Despite being project leader of what could be considered "the competition", I feel I should chime in here.

First off, don't take the Dumpshockers too seriously. The concept of a Shadowrun MMO immediately draws to surface the most jaded naysayers and rabid fanbois near simultaneously. Introducing the SRO project a few years ago lead to a very large thread with some very shearing criticism and doubts.

I don't have to tell you that a team aspiring to such heights as MMO production can be devastated by the default consensus of "Ain't gonna happen." While Dumpshock is an invaluable resource for nearly anything Shadowrun and is home to the multitude of denizens that still call the Sixth World home, it can be a harsh place and you should not steer the ship of your project by this fickle light. These folks will eventually become the great power that drives the formative engine of early SR MMO community, but know that many have come before you and I.

That said, on to a few comments that I hope you won't begrudge me for:

All that I know for certain is that the desperate attempt to market to the widest possible range of tastes has caused Hollywood to produce a long stream of mediocre movies.

And they're repetitive too.

If you follow a formula of how it should be done you'll end up with a clone of all the other MMO games. Only it wont be as good as them because you'll just be copying them.

DO pay attention to people here on Dumpshock because this is an enormously concentrated knowledge resource for the Shadowrun setting and flavour. And that is what will set your game apart. With the best will in the world, it wont be the gameplay or the interface, though I will allow that both may be good. It will be if you can get across some of Shadowrun's enormously rich setting and flavour.

I have a few ideas for this. I'll type them up after this.

-K.

On the subject of death, this is a fairly ever-present thing in Shadowrun and to lose it, or to mitigate it, would significantly alter the flavour of the game. Likewise, allowing people to develop their characters in a D&D style ever increasing invulnerability would have a similar effect.

For both of these issues I have a couple of undeveloped ideas. They're not fully thought through and I'd be interested to see if anyone can iron out the bugs.

For the issue of death, Shadowrun has always been a team game. The basic unit of play is the Shadowrunning team. Perhaps ways could be found to replace the identification with a single character with an identification with a formal team. Thus the high level of danger can be preserved from the Shadowrun PnP game without people thinking that their precious time and acheivement is lost when a character dies.

Off the top of my head, ways you could formalise and encourage this in the game would be
1. Formal teams as an actual entity in the game. Name, membership list (with max size), etc.
2. Reputation as a team attribute. This can be a de facto "I'm better than you" substitute in some ways, but can also be a vital part of the game, opening up higher-level runs, affecting the acquisition of equipment, contacts, relations with NPCs, etc.
3. Drive the team aspect home by formalising the effects of new players joining a team, character trading (or defecting) between teams, etc. There's a lot of scope for expanding on this. For example, a team saying to themselves "do we let Khadim join? We need a mage, but he'll lower our reputation temporarily and he has emnity points with both Yaks, Mafia and Renraku. That's bad."
4. No playing other than in a team. (Maybe not a hard rule, but a soft one that is strongly discouraged through things like dying loses all accumulated nuyen, contacts, etc. whereas a team will preserve some of this.

The effect of the death of a character would therefore be damaging, in that the team then had to take the player back on with a newer, less experienced and reputable character. But it wouldn't be the complete waste of a players time that the death of their character would have been otherwise.

For the second issue, ways of substituting for the accumulating invulnerability and personal power you get in other games, I can think of the following:
Increasing contacts, influence and resources. Imagine the game where you could bump off player X's character but you look at his rep list (or whatever we want to call it) and you see that he has high rating allegiances with both the Yakuza and the Mafia. And you know that if you bump him off, you're going to earn negative points with these people (and maybe a shot in the back when you really don't need it). Worse, imagine if once you've earnt these negative points, then other players would gain postive points with these groups by bumping you off. It would lend a whole new dynamic to the game. You'd need to drum it into players with the introductory material, but that's okay.

But it's not like characters in Shadowrun don't become more powerful with time. A bit of cyberware here, a quickened armour spell there. People can get pretty tough. They just never become invulnerable.

