167 replies to this topic

[Logicron]

Ever hear the urban legend that GURPS is such a throughout system that a videogame studio used it as the basis for a 3D game engine?

[Copper Bezel]

I feel like most systems that are more open usually end up complicating the "same amount of points" idea somewhere eventually, though. Like if you were playing a GURPS cyberpunk, it's straight up presented to the GM as an option whether cybernetics cost character points, money, or both, and character points can be spent to maximize starting wealth, which of course applies during character creation - with the result of either allowing you to prioritize gear over attributes in Shadowrun terms, or requiring you to do so for some kinds of builds. (A level of flexibility that would of course be a balance nightmare in a game that wanted to build the kind of balance and consistent experience between games that a D&D or a Shadowrun wants to build, but not so much an issue in an open game like GURPS where every campaign is a new world and a new meta defined by the players' and GM's choices.) I guess my only familiarity with using RNG is in Pathfinder, where it's limited to smaller pools like attributes or starting wealth, as opposed to SR priorities or GURPS character points, which are the universal currency everyone starts with that determines literally everything they're going to have access to in the build, and come before those kinds of smaller pools exist.

 

I've been meaning to look into alternative systems for SR, and made a couple of fruitless searches, so I'll have to check that out, thanks. = D If I had any confidence that there was a keikaku underneath SR's rule system, and I know I've sometimes doubted my conviction in the last year playing it that this was completely impossible, I really have to admit that seeing 6E released in incomplete form has ruined it, with things like deck attributes that no longer mean anything but are still there, skill points worth the same as attribute points in progression but not character creation, strength-based characters in a melee system that no longer uses strength for damage, etc. - I.e., direct evidence that this is all piles of piecemeal edits and hacks that no one steps back and untangles between editions, and never mind any balancing pass or playtesting stage. I'm not convinced that a middle ground between open and closed games is possible to begin with, but I definitely don't think it's possible while maintaining a notional conceptual backwards compatibility with prior editions, or generally with being Shadowrun.

 

I'm starting to wonder just how much intersection there is between Shadowrun and furries now, though. We should just make Furry Shadowrun an actual thing. I'd like to propose the name "Sneakypaws". X ]

Edited by Copper Bezel, 29 September 2019 - 01:41 PM.

[Dekafox]

Ever hear the urban legend that GURPS is such a throughout system that a videogame studio used it as the basis for a 3D game engine?

 

Not heard that one before.  Can't be worse than Javascript.

 

As for the morass that was 6th, there's a 2 hour long video from a streaming group(Twilight Sins?) that tried to use it(and gave up) going over a multitude of the things wrong with it. Somewhere between 4th and 5th, the main line dev and a bunch of the better freelancers left CGL, and 6th seems to be the end result of the direction they've been headed since then.  The german licensee(Pegasus) has apparently cleaned it up a bunch in the past, but I don't know that they can fix 6th without what amounts to a complete, consistent rewrite. They described it a lot like you said - a bunch of people wrote individual portions, but no editor ever tied it into a cohesive whole.   The playtesters even told them it wasn't ready and needed about another year, but they shipped it anyways just to get it out for Gencon 2019 and beat Cyberpunk RED.  I think someone said it's the lowest selling book on Drive-Thru RPG and one of the few that they will give refunds on.

 

From what I've heard though 5th was not that tightly edited either.  For example, when I was looking at the cyberware, there's a note that reaction enhancers are incompatible with wired reflexes, then further on, on the same page it says the two can work together via wireless.  How can they work together via wireless if you can't have both at once? 

 

Unfortunately I don't expect 6e to die off, just because there are a large portion of people who will not play any version but the most recent of X game. If this doesn't outright kill the game or cost them the license though, I expect a 6e revised at some point that will merge in whatever fixes Pegasus comes up with. Probably for the 40th anniversery.

 

 

I'm starting to wonder just how much intersection there is between Shadowrun and furries now, though. We should just make Furry Shadowrun an actual thing. I'd like to propose the name "Sneakypaws". X ]

 

Elf = wolf, dwarf = badger, troll = bovine.. or would elf be fox and orc be wolf? Actually, thinking about it, elf would probably be cat. You could definitely play around with goblinization instead being furrification in the timeline though, or when Halley's comet goes by, instead of SURGE only happening to select people, everyone SURGEs into a furry.

 

On a side note, apparently if you have a centaur body and skimmers, you can get up to 230kph.

[Logicron]

Elves would be horses, they're both herbivores built for agility and have a reputation for being noble.

