4th Edition mechanics ported to Shadowrun?!

[The 13 Wise Buttlords]

Could 4th Edition mechanics be ported to support a Shadowrun setting?

Let's face it, the gap between the powerful and the not-so-powerful has become vastly less than in 3rd Edition. A team of 20 15th-level characters stands a reasonable chance against Orcus, who is a demon god. The most powerful poison in the game has a reasonably hard time killing a 1st level character. Rituals by and large suck and don't meaningfully affect the course of events. Magic can't really replace the nuts and bolts that requires society to run. The absolute best you can do with it is shorten the distance between places and feed everyone with it. You can't even run a mine or craft a wagon with magic in 3rd.

So this setting can't support Greyhawk or Mystara or whatever the fuck because being 30th level doesn't really let you do anything relative to the rest of the setting. If you want a damn castle, you still need engineers and artisans and unskilled laborers. You can push around peasants all you want, but if you piss off enough people they'll all be able to talk to the local mob who knows a guy who knows three guys who can call in a strike force to take the sucker out.

So fuck it. It's 21st century Earth and the world of Shadowrun is in full swing. Suddenly the people supposedly in power/having ass-kicking ability jump up to levels relevant to how much political power/ass-kicking ability they actually have.

Does anything really change in the long run?

[Voss]

...
Gah.

Actually, I'd rather do D&D with Shadowrun rules than do the reverse.

No, lets not suck all thats good and interesting out of another game.

[zeruslord]

isn't shadowrun meant to be more of a rocket launcher tag or gritty and deadly situation than 4e's padded sumo setup? Orcus should definitely lose to 20 15th lvl characters, but they shouldn't make it to him, and many of themwill die. He should actually be at significant risk against a single level one with an assault rifle - not that he actually is doomed, but that there is some real chance of him biting the dust, and it adds up.

[Leress]

Short Answer: Fuck No

Long Answer: As Zerus said, padded sumo has no place in shadowrun. 4e has long drawn out battles with dragons. In Shadowrun you run and literally grab a rocket launch and that is still a slim chance of working.

[Jerry]

As Zerus said, padded sumo has no place in shadowrun. 4e has long drawn out battles with dragons. In Shadowrun you run and literally grab a rocket launch and that is still a slim chance of working.

Not to mention that a rocket launcher may not get through reinforced vehicle armor on a tank.

[RandomCasualty2]

Yeah, you probably don't want drawn out battles with guns. It's just not as interesting and often gets pretty stupid. Shadowrun isn't really a heroic game, it's a game where you play tactically efficient and smart.

Keeping it deadly is a good idea to encourage that style of play.

[The 13 Wise Buttlords]

Long Answer: As Zerus said, padded sumo has no place in shadowrun. 4e has long drawn out battles with dragons. In Shadowrun you run and literally grab a rocket launch and that is still a slim chance of working.

Yeah, you probably don't want drawn out battles with guns. It's just not as interesting and often gets pretty stupid. Shadowrun isn't really a heroic game, it's a game where you play tactically efficient and smart.

That's the thing, though, 4th Edition doesn't encourage you to run up with your sword, stack on the damage, and hit things.

I mean, it does, but if you do that and you haven't run out of powers beforehand then you and your party are idiots.

What it does encourage you to do it to whip out a stunlock combo or to freeze enemies in place with invisible knights or to chain layer status effects and hope for the best--though if you have an orb wizard there's not much hope involved. 6 10th level characters will kick the shit out of 3 15th level characters, even though the game and previous editions tell us the exact opposite should happen.

In a strict storybook perspective, this means that Orcus dies after 3 minutes of being beat on rather than 6 seconds. But it doesn't solve the fundamental Scarface problem; no matter how badass you get or how many demon armies you command, a squad of plucky young sociopaths can kill you if they want to and you can't do a damn thing about it other than to put this band through a gauntlet.

I mean, even with these rules it's easier to kill Orcus than to take down Zurich Orbital. If you manage to put Orcus ON Zurich Orbital and your party manages to get onto there, his difficulty doesn't raise all that much.

[RandomCasualty2]

In a strict storybook perspective, this means that Orcus dies after 3 minutes of being beat on rather than 6 seconds. But it doesn't solve the fundamental Scarface problem; no matter how badass you get or how many demon armies you command, a squad of plucky young sociopaths can kill you if they want to and you can't do a damn thing about it other than to put this band through a gauntlet.

