Milk Runs

I've never played Shadowrun before.

I've played a lot of D&D and Pathfinder, though.

Where should I start if I want to get into Shadowrun? Do I have to be a fan of cyberpunk to enjoy Shadowrun or can I be a "normie"?

>Creating a fake bank job for rich kids.
>Stopping a new club from opening.

>Playing a "cyberpunk" game that isn't a dystopia
Why even bother with Shadowrun?

You say that like SR's non-dystpic setting is the best reason not to play it. Rather than, say...
>Flawed central mechanics.
>Everything way to complicated.
>Terrible in-world lingo.
>game-within-a-game cyberstuff for no good reason.
>Overreliance on derived statistics.

>Not really
>Not really
>Not really
>So?
>So?
The best reason not to play Shadowrun is its setting user. The system, while not the best, isn't unusable.

But it is a dystopia. Corporations freely use and abuse everything, there are multiple massive disasters that have completely fucked everything, the few places that aren't ecologically fucked are instead ruled by iron fisted governments that would qualify as eco-terrorists if they weren't in charge. All the magic did was add more ways for things to be fucked.

>A stable middle class exists
>Countries are stable and generally have acceptable amounts of liberty
>The worst thing a corporation will do to the average citizen is look at what nude movies you watch
Yeah real dystopic my dude

>a stable corporate wage slave class exists
>countries are stable, but in a cold war. Their liberties are polite fictions at best
>the worst thing a corporation will do to the average citizen is have them shot for trespassing or keep them as an employee who lives in corporate housing, is paid in corporate scrip that can't be easily transferred to other currencies or used for anything outside of the corporate store, gets one week of unpaid vacation a year, can't leave corporate property without permission, and might be subject to random tests and experiments

A stable rich class exists. There is no middle class outside of a very tiny corporate employee class. Countries are only stable because the corporations want them to be. If they try anything funny, they get crushed by economic and military clout. As for what the corporations will do to the average person, that's the same in almost all settings. It's what they do to the legally-not-a-person class that matters.

>Stability
>Middle class
>Order
Again not dystopic. It's low-key bad, maybe, but no where near what is expected for the genre. Making corporations be governments was a mistake for the setting.

Literally every cyberpunk setting has stability and order for corporate slave-citizens. That's normal.

Except that one he posted, but even that has a stable rich class of planners.

No they don't. See previous pic related.

Most of the genre does. Sheeple get to be stable, anyone who wants to be free probably doesn't count as a person legally anyway.

Me bottom right

For the higher-ups, not for the disposable working class. Until you hit executive status, you're living in a shitty barracks in a slummy area, or the streets. The rest of the world is violent to you; sure your job may not be, but those cyberpsychos who blast Run DMC outside of your cube apartment are.

That's only Shadowrun. Even the tiny middle classes experience urban disorder.

Magic and it's hilariously awful implementation is what always gets me. In one way or another , the setting's always been unapologetic in the fact that mages have already won everything, forever. Being an elven mage is so disgustingly good for you it beggars belief. Magicrun indeed.

Considering they make nuclear weapons not work, but gave magic users volcanoes and dragons, I'm inclined to agree.

How cool would it have been if that Shasta bitch got 500kt of pain when she forced California to hand over its land to elves.

The game-within-a-game cyberstuff is the absolute worst. Things like Neuromancer, Johnny Mnemonic, and Snow Crash were what got me interested in Shadowrun and it turns out that its so divorced from the rest of the group (or forces splitting the GM's attention, slowing down the game).

I can't even about 5e's wireless bonuses stuff, which has no in-setting explanation.

Read some Gibson for Christ's sake.

Gibson never really focused outside of the main characters. His worldbuilding was weak overall.

That doesn't mean it wasn't genre defining.

It kicked off the genre, but aside from the memes of it being the first I wouldn't really recommend it to anyone.

>Yes
>Yes
>Yes
>its bad
>its bad

See how easy it is to counter non-arguments with other non-arguments.

Id be fine with it if it werent a whole thing on its own. If it were just a boiled down abstraction with programs as utility objects in the cyber world. That'd be just dandy.

>two word non-arguements are inferior to 3 word non-arguements

Fine.

Dice pools achieve nothing over simple target rolls, other than having a broader curve overall, which in a task with defined success only increases the likelihood of drastic failure.

Having 3 stats for comlinks, and 10 different types of 9mm pistols does not enhance the game.

