Shadowrun Simplified?

[Orion]

The new Shadowrun Crossfire card game has been *extremely* popular with my friend group, and it's stirred up some nostalgic memories. There's talk of running an RPG of some kind, and Shadowrun would be an obvious fit. Unfortunately, Shadowrun doesn't meet my minimum standards of playability. The hacking rules are broken, of course, but that's not the only problem. There's just way too many die rolls and way too many dicepool modifiers. Resolving one initiative pass from one character involves making two attack rolls with different numbers of dice against two defense pools that may also have different numbers of dice, followed by two soak rolls. The enemy counter-attacks with two attacks at different numbers of dice which are themselves possibly different from the numbers he had last time around because of wound penalties. This is before using any actual conditional or situational bonuses. The drain rolls after every magic action are obnoxiously deterministic. Triangular/linear build costs are obviously unacceptable, as is the skill bloat.

I've been kicking around some ideas for a hacked down Shadowrun 4E. Here's what I've got so far.

Damage -- has exponential scaling a la sundown.

Stats -- Body has got to go; it gets folded into Strength. We could roll with 7 stats or we could collapse some more. Folding reaction into agility would be natural but also create a master stat. SPLITTING reaction between agility and intuition might be workable. Willpower could also fold into Charisma, since willpower is nothing but a defense stat for most people and Charisma is a dump stat. Currently I'm thinking Strength, Agility, Reaction, Logic, Intuition, Willpower.

Skills -- There need to be way fewer skills. Skill groups are gone. Most of the skill groups are now going to just be single skills, with the component skills available as specializations. The really bad skills will now be subskills which require a base skill but cost half or even a quarter as much as a base. I'm thinking something like:

AGILITY: Gunplay (Subskill: Ordnance), Martial Arts (Subskill: Exotics), Infiltration (Subskill: Thievery)
STRENGTH: Athletics (Subskill: Acrobatics)
REACTION: Pilot (Subskill: Rigging)
INTUTION: Alertness (Subskill: Shadowing), Assensing, Survivalism
LOGIC: Saboteur (Subskill: Mechanic), Data (Subskill: Hardware), Hacking (Subskill: Software), First Aid (Subskill: Medicine), E. Warfare (Subskill: Cybercombat), Forgery, Academics
WILLPOWER: Etiquette (Subskill: Negotiate), Intimidate (Subskill: Leadership), Con, Linguistics
MAGIC: Spellcasting (Subskill: Ritual), Counterspell (Subskill: Banishing), Summoning (Subskill: Binding)

Karma Costs: I could go triangular or linear with skill and stat costs; I don't really care. I'm considering a compromise with a less steep escalation like a 1/1/2/2/3/3 cost progression.

Number Control: I think we can agree that the Stat (1-6) + Skill (1-6) + Gear (1-6) generated dicepools that are way too high. Okay, there were limits. Starting character skills were mostly restricted to 4, and starting gear for most tasks didn't go above +3 or so. Still, when you add in skill specialization, cyberware bonuses, adept powers, mentor spirits, special qualities, and the like, there are a lot of ways to get 15 dice in your pool. This is unwieldy and deterministic. I'm not entirely sure of the best way to handle this. One way would be to clamp down on the various medkits/foci/master tools/skill wares that add dice to stuff. The other would be to actually clamp down on the core scaling. Would it be absolutely crazy to put stats and skill on a 1-4 rather than 1-6 scale?

Magic Reforms

Adepts get completely re-written. They get selectable powers in after sundown style trees which are actually good.

Spellcasting, Sustaining, and Drain. Dicepool penalties for sustained spells are gone. Instead, you can sustain one spell for free. Sustaining two spells prevents you from speaking or attacking. Sustaining 3 spells prevents you from taking any action other than a careful walk. Instead of inflicting special un-healable stun damage, drain is now tracked separately. When you cast a spell, you have a chance of suffering a drain. When you take a drain you also take a box of stun damage, which can be cured by any of the normal ways of curing stun damage. Each drain point reduces your effective Magic by one. Possibly you have some amount of drain tolerance where the first few don't help. Direct combat spells like Flamethrower are now Sustains which allow you to spam the attack at will. This is the only way I can think of to make it viable to use damage spells that drain.