What do you even mean by this?

[The 13 Wise Buttlords]

What do you even mean by this?

I'm saying that personal power doesn't buy you political power in 4th Edition.

Well, it does a little bit. Orcus can still raze an entire village of peasants if he goes on a homicidal rampage and barring a hero visiting his parents nothing is going to happen to him. But it's still a dumb move on his part, since the chances of him attracting a force that can kill his punk ass is much higher than it was in 3rd.

Personal power DID buy you political power in 3rd, because levels had breakpoints that made you completely untouchable to people below you. The general idea was that epic-level mages didn't give a shit about non-epic mages, 20th level mages were more or less invincible against 13th level mages, and 13th level mages didn't give a care how much 7th level wizards whined and stamped their feet, and 7th level wizards could oppress peasants with impunity.

This sorting algorithm of power and evil is perfect for feudalism, but it breaks down in 4th Edition due to how saves, perfect defenses, and lockdowns work. After an easily-obtainable point, party size means a lot more than levels. No amount of level 10 characters in 3rd Edition D&D were going to kill the Tarrasque without intentionally breaking the system in half but if you get enough 15th level characters in 4th and they can take it down without much rules finangling.

So. Being huge and badass and Superman doesn't buy you political power, because not even a god can take on an organized society in 4th unless they have an organized society of their own.

And not only can you not just kick everyone's ass you hate in 4th, but you can't just bribe your way to victory either. The best a 30th level character can do with the money and treasure they're supposed to have is feed a city. They can't conjure up water, they can't grow crops, they can't build houses, they can't mine for minerals. 3rd Edition characters could however, so if you got tired of killing your way to the top you could just SimCity your way there.

What I'm saying is... since high level characters don't have much of anything the vast majority of people want and they're by no means completely safe against the armed might of a city then eventually feudalism is going to break down.

Since feudalism breaks down, another system of government and economics is going to have to replace it and I'm wondering whether 4th Edition could support a modern society.

[Amra]

That's actually... a really interesting point that I'd never thought about much before. Not the Shadowrun thing - hellz, I haven't played Shadowrun in 14 years or so - but the "Can D&Dland even exist when its mightiest heroes are so completely lame?" question.

Hmph. It rather puts a dent in some of F&K's beautifully-reasoned Dungeonomicon outline of why D&Dland works the way it does, but doesn't present any useful alternatives. I guess in some ways it represents the real world a lot more closely inasmuch as "being personally hardcore" doesn't get you a kingdom on the grounds that you're seriously not all *that* hardcore when you've gone as far as you can go.

As you suggest, we're looking at a situation where politicking and *influence* are going to be more important in the long run than any power you acquire from class levels. So they've (probably inadvertently) totally come up with a world in which you don't need to explain away the existence of Aristocrats, for instance. Unfortunately, it just ain't high fantasy, which is what D&D is.

Sorry, "was".

Damn.

[RandomCasualty2]

Personal power DID buy you political power in 3rd, because levels had breakpoints that made you completely untouchable to people below you. The general idea was that epic-level mages didn't give a shit about non-epic mages, 20th level mages were more or less invincible against 13th level mages, and 13th level mages didn't give a care how much 7th level wizards whined and stamped their feet, and 7th level wizards could oppress peasants with impunity.

But the problem is that at the same time, this also makes politics irrelevant and that's a bad thing (At least IMO).

Because like you said, you honestly didn't care about people way lower than you, so why you'd ever want to actually bother ruling over them is a constant mystery.

I actually like how in 4E, numbers matter now to some degree. It means that politics is actually something meaningful. Being a king with an army does make you more powerful, As opposed to 3.5 where by the time you got an army, nobody cared about it.

[The 13 Wise Buttlords]

Because like you said, you honestly didn't care about people way lower than you, so why you'd ever want to actually bother ruling over them is a constant mystery.

A lot of explanations have come up, none too convincing. If you're a cleric or someone on the way to divinity then you want a lot of peasants worshipping your god of the week; it makes them more powerful and more able to take on idiots trying to usurp their position.