Now some of these ideas need work and fleshing out, but I hope they stir some ideas and show you that you don't have to follow Grey Pawn's MMO formula for pleasing all areas of the market. There are always other options if you look,

-K.

much of the discourse is just plain liable

but yea, i'll agree with you GrayPawn,

I just think a lot of us have a fear that a Bad MMO with the SR name will drive people away from ever picking up the P&P game. Us SR P&P fans are few and far between.

You know, why can'y you have your cake and eat it too with the death issue?

Instead of focusing on a single character use a Character Pool, and as your Primary Character gains karma, a certain percentage (If I remember correctly in Third Editition it was ~1/4 or 1/2.) goes into a pool which can be used to improve the rest of the characters in any given pool.

That way death will still be huge, but the player also won't have to start completely from stratch either.

I don't think he was referencing Team Karma. At least, not in the way I've ever seen it implemented.

It could be that my memory is simply failing me as well, and that I've somehow gotten confused with another game's approach.

I still don't think that its a bad idea even if it wasn't part of Shadowrun like I thought it was.

A Shadowrun MMO could be absolutely amazing, in my opinion.

A few pointers, though:

1) STAY AWAY from character classes beyond Male/Female, Human/Ork/Elf/Dwarf/Troll and Mundane/Magician/Adept/Mystic Adept/Technomancer. Let players choose skills, gear, cyber etc as approperiate after that, for varied and individual characters.

2) Look toward the feel of MMOs like City of Heroes and Matrix Online - both have a set-up that is fairly easy to translate into Shadowrun, and MxO especially has a very gritty feel to the setting and a pretty good mission system.

3) Make sure to stick to certain concepts from the RPG - Essence limiting cyberware, magic and resonance.

4) Try and create the three overlapping 'worlds' - Astral, Real, and Augmented Reality.

5) Make sure there is a wide-variety of missions to choose from, from several organisations and free agents. Use a Reputation system to limit access to special missions, and make sure that people can benefit both from choosing to work for a certain organisation, as well as freelancing for everyone.

6) Character creation: Make this customizable as far as body type, hair and facial hair goes, and make sure there is ALOT of different clothing options in the game. If you can introduce a background for the character that could be excellent.

Say, you choose one among several options for where the character was born, raised and trained, and how he/she became a runner. These options will give bonuses to certain skills/attributes and penalties to others.

Try to stay fairly true to the current character creation style (BP buying Skills, Qualities, Attributes, Powers, Gear etc from base lists) and the advancement through Karma.

Introducing some sort of level system would be good, though, but instead of calling it Level, use the existing Street Cred and Notoriety ratings. Street Cred as a measure of experience, and Notoriety (positive or negative) as an indicator of 'honor' and such.

Loose Notoriety for things like ganking, maybe.

This'll create some flexibility as well, because you can either diversify and be good at many things, or specialize and be Really Good at one or two things.

That added - good luck and try to stay true to the feel of the setting.

EDIT:

Death: Treat 'Death' as severe injuries, and give several options to counter it:

- Burn Edge to revive fast (basically self-ressurect at a cost)
- Use Magic to heal the character (ressurect/healing by others)
- Have a DocWagon contract and be taken care of (fast healing and little gear loss)
- Heal naturally (takes longer and loss of gear)

Tanka's long post about straying from SR one iota causing the wrath of DS is a pretty constant overriding editorial comment in the project. http://awakenedmmo.org/wiki/Canon summarizes such notes.

Permanent death!!! ROARRR!!! I don't think anyone has had a luke warm opinion about that. They either believe it's core to the SR flavor or that is needs to be amended for the sake of the average players. I am the first to remind everyone that DEATH is permanent in SR, but NEAR DEATH is rather recoverable. In many games where the characters would die, they only mostly die in SR. The normal facilities for averting death will still be present in one form or another, including: DocWagon, Magical healing, medkits, etc. Also, everyone remembers that you don't have to fight til you die right? He who fights and runs away...makes it easier on us to have a perma-death mechanic!

