 Shadowrun! It’s the oft overlooked and sometimes reviled cousin of Dungeons and Dragons. As a franchise, Shadowrun does everything Dungeon and Dragons does. It’s got novelizations, board game and video game spin-offs, and is even up to five editions! Some of these editions even vary wildly from one another to the point where you may as well be playing a different game when you use a different edition.
Despite this, Shadowrun sometimes feels like it’s cursed to live in the shadows (Ha!) of Dungeons and Dragons. It’s not without reason, though. After all, their 5th edition core book is about 500 pages long, all of which you must have AT LEAST a passing familiarity with. By contrast, D&D has three core rulebooks, but you only need one of them to know the rules, and it can be treated more like an encyclopedia if you know what to look for. Enter Shadowrun: Anarchy. This is a ruleslite and scalable edition of Shadowrun. Today, we discuss the edition of Shadowrun that breaks all the rules, so strap in, chummers! 1) The Setting For the uninitiated, Shadowrun is a game set in a dystopian, cyberpunk future. To make this even more nutso-buttso, it’s our world 50 years from now with magic having returned to the world in 2012. Magic here refers to spells, otherworldly energy, and all manner of supernatural critters. Critters, such as otherwise ordinary wild animals that were made more vicious because of the influx of magic, vampires and ghouls whose conditions are literally a disease, or even the god-like Dragons who, in Shadowrun, are embodiments of magic itself. While technology advanced rapidly in Shadowrun, it’s still very familiar to the technology we have today. What’s a comm-link? It’s like a smart-phone. What’s the Matrix? The Internet. Why is everything, including my gun, connected to the Matrix? Probably the same reason our world has WiFi slow-cookers. Being set in an alternate version of our world works to great effect in Shadowrun; it makes everything much more immediately relatable. For anybody like our Corporate Overlord Josh Heath who is interested in promoting diversity and inclusivity, this is a very useful quality. If you’ve lived on planet earth, you have a place with some emotional attachment in Shadowrun, and that’s a good starting point for imagining yourself in a different world. 2) The Rules Are Still Very Similar To Core Shadowrun As mentioned earlier, Shadowrun 5th Edition has some dense rules, which makes it difficult to cut things out or simplify them without damaging the feel of the game. Shadowrun: Anarchy is a fine example of this; it drastically simplifies things, and something does get lost along the way. However, the end result still resembles Shadowrun: fists full of dice that either end in a total miss, or an accidental kill. There’s still the divide between magic and cybernetics; going too heavy on one makes the other impractical. That je ne sais quoi they call Edge is also still present, allowing somebody who’s otherwise not special in any way what-so-ever to somehow accomplish big things through dumb luck. Shadowrun: Anarchy is a narrativist take on Shadowrun, but it still still remembers that it’s Shadowrun, and most importantly, that it’s a game. The story is much more important in Anarchy, sure, but they don’t neglect players (such as yours truly) who want the figurative crunchy bits they can sink their teeth into. 3) Gameplay Is Scalable Shadowrun Anarchy, to contrast many of the other editions of Shadowrun, doesn’t have a lot of content; not explicitly written in the book, at least. There is a few basic lists of everything you’d expect: weapons, tools, spells, NPCs and sample characters. For folks who find these lists lacking and want more, Shadowrun Anarchy does include methods for padding them out. The first such method being a conversion guide, which describes how to bring a character, spell, or other thing from the more detailed versions of the game into Anarchy. Since Anarchy is the simpler of the two, this usually means stripping away details that Anarchy doesn’t accommodate, such as the difficulty of acquiring a given item or learning a spell. The second method is the “Shadow Amp” creation rules. Shadow Amp is the name Anarchy has given to spells, traits, cyberware, and other stuff that would otherwise amplify a shadowrunner’s abilities. These are guidelines which can be used to create anything your imagination can dream up. Though if you’re really pressed for time, such as introducing a strange new piece of technology or magical artifact mid-game, there’s even a guideline Shadowrun Anarchy has for completely improvising new things: it gives a 2 dice bonus (or penalty!) to whatever it sounds like it would. The conversion rules, character creation, shadow amp creation, and the various sample lists means that Shadowrun Anarchy comes with numerous ways to play, both out of the box and for those who want to take their game a little bit further. 