That was awesome, cheers for this. It's always good to hear other GMs strategies on how to run games, gives me new ideas to play with and implement. Can't wait to see the next one, mate!
I don't think Shadowrun is so much "too complex" as it is "poorly organized, edited, and produced". If you're not ok with making up or ignoring many of the rules, you're going to have a bad time. 5:56, case and point.
It's both. It's complex, but not *too complex*, and it's major downfall really is the horrible organization in the books. If chummer didn't exist I don't think I could actually play the game let alone have as much fun as I have, books are that bad.
The Shadowrun system has always been overly bloated. It's far too complex for being a game about orcs and elves trying to steal laserdiscs from corporations run by dragons. And yes, it's further complicated by the abysmal production quality and absolute lack of proofreading.
@@TheHarkonnenScum "It's far too complex for being a game about orcs and elves trying to steal laserdiscs from corporations run by dragons." I disagree, shadowrun is just complex enough to stay mechanically interesting and engaging even after years of play through giving mechanical weight to all the things in the world that characters interact with influencing choice. It remains one of the few RPG franchises that isn't completely abandoning planning and tactics for story and narrative. The books however are a clusterfuck and a good rulesopedia would probably increase playability 10 fold.
When I listen to the last part of this, it reminds me that Anarchy was the best thing to ever happen to Shadowrun. But that Cue system was a big mistake. I’m one of the believers who things that Shadowrun Anarchy minus the cue system plus 30 more pages of rules, would have been the perfect 6th Edition.
Relating to the last question: What my GM did to introduce myself and one of my friends to Shadowrun was, in my opinion, quite ingenious. Essentially he asked my friend and me what kind of character we wanted to play (I wanted to a cybered-up assassin while my friend wanted to be a drug-fiend Face) and then he ran a one-shot for us using some of his old characters that matched those criteria. We didn't have to go through the complex character creation and we got the chance to experience the game and the mechanics in an experience he could take time to explain what we were doing. Also, in this one-shot, we did I had an experience that made me quite like the Theater-of-the-mind style play. My assassin, after having his safe-house and identity burned, was tasked to kill a sleazy brothel owner. So, to pull this off without having to go through the front door and being searched for weapons, he used his grappling gun to reach the roof of the building, break the lock on the roof access, and then find a vantage point above the mark but still hidden (think of the tiled ceiling that many schools and other buildings have that lead to an empty space before the roof). Once their my character used his grapple Widowmaker style to hang from the ceiling and fired his sniper rifle straight down to put a hole through the club owner's skull and blow off his jaw. It was one of my favorite SR moments ever and I still remember it even two characters later (and if your wondering what happened to him; my next character was that assassin's nephew and he watched his uncle get sacrificed by Aztlan blood-mages, so rip).
Thanks for answering honestly :) As for helping new players get into shadowrun, I had the same experience. Really wish I'd had the advantage of seeing this video *before* we'd started playing. Would have saved a lot of heart/head ache.
There are pretty good Shadowrun conversions for Savage World mechanics available for free online. All the fluff of Shadowrun, none of the cumbersome mechanics. Gonna playtest the rules soon.
I've been trying to run my combat like a hybrid lately. I sketch out a very rough map that isn't to scale just to show rough relative positions, and players are free to come up with more details.
Yeah, this. I set up points of interest like cover or objectives, and then we just use it as a guide on relative positioning so players can use their judgement better and know better what I am setting in front of them. I will have my scratch sheet, and most targeting decisions from my players is about which wounded goon they are focusing on, or other environmental trick they want to play. The sketch is very helpful if you want the surroundings to impact the combat and for AoE type events. I will HEAVILY streamline actual combat rolls down to a roll to hit, and those successes making damage resistance roll more difficult, and I will fudge most modifiers for these except for the situations like someone cinematic fighting or the incoming rocket. It can be hard to balance danger-level of combat that way, but I think the result means there is more play and less rules-lookup.
love your vids. For rules we are lucky to have a guy who likes to know it all, so I as the GM give him 35 seconds if a rule question comes up, if he does not find the rule. Well then it is the rule of cool of course. keep on keeping on man I think you could make some shadowrun fans.
