Is Shadowrun really that bad?

I LOVE the fluff and setting of Shadowrun. It's one of my favorites.
The RULES however... aren't great. Hacking is messy, and combat leaves WAY too much 'dead air' where one or two characters have 4 or 5 combat rounds, even more on a good roll, and the rest only have 1 or 2.

It makes for great video games were most of the book keeping is automatic and behind the scenes though.

No, it's really not. It may be a schizophrenic mish-mash of a setting, but it's still a fun one.

It is generally admitted that early fluff was excellent and well-researched (for a cyberpunk fantasy), but it took a progressive dive to the disaster that it is today.

Four worlds problem:
Hacking, astral projection, rigging (technically not a world) and meatspace. All are handled separately.

If you consider that combat in other game systems is famous for slowing the game down, imagine handling the four worlds problem AND combat (different rules apply to each one) at the same time.

Shadowrun was built to be handled by a computer.

Shadowrun is bad for running Shadowrun. Play Shadowrun in a different system so you can focus on Shadowrun instead of Shadowrun.

Depends on you. If you like or don't mind very rules heavy aystems, and think tje idea of mixing cyberpunk in with urban fantasy and a lot of dungeons and dragons stuff, you should like it.

If you are not co with either of those things, you will not like it.

>the thing that would immediately destroy any chance of a fun campaign would be a literal-minded rules lawyer player
True for pretty much every game ever.

But doubly true for a mess of a system like shadowrun.

Anyone who says otherwise are just butthurt Gibson fans who're mad that he's mad at SR.

My problem with Pathfinder is that it was the largest contribution to the modern flanderization of cyberpunk and that is pretty much beyond dispute.

It lifted the most superficial elements from the original Gibsonian literature, missing the spirit and the point entirely, and just in case that wasn't shallow enough for neckbeards they decided to sprinkle some generic elves and dragons and magic in there so people wouldn't be too scared off.

The presence of fantasy elements add nothing to the cyberpunk spirit except to dilute and distract from it, and then they don't even do anything interesting with the intersection of the old world and the new age.

It's a flailing, disfigured Frankenstein zombie of its "supposed" source material (the authors of which want nothing to do with it), designed for the broadest possible nerd market, and worst of all? For most people it's now synonymous with the genre.

Fuck you niggers, for real.

Depends.

I feel the game rewards newbies and punishes older players.
Playing your average Sammie is ridiculously easy, streamlined, and very fun. But playing a decker or a mage? Christ, I am glad we have two rule lawyers in our group; they don't call it "Pizzarun" for nothing.

Catalyst fucked it hard.

But hey, Loren Coleman got a new porch

Is this some badly cooked pasta?

I'm running Shadowrun with no magic and no metahumans and you can't stop me.

Tell me all about your degree in literature.

It always befuddles me when someone says Shadowrun is cyberpunk. It's like, have they never consumed actual cyberpunk media before?

It's an exercise in missing the point.

Shadowrun the setting is awesome.

Shadowrun the game runs into so many problems that it's infuriating.

It would be cool if they got rid of all of the fantasy aspects and just went full anime techno-dystopia

If you get a hang of the rules the setting can be really great.

Getting a hang of the rules is the difficult part here … I'm doing oneshots for some friends, so to explain the game to everyone who's new to shadowrun I've written several readme files for every "profession" (one for base-mechanics, one for mages, one for deckers, …) summarizing the rules which are a total of 20 pages now …

Problems with Shadowrun.
>Fluff and crunch don't mesh properly
For example: magic users are rare, like 0.1% of the population so your standard 5 magic point runner (with the help of some spirits) will be an untouchable god against all but the most world renowned wagemages.

>Too many worlds.
There's combatworld, matrixworld, socialworld, astralworld, and legworkworld. And inevitably someone (or everyone except one person) is going to be left out of long portions of the game sessions.

>Encourages minmaxing.
This one is subjective, but in my experience characters tend to hyper specialize into one or two of the aforementioned worlds. Your experience may vary.

>Complicated system.
Holy shit this one is an issue. Your GM needs to be a back to front expert on the entire book and god help you if you're using splats.

There's more, but these are the most prevalent issues. Never split the party is good advise in every RPG in the world, but in Shadowrun most of the time you will be doing it on purpose.

>so your standard 5 magic point runner (with the help of some spirits) will be an untouchable god
That does not follow. The fact that magic is rare doesn't make it more powerful.
I'm sure the percentage of people in the world who can play guitar with their toes is fairly small, but none of those are untouchable gods.

The game you're looking for there is Cyberpunk 2020.

It's just not my cup of tea, plus in my introduction to it, the GM made it feel like an urban fantasy setting than he did a cyberpunk fantasy.

