Shadowrun

A mix of fantasy and modern-day, street-level missions, magic and technology, monsters and artifacts, and vehicle combat. Starfinder uses starships, and Shadowrun uses vehicles. Your team of mixed magic-and-tech characters gets a mission to go to a place and use transport to reach there. It is structurally the same game.

This was the better Starfinder - at least in the setting.

I know the 6th Edition has MAJOR issues. If I got this, I would likely use Cypher System, Savage Worlds, Year Zero (already very close and has an SRD), or GURPS as my ruleset and ignore the broken system.

The setting is still great. Iconic. An all-time great.

The rules need help.

My version of Shadowrun is much more post-apoc than the official setting. The mega-cities are the only place humanity can live. The awakening has overrun everywhere; small towns and sparsely inhabited places do not exist. Monsters and wild magic are everywhere, along with raiders and other inhuman monster groups. The most significant areas outside cities are heavily defended corporate megafarms, often under constant assault.

But nobody lives outside the cities. The native nations may claim the land, but they can't even control the devastation of wild magic and creatures that devastated the world. You go outside the cities and are in for a constant fight with monsters and raiders - like something out of Mad Max or Aliens.

It is like a Rifts setting mixed with Car Wars.

There is also a heavier fantasy element as "forces from beyond and the past" appear to change the world, and even the forces of Hell get involved in a limited way, threatening the world with a Doom-like apocalypse.

This is how our game has always been since SR4 and how it ended a few years ago. My players loved it. The default setting assumes small towns and rural life exist, and my players understood our game-setting was more extreme and had that sharp divide between cities and rural adventures. We also had a few more fantasy races in the mix; mysterious fairies were flitting about, demons lurking in the shadows, dark elves were rumored, and I planned on having goblins show up with their machines and constructs. They used the same designs, just with a few changes:

• Fae - use elf, limit STR/BODY to 3, flight
• Goblin - use dwarf
• Demon - use orc, troll, or elf (depending on type), custom qualities as needed
• Gnoll - use orc, berserker trait
• Dark Elf - use elf, they get limited "Predator movie" stealth

So, the five new races sort of piggyback on the existing ones and are more "flavor options" for the game. A few may have custom positive and negative qualities (like a succubus getting flight wings and charm as positive qualities). So they don't unbalance the game and open the door to more strangeness and mysteries. I can also use online tools (Hero Lab) to create characters and have the race selections work without custom options.

The fae are the (not the illusion, but real here) ones from the cover of the Shadowrun 1 Grimoire, and we called them chroma-fairies since they had different magics based on their colors. They were rare in general life, but in high magic areas, they could be seen out and about, flitting around, sitting on shelves in arcane libraries, appearing in bars to cause a little trouble for fun, and the people accepted them as a side effect of high magic areas drawing in all sorts of strange phenomena.

They did not have traditional IDs and never really went on runs, but they were great NPCs, sources of information, and side characters that immensely added to the magic side of the game for color and feeling. Mages liked visiting arcane universities and libraries and seeing these unique fae flitting about.

The rest of the new races followed that "magic pulls them in" model, where goblins could appear in high-machinery areas, demons in regions of dark magic, dark elves in areas of high shadow magic, gnolls in places of high violence, and so on. The actions of the world started drawing in "the others." They became character options if a player really wanted them and they fit the story. Otherwise, they made terrific NPCs and increased the WTF factor of the entire setting.

The undead were coming one day, but that would be more like an invasion of the dead in areas and a huge turning point for the world.

What makes Starfinder hard for me is the stories are not straightforward. You can buy an adventure path, but I like games where the stories write themselves. In fantasy, it is easy; the stories write themselves. There are times I feel Starfinder was written for a collector's market. They tend to throw everything and the kitchen sink at you, and then you need to figure out how the mess of disassociated parts fits together.

Shadowrun challenges you. It is a very low-level street game with a flat progression system. This is survival: social, environmental, magical, urban, wilderness, and staying one step ahead of trouble. The stories come from action and mob movies. There is an element of 1984 and Big Brother out of the Paranoia game. In Starfinder, there are moments where they write conflict out of the game for some idealistic worldview - and they are afraid of making factions fight (or even creating opposing ones). The 9-axis alignment system is in the game, but I have never seen it used.

