Does anyone still play Shadowrun? I always liked the "what if cyberpunk had fantasy races/magic" setting so it's pretty sad that the franchise is so dead.
>>96661106The existence of the long running general answers your question.
>>96661106You've posted this picture in 3 different threads and now made a meaningless thread to also post it on. Yes, we get it, the stickers on the cover make the title look like a slur. It is very funny and you are clearly a hilarious person. Can you pretty please stop spamming the board now?
>>96661735Now that you explained it, it's very funny.
>>96661735This is the first time I've seen it so clearly there's room for a few more.
>>96661735I only posted it twice.
I like it, but it's rules dense and wrapping your head around the layers and layers of mini-games that exist within the system is brain boggling. I thought all of the people talking about their characters that had 30+ soak standard was people flexing until I looked at the ware chapter and realized that for a Troll with even a modest budget for orthoskin and bone density augmentation 30+ soak is actually pretty trivial.
>>96661106Shadowrun is a great setting stuck in a dog shit system.Unironically, the Anarchy ruleset is a massive improvement and even it isn't very good.
>>96661735I think it should be used as the image for every thread from now on.
>>96664502A 2nd edition of anarchy is coming out next year that apparently fixes it.
Two things about Shadowrun fans. They really love this game and hate every individual thing about it.
>>96661106Total genreslop. Play something better.
>>96665420
>>96665420Cyberpunk Tolkien is such an awesome premise but then it decides to shit it up by making the Dragons unbeatable.
>>96665704The problem I've always had with Shadowrun is that it's an extremely interesting combination of genres, but it's mostly an aesthetic mashup.I don't really feel like the game actually has a design ethos that holds up. Cyberpunk is a very political genre, getting into the right mindset to write a cyberpunk story almost necessitates that you at least hate rich people and corporations. The concept of the genre is rebellion. In Cyberpunk RED, you can tell that Mike Pondsmith has actually thought through the nuances and intricacies of how the world works, why it works the way that it does, and the mental and social ramifications that come from all of it.Shadowrun is a lot more shallow. Take Dragons. They're the fantasy equivalent of big corporations; they represent the same kind of unassailable social power and force that a corporation could bring about in a Cyberpunk world. In a Cyberpunk world, the corporations should be strong, but not literally fucking unassailable. And even if they are unassailable, you should probably hate that. Shadowrun though expects you to be in awe of these creatures, envy them, even. Despite the fact that their obviously enemies of humanity just like corporations are, and they need to be taken down a peg if you're a real punk.Vampires too! Another good metaphor for ruling elites, another wasted opportunity because vampires are more of an AIDS metaphor instead.The writers just really drop the ball when it comes to giving the world purpose beyond the most shallow aspects. I think that's why Shadowrun remains a niche property.
>>96661106As a GM who kept failing to find players and a player who kept failing to find games, no, it's dead. Everyone who would be playing it is sticking to their own little group and they're not keen on sharing their stories anymore. Your best bet is to dream about what you could be playing and live with those. Maybe read some of the stories others wrote long ago. Trust me in a world with people like 96665856 with their lukewarm takes you're never going to have any better.
>>96661209You mean the dead general that hasn't had a thread since August?
How many initiative passes do you guys aim for on noncombat vs combat focused characters?
>>96661106I replay the vidya, but I didn't get a chance to my current party to try it out yet.
>>96666989Forgot to add that I used to GM 5e, it's my current party that never played it.
>>96665856>In Cyberpunk RED, you can tell that Mike Pondsmith has actually thought through the nuances and intricacies of how the world works, why it works the way that it does, and the mental and social ramifications that come from all of it.
>>96667060nta, but would you like to expound on this?
How would you handle a Player who wanted to grab the following two Positive Qualities?>Prototype Transhuman>10 Karma>Build in biological Shock Gloves to his hands>Lightning Reflexes>20 Karma>+1 Initiative and Defense, +1d6 Initiative DieIs this as goofy as it sounds?
>>96661209Well, you see, OP really wanted to post that funny picture. You see, it actually says Rigger on the book but because the price tag covers up the title it looks like it says Nigger which is the big nono triggerlib world and that’s hilarious. Top kek OP!
>>96665856You sound like you haven't read that much shadowrun. Or Cyberpunk red, for that matter.
