And if this is real, I still want to know if this means Unwired is being pushed back and RC is being released first.

In one of the chats the Devs said they were contemplating having AIs as a PC option in RC. It might be prudent to have Unwired released before publishing the rules for playing PC AIs.

My point is that these books aren't all meant for shadowrunning per say. It could be used for all sorts of campaigns. Political campaigs, all dragon campaigns, high powered campaigns. Making all the books around one type of game doesn't allow for the world setting to be fully realized.

Um, no.
That's all!

Shrug. If you want to justify it, humans and elves have an augmented maximum Body of 9 ... 12 if you really want to push it. Doesn't really seem to be that much of a problem.

No, he's right. Shadowrun, the game, has never been only about Shadowrunners. Entire supplements have been published based on the premise of a non-Shadowrunner team (be they Specops for a gov't or corp, Yakuza or Mafia thugs, a Docwagon team, gangers, you name it). The rest of the world exists as more than just a convenient backdrop for Shadowrunning teams, and for more than just backstory seeds for individual Shadowrunners.

In some games, a Dragon can fight in just fine (no worse than your average Ghoul, Drake, or Shapeshifter). In your games they can't. Heck, in most of my games, they can't. But that doesn't mean the idea of it is innately retarded, or someone who disagrees with your assessment of them is innately wrong (especially when they're saying Shadowrun isn't just for Shadowrunners, and that all sorts of other games exist, which is in every way a true statement no matter how clever and lulzy you think you're being).

This sounds like something for a Arduin Grimoire Campaign I played and GMed in long ago times. Dave Hargrave (may here rest peacefully)got me started, talk about a Killer GM.

You usually had multiple characters entering a dungeon he ran, and hoped one would survive to get out. 100 hp technological heat rays/beam, are deadly at low levels. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/grinbig.gif)

I one time allowed a player to play a Greater Demon Character in AG, I learned my lesson the hard way. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/grinbig.gif)

If not a joke, not in my games.

WMS

Saying that one can Shapechange into the Augmented versions of critters in an interesting interp. Not a can of wyrms (pun intended) that I would want to open in my game.

But, even given that.

People shouldn't have to come up with interps and exceptions for the exceptions. The RULES should have that covered. They should not directly contradict themselves from one paragraph to the next. If this is real and this is any example of the writing for the rest of the book. We will be able to write a whole other book about all the FAQ's, Erratas and interpretations for this book.

Correct me if I am wrong: Shapechange makes you take on the physical stats of the new form, correct? If so, then..Dragons would lose alot using Shapechange.

I would also point out that requiring dragons to be Magicians is actually a limitation. It means you cannot have a Dragon Adept or Mystic Adept. We can, of course, assume they have an Essence of 10, and the standard 1 Edge of any creature outside of Humans.

But, over all, they really do not seem that powerful to me. I really do see the RP challenge to this: The "Phenomenal Cosmic potential! Itty-bitty starting skills!" problem. I could also see the reason to drop the Shapechange spell being when in a truly desparate situation(remember! when shapechanged, you lose any of your innate physical stuff, though I think a Dragon would keep their Dual-Natured disadvantage)

Okay, since it's Critias, I'll respond slightly more sanely.

It's like this:
None of those ever presented "Megacorp CEO" as a starting character build.
None of those ever said, "Here, play a Horror for 400 BP."
In fact, none of them ever made playing something a PC if they are tiny in number. To quote shadowrun itself, if 'most people will go their entire lives only having seen a dragon with their own eyes once,' they are not numerous enough to have build rules allocated to them for PC use, EVER. Edit: To clarify, they would be better served by simply having the GM work shit out with the player on an individual basis.

Or to put it another way, nothing says I couldn't put out a sourcebook detailing how to play world-class chefs in the 6th world, each striving to create the best steak while juggling their hot-rod romances and snorting enormous amounts of cocaine. But you know what? This is not a valuable concept for Shadowrun, the game. This adds nothing except an air of ridiculousness. It takes something that, on its own, can be interesting and thought provoking, and reduces it to the level of daytime cartoons. I have nothing against cartoons. I just don't want them in my shadowrun. The rules in the BBB provide plenty of ways to use any of these things as NPCs, so there' s no reason to provide PC costs for them unless they're directly intended to be PCs.

The idea is innately retarded because it's like making rules for sentient toasters and wasting part of a book on them. It does not add anything to the game, and drags the level of awesome in the game down several notches.

For the record, I think it's a joke.

That was terrific. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/grinbig.gif)

Don't get me wrong. I am not saying, implying, believing, thinking, or even dreaming that this is real. Just pointing out that there could be a loophole in the Shapechange rules that might be utilized. Personally, I would just add 1 to the DV of the Shapechange spell to increase the Body difference capacity by 3 or 4 (and then make it Caster Only to reduce the DV again (IMG:style_emoticons/default/biggrin.gif) ). (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

So, if there are rules for AI PC's in Unwired(like was said they were thinking about), since those could be in your AR toaster, you will make this same assessment?

In a word, maybe.

An AI and a sentient toaster are subtly different. An AI could be like unto JackBNimble'd victims - ordinary people who are forced to run as agents, perhaps residing in a humaniform drone body.

A sentient toaster, conceptually, is an AI whose primary aptitude and skillset involves making the aformention toast. I like toast. But I don't think it's very shadowrunny.


Doing AIs is a tricky thing, and often results in stupid. But not always. A lot of my response would depend on what kind of AIs were playable and what they cost, etc. Unlike dragons, we really don't even have stats or expected behavior to fall back on.

