From: flindholm@mta.ca
Subject: Re: ShadowRun HEROIC??? (was Re: Burn, GURPS...)
Reply-To: flindholm@mta.ca
Organization: Mount Allison U, Sackville, N.B. Canada 
Date: Sun, 24 Jan 1993 16:47:59 GMT

In article <1jt6g1INNomv@geraldo.cc.utexas.edu>, cwagner@ccwf.cc.utexas.edu (Christian Wagner) writes:
>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.

  Actualy, I havn't ever noticed my players behave heroicly. They seem to 
relate better to the brutal world in Cyberpunk.

>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 have obviously not played Shadowrun 2nd ed. Game lethality is much higher.
If you are shot with a Heavy pistol, you feel it. Admitedly not quite as much
as real life, but the time it takes to fire has also been reduced. If you 
shoot that Bod 3 guy in an armor jacket he is probably toast.
>
>>	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? 

   Most of the time fights in the modules are fairly avoidable if you play
with a light touch. As for ones that are not PC's still have an advantage
over NPC's just because their PC's. It is assumed the players will not act
so stupidly as to get themselves killed. As long as they survive the fight 
they can be patched up fairly handily.

>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'.....

 What exactly do you do in Cyberpunk? 

             Cyrus

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