@faraday The short answer is it doesn't handle alternate style characters. The long answer is that it does allow them, but you HAVE to be a part of the shadows. Your street doc? Can't be a doctor at a hospital who works the streets on the side. Or they can... but you have to buy your own hospital if you want to do that, but even then, it's an illegal hospital.
@Jennkryst That's weird as hell to me.
@Arkandel At one point, it got very PVP-ish when people worked for actual megacorps, or were ranking members of the mafia, or leaders of gangs... anyway, people brought big guns to bare on other players, so staff put their foot down. The degree the foot got brought down varied based on who was staff at the time... Vulcan got away with murder... another person (I forget who) got shit done solely because they knew Wyld's phone number and would call him and have something done... Mirage was hired hesitantly because of some problems with Accelerate (his decker PC) while we were in the middle of making new, player-friendly matrix rules, and he basically trashed it all saying the status quo was fine (when the status most most definately not quo (yay for paraphrasing (and parenthesis)), else we wouldn't have been working on new rules).
@Jennkryst No, I suppose I see it, I just come from a long streak of games where people can play anything thematically possible within their world, from CEOs/House Heads to criminals, doctors, police officers, drug addicts... anything. The idea of being so restricted is a bit alien to me.
@Arkandel said:
@Jennkryst No, I suppose I see it, I just come from a long streak of games where people can play anything thematically possible within their world, from CEOs/House Heads to criminals, doctors, police officers, drug addicts... anything. The idea of being so restricted is a bit alien to me.
Me too. I mean, I can understand restricting some concepts that are more powerful than the game wants to deal with (like a CEO in Shadowrun who's more powerful than a President) but an ER doc moonlighting on the side? Or a journalist getting mixed up in shady dealings. That's kinda... bizarre.
I don't agree with it, either (it's one of the many reasons I don't play there anymore).
@faraday You can, much of the everyday plots are dependent on self-generation/player run plots (think of them as weekly episodes or dungeon crawls or whatever you want).
Right now i'm getting the metaplot started and I've planted clues and rumros and what not. I've played a drug addicted streetdoc and a tacit legbreaker for a grandfathered mobster. We have a guy who moonlights a s superhero and a Vory-adjacent fixer.
It's more that the narrative responsibility is on you for everyday stuff because staff overall is mroe hands off. As story teller staff I'm hands on, but it's one story. Though a journalist might want to dig into rumors. We have a ganger running a nomad crew in the Warrens. It's pretty wide open currently, honestly.
It also has something to do with the way money works. It's not a Resource dot system... you have what you have. A real dayjob would give you money, and they're all like NOPE, CANNOT DO. If you're cool with having no income or resources or pull for your ER Doc from his ER job, then I mean, sure, you could be one.
@Jennkryst said:
A real dayjob would give you money, and they're all like NOPE, CANNOT DO.
I just really don't understand the reasoning. Why? Plus, won't any Shadowrunner worth a damn have money? I mean that's what you're doing what you're doing, to get paid.
ShadowRunning is not a full time gig. Work comes, it goes. Sometimes you do all the work, something goes sideways, and you don't get paid at all. Sometimes you're flush.
The 'goal' for most shadowrunners is to make enough money to retire outside of the shadows. Most don't ever get to do that, they either always want more shiny, can't give up the adrenaline, or simply are not successful enough to make the money in the first place.
The team isn't in a vacuum, there's a /lot/ of running teams, or people who think they are runners, all competing for work. So your connections network is what determines how much work you're going to get, that you're actually willing to do.
There's a lot of people who refuse to put on the black hat, see ShadowRunners as some sort of super hero, and that's fine, I guess, but it doesn't pay the bills imho.
@Arkandel said:
@Jennkryst said:
A real dayjob would give you money, and they're all like NOPE, CANNOT DO.
I just really don't understand the reasoning. Why? Plus, won't any Shadowrunner worth a damn have money? I mean that's what you're doing what you're doing, to get paid.
It's downtime vs active. Having a dayjob gives you money for time spent either doing nothing while you're at work, or RPing being at work. Going on shadowruns, however, 9/10 times involves actively being involved and there being 'danger' (danger in quotes because of the loltastic consent rules in place). And they are very big on high reward requiring high risk. Earning 50,000 nuyen for just walking a pet had best involve ROUSes trying to eat you, for example.
I'm going to employ a bit of fiction logic here, but follow along.
