Almost, but not quite. In SR the Johnson is just whoever is contracting the run, even if you know them or they're even another runner. They also may or may not be a middleman representing someone else. For instance S-K corpos use the title Herr Brackhaus instead of Mr. Johnson and it's known that Lofwyr himself occasionally uses that alias making runs for S-K potentially spicey given you may be breaking one of the cardinal rules, never deal with a dragon.
I hate the trend of every hero needing to be a cosmic chosen one messiah who saves the world. But handing out unceremonious anti-climatic deaths for its own sake is equally goofy.
Not my fault the hill giant rolled a crit and maxed his damage roll. Sometimes shit just happens.
Once that happens a couple of times, players start getting a bit more careful about how much HP they're going into fights with. If a crit can one-shot you, you should have retreated or healed one room back.
I think I was blinded by the :islamic content: that I missed that completely. I was a happier man than I was before reading that, now I think my cold just got worse.
"You wrench out a fake smile every single morning and tell yourself it’s going to be ok, but deep inside you feel the depression creeping up like a weed, ready to crush you under the unbearable weight." Bet they can't look at their reflection without bursting into tears.
These creatures really can't help themselves, another tally on the "retard being incredibly racist in an attempt to be anti-racist."
Huh, was there some big drama with GW in 2018? Could have just not liked playing 8th edition or felt the need to move on.
Based.
I think that's fairly common, or at least most people I know who take to the mini side of the hobby give personality to their minis. Would work quite well in translating to TTRPG for obvious reasons, just make sure that if he writes a back story for his character it isn't a novel's worth.
...I think he might be on the spectrum. No offense, since uh...this is a very autistic type of game, especially these days. I'm seeing a bit of normie behavior here so 5e might be a better choice here than I thought.
Based if true.
Err, so he plays Bolt Action but struggles with the rules or is that a mistype and he struggles with rules more complex than Bolt Action? Again definitely play light rule games as there's nothing worse than overwhelming a new player, it will turn them off no matter how helpful and encouraging you are.
The beginner box might be best, same with BF, not sure about Starfinder or Knave to be honest. Savage Worlds can be good given its ease of use for lack of a better term, good for encouraging the use of imagination, so long as they're physically capable of doing so. A lot of games use the SW system too so if they don't like the setting there's loads to choose from such as Deadlands, RIFTS has a SW edition (don't recommend that for a first game), 12 to Midnight, etc.
Well shit that might be good, again T2K might be "too depressing" (I still think that's silly) for a newcomer so talk to him about it first, especially considering you asked for more "heroic/upbeat" settings (which I completely forgot, mb). Talking to people about what game you want to run, no matter how ignorant of the topic they are, I think is pretty damn important.
Ah, I don't do much with Cyberpunk related things so excuse my ignorance.
On one hand, might be good since he knows at least a little bit about the setting, on the other hand if he left 40K on bad terms it might bring back bad memories, again talk to him about it.
Or better yet, if they can't handle it they can fuck off back to their hug boxes and leave their betters alone. Gotta learn 'em or kick 'em.
When asked, he said it got too expensive. I don't buy it though.
My bad (been making typos a lot recently.
It's more that I'm a bit burned out on the constant grimdark RPG settings. I don't mind a bit of darkness, but when every setting is a hopeless meat grinder, I get sick of it. If I can't answer the question "would I like to live in/go on adventures in this setting", it makes me wonder where the "fantasy" is.
I hear those games are complex, and out of print. Wrath and Glory I heard was bad (from this thread iirc).
I think so too. He has certain ticks/manerisms that I notice on some lesser RPG and wargaming channels. If not tism, it's something.
I see. I'd heard "Mr Johnson" was "Mr Johnson", even if it's a woman. I didn't know about it being a catch all term for anyone contracting a run. I assumed it was the name for the corpo fixer.
Don't. One of the delightful things about Shadowrun is how surprisingly realistic it is. Even though it has elves and orks and dragons, everything is played pretty straight and with plausible consequences. Someone playing a Dragonborn screams that they think it's Anything Goes Fantasy. That's kind of the opposite of Shadowrun. Start with normal stuff. IF you don't like it because somehow that's too boring for you, start bringing in more edge stuff like SURGE, etc. But really, try it as is, first.
