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As someone who played a hacker when Shadowrun 4E game out, the rules about the actual wireless/matrix/VR was so woefully underbaked in the base book. It told you very little about what you could actually do. Sometimes it was literally a roll-a-server chart. Of course, it wasn't like a massive flow chart where you roll and "This system is a 4: former SOTA system so it's +1 to whatever, and the security here is 2: proactive white IC, lets roll to see if the sysadmin is around etc." No, it was literally a single chart of 1D6 with a tiny description of what you encounter. Even though I had a big complaint that much of the stuff in 4E was weirdly homogeneous, at the same time if they wanted the hackers to be walking about with everyone else, I always thought a better way might be to universalize certain systems. Instead of magic getting its own (broken, utterly irresistible as a mundane) system and hacking having its own (unloved, commonly useless) system. Lets say you wanted to open a door. The magic user could Powerbolt it, the street sam could smash it, and the hacker could overload the circuitry. Maybe there could even be more stealthy objects, like a Knock spell, and cyberware hand that can imitate for readers or a specialized program to leave less evidence from a hack. Another potential fix would have been to make AR-hacking faster than the base hacker's initiative, like a free actions per round only usable to do something in AR or something, and/or hot-VR even faster than wired reflexes, and give the hacker like 6 actions, interlaced with everyone else's, so afford them some feeling of special-ness. Anygoons have an opinion on the new Cyberpunk stuff? I always felt like Shadowrun's worst parts was all the magic and 'racial' poo poo. Of course that's also the unique selling point and the part most beloved by the fans who began making the game in latter days when I played in 3E, 4E, and 4E20th, so they focused on that.
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Jan 2, 2022 09:55
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It seems like one of those things where they need to just relook at it from first principles and figure out what the gently caress they're actually wanting to do. And also take a look at real life. People carry around smart phones but also use terminals at work, and big companies often use outdated hardware and software they can't be assed changing.
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Jan 2, 2022 11:35
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Arivia posted:This sounds rad. Do you know where it is in the PDF of the Lancer rulebook? Page 63 under Flight. quote:Some characters can fly for either all or part of their I asked in the discord to completely clarify - the 'vertically and horizontally' are independent of each other.
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Jan 2, 2022 12:27
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ninjoatse.cx posted:In every edition hacking has always been "now you go do your thing in La La Land" while the rest of the team does the run/has fun/twidles their thumbs. To be fair, splitting the party should be encouraged in a heist game. The problem is that Shadowrun's rules have never been snappy enough to make "let's cut away to see how it's going with the decker" not be boring as sin. Like Ghost Leviathan said, Shadowrun just needs to go back to basic principles and make sure all these subsystems work right.
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Jan 2, 2022 17:24
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Hostile V posted:This is kind of a weird question but as someone who knows the general metaplot and pitfalls of Shadowrun, I've heard it said multiple times that Shadowrun 3e is the best version of the game (and not in a "it's good" way but in a "most functional or balanced" way). Could someone confirm/deny that for me and just explain how the gently caress that game generally works, I had a discussion about Shadowrun with some folks and that jogged the 3e thought loose and now I'm curious. Having played a few SR editions, 2e is absolutely the one I felt was the easiest to parse as a player. The only real "pitfall" I felt while I was playing it was that if you read some of the supplements, there's equipment in there that's notably better than the core gear without being notably more expensive(sometimes even the same price or cheaper), but even so the non-core gear selection was nothing compared to the hellscape that was trying to chargen in 4e and figuring out which one of 500 guns from four supplements was the best choice. I played a hacker in the 2e game I was in last, and it may have been down to a good GM, but I never felt like I was off playing my own game while everyone else was doing fun stuff.
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Jan 2, 2022 17:29
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Oh, 4e still had the dreaded "initiative passes", where they tried to prevent the guy with Wired Reflexes from being the only one who got to take any actions in combat by ruling that everyone gets their first action before anyone gets their second action, and so on. Problem is, they had movement evenly divided between multiple actions if you had them. So Andy and Bob both have a movement speed of 30 feet, Andy has 1 initiative pass but Bob has 2. Andy darts from one block of cover to the other 30 feet away in one action safely. Bob tries to do the same but ends his first initiative pass exposed 15 feet between the cover blocks and is promptly shot to bits by everyone acting after him on pass 1.
