Nelsormensch

Netrunner!

Recommended Posts

Damn I saw that art you posted and was suddenly way more interested in Netrunner. Then I read the text. ):

 

That art is perfect.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

OCTGN!  I'll have to give it a look.  I have a lil Board Game crew in town but can't get anyone interested in this.

 

A good friend and I played several times, roleplaying our factions, it was hilarious.  Then he moved out of town due to "employment".  Sheeeesh!

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

I'm a little sad that it's no longer set in the world of Cyberpunk 2020.

 

It's kind of annoying that Fantasy Flight Games has two really and truly lifeless science-fiction settings that they seem determined to use as their one-size-fits-all re-theming of various rescue properties. The Twilight Imperium universe was a terrible fit for Rex, as evidenced by the fact that every single person just talks about it in terms of Dune anyway.

 

Android is a bit better fit for Netrunner, but it still feels like a "punk" aesthetic as conceived by a corporation. Ugly and tasteless as it is, the art for the old game just has so much damn character.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Last night we broke all the tokens out of the cardboard template and attempted to make the starter decks as instructed by the rulebook. I finished reading through the rulebook today and Chrissy met me downtown after work for our first game of Netrunner. At first we were playing outside, but the wind picked up. Note to self: if you want to make gaming friends, play Netrunner upon a picnic table on a college-campus. Two people approached us separately to ask what we were playing within 15 minutes. I had to explain that we had no idea how to play it yet, so we couldn't give much of a description. We are such posers. It got windy, so we had to take it indoors.
We ordered fries and drinks and appreciated Burger King's huge booth-tables and lack of customers. They played dance-music the entire time which was cool. I played as the corporation; I figured that if Chrissy played the runner, all her cards would be face-up so I would be able to explain stuff she needed to know. She got that fucking card that lets her gain 2 credits every click and was swimming in money the entire game, where I was using most of my clicks for 1 credit each. Most of my attempts to trap and ambush her failed because she would use an event that exposed them or I wouldn't have enough credits to be able to advance the asset and pay for rezzing the ice in time. Or she would just look at me and be like "That's one of your traps, isn't it?" and I wouldn't be able to make a good poker-face. It was a massive struggle. She accessed the first three of my agendas and there she sat at 6 points for the rest of the game. I had ice all over the place on servers that she had no interest in. So then she starts accessing my R&D, going through my ice very easily with her tons of credits. I had very few credits the entire game. She had all this hardware that let her have a total of 8 memory units and so she had plenty of programs and credits to just run whatever server she wanted successfully. We get to the point where she has one card left in her stack and she's like "What happens if I run out of cards?" and I was like "I don't think you lose like I do when you run out." and she was like "Well let's do this, I don't care, look at all my stuff, I can run your piddly shit all night." So she just kept running my R&D and telling me whether or not I had a good card coming. She was dominating so hard that she felt bad for me and started saying things like "I'm going to play the corporation next time because you aren't very good at it."
We get to my last card and it's just a piece of ice. We were like "How are we supposed to win if there are only 6 agenda-points total?" Upon further examination, we discovered that the neutral corporation-cards had not been put into the starter-deck. It was really fun. We have a pretty good grasp on the game-mechanics (we think) but we didn't do a trace or a tracker or bad publicity, and she didn't even get any brain-damage. It was really fun. She said "I'm already glad you bought this game." Next time we will have a legal deck for both sides. We both look forward to playing again.

tumblr_mt3gvppVhQ1s7gx5to1_500.jpg

 

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Glad you enjoyed it, clyde.

 

While I can understand some people enjoying the 90s are for it's crazy style, it's absolutely unbearable for me to look at. I really like the art on most of the cards from the Android version.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

The current art-style is also enjoyable. It's cohesive in a way that makes me feel like there is a comicbook set in this world.
I heard someone say that the 1950's version of the future is different than the 2000's version of the future. Further, the 1880's version of the future is distinctly wicked/cool. I have an affinity for the 1990's cyberpunk amalgumate style. It's probably because it is the style which has been associated with the most severe (yet attractive) version of the genre I have been exposed to. Blade-Runner cities and Max-Headroom sabatoge will always evoke speculations of how technomancy will create a new age of wizards and magic.

