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Neko_Ali:
Ehhhh.. I don't see how one entire combat, much less one round could take an entire session in Shadowrun, unless everyone was reading the entire combat rules for the first time while trying to do it. Even then.... I assume it's hyperbole. Or people repeating second or third hand shit-talking they've heard about the system. Combat will take longer than D&D or Pathfinder... Those mostly boil down to two rolls. Either attack or saving throw, and damage. And you usually can throw both at the same time to make it faster. Shadowrun each attack is going to involve 2-4 rolls. Attack vs Defense, the Body and Armor to resist the damage. Plus Drain if the attack was with a spell. Once you know the rules even roughly you should know how many dice to throw at each step and it moves along pretty swiftly. The only time I've felt the game bogs down is dealing with Matrix combat.

With long experience in D&D 3/3.5 Pathfinder is simple for me as well. Naturally since it grew out of that game system when Wizards put out 4e. A lot of people complained that there were too many options... which in part is where my room mate's hate comes from. But I like player options. Because I understand that they are just that... optional. And when my players come to me with something that I don't think will fit with the game, or I think is too overpowered or something I have no problem saying no. Nine times out of ten though I have no problem with saying yes so it doesn't come up all that much. I would imagine my room mate would go along with playing, if the majority of the group wanted to. And probably have fun doing so. Especially for Starfinder since the 'too many options' isn't really an issue in a game with only one player rulebook so far....

Gyrre:
Jab this is all way over my head.

As for the question I posed for racial abilities, I think I finally have my answer.
Ghostwise halfling's silent speach: yell at braindead co-workers with zero evidence of it.
Air Genasi's endless breath : sit at the bottom of the pool
Firbolg's Speech of Beast and Leaf: have all of the insects understand when I tell them to piss off or die? I'm in!

hedgie:
We got further into the Castle of (un)Death last night, and things are not looking the greatest for our heroes.  The shadows were basically mooks, but the surprise attack meant a bunch of people got some con-drain.  We proceeded by some empty rooms (no baddies, but no loot, either), into a room where a couple of people started hallucinating baddies (if there was a gazebo indoors, it'd have been shot up bad), and as we're about to exit it, a side door that we barred got busted through by some female-orc looking thing[1].  Our rogue tries to talk to it in orcish, but as I've mentioned before, she has no diplomacy, and rolled shittily.  the orc looked fairly aggressive, but hadn't attacked yet.  Our archer prepped to let loose if she did anything violent, but I (foolishly) tried the diplomatic approach, and stepped forwards with my hands out to show that I wasn't holding a weapon and saying in orcish that we were sent to remind her that she was needed at the camp.  I promptly get charged, smacked with an axe and dinged for four temporary negative levels on top of the damage we took.  Thankfully, our more tanky people surrounded her and I was able to withdraw.  I didn't want to burn my better spells to take her down since we had far more to travel, aoe spells would hit too many friendlies, so I was limited to attempting to hit her with my retribution[2] hex and licking my wounds.  She dropped quickly enough once we were in position, and rolled poorly enough that only the archer and rogue got dinged by level loss after that first charge.

So we decapitate her and have the necromancer's skeleton pet put this energy draining axe into a bag of holding, and I burn a Limited Wish to restore myself to full strength[3] We start proceeding, and the archer notices a sound coming from behind us.  Apparently this orc was undead, had healed, and was starting to put her armour back on.  One of the clerics recognises it as a type of undead that only stays down if it is killed by glass or obsidian (neither of which we have).  We knock her down again, and I signal the group to back the fuck up, and drop "black tentacles" where the body was, and sent my imp out to break some of the mirrors we saw earlier.  I figured that if she did get back up again, being grabbed and crushed by a giant unkillable tentacle would at least delay her.  Thankfully, the imp got back before the tentacles ended, and our gunslinger cut her head off with a shard when she started to twitch.  Unfortunately, I didn't put the bottles of whisky that the female characters pass around when the boys are doing something stupid on my character sheet, or I wouldn't have bothered with the tentacles and just glassed her. 

Meanwhile, our rogue was missing.  Apparently, despite criticising the dwarf for running off down unexplored passages and checking things out on his own, she decided to do precisely that to look for glass, DESPITE the fact that I had told my pet to go to a known source and take care of it.  Thankfully, there was only one place she could have gone from here, and our necromancer sent her skeleton to get her, though by this time, she was a drooling vegetable in an airtight gimp suit.  We manage to get the mask off, and she's breathing, but with all the IQ and personality of a turnip (int, wis, and cha all drained to 0).  At this point, we're out of time, and we'll see more in two weeks.

[1] We had been allowed in on condition that we find the orc tribal leader's girlfriend.

[2] If it had succeeded, she'd take ½ of the damage that she dealt physically, bypassing her damage reduction.  Since she was whirlwinding, it had worked, it'd have fucked her up bad

[3] Since all three of the group's casters are potential healers, I don't think it's much of a stretch to say that we're the highest priority when it comes to healing that sort of stuff.

Neko_Ali:
*scribbles down DMing notes furiously* And people accuse me of being evil when I run games.

hedgie:
It was a pair of ghosts in similar gimp suits that did that to her, both of deformed humans, one a little person, another a "giant" that were doing the ability damage with a performance designed to look like they were trying to communicate something by pantomime.   it wasn't until most of the group was dinged by their ability that the good cleric was able to figure it out with a perform check.  I'm sure our necromancer would have gotten it eventually, but who knows much damage they would have done before that happened.  I think that for me, two consecutive natural 20s used up my luck, so I'm glad that we were able to turn away from them and shut the door, as it seems as though the creatures here are bound by whatever magic is on this place to a specific area.  This is helpful since we've mostly been having our necromancer briefly take control of whatever undead was around then the group running to the next area (this isn't a hypothesis, one of the controlled undead confirmed it).

Worst place is that my pet had to shut off constant detect evil and detect magic sight because both were going off like a Geiger counter at Chernobyl.  Same happened to the necromancer when she cast detect undead.  This place is seriously nasty.  Don't want to rest here, but unfortunately, our egress vanished when the necro lost control over the nasty in that room, so it means busting through a tower and some minotaur skeleton warriors to have somewhere to land, since it's dimentionally locked as well, I can't just use my teleports.

 I'll strongly push for this next session, although I *know* the necro is against it, since I was chatting with the player this morning.  She thinks that it should be a lesson for people to not just blow spells or 1x/day use abilities, but I think that given that one of our players is newish, and now we have a better idea of what's actually here, regrouping and better preparing would be better than slowly being ground down due to a lack of restoration spells.

Edit:  And it turns out that the reason the axe reappeared in the orc thing's hand is that it was a cursed item, so at least the second time around, she was without armour.

Edit again:  Neko, for the most part, he isn't truly evil, but does give us enough rope to hang ourselves and is good at exploiting a character's (or player's) personality.

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