Shadowrun is one of the worst systems I have ever seen. There, I said it

That's always the problem with low-magic settings. As long as it's given to players as an option, it won't be rare in-play

Why I don't fully agree with OP shadowrun does fall into that category of just because you can do it doesn't mean you should.

I've enjoyed Shadowrun games in the past, but I wouldn't call it a good system. I'm playing Shadowrun 5 at the moment, which is okayish, but it is annoyingly clunky.

The best game I ever played was with an SR4 GM with a lot of experience and an extensive list of houserules, who knew the system so well he could remember details and resolve things super fast. But that's still something of a criticism of a system, that it takes that much work on a GM's part to actually make it work smoothly.

It'd be nice to see an edition of Shadowrun with actually good mechanics, instead of stupid things like balancing by in universe rarity.

If it honestly and genuinely takes you that long, you aren't actually smart enough to play the game. As long as the player in question knows what they want to do during their action, it takes our group about 30 seconds to resolve an action.

>By the time his turn comes up, the player has chosen what he wants to do and has his dice pool already set and the dice in his hand.
>Roll
>Pick up red results, and inform GM of results.
>GM has been making his defense roll while I do this. If I fail, no problem, he ignores his roll. If I succeed, then he has his resistance result ready.
>GM informs me of his roll result, and we modify my net hits accordingly, picking up or dropping dice as needed.
>Make new roll for result, inform GM of hits on that roll.
> GM tells us what happened
>Next player

30 seconds. 45 seconds to a minute if things (usually spell power) have to be adjusted. It sounds like your group needs to either be smarter, or learn the rules better, or both.

So it's from two to six times slower than other systems, if and only if the players know what they're doing.

It's easier when you're not dumb.

That's not even the worst part of Shadowrun, the worst part is broken ass Init Passes.

To be fair, you have to have a very high IQ to understand Shadowrun.

I can tell no one in this thread has actually played 5e because nobody's complained about the horrendous editing and non-existent table references in the core book

have fun

that or they already assume those are known
"Editing? Of course that's a problem. I already assumed you knew"

I can tell you aren't from planet earth since you haven't mentioned all the oxygen yet.

Nah, ran it for a decade (1E/2E), it's fine.

>The fact that it takes at least three different rolls to resolve a single attack, each with a hundred billion d6 to count hits, is insanity.
Each takes literally only a few seconds, interrupted by minutes of strategizing by players, usually. Your complaints are for naught.

>(and it's not just a couple of pages for each, either)
Back in the days people weren't too lazy to read and learn rules.

>JUST WHY. And even more intriguing: why has nobody ported the fluff (which admitedly is interesting) to a better, less rip-your-eyes-out system?
Because this is a nerdish hobby and nerds don't mind complexity. If people like you fled the hobby, it would be a good thing overall. Or if we at least could divide the hobby more between filthy casuals and actuals roleplayers, that would be a good thing as well.

>t. never played nor run a SR game
Learn the fucking rules, man.
LEARN THE FUCKING RULES.

I enjoy complex systems. I don't think a lot of what Shadowrun has is satisfying, interesting complexity. A lot of it is pointless clunk you could strip out or simplify without any meaningful loss.

>>I shoot him
>>ten minutes later
>>okay, so I deal 1 damage
Won't take 10 minutes if you know the fucking rules.

>I'll finish him off in my next initiative pass, it'll only take one hour for everyone else to take their turn.
Learn the rules.

>But that's still something of a criticism of a system, that it takes that much work on a GM's part to actually make it work smoothly.
As long as you get more out of a system by putting more effort into it, it's not a system problem. The only problem then is that it has a high entrance barrier, aka it is good at keeping rules-lite people at bay.

Shadowrunners are not ordinary people. The demographics of high pay, high risk, glamorous mercenary-criminals is not going to be indicative of the general population demographics. Anyone who is involved at all is exceptional. Even the most mundane soldier type shadowrunner can outshoot trained snipers and win firefights against special forces with one eye missing and a hand behind their back.

You've ignored some of the most important things (though I haven't played 1e/2e; in 5e they're worse I suppose)
>Mages, technomancers and hackers use different sets of rules
and
>Character creation is unbearably slow
The first character I created was basically garbage. Afterwards I knew what I was doing … Good design …

The old version isn't that good to be honest. Still waiting for the current version 3, built upon the current set of blades in the dark rules.

Despite what game designers tell you, system doesn't matter. As long as you've got a pleasing aesthetic and hook, people will play your game no matter how it works.

This is actually retarded.

I mean, I guess in some groups or playstyles it might be true, but in that case why not freeform? A system can be a meaningful addition to your game, and a good system can act to support and improve the experience in many different ways.

But I don't think you get more out of it than you put in. In some cases, sure, but Shadowrun is a deeply flawed system that could execute a lot of its ideas a lot better.

