QUOTE (hermit @ Jun 9 2010, 08:58 AM)
Quite on the countrary, it keeps SR from becoming yet another angry dystopian collection of scifi clichés. Wanting Magic out of SR is like saying the Cthulhu games would be awesome 1920s gaming if you could only lose that damned mythos shit.
SR always was about the mystic surrounded by the semi-near future. It never was SciFi to begin with. If you want that, play Cyberpunk 3, or any of a plethora of less successful games like that.
I came back to the boards mainly because my roommate was talking to some of his friends and they got into the idea of playing Shadowrun. So I was going to run the game and decided on 4e to lower the learning curve (I know 3rd Ed very well, but never really dug into 4e) since they normally play nWoD stuff and a lot of the concepts would be similar. Turns out, their normal GM wants to run a Cyberpunk 2020 game and asked me "Is there any way you guys could combine them?"
Now, for the record, I'm working on converting Harlequin to 4e...going to run them through Universal Brotherhood and the related stories while that's going on (even going to have my roommate play and Infected from the start who undermines them and eventually turns on them when they get too close, leading them into an ambush). Then I start creeping in with the Enemy, going through Harlequin's Back (yes, I'm serious, I want to run that damn thing), then the elections and aftermath...basically going to go through the entire canon timeline.
My Crowning Moment of Evil GMing though is going to be when the group does an extraction from the Renraku Archology...on December 24, 2061. I'm going to have everything go perfectly for them...all the security guards are distracted or on break or just not paying attention, bystanders will be helpful, it's going to be the smoothest run ever...and I'm going to wait...and wait...and the SECOND any of them even breaths anything remotely similar to "This is too easy", that's when Deus locks the place down. If they can hold it in until they get out, they'll be alright. The gates close just after they leave...but if they say the magic words, they get locked in.
You just flat out can't run that kind of game in Cyberpunk, it's not built for it. It's built...well, frankly, like Shadowrun 4e's world is. Street-level play. That's never interested me. I'm already a cog in the machine working in my cube 40 hours a week as it is...I don't want to spend my free time pretending to be a cog in the machine but eating out of a vending machine and sleeping in a coffin...