Link

Meh.

I can't post there anymore. IIRC, I got banned for celebrating Strom Thurmond's death in Tangency. Buh.

What a bunch of dorks. They were all crying cause the rules are to hard. Cry me a fraggin river.

Go play D20 if you want simplistic, un-realistic game play. Don't get me wrong, I like D&D but it is a no brainer to play. I like how complicated Shadowrun is, I like that you have to read to play it. You have to invest some energy in learning the setting if you want to get the full experience.

As for the slam against DSF.... there just jealous cause FanPro listens to it's fans.

I have to admit they are right about the supplements. I had to go over and grab my friend's M&M when I read the predator 3 had smartlink 2, and had no ideas what its' stats were.

Yep, because that's limited to Shadowrun. The all-mighty D&D never requires multiple supplements. Ever.

edit: damn... misread again...

Anyway... you are in no way required to have both CC and MM to use the vast majority of the options presented in those books. IIRC, there are only 2 weapons in CC with a built in SL2, and the SL2 modifications in MM can be applied to any of the core guns.

The same thing applies to all of the other sourcebooks... while, sure, there are some things in a good number of the sourcebooks that reference others, those other books are certainly not required to use the sourcebook you have - having more sourcebooks just increases the utility of the whole set.

Besides the kick-ass (can I say ass?) setting, what draws me to Shadowrun are the (somewhat incomplete but very elegant) rules.

I like skill-based level-less class-less systems as I find them to be a more believable progression of skills, instead of every Joe Decker getting the ability to validate acounts at level 4.

I like throwing more than 1 die at a time... and in comparison to GURPS often more than 3 dice at a time. It has the advantages of White Wolf's count successes model (I know SR came first!), and the level of success that brings.

I like not having the the extremes of the hitpoint system, were heroes are more than likely to jump off a cliff to get to the bottom than to use a rope since they know they'll survive, and can just use that wand o' healing to get them back to perfect health.

Why on Earth! would someone want a d20 version of Shadowrun? Without some major rules changes you would lose the gritty feeling of a true Shadowrun game. It would simply be a game of acrology crawls.... for the next big pay data.

I do think though that FanPro needs to somehow stress the ability to play the game with only the BBB, which seems to be the majority of the discussion of problems over there. As far as making the rules more accessible, the Quick Start Guide really isn't that bad for a beginner.

Additionally, some more software liscensing, or even a movie would do wonders for Shadowruns sales.

BTW, Where was the Dumpshock Slam? Maybe I'm too thick skinned to have seen it.


Edit: In reference to the comments on that board about rules-creep. It seems pretty common that level-less/class-less systems suffer from rules-creep. GURPs is just as guilty as Shadowrun in that regards, even White Wolf had that problem to some degree. And most classed/leveled systems seem to suffer from power-creep, ironically White Wolf falls into this one too.... Power-creep though I think has more to do with not allowing people access to all the aspects or abilities a character can perform until "higher" levels, whereas in Shadowrun, or GURPS, you can pretty much do everything from the start, but just not necissarily be "Great" at it.

I agree with you all about the rules...I fuckin' LIKE 'em complex. Keeps the ol' noggin in workin' order. However, the guy who said that it was too cartoony these days does have a point. I prefer the grittier atmosphere of the older stuff (especially the art), and I would probably punch Prescott in the face if I ever met him (not really).

Only system I fund too complex in the BBB was the Matrix rules. For pete sake you had to get one of the matrix books to even find a definition of stats on a deck (like sensors, what a sensor rating 4 meant over a sensor rating 2, etc)
otherwise it's fine as is.

Personally, I see Shadowrun in two distinct lights: One is the old Tim Bradstreet, gritty neo-modern futuristic fantasy that I like to envision my games in, and the other is the more cartoon/super-hero esque one that Shadowrun has become.

I don't deny that by simply changing the camera filter, I can easily switch the world back and forth for my players or myself for that matter. I think they both have merit in that though. Both appeals to different types of folks, and both are available to portray when running a game. It gives it a greater depth and range of situations. Sure I often prefer the harsh reality of the near future, but sometimes nothing can beat the unintentional but innate humor in the antics or your players that really represents the cartoon aspect.

huh. I don't consider Shadowrun to be particularly realistic or gritty in its current incarnation (the encumbrance rules and explosives should dispell ANY notions of realism). It has successfully transitioned from an old school CP2020 with elves
to a quasi-transhumanistic nanopunk/biopunk setting.

