Much like our very own Greg, I GM for our little group over here; however I run a tabletop RPG called Shadowrun. A brief backstory is that sometime in the next few years, orks, trolls, and elves are born to human parents. This marks the beginning of the Sixth World: the return of magic to society and a highly advanced technical era. Corporations run pretty much everything and tax the ever-loving crap out of the poor while skirting around taxes themselves and reaping the rewards. Meanwhile, shadowrunners are those who are fed up with the system, so they made their own. Dealing almost exclusively in black-market, back-alley deals, shadowrunners make a living off-the-grid and on the run.

All this and more lies at your fingertips. (via Save/Continue)

The Main Difference

While D&D may focus more on the story of the world the players are in and exploring that to its fullest, Shadowrun is easier to run a one-off campaign with. Most runs start with a fixer, lovingly known as “Mr. Johnson”, giving one or a group of shadowrunners a job. This could be any number of things: information extraction, assassination, smuggling, you name it. There are plenty of pregenerated worlds for you to set up shop in as the GM. Catalyst Labs, the makers of the game, go to some pretty impressive lengths to make sure that the game is immersive despite this, though.

For instance, Shadowrun not only offers general base stats, but skill sets to go on top of that. At character creation, you get a certain amount of points to put into each section. Dice pools (which I’ll cover later) are calculated depending on how many points you have per skill and how many points you have per attribute. Even on top of that, there are pages’ worth of gear for your players to choose from to make their character exactly how it should be. Since we’re playing in the future, also, there’s another pile of cyberware and bioware enhancements that players can buy. You wanna have glowing tattoos that change color with your emotions? How about hair? Well, you can. No magic needed.

Game Mods

I should start off by saying that Shadowrun, in its fifth edition, is incredibly number-heavy. It’s dense. Character creation, with an uninitiated player, takes a solid hour and a half if you’re fine-tuning your gear list. It’s run entirely through d6 rolls instead of the various dice that D&D uses. For each point you have in a specific skill plus the base attribute associated with that skill, you roll one d6. When characters start getting good, dice pools can easily reach 40 or more.

Combat in and of itself is another beast. If you’re familiar with tabletop RPG combat at all, generally you have an initiative roll which determines the order of operations once per combat engagement. Shadowrun has one every combat turn– and if you roll high enough, you can move more than once per turn.

Complications aside, I have a set of modifications that I implement in games that I run. More than once I’ve considered having gear and weapon cards available for players to look at when they’re offered the opportunity to upgrade. I now know that Catalyst offers such as a printable PDF. I feel as though especially with Shadowrun, the more you can prep your players during the campaign, the better they’ll roleplay.

GMs come prepared. AliExpress celebrates. (via /u/pizzatuesdays on Reddit)

Custom Mechanics

To keep gameplay moving with a regular group of six or more, I’ve modified the way things are supposed to be. Just a touch, though. GMing is a fairly new experience so I’m keeping it pretty vanilla for now.

One thing I completely threw out the window in the current campaign is turn-based astral and matrix combat. It’s a free action, it just happens. My attention capacity isn’t enough to have up to three separate initiative counts running. Shadowrun 5e has rules for hackers and mages performing combat in their respective planes, but it’s complicated, slows down physical plane combat, and isn’t really fun unless you have a party of all deckers and technomancers or astral-projecting magicians respectively.

I also run simplified rigger actions. This is a bit of a homebrew solution, as either it’s not discussed in the core rulebook or I keep overlooking it. {Double-check the rules on this.} Since there’s only one rigger in the group, I don’t want to slow them down in combat. Plus, if you’ve spent 100,000 nuyen on a Roomba, you should at least know how to use it.

Another mechanic of combat in Shadowrun is the fact that guns fire different counts of ammunition per pull of the trigger. This creates interesting layers for advanced players like reloading and being careful with what they shoot. Once again, I threw these out the window along with things like carry limits and guns being unconcealed by default. There are a lot of little things like this that I choose to overlook because they can slow down the roleplay.

House Rules

My first house rule is that if anyone has a legitimate concern with something happening in the session, voice it. Things like extensive torture, mutilation, and the like can be stuff that does happen in the underworld. Just because it exists, it doesn’t mean it has to be in the session to move the story along. This is a public topic in the group, but I encourage players to tell me privately if something makes their stomach turn a bit too much. Likewise, I have some limitations with what I do and don’t let players do in accordance with those concerns.

Another, more lighthearted house rule I have is that if you know you’re going to miss a session and want your character to still be active in the background, you write their story. For instance, one player’s character is incredibly mundane, so he went to the dentist during one session. This is mainly to keep people engaged whether they’re there or not. It also usually gets a good laugh.

One other, more whimsical rule I have is something called a point of the D. Players are rewarded for doing cool dumb shit by getting a point. One point is equivalent to one reroll of the appropriate dice pool.

Lastly, it goes without saying, but I run a lot of free sessions since the group is so large and (at least I think) the story I’m trying to tell is important. Not every session has combat because even small battles take close to an hour. There are times where I’ll make decisions for the group to set up key plot points. I’m not sure if this is standard practice, but I don’t do it too often and sometimes a shove in the right direction won’t cut it.

When your crew pulls through that insanely hard battle with one box of damage before down, you end up feeling pretty damn cool. (via Fandible)

Other Encouragements

The only thing that really distracts me when GMing is players who aren’t paying attention to the game. Again, due to the large party it’s alright to check Twitter for a few seconds while you’re not in combat. But don’t watch TV while we’re playing. Or I’ll come for your ass when you least expect it.

I do recommend that everyone be the GM at least once in their own campaigns, just so they’re aware of the work that goes into it. It took me two months to start running one Shadowrun campaign because I was learning its ins and outs and developing the world. Show your GM some respect. Give them the few hours they’re asking for.

Also, help out your GM by reading up on your character a bit. Know what their gear does, know what your cybernetics do, and know what your abilities do. If your character has qualities that affect your rolls, know that, too. Keep up with combat when it happens, and ask questions.
Be engaged in the session. There’s little more that makes me, personally, happier as a GM than when I feel my players are enjoying interacting with the world around them.

Now go out and play some tabletop RPGs. There’s nothing like a bunch of people getting together and telling a story together. That’s really where the magic is.

Cover image is from Shadowrun Universe.