I agree with you here. You can find D20 in almost any store, see it on posters, advertised on RPG sites and the such. for me to find Shadowrun material I had to look all over the net before finding a good place to order from. Quite a few of the game shops that are here in Houston had not even heard Shardowrun or thought that they went out of business when FASA closed its doors.

I don't like to bag on game stores, but any store that doesn't know Shadowrun is still about is really, really clueless. Shadowrun products are solicited in the same manner as other game industry products, FanPro attends both major North American game conventions and the GAMA trade show, ShadowrunRPG.com is the number 1 google hit for "Shadowrun" ... it's really not that hard for them to get ahold of us. Not that any game store needs to get ahold of the publisher, as FanPro's products are carried by every major distributor.

That said, though, FanPro just hired Rett Kipp to handle marketing and other related stuff, to improve, well, everything related to marketing.

To be fair, one of the big things d20 has going for it is that WotC is big. No one can compete with the sheer scale of their operations, and that means they can do a lot of stuff other publishers can't -- like do the first print run of D&D 3 and sell it at below cost to start with, or bombard gaming stores with flashy marketing. Plus, you have to admit that when it comes to RPGs, there is absolutely no bigger a name than D&D -- when you find Joe Schmoe on the street and ask him about D&D, he might have a good or bad opinion of it, he'll at least know what it is. Ask him about Shadowrun and he'll probably say "Huh?" That's a pretty big barrier to entry.

That said, I think FanPro is trying to get some more visibility -- the FanPro Commando program is all about that, and I'm sure Rob tries to get as much exposure for the game at the big gaming cons as he can. I think everyone can take d20 as an example of a great way to do marketing, if you're rich and have the money to spend on that sort thing. But the fact is, only WotC and maybe White Wolf have that kind of scratch to throw around.

You just can't expect a RPG line to bring in enough money to compete with the type of money WotC gets from games like Magic: the Gathering. I know I spent something like $5k a year on boosters alone when I played magic, and I spend something like $100-200 a year on Shadowrun (maybe), and a good portion of that is shipping and handling.

Given the nature of the beast, I think FanPro is doing an awesome job. It's lightyears ahead of some of the other companies that took over FASA products (LRGames, anyone?) as far as producing quality, well formated books.

I've been part of RPG groups a few different regions of the US, and I've personally never met anyone who's played Shadowrun who didn't prefer it to D&D mechanically, including a quite a few lovers of Hack&Slash "roleplaying".

Why is D&D always linked with Hacl&Slash? If I look at the last ten D&D games and the last ten SR games I participated in, the SR games where far more Hack&Slash than the D&D ones. Current generation (3 / 3.5) D&D is a very different beast from the AD&D I played ten years ago with the skill system as the default instead of an option and all. And D20 is more than just D&D.

D&D has it's limits but it's not as if SR is perfect. Things like high body characters surviving grenades with minor scratches and the various dice tests are some that come to mind.

Birdy

He didn't get lucky with the rolls to raise Ettiquette from 3 to 4, for instance. One time he tried to raise a skill from 2 to 3 and didn't get the roll. I even did a house rule to make it so the roll was less and it didn't work.

You are right, D&d and D20 are not the same. But the fact is that more D20 books are like D&D than they are aren't.

…Or you could have just not used that optional rule…

~J

Okay let's look at the classes. What one doesn't get nifty brownie points that are worthless outside of hack and slash? Well, everyone but the mage. How many spells are useful only in combat, a whole lot.

Okay feats, what are nearly all feats, well how to do nifty things in combat.

Let's look at the rule system..Boy they made skills to be just like the rules for combat.

And yes you can play either as hack and slash or not..YOu can also play Feng Shui without combat..That doesn't mean one game isn't built around combat anymore or less.

I too, concur.

If that is what Shake wants in his game, he can have it. I like to fill in some of the blanks myself. Having some leeway in describing the world and how it works is one of the things that makes it easier to find something to interest new players.

Shapeshifters are inhuman.

Tech isn't at that point (even in the setting I play in which mundane tech like simsense is more advanced and robots are useful), and frankly there aren't enough (quasi-)sentient AIs in SR to provide a reason for making them PCs, whereas shapeshifters-- non-humans that they are-- probably number well into the thousands worldwide amongst the great variety of shapeshifter types.