I don't see what the problem with a Shadowrun d20 would be. It would certainly spank the crappy cyber-supplements that currently exist.

I have to disagree. SR's system is definitely a mess of things no one bothered to try and keep consistent on any level. The impenetrability of the rules— not out of sheer complexity but out of sheer idiocy— is probably a huge turnoff for initial players. Complex rules are much more tolerable when they're intuitive and well designed.

I do like Shadowrun, and prefer a more realistic set of rules, but have to agree with the assessment that the rules can often be overly complex without necessarily adding realism.

I GM for a game that meets every couple of weeks, with experienced players, and we still have things we can't figure out cannon almost every week. Most of the time I just decide what makes the most sense to me (GM fiat) and follow up on this forum to get the official ruling afterward.

A related question: How complex do you think is too complex? Ideally, how many hours/weeks/years should it take before you know what you're doing without having to look things up?

Well it's no chartmas..no wait,table-mast....I MEAN roll-mas...I MEAN role-master... High end realism at the cost of your sanity and time!!

Scanned crossreferenced PDFs...that's the true solution...

For me, one of the nice things about Shadowrun is that each rules group does have a flavor all its own. Sure, it can be intimidating to new players (I've been playing it forever and still haven't quite got everything down), but it's certainly fun. And once you start getting bored with one aspect of the game itself, you realize that you have several other aspects to keep your interest piqued.

Playing a rigger is a completely different experience from playing a magician, which is a completely different experience from playing a decker or a sammy. It's great.

A unified rules system for the different branches of stuff would be horrible. Agh. There are some people who need crucifixion now.

~J, zealot

The rules are too complex. Do you know how many things affect the TN for shooting? Here's a list of some of them. And can you believe it, the list doesn't include the Claw Foot from M&M?

Just for example, we could live without the following Recoil Compensation mods:
Strength, Claw Foot, Personalized Grip, Heavy Barrel, Barrel Weight, Foregrip

A much more fun series of Shadowrun related threads on RPG.net are these:

Shadowrun and anti-goverment zealotry
Robert "Sprite" Boyle and shadowrun

While I find the basic rules of Shadowrun very cool and appealing (much better than any other RPG I've looked at so far) I think they really get overly complicated quickly. I'm one of those GMs who favors Roleplaying over Number Crunching. All this dice rolling and page flipping really gets in the way of a good story and atmosphere. My solution to this is to boil down the rules to very few simple dice roles and by banning riggers from my games. Plus I'm thinking of writing a minimalistic, setting-independent gaming system some time soon.
Luckily, during a run most things (besides from rigging) can be reduced to very few basic skillrolls and I usually just go with whatever makes sense at that time. The more complicated stuff (like initiating, learning skills, healing, etc.) is usually left for downtime, where atmosphere and story aren't all too important.

While I hardly ever play with experienced SR players I oftentimes play with SR newbies. THe experience I've made is that most of them are really turned off by the complexity off the rules. I mean, I can't make each one of them buy a 30$ book for a game of which they don't even know whether they like it. And I find Shadowrun a bit too minimalistic with just the core book. Not rules-wise but material-wise. I mean, ok, with such a complex system there's only so much that can be crammed into a single book but I would like it better if they had less rules and more material in the main book (especially equipment).
Another thing that is a feature and a drawback at the same time is the overly complex character generation. While I really love the fact that you're totally free of classes and such restrictions and that not a single dice is rolled during chargen it still takes at least a few hours if not days to create a single character. If you want a quick game to introduce a few newbies to the system there's really no way around premade characters and so far I haven't really had the time to make a catalog of PCs to bring to a gaming session.

