>interested in Shadowrun>only hear people complain about the system and how you should just run the game in a different system altogether because only the lore is cool>have had pic related around for years>decide to try it>it’s actually really good and funOkay so why do everyone complain about the system again? I know sixth edition is apparently a dumpster fire and that fifth edition had terrible editing but that it was mostly the same as 4th/25th anniversary rules wise. Is it just terrible editing in the other editions that have broken people or are people just afraid of crunchy systems now?
>>97758374I haven't played 4/25e (yet, hopefully this year) but the usually complaints about it are that characters are too powerful and that the changes to the setting the were too great and everything from 4e onward doesn't feel like shadowrun anymore.Have just tried out 2e, I can tell you that the earlier systems are a near unplayable dumpster fire, so I hope you're right and 4e is fun.
>>97758374Overall I think the bad will 6th edition was so bad it spilled into 5th edition games and on top of that Catalyst being a terrible publisher, no one plays as much. Shame because I like the setting too.
Which edition is closest to the vidya?
>>97758485They are all set in the 2050s, aren't they?
Thoughts on 5th ed?
>>97758374How new are you?The majority of this board hates crunch, and will equate it to vIdEo GaMeS whenever possible.It's all about making stories and jerking off about worldbuilding now, nobody likes playing games any more.
>>97760240>The majority of this board hates crunch, and will equate it to vIdEo GaMeS whenever possible.>It's all about making stories and jerking off about worldbuilding now,If only.
>>9775837425th anniversary edition is good, probably the last good version
>>97760258>If onlyThere are other places for nongame media, you fucking moron. Go to any of them if you hate games so much.
>>97760240tell us more about how you're a retarded 4rry
>>97758374What edition did you play?>Okay so why do everyone complain about the system again?99% of complains from "bad system" on /tg/, reddit or anywhere on the internet come from dndogshit eaters. They complain that anything that is not d20slop is le bad system because they don't want to learn it. Other RPGs like gurps, vtm get the exact sort of criticism.
>>97758374Maybe if you listened to the people complaining about the system you wouldn't've made this shitty thread.
>>97758374Because the Matrix exists and first-timers running a game are too scared of getting things "wrong" to just simplify the whole business.In general, beyond the Matrix, though, the game can get a bit clunky if you don't know exactly what you're doing with it, it's not very open to new game masters unless they've previously played the game, so that gives it as a reputation as being overly complex and arcane.
>>97758374The base mechanics are amazing, the systems are fucking terrible.5e, for instance, requires johnsons to be time traveling god beings in order for the payscales to make sense.It also did not include what happens when you run out of health at launch.
>>977584685th edition has a huge goddamn mountain of problems so severe chummer was created.The editing is godawful, like 70% of it was obviously never playtested, the freelancers making it did not communicate, and were all entirely dropped when the CEO embezzled their paycheck.
>>97760361Why do you D&D faggots assume everything is always about D&D?Shadowrun has fucking problems. Shadowrun had its writers get a court injunction to repo all the computers from the office, game files included, after not being paid.
>>97760449>Game has problems>There's a court case-This is your mind on dndogshit.
Players have complained about Shadowrun since the first edition. Second edition cleaned some things up, but introduced new problems. Many old school gamers feel like Third edition was the last good edition and won't recognize anything Catalyst has done. The fourth edition was the first under Catalyst and brought us the wireless internet and Augmented reality and my older players hated it, but the revised anniversary edition is lauded by many as the best form of the game (if they joined past 3E). Fifth edition capped dice pools and had many errors, slowly addressed, didn't pay freelancers, and revealed flaws at Catalyst Game Labs that ran deep; it also gave us Shadowrun Anarchy for those who wanted something simpler, but it had its own problems. The Sixrh mediation was nearly dead on arrival, needing errata almost immediately (as had 5E, some of which never got addressed); between the new edition seeming to carry legacy issues and Catalyst still dealing with deep flaws, many are upset with Shadowrun as a whole, when the issue seems to be more an issue with Catalyst.Shadowrun Anarchy 2.0 had a successful KS campaign recently, too.I enjoy both versions of Anarchy, but if I were going to play one of the main lines, I would prefer 4AE, then 3E. Every other edition, you might as well play something else, IMHO.
