One of my runners complained to me today, "The problem with shadowrun is that their attention to detail is all messed up. For example, it doesn't bother tham that armor on vehicles can go up to twenty but only takes up 1 slot without reducing speed or handling... meanwhile they went to the trouble of including a modifer on the pheromone scanner for menstruating females."

Well, with the VERY ADVANCED technology of 60 years from now, there could be some new polymers or stuff that are highly resistant and very light. If this is unbalancing from a metagame point of view, this is discussion for another topic.

From the title, I was wondering if you were gonna ask how a phermone scanner can smell the..... 'scent'.... through armour.


"Oh, so THAT'S the problem with Shadowrun."

The problem with Shadowrun = Not enough cowbell.

Advanced tech or not, most effective armor is by its nature ablative.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ablative_armor

Included link for clarity.

The armor dies so you don't.

I am not interested in the game being fixed for armor weight and size but I wanted to report that I understood the persons intuition on armor and could see their point.

As for the chem sniffer, its probably just an easter egg for us to giggle at, not worry about.

BlueMax

Most effective, yes. Most efficient, sadly no.

Good for tanks that aren't expecting more than one round per quadrant in an engagement - Bad guy fires first, ablative goes, they return fire, cook the bad guy.

Not so much for shadowrunners.

"Crap, I tripped and fell on a nail!" *kablack*

*alarms*

"WHOSE IDEA WAS THIS, ANYWAY?!"

It's true though. The game is intended to be abstract from top to bottom, yet they inexplicably go into way too much detail about certain things. This has always been a problem for Hacking/Decking rules, for instance. Vehicle armor fits in well with the default mentality of the game. It's the detailed stuff that doesn't fit; those details are supposed to come from the players and the GM as they interpret the dice rolls, situation, and actions taking place. +X for detecting increased pheromones fits that theme, with the GM and player's being left to determine what fits that description. Including menstruation as an example for that modifier also fits. But a flat +X for detecting menstruation doesn't.

Of course, the reason you see things all over the place is because of how the game is put together. When you have a half dozen freelancers (and worse, fanboys-turned-freelancers) throwing rules together, each one of them is going to want to do it their own way and sneak in whatever they can no matter how disruptive or inappropriate it is to the game's core concepts. That's fine for fluff and background information as diversity is a great thing there. Not so much when it comes to actual rules for a game.

I also think one of the biggest problems in the roleplaying "industry" is that so many people refuse to see them as actual games, so much as rules being a nuisance for their storytelling and play-fighting. Which is a shame in my opinion. You can have your cake and eat it, too... but few bother to pay equal attention to both sides of the "roleplaying game" descriptor.

For serious. I never even read any of the fluff, because it has so little to do with the game.

I'm freelancing atm and the rules are in my eyes the most imporant thing in writing I can mess up fluff a bit it can be retcon later. I mess up rules its going to heavly effect every customer untill its fixed errata or just a new edition.

I have a A4 not book dedicated to the rules and play tests of ideas ect.

I find the fluff to be the cheesy, grease-laden topping on the RAW dough.

-- It's really really really hard to keep track of this kind of thing without a very heavy-handed line developer. Shadowrun has always vacillated between "rules realism" (lots and lots of modifiers, new subsystems) and "free form" (bah, it's an abstract game deal with it).

Well, I for one never realized (until last year, maybe?) that these books were cobbled together from various pieces written by freelancers. Ignorance is bliss.

There is a classification for people who refuse to see them as games: Simulationists.

BlueMax
/needs a shower now

On the contrary, simulationists are fundamentally about the play-fighting, to the exclusion of the storytelling.

Woooah.

You can geek out and detail way more than fighting. You can make a chem sniffer that tells what phase of the moon a lady is in. Simulationists are about simulation. Yes you can simulate fighting but, you can also simulate a whole lot more.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNS_Theory#Simulationist

BTW I am sadly a Gamist. Not proud just honest.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNS_Theory#Gamist

BlueMax

I didn't mean only fighting. Sorry about that wording. I meant that simulationist = mechanics, as opposed to 'not seeing them as games', which I read as "so much as rules being a nuisance for their storytelling".

I agree that the situation is more complex, because there's 'gaming' vs. story vs. simulation-for-its-own-sake, etc.