Shadowrun is the opposite; everyone has a reason to stab each other in the back.

At least, in the setting - whatever version is your favorite.

The stories are simple here.

Urban Fantasy: The Gonzo Game

I look at all the 5E implementations of sci-fi and cyberpunk, and every time, it is a 300+ page book with too many rules, too many complicated subsystems, and half of the rules you will need to interact, and adventure in a near-modern cyberpunk city environment are nowhere to be found.

3.5E, 4E, or 5E can never have enough rules for everything. It was like this back in Pathfinder 1. I have thousands of pages of rules for everything, and I still have large gaping holes for relatively common fantasy tropes. I sit here and wonder if they can ever write enough 5E rules or if it will ever stop.

Some games are rules sponges, and they are built to sell you more rules. They lack generic mechanics where a simple, universal, and coherent rule could handle one thing.

5E was built to sell you the next book, and it will never stop. Even the classes are designed to be very book-dependent; you get one new subclass with this book, nickel-and-dime the design over a few hundred (or thousand) dollars of expansion books.

This is how the game was designed.

Everything from 3.5E on is like this.

It is a mobile game with stamina mechanics and particular currencies needed to complete basic actions. Only here, the rules are just generic enough to cover basic actions. Still, for anything exciting or radically different, the game needs an entirely new subsystem for things like monster training, car chases, vehicle combat, hacking, magical research, city building, hirelings, coffee shops, universities - and you need a sixty to eighty dollar book for each of those activities.

Play the game long enough, and you will need a book for something else.

Urban Fantasy? Taking elves, orcs, tieflings, magic, and monsters and mixing them with magic and cyberpunk? The closest thing I have to that is Starfinder, dozens of books I am not rebuying, and the story is the same. The core book covers 30% of what you must do as an adventurer but lacks many subsystems for specific circumstances. I bought books and books, and while I may get good coverage of most of the things I need - it will be a  few thousand pages of rules.

I am done with games like that.

I hit the 5E wall with a desire to run a d20-based Cyberpunk or Shadowrun game, and I realized how difficult this would be to pull off without a few thousand pages of rules. If a game were relatively complete in one book, learning how vehicle combat, hacking, magic, monsters, and everything else work in a heavily structured game would not be worth the time and effort. The 5E design makes it even harder since a good representation of a few classes would take over 100 pages of rules, powers, and options - if you include magic and tech powers.

The time it would take to learn and apply these rules for a typically unsatisfying and overly complex result would not be worth the time and effort. I experienced that in GURPS: Traveller, where my starfighter combat turned out to be something between a mix of a physics simulator and a submarine warfare game, and the two fighters searched for each other in a vast void of space, never finding each other, and never being close enough after they made a guess where the other ship would be.

They were lost in space and could only fire when they were 2-3 hexes apart, with zero chance of detecting each other to get that close.

Many systems written in these d20 games for starship or vehicle combat aren't worth playing, and the hacking and other systems are the same. They are created for map combat, and everything else is an afterthought. NPCs do the vehicle combat and hacking, and the GM handwaves it. For urban fantasy magic meets cyberpunk game, I don't want 5E 'in-room combat' with a leather jacket, sunglasses, and attitude.

Cypher System handles the entire Urban Fantasy genre better, with more flair and ease of use. Motorcycle chase through traffic? The system does it easy; the enemy has difficulty, uses the traffic on the freeway as a hindrance, uses your skill (and possibly bike) as an asset, and you roll a d20. Apply effort as needed. I don't need to learn 20 pages of unworkable vehicle combat rules that will require battle maps, road sections, and for me to place down every car to move around.

Roll a 1? GM Intrusion, and you wreck your bike. Roll a 20? The one you are chasing does. Major and minor effects are covered in the same roll, along with extra damage.

GM intrusion? Chase complication. Player intrusion? Force the issue and push the story forward.

Hacking? Same. You have your skills and tools as assets, set the difficulty rating, apply hindrances to the situation, and roll a d20. Apply effort as needed. Done. I don't need to learn 20 pages of hacking rules that nobody will use.

