Runner's Companion was Terrible

Lago PARANOIA · Post by **Lago PARANOIA** » Sun Sep 11, 2011 5:14 am

If you don't want your players to kill off your plot hooks then how about, oh, rewriting the NPCs so that they aren't actually annoying rather than shoving your shitty writing and ego down the players' tender throats?

Look, I don't actually have a problem in theory with people presenting prettier-and-better-than-you smug bastards who flaunt their right to be an asshole. Bad guys you love to hate are a staple part of fiction and in order for them to achieve maximum hateability they need to be able to back up their smugness to some extent. But it can really quickly reach a point where 'love to hate' transforms into 'just plain hate' and cockblocking readers and PCs from inflicting comeuppance is just you wanking to the plot.

Fuchs · Post by **Fuchs** » Sun Sep 11, 2011 9:02 am

Schwarzkopf wrote:My players absolutely loved interacting with Harlequin because of the way that he was roleplayed; exceedingly charismatic, awe-inspiring, a "force of nature" as someone put it. I doubt they'd have tried to off him, and not just because narrative descriptive detail made it clear that such an attempt would be flagrantly suicidal.

Also the original adventure was structured in such a (good) way that Harlequin being 'better than the PCs at everything" was never an issue; there was never a situation where they were trying to do the same thing as him and could be upstaged, and there was a very good (if slightly arbitrary) reason why he couldn't "just do it himself".

You can and should be exceedingly charismatic and awe-inspiring without being a cheap Elminster knock-off. Once you add "and he's far too personally powerful for you, so don't even think of assassinating him" territory you leave decent DMing and enter DM wanking.

nikita · Post by **nikita** » Sun Sep 11, 2011 9:25 am

I believe that the key to having extremely high powerful NPCs interacting with player characters interacting them is manners.

I have to ask why some immortal elf is so badly house trained that she cannot behave in public? Didn't thousands of years of living in a civilization taught her anything?

Fuchs · Post by **Fuchs** » Sun Sep 11, 2011 9:29 am

First rule of Shadowrun GMing is: If it interacts with the runners it's expendable.

Count Arioch the 28th · Sun Sep 11, 2011 11:57 am

I tell all my players the same thing when I play campaign settings: If you run into a canon NPC, I not only am okay with you killing them, I expect you to. I've played in enough game where there was a canon, untouchable NPC and I hate it.

ishy · Post by **ishy** » Sun Sep 11, 2011 2:55 pm

If I don't want my pcs to kill an npc I also like to sometimes make him/her/it pretty weak and just give it protection from for example a powerful mage guild. So if they just try to kill they will suffer, but if they really want to, they have to first sever his/her/its connections. Which can turn into an interesting story (or at least side story) on its own.

Wesley Street · Post by **Wesley Street** » Sun Sep 11, 2011 8:17 pm

Don't want players to harm your NPC? Don't give them reason to.

Aryxbez · Post by **Aryxbez** » Fri Mar 30, 2012 6:50 pm

So, what could be done to make all of those racial options viable? Yes, I'm including the hard stuff like Drakes, sentient AI, Centaurs and Shapeshifters. Especially would want Cyborgs viable as well, unless they're already workable. I'm of thought that almost anything should be an option, provided it's workable in some way.

Also since I recall reading of how a mage of less BP, could actually be made "better" than a Drake so should its cost be based on something like that or SURGE (whichevers cheaper)?

Like in D&D, Vargouilles, not so much, due to lack of basic physical manipulation to interact with the game, however at least a Beholder has telekinesis for all that, and so forth.

Stahlseele · Post by **Stahlseele** » Fri Mar 30, 2012 9:34 pm

These metatypes rely purely on the given setting . .

Cyborgs would be PERFECT to go into Chicago for example.
Or into the Australian Outback. Or the SOX.

Centaurs and Naga would be more at home in wooden territories, where their bodies are not such a problem and might actually give them an edge too . .

