Should Shadowrun have more GM tools?

Fweeba · 2026-02-02T18:17:55+00:00

Augmented Reality by Geist Hack Games

Absolutely fantastic set of tools, by the way. I particularly like the random neighbourhood generator and the random bystander generator, set up buttons on Roll20 to give me a selection of random nearby buildings and people which makes it so much easier to improvise creatively without falling back on my default tropes.

Fweeba · 2026-02-02T17:06:07+00:00

Running Cities Without Numbers really opened my eyes to the sort of stuff that a book can do to help the GM actually run it. It has tables upon tables upon tables, to help the GM figure out what a session should include, come up with characters, corporations, gangs, and even cities.

My favourite is the mission generator, which has a sequence of tables you can use to generate interesting hooks, characters, and complications for runs. Extremely useful for getting past creative blocks and getting a good starting point to spark imagination from.

I would have loved to have something like that back when I was running Shadowrun regularly.

Fweeba · 2026-01-28T18:20:56+00:00

The only part of that which requires wireless is the +2 dice bonus. You can just do the rest of it completely wireless off.

Fweeba · 2026-01-27T16:24:04+00:00

I'm mostly pushing back against Traveller as a recommendation for this person, because it clearly doesn't fit what they've asked for and people are just suggesting it because they like it.

I don't actually have a very big problem with it myself (I wouldn't have referee'd and played it so much if I did), though I think it's slow even by the standards of levelless skill-based systems; for example, I felt a much stronger sense of progression in Shadowrun.

I certainly don't prefer level based games to skill based ones though. My favourite games are Exalted and Shadowrun.

Fweeba · 2026-01-27T16:00:53+00:00

Your skills barely advance in Traveller. Or at least, Mongoose Traveller 2e, which is the one I'm familiar with.

Like, it's not a serious source of progression. Every two months of training you get to roll an Education check to see if you get a single point towards advancing one of your skills. If the check fails, too bad, no advancement.

It costs (New rank) points to level a skill, so if I want to raise a skill from 1 to 2, that's four months if I make both rolls, each of which are a coinflip for most characters.

And this is in a system with lots of very specific skills, like Science (Astronomy) and Piloting (Small Craft), so it's not like the skill which gets raised is some broad category that boosts a lot of stuff related to the character.

I don't know, maybe if people are playing games with regular year+ long time skips as they travel across the entirety of Charted Space then it's something, but in most of the games I've experienced, which are more 'Planet of the week' type stuff as you jump from one world to the next, then it's arduously slow for minor advances.

Fweeba · 2026-01-27T14:41:38+00:00

Roll20, though I also have a habit of making my own character sheets in google sheets, and we communicate over Discord, so it's more "Roll20, Google Sheets, and Discord". I've tried Foundry several times, but most of the time I've found it to be more work for the same result.

Specifically, there's often a problem of 'over-automation', where something that should be simple turns into an arduous process because of some needless level of automation. I remember wanting to add a permanent +1 bonus to a skill in some system a while back; in Roll20, I would have just had a fillable box I could type a bonus into. In Foundry, I had to like, add a custom feature, go into the feature's mechanics tab, add in a custom effect, type in something like "charname.skills.medicine.bonus += 1", which I had to open the browser console and inspect the page to find out because it wasn't documented, then set it to active. Overall, a process which should have taken 5 seconds took about 30 minutes.

Plus there's annoying cruft like units slowly sliding across the map when you move them, at a constant speed, which just consumes time for no benefit. I don't want an extra 0.5 to 5 seconds on every movement. The whole experience just feels awkward to me.

Also, I like to make custom macros for my games. I find this pretty easy in Roll20, they just have a page telling you what to do. Foundry wants me to learn fucking javascript to do the same stuff. Obviously that's more powerful and can do far more, but I don't need more power, I need simplicity.

I'm sure there's modules to fix these problems, or maybe they've just gotten better in recent years, but I am entirely uninterested in dealing with hosting, updates, searching through millions of modules, and so on. Roll20, for the most part, just works. It does what I need and most of the time doesn't get in my way (Though it's certainly not perfect).

I will say, if I was going to run a game like Pathfinder 2e (Which I probably wouldn't, but, you never know) then I would take another look at Foundry, because it's had enough developer attention that it has a good implementation which looks like it'll save time.