Magicians: We will break down the pile of Magician abilities into subpowers which are transparent with the adept price system. This makes mystic adepts and aspect magicians both work. Right now I'm thinking that Basic Conjuring lets you summon 1 spirit type, Advanced enables binding and +1 spirit type, and Flexible Conjuring enables +3 types. Similarly, Basic Spellcasting gives you 1 school, Flexible Spellcasting gives you +3 schools, and Advanced Spellcasting gives you counterspell, ritual magic, and +1 school. Watcher Spirits come free with Astral Projection. Wards come free with Astral Perception.

Combat: Soak rolls are out, Passive Soak is in. I'm not sure whether people want to track individual bullets. I'm not sure how many guns need to exist.

Hacking: Completely re-designed. Either a nearly direct copy of ends of the matrix, or admitting that hacker is not a main class and stripping it way down. Technomancers: Completely re-designed.

Does this seem doable? Does this seem interesting?

[unnamednpc]

I am (for the nth time) working on something similar. I'm going for a condensed mash-up of AS, alt.War and bits from Frank's Fifth Edition thread from yore.
I can try to cobble a tl, dr together after I got my first playtest results, which might happen this or the next weekend, if you or anyone are interested.

[Username17]

Shadowrun's 3 rolls per attack is one more than you need, but if you were going to cut one I would think it would be the defense roll rather than the soak roll. The defense roll could just be a to-hit threshold and the game would work a bit better with unaware targets that are still hard to hit because they are far away in darkened moving vehicles or whatever. Full defense could just be a one roll action to raise your to-hit threshold.

Two attacks per pass is twice as many as you really need. The basic assumption could just be that you send a couple of bullets at people and splitting your fire against two enemies could be a to-hit and damage penalty. Single shot weapons like rifles could have a to-hit penalty unless you take aim actions. This would make rifles the preferred sniper weapon and still not make them a melee weapon of choice the way they are in SR5 and nWoD.

I actually totally don't feel your objection to 15 die pools. In my experience, the game works well enough with dicepools between 6 and 20. And it's really only at dicepools above 24 that things get actually stupid. So SR5's dicepools are a warcrime, but SR4 stayed solidly in the sweet spot for everything except kaiju spirits and vehicles.

Speaking of spirits, SR4 gave spirits high stats, which was fine for physicals and magic, but definitely a bit off for mental stats. But skill == force and edge == force were straight insanity. Unbound spirits shouldn't even get edge, and bound spirits shouldn't have an edge higher than 2. Spirit skills should just be half force across the board.

A simpler hacking system than EotM seems like what you'd want to go with. You still have to answer the questions posed in it though. Since you're already committed to rewriting the equipment list, you wouldn't need to put the same stats on commlinks and you probably wouldn't want to.

[Orion]

I'm picturing commlinks with two stats. Signal, which is just literally how far your signal can go, and rating. Hacking dicepools use your Logic or your Commlink rating, whichever is worse.

[Blade]

Seems interesting and on the right track.

Merging Charisma and Willpower is good, but you might want to have a quality like "Pretty" that would allow someone to create a character with a pretty face (who'd have bonuses on some social rolls) but without the self-control and assertivness of a character with a high Willpower attribute.

I'm a bit unsure about having acrobatics on Strength. It's cool to have an important skill based on Strength, but trolls get a huge Strength bonus, and I find it a bit weird to have trolls be better acrobats than elves.

I wouldn't have done the same merging of skills, but that's just a matter of taste or opinion.

For the dice pools, the original SR4 team wanted dice pool to be capped at 14 dice. A solution would be to have a hard cap there, with additional points being only useful for reducing penalties.