So can a runner use a click to gain credits after the corporation has decided how much to spend on a trace, so that they can have enough to not get the tag?

 

Edit: From what I read in the rulebook, it seems like the idea is basically "You can use a click whenever you want as long as you have clicks and it is during your own turn."

 

We just played our third game and it felt like the first one where we really knew what was going on. Chrissy had 5 points scored and I had 3, at that point she has a lot of ice installed. We both knew that her first remote server was the one that was the most heavily protected; I could get through it, but it would cost me around 20 credits to do so and I only had 4. She installed another piece of ice on that server. Then I spent all my clicks on magnum opus to gain 8 credits. On Chrissy's turn she put a new agenda in the server and advanced it two times. It was pretty obvious to us both that whatever she installed was going to be at least 2 agenda points. I spent another turn gathering 8 clicks ( because now I needed even more credits to get through), She spent her next turn advancing her agenda three times and scored an agenda for 3 points. It was really fun, because we both knew what we had to do in order to win and we were racing for it.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

You can't use a click in the middle of spending another click, unless a card explicitly says you can. Since the only time you're going to be encountering a trace is during a run (which is using a click) or during the Corp's turn (at which point, you have no clicks), you can't use a click in the middle of a trace to gain credits.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

You can't use a click in the middle of spending another click, unless a card explicitly says you can. Since the only time you're going to be encountering a trace is during a run (which is using a click) or during the Corp's turn (at which point, you have no clicks), you can't use a click in the middle of a trace to gain credits.

Ok, that is useful information.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Here is something I really appreciate about this game:

I'm reading through the rulebook for the second time and I've played three matches now. I've had dreams that were influenced by the game-systems for the past three nights. The only one I remember the details of were that someone was coming up our gravel driveway (we live in a rural area and do not have many visitors) and I was thinking of the situation in terms of a run; had I installed enough ice on the driveway?; was the intruder breaking subroutines?

The fact that I am having hallucinations of logic where my default thought-processes are being supplanted by game-mechanics during my hypnagogic state makes me suspect that this game is super-fresh (within the sphere of what I games I have been exposed to personally). I love it when this "tetris-effect" happens with logic, rather than with visuals when I close my eyes.

I have no idea what hacking into a corporation or managing firewalls is actually like, but Netrunner totally makes me feel like I'm making decisions in a cyberpunk world. This is the coolest version of a hacking-themed game I've played I would have loved doing this in Deus Ex or Mass Effect. Even tower-defense games have significant things to learn from Netrunner; have multiple targets of varying importance and disclosure, have those values change bewtween player turns and ideally allow the access of those targets to change the abilities of the defense and the abilities of antagonist.

I'm getting a lot out of this game.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

I'm really glad you're liking it clyde. It gets even more fun when you get into the deckbuilding aspect.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

It warms the cockles of my heart hearing someone digging Netrunner so much. Yeah, it's a really, really damn good game on a multitude of fronts. The number of days I've fallen asleep or woken up thinking about my decks is ... a distressing number.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

It's kind of annoying that Fantasy Flight Games has two really and truly lifeless science-fiction settings that they seem determined to use as their one-size-fits-all re-theming of various rescue properties. The Twilight Imperium universe was a terrible fit for Rex, as evidenced by the fact that every single person just talks about it in terms of Dune anyway.

 

Android is a bit better fit for Netrunner, but it still feels like a "punk" aesthetic as conceived by a corporation. Ugly and tasteless as it is, the art for the old game just has so much damn character.

This is slightly off-topic so I apologize but it is interesting to me that in the inevitable comparisons between Eclipse and Twilight Imperium lots of people claim that TI is a much stronger game thematically which never made sense to me since they both are kind of generic space opera settings. I mean they're both a lot of fun to play, but that particular claim never made any sense to me.

Anyway, I really need to try Netrunner out

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Hey Nels, now that you and Vanaman work together, you should teach him Netrunner! I get the feeling that it's very much his kind of game.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Hey Nels, now that you and Vanaman work together, you should teach him Netrunner! I get the feeling that it's very much his kind of game.

 

Oh, I'll try my best to drip this honey onto everyone. Nicholas Breckon expressed interest, I'll see who else I can get to bite. It feels closer to Starcraft than Dota, but I think there might still be a siren to sing here.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

I've never played DOTA, but whenever Sean talks about its seemingly-bloated-but-in-reality-intricately-elegant design, my mind immediately turns to Netrunner.