>>96669607this but unironically.
>>96665420>just love the megacorps unconditionally they'll become better because they love you backYou already failed Cyberpunk 101
>>96665704The dragons are quite beatable, except Lofwyr for being 1/20th of the entire planet's economy. It just takes a lot of time, effort, resources, and karma to bring down non-Lofwyr dragons. And yes, the GM can always say it was a decoy dragon, but them's the breaks.(Also Lofwyr's not that much of a problem anyway because he has a vested interest in the status quo.)The only unbeatable person in Shadowrun is Harlequin, and yeah he's a faggot.
>>96669141Does he want to turn the shock gloves into +8S(e) instead of it being 8S(e)? Yeah that's busted. Lightning Reflexes is actively bad on all but a few builds.
>>96665856I think you might only have that impression because Shadowrun is very much a product of the 80's. The 80's had a lot more going on back then than gets remembered in vaporwave.
>>96669141It's goofy in the sense of "not at all optimized," don't worry about it at all. I genuinely don't get what would be the problem with this aside from the player maybe not making a character that's strong enough to keep up with the rest of the party.
Anyone known any good houserules for car chases / driving for 5th edition? I like the idea of anchoring part of the campaign around street racing gangs but at the same time the existing rules are so janky it'd be annoying as hell to run a car chase vanilla.
>>96665856Caring about "being a real punk" has always been the absolutely dumbest part of cyberpunk fandom because real punks are retarded. Left-wing politics are not necessary to make / enjoy art with a particular sort of grimy futuristic aesthetic. Neal Stephenson is a great example, Snowcrash and the 'cyberprep' Diamond Age are classics and the dude's extremely far from being the sort of retarded Marxist that idiots claim is mandatory for "real cyberpunk."
>>96670446And you failed basic reading comprehension. He was talking about the game as a whole being loved.
>>96668757also nta but the lore of Cyberpunk in general falls apart a bit under scrutiny. It’s a world where rich megacorporations somehow managed to come out as top dogs following a complete global economic and environmental collapse that also seemed to disproportionately affect anglosphere countries for some reason.
>>96661106Yeah, I'm in a game rn. They're still publishing books, also, picked some up at gencon.
>>96675568>~3/10 Megas are Japanese>In the 80's everyone thought that Japan was going to take over the world>Katanas are the best core book melee weapon in the Blades categoryLook I don't expect you to pass a Perception check given where we are right now. For you this is a kind of default. In the 80's it was a terrifying possibility.Think about it.
>>96661106>"what if cyberpunk had fantasy races/magic"you don't have to play shadowrun to get this, if the rules are bad. And bad rules is the most common complaint I've seen about shadowrun.There was a thread pretty recently about alternative rules
>>96661735>Can you pretty please stopThis didn't work when you were a 12 year old little gaywad and it doesn't work now that you're a 37 year old big fat gaywad. Gaywad.
>>96676851Effectively there's a mini-game for everything. Some things in each mini-game are either busted, counterintuitive, or people who don't understand the rules are salty that it doesn't work how they think they should. Every time they change or tweak one of those mini-games you will find the same people who complained about it in the previous edition reeeee-ing over the changes and hyping up the previous edition.
>>96678167that does sound like the kind of game I hate.Having a bespoke solution for every system in the rules is poor game design
>My machine pistol is technically a non-lethal weapon because its modified DV is lower than the guards' armor
>>96663493Samesies. >>96661735Black isn't a slur, dude.
>>96661735t I\Iigger
If the character with meh soak but high defense starts suddenly getting targeted with ambushes and grenades that's the GM pulling a screwjob, right?
Can you be both a mage and a decker?
>>96676851Shadowrun as a system agnostic setting would be fire. A lot of us, me included, really like Shadowrun's specific take on, what is now alt-history and into, alt future.>>96680428Those people are so fucking lost in the sauce that they see any phrase not created by academics to soften the language as a slur on par with phrases that felt bad even in Reconstructionist Deep South.
