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One beef about Origins

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nimrod_funk

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« Reply #15 on: <06-29-11/1133:28> »
My thought has been as a GM as long as your not playing Paranoia it's about the story more than the combat. Combat is all good and well but I try to get my campaign players to be more "adaptable" to many situations with they're points than focusing on combat monsters. In reality any organized syndicate, government agency, or corporate body has the resources to wipe out a player eventually. They have the resources to make your life hell, and slowly bleed you to death or just organize a space based laser accident on your location. Combat should only be part of the jist. Really all your doing is throwing down dice. What fun is that. If it's a war game sure I enjoy that. Role-playing is more about the story and the fluff than game mechanics. Your essentially telling a story and the players are making it happen. Unless the players do something really stupid I just tone down the combat or threat. Shadowrun is easy to Munchkin. That's what I liked about Cyberpunk, the lethality. Knowing that combat is dangerous, and combat kills. You try not to get into gun fights because bullets are very good at shredding and coring out flesh. I think that's one thing that Shadowrun has always lacked, lethality. You could always fudge this. I knew one Cyberpunk GM/writer (Charlie Wong) in Boston who would cut all combat stats by four in snapfire combat. Your scared, full of adrenaline so your prone to miss and make mistakes.

That's why at Texicon I was so pleased with the game. It was a really good story. The combat wasn't too tough but a really cool idea. I felt like "Damn I wish I had thought of that" and it took the players from "Oh crap what do we do now" to figuring out the puzzle. For me that's what roleplaying games should be about. If you like lots of combat and swords and sorcery play AD&D 4th ed or Exalted ect. A good story is where you find it.
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squee_nabob

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« Reply #16 on: <06-29-11/1151:02> »
Challanging combat and roleplaying are not mutually exclusive in all systems. HERO system is one that combines them well because talking is free all the time, and it is in genre for Super Heroes to trade witty banter, make difficult decisions, and fight all at the same time.

In shadowrun, combat is designed (from both a mechanical and genre perspective) to be short, brutal, and solved with overwhelming violence from one side or the other. You cannot have a back and forth shadowrun combat, where the outcome is in doubt. This is due to the offensive and alpha-strike nature of the combat engine.

Role-playing is more about the story and the fluff than game mechanics.

Even if I agreed with you (I feel the statement is too general to agree with in totality), It is not unreasonable to expect good mechanics. A group of children playing make believe can have awesome stories (see Axe Cop), but what separates them from RPG players is mechanics.

Onion Man played a channeling voodoo mage (one of the most high powered combat archtypes in the game), and thus was not challenged by anything. That’s understandable. That’s not the GM’s fault, but the Missions system for not helping all characters to be in a similar power bracket (12 Hardened armor > 12 armor for example). This problem has been hotfixed by banning future possession mages.

A bigger issue is vast discrepancy of 400BP, 0 karma characters. You can build 2 characters who are both “faces” but one may throw 20 dice at everything, and the other throw 17. The 17 dice face then becomes an assistant to the 20 dice face all the time. With 2 hackers it is even worse, as the other hacker just increases the chance for an alarm to be triggered. When you add in how bad the sample characters are, there is a huge difference between 8 built characters and 8 sample characters. This large imbalance is what makes building shadowrun missions very hard. There is no simple solution and gradual improvement is necessary. Don’t blame the player for playing a character that might have been acceptable at his home table, and legal in missions without realizing how overpowered it would be at missions.

nimrod_funk

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« Reply #17 on: <06-29-11/1351:18> »
I've never been a big fan of Shadowrun's mechanics. It's always been the world, the detail, the plot, the writing, and development that made Shadowrun interesting and fun.

Personally I found the best cleanest system for combat and rules to be Interlock by Mike Pondsmith. The Hero system while infinitely adaptable and configurable, the combat that I played was a little slow and arduous.

Shadowrun has always been cinematic in nature, which is what makes it fun. Less so on the realistic. (Personally I like building complexity in detail when I'm building terrain, not gaming.)

That's just me though.
"Can't stop here it's bat country"

squee_nabob

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« Reply #18 on: <06-29-11/1402:02> »
I agree on the cinematic nature of shadowrun being the biggest draw. A good shadowrun is like a heist movie. The PCs gather information, plan, and finally execute a mission while dealing with complications along the way.

The chance to do that over and over again is what keeps me coming back. Sorry if my last post sounded a little aggressive, rereading it I think you touched a nerve accidentally.

Onion Man

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« Reply #19 on: <06-29-11/1901:33> »
For me that's what roleplaying games should be about. If you like lots of combat and swords and sorcery play AD&D 4th ed or Exalted ect. A good story is where you find it.

I've all but abandoned DnD4e.  Before PHB2 it was a simple, elegant class-based system with fast mechanics and high heroics.  PHB2 (and all the builder books) power-creeped it way too much, and PHB3 put the power creep way over the top.  Between the power-creep and the hybrid class system (why even have a class system if you're going to hybrid the classes into homogeny?), WotC has done exactly what I expected them to and killed the game by killing the system.

AD&D2E was by far and away the best of the D&D systems.  1E and Challenger were too simple and vague, essentially a talk story with an occasional (and often nonsensical) die roll, 3.x was competitive algebra, 4E is back to being a talk-story but with more mindless dice rolling than ever before (and a horribly restrictive set of rules for hombrew, GSL is way more restrictive than OGL was).
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John Schmidt

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« Reply #20 on: <07-10-11/2323:19> »
My opinion goes like this...

Four hours, get yourself bogged down into a single combat and that is time you are not going to make up down the line. Cranking up the difficulty is like asking to run over your allotted time.
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Walks Through Walls

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« Reply #21 on: <07-15-11/1747:52> »
Onion Man was the CMP Moving Day one of the missions you played at Origins?
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Onion Man

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« Reply #22 on: <07-16-11/0202:49> »
It sure was.
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