Friday, January 14, 2005
Shadowrun, Part Trois!
The comments regarding my last Shadowrun post are getting a bit long, and the personal shots are starting to come out. You just gotta love my friends, eh? ;)
And yeah, I know who TBO is, but I won't out him here. :P I will admit that I didn't know originally who it was. I had guessed correctly, but then I convinced myself I was wrong ... and that it really was some stranger who reads my blog. I should've known better.
With all the trashing of Shadowrun's mechanics, you'd think my opinion of the game is very low. However, that's not really the case. Like I wrote in my original post, the concept of the game is great (one of my favourites, in fact), but the system never sat well with me. Of course, I can also only talk about the second edition version of the game, as I'm not really familiar with too many of the changes in the third edition.
So it's probably about time I actually explained some of the mechanical things that I don't like about Shadowrun. The first thing that always makes a game more complicated is when it requires multiple dice just to figure out the simple question of "do I hit him or not?" In a game where combat isn't the focus, such as Vampire: The Masquerade, this isn't really a problem, but in a combat-heavy game like Shadowrun, the quicker you can resolve to-hit rolls, the better.
In fact, combat in Shadowrun is like a more mechanically advanced version of what is found Vampire (actually, I guess it's probably the other way around -- Vampire is a less mechanically advanced version of Shadowrun, seeing as Shadowrun is older than Vampire by a couple of years). You take your dice pools, throw them on the table and start counting successes. Of course, with Shadowrun, if you roll a six (it's based on six-sided dice), you reroll the die and add the new result to the six. If you have a difficulty target number that's higher than six, you might very well need those extra points. Vampire doesn't have any such rule, but Vampire uses a botch mechanic, wherein if you roll a one (the game is based on d10s), it cancels out a success. In the end, though, Vampire isn't about combat and Shadowrun ... well, it wouldn't be Shadowrun without exchanging some lead with NPCs.
In the few games of Shadowrun I've been involved in, I don't remember combat ever going quickly. There's a lot of rolling. It's a very nitty-gritty system in that respect. And that's just fine if that's the way you like your combat. Dungeons & Dragons, on the other hand, uses a single d20 roll to see if you hit. Then you calculate damage. It's somewhat quicker, which ends up working for me. I don't think combat encounters are the highlights of roleplaying game sessions, and when combat is going on, I like the mechanical aspect of it to go by as quickly as possible, leaving me to give details on what happens.
As with Shadowrun, D&D's combat complexity starts to factor in when you start dealing with combat maneuvers and tactics -- surprise rounds, called shots, flanking, charging, assisting, tripping, disarming, attacking multiple times, shooting blind, etc., etc., etc. In this case, both of the systems are needlessly complicated, and trying to recite from memory what the penalty is to a called shot to the head is just a pain in the ass. I might as well be playing a war game if all I'm doing is memorizing and regurgitating combat rules.
So what's the message here? Games suck. Or something like that. Frankly, this is now just too long and it's time to click "publish."
And yeah, I know who TBO is, but I won't out him here. :P I will admit that I didn't know originally who it was. I had guessed correctly, but then I convinced myself I was wrong ... and that it really was some stranger who reads my blog. I should've known better.
With all the trashing of Shadowrun's mechanics, you'd think my opinion of the game is very low. However, that's not really the case. Like I wrote in my original post, the concept of the game is great (one of my favourites, in fact), but the system never sat well with me. Of course, I can also only talk about the second edition version of the game, as I'm not really familiar with too many of the changes in the third edition.
So it's probably about time I actually explained some of the mechanical things that I don't like about Shadowrun. The first thing that always makes a game more complicated is when it requires multiple dice just to figure out the simple question of "do I hit him or not?" In a game where combat isn't the focus, such as Vampire: The Masquerade, this isn't really a problem, but in a combat-heavy game like Shadowrun, the quicker you can resolve to-hit rolls, the better.
In fact, combat in Shadowrun is like a more mechanically advanced version of what is found Vampire (actually, I guess it's probably the other way around -- Vampire is a less mechanically advanced version of Shadowrun, seeing as Shadowrun is older than Vampire by a couple of years). You take your dice pools, throw them on the table and start counting successes. Of course, with Shadowrun, if you roll a six (it's based on six-sided dice), you reroll the die and add the new result to the six. If you have a difficulty target number that's higher than six, you might very well need those extra points. Vampire doesn't have any such rule, but Vampire uses a botch mechanic, wherein if you roll a one (the game is based on d10s), it cancels out a success. In the end, though, Vampire isn't about combat and Shadowrun ... well, it wouldn't be Shadowrun without exchanging some lead with NPCs.
In the few games of Shadowrun I've been involved in, I don't remember combat ever going quickly. There's a lot of rolling. It's a very nitty-gritty system in that respect. And that's just fine if that's the way you like your combat. Dungeons & Dragons, on the other hand, uses a single d20 roll to see if you hit. Then you calculate damage. It's somewhat quicker, which ends up working for me. I don't think combat encounters are the highlights of roleplaying game sessions, and when combat is going on, I like the mechanical aspect of it to go by as quickly as possible, leaving me to give details on what happens.
As with Shadowrun, D&D's combat complexity starts to factor in when you start dealing with combat maneuvers and tactics -- surprise rounds, called shots, flanking, charging, assisting, tripping, disarming, attacking multiple times, shooting blind, etc., etc., etc. In this case, both of the systems are needlessly complicated, and trying to recite from memory what the penalty is to a called shot to the head is just a pain in the ass. I might as well be playing a war game if all I'm doing is memorizing and regurgitating combat rules.
So what's the message here? Games suck. Or something like that. Frankly, this is now just too long and it's time to click "publish."
// posted by Chris @ 2:08 PM 
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