Regarding grids vs theatre of the mind I actually have the opposite opinion but for the exact same reason. I find a lot of times in TotM that players imagine a blank room, just stay in place, and don't try anything cool. But if you have a grid and you have details and you have physical representation of space, players will look to find everything they can do with what they see.
I have a question regarding host "design" I guess. I think its relatively easy to imagine what a building in the 6th world might look like but I'm having a hard time deciding what the inside of a host might look like. Not just in terms of aesthetics but rather in what goes where. How many hoops does the decker have to jump through before being able to access a camera or all cameras? Where would (security relevant) files be located, could you just find (and then proceed to access them) after a single matrix perception test done after joining the host? I always feel like hosts should feel like digital buildings or dungeons where the decker needs to bypass dangerous hazards (lit. firewalls) and such before coming to a "room" that contains the paydata they're seeking but I'm not sure how that would be handled in SR5. So, to make a long question short: How do you do hosts?
Marvellous! I loved the "ignore the rules" advice so much! Who can force you to observe all the rules if your objective is to get together and have some good old theatre of the mind fun?!
As long as that is just for starters. Once you get going, the rules matter. Otherwise you should literally just use any other rule system with the setting bc it doesnt matter. That applies to all tabletop games.
@@nowayjosedaniel I agree, you do need a certain set of rules that should be observed: As far as I recall, though the advice was something along the lines of: If applying non-essential, rather specific rules would require fumbling with a lot of papers and interrupting the game flow, ignore them. Instead, just take an informed guess as game master whether an action is likely to succeed or not, then either admit automatic success or make up some dice roll based on the general rules, so everybody can continue to roll with the flow. I'm all for that. But if you want to construct a story or task that will definitely require knowledge of more specific rules, be aware of that and learn them before running that part of the game.
Our group started with Shadowrun. I played a Mage and did tons of research, wrote up pages and pages of notes to mechanics, spells etc. Yep, turns out I was alone in this. The Rulebook is a total mismanaged clustertruck of an insult. We did 5-6 5h sessions and people started to get frustrated. So I took over and we're playing D&D now, no need to ignore the rules if there aren't as many convoluded ones. And yeah, only D6 is great but is it really better to roll 18 D6 instead of one D20? edit: oh, wow, comments are from years ago. Shows how much interest there is.
There are months ago viewers sprinkled in! There is a charm to dropping 18 dice on the table, go watch some Warhammer 40K play videos for peak dice dropping! I streamline the rules in my group, and luckily they like narrative more than squeezing out another +2 dice pool because of something on page 154 of a supplement!
The matrix rules gave me the most headheaks . I think whats make Shadowrun hard to learn is how the rules are spreed up all over the book . And some time you may have consults two different chapters to understand how the mechanics works together . At least the index from the core rule book is solide . But in the end its worth the time .
I always point people at Lauren Bonds' "How to play Shadowrun" videos. 4 small videos, about 25 minutes total time to watch, and she lays it out beautifully. th-cam.com/video/QvEEmCPQgy8/w-d-xo.html is the first one. After those, I send them here to Complex Action for specific question searches.
Good. Now I don't feel bad for taking the past year to mod the rules using bits from many editions, along with implementing certain changes from the recent PC games. Still the same Success/Resist/Oppose tests, but I've added a hit point system, an action point system, and the 'special attacks' from the VGs. Of course, if you change one rule, maybe about seventeen others are affected. Hence the time, AND its my first campaign to run. (I did learn the original rules first, before I changed anything.) I'm about to start character creation for my gal, and we're gonna sit down (each with a couple practice characters) and play with maps and without. (i figured, for HP, we'd want that more tactical realistic combat.) Not sure if it's gonna work, and I can always just switch back to original rules, but all I care about is if it's fun- for me and others. This is more of a practice for us. I'm sticking with 1st and 2nd edition, story-wise. I just love that old 80s cyberpunk feel. Cords, trodes, floppy disks, neon, etc. (Also, the old Genesis game has come in handy many times, especially for tweaking Matrix rules.) I JUST discovered Shadowrun during quarantine, two summers ago. I've read through several source books and a couple of the novels. I currently have about 8 different campaign scenarios for a central story (with more coming along every day), along with pages of random encounters, on-the-go names, weapon/item stat and price lists, band names, food items, etc., etc... and I'm still sure I won't be ready for everything. AND, yes, many have suggested Shadowrun: Anarchy to me, and it does sound like fun... but it has to be with the right group. A group already familiar with the sixth world. I know plenty of improvisers who would just RUIN that game for the sake of their "yes and..."
