Where have all the crunchy games gone?
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I'd love a D&D game, though Tenebrae has been fun since I rolled up a monk. They've been pretty helpful helping me build my PC to where she is useful.
I mean, stats and sheets are alright but I think after running sheets of numbers through R and stuff, I'm totally down for softer stuff.
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I don't really consider Shadowrun crunchy I would put it like WoD in the medium crunch bracket. When I think High crunch I think things like, Traveler, GURPS, Champions/Hero, and anything GDW published. (Games Design Workshop). and then for the truly crazy level of Crunch Tri-tacs hit location chart, which starts with rolling a percentile to determine which general area of the body you hit then another roll to get which part of that part you hit. On the human head there are 36 possible hit locations in the system. (Note I never actually played this system though the game I bought that used it i did love the setting for. )
While Shadowrun and WoD can both go more crunchy if the person running things uses a lot of modifiers neither tends to be played that way.
I will say SR is generally perceived as more crunchy but I think that has a lot to do with its focus on action, where WoD even in the table tops I have been in has more of a culture of a lot of rp while minimizing the actual use of the system and more of a focus on scheming and manipulation that while there are systems for that the tend not to be used as rigorously as systems in Shadowrun for things like rigging or hacking. -
There IS a 'rules lite' edition of Shadowrun coming out which I think is a 'sign of the times' in the demands of the aging gaming population generally. I expect the pendulum will eventually swing back to greater degrees of crunch and simulationism in time.
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@Lithium I have a scifi thing in wod slightly setup, and am working on a cyberpunk thing. It's just taking a lot of time thanks to work. Getting people to help is a pain since everyone I talk to only wants baseline wod.
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While I haven't played much Shadowrun, the game's premise is specifically set up to involve skilled mercenary criminals that do whatever it takes to get paid. That may mean sweet-talking or sneaking your way past the front door, but it also involves guns, hacking, drones with guns and bombs, punches to the face, the occasional hurled fireball and probably someone running around with
duct tapea med kit when things go wrong. There's lots to work with there but it's inherently built around action. With lots of action comes a risk of death.Meanwhile, WoD specifically has built-in emphasis on social/political interaction. In WoD mushes, this is combined with a low ST:player ratio, which reduces incidences of dice rolling for violence. When you throw that in along with MU*ers tendency to freeform RP (no PVP social roll policies being common) then the pressure and unexpected outcomes that come from bad rolls are greatly reduced.
The system itself is quite capable of being used for development of min-maxed/specialized characters, it's just that character specialization gets little opportunity to be showcased in bar scenes or the overpopulated monster-of-the-week plots that are common PRP fodder.
The WoD books are designed for tabletop (Mind's Eye Theater aside, which tbh I've never played, on top of which I've never LARPed in general), as are a lot of the systems listed in this thread. How 'crunchy' a game is is always about how the GM runs their game, which in turn is about how GMs tailor their games to their players. MU* environments don't do this well, particularly ones which don't allow sheet sharing to other players via the system and don't have any GM-specific reference notes.
With a tabletop, GMs typically have some leeway to fill in a character's background themselves, which creates a very interesting interactive dynamic. MU*ers, on the other hand, seem to prefer the idea that their backgrounds are sacred and can never be influenced in that type of manner by a GM. STs therefore will never try to do this, and playing on something in the character's past or integral to that character's personality is generally something that needs serious hand-holding or trust between GM and player to be done.
This type of thought process has generally led to WoD MU*ers playing more freeform and erring on a conservative side when it comes to letting others influence what they believe their character to be. It encourages shying away from risk taking from both ends unless the parties involved are very familiar with one another. That's a culture thing, not a system crunch thing.
All that said, a Shadowrun game without good staff will probably die faster than a WoD game without good staff, because WoD games can theoretically get by just with players.
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Bear in mind that 'social interaction dice' are a very screamed about thing and usually the least used feature of WoD on games, because you're a rapist pariah if you want to ever use your dice to determine what another PC might be influenced towards. People start hyperventilating at the mere thought of using it. So honestly, most PrPs I've seen or even staff run things on WoD mushes are heavily combat oriented or spectating. Even heavily "political oriented" splats in mushdom tend to never get to use their social dice or merits at all (except for to get a few extra dug rooms on their mansions, ect) or very seldom, so combat skills dominate. That is starting to change now, thank god.
But as I said before--social capital is king, and not from your +sheet, and can be on rules focused games as well.