Magic? Same. Summoning a trash golem? Same. Making a deal with the mega-corps? Same. Helicopter combat? Same. Disabling high-tech security systems with a remote drone? Same. Casting an illusion? Same. Creating a combat robot? Same. Retrieving deleted data from a secure system? Same. Understanding ancient magical rites in an unearthed temple? Same. Climbing buildings? Same. Starship combat? Same. Training cyber combat pets? Same. Being a race driver or rock musician? Same.

Thousands of pages of rules I don't need to remember or keep on a shelf and never use.

Dozens of books I don't need to waste money on or flip through, taking away play time.

Yes, having a detailed subsystem for chases, vehicle combat, hacking, magic, and every other thing is a 'nice to have' - but given most games get this sort of game design utterly wrong on the first design, and they are never fixed. The Starfinder ship combat rules were horrible in the first book, and they changed many of the numbers in later printings. Most 5E books don't get a second printing, and some - like Spelljammer - don't even include the rules for what they are promising.

90% of the time, for a narrative experience, the Cypher System rules do the job faster with more flair and flavor than anything I have seen designed in almost every 3E to 5E game ever printed.

For a setting that demands so many unique interactions and situations - having a system that simplifies everything under the sun will make the game a faster and more enjoyable experience. This worked wonderfully for my Cypher System 'Road War' campaign, and I could run a day's action in 30 minutes and be happy with how it played and the results. There was tension in the pool management and a real fear of failure when I played solo. I don't get that from many other games.

If one of my three pools drops to zero due to effort or injury, everything gets more complicated, and I wonder if my character will make it through the day. And I can't fudge the rolls or the rules, and it is pretty clear when I lose points in a pool and from what.

The roll stands, and my character's life gets more complicated.

But I can fight back by spending those precious XP. These pools have an abstract narrative nature, but they simulate hundreds of pages of complex subsystems in one roll with one number.

The system works, covers anything I can imagine, and saves me hundreds of dollars in books and days of time learning exploitative and broken systems. If I want to watch complex subsystems break and fiddle with numbers, I will play 5E. If I wish for an incredible story with a system that handles anything, I will play Cypher System and forget about those other games.

You need to ask yourself, what is the most important?

What gives me the most fun?

For me, the story wins.

The Future of Urban Fantasy

Don't ask questions, it's D&D with guns!

That is what I get with Shadowrun, and the more I read and think about the game, the more I realize that this alone isn't the future of the urban fantasy genre. The genre needs to break away from one defining game, and answer the question, why?

Cities Without Number introduces an 'Intruders' concept, where the world is destroyed by magical incursions of alien fantasy monsters and races from other realms. These forces gate in, destroy cities, and bring terror and destruction to the land. They bring magic with them, and the setting is explained. The fantasy races in the book are more a result of genetic modification. Still, there is really nothing to keep you from making traditional elves, orcs, dwarves, and others refugees from the Intruders' world and having them live on Earth and blend in.

Or not. The potential for conflict exists, but in the face of an existential threat, this could force everyone into enclave cities with high tensions, forcing people to get along. This is the problem with D&D and Pathfinder 'writing conflict' out of the story and backgrounds, this happy world where everyone is best friends, like a version of Sesame Street. This does not reflect reality and turns RPGs into silly kids' games.

Urban fantasy needs a break from Shadowrun, like the high fantasy genre needs a break from D&D.

And Shadowrun also needs a break from D&D while we are at it. When you mix these two genres, you need to answer the question of why. Mixing elves and orcs with cyberpunk creates a central conflict between myth and technology. The urban fantasy genre is about the death of myth, magic, and tradition.

This place called the Internet is where our shared culture goes to die.

Our fairy tales, myths, shared stories, religion, and core beliefs of who and what we are - the mystic nature of the soul - all die on the Internet. Putting elves, orcs, trolls, dwarves, and others in an environment like this just highlights how these iconic myths are now worthless anachronisms in the face of corporate greed.

An elf in an urban fantasy world is a shadow of a true high fantasy elf.

