Shadowrun 6th?

[samcifer]

So our alternate Saturdays D&D 5e campaign fell apart and we're switching to Shadowrun 6th ed as older editions are hard to find and too expensive to buy when we find them. Does anyone else on here play SR?

[LibraryOgre]

I have played everything through 4. I think I might own a PDF of 5, and have heard little about 6. I'm considering setting the game up for Savage Worlds.

[DeTess]

I've played 5th edition for a while, and then modded the setting for FATE because it made it easier on everyone involved to play the occasional 1-shot or short campaign, as building characters is... I wouldn't call it a chore, as it's fun for those inclined to optimizing and stuff, but it takes a lot of time.

Personally, I'd say Shadowrun is a fantastic setting bolted to a mediocre system (and 6th sounds like it might be the worst of the lot). That's not to discourage you from playing Shadowrun, as I think it's a fantastic setting, but if you find yourself bouncing off of it because of the rules, consider porting the setting to another system and giving it another shot.

Also, obligatory link to Dunkelzahn's will: http://danvolodar.ru/ancientfiles/Dunk_Will.htm , as it's the single greatest bit of lore for DM's to use (though you might need to learn a bit more about the world to be able to utilize it fully)

[Telwar]

I think there are flashes of brilliance in SR6, but I think it needed a LOT more public input, and I'm half-expecting a 6.5.

I will probably run a one-shot of SR6 once our FFG SW game is running down, but I expect it to go over about as well as a lead balloon.

I liked SR4, though.

[Anonymouswizard]

I think there are flashes of brilliance in SR6, but I think it needed a LOT more public input, and I'm half-expecting a 6.5.

While I've not read or played 6e I kind of got the impression that it's about 10% good ideas to build upon and 90% Shadowrun overcomplication.

Like, there's so much potential in Shadowrun, if the designers could just get the system out of the way. I think Shadowrun could work really well with a simple, slim set of core rules that didn't go into too much detail and threw out strict simulationism for focusing more on narrative flow. I remember the one time I got a decent campaign running the decker spent most of their time in AR so that they didn't have four times the turns of most of the characters (I think the only person who came close was a dwarven Street Samurai with something like 10+2d6 initiative, not even the elven adept took initiative boosts).

I think Shadowrun might not even have managed to get a better system than Cyberpunk despite six editions and a spinoff compared to Cyberpunk's three editions. Yes, Cyberpunk has a lot of problems, but it's so much simpler. These days I'd rather just run Cyberpunk with Fuzion magic than bother with all the problems of Shadowrun's system.

[farothel]

I've only played 4th and a little of fifth in a PbP. Never played 6th though. I like the setting, but every one of the versions can do with a bit of work.

[samcifer]

The rulebook is so poorly written that I've had to end up asking losts of questions online to understand it. Most of it is pbadly written with lots of flavorful descriptions that are a bit vague on details and you pretty much have to flip through the entire book just to learn how to fill out a character sheet as the info is spread all across the book. Movement, for example is barely covered at all.

[DeTess]

There's also a general shadowrun thread here if you've got questions about shadowrun stuff: https://forums.giantitp.com/showthre...e-that-Chummer

However, as you can see most people here have given 6th a miss.

[Delta]

The first main flaw of 6e has already been mentioned, it's amazingly poorly written. A lot of it is written in a way you only really understand it if you already have a lot of experience with older editions to make sense of it, the character creation chapter alone is a mess with options to basically break your character during creation (just try and build an Adept and buy additional Magic with bonus attribute points, voila, broken character) and some of the most convoluted rules paragraphs that even if you understand them don't make a lot of sense.

The second one is that there's no direction whatsoever. Someone wanted this to be "simpler and faster" and they massively reduced the skill list for that, but no one else writing the book apparently got that note. Then someone else had this great idea of a more abstract, conflict based mechanism that allows you to get rid of a lot of situational modifiers, which by itself isn't a bad idea. But since apparently, there was no coordination, no centralized vision whatsoever, whoever had that idea just took it and used a sledgehammer to force it right into the middle of an otherwise mostly unchanged absolutely simulationist, not abstract at all rules system.

