Shadowrun Were the Shadowrun games too much of a power fantasy?

[Trippy]

Dragonfall is a weird paranoid masterpiece, maybe one of the best pure-cyberpunk evocations of "You are a bug next to the cosmic-economic order of things."

This first game is undercooked, and "Hong Kong" is overwritten pseudo-ambitious Bioware horseshit. But Dragonfall is fucking gold, Ponyboy. I thought this was well known at this point?

 

[RaggleFraggle]

I don't really think RPGs are limited like that

I dunno, I can't think of any RPG off the top of my head in which you don't eventually grow into a badass. That progression of your character is one of the staples of the genre.

That’s because these games have combat systems. I don’t think combat is mandatory for a good experience, but it’s been drilled into gamers’ heads anyway.

 

[Lambach]

I don’t think combat is mandatory for a good experience

One Disco Disco was more than enough, thank you very much.

 

[0sacred]

That is a rather extreme scenario, so think of roguelites where the objective is to protect some village from inevitable destruction. You still win, sorta, because you are ever more successful in your last stands. Can that be done in a Shadowrun plot? Can you have a game where you're a runner who's pretty much fated to die from psychological trauma and physical damage, making money and attaining luxury on the way? I dunno, but it's just food for thought.

I could see it, but I don't think any devs have the balls to do it. Maybe a downward spiral is too much to ask of them, but in a Shadowrun game, I'd totally be fine with you simply having personal motivations (including fame and riches), and not achieving anything more beyond that. Thinking about it, this is how Dead Man's Switch should have ended, probably. Solving the mystery of your friend's death and putting down some baddies along the way, but the real culprits should have escaped you.

 

[Delterius]

Solving the mystery of your friend's death and putting down some baddies along the way, but the real culprits should have escaped you.

oh man sometimes I wish they did

I don't really think RPGs are limited like that

I dunno, I can't think of any RPG off the top of my head in which you don't eventually grow into a badass. That progression of your character is one of the staples of the genre.

That’s because these games have combat systems. I don’t think combat is mandatory for a good experience, but it’s been drilled into gamers’ heads anyway.

I don't think a combat system is limited to portraying demigods of fighting either. A guy with a broken bottle that barely scrapes through the night by kicking sand on people's eyes still won a fight, but was he a badass? Not compared to the average RPG protagonist I'd say.

 

[RaggleFraggle]

I don't think a combat system is limited to portraying demigods of fighting either. A guy with a broken bottle that barely scrapes through the night by kicking sand on people's eyes still won a fight, but was he a badass? Not compared to the average RPG protagonist I'd say.

Yeah. The gritty vs cinematic scale and inconsistent implementations thereof have always been an issue with this genre, owing to its wargame roots.

 

[Lambach]

I don't think a combat system is limited to portraying demigods of fighting either. A guy with a broken bottle that barely scrapes through the night by kicking sand on people's eyes still won a fight, but was he a badass? Not compared to the average RPG protagonist I'd say.

Good luck turning an average Joe shanking people with a broken bottle and never advancing past that (because he's just an average Joe) into engaging RPG gameplay.

 

[Hagashager]

Another reason to cane bubble gum chewers. Singapore know it all starts with one piece of shit spitting on the sidewalk.

They relaxed those kind of measures recently. However people have started complaining that things aren't as good as they used to be.

So basically the endpoint is just Brazil. Historically, that is how most civilizations go. The fear of authoritarian oppression is real and happens, but far more likely and frequent is just straight anarchic collapse and disparate communities. Even the Fascists who ensure the trains run on time cannot escape entropy itself.

I don't care for Cyberpunk media. Its ethos always seems to contradict itself. You've got a dystopic society where the bulk of humanity is dying away under neo-feudalism, yet somehow Johnny Mneumonic still lives a life of Luke Skywalker-esque heroism complete with drugs, sex and rock'n'roll.

Video-games, being power-fantasies by nature, only make this dissonance worse. As truly atrocious as Cyberpunk 2077 was, at the very least, that game's plot made an earnest attempt to a tell a more human-oriented story.

 

[RaggleFraggle]

You just have to accept that power fantasy is part of rpgs. Nobody wants to play working class Joe whose worst problem is finding a rest stop. They want to play Joe the Trucker worrying about a nomadic coven of murderous desert vampires (or whatever) getting between him and his paycheck.

I’m surprised we don’t see more obscure 80s and 90s ttrpg IP going into video games. They’d get way more exposure and profits. Gamma World, Rifts, Torg, Traveler, Star*Drive, Jovian Chronicles, Chill, Nightbane, Star Frontiers, etc. These have premises that readily fit video games and have deep flexible creative worldbuilding that saves devs on effort.

Play a Star Law officer hunting down alien criminals, play a heroic space outlaw rescuing space princesses, play a Galactic Concord diplomat investigating the weird aliens abducting colonists on the frontier in the wake of a century of galactic war that isolated the colonies until now, play an agent of the Hoffman Institute hunting down vampires, cryptids, portals to alien worlds that monsters come out of, a cadet in the Jovian colonies piloting a mech to resist Earthly aggression, a post-apocalypse survivor with mutations and psychic powers, etc.

 

[grimace]

Will we ever see a Shadowrun movie?

 

[lukaszek]

Will we ever see a Shadowrun movie?

you wont get anything more than netflix bright

 

[LarryTyphoid]

You just have to accept that power fantasy is part of rpgs.

A downtrodden underdog rising to a challenge out of his league is also kind of a power fantasy, or at least wish fulfillment.

 

[S.torch]

Is not enough for you to live in Latin America that you want every story to emulate a similar experience?

 

[Cat Headed Eagle]

Will we ever see a Shadowrun movie?

Matrix already stole all of that shit and claimed as its own.

Reminder that the Wachowskis threatened William Gibson with legal action if he actually made that Neuromancer movie he wanted to make in the mid 90s, only to fellate him as a main influence after the Matrix came out.

 

[ind33d]

Shadowrun is just a bad IP. A world in which magic and technology and xenos coexist? If I wanted that, I would just go outside

And I like the video games, but if they were based on CP2020 or Traveller or something, they would be better.