4) It’s Not Dungeons And Dragons Dungeons and Dragons is the one game almost everybody in the tabletop gaming fandom has some familiarity with. Despite this, though, it doesn’t really do a good job as a “common language” among RPGs; it’s too wildly different from everything else that exists. In fact, it can be argued that there really isn’t any unifying thread between RPGs other than they’re played around a table and dice get thrown around. In other words: if you want to overall become better as a GM or a player, exposing yourself to different games is the thing to do. After all, different rulesets are suited to different games. Shadowrun’s tendency for rolls to be either wildly successful or hilariously pitiful allows for more incorporation of improvisation, especially in it’s more narrativist form as Anarchy. Any plans, be they the players’ or the GM’s, aren’t guaranteed to happen without a hitch. And if that sounds like a familiar scenario in other games you play, what better way to practice handling it than playing a game where such a scenario is commonplace? Aaron der Schaedel’s claim to fame before being the resident weeb of High Level Games was a series of videos he did breaking down the rules of Shadowrun 5th Edition. They’re still available on his now scarcely updated YouTube channel. Picture Reference: https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/194759/Shadowrun-Anarchy  All right, tabletop roleplaying gamers. It’s time to talk about a real problem for your long-term roleplaying happiness: enemy NPC fatigue (ENPCF), or “boredom,” for short. We’ve all been there: you’re on a dungeon crawl, twelve levels down the tower, and the monsters are starting to blend together. What was that last one? Tarrak, tarrasque, tourrette… it doesn’t really matter, actually. The slavering mandibles, grating claws, and magical damage resistance all look the same at that point. Granted, it’s been fun to collect loot and advance your character, but if you wanted to go grinding or farm resources, you might as well be playing Skyrim. It’s time for a serious villain overhaul. The following are a few memorable monster villains from my own playing history. Let these creatures and people be an inspiration to your own memorable villain repertoire and take your games to the next level. 1) Rifts - The Evil Blob A telepathic alien entity had taken control of a supercomputer. The supercomputer/monster then embraced (enslaved?) a race of cave-dwelling creatures. It taught them to read, write, and manufacture; it trained them to build and use amazing technology, established a social structure and government, and it even served as a quasi-religion. All it demanded was food in return, and it received enough that it grew into an enormous, fleshy blob. Our party came at this creature sideways. We were being attacked by bands of these small, hairy, Gollum-like cave-dwellers. We didn’t think much of it, random encounters being what they are, but we started to wonder when we accidentally captured one of them. The creature told us that we had to leave, that we were invading the territory of their tribe, and that their great leader would destroy us. Intrigued, we did a bit of reconnaissance, and discovered “the blob”. In the end, however, our group determined that this blob-like creature had in fact improved the quality of life for these cave-dwellers immensely. Rather than invade and fight the blob, we decided to establish a bi-lateral trade agreement with it. Whaddya know? This was memorable because we didn’t have to fight it at all. There was enough grey area to decided that killing it would probably be worse for the hairy creatures in the end. To keep things interesting, create villains that the characters don’t need to fight, but can be overcome in other ways. 2) D&D 3.5 - The Vampire Lord With The Crazy Castle This villain is both a creature and an environment. At the beginning of this encounter, our party was warmly welcomed into a castle. The castle was well appointed, tastefully decorated, and we were fed a luxurious meal. We were waited on by a group of lovely ladies, the daughters of the lord, who later surprised various members of our party by arriving in their bedrooms. That’s where the red flags went up. They were, of course, vampire spawn who were working for the vampire lord of the castle. As the illusions faded, our characters began to see that the tapestries in this castle were rotting, there was black mold and cobwebs everywhere, and our hostesses were, in fact, undead abominations. The castle then became a magical labyrinth of bloodstained dungeons, torture chambers, decaying dining halls, and all-round horror. The castle itself eventually herded us into the great hall for a final showdown with the vampire lord. While I don’t remember the name of this creep, I will surely never forget the feeling of sick dread I had while moving inevitably through his castle of horrors to meet him. Environment can make the villain! 3) Shadowrun - Bug Spirits What is big, horrifically alien, deadly… oh, and can’t be harmed by ordinary weapons? Shadowrun Bug Spirits. Denizens of a poorly understood nether dimension, these spiritual creatures have manifested on Shadowrun’s parallel earth to… well, nobody really understands why they’re here, which is part of what makes them so scary. To destroy the living? To consume everything? To reproduce? Also, if they get ahold of you, they will either eat you (which would be a mercy) or they will take you back to their nest, where a gentle, well-meaning madman plants a spirit larva inside you. It takes possession of your body, and you will become either a true believing member of a bug spirit cult, a hybrid bug-human drone, or the shell of an egg that will hatch into a spiritual insect. I still shudder. During an extended Shadowrun game, Bug Spirits were just one element in probably the most convincingly storied game world I have played in; they were nevertheless one of the most memorable creature villains I have ever encountered. Better than Ridley Scott’s Alien, it makes the so-called ‘mindless’ monster deeply personal on both a physical and a spiritual level. Did I mention that ordinary weapons don’t hurt them? 4) Rifts - The Coalition The