![]() Most skills have a "primary" Stat that they're usually combined with, and a "secondary" stat that can be used in certain unusual conditions. ![]() The system is based on a dice pool of Stat + Skill, so you add your stat to your skill and that's the number of dice (d6s) you roll, with a 5-6 being a success if you get more than half of your dice showing 1's, that's a "glitch". There are also four "special attributes": Edge, Magic, Resonance, and Essence. There are eight attributes: Body, Agility, Reaction, Strength, Willpower, Logic, Intuition, and Charisma. Here's the table so you can follow along at home. The higher an area is rated, the more points or other stuff you get to spend. Our first step in the system, though, is to take the five character priorities - Metatype, Attributes, Skills, Magic and Wealth - and rate them in order. First of all, we're asked to think about our character's history and how they feel about the darker side of the streets - partly because it can include stuff which might upset players, so this allows some boundaries to be established. So, it's traditional that we start with character generation, which is a kind of awkward place to start on this system, but what the heck. You're a bunch of guys and gals who are so hard up and downtrodden that they sell themselves to anonymous corporate bidders to do dangerous and illegal work that will probably have them killed, but inexplicably are the most talented and powerful people in the world, and doing this makes them incredibly cool people and gives them enough wealth to buy a small country. I'm not going to worry about the setting. What I can say is that they also don't like this one, that several Shadowrun podcasts have abandoned it, and even the current maintainer of Chummer, an excellent character generation tool for Shadowrun which must have taken months of work and dutiful effort to keep up-to-date, wrote that "there are enough vagaries and conflicting rules that I want nothing to do with it". I haven't the experience of those Dumpshock grognards. for no particular reason other than possibly to piss off the developers of the Dungeon World hack for Cyberpunk which is also called Sixth World) is bad. I'm not going to say that Sixth World (aka Sixth Edition, but called Sixth World. The rot went on with Court of Shadows, the supplement that jumped the shark on a hot-rodded racing camel, and Shadowrun Anarchy, the storygame-style Shadowrun written by someone who had literally no idea what story games are except that they're "light on rules" and therefore made one by just deleting a bunch of rules.Īnd, now, finally, the foundation has cracked. That and WAR, the famously bad supplement which included corps bringing the Matrix to the jungle by strapping satellite uplinks to jaguars. I didn't know, but I was witnessing the start of the rot. It could offer sandbox-style city settings with meaningful interfaction politics for the social types, exciting gun fights and lots of gear porn for the murderhoboes, lots of interacting systems to create player niches that interlock with each other, a decent number of sample adventures, and it's been going for 20 years, how bad can it be?Īfter a few sessions of my head in my hands at gunfights ending in one shot, tedious sieges and abandoned encounters, frantic flipping through the rulebook for even simple cases, combat rules requiring everything specified down to the metre when the PCs can literally go anywhere, people with wired reflexes being unable to run from cover to cover without inexplicably stopping in the middle, corporate executives using cyberware and commlinks that could be hacked by a child, sample adventure characters with guns they couldn't use, the permanent threat of police or corporate authorities who are too weak to actually threaten the PCs except by GM fiat force majeure, and a goddamn undercover infiltrator with no skill in Deception, and a bunch of Shadowrun grognards on the Dumpshock forums telling me that everything I was doing was wrong I threw up my hands and gave in, and it put me off RPGing itself for several months. So, after my group got tired of 5th Edition D&D, Shadowrun seemed like a good one to try. It was Shadowrun Fourth / Twentieth Anniversary Edition. It wasn't even Dungeons and Dragons 5th Edition. Because the game that broke me wasn't Blades In The Dark. So I'm going to grit my teeth and return to the scene of the crime. I admit, I can't always wholly deny that, either. I am aware that there are some folks who say that I am "brokebrained" when it comes to RPGs and especially to running them.
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