Why does it always have to be a rule discussion. Can't it stay around the setting (campaigns-plots-locations) instead of the old Floating TN/dice pools/wireless bonuses discussions?

Rules are objective. We can mathematically show why a rule is good or bad.

Setting stuff is subjective. It's a matter of taste. Personally, I find the fiction for SR5 to be a mixed bag. I thought the rules presentation in SR4.5 was excellent. But everyone will feel differently.

Many will remember me as being one of the more vocal anti SR4 people, and i'd still play that over the idiocy that is SR5.
As for the setting . . that did not even change all that much in SR5 as far as i can tell.
So Boston is now a second Chicao, only with a different type of Problem. Who cares? Boston never got much of a write up to begin with, so many people simply never bothered with actually playing in boston, so this has, in effect, no effect whatsoever ono most people actually playing.
The only thing that is a real "change" in the setting is the . . *thinks* Insect Spirits . . Shedim . . Deus . . ok, no, it's only the 4th kind of mind control and technically not even that as it is more or less what DEUS was doing back in Arcology Shutdown already . . And of course, suddenly EVERYTHING that was produced using nanotech is now eeviil . . BECAUSE REASONS!
That is all the change that happened, because the setting simply did NOT go forward as usually for some years but is a direct continuation with some changes happening basically over night for no reason at all.
Oooh yeees . . Cyberdecks are back . . Because reasons . .
All the IMPORTANT STUFF happened before SR3 already. Some interesting stuff happened IN SR3 still. The Crash 2.0 and OOH TERRORISTS! BE AFRAID! WE ARE EDGY BECAUSE WE ARE WIRELESS! was neither important nor interesting and started the decline of SR with the advent of SR4 . .

Well a bit more objective because some like rules with an heroic feeling, easy ones, some realistic ones, simulationists.

But I'd rather take Stahlseele's option opinion on the setting than the 25th rule comparison thread. Not that I don't like such discussion. But those one start to feel old to me.

I admit that I have seen nothing to make me like SR5 over any previous version. I still think that deckers are a necessary feature if you're going to assume that hot sim means something, and that includes a direct wired connection, not wireless.

For analysis of data flow, see:
http://forums.dumpshock.com/index.php?show...p;#entry1272854
and
http://forums.dumpshock.com/index.php?show...p;#entry1272878



This in particular irks me. Suddenly turning something into a bogeyman where it previously wasn't is bad for coherence.



This one I can kind of go along with - the wireless matrix (as opposed to wireless turtle equivalents) was a bad move. However, undoing that bad move isn't enough to save SR5.



Again, I agree. SR3 was where things last were manageable in metaplot terms.

The trouble with SR4 and onward is that they seemed to shift to more spy-flick "realism", giving you more things to worry about (being recorded on a random pedestrian's commlink, milimeter-wave scanners that can spot all of your illegal augmentations, etc.) while still having character options geared more towards the original, action-flick kind of game. You can start out with a machine gun, but not a decent gun made with ceramic compounds (the Urban Fighter) or a collapsible one (the PSK-3 pistol). You look at all of the options they put out, such as exotic metatypes and sapient critters, and think "How could someone like this function, without being nabbed after the first job they pull?" I miss SR 1-3, with Ghost tossing a white phosphorus grenade under a car to blow up some security goons, or Animal breaking into a nuclear power plant by going truck-sledding. I like most of the SR4 rules just fine, but the setting has lost a bit of what made it so special.

I'll also add that, with the exception of the first half of Runner Havens, nearly every Shadowrun book put out for 4.5 missed the point. Hong Kong was absolutely wonderful, rich and amazing; but every other setting in the book was bland and flavorless. Ghost Cartels started off as a bloodbath, shifted and became Shadowtemps Intl., and then ended as the pawns of Groot's evil twin. Emergence was just bad, and pretty much killed technomancers as a viable player archetype. Dawn of the Artifacts really didn't need the Mary Sue. And so on. Even On The Run didn't work: it was a great GM guide, but a really awful adventure.

I don't know why, but while FASA couldn't do layout to save its life, they were great at metaplot. Like I said before, White Wolf cribbed off FASA's notes when it came to developing metaplot. Portfolio of a Dragon was probably the best metaplot book I've ever seen-- it was so loaded with plot hooks and ideas, I can still use it for inspiration.

5th, Stahlseele. Shadow spirits as well, although they're technically more emotional manipulation than outright mind control.

Why was On the Run a bad adventure? Sure, the listed reward was absolute drek even under the presumption of a milk run (which it rapidly wound up not being,) but it wasn't a terrible Run.

