From: cwagner@ccwf.cc.utexas.edu (Christian Wagner)
Newsgroups: rec.games.frp.advocacy
Subject: Re: ShadowRun HEROIC??? (was Re: Burn, GURPS...)
Date: 24 Jan 1993 15:16:43 GMT
Organization: The University of Texas at Austin, Austin TX
NNTP-Posting-Host: mickey.cc.utexas.edu

In article <C1CMt9.1q5@news.cso.uiuc.edu> dv52151@uxa.cso.uiuc.edu (RedSwordTarga) writes:
>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 at the wonderful SR pseudo-slang> Tell me, Axly, would you play a 
character like Slick Henry (from _Mona Lisa Overdrive_) in SR? Someone with no
cybercrap, no ultra-skills, no real advantages to speak of except being an 
interesting character?

Wonder-schmucks like Cowboy and Molly have a place in cyberpunk, yes, but in 
SR, -everyone- is like Cowboy, or Molly, or Case. Due to the very nature of 
the game, you -can't- play an interesting character, because the game is 
basically one firefight after another, in search of a particular person/chip/
diskette/demonic artifact/bigger gun. 

>><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.

That's what I meant. In, for example, GURPS, or ever Cyberpunk 2020, or even
-Hero- for Christ's sake, an -unskilled- person can unload a 12-gague at PB 
range and there is a chance (which varies from game system to game system) that
the target will be dead. 

This cannot happen in SR; the -only- way to boost the damage of a weapon is to 
be skilled with it. That 10S shotgun cannot kill, -period-, unless one is 
skilled with it, and that is utter and complete bullshit.

>>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. 

[various stuff deleted]

>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.

<AHEM> 1) The grenade-in-the-shorts problem still exists, which you didn't 
mention at all, and 2) Again, an unskilled person can't kill someone with a 
heavy pistol. 

I may not be completely up on SR, but I know they haven't changed enough stuff
in the 2nd Edition to fix the silliness about gun skill determining damage. 

However, I -am- going to stop complaining about the SR system itself; they 
have apparently increased the deadliness, but it's still got too much 
silliness, IMHO, and since it's IMHO, I'm not going to continue flaming about
it. So let's drop this section of the flamewar, shall we?

>>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.

<ahem> This isn't the system I'm bitching about here. It's the background and
the attitude of the game itself, an attitude which is shared by a lot of SR's
players. 

I haven't heard of an SR campaign yet that isn't seriously combat-intensive, 
and which doesn't deal with that bastard plot device, having the characters get
hired to go blow away someone/steal something/extract someone/etc etc. It's 
barely an RPG in my book, closer to a &#@! tactical simulation. 

-- 
    "Well, do you ever get the feeling that the Story's too damn real
                        and in the present tense?"
               Christian Wagner - cwagner@ccwf.cc.utexas.edu