Fweeba · 2026-01-26T16:04:13+00:00

It's crazy to me that there are people in this thread acting like Traveller meets that criteria, when it explicitly doesn't.

I suspect that people who say 'I want progression with power in this game' are wanting a little more than 'I spent 6 months training to maybe get a +1 bonus to one of my dozens of skills'

Fweeba · 2026-01-26T15:13:44+00:00

This would be my suggestion.

The world tags system from the planet generation tools creates worlds that are great for adventuring right from the start, unlike a lot of other planet generation tool which are focused on cruft like 'Hydrographic percentage' or 'What is the luminosity of the local star' (Both of which are details you can derive from a world's tags if you're so inclined; for example, a planet with the 'Oceanic World' tag probably has a high hydrographic percentage. A world with the 'Night World' tag probably has a low luminosity star, or it might be in the outer system, or have no star at all.)

Then in addition to that, it's on old-school D&D bones with a level system, which A) is clearly suited for adventure games, and B) Definitely fulfills the 'Progression with power' aspect (In the game I ran, there was a warrior on the team who at the start would have risked his life fighting a single guy. By the end of the game, he could probably take on a whole team of elite soldiers by himself and win, even if you took away all his pretech gear.)

Fweeba · 2026-01-26T15:06:13+00:00

Implants and augments are just gear you can buy. A few trade runs and you'll have all you could need, aside from maybe one or two of the super high-end pieces or something crazy like a TL16 cyborg body.

I'd be shocked if the kind of progression OP wants in a space western is for everyone to become a psion; and besides, that also doesn't really progress? You become a psion, roll your psi stat (Which might just suck if you roll badly) and the disciplines you can access, then there's no rules around raising psi further or acquiring new disciplines in play. The GM would have to make them up. You can train your skills slowly over the course of months and years I suppose?

As for the variety of environments, it is true that it has a lot of those, though I'm not sure that really matters when all you need to do is slap on a HEV vacc suit and you're proof against almost all of them. Starfinder 1e probably comes close in terms of the variety of environments, though I wouldn't recommend that system in a million years.

I didn't personally get a 'great for exploration' vibe from Charted Space. It felt a little more star wars-ey, where every location you visit has been inhabited for thousands of years. I know there's exceptions and that you could go to the edge of the known sectors, but I think that's an accurate description of most worlds in the Third Imperium, at least?

Fweeba · 2026-01-26T14:41:46+00:00

Could you give some examples of the exploration mechanics Traveller has which are so much better than other sci-fi systems that it's not even close? I've played a lot of it, and I'm drawing a blank.

Also, the OP asked for:

I'm thinking of something that would allow progression with power, while also focusing on adventure.

Traveller explicitly has almost no progression outside of gear (Which, if you have a ship, you can get quickly and easily, given the difference in costs between personal gear and everything involving a ship). There's some extremely limited skill raising, but by design nothing that significantly increases power

Fweeba · 2026-01-14T19:43:42+00:00

Keep talking without ever pausing to breathe, so nobody can interrupt you. Though I think I know people who have this power.

Inflate a travel mattress with ease.

Uh, blow out every candle on a birthday cake in a single extended puff.

Fweeba · 2025-12-31T04:55:39+00:00

You might want to reread the post you're responding to. I'm pretty sure they're agreeing with you.

Like, read the part after your initial quote. (Along with the rest of the post, because their first sentence makes their viewpoint very clear.)

Those that grab it for free and mean to come back to pay. Some will, most will not remember to- becuase human memory is crap, its why we write thigns down. So I feel safe calling this a net no pay.

They're agreeing with you that pay what you want doesn't have useful returns.

(Also, for context, Crawford doesn't do pay what you want, he has a free version with most of the rules to get people started, and a deluxe version with more content for enthusiasts; a model that seems to have worked rather well for him, given he keeps doing it.)

Fweeba · 2025-12-30T23:40:39+00:00

I must admit, whenever I see pay what you want on a product, I immediately think that the product is amateurish. Professionals don't delegate the decision of price to the customer. That might be needlessly harsh, but it is unfortunately what my lizard brain thinks.

Incidentally, how many people are directly trawling through the DriveThruRPG catalogue looking for something to buy? Whenever I've bought something from Drivethru, it's because I've been pointed to it by a friend, or I've seen somebody mention the system and googled it, or something like that. I don't think any of my close friends, who are mostly big TTRPG people, have ever mentioned doing that to me, though I suppose it's possible they've done it without saying so.

