In which Vox and Mr. Johnson talk with Bamce of RunnerHub for this RunnerHub-tutorial-for-Reddit-newbies episode.
Show Notes:
RunnerHub
Create a Reddit account
Create a Skype account
Create a Roll20 account
Acquire Chummer5
Acquire HeroLab
RunnerHub – New Players Start Here
RunnerHub – House Rules
RunnerHub – Character Generation Board
YouTube – Rob’s (Bamce’s) Channel
TwitchTV – Rob’s (Bamce’s) Channel
Gamer’s Tavern – Plot Resistance
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I applied to RunnerHub and had a bad experience. Not only were there issues of cohesion (a mod said he was handing off my application, I never actually found out or heard from the new guy), as well as a kind of snobbery.
The line that convinced me that I need not apply was, “Regular ammo is crap. Don’t bother with it.” I don’t know what he thought I should have had instead, but I bought it because it is:
A) Legal with the right paperwork.
B) Easilly purchased.
C) Won’t blow up your gun on a glitch.
D) Less likely to blow through walls or get KE on you as a paramilitary threat.
I know there are multiple mods, so my experiance is likely not entirely representive. That being the case, these people are the ambassadors of the Hub and the opinions they relate are seen as policy or wisdom. Given that policy or wisdom I said thanks, but no thanks.
I am sorry that you had an unpleasant experience. How long ago was this? ((Also depending on who it was everyone who does sheet checking is a mod so they can change flairs and such))
Sadly we are a volunteer basis and sometimes people have bad days.
A) As for the “regular ammo” all versions of non lethal (sns, gel) fall under the same licensing restrictions.
B) With gel being the same avail, .5 nuyen more expensive per bullet,
C) is gel
D) the additional knockdown chance, and won’t accidentally murder someone.
But, not exactly the place for a big debate on that
I subscribed to the early in its creation. I did plenty of reading, posted a few questions and comments. I found, just like most online media, that there were a few individuals who were disruptive or lacked any personal communication skills.
Later, I created a character, received feedback, and was finally approved. I found it to be a enlightening experience, and learned a few rule tweaks along the way.
I never got to play, though.
I don’t have a standard clock in, clock out, go home, job. I’m always on the road. I thought about doing Roll20 on my tablet, and Skype on my smartphone. But, it didn’t meet with the warmest reception. I can understand that.
So, I think it’s a great collection of Shadowrun fandom of all types.
If your who I think you are I am sorry about that situation.
Should the time ever come when you can sitdown for a night a run is posted you are still welcome to come to apply. Just the whole playing while driving thing
I fully understand, and thank you. It’s embarrassing that you remember the issue given all that you do over there.
The Runnerhub has made Shadowrun accessible to many people. That strengthens the community.
I’ve played a few games on RunnerHub. Be warned that the experience can vary wildly. The first couple runs I had were pleasant and interesting; quite fun. Then I had a run where the GM had KE randomly stop me in the street and search me for illegal goods simply because I was driving a motorcycle with a pack slung on my back. He then railroaded me into getting captured without any way of avoiding it even though I had a good fake SIN and permits for all my equipment. The rest of the players seriously considered letting my character rot in jail because they didn’t want to risk themselves on someone they barely knew. They did come get me but I spent the entire mission sitting around doing nothing because I had guns leveled at me the whole time. Like I said, it’s probably just the one GM but between that and how difficult it is to get on runs I’ve really been turned off.
I just want to mention that the ones that were fun were pretty great, and I’ve listened to a lot of the streams of others playing and they were interesting so I want to stress that you may just have to keep a list of GM’s that don’t fit your playstyle.
I am sorry that this happened.
Did you send in a Interpersonal ticket about it?
I should have covered that there are occasions where “unfortunate” situations happen. Is something that can come up with any community this size. We do have both an Interpersonal division, for more player player disagreements. As well as a thematics division, where should a player or gm have an issue with something that happened on a run, they can contact them and try and work out some details.
We have retconned whole runs, or aspects of runs if we find that they, well situations like you mentioned.
You are always welcome back though.
I have been a part of Runnerhub, both as a player and a GM, for just over a year now. I got involved because I wanted to play, and finding a table locally is very difficult. (I have a non-standard work schedule.)
