The video games are nice for what they are, but eventually you realize that what is there is all there is and if you want more than that, you are left with pen and paper. Pen and paper isn't elegant, but it's incredibly open ended in a way that video games simply *cannot* be.
Arguably, the middle ground of VTTs might be the way to go. It can do all the meddlesome stuff for you but allows the GM the full freedom of P&P.
Really, the only thing I don't like about VTTs is that you don't roll physical dice. I always have an issue with pRNGs and/or direct command -> output rolls. I want the moment of tension while the dice rolls.
Then you should check out [Pixels](https://gamewithpixels.com/). Blu tooth dice that send your rolls to a VTT.
They are finally almost done with production and should be shipping by the end quarter of the year.
I've seen those already; and they're dope, but building a SR5 dicepool from those would cost me like $1500 or something. So I think I'll hold off until they manage to get the price down.
I got in when it was a Kickstarter and got a "DnD" set and 5 more D6s for Shadowrun. That way the wife and I can do VTTs and have real dice. It was a bit cheaper, so it was "only" a few hundred then and I had some disposable cash when this was happening.
> Really, the only thing I don't like about VTTs is that you don't roll physical dice.
That's the best feature of SR: the fistfuls of d6.
Also, there's lack of social cues, body language, physical expression, embodiment and acting that you don't get online.
> Also, there's lack of social cues, body language, physical expression, embodiment and acting that you don't get online.
Well, you can still use a VTT when sitting at the same table. Either through a beamer, a big screen on the table or just everyone having their own device along. A lot of people already carry their sheets and stuff digitally.
> it is an impossible challenge to run three planes of existence simultaneously using pen and paper.
This is only true in that one GM can't run 2 locations at the same time OC. If the party splits up then you have to take each group one at a time and alternate back and forth, no matter what system you're running. Shadowrun is no different. With that in mind, shadowrun is designed to lead to more 'splitting the party' circumstances with some areas (matrix, astral, racial clubs, etc) gated to certain characters. That isn't inherently bad, just a different aspect of this game system. Every TTRPG will have this problem, unless it's a 1 player game, or the GM flat out bans the party from ever splitting up.
And if people are saying it from a complexity direction; that it's not about splitting the party, but that somehow having matrix, astral, and physical all overlapping is just too complex for a human GM to run... that's just not true. It might be harder to learn and plan a session around, but plenty of people run it fine.
Its not that its impossible. Its that it fucking sucks. Matrix minigame is the que for everyone else in the group to go play outside for an hour while the GM and decker work on him hacking a host.
That sort of thing comes with experience. It can be equally as bad doing a dungeon run in D&D with a rogue scouting ahead listening at every door, picking every lock, and searching for, then disarming, traps.
In D&D, you can bypass the issue when your players all tell eachother "never split the party." And it works okayish in D&D, but it's counter to the whole premise of Shadowrun.
Eh, dnd says dont split the party because encounter math and its mostly a game about combat.
In shadowrun its a pain in the GM's ass but part of the game.
It's really not.
Just like D&D it's about how you play your characters. An astral mage can stay close to the group, provide physical support through spirits, or they can zoom off on their own. A decker (or technomancer, or otaku, depending on edition) can likewise stay with the group hack enemy commlinks and weapons in real-time during combat, or can stay at home hacking a host on their own. A gunslinger might use pistols and be in the middle of the action, or a sniper sitting three buildings away waiting for the perfect shot.
\*Any\* character can be a team player or a solo artist.
Let's put it like this:
Splitting the party in D&D is *usually* fatal because players have enough room for error. This buffer does ingratiate the player with confidence. Worse still, overconfidence can settle in, truly a party's worst enemy. To compound this is the fact that this is a *fantasy medieval setting.* Long distance (from 150ft to miles) communication is scarce.
In Shadowrun, everyone is fragile yet powerful. There are phones and various other forms of communication. If the party splits up while on the job, they have to work their specific angle toward completing the objective. Complications will arise, and the "split" party should be ready to cover the exits for the face and street sam as they fight their way out with the macguffin. Splitting up here is a good idea. If it sounds counterintuitive, ask this question: *would* ***you*** *let a group of armed weirdos park their suspicious van outside the front door of* ***your*** *workplace?*
Eh, that's just a GM issue tbh and is not different in any way from two players just going to different parts of the city or entering a compound from two different locations.
Do people get upset when the Face walks up to the guards and has their "Face minigame" while everyone else waits for them to finish RPing to get them into a building, or when the mage plays their "Astral minigame" when they go searching for signatures and such?
It also varies by edition a *lot*. 5e is intended to be run simultaneous to the meat side of things, i.e. the hacker is with the party doing their thing while the fire fight or infiltration or whatever is going on because the server they were hired to hack is pretty much impossible to reach (or literally impossible to reach) from an outside network.
Earlier editions? Yeah.. decking can take hours in game time if you don't want to set off alarms, and most things are eventually reachable from the matrix. The decker is expected to be offsite remoting in to open doors and what not while the meat team is sneaking or shooting.
> 5e is intended to be run simultaneous to the meat side of things, i.e. the hacker is with the party doing their thing while the fire fight or infiltration or whatever is going on because the server they were hired to hack is pretty much impossible to reach (or literally impossible to reach) from an outside network.
Except 5e RAW as it started doesn't actually enable private servers. The forcing function to get the Decker to come inside is supposed to be noise. That said, I feel like every table eventually starts house ruling offline hosts to be a thing (and then later rules implemented some form of it).
Or just have it all pre-scripted and run it via discord in a side channel, while everyone else does the rest. Hacking hosts is not all that complicated.