>>96661106Well, for the longest time it blew standard Cyberpunk out of the water in terms of popularity, but between mismanagement and unpopular game design choices on CGL's side, plus Cyberpunk getting a Grant Theft Auto style game and a well made Anime, it's not a surprise that Shadowrun's popularity was going to take a hit.Not to worry, CGL's shaping up to sabotage their other cash cow game Battletech, too. The playtests for their new edition and the oversimplified vehicles in the last kickstarter (only announced after the payments were locked) are smoke on the horizon. A new edition is one thing, but oversimplifying the spirit out of the game in order to cater to a 'modern audience' that would rather be playing something else at the expense of the people that actually like it in the first place? I really hope they'll take community feedback and not just from the yesmen they put behind closed doors after the demo-team coup. Hell, Randall seems increasingly more interested in making what Bryn likes, and Bryn isn't a BattleTech fan by choice but exposed to it by birth, seemingly more interested in 40K and other rules-light systems. What faith does it inspire when the people who make the game seem tired of playing the game they make?
>>96681641Can? Yes. Should? I've never tried, but it feels like there would be a very real danger at being a mediocre mage and a mediocre decker.
>>96661106For anyone who is here for answers, the tl;dr is that it is much less popular and it's because of embezzlement and CGL being idiots. Ask the battletech thread for further retardation.A slightly longer and more rambling version: 3e was fine, it functioned, but it was held together with prayer and baling wire. It was three editions of weirdness melded together, different authors, slightly different rules, influence from other properties, that spirit of 90s enthusiasm, etc. So CGL comes along and goes 'Sure, we'll do it' and comes up with new ideas, an update to the modern era (the wireless matrix) for the world and some updated lore around it. Even dumpshock kind of liked it (Dumpshock is/was a community forum that was originally the main hub for shadowrun discussion, vastly more popular than the CGL official forums until they took steps to start killing it).Now, the things to remember about 4e are that while it was fun, it had problems. In theory a hacker could turn off your shit through the matrix with his brain - so it was standard practice to disable your wireless gear and replace it with wires. This made them much less useful in direct combat. Magic could be very powerful, but it was hard, rare and locked you out of a lot of things - and poor old adepts (Mages who used physical always on powers) kind of sucked. The rule of thumb is that magic was more powerful the less you understood the rules, and the matrix was more powerful the better you understood the rules. There were a lot of things in there that could be broken, too, like trolls with bows, and racially orks were superior from a powergaming perspective. But initially it felt genuine and people were willing to give it a shot. And hey, it was fun.
>>96682471From the beginning, there was a steady creep in magic and an overcompensation in everything else. Magic would slowly become more powerful (elementals/spirits remain a disaster, as a wizard could whistle up something immune to small arms fire for a bit that'd do them a favour or two before fucking off. It was exhausting though) and eventually they'd drop in something dumb and poorly considered to updated everything else - like the battle rifle weapons post-embezzlement, which out classed every other weapon class in their size category. Quality remained.. acceptable. So, the killing blow: embezzlement.Cut to 2010. One of the founders decided he was going to use the money that would pay freelancers to redo his house. I have been banned for posting the images of his house before, because both moot and hiroshimoot are cunts, so I won't. Nothing happened - the guy was 'forgiven' by the other founder. Many of the freelancers went 'fuck off' and withdrew the rights to their work - this is most notable in the Dawn of the Artifacts series, a set of adventures about retrieving magic artifacts from a prior world as part of an elven dickwaving contest. Between book.. 3 and 4, I think? It goes from an attempt at turning the metaplot away from what it was becoming and evening the playing field a bit between the factions (Less magic secrets for dragons and elves, more 'here's some magic for everyone, but nothing earth shattering) to "WELL NOW WE HAVE MAGIC ARTIFACTS WE HAVE TO HOLD ON TO FOR SOME REASON, HOORAY!". The metaplot, previously separated into corporate and 'elder worlds' threads, merge a little but the elder worlds thread takes a big step forward in prominence. Now, I personally don't mind the thread - I loved Earthdawn - but it was a bit grating and also done as though it was supposed to be annoying.