To be fair, it's not like any other edition of Shadowrun is really well written. 6e isn't "unplayable" compared to other editions, there are things to like here, and all other editions have huge flaws of their own. It's hard to recommend any of them outright, personally I always liked 4e because it felt like the last time I can imagine them at least having a sitdown where they discussed "Okay, what do we want from this new edition?" before they just started writing stuff up, while 5 and 6 both feel like "It was time for a new edition so everyone just took what they thought was a good idea at the time and we cooked up a new core as quickly as possible"

[Seerow]

My group picked up the book and is planning to give it a whirl after our current campaign wraps up.


It is somewhat annoying that as a core book a lot of the rules seem to just assume you already know the rules. I did play a lot of SR3 and SR4, so I do know a lot of things, but SR5/6 are just different enough to make what I think I know wrong a lot of the time.

For example, do you know what you roll to resist damage? Here's a hint: If you think your armor factors in, you'd be wrong.

[samcifer]

My group picked up the book and is planning to give it a whirl after our current campaign wraps up.


It is somewhat annoying that as a core book a lot of the rules seem to just assume you already know the rules. I did play a lot of SR3 and SR4, so I do know a lot of things, but SR5/6 are just different enough to make what I think I know wrong a lot of the time.

For example, do you know what you roll to resist damage? Here's a hint: If you think your armor factors in, you'd be wrong.

Yeah, armor is only for helping to calculate who (if either side) has edge over the other. Armor has no other purpose and you only use Body to soak damage.

We played our first session last night with my fiance' playing a troll street samurai, the dm of our abandoned D&D campaign being a female dwarf weapons specialist, one guy playing an elven face and my ork battle mage who can hack. We based the campaign setting on a shadowrun version of our rl home metro and are actually based out of the house we play at (the home of me, my fiance' and the gm). The plot is to help a pizza-making vampire mafia boss help steal the recipe for a rival's new pizza crust and we only got one action scene as character gen took a long time, but we fought a group of vampire lackeys and the human leading them, but made short work of them (only 2 rounds of combat. We tried to get the human to surrender, but someone killed him sniper-style from the car he'd been in and left. We took the man's body inside the house (they ambushed us at our place) and I was able to hack into the human's cyber-eye and got visuals that the right-hand man of the mafia boss is behind it, but there was a digital bobytrap and the data was lost and very nearly my cyberdeck as well, but I was able to repair most of the damage to it and we ended the session for the night.

[DeTess]

Yeah, armor is only for helping to calculate who (if either side) has edge over the other. Armor has no other purpose and you only use Body to soak damage.

We played our first session last night with my fiance' playing a troll street samurai, the dm of our abandoned D&D campaign being a female dwarf weapons specialist, one guy playing an elven face and my ork battle mage who can hack. We based the campaign setting on a shadowrun version of our rl home metro and are actually based out of the house we play at (the home of me, my fiance' and the gm). The plot is to help a pizza-making vampire mafia boss help steal the recipe for a rival's new pizza crust and we only got one action scene as character gen took a long time, but we fought a group of vampire lackeys and the human leading them, but made short work of them (only 2 rounds of combat. We tried to get the human to surrender, but someone killed him sniper-style from the car he'd been in and left. We took the man's body inside the house (they ambushed us at our place) and I was able to hack into the human's cyber-eye and got visuals that the right-hand man of the mafia boss is behind it, but there was a digital bobytrap and the data was lost and very nearly my cyberdeck as well, but I was able to repair most of the damage to it and we ended the session for the night.

Sounds like a fun session! I similarly based my first shadowrun campaign on my home city, which can work really well in grounding people used to fantasy into a more modern mindset.