"Null" is not easier to say than "no", and is harder to pronounce quickly in a sentence.

You didnt refute the other stuff, so I dont have to make an argument.

/thread

Dice pools typically make it easier for a GM not to fudge target numbers.

Style over substance, products are everything, names matter. You need fifty billion pistols not only for stat variety, but because it's the style of cyberpunk.

I'll give you that null is stupid as fuck. Nuh sounds better as the logical cyberpunk evolution of "no," I think.

Maybe you should consider playing PbtA instead of an actual RPG system.

merriam-webster.com/dictionary/dystopia

Shut the fuck up with your made up definitions.

Shadowrun is a shitty as fuck place to live. The only fun is to roleplay a Runner.

>The guy is right, let me attack his argument style instead of defend my shit

PbtA has its own problems to be sure, but Shadowrun is a fucking mess.

Shadowrun could be vastly improved with abstractions rather than simulationist specifics. I agree that the corporation of shit is critical, but you could just as easily have one pistol with a randomly generated name. It would have zero effect on gameplay and make the rulebook several pages shorter.

You're late to the show, idiot.

Woaaah look at that I can look up definitions too xdd

Go to bed Andrew

>OH FUCK HE CAME BACK WITH ACTUAL DETAILS
>I NEED TO DOUBLE DOWN ON MY OPINIONS
>SHIT I DIDN'T EXPECT THEM TO ACTUALLY THINK

the pbp campaign started with a similar mission. And all the players had a reaction along the lines of "...motherfucker..."

>I'm getting my ass kicked from all fronts
>better lash out where I can

>Shadowrun is a shitty as fuck place to live
I'd rather live in its universe than in 2020's, When Gravity Fails, Hardwired, Cyberworld, Cyberspace, Bubblegum Crisis... The only cyberpunk setting I can think of that is nicer than Shadowrun's is Ghost in the Shell and that's post-cyberpunk. Shadowrun was always the lightest cyberpunk setting out there.

Hey, your definition also supports the same argument! Awesome.

Get a life. One of those is subjective, another I countered, the last one he agreed with me on.

>totalitarian governments
>cataclysmic decline in society
>societies in advanced state of collapse or disintegration
None of these define Shadowrun.

>I didnt read the thread, better start trolling.

>. I agree that the corporation of shit is critical, but you could just as easily have one pistol with a randomly generated name
>One pistol
>Randomly generated name
>Just go ahead and suck the entire soul out of the game
>Who cares about ties to the setting?

Cyberpunk and fantasy are the biggest parts of it, but it can be just as much fun if you like mob and heist movies and true crime stories and police corruption. In my own games, my players routine spent the first half meeting the Johnson, planning the perfect crime, roleplaying with contacts, and scoring any gear they need. Then they'd spend the third quarter executing the perfect crime, then the fourth escaping when things go awry and collecting their pay.

One tough part of it is the mage being off on astral recon, and the hacker hacking computers, but my players just used that as time to smoke some pot and plan the next moves for their characters.

>There are worse places to live
>magically means Shadowrun is a nice place to live

What is the soul of the game, and how does having specific names for specific items take that away? Surely you dont believe that every character has encyclopedic knowledge of all the equipment in the game.

>Dystopias are often characterized
>Dystopias are often
>often

It's pretty damn tame compared to everything else. It's baby's first cyberpunk world.

Its broadly a better place to live than the world today. Sure things are a bit less clean but at least there are ways to solve problems. Nothing in Shadowrun is intractable.

> Surely you dont believe that every character has encyclopedic knowledge of all the equipment in the game.

Dude, if you are just going to start saying random shit that has nothing to do with your conversation then you are going to be alone for a very long time.

Dunkelzahn caught the wrath on that when he ran for President, but even I admit that was kind of a goofy bit of metaplot.

All of Shadowrun's metaplot is goofy.

...

Neuromancer was a rough first effort, but I think his style started hitting its stride in Count Zero. His "Bridge Trilogy" was nearly all worldbuilding.

Baby's
First
Cyberpunk

The relevance of the connection between names and items is diagetic, so the only people it should matter to is the characters. If you changed the name of a company in shadowrun it wouldnt change the game.

>I have not read the Shadowrun book

I'll openly admit I did not care much for Neuromancer at all, and it kind of ruined Gibson's cyberpunk for me.

Though I LOVED the Blue Ant trilogy when I was in highschool.

Thanks for admitting you are wrong.