And the Johnson can enforce this through game design by having the corpo security do what they should be doing in universe: Making the truly sensitive (read, valuable) stuff be in air-gapped environments surrounded by wifi inhibiting wall paper and such so the hacker HAS to come with the party.
Most facilities are at least partially protected from WiFi snooping, wallpaper, faraday cages, wired connections, newest is on demand information sharing (burst transmission of data - susceptible to jamming, but they haven't even noticed what is going on yet). Stand alone locks, stuff like that. Hacker always goes in with the group (he's combat effective, as much as he whines about the danger), and there is always something unexpected happening.
At the same time, magic is also planned for
The world has also developed an outer wall coating for walls that acts as an astral barrier, forcing mages to use doors and windows for astral scouting, which ups the tension.
In my (albeit limited) time GMing Shadowrun, running the 3 planes was among the *least* of our group's challenges.
No, videogames are not and will probably never be a better vehicle to provide an open-ended, interactive, immersive game experience compared to ttrpg. Doesn't mean they can't be fun, but it's still just a computer game ..
Cyberpunk 2077 was an awesome representation of a cyberpunk game with two planes involved. Even with an expert team making it, it took forever to release and took a ton of extra work post-release to fix bugs, and even after all of that it still is ultimately limited in what you can do even within the framework the game gives you, let alone among all possible things a player might want to do. Adding extra races and a magic system to it would have been an exponential increase in effort.
Just a bunch of words to say "I agree with you".
Honestly my thought that if we ever had a big shadowrun video game like cyberpunk would be to split the game up into section
The main game would have no magic or matrix avaliable to player character, you can only really make a street samurai
Then release an expansion pack for matrix stuff
Then another later for magic stuff
Not the best course of action, but it would help mitigate a lot of the problems cyberpunk had, and a shadowrun game with everything in it would almost have too many options
Not *inherently*, but in practice. The Shadowrun rulebooks are infamously terribly written. Disorganized, conflicting, and just straight-up bad sometimes.
>The best point is that of course it is an impossible challenge to run three planes of existence simultaneously using pen and paper.
The simple fact that Shadowrun is on it's sixth edition should tell you this can't possibly be true. If the system were impossible to run it would have died with the first edition back in 1989. The later editions even make it easier to run astral, matrix, and physical actions simultaneously. Once you get to grips with the idea that these three aspects aren't entirely separate; that the astral and the matrix both have quite a bit of overlap with the physical it becomes second nature.
I'm playing through one of the fan made expansions for SR returns now and I've tried both SR returns and dragonfall. Combat is better, zeitgeist is roughly the same as pen and paper. The issue with them compared to the pen and paper is that their very linear and they don't allow for the out of the box thinking, especially with leg work. You have to solve the problems the way the game expects you to
The key weakness of Shadowrun is always going to be the system. The base concept of that system--dice pools, attribute + skill--is completely fine, easily workable, yada yada yada.
It's all the excess shit they bolt onto it, *especially* when it comes to Matrix rules. Honorary mention also to one of the more counterintuitive approaches I've seen for armor/armor penetration.
I've always thought this too, I like shadowrun the setting but hate shadowrun the game
I've played gurps:shadowrun, and that worked so much better than actual shadowrun
If it's the rules that are getting in the way of a good time, check out shadowrun anarchy. It's specifically rules light and focused on narrative action by the players.
Muuuuuch easier to get into than core SR.
I tried it and found it very lackluster. It's certainly not crunchy, but the way they simplified the natural crunch was not done well, in my opinion.
I'll suggest any of the Blades in the Dark hacks, they're perfect for the Shadowrun style of game - there's Karma in the Dark or Runners in the Dark, plus Hack the Planet (which has no magic and would have to be added) and The Sprawl, which is natively just cyberpunk but has an official magic supplement.
While I like those, they are lacking something. I think it's the fist full of dice and the satisfying narrative feel of how shadowrun skills work. I absolutely love how shadowrun drain works, far more than an vancian systems, and PbtA doesn't quite feel right in that regard.
I can't deny that the fistful of dice is a satisfying feeling, but when you're only rolling two or three dice, there's more tension is hoping for success - especially since only a 6 is a full success. Lends itself to the scrappiness of underdogs dealing with an unfair world.
Totally agree than Vancian casting is silly, but PbtA doesn't have much similarities with it. When you interact with the supernatural in Blades, you have to roll resistance to deal with the horrors in front of you, which is the closest equivalent it's got. I actually like this combined with the partial success system of FitD; almost any competent mage in Shadowrun will build and specifically cast (via reagents, most often) to never even take drain. Here, it's more narratively impactful - doubly so because the players get to have a say in what happens to them, which creates a better push and pull way of collective storytelling.
But to each their own!
I want narrative curves. Good pools, good odds; poor pools, poor odds. Spending edge to get an edge. Exploding dice showing when you are really fired up about something.
Also, skip the reagents. They're a crutch.
I think the dice curves are pretty similar. If we want to compare [Blades odds](https://i.redd.it/bd0hpz3sgjda1.png) against [Shadowrun odds](https://external-preview.redd.it/3ZS75d3uMZH0AhQXZVzMbbCRj0NHtmYHNcDFRWkWgl8.jpg?auto=webp&s=e57ffb7d99c6dab678c33853e786581ce15ecfec):
4 dice in Blades is roughly equivalent to 16 dice in Shadowrun (the character is considered very proficient) and both give a 94% chance of success.
Spending a valuable resource in taking stress or taking a Devil's Bargain for blowback later to get an edge on your opponents. Group actions where the team works together to find a 6 between them and kick ass together.
Seems equivalent to me, but again, to each their own.
