Okay so, I'm completely new to shadowrun, but not to rpgs. Played rifts and dnd for about 7 years. I was wondering.... Do you not gain experience/level up in shadowrun? And is there an available book that has enemies all statted out for me to use in my games right away? 4e btw. And lastly.... What do you guys find attracts you more to Shadowrun than to other rpgs? Just curious of other things that may make me want to start a campaign. Liking the look of it so far

Shadowrun is different from a game like D&D in that there are no character levels. Characters advance instead by spending Karma, which you can use to raise a skill, attribute, or practically anything else in your character's stats. Right now, the SR4 (and SR4A) book has some basic stats for someone to run a game, and Running Wild (a book composed entirely of critter stats) just was released yesterday in PDF (print should be out eventually).

Rather than gaining experience/levels, you use you karma (the equivalent of experience points) to raise your Attributes and skills.

The main rulebook has stats for grunts (groups of commonly encountered NPCs such as gang members, cops, etc.), for contacts (fences, mechanics, doctors, etc.), and critters (dragons, spirits, ghouls, etc.). The character archetypes (ready-made characters that let you begin quickly) are also good for quick opposition, although this should be used for runner-level opposition, not a standard encounter.

I like shadowrun because it is an interesting mix of fantasy and cyberpunk, where you can have an elven sorcerer in a green mohawk and a leather jacket with zippers and studs, with a submachine gun handy if his magic doesn't cut it. I like the action movie (with a bit of noir) feel of the game. I like making characters with build points. It gives so much flexibility at character creation. The downside is that it takes a while to get the knack of it. You can get so much different stuff that you aren't good at any of it, or you can go so hog wild making the greatest kung fu fighter of all time that you have someone who can't do anything else. The gamemaster also has to watch the power levels more - two characters built with 400 points can be very different, power-wise.

Amen to that...
And welcome to the Forums tremulant123...

Well... welcome.

1; Leveling up: In Shadowrun you don't have to wait a billion adventures to get enough xp to automatically improve your stats. You get a constant stream of karma (like XP), which you can use to improve many aspects of your character. (improving skills, attributes, getting new spells or deepening your ability to use magic or other speciel talents).

2. Ummm? Core book. Also there are foes statted in all adventure books. It is also very easy to just do it on the fly. Just set their dicepool in relevant situations, maybe give them a bonus for equipment and done.

3. What does me attract to Shadowrun? Well it is a VERY nice setting. You can have a multitute of adventures. You can go from: "That's it we gonna kill EVERYBODY" to a noir detective story to a mystery thriller, political intrigue or high-magic fantasy to gruesome bio-science fiction or urban survival in a cold, cruel world. And all meshes perfectly. It really is one of the really perfect worlds for roleplaying (Like Earthdawn is for high magic or Seventh Sea for swashbuckling (and no THERE IS NO D20-SYSTEM))

I'd just like to add that this depends heavily upon the party, as some are so underpowered (the Sprawl Ganger and Weapons Specialist, notably) that my last combat hacker could shred them with relative ease.

So yes, your GM *does* need to watch the character sheets with care.

Get outa here you lame newb!!

(just kidding)

I think everyones answered your questions, welcome to dumpshock, this place is a goldmine.

Its true. I believe my "Evil Bastard" rating has at least trippled from my time spent here.

1) You've gotten the answer a few times already =)

2) Same as above =)

3) What attracts me to SR is the setting and the feel, combined with the balance of rules and freeform. D&D was way too rules-based to really enjoy, and World of Darkness pretty much had no rules. Shadowrun is a comfortable middle ground.

I like the sense of mortality in Shadowrun. Combat is something to avoid, or approach with lots of preparation. If you're just starting out, it's vital to know that characters are all eggshells with hammers. In D&D you get a sense of immortality, with long battles of hit point attrition. On the other hand, in Shado-- BAM! ...

Exactly. D&D is Rockem Sockem Robots, and Shadowrun is very much like real life... Plus magic.

Shadowrun is very different to D&D and Rifts.

As mentioned earlier, it's a game of eggshells armed with hammers. A starting character, with a lot of preparation and the right info, can kill a dragon. Not easily, but they can do it by the numbers. The thing that makes the greater difference is information and tactics. Treachery and planning beat raw numbers most of the time. And incidentally, dragons are very, very good at treachery and planning.

