From: 911087e@axe.acadiau.ca (JOHN ANTHONY ENZINAS)
Newsgroups: rec.games.frp.advocacy
Subject: Re: ShadowRun HEROIC??? (was Re: Burn, GURPS...)
Date: 26 Jan 93 20:01:03 GMT
Organization: Acadia University

In article <2439@blue.cis.pitt.edu> seawasp@vm2.cis.pitt.edu (Sea Wasp) writes:
>        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.
>        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...
>        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...

you bring up a point about skills in SR. They are my biggest complaint and 
they were not changed in SRII. 
i have a chacter with an int of 6. he has a chemestry of 6. if i make up a 
troll with an int of 1 and a chemestry of 6 they will be equally good, even 
though the first is a genius and the second can't spell his owne name.

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

i wish i had players and a gm like yours. right now the only reason i play 
is because it is all there is.
--johnny vague