My first real Shadowrun game night

So, after 3 sessions spent working on character creation, we finally got to sit down to play an hour of Shadowrun last week. My thoughts on the system so far:

Augmented reality is going to be fun.

Shadowrun does a great job of hammering home life in the information age.

Walk into a club, and your personal area network displays drink specials hovering over the bar via your cybereyes, and your visible message indicator displays four people welcoming you, one hitting on you from across the club, and the DJ’s current playlist is scrolling in your peripheral vision. Step into a drug store, and you get hit with spam from the shady dealer across the street, trying to undercut the prices. Want to buy something? Just pick it up and walk out — provided you’re legal, the RFID tag in the clothes and your ID number do a little dance and deduct the money automatically.

Already, in this age, we’re bombarded with data and information — the system does a great job of extending that to its logical outcome. It’s hard to remember to constantly bombard the players with that information, but it’s a lot of fun, and makes the game setting very unique.

The rules require more player involvement.

In simpler systems I’ve played, I could be a one-man rules engine. But in this game, there are rules for everything. Want to go search the Web of the future? Be ready with your data search skill, your knowledge attribute — you’ll also need the force level of your Browse security software and the processing power of your commlink’s operating system.

And that’s just a matrix search. I didn’t even get into how a player summons a spirit and calculates the number of favors that spirit owes her, or astral combat, virtual reality, simsense or a million other rules. And, just to help things out, the folks at Wizkids Catalyst Game Labs (thanks,@adamjury) have released a series of books with “advanced” rules, just in case these little simple rules are too basic for your plant-girdling intellect.

That said, I’m trying to task individual players to learn the details of their own character’s rules. The technomancer of the group is trying to learn all the rules of constructing A.I. in the matrix, intrusion countermeasures and the like, just so I don’t have to.

It’s definitely a colder world.

As I’ve stated before, one of the things I loved about the Serenity world was that the crew of characters became a family. There was room for more colorful personalities and mixes of styles, and the ship as a home was always a running thread through the campaign. Shadowrun, by its nature, has characters living usually living alone (there are a set of rules governing your individual “lifestyle cost”). I liked having a ship on the move as a “deus ex machina” to take players to new places and conflicts — somehow, stacking a bunch of cybermages in an RV doesn’t have the same ring to it.

So. Many. Dice.

Shadowrun only uses your basic six-sided die (a d6 to us RPGers). As they state on their site, “d20 gives you cancer.” Only using a d6 means there are times you must roll a LOT of them. A dozen isn’t unusual, and sometimes someone has to shake up 20 dice to determine the outcome. It’s admittedly a little fun, but it means that players lounging in a living room on couches plus dozens of dice means a lot of rerolls. We may have to succumb to a table.

We’re going to keep at it.

It’s fun, and a nice change of pace. Mostly, it’s nice to have such great support for a game — I love not having to create all my own source material as I did with Serenity. But, should it go south, I reserve the right to mock this system in a most juvenile fashion by calling it Sad-o-run.

But I’m not there yet.