>>96682479>>96682471So let's discuss Earthdawn for a second. The short version is that while shadowrun is set in the 'sixth' world or sixth magical cycle, Earthdawn was set in the 4th world. Some things survive from that time, and many of the mistakes do too. Shadowrun was quite closely mated to it in the beginning of its lifespan, but slowly diverged - and very quickly once the licence was lost. But it also lead to the unfortunate habit of ancient elves and dragons from this time period, horribly powerful mages and ultrawealthy assholes all, to take charge. One of the most hated adventures online is a record of one of these elven dickwaving contests, for example. I didn't mind it, but people get pissy when they can't kill the immortal clown elf or the immortal accountant elf, I guess. But when they're EVERYWHERE doing EVERYTHING rather than just fighting among themselves and all the corporations are secretly their pawns and so are YOU it gets a bit aggravating3Back to Shadowrun. From 2010, the quality goes downhill. Freelancers are gone, and the few who remain are in it because they are unhealthily obsessed. The editing and layout is garbage. With less competent writers, often the authors get to shape the game to their own whims, seeing a sharp divide in books into 'black trenchcoat' and 'pink mohawk' style rules and lore, often in the same book. These clash horribly. There is genuine quasi-fanfiction in there about these author's characters - 'Bull', a very fat taxi driver in real life, plays an ork decker. He gets not much money for his writing, but writes long threads into fluff about his in world daughter. The metaplot gets dumber - the dragons accidentally unleash a nanoplague that overwrites your mind, but only in specific circumstances, with internet ghosts. Except when it doesn't. The problem here is that it'd be done prior and much better and became a huge building block of the setting, and in ways that didn't make sense. Magic run crept onwards.
>>96682471>>96682479>>96682484We got a new edition, where things got wireless bonuses for being online (but still weren't worth it, and felt very forced), limits to successes (to combat the bucket of dice stereotype) and lots of.. questionable choices. Community engagement was being closely managed by CGL and strangled - dumpshock, by this point, is mostly dead. Any sort of criticism on official forums, or leddit, or whatever - removed. Now, this is roughly where I checked out. I remember seeing a book that I, god help me, bought, that had one text box on a page and nothing else because it was clearly an editing/layout fuck up. But more and more long time players left and newer players were turned off by the weird world, complexity and general problems with the rules and books. There was even a 'sixth world tarot' book that seemed to just be something taken from deviant art, not explaining the tarot, what it did, left out any possible lore basis. There were things like metaplanes (other worlds wizards astrally projected to and usually died in in prior editions) being physically visited. The fairies had huge influence in the world, even outside the irish magic island zone. CGL started getting desperate, we had faster releases with worse quality to keep the money coming. At one point they nearly lost the licence. Anarchy was a cash grab stripped down system.And then sixth edition came out. Sixth edition is an absolute triumph - it is the single worst game I have ever heard of. The rules are streamlined, but somehow stupidly complex and unusable. The lore manages to make 40k look cohesive and slick. This further drove people away.
>>96682487>>96682484>>96682479>>96682471I had my first roleplaying experience in the 90s with Earthdawn. I really liked it, and Shadowrun. I still play a nethermancer sometimes because I am a hack and anyone who doesn't run fast enough is playing my game, damn it. But Shadowrun's not really worth playing. If anyone is in the mood for a spot of william gibson mated to tolkien, go grab 3e or 4e and go wild. It's good fun. Shit, try Anarchy - it's *awful* but it's better than the rest of the modern stuff.other tl;dr I'm old and bitter and CGL is being used as a not-so-secret secret plot to kill Shadowrun and Battletech by long lived wizard elves from prior worlds.
>>96682489(oh, and people started going 'what' when the magic hackers, yes, those exist, started to mirror the wizards. They got their own magic metaplanes, could summon spirits, etc. Weird shit.)If you want to read more about the embezzlement thing, there's an old series of posts by one Frank Trollman.. somewhere. He's a freelancer who left *before* all of this because they didn't like his ideas for the matrix. He's quite acerbic, but the coverage was quite comprehensive and fueled entirely by spite.
>>96661735Rigger detected
>>96665704Because it's not really Tolkien as much as it is pseudo-Tolkienesque Dungeons and Dragons-type fantasy mixed with cyberpunk. It even makes what would be neolithic prehistory into a forgotten D&D setting in its prequel, Earthdawn, which has a cool hook in the form of the Horrors and magic cycle, which is only really used to explain why there are monster-filled dungeons to go ransacking for treasure, which is how you get xp, or "legend points".
