Ten things I hate about Shadowrun LOOK, ROBOTFirstly, I want to thank the chap who got me this massive book. I hate it, and thats wonderful. Its filled me with such joy to go through and puzzle out why some of these rules are even in the book, and its going to provide me with hours and hours of confused fun yet. So, thanks, Matt. Now Shadowrun is a fucking joke, and heres why. This is the random personality table for NPCs, and almost all the personalities are awful. DINOSAURSFor those who dont know, Shadowrun is a combination of two great 8. High Fantasy and Cyberpunk. So youve got near future chipheads and goons struggling to survive in a world of chrome and neon and double crosses whilst also, crucially, being trolls and elves and casting magic spells. Now, these days were in something of a movement towards lighter games. We dont need massive blocks of stats and numbers to help us define a game world we need brisk, crisp rules that power reward behaviour and power stories. Theres still a market for your Travellers and your Dark Heresies, of course, for hardbacked tomes that have rules for every eventuality and worldbuilding that covers every base. Theres a thrill to pitting yourself against a ruleset and trying to wring the most effective characters out of it. But, for the most part, theyre dinosaurs. This is a BENEFIT you can purchase for your character. Distinctive Style is a penalty. In a game where youre trying to make a legendary name for yourself. GUH. Shadowrun is a dinosaur. It is a Frankensteins Monster of a game, a cobbled together list of in jokes and leftover rules. COMPLEXITYIm not against complexity in games, but I am against it when its the first thing that players come across. In all of these examples, I want you to remember that this is the core book the book should allow a gamesmaster to run a game with no extra written materials. This is not the advanced, all singing all dancing hundreds of rules for a specialised class splatbook. Take a look at this sample starting character SERIOUSLY. You probably wont be able to read all that, and thats fine. This is a Rigger, one of the six basic roles you can take on in a Shadowrun team theyre in charge of piloting vehicles from unmanned drones to tricked out battletanks. As a starting player, here, youre expected to look over the list of potential vehicles and pick out twelve of them. Thats too much to take in as a new player. If youve been playing Shadowrun for the last ten or twenty years, its fine. But if youre just coming to the world now, thats so much choice as to make informed decisions almost impossible. REDUNDANTThat level of granularity although its so granular its now unpleasant to experience, so perhaps grittiness is a better word, in as much as the bottom of a cup of coffee is gritty is present in every level of the game. I cant imagine what they cut from it, because it seems like everything is here. I hate three kinds of rules redundant rules, rules that require maths, and rules that directly counteract against the story. Shadowrun is made up of all three. For the first example, heres a paragraph that offers full rules for treading water Not swimming TREADING WATER. Now, this isnt a game about pirates. Hackmaster 5Th Edition Character Sheet' title='Hackmaster 5Th Edition Character Sheet' />Or fishing. Or, you know, swimming. Its a game where you are thrown onto the mean streets of Neo Tokyo or Neo Wherever and fight to survive against almost impossible odds through canny use of tactics. Sea has fewer rules than this for treading water, and large sections of that game are expressly designed to take place on board ship. Once a game does something like this, its hard to take it seriously. You have to read it with an eye for which rules youre going to use and which ones youre going to cut out, and thats not a good rules set. This is like when Vampire The Masquerade decided that skills such as Flying and Lip Reading were as mechanically important as skills like Persuasion and Streetwise in their urban game of dark horror. What else is uselessWhere do I draw the line Can these rules survive intact if I ignore bits of them Will I still be playing the game as the designers intendedAnd while were at it, Im fully aware that the important bit isnt the rules, its that we all have fun, and we can ignore rules if they dont fit. Hackmaster 5Th Edition Character Sheet' title='Hackmaster 5Th Edition Character Sheet' />Its just that its a fucking shoddy excuse for writing bad rules, is all. If I wanted to ignore rules I could just tell a story with my friends and leave the dice at home a game should fit together beautifully and each rule should act in service of all the others, not function as some dirty little grab bag of ideas. Hackmaster 5Th Edition Character Sheet' title='Hackmaster 5Th Edition Character Sheet' />Especially if its in hardback. My favourite thing about this passage is how Ive read it four times and still cant understand it. In fact, no, youre getting a rant. On behalf of Dragonsfoot, welcome to the Second Edition Advanced Dungeons And Dragons Section. Shop from the worlds largest selection and best deals for Role Playing Games. Shop with confidence on eBay Setting. In 4th edition, the official setting of Hackmaster was Garweeze Wurld, a giant continent on the planet Aldrazar based on the notes of Jolly Blackburn. Youre getting a full rant. This isnt some backwater unplaytested clusterfuck of a thing. This isnt some sideshow attraction like FATAL, or a product that is essentially satire akin to Hackmaster. This is the fifth fucking edition of a wildly popular title. This game has been in circulation longer than a lot of my readers have been alive. This isnt some PDF weve found on the arse end of the internet. This is a product, a piece of game design, and it deserves to be viewed under a critical lens. If I didnt like one character in a film, could I mute all their dialogue and still experience the film as intended Probably not And yet we still see these massive, bloated games where every rule is inherently optional. Its bad design. Dont give me things I can cut away and not detract from the experience. If I can remove a rule from the game and not change much, thats something you should have done yourselves. MATHSNext up maths. Hackmaster 5Th Edition Character Sheet' title='Hackmaster 5Th Edition Character Sheet' />Maths are the bane of pacing. I can dig that Shadowrun is explicitly designed as a sort of puzzlebox. Your team of cyber badasses is given a difficult mission to undertake, and through clever application of their talents, equipment and capabilities they can overcome the difficulties posed to them and get paid. Mechanically, its not that different from a classic dungeoncrawl. However, these are the rules for working out whether explosion damage is reflected off walls COME ON. There is no way you can do this without scratch paper, and these are rules for explosions. This isnt character gen, or background creation, or even an ongoing skill challenge. No, these are rules which the GM is supposed to look up every time someone throws a grenade near a surface. Not only do they have to work out if the wall is destroyed or not, but if it remains intact, they then have to calculate how many times each target is hit by the blastwave as it rebounds within the space. This is a terrible idea. You take the excitement of an explosion and render it down into a series of calculations. 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