Coalition forces from Kevin Siembada’s Rifts are a great, multi-layered enemy. Xenophobic, merciless, and dressed up in black skulls, they make perfect cannon fodder for gamers just out to bash some bad guys. It’s like being Indiana Jones and punching Nazis. In one game, however, we players got a closer look at them and the Nazis began to look more like the Germans from Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds. Some prisoners we had captured seemed a little too human, a little too close to home. Think about it: these people are the last major human power in the game world, the descendants of those who survived the coming of the rifts. Why do they fight against DeeBees? Because this is their earth. Why are they xenophobic? Because many, many of the things that have come through the rifts have been incredibly dangerous, or utterly evil. What made these villains most memorable was being able to stand in their shoes. We realised that, if the world really did erupt with magic and extra-dimensional beings, humans would likely only survive if they banded together - and it becomes easy to see yourself joining up with the Coalition just to survive. Have some sympathy for the devil; there is a lot of power in having sympathetic villains with their own agenda. 5) D&D 3.5 - The Desolator The Desolator was an evil half-orc, half-ogre chieftain who allied to dark powers that planned to unite the orcish hordes to annihilate the world. Sounds like a fairly straightforward Dungeons & Dragons character at first glance, but I could have kissed the Dungeonmaster. Maybe I did, I don’t remember. This villain was capital ‘A’ awesome for me because he was a direct response to the character I was playing. My character was a half-orc barbarian (classic!) who had become the king of a tribe of orcs who were trying somehow to be good. Yes, we took some liberties with the canon, it’s a part of the hobby. I made a long write-up trying to reconcile this bizarre situation, but the short version is this: My character, whose leadership was in dispute, had used a once-in-a-generation war cry to call all the orcish tribes to war against the Desolator and his buddies. The Desolator, on the other hand, had used the same war cry to call the orcs to fight against my character and the forces of good. Part of the final battle involved an argument between him and I to persuade the orcish onlookers whom they should follow The physical victory over the villain was that much sweeter because of the moral/political victory of winning the hordes over to my side. The best villains have a personal connection to the players’ characters and the characters’ players! Create villains who have a rational agenda to create interesting grey moral areas. Allow more than one way to overcome villains in order to keep things interesting. Add an environment that matches your villain to create a more memorable experience. Use monsters that can do worse than just killing a character. Finally, make villains personal by connecting them with characters in important ways. These are just a few suggestions; hopefully these experiences will help you to change things up and keep your games fresh! Landrew is a full-time educator, part-time art enthusiast. He applies his background in literature and fine arts to his favourite hobby (role-playing games) because the market for a background in the Fine Arts is very limited. He writes this blog on company time under a pseudonym. Long live the Corporation! Image source: Art of the Genre’s article on Shadowrun’s Bug City   We’ve all been there. Someone misses a gaming session, and the GM can’t run her game. All eyes turn to you. You have a week, possibly less, to come up with something. Time is ticking, the grains of sand are falling in the hourglass…. What can be done???
Well, I have a list of generic plots, and if I don’t have time to develop a full bodied plot, I just pick one that seems to fit, dump some NPC’s in, even more monsters, an artifact or two, and allow everything to unfurl. 1) The Exploration The perfect starting adventure, infinitely adaptable. Take a rag tag group of peoples and send them somewhere. Make it boring, just a series of campfires at the end of the day, night after night. Make it a gauntlet, where the players have no way back and have to fight their way through. Give them something good at the end. Maybe one of the party is a traitor? Or a huge boss at the end. Or don't. Defy expectations, always! See Also: Anything from Jules Verne, The Mummy (1999) 2) The Wetworks Ah, killing. Is there anything easier to grasp? Go there, kill the thing. Usually this goes hand in hand with the exploration. Go there, explore your way in, then kill the thing. Now, in games like Shadowrun, you get missions that are just about the killing, and most of the prep would be about actually getting there. So, maybe the hard bit is to get through the security and/or the traps to get to your target (sorry, your Tango). Maybe your target had other ideas, and it is a billion times more powerful than expected. Oh yes, maybe you've been had, my sweet summer child. See Also: Shadowrun, Assassin’s Creed 3) The Recovery Not unlike the previous two, but you'll need to grab something. An artifact? Some sensitive data? There are many choices. Again, the main issues in this plot might simply be that it's horrendously difficult to get to the thing, and the thing itself is just a gimmick. Or maybe the thing is cursed and will actively act against the players. Or the thing will broadcast its location and anyone that can will chase after you mercilessly. You