opening match #8: Shadowrun 5e vs A Song of Ice and Fire
this final opening round match-up review one has taken me a bunch of extra time for many reasons, firstly being that our mini-campaign of A Song of Ice and Fire spanned 5 whole weeks, plus a delay or two and a good session zero. thank you very much to friend Caroline for joining in on that game-- it was a most intriguing whirlwind of an adventure!
secondly and thirdly: I had been rather intimidated and hesitant about grappling with the notoriously labyrinthine Shadowrun book again. and I am a tad busier now than I was in August.
I last played Shadowrun many years ago now-- 2018ish I suppose? we and some friends ran through a short 3-session arc once in Indiana and once again in Louisiana; both were quite fun. and since 2019 I've been a fan of a narrative podcast performance version of Shadowrun called Fun City. it's good stuff. Mike Rugnetta is awesome, as are his roleplaying friends, and their voices plus marvelous sound design all come together to make the system look impressively manageable, somehow. (sidenote: I also found their Float City story arc, a pandemic side project using the indie RPG system Stillfleet, extra extra cool. someday I may need to check out Stillfleet properly. I notice it calls itself "grimdark," too. interesting.)
anyway, along with all that in-person and vicarious storytelling fun, I remembered Shadowrun being supremely complicated and overwhelming. it took me a while to work up the energy to face it again with a (hopefully, sort of, somewhat) more open mind.
the A Song of Ice and Fire RPG, conversely, was totally new. I've watched the HBO show (much thanks to all the friends who ever shared their HBO subscriptions and/or couches and homes to facilitate that endeavor), read three of the Game of Thrones books, and this past summer we watched House of the Dragon, too. there is much about Mr. Martin's world that is utterly vivid and iconic. I'd say it deserves its fame. Jeremiah and I were excited to have this tournament as an excuse to actually try out the RPG system based on it all.
once more I've kept the same outline of sorts for this review: a tidy table of metadata,
summaries of the few characters I've made in each system, and then thoughts
on their aesthetics, mechanics, approachability, and preliminary(ish) judgements.
| SYSTEM |
Shadowrun (5e) | A Song of Ice and Fire |
| tagline = | "Everything Has a Price" |
"Adventure, war, and intrigue in George R.R. Martin's World of Westeros" |
| publisher = |
Catlyst Game Labs |
Green Ronin Publishing |
| pub. date = |
2019 | 2014 |
| cost = |
$59.99 | $49.95 |
| length = |
11 major sections / 496 pages |
13 chapters / 320 pages |
| my exp. level = | some | none prior |
previous characters
sadly, I have very thin memories of my two prior Shadowrun characters. both appeared in different renditions of "Mr. Sandman vs. the Dragon," Jeremiah's tried and true 3-session adventure. and I know both were riggers, created as such on recommendation from my husband GM, for the sake of that character type's relative simplicity.
one was named Kitza and I think her character sheet is kicking around somewhere in a box... likely buried beyond any easy reference. the other was a dwarf, I think? maybe named Pablo... or something like that? I remember something about some family of his being trafficked by a megacorporation and somehow, for better or for worse, were able to crawl free from a shipping container on some crowded docks at the end of the story. maybe.
all in all, not much to reminisce about here. onward to the fun new stuff!
new characters
when I (finally) got around to re-reading Shadowrun and wading through its differently-unique character creation system, I came up with a mystic adept half-inuit half-Japanese elf chick named Ingyaka. she's sort of secret agent-y in my imagination-- like a stealthy, nature-loving, spirit-whipsering Jason Bourne or something. since we didn't plan a Shadowrun one-shot for this tournament, I have no idea how she'd show up in actual gameplay, and indeed I confess that I called her finished enough once I'd chosen her many magic spells. the tedium of figuring out what gear and eqiupment to purchase with even just six thousand nuyen (6000¥)--the lowest amount you can possibly start with-- didn't seem necessary just to write about it for this review.