However, even though this has been a pretty negative post so far there are many things I like about Shadowrun. It's a pretty realistic setting. It's not one of these totally over-the-top fantasy games where the heros run through countless dungeons just trying to gain experience by slaying as many monsters as possible and to find the next magical sword that makes them even more badass. The setting is very complex and leaves a lot of room for creativity. Anything is possible, literaly. You can run any style of campaign in the Shadowrun setting. Suspense, Hollywood action, horror, thriller, comedy, espionage, wars... it's all there. And since you aren't bound to classes you are free to play any character you want! Wanna play a police campaing? Sure, here ya go! Firefighters? No problem! Special ops? Check! Mercenaries in a war? Check! Low-tech gang? Check! Wanna play a member of cult that is trying to destroy the world? go ahead! Really, the sky's the limit!
Any kind of story, any kind of feeling. It can all be achieved in this setting and with these rules. And the setting really encourages te players to think about what they're doing. There are consequences to most of their actions. The modern setting allows for far more immersion that the classical fantasy setting, IMHO, since we are all familiar with the social mechanics, with the way people behave, with economical mechanics, etc.
Did I mention that I love not to be restricted by classes and levels?
The count-the-successes system and the way damage is handled are big bonuses (boni?) as well. I've tried many settings and gaming systems and none has been so appealing to me as Shadowrun, so far.
The only problem I have with it is the overly complex gaming system. I mean, it's a game. I want to play it, not study it. I don't want it to require a college degree to understand it. I've been playing Shadowrun for years and I only know a fraction of the rules good enough to use them without the books. And the sheer number of books that I have to bring to each gaming session is just ridiculous.
Granted, I've never actually played Call of Cthulhu but I find it amazing how they get along with only *two* rule books, one for the players and one for the GM. And everyone I've talked to who has played Cthulhu says the rule system is really nice and elegant and suits the game extremely well. But then again, it's a completely different premise so I guess this can not be copared to Shadowrun...

Ok, enough babbling and ranting from me for now...

There are some rule systems that are less complex and still a lot of fun, e.g. Savage Worlds. I'm currently running that with 50 Fathoms and my players (and I) are having a blast.

Personally, I started with Shadowrun 2nd in '95. It wasn't really, I'd say, the game for beginners. But the rules made sense and number crunching, although I'm no big friend of math, wasn't all that hard.

Yes, the rules are complex, but understandable. The basics (roll d6s, compare against target number, stage up or down or base time/successes) hasn't really changed. I do sometimes wish that the staging rules were consistent, i.e. 2 successes a level, rather than that holding only for combat and magic, while matrix and rigger is 1 success/box.

3rd redid a lot of things. The cartooniness does sometimes make one wonder, but part of that can be that I liked Peter Bergting's art and that seems to me to be the picture I have of Shadowrun.

It's a great game. RPG.net has decent reviews, but the forum is...worse than Dumpshock (hey, the most polite forum I know is PEGINC, followed by weirdwest.de, followed by Fanpro, followed by Dumpshock). It's truly the bottom of the forums, in terms of politeness.

Don

I was gonna sign up and post this there, but i couldn't be arsed in the end.

I love the complexity of the Shadowrun rules because...guess what? Life is complex. Plus it gives all the books a huge re-readability value. The Shadowrun sourcebooks, placebooks, adventures, and novels are all very re-readable because when you read one, you discover stuff you never noticed in others. It's a real domino effect. Only after reading damn near every book written for Shadowrun, AH's page, the timeline, and a few Earthdawn books (never liked that rules system for some reason), I'm just now starting to get the big picture. Esp. in the begining of Shadowrun (from Nigel Findley's work until Tom Dowd left), the Shadowrun universe was like a giant jigsaw puzzle. Every individual piece was cool on its own, but when you started putting them together it was just INSANE. That's missing just a bit from the newer books, where you don't get as many teases as you used to (Are there IEs or no? What's the deal with the Bugs? Who are these people posting the "secret" comments in Aztlan (otaku), and who are all these people talking? Wait, some Otaku can use the Matrix WITHOUT a deck?!). Now, everything happens all at once in one book. The Shidem show up, and there their stats are in the back. No mystery. No suspense. No wonder. There's a weird post about zombies, then there's the post explaining what they are in detail. I really miss that in the old books...

The Abstruse One

I still don't like the class system of d20, nor the idea of hit points and not even the level based character progression.

In bashing d20, I made the following comparison to a roommate: "When you break cover and half a dozen goblin archers draw down on you, you do not buddy up to them. You roll over and fragging die like a pincushion." Proudly paraphrased from one of the endless grenade conversations here.

That being said, the newly uniform nature of the base structure is more appealing than in editions past.

Shadowrun is complex and are there plenty of nuances that either get overlooked or not brought fully into play -- but I fully endorse anyone's right to use, modify, improvise or outright ignore any rule that doesn't make sense or can't be found promptly. It's called imagination.

-Siege

Edit: For clarity of ranting

In the end, does it really matter?

Some people will always think that Shadowrun is a little complicated and some people will always deride D&D as roleplaying for the simplistic and moronic. The beauty of an Internet forum is that you voice your opinion and it basically sounds like this.

"X!" "Y!" "X!!" "Y!!" "X, you inbred son of a-" Then the mod walks in... "Okay, you're both banned."