I'm also working on an alternate ruleset for Shadowrun, focused on speeding up combat while keeping it tactical and dynamic. It will use playing cards (or mahjong tiles) along with dices. If anyone's interested, I can post it here when I'm done.

[Orion]

I'm fine with rolling 15 dice. 18 is my personal subjective cut-off where I feel that things have gotten stupid.

Is there any reason that even bound spirits should have any edge at all? What if we let conjurers donate their own edge to bound (but not unbound) spirits and called it a day?

On script kiddies: Programs rated 3-4 are customized to one person's neural architecture. Your hacker can write some for their friends, but you have to worry about sync ratios like in eva. Your programs will rapidly decay to rating 2 if you don't have a regular meditation with your coder. Programs rated 5-6 aren't "programs" in the conventional sense. The top hackers dynamically re-compile their software second to second out of a huge toolkit. These programs also decay if not maintained, although more because of advances in security than because of neural change. You can't use programs better than your logic, and you can't use programs rated 5+ unless you have at least 4 in the relevant skill.

On drop outs: It legally required to have an active commlink in most urban areas. Cops or security drones will pull you over if they see an meat body without a digital profile.

Also, hacker is not a real character class. All hackers are required by law to be samurai. The 8 iconic characters are conjurer, caster-adept, rigger, samurai-hacker, samurai-burglar, samurai-face, samurai-soldier, and samurai-adept. Adepting shouldn't just be an alternate way to fight. Adepts should as a matter of course roll out with warding, ghostbusting, aura reading, and other supernatural utilities.

[Username17]

I'm fine with rolling 15 dice. 18 is my personal subjective cut-off where I feel that things have gotten stupid.

Subjective declarations are subjective of course, but things are still pretty non-deterministic at 18 dice. Combat is deterministic, but that's because the effects of an extra hit here or there are not felt. In order to push an attack up from dropping an opponent in 2 hits to dropping an opponent in only 1, you need five extra hits, and that is way outside the realm of what you're normally going to see. If you put attack and soak onto the same sort of log scale as stunting, the fact that an 18 die pool has a 23% chance of rolling 4 hits or less and a 22% chance of rolling 8 hits or more is plenty of variability.

The issue really is the "1 hit is 1 damage box" thing that SR4 combat has going, where rolling 4 hits and 8 hits are actually the same because you need a difference of five hits to make any difference.

Is there any reason that even bound spirits should have any edge at all? What if we let conjurers donate their own edge to bound (but not unbound) spirits and called it a day?

Well, Bound Spirits are ongoing characters and have names and personalities and shit. They don't necessarily need an edge score, but it wouldn't be inappropriate for them to have one. An unbound spirit is a fire and forget tool - it basically might as well be a spell for all anyone gives a shit. But bound spirits are recurring characters and can sometimes be among the more memorable NPCs in the game.

On script kiddies: Programs rated 3-4 are customized to one person's neural architecture. Your hacker can write some for their friends, but you have to worry about sync ratios like in eva. Your programs will rapidly decay to rating 2 if you don't have a regular meditation with your coder. Programs rated 5-6 aren't "programs" in the conventional sense. The top hackers dynamically re-compile their software second to second out of a huge toolkit. These programs also decay if not maintained, although more because of advances in security than because of neural change. You can't use programs better than your logic, and you can't use programs rated 5+ unless you have at least 4 in the relevant skill.

This is terrible. If your goal is to streamline things and speed things up, keeping track of rating degradation periods for dozens of programs is... the opposite of that. The question you should be asking yourself is whether programs need ratings at all. What things you have as programs and what things you abstract into whatever you call the computer use skill is a big question, and what kinds of software related treasure and upgrades there are for players to lust after is another. But whatever choices you end up making, it's pretty clear that the world is in all ways a worse place if you have to track SOTA timers on track programs to see when they degrade from rating 4 to rating 3.

On drop outs: It legally required to have an active commlink in most urban areas. Cops or security drones will pull you over if they see an meat body without a digital profile.