know, a Thursday. See Also: Tomb Raider, Indiana Jones 4) The Heist The Recovery on steroids. You need to go the place and do the thing, but getting in and out is the key aspect. Maybe it needs to be done in total stealth, with zero impact. No killings, just quietly in and out. Maybe the thing is behind enough traps to give pause to Indiana Jones' and Lara Croft's' secret baby. It's stealing from the mafia, stealing from the dragon, stealing from the duke. See Also: The Italian Job, The Hobbit 5) The Escort Someone (or something) needs to get from a to b, preferably in one piece and hopefully alive. Now, for anyone that has ever played an escort mission on a computer RPG knows the hell on Earth this represents. Escorted people are usually idiots. As in, they have the survival instincts of depressed lemmings. So maybe make your escorted an arrogant princess, with tissue thin armour, but a conviction that she can kill red dragons with her own hands. The players will need to balance self-preservation, and making sure she doesn't make the enemy orc splatter her all over the landscape. You can also toss this trope on its ear, and make the escortee completely capable of taking care of herself, and she’s staying with the group so she can use them as expendable resources along the way. See Also: Fallout 4, Any other RPG ever made 6) The Cargo Run A rehashing of the Exploration troupe, with many items from the Escort. Take package or item from point a to point b. Could be run as a chill mission, or as madly as you like. The fact that the NPC that is accepting the delivery will only be known at the end of the adventure, offers new possibilities. Maybe the receiver doesn’t want the item (it might be damaged?), or wants to change the deal, ambushing the players. Maybe there is an animal in package, causing havoc? Maybe the package is cursed? See Also: Firefly 7) The Milk Run This one I borrowed from Shadowrun. It's not a type per se, more of a narrative. Make the mission stupidly easy (a milk run). Convince the players that yes, it'll be THAT easy. Then pull the rug. And watch the fireworks. See also: Any narrative involving a mission. Seriously. So here were my usual adventure types? How many others can you come up with? Rui is a Portuguese scientist that, after ten years doing strange things in labs, decided to become a teacher. Then, two years ago, like he was bit by a radioactive D20, RPG’s came into his life, and he’s now juggling teaching, playing and GMing quite happily. He lives in the UK with his partner Joana, an ungodly number of potted plants, 4 to 5 RPG’s at various stages of completion (and across as many rule systems), and maps, cursed idols, evil necklaces, and any other props he can get his hands on. He’s been writing for HLG for a few months, and is one of the resident vloggers. He can be reached at @Atomic_RPG.  As I brought up in a previous article, to play around with the mechanics is to create the rules by which the game world is governed. Role-playing games are an attempt to simulate reality, but not actually the reality we live in. (What is there to simulate? Double-stuff Oreos already exist!!)
Role-playing games simulate the logic of the fictional worlds we see in books, movies, TV shows, and other media. One rule that applies in many of these fictional worlds is that when things get really tough, characters have a resource that they can tap so that they can succeed at their task. It may be called luck, fate, edge, hutzpah, moxie, karma, the goodwill of the audience, the matrix of leadership, or any variety of things; the character applies this resource at just the right time so that everyone can live happily ever after… if that’s your genre. There are a variety of ways that this is simulated in role-playing games. The great John Kim wrote an article to give a quick history of the origins of these mechanics. They are called something different in almost every game that uses them, but for simplicity’s sake I will be calling them luck resources. Luck resources vary between games, but generally they allow players somewhat greater agency by allowing them to reroll, modify dice rolls, and add or change story details. Some luck resources can only be used by the players, some by both the players and the gamemaster. They may sometimes be used before making a roll, afterward, or both. In spite of all these differences, however, I’ve identified the best luck resources as 1) simple to use, 2) providing effective agency (in quantity and quality), and 3) balanced so that they don’t break the game. Let’s start with the ugly: 1) Bad Karma: Marvel Superheroes (Ugly) I hate to beat on TSR’s Marvel Superheroes so much, because I’ve spent many a happy session playing Beast and any number of homebrewed superheroes; but the luck resource used in this game is broken. It is called Karma: characters earn Karma by doing good deeds, saving the day, and otherwise behaving heroically. Karma can then be spent on character advancement or to succeed on rolls. Spending Karma to succeed is where this becomes a luck resource. The difficulty, however is that you need to use the same resource pool for both advancement and luck. The mechanic is simple to use, but it fails to allow effective agency. I agree with John Kim in his above mentioned article; this mechanic generally leads players to either hoard their Karma to make their characters stronger, or to spend it all the time and leave their character weak. This creates a disparity between characters and bad feeling around the table about Karma spending, making for an ugly mechanic. 