This explains everything that's wrong with Shadowrun, IMO, even if the tone is a tad exaggerated:

http://lookrobot.co.uk/2013/10/14/ten-things-hate-shadowrun/

Quote from: Shrieking Bansheeand Shadowrun has too much in spades, and also wildly unbalanced

Yep, that's more or less the conclusion of the above article.

Quote from: Itachi;1137803Come on man, this doesn't make sense. Investment is in the eye of the beholder, and has little to do with specific systems. I built my last OSR char by rolling stats randomly concluding it in 30 min and I was completely hooked. I tried building a Shadowrun char in 5E and halfway through I dropped it as I realized the alocated priorities meant the resulting character was nothing like I envisioned it so now I had to redo the whole priority thing. It was an exercise in frustration, not investment.

Oh, don't get me wrong, that priority thing is something that never made much sense to begin with. It restricts you unnecessarily and is also wildly unbalanced.
It's one of the things I'd just take out of SR.
But: It is also optional, we used it once for our sessions and then moved right back to normal point buy because nobody liked it.

 

Quote from: Itachi;1137803My point being: investment has more to do with how each person gets motivated or excited in relation to a given character, and while system may be a factor in this equation, it's far from being the only one, or most important one.

Maybe if you are in it only for the narrative experience.
But if you are in it also for the crunch and the rules, then the system is a major factor.
You could give me the best DM, but if I'm playing 5E, I won't feel any connection to my character because the system doesn't allow me to build anything interesting that would really feel like "mine".

 

Quote from: Itachi;1137803And really? Anyone who played Shadowrun knows it's combat can take hours easily if you have more than a handful participants involved.

And yet, you are talking to someone who played SR for 10+ years without any such problems... seems to me you did it wrong.

 

Quote from: Itachi;1137803Take 2 teams of 5 competent members each going at each other (say, experienced runners vs experienced corp security) and you can expect 2 hours minimum with all the "calculate initiative passes for each participant, calculate dice pools for each participant, calculate situational modifiers for each action.. consulting from a table with dozen ones like dim light, moving attacker, speed of target, weight of your weapon in relation to your strenght, fire mode (burst fire, full auto, single shot, etc), negative modifiers due to damage, etc. and that's just for a single action (of which everyone has two per turn!). Also remembering each rigger's drone and shaman spirit has their own initiative passes and modifiers and damage tracking,... All the while the decker has to keep facing trule procedural nightmares for the most banal of actions like turning off the lights or an alarm! And then everybody roll and calculate initiative again at each new round!

1. Don't manually calculate everything, use tools. Get a laptop, get a phone. Many good tools around for initiative, etc. Nobody forces you to go full analog to draw things out unnecessarily. It's a scifi setting, go with the flow
2. Don't calculate initiative every round. It's completely unnecessary, really. But hey, here you got a point you can easily convince me to streamline. Thumbs up! Didn't even remember you are supposed to do that in SR.
3. Players calculate their own rolls and should have everything in their heads anyway. It takes a few seconds to get the number of dice you have. For experienced players, anyway, of course things take longer if people are new. If you have a bunch of experienced players and combat still takes hours, then I don't know what to tell you. Go back to class?
4. Deckers... yeah, true, but we covered that already.

Quote from: Itachi;1137803And a month from there when it was time to pick up where we let it off everyone dreaded at the possibility of going back to that nightmare of slowness and granularity that was combat, and we preferred to assume it was resolved and start playing in a fresh situation.

Sounds to me like you got a bunch of inexperienced (in the system) players together, maybe even a DM inexperienced in it, and expected it go totally smoothly using a system that has some crunch and calculations.
And then went on to blame the system for your own shortcomings and wrong expectations.
Also, I'd never play in a game that isn't at least bi-weekly. It's just too much time, rips you out too much.

 

Quote from: Itachi;1137803Otherwise it will become the new GURPS and HERO as Rhiannon says above, a game exclusively for grognards with little appeal to young players.

