Here's what I would like to know:

When it comes right down to it, how do you really like to play in the 6th world?

I don't want this to devolve into a flame war, so please, just answer the OP for yourself, because I would like to see an actual cross-section of the people who are willing to respond.

The three categories I chose are for this are:

What character power level do you really like to play/run?
This can be a lot of things, but mostly includes starting BP/Karma, advancement rates, incidence of special powers/rare races, availability of special equipment as a matter of course (eg. APDS ammunition, lasers, nano-disassemblers, access to space).

What type (dificulty level) of game do you favor?
This really comes to danger: Do you like it so mages/virtuakinetics lose magic/resonance from healing? Worry about where you're sleeping? Pretty paranoid? Or do you focus on the 'runs? Maybe your characters are like those in Star Wars - immune from the beneficial bonuses their opponents might have gotten from wide bursts or tracers. Maybe you like playing primer runners where the dice are just an minor nusiance. Do you mix and match some more dangerous and limiting, while opening other things up? If so, what and why?

How much magic do you like in YOUR 6th world?
What sets the 6th world apart from the usual dystopian future/cyberpunk mileu is the presence of fantasy magic. How much do you like to explore THAT side of the universe, or do you really prefer to focus on the Cyberpunk side of things?

Ok, the forum is open, have at it...

Had to chose Average on all counts, because me and my group will go to both sides once in a while with everything.
Yes, the one time we did NOT have magical Backup did hurt like crap. But it was an interesting situation at least ^^

Pretty good poll. It's just got one flaw -- you called the highest level of magic "ludicrous." That skews you against accurate self-reporting, since there might be people who you would label that way, but they'd be more likely to label themselves as "prevalent," given the negative connotation of the last category. You probably should have called it "ubiquitous." Now, maybe nobody would pick that one either because it's such a gross violation of RAW, but thanks to the way you labeled it, we'll never know if it was because nobody plays that way, or because you wrote a non-neutral response for them. But I've seen worse polls, where pretty much all of the answers except the one that the poller wants are variations on "der me so stupid."

If it were the Case, i would have chosen the ludicrous choice. if only because it reminded me of Spaceballs Ludicrous Velocity ^^

I also leaned towards the middle, because I like to mix things up

on characters, maybe you should have asked more about style also. I like to run PCs who seem average, like many movie characters, who at the end of the day turn out to be some badbutt when the chips are down. I enjoy playing a character's flaws or unquiness. One PC/NPC, Ronin a cybernetic samurai I played up his sense of honor. Whenever he would walk into the underground bar in Denver, where you had to buy a round if you didn't put your weapon in the box, he would just put a credstick on the bar. That was because he was always armed, be it martial arts, the restreactable spur or the heavy pistol in his cyber arm.

An NPC I am running in my current game, is a human assassin and connected to one, or more, of the PC's background(s). I run him cool and mysterious, with hint of asian honor. And he drives the martial artist nuts by saying. "You're ok, for a human."

i enjoy running a gritty/cinematic games. one side where the players realize they may get serious hurt, while when they make make a good role play, or roll play it is big just like in te movies

magic is usually balanced, though right now my group is very heavy magic, with very little cyber

Powerful character for A. I like to play a cut above average; but not quite immortal cinematic stuff. Of course-I have varied moods for the extremes-sometimes I DO like crazy cinematic, others low-level. But Powerful is the average that I like.


Difficulty: again, average. I like there to be danger, but not so much where Im always in fear that everything could go to hell 100% of the time. I play to have fun, not be stressed. (Hey, for some it's fun-for me, it's not.)

Magic: again, average here. Not so many there's Hogwarts on every corner, but more than none.

Im kinda middle ground all around, except for the characters, which I like to have a manga-esque feel.

Where's the "wherever the GM sets it" option?

SR is a social activity, and varies massively by location. I've played in Seattle, Caracas, Denver, Lancaster (UK), Tokyo, Sydney. Each of those has a very different magical prevalences. My current game is set in a location that attracts talismongerers and student mages, so awakened elements of the setting are remarkably prevalent. At the same time, I've played in Caracas where Magic sometimes just doesn't turn up.

And asking people to self-report the difficulty?