That's because it doesn't apply to you. Sandy Peterson thinks your rules interpretations are silly.
2072, in Seattle. That's 4th Ed. starting point and you have excellent background sourcebooks like Seattle 2072, the core supplements like Arsenal and further background books like Corporate Enclaves and Vice. It means there's a lot of background meta-story to catch up on and some surprises like Insect Shamans will have been spoiled unless you mess with the timeline. But on the whole it's your best starting point.
It's good but weak for campaign. Excellent for one-shots. There's a second edition coming out but it's largely a cash-grab and breaks more things than it fixes. Excellent for one-shots because pre-gen characters are almost expected and the rules are relatively quick to learn.
The adventures do bring in a lot of Prometheus and Covenant lore. But that said nothing stops you just keeping it to the original movies material. It has everything you need to do that. And would be fairly easy to adapt Chariots of the Gods to have a traditional Alien rather than what it actually does. The core RPG doesn't "mostly deal with black goo". But the adventure line does. Just write your own, I say.
As an aside there's now an Arkham Horror RPG entry to the line to compete with CoC. It's more Indiana Jones than Wilbur Whately but people can play different styles that's fine. The problem I have with it is it's very revisionist approach to the time period. Want to be a Black woman on an Ivy League scholarship with a her blonde, blue-eyed boyfriend? Well no problem - that's one of the pre-gens. The book tells you to leave out any of the racial or sexual attitudes of the 1920s. Oh, and to tone down the insanity too because Mental Illness isn't something for fun.
I found it fun not to explain Mr. Johnson (or some other terms) and just let players learn from context queues. "Who's the Johnson" or a succession of "My name's Mr. Johnson" all different people. They picked up quickly and it's fun to just introduce the slang dynamically.
The RPG community has a lot of emotionally stunted people in it, and emotionally stunted people often equate "dark and edgy" with being grown up. Whereas most actual grown ups just miss cheerful and inconsequential fun and wish they could have more of it. So there's a tonne of dark settings. Also, the formative years for a lot of games were in the 80s which was rife with this stuff. Even if a game is more modern like Terminator or Aliens, the setting is from the 80s. One of the things I like about Shadowrun is that whilst filled with awful dystopian elements, the tone is wild and free much more than it is doom-laden.
S-K is Saeder-Krupp the
Doesn't surprise me. Fantasy Flight had a CoC themed Battlestar Galactica clone. It was good, cleaning up some of the rough edges of that game. But I never bought it because the characters are complete shit. Like the gangster/muscle role is straight up trans. No subtley at all. His picture is a man in makeup and his back story is just some stunning and brave fanfic.
So, about that...
Sort of.
Well of course you can do what you want and if you simply need advice in how to do that, we can give it. But when you say "expand monsters to include fantasy stuff" I get strong vibes that you're not really familiar with Shadowrun and as a general rule my approach is "if you're going to change something, know what you're changing". A big part of Shadowrun's charm is the realistic approach to its fantastic elements. The metahumans are all awakened versions of humans as human "junk DNA" only became active in a mana-rich environment causing those genes to finally express as the mana levels rise again. Elves and dwarves were born. (And there were "spike babies" who were born before the wider awakening and regarded as having some weird birth defects until the truth emerged). Orcs and goblins went through "goblinization," sometimes as adults, and it was a hugely traumatic and socially disruptive thing. This isn't fantasy races of elves and dwarves with pre-existing cultures and kingdoms. Ditto animals that also in some cases either starting to breed true or goblinize. You got Hellhounds springing from some breeds of dogs for example. I don't know fully what you mean by "expand monsters to include fantasy stuff" but I have visions of you throwing in Beholders or Storm Giants or something. It would trample all over the flavour of Shadowrun. Now you can DO a fantastic creature in Shadowrun if you want, but more probably as a spirit, which can have unusual forms. But even there they tend to follow particular archetypes, like you might have a Fire Spirit manifest as an elemental (if Hermetic) or some efreet (if Islamic). Magic has rules as well. Your mage isn't going to be casting "teleport" for example.
