<– Back to the Story Time With Uncle Mike

April 20th, 2000 - The First Story

I just upgraded my machine and thought I lost all of my saved mail. It took a week just for me to hunt it down on various servers and back-up tapes. I’m very sorry about this and I hope to do it faster next time.

NightRain: I would like to know where you got the idea that taking the fictional side out of the rulebooks was the way to go.

Fiction and rules rarely mix. They are two very different writing styles with two very different goals. Rules need to be clear, easy to understand, and full of game mechanics. Fiction works best on an interpretive scale by using images skipping the A to B to C order of rule writing. It doesn’t use game mechanics but applies the results of game mechanics without ever mentioning them. In my experience, fiction not only gets in the way of rules they actually cause problems in people’s understanding of them. For that reason I choose not to put fiction in the rule books.

So far it seems to a pretty good decision.

Neuron: When are deckers going to be playable?

LOL! You must still be playing SR2. They are playable, you just don’t realize it yet. Give the SR3 rules a shot.

NightRain: Why were some skills like firearms broken up when other that also made sense as seperate skills like eqiquette, were put in as one skill?

I guess we differ on that. Having fired many weapons, I know that there are different ways to hold, handle and use firearms. The concept of people picking up the nearest weapon and firing it with no penalty always bothered me. Having characters in Shadowrun 2, all with Firearms 4 meant they could shoot nearly every weapon, so the Merc and the Mage are equally as good. That doesn’t make sense. Now the mage has a skill in only one, possibly two, weapons classes and the Merc can have a broad range of combat skills and not feel that everyone can do what she does.

Etiquette went through six versions for SR3. In the long run the system presented in the game works best. The concept of knowing how to behave correctly in any setting has more to do with Observation and Intelligence than anything else. That is what the Etiquette Skill represents. If you are good enough at it you can blend in anywhere. Specializations are the techniques and interactions unique rather than general to a subset of people.

I’m not sure how else if would have gone without huge listings of groups, attitudes, regionalisms, beliefs and habits. It would have made the list of languages in SR2 look like a brief paragraph.

Ereskanti: What would be the one thing, be it project; task; or new concept … that you would like to see for Shadowrun?

Geez…there are so many. A fully fleshed out world would be great - that is the biggest one and the hardest one to do. I’d like to see some “smaller” stuff get accomplished for SR like fresh view of organizations (not just corps or governments), in the same fashion we did organized crime but with more of them in one book. I’d like to be able to do multiple plot lines without having my head explode.

m0ng005e: Who’s your favourite dragon?

Tough one…I like Hestaby. Lofwyr kicks hoop and that makes him cool. The others aren’t really defined. It would be a toss up between those two I think. Oh yeah I have a soft spot for the Big D.

Have Fun!
Play Games!

Mike Mulvihill
Shadowrun Line Developer
FASA