It's perfectly servicable. Has own issues, has problems with being a bit too "robust", but my biggest issue is about god-awful setting rather than the mechanics themselves. Gameplay-wise the game is crunchy shooter and it's fun. It's the shit-tier setting that rubs me the wrong way.

So what is the best cyberpunk game?

Not him, but CP2020 has also the rather unfortune problem of being aged like milk. I remember playing it in late 90s and it was already back then rusty. As for now, unless I play it with real grogs, nobody wants to even touch that without a ten-yard pole and for a good reason. The crunch is just barely servicable from the standpoint of modern standards. And it's not about "modern games are casual shit duurrrr", but CP2020 simply aged badly. A lot of what was cutting edge when it came out is now obsolete itself.

Well i kinda like the idea of the Samurai and all the crazy augmentations but yeap, the fantasy part is kinda of unnecessary

Straight out cyberpunk? CP2020. Didn't age well, but is workable if you adjust to the game.
Modern ruleset for cyberpunk and making setting on your own? GURPS 4e, hands down. Combining few kits you are going to get top-tier crunch, but setting is entirely on you.
Don't mind magic? Shadowrun then. Just don't try to think too much or too hard on the setting and it's fine by itself, even if certain features are pretty redundant.

>the GM made it feel like an urban fantasy setting than he did a cyberpunk fantasy
Was he running a homebrew campaign or something from a book? I've definitely noticed that a lot of published material (at least for 5th edition) seems to almost be afraid to embrace the cyberpunk aspect of the setting that it tries so hard to bill itself as, and more often than not it feels like the missions are frequently, "You know how you chummers ALWAYS are running the streets? Well how about I send you to the jungle/outback/wilderness/ruins/other-place-with-no-Matrix-service?" It almost seems like the writers themselves think putting an adventure in a stereotypical dystopian megacity is too cliched or beneath them.

Missions organized play is even worse in this regard. One of them actually has you going to Amish country for your task. Though to be fair it was part of an April Fool's joke mission, but it was also literally one about a certain kind of technicolor horse fad, which made it even worse.

For me Shadowrun went into "Fallout spiral". They've started with pretty neat ideas, and then with each itteration of it and each new team working on it, they've exaggerated into absurdity what was originally a background, tertiary element. The fantasy part in earlier edition served just as a spicing, with soem further dehumanisation and bits of urban fantasy. By now it pretty much plays the major role in the setting itself, sidetracking the cyberpunk bits.

Honestly 2020 never bothered me that bad mechanics wise, but then again I play shit like WoD and Pathfinder without issues.

>outback
Say what you will, but Mad Max is perfect for explaining the concept of a Manastorm.

oh shit
now I understand

Except the only real counter too magic is magic.

Or technology.
It's really fucking hard to work Magic on drones.

I unironically think that the shadowrun system is perfect (except the hacking).

Fight me.

I like when game is simple in design. And when it's not simple in design, then it comes with justification why it's using complex and/or variable rules.
CP2020 is neither of those. It's complex for the sake of it and due to lack of polish. Don't get me wrong, it streamlines a lot of shit that was going in the late 80s in game design, but outside that context, it's a piece of rusty junk, where 2/3 of the parts serve no real reason other than just being there and cluttering the whole thing. If you have 20 different types of rolls in your crunch for no real reason other than not streamlining it, you've fucked up big time. Same if you have rules with no real justification other than "Because". As much as people complain about all the issues of it, GURPS wins in running cyberpunk games, because shit is simple in general run and complex when you want it to be complex. CP2020 is complex, because.

I've been tempted to run a Shadowrun game with Dogs in the Vineyard but I fee like that's going to be too narrative. But it could definitely work if you were doing an Ocean's Eleven style run but I don't know how much it has in terms of legs.

Plus one of the things I love in SR is tons of bizarre cyber and biofreak stuff. Getting 3 initiative passes and using them to mow down six mooks with six well placed headshots is alot cooler than "Wired Reflexes 2d6"

Unless your Force 5 Air Elemental with an Heavy Machine Gun has something to say about it.

Can't only Guardian Spirits know how to use firearms?
Or did 5e change that as well.

Crunch is 7/10. Could be a little bit better, the rules could be more clear and better-worded, but it's definitely a solid, reliable game in its current shape
Setting is 2/10. I guess that's the moment when you use word "subpar". Part of it comes from continously being run as a single, unified setting all those years, part from sloppy writing and part from the sole fact it's "urban fantasy in cyberpunk real world retrofuture!". The whole magic in cyberpunk just doesn't work. It could work as either future tech urban fantasy, urban fantasy in general, future tech cyberpunk, used future cyberpunk... but not all those things together. Especially not in "real world" setting. Just running a homebrew setting or ripping any given cyberpunk work/setting is better than playing Shadowrun's

Oh who fucking knows anymore. The point is magic is ludicrously powerful in the setting and confronting it directly is impossible unless you're a mage, delving deep into splat books, or carrying around a ludicrous amount of firepower.

