No, it’s not Shadowrun Sundays, but hey, as long as I’m whining about writing…
As I’m ramping up for my GenCon appearance, I blithely posted on the freelancer’s forum “Hey, I’ll run Sacrificial Limb for the team if anyone has time for a game. I’ll even upgrade it to 5th edition.” To which the line dev says “Hey, if you upgrade it, send to me and we’ll post it as a PDF before the con.”
Given all the pre-con prep going on at Catalyst I doubt anyone has the time or brainspace to actually get the PDF fixed up before the convention next week. Especially as I looked at the file and had a huge “ERK! What the HECK was I thinking?” moment.
One would think an edition upgrade would be easy, especially as I was one of the playtesters. But that doesn’t account for the fact that I haven’t read through SR5′s core rulebook since I playtested (meaning things have been added, rules have been modified, and some things that were in the playtest version no longer even exist). Plus it isn’t just a matter of changing over the NPC stats. I have to comb through SL and find every instance of an Opposed Test, a drone / vehicle / Matrix node, and gear stats, then update all those numbers as well. Then I have to verify that Karma rewards and Nuyen payouts are still appropriate to the adventure or change those (lower or higher).
Not to mention that it takes me upwards of 4-5 hours to create characters from scratch on a good day, and that doesn’t include the work of streamlining them after the initial build points spend. To be fair, I haven’t created many characters using the new Priority Table system. So I don’t know how long it’s going to take me this time around. The task, however, is a daunting one.
So I’ve gotten all the way up to page 14 of my adventure and suddenly realized the fastest way to actually make these changes is to print off the damn PDF, highlight every number that needs to be touched, and then (and only then) start restatting things. If I do it like this, I’m less likely to reinvent the wheel on shared objects by searching for those ridiculous Opposed Test tables fifteen times between searching for gear stats and sensor ratings. So this is my plan, then. To minimize the back and forth between PDFs by getting a dead tree copy and actually writing some of this crap down.
Also, it will increase my chances of finding every number that needs to be changed and not needing an errata for the SR5 version of the adventure.
And no, I’m not actually getting paid to do this (that I know of), but since Sacrificial Limb came out as we were discussing SR5 (yes, we did know that long ago), I feel the need to make sure it’s current enough that people will still want to play it. I also really hate it when RPG product is unusable one year after it’s been published.
So an SR5 edition of this adventure is forthcoming (soon, I hope) and maybe I’ll convince Mr. Line Dev to add in an extra bonus or two so everyone knows the difference between the two versions. What do you think of that, gamers? Any suggestions on bonus material?
Wish me luck on the rewrite.
#sfwapro
