Shadowrun: Anarchy Sounds Terrible

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pragma
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Shadowrun: Anarchy Sounds Terrible

Post by pragma »

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R0leMiXgtYU

It turns out that it's possible to screw up the koan-like exercise of not writing rules for a narrative game. Unsurprisingly, CGL is up to the task. The above video features some yahoo discussing prototype rules for Shadowrun: Anarchy and highlights include:

* Only one person is allowed to talk at any given time unless the GM bypasses the rules or a player spends metagame currency
* Each player is free to narrate _anything they want_ happening unless it said act a chance of failure. Who decides whether there's a chance of failure is not specified.
* There's a GM even though characters adjudicate all interactions.
* In spite of this, the game promises a batshit long list of gear and modifiers which fiddle with your dice pools.
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Post by RelentlessImp »

Considering Shadowrun 5E is already a garbage bag that's been lit on fire and continues to be on fire through some arcane ritual spewing toxic fumes into the playspace, of course any new iteration of the rules, even an alternate way to play the game, is going to be little more than the aforementioned toxic fire.
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Post by Mask_De_H »

Adam Koebel has a very punchable face, apropos of nothing. As expected of one of the Dungeon World designers.

From other sources talking about Anarchy, Adam flubs a couple of points here: mainly the "do anything as long as it doesn't have a chance of failure," and "only one person can talk" bits.

Only the player whose turn it is can narrate what they're doing (since their narration is basically fluff justifying a dice roll, Leverage/Assymetric Threat style), but you can still say shit out of turn. The "do anything narration" is just marketing patter for stunting.

To me, it sounds like AT without the alternate minigames and "narrative" mechanics shoved in sideways.
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Post by Neurosis »

I'll be frank (not Trollman, just honest): they shoulda paid me to write it.
I'm in their freelancer pool, and I'm like the only one in there with any notable game design skills.
But of course they had their LAYOUT GUY design it instead?
Last edited by Neurosis on Wed Aug 24, 2016 9:43 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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Post by Stahlseele »

That sounds more like a mother may i MTP set in the shadowrun universe to me . .
Justifying rolls with fluff? Wrong way around.
Roll. Describe Result on basis of what you rolled.
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Post by Mask_De_H »

Who gives a shit what you think, Stahl? You unironically play the dumpster fire that is SR3, which is the same thing, but with obfuscating rules cruft that was a bad idea in the 90s.

It's a hacked down Shadowrun written by hacks. Simple as that.
Last edited by Mask_De_H on Wed Aug 24, 2016 11:20 pm, edited 1 time in total.
FrankTrollman wrote: Halfling women, as I'm sure you are aware, combine all the "fun" parts of pedophilia without any of the disturbing, illegal, or immoral parts.
K wrote:That being said, the usefulness of airships for society is still transporting cargo because it's an option that doesn't require a powerful wizard to show up for work on time instead of blowing the day in his harem of extraplanar sex demons/angels.
Chamomile wrote: See, it's because K's belief in leaving generation of individual monsters to GMs makes him Chaotic, whereas Frank's belief in the easier usability of monsters pre-generated by game designers makes him Lawful, and clearly these philosophies are so irreconcilable as to be best represented as fundamentally opposed metaphysical forces.
Whipstitch wrote:You're on a mad quest, dude. I'd sooner bet on Zeus getting bored and letting Sisyphus put down the fucking rock.
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Post by Neurosis »

I wouldn't call SR3 a trash fire. SR5 is a trash fire. RIFTS is a trash fire and a half.

SR3 was mostly serviceable with a broken Matrix and broken vehicles, like most editions of Shadowrun. I prefer SR4, but that's not perfect either.
For a minute, I used to be "a guy" in the TTRPG "industry". Now I'm just a nobody. For the most part, it's a relief.
Trank Frollman wrote:One of the reasons we can say insightful things about stuff is that we don't have to pretend to be nice to people. By embracing active aggression, we eliminate much of the passive aggression that so paralyzes things on other gaming forums.
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TiaC wrote:I'm not quite sure why this is an argument. (Except that Kaelik is in it, that's a good reason.)
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Post by Blade »

Looks like it's not all bad, but I'm still keeping my lean-but-complete home system. It also has automatic success when there's no chance of failure, but there are actual rules to know if there's a chance of failure or not.

