That's the biggest issue with the Sega Shadowrun, character advancement is so glacial that it really bogs down the middle of the game with endless random runs for karma.My concern with "100 hour" campaigns--or even ones that intend to have you import DMS characters--is the pacing. A 12-14 hour campaign doles out upgrades at a good pace, so these UGC campaigns will have a choice of having players capped out when they're less than a 6th of the way through, or making people go 20+ hours between upgrades. (You can't add new items.)
Also, there's the karma issue. A long campaign would have to drastically reduce the amount of karma given out or else you'll end up with characters that have every stat and skill at 'optimal' (read: 6-10) levels. But again, going 20+ hours with only a handful of stats in the 1-4 range doesn't sound like much fun to me. I guess I would front load it a lot and then give 1 karma max for everything past about 140 points, but that's not really an ideal solution either.
Yeah, this is one of the things I've been thinking about for my campaign. You really have to take care to balance stat checks and combat difficulty with the pace of karma gained. Basically, if someone can't meet any of the stat requirements for an objective during a run, they will end up having to fight for it. In DMS you get so much karma it's pretty easy to game this though. I just always save a pool of karma so if I run into a stat check I can just pump that stat right then. They probably should have limited karma spending to Seamstresses Union or something.My concern with "100 hour" campaigns--or even ones that intend to have you import DMS characters--is the pacing. A 12-14 hour campaign doles out upgrades at a good pace, so these UGC campaigns will have a choice of having players capped out when they're less than a 6th of the way through, or making people go 20+ hours between upgrades. (You can't add new items.)
Also, there's the karma issue. A long campaign would have to drastically reduce the amount of karma given out or else you'll end up with characters that have every stat and skill at 'optimal' (read: 6-10) levels. But again, going 20+ hours with only a handful of stats in the 1-4 range doesn't sound like much fun to me. I guess I would front load it a lot and then give 1 karma max for everything past about 140 points, but that's not really an ideal solution either.
Eventually.Can you edit or create brand new weapon abilities? Cause they could use an overhaul
*edit*
The main balancing factor that weapons are missing from tabletop is concealablility, dunno how well you could recreate that in SR
I don't want to derail this much, but 4th and 5th edition (5th was just released) fixed this to a certain extent. The timeline has bumped up to 2075 and just about everything is wireless, which allows hackers (both technomancers and deckers) to do a bunch of stuff to fuck with people in combat. They've also got it set up so hackers bounce between AR/VR and meatspace throughout the run, at the same time that the rest of the team is doing their thing. It's still easy to get stuck with the rest of the team waiting for the hacker to finish before they can do something, but it's easier to avoid with some effort.As an old GM of pnp Shadowrun back when it came out, I fucking hated deckers. The concept of deckers is cool, but trying to implement having someone else do a mission somewhat separated from everyone else was just a bitch to do. The people not decking would be bored as fuck while the decker did his mission and then he would be bored as fuck while they were doing their stuff. Heck, take this game. The separate decking missions were alright I guess, but the ones where you were decking during a mission were annoying, with you swapping back and forth. Also, deckers are utterly worthless in combat so you are stuck dragging them along until you get to "their" part.
So I guess I don't really mind that it is just an afterthought. I wouldn't want it more intrusive and would rather they spend more time on other stuff.
Eh, Harlequin is part of the Sega game too, and iirc he and Telestrian were also neck deep in the insect spirit plot before the failed raid on the main hive at Cermak and Racine and the creation of the Chicago Containment Zone. After that I think the metaplot with the horrors occupied his time and the time of most of the other immortal elves.Mirroring many posts before me I'm sure, but the campaign is pretty shallow. Very, very limited cyberware choices, no bioware at all, no drug addiction/side effects, smartlinks not available until the last mission for some reason, etc etc. I'm pretty excited to see what can be created in the future with this, as the world design and feel of the thing is amazing (though they jumped the shark a bit with harlequin at the end imo).