Slashdot Mirror
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."
before playing the new WoW board game, you must wait in line for d10 * 10 minutes
and beware! one wrong roll of the dice and you will be dropped from the game and must wait in line again
hours, and hours, and hours of fun for all ages! =)
And a comic is more valuable than a thousand jokes.
- Everyone does nothing for 20 minutes while everyone picks the costume they like.
- Hero1 shouts out across the table "LFG" (looking for group.
- Hero1 proceeds to tell Hero2,3+4 they are on his team.
- Hero3 tells him to get screwed as he doesn't accept blind invites.
- Hero4 asks what are we doing? Hero1 replies "We are going to get loads of XP!", Hero2 replies "I don't know I am busy buying stuff".
- Hero1 stands around doing nothing for 20 minutes except letting off his powers to show off the effects to the newer heros, meanwhile a woman is getting mugged 20 feet away from him.
- Hero2 starts complaining why isn't he getting XP, hes been standing around for ages waiting for xp and his team shouldn't be so lazy.
- Hero4 says screw this and goes off to another table to level up.
Interesting that FanPro says they're revising Shadowrun to be "simpler and more streamlined for quicker, easier and more consistent play". My RPG group tried Shadowrun (at my suggestion/insistence, as I'd played it back in my teen years), and it lasted less than a year because the game system was too cumbersome. There were so many things to remember that we spent more time flipping through the rules than we did playing the game. Each additional subgame system (Matrix, vehicles, magic) had its own vastly different rules, to the point where we had real trouble remembering all those details, even with cheat sheets.
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.