Samantha Patri's Blog

This is from an essay we wrote back in 2012, when Shadowrun 5e was first announced. A lot of this still holds true to this day. We're going to tweak it slightly, but for the most part it holds up well. Shadowrun 5e  is slated to come out this summer.  I decided to make a wish list about what I would like to see in it, and I was (not entirely) surprised to see people wanting a reversion back to the first edition "feel" of mirrorshades, cyberdecks, and the removal of the wireless world from the setting. Having just finished writing an essay on science fiction, this debate was already fresh in my mind. Good science fiction uses the setting as a framework to reflect aspects of the modern world and raise questions, while near science fiction will usually extrapolate from where we are to where people think we will go. Shadowrun , I feel, does this very well, which is why it is one of my favourite roleplaying games. When dealing with many science fiction games, I tend to think ...

Or: "How to play an Evil character in a Good party without alienating yourself, pissing off the players, or pissing off the Game Master.  Our sister is in a Pathfinder campaign, and decided she was going to play a rogue - with a major focus on stealth (+20 by Level 5), deadly sneak attack dice (3d8), and a Neutral Evil alignment. The game master, who has played with us for over a decade, trusted her enough to let it slide, and away we went. The way she's been playing the character's pretty straightforward.  She doesn't quite hang out with us as we travel - she's perpetually in stealth mode (can move her full speed or even run while remaining stealthed). So our group never knows where she is or what she's doing until she lets herself be seen. She does talk with the group but her interaction is usually light during travel time. During a mission into a building, she infiltrated ahead of us because she was the only one who wouldn't trip security. She scoured th...

Ever run a game and have one player just implode during the first session because ' you're not doing fantasy right '? Running a game, and the group is heading into a village. We describe the farms and farm houses along the way - low stone walls to mark regions, low, one-level homes, and the like. It was winter, and the players decided to check on the farms, and we described how the people living on there tended to keep the animals in with them, sharing the body heat to protect them from the cold. One of the players (we'll call him 'Fred') grumbled about this, saying that there should be barns and haystacks and people didn't live with their animals. (Hint. People did .) Whatever. Once the group made it into the village, the first thing that happened was the player immediately looked for the tavern. They found the village pub, and the group went in to sit down and get a meal. There was a few things to eat - not much, mostly bread and a bit of broth, but plenty...