From: dv52151@uxa.cso.uiuc.edu (RedSwordTarga)
Subject: Re: ShadowRun HEROIC??? (was Re: Burn, GURPS...)
Organization: University of Illinois at Urbana
Date: Sun, 24 Jan 1993 08:12:44 GMT

cwagner@ccwf.cc.utexas.edu (Christian Wagner) writes:

>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.

Well, that's nothing to do with system and everything to do with players.
As far as character abilities, Cowboy from Hardwired was a "rigger" of
extreme prowess, and Gibson's Molly is a top flight samurai. If the character
is good at something, then he/she just gets that much more powerful and
entertaining of an opponent. If your player can get geeked by a go-ganger
then the corps will chew him up and spit him out.

><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....

That's possible in any role-playing system, so it doesn't prove shit. No,
weapons are not as effective in games as in real life. In SRII, a shotgun
does 10S. That's a pretty serious messing up of your internal organs. Most
people won't be moving after it.

>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. 

In SRII, you compare successes acheived by the shooter to the number of 
resistance checks made by the victim. Positive numbers stage up, negative
stage it down (If you get more combat pool successes than the shooter,
you've dodged and don't take any damage). So the average 3 success,
3 round burst of SMG fire with flechette ammo (gee, it sucks not
wearing armor) will do 11D. I don't think most people are going to
get any successes on the resistance check, much less the 2 he needs
to keep from dying.

>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. 

You are playing the old rules. In the SRII rules, that heavy pistol does 
9M. With average die rolls, he's going to take at least a moderate if
not a serious wound. Any serious arguments you wish to make about the
"realism" of SR are sort of voided by the fact that you aren't current
on the system and therefore aren't qualified to comment on it.

>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'.....

Huh? The system has no bearing on what you have the characters do. If you 
don't like SR adventures by FASA, write your own stuff where you do things
that you find interesting. This sounds more like a bitch about one 
particular campaign than a constructive comment about a game system.

Axly

********************************************************************************
*   Axly      *  "Is Axly tough? Yes. Talented? Yes. Brave? Oh, certainly.     *
* Red Sword   *   He is also erratic, irresponsible, accident-prone, and a     *
*   Targa     *   constant threat to public safety. The trick is to keep him   *
*             *   pointed in the right direction. "                            *
*             *         -Niki                                                  *
********************************************************************************