My players had fun with it. They kicked the ass of the Shangri-La strike teams, locked them up naked in a cellar and made them buy their own freedom with their own personal bank accounts (the Shangri-La guys had shot an NPC pubgoer in the crossfire, and my players were collecting for her medical bills, and were feeling vengeful; the mooks either paid up, or the money would be raised by selling them live to Tamanous,) annihilated JetBlack's team with milspec hardware that they'd extorted from the other Runner team (whom they provoked into walking into an ambush before the graveyard and took their gear from them in exchange for their lives,) talked the two old ladies into meeting up again, and told Darius St. George that they'd been hired to return stolen property, not to steal from someone else (otherwise the money they were getting would have been much higher,) and made him negotiate a major deal with Kerwin Loomis to get the disc, followed by getting paid by Loomis for the deal and an armed escort to Sea-TAC. And they still got Darius as a Loyalty 2 contact out of it (Pornomancer face; can fuck you in the ass and have you thank him for the privilege.)

They also stole the orc singer's commlink right out of his hand, the afternoon before the show, and he paid them for the privilege (and a truck full of devil rats, and a truck of regular rats to boot), as well as wound up as shadow partners in the new management at Loomis's pub, which I moved to a faux English Towne walled community.

I wrote an entire review for RPG.net. There's several problems, starting from the beginning: you're asked to find a disk. You're not given really any info about the disk, just that it's a disk. In other words, you were handed a haystack and told to find a needle. That bothered my players immensely.

The more general problem is that this module is decker-heavy, and light on magical events. In fact, you could almost take magic out of it entirely, and not notice. This is a bad thing for an introductory module, which is supposed to have something for everyone. The bigger problem I had was that we didn't have a decker. That made large chunks of the module unplayable. I hate using GMPC's, but that's what I had to resort to.

My biggest problem, though, was after they found the disk. In order to finish the adventure, they need to betray their Johnson. That's fine for veteran players, but for an introductory module, it's a piss-poor way to introduce them to the world.

And finally, the sixth world is full of unique enemies and factions. Megacorps, Organized Crime, the Draco Foundation-- there's a lot of in-theme groups that you could bring in to introduce to new players. But for some reason, we get a World of Darkness plot: a vampire did it. We're trying to make Shadowrun stand out, and they do a vampire plot. It became too easy to forget they were playing Shadowrun, and not Vampire: The Emoing.

As you can tell, I had a lot of problems with it. The GM advice was great, and it works as a guide to the elements of a Shadowrun adventure. But it doesn't work as an actual Shadowrun adventure, it misses the boat in too many places.

Having played in the Hong Kong setting for years (we are still there, for the most part), I agree that it was amazing indeed... And I actually enjoyed Emergence (One of our most interesting Technomancer characters came from this), Ghost Cartels (gotta love the Cartels, rat bastards that they are) and the Artifacts series (Frosty never really did much of anything because we were competent enough to do the majority of the work instead of her) - When you have an awesome GM, setting inadequacies (of published material) can be fitted to work out wonderfully. And we have an awesome GM. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

I do agree that the setting material has been on a steady (though slow) decline, in a lot of ways, since FASA, though.

I'd say that the old black and white art with cables and obvious cyberware and such feels much more cyberpunk to me than the modern-day "semitransparrent AROws everywhere" thing.


>relative simplicity and consistency of SR5
>SR5
>simplicity
>consistency

Not all runs are "Go to place, shoot it up, loot everything." Really, the adventure hires people to look into something which is ostensibly stolen. (It's not, but so what.) That of course means they're going to do legwork.




Gee, a task to commit crime in the year 2070 might necessitate a computer expert, who'da thunk it?

And really, maybe one in one hundred people's lives are touched by magic every day in the Sixth World. Just about one in one's lives are touched by computers every minute of every day.

Unless your Run is to head out into the Salish-Sidhe wilderness, a hacker is, in fact, going to be an absolute requirement, and you should've made this clearer to your players at the onset.e





Um, no?

Betraying Darius St. George is an option. It's certainly not the only option: players are perfectly capable of taking the disk from Kerwin Loomis, setting the opposing Runner team and JetBlack's crew on one another/evading them both/defeating them both and heading on to deliver the disk to Darius St. George intact and alone.




Hold on, you were complaining about a lack of magic up above. You can't have it both ways, vampires are, in fact, an Awakened threat, and something for the mage to deal with. And it certainly wasn't as if JetBlack's vampire gang were the only game in town - Ari Tarkasian? Sent Shangri-La goons and then other Shadowrunners to get the damn disk?