You sound like the stuck up hipsters in my English class who think Sci Fi is the greatest thing since canned bread and that fantasy is childish and uninspired.

Spirits don't use weapons. Even if your Guardian Spirit looks like a headless horeseman with an Uzi, that's not an Uzi he's using. Those bullets are magic and use the rules for Critter Powers, not weapons.

He ran it stock standard, but the way it was all presented, it didn't feel like cyberpunk at all. Like the tone wasn't there, if that makes sense.

gotta be 18 to post senpai

I understand that man, however in 4e Guardian Spirits have an optional power which granted them a combat skill.

Meaning that your Apache Chief Guardian Spirit could bend over, pick up the CorpSec minigun, and let loose on the advancing corpers.

Both aspects tend to stomp each other out, in my experience. Magic and tech don't really get mixed heavily in setting, so you don't get magic drones or digital wizards (Unless you count technomancers, but they're kinda underwhelming)

It's a uni course

Well, 5e spirits have "all relevant skills at a rank equal to their Force;" Combat skills are rather relevant to Guardian Spirits, so it makes sense that they can still do that.

is shadowrun the only system where you can "mow down mooks with headshots fast"?

Dis-fucking-gusting.
All the more reason for me not to play 5e

Wasn't it the same for 4e?

Bad example I guess. The point I'm trying to make is in a system like DitV the difference between a Street Sam and a Mage is a trait listing of Cyberware 2D10 and Magic 2D10.

Half of the fun of being a Street Sam is shopping for new wiz gear and that's not an aspect you can implement in DitV.

No, they had specified skills which were mostly the kind of stuff you'd expect a walking mystical bonfire to be able to do. Running, jumping, punching, flying for air spirits.

Then you had the specialised Spirits from alternative traditions like Task Spirits whose entire jam was that they could have a specified mechnical skill, and so forth.

If I recall if you bound a spirit you could give it a skill you have equal to its force. So if you've got Heavy Weapons you can bind a Force 5 air elemental, which has like Agi 10 and give it a Ultimax HMG-2 with tracer rounds and watch it tear ass through everything.

In 4e? Nope.
Binding just let you keep its services beyond the normal time limit.

Or a sniper bullet in the brain. That's also a counter to magic.

What kind of shit mages are you running into that actually put themselves in the line of fire?

Ones that want to throw spells?
I haven't played 5e but in 4th you had to have clear line of sight to sling spells at someone.

Can't you just augment your vision to wallhack, and thus have LOS?

Nope.

Magic targeting rules are convoluted. There are two different types of spells; those that travel to the target through meatspace (fireballs, lightning, etc), and those that travel over the astral plane. The first requires that you see the actual light reflected by the person's body (regular sight, mirrors, or fiber optics. digital sight is a no-go, because it's translated.), and the second requires you to be able to perceive their astral signature. The second targeting system has its own issues, because the only indication that the astral plane isn't wallhax as far as the eye can see is in a single throwaway sentence buried in a paragraph of the core rulebook.

And with the sentence taken into account, any armor that isn't multiple inches thick and encompassing your entire body (this isn't even detailed in 5e as far as I know, making RAW astral targeting some insta-lock bullshit) won't obscure your astral signature.

Mech suits are meant to make you immune to astral targeting, but 5th edition's editing fails to bring that stipulation over in hard writing, so it's extremely unclear what astral targeting's limitations are.

I was literally asking for more systems like that i am interested, but is good that you expanded on your answer

>Went to MIT&T on Corp scholarship
>Wrote his thesis on spirits and their manifestation of human consciousness
>Graduates a magic 3 wagemage specialized in spirit summoning
>is on astral overwatch in the Azztechnology archology, high security zone
>monitoring about 30 corp facilities in the sprawl
>security reports a heavily armed team has been detected in a shipping warehouse by the bay
>sends one of his Watcher spirits to check it out
>four intruders, two heavily cybered
>astrally projects to facility
>they are tearing through onsite security, high threat response is atleast 25 minutes out
>this facility is marked Red 7 security, low priority
>is about to return to his normal rounds
>message comes in, this facility is temporarily housing a tech prototype marked Red 1 priority
>Calls his force 3 bound spirit of man to aid him
>With the aid of his bound spirit, summons a force 6 water elemental in the astral plane
>due to the massive drain, takes a huge amount of stun damage
>slams a stim slap patch onto his arm to stay conscious
>orders the Water Elemental to manifest physically and subdue the intruders in the facility
>the force 6 water elemental rips apart the shadowrunning team because they are just 4 meatworld assholes
>Wagemage, having never left the office, gets major kudos from his boss and an extra day off as thanks for protecting the prototype

Fucking magic man.

