Only changes she made were limiting things that were unlimited. Everything else was pulling from the optional rules from Unwired. Seriously, how is it a major change to basicly have the technomancer just get the fading out of the way at the beginning then have to roll for fading everytime they use a program? She did that for speed of play reasons. It was already assumed by the rules that you would just keep rollling with the non-action for Threading, so, instead, she made it one roll. Since the optional rule from Unwired said that it made Complex Forms count like spells, it was just by extension that, if a Complex Form ended up higher then the Technomancer's resonance that it would cause physical fading.

Taking out the "Look! I can buy more echoes for 15 karma!" OPTIONAL RULE makes Submersion more special. Really, all the core functions are still there: they still use complex forms to hack, they still thread if they do not know the complex form they need.

As for the not turning off their AR interface..well, um, tell me where it says they can stop seeing AR? And, GMs are allowed to apply penalties where they feel appropriate. Your average Hacker can just just turn off their commlink or AR when they are getting bombarded by too much stuff, the TM cannot, without creating a special complex form version of reality filter that..clears out all AR.

Other things PCs can do at close range.

-shoot the person in the face
-totally mind rape them with magic
(I could go on)

Heavin forbid they not solve their problems that way

Personally I like the play elements.

Though I wish hacking was a bit more of a rare skill. Back in older editions the cost of a decent cyberdeck made true deckers rare things.

But again that's something I'll forgive them.

A1 should be struck from the list, the books are in the works.
A2 I don´t mind. It was cool when I was half my current age.
A3 Cyberware is not passe, quite to the contrary it became accepted. See Aug pg. 17. Only R&D moved on after so many years.



B1 The wireless paradigm... you are free to have as many old devices in your game as you like. Disabling wireless is in the rules, wired connectivity is in the rules. If this point disturbs you, talk to your GM.
B2 I´d love to help, and I´m sure there are others. I´d rather talk about rules application than be part of the current complaining.
B3 No issue if your GM has a spine, no issue if your group doesn´t like PC death.



C1 "Fantasy fluff": Diversity is king. Technical-inclined players will play hackers anyway. Balance-wise I have issues, too. Solveable issues.
C2 I´ll personally start from misunderstood semi-autonomous knowbots. As relevant to individual campaigns as IEs.
C3/C4 Ended plots and dead people after two decades - things change, things stay the same.
C5 Is not a valid complaint, because it can´t be addressed this way - too unspecific. I´ll also say that a good game depends on a good GM anyway.
C6 Flavour is IMO not a question of different rules. You need certain differences to be arbitrarily written in the rules? Should not be necessary, and will not really help if it is.



Some other points:
- Clustering is no problem per se, anything rules abuse will gain you there is a cheap nexus. Which can´t be abused outside agent smith. And that one can be fixed. Unwired is IMO a good book.
- The wireless matrix initiative is on pg.52 of Dragons of the Sixth world, copyright 2003. There will be a few other sources, but I´m not going to dig them up.
- It seems that many of the complaints might come from computer-RPGs. Rules and gameworlds somehow have to be fixed and exploitable (but that only to an individually "perfect" degree). In support of this theory I offer that hackers and mages and social adepts and samurai can all break the rules in their respective fields, but TMs are somehow considered the devil. It is hard to build a balanced TM under the BP system, it is easy to munch a samurai. Same coin, different side. C-RPG gameworlds permit you to play your favourite plot over and over again. Creativity is only possible within programmer-provided venues.
SR is not like that (fortunately), and people suddenly have to agree on a lot of things. Damn interaction.

What? The fancy superior elven nation? Never thought a collapse of it would be possible! (IMG:style_emoticons/default/rotfl.gif)

My biggest problem with edge is that

starting character with edge 5-6 > starting character with edge 1-2

Because honestly how often are you going to need edge more than 5 or 6 times. Plus your getting 5-6 dice instead of 1-2.
If edge (as written) is going to be that powerful it needs to be more expensive to raise.
There are lots of problems of one character being significantly more powerful than another using build points, especially when group skills cost considerably more karma than attributes but cost the same in build points.

Providing you can survive you want to pump all your points into group skills and gear (probably edge to as you will be way more survivable with an edge 5 or 6) and use your karma to raise your attributes.
If build points are going to be the standard method of character creation it needs to be more balanced.

Edge is used for re-rolls and avoiding glitches as much as for adding dice. Often the re-roll will be superior to adding dice anyway.