>>97758374I found it pretty enjoyable when one of my GMs decided to basically ban magic and decking and had us use other archetypes.
>>97760318You should try crying about it
Ok I'm going to get crucified here but I have to ask: I have NEVER understood gun staging. I get more hits with my gun and my damage goes down? Last time I asked this question, no one every bothered to answer it. This was probably 11 years ago. Can anyone explain it to me like I'm fucking 5?
>>97758374IMO 4th (anniversary) edition is quite good but 3rd edition has a very different feel due to the wireless stuff (and is still good).The biggest problem is just that matrix/astral/meatspace makes it so you're trying to run three games at once. It's exceedingly difficult to do.If you force everyone to be in the same space or play asynchronously it's pretty fucking great.Also, the fact that there's decades of splats means a lot of stuff is really powercrept, so you have to pay attention to what you let in or out of the game. Overall I'd recommend it, but to start simple (limited/no splats, low BP), and only branch into the full game when the group is very comfortable.>>97760439Chummer outdates 5th edition newfriend.
>>97760637Do you mean when your damage goes from light to moderate or moderate to serious, etc?
>>97760439Man you really do post this every single time shadowrun gets mentioned huh
>>97758374My only gripes with it are bad editing, missing rules, and contradicting rules in some places. I had go online looking up so many erratas. Also, the Priority System is fucking horrible and you should always do Point-Buy chargen. Awakened are awfully karma hungry, and there are a lot of ways to permanently gimp your character, especially if you're Awakened. Not that they need the buff, but some more ways for Awakened to spend cash (e.g., to regain lost Magic, to quicken spells, to attune foci, and other things that you can lose) would be nice. Otherwise, I really like it.
>>97760258>If onlyYou should try crying about it
>>97760765>sure wish I could buy my way out of the only thing that hinders me in any waydon't we all lol
>>97760671I think so. It's been a minute since I read the rules. It wasn't very intuitive so I lift reversed it to where when you got more hits with a gun you staged upward not downward as it seemed the rules suggested. I know it wasn't a typo, it was my misunderstanding. I just couldn't understand WHY I didn't understand it, if that makes sense. None of the other systems ever gave me a problem, just that one rule. I issued changing it but I didn't know what else I could do
>>97760913Interesting, that is how it's supposed to work in my experience though, if you get a bunch of hits you can stage up your damage.
>>97760962I thought so but the way I kept reading it, and could not see for the life of me, is how they explained it working. I just assumed I was doing it right but it never set well with me because I'm a systems guy through and through. I want to understand why it works the way it does so I can explain it to my players if need be
>>97760962Ok I just reread it. I see where I got confused. My young self just didn't understand it. When it says the target can stage the damage down, I must have been thinking the attacker did that but it says in black and white that the target does that. Oof. I thought I was smart, too
>>97760765The smartest thing that Anarchy 2e has done is get rid of Karma entirely. Everything being nuyen solves the problems and makes thematic sense as well.
>>97761128So adepts mages and shamans are now what, five times better than everyone else rather than just two times?
>>97761051I was wondering if perhaps that was the issue. Hey man, happens to us all sometimes.