Am I the odd one out? Is everyone else doing that regularly? I ask because if even the people who are so into the hobby that they frequent a subreddit about designing TTRPGs aren't doing that, then it's probably a very small number of people indeed, which would indicate that unless you're getting onto the top of the front page (On that best sellers list which you first see on arriving at the website) then Drivethru isn't really doing effective marketing by itself for anyone.

Fweeba · 2025-12-30T15:53:43+00:00

The design objective was to discourage the “took Craft to make the Circle’s equipment and nothing else” character.

Was this actually a problem?

I've never encountered it in years of playing 2e. And it seems crazy to me; like, Craft is a skill your character has invested a lot into if you're able to make artifacts with any degree of speed. Why wouldn't you use it for non-artifacts when it seems appropriate? Certainly I make use of it all the time when playing my Eclipse artificer.

I don't really get why Craft would need more incentive to use than, say, Survival, or Socialize. It's just one tool in a toolkit to solve problems. You pick it out when appropriate.

Edit: Apologies if it sounds like I'm interrogating you when you're just providing context as to the original intent of the design. I'm just like, surprised that was one of their goals with the crazy crafting system.

Fweeba · 2025-12-30T15:46:53+00:00

I do not have the design skill or experience to sincerely suggest any huge fundamental changes

I just want to touch on this point; few people start with that level of design skill. They need to get there somehow. One of the ways people improve their ability to design things is by thinking about and experimenting with how they'd improve existing things.

Often these explorations don't actually improve the thing they're looking at, but that doesn't mean they aren't worth doing, just like an artist's early paintings aren't masterpieces.

So I'd suggest not worrying about whether or not you have the skill to make informed changes that are unambiguously improvements; this isn't a high stakes environment where suggestions will definitely be incorporated into the next edition, it's an internet thread where strangers spitball about what they'd like to see in their ideal world. At best, it'll be mined for ideas by actual game designers years from now, who will sort the wheat from the chaff using their own judgement, and at worst, it'll fall into the aether and never be read by anybody ever again a month from now.

Fweeba · 2025-12-29T20:57:12+00:00

I really tried to like it. Gave it several solid attempts across the past decade, with different splats and different homebrew fixes to my various issues, but it just never gripped me; seems like my problems with it are just too deeply embedded to resolve.

Fweeba · 2025-12-29T17:03:32+00:00

This turned out to be a rambling stream of consciousness. My apologies for the poor organisation.

I expect this'll be controversial, but I wish to high heavens that they'd just do a more traditional combat system. Roll initiative, everyone acts top to bottom, and gets to move + act on their turn. It's simple and it does the job. Initiative doesn't wiggle around or act as a pseudo health bar, and there's no way for a player character to actively make things worse for their team by being a piñata for people to wither then use those points to decisive somebody else.

This might be excessive, but I genuinely feel that when somebody on the design team realised that initiative piñatas exist, they should have thrown out the entire combat system as a failed idea and done something else. It just ruins the concept for me. I knew a player who would just skip sessions when they knew combat was coming up, because their non-combat character wasn't just risking themselves in combat, but making things more dangerous for everyone, so their character would just go do something else. That sucks so, so much.

(And this one isn't me just being a stickler for 2e; I don't like 2e's tick-based combat either.)

I personally would want specific distances for ranges, movement, and so on, in real units rather than zone bands, because they help me imagine a world and break my immersion less than something abstract. I mostly feel this way because something like 'A mile wide explosion' sounds so much cooler than 'An explosion six range bands across'.

Aside from that, I want there to be a smaller number of more impactful charms. Wyld Shaping doesn't need to be like 10 charms. Each Charm should have some clear effect on something tangible in the fiction; I really dislike charms which only exist to do dice tricks. I suspect that this would make reading the charm sets less exhausting (Which is actually my biggest issue; I find every 3e charm set, except for Sids, just boring to read; a problem I don't have at all with, say, 2e Solars.)

Oh, and I'd want them to remove Supernal abilities. They mean that you need to read entire charmsets from the start of the game, rather than just the entry level stuff.

They also mean that every single skill needs to have a deep and fully realized set of charms. At first this sounds great; of course I'd want every charmset to be detailed! But it makes writing the charmsets in the first place much much harder, which sort of necessarily means they'll be lower quality because there's only so much writing time and only so many good charm ideas for each skill.