The myth is dead.

The magic is gone.

Those skyscrapers of the mega-corporations are the leg, neck, and ankle shackles around who that elf is inside. The identity is lost forever. You are just a wage slave with pointy ears. D&D or Pathfinder can't write a background like that; it would trigger someone. Those games are played in the kid's room.

But that is urban fantasy; it is not D&D with guns. It is a story of losing what makes us human through watching others lose what makes them myth and legend. It is a painful, nihilistic, and pessimistic genre that makes us reflect on the loss of identity and self. These destructive forces in our world are brought on by money, Wall Street, and the soul-sucking Internet.

No wonder the genre is either silenced or lacquered over by a corporate saccharine veneer, highlighting cyber's kewl neon opiate looks! The genre is not the flash, colors, looks, and styles.

The genre is a mirror to the darkest parts of our souls.

The flash and neon colors are there to hide the pain of having your soul ripped apart. Your identity is being turned into a number. Your body is being converted into a machine.

If you can't see beyond the lights and colors, the corporate brainwashing is working.

You are too distracted to feel the pain.

Shadowrun: Dated?

I looked at Cities Without Number recently to run a Shadowrun-style game, and I wondered if Shadowrun is a bit dated? Not in tech, rules, or style, but in the general sense that its story of humans mutating into fantasy races and the societal tension that causes - and is core to the story - is not unpalatable to today's gamers who prefer the Cartoon Network 'happy time friends' style of backgrounds that all get along, there is no animosity between groups, and player choice needs to be protected at all costs.

Shadowrun is infamous for its tensions between the awakened and the not, which is core to the story. Now, I checked out at 4th Edition, so I can only speak to classic versions, and this may have changed.

If Wizards or Paizo were to make this, priority number one would be to strip out anything that insinuated that any animosity or tension exists at all between anyone. The 'lifestyle brand' marketers are in charge in those places, and they cannot make anyone feel bad about their choice. If you choose to play an orc, you are celebrated and loved by the world. Same with trolls, dwarves, and elves.

A few aspects of the setting could remain, like rich-versus-poor and powerless-versus-powerful, but the core story of the awakening happening would be pushed to the background to appease the 5E crowd. It would turn into Fantasy Hackers 2049, a 5E-style mess of 'animal cracker' sort of flavorless dough backgrounds and power-gamed classes that feel like mobile-game gimme mechanics. This modern style of 5E design feels like you won the game before you even begin, like an MMO where you are guaranteed to get to the maximum level.

Oh, and everyone would have night vision except humans.

The 5E style of game design is becoming its own predictable trope.

I don't know if there is a place outside of old-school gaming for Shadowrun. Cyberpunk 2077 made the underdog of the cyberpunk RPG movement the winner, and it would take a similar open-world experience to reinvigorate Shadowrun. But it would have to be done right and focus on the core conflicts and stories in the world rather than lean too heavily on 'this is modern D&D' for it to have meaning.

Shadowrun was designed in the 1990s during the Vampire RPG craze, so players could choose to be outcasts - and that was cool. Dark Sun also played to those feelings, and you need to understand the 1990s and RPGs to understand Shadowrun. This was an era where the Satanic panic killed D&D for us. D&D died with the mainstream 2nd Edition, and it was time to play other games that let us be the outcasts that society feared.

They did an excellent job with Battletech recently and the wargames on PC. I would love an open-world Shadowrun RPG. But I would hate to see it become another 5E and lose what made the world special.

That rebellious spirit. That sense that society disliked the awakened.

I don't want to be accepted.

I want to be cool. The outcast. The hated.

That is where you become heroes.

Fantasy Cyberpunk Games

The last major version of Shadowrun I bought into was the 4th Edition, and I skipped 5th and 6th. I hear the 6th is a complete mess, so I am not in the market until another major revision. I never liked any of the editions and the rules, we spent more time figuring out the rules than playing. I still like the concept, but the setting always felt a little forced.

We had a d20 Modern version of a fantasy cyberpunk setting when we played D&D 3.5, and it was very over the top compared to the more serious Shadowrun. It assumed a modern world, plus all the monsters and races from the 3.5 SRD were present. It was like the Urban Arcana setting for 3.5 but turned up to eleven.

