Last night I was watching Bladerunner on TV and was surprised, in the scene where Harrison Ford shoots the exotic dancer, the streets are badly crowded where just pushing through was a problem and I couldn't help but htink although Bladerunner is the granddaddy of SR, our ctys were never that dense. Clubs or some malls sure but not the open streets Do you get that in your games?

Well, currently, my PCs are playing in:

The Barrens - not crowded at all
The wilds outside Seattle - nope
In an Aztechnology pyramid - not crowded anymore (heh!)
Seattle - just starting, don't know the GM's take
Los Angeles / San Fernando Valley / Las Vegas - some parts yes, with collateral damage possible

Ironically, a bunch of my nightmares have helped me with this thing.

It depends on the city, area, and what's going down. For Seattle: The Barrens are pretty Barren, but anywhere there's shelter of any sort against the volcanic ash or rain, it's packed pretty tightly (Think of the scenes from Soylent Green, only with more firearms, probably the same vintage.). Downtown is packed tight day and night, I picture videos I've seen of Tokyo traffic to get an idea like that. Tacoma is a lot of heavy traffic (Trucks and such), but not much in the way of cars (I worked in an Industrial Zone once, so I have a great idea how that works.) The rest of the areas are packed during rush hour, and nearly dead the rest of the time, save for Friday Nights where there might be some partying going on.

The nightmare parts come into play when things start going down, and just how much confusion and chaos can happen, not to mention people being trampled, random passer-bys being in the way, and so on. The best I can suggest for that is the Tech-Noir scene from The Terminator, only with more people and harder, louder music (At least in clubs. The mellow music of the Malls makes things surreal, and the lack of any music at all in the streets makes things just more real and less like a movie.).

I... Really don't like my nightmares, BTW.

You have nightmares about the TECH-NOIR club in The Terminator? I think that wins the nerdiest nightmare award.

It really depends on what city, where in the city, and very important, what time. I live near Seattle, and some streets even in downtown can be ghost towns during the right times(while everyone is at work or after 2AM).

Where I live in real life, nah, it's not too crowded. It's a little agricultural city - lots of free and open space.

We play in Denver though; I haven't made much of a thing about the crowds, so, uh, no?

I've nearly doubled the population of major cities like Seattle in my SR$ setting. They're crowded, dirty places, where the major highways are often multi-decked multi-laned structures. Everything is more crowded, and that means resources are that much more precious. In poorer areas things become a multistory warren of improvised housing. The only parts of the city where space isn't at a premium is the parts rich people live in because they can afford the space. In Seattle this becomes especially poignant because the city cannot expand it's borders easily. The Metroplex has X amount of space. So they've expanded onto lakes, rivers. and up. Up is always the easiest although not always so safe for the poor.

Industrial zones and the barrens are crowded in different ways-and the people who risk living there do so at great risk. I've also greatly expanded on the fear of Ork population growth-and have expanded their numbers by about a 125% or so. ork life tends to be cheap on the streets. (For the Record the Ork's are amongst my favorite parts of Shaodwrun! And I do like the addition of Or'zet and some of the Earthdawn Ork cultural stuff! If I could get away with it I'd add the burning heart of Gahad!) It's because of the Ork underground I've also expanded my city down! Secret cities are there.

So yeah in my game it's an insane asylum wrapped in a prepackaged corporate glittering wrapper that's rotten to the core, but there's hope. A few places remain where there are heroes. Of course, those aren't necessarily the PC's!

It was Industrial Goth music, but yeah, it was the Tech-Noir. Also, the band was lip synching.

And I wish what was in there was only The Terminator.

Because VITAS decimated total population, Shadowrun's vision of population is different from Blade Runner's [which was influenced by then-current trends in urban population density]. In order to make SR's vision of balkanization and urbanization work, I've made Shadowrun something like much of the eastern portion of my own state: super-dense urban cores, the centers of which are high-tech, high-class, and high security, surrounded by dense low-income high-crime urban areas [with islands of absolute devastation like the various Barrens and hyper-polluted areas], surrounded by middle class and high class suburban sprawl, surrounded by very lightly populated rural areas, much of which has gone back to nature, sometimes accelerated by magic. I've set some adventures a few thousands of years after Shadowrun, and really taken this to an extreme, with virtually everyone living in incredibly dense urban cores surrounded by absolute wilderness.

3278: Add in some devastation and an environment that wants to eat you, and you just described Judge Dredd.

"some", that's an understatement. Judge Dredd was decent at justifying the premise of megacities with their use of true wastelands. Without such an environment wilderness and huge cities don't mix well believably.

Which is why I like how Seattle is set up. The wilderness is just over there...too bad none of you can touch it.

I live in DC, so the fact that SR Seattle is less crowded than the (by my measure) pretty empty city I live in never rubbed me right. I make most of Seattle pressed for space, and at LEAST as dense as DC (with the exception of the areas which are specifically not full, like warehouse or agricultural districts). The barrens vary, with Redmond being a giant squatter town, and Puyallup being more of a ghost town.