I would usually be sad to see another original RPG go 5e compatible but Neuroshima was infamously poorly designed ruleset, possibly worse than Shadowrun. I probably won’t be running it, but may steal statblocks for my 5e game if I need weird stuff again.
TIL the origin of this comic is transphobic shit
Could you elaborate a little on the design issues?
From Wikipedia it looks like you roll 3d20 looking for at least two successes, where the TN is a character attribute.
I find success counting mechanics are much lower cognitive load at the table than adding up mechanics, plus there’s a sensible limit to the number of dice and players will always have the target number written on their character sheet.
Plus that gives you a fairly clear 4 levels of success which is always easy to interpret as crit/pass/fail/crit fail.
I personally don’t like using D20s but that core mechanic seems fairly smooth and elegant to me. Where does the physics degree part come in? Too many overly complex subsystems? Weird character creation?
The issue with the rolls arises when you have modifiers (like skills), which are in percentage, so you need to sum them up and then cover result and apply it to the roll. Oh and also, you apply Difficulty Levels to your relevant attribute, which are really weird. Easy is -2, Average is 0, Problematic is -2, but then Hard is -5, Damn Hard is -11 and Lucky is -15
So in theory your action should be “roll 3d20, see if you have two successes under relevant attribute” but in practice it’s “add DL to your attribute. Sum up all the modifiers, then convert the sum to a percentage of 20.Roll 3d20. Apply the number you got to the roll results. If two or more results are equal or lesser than Attribute, you succeed, othertwise you fail”.
And THEN you add complex rules for every single minutia thing on top of it. Or lack of rules for things that were deemed to important, because those were relegated to one of many, many expansions.
Oh and in combat you instead roll a d20, and you need 3 different d20’s for 3 different phases of combat.
And then you add the poorly organized book, sometimes contradicting itself (eg. you are supposed to fill a questionnaire to explain character’s concept and what they do BEFORE rolling dice in order for your attributes)
What was wrong with Shadowrun?
Shadowruns actual rules aren’t so bad, character creation is crunchy but you could fit all the non matrix/spirits combat stuff onto maybe 2 sides of a single A4 sheet. The real problem is the editing, that information is spread across the entire rulebook so badly that sometimes it even feels like the information was cut off mid paragraph.
Good question! I only play computer games. Never play table games, what is so bad?
Shadowrun is a “crunchy” game, this means it has a lot of rules, and those rules are not simple. If everyone actually learns the rules for their characters, and people don’t do things that are extremely odd, the game can run smoothly.
IIRC from when I ran it, if someone does a normal melee attack (without any magic, hacking, or vehicle shenanigans), it’s like 20 steps, and some people can attack 6+ times per round at level 1.
Compare this to a game where at attack is “roll one die, add one number to it. Is it higher than their armour? Then roll a different die and add one number to it. That’s the damage you deal”.
Edit: Even those of us that love Shadowrun kinda hate Shadowrun. There was also a time when the guy in charge stole a bunch of money from the company, and they didn’t have the fund to pay the people who actually worked on their games.
https://www.tgdmb.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?t=50989
https://hackslashmaster.blogspot.com/search/label/Shadowrun
And the book is horrible. Want to throw a grenade? Let me check under grenades… No, not there. Let’s check under the throwing skills. Nope, no throwing rules for weapons. Well, maybe under attacks? No, that doesn’t have grenade throwing rules either.
Oh look, here in a completely seperate section, contained in an unlisted sidebar, are the rules on grenade throwing.
Add to that injury rules.
Oh, you’ve been shot? It’s going to be nearly impossible to cast a spell or fight back. Maybe realistic but the number of characters I spent multiple hours making only to be wounded within moments of play was… greater than two.
It has been a few decades.
Part of me likes poring over lists of slightly different things with complex interactions, but for the most part I think such rules are a relic back when the design philosophy seemed to be “use these dice” and “the players might do it, there should be a rule and probably a roll”.
Also SR5 having drug effects separate to the drug prices, among many other things. I really want to see a more nerdy SR vidya but that probably won’t happen
Whats wrong with 5e?
Where do you want to start? The player mechanics are way outdated and overcomplicated for what it wants to be, the GM mechanics are functionally nonexistant, the lore is cliched at best and still incredibly bigoted in many areas, the better adventures are just rehashes of 2e and 3.x adventures and still need entire communities dedicated to making them runnable, it’s unbalanced until you get to about level 10 at which point it becomes unplayable, and without pirating it’s incredibly expensive.
Trying to strap every possible setting and mechanic onto a fantasy rule system was one of the issues 3.x ended up with, and 5e hasn’t been designed to solve that.
