Borderlands Conversion, A place to throw ideas around about SR4a Conversions Options

[Runeblood]

MY groups is in love with Shadowrun!

Well ok, they're in love with the setting and concept. Thinking, planning, and legwork are way too much work!

This got me thinking about alternate settings to Shadowrun where the mechanics can be used to good effect. I decided on the Borderlands setting for the test of this. There are several reasons:
1. The setting, for those who are not familiar, is gritty but has a comedic edge and is rife with pop culture references.
2. They are looking to do lots of pink mowhawk stuff anyway.
3. It give me a chance to work on interesting house rules and mechanics for setting specific ideas.

Some parts of the project have been challenging. Augmentations are fine the way they are. Magic is easilly explained away by the psychic or strange powers that people in the game possess. I am loathe to include ammo regen, specifically because I can't think of an explaination that isn't lame.

Basically the point of the post is to let you know I've been working on it. To answer questions you might have about the project, and to (most importantly) post rulings on things that I've come up with to fix certain aspects of the system or to make up equipment that doesn't exist (force fields and healing bullets for example).

[Tanegar]

Ammo regeneration could be a nanotech assembler module. If you recover ammo that you can't use (SMG ammo when all you have is revolvers, etc.), you feed it to the assembler, which breaks it down and uses the materials to create ammo you can use.

Really, though, Borderlands runs on the MST3K principle: don't think about it too hard.

[Manunancy]

Healing bullets can be handwaved as capsule rounds loaded with regenerative serum or something along that line - but it's something that in my opinion can be ignored without undue trouble. The selling point from a player's point of view would be Pandora, it's exotic fauna and the possibility to go not only pink mohowak but day-glo, monofilament-laced, LSD-soaked pink mohawk and get away with it.

As far as force fields go, give them a barrier rating and you should be ok.

[ZeroPoint]

While I don't have much to say about borderlands conversion directly, I find SR's system is pretty simple to convert in small chunks at a time. While its annoying on some levels that meatspace, matrix and magic all have completely different mechanics, its nice when porting because you can just cut things out wholesale and have 0 impact on the rest of the game mechanics. Setting will take a hit, but mechanics don't touch very often. You could cut matrix and magic out completely and the game full of street sams wouldn't even know they were gone. Take out augs, and matrix rules and you could be playing dresden files.

I've been working on a Mass Effect conversion for a few months now. Also taking the opportunity to rebuild the skill system a little, make a completely new Initiative system, and use something based almost entirely on Franktrollman's Matrix rules. And of course changing magic >> biotics

While there may be other systems that would be better/more easily adapted to such a setting (Gurps), I find I just like SR's core mechanics a lot better. Don't ask me why because I don't have an answer yet.

[Mirilion]

While there may be other systems that would be better/more easily adapted to such a setting (Gurps), I find I just like SR's core mechanics a lot better. Don't ask me why because I don't have an answer yet.

This. They feel right.

[Runeblood]

Out of a lot of systems I have played, I like the SR system for anything that involves alot of guns. I find it's just crunchy enough to handle all the things I want a gun game to handle without being too involved or too vague. Close to that would probably be some of the new 40k RP systems, but there are other balancing acts in those games.

As far as healing bullets, I had them written up as healing a set amount of boxes. They were capsuled bio-regenrative gel. I had it as healing 1 box standard, +1 if it's a shotgun round, +1 if it's from a burst. +2 If it's fully automatic. You need to get the bullet to the wound, so you need to take a called shot penalty for the shot.

I was worried about Force Fields being too much damage mitigation with a Barrier Rating. I think I would limit it so that can absorb it's device/barrier Rating x3 worth of mitigation before shutting off for a while.

[ZeroPoint]

Out of a lot of systems I have played, I like the SR system for anything that involves alot of guns. I find it's just crunchy enough to handle all the things I want a gun game to handle without being too involved or too vague. Close to that would probably be some of the new 40k RP systems, but there are other balancing acts in those games.

As far as healing bullets, I had them written up as healing a set amount of boxes. They were capsuled bio-regenrative gel. I had it as healing 1 box standard, +1 if it's a shotgun round, +1 if it's from a burst. +2 If it's fully automatic. You need to get the bullet to the wound, so you need to take a called shot penalty for the shot.

I was worried about Force Fields being too much damage mitigation with a Barrier Rating. I think I would limit it so that can absorb it's device/barrier Rating x3 worth of mitigation before shutting off for a while.

or for force fields perhaps you can treat them as softer barriers with a lot of thickness, rather than harder barriers? Don't have my books in front of my so not sure if that would work, but my thought is that it could work like separate layers of barrier, and as each one is damaged/destroyed the protection it would provide would lessen to the point that it breaks.

[Manunancy]

For the gun turret's forcefield, an possibility would be treat as cover, giving a penalty to hit whoever is behind - the things is about belly-high, 50% cover, 75% when croushed and total if you're prone. The barrier rating won't come into play unless you're shooting straight at it (to try to get at the prone guy hiding behind it) which should keep the eventual problems manageable.

For a 'personnal' force field, I'd say two options : treat them as extra armor or maybe as extra hit boxes depending on the feel you want. The latter can be of tw okinds : either a big pool that ablates over time or a fixed soak that uses up a charge for each irt and drops when dry. The former is great for stopping massive hits, the latter acts more like extra armor depeding on the number of soaked bowes and charges.