Posts made by Lithium

@Arkandel You own a cat. You have given yourself over to the lordship of the furry kind. You shall garner no sympathy since you have /chosen/ to be /enslaved/ by a feline.

The fault is all yours.

Honestly... I think survival/apocalypse genre games need either a highly involved and active staff that is making plotfu happen at regular intervals /or/ coded threats/bots that attack and screw things up at various intervals.

If you don't have those, then you lose the 'survival' aspect of the game because there's nothing threatening your survival during those lulls.

If you are randomly RP'ing and all the sudden you are attacked though, then shit just got real.

Same if you are having to go out and coded look for supplies to 'survive' with and then bam, attacked, or maybe it's just another type of survival event. That ground? Yeah that wasn't ground, that was actually a leaf covered rotted remains of a floor over a basement full of murky stagnant water and who the fuck knows what else. Deal or die.

Survival and apocalyptic games /need/ to have existential threats, and often, or it's not really a survival or apocalyptic theme imho.

@Monogram You don't get to decide what brings the RP 'down' for everyone who plays though. Different people have different likes, dislikes, wants, and desires.

My character wanted nothing more than to find some smart people, and get the hell away from all the violent sociopaths to create a farming agrarian society of their own.

Still think it would have been awesome RP building our own society and such, trying to keep it alive..

The cynicism and grit of Shadow Run depends entirely upon what type of character you want to play and what the theme of the game being ran is.

Play a bunch of gang bangers with low resources and then try to survive in the Redmond Barrens or most any other sprawl for example and you'll see how grit and grimdark ShadowRun can be.

Many 'Runners are already a stage above the darkest it can get, but they can fall. If they end up screwing up the run and not paid then are hunted by two corporations and have nowhere to go except into the sprawl and crawl into a hole, try and not die... yeah it can get pretty bad.

To me Magic is just another type of 'Tech' in ShadowRun. Yeah it's rare, but so are Panther Assault Cannons. Supernatural threats, bounties, and metacritter guard dogs are all just part of what makes ShadowRun what it is, but it doesn't necessarilly make things more pleasant overall.

So part of this really @Thenomain you have to /decide/ what you want the overarching theme for /your/ ShadowRun to be, and then to make it that.

Because as it's written, ShadowRun can be practically /anything/.

@Thenomain Dragons.

But really I can't answer that so much honestly. I've never really played pure cyberpunk, I only read the first Gibson book and never really got into Cyberpunk 2020 as a game, nobody played it in my area when I was big into TT.

So I haven't the right information or perspective to give you a good answer to that question.

It might very well be Cyberpunk with pointy ears (and tusks) and magic, I can't say otherwise.

I also admit that I loved the lore and stories of ShadowRun, especially when it was still tied to Earthdawn.

@Thenomain Pretty much. ShadowRun always seemed to me to be like modern civilization, then ramped up to the extremes in every way imaginable for better /and/ for worse. Then throw in magic, supernatural, fantasy races, and cyberware, true virtual reality, and mash it all together in this glorious conglomeration that can be played in a lot of different ways.

That it has all those elements means it can be ran any which way you want. Low magic, low tech. High magic, high tech. Or any combination thereof.

@Thenomain Because it is very much a place where the majority are essentially slaves to the corporations they work for, or the SINless in the sprawls who have no identity at all and pretty much live in a third world economy where might makes right, gangs can and do rule huge swaths of area, supernatural rats are a serious threat, trying to survive every day is a very real struggle and life is by no means certain.

There's darkness and grittiness there, in addition to the Runners themselves essentially being 'outside' the system, yet without the 'system' they wouldn't have work either.

If you are rich/influential/powerful then the world of ShadowRun is luxurious. For most (PC's included) it's the opposite, it's a harsh struggle for survival. There are more 'Runners than work, and you might be flying high one month only to be back in the gutter the next.

