From: seawasp@vm2.cis.pitt.edu (Sea Wasp)
Newsgroups: rec.games.frp.advocacy
Subject: Re: ShadowRun HEROIC??? (was Re: Burn, GURPS...)
Date: 24 Jan 93 17:05:17 GMT
Organization: University of Pittsburgh
Originator: seawasp@unixd3.cis.pitt.edu

In article <1jt6g1INNomv@geraldo.cc.utexas.edu> 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). 

	Perhaps all the players tend to be power-crazed munchkins? There
isn't ONE PC in our group which meets those specs. We have an information
specialist, a sort of halfassed fighter type with contacts, a thrillseeking
Rocker Bimbo (not REALLY a bimbo, but she projects the image), one combat
mage (who can cast SOME nice spells, but the better ones are tough to cast),
and one Enchanting Adept -- can build enchanted items, given lots and lots
of money, time, and luck.

>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.

	Sounds like you're blaming the players, not the game. ANY CP based game
has the potential for that kind of abuse, and I've seen the same thing in
those, or in space games, and so on and so forth...

><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....

	This is, indeed, a glitch in the rules. It's not completely unique
to SR, of course -- even medium-level D&D or RoleMaster characters can
take several direct shots from large swords and laugh them off.  At least
in SR they have a consistent way to degrade your performance if you get
wounded. One wound can slow you up enough to kill you (we call that "getting
on the Death Spiral").

	I won't defend that flaw; I presume it evolved because they wanted
to base their system on skills, and changing the weapons and such would
have disabled the system in other ways. Maybe it was a tradeoff. Since we
rarely are fighting ordinary people, it doesn't show up very often...

>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

	Forgot about the grenade wounds. THAT is a kludge, and one easily
fixed. Grenades should be much nastier.

>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

	Once more, this isn't the game. It's the players. MILITARY operations?
Our group avoids them like the plague. We went up against ONE, repeat, ONE,
guy with an automatic medium machine gun. He killed one of us (revival by
DocWagon, expensive as hell), disabled the rest (one of us simultaneously
killing him).
	We're much more interested in characters than in combat. My characters
like thinking and planning. Shooting and blowing things up, that's different.
Even on the "standard" runs, we plan them to AVOID combat at all costs.
Combat's a good way to DIE. Unless you have just TONS of Karma lying around
to blow, any reasonably well-equipped opposition can toast you in a few
rounds of fire. Sure, if you assume that all those bullets hit, you took
a lot more damage than "real" people can take, but then that's true in a 
lot of games. Also, if a character is shot by a big gun and takes a 4S3,
and manages to stage it down to a L wound, that does NOT mean that he
is ignoring a large hole in his chest. It means that armor deflected it, or
he dodged at the last second and got creased, etc. He's bruised or lacerated,
not punctured.


                                 Sea Wasp
                                   /^\
                                   ;;;