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Looking to learn Shadowrun

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FrogDailey

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« on: <04-22-20/1935:07> »
Looking to learn how to play shadowrun. I have never played before, but I have played D&D 3.5 4 and 5 ( I prefer 3.5)

I'm in the Virginia Norfolk area

Stainless Steel Devil Rat

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« Reply #1 on: <04-22-20/2142:30> »
Glad to hear you're interested!

Not sure if you already have a group of people to play with or not... assuming not.  I'd recommend joining some Shadowrun themed social media groups to find games in your area, or online.  There's been a pretty good boom in online play in recent weeks for obvious reasons...  Two groups I'd recommend looking into are Shadowrun Missions Online and the Shadowrunner's Union facebook group.  The latter is system agnostic, but if you have books for a particular edition there are even more niche groups out there that cater specifically to a single edition.

So, Shadowrun has some commonalities with D&D in that both are tabletop roleplaying games.  You have a character that you play in a cooperative story wrought by the other players and the referee (called a GM instead of a DM in this case).  The high level concepts are the same, or at least similar.  The GM presents a story, the players react to it by doing things, the GM says what happens then, and so on.

However, there are some profound differences between a game like D&D and a game like Shadowrun.  To put it in D&D terms:

Imagine that there are not only no classes, but no levels.  You spend your XP developing your skills and attributes directly in a piecemeal fashion, rather than everything bumping up all at once in infrequent intervals.  If you want to gain a capability, instead of multiclassing you just buy that new capability when you have the points to begin developing it. 

The archetypical D&D adventure involves exploring a dungeon, right?  You're presented challenges in the order you encounter them, and you puzzle out the best/most efficient way to do so.  Quite logically, you don't slay the dragon and take his loot until after you've gotten through the minions and you don't go thru the minions until after you've solved the puzzles to gain entry to the lair in the first place.  Ok, so Shadowrun missions NEVER work out that way.  Problems/challenges in Shadowrun are never solvable in only one way.  In shadowrun, if you were hired to slay a dragon, instead of going through the dungeon "as the module is written", you might very reasonably instead find some geologic or historical data on that mine or cave system, and drill directly to the end boss with industrial machinery rather than run the gauntlet "as written".  A HUGE difference in playstyle/theme is you're given a goal, and it's a big sandbox to play in to figure out how to accomplish the goal.




RPG mechanics exist to give structure and consistency to the game world, true, but at the end of the day, you’re fighting dragons with algebra and random number generators.

markelphoenix

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« Reply #2 on: <05-17-20/2006:10> »
Watch your back, shoot straight, conserve ammo, and never, EVER cut a deal with a dragon.