You don't level up. You never get more "hit points". You seldom wade through a room full of "low-level" mooks without caring because it only takes one of them to call HQ and then you've got Lone Star tailing you and it doesn't matter if you can beat up a Lone Star cop because what they'll actually be doing is following you back home and finding out where you live and sending SWAT teams at 3am. And even if you think you can wade through a room full of "low-level" mooks, it only takes one to have a grenade in a small room and you suddenly find out that the term "low-level" has no meaning in Shadowrun. Right place and time, with right skills. That's what Shadowrun is about.

To give you a couple of illustrations, in the introductory game I ran for my current group, they had to kidnap a man from a factory where he was hiding out. I gave them a "milk run", because it was our first time as a group. Well they easily outmatched the light security at the facility but they went in without any preparation, found the place was actually huge and ended up wandering from room to room looking for this guy. Meanwhile, alarm systems had been tripped, the target patched himself in to the camera systems, watched where they headed and nipped out via a different corridor. The only reason they knew he had left the place was because one of them had waited outside with the van and he promptly kidnapped this person to make them drive him to safety. How was all this different to D&D? Well for a start, when the target kidnapped the PC, there weren't rounds of combat wittling the PC down in hit points. Instead, the NPC passed a stealth roll, got behind the PC and put a blade at his throat. That would have given the NPC many bonus dice on his next attack if he wanted, very probably letting him kill the PC if he wished.

(The party pulled it back, by the way, stalling him with negotiation and then ending up in a Mexican standoff. The two groups eventually compromised with the NPC allowing himself to be captured, but only on condition of being handed over to the cops, instead of their employer. He figured with a good lawyer, he'd get off lightly. Which he did and is now a sort of contact of the group.)

Something else to watch out for is that whilst D&D hit points, healing surges and daily powers give you a sort of steady progression from top condition to dead without any diminishment of ability until that point and relatively easy estimation of how close you are. Usually players can say they're done for the day and make camp somewhere until they're all restored in the morning. In Shadowrun, you can find yourself running away very suddenly, and that running when you have a bullet in your thigh isn't much fun, either. And you'd better know where you're running to because in D&D the default setting is one where you have a culture that you can retreat back into and buy healing potions from. In Shadowrun, you are criminals and if Lone Star (the privatised police force) are after you, you might find checking into the nearest inn coffin motel a little risky.

I hope that helps a little. I have a FAQ for new players geared slightly toward those coming from D&D backgrounds, it's here. In fact, if you have a look through the Shadowrun section on my site (link in sig), you'll find quite a bit of information including some "NPC Rosters" and an "Opposition Roster" which are compendiums of grunts and pre-gen NPCs.

And, as others have said, welcome to the Shadows.

K.

EDIT: To clarify a little on the nature of progression in Shadowrun. It varies. You can start out quite maxed out in Shadowrun. You can't go "superhuman". If your character is already one of the strongest people around, then congratulations. You've reached the top! There's usually something to spend your karma on. It's worth being a well-rounded character and magical characters always have something good to spend their karma on. Mundanes tend to benefit more from financial rewards letting them buy better cyberware or equipment. Every team wants a van with a pop-out machine gun turret, after all. But you also gain through building a better rep and getting better jobs as a result. My group are still living in a squat but after this next run, they'll be able to afford to get apartments of their own. It may seem a bit of a come down after D&D where you might buy a castle, but after living with the leaky ceiling and the devil rats, you learn to appreciate modest comforts. Shadowrun is a dystopia, after all.

And as to what attracts us to Shadowrun? It's gritty, it's dangerous, it's dripping with background and story and you have to think about who you piss off and if they know where you live. Or, as another Dumpshocker once put it: "Shadowrun is shooting people in the face for money. With elves."

What attracts me to shadowrun is the fact that one can play Terminator Versus Gandalf.
THere's close to nothing you can't do straight out of chargen. Aside from an Elf, nobody is likely to die if some rats attack. Well, at least not due to wounds, maybe due to disease but that can happen if you eat in any fast food shelter so no big change there ^^

Not sure which edition of D&D you came from, but both D&D and Rifts kind of have a tendency to "shoe-horn" you into stereotypes. Seriously. If you are an elf, you are going to be using a Bow and Longsword, simply because the Longsword was the best melee weapon, and you start off being able to use it for free! Rifts, if you are a glitteboy pilot(not Chromium Guardsman, though, but a core book Glitterboy Pilot), you are pretty much worthless outside your suit...and heaven help you if someone actually steals your suit, and you have to use something other then a Glitterboy armour!