I don't have 5e but I've played LOTS of 1e thru 3e and I'm still trying to figure out WHY everyone seems to think Shadowrun is so complex. It doesn't hold a candle to AD&D or the HERO System for complexity.
I love character creation and I want to start off again with some unexperienced and will just create the characters for them after talking to all of them to have an idea what they thin they would like to play :D maybe after a short oneshot with archetypes or something similar.
I'm really new to shadow run like I bought the runners toolkit but I'm kinda lost can someone please break everything down to the simplest way possible please and thank you
Hi I'm getting into Shadowrun with the 5th edition book I created a novice bounty hunter with a Blade Runner-like outfit and learning some basics with attributes. I know how to roll intiative in Shadowrun but the question is: how much dice should I roll from my 7+1d6 initiative score without augmentations or stims? Feel free to answer when you have time
Complex Action ok thanks chummer. Basically its a roll the dice based on attributes of reaction and intuition + 1d6. Just do the math, learn progress well and survive in the 6th World thanks again
Ok so I'm a fan of Technomacers in 5e the Puppeteer complex formm. It isn't specified in the rules weather you can make an enemy hurt the selves with an attack action or changing their boot code. the matrix actions in the book are described in the context of an attack. How to you handle this complex form.
Easy answer? Don't play Technomacers, mages or anyone who can go into the matrix/astral plain. :) Slows the game down 100% while the others wait around being bored and confused.
Been a while since you made this, but I thought I'd ask anyway - is it weird that the prebuilt characters have their skill points spread so thin? I don't have much experience with the game, but when I ran a few sessions, all my players built a set of "core skills" that were at 6, with only a few lower-rank skills. Granted, I also had a troll with cyberarms who destroyed everything I threw at him, so maybe I missed the boat on balance.
The question of what is a high or low starting skill level can be pretty darn subjective. I think it makes a lot of sense to have characters starting with skills at 5 and 6 if you're playing a one-shot or a short run of sessions. That's b/c skill points are a better value for your karma points in terms of getting high dice pools in the area you specialize in. However, if you're making a character for a long term campaign, then I think it makes more sense to favor attributes a little bit more. Let your skill values be lower and have a broader selection of skills to choose from. In a long term campaign you've got time to raise those skill ratings through character advancement. It really is just personal preference. I listed what I think are the main benefits of each approach, but there are exceptions, of course.
"Just ignore the rules as much as you can." Right? You didn't turn to a life of running in the shadows just so you could follow the rules. Leave that kind of stuff to the corporate wage slaves.
That was awesome, cheers for this. It's always good to hear other GMs strategies on how to run games, gives me new ideas to play with and implement. Can't wait to see the next one, mate!
wait, Rimmy? I didn't know you played SR! sweet!
Heh
Agreed
I don't think Shadowrun is so much "too complex" as it is "poorly organized, edited, and produced". If you're not ok with making up or ignoring many of the rules, you're going to have a bad time.
5:56, case and point.
Its totally complex, you need to remember so much for the game to even run smoothly.
It's both. It's complex, but not *too complex*, and it's major downfall really is the horrible organization in the books.
If chummer didn't exist I don't think I could actually play the game let alone have as much fun as I have, books are that bad.
The Shadowrun system has always been overly bloated. It's far too complex for being a game about orcs and elves trying to steal laserdiscs from corporations run by dragons.
And yes, it's further complicated by the abysmal production quality and absolute lack of proofreading.
@@TheHarkonnenScum "It's far too complex for being a game about orcs and elves trying to steal laserdiscs from corporations run by dragons."
