So, I was surfing the Net. looking for stuff to inspire me gameing etc. and I found this neat little article. Well he makes some good points and he doesn't have his head too far up his ass. I thought I'd share with you guys.

link

What do you think? Discuss. (Personally I think anything that make SR more visable is a good thing)

Well... the PnP RPG industry as a whole is pretty freakin undergroud. So there's no real surprise that, despite the mass-market appeal of The Matrix, sci-fi in general and computer RPGs, SR fails to attract any sort of decent segment of that population. That is a failing of PnP RPGs as a whole, not just Shadowrun. I don't expect that to change, ever, even if the Shadowrun devs were to begin some sort of mass-market publicity blitz.

As to why SR does not attract more of the current RPG population, that's a tricky one. I only play SR, and so does my group. I'm not even a little attracted to other RPGs. But I've met a few 'generalist' gamers that switch games, and I think the hangup is that the cyberpunk setting is not something people think about. You can go "hey, I feel like a fantasy setting... let's run a game of D&D (or whatever)", but it's pretty rare for people to think of cyberpunk for their next game. People will either think of far-future sci-fi (Star Wars, whatever) or Fantasy.

Bleak near-future with Elves is not a spontaneous idea for most people. The group dynamics is differant too - in other games, groups -'parties'- stay together and act together more easily than in SR.

Anyway, just some of my ideas.

PNP isn't that underground anymore. We can buy both dungeon and dragon magazines at the local 7-11. When I was in high school about 1/3 of my grade played a pnp rpg of one kind or another. There rest knew exactly what they were.

It's true that SR doesn't attract a huge segment of the games. Thats too bad. I find SR has one of the better game mechanics and character creation and advancement rules. It might be that a whole lot of players out there are big into fantasy novels, and play mmorpg, so when they choose a game they choose one that gives you cancer just because it's something that they know they like. Another problem is the amount of books available. SR books are of really high quality. There are also very few of them. With that other game and its ogl you have row upon rows of books at your local game shop dedicated to it, they even have the books at chapters. ST has a very small selection that doesn't grow anywhere near as fast as the others.