>>97758374I've found that online discourse about RPGs is often dominated by people who read rules and think about playing games, but very rarely actually play. These people then make seemingly valid points about how the rules "should" work with no actual experience of playing and create a "commonly held" opinion about the game repeated by other people who may not even have read the rules.Hence why the experience when you start playing doesn't match the discourse around the game.That's not to say some games aren't just shit and rightly identified as shit however, but first hand experience of actual play is required to know that for certain
>>97758374People complain about it being a bad game because (get this!) it is a bad game.Take combat for example. You have retardedly many modifiers and options to take into account for (at least) three different rolls to resolve one attack. Two of which are likely rolled by the GM. Everyone else has to twiddle their thumbs.This is a problem on its own but it gets elevated to pants on head retarded heights when even one person does matrix stuff. For every initiative pass (not whole round) in meatspace matrix does four fucking passes. This is bad game design.The simple is too complicated for the devs themselves. Grab your copy of the CRB and check the pregens. We haven't had a CRB where _all_ pregens have been legal builds in three (probably more) editions.Awakened characters are just better. Why would I as an optimizer ever play a BMX bandit over an angel summoner?
>>97758374Dice pool systems with only the highest possible value and lowest possible value of a given die mattering is pretty shit from a design standpoint (WoD/SR). The only benefit those systems have is they are inherently retarded for players and GMs alike.d100, 2d20, d20, SW, FATE, PbtA, Genesys/FFG SW, GURPS, and more are better. The dice pools of SR and WoD have the benefit of being easy to understand but are still terrible in execution.
>>97758494No. Each edition moves the timeline forward by a decade or two. If you're talking about Shadowrun Returns, it's based on 3e, give or take.
>>97761543ttrpgs demand a lot of time to properly parse them. For example, a lot of people hating 5e spent years in the 5e ecosystem before they branched out. The hobby as a whole is too time consuming to be present online at the same level as a pure consumerism, like you see with movies and comics. And even those interests are filled with people who can't be bothered to consume the thing they want to talk about. It's only natural that most discussion will come from people without a proper opinion based on years of trying to make it work.Smaller games usually have healthier groups because they can be grasped in a one shot so people can talk from experience. Something with multiple editions and a history of internal issues and a noticeable crunch, like Shadorun, will be mostly outsiders r it will disappear from the internet. Those are the two options you have. I think it's fine to tolerate dumb takes in exchange of keeping the name alive, at least you can get players, but it's a shitty exchange one way or another.I only played one session of Shadowun. Some of the memes felt real, we had too many systems for everyone to do their thing and rolls felt either under or overwhelming. I'd probably feel different with more sessions, it took me a month to like WHFRPG, but I can see where people are comming from.
>>97761543This has been a problem for a long time. It really became noticeable when PDF versions of game books started becoming commonplace though.
>>97760240why is crunch vs fluff always depicted as some kind of zero sum game?
>>97761907because that retard got told 20 years ago that D&D 4.0 was tabletop wow, because it is and he's been seething about it every day ever since
>>97758374Drain and the matrix are really clumsy, coincidentally these things are central to Shadowrun
>>97761707> Dice pool systems with only the highest possible value and lowest possible value of a given die mattering is pretty shit from a design standpoint (WoD/SR). The only benefit those systems have is they are inherently retarded for players and GMs alike.Why?
>>97760487So, are you too retarded to understand how this might be detrimental to a game's development, or what?
Why not just sell it to that German company at this point?
The setting is gay, too. "What if cyberpunk but fairy dust and D&D 'I automatically insta-win' wizards?'" Barf.
>>97762250CGL has no idea what their IP is worth at this point and would probably want to overcharge Pegasus for an IP transfer. And for Pegasus, SR in only one title next to Call of Cthulhu, Avatar Legends and their whole portfolio of board games.Although with the prices they want for German Shadowrun books right now, they can't be paying CGL that much under the current license model. It used to be that only the core rulebook was heavily subsidized at €20 for the hardcover and €10 for a softcover version. Now everything seems dirt cheap.
