Just joined Lemmy today and found this community. Any Shadowrun players/GMs here? Been playing SR5 on and off for quite a few years, and just started a new campaign. Very excited to get it off the ground.
I absolutely love the setting of Shadowrun, but have never had the opportunity to play. As for running a game myself, I've heard a lot of horror stories about how crunchy and complicated the system is, and that has been enough to keep me from trying to run a game myself. :P
The rulebook is absolutely atrocious. Absolute garbage formatting that forces you to look in 5 different places for anything.
Once you get a basic handle on the game though, it flows really well, especially for a more trenchcoat style with lots of background plot and mysteries to uncover. The lore is what keeps me coming back more than anything else though.
However, there's 3 aspects of the rules that I consider very crunchy and clunky, and I houserule:
Grenades in enclosed spaces. Nobody has time to sit there and do linear algebra to figure out how many times the shockwaves bounces between two walls doing damage each pass. If you throw a grenade into an enclosed space, chunky salsa and we move on with our lives.
Non-combat decking. If you need to hack the system while your party is being attacked by enemies, that's a cool combat encounter for everyone. If you want to get the floor plans of the building during legwork, I'm not having the decker run a solo session getting the data while everyone else stares at their phones. I make the decker roll a computers + logic test, give them info depending on successes, and we all move on.
Certain spells are absolutely horrendous in terms of how they affect the game. The 2 worst offenders are mob mind and chaos. Mob mind because you roll resistances for every single goddamn person in the area. I just make a very rough average of a nornal civvie, and houserule that the more excess successes you have the more people "failed" the save. Chaos has no written spell effect. I made my own table, with random effects ranging from fire to input failure to software glitch and lots of other possibilities. Keeps things fresh.
Jeez, that turned into way more of a wall of text than I intended, sorry.
Same. I've gone so far as to buy sources (5th edition) and tried running it once, but holy damn that crunch will break your teeth. I did support & enjoy the Shadowrun Returns trilogy of video games that came out a while back, and highly recommend it.
Sorry, I love the setting but haven't played in a long time, and my time/energy is capped out for games already with the two PF2E games I'm in (one of which I run)
Oh, I wasn't trying to recruit for a session or anything, was more wondering if there are members of this community that like and/or play shadowrun.
I got the PF2E humble bundle during the height of the DnD community license scandal, and the system looks interesting. Might give it a try in a few months when one of my campaigns dies down, I'm also pretty capped out atm myself :)
I like the Golarion setting (there are some steampunk-ish countries, so you may love some of that content :D ), and I like the system. The remaster (a sort of 2.1 edition) looks like it'll be a nice cleanup / errata as they ditch all OGL content and replace most of it.
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