You'll excuse me, this being Veeky Forums I assumed you were being ferocious.

And no, I don't have any other systems like that.

What a clusterfuck. Is there errata for it, at least? And what is the benefit of using meatspace when no-sell astral exists?

>a single throwaway sentence buried in a paragraph of the core rulebook
God the debate about whether walls exist in the astral plane raged for months with my group. We came to the conclusion that they did.

>targeting via astral
>insta-lock bullshit
Yeah basically.

The chummers that didn't prepare a counter to spirits deserve an asskicking desu

The worst part of Shadowrun is that is clearly obvious someone could go through the trouble of clearing and streamlining the ruleset, or remaking it from the ground up so it could actually work, and it is also clear that the book was never intended to work as a ruleset, because over interacting rules are very far from each other, or doesn't reference adequately.

And thus my point of needing magic to counter magic is proven. Thank you.

Come on user, that's just crazy.

You know what? Those rules are so bad that they wouldn't work if the game were just about hackers being hackermans hackering hackavel stuff on hackerspace.

Good Lord, those designers really need to put their shit together.

I played it with my group (4e) and it was really awful, both crunch and fluff. The rules are generally terrible and seem purposefully obfuscated and muddled at times. The lore is raw sewage. I like the concept of cyberpunk, but Shadowrun doesn't appeal at all. The setting seems to suffer from utter lunatics slapping ideas together and running with whatever incoherent bullshit sticks.

On a fundamental level I found a lot of it cringeworthy from a philosophical viewpoint.

The Matrix rules for 4e are a horrendous, hard to comprehend bunch of overly complicated drivel that I would not wish upon my greatest enemy.
Fucking around with account privileges, matrix IDs, DDoS attacks, botnets and all kinds of insane tricking, switching IDs like they're going out of fashion and leaving the Corps running after some poor tool whose Commlink you've jacked.
It's just sad that I actually like them.

5e is about throwing matrix juice at each other and trying to unleash your true hacktitude to fry their cybereye motherbox with a bad cookie mode switcheroo, because they left their WiFi mode on, because their gun only sends targetting data efficiently through a remote cloud server run by a Corporation, and not through a fucking wire you fucking installed in your cyberarm.

I hate this so fucking much. I'm considering trying to rework the entire game to work on a D% system similar to the 40k RPGs. Still no fucking clue how to make hacking good.

>On a fundamental level I found a lot of it cringeworthy from a philosophical viewpoint.
Like what?

I really like the thing of mega corporations dominating everything and trying to outwit them for a while

What if hacking worked like this:

I want to hack that security camera

Rolls hacking dice and gets x number of success needed

You hacked the camera, nice!

Oh god, you just reminded me how difficult it is to loop a camera in 5e.

>MODERN
>CYBERPUNK
>MEMES

We are hardly living in a dystopic cyberpunk world you nerd

In 4e, you can just be not a complete tool, grab one of your wire-tap microdrones, send it walking up the wall to the camera with its gecko-tips, then perform the very simple, singular, roll to intercept and loop the feed going through the wire.

Alternatively, you can do the longer, more boring task of hacking the camera's node, then fucking with everything from there. But that might be harder, especially if they've just slaved it, as they would usually do when it's a peripheral controlled by a more powerful node... Which would mean you'd have to go straight for the node controlling likely all of the cameras in the building.

Which if you're hot shit, and they're cold diarrhea, won't be a bad move.

Or astral hazing, but no GM will let you take it because it's a (very effective) counter to magic.

Plus some faggot will always ask if they can aspect it.

Judicious use of WP grenades could've solved that problem, though.

No they can't, if you bothered reading the spell at all you'd know that.

>You call forth spirits to protect you. They flit around you to a distance of 15 feet for the duration. If you are good or neutral, their spectral form appears angelic or fey (your choice). If you are evil, they appear fiendish. When you cast this spell, you can designate any number of creatures you can see to be unaffected by it. An affected creature’s speed is halved in the area, and when the creature enters the area for the first time on a turn or starts its turn there, it must make a Wisdom saving throw. On a failed save, the creature takes 3d8 radiant damage (if you are good or neutral) or 3d8 necrotic damage (if you are evil). On a successful save, the creature takes half as much damage.

see

I don't think it's that bad, granted I only played the videogames.

This pic is from Shadowrun right?

You...
Are either very dumb.
Or think you're much funnier than you are.

It's the latter, but getting a response was all he wants.

Wrong user?