| From: | "Thomas Holmes" <Thomas.A.Holmes-1@**.umn.edu> |
|---|---|
| Subject: | General Reaction |
| Date: | Tue, 6 Aug 1996 14:58:49 |
couple of coments I'd like to throw in about my initial reactions.
1) Lot of player bashing. I don't mean this to sound too negative but the
majority of these posts seemed aimed at penalising players. I personally
quit playing shadowrun with several groups for this very reason. I am
playing the main character in an interesting sci-fi story, and I expect my
character to dominate and succeed so long as I play reasonably well. As a
source of entertainment I /do not/ want to spend long hours calculating
intricate details or role-playing non-significant roles. I don't see the
role of the referee as being a source of frustration and character
bashing (perhaps too strong of terms, but they say what I feel). I also
don't see the referee as 'judging' or 'creating balance' or these other
terms I see repeatedly.
2) Related to 1) above, shadowrunners are /not/ good guys in any sense of
the word, under any ideology. They're proffessional (or unproffessional)
criminals. I think of 'Resevoir Dogs' 'Pulp Fiction' 'Harley Davidson and
the Marlbarrow Man' 'True Lies' 'The Proffessional' 'The Killer' 'Le Fem
Nikita' etc. etc. etc. The main characters in these stories are very
interesting, but they are /not/ heroic, or good guys. As a player I expect
to be playing one these kinds of characters. I might have some kind of
personal code, but I /do/ break faces and kill people to get what I want,
if I have to. Criminal all the way. Any referee who tries running things
otherwise I think is going to have to very explicit in his themes, desires,
and closely supervise character creation. Which is fine, but not ShadowRun.
3) I run games quite a bit, and have never had any problems with characters
being too tough. I've played with some really twinkish players, who
agonised for hours over point efficiency to be super profficient killers,
but they never unbalanced or through my game out of whack. The best
explanation I have to offer to those having problems is to /expect/ the
players to come out on top when they play. Then you can be happy when they
do. I personally have a reputation as a 'tough' gm, but I've always let the
players exploit the rules fully, and I rarely use any tech or magic with my
opposition characters. Players usually die from poor planning or execution
of a run, and tech and magic both rarely affect the outcome either way on a
botched run. A lot of either does severely inhibit where the players can
go, and thus what kind of runs they can do/accept.
Now that I've vented my spleen:
Hi again everybody! Interested in what you're saying, glad this forum's
around.
Thomas
