Shadowrun RP discussion

[Dante]

I have the feeling that we need a Shadowrun RP thread, but because I'm not too good with Shadowrun, and I doubt everyone is familiar with it, I was hoping to discuss a few things here before posting the signup thread.

1. Are you interested in Shadowrun, with its blend of high tech and magic and shamanism?

2. How much do you know about Shadowrun?

3. What kind of a game would you like to play? (I.e. covert ops work vs. kick-in-the-door action)

4. What kind of person would you like to play? (Cybernetic Street Samurai vs. Willowy Elf Adept, etc.)

There's probably more, but that's all I can think of for now.

[Gramcrackered]

1. I really, really, REALLY want to play Shadowrun - I've been trying to get a game going for YEARS now with no real success.

2. Partially because I don't know a whole lot of the fine points, rules-wise. Sure, I know the general story, but have never really gotten around to carefully reading the game mechanics.

3 and 4. But, at any rate, none of that really matters, as I'd never rp on here. Not as a slam to this forum, mind you, but because I prefer to play with rules and dice. Freeform makes my skin itch.

[Flarecobra]

What's Shadowrun? I've never heard of it.

[Gramcrackered]

Cyber-punk with magic mixed on in. Think like Blade Runner.

Alright, maybe that explanation was a little brief and unhelpful. I blame television.

[Kieran Dineer]

OOH! OOH! I played the video game! Does that count for anything?

[Raiden]

1. I have never heard of Shadowrun, but the name sounds cool.

2. Like above, el zilcho.

3. I'm more of a "kick-in-the-door-and-kill-everyone" kind of RPer.

4. The Cybernetic Street Samurai would kick that Elf's ass. Go Samurai!

[IHateMakingNames]

Was Shadowrun a really old Genisis game, where you get guns and magic and I think summon like things, and at one point your thrown into a slum/jail, and have to win in an arena to get out? Cause I played a game like that...

And if it is, you might want to remove guns... Since all solutions woud be "Person A shots person B"

[Forever Zero]

1. Extremely. Like Gram, I've been interested into getting into Shadowrun for a while, but never had a plan to play it and can't get the basic information.

2. I became interested after playing the SNES and Genesis game versions, and while I don't have the rulebooks or anything, I have a good idea how to play and what everything is.

3. Doesn't matter. I would think the missions could change around each time, from basic transport jobs (with interesting complications of course) to all out corperate raids.

4. For those that know shadowrun, I would want to play a Decker (like a cross between hacker and matrix person) with plenty of cyber upgrades.

And yeah, taking out guns in shadowrun would be the equivelent of taking out medieval weapons in a fantasy RP, so that would be a no.

[Minkus]

1) Oh yeah! I love Shadowrun!

2) I've got the Third edition core rulebook, and have perused it many-a-time. My cuz has "Man and Machine", the basic cyberware/bioware book.

3) Depends on how we start. If I start with a shadow-assassin/sniper, it's very in-depth with much skullduggery and cloak-and-dagger...was that redundant?

4) I'll play anything you need, although I have less experience with the magic realm. Not that I have anything against it, it's just not my expertise. I'll "DM" it if you need.


Ok, a quick over view would be...

Only 6-siders. No d20s. Ever.

Set in/around 2060. Plenty of games/novels aren't in that year, or else we'd all get bored of it, but that's the general base year.

World maps, political moreso than physical, have gone wild. US is NOT the standard US. Europe has gone crazy-go-nuts, etc.

Megacorporations now run the world. Imagine Microsoft, left unchecked, with it's own private "security" force, and enough contacts to make just about anything happen. Now make ten more companies with just about the same capabilities, and you get the idea.

Corporations, by international law, are allowed to have a "shoot first, ask questions later" policy. Almost all of them do.

Standard races are elf, ork(yes, I know it's a k), troll, dwarf, and human.

Dwarf=1.2meters/54kg
Elf=1.9meters/72kg
Ork=1.9meters/95kg
Human=1.7meters/70kg
Troll=2.8meters/225kg

Orks are pretty close to fantasy orcs, for the less geeky among you, the Lord of the Rings movies have a pretty good approximation. At least, the larger ones. Uruk-Hai, basically. Small tusks, generally they don't go past 3 inches out of mouth.

Elves are same as fantasy elves. Almost entirely.

Dwarves are physically the same. They have no special love for gems and money, aren't superior smiths unless by training, and if they live underground, it's because they tend to fit better, since they're smaller, and basements are often cheaper than penthouses.

