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WoW Board Game, Shadowrun 4.0, and City of Heroes RPG
Among the many announcements made at the GAMA Trade show this week, one of the most exciting is the revelation that Shadowrun 4.0 is on the horizon, to be released at this year's Gen Con game fair. Other news includes a World of Warcraft board game, an "Ultimate" version of Rifts, the Production Schedule for Dungeons and Dragons for 2005, a City of Heroes Table-Top RPG, and a 10th Anniversary Settlers of Catan edition. From the Shadowrun Website: "The core mechanics are completely revised to be simpler and more streamlined for quicker, easier and more consistent play. Matrix 2.0! An all-new level of wireless "augmented reality" overlays the real world, unleashing hackers to be mobile digital wizards."
Right, cuz thats what made deckers so cool....they were just like D&D wizards. BZZZT! WRONG!
Shadowrun == D&D. And its players like it because of that.
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
And a comic is more valuable than a thousand jokes.
Matrix 2.0! An all-new level of wireless "augmented reality" overlays the real world, unleashing hackers to be mobile digital wizards.
When I first played Shadowrun back in the early nineties the way they concieved the Matrix was consistent with all the SF around. A really big, fancy VR network. This new version will be a nice change since the adoption of ubiquitous wireless functionality in everything under the sun really will turn Deckers into Real-Time digital mages (as opposed to the nasty game mechanics you used to have where the Decker player basically had to show up 4 hours before everybody else to get all his solo matrix shit out of the way).
For a Sci-Fi look at how it would be read the Man-Machine Interface graphic novel by Masamune Shirow. It's almost enough to make me want to play SR again.
-Pinkoir
Let me qualify the subject line with the fact that I'm a great fan of the Shadowrun universe. I'm hoping and praying that Microsoft gets off it's rear and lets someone produce a Shadowun MMORPG, because it would certainly have my gaming dollars.
That said, the Shadowrun 3rd edition rules are the most convoluted and obscure RPG rules I've ever had to work with. That's not to say that they're worse than earlier versions of the Shadowrun rules. The first and second editions are even worse, and can be broken in so many ways (as a bored game store owner friend of mine went into hideous detail about one night). However, unless you know the relevant rulebooks inside and out, you are going to have a devil of a time finding the relevant rules. FASA has a horrible reputation for piss poor editing in its books. In some of the older FASA releases, page references are wildly wrong, or completely nonexistant (one popular and hard to find book has all page references as "Page: xx") or even mentioning rules that just plain don't exist.
I ran a Shadowrun campaign for, I believe about a year, approximately a year ago. Page references were just wrong on more than one occasion. Rule sections were unclear. Whole categories of (at least in my game) often happening situations were completely untouched upon, or mentioned only in passing. I'm not averse to house rules, but i like to at least try to see what the game system's rule for a situation is, and see if it made sense. There were so many normal types of situations that even the advanced rulebooks (like Matrix, etc) didn't even mention. I had to develop house rules for all kinds of normal situations. My play group spent hours flipping through sourcebooks trying to find something, ANYTHING that made sense.
I wish the FanPro people well on this. I'll probably pick up the 4th edition rules to support people making stuff for the Shadowrun universe, but any further purchases, and whether I bother running a Shadowrun campaign ever again I've got a lot of doubt about.