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QuantumNinja posted:The way it works is that every modifier you have gives you a dice pool penalty. If you have two on the same row, they add up to the next row (so two at -3 gives you a -6, two at -6 gives you a -10). If you have two at -3 and one at -6, you're at -10 total. It's insane to stop and look at this table and do the math, but it's also the fundamental charm of Shadowrun: minutiae rules all. The problem is that most of the minutiae in Shadowrun is functionally an exercise in "can you spot the trap stuff" and "how to stack the most bonuses the most effectively" which leads to the endless cycle of Shadowrun GMs getting frustrated with "munchkins" and "power gamers" despite that sort of thing being exactly what the game tacitly encourages you to do. If you want a game where minutiae rules all but actually has better rules then it seems like GURPS would be a better fit, otherwise if you're going "ugh why do my players keep minmaxing why won't they just stop cramming +1's into everything and jacking their dicepools into the high teens/low 20's by default and just embrace the grimdark cyberdistopia mileau of robot elves shooting orcs in office buildings" then a game full of (badly designed) minutiae isn't really going to help you accomplish that either. I don't think you're going to effectively hybridize *World with Shadowrun in the way you're talking about because *World at its core only tangentially cares about your gear and cares more about what you're doing and how you go about it. An *World game that tried to codify the differences between laser sights and smartgun rigs and reflex sights and this that and the other would collapse under a pile of fiddly bits and pieces. In fact, I agree with you that pretty much every attempt to make a Shadowrun *World hack is bad but from the opposite direction...too many of them try to cram too much fiddly minutiae in there in an attempt to replicate Shadowrun's system when what they should be concerning themselves more with is stripping all the stuff away and focusing on creating a solid set of basic moves and playbooks designed to zero in on whatever the designer deems the quintessential "Shadowrun experience," whether that's gonzo gunfights where people are doing bullet-time dodges and flipping cars with their cyberarms and hacking nearby display terminals to explode like bombs or slick professional freelance criminals with an eye on the bottom line in a job where bullets flying means things are horribly hosed. You probably won't get both aspects at once in a single *World game because the best *World games tend to have an extremely targeted focus instead of being all things to all players, but you probably also won't get a game that satisfies the gear porn and minutiae modifier desire out of *World either. I say this as someone who would dearly love a better designed Shadowrun than the actual Shadowrun, but I think you're better off starting with a crunchy, more gear-centric system first rather than trying to overhaul *World into something it doesn't generally touch on much if at all. (Can I also just say I think it's weird how roleplayers seem to have latched on to huge shopping lists of guns and gear and fiddly poo poo as part of the quintessential cyberpunk experience? I don't remember the parts in Neuromancer or Hardwired where the protagonists spent two hours comparing the relative merits of competing brands of heavy pistols or rattling off laundry lists of their cyber-implants and yet somehow you can't have a cyberpunk RPG unless it has a million pieces of equipment for people to tinker with like they're building a Magic deck.)
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Aug 12, 2015 06:37
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Siivola posted:That's odd, because it's been something like ten years since I read Gibson's stuff, and basically all I remember is the gear. It wasn't Magic deck level nonsense, of course, but Gibson spent a lot of ink describing how cool this rent-a-cop MRAP is or how far that cyberpunk fixie has been tricked out. I'm pretty sure Neuromancer had a paragraph or three about how cool Case's cyberdeck is, and then there's Molly's eyes, and I think there's a bit in one of the books about the dangers of monofilament wire, too. I should maybe re-read Neuromancer just to see if I can figure out what the gently caress actually happened in that book. Teenage me didn't have a clue so I guess I just focused on the sensible bits. Well I mean, Molly Millions has like three bits of cyberware that get brought up as being important enough to mention. She has a jacked up nervous system, she has retractable finger blades, and then she has what basically amount to mirrorshades implanted over her eyes. I don't think they get brand names or anything and Gibson definitely doesn't go into the realm of technofetishism that someone like Tom Clancey does, a writer who will legitimately spend two pages telling you why this or that particular assault rifle is badass in excruciating detail. Likewise the stolen Russian icebreaker in Burning Chrome is only ever discussed in generalities, not specifics about how many megawhomps it petaflops per second, what you know about it is that it's extremely powerful and extremely hot poo poo and it does exactly you would expect some black market military inforwarfare software to do. Rikki's desire for a new set of cybereyes (with the designer's name on them no less) is certainly present, but Gibson doesn't wax rhapsodic about how they're a set of Zeiss-Ikon Spectra 450's with auto-zoom and enhanced target tracking capability with capacity for 14 distinct upgrades, which you'll find outlined on page 268. The bartender has "a Russian military prosthesis, a seven-function force-feedback manipulator, cased in grubby pink plastic." What's that stuff mean? What are those seven functions, what's it do, how much stuff can you cram in there? Doesn't say, and I doubt Gibson put any more thought into it than he did "but what do people in the sprawl eat?" like he got asked that one time by people who wanted to make an official William Gibson Cyberpunk RPG.