I disagree, shadowrun is just complex enough to stay mechanically interesting and engaging even after years of play through giving mechanical weight to all the things in the world that characters interact with influencing choice. It remains one of the few RPG franchises that isn't completely abandoning planning and tactics for story and narrative.
The books however are a clusterfuck and a good rulesopedia would probably increase playability 10 fold.
@@SurmaSampo yeah, and if SR really is so bad, we wouldn't be discussing how bad it is
When I listen to the last part of this, it reminds me that Anarchy was the best thing to ever happen to Shadowrun. But that Cue system was a big mistake.
I’m one of the believers who things that Shadowrun Anarchy minus the cue system plus 30 more pages of rules, would have been the perfect 6th Edition.
Relating to the last question: What my GM did to introduce myself and one of my friends to Shadowrun was, in my opinion, quite ingenious. Essentially he asked my friend and me what kind of character we wanted to play (I wanted to a cybered-up assassin while my friend wanted to be a drug-fiend Face) and then he ran a one-shot for us using some of his old characters that matched those criteria. We didn't have to go through the complex character creation and we got the chance to experience the game and the mechanics in an experience he could take time to explain what we were doing.
Also, in this one-shot, we did I had an experience that made me quite like the Theater-of-the-mind style play. My assassin, after having his safe-house and identity burned, was tasked to kill a sleazy brothel owner. So, to pull this off without having to go through the front door and being searched for weapons, he used his grappling gun to reach the roof of the building, break the lock on the roof access, and then find a vantage point above the mark but still hidden (think of the tiled ceiling that many schools and other buildings have that lead to an empty space before the roof). Once their my character used his grapple Widowmaker style to hang from the ceiling and fired his sniper rifle straight down to put a hole through the club owner's skull and blow off his jaw. It was one of my favorite SR moments ever and I still remember it even two characters later (and if your wondering what happened to him; my next character was that assassin's nephew and he watched his uncle get sacrificed by Aztlan blood-mages, so rip).
Thanks for answering honestly :)
As for helping new players get into shadowrun, I had the same experience. Really wish I'd had the advantage of seeing this video *before* we'd started playing. Would have saved a lot of heart/head ache.
+Travis Haha, you are a good sport for being the brunt of a cheap technomancer joke. ;)
i was a shadowrun fan before i even knew it. I had the snes game when i was a kid. played that game so much and died all the time.
Same.
There are pretty good Shadowrun conversions for Savage World mechanics available for free online. All the fluff of Shadowrun, none of the cumbersome mechanics. Gonna playtest the rules soon.
Awesome video. So darn helpful.
It would be cool to see you go through the process of character gen. On that note, what's your favorite Shadowrun archetype?
I've been trying to run my combat like a hybrid lately. I sketch out a very rough map that isn't to scale just to show rough relative positions, and players are free to come up with more details.
Yeah, this. I set up points of interest like cover or objectives, and then we just use it as a guide on relative positioning so players can use their judgement better and know better what I am setting in front of them.
I will have my scratch sheet, and most targeting decisions from my players is about which wounded goon they are focusing on, or other environmental trick they want to play. The sketch is very helpful if you want the surroundings to impact the combat and for AoE type events.
I will HEAVILY streamline actual combat rolls down to a roll to hit, and those successes making damage resistance roll more difficult, and I will fudge most modifiers for these except for the situations like someone cinematic fighting or the incoming rocket. It can be hard to balance danger-level of combat that way, but I think the result means there is more play and less rules-lookup.
love your vids. For rules we are lucky to have a guy who likes to know it all, so I as the GM give him 35 seconds if a rule question comes up, if he does not find the rule. Well then it is the rule of cool of course. keep on keeping on man I think you could make some shadowrun fans.
Regarding grids vs theatre of the mind I actually have the opposite opinion but for the exact same reason. I find a lot of times in TotM that players imagine a blank room, just stay in place, and don't try anything cool. But if you have a grid and you have details and you have physical representation of space, players will look to find everything they can do with what they see.
I have a question regarding host "design" I guess. I think its relatively easy to imagine what a building in the 6th world might look like but I'm having a hard time deciding what the inside of a host might look like. Not just in terms of aesthetics but rather in what goes where. How many hoops does the decker have to jump through before being able to access a camera or all cameras? Where would (security relevant) files be located, could you just find (and then proceed to access them) after a single matrix perception test done after joining the host?