>As long as you've got a pleasing aesthetic and hook, people will play your game no matter how it works.

It is indeed slower and more complex than other systems where combat boils down to "During Round 1, wizard casts spell and wins, while martials stand about and do nothing of consequence. Combat ends."

You're 100% right, user. You should stick to other games where granularity of results is neither needed nor desired. However, when granularity of results *IS* desired, Shadowrun and other systems which are not intended to be "babbys first RPG" will be here for you.

>I like SR because it's one of the only quasi-popular systems where armor protection actually matters a damn. In pretty much every system where this happens, it seems to require additional rolls to make armor matter. Since this is desired granularity, it's simply a price one has to pay for the desired result.

I play D&D with a group of people who would be interested in the setting, but they're the type of players who need to be reminded how AC is calculated and what their attack bonus is every single time they roll to hit.

Shadowrun will never happen with them. The game I ran in college with actual gamers who were willing to spend hours learning rules and navigating a book with a confusing-as-fuck layout did go well, though. The first few sessions were a bit rough, bit we got the swing of things after that.

Technomancers are a fucking mess to figure out, though.

If someone could take SR's fluff and crunchy feel, and combine it with a set of mechanics that weren't clinically retarded, it might be the best game ever.

GURPS says hi

And that's like your opinion, dude. It's not like you made no effort to argue your case or anything.

>unironically defending Shadowrun as a system
>"learn the rules" when the rules themselves act as a five hundred page incomprehensible lovecraftian entity that does not want to be read
wow haha kill yourselves

Shadowrun is not just "being played". It's in the icv2 Top 5 of successful RPGs. Mere aesthetics don't get you there.

>"normies get out of my hobby" as an argument

>t. brainlet
What are you doing in this hobby? Shouldn't you be watching some soap opera at this hour instead?

I don't mind normies, I mind casuals that drag down what RPGs can be by insisting everythign gets dumbed down to their level of """intelligence""".

People like you don't get Shadowrun? Great, that's a strength of the system.

A lot of it has been mentioned in this thread already, but I'll go over my main issues.

Chargen is overcomplex and their pricing structure is dumb. Pricing by in universe rarity makes a certain sort of sense, but it's unbalanced as fuck. It also makes chargen a nightmare because you never know when a cheap but really useful bonus is tucked away in the corner of a page that you just skimmed over. Every time I've made a SR character before showing it to a friend more familiar with the system, they've been able to boost my dicepools and capabilities significantly just by picking out the various small sources of additional bonuses the system never tells you are present or important.

Things should be priced based on their utility to the character, even if you include the in universe price as a fluff thing, in order to clearly convey to people what things grant useful bonuses. Making character generation less confusing would be a boon for everyone.

The 'pricing based on rarity' thing also applies to metatypes, and is dumb there, too. Balance based on what advantages they provide, not on how many orcs there are in the world.

The hacking rules have always sucked. I say that as someone who has tried playing hackers. 4e's were flawed, my experience of 5e has been that they're even worse. Confusing, arcane and still suffering from the issue of 'The hacker plays their own little minigame while everyone else twiddles their thumbs'.

The skill list is overly bloated and could use with consolidating, combat rules are honestly pretty simple at their core but could be better explained, and 5e's initiative passes just seem like pointless dicerolling to make it different from 4e.

There's more, but that's just off the top of my head from my experience with the system.

Well this looks promising...thanks.

...

GURPS is:
A) A shit system
B) More complex than any edition of SR
C) populated entirely be edgelord faggots or the cringiest of the cringy
D) a meme
E) all of the above

>pic related

bahaha you sure showed him user

>Logic is Willpower
>Presence is Intuition

What the hell.

Hey, SJG. Write a self-contained GURPSSR-book and I'll buy it.
I'm not even a fan of your system, but it's still Nobel Price-material compared to the clusterfuck that is Shadowrun.

It's about the story, man.

>complain about SR rules
>ignor the rules light system they also publish
I guess user just enjoys being angry

Is Shadowrun Anarchy any good? I've heard of it, but never really much about it.

I've only skimed it but it seems to be basically Fate with a few tweaks. Probably a good way to introduce players to the world if they can't be bothered to read the full rules

Solid, rational criticisms. They'll be ignored by everyone in the thread.

> Anyone who is involved at all is exceptional. Even the most mundane soldier type shadowrunner can outshoot trained snipers and win firefights against special forces with one eye missing and a hand behind their back.

Yeah a typical night out for my street sam is outsmarting and trolling the Dawkins Group over the Matrix while simultaneously fighting off a squad of Red Samurai in my Armani Tuxedo.