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Aug 12, 2015 08:06
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Bucnasti posted:Yeah, the sprawl trilogy is all about fetishizing name brand this and that, Case didn't use just any old computer, he used an Ono-Sendai Cyberspace 7 and that gave him an advantage. They encountered a fancy Braun robot in the Villa Straylight, and they drive around in specific brands of cars and motorcycles. Burning Chrome was all about getting someone Zeiss-Ikon eyes. Hardwired and When Gravity Fails both focused on tech as well, but Williams and Effinger just didn't have a flair for name brands the way that Gibson did. Cyberpunk's roots are in early 80's consumerism, that's what made it cyberpunk instead of just near-future sci-fi. That's what made Shadowrun and RT's Cyberpunk games stand out against all the other games that jumped on the cyberpunk bandwagon at the time, they embraced the name branding, you don't just use a heavy pistol, you use an Aries Predator, you don't just drive a mid-sized car, you drove a Eurocar Westwind. Honestly when you break it down like that it sounds like what you really need is just a big list of randomly generated brand names because that basically seems to be the important factor here that people have latched onto, that William Gibson gave things brand names. That's a far cry from the gear porn of cyberpunk RPGs where the assumption is that if character creation isn't an entire minigame of cramming cyberware into your character's body and selecting his personal arsenal from a list of 100 guns and custom ammo types that it's too lightweight. edit; To contribute a bit more, Technoir is a pretty good cyberpunk RPG that manages to not have extensive gear porn or even brand name fetishism while still being laser focused on getting to the heart of the matter which is heavily noir inspired cyberpunk roleplaying. It's got robot arms and robots and everything. There's gear and cyberware and stuff and customizability, but it's more in the realm of the Battlebabe's custom weaponry adding/subtracting tags to things than it is "if I take this scope and this attachment and these custom mods then I can get +6 to hit with my pistol." Kai Tave fucked around with this message at 08:42 on Aug 12, 2015 |
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Aug 12, 2015 08:38
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Bucnasti posted:Yeah kinda, Cyberpunk is an aesthetic as much as a setting, it's about taking the early 80's to it's extreme conclusion and brand obsession was a new thing at the time. The implication is always that something with a brand name is better than something without. Gibson didn't need to say how much of the rambits Case's computer had, he just had to give it a cool sounding name and have the characters react to that name with reverence to communicate to the reader that this was a bad-rear end piece of hardware (this was actually kinda revolutionary for sci-fi at the time). And I certainly don't dispute that, but I think you've hit the nail on the head by pointing out that what Gibson made good use of was implication rather than overt explanation. Something gets a brand name and people react with appropriate awe or whatever (though amusingly enough in Burning Chrome it's not even the fancy Zeiss-Ikon eyes that get any sort of elaboration beyond being expensive and trendy, it's Jack talking about Tiger's Ono-Sendais and how they have depth perception problems, a lovely warranty, and will likely leave him with crippled optic nerves inside six months). That's not a thing you need gear porn to capture, and I think a lot of people in the hobby (including many cyberpunk RPG writers) are missing the forest for the trees when it comes to cyberpunk and how it handles tech. edit; Flavivirus hits it on the head too by pointing out