When you put a full load of 3.5 monsters and races in a modern world, with magic, a lot of strange things happen. I don't even know if the world was Earth; it was some messed-up generic 3.5 setting that got shifted into a modern reality with full cities, industries, freeways, and nations. The land between cities was too dangerous to trek in, so the cities were fortress towns filled with all sorts of crazy neighbors. We had one scenario go through a slum where the PCs encountered a beholder sleeping in his home, surrounded by dozens of empty TV dinners, and the beholder hoarded televisions and had a few hundred (all turned on and in every room) in his run-down house. They let him be, and that beholder is probably still living there to this day.

There weren't really "monsters" in this setting, not how D&D has this ingrained xenophobic and genocidal outlook against monsters in the setting. If a monster was halfway intelligent, it lived in the city. If it wasn't intelligent, like a basilisk, those could possibly be tamed and kept as pets. Pretty good home security with a pet basilisk, I tell you, and the beholder had one in a doghouse out back. Like factions (drow, dwarves) tended to group in places they liked and had jobs benefitting the city. Dwarves ran the underground trains and maintained the infrastructure below the streets. Drow drifted towards security, infiltration, and corporate espionage and lived in windowless ebony tower skyscrapers - keeping with that web-like theme of their influence, isolation, and eternal darkness.

The government has to be evil (and very powerful) to keep things together, but they tolerate good factions in the city. Good factions were insular and tended to have their own communities. Dragons (with armies and control of nukes) ran the government, and they used lawful angels and devils to keep everyone in line. The angels and devils had a truce, mainly because they knew neither of them could challenge the dragons, so they acted as enforcers and "the feds." The government let everyone live as they wanted, but if things got too out of control, teams of angels and devils would sweep in to keep things from blowing up civilization. The locals had their own civil and corporate cops that handled the low-level stuff.

There were a few good dragons working within the system to make things better, and they (and their supporters) were the eternal underdogs. Demons (the chaotic ones) were the troublemakers wanting to tear it all down, and they had a couple allied factions helping them. Chaotic and violent monsters lived outside the cities where they were constant threats.

It was a cool setting, one that had a few long-lasting and popular NPCs stick with the group, so the setting always hung out there but was never used that much. It was a fun "alt-Shadowrun" with a more 3.5 flavor and a lot of zany black humor and silly monsters hanging out in unexpected places. It was almost too wild for our group's tastes, but as an exercise in imagination, it was a great alternative setting.

If I were to do this today, I would likely use Cities Without Number as the base system, and augment that with the Swords & Wizardry (revised) game for any of the fantasy stuff. I am done with the 3.5 rules, and CWN does a good job of merging the B/X combat, AC, and hit-point systems with cyberpunk concepts and plenty of random charts. And any Sine Nomine game can drop in B/X characters, monsters, races, and magic without many changes at all, and it just works.

Cities Without Number is a great "basic B/X" rule implementation, cross-compatible with everything. I am liking this system the more I read it since it allows a great deal of customization while keeping the core mechanics very rules light. Having B/X characters drop in and work as-written is also a huge plus. They assume a lower power level and like to carefully consider spells and magic before they are added to the world since high-fantasy magic can be game-breaking. I tend to agree with that assumption.

If I used Earth, I would change it so much things would be unrecognizable. The "magic storm" the planet went through would shift continents around, raise some out of the ocean, create inland seas in others, and generally mess things up to keep things fresh. you could probably hex-crawl and randomly generate the world and it would work, and just keep the major landmarks and cities in the same places and meld them in. Things outside cities are more 'Thundarr the Barbarian' ruins with chaotic monsters infesting the ruins. Call everything "The Wastes" and keep people in cities and you have a great campaign world.

That is what I did in Shadowrun 1.0 back in the day. We assumed the shift in the world destroyed the outside world, made rural areas too dangerous to live in, and kept cities their feudal cousins. Low Fantasy Gaming's excellent (and beautifully made) cyberpunk-fantasy game Lowlife 2090 does the same sort of thing, with a 5E shell and compatibility. You could run the same style of game here in 5E, with cities filled with fantasy races and wild wastelands between the major feudal population centers.