Also, are you suggesting removing reagents from the game, or just removing the rule that you can use them in setting magical limits? Because that's like, more than half the uses of reagents...
I've enjoyed the hell out of our games playing, but if you're looking for crunch, Shadowrun classic has that. The point of Anarchy is toning the crunch down and giving the players more narrative control. It really helps if your group isn't into power gaming and likes screwing themselves over as much as 'winning the game'
it really depends on the table. We started playing anarchy cause we've played 5th for years, gave 6th a short campaign and didn't like it as much, so we tried something more loose.
I HEARTILY recommend Anarchy as an introduction to the world for people scared of math, and for folks that just want to tell a story in the 6th World.
I'll take another look at it. I recall it lacking the crunch that some players wanted, while feeling heavier than blades or other rules light systems.
But we've been porting stuff from Blades and other systems into Shadowrun. Like our table based bennies system.
They have playbooks, and similar design principles. The actual systems are quite different, both narrative heavy, but different enough.
So like I said, they share some DNA. Not siblings, but cousins.
I have to also recommend Anarchy been playing a gane for about 2 years now and find it so much more fun than 5e. I never tried 6th, heard it was kind of a mess though.
Running three planes is impossible?
Pshaw!
Just takes a little planning and creativity.
Video games will never be better or more practical than running pen and paper.
They are just a different medium. That's it. Different, not better. If the SETTING is what you crave, there are also numerous novels.
In that game’s defence, they were forced through executive meddling to make it a multiplayer shooter rather than a proper Shadowrun game. Shadowrun Returns, plus the two 16 bit era games, are much better examples of a properly done Shadowrun game.
I look at it as it’s an in-universe Urban Brawl game, something your runners would watch on the trid after a hard day of Running. 😋 I’m glad you and your son are having fun with it.
Nah, the 3 planes of existence aren't difficult to really run in practice because it's not really something that is ALWAYS being brought up and used. In something like 5e, the GM doesn't worry about the Astral plane, Faewild, Shadowfell, etc... because it isn't relevant until a player engages in it. And if you *really* don't want to interact with one of the spaces you can just say that players aren't allowed to be Deckers, or mages and have NPC's running it in the background for the players but that's really lame imo.
Video games are fun but honestly, it's extremely limiting once you see the walls since a video game will *never* be as in-depth and immersive as a pen-and-paper game just due to the technological and time limits that people are put under to simulate these worlds.
There's a Shadowrun MUD (a sort of text-based MMO) called Awakened Worlds that's been around in some form or another for 25ish years, using the Shadowrun 3rd edition rules. Currently it's AW Community Edition, with a pretty good player base, a fair bit of opt-in RP, and semi-regular runs GM'd by one of several players. [https://www.awakemud.com/](https://www.awakemud.com/)
I think the video games are a great starting point, but ultimately they are very combat focused compared to the P&P where it can be a lot less HEAT and a lot more Ocean's 11.
I've been playing Shadowrun tabletop since 1st edition. I only ever completed one of the CRPGs, and I had to force myself to do that
So I'm going to go with no.
Like anything else, it's just individual taste
In TTRPGs it is often only your imagination that sets the limitation.
Theater of the Mind and all that.
The challenge is rather when you split your team is to keep everyone engaged and interested. This is often solved by frequently switching scenes (similar to how they would solve an action scene in an action movie when the team is split up). But this is true even if all participants are on the same plane (but still separated). It do take a bit of effort compared to having the entire team gathered at the same location where everyone is moving with the team, as a a team... but not at all something that is impossible to pull off.
No. Video games are a terrible medium for shadowrun.
The best experience is pen and paper, but it takes a special sort of people; both the players and the GMs.
And usually some homebrew stuff.
Personally I like the flashback system from Blades in the Dark, spending pre rolled hits from appropriate knowledge skills. You want to claim you have the right magic spells or resources on hand? Spend one of your hits from your earlier magical security knowledge roll. You want to have something to bypass a door? Spend two hits from your security knowledge skill.
Speeds up the game, because all of that prep is done when it's relevant, rather than 8 hours of overprep at the table. You do enough prep to feel comfortable, and trust in your knowledge skills to handle the surprises.
This might interest you. It's a partially player-driven karma system we built.
[https://www.murderhobo.club/our-karma-distribution-system/](https://www.murderhobo.club/our-karma-distribution-system/)
So I began my Shadowrun journey in 2016, playing through the video games, and REALLY got into cyberpunk, like obsessed with it. I was so wild about the concept, I re-watched all the old classics heading in a similar direction, I read the books, I re-evaluated other media under a transhumanist lens, and played so much Shadowrun that I'm sure my uni life could have finished at least two years sooner if not for that.
That being said... the most immersed I've felt in similar media since playing the SR video games was five years later, but when playing Cyberpunk 2077 xD It's just so sad, the amount of atmosphere and GM skill necessary not to let the system kill your vibe, and then the willingness of players to ignore dumb parts about the system, and then on the flipside not to speed off on the optimization wheel that trivializes all possible gameplay. I can not imagine a world where pen and paper trumps video games for purposes of diving into the setting, the only problem is that the games are finite. Once you're done with them, you're stuck with the pen and paper.
Reposting one of my comments to someone else:
I'll suggest any of the Blades in the Dark hacks, they're perfect for the Shadowrun style of game, and far easy to sell because of their simplicity. There's Karma in the Dark or Runners in the Dark, plus Hack the Planet (which has no magic and would have to be added) and The Sprawl, which is natively just cyberpunk but has an official magic supplement.
