWoD has more special case rules (the effects of individual numbers on your dice change depending on the shape of your weapon), and oddly enough slightly less flexibility (character creation is much more formalized with no discretionary expenditures at all, and the lack of a separate to-hit and damage roll make it so that different armanents don't really matter despite having special rules for each that you need to bring up each time). All told, SR4 is a little more flexible and resolves a little faster than NWoD, and is thus a better game.

-Frank

[mfb]