Unfortunately my long running (3 years I think in different forms) shadowrun campaign came to an end, however I've got a few problems with the new system (love the world however..)
1. Min/maxing has been lessened however it's still a problem (I try and get around it through roll playing. Your a gun bunny with nothing else? try being in a situation with no gun..)
2. The 1-6 stat levels (higher with feats etc) are a little too limiting. What I mean here is that the different levels are too undefined and don't effect the odds enough. Almost any test you do within the game is unpredictable, hence you often can't plan on the out come unless you ARE min/maxed.
3. injury modifiers. I like the fact they're in the system, but on a min/maxed player they don't really work. As an example Baccus had a gun bunny who had 14 dice to shooting their gun. For being "close" to death he only lost 2 dice from that total, which if you ask me is a little sus.
4. Injury locations/effects. The numbering system for injuries was limiting since it never really took hit locations into effect and couldn't deal with perminant but not deadly results (like broken bones) yeah you can GM them into the game, but some rules would be nice.
5. Wired reflexes. How to play them out is a question, since they don't technically make you think faster, so do you make the play state what they're going to do at the start of the turn then stick fairly close to that and only let them "react" to other things and not make new decisions until the next turn? and if you let them make complex decisions on every pass, then it makes it too powerful (plus slow combat) since anyone without them is left WAY behind.
There are more issues, but I'm slightly drunk and tired so I can't think of them at the moment. Really I'm thinking of taking the SR rules as a starting point and modifying them to over come these issues, then maybe taking another crack at running a game.
1) I'm not completely anti min-maxing in shadowrun, since most of the campaigns I was in needed an RPG accountant to make a character that was at the appropriate levels of power. Its more the reason for min-maxing that annoyed the hell out of me, since it usually led to characters that were deliberately weak in areas that should have been part of their core package, so the player would have somewhere to get bang for buck on experience.
Compared to early editions, the breakdown into active skills and other skills was a great move, which solved a big chunk of the problem by allowing characters to have "flavor" skills, without hurting for skill points as a result.
I suspect the best fix would be to price skills at creation in the same way they're priced with experience points (karma, whatever) and boost the points given at creation to reflect the increased cost. A little more maths, but it'd be worth it.
2) And this is why I don't disapprove of min-maxing too much. Shadowrun has always had the problem that the level of expertise that the flavor text says a 6 in a skill or stat should give you is way off what you actually get. In the case of characters who had an appropriate pool to call on, the end result wasn't too bad, but if you want a competent gunfighter, juicing your skill and your combat pool was the bare minimum for a hardcore runner.
3) Injury modifiers seem to be less effective in the new system. (says the guy whose main runner could drop an average mook with a 3 shot burst while nursing a medium wound (I dont take serious levels of damage, matter of policy) 8 out of 10 times.
4) Yeah. well. I'd probably avoid criticals in combat, but moving the "Permanent effects of heavy wounds" from a "at the end of the run" basis to a "At the end of the combat" basis, that could work. I'm a gun man, and my core influence is the movies, so wounds that are generally painful, rather than incapacitated bits, seem the natural order of things.
5) I've always been in the full choices every action option. It's nice to have players who play to "set course, and only chart minor deviations from it type thing, but enforcing it would be a sharp increase in workload.
Another option would be to only give partial details on new information revealed. Rather than stating that its a security guard thats just come round the corner, just go with a generic "something", see if they shoot the 12 your old kid, and then give extra details at the bottom of the turn. Bonus points if shooting an innocent 12 year old disturbs the majority of your party. Many bonus points if you can come up with a way to get them to shoot a party member.
Mind you, giving some of the different types of reaction boost different amounts of decision making speed, that'd be interesting.
But yeah, mainly its the feel of the world that keeps me willing to put up with rule suck. And the fact that enough players and GMs I've played with have had a world view that was compatible with mine for most of my campaigns to have enough good moments to make me forget the suck. And the fact that I had a character with top level move-by-wire, the stealthiest attitude in the group, and custom guns that never let me down. Never underestimate the happiness a player gets from pulling off a few truly bad-ass moments.