>so the only people it should matter to is the characters
>I don't actually roleplay

What are you even talking about? Actually try forming complete thoughts.

I've always wondered why these settings dont try to be realistic about their dystopia like
>85% homeless and rising from the rise os robot workforces
>Homeless basicslly nonpeople and can't buy or find resources, thousands die every day
>corps copyrighting and sue hunting for everything, down to smells and colours perceived by the naked eye
>You could just as well live in a glass house with a megaphone. Everything you say, do and feel is recorded
>Doomsday clock moved to 12 seconds to midnight because every fuck with enough money can buy a nuke

That sounds about right.

Dystopias change with every decade. One decade's vision of a dark future is no less valid than another's.

>I cannot comprehend the players caring about weapon names

>85% homeless and rising from the rise os robot workforces
That wouldn't be very realistic. If the number of homeless starts climbing like that, you're going to have revolution in your hands very, very quickly. And your soldiers are probably going to join in.

Explain it to me then. What does having specific names bound to specific guns add? Unless all the players have memorized the different minute stat differences between every weapon the names arnt useful for recall of weapon stats.

This. Dystopias reflect the modern world more than the future.

That kind of dystopia wouldn't last very long.

The economics just don't add up. You'd either have the rich rapidedly become poor and/or the end of the world, or end up with enclaves of "wealthy" individuals waited on by robots in some kind of quasi post scarcity and the entire rest of the world is abandoned.

A world where 85% of people are homeless would last for less than half a decade at best.

You could have large corporate hostels where people can wait to do day labor and consume anti-depressant starch gruel.

I think you've got a point though: in a world with 85% homelessness there's not going to be a body that would collect that data and present it that way.

Pic related is the realest most dystopic dystopia prove me wrong

Very few fictitious worlds accurately reflect the future though.

>It's not useful for weapons in-game to have names that tie into lore
>I don't roleplay

Because the future is nigh-impossible to predict. Even Transhuman Space, the setting that had the hottest futurists around and extreme amounts of research hasn't predicted the future correctly.

Thats not a dystopia, its more of a non-topia. Its the difference between tyranny and anarchy.

Why cant randomly generated names tie into lore?

Sure?

>Dice pools achieve nothing over simple target rolls
They improve consistency for skilled characters, something sorely lacking systems that use a single die and a target number.

>Implying anarchy can't be a topia
The Revolutionary Insurrectionary Army of Ukraine would like to talk to you

>random

Where would the money to pay for this stuff come from? If it's already some kind of post-scarcity where the rich don't actually need any amount of human labor to extract raw materials and make them into their luxury goods, then why even bother with poor people at all? You could either exterminate them or fuck off to some space habitat.

If they still need some human work force to maintain standard of living, then the fact that the majority of people are now living hand to mouth means that their wealth would rapidedly become non existent besides what they physically have. It would become some kind of futuristic feudalism.

They can, but since they flatten out the distribution they make really strange situations like 9mm piercing tank armor possible under certain conditions. While thats obviously hyperbolic, you can end up with many more common examples that dont quite gronk as being plausible. Im not suggesting that single-die is superior, but once you clear six dice the distribution is so wide you cant really get consistent performance out of it.

>Anarchy
>Army

I believe these are mutually exclusive

For starters, it would be worth having people working to keep them from rebelling, and even if you're post-scarcity its still nice to have people do things, especially highly selective tasks like sorting, and curation. While that may sound narrow there are tons of tasks in which those two subtasks are critical.

Not having established things, with differentiating stats makes it seem like the naming is just useless. Your Dickrecker 5060 Anime Edition being the same as your friend's Cockdestroyer 6050 China Edition makes them seem a lot less special and matter a lot less.

Don't even fucking get me started on Shadowrun tanks. Their armour should all be multiplied by 5 and their weapon's damage multiplied by 5. As it stands, a fucking 120mm Rheinmetall does the same damage as a man portable 20mm rifle.

Sausage.

Good doggy.

Dude don't ask me ask Ukraine (Or the Spanish CNT-FAI).

But at the same time there will only be a handful of these named and crafted items worth taking. If anything, having generated names makes your item more special because it is part of such a massive hypothetical product-space that its unique. On a roleplay level it realizes the corporate consumerist culture better than just a list.

But even those types of tasks are rapidedly being computerized with machine learning.

Having them working literally pointless menial labor just to keep them from rebelling would become a pointless waste of resources pretty quickly if you have complete control of any military force.