I also think that you cannot really pretend to speed up the game if you keep having variable dice pools with more than 7 dice.
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Post by Neurosis »

Well I sure wish I'd kept my big fucking stupid mouth shut.
For a minute, I used to be "a guy" in the TTRPG "industry". Now I'm just a nobody. For the most part, it's a relief.
Trank Frollman wrote:One of the reasons we can say insightful things about stuff is that we don't have to pretend to be nice to people. By embracing active aggression, we eliminate much of the passive aggression that so paralyzes things on other gaming forums.
hogarth wrote:As the good book saith, let he who is without boners cast the first stone.
TiaC wrote:I'm not quite sure why this is an argument. (Except that Kaelik is in it, that's a good reason.)
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Post by Rawbeard »

Jesus fucking Christ, what is this? Can I kill it with fire? The game sounds terrible, too. *badum tsk*
But seriously, what is up with CGL?
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Post by JonSetanta »

Schwarzkopf wrote:Well I sure wish I'd kept my big fucking stupid mouth shut.
It's for the best you're not working with them if they treat you like that.

And I hope they see this message.

Fuck you guys. You lost some good talent.
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Post by Stahlseele »

Schwarzkopf wrote:Well I sure wish I'd kept my big fucking stupid mouth shut.
My condolences.
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TFwiki wrote:Soon is the name of the region in the time-domain (familiar to all marketing departments, and to the moderators and staff of Fun Publications) which sees release of all BotCon news, club exclusives, and other fan desirables. Soon is when then will become now.

Peculiar properties of spacetime ensure that the perception of the magnitude of Soon is fluid and dependent, not on an individual's time-reference, but on spatial and cultural location. A marketer generally perceives Soon as a finite, known, yet unspeakable time-interval; to a fan, the interval appears greater, and may in fact approach the infinite, becoming Never. Once the interval has passed, however, a certain time-lensing effect seems to occur, and the time-interval becomes vanishingly small. We therefore see the strange result that the same fragment of spacetime may be observed, in quick succession, as Soon, Never, and All Too Quickly.
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Post by Neurosis »

Thanks guys. I appreciate it.

But it was a learning experience for me. I need to be way more subtle in the future.

Talk less, make more.
For a minute, I used to be "a guy" in the TTRPG "industry". Now I'm just a nobody. For the most part, it's a relief.
Trank Frollman wrote:One of the reasons we can say insightful things about stuff is that we don't have to pretend to be nice to people. By embracing active aggression, we eliminate much of the passive aggression that so paralyzes things on other gaming forums.
hogarth wrote:As the good book saith, let he who is without boners cast the first stone.
TiaC wrote:I'm not quite sure why this is an argument. (Except that Kaelik is in it, that's a good reason.)
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Post by pragma »

I'm sorry, man. I didn't have any intention of setting this thread up as a lightning rod for anything but an ill-considered mix of narrative and non-narrative rules. I'm sending sympathy.
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Post by Neurosis »

Not your fault at all, pragma, don't feel bad.

Thanks for the good vibes, I feel 'em.
For a minute, I used to be "a guy" in the TTRPG "industry". Now I'm just a nobody. For the most part, it's a relief.
Trank Frollman wrote:One of the reasons we can say insightful things about stuff is that we don't have to pretend to be nice to people. By embracing active aggression, we eliminate much of the passive aggression that so paralyzes things on other gaming forums.
hogarth wrote:As the good book saith, let he who is without boners cast the first stone.
TiaC wrote:I'm not quite sure why this is an argument. (Except that Kaelik is in it, that's a good reason.)
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Post by Username17 »

Blade wrote:I also think that you cannot really pretend to speed up the game if you keep having variable dice pools with more than 7 dice.
As long as you're counting which dice are hits and not doing something stupid like summing dice that fit certain criteria or trying to make straights and pairs and shit with your dice, dicepool systems run at an acceptable speed even with 24 dice. Obviously they move faster when you roll less dice - and thus anyone who tells me that resolution speed is a priority who doesn't move from TN 5 to TN 4 or 3 gets the immediate hairy eyeball from me - but the difference is marginal compared to the difference between arranging rolls more times and rolling fewer times. Shadowrun has six complete rolls of different dicepools everytime a player opts to shoot bullets at a couple of dudes during an action. That's obscene and far outweighs any possible benefit you might achieve by reducing expected dicepools from 15 dice to 7.

Shadowrun with more fluid narration and less fiddly die rolls is certainly a noble goal. I have that goal myself.

But I see no evidence that the people behind Anarchy understand any part of what slows down Shadowrun or how to effectively speed it up. The "no rolls for things with no chance of failure" is one of those ideas that should be on the table during the design brainstorms - not left alone as an actual rule. Shadowrun already had the "take 4" rule, which was a pretty effective rule for skipping pointless die rolls. If rolling one hit per four dice (average was one per 3) was sufficient, you could skip the roll. That's already a clearer and more effective rule than anything the Anarchy guys came up with.

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Post by Blade »

Sure, rolling less helps a lot, but I still think that having to count the dice you need to roll slows down the game as well. When it's about 7 dice, most people will be able to quickly get the right number of dice, but when it's 24 dice, you need to count them individually (unless you arrange your dice in stacks).