Power Level: I like it high, but not insane. SR3 we played mostly normal 120 points, specialized but not hyperspecialized. There were pretty much no "dump-stats" for us, and we thought of real developement... but we always were pretty powerful. But since our Character really died much we became not so "godlike" as in other rounds. If someone got to say 100 Karma earned it was a wonder... i can think of... 5 or so characters in our group who made it to retirement (In at least 4 years of playing) *g*

Danger: If there is no threat it is no fun. We played it very very hard. The GMs never willfully killed someone off, but ONE stupid move on your side and you can die. Also we played with secondary effects and stress on cyberware/stats and essence loss. (That 0.15 essence guy of us... oh how he ran from that one vampire *g*). So i like it REALLY hard... its so much more rewarding to survive against really bad stuff, knowing that the GM WILL kill you if you make poor decisions.

Magic: We played Magic rare, but of course in concentrated amounts on both sides. (Runners and Security). So our team(s) often had 2 (of 4-6) characters magical. But some had none. (And another one had all but one). Magic defenses were rare, and when there were some, mostly passive (wards, watcher). But when something came down hard on us, they always had integrated magic in their troops (Swat-Magician, Elementals and such)

I am speaking in past tense because my new group will start only this month and i assume they will be much more.... nice in terms of dangerousness (They like to play a character for a long time in D&D). Which is not really that exciting for me. A Hero has to die young in a blaze of glory, or retire when he earned enough money. (If you can buy a perfect SIN and middle or high lifestyle... most people chose to end their career)

Apologies, but the top level is where the Awakened make up something like a clear majority of the total population in contravention of all the Fluff. In retrospect I could have chosen a better word, but I thought the contextual description summed it up pretty well, especially compared to the rest, but thanks for the feedback. I will keep that in mind for the next time. It should let me edit the thing so let me have a look-see.

im going to go ahead and say we play powerful characters because ill allow my players to do whatever and we ignore availability. are games tend to get very cinematic both being easy for unimportant matters and very difficult when itll make a difference. i would say we represent the magical demographic pretty accurately.

The games I play in tend to be very magic-heavy (GM's pet corp is practically a magical initiatory group of it's own), and our games tend to range from gritty to cinematic. Our cinematic end of the spectrum was realized with a group we ended up calling Omega, simply because there was nothing the GM could throw at us that hurt us. (SR3 characters, 2 physads, a hermetic that ran with no less than 4 bound Force 5+ elementals -- one of each type, and a cobra shaman comprised the group. On occasion, we hired an NPC troll gun platform)

What character power level do you really like to play/run?
I picked powerful, because to me, shadowrunners should be tougher than most people. They are in-demand specialists who do extremely dangerous work for a living. They should be good enough to reliably function at their jobs - so considering what their jobs entail, they should be tough.

What type (dificulty level) of game do you favor?
I picked cinematic. I like games where there is a real chance of death, but I prefer an action movie feel to "realism" that comes at the expense of playability.

How much magic do you like in YOUR 6th world?
I picked average, but that is for the world as a whole - I believe that both shadowrunners and some of their tougher targets should both have higher levels of awakened than in the general population.

Now that I see the results, I think a few of the other categories could have been better designed, too. There's a huge majority that uses "average" power characters, but also a huge majority that prefer "gritty" difficulty level. That doesn't make much sense -- assuming that gritty is easier than average, the majority of people would want average difficulty to go with the strength of their characters. I think the word gritty is simply too attractive, and it doesn't send the right message. It would have been better to call the categories "Very Easy," "Easy," "Medium," "Hard," and "Very hard." All of those are value neutral and are essentially quantitative, while words like "gritty" are attractive and lead to misreporting. I believe most people use average level characters and average difficulty level, they just prefer the word gritty, and weren't quite sure that gritty was supposed to be easier than average.

Also, the word cinematic is quite unclear. How is it that 7% play cinematic level characters, but 17% play cinematic level difficulty? That doesn't seem to jive. If cinematic is the highest difficulty level, you wouldn't expect characters below that level to survive it. I think it must be that people think that cinematic difficulty means something different from cinematic character level. If it was "very powerful" and "very hard," there might be more consistent numbers there.

