Monthly Archives: February 2013

Sprawl Gangers Designer Diary 1

By randall | Published: February 14, 2013

Shadowrun 5 Sprawl Gangers Logo

Greetings! My name is Ross Watson, and I am a huge fan of Shadowrun. I’ve been playing Shadowrun since its inception in 1989, and I’ve played every edition of the game right from the first. I’ve played Shadowrun when it was an online text-based game (Shadowrun Seattle MUX and Shadowrun Detroit MUX), and now I’m very pleased to say I’m deeply enjoying the opportunity to work on a game set in that universe!

I’ve been a game designer for over 13 years now, and I’ve worked on a ton of games. Much of my experience lies in developing RPGs and miniature games, and it’s great to bring that experience to the table for Sprawl Gangers.

Randall and I plan to release a number of designer diaries about Sprawl Gangers in the coming months. I wanted to take this opportunity to tell you about my basic design philosophy for Sprawl Gangers to give all the fans an idea of where I’m coming from and where I want to go with the game.

When it comes to skirmish-level miniature games, I have several favorites! I would say that the games that made a deep impression upon me as a designer include Kill-team, Necromunda, and Mordheim, and I’ve learned to enjoy other exciting rulesets like Infinity and Dust Warfare (although I’m a bit biased about that last one!).

What I want for Sprawl Gangers is to design a fast and fun skirmish-level wargame that uses a lot of cool terrain and brings some new ideas to the tabletop. I want to marry that ruleset to the superb intellectual property that is Shadowrun, and make Sprawl Gangers a natural fit for that universe.

What that means for me is that I need to make sure and find a way to bring things like magic and spells into the game alongside and in conjunction with mechanics for hacking the matrix with your cyberdeck and using your wired reflexes cyberware to swiftly strike at enemy gangers.

It is a real pleasure to work with Randall on this ruleset—he brings a unique perspective from his own decades of experience as a miniature gamer, and it has been very rewarding to find out just how much we have in common as game designers… while retaining our individual flavor, of course!

I look forward to being able to tell you all more about Sprawl Gangers in the weeks to come, and until next time… keep your ammo handy, never trust an elf, and never deal with a dragon!

Ross Watson

Posted in Sprawl Gangers, Uncategorized | 5 Responses

SR5 dev blog: More about limits–and exceeding them

By jhardy | Published: February 12, 2013

Shadowrun 5 Logo with Text

In the last development blog about Shadowrun, Fifth Edition, we talked about the concept of limits and how they apply to gear. Limits started as a way to put the focus on skills and attributes to build dice pools, but as we developed the concept, we found other uses and effects for them. This, of course, is one of the blessings and perils of game design—when you make a change on an underlying issue, its effects spiral out in different ways, some expected, some not.

As we were working on limits, we developed two kinds—one tied to gear, and one not. This second type is what we are calling inherent limits, and there are three of them—Physical, Mental, and Social. These are derived from a character’s attributes, which we liked, since it gave us a chance to encourage more balanced characters. Every character has certain attributes that are more important to them than others, and that’s not going to change, but we felt that limits meant that people would have to think a little more about the other attributes, making sure they weren’t ignored so that their limits were not too low.

As we were working on and playtesting limits, we also had to think about possible objections or difficulties with limits. We knew there would be times that players would roll some hits that they would not be able to count, as that’s built right into the design. What was potentially problematic was the Great Roll (yes, it’s important enough to deserve capital letters). Let’s say you’re a hacker in a firefight you didn’t plan to be in. Everyone’s turned off their wireless, and there’s not much Matrix action in the area. You’re running low on options, and to make things worse you’ve been noticed by the big troll tank who is currently rushing at you with thoughts of grinding you into a messy pulp.

In this case we’ll say you have Agility 3, Pistols 3, for a dice pool of 6 (ignoring modifiers for the time being to make this example simple). You didn’t spend on the most accurate pistol on the market, opting for a light model with an Accuracy of 3, since most of the time that’s going to be enough to cover the hits you’ll get when you take a shot. But this time, when the situation is bad, you actually make the perfect roll. Three fives, three sixes. Six hits. With an armored-up troll closing in on you. Beautiful. But you can only use three of them due to the weapon’s limit.

One of our guiding principles is that while we want Shadowrun to be difficult, we also want players to be able to be awesome. So in this instance, we turned to Edge, with a function called Breaking the Limits. The hacker can invoke this ability after the roll of the dice, and then use all 6 hits, hopefully stopping the troll cold (or maybe not—even a great shot with a light pistol doesn’t tend to stop a troll).

The hacker had at least another option if he wanted to plan ahead, as using Edge to add his Edge rating to his dice pool also allows him to ignore limits. Edge, then, becomes more important in Shadowrun, Fifth Edition, which we view as a positive development. Shadowrunners should be living on the edge anyways, so increasing the emphasis on that stats seems like a good thing.