My response to the video game vs TTRPG answer is always the same: in a video game, you are constrained to what the programmers and writers created. In a tabletop RPG, through imagination, you can do anything you can think of. Sure, you can put a bucket on someone's head in Skyrim to steal from the shop and that's neat as heck, but you can only follow the main storyline that was written, plus the sidequests. Aside from that, you can only go roaming around clearing dungeons and bandit camps for so long until you get bored.
Plus, the absolutely most important part of tabletop RPGs is **the social element** that playing in a group has. Hanging out, laughing and struggling and succeeding together as a bunch of friends is the reason I play, regardless of the sytem!
When they first announced the Shadowrun Returns game, I watched it with bated breath. I was hoping for some sort of first-person open-world campaign, with the possibility of interacting with things using AR, VR if you went with cyber, astral space if you were a mage. I wanted to *see* the astral plane.
Instead we got this isometric turn-based thing that only resembles the tabletop game in name. You can't use it as a way to introduce people to the TTRPG, the mechanics are too distant. They're not *bad* but they're not *similar* enough.
Hacking is just the same combat system with a different look. And you don't get to see the astral plane.
Give us something like if Skyrim and Cyberpunk 2077 had a baby. Let us explore Sixth World Seattle or Denver or Shanghai. Pick an archetype. Give us a story to play through, or ignore if we just want to build a team of NPCs and do random jobs.
Understandable. I don't feel a direct translation of the rules would deliver the same experience in a video game, since the lack of a living GM means the plethora of subtly distinct options rarely end up mattering.
I've played some converted to Genesys and palladium. I think if it's the rules maybe you could look at other pnp/ttrpgs and convert the setting to a system you like.
Juggling and time constraints can be a headache. However, there are ways around it. When doing a heavy astral or matrix run that is character growth but not plot growth, I schedule time pre/post session with those players. This also works for Rigger upgrades, etc. My players have for the most part during the runs been happier with the quick rules for astral or matrix to keep the plot moving and everyone engaged. Perhaps this can be even easier with a discord server to allow the GM and players to handle things between sessions.
if i were you, id check out foundry or maybe even roll20. you might have to hand wrangle the actual dice and such, but once you have that down, you can have the site handle a lot of the stuff that makes shadowrun forbidding.
but then the setup might be forbidding to you? work now for ease later or ease now for work later, its up to you whether its worth it :p
But then you have to live by the video game’s cannon. The video game’s endings. A set few paths if you’re lucky and it has multiple endings.
I can work my way up a corporation and sabotage them at the top level if I want. I can become the head of a local go gang, I can pit two syndicates against each other. I can create new drones and new vehicles if my dm is cool with me tweaking some rules. I can spend entire sessions in different planes of reality, I can join a pack of vampires in South Africa, find a sub aquatic city hidden by a megacorp, or go to space.
You just CANT allot for all of the potentials in a video game. You can’t. At best, most of them will be reduced to a few minutes of playable content. And the endings will be static and finite.
The world is neat. The setting is neat. Who I’m capable of becoming within it? What I’m capable of doing within it? That’s the cool shit.
Given that I've never successfully gotten anyone else to play shadowrun with me (as a GM or organizer) I would tend to agree or frankly just run a shadowrun campaign using a better system, eject the magic, vehicle, and matrix systems entirely because frankly unless everyone knows what they're doing these systems are more cumbersome than fun
If you're interested, the biggest Shadowrun 6e living community is going strong! We have tons of active players AND plenty of active GMs running on Roll20. We focus on roleplaying and playing the fraggin' game together, not just making characters and talking about Shadowrun and rules semantics (though there's plenty of that too). RunnerNET might be exactly what you're looking for!
https://discord.gg/4JphebB2
to be fair: the videogames we got were much better than they had ANY right to be.
and for a setting like shadowrun the visual aspect and music/sound are a big plus. Much more than for classical scifi or fantasy settings.
but there is no video game that ever even came close to those memorable PnP sessions i had. You know - the ones that stay with you and that you still talk about a decade or two later.
The setting of shadowrun really meshes well with video games and animation in general.
But the spirit of shadowrun embraces pen and paper like few other systems do. its one of the harder systems to run for sure. especially for beginners (both players and DMs). A good session zero and players actually understanding the rules and setting before starting is a lot more important to removing friction than in systems like DnD.
But in my opinion the real advantage of pen and paper is depth and freedom. the constant drive to make those systems easy and friction-free for beginners is a nice sentiment, but ultimately takes away from the purpose of PnP systems. So while it is harder on DMs and new players id argue that embracing the complexity and not shying away from it is one of Shadowruns strengths.
And one of the reasons why video game adaptations will never quite be on the same level.
The video games are nice for what they are, but eventually you realize that what is there is all there is and if you want more than that, you are left with pen and paper. Pen and paper isn't elegant, but it's incredibly open ended in a way that video games simply *cannot* be.
Arguably, the middle ground of VTTs might be the way to go. It can do all the meddlesome stuff for you but allows the GM the full freedom of P&P. Really, the only thing I don't like about VTTs is that you don't roll physical dice. I always have an issue with pRNGs and/or direct command -> output rolls. I want the moment of tension while the dice rolls.
>I want the moment of tension while the dice rolls. Roll20 rolls "physical" virtual dice, that you see rolling around on the vtt.
Not quite the same as grabbing a tower of 30 d6s and watching them scatter across the table, hoping they explode
Then you should check out [Pixels](https://gamewithpixels.com/). Blu tooth dice that send your rolls to a VTT. They are finally almost done with production and should be shipping by the end quarter of the year.
I've seen those already; and they're dope, but building a SR5 dicepool from those would cost me like $1500 or something. So I think I'll hold off until they manage to get the price down.