As others have mentioned, the experiences can vary. Both as players and as GMs.
If you have an issue with anybody, either a player or a GM, let someone in the Interpersonal Division (ID) know about it, please. There’s a direct contact link for them on the sidebar of the Runnerhub’s Sidebar.
Or, you can reach out and contact me personally. My Reddit name is the same: /u/jWrex. While I cannot magically make everything all better, I will do what I can to help. We can’t fix anything if nobody knows it is broken.
It took a few days for my character to get looked at, but once it was looked at the reviewer was on top of it and it was approved quickly, since then it has shown to be worth the wait with many newbie friendly people 🙂
I joined Runnerhub sometime ago (approaching 6 months) and I don’t regret it. Runnerhub is an active outlet for me to get my Shadowrun fix, which I can’t get in normal life because most of my Home Group are somewhat overwhelmed by the sheer amount of rules. That sheer amount of rules drew me right into the game.
I got my first sheet up, after taking some time for approval (I hadn’t made the simplest character), and still play him to this day. There have been very few instances where I’ve had fault with any other member of the community – of the dozens of players and GM’s that I’ve had the pleasure of playing with, i’ve only ever found fault with 1 other player. The easy solution was don’t apply to jobs with that player. The time zones can sometimes be a mess (applications to a game that runs at 4am for me isn’t uncommon), but that’s what happens with a global community.
I have thoroughly enjoyed becoming a part of the community, and currently spend much of my time as part of the Character Creation Divisions (CCD) Sheet Time to help guide and approve new players into the Hub. I relish this, as I thoroughly enjoy handling Character Sheets – making and examining characters is one of my favourite parts of this system.
I take issue with the statement that “Shadowrunners aren’t the heroes of the land.” If dragons can exist, why not heroes? And where is it written heroes always win or go down in a blaze of glory?
You can totally play a game of shadowrun on a more “hooding theme”. However your standard setting of shadowrun is that you are people who take money to do bad things to law abiding citizens.
On a top down metalevel there is a large number of people you are making the world worse for. Granted there are some who benefit from the things you’ve done.
I’ve been a huge supporter of the hub, as many know. A thick skin can be very helpful for the application process. It should be known that the guys that volunteer see a lot of apps and their primary concern is that the law of the land is followed by all (no special cases, it must be this way and they HAVE to tow the hardline on that) and they’re trying to help optimize your character so that you have actual fun and don’t feel overlooked (as the guys went into in this podcast). I’ve seen people get put off by this assistance because it might seem harsh or unbending… but it MUST be this way to keep the community goin’.
Bamce is awesome and always takes the time to help. If you had a bad experience with the hub just try to put it in perspective and just have fun.
I started playing on the Hub about a month ago and so far I’ve been having a good time.
I also play in meat space, half-gming and half-playing with another group. If you’ve played in a group campaign before, you should know that the way the game plays is kind of different. Runs on the Hub usually have about 10 people applying(depending on time and day of the week). Usually you end up with a new team every run. Its a pretty fun way to play. I read a lot of the accompanying RP like the JackPoint threads and to hear about some of the legendary characters and then to have them show up in a run is pretty awesome. You don’t get the same kind of persistence that you get in a campaign where you interact with the same team members, but you do get this wonderful kind of understanding of a world that is larger than what you do, which I think matches the flavor of the SR universe beautifully. Its a lot of fun. And once you do develop report between characters, its pretty cool and a fun way to RP.
Speaking of persistence, even though a lot of these runs are one shots, they do happen in a shared world, and events that happen in one game have a chance of effecting the whole sub, depending on what happens. If you end up blowing up a building, the sub might publish the event, and inform players what kind of stuff might happen as a result of that run. Check out the Breaking News posts if you want to know more about that.
The runs I’ve been on have been fun. My most crazy moment so far was when I got into a gun fight at an award show while protecting a Troll rapper from a rival ghoul rapper. I’ve managed to do some of my favorite roleplaying in at least a year so far.
Tips: take your time with it. When creating a character and applying, take the time to check out the Hub Rules. Its easier for you to get your character accepted if you can catch things that aren’t allowed beforehand. Don’t worry too much if you miss a rule though. It’ll just take a little bit longer to get the character approved.
