A Little Bit of Shadowrun

So sometime back, I promised to look at other games and occasionally do posts on other geeky insights. Let it not be said I'm not a man of my word.

I probed some players, and got some interest in Shadowrun. So I put one on my schedule, and the first game was last night. I didn't have long to gather players (and, as usual, that old jerk work schedules excluded some otherwise interested players), so there were only two: Joseph and Will from Encounters.

Shadowrun isn't as old as D&D, but it is an 80s classic and much beloved. A brief summary of the idea is that it mixes cyberpunk concepts (a future too-near ruled by corrupt corporations filled with cyborgs and direct brain-link hacking) with with fantasy ones (magic, dragons, dwarves, elves, orks, and trolls). If put under a microscope, the setting makes no logical sense (the "Earth" of Shadowrun is called "the Sixth World" in honor of the old Mayan calendar thing), but it is a lot fun. The built-in excuse for a bunch of mercenaries with no real backstory or identity to team up to commit questionable moral acts is in the title: the Shadowrun. In short, Shadowrunners are criminals for hire, and their job is to commit corporate espionage. They get these jobs because they don't have SINs (system identification numbers, the source of identity in the crapsack future), so they're the perfect deniable assets. And because corporations have multiple layers of security: electronic, guards without guns, magical wards, guards with guns, etc., a good team of Shadowrunners includes Street Samurai (warrior types-did I mention this game of from the 80s when everyone thought, incorrectly, Japan was going to economically conquer the world. It mostly remains due to tradition and the fact that many gamers are Japanophiles) to kill the guards with guns, a decker (brain-to-computer hacker) to get past the electronic security, a hermetic mage or shaman (mages focus of spell-slinging, and shamans are better at dealing with spirits) to deal with the magic, a face to talk to the guards without guns, and a rigger (brain-to-vehicle hacker) to drive the get away van.

Needless to say, technology and history marching on have not been kind to Shadowrun's timeline. In the 90s they did a storyline where Dunkelzahn, one of those newly returned dragons, ran for president and won (I'm pretty sure a certain orange-haired man would have asked to see THAT birth certificate), 2012 has come and gone with no goblinaztion (where normal people "turn into" orks and trolls) and no resurgence of magic, and since the 80s first the internet then the advent of wi-fi revolutionized computing. And unlike the un-history of Paranoia, Shadowrun's lore is deep and broad enough that its almost impossible to ret-con away like a failed comic book plot-line. The history muddles along, reading more like an alternate time line now than a future too near scenario.

Power and option creep have also set in. The fifth edition book has technomancers (magic brain hackers), adepts (use magic to enhance their physical abilities as an alternative to the cybered-up street samurai), and drones (riggers can use these remote control buddies to participate in the run from the safety of the getaway van). Plus it has new rules for wireless networking to make your hacker even more crazy useful. Fifth edition is almost 500 pages-and its to hold all those damn options and the spot rules for them. I'm not against options (let the players do what they want is something most DMs will cringe at, but I want the players to have FUN, dammit), but its a LOT of game to learn. So I was doomed to be a little unprepared.

At its heart, Shadowrun is simple enough. It uses an individuated (read each die separately for a "success") dice pool of d6s. Previous editions used moving target numbers and "exploding" dice (you can re-roll a six and add the re-roll for a higher result), but starting in 4th edition the designers followed White Wolf's lead and set a flat target number. In 1st through 3rd edition, Skill and Attribute were separate dice pools, and it was more difficult to raise a Skill over its linked Attribute (similar to Savage Worlds). Starting in 4th, the dice pool is the Skill + the Attribute (again, following White Wolf's lead). This means dice pools can get huge. The biggest pool from our first night was 11 dice. In SR4, this meant it was more efficient to raise your dice pools by buying up skills. SR5 introduced a concept called "Limits," which cap your successes and are based off of your Attributes and (mainly for attacks) your equipment. This provides incentive to raise the much more expensive attributes. Plus, the Social limit factor's in your character's Essence (the "soul" Attribute, previously reserved to be eaten by cybernetics), so if you want to deal with people, you have an incentive to avoid cybering up.

Since character creation in Shadowrun is a weekend killing endeavor even with players familiar with it (So. Many. Options.), I had Joseph and Will grab pre-gens out of the book and put the stats onto blank character sheets. In the grand tradition of pre-gens, they're not very well put together, but they're playable. Joseph picked a Drone Rigger he named Hector and Will picked a Street Samurai he named Jan (pronounced "Yan"). Both of these templates are orks, victims of rather a lot of prejudice in the Shadowrun world (tusks and an underbite, coupled with being bigger and broader-think "the big dumb guy" stereotype-than humans, are the main reason for this).