2) The Hand of Fate: Fate Core and Fate Accelerated Edition (Good) Can I write an article without talking about Fate? I admit my bias, this is my favourite game.That being said, this luck resource leaves just enough to be desired. It is based on Fate Points, which are integral to the game. Players begin each session with a certain number of Fate Points (usually 3), and they earn extra points when bad things inevitably happen to their character. Fate Points can be used to modify rolls before or after they are made, to re-roll, or to create story details, but with a catch; they can only be used to invoke different story elements, called aspects. Without going into great detail, what that means is that your character design will flavour the way ‘luck’ works in gameplay, which adds great storytelling value.The limitation I mentioned is in the value assigned by the mechanic. According to the basic rules (there are variations), a Fate Point is worth +2, no matter how perfectly or poorly it applies in a given situation. This makes the mechanic very simple to use, but at the cost of the quality of player agency. 3) The Bleeding Edge: Shadowrun (Hella Fun!) Say what you want about Shadowrun; in an entirely-subjective-not-measurable way, this is my favourite luck resource. Shadowrun uses a dice pool mechanic to resolve tests. Edge, a kind of luck mechanic, is treated like a character attribute - that means players can choose whether or not they want to have it during character creation. Very early on, I realized what it was and pretty much always bought it up as high as functionally possible. In a single session, you could call on Edge a number of times equal to your Edge attribute. You could call on it before or after your roll, with different effects. After the roll, you could re-roll or roll a few extra dice. If you use it before the roll, however, it would allow you to add a number of dice equal to your Edge score to your pool. Also, if invoked before the roll, sixes got re-rolled in a sweet exploding dice mechanic. All that just to say that five times a session, I was shaking a mitt-full of dice that meant the odds were most definitely in my favour! 4) Where Have All the Heroes Gone: Mutants & Masterminds (Bad) Now, to clarify, Hero Points is not actually a bad mechanic. It’s quite good. It does everything that you want a good luck resource to do. In writing this article, I just noticed that there’s only one luck resource I marked as bad, so I’m going to pick on the one flaw in this one. In Mutants and Masterminds, players get Hero Points that allow them to re-roll, modify a roll, and add or change story details, much like Fate. Players receive them for doing heroic things, like Marvel Superheroes, or for accepting complications built into your character concept, again like Fate. What’s the drawback? The problem is that even if you’ve earned points, the amount you have resets to just one at the beginning of every session. This weakens an otherwise powerful mechanic by limiting the quantity of times players can take agency. Just make a house rule to fix this one - it shouldn’t break the game. 5) A Muse of Fire: Dungeons and Dragons, Fifth Edition (Good) So simple, and so fun, the Inspiration mechanic from D&D 5E is the first luck resource for the WoC franchise that applies to all characters regardless of race or class. It is somewhat different from the others mentioned above. Instead of allowing players to reroll or modify a roll, it permits the player to invoke the ‘Advantage’ mechanic. This increases the odds of success (including critical success) by allowing the player to roll a second 20-sided die and choose the highest result. Like the Shadowrun mechanic, this improves the odds while still allowing for titanic failure when the dice gods demand it. Players may only have one point of inspiration at a time, which is somewhat limited… but borrowing the Advantage mechanic and allowing the resource to only affect dice rolls keeps the balance and just adds a layer of fun to the classic game. There are many other luck resources that I’ve heard of and read about: Savage Worlds’ ‘Bennies,’ Open d6 ‘Fate Points’ (not to be confused with Fate ‘Fate Points’ - stay with me), and many others. I’ve written about the ones that I’ve actually played; but from what I’ve read, the luck resources covered above represent most of them in functionality. All of them are intended to give a larger-than-life movie feeling to your game, and will hopefully help you to take your games to the next level!! Landrew is a full-time educator, part-time art enthusiast. He applies his background in literature and fine arts to his favourite hobby (role-playing games) because the market for a background in the Fine Arts is very limited. He writes this blog on company time under a pseudonym. Long live the Corporation! Tags: Dungeons and Dragons, d20, Marvel Superheroes, Fate Core, Fate Accelerated Edition, Shadowrun, Game Design http://www.darkshire.net/jhkim/rpg/systemdesign/heropoints.html http://www.highlevelgames.ca/blog/5-good-bad-and-ugly-dice-mechanics  Role-playing games are the best thing since sliced ogre for you, your kids, and your grandma... but there is one particular happiness that can be gained from them that is not for everyone. Only the select few, those of us with refined palates, the nerds among nerds who would appreciate the emphatically overdrawn syntax of this sentence ever learn to enjoy it. It is enjoyed by such brilliant minds as the Matt from Herding Dice, John Kim, and other masters of mechanics. This is the joy of the hacking the rules themselves.