[Copper Bezel]

I had noticed that contradiction in wired reflexes vs. reaction enhancers and naively thought it meant that the bonuses couldn't be stacked without wireless, but I'm suddenly realizing that that probably wasn't what was intended and, in fact, there exists no defined intention at all. (Cyberware is one area I'm 9% familiar with, compared to the unknown wilds of magic and technomancy, as a result of playing my plastic squirrel and spending a lot of time in CF and the wiki looking for parts I can't afford. Then I ended up building a thing I still can't afford, because there weren't enough cyberware things and rules apparently.)

 

I'll have to show my cards and admit that a lot of my knowledge of 6E comes from the same Twilight Sins play. But they cite their sources, as it were - I could brush off a vague impression as one group's take, but these are demonstrable gaps, contradictions, and half-implemented changes right in the book. I've only played 5E, and I don't think our group is likely to switch to 6E, certainly not so long as I'm around to suggest better options like the ones in that discussion you linked. But yeah, it's definitely similar to problems that existed in 5E, similar enough to be illustrative of what happened to 5E in the first place, while being on a completely different level of incoherence. If 4E, being before the loss of the talent, didn't have the same set of problems, that's good to know - but like you said, it also kinda just becomes difficult somehow to play games in older editions as soon as new ones exist, because people want the latest and uh, "greatest". X /

 

I love this metatype conversion idea. = o My group just used the surge as a handwave for why there are furries and we all took some qualities to suit, so like ... furries in our world are street trash with hard lives who experienced something shitty to trigger their surge genes, so we picked up things like functional tail or keen-eared and so on from the Qualities list for the usual karma cost at character creation and the usual addictions and phobias and whatnot to pay for them. Going completely Zootopia and replacing the existing racial metatypes with mechanically meaningful animal archetypes would be bloody amazing.

Edited by Copper Bezel, 29 September 2019 - 03:30 PM.

[Logicron]

I've always wanted to replace halflings with large cats who walk upright and can hold stuff in their hands.

[Fnu Aw]

I just want to know, at character creation, if I want to be good at X, what do I need to pick now? I don't care what they call the things I need to pick or how they work as long as I can find them.

 

With Shadowrun this is impossible. You need an absolutely six dimensional Pepe Silvia flowchart to trace all the bullshit factors that get pulled into the outcome of any roll. It's beyond good. Beyond evil. Beyond time. Beyond reason. You will not find them all.

 

 

I love this metatype conversion idea. = o My group just used the surge as a handwave for why there are furries and we all took some qualities to suit, so like ... furries in our world are street trash with hard lives who experienced something shitty to trigger their surge genes, so we picked up things like functional tail or keen-eared and so on from the Qualities list for the usual karma cost at character creation and the usual addictions and phobias and whatnot to pay for them. Going completely Zootopia and replacing the existing racial metatypes with mechanically meaningful animal archetypes would be bloody amazing.

 

I prefer the way it is now, where we're highly conspicuous freaks in an otherwise human world. It adds a level of farce to the idea that we're a criminal band that so far has operated mostly in broad daylight, and I love it.

[Copper Bezel]

I do like that aspect, but I wish it came up in play more. I really enjoyed that bit in the side RP where I got to play the box store employee who helped Snowie and Novi pick out a coffee machine while reminding us how brave we were and making sure we knew exactly how sorry she felt for us with our condition. I bet she had a good story in the break room about the freak pack she had to help and was imagining fleas for days.

[Patch]

So I was poking around on imgur and found an open source character generator for 5E Shadowrun on github: https://github.com/chummer5a/chummer5a

[Copper Bezel]

The terrible thing is that we all started with Chummer. X] It definitely helps, and there's no playing Shadowrun without spreadsheets and other aids in any case, but while Chummer is very good for listing the available options and doing the math, it doesn't make up for a lack of familiarity with the system. Thousands of pages of system. To, you know, get to that starting point to know what steps to take to make your character have the ability to do a particular thing. X]

Edited by Copper Bezel, 29 September 2019 - 04:20 PM.

[Patch]

Ah... >.>

[Fnu Aw]

I used Chummer. I took no steps to try to build a Face. I built an entirely capable Face. I don't know.

[Dekafox]

I love this metatype conversion idea. = o My group just used the surge as a handwave for why there are furries and we all took some qualities to suit, so like ... furries in our world are street trash with hard lives who experienced something shitty to trigger their surge genes, so we picked up things like functional tail or keen-eared and so on from the Qualities list for the usual karma cost at character creation and the usual addictions and phobias and whatnot to pay for them. Going completely Zootopia and replacing the existing racial metatypes with mechanically meaningful animal archetypes would be bloody amazing.

 

I still think elves would most likely be cats, and perhaps orcs canines in general.