Plus you get something else for the BP you don't put into edge. That something should be fairly significant.

For those of you advocating we shouldn't have points to improve on and just need to house rule everything....

that is why I hate SR4 ruleset to begin with and stick with SR3. I don't need to buy a new rule mechanic just so I can do the work of fixing it myself when I've already fixed a previous edition.

(Which I would say is in large part due to inadequate testing as a result of using a brand new mechanic rather than improving a very well played and playtested 3rd edition and improving on it. I won't pay for sloppy mechanics even if it is my favorite game). So if you expect to bring more players to the game (and this is something which will hold you back from new and old players) then things should be fixed and not just come up with excuses on how players can fix it.

In the Missions games we play strict cannon rules and it works fine.

Then my comment wouldn't apply because you think everything is perfect. My agrument was against those who say players should do the work of fixing all problems rather than the developers trying to fix problems.

So far that seems to be far from the general consensus though.

Sorry, I should have quoted your entire thought.

I'm saying you don't need to house rule everything. The system is playable out of the book. In fact, there is an entire forum here on dumpshock devoted to Missions as well.

I then go on to state that it is the general consensus of Missions GMs/players that it pretty much works straight out of the book as well.

Concerning the new magic system, it was actually one of the points that sold me on 4th edition (combined with several other factors, mostly the new core mechanic- i don't have an elaborate set of 3rd houserules, though).

See, when i first looked at SR magic rules (in the SR2 BBB), my initial thought was "hell, that's quite...generic. A bit sparse, isn't it?"
From other RPGs, i was used to fancy spell formulae in made-up Latin, lists of material components, spells that where mostly available to specific traditions, relatively rigid fluff describing their view of and ways to work magic, elaborate catalogs of potions and magic items, long lists of demons and their domains, fundamental divisions between the sources of divine and arcane magic and in-game descriptions of magical tomes, all written up in mystical mumbo-jumbo.

Instead of that, i got magic as science.

Not in the way the white-bearded nerd of fantasy tropes, the traditional depiction of a wizard, learns his spells at some kind of academy, where pointy-hat professors graduate him,

But in the way of "science, as in quantum physics".

So, in SR, i had to first accept that people had a non-fantastic view of a classic fantasy trope.
Which wasn't hard for me, it was one of the things i embraced about SR.
Transporting such tropes to a postmodern setting and looking at them in a completely new way.

It perfectly fit that approach to have relatively abstract descriptions, to get a lvl 4 weapon focus instead of a holy sword of undead slaying +3, a Force 6 thunder spirit instead of Arjunoor, a Rating 5 hermetic library on optochips instead of the Almanach of Transmutations, Borbarad's Metaspeculative Demonology and a folio of the Arachnoid Almagest (damn, i have played way too much TDE).

Then, i nevertheless had to add flavour to SR magic in my in-game description of it.
How the spells looked like, what the caster did to invoke those effects, how the foci and medicine lodges where built.
It was okay to do this on my own, i even preferred it this way, as it was obvious to me even back then that magic in SR was something that basically worked the same for everybody and that all differences between the traditions where not a fundamentally distinctive approach to magic, but basically just fluff.

Seeing in 4th that the rules had finally gone the whole way to emphasize this was a good thing.

Almost all new traditions introduced in 1st and 2nd ed where just a different take on shamanism, local colour to the same mechanic concept, be it druids, witches or whatever.
It was okay when voudoun came out in Awakenings that it had a different way to summon spirits, but this part of the description was not what made one player in my group immediately stat up a houngan.

Path magic's rules in Tir na nOg already felt clumsy and gave off the feel of the magic system stretched to its limits.
What was presented later in 3rd ed supplements showed nothing but how inanely complicated and cumbersome the system had become.

This was the time when i lost interest in SR.
The compelling descriptions of Awakenings where gone, replaced by a metastasizing lump of uninspired rules that where as broken as always, but without the fluff that had kept me buying every new sourcebook that reached the stores.
It was not my game anymore.



With SR4, i felt like i had been given the magic system i had always been looking for.
Something intuitive and flexible that could easily be adjusted to any tradition imaginable.

Of course, there is no mechanic difference between a mage and a shaman besides drain attribute and spirit selection- why should there be one when they basically do the same when channeling mana from astral space?
Having fundamentally different, hard to balance mechanics for conjuring does not make traditions distinctive.
Compared to the fluff i make up for each of my casters, such a mechanical choice means nothing when it comes to flavour.
To create more diversity than you can make up on your own in RPing would mean to have mechanical differences between the traditions that go far beyond everything SR has ever offered.