Personally I've solved the problem by having the rolling happen when there's time and using another mechanism during the action.
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Post by Username17 »

Blade wrote:Sure, rolling less helps a lot, but I still think that having to count the dice you need to roll slows down the game as well. When it's about 7 dice, most people will be able to quickly get the right number of dice, but when it's 24 dice, you need to count them individually (unless you arrange your dice in stacks).
Gosh... if only cubes stacked well?

Image
This 104 page actual book should explain how to do it.

If we were talking about rolling a pile of d20s or even d8s, this would be a potentially big deal. But we really are talking about d6s. They stack super well.

Rolling big piles of d6s isn't the slow part of fucking Warhammer 40k. And that's a game where you seriously roll 40 d6s at a time. It's just not that hard. It's nowhere near as time consuming as like rolling on charts or measuring base to base distances and shit. You can shave time off resolution times for dicepool based RPGs by shrinking the dicepools, but not a significant amount of time unless the dicepools have gotten to "more dice than you have on hand and you have to roll twice," because that shit is bullshit.

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Post by Smirnoffico »

FrankTrollman wrote:Rolling big piles of d6s isn't the slow part of fucking Warhammer 40k. And that's a game where you seriously roll 40 d6s at a time. It's just not that hard. It's nowhere near as time consuming as like rolling on charts or measuring base to base distances and shit. You can shave time off resolution times for dicepool based RPGs by shrinking the dicepools, but not a significant amount of time unless the dicepools have gotten to "more dice than you have on hand and you have to roll twice," because that shit is bullshit.

-Username17
So much that. When I got into Shadowrun, I just took my wh40k dice and dice cup and never looked back. But even warhammer has you make only two rolls (and one for opponent) per attack
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Post by rasmuswagner »

The benefit of huge dice pools is that you can have an even more expensive tactical smartscope give another +1 die without completely fucking the RNG, and that means you can print it in a book at the end of the development cycle and still sell it.
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Post by Neurosis »

Rolling big piles of dice is awesome. Shit, even storygames have figured this out.

e: the ones that let you roll dice at all.
Last edited by Neurosis on Tue Aug 30, 2016 5:02 pm, edited 1 time in total.
For a minute, I used to be "a guy" in the TTRPG "industry". Now I'm just a nobody. For the most part, it's a relief.
Trank Frollman wrote:One of the reasons we can say insightful things about stuff is that we don't have to pretend to be nice to people. By embracing active aggression, we eliminate much of the passive aggression that so paralyzes things on other gaming forums.
hogarth wrote:As the good book saith, let he who is without boners cast the first stone.
TiaC wrote:I'm not quite sure why this is an argument. (Except that Kaelik is in it, that's a good reason.)
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Post by Stahlseele »

Image
Welcome, to IronHell.
Shrapnel wrote:
TFwiki wrote:Soon is the name of the region in the time-domain (familiar to all marketing departments, and to the moderators and staff of Fun Publications) which sees release of all BotCon news, club exclusives, and other fan desirables. Soon is when then will become now.

Peculiar properties of spacetime ensure that the perception of the magnitude of Soon is fluid and dependent, not on an individual's time-reference, but on spatial and cultural location. A marketer generally perceives Soon as a finite, known, yet unspeakable time-interval; to a fan, the interval appears greater, and may in fact approach the infinite, becoming Never. Once the interval has passed, however, a certain time-lensing effect seems to occur, and the time-interval becomes vanishingly small. We therefore see the strange result that the same fragment of spacetime may be observed, in quick succession, as Soon, Never, and All Too Quickly.
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Post by Hadanelith »

Rhetorical answer: 40k Apocalypse. I have actually done this. Note: rolling more or less ANYTHING for the Green Tide formation (100+ ork boyz) kinda NEEDS 3 pounds of dice. It only gets sillier when they manage to get into close combat with 5 different enemy squads SIMULTANEOUSLY. Shit gets stupid.

/pointless digression
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Post by OgreBattle »

Hadanelith wrote:Rhetorical answer: 40k Apocalypse. I have actually done this. Note: rolling more or less ANYTHING for the Green Tide formation (100+ ork boyz) kinda NEEDS 3 pounds of dice. It only gets sillier when they manage to get into close combat with 5 different enemy squads SIMULTANEOUSLY. Shit gets stupid.

/pointless digression
How long did it take to move, roll attack/defense, remove casualties for that green tide? I've only played in 1500ish at most
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Post by Koumei »

There's a formation that requires a minimum of 100 Necron Warriors (all forming one blob), and even though they won't be charging into melee, their shooting is good enough that everyone else will want to charge them, ideally with several units at once. So no matter how you do it, there will be lots of dice.
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