The Good Fight Released!
Patrick Goodman’s The Good Fight: A Short Guide to Superheroic Roleplaying in Shadowrun is now available. This article takes a look at running Shadowrun from a more benevolent perspective, and includes a detailed list of inspiring reference works, both in the comic and film mediums.
If you enjoyed this article, please consider a small donation 
to help keep the Shadowrun Supplemental going.
January 23rd, 2005 at 13:41
There are two options for super-powers not mentioned in the article. One is the idea of “emulating” mutants with bioware. That is, you create your character as normal, but can buy bioware (as normal); however, the bioware is treated as a “natural” mutation of the character, not an implanted system. The same could, I suppose, be done with the physad rules.
Another option is to emulate more over-the-top powers by allowing characters to somehow buy the ability to cast specific spells. Perhaps this could be bought as an edge (0.5 edge points per force point of the spell?). I’d recommend such powers be “cast” using a number of dice equal to your Essence, with no pool (and perhaps reduced, or maybe no, drain). You could use such a system to build Invisible Girl, for example (with improved invisiblity and physical barrier). You might also reduce or elminate the -2 concentration penalty for sustaining this type of power.
January 23rd, 2005 at 21:17
As both a SR & supers player & GM, this article was well written & a refreshing change. Bravo to all!
January 24th, 2005 at 11:26
Maybe this would be interesting, too: Project Marvel - Marvel superheroes with stats from Shadowrun, if I understand prperlyhttp://www.geocities.com/Area51/Vault/7157/marvel.html
January 26th, 2005 at 23:29
Dude. I love you. I play a pacifist healer (both tech and magical) and I’ve often had people look at me funny when I say that Shadowrun has ample need of heroes, rather than more runners.
February 12th, 2005 at 2:55
As a long-time player and GM of Shadowrun, I’ve often considered running a superheroic-style campaign, but I find that the mechanics ultimately get in the way. Because of the way the TN system works, just a few penalties and your street-level hero is rendered incapable of anything even remotely heroic — and I’m not talking just wound modifiers. Your average ‘darkened alley’ is around +4 to all vision modifiers, and that’s even if you have low-light vision! It’s little examples like this which make it impossible to run a superheroic-style campaign without breaking into the hunt-and-creep style of combat, and your X-Men start looking a lot more like The Punisher.
To combat this, all negative modifiers for your heroic PCs are halved. In fact, it should be hard for a hero to have a TN go much above 6, but easy to get down to 2. I would also allow PCs to combat pain and wound modifiers by giving them a Willpower check every turn with a TN equal to 3 plus the wound modifier they’re working with. One success means one action they plan to do is free of all modifiers, excepting the next Willpower check, of course.
I would also follow a scale as in Champions about statistics. A person with a Strength of 3 being average and 6 being maximum human, when you start getting into 7+ Strength, you start getting into the ‘lifting cars’ range of strength. Body, Quickness, Reaction, same thing. While I wouldn’t put these abilities in the same range as Superman, I see no reason why a cybered-up troll with a Strength of 14 shouldn’t be able to move a city bus… with a lot of effort and grunting…
It’s changes like that which have to be made to the system to make sure that the players can actually play in this environment without having to worry about the mechanics messing them up.
April 3rd, 2005 at 0:59
I personally am already trying to set up a similar game to the one mentioned, but with at twist: It’s done anime-style. This is not so much to please me as my players (Anime fans, the lot of them), but either way you end up with absurdly powerful characters fighting for truth, justice, and the pursuit of japanese pop culture(which is my players’ definition of happiness).
Anyways, my solution is to simply remove cyberware-related geasa as a method of munchknizing for physads, and blow their abilities waaay out of canon. Providing characters ascertain enough Karma, a character could obtain Improved Reflexes V and magic-based Smartlinks. (you pay karma for each weapon you use, making one-weapon characters like Vash very effective with one souped-up weapon). I’m also going to allow almost all cyberware and bioware’s effects to be emulated by physad abilities; the magic cost will be roughly equal to that of the essence cost or bio index, providing that it’s in character. (retractable cyber-spurs are, after all, not unlike Wolverine’s claws.)
Although both of these are VERY expensive in terms of karma, you must consider that characters are doing deeds for the benifit of others, earning them much more karma than the average runner. Also, although you could get anything from eye-lasers to echolocation at chargen, it would cost a lot of points, requiring characters to start small and work their way up until they have enough dice floating around in their preferred techniques that they can stop taking down muggers and start annihlating entire mafia “families”.