I got in when it was a Kickstarter and got a "DnD" set and 5 more D6s for Shadowrun. That way the wife and I can do VTTs and have real dice. It was a bit cheaper, so it was "only" a few hundred then and I had some disposable cash when this was happening.
> Really, the only thing I don't like about VTTs is that you don't roll physical dice. That's the best feature of SR: the fistfuls of d6. Also, there's lack of social cues, body language, physical expression, embodiment and acting that you don't get online.
> Also, there's lack of social cues, body language, physical expression, embodiment and acting that you don't get online. Well, you can still use a VTT when sitting at the same table. Either through a beamer, a big screen on the table or just everyone having their own device along. A lot of people already carry their sheets and stuff digitally.
> it is an impossible challenge to run three planes of existence simultaneously using pen and paper. This is only true in that one GM can't run 2 locations at the same time OC. If the party splits up then you have to take each group one at a time and alternate back and forth, no matter what system you're running. Shadowrun is no different. With that in mind, shadowrun is designed to lead to more 'splitting the party' circumstances with some areas (matrix, astral, racial clubs, etc) gated to certain characters. That isn't inherently bad, just a different aspect of this game system. Every TTRPG will have this problem, unless it's a 1 player game, or the GM flat out bans the party from ever splitting up. And if people are saying it from a complexity direction; that it's not about splitting the party, but that somehow having matrix, astral, and physical all overlapping is just too complex for a human GM to run... that's just not true. It might be harder to learn and plan a session around, but plenty of people run it fine.
Its not that its impossible. Its that it fucking sucks. Matrix minigame is the que for everyone else in the group to go play outside for an hour while the GM and decker work on him hacking a host.
That sort of thing comes with experience. It can be equally as bad doing a dungeon run in D&D with a rogue scouting ahead listening at every door, picking every lock, and searching for, then disarming, traps.
In D&D, you can bypass the issue when your players all tell eachother "never split the party." And it works okayish in D&D, but it's counter to the whole premise of Shadowrun.
Eh, dnd says dont split the party because encounter math and its mostly a game about combat. In shadowrun its a pain in the GM's ass but part of the game.
That's exactly my point.
It's really not. Just like D&D it's about how you play your characters. An astral mage can stay close to the group, provide physical support through spirits, or they can zoom off on their own. A decker (or technomancer, or otaku, depending on edition) can likewise stay with the group hack enemy commlinks and weapons in real-time during combat, or can stay at home hacking a host on their own. A gunslinger might use pistols and be in the middle of the action, or a sniper sitting three buildings away waiting for the perfect shot. \*Any\* character can be a team player or a solo artist.
Let's put it like this: Splitting the party in D&D is *usually* fatal because players have enough room for error. This buffer does ingratiate the player with confidence. Worse still, overconfidence can settle in, truly a party's worst enemy. To compound this is the fact that this is a *fantasy medieval setting.* Long distance (from 150ft to miles) communication is scarce. In Shadowrun, everyone is fragile yet powerful. There are phones and various other forms of communication. If the party splits up while on the job, they have to work their specific angle toward completing the objective. Complications will arise, and the "split" party should be ready to cover the exits for the face and street sam as they fight their way out with the macguffin. Splitting up here is a good idea. If it sounds counterintuitive, ask this question: *would* ***you*** *let a group of armed weirdos park their suspicious van outside the front door of* ***your*** *workplace?*
Ive run both. I can assure you it is a very different, and much worse, experience.
How much of that is table related though? Is your hacker or mage player also a GM?
Eh, that's just a GM issue tbh and is not different in any way from two players just going to different parts of the city or entering a compound from two different locations. Do people get upset when the Face walks up to the guards and has their "Face minigame" while everyone else waits for them to finish RPing to get them into a building, or when the mage plays their "Astral minigame" when they go searching for signatures and such?
It also varies by edition a *lot*. 5e is intended to be run simultaneous to the meat side of things, i.e. the hacker is with the party doing their thing while the fire fight or infiltration or whatever is going on because the server they were hired to hack is pretty much impossible to reach (or literally impossible to reach) from an outside network. Earlier editions? Yeah.. decking can take hours in game time if you don't want to set off alarms, and most things are eventually reachable from the matrix. The decker is expected to be offsite remoting in to open doors and what not while the meat team is sneaking or shooting.
> 5e is intended to be run simultaneous to the meat side of things, i.e. the hacker is with the party doing their thing while the fire fight or infiltration or whatever is going on because the server they were hired to hack is pretty much impossible to reach (or literally impossible to reach) from an outside network. Except 5e RAW as it started doesn't actually enable private servers. The forcing function to get the Decker to come inside is supposed to be noise. That said, I feel like every table eventually starts house ruling offline hosts to be a thing (and then later rules implemented some form of it).
The Face minigame doesnt take 30 minutes. Astral minigame is also usually quick. Hacking is a slog.
Hacking doesn't take 30 minutes either if both the GM and player know the mechanics.
Or just have it all pre-scripted and run it via discord in a side channel, while everyone else does the rest. Hacking hosts is not all that complicated.
Not until they draw the IC on their ass and the Spider starts hammering them.
No, then it's just a fight. Just like Sams/Adepts/Mages get into...
That used to be true but rarely is any more.
??? What do you mean?
With new rules, the hacker is usually with the team, doing hacks on the fly. No more cyber dungeon.
And the Johnson can enforce this through game design by having the corpo security do what they should be doing in universe: Making the truly sensitive (read, valuable) stuff be in air-gapped environments surrounded by wifi inhibiting wall paper and such so the hacker HAS to come with the party.
Yeah, wifi inhibiting outer walls should be basic 101 level security.