 

Also, "drip this honey" sounds really gross.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

I've never played DOTA, but whenever Sean talks about its seemingly-bloated-but-in-reality-intricately-elegant design, my mind immediately turns to Netrunner.

 

Also, "drip this honey" sounds really gross.

 

Yeah, I think the big difference between Dota and Netrunner is the team play compared to 1v1. So that's why Netrunner feels slightly closer to 1v1 Starcraft than Dota. Otherwise yeah, there's a lot of shared territory there for sure!

 

And I leave to please.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Yeah, I suppose the team play is a big factor.

 

Off-topic, I'm playing Mark of the Ninja right now and really loving it. Good work! I can't wait to see what Campo Santo does.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Off-topic, I'm playing Mark of the Ninja right now and really loving it. Good work! I can't wait to see what Campo Santo does.

 

Thanks man! Score it in the latest Humble Bundle? Glad you're digging it. Heh, we hope to not completely disappoint your expectations ;)

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

How does the ice "cell portal" work. If the runner doesn't break its subroutine, does she have to go through all the ice on that server again? Or just the first one once more?

Also, do any of the expansions include new agendas?

Also, are there any expansions that are pretty much an additional runner deck? Or do they all just add a few cards to each runner type?

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

How does the ice "cell portal" work. If the runner doesn't break its subroutine, does she have to go through all the ice on that server again? Or just the first one once more?

 

Yeah, if that sub isn't broken then the runner immediately returns to the very first piece of ICE on that server. They can immediately choose to jack out at that point (unless they're under affect of Whirlpool or something), since the runner can always jack out when they encounter ICE (aside from the very first piece of ICE each run, but Cell Portal doesn't make that "first" happen again).

 

So Cell Portal is kind of conditional and a bit expensive, but if you've got a couple piece of really expensive ICE before it, it can still stop a runner that doesn't break if it they can't afford to get back through again (plus they wasted all that money getting through). And if Cell Portal's subroutine isn't broken, it stays rezzed until its sub fires, which is nice. And technically the corp can keep paying to rez it if the runner encounters it again on the same run.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Also, do any of the expansions include new agendas?

Also, are there any expansions that are pretty much an additional runner deck? Or do they all just add a few cards to each runner type?

 

There are two types of expansions: Data Packs (of which there are currently 6) and Deluxe Expansions (of which there is currently 1). Data Packs contain 60 cards (3 copies each of 20 unique cards). It's always 2-3 cards for each faction, including both Neutrals. Lots of them have agendas. Deluxe expansions contain 165 cards (3 copies each of 55 unique cards). So far there's only been one Deluxe Expansion, which had only Haas-Bioroid, Shaper and Neutral cards. Presumably, future deluxe expansions will have a similar focus on a Corp faction and a Runner faction.

 

If you'd like to explore what cards are out there and which packs they come in, I recommend netrunnercards.info. It's very thorough (even including revealed spoilers of as-yet-unreleased cards) and easily searchable.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

How different do the different factions play?  Magic put's a lot of effort into having each color have a very different play style and from what I've seen from Quinns on SU&SD it seems like the same is true for Netrunner, but having not had a chance to pick it up yet I don't actually know what different playstyles would entail. 

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

They play pretty differently. The Runner factions are probably more similar to each other than the Corp factions are, but there's still definitely a feeling of "Okay, I'm playing Shapers, this is what I can expect." This is emphasized by the Influence and Identity systems: your Identity gives you a special power, so you'll probably build around that; each Identity has an Influence limit, which dictates how many cards from other factions can be in the deck. This means that, let's say, a Shaper deck with the Kate identity is going to play a lot differently from a Criminal deck with Gabriel Santiago.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

So Cell Portal is kind of conditional and a bit expensive, but if you've got a couple piece of really expensive ICE before it, it can still stop a runner that doesn't break if it they can't afford to get back through again (plus they wasted all that money getting through). And if Cell Portal's subroutine isn't broken, it stays rezzed until its sub fires, which is nice. And technically the corp can keep paying to rez it if the runner encounters it again on the same run.

Why would the corp have to rez it again on the same run? Doesn't it stay?

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now