1. Min/maxing has been lessened however it's still a problem (I try and get around it through roll playing. Your a gun bunny with nothing else? try being in a situation with no gun..)
2. The 1-6 stat levels (higher with feats etc) are a little too limiting. What I mean here is that the different levels are too undefined and don't effect the odds enough. Almost any test you do within the game is unpredictable, hence you often can't plan on the out come unless you ARE min/maxed.
3. injury modifiers. I like the fact they're in the system, but on a min/maxed player they don't really work. As an example Baccus had a gun bunny who had 14 dice to shooting their gun. For being "close" to death he only lost 2 dice from that total, which if you ask me is a little sus.
4. Injury locations/effects. The numbering system for injuries was limiting since it never really took hit locations into effect and couldn't deal with perminant but not deadly results (like broken bones) yeah you can GM them into the game, but some rules would be nice.
5. Wired reflexes. How to play them out is a question, since they don't technically make you think faster, so do you make the play state what they're going to do at the start of the turn then stick fairly close to that and only let them "react" to other things and not make new decisions until the next turn? and if you let them make complex decisions on every pass, then it makes it too powerful (plus slow combat) since anyone without them is left WAY behind.
There are more issues, but I'm slightly drunk and tired so I can't think of them at the moment. Really I'm thinking of taking the SR rules as a starting point and modifying them to over come these issues, then maybe taking another crack at running a game.
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and also means that death is no-longer a problem.. :(
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1) I'm not completely anti min-maxing in shadowrun, since most of the campaigns I was in needed an RPG accountant to make a character that was at the appropriate levels of power. Its more the reason for min-maxing that annoyed the hell out of me, since it usually led to characters that were deliberately weak in areas that should have been part of their core package, so the player would have somewhere to get bang for buck on experience.
Compared to early editions, the breakdown into active skills and other skills was a great move, which solved a big chunk of the problem by allowing characters to have "flavor" skills, without hurting for skill points as a result.
I suspect the best fix would be to price skills at creation in the same way they're priced with experience points (karma, whatever) and boost the points given at creation to reflect the increased cost. A little more maths, but it'd be worth it.
2) And this is why I don't disapprove of min-maxing too much. Shadowrun has always had the problem that the level of expertise that the flavor text says a 6 in a skill or stat should give you is way off what you actually get. In the case of characters who had an appropriate pool to call on, the end result wasn't too bad, but if you want a competent gunfighter, juicing your skill and your combat pool was the bare minimum for a hardcore runner.
3) Injury modifiers seem to be less effective in the new system. (says the guy whose main runner could drop an average mook with a 3 shot burst while nursing a medium wound (I dont take serious levels of damage, matter of policy) 8 out of 10 times.
4) Yeah. well. I'd probably avoid criticals in combat, but moving the "Permanent effects of heavy wounds" from a "at the end of the run" basis to a "At the end of the combat" basis, that could work. I'm a gun man, and my core influence is the movies, so wounds that are generally painful, rather than incapacitated bits, seem the natural order of things.
5) I've always been in the full choices every action option. It's nice to have players who play to "set course, and only chart minor deviations from it type thing, but enforcing it would be a sharp increase in workload.
Another option would be to only give partial details on new information revealed. Rather than stating that its a security guard thats just come round the corner, just go with a generic "something", see if they shoot the 12 your old kid, and then give extra details at the bottom of the turn. Bonus points if shooting an innocent 12 year old disturbs the majority of your party. Many bonus points if you can come up with a way to get them to shoot a party member.
Mind you, giving some of the different types of reaction boost different amounts of decision making speed, that'd be interesting.
But yeah, mainly its the feel of the world that keeps me willing to put up with rule suck. And the fact that enough players and GMs I've played with have had a world view that was compatible with mine for most of my campaigns to have enough good moments to make me forget the suck.
And the fact that I had a character with top level move-by-wire, the stealthiest attitude in the group, and custom guns that never let me down. Never underestimate the happiness a player gets from pulling off a few truly bad-ass moments.
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