Cyberpunk is developed from the ethos of noir. One part of cyberpunk is that everything is disposable, including people. Especially people. This is why the stigmatism on wage-slaves or salarymen. Shadowrunners started as people you would hire when you needed dirty work done, people who work beneath the law or able to be flexible about it. It's kind of like hiring a Raymond Chandler private detective; they might get the job done but it's a dirty job that nobody really wants to do.
In the cyberpunk future, things tend to be worth more than people and the cost for installing and maintaining cyberware doesn't give you much of a chance to strike out on your own; you're owned.
Now Chandler was more hard-boiled than noir, but Gibson was writing about people, and generally he was writing about the moral ambiguity of people that would eventually lead his heroes to do the right things in spite of the harm they might do to the egos of others. New Rose Hotel is the seminal example of this, but pretty much half of Burning Chrome is solidly noir in its approach on human relationships.
But ShadowRun is a game, and as a game you can make it about anything, but on the whole I believe 'runners are not rich because they're paid for shit or at least their payments have to almost immediately go to paying off everyone who got them there, fixing things broken. c.f. Listen Up You Primitive Screwheads, which is a wonderful guide how to fuck up your players' characters' lives in a fun and cyberpunk way. More punk than noir, absolutely. CP2020 is all about the punk.
Which brings me back to my original comment: I don't know what ShadowRun is supposed to be about. I don't think it's cyberpunk. I think it's post-modern fantasy.
tl;dr: Because life sucks if you're not protected by The Man, and life sucks if you are.
Pretty much what @Thenomain said. On the one hand, you could easily have a game set in the 6th world (Shadowrunville) where players could be whatever. Wyld, Shadowrun: Denver's headwiz, often butts heads with theme staff who are Very Dystopia/Noir Gritty in their views, and while Wyld is an awesome coder, he is not good with people (which is why he has other people to deal with shit, and even a Chief of Staff to handle things that would normally take a Headwiz to handle).
I would do several unspeakable things to get ahold of some of SR:D's code, because their voucher system is amazeballs, as well as their in-mush documentation system. To those who haven't seen it - every piece of 'ware (be it cyber or bio) is listed, because when you install it, it modifies stats on your +sheet. +document/find (thing) will return every +help or +news or +anything file that has an instance of (thing) in it. +qarchive will return every +queue (+request before +request was a thing) you have submitted (going back to 2010, when +qarchive was created).
Initially Shadorwun was very much cyberpunk with magic and elves... and I hated it with a passion. Still do hate that era of it, mainly cause I like my cyberpunk with out that.
Fourth and fifth edition really are not cyberpunk at all. They are still noir-ish but is is closer to more conventional near future sci fi, most of the punk elements have been removed or shunted to the back ground. Heck some parts of the meta plot even show marked improvement in the world. Shadowrun is as much about the world the characters are in as it is the characters themselves.
I would guess that yes most Shadowrun tabletops feature the a group of traditional illegal service doing operatives just like most D+D games feature the standard adventuring party roaming through abandoned ruins and killing thing to take their stuff. As to what the character do when not on that activity, well that will always depend on the table or mush. I have been in D+D games where any time not on adventures was glassed over in a couple of sentences.
Now the question as to what the characters do when not busy is an important one for MUSHes since I have always described mushing as essentially rping out most of the stuff that gets glossed over in a table top, but for the most part has to be answered on a player level not a game design one.
Though is MUSHes provide a guide it is basically become college students, a lot of drinking and coupling.
I never played Shadowrun for long - a handful of sessions, although I really liked their street Samurai mechanics for cybernetics.
What has stayed with me after all these years though (and maybe it's nostalgia talking, I haven't re-read it in forever) is the Secrets of Power novels trilogy. When I first went through it though it was pretty damn good, starting from the perspective of a lowly corporate wage slave then taking him through the paces of shamanistic magic - very cool. Back in the day I really wanted to play in that setting, whatever it was.
But then again I always liked learning theme from the inside out through novels when possible, dice be damned.
@Jennkryst We've got some of that noir/grit stuff going right now, happy for a helping hand if interested....
@Lithium Come hop on the game, I work with all types of characters and often impose either a limited karma pool or zero refresh during course of the campaign. I'm pretty easy going too.
@faraday The short answer is it doesn't handle alternate style characters. The long answer is that it does allow them, but you HAVE to be a part of the shadows. Your street doc? Can't be a doctor at a hospital who works the streets on the side. Or they can... but you have to buy your own hospital if you want to do that, but even then, it's an illegal hospital.