that just having "branded" as a tag would more or less accomplish all it accomplishes in Gibson's writing. It's a nebulous, fetishistic signifier of ineffable qualities, not something that prompts comparison shopping. Bucnasti posted:I don't think you need 100 guns and a separate mini-game to realize a good Cyberpunk game, but I do think you need a fair amount of attention to the tech itself, that's another of the major focuses of the genre, using, exploiting and in some cases internalizing technology. If you ask someone about their Shadowrun character, they're going to tell you in detail about all their cyberware/magic foci/whatever their character uses to do their job and you're not going to be able to reproduce that with a dozen basic moves and 2d6. I do too, but I think starting with *World as a base system is going to be a doomed effort because it's fundamentally not a game designed to give that much of a poo poo about gear porn. The thought of trying to recreate the Shadowrun experience as defined by "poring over chapters of minutiae-laden crunch and spending two hours tuning a character like a car's engine in the latest Forza game" in *World puts me in mind of something like Strands of Fate, or that one Battle Royale *World hack with like 26 basic moves. But also I think it's weird that "exploration of the themes of technology in cyberpunk" has somehow wound up being filtered through the RPG hobby into "let me tell you about my street samurai with his dozen pieces of cyberware and six guns shooting three different types of bullets." The first thing you'd need to do if you wanted to make a Shadowrun *World hack is figure out what sort of Shadowrun you want to hone in on because *World games work best when there's a very clear focus on specific themes and tones and Shadowrun's writers and fanbase both can't decide whether it's a game of explosions and wahoo gunfights and plans involving airdropping a tugboat stuffed with C4 onto someone or a gritty, hardscrabble game of cutthroat corporate espionage using deniable assets as pawns where every bullet could be the one that ends you. They're both enjoyable, but I doubt an *World game could do both and once and still be decent at it. Kai Tave fucked around with this message at 09:43 on Aug 12, 2015 |
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Aug 12, 2015 09:41
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Bucnasti posted:Shadowrun being a kitchen sink setting and having 25 years of splatbooks might make it an insurmountable task to work into a *world game without cutting it down to the point that it's no longer recognizable as Shadowrun. Probably. I mean Rifts is a hot loving mess of a game and even people with fond memories of making Ultra Neuro Cyber Space Knights with ten million MDC will happily admit that, but I imagine that if someone was trying to make some sort of pared-down Rifts hack that you'd get the same sort of response...that without a thousand OCCs and RCCs and a hojillion suits of power armor and giant robots and laser guns that it's just not Rifts, y'know?
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Aug 12, 2015 10:15
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Galaga Galaxian posted:This. So much this. I want a good ruleslight Cyberpunk game. Have you checked out Technoir? Because it's a pretty good rules light cyberpunk game.
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Aug 12, 2015 18:08
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Evil Mastermind posted:I really like the idea of a PbtA cyberpunk game where the corporations and relationships between them are created by and during character generation. Doesn't the Sprawl do exactly this? At least in an earlier draft I recall that making a corporation and giving some details on it was something that every player did during character creation.