This doesn't help at all. You can have an active commlink and still be dropped out. You're dropped out because nothing you care about is online, not because you literally have no web presence at all. You can have a burner comm with a fake ID on it turned on in your pocket and still be completely dropped out. As long as none of your mission critical gear, your sensitive information, or your amygdala is online through the commlink, you're 100% dropped out and enemy hackers cannot do dick to you without some sort of stick model.

Also, hacker is not a real character class. All hackers are required by law to be samurai. The 8 iconic characters are conjurer, caster-adept, rigger, samurai-hacker, samurai-burglar, samurai-face, samurai-soldier, and samurai-adept. Adepting shouldn't just be an alternate way to fight. Adepts should as a matter of course roll out with warding, ghostbusting, aura reading, and other supernatural utilities.

I can't even really evaluate this statement. You can't really sell me on a vision of the Hacker character until you have a vision of what Hacking does and how it does it. You haven't convinced me that you have one of those.

-Username17

[name_here]

You could do the rating thing, but I'd do it with having programs have a rating when you're controlling them directly and a lower rating when you're not.

[Ice9]

Those thresholds seems like they'd be fine without the decay part.

Program by itself - max 2.
Program with person it's tailored to - max 4, max Logic.
Program with hacker (skill 4) - max 5-6, max Logic.

Then you'd just need a system where the Rating is fairly important, like Rating 2- programs are going to fail against non-bullshit security, and there's a notable difference between Rating 4 and 5 (as opposed to a 33% chance to get one more success).

[TheFlatline]

So speaking of matrix dropout, more and more stuff today is joining "the internet of things" and reporting home constantly.

In real life it also turns out this shit has zero security as well and is easy to hack, sometimes in frightening ways.

So instead of the stupid carrot and stick approach that SR5 did and fucked up royally, why not just say that all your equipment talks on the matrix, and it's fucked up, an invasion of privacy, and it's so ubiquitous that there isn't a whole fuck of a lot you can do about it? I mean, we already have data miners tracking cell phones by wifi MAC address to see where you are and what you do (that free wifi in Walmart isn't for your benefit ultimately, they don't even care if you use it so long as you can *see* it). Cars are more and more carrying cell enabled monitor computers that call home and deliver performance statistics either to car manufacturers or insurance companies.

So yeah. Your cyberarm totally either links into your commlink or uses NFC to communicate with stations and transmitters scattered around most urban areas to report back the neural/mechanical interface feedback and shit. This is what keeps state of the art happening in 2075 SR. Smart hackers can trace this shit the way mages can trace astral projection. Maybe it's not bound to an identity that's of any use, but a good hacker can track your cyberarm as it does shit around seattle.

And sure, you can rewrite the code on maybe your pistol so that it "opts out" of AresAlert Premium Firearm Monitoring provided courtesy to your Predator pistol, or find an underground illegal gunsmith to just *make* you a gun that doesn't rat you out, but rewriting the firmware on your cybereyes to drop you off the grid is a really, really difficult feat, not so much in the actual masking but in not fucking up your eyes.

I dunno. It may be a terrible idea. But it's the way our world seems to be trending.

Edit: I forgot my point in all of this. But the idea was that hackers can mask digital signatures the way mages can mask astral signatures. Although it doesn't seem like that exciting of a concept when I type it out.

[Whipstitch]

Well, infinity mirror, for one thing. And even if you work around that issue, the paradigm you're suggesting mostly sounds like a way to fuck dudes with cyberware right in the ass, forever. As combatants, Street Samurai have one true niche in a full scale shoot out: they're one of the baddest things you can have on your side without faffing about with matrix supremacy. Without the ability to effectively hide mil-spec super villain gear under their long coats Street Samurai give up even more ground to the rigger's killbots.

[Username17]

Having matrix connectivity default to "on" for consumer products is completely sufficient explanation for why you can hack wageslaves. The problem is that you don't actually give a shit whether you can hack wageslaves, because in most circumstances they are not important. What matters is whether and what hackers can do to ninjas trained in electronic warfare during covert missions they have launched. And for those purposes, the default settings of anything don't mean very much.