As for my initial concern, with "ludicrous," I think it might have been unfounded. After all, there's no room anywhere in the fluff for magic being everywhere. It's going to be the very rare group that turns the magic dial up that high, because no matter how you slice it, that's way outside of RAW. No matter what language you used, you still probably wouldn't get many picks. Even if people do play like that, they'd probably self-report inaccurately because of the stigma attached to altering RAW so radically.

I FEAST UPON THE SOULS OF MY ENEMYS!


Wait..This isn't the what I had for lunch today thread? darn,

Average to gritty seems to be our usual playstyle, but I've seen hells a lot of fun come out of the powerful games, most of which I missed out on. And I'm not just talking ShadowRun, the last overpowered game I was witness to (I was unable to play because I had class until 8 and the game went from 6 to 11...or later) was a Scion game.

Scion, the game where the players are the bastard children of gods.

With godly powers.

There are three levels of play, Hero (you're Hercules....ish: you're stronger than one man, but not quite 10), Demigod (you ARE Hercules, or Gilgamesh), and God (you now rival Thor and Baron Samedi).

Each level of play has an experience bracket, that is to say, to move up into a higher experience bracket costs a bucket load of EXP, but you can do it eventually. Whole campaigns have been known to run for two years or more without anyone moving up a bracket, oh sure, they get new powers and get stronger and stuff, but no one saves up the EXP to advance to the next bracket.

Now. Condense the entire game into 11 weeks; Hero to Godhood (EXP doleouts were, IIRC, about 250 a person, advancement from Hero to Demigod (and Demigod to God) were free when the GM said it happened).

Sire some bastard children of your own, save the world, gain followers, break the rules, destroy the world, and duke it out with Titans.

Most epic game I was ever witness to.

GMed by the most epic man I have ever met.

A man who also happens to be an Ultraviolet in Paranoia. And he got that way by playing the game. He also ran some amazing Paranoia and ShadowRun one-shots (one of which consisted of a party of about 6, 2 of which were inside agents--one for lonestar, someone else managed to get the highest body count by releasing a nerve agent into the ventilation system of a nearby hotel).

One of the other epic games--on in which the aforementioned GM was a player in--has been since referred to as the "I can't believe we're not epic" campaign. D&D 3.5 where the party managed to cutscene 37 Balors and their minions after having demonstrated that they could kill one (and the minions) before any of them got a singe action and did so without spending any consumable resources (spell slots, scrolls, potions, etc). They were level 14.

Cinematic, Dangerous, Special. I mean dangerous assuming it is the highest difficulty level. If I screw up, despite being able to wade through people, hip deep in blood, I want to die.

I wouldn't mind more.. magic "tech" for lack of a better term. Where Magicians are rare, maybe even Hen's Teeth, but magical technology is not. I might try and convince the GM (when we finish our current game od ED, anyway) to let us do some research for stuff like DH's power weaponry, or armour that corresponds directly to your magical abilities in exchange for some god awful downside.

Ok, here is why I separated the questions: it is possible to have "Jane Q Public" characters with little or no special abilities, but they go on cinematic adventures accomplishing incredible goals and things of that nature. On the other side, some people like their characters amped up a couple notches, but want things hard and gritty and to have to worry about who's popped their latest fake SiN or scoped their diggs. I don't see them as irreconcilable at all. And I chose to order the three questions in ascending order, from hardest on the characters (1) to easiest (5) each time. A gritty game implies that there are more ways to die than just on a 'run, that you DO have to worry about the details of your place of residence rather than just the entry "medium" and your choice of travel is important (cab? bus? train? personal vehicle?). I think most people got it pretty well, I was trying to be descriptive, and my post clearly stated what I meant in each category. Or at least I THOUGHT it did.

Regarding magic, it sounds from some of the posts I have seen that some people think it should be more or less prevalent in their worlds either because they like it or dislike it and seek to emphasize or de-emphasize it respectively.

I prefer characters who are a cut above the crowds. After all, most people aren't Awakened, can't afford the impressive cyberware, and don't have the contacts for heavy and illegal loadout. That makes characters powerful, I suppose. And the difficulty the characters face should be variable. Sometimes prime runners go on milk runs. In fact, they should do it as often as possible: it pays the bills and doesn't eat your pay with hospital fees. But the characters should also face grueling challenges sometimes. Hitting that top-level difficulty is fun.

