Kind of a curiosity question. I tried to do it once. The idea was elves, orks and dwarfs were aliens with the elves having conquered the other two. They came to earth in sleeper ships designed to be cannibalized on landing and waking. They landed in Texas and started taking over territory using their high tech and ork soldiers. The humans finally were able to stop them when trolls revealed their existence to humanity and demonstrated magic, which they used to fight the invaders. After a few years territory lines were drawn and elves had their own hostile country and a ceasefire.

The best part was how they completely and easily conquered Texas.

We build rules for using the SR mechanics for doing a fantasy world (akin to *shudders* D&D). We never actually got to play test it, but it looked good. We removed matrix completely. Turned cyber and bio ware into necromantic magic (still costing essence) and had to convert the armors into something more scene appropriate.

I would still like to play test that sometime.

-D

i played a game where most of the SR mechanics were transferred to star wars game

I have heard tell of a Mass Effect conversion.

Yes.

Star Wars
Warhammer 40,000
Fantasy
Stargate

Though most of mine has been for Shadowrun 3rd and older I have reworked them for 4th. Even ran the last 3a.

A friend challenged me to do a T.M.N.T. (old game/B&W comics version) using the critter powers and metagenics as a base.

This is something my group has been working on/towards. At least we started out making a mass effect conversion. But the fact that I was the only one of my group that hasn't played mass effect yet (and I'm the GM for most of our games) meant that we put that on hold for the moment and took what we had done so far and adapted it to a more generic space-faring setting. I think we did put together a SR conversion of playable races for ME though...I'll see if i can find it.

We had played with and looked at other games that are already designed with space settings in mind (Alternity and GURPS being the primary examples) but found they didn't have the right feel of play that we wanted. GURPS method of granularity is so generic that it just doesn't feel interesting. Alternity did a bit better job in this regard but has some wonky rules.

We decided to take the opportunity to rebuild a lot of the game mechanics as well to better fit the setting and to fix some of our perceived imbalances in gameplay.

Some of the main changes we've made so far are changing skills to having tiers, adjusting available skills/groups, creating greater versatility and definition for skill uses. Changing the way certain attributes are derived and how attributes interact with skills...

I recently ran a Star Wars game and had thought the game mechanics for shadowrun would work better then the d20 we ran. How well did it work out for your group?

I've seen the reverse twice, where the SR universe was used on a different game system.

I love the universe, but really feel the game is broken in too many places to want to overlay it on another universe.

Oo! Some friends and I did an SR4A conversion to old-school Shadowrun in 2050 once. =i)

Seriously, though, Mass Effect? Two great tastes that taste great together. I'd love to hear more about it.

My group did a generic space opera game once.

It featured an AI that was practically viral. Any time a civilization built computers that were sophisticated enough, they'd pick up a signal in the background radiation of the universe, which was essentially a download and auto-install AI (or code that would cause computers to become sentient, etc.) and said AI was always hostile to organic sentients.

One defining moment of the game was when one of the players managed to get into the central core of one of the computers and have a conversation with it as to why it was doing what it was doing. His escape plan?

"Wow, that's really awful. I'm...I'm going to just go kill myself now."

And he walked out.

The AI let him go because if he was going to off himself anyway, then why bother spending the CPU cycles doing it?

I used Shadowrun 2nd edition rules with some tweaks (on races and cyberwares) for a Guilty Gear game like 4-5 years ago.

Broken?? I'm actually curious on your opinion on how so. I can see areas where a few improvements can be made but I usually fix those with house rules or GM says so.

I've seriously considered trying to do the 8th World idea (the Shadowrun/Battletech crossover joke), but no, not really. I prefer tinkering with World of Darkness rules for a generic and simple rule set (though my group hasn't played anything I've tinkered with anyway).

Costs of skills. Why does banishing a spirit cost just as much as summoning one, when banishing accomplishes so little most of the time?
More controversially, why does the unarmed skill cost as much as a firearms skill, when guns accomplish more in a wider array of situations, where unarmed needs a very specific series of serendipitous events to work well?

Glitching and equipment. The magical laser beam rod (shaped conveniently like a mag-lite) with a simple red button for firing will never ever misfire for a skilled user, but critically break down at least once before discharging it's battery for an average joe.

Initiative and Weapons. A weapon firing at it's fully automatic rate can increase its maximum fire-rate depending on who's holding the gun.

Depending on what you considered mechanics of the game and what you consider 'The Universe', much of Magic is broken to the point where the game becomes less fun. (Spirit search powers, Summoning spirits from Astral, easier to hit and difficult to absorb damaging spells costing far less then harder to hit and easy to absorb spells, etc)

That's just off the top of my head at lunch. I'm sure I could think of more if I had the mind to.

it worked pretty well, it wasn't a full translation as the GM was basically using us for testing haha. there were a few bumps but nothing bad that was solved relatively easy. it was more of a mesh between the two than a strict translation of SR4 mechanics to strict star wars though.

I've done the opposite as well, running SR (in the SR2/SR3 era) with old World of Darkness (though in fairness that was a Werewolf/Shadowrun crossover and I decided it was easier to fit cyber & SR magic into oWoD than Garou into SR2), Millenium's End, and 2300AD (that last was unsuccessful). But I've never tried using SR rules for non-SR settings, no.

I had been working on a project to convert Earthdawn to SR4A mechanics. It is, ostensibly, the same universe as SR. It's quite a bit of work. So far all I have is a few hundred Earthdawn Adept Talents converted into Adept powers, along with some basic rules governing magic, edge, summoning, etc.

Ugh, I like Earthdawn mechanics. Why would you taint them with SR4?

You must be horror tainted!



Honestly though, they seem too far apart to close the gap to me. Just the nature of everyone being magical. I guess the attribute + skill is somewhat similar to attribute + ranks, but you'd have to figure out thresholds and stuff to match the difficulty curve of the step system.

Just uh..well, good luck

I really hate the Earthdawn mechanics. I realize it's a matter of opinion.

I believe in the write-up I granted everyone the mystic adept quality for free. In addition to that, each Discipline costs 10 BP or 20 Karma as a positive quality. It starts you as a 0-circle adept in that discipline. You can take as many disciplines as you want, but you gain Circles(initiations) in them separately.

I'm currently working on an Aliens V.S. Marines game. It's going okay, I am just having trouble covering what all Aliens can do or see magic-wise.