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Aug 12, 2015 21:46
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Zorak of Michigan posted:I think maybe the commitment to gear-dork-ness should also be reflected in the Moves. I'm not sure how tightly to tie them but (for example) the Street Sam's special killy move should require them to mention the brand name or a tag from a weapon or cyber-enhancement to trigger the move. You want to just punch somebody? Basic move. You want to disembowel some dude with your razor-sharp finger blades by Hanzo Global Industries? Now you're triggering Sonny Went To Chiba. I think the problem here is that "dropping a brand name on a piece of gear to explain why it's badass" really only works one time for any given piece of gear, after which everyone at the table is probably going to be like "yeah yeah, we get it, your Arisaka gun is badass for the 50th loving time." So unless the street samurai is constantly acquiring new implants or new gear, which is a possibility but again "constant gear treadmill" is more a product of cyberpunk RPGs and not a lot of cyberpunk fiction, this seems like a move with limited usefulness. QuantumNinja posted:Yes, Sprawl does this exactly. Honestly, I think that Sprawl is a good cyberpunk system: it hits upon gear, focuses on Megacorps, and generally gets into a lot of the grit you would expect. If you want classic Gibson-style stories, it will deliver. Non-derisively, it really does sound like you need to check out GURPS. If you want to get lost in minutiae GURPS has you covered in spades. What it doesn't have is everything pre-made for you like a catalog, you'll need to supply cyberfuture brand-names yourself and cyberware is probably not going to be gear so much as a function of purchased character abilities, but it absolutely has lists of guns and gear and it has advanced combat rules for things like martial arts that make Shadowrun look like Risus by comparison. I'd recommend Spycraft but it doesn't really have much in the way of cyber or magic, but it also has extensive gun lists, feats, combat styles, and like a dozen separate conflict resolution subsystems for car chases, manhunts, hacking, on-site infiltration, seduction, interrogations, and so on. e; Bucnasti posted:One of the things I've always disliked about cyberpunk games is the inclusion of the matrix in the rules. If I was making a cyberpunk game I'd either make running the matrix super abstract (When you hack the gibson roll +smarts...) or I would come up with a completely separate set of rules for the matrix and make it into it's own game. This is another problem a lot of would-be Shadowrun *World hacks run into. The last draft of Sixth World I looked at had Matrix rules that were like ten pages long. The Sprawl's were only like two pages and I even thought that might have been a bit excessive, but we'll see. Kai Tave fucked around with this message at 06:15 on Aug 13, 2015 |
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Aug 13, 2015 06:13
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Bucnasti posted:I loved GURPS back in the day, I'd probably play a GURPS Shadowrun game, but I don't have time to do all that work. This is honestly where I'm at with a lot of crunchy systems with tons of fiddly bits these days. Back when I was in high school I played the poo poo out of Magic: the Gathering, bought and obsessively studied several different M:tG magazines for deckbuilding purposes (this was before the advent of widespread netdecking and people on blogs breaking everything down in exacting detail), and I would spend hours on a lovely Macintosh computer making Shadowrun 2E characters for games I would never play. I used to think gear porn books were the best fuckin' thing ever and I owned tons of supplements for games full of robots, guns, cyberware, magic spells, and all kinds of poo poo, most of which went unused. These days I simply find I can't be arsed to bother with a lot of that stuff anymore, especially since it's become increasingly clear that a lot of game designers who are themselves fond of minutiae and gear porn aren't talented enough to make it a worthwhile endeavor. Too often games with lists of poo poo like Shadowrun are an exercise in figuring out what 10% of everything is good with 90% being filler or trap options. The last time I played Shadowrun was here in the Game Room. It was a fun as hell game run by a cool GM who has since vanished off the face of the earth (RIP children overboard) but making my character took me like three hours of flipping between pdfs and crunching numbers and starting over because nope, that doesn't work like how I thought it would, and I know that quality is here somewhere but what book is it in...and then when the actual game got started it was fun, but I noticed that I used about 10% of all that crunch baked into my character and the rest might as well have been set dressing. Then the new edition came along and with all the changes it made to various gear costs, skill costs, how stuff worked, etc. it turned out I couldn't actually recreate that character in the new edition as a starting level PC and it was like welp, okay then. To bring this around to *World chat, I appreciate that gear in *World games like Apocalypse World are generally defined by what's going to be most important. Does it pierce armor? Is it expensive and flashy? Does it cause horrific wounds beyond the usual? Tags are an interesting, if somewhat binary, shorthand keyword system and I do love me some keywords. Technoir also uses a keyword system for pretty much everything since a lot of the system is built around playing with keywords/aspects, exploiting them and applying them offensively, so you get things like a cyberarm whose tags are high strength, gesture input, and natural looking for instance. What a tag system lacks is gradiation, the difference between a +3 bonus and a +4 bonus and a +5 bonus, but in highly gradiated systems like by-the-book Shadowrun what usually winds up mattering the most is extreme values in either direction anyway.