Trolls are not DnD trolls. They are big orcs. Not quite ogres...think 8 or 9 foot tall bodybuilder, add 1-2 foot horns on head. Tusks can be up to 6 inches long.

Humans are, in a mixed blessing, unchanged.


Magic isn't D&D style "memorize/day-limit", nor is it FF style mp/mana. "Cast 'n' Roll" as my cousin says. First, you choose what spell you're casting, and at what level. Then, you roll your Willpower to resist it...I'll explain later.

Characters Are drawn up using a Priority system. Magic, Attributes, Skills, Resources, and Race are the priorities, and you assign them "A" through "E".
| Race | Magic | Attributes |Skills|Resources
A - Full Magi 30 50 1,000,000
B - "Half"-Magi/Adept 27 40 400,000
C Elf, Troll - 24 34 90,000
D Ork, Dwarf - 21 30 20,000
E Human - 18 27 5,000

Attributes are Strength, Quickness, Body, Willpower, and Intelligence. 6 is max unmodified human, but the races get alterations/mods.

Skills are self-explanitory, but don't work the same way as D&D. If you have "Skill-Pistols-4" You don't get a +4 on your roll, you get to roll 4 dice to see if you can hit the target number.

Dice can be re-rolled, this makes it possible to hit a number like 9 with a d-6. If you roll a 6, roll again. repeat until a non-6 is rolled. (Yes, there are difficulties above 12...these tend to be things like "Jump from 60mph car with only minimal injuries.)

Body can be modified by Cybergear, but this decreases Essence. When Essence hits 0...bye bye! Magic is DIRECTLY linked to Essence. So no, it would not be a good idea to put a pair of cyberarms on your combat mage.



I think that just about covers the main things, any other things you want/need to know, just tell me, I'll do what I can.

[gh0st]

1. Yay Shadowrun!

2. As much as I've been able to find out without ever actually playing a game or buying the rulebooks.

3. i'm more a fan of covert-ops type stuff. and blowing things up. and no, from my point of view that isn't a contradiction in terms.

4. i'm a rigger at heart. *grin*

[Dante]

Finally... some feedback. Spread the word, children of the Fifth Age. Spread the word!

P.S. I've always been disposed towards Street Sams. Yeah.

[Minkus]

A few thoughts on SR...

Never played the SR video game, but my cousin, our resident rules lawyer, has, and he said it was almost nothing like the actual dice-and-paper game. Maybe he was just too much of a fanatic to allow some rule-bending.

The "Person A shoots person B" theory is actually very sound. Although, sometimes "shoots" becomes "slices with a sword after having blasted it with a spell that could level half a city block." and "person B" becomes "anything and everything within sight". But, in reality, few of our games ever degraded that far, as we needed to keep hostages/witnesses alive, or sometimes they had the last working keycode. Gotta do whatcha gotta do.

We never touched the idea of loyalty-beyond-team. All too often our Fixer or Johnson would screw us royally. For those of you who stated no experience with the game, or little, Fixers are the middleman at almost anything you can think of. Johnsons are suits. The company execs that think every Runner is a merc that'll kill their own mother for a high enough price.

It would be almost impossible to do as a no-dice, forum-held RPG, since so many rolls are needed. Also with that, there are...I don't mean to offend anyone with this thought, but going through the threads in Roleplay, I see way too many people who could be considered Demi-gods, or at least, super-heros. Being able to Hadoken a city into the ground is all well and good, but it takes a lot of practice to get there. And, in Shadowrun, every...that's right, every other Runner is competition. To get to the super-humanoid stage, at least in Shadowrun you need...
1) To kill all major threats (to your team and yourself)as fast as possible.
2) To kill all minor threats (to your team and yourself)when you have the time. A thousand needles can kill just as easily as one stake.
3) To gain the respect, fear, and possibly trust of at least 20 corporations that could make our current "mega corps" look like mom-and-pop shops.
4) To kill each and every upstart who thinks they can make it big if they kill you. Similar to #1, but more Western movie style. after all, the fastest gun has the most duels over nothing, not the random farm-hand.
5) To either a) trust your friends completely and unquestioningly or b)kill them all, and leave no evidence behind. Private Investigators are on the rise in SR.
6) Spend millions, maybe billions, on a personal security force. One in which even the lowliest members would gladly hold a grenade to their chest if it meant you would live.