Combat is very well-balanced. Not along the offence-defence aspect but along the character-vs-character aspect. It's not a game where you stand there and beat each other with swords until one of you runs out of hit points first. It's a game where tactics and planning and quick reflexes win the day. But in terms of how it plays, pretty quickly so long as you know the rules. And it covers any standard circumstance that is likely to come up - ranged combat makes sense, movement speeds are fine (so long as you don't allow multiple run actions per initiative which IIRC I had to house rule in because it wasn't spelled out). Vehicle combat, which I know you're interested in, is a natural extension of regular combat. In fact, it's all largely one nicely consistent system.
We can advise on ways of dealing with all of that. Believe me, I've had players try to break my games in every conceivable way. My favourite was when they splurged on magic, semi-cakewalked the mission and then at the end got paid less than they'd spent on completing it. And they knew exactly how much the mission paid, btw. And the Samurai spent about 200 yen on bullets total. The mage spent about 4,000 yen on spirit binding materials (iirc). I think I exaggerate slightly - it was a long time ago, but I think they ended up clearing about 1,000yen for the entire mission which didn't even cover their rent. And it prompted a realisation that the mage player burning through 10x as much money as anybody else so that he could feel super-powerful was not a policy they were willing to continue to fund.
You could run Renraku Arcology as a giant dungeon crawl if you wanted. But it'd be odd. A lot of the usual dungeon tropes would such as "one way in and out" would not apply. The arcology has innumerable VTOL pads, transit stops, elevators, thoroughfares, etc. Not saying you can't do it but if you have the mindset that you're going in level by level you need to keep in mind the players might say "Okay, our target is on the 53rd floor on the West side, we fly a chopper to there, blow out the windows and rapel across" so plan with a Shadowrun mindset in place. Also the system is a bit too realistic in some ways for grind. There's magic and physical healing but it's not "new day, we're healed up and spell slots replenished".
Are you implying the noble Tir's are fake and gay and not true and honest elven/metahuman nations come again
While that's true of the arcology now, it wasn't so much during the actual Lockdown, I can definitely see ways to run the shutdown as a dungeon crawl. Sure SR lacks the easy insta-heals of something like D&D, but the lockdown lasted a couple of years in game before the military was able to bust in and end it, and the facility included medical and manufacturing facilities (hence the fucked up shit Deus was able to do), that would definitely give players the ability to heal/re-arm/potentially even upgrade as they fight their way up, or down, the facility to end it.
Oh, no. Not at all. They're as genuine and authentic as the Native American Nations who are not at all full of LARPing White people making up tribal sounding names. *cough*Ghost Who Walks Inside*cough*
All great ideas for a series of adventures. No disagreement there. My sole point is not that it might not be fun, but that it needs to be approached as a Shadowrun thing both in rules and setting. It's sort of a dungeon setting if you squint. But "we've been here for six months now. The accounting tribe has retaken the 67th floor and supplies of NERPS are running out..." is not a typical Dungeon Crawl adventure. It's different. It's Shadowrun.
Dumb name aside (and frankly I've seen some equally dumb if not dumber indian names IRL) isn't Ghost an actual legit injun, or am I misremembering who he is (he's the gang leader/runner in the OG trilogy right?)
Just don't forget the run-flat tires like a fellow player did. The hobo decker/rigger pimped out their "house" to be a mobile fortress with armor and a concealed gun turret, but forgot to make sure their tires could run after getting some holes in them. Made sense for the character herself though considering she was a bit of a ditz when it came to things that weren't fancy tech.
One of the very favorite ways I had when automotive car chase firefights started to be a thing. Car Wars had rules for that shit. Oh, you thought your enemies were too dumb to shoot out your tires?
In this case it was an ambush with anti-personnel mines. GM's plan was to disable the vehicle and force a gunfight, the player said "Oh hey, I've got armor" and then I went "Uhh... please tell me you remembered the run-flat tires on it, too."