I don't see cinematic as quite belonging on the same axes. Cinematic is letting the characters attempt or get away with things that aren't realistic but are cool. Trolls with bows shooting down attack helicopters are cinematic. The armored sam charging machine gun emplacements and shrugging off long bursts to take them out is cinematic. It's not about the characters' power, really, and it's not about difficulty. It's more about pace, I think. Cinematic is anti-gritty in that many "threats" are minor inconveniences that just make your characters look good without really breaking a sweat. But when they face their real challenges, well, cinema demands that they work hard for their victories.

Really a cinematic game is one in which karma/edge is spent constantly from large pools, or perhaps one in which things are done all the time that would require such expenditures in a grittier game.

I really don't care about the powerlevel of the players and game, as long as the two match. As far as magic, what i like and what i normally get in a game are two DIFFERENT beast. I like to have sometimes one awakened character per game or less... but every game i run or get into the table is about HALF Mages. Which is what spurred my new long term character, my Mage geeker... which is a mage.. kind of himself

Ok, so I think the problem is that the difficulty levels are completely subject to interpretation. What's more dangerous, "Gritty" or "Powerful characters?" That might be interfering with the results. It's not clear whether the difficulty scale goes from most to least, or least to most, or what any of the terms mean, really... Not that it matters. I'm just interested in inferential statistics, and I like to comment on helping people create polls that actually test opinions, rather than manufacture skewed results with confusing questions.

I didn't find this poll confusing at all. How could one think they are? (rethorical question). Also you can easily mix these up. (Yes weak characters can play play in a dangerous or a cinematic game, and a "cinematic Hero" can still be challenged. (Also i had no problem with "ludicrous Magic level"... it's name describes that it goes against the intended set ofrules and descriptions in the books. (But we all know you don't HAVE to do as they say)

Well, it's not much of a rhetorical question, because it has a definite answer which does not confirm the rhetorical point being made. For one thing, "Cinematic" is the most powerful kind of character, but also the easiest run difficulty? The power level of characters goes from weakest to strongest, and then the power level of games goes the opposite direction. Cinematic is not synonymous with "weak," or "easy," so it's easy to assume that, like with characters, Cinematic means strongest. It's easy to conceive of a difficulty scale where "dangerous" is the easiest level, and "cinematic" being crazy difficult, like ninjas rappelling down every other vertical surface, and hideous monsters from beyond popping up in every adventure. That's why it's confusing.

It was a rhetorical question (sorry for the typo before), because i didn't want an answer. Doesn't matter if you may have one. (That's pretty much is the point of a rhetorical question... you use it to get people thinking, or at least thinking YOUR way *g*)

I tried to use it to imply that people should read given options, carefully think about them , assess logical structures and patterns (and if unclear assume likely stances of the original poster)

I think "cinematical" implies the feeling of movies overall: That you know the heroes will win. It is all about the presentation. Which means: Heroes are strong, will overcome their obstacles. If they are not in their world, cinematical heroes (say in a gritty/dangerous setting) are still powerful and will pretty much succeed and exceed expectations in their tasks, but the world itself presents them with unfamiliar obstacles. (Like hard social ones for a ever-cool no-talk-gunslinger) This makes it hard, but does not take the overall "mega-coolness" of the characters.

DAMMIT... did i just argue on the internet? Sorry... But well, i just wanted to imply: don't hang so much on words; at least TRY to think what the others mean, not what they say/write.

I shut up now... bye

You can call your question rhetorical, but you can't forbid people to answer it. A rhetorical question has to be something where the answer is implied by the question, and it makes a point. Your question did not suggest an apparent answer, but rather invited one, because the answer was not obvious. I think I explained clearly why the poll is confusing. There is more than one way to read it. That's why it's confusing, because people could look at it, especially if they only take a brief look, and misunderstand it. If you haven't taken any collegiate level statistics classes, you might want to step down here. In order to be accurate, polls have to be very carefully written, and this one is full of errors that could easily render it useless in terms of finding out peoples' actual opinions. Not that it really matters, it's an informal poll. But I assume that Dumpshock pollers want to know peoples' real opinions, and not some skewed version based on a flawed set of questions. So whenever I see a problematic poll I like to drop in and suggest how it could be better, for future reference. That's all.

