[Experimental] The bastard child of Polaris and Shadowrun

[Mikael]

Some background: Our group has been playing Shadowrun for the longest time (15 years). The latest incarnation is under new management (GM) and is called SRTeens, as we are playing kids, who are not runners, but do possess all sorts of fancy abilities. Overall, the game is all old-style, even if the GM is claiming to be just setting things up, and then letting us run with it. Last session, we brought in Keys from TSOY (not an immediate success, but I'll start another thread on that after we have played another session).

As we are playing very infrequently, one player and the GM were keen to move things forward via email between the sessions. Initially, I was not interested, as freeform email play is somewhat of a pain to me, and I was not at all convinced I could find the time for it. But then the GM said, "How about we use some indie rules for this between-session game, like Universalis?" and the other player chimed in with: "Yeah, or that other thing that Mikael's been talking about, Polaris?" He was only thinking about modeling some commentator roles along the lines of what he could remember from my explanations, something like "an angel on one shoulder and a devil on the other."

I was immediately much more interested, as I saw a chance to finally get to play, if not true Polaris, at least with the key phrase conflict resolution system. I think Ben really cornered the market with his system, in the sense that I do not think that it will be easy to come up with significantly better system based on phrases and (what's essentially) a well-balanced flow chart between the phrases. That said, I am truly surprised that a lot of people have not applied the system to other settings than the original tragic chivalry. Is the system so tied to tragedy that it can not be applied to other types of games without falling horribly apart? I am willing to give it a try, and so are the GM and the other player, J, after some persuasion.

So, the basic setup is me and J playing scenes of interest to us between the whole-group face-to-face sessions. The face-to-face sessions will use the vanilla 4th ed. SR rules with the possible addition of the TSOY Keys. The email sessions will be freeform, with me and J as each other's Mistaken, although we are just calling each other adversaries (on the player level, the characters are not opposing each other). Our GM is filling a sort-of-a Moon role. I am also hoping I could tempt one other player to at least participate in a Moon-like capacity - he got pretty much fed up with our games a while back, but this whole thing might be more to his liking.

Our Polaris "conversion" goes as follows:

We are using the standard Polaris flow chart (created by me; the PDF for the one on the TAO website seems to be corrupted?).

As Themes we are using four character-specific Themes, under which we have organized the character's attributes, skills and whatever else seems suitable to provide inspiration. For example, the Themes for my character are: "Small" (frail and nimble), "Dances with spirits", "Elemental boy" and "Little prince". As an example of what goes under each Theme: Under "Small", I have placed both his Body score of 1 and his reasonable Stealth skill.

In SRTeens, we have no Zeal and Weariness, so the roll in "It shall not come to pass" needs to be about something different. We say that you need to roll over the amount of your untapped Themes plus one. Thus, if you have not exhausted any Themes, you would need to throw a six, and when you have used them all, anything but a one is a success. Success blocks whatever you were blocking and refreshes all your Themes, and those of your adversary, as per normal Polaris. Intended effect of this scheme is to encourage the use of other phrases until a number of Themes have been tapped, and then seeing which of the players is willing to take the risk first (with success again making rolling a very unattractive option). We'll see how that works.

Any comments on our approach? I'll get back to you with some Actual Play as soon as we get a few more scenes in.

A tangent: As the basic character in SR is a hardened criminal ready to kill for money (no matter how glamorous they try to make it), you could play an SR game that is much more faithful to the original Polaris, by using the rules as-is and starting with fresh and idealistic youngsters with some special abilities. Zeal and Weariness would then be used to track their decent into cynical 'runnerhood or death. Pretty nice match, I would think.

[Ben Lehman]

Mikael --

Awesome!  I would have done stuff a little differently but what you've got seems pretty workable.

I've got one meaningful suggestion, though.  Since you aren't interested in Zeal/Weariness arcs, what I would do instead is to associate a number with each of the themes, which should all sum up to 12, with none lower than 1 or higher than 5.  When you roll, the heart is trying to roll under the appropriate number, which is governed by the last theme expended, or whatever the Moons feel is appropriate otherwise.

I've always thought Polaris had a lot of potential for this sort of hacking, and I'm glad to see some of it actually happening.  Please let us know how it actually plays.

yrs--
--Ben

[Steven Stewart]

I was thinking a lot about this topic this morning when I was stuck in an MRI machine for a half-hour with nothing else to do. I like both settings of both games, but the Polaris rules that much better than anything out there.

I would think the following could be a good fit without having to change almost any of the Polaris rules set, just the setting set:

Protagonists still have four themes:
Fates (as per Polaris)
Resources (Replace blessings - but also include things like Contacts which have been a big part of shadowrun for a long time, also include things like cyberware, etc.)
Reputation (Replaces Offices, this is your street cred, what you know are known for, could be professions like hot street samurai, or something like bad motherfucka like from Pulp Fiction)
Abilities - just like Polaris.

Players still have a shared Fate (in a game we did that was similar but different- meaning a cyperpunk game using a narrativist conflict phrasing type of game - during a playtest for something I working on- we had something like Sony-Maas new Biochips for activating the wi-fi network contain sublimial messages to people - so we had a shared fate like Sony-Maas).

Instead of zeal and weariness, you could have Hustle and Burn-out. Instead of Ice and Light, Just rename it like Shadow (for your personal stuff like Resources and Abilities) and Biz (for Rep and Fates). Characters could start off expierenced though so for every point below 4 for hustle, you get to add a point to Biz or Shadow.

Rest of the play goes like Polaris, instead of Betrayal of the People, you get an aspect of "Always someone better than you", to represent that the streets will eventually gobble-you-up. Afterall how many 40 year old console cowboys are there?

Characters can die once their Burn-out is at least 1, and when they roll an advance to get Burn-out to 5 the get a scene where their character realises, that there is someone better, younger, faster, and smarter, they can't cut it anymore. Either they go the way of the alley burnout, or maybe something else, but in the end they don't have the biz anymore.

Just another spin.

Cheers,