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Jan 2, 2022 18:29
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hyphz posted:Oh, 4e still had the dreaded "initiative passes", where they tried to prevent the guy with Wired Reflexes from being the only one who got to take any actions in combat by ruling that everyone gets their first action before anyone gets their second action, and so on. Probably pretty close to how a fight between anyone accelerated through tech or magic and anyone not so augmented would go (or as close as TTRPG rules could be expected to be) but yeah, massively unfun.
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Jan 2, 2022 18:43
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Lemniscate Blue posted:Probably pretty close to how a fight between anyone accelerated through tech or magic and anyone not so augmented would go (or as close as TTRPG rules could be expected to be) but yeah, massively unfun. It's the opposite: the person with the augments gets mowed down by gunfire because his movement is divided among all his actions, while his slower opponents take their full movement all at once on their single turn, reach cover, and use the rest of their single turn to shoot up Cyber-Bob.
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Jan 2, 2022 19:27
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Kestral posted:It's the opposite: the person with the augments gets mowed down by gunfire because his movement is divided among all his actions, while his slower opponents take their full movement all at once on their single turn, reach cover, and use the rest of their single turn to shoot up Cyber-Bob. This is why rogues in 5e feel so fun to play IMO, getting a free dash or disengage as a bonus action and zipping around the battlefield as needed is great
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Jan 2, 2022 19:31
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Magnetic North posted:As someone who played a hacker when Shadowrun 4E game out, the rules about the actual wireless/matrix/VR was so woefully underbaked in the base book. It told you very little about what you could actually do. Sometimes it was literally a roll-a-server chart. Of course, it wasn't like a massive flow chart where you roll and "This system is a 4: former SOTA system so it's +1 to whatever, and the security here is 2: proactive white IC, lets roll to see if the sysadmin is around etc." No, it was literally a single chart of 1D6 with a tiny description of what you encounter. Then the Hacking supplement for 4e came out and made them completely busted. Funnily enough by giving them real-world hacking tools like DDOS attacks.
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Jan 2, 2022 19:52
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Kestral posted:It's the opposite: the person with the augments gets mowed down by gunfire because his movement is divided among all his actions, while his slower opponents take their full movement all at once on their single turn, reach cover, and use the rest of their single turn to shoot up Cyber-Bob. Oh poo poo, I misread. Yeah, that's hilariously bad.
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Jan 2, 2022 20:25
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4e was a weird edition like that. In every other edition you could divide movement up however you liked. If we're going to point out brazen flaws, every edition had them, but my absolute favorite for how sheer dumb it was was always invisibility. Casting invisibility on yourself was always filled with rule holes, but casting it on a barrier and casting spells through it was a loophole that, instead of being plugged, they turned it into canon with a spell in 5e that could just make part of a barrier invisible. So loving stupid. Jason Hardy really has no business with anything related to RPG design.
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Jan 2, 2022 20:32
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Magnetic North posted:Anygoons have an opinion on the new Cyberpunk stuff? I always felt like Shadowrun's worst parts was all the magic and 'racial' poo poo. Of course that's also the unique selling point and the part most beloved by the fans who began making the game in latter days when I played in 3E, 4E, and 4E20th, so they focused on that. Cyberpunk RED is great. It's so ridiculously polished compared to 6E Shadowrun and shows what you can do when you care about putting a decent product out and not... whatever Catalyst is doing. For some reason even the admittedly bloated skill list charms instead of irritates (although you can trim it down easily enough). There's only like one house rule I would use off the top of my head and that's tweaking armor so pistols are more effective and heavy armor doesn't make you quite as OP. (My favorite new cyberpunk game is Hard-Wired Island, but that's a different creature altogether.)
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Jan 2, 2022 21:11
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Dawgstar posted:Cyberpunk RED is great. It's so ridiculously polished compared to 6E Shadowrun and shows what you can do when you care about putting a decent product out and not... whatever Catalyst is doing. For some reason even the admittedly bloated skill list charms instead of irritates (although you can trim it down easily enough). There's only like one house rule I would use off the top of my head and that's tweaking armor so pistols are more effective and heavy armor doesn't make you quite as OP. The only things I don't really like are the vehicle and barrier rules. I can't think of any system that handle cars well, now that I think about it.