Meanwhile the cops are corporations in their own rights, and don't really care about the rights of the individual over the 'Law' they have been hired to enforce (to varying degrees of accountability) mixed in with their own greed and needs.

That's the dichotomy I mentioned, there's the potential for the 'high fantasy' bit where magical people have incredible magical toys, the rich have the best pads and cyber/bioware, and then on the other side there is the guy who got rolled and his arm chopped off because it was a prosthetic and what's left of him gets sold as meat to Tanamous Ghouls.

@Thenomain I don't know that I'd consider cyberware & bioware as low technology, but there are very much high fantasy elements to ShadowRun with all the magic around.

@tangent To be fair, I have been playing these games for almost 25 years now... so much of my perceptions have a /lot/ of history behind them, which may or may not be relevant today.

I'm old and jaded.

Edit: I'm trying to fathom how admitting what is potentially a fault in myself is worth a -1. LOL.

To me ShadowRun is the mix of magic and futuristic transhuman elements.

It's the semi-dystopia of CyberPunk mixed with the wonder (and horror) of magic and the supernatural.

Where you could have a child come up as a whole different /species/ than you just because of magics resurgence.

Where the corporations are bigger than governments, and governments try desperately to stay relevant, where most people are happy to just do their time and get their soycaf and underneath it all is a horrible third world element in the sprawls and such.

Where Might makes Right, but the scale can change in the blink of an eye.

Where does Morality fit into such a world?

All these story elements are what make ShadowRun so great for me.

@tangent I'm guessing we're just not seeing things the same way (Based on this idea that I am so concerned about OC's not being powerful, which is to me like projecting an idea onto what I am saying rather than my point that FC's can (and often do) trivialize the presence of OC's).

When I played on JLU it was FC's controlling practically every scene.
When I played on UU it was FC's being the OC's weren't invited or included into scenes.

Same with every other game I tried.

To be honest I stopped even trying to play on the 'consent' style games /because/ there was little recourse for the OC's to be involved. They just got overlooked, ignored, or overshadowed.

Maybe things have changed. I don't know. I don't do consent games anymore.

@WTFE In as much as a diseased chainsaw inserted into an individual can be considered sexual intercourse... yes.

@tangent Oh jeeze.

It's not about being /powerful/ (for the nth time) it's about being /relevant/.

@Ganymede said in Comics Stuff:

a lot of us prefer to forget Mina Harker having sex with Allan Quartermain.

But Sean Connery is the sexiest old man alive.

For serious.

And I am not even into men.

@Arkandel Depends on the math: Named Asshole Delinquents: Murphy (Big king asshole behind Bellamy, who wasn't really a Delinquent, he was a stowaway), a handful of guys who followed Bellamy/Murphy, and then there were the others. Finn, Carter, Wells, Octavia, the two stoners/tech heads...

So... yeah, most of the 100 weren't assholes to the nth degree. Even the most violent of murderers didn't come down and be assholes until someone on the Ark blackmailed them or threatened their family.

So... by design... following the theme of the game to have so /many/ wasn't what I was expecting, per the theme.

@Arkandel A lot of antagonistic RP.

@Thenomain You're probably right.

@lordbelh Samson wasn't an antagonist. Samson was a defender. He stood up for people smaller than him who were being bullied. Samson didn't start with an antagonistic attitude towards anyone, but he did end up in situations where he was facing off with antagonistic people. All. The. Time.

Considering I only played there for a week and a half or so before I got burned out without my SO also playing there to counter balance the shit, I hardly think I was part of the problem.

@Arkandel I never once said it's a new problem.

It is a problem that is exacerbated by FC's however.

It's why /I/ prefer a game that is OC only.

You are probably right. I wish I had ran into situations where that didn't seem to be the case. When I was there it was one big asshole after another: Do what I say or starve. You can't use this unless you fight me for it. If you go against me I'll kill you in your sleep.

There was so much angst and asshole that it is all we ever remember seeing, even if we did see other stuff, because it got drowned out.