Sentient AI's basically need a way to interact with the real world. Probably one of these metahuman looking drones or something with an built in holo-projector maybe . . Well, if they want to really interact with metahumans on such a scale at least . .

While we are at scales: Drakes . . are only a real Problem because of the Great Dragons hunting them or them working for a Great Dragon . .
Depends entirely on which dragon you are working for in the latter case.

Shifters should not be too much of a problem usually. Well, at least the quadruped ones. All bets are off once you go for something more exotic.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Sat Mar 31, 2012 6:40 am

Runner's Companion is an example of a book where basically every part of it is wrong, and if you want to fix any part of it you have to fix several parts to fit together into a working whole that would at least support that part.

The metatype variants have insane point costs. Also they are now based on the Surge Qualities, which are not only costed by a crazy person (and wildly differently from the costing of the variant metatypes), but also have effects that appear to have been generated procedurally by Dwarf Fortress.

For starters, you could go through all the metavariants and give them prices that were not "completely insane". Right now an Ogre gets a flavorful (sorry) but not especially meaningful digestion ability and costs zero points. An Oni gets a mild "striking skin pigmentation" disadvantage for which they pay 5 points. Yes: the near meaningless advantage is free, but if you want the near meaningless drawback, that costs points. What. The. Fuck.

But you'd also need to rationalize the point costs on those special qualities. All of them cost multiples of 5 (or are negative qualities that provide you with a multiple of 5 points), and that's basically crazy. Most of them are "you look distinctive to one degree or another", and "being distinctive" is collectively a 5 point negative quality. And then you pay points for have a completely useless elephant nose, but having an almost useless third eye is a drawback. Again... huh?

And the qualities themselves are batshit. Many, hell most of them should not be in the book or should have completely different effects from what they are listed with. Why doesn't the ability to eat sawdust lower your lifestyle costs? Why are big teeth statted as a fucking weapon (and even if they are, why are they 10 freaking points)?

And the qualities given to each of the metavariants are straight from bizarro land. Fomori are smaller than normal trolls and considered more handsome. That is why they have higher racial Body score limits. Wait... what? Even if the rules for costs made any fucking sense at all, the actual qualities assigned to any metatype variant are pretty much indefensible in about half the cases.

Nuke it from orbit. Start over from scratch. Runner's Companion can at best be used as a place holder template to remind you of what you want to make rules for. But even then they fall down on the job tremendously, going on at length about pirate families and similar garbage and leaving out playable Mantis spirits.

-Username17

Ancient History · Post by **Ancient History** » Sat Mar 31, 2012 12:50 pm

Hell, I wrote a good chunk of it and I admit it's crap.

kzt · Post by **kzt** » Sat Mar 31, 2012 9:20 pm

Ancient History wrote:Hell, I wrote a good chunk of it and I admit it's crap.

How did it end up so awful?

Ancient History · Post by **Ancient History** » Sat Mar 31, 2012 10:45 pm

Lack of communication, lack of proofing, general dumbassery, including on my part. Basically, there we nobody good with rules checking to see if the different rulesets in the book made sense individually or worked with each other - and while several of the freelancers typically looked over each other's stuff and offered comments, corrections, etc., that didn't happen. I think RC went through when Shadowrun was basically without a line dev and Randall Bills was more or less in direct charge, but I may be misremembering. Anyway, that's how a lot of stuff got passed to print, but doesn't explain conception.

Like, the KarmaGen rules are borked because 1) they use too much Karma and 2) as written, races cost nothing. 1) Happened in part because RC was being written in between SR4 and SR4A, when attributes went from x3 to x5; 2) happened because I had this idea that the increased cost of attributes more or less evened out - it was a nice idea, but kind of silly and everyone jumped me on it. I admit I did a lot of stuff in RC because the alternative was letting Aaron do it, and I had no faith in Aaron's ability to do rules. So the fact that I fucked up the rules makes me a jerk and a hypocrite.