>>97761192I was really young and the language is slightly clunky. After playing mtg for decades now and how triggers work, the stack mechanics, etc, it was really clear to me what the rule was doing and how I misunderstood it. It was only the third system I ever ran so I was still pretty green. SR rules are stated pretty different then what I was used to, that's for sure
>>97762269Pink Mohawk cyberpunk is kino. Outdated but kino
>>97762376>It used to be that only the core rulebook was heavily subsidized at €20 for the hardcover and €10 for a softcover versionThat's how it was during SR5. SR6 got more expensive. Did they reverse that? I stopped caring about new Shadowrun books after SR6 released.
>>97762402
>>97762451That looks like they are going to stop releasing SR stuff.
I always thought SR would make for a decent TTCCG. Please stop me if I'm making any sense. I would probably chase this dream
>>97758374If you let me play in your campaign, I would either have to go out of my way to make a weak character, or you would have to dissalow almost every character option.The game systems are broken in that perfect way, where players that don't know what they're doing will usually make the type of characters the designers intended, while guys who read the rulebook can create an unstoppable god in a bunch of different ways, and it's really fucking difficult to balance those two player types in the same party.It's not a totally unfixable problem, but the system is also pretty clunky with too many dicerolls, and the matrix rules are annoying like in every edition. Considering there are setting-agnostic systems like Cities without number, that found elegant solutions to all those issues, I'm not really likely to switch back to the Shadowrun game system.I played 4e, 25th, 5e and 6e and they're pretty much the same, with maybe a slight decrease in quality from edition to edition. 5e fixed a few glaring balance issues with 4e, but introduced new annoying stuff like limits. And 6e fixed nothing while introducing a bunch of annoying shit, and every edition makes the rulebook a bit worse edited and harder to read and the fluff more retarded.
>>97760322>>97761984>anon has a chip on his shoulder 15 years hence
>>97762517>6e fixed nothing while introducing a bunch of annoying shit,It cut down the skill list to a third and made it so that riggers aren't completely fucked on the skill front.The idea of using edge more and gaining it for things that would previously be handled by modifiers (similar to D&D 5e with advantage) was good, it's just that the implementation wasn't.
>>977603224e was more crunchy than anything that came after, period. They storytelling stuff was really pared down for idiots like you who can't read
Brothers I'm so happy, my group finally got back together after a year long break. We played last friday, shit was so cash.
>>97761751A quick Google search shows that the three games (Returns, Dragonfall, and Hong Kong) do all, in fact, take place in the 2050s, which places them solidly in the second edition of the lore.
>>97762012Shadowrun isn't as bad as WoD because 1s don't cancel 6s and only contribute to glitch state if half your pool is 1s. In WoD 1s cancel out 10s making each new die added having equal chances of hurting or helping a roll making larger pools kinda retarded. Both are retarded in the sense that the core resolution mechanic is pretty ass at generating a success chance as soon as the TN starts moving up. You could be a fucking legend in SR with loads of enhancements and high attribute values but netting a TN of 5 is just a giant crap shoot making all that advancement feel kinda useless.
>>97758374Happy for you, anonAs for myself I would love a Savage Worlds edition like they have one for RIFTS.
>>97763523you do realize that the TN doesn't change in shadowrun, right?And that the dice system makes being an enhanced character EXTRAORDINARILY CONSISTENT at whatever they are good at?
>>97764999>>97763523honestly, I've not seen a base dice mechanic better than what WoD and shadowrun do.
>>97764999>>97765022What I've noticed with my (very, very limited) interaction with Shadowrun is that it feels a lot worse when you have a high number and still roll like shit. So, regardless of the fact that most of the time the dice go the way they aught to, those very occasional roles where you throw a shitload of dice and still don't get any successes stick out harder to a certain kind of person.
>>97764999>you do realize that the TN doesn't change in shadowrun, right?It changes in 1e, 2e, and 3e.
>>97764999Not sure if he means target number on a die or target successes. The former only applies to some editions of both.
>>97765079It should feel a lot worse, it's statistically WAY more unlikely than it is in any other dice resolution mechanic I can think of.