If you're actually fighting for the forces of good and evil, you want to create conditions that will pump out as many like-minded characters as you can. You might not even be fighting on the side of good or evil, you just might have some weird goal like 'drag kuan-to from obscurity to a new world power' or 'make everyone in the world like carrot cake. EVERYONE.' This actually means using your personal power to buy political power, because a city of 1,000,000 people will spawn more 20th level heroes than a city of 1,000. Your task is to eliminate up-and-comers who will oppose whatever team you are on when they get powerful enough and to defend your spawning grounds against people who want to destroy it.

A lot of characters, but certainly not all, will fall under one of the two categories. They can even combine. When that doesn't happen you get things like demiliches.

But yeah, 3rd Edition not answering this is one of its biggest failings.

But 4th Edition has the opposite problem. Why should low-level characters care about heroes at all? It creates the X-Men problem where the heroes routinely save the world but no one gives a care since Xavier being happy doesn't put food on the table. If Xavier isn't happy and decides to go on a rampage, then a new force of assholes pop up and offer to take him out. On the whole, though, life doesn't really change unless you go REALLY into crazytown. I'm talking past House of M craziness.

So heroic characters of 4th ed live in their own insular world where the only thing that really matters is thrill and violence, because they don't produce nor find anything that can be used by the people at large. The best they can do is get to 20th+ level and load up on family feed bags and try to make a welfare state. But if you're going to go through all of that effort to stabilize society, why not just do something like invent double-column bookkeeping or bureaucracy?

Occasionally death liches come by and torture people because they're sadists but it's really not even a big deal. The death liches kill everyone in the village... so what? If they attack too big of a village/disrupt society then it's almost assured that the hammer is going to come down and kick their ass. In 3rd Edition, you could get away with burning down a metropolis if you were high enough level. 4th Edition characters couldn't get away with burning down a city of 5,000 people in it even if none of the characters in it posed a threat.

[zeruslord]

If you're a 3e (core) paladin, you are required to care, no matter what. For the 4e heroes, people might look at it like we do a sport. Everybody is happy when our team is winning, and we hate it when we lose, but it really doesn't affect our actual lives unless we lose a bet or something. Given enough people sort of caring, the heroes really can feel as heroic as Eli Manning or whoever, but they still don't affect the real shape of the world.

Your kuan-to thing doesn't work, because it's really the characters who are a world power, and kuan-to is just along for the ride. If things go wrong for them, kuan-to collapses entirely, at least until their children are old enough to have levels and real classes. Anybody who has "make kuan-to into a world power" as their personal goal is so fundamentally misguided as to the way the world works that they don't see any reason not to care. Really, unless your goals revolve around some ideology or other or require lip service from enough people, you don't and shouldn't care about ruling people. There are probably some things it makes easier on you, but it doesn't really make a difference when you can burn a single level one spell a day to feed you, and there's a reason we call it the turnip economy. One argument that could be made is that nobody in the setting has really thought this through. In some settings, there is really some hard cap on personal power - there is a limit on level, and no matter what magic items you get, one action really can't do any more for you past a certain point. The problem is that in D&Dland, this point, if it exists, is far enough into epic that you have silly things like golems made of neutron stars. It does explain a Conan-level guy taking over a kingdom. Maybe ruling a kingdom is actually what you need to get anyone to take you seriously in high level politics and diplomacy? One issue with this is that it either doesn't carry over to the planes or they're absolutely loaded with kings, former kings, and once-and-future kings. Not that planar adventuring doesn't get rather silly anyway, of course.

Another thing, pulled from TNE, would be that you really care about the land, and free turnips and level five guards in the castle are just side benefits. A level 20 can tax his people to get a lifetime supply of Kobe beef and he doesn't even care. What he does care about is some sort of power source built into the land itself or something.

One of your suggestions, about controlling the future level twenties of the world, is actually a real reason to rule people. The worry still isn't the actual peasants, it's the retired adventurers who are hardcore enough to have potentially hardcore children. They care about the peasants, because peasants still might actually hurt them, and you care about their kids not growing up hating you. Controlling the peasantry is useful because peasants can provide useful information and save time that you might care about.

Basically noone cares about the peasants per se beyond level ten or so - there is nothing that they can offer you that is cheaper or better than what you can get by slapping an efreet around, and they are no longer a threat at all.

[Username17]

I think it important to note that a high level character in 4e is not as impotent as they might at first seem. Sure, they don't actually do that much damage. A 20th level character uses his ultimate piece of blood magic or his deadly uber combat tactics and he does... like 25 points of frickin damage. I don't even care. This is not only not enough to kill any first level character without a critical, it is not enough to drop many first level characters! It's bullshit.