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character creation in A Song of Ice and Fire is much less an
individual affair than it is in most other RPG systems where one expects
to play as a member of an adventuring party. in this particular game, players
first collaborate in creating a noble house-- perhaps one as great and
powerful as the Starks or the Baratheons, or perhaps one of lesser
renown, one bowing at the feet of some grander pillar of Westerosi
history. ours was built along these lines-- a smaller house under the
protection of and bound by honor to the great and wealthy Lannisters.
we called ourselves House Portayne, a wealthy house ruling an island of silver mines just off the west coast of the Reach, south of the Iron Islands. Caroline primarily played Lady Alasta Portayne, and I primarily played her second-born child, Tobytha. we had some input on the Lord (the chaste and humble Elrin Portayne) and other children (an older brother, Ethon, and a younger girl, Joryssa), as well as some side characters associated with the family. together we came up with a name and some basic info for our family's maester, Maester Bridon (hailing from house Wylde). later on, for my second official character, I created Gwenna Fallside, a rough castle guard who quickly earns the family's trust and becomes castellan of Silverfont Castle. for a few highly intense B-plot scenes inbetween the primary roleplaying action, Caroline and I played as Gwenna and the Maester. one of us may have gotten forcibly tossed out of a tower window to their death. very Game-of-Thones-y, isn't it? the B-plots were all very neat, adding to the deep and expansive feel of the game.
our mini-campaign was set to span the reigns of Aegon the Conqueror and Maegor the Cruel, and we knew ahead of time that House Portayne would not survive. it turned out that we were all utterly doomed to be poisoned by jealous Lannisters and chased down by pirates trying to escape the inevitable seige of our island. little Joryssa did grow up and get married off to a son of House Reed, so maybe she and her line will survive to remember her origins. exploring the long-ago past of the Song of Ice and Fire universe like this was incredibly cool, even if all evidence of our House was hopelessly erased in the end.
aesthetics
these two games both come with quite intricate worlds-- one explicitly grown from the richly detailed, sprawling civilizations in Martin's novels and the other from the remix of almost everything else a person could want to tell a story about. both are alternate versions of something like western civilization, in a way. in A Song of Ice and Fire, we have an alternate history of European geopolitical conflicts, with zombies and magic and dragons and extra murder on top. in Shadowrun, it's an alternate near-future, with ruthless megacorporations and magic and dragons and cyberpunks all the way down.
A Song of Ice and Fire, as an RPG system, seems to me like a vast, ornate, and orderly library of fairly traditional fantasy ideas-- spacious yet organized, and more or less tidy. it may have dozens of secret passages and a skeleton or two hidden in the corners, but generally it's presentable and logical, even if there's a lot going on. its illustrations have a soft realism, not lacking in the violence you'd expect from this particular setting, but lit by torches and candles so it all seems not quite mundane, but not quite so shocking or garish either. the book's design feels monestarial, with a tinge of rennaissance, maybe a little bit fancy-Shakespearean on the edges. there is a lot of all-caps, angular and serifed, strong and delicate at the same time, perfectly high contrast and comfortable to skim through.
conversely, the Shadowrun system feels like a massive kitchen sink full of influences. some of the art reminds me of Paul Kidby's style, which does seem fitting somehow (he's the artist who illustrated plenty of Terry Pratchett's work). other pages and spreads are more evocative of comic book and/or videogame art. like I said-- it is a mishmash. in a good way.
if this system were a physical room it would be a somewhat grimy, mostly abandoned, very magical attic full of random knickknacks, old photo albums, broken electronics, weird porcelain figurines, and wildly colorful posters, all collected over many decades and now surrounded by a tangled sea of wires and cables and spikes and jewelry. it's got all the neon-and-fishnets and glossy high-tech punk style of Cyberpunk mixed in with an animistic spookiness. we could say Pathfinder and Mage and Werewolf got put in a compost heap with all the other urban, cyberpunk techno-fantasies you've ever heard of, and Shadowrun is what crawled out, dripping with lightning and breathing fire. here, orcs and elves and magic and machines coexist with normality just like anything else that ever might have evolved on the planet Earth.
funnily enough, dragons and dragon imagery show up far more prevalently in the Shadowrun book-- little tattoo-ish line-art dragon symbols glow red in the bottom corners of every page, next to blocky page numbers and footer text-- than in A Song of Ice and Fire. Shadowrun gives us 8 lines of index entries under "dragon(s)," whereas "dragon" doesn't even show up as a unique entry in A Song of Ice and Fire's (much shorter) index; over there we only see Dragonbone, Dragonglass, and Dragonstone. that's interesting, eh? what if we wanted to play Targaryens?
mechanics
summing up the game mechanics and rules for these two isn't going to be easy. but I'll do my best. at least they have one wonderfully simple thing in common: rolling a bunch of d6s all at once based on your rating(s) in whatever skill.
for character creation, Shadowrun gives you 5x5 grid of options, across which to prioritize various character elements: metatype, attribute points, skill points, magic abilities, and extra funds for gear/equipment. for each column, you can only choose from the options included at one of the 5 priority levels.