I mean, the fiction in the book is fine. Brief as hell, but Infected, Sapient Critters, etc. all have workable fluff. But I wish I'd had more playtesting and a stronger editorial pimp-slap on my mechanics, because some real bad stuff got through on my end. Huge costs for Infected et al., Ghoul-Armageddon, and terrible use and abuse of the disease rules in general. Some of them are honest fuckups (Contact vector for ghouls should be Injected), some of them are bad concept (I should have let people buy Infected powers individually rather than saddle them with 400-point Karma debts, fuck this cost-of-quality shit), but the end result is: I fucked up. Other people on the book fucked up in their own ways, too, so the whole thing is a wash. Seriously, before War! came out, RC was widely considered by freelancers to be the worst book we'd ever put out.

What makes it worse (ha) is of course that by the time Running Wild runs around, I'm busy as shit on everything else and other people like Patrick and Aaron are doing the rules and fluff - and while they are wonderful people that write well, we see completely differently on some things. So some of their stuff doesn't agree with my stuff, and the result is not so much that their rules or fluff are worse (except for Aaron and his fucking astral combat nonsense), but they don't quite jive with what I was doing - which is half the fucking point of having a shared setting, trying to get stuff to work together. If you do something in one book to fix some godawful mess started 20 years ago, you don't want some other writer to immediately go behind you in the next book and "fix" it, particularly if their way of fixing it brings it back to how it was to begin with - which, if you have no idea what I'm talking about (and why would you?) is the whole Infected/multiple viruses nonsense. Don't get Frank started on that, we don't have enough mead.

And then, there is the art. This is a book where we literally begged and pleaded to use old art, because the new art they bought was so completely and utterly crap. The Infected, the metavariants, everything except the bizarre cheesecake cover. The worst is this one troll or something that looks to be wearing a diaper on their head. It is ridiculous, amateurish, horrible - and somebody got paid for that. Somebody got paid more for that than I did for the writing of it, probably. Fucking artists, man.

UmaroVI · Post by **UmaroVI** » Sun Apr 01, 2012 9:26 pm

Ancient History wrote:(except for Aaron and his fucking astral combat nonsense)

Something of a tangent, but what are you referring too, exactly?

Ancient History · Post by **Ancient History** » Sun Apr 01, 2012 9:58 pm

Running Wild, Aaron wrote the rules so that a dual-natured creature in astral combat didn't actually have to move to hit something in astral space - which was retarded - and I think there were some things on astral perception that were whack too. It has been some little while, so I don't remember all the details, but we used to get in fights about that shit.

Blade · Post by **Blade** » Mon Apr 02, 2012 8:56 am

Runner Companion is the kind of book that everyone agrees has badly balanced rules, but since it allows people to do more powerful characters, most players use it anyway. It's a bit sad.

As for fixing racial options, there's not just the problem of rules: once you start playing "Magical Centaur and his AI friend" you're not really playing Shadowrun anymore. Metavariants are still ok, but while other sapient races exist, having one in your game can greatly change the feel of the game.

Fuchs · Post by **Fuchs** » Mon Apr 02, 2012 9:52 am

The effects other sapient races have on a game are not that much different from the effects of the more extreme surge options.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Mon Apr 02, 2012 10:50 am

Blade wrote: As for fixing racial options, there's not just the problem of rules: once you start playing "Magical Centaur and his AI friend" you're not really playing Shadowrun anymore. Metavariants are still ok, but while other sapient races exist, having one in your game can greatly change the feel of the game.

Huh?

I am actually totally at a loss as to any real qualitative difference between "playing a centaur" and "having nonretractable hand razors". Playing freaks who could not possibly blend into a crowd or hold a job at Quiznos has been on the table since the very first core book. What is so special about centaurs that makes the game structurally different?