You've got some non choices in this poll - you can have powerful characters in a gritty, tough game. But you've got 'powerful characters' as a difficulty choice.

Actually, the "powerful players" implies that they (no matter the selected level) are noticably above the opposition's level. Thus "poor" players would then compete against "weak" opposition. Cinematic characters would 'run against powerful opponents. Does that make sense?

What kind of characters I like?

I chose average. As in standard 400 point creation, no items with availability above 12 at start, and as a GM I stress the need for charcaters to have varied skills and less specialization. this means an average character from my games can usually fit, adequately, into 2 or 3 roles (e.g. The Rigger can hack, has negotiations and is a good shot as well). Then again being a good shot is around the 3-4 range in a skill, a 5 is someone scary and a 6 is pretty much unheard of.

Attributes follow a similar lining, with one exception. For me regular John Doe and Jane Doe have an average attribute score of 2. So charisma 2 is just normal, 3 aobve average-trained, 4 is that huge guy at the gym who goes there every day and works out 4 hours straight, a 5 stands out immediately (charisma equivalent of great hollywood stars and such) and a 6 is pretty much Albert Einstein. Now when that charisma 7 elf enters a bar he turns faces, and sure he can talk his way into Damien Knight's office, but every girl who has seen him remembers him and the guys feel either doubts about their sexuality, the same infuatuation as the girls, intense envy or crippling fear.

What kind of game?

Gritty to dangerous deffinitely. Not because the bad guys have every stat at characters +2, but because they are nasty, witty, intelligent and are, allow me this redundancy, "dangerous". If you fuck with them they will retaliate, if you leave any holes in your aliby to the Star they /will/ get you, some will take revenge after brooding over it for a long time, they will execute your children, burn your house, rig your car with bombs, use ritual sorcery, have that forensics team study your DNA at the scene of a crime for years and all that stuff. Players usually are more afraid of not doing things silently for all of teh above, even if they can kill every HRT a corp cans end their way. Oh! And remember the golden rule of reinforcements: one assault rifle on the street means, at least, twenty cars of patrolmen, one or two SWAT teams, drone support, elemental support and one or two yellowjacket support choppers. Why? Because law enforcement /is/ militarized and they respond harshly to criminals. On the Barrens you may get away with the rifle, but gangersd will want that for their arsenal so you're not much better off. Social skills are a deffinite requisite to survive, even for the charisma 2 sammy. Don't ask what do grenade launchers get for a response, or a fireballing mage.

However the NPC's deffinitely play by the rules. Usually, if the enemy is also a shadowrunner, I follow the general accepted codes of conduct (try to keep a low profile, don't draw attention, keep it hush-hush, etc), if its a corp, PR are very important so the hit team will have to perform with the same care that the characters must, cops are afraid to shoot pedestrians and would rather get an arrest than a dead guy (looks better for the media, as there's a face to blame for all the dirty crime in the city).

On the other hand NPC guards do wet their pants when someone puts a gun at their temple, gangers run when a mage casts a spell and even Special Forces dudes with Unarmed Combat (Kicking characters ass): 6 will, on a principle, avoid violence. This is because in every fight there's risk, and they want to avoid it if possible.

How much magic?

I like it low-end for NPC's and as much as players want. My group has one elf raven shaman, one TirNaNog elf follower of the Path of the Wheel, used to have a mystic adept, a Troll Combat mage, a technomancer and a rigger. They don't need a sammy, deffinitely, as those are getting quickly redundant and overly expensive to maintain -at least in my opinion and my group so far agrees-. When violence is needed drones fill the part of the razorguy-gillette, have better sensors, often better sense and almost always better social skills -drones know when to shut up -. However That is adeffinite rarity and the team has recieved more than their share of contracts exactly for this reason: no other group ion the city has such a high amount of awakened people working together. At most the other teams have one aspected magician, and they usually know but a crappy spell or two. All in all the group is about 30% to 40% of the awakened running population in Denver.