For cyberpunk, you want characters (and everyone else) stuck in cities. This is a genre requirement and sets up rural areas as no-go danger zones filled with monsters, destroyed ruins, and Max-max-style roving gangs (if you are not doing fantasy). When we finally read the Shadowrun world books for 1.0, we were a little shocked they assumed rural areas were filled with safe havens. Not in our version of the world, those hoop snakes were killers.

I like the fantasy and cyberpunk mix since it is the peanut butter and chocolate of cyberpunk gaming. The genre outgrew Shadowrun for us, which always tried too hard to explain things and make them realistic. Also, the cities outside Seattle felt 'meh' to us, and never could live up to that one amazing place - which was a huge weakness of the setting. With the Cyberpunk rules, I could make Dallas engaging as a setting, whereas Shadowrun always felt like it couldn't. Seattle became the too-popular focus of the world, like Waterdeep in the Realms, and killed the game world, and also, the game itself.

With a B/X set of cyberpunk rules, I could make all of Manhattan an arcology structure, a large sealed-off mega city run by the corps, and have the surrounding areas be crime-infested areas with plenty of places of interest to have adventures in. I could even have Manhattan Island be several competing arcologies, each run by a different mega-corp and trying to grow into each other and take each other over in a Game of Cities sort of conflict. That is a cool story.

Mixed with a cyberpunk-fantasy theme, that is an epic story, especially if you flavor the factions with traditional fantasy races and monster types. The Drow of Wall Street and their shadow dragon allies are eating up the south, with the elves and green dragons controlling Central Park and the surrounding areas, and no one gets along.

It would be a fun setting, and pay tribute to the original game that started this, but play on a wider variety of fantasy tropes.

Rules Anthropology and System Mastery

One thing that always amazes me about the d20 rules is how the rules feel stuck in anthropology. D&D 3, D&D 3.5, Pathfinder, D&D 4, and D&D 5 all rely on the theory of system mastery, which requires a set of rules to have a certain level of in-built complexity. This complexity means players need to learn the game, and it creates a class of  'player experts' who are walking encyclopedias of game knowledge and reference.

Following the theory of system mastery, the game in theory cannot be simple. There needs to be built-in exceptions, tricks, little twists and turns of rules, gotchas, and I-don't-know moments of vague presentation that require a college level of mastery of a particular rules set. The more arcane, the better, because this allows the 'player expert' to become more valuable to a particular group or setting.

Anthropology? You feel like a scientist digging through the history of these games to just be able to play them. They are incompatible with each other, have enough small changes between them that one game is realistically all an average person can play, and some of the assumptions you carried over from previous editions will trip you up. It's why I still like Labyrinth Lord or Basic Fantasy as my go-to D&D games, they stick to the core design, there isn't much to learn, and there isn't much to mess you up.

Self-Taught Experts

That "power of knowledge" is an important thing. It both creates a barrier to entry (noobs suck at the game), and it creates a barrier to exit (why would I give up all this knowledge and power). It gives those who invest the time a certain level of importance in communities, power over others, and value. If the game is widely played, the more value that person has in a community, gaming group, or forum. Also, if the books needed are expensive and voluminous, the investment in the game keeps people from leaving as well. No one wants to have wasted all that money.

You can short-circuit all of this and say, "I don't have the time," and walk out. You can go to a simple rules system. Many modern designs cater to people without the time to learn all this complexity, and these keep today's time and interest-strapped people in the hobby. They are also exit-points for people that are tired of the heavy games, as a group can only really maintain interest in one large game at a time.

Some modern non-d20 games follow the system mastery model as well, such as Fantasy Flight's Star Wars RPG. While the basic mechanic is simple (as presented in the starter sets), once you go all-in with the main rulebooks there are enough gotchas where you need an expert to sort things out. This is similar for Shadowrun, GURPS, and other games where the weight of expansions and rulings have turned a once-simple game into something more complex.