To play around with the mechanics is to create the rules by which the game world is governed; it is a creative process in some ways more fundamental than playing a role. The core of all role-playing games is that they simulate a reality in which people can enjoy playing characters. Game designers have found many different ways to simulate the limitations of reality while allowing characters to have autonomy, each game striking a balance between a sense of realism with a sense of fun. Each design has a different flavour; there are so many games out there now that you can truly order them to taste. There are many mechanics that form a game. This article’s focus is on dice mechanics, what makes them good, exciting, clunky, or weird. Dice mechanics are good when they 1) create tension (there’s a variety of possible outcomes), 2) are somewhat realistic, and 3) are simple. If you have any favourite dice mechanics, please let me know in the comments! I’m always looking for interesting game systems. 1) Meat and Potatoes: d20 mechanics (Bad to Good!) Dungeons and Dragons, Pathfinder, and the d20 Open Game License are the staple of many a role-player’s diet. d20 mechanics have their high and low points. There are an exciting twenty possible outcomes for each roll, which usually include one opportunity for wild success or critical failure. These mechanics break down in the realism department because each outcome has an equal chance of happening. The rules change the probability of success by incorporating modifiers and changing target numbers, but no matter how weak or powerful your character, there’s still a 5% chance that you’ll either critically hit that dragon or fall flat on your face jumping over a log. These eventualities often seem out of place and ridiculous. Regarding simplicity, recent incarnations have improved considerably, most of them paring it down to just a 20-sided die, avoiding the need for excessive polyhedrons. The 5th Edition Dungeons and Dragons also introduced the idea of advantage and disadvantage, which improves the believability of the outcomes by giving players a pool of two 20-sided dice to choose from. 2) All Had The Graph Of Power! Marvel Superheroes (Bad to Ugly!) One dice mechanic that has always intrigued me is the one designed for TSR’s Marvel Superheroes. It features very simple resolution: every action is resolved by a percentile dice roll combined with consulting a chart. It accounts for the huge disparity of power in the Marvel Universe by having each character roll under the assigned level of their power for different effects. As interesting as it is, however, the reality it creates is a broken one where failure is frequent. This means Colossus may have difficulty pinning a starving serf to the ground, and Aunt May can knock Spider-Man out cold. There are some mechanics that work to mitigate this kind of thing, but they aren’t powerful enough to avoid frequent absurd power upsets. Wild successes and failures are defined by the chart. Oddly, if you put together the chance of a wild success or a critical failure, depending on the action you’re taking, it is frequently more likely to knock it out of the park or to fail epically than it is just to succeed. Again, this undermines the sense of realism in the game. 3) One Roll To Rule Them All: Fate Core & Fate Accelerated Edition (Best!) Featuring a robust mechanic based on the earlier FUDGE system, the Fate systems are two of my favourites. Players simply resolve all actions using a small pool of four FUDGE/Fate dice, which are 6-sided dice that supply outcomes between -4 and +4. There are fewer outcomes possible with this type of roll, but the outcomes follow a curve. The curve makes wild success and failures possible, but more rare, lending a sense of realism. There are also other mechanics that enable characters to succeed where they otherwise may not, and scale mechanics that allow this single dice roll to resolve conflicts on any scale. In combination, this creates a dice mechanic that simulates realistic outcomes, while providing the creative freedom of a truly universal system and enough tension to make victory sweet. 4) Welcome To The Desert Of The Real: Shadowrun (Good to Ugly!) There will always be a soft spot in my cold gamemaster heart for this game, though I don’t play it much anymore. In principle, the resolution mechanic is fairly simple; a combination of skills and gear provide characters a pool of 6-sided dice they use to resolve opposed, unopposed, and extended actions. The bigger the dice pool, the greater a character’s chances of success or wild success. Dice pools by nature allow somewhat more realistic outcomes, and the core mechanic is really quite simple. There are so many additional rules, however, that gameplay tends to bog down in the simulation. Almost every piece of gear, skill, and action has a specific rule that is perfectly logical and lends to a sense of realism for the game. But, frequently, the complexity takes players out of the game too much for them to enjoy the sense of immersion that so rich a game world deserves. Also, rolling upwards of twenty dice is both super fun and more than a bit ridiculous. 5) ...And Four Stunt Points! Fantasy AGE (Good!) This dice mechanic is a hybrid of early d20 mechanics and the Fate system. It uses a small pool of three 6-sided dice to resolve actions with a single type of roll. Outcomes range from 3 to 18, again making them feel realistic. An object of study for Matt from Herding Dice, it also features some super entertaining tricks. When players roll doubles, they gain a certain number of points with which to buy stunts – which are cool things their character can do. This means that wild successes are not limited to high rolls (though high rolls help). While it does not cover the same scope as Fate, it is nevertheless a very enjoyable resolution mechanic. These are only some of the highs and lows that players may encounter using different dice mechanics. Of course, this article doesn’t consider all the different mechanics that exist, and doesn’t even touch other forms of resolution. If you’re still reading, you’re probably of the ilk that will stay tuned for the forthcoming article about alternative resolution mechanics. See you there! Landrew is a full-time educator, part-time art enthusiast. He applies his background in literature and fine arts to his favourite hobby (role-playing games) because the market for a background in the Fine Arts is very limited. He writes this blog on company time under a pseudonym. Long live the Corporation!  Hello. My name is Landrew, and I’m a role-playing game junkie…