As for corps and those who can pay, they go for cheaper solutions: long turns for teh awakened, large expenses on bound elementals and spirits, wards and foci used as security measures. Adepts are more valuable repairing wards than being cannon fodder for runners and the corps like it that way. It also means there's a heavy use of manatech on regular guards and paracritters a high priority for "delicate" areas. The corps also cultivate background counts on their grounds. I'd rather exploit the passive uses for magic like ritual sorcery and enchanting for these cases, and show just what the players are missing for saying they just want spellcasting.

The cops tend to use astral mages to scout and direct spirit action, specially Spirits of Man, as they can cast spells, and can take over the role of acting magician inside a SWAT team, helping a mate in need and similar.

Cinematic implies a theme as well as a power level, it's best to separate them.

Please note that these statistics and descriptions reflect Shadowrun Second Edtion.

I chose that I perfer to play 'Powerful' characters. We use the Second Edition Pirioity character creation system, so the characters do not usually end up being absurd. However, as noted in your description of this question, we have no limits on availibility. Our characters are made so as to have been on a shadowrun (or many) before. If you want APDS ammo, you could have gotten it by now. Fopr the post part, there is a gentleman's agreemant (gentlefolk? gentleperson? whatever...) that characters will not be stupid. We don't take edges and flaws, we do play characters with personality traits though (flaws with no points). If a PC is a street thug on his first run, he doesn't start with resources in the A priority (1,000,000) [Aside: the exception to this is sometimes street mages, but that is a flaw with the priority creation system in that resources and force points are given in the same entry, so if your street mage knows many spells, which is entirely possible, she has to start with alot of money.... But that is another issue entirely.] Also, my group plays using (in our opinion. No I don't want to "discuss" it again ) higher karma reward for runs, such that characters may actually improve over time as well as a more realistic amount paid to the runners than suggested by shadowrun (any edition) cannon. (If you can make more money with less danger being a wagemage, you would. A street mage could walk into any corp, ask for a job and a SIN and almost definately be granted both.) All of that being said, for our newest campaign, I'm playing a shaman with meager attributes, good skills actually, and 3 spells (with 5K to spend at creation). However, she will most likely initiate at least a few times (see below for statistics), and probably will end up being one of the more powerful 'mages' around once she gets going. I've also played a Physical Adept who killed armored trolls with playing cards, owned more than one small company, and used his "Dispelling focus" (Technically, it was a level 1 weaopn focus, but I didn't add the extra die to rolls becuase I only wanted it to be 'astrally active' to attack spells and spirits) to counter sustained magic. Also, with note to power and the ignoring of 'restricted gear' rules, the last character that I played had a tactical computer. Yes, he basically just noticed everything and killed anyone who got in the way (not that he liked killing mind you).

Shadowrun is a cyberpunk game. Well, second edition is anyway . The megacorps make the governments of today look like hippy bastards (no offence, i'm sure all of you hippies reading this are great people who even take showers occationally). They have extraterritorial rights, meaning that when you break into their building they can kill you, torture you, and throw your mangled corpse in the dumpster without anyone else batting an eye. After all, you don't even exist. The coprorate peacekeeping forces (LoneStar, KnightErrent, etc.) are similarly scaled to those of today. You were holding a gun? You must have been threatening them, otherwise they wouldn't have shot you in the face before asking you to drop the gun. Yeah... right. The megacoprs are not concerned with your life, nor with the lives of their indentured slaves wonderful employees. They care about the bottom line, the next dollar. They hire you to break into their competitors facilities, in which they are pretty sure you'll end up killing a guard or 30, to steal some piece of information or another becasue it MIGHT put them one step ahead. Now add to this Dragons, who's schemes run over decades and centuries, Free Spirits, the crazy death mages from aztlan, the Invae (the Insect Spirits) of the universal Brotherhood and otherwise... And we haven't even begun to talk about the gang wars, the political infighting, the wars, the poverty, the porn industry, the BTL dealers... The list goes on. 90% of the world would slit your throat for a buck (10% if you're only counting SINners). more than once have our PCs been attacked in their homes, while they were asleep. A PC's wife was murdered with ritual magic. Airborne toxins to out apartments, to keep us under control so they could grab us to interrogate us (this didn't work out well for them, but well...). Another campaign started with the first "run" in the Chicago Containment Zone weeks after it was established, hired by Ares to clear out an Ant nest. The 6th world is a dangerous place chummer. Better learn fast, or get out now. (Oh right, I chose "Powerful" for the second question )

