Why Shadowrun Sucked

 Let’s get something established right away.  When we are talking about Shadowrun, we mean the first edition (first two editions?).  We haven’t so much as looked at a Shadowrun product in a couple of decades.  Maybe they fixed some of this, but they probably didn’t.  Someone besides FASA owns it now, and we wish them the best of luck, if somewhat half-heartedly.

But here’s what sucked:  There were two aspects of the game that broke the golden rule of RPGs:  Don’t split the party!  Deckers could hack their way through the matrix, and mages could astral project.  While they were doing this, anyone who wasn’t a decker or a mage couldn’t follow, couldn’t participate, typically couldn’t even watch.

The problem was that hacking your way through the matrix was pretty cool.  It was a major part of the game.  In a lot of situations, you might have needed to have the decker(s) handle the hacking piece in order to move to the next stage of the adventure.  What do the rest of the players do while the decker is handling things inside the internet?  They sit around bored, that’s what they do.  Use of the astral plane was far less often, but if used, the exact same thing happened - most of them sat around bored.

It is important as a GM to keep the players involved and entertained.  Having the majority of them sitting around while someone else is “adventuring” isn’t why they came.  If that was what they wanted, they could watch that on the internet performed by people who do funny voices.

As cool as running through the matrix can be, it should be something the party can share.  Establishing a non-standard adventuring site like this is exactly what we want to encourage, but not when only a small part of the party can participate.  The same can often be true when trying to run adventures in dreams or some of the other strange places.  While we are going to continue to encourage all GMs to use non-standard adventures, only use ones that all of the player characters can participate in.

 

This post was written as part of the recently released Horror in the House of Mystique aka All About Non-Standard Adventures, the latest in our Small Bites editions.  Each Small Bites book looks deeply at one subject, a character archetype, a race/monster, a style of questing, or some other role-playing/world building subject.  This one details everything having to do with those monsters that are typically huge, super strong, but also not so bright, and how this will affect their actions and tactics, as well as other game mastering tricks, but within a fully defined mission showing both the stats for point-based characters (like in Legend Quest) and class-based characters like in most of the die-20 games.

We hope we’re getting you interested.  If you want to see the World Walker edition for FREE!! click the link here.  If we’ve hooked you and you want to get the full 61 pages of content in the Game Masters’ edition, click here.