I'm not sure a SR game would die without staff. I noticed the various SR spinoffs seems to have a lot more focus on social RP and less staff running of things, and many of them lasted for quite some time. In addition, I wouldn't have termed most of the huge bloated staff register on some of those games (including SR seattle even in its heyday) as "good".
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@faraday Have you ever tried to make a Rigger with a custom vehicle? Or a Decker with a custom deck? Those two areas in the game get very, very, very crunchy. Cyberware/bioware is a little fiddly, foci/initiation is a tiny bit fiddly, all the modifiers (SR3) are a little fiddly, but in general, Shadowrun is a pretty light-crunch game... until you bring in Riggers and Deckers.
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Unfortunately I've found this is the case in most of the WoD games I've tried as well, and it's one of the reasons I've kind of given up on playing them. I agree with you, and basically think that what you are looking for is probably going to be best served by trying a multitude of games and keeping an eye on staff activity.
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@Seraphim73 Though with the exception of a separate grid (at least on Seattle), I don't recall there being a lot of staff support for riggers in particular. So yeah, you could build stuff out, but whether or not it gained you anything in play is...meh. (I had a rigger on Seattle, and one on Detroit too). Deckers at least could do paydata on the old games. And they always had staff that would run shit for them, at least.
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@mietze Oh god... despite having tried SR:Seattle briefly, I would never look for a Shadowrun MUSH. The whole idea of small teams of professional paranoiacs who do covert (or overt) jobs for pay... just doesn't work on a MUSH, unless you have 1 Storyteller/GM per 4-10 players or somewhere around there.
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Back in the day, SR:Seattle had...shit. Like a HUGE staff roster when you consider that it was in essence a 'single sphere' game. It also could be PvP at any time (fights between groups did often break out and they often caused massive PK--gang wars, orks/trolls converging on humans/elves going down into the UG, the free for all of the Barrens) and since all equipment things were objects rather than +sheet stuff, that means if you killed people you'd get their stuff and their credsticks, ect. I don't recall ever being bored there. Though there was plenty of silliness/social/sexytimes shit too. I saw much more politics and negotiations there than I've seen on most WoD places, even my favorite political places. Probably because staff would not intervene in PKs. I remember regular purges and assasinations between yakuza/mafia/associated racial and org gangs/triads/ect
This is not to say there wasn't cheating/favoritism/gaming the system/ect because certainly there was, and sometimes the PK stuff got a little old (especially harsh for the people unused to it/not expecting that a simple mistake like going into the barrens desced as being dressed up or randomly wandering into territory could get them killed within hours of getting out of CG--and a full background and all that shit was required (of course, with a zillion staff I don't recall the turn around time being very long either). No age policy either for PCs, which probably led to some gross stuff. So I'm not saying it was halcyon days, but it was very very different from the offerings you see now. And I think while there was like super drama that spilled into RL, there wasn't quite the uber major ooc nastiness that's vomited all over the place that you see in some WoD environments either. It may just be perception though, and my aging brain.
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@mietze My one experience there did not go well. In addition to the (as I recall) total bias toward Adepts and other Magic Users because Karma was more readily available than credits (and didn't have to worry about the Essence cap), I had the pleasure of going on-grid, moving my gear into the room that I had written into my background as having stayed at for a good long while (I don't remember if it was weeks or months), and logging back in to find a Staffer in my room, telling me that some NPC saw my character hauling his half-dozen pistols up in a duffel bag and decided to break down the door and burgle his room while he was out and about.
I was not impressed by the welcome given to a new player.
Not to say it was a bad place, I didn't really stick around much longer than that (long enough to get obliterated in a fight-club type fight, and run a few automated missions).
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I give up. You're bound and determined to read what I wrote negatively.
Have fun with that.
To everyone else who decided to discuss the topic, thanks.
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It's my guess that if you coded up or automated a system that is considered pretty crunchy on the table top (like RoleMaster or GURPS) it might not be at all crunchy on a mud/mush.
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@Seraphim73 I think Shadowrun had a +stash command, where you could hide your guns. Looking back at it, it was a shitty way to treat a noob. Things like that were the norm. Mess up on a run? consequences! Carrying visible firearms downtown? Consequences!
Anyway back to the topic. I think shadowrun is regarded as crunchy is because at least in 3rd edition, Rigging, decking and magic were almost like separate rule sets. Some staff on Shadowrun and Detroit only dealt with certain rules and you could kind of tell by the plots they ran. By the time I started playing there were mostly street sams, phys adepts, and mages walking around. Every once in a while you'd bump into the odd rigger or decker.
