From: cwagner@ccwf.cc.utexas.edu (Christian Wagner)
Newsgroups: rec.games.frp.advocacy
Subject: Re: ShadowRun HEROIC??? (was Re: Burn, GURPS...)
Date: 24 Jan 1993 04:38:25 GMT
Organization: The University of Texas at Austin, Austin TX
NNTP-Posting-Host: mickey.cc.utexas.edu

In article <2425@blue.cis.pitt.edu> seawasp@vm2.cis.pitt.edu (Sea Wasp) writes:
>In article <1jsr9eINNlvl@geraldo.cc.utexas.edu> cwagner@ccwf.cc.utexas.edu (Christian Wagner) writes:
>>GURPS fails when one wants to run a highly-heroic (read ShadowRun) style CP
>>game, with PC's running through gunfire, assaulting buildings with big heavy
>>ultra-tech weapons, and -surviving-. If one wants to simulate the literature,
>	SR HEROIC?

Yeah. All the PC's tend to be mega-killing-machines (or mega-decking-machines,
or mega-driving-machines, or mega-spellcasting-machines). 

Cyberpunk isn't about being heroic. It's not about being able to toast anything
in existance with your Assault Cannon/Flatline Program/CyberVehicle/KillSpells,
it's not about combat, it's about -people-. In ShadowRun, the people get left
behind under all the hardware.

>	That's the first time I've encountered THAT. The only problem we 
>encountered with the rules was the armor autosuccesses. Make those extra
>dice, and you're done.
>	After that, it's GODDAM DEADLY! One thing all of my characters know:
>when the bullets start flying, you LEAVE! Unless you're in full armor, 
>any medium weapon will TOAST you unless you're close enough to prevent it 
>from firing. 

<chuckles> I don't know about you, but the fact that an unskilled person 
cannot kill (and often can barely wound) a normal human with a twelve-gague,
-even if he hits at PB range-, make SR seem more than a little undeadly....

And I won't -even- get into the way one can build supercharacters; you can,
quite easily, build a beginning Troll character that can put a anti-personnel
grenade in his shorts and take a -light wound- when it goes off. The amount of
ammo one has to put into a -normal- unarmored human to kill him is way too
high; when you start adding armor it gets ridiculous. 

>	Last combat we had was a bad random encounter -- we had to meet 
[Example of deadly encounter given]
>	And THAT wasn't all that nasty an encounter compared to the 
>PLANNED ones...

That's odd. In the few SR games I've played, and -all- of the ones I've 
watched, I've never seen a PC die. And to kill the enemy they had to blow 
karma, and generally hit their oponnents with enough pistol ammo to -shred- a
human torso in RL.... I mean, the 'heavy pistols', with (roughly) 4M2 damage,
-cannot- kill an unwounded, unarmored human, unless one has a skill of at least
4 in the gun, and rolls all successes. And even -then-, a normal human with a 
body score of 3 will, about half the time, roll two successes and drop the 
damage down, so they live, and are -concious-, even though they've just been,
essentially, drilled through the torso. 

>	I've heard a lot of  SR gripes -- too many dice from hell, 
>genre mixing that some people don't like, and so on... but non-
>deadly is NOT one of the ones I'd agree with.

Now, let me ask you this; if combat in SR is so deadly, then how come the 
FASA-made adventures always have at least four or five gunfights, with the PC's
facing moderately well-equipped and well-skilled opponents, and the PC's are 
expected to survive? 

And this brings up my other gripe about Shadowrun; it's almost all $#@! combat
or military-style crap. Extractions, assaults, thefts, it's all violent and
it gets -OLD- fast. The character creation system is munchkin in the -extreme-,
and it's flat-out impossible to integrate some character types and 
personalities into an SR campaign, because the whole thing's based around 
military-style operations. It's dungeon-crawling, except the dungeons are above
ground and the orcs are called 'Security Guards'.....

-- 
    "Well, do you ever get the feeling that the Story's too damn real
                        and in the present tense?"
               Christian Wagner - cwagner@ccwf.cc.utexas.edu 
Newsgroups: rec.games.frp.advocacy