>>97765079Have you rolled a d20?
>>97765620Nobody in this thread has rolled anything. Everything is based on vibes. The dndsloppa way.
>>97765085Those are the only actual editions of Shadowrun.
>>97765620>>97765709I'm not sure why you're seething so badly, or at what.That people have had the gall to play shadowrun?
>>97760642I've wanted to play a cyberspacr focused game for a while but it requires everyone to be a technomancer or decker.
>>97765620It's not about it being swingy, it's about the fact that when you have a huge number of dice and they *still* all come up 1s 2s and 3s, it feels a lot worse, even though that's statistically unlikely.
>>97767706I get that but you gotta take the good with the bad. If they were all 6s, also highly unlikely, would you turn that roll down? Ofc not
>>97767712I think you're not understanding what I'm saying. I'm not passing a judgement. I'm saying that when a player has a high number in a skill, and they still bomb that roll, it sticks in there differently than in other systems. I'm not passing judgement on it, I'm not making a qualitative statement, I was pointing out what I noticed about why people might not like the system.
>>97767739It's also appropriately rare.
>>97767739Yeah I get that, no need to explain it. Would you take a roll of all 6s or nah?
>>97768077Yes, obviously.
>>97767914You say that, but in the little bit we played, I watched our street same roll like absolutely dog shit with something like 10 dice, and our hacker had a 12 dice roll that didn't get anything over a 3.
>>97765835>original Rigger 3 instead of the FanPro Revised versionMy condolences.
>>97768156Was just curious. Thank you for answering
Short version: 3e is doable but sometimes needs on the fly adjustment. 4e is vulnerable to lots of one weird trick minir pun pun bullshit things and right at the start dof the magicrun downward slope. 4a fixes a lot, but not all, of 4e's problems. 5e is a disaster and gets worse from there.Without getting into the CGL embezzlement as the start of the downward slope or their active attempts to kill off discussion they didn't control on other sites, SR's quality dipped hard in terms of lore too as time goes on. It doesn't make sense even in context anymore.Go find the cyberpunk general and go back through the last few threads, someone wrote up a quick explanation on the embezzlement and quality issues I largely agree with .
>>97772171Is 2e doable as is or nah?
>>97762250CGL doesn't own it, only licenses it. It's not theirs to sell. Though I suppose that if they really wanted to get out of the game, they could terminate the next time the contract with Topps/Fanatic comes up for renewal and Germany could step into the gap.
>>97773247The theory is that they have to license Shadowrun in order to license Battle tech, which is the thing that actually makes them money.
>>97773146I just tried to start a 2e campaign and I found it a near unplayable slog.
>>97773653Well, chances are if you didn't play it then you won't be smart enough to play it now. Too much hormone disrupting poison in the food your whole life to develop a working mind.
I am running a 3rd edition game and it is going well, is it complicated? No.Do you have to read and understand lots of stuff? Yes.This has not been a problem because I love shadowrun so much.For a GM that is indifferent I can understand why they would think it is all too much to bother running.
>>97764035It exists and is called Sprawlrunners. Or you could use Interface Zero, but in the end I just created my own setting.
>>97773747You seem pretty butt blasted my dude. No one was having fun at the table, the book is a nightmare to reference, and the hacking rules are absolute dog shit. You aren't some kind of mega brain for playing a clunky as fuck game system from almost 40 years ago.
>>97758374Shadowrun continues to mystify me.Why was it never more popular? The video games were pretty good.Is medieval fantasy just THAT much more popular than sci-fi fantasy?
>>97775802I mean, I'd say it got about as popular as a sci-fi/fantasy fusion ttrpg could. In the 90s it had two well retarded videogames and a long running series of novels, alongside it's pretty robust game line. I think the fact that there are certain people for whom the premise is just too stupid, and the fact that the rules have a high barrier to entry kept it from being any more mainstream than that.