The other mechanic we wish to introduce is the concept of an ending for characters other than death. The stories of the characters in Shadowrun: Awakened will hopefully have a beginning, a middle, and AN END. Again, the idea is in flux, but we want characters to have an end other than death so people have a much longer-term goal than "become level 60 then be obnoxious").

Points on presenting Astral, Matrix, and the real world all together is very valid. It is made easier by the presence of AR in SR4 (SR4 being our core edition for material). This means the worlds are concurrent. Their presentation together is very important.

I find DS's passion on this subject quite rejuvenating, but remember that there are going to be people "in the trenches" on the project trying to deliver on these promises. Only time will tell on some of this so don't entirely judge what we will deliver tomorrow by what you read today.

And, if you are capable, why not try to give us a hand? First, read about us here: http://awakenedmmo.org/wiki/Members_Charter and consider if you truly want to be a part of this and that you will be able to competently and consistently be a contributor. Anyone interested after that can join us during one of our scheduled IRC chats (look on the "Calendar" off the forums page) or contact on the "core members" directly.

Good luck on the project, but since you won't (as far as I'm concerned) be basing your game on SR I'll stay out of it.

~J

Because I believe Shadowrun, 4th edition to be a misnomer. PM me if you want to discuss it further.

~J

I'm not going to run the numbers to see how different SR3 and "SR"4 are when firing a pistol, but I suggest you reread the flavour portions of your rulebooks if you want to make the claim that you can "stick to" both at the same time.

Fair warning: further discussion in this vein not in PMs will be ignored.

~J

On the issue of permadeath, I think Dragon Realms handled it well. Dragon Realms, death is permenant by default. In order to resurrect your character, you had two choices. The most obvious is to have a level 20 cleric cast a resurrection spell on your corpse before it decayed into nothing. This wasn't usually an option, however. There were no level 20 Clerics when I played the game.
The second way, and the most common way, was to earn Favors from the gods. One had to go on a quest to earn favors and have to pay exp to accumulate them. It was a rather long and drawn out procedure and characters often died without any favors to spend, although most players were cautious enough to stay out of dangerous combat before restocking.


In SR, DocWagon was take the place of favors. PCs could spend resources to secure a HRT contract. If a PC has a HRT contract then extremely beefy NPCs with the Doc Wagon printed on their heavy milspec armor come and pick up him up when he hits overflow. He wakes up in a Doc Wagon hospital minus any equipment that he dropped when his boxes were filled. He then has to pay the bill in full before he can secure another contract. Platnium contracts could be rare and expensive that PCs probably won't be able to afford them for a very long time.


The thing is that favors are cheap for low level characters and expensive for high level characters due to the way the exp system works in Dragon Realms. Each skill has its own independent exp which is expressed as a percentage and which is raised by successful skill use. When the percentage reaches 100 the skill gains a level and the percentage is resent to 0. As the skill levels are raised raised, the exp one gains for using that skill is reduced. However, favors always cost a fixed level percentage. Because low level characters in this system will have an abundance of spare exp percentage there is little excuse for them to suffer permadeath while high level characters have to be more careful due to the increasing tedium of earning exp to spend of favors. This results in a tendancy towards low level characters.

However, justifying such a system for docwagon is difficult to do IC. It is possible to just suspend disbelief in this case, but I'd rather not.

Death should be done just as it is in SR, as in SR so long as the character can be stabilized promtly ten boxes are actually very survivable. This should make death less likely, as most groups would have at least a couple of people with the biotech skill, and everyone should have a decent medkit and trauma patches. It would really change the emphasis of the mission if a group member gets shot up that badly, just as it should do. Obviously it would be down to your teamates whether they pick whatever kit you drop up (and whether they give it back!). Following that, the side effects of your injuries would manifest as wound effects as penalties.

Obviously, if you do fail to stabilise in time, you die - dead.

...only to find out that they have implanted a cortex bomb...

Cyberzombie, yay!