Shadowrun 4th edition: Love and Hate
I used to play Shadowrun back in highschool, quite a bit actually. Fun game; it was the first real successful RPG that mixed high tech and magic into one interesting alternate-earth type setting. Good stuff. We geeked out with second edition, mostly.
Fast forward about a decade and change, and a bunch of friends of mine have shown some interest in Shadowrun 4th edition. So I figure, what the hell, let's take a look. I recall spending a little time going over 3rd edition, although not actually playing. 3rd didn't seem all that different from its predecessor, except that it was put together by a totally different company than the old FASA crew. As a side note, I had thought FASA went out of business, but it turns out they just decided to license out their I.P. and stop making their own materials.
Anyway, back on 4th edition: It's a pretty big overhaul from the previous editions, including a new rolling mechanic and a bunch of other changes. Mostly good; so far the system seems pretty solid and playable and even fun.
But at the same time, it pisses me off. Because a lot of the changes they made for 4th edition are what I'd set up for my own indie game system. A lot. On the one hand, it's cool that someone else had similar ideas to mine. I think that means that some of my concepts don't suck. On the other hand, putting my system out now would probably just garner cries of "LOL look at this n00b copying shadowrun stuff."
Not that I'm anywhere near releasing a damn thing; as I've whined about before, I never finish any of my projects.
Still, I'm happy and annoyed at SR 4th at the same time. It's good enough that I'm probably going to give a game a shot and see how it goes. So what the hell, I'll not be bitter and give them a free plug and say: hurry up with a rigger book and a bestiary, god damnit.
Comments
Do you still need 40,000 d6
Do you still need 40,000 d6 to play? That was my biggest gripe with the game. I preferred Cyberpunk; 1 d10 and one d6 and you were good to go.
I completely sympathize, btw. I never finished any of my personal gaming systems either. :(
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CyberLizard
http://cyberlizard.com
Not as bad as it was
There's still a bit of the 'buckets O' Dice' thing going on, but it's not as bad. You can cash in dice for automatic successes; 4 dice for one auto-success, and then roll whatever is left if you want. The average die roll succeeds 1/3 of the time, so it's not quite as good as an average roll, but it's guaranteed and it can cut down on senseless rolling.
The best thing it did was remove that annoying reroll and add on a 6 nonsense. It makes even a large pool of dice tolerable to roll.
To be honest, I wind up rolling more dice in D&D playing a sorcerer who likes teh fireballs. :P
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