It was a great intro. There were opportunities to betray the Johnson for money or morality, there were company men and opposing Shadowrunners and hostile Awakened entities. It showed just how jaded and depraved the Sixth World has become, that people are hiring black bag men not over cases of critically-important corporate espionage, or top-secret military prototypes, but frigging music, and are all perfectly willing to kill people to take it from its rightful owner. There's opportunities to hack, opportunities to get your magic on, opportunities to fight like a boss. And in the end, it kicks the players in the arse by reminding them that at the end of the day, all their hard work, their sweat, their blood, their potential casualties and all the people they've left facedown in a ditch, may be for precisely jack shit, because whether they get the disk to Darius intact and alone, hand it over to JetBlack, or even somehow decide to side with Kerwin Loomis and make sure he gets his due for the disk which is his rightful possessions (as it was willed to him by his father, who was given it by JetBlack in the first place,) nothing happens with it. Nobody produces it or puts it on the Matrix. Nothing.

But they got paid. Hopefully.

There's a difference between legwork and "Quest for the impossible to find item" WoW-style adventure. All they're told is to find a disk. They *need* more information about this disk to find it, but their Johnson won't give it to them, and there's no clear way to find out. The clues to start figuring out which disk they need is all GM material.

Right, so I need to start a new RPG by forcing a player to run a character they don't want to touch? If no one wants to play a decker, I'm supposed to blackmail then into it? Come on, one of the first principles of good GMing is player agency: letting players enjoy their characters. On The Run is supposed to be an introduction to GMing Shadowrun as well as playing; do you really want to start that by taking away player choices in the characters they can play?

And "hackers" are part of the problem: this is Shadowrun, not CP2020.


Wrong. In order for the game to proceed, once you get the disk you need to crack it, which goes against their Johnson's wishes. That requires a betrayal. If they investigate further, or really do anything other than turn the disk over the second they find it, they're betraying their Johnson. Basically, half the plot *requires* that they go against him.


Vampires are a mundane threat, which anyone can deal with. Spirits are an Awakened threat, which require magic. And even though you can make the battle bigger, you're still basically dealing with a Camarilla plot in a Shadowrun game., That's not good for an adventure designed to introduce *Shadowrun*.


And that's just as bad. I hate "nullification" plotlines, because they leave the players feeling like they achieved jack squat. Making the characters feel despondent is one thing, but players should always feel like they achieved something. If they're not getting somewhere, what's the point of playing the damn game? On The Run had a ton of problems, and leaving the players with the feeling that it was all for naught was one of them.

Just to expand on the "hackers" thing a bit:

There';s been a definite style shift over the editions. SR1 was all "pink mohawk"-- you didn't run the shadows because of the money, you did it to stick it to The Man, and incidentally make a few nuyen. The idea of a "professional shadowrunner" wasn't really there: shadowrunners weren't professionals, they had other jobs and did shadowruns on the side. That's why the original archetypes included Rockers and Investigators-- they were never meant to be career shadowrunners.

2e started to change that. The first glimmers of "black trenchcoat" started to appear in this edition. More professional behavior was expected of shadowrunners, especially at the meet, but in other areas as well. Instead of being street-connected, shadowrunners now started coming from all walks of life.

SR3 was the best blend of the two. While the game still had a heavy street focus, the idea of a career shadowrunner really solidified. The opening fiction did a good job of mixing black trenchcoat and pink mohawk concepts, where you were hired to do a job, and kept it just business until you were betrayed-- then it became personal. Not coincidentally, this is the era when Faces started to become a popular archetype, as social solutions became more viable.

SR4/4.5 went completely black trenchcoat,. The street elements were almost totally removed, and now shadowrunners were just career heist criminals. For example, shadowslage-- it was the most colorful, street-based element of Shadowrun since it came out, and now it was removed entirely. Renaming deckers into hackers was one of the symptoms of this: not only did it destroy the flavor of the game, it changed the feel-- instead of being console cowboys on a futuristic matrix, they were just guys who sat in front of a computer.

SR5 has tried to fix some of this. Shadowslang, and Deckers, are back where they belong. I'm still not sure about the street focus, though. It still feels like they're running with the career shadowrunner idea, instead of people who have lives and jobs, and do shadowruns on the side.

Wow, seriously? I'm not arguing about shadowslang since 5e has discarded even "drek" and "frag", but hackers vs deckers in 2014?
A hacker is a guy who sticks wires coming from a small universal electronic device called commlink into his brain to go into hot VR and hack the world.
A decker is a guy who sticks wires coming from a small specialized electronic device called cyberdeck into his brain to go into hot VR and hack the world.
The difference being?

