Re: Runners in the Shadows. How many playbooks is too many? To cover all the different tech and magic niches, I came up with some extras. In all I’ve got 8 core books: Brains (Spider), Face (Slide), Muscle (Cutter), Trigger (Hound), Shadow (Lurk), Rigger, Hacker, Street Doc (the closest thing to a Leech would be Doc/Rigger). There are also 3 special books (usually character creation only), the Awakened, Adept, and Technomancer.
Feeling like a lot, but then they all seem to have different approaches and purposes, and it feels weird having one tech or magic book given the lore of the Sixth World. My worry is I’ve gone too far by adding abilities to separate medical assistance/terrorism from hands-on tech mayhem from digital warfare, but also that cutting them will make the roles too same-y. How do I know when I’ve gone too far?
If you can still:
1) Give every playbook a slew of cool moves, gear and contacts.
And
2) Make every playbook feel sufficiently distinct from the others.
Then you haven’t gone too far. If you can’t do both, then trim your list. Rigger and Decker seem sufficiently different; Technomancer seems like Decker with a funny accent, but maybe you can make it work. Same thing with Adept and Muscle. Chi or Augments is basically a flavor choice.
“Character creation exclusive” is kind of a buzzkill, by the by. I know I know, sixth world lore, Awakening doesn’t just happen, blah blah, but dicking around with character progression feels pretty core to the Blades philosophy. And presumably you’ll have at least one magical action rating that everyone can access anyway. Just think about it.
This might sound crass, but: why aren’t you waiting a month or two for The Sprawl to come out with its magic and metatypes supplement Touched?
James Etheridge 1) and 2) 100% agreed on my end. Others may value other things too, as I do. Like a strong 3) in my book is adhering to Blades conventions as much as possible, but another strong 3) for me is being faithful to Sixth World lore.
So, while development began by outright declaring anyone could access Awakened just like Whispers in Blades, in play every table ended up agreeing you couldn’t go there later, or fiction first to go there after creation made sense, which LTPs or RP handles nicely. Newest design of playbooks now just assumes most players will prefer things this way, and assumes other players will want to discuss the availability of those (just like with the three special playbooks from Blades) rather than having the decision (whether to have them be as available as you want them to be) made one way or the other. It’s actually ambiguous in the text, in other words. But strongly hinted that it should be exclusive.
Lex Permann I don’t think you are being crass. However I also think your implication as it stands has little to do with the intent of this “hack and add on” thread I started in the Blades community. At this point, it’s worth mentioning, Runners is not a project that just started. Nor is it duplicated by the wonderful work done by Hamish
James Etheridge i only disagree with your last point. Channel is astral perception, resonance examination, interacting with & understanding supernatural stuff. That action has no business on anyone’s sheet but a magic user in the SR universe.
The Attune/Channel action is special in Runners, the 13th action if you will, and Hack is on the standard action list.
Devil’s Advocate: If it’s a major advantage to have a feature that is exclusive to one playbook, with everything else able to be taken as veteran advances, why would all players not take that one playbook to get the special ability and then branch out down the playbook they wanted?
As for the number of playbooks, I completely agree with the first response; if they all feel cool and different, you’re fine.
Jason Lee I wondered this myself at first. Yet people do take the standard playbooks often, stating up front that they care not about the magic stuff, and perhaps reserving the ability to grab all the cyberware they want with relative impunity (except to their metahumanity).
Part of me hopes that the fluff on becoming a cyberzombie from a fully Awakened body is also at work: that it is sufficiently more horrific than it is for a cyberjunkie. The bit I wrote about “nightmares and memory chasing going on for what seems like an eternity for Awakened brains bound for cyborg bodies” and [basically] that “their supernatural senses get all smashed up in a jar, and they lose touch with their astral abilities.” is also why characters might not.
Fair enough. I sometimes game with some rules lawyers, min-maxers and other people who like to exploit systems. I know for example that in my group, if we play D&D Modern and you don’t take your first level in Fast hero (is that the right name? It’s been ages since I’ve played), you’ll put yourself at some sort of disadvantage, so everyone does it.
If the playbook exclusive ability gives a bonus at the cost of blocking some other ability, that might help balance it out. I guess something like spell casters not being able to wear good armour is a basic example of this kind of trade off in other systems. It’s your system at the end of the day though, so you’ll know better than I would what fits right.
Yeah that’s a thing and I am gaming with some of those too. Some min maxing is allowed and is to be encouraged, with the caveat that everything comes at a cost. 🙂
usually one or two reasons leads players away from automatic selection of the Awakened book:
1. To avoid the added costs of magic use: there is a shorter stress track in Runners, driving magic users to vice and overindulgence more.
2. to avoid a possibly complex play experience. If you aren’t magical, you’ve got more time and dots for better guns, learning to shoot guns better, etc
(3) And the sort of hidden reason is: the rules don’t actually lock you out of the special books at all. Those books are just “Special” with a write-up saying how or why they’re special to guide the discussion. The rule there is an intentional point of discussion about the desired tone for magic (maybe they’re all past editioners who are ok with latent Awakened being a thing, I dunno)
A surprising number of not-SR-fans asked about the possibility of becoming Awakened through play also, and I had to help narrate an awakening once too. so I left it flexible on this point so that coolness can happen again, but with fluffy guidance to that discussion.
Seems fair enough.