“I want to play a werewolf but the DM says they’re overpowered”
Funneling all the monsters off into their own franchises with incompatible rules/cosmologies/vibes always struck me as a missed opportunity. A team of mixed universal monsters playing reverse Scooby Doo seems like a fantastic premise for an RPG.
I think the remake of the series tried to address that and create a standardized form of rules to allow a mixed party, with the obvious caveat that tonally and power-wise that still doesn't really work.
Ironically Shadowrun does it better, because there at least the normal humans can load up with fancy cyberware, advanced weapons, and weaponized drones although things like shapeshifters and vampires are still mechanically broken in a lot of ways (and that's before you get to how completely and utterly broken a mage that knows how to completely break the system gets, since they can spam absurdly deadly summoned spirits or just vaporize a 28 meter diameter sphere of basically anything for about as much as a single anti-tank missile would cost, and then there's the fact that you can do that with a shapeshifter so suddenly you're vaporizing huge chunks of the world multiple times a turn and also you instantly heal any wound you take...).
you can do that with a shapeshifter so suddenly you’re vaporizing huge chunks of the world multiple times a turn and also you instantly heal any wound you take…
I can't speak for any edition of Shadowrun, but at least in 4th, Regeneration doesn't work on magical damage, which explicitly includes Drain from spellcasting. In 4th, regeneration also requires that you roll for how many boxes of damage you heal, so it was no longer "i'm completely fine by the end of the turn", but "only" that average vampires and shapeshifters heal major wounds from assault cannons within a few minutes.
Back then, the standard powergamer way to ignore Drain was to get one of these medical drones that are basically walking robot hospital beds with a built-in medkit, put the mage in that bad boi, overcast everything so that the drain causes Physical damage and then have the drone immediately heal that off.
One of the 5e splatbooks included improved reagent variants that can be consumed to reduce drain by a flat amount per reagent used. So as long as you're stocked on those you basically get to fire off miniature nukes as much as you like, and shifters get innate bonus initiative for the potential for IIRC 3+ action passes per turn. IIRC the math works out to something like 2000 nuyen per force 14 (assuming you took exceptional attribute: magic and a 7 in magic at chargen) fireball to completely negate the drain, which IIRC is about on par with what a dumbfired rocket costs (guided missiles being more expensive) but without being outright illegal or requiring heavy barter checks to acquire. In fact, I think I built a character based around exploiting exactly that combo, though I never played it. A mystic adept with improved reflexes can accomplish functionally the same thing too.
Otherwise you're right that regeneration doesn't help with drain, though I can't remember if it's rolled or a flat recovery amount per turn in 5e.
Funneling all the monsters off into their own franchises with incompatible rules/cosmologies/vibes always struck me as a missed opportunity. A team of mixed universal monsters playing reverse Scooby Doo seems like a fantastic premise for an RPG.
I think the remake of the series tried to address that and create a standardized form of rules to allow a mixed party, with the obvious caveat that tonally and power-wise that still doesn't really work.
Ironically Shadowrun does it better, because there at least the normal humans can load up with fancy cyberware, advanced weapons, and weaponized drones although things like shapeshifters and vampires are still mechanically broken in a lot of ways (and that's before you get to how completely and utterly broken a mage that knows how to completely break the system gets, since they can spam absurdly deadly summoned spirits or just vaporize a 28 meter diameter sphere of basically anything for about as much as a single anti-tank missile would cost, and then there's the fact that you can do that with a shapeshifter so suddenly you're vaporizing huge chunks of the world multiple times a turn and also you instantly heal any wound you take...).
I can't speak for any edition of Shadowrun, but at least in 4th, Regeneration doesn't work on magical damage, which explicitly includes Drain from spellcasting. In 4th, regeneration also requires that you roll for how many boxes of damage you heal, so it was no longer "i'm completely fine by the end of the turn", but "only" that average vampires and shapeshifters heal major wounds from assault cannons within a few minutes.
Back then, the standard powergamer way to ignore Drain was to get one of these medical drones that are basically walking robot hospital beds with a built-in medkit, put the mage in that bad boi, overcast everything so that the drain causes Physical damage and then have the drone immediately heal that off.
One of the 5e splatbooks included improved reagent variants that can be consumed to reduce drain by a flat amount per reagent used. So as long as you're stocked on those you basically get to fire off miniature nukes as much as you like, and shifters get innate bonus initiative for the potential for IIRC 3+ action passes per turn. IIRC the math works out to something like 2000 nuyen per force 14 (assuming you took exceptional attribute: magic and a 7 in magic at chargen) fireball to completely negate the drain, which IIRC is about on par with what a dumbfired rocket costs (guided missiles being more expensive) but without being outright illegal or requiring heavy barter checks to acquire. In fact, I think I built a character based around exploiting exactly that combo, though I never played it. A mystic adept with improved reflexes can accomplish functionally the same thing too.
Otherwise you're right that regeneration doesn't help with drain, though I can't remember if it's rolled or a flat recovery amount per turn in 5e.
After Sundown does just that and it's free: https://github.com/thegamingden/after-sundown