within the basic constraints of those priorities, you'll then assign ratings to 8 core attributes, a few derived stats (Edge, Essence, and Magic) that I still don't totally understand very well, and however many relevant skills you can afford. and good gracious it seems like there is an almost infinite
list of skills. the actual rules even allow for making
up your own skills if you find that the pre-written lists don't fit
what you want to do. so how's that for flexible? if your character uses magic, a you'll also take a magic ability rating and choose some related skills and spells. there are plenty of spells to choose from, too, and they can be learned in any order.
finishing touches for your character will involve choosing qualities and spending some of the 25 Karma you start with. Shadowrun qualities work kind of like the advantages, merits, and flaws in World of Darkness-- adding positive qualities costs you a few Karma, but adding negative qualities (like addiction, a bad reputation, etc.) can earn you some of it back. Karma is one way you'll level up as your game progresses, so you don't have to spend it all at character creation, but you have to spend at least some.
once gameplay gets going, it's pretty action focused. the whole concept of Shadowrun is
that you and your party get hired as Shadowrunners-- fairly
unscrupulous folks taking on dangerous semi-legal jobs on the fringes of
society, hoping to get away with it every time, earn an excellent
reputation, and rake in millions of nuyen (¥ = the currency of this
particular dystopian future). no matter how sneaky you might be, things
are bound to go wrong.
combat works using very short "combat
turns" of 3 seconds each, during which each player acts according to
their initiative score. for some reason, there are also 6 types of
initiative depending on what kind of combat is going on-- are we in the
real world, or in the matrix, or in the astral plane somewhere? the
various initiative options provide different numbers of d6s, so you'll
roll that number of initiative dice, add your initiative attribute
rating, and that total is your initiative score. whoever has the highest
score goes first, and so on, til the end of the round. then everyone
subtracts 10 from their score, and those who still have a positive
number can act again.
as your team completes shadowruns for all their shadowy clients, you'll earn cash rewards and Karma, with which you can then purchase more gear and any upgrades that make sense for your story, according to whatever you can afford. character progression is all quite customizable.
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I've briefly mentioned the group House creation aspect of A Song of Ice and Fire already. once you've created your House, each player creates a character, either working from scratch or starting with one of the provided archetypes. the system here reminded me a lot of the Wrath & Glory character creations options, except there are more of them available. I do think having a good range of pre-made templates to which you then add your own flavor is really nice.
I want to say the individual character sheet for A Song of Ice and Fire is one of the simplest I've ever seen. rather than attributes + skills, we just get one list of 19 abilities, nice and alphabetical all the way from Agility and Animal Handling to Healing, Languages, and Marksmanship, and on to Warfare and Will. scores for each normally start at 2 and go up from there. most abilities also come with a range of specialties (skill with a certain weapon, or a certain approach, etc.) that can grant you bonus dice on relevant rolls.
your characters' age will also play a major role in some of their other stats. younger characters have fewer points to spend on ability ratings, but more destiny points to start with. destiny points can be spent for bonus qualities, or they can be used in various ways during gameplay to add bonus dice or change the outcome of a scene in particularly dire circumstances. as your character ages, they'll gain more experience but also more flaws.
the system allows for free creative decision making with some things, but also gives you fun tables full of options to roll for with others. the dice may dictate which part of the continent your House is from, how established or respected they are, how much land, population, defense, wealth, and influence they have, and whether or not there's an heir or a maester or an army at your disposal. as your game progresses, you'll make House Fortune rolls fairly often to see how all those stats change over months and years of in-game time. this was some of the most fun we had storytelling the big picture-- coming up with the story of a new resource or alliance that could explain the increase of wealth for our House, or imagining the crimes or plagues that would explain a drastic dip in population added to the pure fun of rolling dice for the quantitative stats.
on the smaller scene-by-scene scale, gameplay in A Song of Ice and Fire involves combining your ratings and speciality bonuses for each ability, rolling that many d6s, then adding up all the results. it's more math than just recognizing the 5+ dice as successes and ignoring the rest, but it also feels a little more dramatic that way too. even if you roll low numbers, if you're rolling enough dice, it might still add up to a success. difficulty levels range from "automatic," requiring no roll at all, or "easy," requiring at least 1, all the way up to "very hard" at 18 or "heroic," requiring a total of 21 or more.
