Hey, I made this big, elaborate cheat sheet for Shadowrun.

Hey, I made this big, elaborate cheat sheet for Shadowrun.

Hey, I made this big, elaborate cheat sheet for Shadowrun. Because you know, Shadowrun is probably the most mechanically-complex game in the hobby right now that isn’t an actual miniatures game. 

It took all of five minutes before I got a response: have you checked out the Apocalypse World hack of it?!?!?

Here is what I said to him (and, good sir, if you’re the one who asked me that, no offense. I posted a really long, meandering answer that is so weird I should share it with the general public.

 

I’ve looked at it, it is indeed very impressive! My problem, though…the same as my problem with the Fare Core hack, and the Cortex hack, and even the d20 hack….is that I sincrerly, truly believe that the mechanics are a part of the world that is Shadowrun. Especially if you’ve played it since the start. Those piles of six-sided dice on the table. The constant pouring over source material, hoping you’ll find a heretofore unknown +1 dice pool modifier, a single die that could make the difference between dropping that sniper at 200 meters before he does it to your mage!

Now, I again, I frickin’ love PbtA games. The first hack I ever wrote was a zombie apocalypse hack of Dungeon World. I get that game. And you know what I get about it? I get that gear does not friggin’ matter at all!!!! It’s all about story, man! Well, Shadowrun is different. Part of what makes Shadowrun different and unique, and that world so fucking COOL…is that all that gear? It does mean something! It’s that there’s a table of guns all of them can be pistols, all of them could have subtle variations in a wide array of statistics…accuracy, armor penetration, damage, effective range, clip size, firing modes…and that players, totally in theri roleplaying place, can say “I like THIS gun becuse it does MAWR damage!” While the assassin sidles up and goes “I’ll take the accuracy gun. Who needs a bullet to do damage?”

SEE?!?! That’s just a microscopic example of why the mechanics…all the fuckin’ crunch, all those goddam numbers…is such an important part of Shadowrun’s setting. You hack all this into Apocalypse World, or Fate Core? You’ll get a great cyberpunk-themed game….but it ain’t Shadowrun. The only way you get to play Shadowrun is to play Shadowrun.

So what I’m taking from Apocalypse World are not its mechanics. I’m taking its radical approach to rules writing, where the reader is directly addresses, and directly told what to do, when to do it, and how it’s done. Because Shadowrun does that too. But it doesn’t have the voice to make it as intuitive as it should be. So here is my meager, humble attempt at colliding two awesome worlds!

5 thoughts on “Hey, I made this big, elaborate cheat sheet for Shadowrun.”

  1. Ed Gibbs​ I see your point, and I only disagree with you a little. I love Shadowrun (sadly haven’t been able to play it nearly as much as I would like). The gear is very important to the game.

    Recently I played a playtest of the Fate Core version of Interface Zero. OMG I loved it. It really scratched that Shadowrun itch. Tech, equipment, and cyberware are very important. Don Bisdorf​ one of the writers narrator ran it.

    I am so looking forward to the Kickstarter.

    This is only my opinion, which does nothing to discredit your opinion.

  2. Darn rights. I was just about to misquote Meguey Baker without attribution since I have no idea where the source posts are, and since it came up recently on a design thread elsewhere… but then here she is on the thread already, so I’ll just paraphrase 🙂

    > PbtA isn’t specifically 2d6+stat piped into degrees of success, it’s also the design sensibilities of Moves instead of permissions, of player-facing a whole bunch of the game, of the whole sort of general aesthetic mish-mash.

    I really like that When you X, Y is becoming a common way of expressing rules, even in games that don’t try to operate like AW and its close cousins. I saw D&D5E somewhere written up like that, and it was magical – I could have figured out how to run that game easily, with so much less assumed knowledge.

    (Anyway, was your Shadowrun-by-way-of-AW game The Sprawl? I’ve had a chance to play that and it scratched my itch pretty well, but I’ve also never been able to play SR.)

  3. I love the enthusiasm and I get that the crunchy gear tables and action modifiers are an integral part of your Shadowrun experience, but I would pay cash money for a game that abstracted the best elements of the setting and tone and left the gear behind.

  4. John Perich That is a completely valid and acceptable preference. For your needs I’d most-enthusiastically recommend Interface Zero, a Savage Worlds setting. My second vote would go to Nova Praxis, available in Fate or Savage Worlds versions. Both are excellent “modern” sci-fi settings that soften the hard lines drawn by Shadowrun.

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