In Shadowrun, with the cyber, bio, gene, and nano-ware, with the positive qualities...it is entirely possible to not only break stereotypes, but shatter the heck out of them. For fun once, I made a Troll Social adept with 1) Exceptional Attribute: Charisma and 2) Genetic Optimization: Charisma (for a natural, unaugmented Charisma max of: 6), and some minor bio-sculpting to make her dermal deposits less obvious. So, this Troll, with a Out of Chargen Charisma of 5, broke the stereotype of trolls being "Ugly" by her high charisma. I gaver her things like an armoured dress from the Moonsilver line, and an assortment of other really nice looking armoured clothes, and other fun stuff, so that she ended up more of a Fashionista, as well(includiung knowledge skills covering style, high fashion, etc), and...Boom! A Face that no-body would expect.(I think I even included some high class restaurant Matre de's among her large sum of contacts...)

Yeah, the mix of fantasy and tech is what does it for me. When people ask me what the game is like I tell them it's what they would get if the Matrix trilogy and the LotR trilogy had had mad monkey love.

As far as opponents go, I also use the various contact stats that can be found in the Contacts & Adventure booklet that comes with the GM screen as well as the contacts that can be found in the Runner's Companion book. I actually printed them all out, as well as the archtypes, thugs, and spirits from the main SR book and put them into a 1/2 inch binder that I can keep handy with me.

Be aware that character progression is less obvious in Shadowrun than in many other games: after 20 sessions, a character will only be marginally better than a starting character. He will be better, but the difference won't be as huge as between level 1 and level 10 D&D adventurers...
And in most cases, he can still be killed by a untrained NPC shooting him in the head or throwing a grenade at him.

Note on Karma: Without levels as a benchmark, people often indicate character power by total karma: e.g. 150 karma character. A useful 1st-order approximation, but depending on how that Karma was spent...

Three great things about Shadowrun:
1. You can do just about anything when creating a character. There are no "classes" per se (with the exception of the Awakened) so you can just come up with an idea and run with it. May not be useful or powerful, but definitely fun.
2. As a player, you can really be creative while playing. In D&D (and most Fantasy RPGs...and whatever the hell you want to classify Rifts as) things can be reduced to "find bad guy, kill bad guy". In SR, killing is rarely the goal (and wetwork comes with a host of in-character legal, reputation and moral issues), and even if it is, there are so many ways you can go about it. Shoot the target, drop a piano on the target, bomb the target, IED the target, poison the target's pizza...or even do something dull like use a sword.
3. As a GM, the setting allows for endless possibilities in designing a game session. Even the classic "get the case" run has countless variations.

You may find the following resources useful.
FREE Quickstart Rules plus starter scenario
25 Free Downloadable SR Missions.

Welcome to Dumpshock!

The only advice your players will ever need are three basic rules:

• Shoot Straight
• Conserve Ammo
• Never, ever, cut a deal with a dragon.

Don't trust an elf.

In addition to what was said in previous posts, the biggest adjustment you'll have to make is that improving characters is a an incremnetal process. It is not the "bing" you level and all your skills and abilities go up at once. More to the point you may get an extra die here, improve an ability there, or gain a new spell. The point being that is all that a PC can generall have any abilities they want (it is just a matter of karma). There is only two major restriction regarding PC abilities in SR4-you cannot be a mage and a Technomancer and that there are limits to the level of skill (usually 6) and attributes.

Also-just because the PC is new, doesn't mean they lack skill. THey can start with a maxed stat or skill, but does consume alot of your starting BP.


There are some in the main rule book, there are also some in the various adventures that have been published (I'd recommend Ghost Cartels, as it has a wide variety of NPCs). Running wild was just released today (in PDF), and has critter stats. Though I would note that most dangerous thing in SR (Beyond dragons and free spirits) would be the mosters of the 2 legged kind.



The variety and the ease of adapatibilty to suite the desires of the PC's. You can do RP/intrigue heavy games with little or no combat such as Tir (Elvan) High Society, to full blown merc campaign in an African hellhole.

Also-some acronyms to remember:
BBB-Big black book (main rule book)
SR4A-4th Ed main Rulebook 20th Anniversery Edition (some changes to the SR4 original-you can download the changes off the Catalyst main sight at (http://www.shadowrun4.com/)
RAW- Rules as written
RAI-Rules as intended
RC-Runners Companion (book with loads of PC /NPC options)

Edited for correctness.