Shadowrun: Crossfire

Have any F:ATties played this? It's kind of a Shadowrun version of Pathfinder Adventure Card Game. Are they significantly different? I own Pathfinder, but I also love Shadowrun. I'd appreciate hearing from anyone who has played this, haven't seen much chatter about it on here though.

I played Crossfire a few months back...I don't like games where on your turn you flop your hand of cards down and everyone works together to figure out how to maximize your hand for that turn. As I looked at my hand all I saw was a collection of colors and symbols mixed with words to allow me to manipulate those colors and symbols. But I don't know anything about Shadowrun but the game did nothing to draw me into or inform me about the world...From what I gather it is a mash-up of Fantasy and Cyberpunk?

EDIT: Not my Cup'oTea if you will. But I also felt the same about P:AG and Legendary: Encounters so what do I know I guess?

I've played it a couple of times. It's more of an exercise to see how long you last before it all goes wrong. Pathfinder is much more straightforward than Crossfire.

It's a puzzle of escalating difficulty, and very difficult if you're not familiar with it. The decision by committee comment is valid, and that may or may not be a good thing. I do like the idea of continuing the characters with experience points, but at no point does the game feel like you're on a mission with any narrative to speak of.

Shadowrun is a game where they took the idea of Cyberpunk -- a world where technology has so outpaced the average person that it may as well be magic -- and decided it needed actual magic.

Oh, and elves, because god fucking forbid RPGers play a game without goddamn elves.

Legomancer wrote: Shadowrun is a game where they took the idea of Cyberpunk -- a world where technology has so outpaced the average person that it may as well be magic -- and decided it needed actual magic.

Oh, and elves, because god fucking forbid RPGers play a game without goddamn elves.

Nice summary of why I hate Shadowrun. It's Cyberpunk with big clunky training wheels for people who don't think they can handle role-playing without magic.

I always believed Cyberpunk 2020 was a better system, just criminally underrated.

Cyberpunk 2020 had tremendous style, but it often seemed like the only thing that mattered was reflexes and armor. I never got around to trying the special hacking rules that used the Netrunner cards. The Hardwired supplement written by Walter Jon Williams was outstanding, because he was both a gamer and a successful cyberpunk writer.

What does the term cyberpunk mean? I have no idea so can't comment on whether or not Shadowrun fails at being a cyberpunk game. Shadowrun was always about the ebb and flow of magic, heists, and not knowing who to trust. That fact that elves, dwarves, trolls, and orks were in the setting was always window dressing. The in game explanation for the existence was clever too so their presence never felt forced.

The one thing I thought Shadowrun had separating it was it allowed for a lot more racism in role-playing. I'm not saying that's good or bad, but the setting pretty much draws this out and even provided many slurs in the rulebooks.

It seemed that it allowed for playing more dubious characters than one normally would. I imagine players would feel more at ease dropping racism on fantasy races over the ugliness of real ethnicities.


I say this as someone who's only played the SNES game, the TCG, read one novel, played two sessions of the rpg and a read through the rpg books. I don't know how much players or DMs actually handled race relations in their games though.

Again, maybe this isn't something one wants to role-play (we didn't), but from the material I gleamed it seemed like this was an area that other rpgs didn't even go near.

(I didn't love that SNES game though. And the TCG was a lot of fun for awhile.)