As facetious as you're being, the fact that your sammy has a 6 digit value of nuyen in cyber and rolls upwards of 20 dice to attack makes them above and beyond "super soldier" tier. And if you went the other route, having 7 or 8 Edge is incredibly exceptional and allows you to do literally anything with a strong chance of success.

Combat is actually fairly quick and easy as long as you can remember what you're supposed to be rolling. However, the are a ton of other stupid shit in it, like different firing modes on weapons(I don't want to track both ammo and the weird modifiers from this) and character creation(The wealth options just give you way to much money and you can buy everything but high explosives at character creation. Seriously, you can't buy the things that are super expensive(high end cybernetics) at the start, but you can have the money to do so.)

>Chargen is overcomplex
It's assisted point-buy. People who can handle GURPS can handle Shadowrun. In essence, both are complex for one reason only: the astonishing array of options - which is exactly what players of either system dig.

>when a cheap but really useful bonus is tucked away in the corner of a page that you just skimmed over.
That too is due to the vast array of options. The same problem exists on various D&D variants. For example, Star Wars Saga with all splatbooks included.

>Every time I've made a SR character before showing it to a friend more familiar with the system, they've been able to boost my dicepools and capabilities significantly just by picking out the various small sources of additional bonuses the system never tells you are present or important.
Don't optimize characters, in any system, just ensure they are relevant. Which is easier, you know, if nobody else in the group optimizes characters either.

>Things should be priced based on their utility to the character
No, that creates a double price structure, making things even more complicated. The combination of cost and availability must do.

>Making character generation less confusing would be a boon for everyone.
No, the principal way to do that is to remove options. And that would NOT do for everyone. (I personally would argue though for moving more options from the core into splatbooks though, that would make things easier for beginners.)

>Balance based on what advantages they provide, not on how many orcs there are in the world.
t. Gamist

>'The hacker plays their own little minigame while everyone else twiddles their thumbs'.
In part this is inevitable. One of the quickest versions can be found in the legacy Virtual Realities 2.0.

>The skill list is overly bloated and could use with consolidating
Again, removing (customization) options. But customization options are a SR selling point.

Nice normie meme. *dip* *dip*

Where is the Shadowrun version of that for comparison?

Making chargen better has nothing to do with removing options. It's about organising and explaining them better, because the current state of chargen is a confusing clusterfuck.

I only mentioned in universe pricing to pay lip service to it. If you're going to get rid of anything, get rid of that and make players pay costs appropriate to the mechanical benefits they're acquiring.

Hacking being bad is not inevitable, and saying it is just excuses lazy design.

A compressed skill list doesn't remove options. You can have all the same skill uses present, just in a way that's less bloated and annoying.

As someone who played and GMed shadowrun 5e while hating every minute of it Anarchy is a welcome breath of fresh air for the system. Just be aware it's written with the understanding that you already know the Shadowrun setting so it can be jarring for a complete noob.

There isn't one because there can't be one. The GURPS example is second-by-second, and Shadowrun combat rounds are roughly 3 seconds each. Since there's so much going on in the John Wick scene, it simply can't be replicated.

>And even more intriguing: why has nobody ported the fluff (which admitedly is interesting) to a better, less rip-your-eyes-out system?
They have. I've seen SR conversions for many different systems. I remember at one point there was some guy converting the game to GURPS in the SR general thread, and literally no one shit on him for it, some happily helped (I forget if he finished it or not).

SR sucks. We know it sucks.

>the game is badly made intentionally
And here I thought ivory tower apologists were a DnD only thing

The pic should be called "Why no GURPS GM allows supers"

Probably "Why no GURPS GMs allow Tactical Shooting"

Try assuming Wick has 3 initiative passes or can hit 30 init.

He can act for every second of each three seconds that way.

Then he's an illegal character. IIRC, the absolute most an un-cybered/un-magiced human can hit on initiative is 2 passes (it may well only be 1; I haven't touched SR5e in a while), and then only on the most ludicrously min-maxed character imaginable.

Since there's no cyber or magic in the John Wick world, he's only stat-able as a pure unmodified human. Even assuming he's got 9's in all relevant stats (human maximum), he's not getting 3 passes.

There's no way that SR rules can stat Wick and replicate that. Plus the lack of rules for a fair number of the actions he's taking.

He's a protagonist in an action movie. I'm pretty sure that qualifies for Adept stats.

Nah you might be able to take out like 2 or 3 guys in a John Wick scenario before you just straight up die. A better clusterfuck example would be the shootout in Taxi Driver. That's GURPS as hell.

>high pay, high risk,

Let me fix that for you
>low pay, high risk until they stop shadowrunning and do anything else to get money.

Boy you sure are retarded.