I always feel like hosts should feel like digital buildings or dungeons where the decker needs to bypass dangerous hazards (lit. firewalls) and such before coming to a "room" that contains the paydata they're seeking but I'm not sure how that would be handled in SR5.
So, to make a long question short: How do you do hosts?
Best tip. The rules are more guidelines and they are not laws.
Better tip: if a system is getting in the way, stop using it.
Hello Dear Bobby
I have a question, in 5th edition, Power Foci augment the magic Attibrute? or just are a bonus to dicepools involving magic?
Marvellous! I loved the "ignore the rules" advice so much! Who can force you to observe all the rules if your objective is to get together and have some good old theatre of the mind fun?!
As long as that is just for starters.
Once you get going, the rules matter. Otherwise you should literally just use any other rule system with the setting bc it doesnt matter.
That applies to all tabletop games.
@@nowayjosedaniel I agree, you do need a certain set of rules that should be observed:
As far as I recall, though the advice was something along the lines of: If applying non-essential, rather specific rules would require fumbling with a lot of papers and interrupting the game flow, ignore them. Instead, just take an informed guess as game master whether an action is likely to succeed or not, then either admit automatic success or make up some dice roll based on the general rules, so everybody can continue to roll with the flow.
I'm all for that.
But if you want to construct a story or task that will definitely require knowledge of more specific rules, be aware of that and learn them before running that part of the game.
Our group started with Shadowrun. I played a Mage and did tons of research, wrote up pages and pages of notes to mechanics, spells etc. Yep, turns out I was alone in this. The Rulebook is a total mismanaged clustertruck of an insult. We did 5-6 5h sessions and people started to get frustrated.
So I took over and we're playing D&D now, no need to ignore the rules if there aren't as many convoluded ones.
And yeah, only D6 is great but is it really better to roll 18 D6 instead of one D20?
edit: oh, wow, comments are from years ago. Shows how much interest there is.
There are months ago viewers sprinkled in! There is a charm to dropping 18 dice on the table, go watch some Warhammer 40K play videos for peak dice dropping!
I streamline the rules in my group, and luckily they like narrative more than squeezing out another +2 dice pool because of something on page 154 of a supplement!
The matrix rules gave me the most headheaks . I think whats make Shadowrun hard to learn is how the rules are spreed up all over the book . And some time you may have consults two different chapters to understand how the mechanics works together . At least the index from the core rule book is solide . But in the end its worth the time .
Thats why you have a NPC as the decker.
Are there any cool house rules that you like to use?
I always point people at Lauren Bonds' "How to play Shadowrun" videos. 4 small videos, about 25 minutes total time to watch, and she lays it out beautifully. th-cam.com/video/QvEEmCPQgy8/w-d-xo.html is the first one. After those, I send them here to Complex Action for specific question searches.
In 2019 it's still worth it to buy the shadowrun 5th edition books? There's any online group to play with? thanks
Good. Now I don't feel bad for taking the past year to mod the rules using bits from many editions, along with implementing certain changes from the recent PC games. Still the same Success/Resist/Oppose tests, but I've added a hit point system, an action point system, and the 'special attacks' from the VGs. Of course, if you change one rule, maybe about seventeen others are affected. Hence the time, AND its my first campaign to run. (I did learn the original rules first, before I changed anything.) I'm about to start character creation for my gal, and we're gonna sit down (each with a couple practice characters) and play with maps and without. (i figured, for HP, we'd want that more tactical realistic combat.) Not sure if it's gonna work, and I can always just switch back to original rules, but all I care about is if it's fun- for me and others. This is more of a practice for us. I'm sticking with 1st and 2nd edition, story-wise. I just love that old 80s cyberpunk feel. Cords, trodes, floppy disks, neon, etc.
(Also, the old Genesis game has come in handy many times, especially for tweaking Matrix rules.)
I JUST discovered Shadowrun during quarantine, two summers ago. I've read through several source books and a couple of the novels. I currently have about 8 different campaign scenarios for a central story (with more coming along every day), along with pages of random encounters, on-the-go names, weapon/item stat and price lists, band names, food items, etc., etc... and I'm still sure I won't be ready for everything.