“Hi, Landrew…” Hello fellow junkies! In an earlier article, I talked about some rewards that games give players to keep them hooked. After listening to the feedback I got on the article and giving it some more thought, I decided it might be nice to hook my readers up with some solid tips on where to get the rewards they want. In this article, I point out some games (we’ll call them ‘dealers’) that do a great job of providing players with the rewards they want (e.g. a ‘fix’). These recommendations are limited by word count (all hail the corporate leaders) and by my own experience - which is heavily based on Dungeons and Dragons 3.5, the original Rifts, Marvel Superheroes, Fate, and Shadowrun. If you have your own recommendations for reward mechanics, please post them in the comments! 1. “Uppers:” Levelling Up/Character Advancement There’s nothing like good old Dungeons and Dragons for enjoyable character advancement. Although there are definitely some cool things about 5th edition, I’ll take 3.5 any day to get a good high. Feats, skills, and base attack bonuses... the rules are crunchy, maybe, but that’s part of the fun! It’s like a tinker gnome assembling nifty trinkets into a deadly whole. While I prefer simplicity during gameplay, complexity during character creation and advancement is a heck of a lot of fun. Pass that rare, dangerous, and somewhat broken source book, please! Honourable mentions go out to cool combat tricks and spells that can be earned in Kevin Siembada’s Rifts, and the power stunts mechanic in Marvel Superheroes. 2. “Bling & Benjamins:” Gear and Money The nominees for the ‘best gear’ award are tied, in my mind. If you want cool gear with its own stats, you can’t get much better than the gear lists from Rifts and Shadowrun. The detailed weapon descriptions add an irreplaceable layer of realism to the game world in both settings. I would be remiss if I didn’t include the gear lists from Dungeons and Dragons, as well. Again, recent game design theory is often critical of gear lists, saying that gameplay gets bogged down in the details. “Do you have a ten-foot pole on your inventory list? Doesn’t that make you encumbered?” However, removing gear lists also removes the fun of neat equipment-specific tricks and having exactly the right piece of gear at the right time. There’s got to be a happy medium out there somewhere... 3. “Hallucinogens & Immersion:” Exploring Game World Settings Which games have the best settings to discover? With all due respect to the many worlds based on Dungeons and Dragons (or were they called realms? I’ve forgotten), this award goes to Shadowrun first, with Rifts as a close runner-up. In the funny world of game publishing, game mechanics are not considered intellectual property - check out the first two paragraphs of this handy pdf from the US Copyright Office. Given this, a lot of the effort that goes into game design is poured into things that can be copyrighted, like setting, supporting characters, and game history. Hands down, nobody does this better than Shadowrun. It is based on an alternate timeline beginning in the 1980s and winding up in a dystopian cyberpunk future where magic and dragons have returned. The history of this alternate timeline is compelling, detailed, and strangely realistic. It features complex interactions on both the geopolitical and local level. For example, the last will and testament of the great dragon Dunkelzahn, late president of the United Canadian and American States, features enough loose ends and just enough interesting detail to provide plenty of role-playing hooks, while also just being a great piece of fiction in its own right. Also, Rifts. Thank you Kevin, for successfully describing a world in which literally anything can happen. Because, magic. 4. “The Mind Job:” Problem Solving Again, not to play favourites, but Shadowrun is my favourite for built-in problem-solving opportunities. The many heist-style modules lend themselves well to sitting down with your buddies trying to figure out a way to beat the odds. I like it because, though it is frankly combat-heavy, there are still a very large number of non-linear possibilities. Oh, that powerful security team can outgun us? How about when the commander is persuaded to give just one poor order to his team because his cousin’s buddy has the BTL he wants? Now the security goons are in the wrong place at the right time for them to notice our distraction, while the mage hacker ghosts in undetected. There’s nothing like the satisfying click of an opening safe in a heist gone right. 5. “The Happy Ending:” Resolving Story Arcs Jumping off the Shadowrun train for a bit, the best story-based mechanic that I’ve encountered so far is Evil Hat’s Fate system. I say ‘so far’ because I know there’s a ton of games emerging that have built-in story mechanics… I just haven’t tried them yet. Fate has a lot of cool points. The use of descriptors, called aspects, as part of the mechanic means that conflict has a built-in narrative quality to it. More importantly, however, is that character advancement is tied to story development rather than arbitrary monster XP values. Gameplay is divided into chunks like a TV show: scenes, scenarios (think episodes), arcs (seasons), and campaigns. The characters advance by reaching different ‘milestones,’ which are reached at the end of each chunk of the story. Advancement happens because of the characters’ experiences, which makes a ton of sense and is super satisfying as a player. With this structure, it becomes very easy to enjoy the feeling of closure you get from finishing the latest season of your favourite show. As you can see, no single game has everything. There are enough great games out there, however, that it’s not too difficult to find the reward you’re looking for. I hope this article helps you put a handle on what you want out of your games as a player; or maybe it will help a gamemaster find out what to give his/her players to keep stringing them along. No matter what, post your ideas in the comments, and let’s take our games to the next level. Landrew is a full-time educator, part-time art enthusiast. He applies his background in literature and fine arts to his favourite hobby (role-playing games) because the market for a background in the Fine Arts is very limited. He writes this blog on company time under a pseudonym. Long live the Corporation!  Instinctively, I go for simple rule systems. I try to focus on the Role-Playing side of things, and I try and keep the game administration to a minimum. Sure, roll a die to simulate the randomness of the real world. Otherwise, tell me what you want to do, and we’ll take it from there.