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Aug 13, 2015 07:31
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I just like the idea proposed further upthread where when you select your gear at chargen you give it a brand name then explain what makes it awesome and what makes it bad/cheap/dated etc. with every playbook having different arrangements thereof.
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Aug 13, 2015 19:37
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QuantumNinja posted:It might be better if there was another choice, but I'm not coming up with one off the cuff. I would change it so that it reads "On a hit, the gear starts malfunctioning" because it's weird to me that you could roll a move all about making gear malfunction and not pick the "gear starts malfunctioning" option. Then make the choices on a 10+ or 7-9: -You briefly take control over the gear -They don't know what's causing the malfunction -The gear isn't easily repaired So now you can choose to either direct the nature of the malfunction yourself by taking control over the gear or you can leave how it malfunctions in the GM's hands, so choosing between greater or lesser narrative control essentially. The other two work fine as-is I think.
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Aug 14, 2015 07:39
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Tulpa posted:You know, the real robot genre of mecha fiction is pretty legit and a part of the appeal is the 'statistics'. Like, I wouldn't want a Patlabor game where the mechs are genericized by blandly implemented PbtA mechanics. The real robot genre is cool and all but even there, there's a pretty sharp divide between the stuff that happens in the fiction and the stuff that goes on in indices, technical manuals, and the "customize your mech in the garage" part of Front Mission or Armored Core. Put another way, there are extensive tech manuals detailing every last rivet and weld of the Millennium Falcon and Jane's-esque guides to the weapons of the Star Wars universe, but a Star Wars game that focused extensively on gear porn and vehicle design I'd think that it was maybe missing the point a bit (and yeah, a lot of Star Wars RPGs do this to some degree, and it's usually not the strongest part of the game imo). I say this as someone who digs some giant robots, but *World wouldn't be my first choice for something to scratch the Front Mission itch, for that I'd want something more akin to 4E. Kai Tave fucked around with this message at 04:13 on Oct 17, 2015 |
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Oct 17, 2015 03:20
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DemonMage posted:[Edit] Also under the heading of Inspired by PbtA we have Headspace, which is a take on a Cyberpunk future. It's less inspired by Shadowrun and more by Cyberpunk 2020, system wise it's heavily inspired by PbtA games. Adam Koebel is doing a cool setting stretch goal for it. And it sounds really interesting. The main gimmick is that your team is connected via a Headspace, a shared consciousness mindnet thing (with no Off switch), that lets you share skills, but also means you share emotions and such too, even in death a lingering part of consciousness persists. So you have both interesting mechanical and story benefits from it. That's a cool sounding premise but man is that art awful.
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Oct 22, 2015 01:51
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^^^Yeah I know, good art ain't cheap, and I also know the adage about judging a book by its interior art, but on the other hand I present to you R. Talsorian's Cyberpunk v3.Covok posted:Yeah, I originally thought the CTRL+ALT+DEL guy was behind it at first since I think that's his "style." It's like Ctrl+Alt+Del crossed with the guy who does Penny Arcade. I mean, it's not literally the worst art ever (they could have gone with John Kovalic) but it's definitely very "internet gaming webcomic" which isn't the first place my mind goes when I think dystopian cyberpunk thriller.
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Oct 22, 2015 02:17
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Foglet posted:Yeah, but while his Broken Worlds (a K6BD game) is PbtA, Lancer isn't and has been presented like more of an SotDL hack. Coming to this a bit late but Lancer is undoubtedly not a PbtA hack in the strictest sense, but the latest draft does incorporate a new Advanced Pilot Play section which is much more strongly inspired by PbtA's rules framework. There's a very active Discord server and in fact several people in the homebrewing channel are in the process of kitbashing an even more strongly PbtA hack for Advanced Pilot Play if anyone's interested in lending some advice.
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Jun 1, 2018 06:58
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Angrymog posted:They didn't say Lancer was a PbtA hack, but a SotDL one. Yes I know, I was agreeing with them.
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Jun 1, 2018 15:47
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