No mention of SoE...

It's nice that SR missions can be directly downloadable now, though. I hope all future missions are too, but I think that might take prohibitive amounts of ressources to pull off (both in bandwith and storage memory terms).

My understanding is that SRM adventures will, in the future, typically only be available to the people supporting the SRM program by organizing and running events.

Note that players in the GenCon 2004 Shadowrun Tournament will get a first hand seen at some of the new material introduced in "Shadows of Europe"... and people said FanPro would never tackle organized religion .

*STAB*

~J

For real this time?

'Cause I got lured to Gen Con last year with promises of SoE glimpses but they gave me some candy instead and I don't remember what happened after that...

Synner took careful lessons from many drug dealers; he knows exactly how much of a "free sample" to give and feed your growing addiction.

It's true, I worked in Marketing way too many years to let an opportunity like that slip by.

Honestly though, as you can see above, even the Daily Buzz at the FanPro site says SoE is at the printers. Barring from something catastrophic happening at the printers or during shipping there should be no further delays - although I dare not rule it out given my luck.

Hi

How does that "Tournament" function at GenCon?
Who plays against whom and how is the winner determined?

Ciao,

Eismann

Based on my experiences at LepraCon, those with official games make deterinations based on how well the role-player handled themselves. This means that the senarios in the tournament are the same. Of course, having the author of a game show up at the tournament and playings skews a lot of things. That's my assumption.

Or it's a Shadowrun Duels competition.

Gruß,

Don

It's a Shadowrun RPG tournament (WizKids does SR Duels).

The way RPG tourneys work (not exactly the rules, just in general how an RPG tournament works) is you're either given or create using specific guidelines (such as the Shadowrun Missions guidelines) characters and are assigned a random group of 4 or so players and a GM. All the GMs run the same adventure, and points are awarded to the players for accomplishing goals, good roleplaying, etc. kinda like how Karma is awarded in game. There's generally a time limit (4 hours). Sometimes the GM does the judging of the players, sometimes the players do the judging of one another, sometimes both players and GM judge.

Check out the Shadowrun Missions webpage for more info on Shadowrun tournament play, and the GenCon, Origins, or any other big gaming con's website for info on RPG tourneys in general.

Wish I could make it, but I'm in Texas and working

The Abstruse One

I would love to see a scenerio game were two or three teams were going after teh same goal with the GMs co-ordination the interaction between the groups. You would have to have set stoppoints for a "Time-Sync"....


We did it at college with a couple of mid-high leveled PCs... One of the groups was "Bad" and manage to just stalked and kill the other groups. There were a few people who were puffed up, but i havent laughed that hard since...

The way the SR Tourneys work is as follows:

You show up with your ticket, and get into groups of 6. I suggest talking with people while youre milling about to look for a group of folks you dont mind dealing with, as youll have to spend a lotta time with them; or going with friends.

Each team of 6 grabs a table, and gets an offical SR Staff GM. The GM issues out the character packet of 6 characters; the players get to figure out whos who. Youll get a few mins to read your brief background and check out your abilites. The characters are never really min/max'd to the effectiveness levels some people are used to, but simultaneously theyre never illogically made and useless either. Just take note of what you can and cant do with some certainty, and get a good handle on how to roleplay your guy.

After like 20 mins, you start the first run. You play SR for like 3 hours. At the end youll have (hopefully) finished the run, and you can use the last 30 mins to fill out the convention paperwork involed with finishing a setting and scoring the gm, etc.

You do this for all 3 sessions, each team being able to play thought the entier tournament adventure and going as far as theyre able to in the alloted time. You get a new GM each day, and each night the GM packages your status and some notes in an envelope (yes, its unmarked and unobtrusive, they *are* SR GM's after all) so that when your new GM sits down with the group they know where youre at individually as a team.

On the 4th convention day (sunday for gen con) you show up at the SR booth and they announce the winners based on how the GMs scored you. There is NO offical list of how they score you and such, the staff does it in secret (btw, I know a Johnson willing to pay good cred for details, contact me for info, I take 20% cut); but its safe to say that it includes how well you completed the runs, how well you roleplayed, and how well you were able to work with the rules within the bounds of the story.

Generally, the tournaments are great fun. Once I had to play with people I didnt particularly like, which wasnt so great. And one day of one tournament I had a GM that constantly made me ask myself "has he *read* the bbb...". But those 2 times is out of something like 12 runs. If you show up just wanting to play SR and have fun, and dont worry about 'winning' thats probably the best mindset to have. It makes you less likley to flip when things dont follow canon or when someone else in your team does something your normal group wouldnt dream of.

Hopefully they'll get the color separation right on the cover for SoE. Seems that a lot of the post-FASA books (most notably the BBB reprints) have been either too heavy on the cyan or too light on the yellow. Either way, it gives them a distinctively blue cast.

(Am I the only one who's noticed this?)