Recently, however, I’ve been playing a game that is the exact opposite of this, and wouldn’t you know it, I’m actually thoroughly enjoying myself. The game is, of course, Shadowrun. Now in its 5th edition, the rules were streamlined, and the Corebook is written very linearly. And here are the 6 reasons I find this game really great. 1 – Background: Ok, disclaimer; although it is my first time playing the Shadowrun RPG, I’ve been playing other games set in that universe (card, board, PC) for more than 20 years. So I REALLY love the setting. In 2012, magic returned to the world, following an ebb and flow that was described by the Mayans in their calendars. Some people realised they had magic powers and some mutated into elves, dwarves, orcs, and trolls (they had the genes, but the lack of magic in the environment kept it latent). It is now the 2060s, and we are left, after a lot of political and social upheaval, with the 6th World: A universe where elves have cybernetic implants, orcs hack into the Matrix (a global 3-dimensional representation of the internet), and dwarf street samurais kill as fast as they hit. They usually start with the knees. It’s William Gibson's Neuromancer married with Tolkien. HOW CAN YOU NOT LOVE IT!? Oh, and the US president is a dragon. In human form. Did I mention that? I feel like I should. There are dozens of books, both novels and settings, covering most of the world, and they show a fascinating evolution of the in-game universe over the decades. 2 – Characters and Backgrounds: The characters will be from one of a few playable races, human, elf, dwarf, orc and troll, each with various racial bonuses. Where Shadowrun comes into its own is that it has a classless system. You don’t pick Street Samurai (street merc) and get loads of skills with it, you pick loads of skills TO MAKE YOU A BETTER STREET SAMURAI. There is no reason why you couldn’t be a Jack-of-all-trades, but you wouldn’t be a master of anything. Although classless, there are half a dozen broad ‘jobs’ a Shadowrunner can have, the Shaman (magic user), the Decker (hacker), the Rigger (mental control of vehicles and drones), street samurai (street merc, usually weapons-savvy), the face (huge charisma), and a couple more. So if you want to play a magic user, you should keep your skill selection in that area, and perhaps not be too concerned about, say, hacking. Obviously, always pick some guns/gun-related abilities. 3 – The Dice: Dice rolls in Shadowrun are both simple and complicated. You roll d6’s with 5 and 6 as successes. If more than half your dice come up as 1’s, that’s a fail (called a Glitch). Simple, yes? Well, not quite. For a simple roll, something you’re not brilliant at, you might roll 4 dice. For something my character is amazing at, I’m rolling 10d6; and I’m a starting character. With bonuses, our Face (high charisma social guy) is rolling 12d6 to persuade/lie to people. It gets busy, FAST. Combat is where it gets interesting, as you roll for attack and your target does the same to defend. 4 – Character Creation: This is the only item where I feel I should put a small hazard sign. Character Creation in Shadowrun 5e is straightforward, but time consuming and roundabout. If you’ve never done it before, plan for a couple of hours, minimum. It all starts with a table. This table has columns, one with various amounts of skill points, another with money, another with attribute points, and so on. You then pick, say, one amount of money. You now cannot pick any other number from that same line. So if you pick the highest possible number of Skill points, now you cannot pick the highest number of anything else, nicely balancing the character. You then spend these points (which then relate to number of d6 rolled) to buy Skills, Attributes, etc Its complex, sure, but not that bad, really, until it comes time for the gear. Cthulhu help me, there’s guns, gun mods, fake ID’s, drones, drone weapons, computers, programs, vans, motorbikes, clothes, cyberware…. I COULD go on. Don’t let me push you away, though. The book is pretty good at telling you what you need to do, and it follows a logical sequence. 5 – Gameplay: You pick an action, roll the combined Skill + Attribute Bonus number of d6 and see how many came out 5 or 6s. The varying number of successes (said 5 and 6) tell you how good you were at that action. Or you rolled more than half the dice as 1’s and now the drak hit the air recycling unit. With a knowledgeable GM, this is a game you’ll remember for ages. The cyberpunk dystopian Blade Runner-esque environment closes around you. You’re Shadowrunners, shady mercs sent on jobs (‘Runs’) for private or Corporate clients. It can be as simple as delivering a package or killing someone. The limits are yours to choose. 6 – Overall: In the name of all that’s good and fluffy, PLAY IT! Don’t let the size of the Corebook or CC put you off. It’s really the hardest bit. And the level of detail your character will have at the end of it is almost unparalleled. And always remember: Shoot fast, punch hard, and NEVER cut a deal with a dragon. Rui is a Portuguese scientist that, after ten years doing strange things in labs, decided to become a teacher. Then, two years ago, like he was bit by a radioactive D20, RPG’s came into his life, and he’s now juggling teaching, playing and GMing quite happily. He lives in the UK with his partner Joana, an ungodly number of potted plants, 4 to 5 RPG’s at various stages of completion (and across as many rule systems), and maps, cursed idols, evil necklaces, and any other props he can get his hands on. He’s been writing for HLG for a few months, and is one of the resident vloggers. He can be reached at @Atomic_RPG. |
All blog materials created and developed by the staff here at High Level Games 
Click here to support our community for as a little as $1.00 for exclusive content, free downloadable stuff, and even discounts on role-playing game items.
Archives
April 2023
Categories
All
|
RSS Feed