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.
Seriously though why is there still coming 5e compatible stuff out after the OGL debacle?
@DmMacniel @TheGreatDarkness because it sells. And no matter what hobby stuff is going on, dnd players are disconnected from that to a point. There are people that do not even realize there is a wider hobby outside of 5e
I still think about an eye opening experience I had at a bar. Was chatting to some dude and he mentioned he was playing DND. I asked what edition. He didn’t know. He didn’t even know there were other editions. I can’t even guarantee he was actually playing DND and not some other RPG.
There’s a whole lot of extremely… Casual? I guess casual is the word? Casual DND players.
It can be sorta easy to be casual if you have an extremely knowlgeable dm. I sorta started that way, session 0 and 1 just had him help us build our characters and run a 10 minute solo goblin ‘dungeon’ where he explained basic rules and possible actions. The moral of the story was that you can do other things beside kill npcs. Turns out if I had attempted to talk to the goblins or even explored the area I would have realized they were orphan goblin children, malnourished and afraid… Instead I slaughtered them all for no reward or reason. One hint was that non of them were armed and they always ran at my sight. Definitely stopped any murder hobo tendencies from developing. After that he did mention our rule book and linked me to read but he could have very well not and we would have chugged along fine. I prefer pathfinder now a days better.
When I first got into D&D I didn’t know what edition I was playing. I knew there were multiple editions, but I couldn’t find the edition number. The box just said Dungeons and Dragons.
It was 4E, and I played multiple other systems before I finally got into 5E.
To be fair, even Neuroshima fans think this book only comes out to capitalize on Fallout show’s popularity, everyone sees it as a cashgrab.
The thing about D&D is that there is literally zero way WoTC can actually stop you from creating 5e content without their license. You’ll have a hell of a time publishing it, but there’s basically nothing they can so to stop you from just printing sheets or installing a dice bot on discord and getting to the races.
And they also dual-licensed most of the 5e SRD under Creative Commons as part of the “oh crap we didn’t expect everyone to be mad enough to actually hurt our bottom line” drawback from the OGL debacle.
Legally, they can’t keep you from publishing 5e content. You can even publish the 5e rules in their entirety so long as you change all the wording and pictures. I think they can keep you from publishing stuff involving their settings and characters, but you can still use their system.
Legally, they can’t send the Pinkertons to rob you, either.
Have you seen the installed customer base? An independent publisher would be extremely hard pressed to walk away from that.
We have seen branching out since the OGL fiasco, though, which is nice. More system neutral or OSR versions of modules and statblocks, or multi-system statblocks.
WotC aren’t making any money off my homebrew, and I genuinely like the existing designs for their dragons
Because when you’ve got like 4 hours a week of free time to prepare for the game, grabbing something 5e compatible and ad-libbing parts you didn’t feel like preparing ahead of time is easier than learning a whole new system.
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/ShadowrunAdd 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.
I only did SR5, which wasn’t that brutal, but SR4 or SR3 might’ve been more deadly
My RPG heyday was in and after high school, so 90-94. 1st or 2nd edition.
IIRC first edition either forgot the rules to character creation or just forgot the table used.
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)
Dear god in heaven - I’m pretty sure that applying percentages to a d20 violates the geneva convention.
Thanks for the horror story! What a cautionary take in how to destroy an otherwise serviceable core mechanic.
I feel this as I am starting up Gamma World 1e. Looking at attack matrixes again has me drooling. I forgot why we went where we did.