I'm fine with that.
Not everything needs to be streamlined to death in a way to appeal to the apparently ever-shrinking intellectual and attention capabilities of younger players.

I'd rather see SR fizzle out at a high point than try to appeal to an audience that already has more than enough other alternatives.
Better to stick to your core audience and make those happy.
Not that Catalyst would be able to do that, so this is all highly theoretical.

Quote from: VisionStorm;1137806RE: Character Creation. In my experience prolonged character creation is no guarantee for player investment. At the contrary, it's usually an impediment for actual play.

I can't count the number of times I've been having trouble getting a group together, and when we finally do, we spend the ENTIRE session--not just two hours, but 4+ hours between session zero and going through every character option, buying equipment, etc. Then after that everyone is just spent, goes home, and next time we meet half the people can't make it, a handful of people who weren't there that day show up, most aren't even hot about the original campaign concept, setting or game, so we end up rolling new characters and playing something else.

Meanwhile with fast character creation there's no dicking around. You just make a few selections, your character is good, so let's go! You can make your character and play that same day. And unlike your prolonged character you spent hours agonizing over to never play, you have actual experiences with your new character to motivate you to play them again.

What happens after your last adventure? What do you do with all the treasure you found? Do we make it back to town to return the hostages we rescued or is there more trouble on the road back? Etc. Those are the things that bring people back to play in my experience. Not agonizing for hours to make a character they may or may not play.

There are many things wrong here....

Most importantly, you don't create characters in the session, you do it beforehand. In case of inexperienced players, you can do it with the DM, communicate online, obviously - in any case, the final characters have to be signed off by the DM. You don't waste session time for character creation.
In my ~20 years of playing PnP, I have never created a character during a designated PnP session, nor have I seen anyone do that. It honestly sounds insane to me.
Players unwilling to spend that time to create their characters outside of a session are players I'd never want to play with. They have already shown their lack of commitment.
If someone has so little free time as to not being able to spend a few hours over the course of a week or two on char creation, what the heck are they doing with a hobby like PnP?
This is not a hobby for extremely busy people.

If they are just doing it for the narrative experience, okay, but then SR is just not for them.

Also, and maybe this is a cultural thing, but if I agree to join a game, then I will stick with it as long as I can and not quit after a single session if something didn't work out perfectly.
If I agree to join a game known to have more crunch than other systems, I won't quit because "there's too much dice rolling" - wtf, do your research.
Every system has kinks you need to houserule over, and you need to encounter and "suffer" those kinks at least once until you know - and then the next time it will be better.

Quote from: Itachi;1137856Yep, that's more or less the conclusion of the above article.

Its funny because I found the listed examples....Generally not bad. Lots of stuff written is just stuff they seem to not like personally. 'You take penalties for running! Thats not fun!'. Thats just whiny.
The case is if you want uber simple and fun play with so many other systems that exist. I still think Shadowrun has too much stuff in places (The treading water rules are an example), and not enough quickgen GMrules. Also AWFUL editing. Words and words of babble. Mixing fluff and crunch together willy nilly.

I think Shadowruns rules are better then something like Exalted 3e. And that gets played. There is value in knowing your market.

I think Shadowrun needs a tune up, cleaned up wording, some conceptual revisions. But if it wants to be an uber lite who gives a shit system, why even bother since so many exist already?

I think my position and TheSHEEEP 's illustrate the dillema that Shadowrun is facing these days. Old grognards who love the game with all it's 80s quirks x new faces who want something simpler and faster as seen in modern media. I don't think it's an easy situation to solve, because if the pendulum pends to one side it risks alienating the other. Ie: I doubt many modern faces would like the "spend a whole session for chargen" that TheSHEEEP advocates; neither would a grognard like the "create a char in 45min max and start playing" I advocate for.