When player characters go on actual missions, the real balance of incentives has to favor the players having meaningful vulnerabilities to hacking during the fucking missions. If you fail to provide that, the PCs will drop out and you have failed your RPG B/R check.

-Username17

[Korgan0]

I put up a thread in IMOI about removing the dodge step from SR; obviously yours would be different given that you're overhauling everything, but doing a straight-up conversion of 1 point of threshold for every three dice of a defense dicepool seems like it would work out mathematically. Blade brought up that having to recalculate things on the fly for cover bonuses, wide bursts, and so on and so forth would be a pain in the ass, so that requires some attention. At least in theory, though, it wouldn't be too difficult.

[Orion]

This is terrible. If your goal is to streamline things and speed things up, keeping track of rating degradation periods for dozens of programs is... the opposite of that.

Sorry; I thought it was obvious that you wouldn't actually bother doing that. Your programs would be assumed to be passively maintained much like your character's food and rent. It would only come into play if the characters found or stole some kind of super program that was way outside the scope of anything they could comprehend. That would basically be a point and shoot rating 10 plot device that would lose 2 dice per session until it became irrelevant.

The question you should be asking yourself is whether programs need ratings at all.

They don't necessarily, but shadowrun pools are traditionall 3-part. You could go logic + skill + commlink but I think logic + skill + program is more interesting.

You can have an active commlink and still be dropped out. You're dropped out because nothing you care about is online, not because you literally have no web presence at all. You can have a burner comm with a fake ID on it turned on in your pocket and still be completely dropped out.

Yes. That's true. I'll have to go away and try to figure out what I was thinking.

[Korgan0]

If you're set on hacking being an actual part of the game, you could try and implement an effects-based hacking thingy like a few people have been talking about. If you heavily abstract a network and put in some provisos making sure brains are at the centre of them, you could have net hits on an opposed hacking test be redeemable, on a table of some kind, for certain things. Infiltrating hackers could open doors and get access to data, and spiders could identify the hacker if they're trying to be stealthy, call in backup, activate firewalls, and so on and so forth. Hacker differentiation could be accomplished via discounts on various kinds of boons, or something like that.

[Username17]

I put up a thread in IMOI about removing the dodge step from SR; obviously yours would be different given that you're overhauling everything, but doing a straight-up conversion of 1 point of threshold for every three dice of a defense dicepool seems like it would work out mathematically. Blade brought up that having to recalculate things on the fly for cover bonuses, wide bursts, and so on and so forth would be a pain in the ass, so that requires some attention. At least in theory, though, it wouldn't be too difficult.

If you aren't worried about backwards compatibility, you don't need people to have defense threasholds set by their stats. The thing where high reaction people literally dodge bullets is cumbersome and stupid. You don't have to implement that. Just set the threshold to hit a dude based on range, visibility, cover, and movement speed.

People who take a full defense action could set a new base threshold based on their gymnastics check or something, but there's basically no reason for passive defense to be set by your stats in the first place. The fact that close combat shooting is handled as an opposed test while long distance sniping is handled as a straight test with penalties causes a whole lot of dumb edge cases. If you make all attacks just be straight tests against a threshold, a lot of things become a lot less dumb instantly.

They don't necessarily, but shadowrun pools are traditionall 3-part. You could go logic + skill + commlink but I think logic + skill + program is more interesting.

What? Most skills get really small equipment modifiers if they get any modifiers at all. Smartlinks and VCRs are only +2 dice, and that's as good as it gets. Skills like Lockpicking and First Aid, where the gear is worth 6 dice, are really rare. And the world would probably be better if they were eliminated, which seems easy enough to do. Just make quality autopickers be worth +2 dice instead of being rated up to 6 - and same with first aid kits.

Even Synthacardium going all the way up to 4 dice is rare and kind of a standout among Shadowrun skills. To a first approximation, most peoples' dicepools really are just Stat + Skill.

