From: wilder@nx02.mik.uky.edu (jeff wilder)
Subject: Re: ShadowRun HEROIC??? (was Re: Burn, GURPS...)
Organization: University Of Kentucky, Dept. of Math Sciences
Date: Sun, 24 Jan 1993 12:11:06 GMT

In <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:

|>	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). 

Well, maybe all *your* PCs are.

|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, maybe *your* people do.

|>	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....

Huh.  I guess that depends on what you're calling "unskilled."  For that
matter, it depends on what you're calling a "normal human."  Two (2) net
successes with that shotgun (not at all hard to do) equals a deadly wound.
End of story.

|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. 

Uh, wrong again.  Twice.  (I'm beginning to suspect that this is one of
those "Role-Playing Purist Snobs," who's got his nose so far up in the air
(or his own ass) that it's no wonder that he's clueless about the game he's
denigrating.)

First, I'd like to see the Troll.  Lessee, sticking the grenade in his
shorts should count at least as a called shot, right?  So stage that damage
up to Deadly, right there.  No Combat Pool to dodge.  I'd *really* like
to see the character that can take that down to a Light.  (Um, 6 10s?  Even
with 15 Body, I don't see it happening.)  He *might* stage it down from 
Deadly, but I don't have much of a problem with that, seeing as said 15
Body Troll has the equivalent of a half-inch of armor imbedded in his body.

Second, amount of ammo needed:  one bullet.  Two, very occasionally.  And
that's in medium armor.  I'll leave the reality check as an exercise for
RPPSs.

|>	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. 

Oh, I see.  The RPPS is still talking SRI.  (I guess news of SRII, where most
of the admittedly many bugs have been fixed, hasn't quite filtered up to
"Role-Playing Nirvana," yet.)

Well, if it makes you feel any better about the game (which I kinda doubt--
folks down on SR usually don't hold that attitude for any logical reason),
in my campaign thus far, I've seen the deaths of two PCs.  One of them
was an armored and dermal plated Troll, taken out with a single SMG burst.

And I'm not counting the several "near-death experiences," and "miraculous
revivals" I've allowed due to underestimating the deadliness of the system,
and hosing my undeserving players.

|>	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.

Absolutely.  If you don't occasionally like throwing a handful of
dice, SR isn't for you.  But the revamped system does NOT suffer from
"creampuff syndrome."

|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? 

Because it's changed.  And because the PCs usually have magical support,
and the bad guys usually don't.  (And when they *do*, that's when you
*really* gotta watch your ass.)  If a GM tries to run SRII using one of
the pre-SRII modules, the GM will make changes.  Or the players will die.
And die some more.

|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'.....

Whew.  I dunno who you've been gaming with, but maybe you oughtta take
this remarkably ignorant gripe up with Mary Kuhner.  Or Lester Ward. Or..
or me!

My characters have *lives.*  They have SOs, they come down with colds, they
occasionally feel the itching of a hard rain.  One of them struggles to
maintain ties with his childhood gang, though it's becoming painfully obvious
that he's left them behind.  One of them is an on-again/off-again alcoholic,
with a crippling self-image problem.  One of them is trying to come to terms
with the fact that she is beginning to *enjoy* killing people.  We generally
enter into a minor firefight, maybe once every six hours of playing time.  A
major firefight (which are generally avoided at all costs, due to the better
than even chance of a character death) occurs maybe twice a year, gametime.

It sounds as if your "munchkin/dungeon-crawling" problem lies with you,
and the folks you game with.

--
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| Jeff W  uk06666@ukpr.uky.edu | Meddle not in the affairs of cats, for they |
| Wilder  & wilder@mik.uky.edu | are subtle, and will piss on your cyberdeck.|
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