But let's look at it from the other perspective: imagine how much more bullshit things are when you're fighting some 20th level dude in Warplate? That asshole seriously has an AC of 35. If you don't roll a natural 20, you don't hit. And even then, it's not a critical hit. So if our 20th level dude decided to do something completely retarded like take a short rest while eight motherfuckers were beating on him, he'd expect to get hit in the nuts about 20 times. And in those twenty hits, he'd suffer about 150 damage.

And then he'd be able to use as many healing surges as he wanted and be totally fine. He can literally sit down and meditate on how awesome he is while surrounded by people beating on him for the 50 actual combat rounds it takes for him to get all his powers back, and then use all his powers again. Remember: in 4th edition there are absolutely no consequences for being in combat unless you actually die. And even that only counts as consequences if you are low level or poor.

A high level character can walk in, beat a man to death in broad daylight, and then walk away while the guards try to do something about him until he gets off the screen and zones. We are actually way farther into Iron Age craziness than 3e ever was. A 3rd edition Wizard could bend reality to his will, raise demon armies, slaughter thousands, and turn oceans into mountains; but at the end of the day he seriously had about 90 hit points and if some commoner managed to catch him unprepared with a scythe and coup de grace him, that would be the end of it. We're talking like a DC 42 Fort Save to not immediately croak it. If our guy with a stick caught a high level Wizard sleeping with a scythe, the wizard would wake up with 10 frickin points of damage on him! He wouldn't even bother to spend a healing surge at that point although he could.

---

High level characters in 4th edition are like Jason, Freddy Kreuger or Mike Meyers. They don't have crazy abilities or much impact on the world, but they can and do seriously stalk around killing with total impunity. They are totally implacable and don't care about your slings and arrows at all.

It's a different kind of total impunity. A 3rd edition character can seriously turn into a blur of motion and kill everyone in your castle. A 4th edition character can sit there and actually laugh while the entire castle mobilizes to attempt to stop him and fails. Have I mentioned that our 20th level character can win any game of pursuit or stealth or anything with lower level dudes? Seriously, he doesn't even need training, a high level guy can just run around the corner and hide and the lower level people can't find him even if finding dudes is their actual job. If you're a low level aristocrat and you say something that a high level dude doesn't like, that high level dude will walk up and beat you to death. It will take him like 2 or three rounds to do this, and then he will leave. Your guards will assemble in that time and attack him but they can't do him enough damage to make him care before he escapes. And then he will spend five minutes resting and it will be just like he didn't expend any resources at all and was never injured or attacked by enemies in any way.

-Username17

[JonSetanta]

Speaking of 'blur', how good it Move By Wire for advanced speed-type Shadowrun characters?
Awesome? OK? Shit?

As a whole I'd rather play Shadowrun as Shadowrun rather than adapt 4e D&D rules.
There is a d20 Shadowrun adaptation, but upon reading it I realized there's a lot of uniqueness lost. It's good to get away from D&D sometimes.
As Frank described, the mechanics really do define how an RPG world works.

[Username17]

Move by Wire is a system that is almost completely pointless for a high end speedster. For less Essence and greater plausible deniability you can get the same speed and defense pools by getting the Synaptic Boosters and Synthacardium out of the basic book.

Move by Wire costs less money and has a lower bad-ass threshold for entrance and is therefore a way for thrifty corporations to augment 2nd rate razorboys into people who can go toe to toe with high end street samurai.

-Username17

[JonSetanta]

Thanks a lot.
I was considering it years ago with an SR GM at the time and he pointed out the essence cost, a factor that deterred me immediately.
If speed is a character's schtick, by all means MBW is the shit if they can't afford better; but perhaps it should have provided a bit more at each level for such a massive loss in essence.

Can't play Cyborg Justice that way, you know.

I didn't have room for the metal bones and armor plating, nor the single cybereye linked to an extremely modified Walther rifle, nor the muscle replacements. I think I finally did go with Synaptic Boosters but the sheet is jammed somewhere in a huge 15 year old binder.

[Jerry]

As Frank described, the mechanics really do define how an RPG world works.

Unless it's a video game RPG.

Barret: "Cloud, why didn't you use a Phoenix Down on Aeris?"

Cloud: "Shh, it doesn't work unless it's part of the story!"