-Username17

[kzt]

So instead of the stupid carrot and stick approach that SR5 did and fucked up royally, why not just say that all your equipment talks on the matrix, and it's fucked up, an invasion of privacy, and it's so ubiquitous that there isn't a whole fuck of a lot you can do about it?

Say my character has a screwdriver and both a drill and wire cutters. In a few minutes of fairly easy work he can make a device that doesn't have an antenna, and I don't think it will be calling home very often. Plus there is the option of just keeping a radio jammer in your pocket. "No, I don't know why your underwear doesn't get updates around me."

[pragma]

Say my character has a screwdriver and both a drill and wire cutters. In a few minutes of fairly easy work he can make a device that doesn't have an antenna, ...

I'm in the industry and I don't think that would work with a lot of modern devices. There are big trends towards patch antennas, which are printed in the wiring of the PCB of your device; integrated antennas, where a piece of metal integral to the device's structure is used as the antenna (iPhone4, the barrel of the gun in your example); or on-die antennas, which are actually baked into the same chip that does your math. Taking apart any of those would actually be a destructive process.

However, even though it's probably tough to modify devices so that they don't phone home (local jammers or fake access points are good fixes, by the way) enterprising shadowrunners will just specialize in shooting fire out of their hands and living in the woods. I don't like internet of things as a way to prevent dropout because it explicitly relies on stripping player agency when they try to opt out.

[Aryxbez]

The thing where high reaction people literally dodge bullets is cumbersome and stupid.

Given that Shadowrun is more consistently grim and deadly with its ways, but in a world of cybernetics, why is dodging bullets stupid? Cumbersome sure, given the steps, but I do think PC's, Pro rat 6 guys, and Prime Runners should be able to dodge bullets.

[kzt]

Given that Shadowrun is more consistently grim and deadly with its ways, but in a world of cybernetics, why is dodging bullets stupid? Cumbersome sure, given the steps, but I do think PC's, Pro rat 6 guys, and Prime Runners should be able to dodge bullets.

Because it's a grim and deadly setting and people can't actually dodge bullets. You can do things that make you harder to hit, but you can't stand in the open and dodge bullets like SR rules say you can.

The obvious thing that should accompany blocking dodging bullets is to make shooting people harder. People mostly miss in gunfights, unlike in SR. They miss at long range, they miss at 5 meters and they miss at arms length. People who are really really good don't miss nearly as much, but there really are not many Delta or SEAL 6 commandos in your average street gang. This is why often the only guy who gets away unscathed in a drive-by shooting is the target. They get their targets kid brother, the 6 year old in her bed a block away, the old lady sweeping off her steps and the girl in the car at the stop sign at the corner, but their actually target not so much.

[Korwin]

People mostly miss in gunfights, unlike in SR. They miss at long range, they miss at 5 meters and they miss at arms length.

But missing all the time, is also not fun...

[kzt]

People mostly miss in gunfights, unlike in SR. They miss at long range, they miss at 5 meters and they miss at arms length.

But missing all the time, is also not fun...

It is when they are shooting at YOU.

[Whipstitch]

I think it's important to keep in mind here that defensive attributes in SR4 weren't in a terribly healthy place. Evasion ruled and armor drooled unless you REALLY went all in on armor and even then usefulness was largely limited to bullying the lightly armed. Shifting to longer combat rounds where cops can be reasonably expected to eventually hit their targets over 15 seconds or so wouldn't necessarily be the worst thing in the world if you're also tweaking soaks and damage codes in such a manner that dermal plating and titanium bones are actually worth a damn.

[Korwin]

People mostly miss in gunfights, unlike in SR. They miss at long range, they miss at 5 meters and they miss at arms length.

But missing all the time, is also not fun...

It is when they are shooting at YOU.

No it isn't. Don't belive me?
Try The Dark Eye (Where you are not hit most of the time. Shure thats mostly because you able to block most attacks...)
Expect an simple fight to take 1-2 hours.

[Orion]

Frank, could you elaborate on why you prefer the soak roll over the dodge roll?