I think at some point people kind of said "eff those rules."
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For those looking for Shadowrun games, there is also apparently Shadowrun Denver.
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@acceleration said in Where have all the crunchy games gone?:
While I haven't played much Shadowrun, the game's premise is specifically set up to involve skilled mercenary criminals that do whatever it takes to get paid. That may mean sweet-talking or sneaking your way past the front door, but it also involves guns, hacking, drones with guns and bombs, punches to the face, the occasional hurled fireball and probably someone running around with
duct tapea med kit when things go wrong. There's lots to work with there but it's inherently built around action. With lots of action comes a risk of death.Come on, @acceleration ... We both have played with this community and you know that none of the above is beloved, everyone wants to pretty and dancing in the rain with rainbows and all that while they go to college and play at "life?".
Meanwhile, WoD specifically has built-in emphasis on social/political interaction. In WoD mushes, this is combined with a low ST:player ratio, which reduces incidences of dice rolling for violence. When you throw that in along with MU*ers tendency to freeform RP (no PVP social roll policies being common) then the pressure and unexpected outcomes that come from bad rolls are greatly reduced.
The system itself is quite capable of being used for development of min-maxed/specialized characters, it's just that character specialization gets little opportunity to be showcased in bar scenes or the overpopulated monster-of-the-week plots that are common PRP fodder.
The WoD books are designed for tabletop (Mind's Eye Theater aside, which tbh I've never played, on top of which I've never LARPed in general), as are a lot of the systems listed in this thread. How 'crunchy' a game is is always about how the GM runs their game, which in turn is about how GMs tailor their games to their players. MU* environments don't do this well, particularly ones which don't allow sheet sharing to other players via the system and don't have any GM-specific reference notes.
With a tabletop, GMs typically have some leeway to fill in a character's background themselves, which creates a very interesting interactive dynamic. MU*ers, on the other hand, seem to prefer the idea that their backgrounds are sacred and can never be influenced in that type of manner by a GM. STs therefore will never try to do this, and playing on something in the character's past or integral to that character's personality is generally something that needs serious hand-holding or trust between GM and player to be done.
This type of thought process has generally led to WoD MU*ers playing more freeform and erring on a conservative side when it comes to letting others influence what they believe their character to be. It encourages shying away from risk taking from both ends unless the parties involved are very familiar with one another. That's a culture thing, not a system crunch thing.
All that said, a Shadowrun game without good staff will probably die faster than a WoD game without good staff, because WoD games can theoretically get by just with players.
As for that last line... Please see any game created by @tragedyjones
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They are gone because SOMEONE left them in the milk too long.
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I personally think the more a MUSH, outside of a MUD, tries to get crunchy, they more its likely to turn people away. Few that are highly crunchy are truly fully coded for combat, where everything takes care of itself. Thus it leads to rules lawyering and we do see disagreements happen mid scene. These bog down TT games, they make MU* just dredge along while everyone has to wait for the argument to simmer down enough. Folks can opt to leave when they disagree, or agree to not play it out when they lose.
If I want crunchy, I go to a MUD. If it gets into PvP, the other one can't just 'log out' to avoid resolution, or they can, but the game still runs it through for a set amount of time, so they'll still die if they were getting beat up. Without some control to keep dogs in the fight, so to speak, the crunchy becomes arbitrary to me. When it becomes arbitrary, its more just a collaborative story and the crunchy parts are used to find out when there is failure to let the group overcome the failure. Its why I prefer PvE in all Mu*s but MUDs (and most Muds are PvE mostly, the day of PvP trolls who just got big to PK are in the past - not saying they don't do that, but like the PK'ers in WoD on-line, they are more far and few between these days.
I think adding the crunch comes down to playing with those with similar play style and everyone good with letting the dice fall where they land. And playing with those people.
I'm just a surge protector doing my job, sir.
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It's a matter of preference. Some people like more number-crunching, mechanics and systems in their games (in fact it's often a big part of how and why they pick to play one in the first place). Others don't.
Neither means players care more or less about theme, character development or roleplaying quality - such qualities are, as far as I can see, orthogonal to the preference above. Some pretty great roleplayers I've met love to use dice and some rather poor ones are rather elitist about their absence.
I probably fall deeper into the second category these days unless I've absorbed enough mechanical knowledge via osmosis from freaks like Coin or Misadventure, in which case I'm more ambivalent. But I hate learning new systems from scratch.
- He who takes offense when not intended is a fool. He who takes offense when intended is a greater fool.