there are some special rules and procedures for tournaments (jousting
and other non-combat contests), battlefields and warfare (large-scale multi-unit combat)
and intrigue (social combat in simple, standard, or complex modes)-- most of that is laid out in a pretty clear way as a reference.
approachability
neither of these games sits firmly in a category of those with cozy, simple RPG mechanics. beyond the nice, clean familiarity of the stalwart d6, there are layers of rules and exceptions and variations that make both systems at least a little more daunting for the average player. but with a good GM to guide you through it, the struggle can be minimized a great deal.
the first chapter in A Song of Ice and Fire is a primer on the world of Westeros. the book doesn't assume readers are intimately familiar with the world and in fact rehashes a good amount of the history, the map, and the vibes for us. there's enough here that you could get by without much prior knowledge of the books or show if you had to (though why that would ever be the case is a separate and valid question).
I found it quite odd that the book uses SIF and SIFRP as
its chosen abbreviations, rather than the ASoIaF that I've seen way more often out in the sea of internet discourse about the books. perhaps the 2009 publication of the first RPG edition
pre-dated the rise of ASoIaF as the more ubiquitous acronym? or perhaps
leaving out the articles and prepositions and conjunctions seemed more
official? I have no idea, but so it goes. however odd it seems to me, I suppose it doesn't matter so very much.
the order of things
may matter a bit more. the introductory chapters make sense enough--
setting, rules, character creation... but after that we bounce back and
forth a bit-- chapters 4 and 5 go over general abilities and
specialties, then destiny points and qualities. only then do we get into the chapters on
house and lands, with all the procedures and tables for creating our house and determining its history and fortunes. that seems backwards, but I suppose the beautiful affordances of a codex mean we can reference any of its contents in whatever order we like. good crossreferences and wayfinding and beautiful visual hierarchy all make that easy enough, here.
if, despite my general pickiness about the ordering of things, I can forgive the A Song of Ice and Fire RPG book for a bit of wonky ordering, it appears that I (still, these five years later) cannot forgive Shadowrun for similar crimes.
I hope I'm not belaboring the fact that Shadowrun is pretty intimidating as a book and as a system. the fact that there is so much detailed content pulled from fantasy and sci-fi means that it really ought to be handled and designed as carefully as possible for its readers... and perhaps they did their best? who knows. almost since I first touched this game book I have harbored persistent gripes about the mismatched non-parallel lists here and there and everywhere. on any given page, a trio of stats may be listed out A, B, and C, only to have the same stats or categories printed on a standard character sheet in the opposite order, or scrambled to B, A, C instead. why? for the sake of all the dragon-hoarded treasures in all the universes, why would anyone do this?
adding to that the relatively small text, plenty of jargon, and so many options for customization among various slightly-different categories and subcategories, I'd wager a brand new player would
need to fall very deeply and very hard in love with this setting to want
to tackle the complexity of learning the system from scratch. or maybe
it just takes confidence to bend the system to your own creative will?
preliminary verdicts
Shadowrun, upon my revisiting it this past month, really was a lot cooler than I remembered it. one must appreciate its ambitious scope and uniqueness, if nothing else.
I found A Song of Ice and Fire quite unique as well. I'm less a fangirl of its base media, but I still think it's fair to say this game evokes Martin's novels just as well as The One Ring evoked Tolkien's for me.
my experience levels with both systems are pretty even here. both were fun gameplay experiences, both are interesting, and both are significantly different from some of the more popular or mainstream RPGs I've covered so far.
so... do I let my annoyance at Shadowrun's inconsistencies of arrangement knock it out in this first round?
yes.
yes, I do. while I recognize my response to these things as (perhaps more than) a little bit nitpicky, those issues have frustrated my practical experience of the game in a real way. and it all could have been avoided with even the merest ounce of designery forethought or technical editing attention. that this version is the 5th edition makes it even less excusable.
congratulations, A Song of Ice and Fire RPG. for what it's worth, I think most poeple would agree with me on this ruling, even if not for the same reasons.
what's next?
I'll summarize my 8 quarterfinalists and articulate a few final reasons why they win in a recap post next week. after that, dear Jeremiah can help me match them up for a new round. since all the most extensive exploration and research has already been done, future rounds will probably involve much shorter, broad-strokes reviews for comparison purposes. ideally I'll cut 8 down to 4 before Thanksgiving, and from 4 to 2 shortly thereafter, so perhaps we'll crown a first ever TTRPG champion by the end of the semester. fingers crossed.
in the meantime, let me know-- how would you rank these 16 games if you were the tournament judge?
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