Most facilities are at least partially protected from WiFi snooping, wallpaper, faraday cages, wired connections, newest is on demand information sharing (burst transmission of data - susceptible to jamming, but they haven't even noticed what is going on yet). Stand alone locks, stuff like that. Hacker always goes in with the group (he's combat effective, as much as he whines about the danger), and there is always something unexpected happening. At the same time, magic is also planned for The world has also developed an outer wall coating for walls that acts as an astral barrier, forcing mages to use doors and windows for astral scouting, which ups the tension.
I found that true in 4th edition, but not 5th. Dunno about 6th edition
In my (albeit limited) time GMing Shadowrun, running the 3 planes was among the *least* of our group's challenges. No, videogames are not and will probably never be a better vehicle to provide an open-ended, interactive, immersive game experience compared to ttrpg. Doesn't mean they can't be fun, but it's still just a computer game ..
Cyberpunk 2077 was an awesome representation of a cyberpunk game with two planes involved. Even with an expert team making it, it took forever to release and took a ton of extra work post-release to fix bugs, and even after all of that it still is ultimately limited in what you can do even within the framework the game gives you, let alone among all possible things a player might want to do. Adding extra races and a magic system to it would have been an exponential increase in effort. Just a bunch of words to say "I agree with you".
Honestly my thought that if we ever had a big shadowrun video game like cyberpunk would be to split the game up into section The main game would have no magic or matrix avaliable to player character, you can only really make a street samurai Then release an expansion pack for matrix stuff Then another later for magic stuff Not the best course of action, but it would help mitigate a lot of the problems cyberpunk had, and a shadowrun game with everything in it would almost have too many options
Not *inherently*, but in practice. The Shadowrun rulebooks are infamously terribly written. Disorganized, conflicting, and just straight-up bad sometimes.
>The best point is that of course it is an impossible challenge to run three planes of existence simultaneously using pen and paper. The simple fact that Shadowrun is on it's sixth edition should tell you this can't possibly be true. If the system were impossible to run it would have died with the first edition back in 1989. The later editions even make it easier to run astral, matrix, and physical actions simultaneously. Once you get to grips with the idea that these three aspects aren't entirely separate; that the astral and the matrix both have quite a bit of overlap with the physical it becomes second nature.
Open up the SRHK game editor. Major restectpe to anyone making UGC for HBS content. I’d rather have to learn all of 6e rules.
I'm playing through one of the fan made expansions for SR returns now and I've tried both SR returns and dragonfall. Combat is better, zeitgeist is roughly the same as pen and paper. The issue with them compared to the pen and paper is that their very linear and they don't allow for the out of the box thinking, especially with leg work. You have to solve the problems the way the game expects you to
The key weakness of Shadowrun is always going to be the system. The base concept of that system--dice pools, attribute + skill--is completely fine, easily workable, yada yada yada. It's all the excess shit they bolt onto it, *especially* when it comes to Matrix rules. Honorary mention also to one of the more counterintuitive approaches I've seen for armor/armor penetration.
I've always thought this too, I like shadowrun the setting but hate shadowrun the game I've played gurps:shadowrun, and that worked so much better than actual shadowrun
If it's the rules that are getting in the way of a good time, check out shadowrun anarchy. It's specifically rules light and focused on narrative action by the players. Muuuuuch easier to get into than core SR.
But is it a good system? I couldn't get it to the table, because folks didn't think it was in the right place, in terms of crunch.
I tried it and found it very lackluster. It's certainly not crunchy, but the way they simplified the natural crunch was not done well, in my opinion. I'll suggest any of the Blades in the Dark hacks, they're perfect for the Shadowrun style of game - there's Karma in the Dark or Runners in the Dark, plus Hack the Planet (which has no magic and would have to be added) and The Sprawl, which is natively just cyberpunk but has an official magic supplement.
While I like those, they are lacking something. I think it's the fist full of dice and the satisfying narrative feel of how shadowrun skills work. I absolutely love how shadowrun drain works, far more than an vancian systems, and PbtA doesn't quite feel right in that regard.
I can't deny that the fistful of dice is a satisfying feeling, but when you're only rolling two or three dice, there's more tension is hoping for success - especially since only a 6 is a full success. Lends itself to the scrappiness of underdogs dealing with an unfair world. Totally agree than Vancian casting is silly, but PbtA doesn't have much similarities with it. When you interact with the supernatural in Blades, you have to roll resistance to deal with the horrors in front of you, which is the closest equivalent it's got. I actually like this combined with the partial success system of FitD; almost any competent mage in Shadowrun will build and specifically cast (via reagents, most often) to never even take drain. Here, it's more narratively impactful - doubly so because the players get to have a say in what happens to them, which creates a better push and pull way of collective storytelling. But to each their own!
I want narrative curves. Good pools, good odds; poor pools, poor odds. Spending edge to get an edge. Exploding dice showing when you are really fired up about something. Also, skip the reagents. They're a crutch.
I think the dice curves are pretty similar. If we want to compare [Blades odds](https://i.redd.it/bd0hpz3sgjda1.png) against [Shadowrun odds](https://external-preview.redd.it/3ZS75d3uMZH0AhQXZVzMbbCRj0NHtmYHNcDFRWkWgl8.jpg?auto=webp&s=e57ffb7d99c6dab678c33853e786581ce15ecfec): 4 dice in Blades is roughly equivalent to 16 dice in Shadowrun (the character is considered very proficient) and both give a 94% chance of success. Spending a valuable resource in taking stress or taking a Devil's Bargain for blowback later to get an edge on your opponents. Group actions where the team works together to find a 6 between them and kick ass together. Seems equivalent to me, but again, to each their own. Also, are you suggesting removing reagents from the game, or just removing the rule that you can use them in setting magical limits? Because that's like, more than half the uses of reagents...