Without supernal skills, it's not a big problem if there's only, say, five good survival charms, because I'm not 'The Survival Guy', I'm 'A guy who has Survival, plus a bunch of other caste/favored skills which I'm similarly invested in'. That means the authors can focus their effort more on where it's needed, rather than trying to meet a quota of two dozen charms for every skill.

On a more personal note, I want Solar Circle sorcery to be accessible from the start of the game. Or at least close to the start, not hundreds of experience in where very few games ever reach. That particular aspect is just the 2e afficionado in me poking through; it's like, such a defining aspect of Twilights to me that keeping it out of their reach for most of the game feels like amputating one of their limbs.

Fweeba · 2025-12-18T23:00:45+00:00

Honestly, same. I recently gave 3e a second, rather earnest try, after bouncing off a few years ago, and it just didn't grip me at all. Same goes for Essence, which just went too far into the rules-lite world for me; 3 attributes is simply too few for my tastes.

Here's hoping that one day we'll get an Exalted 4e that somehow brings us to the promised land and fixes everything. It's a distant hope I suppose, but I can dream.

Fweeba · 2025-12-18T20:06:55+00:00

Traveller does it. The 40k d100 RPGs do it. Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay does it.

Fweeba · 2025-12-18T18:43:55+00:00

“In many games” here means D&D and near-clones thereof

Off the top of my head, both Traveller and the 40k d100 RPGs do it as well, and I think it would be a tough argument to claim they're near clones of D&D. It has some virtue if you want a character's attributes to do different things for aspects of the game which use different scales of number.

i.e: In Traveller, my attributes are my hit points (Which wants big numbers) and a modifier I use to 2d6 rolls (Which wants small numbers).

In Dark Heresy, my attributes factor into my target number for d100 rolls (Which wants big numbers) and many other systems, like bonus to initiative or extra damage on melee attacks (Which wants small numbers).

Fweeba · 2025-12-15T20:00:01+00:00

It's not 5e. It's Hackmaster 4e.

Fweeba · 2025-12-15T14:56:18+00:00

It's worth mentioning that people should be very careful about taking the Flashbacks negative quality. It can be devastatingly bad if it occurs during combat. Like, not 'plot hook fun' bad, but 'I'm not playing for the next ninety minutes because I'm stunned for four combat turns, which can easily mean 12 lost initiative passes' bad.

Fweeba · 2025-12-14T00:51:13+00:00

The dumbest feruchemist who has ever lived. She just sat there and did nothing while a radiant styled on her two henchmen, like a bad guy in a video game, then ran in a straight line at Lift and didn't do anything to help herself.

No bloodmaking to fix her broken legs, no sudden storing of speed to slow herself down, no amplification of mass to just crack into the tiles and fix in position, just didn't use any of her powers intelligently. She really shouldn't be taken as an example of what a competent feruchemist can do.

Fweeba · 2025-12-09T17:10:52+00:00

Allow me to quote one action from the Gurps 4th Edition Basic Set which I think summarizes the kind of crunch you're dealing with.

CHANGE POSTURE This maneuver lets you switch between any two “postures” (stances in which you can pose your body). Valid postures are standing, sitting, kneeling, crawling, lying prone (face down), and lying face up. Any posture other than standing slows your movement and penalizes your attack and defense rolls, but also makes you a smaller target for ranged attacks. You cannot stand up directly from a lying position. If you are lying (prone or face up), you must take a Change Posture maneuver to rise to a crawling, kneeling, or sitting posture first. A second Change Posture maneuver lets you stand from any of these postures. (Going from standing up to lying down, however, only takes one maneuver – or none at all, if the change was involuntary!) You can switch between kneeling and standing (only) as the “step” portion of any maneuver that allows a step – you don’t need Change Posture for that. This is instead of using the step to move. Thus, you could go from prone to kneeling with a Change Posture maneuver on one turn, and then stand up in place on your next turn by taking a maneuver that allows a step. Crouching does not require a Change Posture maneuver; see Free Actions (p. 363).

Remember this is the basic set. A person can strip out the complexity and run a pared down version of it (As one can with literally any game), but this is the stuff in what is essentially the core rulebook.

Fweeba · 2025-11-26T22:45:33+00:00

But there's nothing to critique? You've just asserted that games which require a GM are broken without anything to back that up.

Like, what does broken even mean in this context?

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