>>97775802Because it's just a weird blend of shit and even its fans don't tend to like the whole package, just parts of it.
>>97775930>>97775950Warhammer's a weird blend of shit but it seems to have snowballed in popularity.Granted I imagine a good chunk of Fantasy's popularity is due to the Total War games.
>>97775964There's nothing weird about Warhammer's blend of shit. It's just medieval fantasy.
>>97775972I assume he means 40k, but part of the reason 40k is becoming more and more popular is them sanding all the edges off to the point that it's just big dudes in big armor pop sci-fi.
>>97776001>>97775972I was talking about both at once, that's why I didn't say 'fantasy' or '40k'.Fantasy wasn't that popular (to the best of my knowledge), but the Total War games seems to have dug it out of obscurity and given it some popularity (I've been told that GW regretted end times because they couldn't capitalize on the new popularity).40k's getting sanded down? Were the games watered down? I only played Rogue Trader and a bit of Mechanicus, but I didn't notice anything being... not-horrible (in an appropriate in-setting way)... at least not to the best of my admittedly limited knowledge.
>>97773146It's alright. Rules are scattered and initiative is pretty odd though.
>>97768159In 5e SR, 12 dice is roughly the bare minimum for competence in a skill. A braindead player doing the bare minimum to make their character good at their primary schtick rolls 14 dice on every action (6d from max attribute at chargen, 6d from max skill at chargen, 2d from skill specialization). Street sammies have a bunch of tools to crank their dice pools to the moon to the point that they should have been rolling *double* what your street sammy was unless their build was spread thinly across a bunch of different capabilities. Deckers are outright required to optimize to be functional (an admitted flaw of the system), but if they do then they likewise should be comfortably sitting with dicepools in the high teens for their important actions.For comparison, standard corpsec usually roll at about 7-8 dice, and corpsec are total jokes who only succeed at anything through pure chance. Your sammy was only slightly better than a slightly trained corpo redshirt.In terms of probability, your sammy gets 1 hit on their test in about 1 in 12 rolls, and totally wiffs about 1 in 60. A *good* sammy (20 dice) only gets 3 hits or worse about as often as a D&D character crit fails, and a roll with zero hits is literally a once in a campaign event. Oh, and then you have edge on top of that which is among other things a daily refreshing pool of just *rerolling every failure in your entire goddamn pool* so you can virtually guarantee a halfway decent roll when it matters.The main takeaway from this is that Shadowrun has a legitimate problem where people who have no fucking clue what they are doing can make spectacularly shit characters, but that isn't directly related to its dice pool mechanics.
>>97775655Sorry it's just the truth, you got poisoned and I'm sorry they got away with it.
>>97776214My experience was with 2e, not 5e.
>>97776214Rolling this many dice sounds like shit.I played entry level exalted and rolling even 10 d10s was a chore
>>97778733Yeah, it's hard for some people to realize that RPGs are like any trend. What was popular then, may not be popular now and vice versa. Dice pool games where a popular thing in the late 90s and early 2000s.
>>97776214>>97778733Wasn't there a rule where you could buy hits?Like every 4 die = 1 hit so if you dice pool was 22 you could just opt to buy 4 hits instead of rolling and counting, then roll just 2 die?
>>97775930Hilariously, it was more popular than Cyberpunk 20xx. It probably wasn't too hard to accomplish that as Mike ran R.Tal like a total retard. Heck, the only reason people know of his game now is due to CDPR's adaptation of it.
>>97779040Optional rule in 4th, not sure for 5th. You're not supposed to be allowed to do it when failure would be important and under though, similarly to taking 10/20 in D&D.
>>97768193Oh but it is the fanpro revised version my son.
>>97784433Those are very much not FanPro spines. Then again, neither are they FASA. Is this a PoD where they couldn't be assed imaging the spines?
>>97785645Who tf cares about the spines of books and what version of which book it is? It literally doesn't matter one pig fuck
