Shadowrun - Good Setting, Bad Games

Alright, I know a lot of F:ATties here aren't into the SR setting, but suppose you were into it...why do the games all blow?

I mean, the RPG is and has historically been a crunchy mess. I'm amazed it continues to sell as well as it does, especially in this age of rules-light rpgs.

Wizkids put out an ill-conceived action figure game. Had they gone the scale of heroclix/mageknight my group would have been all over it. We already had the terrain from other games, but collecting various street gangs, police agencies, monsters, vehicles etc. the game would have been killer pre-painted on a clix base at the (about) 28mm scale. I'd imagine all the Heroclix players at the time would be interested because they had terrain for that game as well. Seems like a no-brainer.

There's some co-op deckbuilder, but I understand you use stickers and mark up the cards, giving the game the Risk Legacy one-and-done treatment. If this were a deckbuilder like Thunderstone - selecting and equiping a team of chummers to go on runs - and able to be replayed...I'd jump in.

The Xbox first person shooter was a train wreck. And I've only heard so-so things about the Shadowrun Returns line.

In the 90s there was a trading card game, that I really liked, but was broken so didn't live past one expansion set.

So, the only things that I've experienced that were 'great' were the SNES and Genesis games from the early 90's and a few of Nigel Findley's novels.

It's a shame, as this is a setting I'd like to game more of, but the games seem to be pretty bad. Frustrating.

Thanks for listening.

The newer PC game that was kickstarted is solid, although unspectacular.

CoolMiniOrNot should acquire the license and have Eric Lang do something with it.

I'm telling you the miniature game Aetherium is like the Shadowrun matrix and it's stellar. Skirmish warbands duking it out in a cyberworld where you can manipulate terrain tiles and shift reality. Excellent.

The hope is always that someone will someday do something great with the setting. It's been blue ball city for almost two decades on that front though...

There is one decent boardgame that has sort of scratched the SR itch. Minion Hunter.

(oh, I know LotR is credited with ushering in co-op boardgaming, but Minion Hunter had it beat by eight years.)

I hate the Shadowrun setting. It took a modern sub-genre of science-fiction and dumped a crapload of tolkienesque fantasy bullshit all over it. Might as well take a fine porterhouse steak and cover it with Hershey's chocolate syrup.

Interestingly, it looks like CoolMiniOrNot may have something cooking with Shadowrun.

At MM, the bottom of the SprawlGanger rulebook entry lists the game being done with CoolMiniOrNot.

www.miniaturemarket.com/cat27800.html

The Shadowrun setting doesn't inspire good games because the setting itself is lazy and derivative.

The best thing about Shadowrun were the setting books. They were fully realized and offered a complete world. As a kid I could just read through those for hours even though we never got into the game itself... it was just a mess of an RPG. But someone great was clearly working on the setting in incredible detail. I played the Genesis game and thought it was ok and then it fell out of favour with me entirely... although I did still read the setting books once in a blue moon. I think I still have this one lying around somewhere.

The Xbox first person shooter was a train wreck.

Setting aside, I found it to be quite fun. I think it gets a bad rap solely for people not liking the Shadowrun setting on an FPS (or at least this FPS).

I'm not so sure this is a Shadowrun exclusive problem, and not more of a cyberpunk issue. Android is okay if not long and a bit diluted but it at least tells a cool crime story if your play group doesn't just rush through it. Netrunner is fun if you dig the hacking/Matrix bits of cyberpunk and Shadowrun. Are there any other decent games utilizing cyberpunk?

Shadowrun is terrible. I remember playing it long ago...I had a couple of books and ran a game for my friends. Group consensus was "lame". But we kept going for a while, eventually we just went back to Cyberpunk 2020 and its stupidly lethal combat system. I'm not sure why Shadowrun inspires such nostalgia...elves and hackers, yeesh. Do not want.

Like I said, I know there's a bunch of SR haters here, but the setting is still very popular in (what's left of) the tabletop rpg world. Heck, it seems to be second only to D&D so far as long term popularity is concerned. Is it the only game from the 80s still selling?

icv2.com/articles/markets/view/32097/top...ng-games-spring-2015

I have no idea how a game with this level of complexity still manages to be a top-seller almost 30 years on. Must be big in Germany...

Anyway, maybe it's a cyberpunk issue, but I feel if there were just one or two tweaks to SR games they'd be great. If the rpg were streamlined, if the pre-painted game were at a reasonable scale, if the deckbuilder were replayable. These all seem line easy calls. I dunno.

Green Lantern wrote: I'm not so sure this is a Shadowrun exclusive problem, and not more of a cyberpunk issue. Android is okay if not long and a bit diluted but it at least tells a cool crime story if your play group doesn't just rush through it. Netrunner is fun if you dig the hacking/Matrix bits of cyberpunk and Shadowrun. Are there any other decent games utilizing cyberpunk?

Good question. One problem with cyberpunk as a genre was that it focused on such a near-future time frame that it became partially obsolete before boardgames in general improved in modern times.

We're living in what was Cyberpunk then.

Our group always had fun with SR. We played a lot of Second Edition. As a game, I always found it superior to CP2020. As a setting, it's certainly pretty polarizing. I thought it had a good FASA background, lots of reasonably well-thought-out backstory and worldbuilding.

It also worked well to just yank all the magic and metahuman stuff and just play cyberpunk-style with it, because the system was more amenable than anything else at the time.

My biggest issues with it were probability related. If they'd used d10 (like the WoD games) the probability points would have been spread out a bit more and had fewer oddities. d6 just didn't have the right granularity.

Forget the haters, it was fun. It was also more fun if you'd read these books back in the 80s:

Mr. White wrote: I have no idea how a game with this level of complexity still manages to be a top-seller almost 30 years on. Must be big in Germany..

I think Shadowrun is still popular for the exact reason Barnes doesn't like it. It's a blender full of magic, guns, fey, cyberware, dragons, and violence. I can't think of many other games that have tried to embrace such a varied level of genre trappings. Add to the mix the game itself is designed to throw any number of crazy character concepts together under the guise of hired guns doing criminal shadow work and it cuts out a lot of exposition (and time wasted) on how and why these characters are working on the same team. What can you do with Cyberpunk but play a razorguy and what...a razorguy?

The RPG has a great point-buy system to build almost anything you can dream up as well and I know that's a big draw for a lot of my gaming buddies. For those that like to get lost in attribute and skill modifiers, endless equipment lists, and spell books Shadowrun is your system.

Shadowrun always looks from the outside like it should be a huge amount of fun, jamming together a bunch of concepts that don't really compliment each other (elves and hacking, orcs and rocket launchers, cyber-ninjas and dragons) and giving players an opportunity to really go nuts.

In practice its tone and rule set always contradicts this, the writing seems to think the idea of elven virtual reality hackers taking down the System is something we should take Very Seriously. And the aggressive complexity and finickiness of the system reinforces this idea.

If you took the basic ideas of Shadowrun and gave them the tone and fast-paced play style of something like the Borderlands games, I think you would be really on to something.