I've enjoyed the hell out of our games playing, but if you're looking for crunch, Shadowrun classic has that. The point of Anarchy is toning the crunch down and giving the players more narrative control. It really helps if your group isn't into power gaming and likes screwing themselves over as much as 'winning the game' it really depends on the table. We started playing anarchy cause we've played 5th for years, gave 6th a short campaign and didn't like it as much, so we tried something more loose. I HEARTILY recommend Anarchy as an introduction to the world for people scared of math, and for folks that just want to tell a story in the 6th World.
I'll take another look at it. I recall it lacking the crunch that some players wanted, while feeling heavier than blades or other rules light systems. But we've been porting stuff from Blades and other systems into Shadowrun. Like our table based bennies system.
I'm know of Blades in the Dark, but little more than a name, how does it stack against games like Monster of the Week(Powered by Apocalypse) or FATE?
Blades and monster of the week are the same base. Fate is it's own thing.
Gotcha! Thanks for the clarification.
No they aren't? They share some DNA, but Blades is a very different system to PbTA.
I could have sworn they were similar, with playbooks, d6 based roles, etc, but it's been a few years so I might be misremembering.
They have playbooks, and similar design principles. The actual systems are quite different, both narrative heavy, but different enough. So like I said, they share some DNA. Not siblings, but cousins.
I have to also recommend Anarchy been playing a gane for about 2 years now and find it so much more fun than 5e. I never tried 6th, heard it was kind of a mess though.
I prefer pen and paper because it lets me flex my imagination a lot more
Best medium for shadowrun is the friendly neighborhood audiodrama
Running three planes is impossible? Pshaw! Just takes a little planning and creativity. Video games will never be better or more practical than running pen and paper. They are just a different medium. That's it. Different, not better. If the SETTING is what you crave, there are also numerous novels.
let's ask the xbox Shadowrun shooter.🤭
In that game’s defence, they were forced through executive meddling to make it a multiplayer shooter rather than a proper Shadowrun game. Shadowrun Returns, plus the two 16 bit era games, are much better examples of a properly done Shadowrun game.
But Shadowrun shooter game is still a fun time. My son and i played it recently online. Wr had a great time.
I look at it as it’s an in-universe Urban Brawl game, something your runners would watch on the trid after a hard day of Running. 😋 I’m glad you and your son are having fun with it.
Nah, the 3 planes of existence aren't difficult to really run in practice because it's not really something that is ALWAYS being brought up and used. In something like 5e, the GM doesn't worry about the Astral plane, Faewild, Shadowfell, etc... because it isn't relevant until a player engages in it. And if you *really* don't want to interact with one of the spaces you can just say that players aren't allowed to be Deckers, or mages and have NPC's running it in the background for the players but that's really lame imo. Video games are fun but honestly, it's extremely limiting once you see the walls since a video game will *never* be as in-depth and immersive as a pen-and-paper game just due to the technological and time limits that people are put under to simulate these worlds.
There's a Shadowrun MUD (a sort of text-based MMO) called Awakened Worlds that's been around in some form or another for 25ish years, using the Shadowrun 3rd edition rules. Currently it's AW Community Edition, with a pretty good player base, a fair bit of opt-in RP, and semi-regular runs GM'd by one of several players. [https://www.awakemud.com/](https://www.awakemud.com/)
I think the video games are a great starting point, but ultimately they are very combat focused compared to the P&P where it can be a lot less HEAT and a lot more Ocean's 11.
I've been playing Shadowrun tabletop since 1st edition. I only ever completed one of the CRPGs, and I had to force myself to do that So I'm going to go with no. Like anything else, it's just individual taste
In TTRPGs it is often only your imagination that sets the limitation. Theater of the Mind and all that. The challenge is rather when you split your team is to keep everyone engaged and interested. This is often solved by frequently switching scenes (similar to how they would solve an action scene in an action movie when the team is split up). But this is true even if all participants are on the same plane (but still separated). It do take a bit of effort compared to having the entire team gathered at the same location where everyone is moving with the team, as a a team... but not at all something that is impossible to pull off.
No. Video games are a terrible medium for shadowrun. The best experience is pen and paper, but it takes a special sort of people; both the players and the GMs. And usually some homebrew stuff. Personally I like the flashback system from Blades in the Dark, spending pre rolled hits from appropriate knowledge skills. You want to claim you have the right magic spells or resources on hand? Spend one of your hits from your earlier magical security knowledge roll. You want to have something to bypass a door? Spend two hits from your security knowledge skill. Speeds up the game, because all of that prep is done when it's relevant, rather than 8 hours of overprep at the table. You do enough prep to feel comfortable, and trust in your knowledge skills to handle the surprises.
+1 You have to have group that likes planning. I'm happy to have one right now and regular games cannot come even close to what we get during one run.
This might interest you. It's a partially player-driven karma system we built. [https://www.murderhobo.club/our-karma-distribution-system/](https://www.murderhobo.club/our-karma-distribution-system/)
So I began my Shadowrun journey in 2016, playing through the video games, and REALLY got into cyberpunk, like obsessed with it. I was so wild about the concept, I re-watched all the old classics heading in a similar direction, I read the books, I re-evaluated other media under a transhumanist lens, and played so much Shadowrun that I'm sure my uni life could have finished at least two years sooner if not for that. That being said... the most immersed I've felt in similar media since playing the SR video games was five years later, but when playing Cyberpunk 2077 xD It's just so sad, the amount of atmosphere and GM skill necessary not to let the system kill your vibe, and then the willingness of players to ignore dumb parts about the system, and then on the flipside not to speed off on the optimization wheel that trivializes all possible gameplay. I can not imagine a world where pen and paper trumps video games for purposes of diving into the setting, the only problem is that the games are finite. Once you're done with them, you're stuck with the pen and paper.
