[PTA/Shadowrun] The Foundation: initial SR(ish) rules game session

[Thomas D]

As recounted earlier, I used Primetime Adventures as the ruleset for our Shadowrun campaign's opening session.  Post-PTA, we spent time out of the game session to remake the characters using a very house ruled Shadowrun ruleset.  Despite our out of game session prep time, we spent the first two hours of the game session finalizing characters. 

Many of the rules changes came out of the campaign premise.  The characters are all members of a well-financed organization sent out on tasks.  All gear would then come from the organization.  Unfortunately, Shadowrun character creation uses a Build Point system and gear comes out of those BPs.  If someone doesn't want cyber- or bioware or a lot of weapons, say like a magically adept private investigator, that player wouldn't devote many BP towards Gear.  If someone wanted a highly cybered, gun-toting fiend, they'd dump tons of points into the gear category.  Even in a setting where the characters will be equipped by a patron organization, the Shadowrun rules assume that you'll be purchasing all your gear. 

(I'm reminded of the d20 Stargate SG-1 game where the members of SG-1 are supposed to purchase the weapons they'd take on each off-world mission.  From that game's rulebook, Teal'c wouldn't have been able to afford the staff beam weapon he used in the early seasons until he was 5th level.)

Because mission loadouts would be handled by the organization, we instituted a Gear Pool.  The thought would be that there's a standard mission loadout and while on the mission, if they needed some equipment (like a set of lockpicks) but weren't issued have any, they'd spend a die or two from their Gear Pool and roll to see if they had it with them.  So far this hasn't worked out well, because we had the characters actually go to the equipment area and, while getting their gear, they kept asking for more things.  Not just things that should have been in the standard kit that I didn't think of, like a mapsoft of the country they were visiting and an Arabic linguasoft, but they went shopping through the gear section of the Shadowrun book.  After the character finalization and the initial mission brief, it seemed we spent about forty-five minutes just gearing up.

What I'd like to do is have the Gear Pool work like Donjon's Provisions score.  The way to get that done -- after the inital mission brief and character scenes around the organization, we'd skip over the Q Branch stuff and get the players on their way.  Although I think this gearing up section of last Sunday's game was annoying, I did learn that there was some gear that the players felt was a requirement for an investigation mission.

Part of what they seemed to enjoy was the creation of the characters.  Putting points in one thing instead of another to make the character "fit" the game system.  Even though we revamped how cyber- and bioware was purchased (and spells known and adept powers), most people didn't take advantage of the "define it in-game" option.  Basically, spending 5 Build Points allowed you to get 1 Essence point worth of cyber- and/or bioware.  You could define all that augmentation at character creation, or you could define it at any point in the game.  "Oh yeah," you'd say.  "My character always had cybernetic eyes with telescopic vision.  I just never used them before."  For the players that could cast magic, they defined all their known spells beforehand instead of leaving a few undefined until a point in game.

I suppose they wanted to know exactly what the limits were on the characters they were playing.  Something like: "My sorceror adept knows these five spells and only these five spells." Instead of the PTA character saying "My sorceror can cast magical spells."  I had the feeling that with one of the players, a character sheet with only two major traits wasn't enough -- he really wanted a list of words paired up with numbers to tell him exactly what he can and cannot do.

Pre-game prep took much, much longer.  I wound up pulling the sample adventure from the Hellboy RPG ("City of Night") and updating a few things to fit into the Shadowrun world.  With the majority of the adventure taking place in the northern part of Mali, which means in the Sahara, I didn't have to worry too much about the Matrix.  However, there is a good bit of magical wonkery happening later in the adventure.  Converting one major element into the SR game world -- and having it behave according to the SR rules -- was vexing.  If we stuck with PTA, if/when we encountered this major element, this wouldn't be any problem with rule dancing.  (We probably would have finished the episode instead of having to stop in the middle of the adventure.)

I can't really comment too much on character development using SR versus PTA at this point as the adventure scenario was a published one and after the whole character creation bit I really wanted to dump them into the actual game play.  I hate the "read this off the page" bit for adventure starters, but I wound up doing that anyway.  We had cool props that were passed around, which was fun.

Given how I felt the game went on Sunday, I'm thinking of continuing the game using the SR rules with the above change to the Gear Pool.  But to keep things on a way to focus on character development, I think every fourth game session, we'll do a session just using PTA with the d20 dice mechanic.

[Callan S.]

Hi Thomas,

I had the feeling that with one of the players, a character sheet with only two major traits wasn't enough -- he really wanted a list of words paired up with numbers to tell him exactly what he can and cannot do.

With the gearing up and this, I'm not really seeing a desire to have 'some boundaries as to what I can add to the SIS'. I'm seeing antipatory tactical play. The preset spells supports that, because you can't do anticipatory tactics when, well, you can pull whatever out of your butt when the time comes. He goes the preset spells because that then allows him to anticipate. This doesn't have end up in gamist play, but it's so close it may as well be, IMO.

I'm not sure what I could suggest to further test this hypothesis. But a suggestion is that next time, for gearing up, set a real world time limit. If they just nod and work out the gear, I'm likely wrong. If they get excited about trying to get their gear down in the time given - jeez, it's another strong tell for gamist preference.