It also comes with a problem, as it’s likely to make Edge diminish quicker than it did in Shadowrun, Fourth Edition. But this was another problem that was actually an opportunity. When looking at ways to change how Edge gets refreshed, we looked at the traditional bonus Karma rewards, for things like good humor, skillful roleplaying, and exceptional daring. We decided that rather than making you wait for a Karma reward for these good decisions, your character could instead be rewarded by an instantly refreshed point of Edge. That brings in positive reinforcement for fun gaming behavior. We hope that this—and many of the other changes we’ll be covering—make the Shadowrun, Fifth Edition roleplaying experience more fun than ever.

Coming up next: A look at Fifth Edition’s Matrix.

Posted in Uncategorized | 25 Responses

Caught up in the Crossfire: An interview with Gregory Marques

By randall | Published: February 11, 2013

Shadowrun 5 Crossfire Logo

The Year of Shadowrun is in full swing, chummers! With even the most scant of information being given about production, Shadowrunners noobie and veteran alike are excited to see their favorite setting experience a new Awakening (or get a full-body Alphaware augmentation, if you prefer a cyber-metaphor). Shadowrun Online and Shadowrun Returns are in full production mode, and we’ve got some sweet tabletop action going with a brand new Edition to the role-playing game proper, as well as several other nova-hot tabletop games.

Starting off this very auspicious year is the Adventure deck-building game Shadowrun: Crossfire from Fire Opal Media. Crossfire is in great hands, featuring some very strong talent in card game design: Gregory Marques, Mike Elliott, Rob Watkins, Rob Heinsoo, Jay Schneider and James “Jim” Lin.

There’s plenty on the ol’ screamsheet of the game to get your inner runner excited:

    Shadowrun: Crossfire is a cooperative deck-building card game for two tofour players set in the gritty, cyberpunk fantasy world of Shadowrun. Playa shadowrunner team and take on tough jobs such as protecting a clientwho’s marked for death, shooting your way out of downtown when a rungoes sour, or facing down a dragon. In each game you’ll improve your deckwith a mix of strategies while earning Karma to give your character cyberupgrades, physical augmentations, magical initiations, weapons trainingand Edge. Shadowrun: Crossfire includes an obstacle deck, black market deck,race and role cards, scenario cards, augmentation stickers, and personalmissions that test a team’s allegiances.

Great! A Crossfire game that doesn’t involve fragile plastic guns or easily lost metal pellets! As awesome as it sounds, it still leaves you wanting a bit more, doesn’t it? Natch, chummer! The good Doctor Belmont has your fix. I was able to conjure up an interview with designer Gregory Marques!

Read Full Article.

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Crossfire: Crossing Genres

By randall | Published: February 4, 2013

Shadowrun 5 Crossfire Logo

Designing Shadowrun: Crossfire has been a happy blend of translation and innovation.

Translation matters because Shadowrun goes beyond being a beloved roleplaying game. Shadowrun is one of the touchstones. Even gamers who have never played Shadowrun know that the game takes cyberpunk, magic, Native American shamans, elves, and orks, and purees them into its own brand of Kurosawa-touched street noir.

Shadowrun struck a chord when it was published in the 80s and it’s still finding new chords for new audiences. I’ve met Native American parents proud that their kids were playing a game in which Native Americans take the country back. I’ve met gamers who shudder when they talk about what happened to Chicago.

From a game design perspective, we had to translate the things that give Shadowrun its identity into the framework of a new type of experience. Catalyst helped by providing a list of ten essentials for the Shadowrun universe, a list I think you’ll see in SR5. But even before he had that list, Crossfire lead designer Greg Marques had established a core gameplay experience that takes the familiar figures of a shadowrunning team and forces them to cooperate turn-by-turn to take down threats that no single runner could deal with on their own (at least not until you play the solo missions!).

As a game designer, I believe there is a special line where translation and innovation blur. To truly translate an originally innovative game into a new genre, you should come up with ideas that strike the audience as new, and that get people excited the same way they felt about the original game’s innovations. It wouldn’t do justice to Shadowrun to produce a deck-building game that struck dedicated deck-builder players as the same-old/same-old.

Of course, it’s a bit strange to talk about the deck-builder genre originally created by Donald X Vaccarino with the brilliant Dominion as if it could already have a same-old/same-old. But the new mechanics created by Crossfire co-designers Greg Marques and Mike Elliot point out that there were some assumptions that other deck-builder games have been making and that those assumptions can be elegantly refreshed. Dedicated deck-builder players are going to uncover something new playing Crossfire.

And when they do, they’re going to be doing it as the members of a team of shadowrunners, embracing the roles that long-time Shadowrun players know from hours around the tabletop: Street Samurai, Decker, Face, Mage. When Crossfire players start looking for more on the world behind their game, and Shadowrun 5 players note that the Crossfire Level must have increased because there sure-are-a-lot-of-people shooting-at-them-all-of-a-sudden, then everyone ends up with new people to play with.

Yours in a bright Post Mayan-Apocalypse,

Rob Heinsoo
Lead Designer, Fire Opal Media

Posted in Crossfire, Uncategorized | 3 Responses