Games do not need to be that complex. Complexity is not depth. A simple game can have wonderful depth without complexity, take chess, for example. This is where great design comes into play. Some designers seem to give up on designing elegant, simple, yet very deep in strategy rules, and go for the arcane, complex, and exception-filled almost spaghetti computer-code level of complexity when depth by the base mechanic cannot be achieved. The depth is obfuscated in the complexity of the rules.

Modern Designs

Some games are by-design simple, and this applies to the OGL retro-clones, Savage Worlds, Legend, AGE System, FATE, and many modern designs. These games have simple rules of thumb, unified mechanics, and a simple set of core rules which are extended to handle anything. If you know how to do one thing in these games, you can assume many other things work similarly and you are on your way. Some players love the elegance of unified design simplicity, while others love system mastery and the power of that complex knowledge.

A lot of indie games embrace simplicity, because it is a lot easier to test and balance a small set of rules-of-thumb than it is an encyclopedia of specific and carefully-balanced rules. I feel the age of huge, complex systems is passing us by, as even D&D 5 has recognized the need to simplify to increase "what can get done" at the table during a session. They streamlined and simplified monster stats, character complexity, and the amount of modifiers and conditions you needed to remember, and players reacted positively to the changes. As a result, the games move faster, players can cycle through more encounters during a session, and a game session can end with a feeling of progress and completion in regards to a story.

Savage Worlds goes in a different direction than D&D 5, with combat meaning less and all actions taking on an equal level of importance in regards to story completion and advancement. Conversions of modules from Pathfinder, OGL games, and D&D 5 to Savage Worlds typically eliminate encounters meant to "level up" the party and focus more on tasks, social encounters, and roleplaying. D&D 5, in comparison, is the more 'video game' and 'XP and loot' type experience, where Savage Worlds is the more the story-based experience.

There Comes a Point...

When you don't have the time to invest in heavy games anymore. It is happening to us, and I have this feeling Bestiary 5 and Ultimate Intrigue will be the last Pathfinder books we will buy for a while. I love the world, I love the mod-able-ness, I love the art, and I love the system, but enough is enough. I can't run this much, and I can't manage this much complexity anymore. If I play, it will be with a subset of books, but even then I question if investing myself in a reduced subset of that complexity will be worth the payout. Learning and mastering a simpler game at this point may give us more bang for the gaming buck.

Even the new Star Wars RPG still feels bloated to us, and we've reduced the game to the base three books. It is the problem with everything being a heavy game, you want to play them all, but one person really can't master and maintain interest in this many large games. They makes these games complex with the theory of system mastery so you won't leave for another game, and then when you collect too many of them, everything in your gaming world collapses under the weight of complexity.

OGL games are cool, and they "get there from here" in terms of providing a dungeon experience for the complexity and time spent learning them. Savage Worlds is also cool and simple, and covers so many genres that it is worth learning because the payout in "fun for time" is very high. D&D 5 is interesting, but we haven't had the time or interest to put into it as much as I'd hoped, plus the OGL games do a good job at the dungeon and loot experience anyways so we haven't had much pressure to jump in.

In our group and for our time, Pathfinder, Shadowrun, and the new Star Wars RPG feel like the losers here. We don't have the time to put into and enjoy them as we would like, and something has to give. When you need to make choices, you typically start throwing the heavy systems overboard first (or you stick with one heavy system and throw out everything else). This isn't to say they aren't deep and fun games, it is just the complexity and time needed to put in to enjoy them fully is very high.

I will probably reorganize my shelves to reflect the new order, and focus on what is right for our group. This is also a consideration when you design a game, do you want it to be so complex that is pushes out other systems, or do you want it to be rules-light and easily accessible? I don't think many games nowadays can compete with the big heavy-hitters out there, so writing a large and complicated game will put you at a disadvantage of competing for attention of players and also being pushed off a shelf due to the heavy nature of your rules.

We do have a lot of large, complicated games sitting in boxes because we don't have the time or mental space to run them (Rifts, GURPS, and others). I feel bad about a couple more being on their way to storage, but really, what can we do? It is best to focus on the games you love, and the ones you have time for, rather than so many you are unhappy you don't have the time and mental effort to play them all.