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Jan 2, 2022 23:33
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Kestral posted:It's the opposite: the person with the augments gets mowed down by gunfire because his movement is divided among all his actions, while his slower opponents take their full movement all at once on their single turn, reach cover, and use the rest of their single turn to shoot up Cyber-Bob. It doesn't work that way in 3e at least, which is part of why its the good one. 3e also didn't do the "you take 4 actions all at once before anyone else gets to take a turn"
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Jan 2, 2022 23:46
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EthanSteele posted:It doesn't work that way in 3e at least, which is part of why its the good one. 3e also didn't do the "you take 4 actions all at once before anyone else gets to take a turn" Yeah. I think the last edition that had everyone take their actions by initiative then initiative - 10 was 2nd edition.
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Jan 2, 2022 23:50
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If I wanted to run aa Cyberpunk style game, is Shadowrun the go-to or is there a better system to use? Edit  Sorry, I didn't realize you guys were talking about Shadowrun for the past page or so.
BigRed0427 fucked around with this message at 05:51 on Jan 3, 2022 |
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Jan 3, 2022 05:37
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Hardwired Island
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Jan 3, 2022 05:41
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BigRed0427 posted:If I wanted to run aa Cyberpunk style game, is Shadowrun the go-to or is there a better system to use? Well it really depends on what makes cyberpunk to you, and what sort of other RPGs you and your group like. Shadowrun is D&D with hypertech, but as the last page has shown, in the hands of a company that doesn't care and certainly can't be assed to make a half decent system or publications at this point. Shadowrun and Cyberpunk are the biggest names, but TG's particular tastes would probably point you to a pbta or forged in the dark style ruleset, since that's more what most of us like these days.
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Jan 3, 2022 05:46
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The "D&D Fantasy meets 80's/90's Anime Cyberpunk" core conceit for Shadowrun is still one of the more compelling RPG concepts(very much a "Chocolate & Peanut Butter" combination) and it would be great if someone made a good modern take on it in a medium crunch system with tactical combat someday*, like there's plenty of good modern made Cyberpunk systems(and most of them do include fantasy stuff in supplements somewhere) but most of them are too rules light and story game oriented for what I want *Lancer is pretty close to what I have in mind overall, indeed it would probably work fine for this purpose with a fair bit of reskinning and house ruling but something purpose made would be even better
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Jan 3, 2022 06:17
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zerofiend posted:Hardwired Island This sounds cool, but it's also a huge pdf with no hard copy available yet. I'll be looking out for it.
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Jan 3, 2022 06:18
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If you want a game like Cyberpunk, the IP that resulted in Cyberpunk 2077, where everyone is a tooled-up cyber-mercenary running around doing jobs for fixers who will definitely not betray you the second it's convenient, you could just run Cyberpunk, the game it's based on. I don't know if RED is any good, but 2020 is still playable despite all the clunk and cruft that's to be expected out of an early 90s rules revision of an 80s RPG. If you want a cyberpunk game, as in a game set in a near-dystopian future where capitalism is ruining everything even more actively than today, and also people have cool robot legs and can hack things, you have a couple of better options: - if you want a game where you play normal, every day people forced to deal with the consequences of predatory capitalism, who band together to fight back against a system that's trying to ruin everything, where violence is a much worse option than stealth, conversation, or hacking (all of which have systems with just as much depth), then play Hardwired Island. - if you want a game where you play people from all walks of life who end up falling into a corporate conspiracy by sheer bad luck, and then need to go out there, shake some trees and get hurt to make the plot go forward (because it's hardboiled noir), then you can try Technoir.
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Jan 3, 2022 11:23
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What if I want 4e, but we're cybernetic now. Because I can't stand Shadowrun lol. But the setting is so good 
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Jan 3, 2022 11:27
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Did later iterations of cyberpunk get rid of cyberpsychosis or whatever the "you've installed too many toys, you're now an insane npc" was called? Gotta say I'm not a fan of that sort of mechanic. Especially as implemented in cyberpunk 2020.