So they were down a face, a dedicated hacker (riggers can do some hacking), and any magic support. But damn were they good at murder. I knew we were all unfamiliar with the rules, so I ran a quick-start adventure from Free RPG Day. It's not complex-a corporate suit hires the runners to find his missing son. There were a few hiccups. The adventure was meant to work with pre-gens provided in the booklet, which are overall weaker than the core book's pre-gens, but have a few bits specifically geared toward the adventure. Still, lacking any social skills or proper investigation skills, they muddled through the first bit, mostly by being savvy players. Using tried and true knowledge of kidnapping (its usually someone the victim knows, etc.), they did some investigation. Of course, half the point is that it wasn't a normal kidnapping. The kid kept his backpack, but not any school books, plus (not spelled out in the adventure text proper, but I figured would be the case anyway), he took his jacket and coat and hygiene supplies. They did find that his computer and the security footage from the gated community he lived in had been thoroughly date wiped. After coming up empty on relative and acquaintances, they did some Matrix (because we won't be calling it the Internet in 60 years, apparently-like I said, lore too broad and deep to ret-con away) searching and hit up their "Fixer" (a contact responsible to putting Shadowrunners in contact with employers), they learned that a group of rookie hunters had taken a child to the docks for a hand off.

The found the warehouse complex, and cased the joint. Two mafiosi-looking goons, and some others in the nearby buildings (thermographic vision is useful, isn't it?) What they did next demonstrated why players and vehicles are a volatile mix. First, a side story.

Some years ago I ran a Vampire the Requiem game meant to show off the World of Darkness's fairly robust chase mechanics. The PCs had their Scooby Van (it's always a Scooby Van, mainly because vans are very good for hauling around a large group of people and all their crap around fairly efficiently), when two vamps drove up behind them on motorcycles with Tek-9s. Instead of just having the driver gun it while the passengers shot back, two of the PCs pulled a Matrix 2, and jumped out of the back of the van and onto the on-coming motorcycles to fight the enemy vamps. I know WoD isn't meant to be a cinematic game, but I have a weakness for cinematic moments, so I let them roll to see what happened. It ended being just. So. AWESOME! One landed on the bike perfectly and shoved the other vamp off. The other just kind of ran into the bike, causing it to crash, stranding him and the other vamp, where they proceeded to duke it out. The point of the story is that players and vehicles are a volatile combination. See characters, in a sense, aren't flesh and blood people but a sheet full of numbers that interact with the game world. So why should they behave like a flesh and blood person would? (Don't answer that-its rhetorical.)

So rather than hack the gates or cut the barb wire fences, Hector drove his Scooby SUV (mostly filled with just all the drones ever-priority A Resources at character generation is a lot of money, so you end buying things you do not logically even need) through the gate a tried to run over the goons. In the meantime, Jan jumped out and rolled on the pavement to get to the back door of the building with the kid in it. Like I said, players and vehicles are a volatile combination.

Hector failed to run over the goons, but when he opened the back of his SUV, he let loose all the drones ever equipped with just stupid ridiculous weapons. He was just trying to pin the goons with suppressing fire, but ended up murdering the shit out of them instead.

In the meantime, Jan kicked in the back door, because picking locks is for pussies. He then waited to ambush the two individuals in the building. One of them, a rookie ork Shadowrunner named Hardhat, emerged into the corridor, Jan threw a grenade down. I am, without a doubt, 100% certain I did the grenade rules wrong. Hardhat was still up after the blast (barely). His magic support, an elf mage named Caduceus, came out to failed to hit Yan with a Powerbolt, a basic damage dealing attack spell. I know I fudged the rules on spell casting at this time, too. But I went in knowing I was woefully under-prepared (we all were, really) so we're all on a learning curve for this one.

Initiative is complicated in Shadowrun. If your Initiative is over 10, you can act multiple times in a turn (3 seconds of game time) on different initiative passes. Its complicated, but easy enough to explain, anyway. Jan's next initiative pass was to spray the corridor containing Hardhat and Caduceus with his SMGs (one a hand-held, the other built into his cyberarm). These rules are also complicated. After going through the combat rules, I THINK we got it right (his dice pool takes a penalty, but the defender's defensive dice pool takes a hit, too, and his attack can apply to multiple targets). Even if we got it wrong, I might house-rule this to reduce the amount of dice rolling. Dice rolling is (almost) always the biggest slow down in combat. He shot Hardhat unconscious and killed Caduceus outright.

That taken care of, he went for the kid, Byron Strickland. The boy clearly was suffering from some sort of dissociative personality. In true Shadowrunner fashion, Jan didn't care. He just wanted to get the kid home and get paid. But he did give the kid a cookie.

They got the kid home, got paid, and got a too buggy to use piece of software the dad's team had been working on.

Overall, an inauspicious, but murder-filled start. And there's enough awesome there that I think the learning curve will be worth it.

In review, the rules are pretty simple in the overall, but start to get complex on a zoom in. Shadowrun's combat rules are particularly complicated. Some of it is legacy. FASA, the original creators, was started by a bunch of retired military buddies. Their flagship tabletop product was Battletech, a now classic game of big stompy robots blasting each other with lasers. However, their first RPG was a license of Star Trek that was, surprisingly enough considering the company's background but perfectly understandable given the source material, focused away from combat.