Now we have partial stats(the article ends in the middle), and the only behavior we really haave is Great Dragons. We do not know what young adult dragons are like. In fact, I would wager they are like a human young adult: they know just enough to get in trouble, think they are better then they are, and know more then they do, and tend to make bad decisions. Considering that said dragons would have a VERY small skillset? Overly specialized? Well..you know what Heinlein said about specialization...

Nah, there has been non-great activity in SR publications. We'd have to go back to 3rd edition at the earliest, probably 2nd - things like Bottled Demon, Paradise Lost, et cetera. It's not as common as GDs, but it's there - and frankly it's not terribly different than GD behavior aside from the fact that they tend not to fly over cities and fight attack jets or blow down Tehran.

As to stats, sure, we're missing half the article. But we have a wealth of back story and stattage in terms of Dracoform writeups for 3 prior editions, 2 fully statted non-great dragons, DotSW, Survival of the Fittest, etc.

For AIs, really all we have is the plan of "Go crazy, take over arcology, torture people" with a side of "Get carted around by dodger and smoke otaku when you get mad."

Actually, I don't, and I am a fan of his. (R.A. Heinliein right?) So, care to enlighten me?

"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects."

I think there's enough interest in playing Dragons, so it makes sense for Catalyst to make rules for such. It's not my cup of tea, especially not in my current campaign, but in a past SR3 campaign, a dragon would have fit right in next to the (non-compendium, full regeneration, NPC-rule) shapeshifter and the "maxed out on betaware, firearms in the double digit range" samurais.

Background-wise, runner dragons face the same problem as do runner mages - they need a reason why they are running, and not making lots of cash legally. And I think they could only run with "light shade of grey" runners, since the "darker shade of grey" runners would probably just kill them and sell their body parts.

Although I think if such rules are published, Dragons as a whole, including Greats, will become a lot more common, both in games as well as with regards to specialness. It's just harder to be impressed by something meant to be a god if one has been playing (with) its kid brother.

So, while I won't use such dragon rules in my games from what I can tell, I think it would not be a bad thing to have the rules, if only for the subtle changes they'll cause.

Besides that, it is also good for a GM. Say a GM wants to have a "Weak" dragon agent of a Great be the Johnson for a series of runs? Rules like this could be the way: "just build him as a 400 point character." Still dangerous, but not going to flat out blast the characters..and I think rules like that are actually good because they DO provide a way for a GM to gauge things. It also allows the GM to have an idea of the Dragons, and, thus, be able to make that one different from what the players, let alone the PC's would expect. Once something moves to PC rules instead of "critter" rules, it becomes more flexible, because, then, it has all the options that PC has, or a Prime Runner NPC has.

(As far as the question whether this is a joke or a preview is concerned, my vote is on "neither" - I suspect Catalyst is testing the waters, so to speak, to see if Dragon PCs are acceptable by enough players/GMs. If not, they can always claim it was a joke.)

I still demand playable Passions and Totems, for a meta/polyplanar ultra-powered DBZ style campaign. If we're going insane, at least we should go REALLY insane. Besides, playing a character that could pummel Verjigorme is every Powergamer's wet dream, now is it?

Or, in line with spirits: What about playable Horrors? They already are a staple in the world (The wraith, arguably the corpselight too), and since everyone claims 'runners are rejects by society and have to be psycho to begin with, what better place to fit your average Horror into than a runner team? He wouldn't even need to be paid, so the team could propably divide his share more or less amongst each other, he'd do this for the food he gets from all the runners' psycho killing.

And, for the record I am with Fuchs on this. The testing the waters stuff.

Nothing impossible for a tricked out and well equipped group of 15th circle adepts of the right disciplines. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wink.gif) Oh, wrong game. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/frown.gif)

I would be fully inclined not to consider this a joke but for one thing - if it were not a joke, I would expect a developer to have stuck their nose in the thread and confirmed that it were not a joke. Ancient History sidestepped the issue, you'll note, and Adam merely said don't stick your middle finger up where people can't see it. (Or something like that.)

I've been waffling back and forth on the issue, and I think that allowing these would require a very special kind of campaign, the same kind of campaign I'd allow ghouls and any other sort of meta-variant. The focus would have to be on them, and not on the runners (or, the runners would have to be something special themselves). Same deal with AIs, though strangely I'm more welcome to the thought of an AI pc in a regular SR game. Weird that.

But, having a BP system for them is *great* because I can use them as NPCs. I'm not one for handwaving (I'm one of those "I have to justify this" sort of DMs) so having a BP cost to them is helpful. This'd be the same for, again, AIs.

I like the rules, and I doubt they're an April Fool's joke, first it was released on the 2nd, and even the BT side of CGL managed to get the joke out on the 1st, and second because it looks too much like a workup of something that's a work in progress. It hasn't been proofread, it may not have been completely playtested yet, but it looks like something that's been thought out (thought, so did the BT one, to the point where people are planning on using it in games at conventions for the hell of it (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif) )

The third reason I think its real is because SR4 has been pushing the boundaries, letting people do what they want in the game. We have new cybernetics and genetic engineering that lets people do characters that might have pushed limits of house rules before, we have rules for "Jarheads" now and living drones, we know there's talk of AI PCs, why not continue the trend of letting people do what they want with Dragon PCs? It may not be fore your game, but its probably for someone's.

As for the rules itself, they look interesting, the drawbacks and benefits seem like they're varied enough that it should be interesting to play, but they're going to be limited beyond the standard magician fare for a little bit, since your skills are limited (plus we don't have the complete rules yet).

The rules as presented seem rather balanced, with starting Dragons quite possibly worse off than an equivalent runner in terms of abilities (outside of the magician bit). Do they need tweaks and some fixes? Sure. Considering the next book is supposed to be Unwired, with RC not out for several months, they have time for those fixes.