For magic, I chose the Average, 1%, option. This both does, and does not reflect the world in which we play. First off, This choice does reflect the population as a whole. There are not many mages walking down the street, you don't see many strange metavariants sitting on park benches. If you see one Ogre in a month, you're had a lucky Ogre-spotting month. this applies even moreso to the number of initiated mages, which are basically 10% of the previous level. 1% of metahumans are Magically active in some way. 10% of those are initiated, 10% of those are grade 1 or higher... and so on. However, the average listed here for magic does not reflect the amount of magical activity the the runners played generally encounter. Most of the cool Threats are magical in some respect. insect Spirits, for instance, have a large role in shaping the events of the 2050's (in which we play). We all like Earthdawn quite a bit as well (we played a 3 year campaign), and therefore we keep it as the History of the 6th world, and it will sometimes (Harlequin/Harlequin's Back anyone?) have an impact on the campaigns that we run. Almost all shadowrunning teams will have a magically active character as a matter of course. This is the only viable way to penetrate magically protected facilities.

EDIT: Hey folks! It's a damn poll on Dumpshock, it's not going to be published in some psychology journal or something. Either answer the questions, or ignore them. Don't post about how bad it is.

I like to set a theme to each campaign (once we get the basics down). But normally, I want the players to start out with standard builds and customize to the theme. I like the players to shine, whether a street level theme or a high-end, globe-trotting theme. I've also been quite enamored with building in a lot of karma-awarding objectives (e.g. bonus karma if you finish this mission only using 1IP), so while the players may be able to shine, I challenge them to do more with less, for a reward.

So, I tend to have more gritty and dangerous campaigns because of those artificial challenges.

I like to keep magic rare and I'd say only about every other campaign do I get a player that wants to be Awakened...so it works out fine for me.

This is basically an admission the poll is flawed. You have choices available without clear definitions of what those options mean.

Thus, any results from this poll are inaccurate at best.

SR4 (not A)
I like a "Street level" to start a campaign - poor/ easy jobs to get peoples feet wet and get a name on the streets. Weak-ish PC's.
The opposition will usually be equal or better then the players (numbers or skills) but often ill prepared for the PC's early on owing to the "questionable" value of the targets.

As time passes things get gritty, fast (20-40 awarded karma). If your not careful with your legwork, security gets a leak from a contact you might coming for dinner and brakes out the good silverware in case you pop by. Double crosses from all quarters get more likely as the stakes rise. Going smoothly from gritty to dangerous as the team starts going national and international (this is in the 125 to 200 karma range, variant with the group). I vote gritty as that where I tend to spend *most* of the time.

Magic: rare, but not hens teeth - there are several hunderd full magicians in any major city and several hunderd to a few thousands mystical adepts, adepts (blah, blah, blah, etc.) in addition to this. Looking at the numbers many people will have some sort of magically active person in the "friend of a friend" cirlce or closer. And yes, all of them are tired of being asked to *insert something mages or their tradition cannot do here*. The Traids being magic heavy makes the SCARY etc. etc. "Mr. Johnson, we have a mage." is a negotiation point I award a die or two for in the unlikely event this has not been factored in.

Its a poll, not a scientific study. Have fun with it and leave it at that. If the OP starts posting that trends and makes claims based on this poll, then go ahead and reign down your terror and pick it apart. Until then, let's just have fun with it.

I answered "average" on all of them, because that's my "default" setting for shadowrun. However, that varies based on the kind of story I want to tell. I ran a Triad gang in Hong Kong that was packed with magic, all the characters were larger-than-life, and the danger level was dialed down: lots of mooks with a couple of "Boss" type NPCs, because it was supposed to feel like an action movie. I ran a spy game where the characters were high-powered, there was almost no magic, and the danger level was through the roof: it was supposed to be James Bond meets Metal Gear Solid 3. The next game I run will have average magic, high-powered characters, and a hellacious danger level.

