If you read my previous post on the subject, it's no surprise to you that I love Shadowrun. I've played all the video games and run several campaigns at this point. People often say they love the setting, but find the game inaccessible, so I'd like to use this post to talk about all the things I love about the game in addition to the setting.
First though, just a moment to talk about me. Who is this guy and why should I care what he thinks? Well, frankly, you don't have to care, but in terms of qualifications, I've been playing tabletop RPG for almost 30 years now. My first was the original AD&D. I played often with a core group of other kids and had a long thriving campaign in the Forgotten Realms that spanned almost a decade.
I've played and GM'd lots of systems and my first exposure to Shadowrun was 2E. I loved the idea and the setting, but had nobody to play with, so stuck mostly with D&D and lots of video games. It was really about 3 years ago that I discovered Roll20.net. I have been GMing 5th edition ever since, more recently in meat space. I have (I think) all the books in PDF format (love you http://drivethrurpg.com/) and several of the adventure guides. I do predominantly gumshoe style storylines (often referred to as "black trenchcoat"). SR5 is not perfect. It has plenty of warts. We'll get into those in another post. For now, these are some things I love...
The Shadowrun community is amazing. This is one very passionate community with an active subreddit, many online games to play, and an array of youtubers doing everything from live play videos to tutorials on the rules system. People LOVE this game and it really shows. If you are ever unsure of how to interpret a rule or implement your own rule to cover something you can't find a reference on, there's almost guaranteed to be someone in the active community who has already asked or written about it. Very few games enjoy this sense of community and it feels good to be a part of that.
There are rules for pretty much any scenario. It's rare you will find yourself in a gaming situation where you want to do something or something happens where you are not able to find some reference in some book (or website) that refers to that specific scenario. If you're just not sure how to proceed, this is really an ideal scenario. Most people find the stack of Shadowrun books intimidating. With somewhere around 40 books in 5E at this point, there's a lot of reading material, but PDFs make searching those resources a no brainer.
Freedom. Rules are great and it's super helpful to have a stack of books covering every situation, but almost every rule ultimately includes a disclaimer making it "at the gamemaster’s discretion." This means a lot of things. I found most rules to be very well thought out and helpful, but every now and then I see things that are just mean spirited (looking at you Addiction disadvantage) or too easy/hard that need adjustment. SR5 in general is very much in the spirit of "This is your game." This is easier than you might think to train new players to deal with. I often start a campaign with new players using a very pared down ruleset and introduce more complex ideas as we go. It works well.
Personal opinions
I think this is buy in.
When I bought Shadowrun, read its rules, despaired at them, read them again, played and slowly got the grips of them I was already in too deep.
Thus I continued playing, and helping others (so they don't have to go through the despair I had to go through).
Given the choice of:
I initially chose the second one too.
Today I would way quicker choose the first option.
I was very close to throwing The Sprawl out with my current campaign, because I didn't like it at all – the last session somewhat fixed it, I'm still conflicted though. This is after two sessions (and I paid some good money for that physical copy!)
I personally read the "golden rule" of "Ignore our rules if you want/it makes sense" as "We designers aren't competent enough to make proper rules. Figure out some proper rules yourself, but feel free to take ours as an inspiration."
If the system is broken and needs hours of writing homebrew stuff to fix it, why play it in the first place? Play something different, save yourself the time.
These are some interesting insights, although I'm not sure I agree.
While I could see this being a factor for newer players, the level of intense year over year contribution instead suggests that the community is very passionate about the game. There are tons of contributors who produce content for and about the game for years. Some of it is pretty great!
Ugh. I despise the pre-made missions for this game. I hate the way they are organized and use them ONLY for inspiration to write my own stories. Unlike DnD, you cannot GM straight from this source material. You have to prepare. The elements are there, but it takes an experienced GM to make short work of it and frankly, I like my stories to have clearer arcs that link mission to mission.
I hope you don't take this as an attack, because I say this without judgement at all, but I think this comes down to experience. GMs with less experience in general are going to struggle with this a lot more. GMs with a lot of experience should feel more comfortable adjusting difficulty and rule complexity on the fly. Generally speaking, if a rule comes up during game and a player advocates for it on the spot saying something like, "p254 says I can roll this and this," I'll either respond that it will work that way for the bad guys too, are you sure? Or I'll say, "Okay, that doesn't make sense to me. We'll play it this way for the rest of this session and then in the break before next game, I'll clearly define a better house rule." To be honest, I have very few of these. Like maybe 3. I tend to just straight up ignore several rules and tables in an effort to make the game a little more simple.
My next post will be about problems I have with the game and I bet you'll see some things there you can relate to, but once again, reading your link, there's a lot to unpack there. I'll put a comment on it directly. Thanks for following my series here!