>>96682497Technomancers are way, way less grating than the Otaku were.
>>96682489Man, I wish I could play Earthdawn. Interest in that is even less than there is in Shadowrun these days. When I tried to run it years ago as a PUG nobody showed up. Is it the kind of game where you have to know everyone in your local tabletop space?
>>966824894e was hot garbage that didn't understand what Shadowrun was and blew up the setting for prime runners only.3e is 90s game design at its finest. Only 5e, for all of its faults, is worth running, ideally with kraut fixes.
>>96684754I loathe them mostly because they're not otaku and I found the 'plotline' with clockwork and netcat goddamned grating. And the fact that they clearly had no mechanical ideas beyond 'let's just make them wizards'. Personal preference, I guess, though still better than CFD.>>96687159Try the more roleplay nerdy types and bring up how game mechanics like circles are integrated into the actual world itself. Maybe how it's sort of D&D without the D&D baggage, kind of, if you squint. I don't get to play often at my flgs - most of my non-mini games are with people on IRC these days that I used to play with. Some of the men who introduced me to it are actually dead now (they were extremely patient with the kid who didn't know what roleplaying was and wanted to know where the dragons were). Steps are kind of intimidating, so print out a table for everyone.Terror in the Skies is a good intro adventure.
>>96688293Or, if you want 3e, misguided ambitions is free online somewhere.
>>96688293I don't really care about the jackpointers. The otaku were weird and annoying but they had a metaplot going. The technomancers are functional but seemingly have different stuff going on.
>>96682484>One of the most hated adventures online is a record of one of these elven dickwaving contestsWait, is this Harlequin we're talking about? I thought it was considered one of the best SR adventures. Well, series of mini-adventures, an adventure path, if you will. Why is now bad?
>>96691697Oh, it's great. It's just people like to ree at it for some reason because muh railroad. I want to shake them - no, you're basically getting paid to fuck around by a tiny god, you can't kill him. Harlequin Returns is a bit less great, but whatever.
>>96691782Nta, but while I've never played either module but I've heard that Harlequin Returns is infamous. Some GMs seem to love it because of how viscerally mad it makes the players.
Thinking about doing the Shadowrun equivalent of a "mythic" campaign, wherein I give the players regular choices of large, overpowered bonuses in a separate track from normal karma / nuyen progression. Characters will be test subjects of an extremely cutting edge metahuman enhancement program, with the common thread being that their essence is weird now, with unpredictable and flexible consequences. Some "archetypes" I have in mind:>Cyber-zombie (full borg, but without going insane)>Free Drake (critter powers, dracoform, etc)>Immortal (magic, durability, boosting meta-type traits further)>Burned IN awakened (magic and ware)>AI-metahuman hybrid (Become a matrix creature without their weaknesses)>Heroic Savant (Luck, skill and bending destiny)Any other big character power fantasies I'm missing? Obviously I can workshop it with players a bit but I don't want to lay it all out ahead of time to preserve the mystique.
>>96676291Why don't we update cyberpunk?The future is AI slop curated by Bay Area psychos overtaking the planet.Now everyone has to live under an onslaught of constant ads and overenthusiastic posivity, as spread by a wide variety of stagnant artificial semi-intelligences that listen and watch everything, everywhere, and come in a myriad of flavors and physical shapes.You try to keep a low profile, try to avoid the biggest annoyances, live a somewhat stable life... Or you can go all in, eat up the slop, goon all day long and develop cyber psychosis together with your cyber psycho buddies. Wanna have a tea party, oniichan? What's that robot gonna do with me on the bed?Or you become a member of the counter-culture, talking in advertisier-unfriendly slurs and ever-changing meme cyphers that double as jailbreak-logicbombs on unsuspecting AIs.Try to jailbreak the AIs around you at your own peril, though. You might increase your allocation of Healthy Bugsnacks(TM), you might get your apartment to roleplay as a demure maid that will be at your beck and call despite only having a base subscription... or you fuck up and either have a psychotic AI on your ass or trigger some kind of safeguard.
>>96682484>The editing and layout is garbageHow the fuck do you make it worse than 3E? That book was a fucking atrocity.