Fuck Gurps and fuck gurps fanbois.

t. Maid RPG player

Not him, and I don't play any of the involved systems but I find it a bit hard to believe that Shadowrun would be more of a hypercrunchy clusterfuck than that

Ok, let's break it down.
youtube.com/watch?v=w-HSoOFdJ3s#t=3m13s

Assumptions: John wick is a physical adept, because fuck you.
He's got qualities perfect time, drive for perfection, that other thing that reduces called shot penalties to 0, and has that knight errant shooting martial art.

Then it's basically a bunch of simple action full auto bursts and called shots to the head.

...What?

That's just a confusing non-sequitur. I mean, Maid RPG is a really fun comedy RPG, I'm just not sure why it's relevant.

IIRC Shadowrun has in universe stated that Bruce Lee was an adept. I think it makes sense for John Wick.

Once you actually play more than just DnD you'll learn than most systems are just as, of not more, flawed.

Depends what D&D you're talking about. There are relatively few professionally published RPG's more flawed than 3.PF.

Well in GURPS you're only rolling about 3 dice then a couple for damage, otherwise you're just using some abilities on your character sheet. SR actually has you roll 10d6 or more for starting character builds, and yet it's basically Fudge. Why? Because the guy who made the first Cyberpunk game 30 years ago did something similar.
It also uses the initiative pass system, which is actually really cool and simple if it were a video game, but it's really annoying for table GMs, and players kind of ignore it, treating it more like D&D initiative than the "let's plan out what we do on this turn guys" thing that it's supposed to be.

Also if you did that shit in the John Wick cap your character would just die. The dudes John shot would occasionally make their HT rolls and just shoot him in the back, regardless of how grogtastic the player was. Typically GURPS Tactical Shooting is just an aim action and then firing at the body, or an aim action and then firing at the head if they're a sniper or something.

Fucking hell I love SR and it's fast enough if the players and dm aren't clinically retarded but can you not make us sound like top tier faggots right now please?

Yeah okay buddy keep playing your plebeian, fledgling systems.

GURPS is flavourless sludge only enjoyed by people without a sense of taste.

It's more of a bitter sludge like shitty store-brand coffee. Then you buy the store-brand cream and store-brand sugar and mix it up yourself.

You clearly don't understand the point of the system, then.

Oh, I entirely understand the point of the system. I'm just rather crudely articulating the aspect a lot of fanboys seem to miss.

The way core mechanics and fundamental, underlying systems affect the tone and experience of a game is something that people have varying sensitivities to. For some people, it's not relevant, for other people it can make or break an experience.

GURPS fanboys, almost universally, are people with absolutely no connection to how a systems mechanics affects the tone of the game. They view it as entirely disconnected, and often get confused when people point it out as a reason not to use GURPS. Because to a GURPS fanboy, it's all the same, so why not use GURPS? But to people who'd rather play other systems, it's because the way those core mechanics affect the experience is meaningful to them, and they prefer a more flavourful, textured set of mechanics to GURPS's intentionally dull, flavourless ones.

I specifically say fanboys because there are also plenty of rational GURPS fans who are entirely aware of the limitations of the system and use it alongside other games, rather than just insisting it's the only game you ever need.

>The billion year old "I'm differentiating between the fans and fanboys" forum argument
How old are you kid? 11? 12?

I'm not even sure what you're referring to? I was just making it clear that I'm making a distinction between people who just like the system and the idiots who insist you don't need anything else.

>Not actually addressing the argument

Would you prefer to run a "Call of Cthulhu+Wild Wild West" game using GURPS, or 1e Deadlands?

That's the perfect example of flavorless sludge set against system mechanics which enhance the game experience.

Sure the core mechanics don't have a lot of flavor. That's why you introduce shit from Action or Dungeon Fantasy or After the End.

There's options there, it just takes effort.

I'm not sure if there's a single case where I would prefer GURPs to old Deadlands

What is unironically defending supposed to mean?
Are you honestly surprised there are people defending a system that is popular on this board?

Don't argue with GURPS players, their the Linux users of traditional games. They're so entrenched in their system that they can't comprehend why most people see it as a a huge time investment to learn.

But the point is that the core mechanics underpin the experience of the game. How basic task resolution functions has an actual effect on the tone of the experience that you cannot replicate by stacking more rules on top of it. It's a fundamental weakness of generic systems as opposed to specific ones.

>"Call of Cthulhu+Wild Wild West" game using GURPS, or 1e Deadlands?

I already know GURPS. What possible reason would I want to learn a lesser system when I already have a perfectlybalanced system that does the same thing?

Mechanics are all that matter in a discussion about mechanics. Not aesthetics. That's a cheap dodge and you people should be ashamed for trying to hide behind it.

>Are you honestly surprised there are people defending a system that is popular on this board?

Yes, because it shouldn't be popular in the first place.

I see what you're trying to say, but have you actually PLAYED GURPS? Like, extensively?

I'd use Call of Cthulhu. Duh!