It WOULD be possible to do a SR RP, but everyone going into it would have to accept 3 very important things.
1) You ARE gutter trash. Runners usually lose all forms of valid ID. You HAVE no rights. You can go to the local Stuff-n-Shack for a brewski, but you can't lodge a formal complaint about anything. Similarly, you will be treated as such. Only one of the characters I've ever seen "get caught" has been alive. The rest have gone out in a blaze of glory. Think about the "Matrix Revolutions" walker scene, or any other last-stand-no-way-in-Hades-I'm-going-to-live scene. That's how many Runners are.
2) A stray bullet/simple magic spell can kill you. Allow me to reiterate. No bullet dodging. You wanna survive a shotgun, wear bodyarmor. A pistol wound can kill, and it's possible, according to the rules, for a sniper rifle to do NO damage, but if a bullet hits you, and you "roleplay" shrugging it off, you better have good reason. No stupid "Heh. I'm immune to missiles" lines.
3) You most likely, if you are a Runner, either know your party/team before the game starts, or they're a friend-of-a-friend, and there fore can be trusted on credit until they show themselves capable, or they die.

[IHateMakingNames]

I would like to add that in my "Person A shots person B" theory, it's much easier to avoid a blade then a bullet, and to do a spell like that would take time, while a bullet is instant

But this seems... Intresting... But it has a lot of rules, and it would be way to easy to die(Unless your constantly extremely lucky) with these rules you speak of, and people usually don't like dieing.

[Andy]

1. I love SR. The game at least. Never really played the pen and paper version. but the game KICKS ASS.

2. I know the mentalities. Thats. About. It.

3. I personally like covert stuff, but i'd like to have a few of the datastealing things where you jack in and such, with head PC's and stuff. Yeah.

4. I'd be a gunfighter. First and Foremost. Next? a spaced out jamacian voodoo shaman.

[Tor]

1 heard of it but never played it

2 nope nothing

3 deep roleplayng is my style, even though I enjoy too kick my enemies ass

4 Psychotic drug abusing thug... yeah

[darkt0aster]

It's been forever (well a few years anyways) since I've played a SR game.

1. hell yes i'm interested

2. i know a good amount...i also have the sourcebook less than 10 ft away from me as I type this

3. I dont care...as long as it's shadowrun

4. I've got an unused character made, he's kinda the sneaky-athletic-has-gigantic-cybernetically-iplanted-claws-with-an-essence-of-about-.2*-he-has-so-many-cybernetic-upgrades person that i'm itching to try out

*Hoorah for reduced essence cost implants (they're twice the monetary cost, but an A in resources can make it happen)! for those who dont know, essence is basically your lifeforce (you start out with 6 or 8...i forget which one and I'm too lazy to check the book right now), if it reaches 0, you are dead, cybernetic implants lower your essence. if you use magic, you want all the essence you can have, so overdoing the implants are is a big no-no

Unfortunately i'm gone all next week. so if you start soon I may not be able to participate :(

[Gramcrackered]

At the risk of becoming an ad whore, I feel I must point out that PlaybyWeb (http://www.playbyweb.com) would be the site to go to if you want to run the Shadowrun game with actual dice and rules, yet still have it be forum-based.

[Forever Zero]

So from what you've heard, do you plan on starting a Shadowrun RP here?

[IHateMakingNames]

If you do, is it going to go by all these rules Minkus has brought up, or just an RP?

[stuper of thought]

Was Shadowrun a really old Genisis game, where you get guns and magic and I think summon like things, and at one point your thrown into a slum/jail, and have to win in an arena to get out? Cause I played a game like that...

And if it is, you might want to remove guns... Since all solutions woud be "Person A shots person B"


there is an old genesis shadowrun game but the one your probably thinking of is the SNES one. there's also the table top version that that sort of thing can happen in.

[Forever Zero]

Well if I was starting a Shadowrun RP (And I recently got the third edition book, so I am learning how it could be done), I wouldn't follow all the hard set rules Minkus brought up. I would use the setting and the basic ideas and concepts for how the Shadowrun universe works, so character would have to fit that, and I would include some sort of stats just so there is a concrete refrence for everyone's strengths and weaknesses, but I wouldn't do it with dice or anything. I would follow a heavily modified version of the rules in the book.

[Dante]

So from what you've heard, do you plan on starting a Shadowrun RP here?

Minkus seems to have everything covered, but I'm worried because I don't have enough DM experience (read as : zero). Of course I want to avoid character wankfests like "I smack the cyberzombie, the 5000-year old elf grandmaster swordsman and the three assault flyers down with a knife and a pistol" but I find it quite hard to draw the line at times. Mostly because if I can picture it is great, I'll support it, so stopping insane acts with good description is ging to be hard for me.