Nothing wrong with trying to be accurate, is there? I assume the OP wants to know something about opinions. But with the poll as written, he knows nothing about anything, except insofar as people have posted detailed responses. If you don't want to know anything about opinions, why post a poll?

Maybe my common sense isn't so common? I thought it was obvious that a voluntary poll is going to be skewed no matter what you do, so there was no reason, for me, to poo-poo the OP and tell him his poll is useless and flawed, or that it is basically worthless to post a poll...

But then again, I'm not much for derailing a thread and spreading negativity...

I tend to run it where the characters are individually fairly powerful, compared to your average street scum, or else this would be a poor profession choice, but they're not so powerful that they don't feel they're in danger in a fight. My players are generally cautious and prudent, so they aren't likely to just rush in and get killed, and I'm trying to keep encouraging that sort of behavior and thinking, without having to make a gruesome example out of anybody. So far, I haven't needed to choose whether or not to pull someone's ass out of the fire, but there have been some close calls, and I think that's about the right difficulty level.

As far as magic goes, I think what makes the Shadowrun setting's Awakened aspects interesting is the indigenous-empowerment and animist/neopagan/nature stuff. We tend to have a lot of that going on; shapeshifters and crazy wilderness things at the edge of the city, shamans as a regular part of city life, Winternight terrorists as a major campaign opponent. I feel it's that sort of thing that gives Shadowrun a particular feel different from other cyberpunk games.

A voluntary poll is skewed if you're trying to extrapolate some population other than "whoever responds." But all we want to know is the opinions of the respondents, without worrying about any inferences we can draw to a larger population. This is basically descriptive statistics, not inferential statistics, so we don't care about self-selecting respondents.

I'm not trying to poo-poo anyone, I'm trying to help the OP and everyone think more carefully about their polls, so they can achieve their goal of actually learning about peoples' opinions. The only person I went negative on was the guy who claimed that, just because he could interpret explain the poll consistently with what the OP was trying to express, that you'd have to be dumb to be confused by it.

I like grenade machine guns. They're fairly easy to make using 4th weapons modification rules, though capacity leave something to be desired. A belt-fed version would be nice to have for a troll.


Power can be measured in two ways, what can be characters do and what can they accomplish. These two are not the same. Characters capable of doing unimaginable awesomeness could also be incapable of accomplishing anything meaningful. That they can blow their enemies up with grenade machine guns does not imply that they can do anything to dent the corporate power structure.

I prefer games where the characters can do much but accomplish little or do little but accomplish much. This means fairly weak characters with political connections and ambition, or extremely awesome loners whose victories are ultimately futile because they don't have any political connections to back them up.

Thanks to everybody who voted, and to those who have so far made commentsin the thread. Judging from the majority of the answers here that addressed my comments in the OP, I think most people got the general idea of what I was aiming for. Looking at the poll results themselves (acknowledging they are anything but scientific), I see a coupleof interesting things.

The first is that for the most part, as a group we play with magic pretty much where (we feel) the original authors of the 6th world and the game system ment for it to be played: where it's still pretty special in the world as a whole, but natural to expect some sort of awakened talent on a team. I had honestly expected a much more "flat" response, with more people picking the below-average and above-average levels.

The second is that as many of us play with "average" (read: book standard to start) character power levels. I expected this to skew a LOT more toward the high end than it wound up.

The biggest surprise to me was that such a large number of people want a "hard" game, regardless of the relative power level of the characters. Perhaps it's the connotations of the word "gritty" which I selected, but combined with other things I have seen on this board, I think it ma just reflect that most of us see running the shadows as a "hard" life with lots of danger and potential pitfalls as well as serious complications.

Once again, thank you to those who voted and to those who took the time to give us some detail about what they really like in their games.

I prefer high powered characters. Who are skilled, tough, but not gods.

For opposition I like a sinking feeling in my gut when I realize what I got myself into. I want to chuckle nervously afterwards. Although sometimes mowing down hordes of mooks is good times. Depends on my mood I suppose. I always want a challenge however.

Magic average to slightly above average. 1 to 2 percent of the population are awakened.

Theme also varies from campaign to campaign. From cyberpirates to solid snake. Pink mohawks to cold hard pros.