AND, yes, many have suggested Shadowrun: Anarchy to me, and it does sound like fun... but it has to be with the right group. A group already familiar with the sixth world. I know plenty of improvisers who would just RUIN that game for the sake of their "yes and..."
I don't have 5e but I've played LOTS of 1e thru 3e and I'm still trying to figure out WHY everyone seems to think Shadowrun is so complex. It doesn't hold a candle to AD&D or the HERO System for complexity.
Shadowrun is pretty hard but so cool
I love character creation and I want to start off again with some unexperienced and will just create the characters for them after talking to all of them to have an idea what they thin they would like to play :D maybe after a short oneshot with archetypes or something similar.
are you still out there ??
Thanks Bobby! It's Math-iz-sias, I guess.. :P
I'm really new to shadow run like I bought the runners toolkit but I'm kinda lost can someone please break everything down to the simplest way possible please and thank you
Hi I'm getting into Shadowrun with the 5th edition book I created a novice bounty hunter with a Blade Runner-like outfit and learning some basics with attributes. I know how to roll intiative in Shadowrun but the question is: how much dice should I roll from my 7+1d6 initiative score without augmentations or stims? Feel free to answer when you have time
Matthew Gg You already said the answer! Its 1d6 and then add the number (7 in your example) to the die roll. That's your initiative!
Complex Action ok thanks chummer. Basically its a roll the dice based on attributes of reaction and intuition + 1d6. Just do the math, learn progress well and survive in the 6th World thanks again
Ok so I'm a fan of Technomacers in 5e the Puppeteer complex formm. It isn't specified in the rules weather you can make an enemy hurt the selves with an attack action or changing their boot code. the matrix actions in the book are described in the context of an attack. How to you handle this complex form.
Easy answer? Don't play Technomacers, mages or anyone who can go into the matrix/astral plain. :) Slows the game down 100% while the others wait around being bored and confused.
2:10 4 hour session??? That's the shortest shadowrun session ive ever had
Shadowrun has really fun character generation... That's where my enjoyment of the game ends.
Been a while since you made this, but I thought I'd ask anyway - is it weird that the prebuilt characters have their skill points spread so thin? I don't have much experience with the game, but when I ran a few sessions, all my players built a set of "core skills" that were at 6, with only a few lower-rank skills. Granted, I also had a troll with cyberarms who destroyed everything I threw at him, so maybe I missed the boat on balance.
The question of what is a high or low starting skill level can be pretty darn subjective. I think it makes a lot of sense to have characters starting with skills at 5 and 6 if you're playing a one-shot or a short run of sessions. That's b/c skill points are a better value for your karma points in terms of getting high dice pools in the area you specialize in.
However, if you're making a character for a long term campaign, then I think it makes more sense to favor attributes a little bit more. Let your skill values be lower and have a broader selection of skills to choose from. In a long term campaign you've got time to raise those skill ratings through character advancement.
It really is just personal preference. I listed what I think are the main benefits of each approach, but there are exceptions, of course.
Interesting. Appreciate the answer.
frag the rules... got it.
I was considering using legos for a combat grid... but I dunno...
Honestly, sometimes yeah...
"Just ignore the rules as much as you can."
Right? You didn't turn to a life of running in the shadows just so you could follow the rules. Leave that kind of stuff to the corporate wage slaves.
I miss bobby
Math -is-sai-as ;)
MATH-izss-lahs
NO BOBBY MAKE A CHARACTER, NO MATTER WHAT. EVEN IF ITS THE WEIRDEST CREATION EVER.
Shadowrun is really not that difficult.
Especially not with my handy videos! ;)
Its stupid and the rules are overly complex.
Awesome video. I have more of a meta question. Is the city of Montreal covered anywhere in setting? Keep it up Masked GM.
+R Knight (RetroGamer1224) Yes there is chummer. www.drivethrurpg.com/browse.php?keywords=shadowrun+Montreal&author=&artist=&pfrom=&pto=&x=0&y=0
My game is set in Montreal.