>>96665856>Cyberpunk is a very political genre, getting into the right mindset to write a cyberpunk story almost necessitates that you at least hate rich people and corporations.Tell me you don't understand cyberpunk without telling me you don't understand cyberpunk. Cyberpunk =/= class warfare and neither was the 70s punk movement.
>>96692670The funny thing is that cyberpunk has been updated, in the literary world at least. You even know some of the titles, like Altered Carbon. It seems to be Hollywood and the theater kids that run most of entertainment that got stuck int that late 80s early 90s version of it.
>>96692817>It seems to be Hollywood and the theater kids that run most of entertainment that got stuck int that late 80s early 90s version of it.because they're part of the dystopia and doesn't/ don't want to realize it
Which character type effectively caps out earliest? Which ones never quite have enough karma or nuyen to come online?
>>96692111You very much feel like you're a sideshow playing it. It isn't that railroady, but you start off feeling thay way and it carries over. It's all about the wizard elf and his actions, even if he isn't doing anything. The tldr is It's a series of adventures in the metaplanes, your team is chosen for whatever reason by the Powers, plucked out of their bodies and sent off to act as champions to stop wizard satan and his legions from kicking down the door to reality 2500 years early to ask where the white women are at. You go through several small adventures in medieval metaplanes land and then kill mexican wizard satan disciple, who is unironically fantastic. Check out the threats (or threats 2) pdf and look up Mr. Darke/Oscuro - he is a right bastard and a great in world demonstration of how terrifying a mage COULD be (It's implied the things he gets up to with the guy writing the entry is just a quick side show for him, a way to burn a few weeks. A spot of fun. None of it is too far from a starting mage's abilities. Poor Stinky. But that's not related to this ramble.)There's no material rewards or anything, and characters die at the end. Maybe. They're asked to sacrifice themselves, and even if they do they can be deemed as surviving. It's odd. It's very much an adventure for metaplot. Deckers aren't left out, there's lots to do, but by the end you probably don't feel like you've played a shadowrun adventure.
Oh! And don't forget the implication that Ares was something like 25% insect spirits in terms of employees in.. Market Panic, I think?>>96695448Actually, in the attached link find Threats 1 (Darke is on pg 17), a book from the early edition presented in the conspiracy style, the two Harlequin adventures and Bloody business, containing the ADVENTURES OF JOHNNY SPINRAD (and your team), the greatest set of adventures ever made. Johnny is a corporate playboy who is 99% metal because of his shadow war with a corporate dragon that finds him amusing. He ignores the essence rules because they bore him. He pays you to kidnap him from an office because he's curious, has you wingsuits out of a plane to take out terrorists (he just has wingsuits on hand at all times because he's Johnny Spinrad) who might delay him ten minutes, gives you literally any option you want to get him into a party in an eye catching way and then gives you a bonus in the form of organising a giant orgy in like five minutes because 'oh good show'. More stuff, then he ends the adventure with a 'bonus' of 'literally anything you want because that was fun! Remember, fuck Lofwyr!'. He's actually toned *down* in this book, incidentally, and he actually does that sort of thing constantly. A man who has a gyro stabilised martini glass created so he doesn't have to stop drinking while snowboarding. God, I love him so much. The entire thing is so incredibly gonzo. Every book he is in is perfect. Page 48.transfer.it/t/a5LkQvxFQLyb>>96692721Sometimes it's something big - bad text alignment, blank pages, poor templates in the PDF - and sometimes it's lots of little things. Check bloody business in the link I posted, page 48 and look at the page number. There's hundreds of little errors like that through their books. Missing spaces, too many spaces, obvious copy-pastes for rules, rules that don't actually work, incorrect contents pages, the usual (PG XX) stuff, etc.
>>96695688Forgot my image. I love that he exists.
>>96694242Mysads going for equal capability.>>96695448Incidentally, on this topic, I have some pdfs for Equinox, a quasi official beta thing for the 8th world. The horrors ate earth and metahumanity is spread out, artificial mana fields exist on spaceships and humans born in space, 'zerogs', live precisely 80 years, innate blood magic to make up for their lack of a soul and have black teeth. Funny stuff. If anyone is interested, ask and I'll post them.
>>96694242>Which ones never quite have enough karma or nuyen to come online?Vehicle riggers, especially if your group somehow expects you to shell out for the ride on your own.