Shadowrun Anarchy seems to be an answer for the new faces, but as with everything Catalyst it was apparently released incomplete and full of quirks of it's own (Mr. johnsons paying jobs with karma cause there's no Nuyen in game? Wut?). Who knows, maybe in a second edition Anarchy can actually become good.

Quote from: TheSHEEEP;1137866There are many things wrong here....

Most importantly, you don't create characters in the session, you do it beforehand. In case of inexperienced players, you can do it with the DM, communicate online, obviously - in any case, the final characters have to be signed off by the DM. You don't waste session time for character creation.
In my ~20 years of playing PnP, I have never created a character during a designated PnP session, nor have I seen anyone do that. It honestly sounds insane to me.
Players unwilling to spend that time to create their characters outside of a session are players I'd never want to play with. They have already shown their lack of commitment.
If someone has so little free time as to not being able to spend a few hours over the course of a week or two on char creation, what the heck are they doing with a hobby like PnP?
This is not a hobby for extremely busy people.

If they are just doing it for the narrative experience, okay, but then SR is just not for them.

Also, and maybe this is a cultural thing, but if I agree to join a game, then I will stick with it as long as I can and not quit after a single session if something didn't work out perfectly.
If I agree to join a game known to have more crunch than other systems, I won't quit because "there's too much dice rolling" - wtf, do your research.
Every system has kinks you need to houserule over, and you need to encounter and "suffer" those kinks at least once until you know - and then the next time it will be better.

There seems to be many assumptions here...

First, most players don't even have their own books. Maybe they do where you live, but most people I know don't even play RPGs regularly. And the task of actually knowing the rules tends to fall largely on to the GM, at least as far as a significant portion of players are involved. And even when they do know the rules or own some of their own books, there's no guarantee that they'll know a game like a Shadowrun specifically. Usually its just D&D. Back in the day (the 90s) it might have been RIFTS or some other Palladium game as well (which seemed to be more popular where I live than SR). But usually, if I want to play some non-D&D game its just me who owns the books, and I have to explain them to everyone else and let them browse them during session.

So what am I supposed to do? Turn players away cuz they fail to meet to extreme standard that requires them to know the rules and have their own books before they try to join the game? Plus session zero and meeting to roll characters is almost like tradition in RPGs and it helps establish a relation and let me know what players are making and what sort of characters they want to play.

Additionally, most people have other responsibilities or life just happens sometimes. I've had players who joined one session, then their work schedules got shifted the week after and couldn't come again at the agreed time and day, cuz they had to work weekends now. Sometimes its an issue of commitment as well, but I have to work with the players I have, not the players I wish I did. People who play RPGs aren't that common where I live. And turning people away cuz they might not be committed enough and ready to put their lives on hold cuz of a game seems a little extreme. How am I supposed to get new people interested in the game if they have to meet some stringent standard and already know the rules and show up prepared from session 1 for a game they may have never even played?

Quote from: VisionStorm;1137910So what am I supposed to do? Turn players away cuz they fail to meet to extreme standard that requires them to know the rules and have their own books before they try to join the game?

Requiring players to know the rules is an extreme standard? You wanna play the modern-day game, most rules are easily available online through websites or PDFs.
Whats with it for DEMANDING a niche bends the knee to somebody else?
Again I advocate for streamlining myself but I really dislike arguments originating from the place: 'I don't like what you like. Change it for me'. The majority like beer and pretzel games usually about as complicated as checkers or jenga. Should D&D forcing people to the extreme standard of not being inebriated to play?

Quote from: Shrieking Banshee;1137916Requiring players to know the rules is an extreme standard? You wanna play the modern-day game, most rules are easily available online through websites or PDFs.

It is if they've never even played a RPG before or aren't terribly experienced with them. But I suppose I could just reject new players out of hand.