-Username17

Ancient History · Post by **Ancient History** » Mon Apr 02, 2012 11:04 am

Yeah, aside from some cyberware wonkiness the sapient critter rules actually work. Infected are crap, AIs and spirits basically unplayable, and and SURGE/metavariants is pointless, but centaurs and pixies aren't too ungodly terribad. I mean, at one point early on we were arguing whether magical critters actually died in a background count, but we got around that.

Fuchs · Post by **Fuchs** » Mon Apr 02, 2012 11:18 am

I am more concerned about the surge stupidity. Whoever wrote that one didn't really look into what cyberware can do about all those "drawbacks". If the runner doesn't like his new flashy hair and tail he can simply go and get ir removed/replaced with cyberware.

I generally think SR underplayed the posthuman aspect of all the options in the cyberware selection.

Ancient History · Post by **Ancient History** » Mon Apr 02, 2012 11:39 am

Not all of the writers were up on, or even liked, the posthuman direction under Rob. Some of 'em (read: Bull) want to drag SR back screaming and kicking and bleeding into the 2050s era of pink mohawks and cyberdecks. Which I understand, but can't sympathize with. Change or die and all that.

Blade · Post by **Blade** » Mon Apr 02, 2012 12:59 pm

FrankTrollman wrote:I am actually totally at a loss as to any real qualitative difference between "playing a centaur" and "having nonretractable hand razors". Playing freaks who could not possibly blend into a crowd or hold a job at Quiznos has been on the table since the very first core book. What is so special about centaurs that makes the game structurally different?
-Username17

The "freaks" were still human after all. This is pretty important.
That ambivalence of the outcast who gets implants that makes him non-human but is, at the end of the day, more human than the rest of the society, is a central theme of cyberpunk.
This works with metahumans too. The troll might have been 2.8m tall, have long arms, horns and big noses, but he was still human. The centaur isn't.

Playing an elf, a dwarf, an ork or a troll is playing a modified human. A creature that is at core a human but looks like a fantasy creature. Your race don't define your culture or your behavior. Compared to other games, being an ork doesn't mean you're violent and being a dwarf doesn't mean you love to drink beer.
Playing a centaur is playing a centaur. It's playing a fantasy creature. If you're a centaur, you think like a centaur, you've got the culture and behavior of a centaur, even if humanity can influence this, it's completely different.

As a (meta)human you play someone who's rejected by the society, by his own kin, just because he's born on the wrong side, or because he doesn't fit in the mold. As a centaur, you play someone who's different to start with.

And this gets even more complicated when it comes to AI and free spirits.

Captain_Karzak · Post by **Captain_Karzak** » Tue Apr 03, 2012 12:11 am

Ancient History wrote:Yeah, aside from some cyberware wonkiness the sapient critter rules actually work. Infected are crap, AIs and spirits basically unplayable, and and SURGE/metavariants is pointless, but centaurs and pixies aren't too ungodly terribad. I mean, at one point early on we were arguing whether magical critters actually died in a background count, but we got around that.

I'm having a blast playing a Pixie, so I'm glad you guys added them in.

But what are they, exactly? Frank says they are Earthdawn Windlings, which having glanced at their racial entry in Earthdawn's players handbook, seems like a reasonable deduction. Can you add a final word about this, or supply more detail?

Do they have any relation to the Fey (free) spirits introduced in Running Wild [p. 170]? The pixie's Vanish weakness [p 85] and the Fey's Vanishing power [p. 215] share a lot of the same language, for instance.

Ancient History · Post by **Ancient History** » Tue Apr 03, 2012 12:22 am

Pixies are ED Windlings. Well, technically I think Pixies appeared first in Paranormal Animals of Europe, but basically Pixes are Windlings. Pixies back in PAoE were fae critters, hence Vanish/Vanishing. I have, I think some old monologue on faeries in SR on Dumpshock.

Stahlseele · Post by **Stahlseele** » Tue Apr 03, 2012 9:18 am

i still don't understand why that vanishing is supposed to be a weakness to be honest . . if you take enough damage to vanish, chances are good any other character taking that kind of damage would vanish into red mist . .