But that's an editorial decision. One that was made well after the existence of shapeshifters was made known, and probably due in no small part to a demand for shapeshifter PCs. I don't see rules for Sasquatches or Merrow even though they are sentient (Sasquatches for sure, Merrows and Nagas have been strongly suggested), or any of the Infected outside of Ghouls. But you can play a Drake--a creature with roots in ED and whose existence was made known in SR several years before Threats 2 came out, and weren't made available to be PCs until DotSW. Maybe the demand will eventually allow for Vampire PCs. But to play androids in SR, there generally have to be androids in SR. The closest we have now are cyberzombies and the robots in SR, the latter of which aren't sufficiently "self-motivational" to justify them being PCs.

Very good point.

No. People who have been with the game for quite some time (also known as 'hard-core fans') lose big time as the system is adapted to whatever rules or even world structure those aspired new players would desire (as guessed by management, sinde marketing isn't even close to knowing as much about customers as to make accurate prognosis on customer behavior, especially in a fringe clientele such as P&P RP systems). It is far more likely that, in the end, more long-term fans would let go of Shadowrun (and not buy their books any more) than new players would be attracted away from other systems. And since these players are, at best, only partially intereted in Shadowrun, they wouldn't be as active buyers as the hardcore fans were.
Bottom line: not a very viable idea.

Ex-fucking-cuse me? Video games are to replace books? Are you for real? I kind of having a hard time that *playing* Webster's will get me a word explained in a better way, or that *playing* Atkins' Biochemistry will teach me the Krebs cycle, glycolysis/glyconeogenesis or any other pathway more efficiently than a book. Also, I have a VERY hard time imagining Bible - the game (or it's sequel Bible II - Return of the Messiah). Nor can I imagine any serious SciFi or any story telling, really, being consumed oprimarily in video games.

The medium may change, yes. Paper hasn't been the first medium where writing was presented on, nor is it the be-all end-all. It will, in time, be replaced. The form, however, of the novel, the textbook, and the poem, will remain. they haven't changed much since they were first conceived, and will stay with humanity for as long as complex thoughts and stories are to be told. Maybe new styles will grow, and maybe the length of the text will vary, but it will NEVER be replaced by *video games*.

This is a technophile's illusion, much like how some scifi authors in the 80s believed video lessons would replace books. So? what happened? We have 2005 now, and I still have five 2 meter * 80 cm shelves containing books of all kinds in my place - and I know people who have far more.

And unless video games can ovver true virtual worlds - and this is a looong way off, mind you - there will be P&P games. It is a bit early for SR's devs to worry about Matrix-like technology, isn't it?

As for your comments on how shadowrun needs to find "back" to it's dystopian, Syndicate Wars-esque roots ... well, I guess you're not too familiar with the world after all for saying this. Shadowrun isn't "high" cyberpunk in any way. I always, for that matter, liked Shadowrun over Cybergeneration (and SW-esque worlds) because it took a more realistic approach. That is it's roots, and that is it's soul. Not "high" cyberpunk with dragons and mojo thrown in.

And what about all this blowing things up you mention? I personally like my shadowrun more sneaky, stealthy, and only one shootout in a session, not a constant shoot'n'slay killfest. Not only do I think combat is slow in SR (or any other RP system, when compated to the real thing at least), but it also tends to be really boring if all your characters ever do is walk around and gun down stuff. I mean, come on, if I wanted that, then I would play a video game (like Killzone or Halo 2, two very decent shooters). If I felt like playing with people, I'd take that game online. No need to get together with my gaming group, dig out all the books, and start rolling dice.

P&P RPing needs to offer something better than such video games. Like storytelling, cooperatively, in a group. Someone once said that roleplaying is half impürovised theater, half cooperative story writing, sith the occasional burst of gambling thrown in. That perfectly sums it up.

Oh, and don't chicken out, respond! You started this post fully well knowing what kind of responses you'd get. Show you have some balls and stand up for what you wrote!

I found a new sig quote.

Ermm... I use e-books.... I read them at least three times a week during board meetings, usually more often. I'm currently half way through Algernon Blackwood's The Garden of Survival.


Is that bad?

Why am I so reminded of that old song back in the 80's?
'Video killed the Radio Star...'
*starts humming to the fragging tune*

No, I just haven't met anyone who used e-books before!

They sell SR PDFs? What books do they sell? This WOULD be handy for sourcebooks ... are SR PDFs less expensive than books? And where can I get them?

Yay! Hey, I loved that song back then ... I even like it now!

*puts in 80s compilation CD*

MTV plays music videos?

I lack sufficient command of the English language to articulate how much I hate MTV.