You give voice to your idea and nobody ever really listens. Just look at this thread. I think three or four people basically repeated what the guy before them said. So what if the RPG.net people Dumpshock is unfairly influencing SR? Everyone knows some of us are maintaining Control Manipulation spells on the FanPro people anyway, but that aside you can look at Dumpshock and basically find a group of people that congregate here for the purpose of butting heads over minor anachronisms in Shadowrun that would get us laughed at if done in public.

In the end, it's all a matter of opinion. They have their opinion, we have ours. We could waste our time calling them flaming idiots who don't know what the hell they're talking about and they should go pike off or go copulate with a running car engine but in the end we just ignore the shiny text on our glowing computer screens and ready the flaming and witty retort and ultimately get nowhere.

So let them say what they want. As a .jpeg I saw on the Internet once said, "Arguing on the Internet is like winning the Special Olympics. You've won, but you're still a retard."

i dont have a problem with either game. sure shadowrun have a lot of details but thats why i like it, you can customize until you die. d&d on the other hand have a bad habbit of turning out the exact same chars over and over. not to sure about modern d20 tho as i dont have the book(yet) but from what i understand it uses multiclassing in a nice way. you take one or more generic hero "classes" at start and then addon "professions" (more or less prestige classes described as jobs) and then go from there.

as for the problem with riggers, only use the rules if there is a carchase. and useing them then makes sense. hell you can use them to simulate dogfights to (alltho it will take a very insane rigger to try and ram a jet with a jet ). personaly i allways (from rigger2 and on. i got into the sr world at around late sr2) belived that you could use acceleration as a flat figure to handle movement in normal combat (if you dont abstract it totaly out there) and in rigger3 they in fact introduces that idea as a suggestion to GM's when they wanted to integrate drones and similar into normal combat.

as for matrix, it have become so steamlined (alltho the matrix sourcebook muddys the water somewhat as it introduces pr decker security tallys) that it realy just boils down to doing skill test vs subsystem rating reduced by any fitting utility if its loaded. and there are even easy to use datasearch rules (that non-deckers to can use) in the matrix sourcebook (alltho BBB suggested that most infosearches should be handeld as a etiquette: matrix test IIRC).

the funnyest thing tho is that some people ask for more details while others ask for less details. just look at raygun (alltho i respect his work on the webpage and all that) and the rest of the gunbunnys or the random computer engineer for examples of more detail and the d20 "zealots" for the less detail.

I love the rule system but you have to admit it's absurdly complex and unwieldy. You waste a lot of time looking up stuff in 6 different books that no sane person has memorized. Then on top of that, the organization of the rules WITHIN each book makes zero sense.

That is the only thing that bothers me about SR. But given the choice of only one RPG to play for eternity it would most likley be SR at this point.

The wizard who reads a thousand books is powerful. The wizard who memorizes a thousand books is insane.

Personally, I like the complexity.

~J

While unable to read the two more recent RPG.net threads linked here, perhaps this is the reason for the anarchist/terrorist accusations concerning Rob Boyle. Apparently, someone named Robert Boyle is the US contact for the "anti-repression task force" of the Anarchist Black Cross Network. Obviously, it would be impossible for two people to have the same name.

For some reason, that reminds me of the whole "Nemesis" street name shadowtalk.

Everybody keeps talking about how complex the rules are, and its not really that complex when you sit back and look at it as a collection of a few different rule sets. You gotta have a seprate mindset for rigging, magic, combat, decking, etc. But the biggest thing that bothers me about all the whining of the complexity is you don't have to know all the rules to play. You have to have a pretty god idea of the rules to GM, but to play, hell, come in fresh without any knowledge, and figure it out along the way. I did this when I started playing D&D, my first rpg. I said I wanna do this, they said you roll this. You pick it up pretty fast. I did the same thing later when learning SR. I said I wanna do this, the gm said roll this while I roll this. Thats what I tell people when trying to get them into a game when they say, "I don't wanna have to take the time to learn." Learn what? You just gotta play a character. I'll take over from there till you pick it up enough and instead of saying, "Roll your 6 pistols dice, you gotta roll higher than a 5" I can say "the ganger has partial cover, so TN 5." And I do the same for chargen with newbies, I just ask what they want and help them get it.


edit: and I pray to god no idiot decides to make SR d20... that would be a nightmare!

you were blessed with an insane GM. Unfortunatly most of us are sane and we can't possibly remember how to do everything in AD&D, Rifts, Shadowrun and Ars Magica. We kinda of have to help each other along. The scary thing is I'm considered the "SR guru" of our little group. That is sadness.