Sunday Editorial (Deep Thoughts Edition)

Thoughts and Ideas, Part I

So i’ve got some extra minutes this afternoon and i wanted to share a semi deep thought about organizing your gaming group and i am going to end up using one of those R words i don’t like to utilize.  I’m going to break out a Rule for all of you, and bear with me for a second.  I don’t like Rules in general because for every rule i can think of, exceptions apply.  If a Rule generates more exceptions than the original idea the rule was supposed to help you by providing a guideline or a hard and fast way of looking at things, then the Rule isn’t much help is it?  The Rule i’m going to drop on you is my rule 0, and it goes something like this “Don’t let the options get in the way of fun.”  Seems easy right?  It’s a fairly easy rule that i use as a guide for when i am building a character for an RPG, or an army for a Tabletop Miniature war game.  There are some considerations for using this rule, and i’m going to talk about this first in terms of character (and party) construction, and then i’ll talk a little bit about designing an army for a Minis game.  Bear with me, and i’ll see if i can help you out with the thought process behind Rule 0.  

Just Dumb Things #5 (Shadowrun edition)

As it happens in college, a friend of mine says to our college gaming club, "Let's Play Shadowrun you fucks"  The kid had never run Shadowrun before, and I tried to explain the complexity of the game, but he was insistent.  I said sure, and so did 7 other people.  So we've got a new GM running a game for a group of players with a mix of skill level and experience with the game.  I volunteered to be the Decker, so that no one else had to try to interact with that particularly interesting subsystem.  Because of the edition, I also picked up the rigger job description and made sure that I had an idea of what I was doing.  My friends decided to make a mish mash of wonderful character concepts and tropes, and we ended up with the following

Some new ideas from Catalyst Game Labs

So Catalyst is showing off a couple of new products for Shadowrun and Battletech.  Let’s take a quick look at these new books and see if we can’t tease a couple more ideas from the big brains.  

Shadowrun: Anarchy (Characters Drive Stories)

Shadowrun Anarchy is loose on the streets and it is a completely new way of looking at how the Shadowrun Universe can be interacted with.  Stories are the driving force behind this new way of looking at Shadowrun, and i’ve long maintained that Characters drive stories.  Let’s take a look at some of the character ideas for Shadowrun, (we’ll compare them to Shadowrun 5th edition and yes, i’ll cover Shadowrun’s character creation system at some point)

Shadowrun: Anarchy (First Look)

Shadowrun: Anarchy is an alternative rules system for playing games and telling stories in the Shadowrun Universe.  Shadowrun has the distinction of being the 2nd role-playing game i’d ever played, and is one of the oldest of its kind still in publication.  Across the last five editions, Shadowrun has pushed the boundaries of the cyberpunk trope and thrown in some old world black magic for fun.  It’s a world where elven wizards take tea with ork hackers while plotting their next move against the Dragon sitting atop the corporate throne.  You can tell so many different stories in the Shadowrun Universe and make flavorful, neat characters that can do a lot of things.