 

I actually see three ways of going with that so far:

 

1) The Great Ghost Dance goes horribly wrong, and triggers the "furrization" across all the major ley lines.  Maybe something to do with Shaman spirits?  That would be if you wanted to go with "Furries have been here a long time" like how the existing metatypes have been.

 

2) SURGE - but after thinking about it, what if it instead transformed all normal humans who weren't warded or deep enough inside some vault? You'd still have a few humans left here and there, but they'd be a rarity - but also the ones in charge of the megacorps, most likely.  You could also go for 1:1 replacement of all the metatypes(barring ones protected like humans) and then the humans get all the species that don't fit one of those templates, like, say, squirrels! 

 

3) Corp screw-up.  What if Evo was researching something using shapeshifters, perhaps to give their security guard adepts the ability to assume an improved combat form?  Something goes horribly wrong, and this causes an awakened virus ala HMHVV to be created that imprints people with furry traits? All it would take is a shadowrun gone wrong for something like that to break free.  the only catch is how it would spread enough to make a large impact, given how fast the reactions were to Chicago(bug spirits) and Boston(CFD).  This option would likely be far closer to what your current campaign is like.

 

As far as character creation, without example characters, whether pregen templates or looking at other characters, it is hard to tell what to pick if you're not familiar with it already.It really does seem as if they expect you to read everything pertinent to the kind of character you want to play before you start making it, unless you want to just copy and tweak.  One thing I wish there was some kind of guidance on is what size of dice pools you need to aim for to be good at something, other than "as much as possible." Even example characters don't really help greatly with that on their own.  It makes an easy way to tell if your skills are spread too thin or not.

[Copper Bezel]

I like that they even provide a ranking, at least in 5E, for how exceptional a skill rating is in in-universe terms - that rating 6 is professional and rating 11 is world best and so on. I wouldn't know whether to trust this as actually reflecting gameplay or not if it meant something, but of course, since tests are rating + attribute capped by limit, it kinda can't. X ] It does sort of track with the default thresholds in Core, with 2 for an "average" test, 6 for a very difficult task, and 8 for a crazy one - a starting character in a situation playing to their strength in this skill might have 10 dice and a limit of, say, 5, but a relevant piece of equipment to add +1 to the limit, and then uh ... roll 4 successes in most cases, with a 1/20 chance of 6. Er. Well, every additional die in the pool makes it three times as likely.

 

I think it's just part of the open-endedness intended in the system though. There are bits that definitely want to be a simulationy game that gives you some stuff and asks you to go figure it out yourself. I don't think that's relevant to the game experience that's actually like, possible in the game as written, but it's a thread that's in there. Like how there's a listing and cost for breast implants. X /

 

They definitely need some kind of condensed character generation guide though. It makes no sense for a new player to be thrown 40+ pages of terms and tables and given no indication which parts to prioritize. (I particularly like that limits are referred to throughout said section and given values only in a table at the end.)

Edited by Copper Bezel, 30 September 2019 - 07:22 AM.

[Logicron]

I just remembered that in the SNES Shadowrun game(which wasn't very good BTW), it was implied that humans used their karma to transform themselves into orcs and elves and stuff instead of those entities being a separate race from humanity like they are in the source material.

Edited by Logicron, 30 September 2019 - 09:12 AM.

[Dekafox]

Never played the SNES ones.  At least it gave a way in for the HBS PC games to exist. (Speaking of which, apparently the first Shadowrun Returns was based on a 1e module, and there's a PnP 5e sourcebook for the Hong Kong one. There's a sourcebook for Dragonfall also I believe, but it's in german.)

[NotVeryKnightly]

There's a sourcebook for Dragonfall also I believe, but it's in german.

This is such an "oh, of course" moment.

[Dekafox]

So been pondering on the street naming for the technofox - Kyubi was referency enough, and something I could see someone using on Jackpoint, but doesn't feel right. Tammamo-no-mae is too much of a mouthful. Nogitsune seems too generic, and Kumiho is the wrong asian culture for her weeb-ness. I then considered thinking of some wordplay with the word "kon" which is the Japanese onomotopoeia for a fox bark, but was drawing a blank.

 

I then realized "Dekavixen" would be almost perfect, if it was referencing deka=10 as in 10 tails!  But then it makes her sound like a R63 me, not this character I'm developing. 

 

Street-naming is a pain sometimes.  Actually, strike that, naming characters in general is a pain sometimes.

[Logicron]

I know how you feel, I'm trying to come up with a name for a girl who is a descendent of Johann Georg Faust, who was basically german Aleister Crowley in my setting.

[MEDdMI]

"con" (prounounced kon) is also an abbreviation of "computer", so maybe you can use kon as a pun that way.

Or abbreviate the long one to Tamma, which sounds like the generic Tama pet name. XD