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Jan 3, 2022 11:30
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Lemon-Lime posted:If you want a game like Cyberpunk, the IP that resulted in Cyberpunk 2077, where everyone is a tooled-up cyber-mercenary running around doing jobs for fixers who will definitely not betray you the second it's convenient, you could just run Cyberpunk, the game it's based on. I don't know if RED is any good, but 2020 is still playable despite all the clunk and cruft that's to be expected out of an early 90s rules revision of an 80s RPG. Honestly regular style Cyberpunk without being blended into another genre is a bit dull for me, and if we're being brutally honest I actually kind of hate most of the actual themes of the genre(they just dip too close to depressing reality for my liking with my fiction), I just like the aesthetic and toys it brings to the table when blended into other genres, so none of those is a good fit for me
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Jan 3, 2022 11:32
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Wouldn't Eclipse Phase of Infinity work for cyberpunk needs, at least as far as aesthetics go? You have mega corps, ais, cybernetics and whatnot while also being able to do stuff outside the standard cyberpunk fare
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Jan 3, 2022 11:59
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Covermeinsunshine posted:Wouldn't Eclipse Phase of Infinity work for cyberpunk needs, at least as far as aesthetics go? You have mega corps, ais, cybernetics and whatnot while also being able to do stuff outside the standard cyberpunk fare I remember not being all that wowed by Eclipse Phase's rules the last time I looked into it, and from my recollection Infinity is kind of eh too(and I am not a fan of that one's aesthetics either)
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Jan 3, 2022 12:19
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EP has a neat setting, but the mechanics are pretty bad (even if 2E is a vast improvement) and the game steadfastly refuses to let you play in the cool parts of the setting, instead insisting that you play Firewall agents fighting Exsurgent monsters, rather than rad space communists loving up corporations.
Lemon-Lime fucked around with this message at 15:08 on Jan 3, 2022 |
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Jan 3, 2022 12:32
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Lemon-Lime posted:EP has a neat setting, but the mechanics are pretty bad (even if 2E is a vast improvement) and the game steadfastly refuses to let you play in the cool parts of the setting, instead insisting that you play Firewall agents fighting Exsurgent monsters, instead of rad space communists loving up corporations. I would personally disagree that 2E is an improvement rules-wise. It's bad in mostly different ways from 1E but it's still the same level of garbage, and the writing still suffers from mostly the same sort of issues plus a few exciting new ones. Like, the setting just has such extremely fundamental problems that prevent me from taking it seriously and it would take a complete rewrite from the bottom up to unscrew it, to the point where you really might as well just design a system and setting from scratch rather than try to repair it.
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Jan 3, 2022 12:45
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I really enjoyed the pitch for eclipse phase, but the more I started reading it the more I was thinking about how to unfuck this mess (talking about setting since rules I would probably grab whatever and adjust). I just want to play communist crab in spaaaaaceeeee instead of running from vagina monsters.
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Jan 3, 2022 12:52
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Lemon-Lime posted:If you want a game like Cyberpunk, the IP that resulted in Cyberpunk 2077, where everyone is a tooled-up cyber-mercenary running around doing jobs for fixers who will definitely not betray you the second it's convenient, you could just run Cyberpunk, the game it's based on. I don't know if RED is any good, but 2020 is still playable despite all the clunk and cruft that's to be expected out of an early 90s rules revision of an 80s RPG. Happily RED is very good, even great.
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Jan 3, 2022 15:51
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I feel like the Quantum Thief books would be a much, much better setting to scratch the "transhuman warring politics" itch than what Eclipse Phase ended up being.
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Jan 3, 2022 16:14
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CitizenKeen posted:I feel like the Quantum Thief books would be a much, much better setting to scratch the "transhuman warring politics" itch than what Eclipse Phase ended up being. I agree with this, though I don't know what rules would work best to portray it.
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Jan 3, 2022 17:12
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bewilderment posted:Page 63 under Flight. That quote is just for the flying part, sadly. Is there a clarification for the range when using an ability (range and patterns on 64 in my itch.io pdf doesn't seem to cover it)? I'm very interested in stealing this idea for my OSR games, just want to make sure I understand it myself. Thank you for your assistance any which way.
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Jan 3, 2022 17:19
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Dawgstar posted:Happily RED is very good, even great. They did clean up a lot of the crap from previous editions, Adding fantasy elements would doable. Back in the 90s, Ianus Publications (now known as Dream Pod 9) came out with a Cyberpunk 2020 supplement called The Night's Edge sourcebook which had vampires, werewolves, and psychic powers that were actually pretty well balanced.