Terminology for one thing. The word Hacker and the word Decker inspire two different images, ones a real world term the other was something more niche.

The former is a basementdweller the likes of which populate Anonymous. Scriptkiddie was not without reason the derogatory term used in SR4.
The latter is a highly specialized individual with modifications and gear the likes of which the former should never ever be able to lay hands on.
Think Johnny Mnemonic here or maybe the cast of GitS if you don't know him.

A decker is a futuristic matrix jockey, who lives in the virtual computer world of Shadowrun.

A hacker is a modern guy who steals credit cards from his PC.

Decker is a term unique to Shadowrun. It's part of the flavor of the game. And when you use it, you get a specific mental image that's rich in history.

Look, lots of sci fi settings have warrior aliens with honor codes. But if I say Klingon, you get a very specific image in your mind. If I asked "what's the difference between generic warrior aliens X and Klingons", you'd just stare at me funny. Klingons are an integral part of Star Trek, like Deckers are part of Shadowrun.

Ah yes, I understand. Once you stop calling a deck a deck and a decker a decker, the magic completely disappears. Because what things are matters not, only what they're called.

You are being sarcastic. Or trying and failing to be actually, because, yes, that is, actually, exactly what's happening.
Words define things in fiction. So here i have a weapon that fires jets of ultraheated air. In my other hand, i have the WinchesterP94 Turbo.
In one hand i have a Detector Array capable of analyzing most things known to mankind. In my other hand, i have a Tricorder.
In one hand i have a glorified Flashlight. In my other hand, i have a red light sabre.
On one side we have a Space-Station/Space-Ship that was made for space only and thus does not need to follow any aerodynamic shapes.
On the other side we have the Death-Star and the Borg Cube.
On one hand, i have a smartwatch. On the other, i have a Pip-Boy.

Namegivers are Powerfull beings. Real Names have Power over things. Using a name already in use and laden with certain stereotypes and will mean these stereotypes get used on stuff you call by that name, wether or not that was your intention DOES NOT MATTER!
If i call something in a book i write a Bath-Leth, i will a) be facing lawsuits from Star Trek and B have people expecting a kind of science fiction bladed weapon. And it does not matter if i use the word Bath-Leth to describe some kind of toilet, people will expect it to be the klingon sword.

CHANGING the name of something that you have established the name and concept more or less completely by yourself is a stupid thing to do too.

A name is just a term like any other that you're free to define in whatever way you wish, as long as you use it consistently ("a rose by any other name" etc). If in the beginning of the novel you inform the readers that Bath-Leth is a type of toilet, this is what they will expect it to be at the end of the book. Similarly, once you inform the reader that you're referring to a runner who cracks corporate electronic systems as hacker, netrunner, matrix cowboy, decker, or whatever you want else, this is what this term means in your further writing, with all that entails.
And if you want to get into semantics, the classical cyberpunk works that are the chief source of inspiration and associations for cyberpunk pnp systems are not exactly shying from using "hacker" either. And somehow the term does not mean "a fat scriptkiddie who stole your card" there.

The term "hacker" has real-world connotations that make it problematic. Even if you're very clear about your descriptions, if you use a real-world term and go counter to it, you have problems. For example, I could use the word "angel" and describe a robot in exhaustive detail. However, every time the reader encounters one, they'll picture a cherub with wings.

Fact is, shadowslang and terms like "Decker" are part of what made Shadowrun great in the first place. What's the difference? What's the difference between a vampire and a Camarilla Kindred? Surely they're the same thing, right? Except one is a generic term that could be used anywhere, and the other is a specific term that carries a rich history with it. That's the importance of names.

Do you mean shadowslang or street slang? SR 4.5 had it in the core book, it was the SR3 core book which gut every streetslang table.

SYL

Why didn't that stop Gibson?

Right, and every time a reader encounters "Timberwolf", he's going to think about a canine with teeth.

Yes, shadowslang makes Shadowrun great. SR4AE Core even has a vocabulary on page 53 for that.
However, the idea that a slang in a group with rapidly changing membership stays the same for 30+ years, despite the vast changes in the rest of the world, seems extremely strange coming from someone out of his teenage years - and who, thus, must've had a chance to witness such change personally in RL.

Uh-huh, and a decker is by its very nature a term for someone who uses a deck. Neither universal commlinks in the 4th nor the glorified iPads of the 5th which can switch their Matrix stats around at will are nowhere near a cyberdeck from the 50ies.