In addition, I lost almost all my SR stuff when the GLOTD virus hit me, and thus I'm not too current. I'm not online when most of you guys either for the larger part, so that's anotehr complication.

What I was thinking of is something like the Casual RP, Perdition's Tale, and Swords of Fate threads... except with my character as possibly the Mr. Johnson or something. I don't know.

In any case, even if I start it, I'll probably have to turn DMship over to Minkus or some other qualified guy. I doubt I can give the thread the attention it deserves, unfortunately.

[IHateMakingNames]

Of course I want to avoid character wankfests like "I smack the cyberzombie, the 5000-year old elf grandmaster swordsman and the three assault flyers down with a knife and a pistol" but I find it quite hard to draw the line at times. Mostly because if I can picture it is great, I'll support it, so stopping insane acts with good description is ging to be hard for me.


I can do that part... I am very good at that part...

[Dante]

See? IHMN would give me endless trouble as a DM...

[Forever Zero]

Considering how much he argues about minor points of realism in RPs sometimes, I don't think he would cause too much trouble. Anyway, just have a sort of co-GMship system, and let one or two other people that know the rules and/or have the rulebook try to keep the others in line when you aren't on.

Also about your experience, everyone has to start somewhere. I have no experience but was thinking of good ideas for an RP, and I figured that since I RP alot, I have an idea how to GM and what the RPers like.

And keeping all your rulebooks and such on computer then getting hit by a virus? Ouch...

[Dante]

I lost six game systems worth of stuff in one shot...

Shadowrun core, Man and Machine, Cannon Companion, Rigger 3.0, assorted campaign books including the arcology attack, and a buttload of other stuff.

Exalted core, Exalted the Lunars, Exalted DBs, the five Solar splatbooks, Book of 3 circles, Creatures of the Wyld, Storyteller's guide, etc.

D&D was the worst off... All 3 corebooks, all the class splatbooks, Magic of Faerun, FR campaign setting, Manual of the Planes, Faiths and Pantheons, Deities and Demigods, Psionics handbook, Epic level handbool, etc. etc. Also had a lot of third-party material there...

Vampire core, almost all of the clan splatbooks, Guide to Sabbat/Camarilla, Storyteller's guide, etc.

Mage core, Masters of the Art, Technocracy core, 3 Convention splats, 6 Tradition splats, etc.

Werewolf core, ST guide.

Not to mention my 3000+ MP3s...

Much murder will be done upon the fool who made me lose my comp...

[Forever Zero]

*gasp* Yeowch, that would be the one advantage I can think of for buying the books instead of getting them on your computer, but that is a deep blow regardless.

[Dante]

I think all these books combined would cost me $1000+... but enough bitching, so... does anybody want to start it?

[IHateMakingNames]

How much do these books cost?

And I always think having Sign Ups first is best...

[Dante]

Shadowrun Core and stuff is almost priceless because I can't find it anywhere, barring net ordering. Exalted core is around $300 or so. D&D is somewhere around $600+. Vampire is around $400, Mage is $300, WW was less than $100.

[IHateMakingNames]

If you had them on your computer, you might be able to Kazaa some of them...

[Dante]

I Kazaa'd every single one of them, so it's no skin off my back. it's just that recently my countrys been comign down real harsh on Kazaaers... so almost everyone's stopped using Kazaa...

[IHateMakingNames]

Not really... Before on Kazaa (Lite) it usually said about 3 million people on, now it's still around 3 million...

[Dante]

I'm from Singapore, btw. Not the states. Maybe the times you go on... my countrymen are sleeping or working?

[IHateMakingNames]

I don't know where Singapore is...

[Dante]

Don't worry, it's the southernmost province of China, famous for authoritarianism, dealing with SARS and some messed up national statue which got destroyed (thank you lord)

[!]

I have heard of shadowrun, but haven't played it. What type of system is it?

[IHateMakingNames]

Go read all of Minkus' post in this thread, but hopefully, we are doing what Zero said at some point on the page before this one

[Forever Zero]

I would be interested in starting it. I won't be doing it soon, because I have college applications to fill out (Yes, I'm lazy and wait till the last minute...) and I want to finish the core rulebook first (I don't use Kazaa at all *gasp*, but I found a copy at my local Waldenbooks for $30 and while I don't have all the extra rulebooks and don't plan on getting them, just having the core rulebook is enough for a RP) but maybe around Jan 1 or after, I might start up a Shadowrun RP...

[Dante]

You start it, then. Due to timezone differential and a heckload of exercises in January I'll only be able to post spottily...