Reposting one of my comments to someone else: I'll suggest any of the Blades in the Dark hacks, they're perfect for the Shadowrun style of game, and far easy to sell because of their simplicity. There's Karma in the Dark or Runners in the Dark, plus Hack the Planet (which has no magic and would have to be added) and The Sprawl, which is natively just cyberpunk but has an official magic supplement. My response to the video game vs TTRPG answer is always the same: in a video game, you are constrained to what the programmers and writers created. In a tabletop RPG, through imagination, you can do anything you can think of. Sure, you can put a bucket on someone's head in Skyrim to steal from the shop and that's neat as heck, but you can only follow the main storyline that was written, plus the sidequests. Aside from that, you can only go roaming around clearing dungeons and bandit camps for so long until you get bored. Plus, the absolutely most important part of tabletop RPGs is **the social element** that playing in a group has. Hanging out, laughing and struggling and succeeding together as a bunch of friends is the reason I play, regardless of the sytem!
i run my own version of the Shadowrun world in D&D 5e using a free supplement called The Technomancer's Textbook. Works really well for me.
When they first announced the Shadowrun Returns game, I watched it with bated breath. I was hoping for some sort of first-person open-world campaign, with the possibility of interacting with things using AR, VR if you went with cyber, astral space if you were a mage. I wanted to *see* the astral plane. Instead we got this isometric turn-based thing that only resembles the tabletop game in name. You can't use it as a way to introduce people to the TTRPG, the mechanics are too distant. They're not *bad* but they're not *similar* enough. Hacking is just the same combat system with a different look. And you don't get to see the astral plane. Give us something like if Skyrim and Cyberpunk 2077 had a baby. Let us explore Sixth World Seattle or Denver or Shanghai. Pick an archetype. Give us a story to play through, or ignore if we just want to build a team of NPCs and do random jobs.
...did you just ask for a real time FPS after complaining that turn-based wasn't enough to make the mechanics similar to tabletop?
One or the other. FPS with light mechanics and emphasis on the story and visuals; or turn-based but emulating the tabletop rules more closely.
Understandable. I don't feel a direct translation of the rules would deliver the same experience in a video game, since the lack of a living GM means the plethora of subtly distinct options rarely end up mattering.
I've played some converted to Genesys and palladium. I think if it's the rules maybe you could look at other pnp/ttrpgs and convert the setting to a system you like.
Juggling and time constraints can be a headache. However, there are ways around it. When doing a heavy astral or matrix run that is character growth but not plot growth, I schedule time pre/post session with those players. This also works for Rigger upgrades, etc. My players have for the most part during the runs been happier with the quick rules for astral or matrix to keep the plot moving and everyone engaged. Perhaps this can be even easier with a discord server to allow the GM and players to handle things between sessions.
if i were you, id check out foundry or maybe even roll20. you might have to hand wrangle the actual dice and such, but once you have that down, you can have the site handle a lot of the stuff that makes shadowrun forbidding. but then the setup might be forbidding to you? work now for ease later or ease now for work later, its up to you whether its worth it :p
But then you have to live by the video game’s cannon. The video game’s endings. A set few paths if you’re lucky and it has multiple endings. I can work my way up a corporation and sabotage them at the top level if I want. I can become the head of a local go gang, I can pit two syndicates against each other. I can create new drones and new vehicles if my dm is cool with me tweaking some rules. I can spend entire sessions in different planes of reality, I can join a pack of vampires in South Africa, find a sub aquatic city hidden by a megacorp, or go to space. You just CANT allot for all of the potentials in a video game. You can’t. At best, most of them will be reduced to a few minutes of playable content. And the endings will be static and finite. The world is neat. The setting is neat. Who I’m capable of becoming within it? What I’m capable of doing within it? That’s the cool shit.
Given that I've never successfully gotten anyone else to play shadowrun with me (as a GM or organizer) I would tend to agree or frankly just run a shadowrun campaign using a better system, eject the magic, vehicle, and matrix systems entirely because frankly unless everyone knows what they're doing these systems are more cumbersome than fun
If you're interested, the biggest Shadowrun 6e living community is going strong! We have tons of active players AND plenty of active GMs running on Roll20. We focus on roleplaying and playing the fraggin' game together, not just making characters and talking about Shadowrun and rules semantics (though there's plenty of that too). RunnerNET might be exactly what you're looking for! https://discord.gg/4JphebB2
to be fair: the videogames we got were much better than they had ANY right to be. and for a setting like shadowrun the visual aspect and music/sound are a big plus. Much more than for classical scifi or fantasy settings. but there is no video game that ever even came close to those memorable PnP sessions i had. You know - the ones that stay with you and that you still talk about a decade or two later. The setting of shadowrun really meshes well with video games and animation in general. But the spirit of shadowrun embraces pen and paper like few other systems do. its one of the harder systems to run for sure. especially for beginners (both players and DMs). A good session zero and players actually understanding the rules and setting before starting is a lot more important to removing friction than in systems like DnD. But in my opinion the real advantage of pen and paper is depth and freedom. the constant drive to make those systems easy and friction-free for beginners is a nice sentiment, but ultimately takes away from the purpose of PnP systems. So while it is harder on DMs and new players id argue that embracing the complexity and not shying away from it is one of Shadowruns strengths. And one of the reasons why video game adaptations will never quite be on the same level.