Has anyone played this?
I love the idea of Shadowrun and would love to buy into it but my god the rules the RULES!
Quote from: Biscuitician;973062Has anyone played this?
I love the idea of Shadowrun and would love to buy into it but my god the rules the RULES!
Try Second Edition if you can find it.
Every edition that i've seen has been fucking atrocious. Who on earth needs this level of complexity: it even has rules for explosions ricochetting off walls ffs!
WTF!
You want a grenade to just be a magic damage bubble, go ahead. Ignore the rule or pick another system. You want a light pistol to not be able to kill anyone no matter how good the shooter is or where they hit, play a game with hit points or something. If Savage Worlds isn't too much for you, try Interface Zero 2.0. Otherwise, there's a Barbarians of Lemuria hack for Shadowrun somewhere IIRC. You can't get much lighter that that.
Shadowrun Anarchy is a storytelling game. Players switch being Lead Narrator and setting up scenes using the Cue system to define plot points, etc.
I like 1e and its not that hard really. Just lots of situational rules that might or might not come into play. Currently playing in 3e of which I have little experience with.
SR Anarchy comes across as very different. Not sure what I'd compare it to? Universalis seems close in the general concept of no GM/alternating GMs?
Anarchy was an excellent idea (Let's make Shadowrun a bit more rules light) with shit execution.
As CRKrueger says, it's based on Catalyst's Cue System. Except the Cues don't actually interact with anything! They don't drive how you get Plot Points, they don't allow anyone to insert shit into the game a la FATE Aspects. THE GOGGLES! THEY DO NOTHING!
It's as if someone told the writers they had to use the Cue System and they said "Yeah, sure. We'll get right on that."
Also as CRKrueger says, the base mode of play is that there is a GM/Ref/what have you, but players have a lot of control of scenes. There're some optional rules to cut that part out and have a more traditional feel, but the system is so light it amounts to "Don't let players use Plot Points to insert narration."
A good portion of the book is taken up by sample characters. Sample characters that are all fucked up and wrong and don't follow the system. I have no idea if they fixed them, but last I heard...there were no plans to. Granted that was months ago.
ALL rolls are opposed. Which irks some people because this was supposed to speed things up. I don't have an issue with it.
There's little delineation on how Amps (special powers) interact with Gear and vice versa. It seems like the intent was to have Amps just be things that give bonus dice (other than the Amps you need to spend to Awaken); but that's not explained anywhere and I'm probably reading into it. A lot of gear stats that I would consider necessary are missing (mostly in the vehicle/drones area) and you'll have to come up with it on your own.
The tl;dr is...it's a mess. You're better off kludging something together with FATE (If you want some of that Narrativium) or Savage Worlds (If you don't) if you want something lighter.
That doesn't sound like my thing at all.
I favour lighter rules, but I'm not into sharing the GM hat around.
If you ignore the Cue system mess - Anarchy's a stripped down Shadowrun with a stat+skill+bonus (from gear, magic, whatever) dice pool system. It's certainly playable as a RPG rather than a storygame, and recognizably Shadowrun for those to whom that matters. All told, I'd describe it on the lighter side of rules medium, but Anarchy's not a rules light game.
That being said, all of Michael Gray's commentary is dead on. It's easy to ignore the Cue system because the game ignores the Cue system. The rules they give to turn it back into a traditional RPG are obviously how any playtesting was played. As a bit of an aside, there are so many sample characters because one of the expected types of play is 'pick one of these characters and go' rather than doing your own chargen. Alas, as was noted, these sample characters were written before errata was written, and they have not been updated.
Which gets me to the errata - it's actually pretty important. They went to press before playtesting was completed (if I'm recalling correctly), and playtesting caught some things that really needed to be fixed. The rules are fixed in the PDF version, but, the sample characters haven't been. And, of course, the version that went to press obviously doesn't have the errata.
In short, I agree that it's a mess. But, it's what I'm going to be using as the base for my next Shadowrun game. It'll be easier for me to tweak Anarchy back towards more what I'm looking for than to try to strip down any version of Shadowrun that I own (which, for the record, is 1st - 4th editions). And I prefer doing that than going with a Fate or BoL or whatever hack.
Quote from: Michael Gray;973273Anarchy was an excellent idea (Let's make Shadowrun a bit more rules light) with shit execution.
As CRKrueger says, it's based on Catalyst's Cue System. Except the Cues don't actually interact with anything! They don't drive how you get Plot Points, they don't allow anyone to insert shit into the game a la FATE Aspects. THE GOGGLES! THEY DO NOTHING!
It's as if someone told the writers they had to use the Cue System and they said "Yeah, sure. We'll get right on that."
Also as CRKrueger says, the base mode of play is that there is a GM/Ref/what have you, but players have a lot of control of scenes. There're some optional rules to cut that part out and have a more traditional feel, but the system is so light it amounts to "Don't let players use Plot Points to insert narration."
A good portion of the book is taken up by sample characters. Sample characters that are all fucked up and wrong and don't follow the system. I have no idea if they fixed them, but last I heard...there were no plans to. Granted that was months ago.
ALL rolls are opposed. Which irks some people because this was supposed to speed things up. I don't have an issue with it.
There's little delineation on how Amps (special powers) interact with Gear and vice versa. It seems like the intent was to have Amps just be things that give bonus dice (other than the Amps you need to spend to Awaken); but that's not explained anywhere and I'm probably reading into it. A lot of gear stats that I would consider necessary are missing (mostly in the vehicle/drones area) and you'll have to come up with it on your own.
The tl;dr is...it's a mess. You're better off kludging something together with FATE (If you want some of that Narrativium) or Savage Worlds (If you don't) if you want something lighter.
Last I heard there's still a crapton of errors and the example characters still aren't legal.
With Stat, Skill and Bonus dicepool, I wonder how close the New Top Secret is to SR:A.
Quote from: Biscuitician;973062Has anyone played this?
I love the idea of Shadowrun and would love to buy into it but my god the rules the RULES!
There are at least 3 implementations of Shadowrun using Leverage out there. I'm a fan of the one from BlackWingHeaven aka Jeremy Puckett, but the other ones seem quite serviceable. Cortex Hackers guide, or if you are in on it, Cortex Prime would do it up easy peasy.
I've started hacking together rules using Mythras, but they are pretty alpha, not playtested, and not complete. Still, it makes a fine chassis. Use animism to handle netrunning if you want. Mysticism for Adepts. Sorcery or Theism for shamans and such. Firearms rules in a free supplement. Use the sorcery stat augmentation spells for cyberwear.
The narrative variant of the rules didn't really seem to fit IMO. I think you'd be way better off with something like The Sixth World (Shadowrun hack for Apocalypse World).
As a stripped down Shadowrun, I think it could work well. Fewer abilities and skills, simplified rules. I could definitely see myself running this for a Shadowrun game. Hacking, for instance, is much simpler.
As mentioned above, they did a bunch of last minute rules tweaks, but never got around to editing the sample characters. So 1/3 of the book or so is made up of sample characters built on old rules. That said, they're all completely usable, just not created by the rules as written. If you printed them out and gave them to your PCs for a one-shot game, I don't think anyone would notice.
Jesus. What the fuck happened to Shadowrun?! Those mormons sure fucked that game up forever...