Quote from: Shrieking Banshee;1137916Whats with it for DEMANDING a niche bends the knee to somebody else?
Again I advocate for streamlining myself but I really dislike arguments originating from the place: 'I don't like what you like. Change it for me'. The majority like beer and pretzel games usually about as complicated as checkers or jenga. Should D&D forcing people to the extreme standard of not being inebriated to play?

Where did I argue ANY of this? I was replying to a reply to a post I made regarding character creation speed, not "demanding" that the game be changed.

Quote from: Shrieking Banshee;1137916Requiring players to know the rules is an extreme standard? You wanna play the modern-day game, most rules are easily available online through websites or PDFs.

There's a lot of casual players who don't have interest in knowing the rules past a superficial level. I play in 2 groups, of half a dozen people each, and one has a majority of casual players: people who don't have the time in their adult lives, nor the inclination, to learn complex rules of the kind you spend a whole session just to create a character. They still love the Shadowrun setting (which some met through the videogames) and woud like to continue playing.

What do you propose? That I kick them out for not having a deep knowledge of the rules?

Quote from: VisionStorm;1137920Where did I argue ANY of this? I was replying to a reply to a post I made regarding character creation speed, not "demanding" that the game be changed.

It's like saying 'Your food is terrible and I'm allergic to peanuts. I'm just saying'. It kinda expects a resolution.

Quote from: Itachi;1137931There's a lot of casual gamers who don't have interest in knowing the rules past a superficial level

A while back Shadowrun was a skin-deep shooter for the people who don't have the time in their adult lives, nor the inclination, to learn complex rules of the kind you spend a whole hour just to create a character.

If you wanna make an argument for rolling downhill, I don't really have an argument against it. Just don't complain when what you value is trampled as well.

Quote from: Shrieking Banshee;1137944while back Shadowrun was a skin-deep shooter....

...that had little to do with Shadowrun, so your point is moot.

My group met SR through recent videogames (Deagonfall, Hong Kong) or the old ones (SNES, Genesis), and that's what they expect to engage with.

Quote from: Itachi;1137946...that had little to do with Shadowrun

Don't complain. It was more accessible ergo its better.

Quote from: Shrieking Banshee;1137944It's like saying 'Your food is terrible and I'm allergic to peanuts. I'm just saying'. It kinda expects a resolution.

In my original post I wasn't even talking about Shadowrun specifically, but about prolonged/complex character creation vs quick character creation in general. And also commenting on the idea voiced by TheSHEEEP that complex character creation helps create player investment in their character and the game, under the assumption that if the player had to spend so much time creating their character then obviously they'd want to play it even more (as opposed to them thinking that if creating a character takes 2+ hours minimum then maybe this isn't the game for them, which is something I've heard numerous times, even from people who ultimately end up liking RPGs, but wish character creation was faster).

And even TheSHEEEP himself in that same post I was replying to, while addressing specific concerns that Itachi brought up about SR's character creation, admitted that...

Quote from: TheSHEEEP;1137866Oh, don't get me wrong, that priority thing is something that never made much sense to begin with. It restricts you unnecessarily and is also wildly unbalanced.
It's one of the things I'd just take out of SR.

...So not only are you not addressing the actual point of my post, but you're giving me shit over something even TheSHEEEP himself (who's the defender of SR's status quo here) actually AGREED is an issue. Since that "priority thing" is one of the greatest drags in SR's character creation process.

@Shrieking Banshee,

Reducing people's arguments to absurd levels just to prove one's point won't lead the conversation nowhere.

Go back to 3rd edition, when the original rules were at their peak. Copying White Wolf's system and using d6's instead just stole all the flavor that Shadowrun had. By 6e, the new White Wolf style Shadowrun was actually more complicated than the 3rd edition variation of the rules... despite the attempting being to streamline the system.

Go back, and go back to the feel in particular.

Quote from: Itachi;1137952@Shrieking Banshee,

Reducing people's arguments to absurd levels just to prove one's point won't lead the conversation nowhere.

Dude, that's all he knows how to do.