When you apply to a run, make sure you read the instruction for what the GM wants from you in your response to the posting. You’ll be surprised as to how frequently people will miss adding certain asked for details. Also, read the descriptions. There are a lot of different types of runs going on. Some of them are very Black Trenchcoat, some are very Pink Mohawk, with a wide variety in between. You can apply to any run, but right now I wouldn’t apply my character to runs that involve heavy artillery, simply because he isn’t specialized for combat like that.
The nice thing about the Hub vs. a meat space campaign is that you can be as engaged as you want with it.
If you are looking to feed your Shadowrun itch, try the Hub out. Its a fun way to game. I usually get in a run a week, depending on my schedule and when runs are going on. Good luck chummers.
I tried runnerhub, but it was difficult to get started. Though that might have been Reddit as it is completely foreign to me.
Also I have been unable to find the new podcast you spoke of in the news. Relative Dimension. All I can find is a Doctor Who podcast. Can you put a link for the podcast for me.
Sure! Here’s what we have: http://relativedimension.podbean.com/.
Relativedimension.com is active now, but I just got it running.. over the next few days I will be linking the shows there.. for now, keep using the podbean link, or search itunes for Relative Dimension.
And thank you , Arcology, again for the mention.
Ah. Yes I was looking for a website. I did not try itunes or anything. I find podcatchers just don’t work, and itunes is just terrible in a number of ways. I like the old fashioned go to the podcast website and download each episode method. Only thing that I have found works reliably.
I don’t know exactly if this is a Runnerhub issue or maybe just a structure issue with something as big as Runnerhub.
As many people have said the grab bag for GMs is sporadic and sometimes GMs have bad days but when I played on Runnerhub I had an overall negative experience. Whenever I tried talking to GMs about rulings on specified things to gain clarity on matters, they acted standoffish and aggressive. It felt like I was being made a villain if I dared to ask about how GMs looked at the rulings and even create discussion about it. I stopped playing a year ago because the entire situation gave me a feeling of hostility from Runnerhub.
I do not know if this has changed but if someone can tell me if this has changed then I’d like to know. I had a friend who might of wanted to play (They are on the Autism Spectrum) and if they were subjected to what I went through I do not think it would be beneficial for their social growth and might spoil the event for them.
Take a jab at D&D players for rolling optimized characters, then follow up with 20 mins of talk about optimizing, streamlining and policing character submissions. Even mentioning between the lines that GM’s will cherry pick. Flavor or style is often seen as ‘weak’ or unnecessary on the hub.
Seems a bit snobbish, no?
I play on the hub, and it’s ok. But if you’re new it’s going to be harsh, unless you’re a celeb in our niche.
Bamce’s hate on bows is very evident, he replied to EVERY thread concerning the topic you search on the subreddit, which is odd, because I’d see it as style over substance, with that said his Youtube username is pretentiousname01 so style is apparently not his thing and this is projected onto the community.
Sorry for the agitated reply, but the sometimes snobbish behavior between ‘system fanatics’ irks me the wrong way. The things that are mentioned in the podcast could apply to any other system if you use the optional rules.
D&D 5e for example has a good background system for fleshing out a character story, that along with some stat rolling systems (roll in order, 4d6, etc..) would allow for interesting characters without writing anything on paper or before deciding on a race or class. Saying that other systems handle character development less in-depth would’ve been a better way of putting it, now it just seems like a jab at D&D/Pathfinder or fanaticism towards Shadowrun.
I love both systems, actively play them both, one isn’t better than the other, along with Pathfinder they are dominating the pnp rpg space and I’m quite happy with it. The /r/runnerhub is a really-really good initiative but it has it’s problems. Would I promote it a very new player, no, it’s too confusing since it’s house ruled without consent of the publisher (Like Society and Adventures, not saying their great but they are global and official).
The most well known fact is the rift between ShadowNET and RunnerHub for some of the reasons mentioned in the podcast or mentioned by me. RunnerHub would improve a lot by considering less streamlining and managing better through GM’s instead of the character council judgement it currently has.
If you do read this Bamce, sorry for taking a strike at you, you seem like a decent fellow and the hub initiative can most likely be greatly credited towards you.