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Jan 3, 2022 20:22
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PurpleXVI posted:I would personally disagree that 2E is an improvement rules-wise. It's bad in mostly different ways from 1E but it's still the same level of garbage, and the writing still suffers from mostly the same sort of issues plus a few exciting new ones. A lot of people like 2E for removing some complexity from the whole process of swapping morphs around, but they’ve replaced it with a very abstract system of having a pool of points that you can spend to make your morph awesome… which is mechanically simpler but also a complete mismatch with the level of mechanical exactitude the entire rest of the system is build on… and if you don’t care for your Super Combat Morph being no better than Regular Boring Morph because you’ve spend your entire allowance of Cool Morph Points in the first fight you get into, the “simpler” system isn’t much of an improvement anyway. EP1e had a lot of issues that came from being half Shadowrun, half Call of Cthulhu, and half GURPS crowbarred together into one game (CoC and SR are obvious, but a lot of the technological powers and rules are taken from GURPS in a really haphazard manner that often leaves out important rules). EP2e tries to fix this by also adding some PbtA and Delta Green RPG, and it’s done in the same sloppy manner that just makes things clunky: on top of d100-1 roll under with criticals on doubles and margin of success it also requires you to use Margin of Success to calculate whether you have a normal, Minor, or Major success or failure, which then lets you pick options from a list to decide what happens… …but where good PbtA games have bespoke lists where the options are major drivers of the entire game, EP2e let’s you pick a bunch of boring combat options or taking 10% longer or shorter to complete a task. It’s a lot of extra work in the resolution step to very little gain. The EP1e Stress system was kind of an uninspired copy of CoC Sanity, but 2e decides to instead copy Delta Green RPG’s Sanity system… but changes a bunch of the values so the diegetic meaning of the system gets wonky. (And DGRPG already lives on the knife’s edge with how it’s Sanity system is pared down to only the bits of NEMESIS’ Stress Gauges it strictly needs and honestly DGRPG probably cut too much in terms of making the system expedient. You just don’t have room to modify anything from DGRPG, it’s a carefully balanced bare minimum.) EP2e is a Frankensteinian monstrosity assembled from the mechanics of other, better games.
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Jan 3, 2022 21:40
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2E removing total recalculation of stat modifiers every time you resleeved was a step in the right direction. Unfortunately they couldn't fix total recalculation of the game's vast implant, weapon and gear lists every time you resleeved, which was way more of a hassle. For a game where you're supposed to treat bodies and equipment as disposable and transient, the system sure does everything in its power to prevent you from doing that.
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Jan 3, 2022 22:01
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2E EP's approach to morphs was mostly a failure to finish the job. They pared down the morph selection: wise and good. What they then did was still keep 50 humanoid morphs that were functionally the same in all ways except for what dice pools they had. Really they should've just had four morph categories: Basically Human Robot Weird And then let people build their own morph out of modifiers(Heavily Armored, Has Four Legs, Extra Head, Fluffy Tail, etc.). As it was, it was this super unsatisfying mid-point between the overly crunchy old system(which had a shitload of morphs that were just objectively sub-par, garbage choices) and a free-form, less detailed system. Right down to the point that every morph bar one has a cortical stack, so they make the logical decision of noting it for every morph that has it, rather than noting "does not have it" for that one. Or if they were going to note a bunch of specific morphs, they should really only have noted the ones that were substantially different from each other. It also had some extremely baffling editing decisions that made otherwise-accessible stuff hard to parse on first readthrough, schizophrenic writing(one chapter says something is a big deal, another says it isn't), the usual dogshit issues(i.e. "everything" about exsurgents and TITANs), sanity/mental illness is hilariously badly handled in almost every way(it's hard to tell if it's ignorant or outright insulting in its treatment of the issue), I don't even know where to start on the gear economy... I could literally eat up the post limit twice complaining about EP 2.0. At least it didn't have Glory, though.
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Jan 3, 2022 22:59
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I got that Nemesis book. Hooboy. I gots me a heartbreaker. Also thanks Mr. Harris for having a pretty sizable team on this thing and also not having a proofreader, even on your first book ever.
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Jan 4, 2022 01:37
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Eclipse Phase is the closest thing we got to a Gunnm/Battle Angel Alita rpg.
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Jan 4, 2022 01:41
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