Claiming otherwise is nothing but unnecessary nostalgia.
You don't need such pseudo-arguments to support why you still cling to 3rd ed.
"I have all the books and a working set of houserules" is reason enough to stick with your favourite vintage edition.

Actually, it's because the settings work perfectly well without updates, and sometimes updates totally screw things up. Star Wars works perfectly well without midoclorians and Jar Jar Binks.


The problem is that everyone got one within five years. After the Crash 2.0, new wireless standard would have to be developed, implemented, designed, manufactured, and marketed. That all takes time. So, we're looking at less than five years for total integration of every last item in your household. That's like saying that within five years, everyone will own an iPhone or clone, only more so.


Not quite. RFID was a big idea for a while, and Wal-Mart was considering switching to an all-RFID model. However, they quietly abandoned the idea. The anti-theft tags you see in some stores and SR4 RFID tags are a totally different concept.

The "Wireless Initiative" was in SR3, but it was far from ready. In fact, IIRC, it didn't appear until after SR4 started development.

The imbalance can be shown with the various character builds. You cannot have a starting TM who's as good at the matrix as a well-built decker. And with the fact they need tons of karma to raise their abilites, the other deckers will be getting better as well; raising basic skills and attributes while the TM is forced to raise their Resonance skills in order to keep up. And money factors in as well; deckers can always add/upgrade cyber for a quick boost to their abilites, while TM's cannot.

Oh, come on now; slang is part of what makes a setting cool. The new Battlestar Galatica wouldn't be nearly as fun if they hadn't added the word "frack!" Star Trek wouldn't be the same without the technobabble. Shadowrun just isn't the same without the shadowslang.

B1: You're actually not free to have as many old devices as you like. If the PC's come up with a plan that centers around a wi-fi attack, it'd be hideously unfair to spring an old device on them.
B2; The vehicle rules are a complete mess. There's actually two sets of vehicle combat rules, which are mutually incompatible, and don't do a good job of modeling situations that involve more than two vehicles, or mixed vehicle/pedestrian combat. There's also half a set of vehicle rules in the rigger section, which don't seem to fit either one perfectly well.
B3: It is if you're playing by the rules. Edge has a lot of issues with it; the "extra lives" thing is just one among many.

C1: As I said before, it's a game balance issue. What's the point of having an archetype, if no one wants to play them? You can't pass it off as a fluff issue.
C2: Yes, that does depend on the individual campaign, but what happens if a player decides to try to bring one into a game?
C3/4: Even in the past, when things changed or storylines ended, there were still things you could do with it. If you worked for Dunkelzahn before he died, you could switch over to working for one of his Watchers, or the Draco Foundation. SR4 didn't change or wrap up plotlines, it murdered them and burned the corpse.
C5: Oh, yes it is a valid complain. Just count how many times in the BBB it says something like: "Up to GM discretion." That means you're not just depending on having a good GM, you're depending on the GM having the same idea about the rules you do. The second half doesn't happen very often. Also, you're forgetting Shadowrun Missions. With the vast amount of GM fiat needed, you can't be sure that the same rule will be used the same way in a different SRM game, regardless of how good the GMs are.
C6: While I personally like the more unified magic system, it came at the expense of flavor. In SR1-3, shamans and hermetics each got about a page and a hlaf of fluff, describing the traditions. In SR4 they each get about a paragraph.


It should be, but it isn't. I'm not allowed to get into it, but let's just say that it's possible to build a well-rounded character, with 20+ dice in a specialty pool, who also has an edge of 8.

I played a lot of Missions games as well; and it all depends on the players agreeing to not use game-breaking combinations. I saw an Agent Smith army unleashed in a Missions game; it was ugly. Also, sometimes (fairly often, actually) the vast amount of "GM fiat" required by the rules means that certain things can end up being radically different between Missions GM's, even when they're both good at what they do.

That's actually the only gripe I have with SR4 - I can accept all the setting changes but only five years is simply not enough time for that! Had SR4 been set in 2080 or even 2100 it'd been more plausible.

But I guess the five-year-step was chosen to at least offer the chance to continue playing characters from SR3 campaigns.
Plus, at least to me Cyberpunk is decidedly a near-future setting. Advance the year to far and it turns into more general SciFi and severs the link to our present (and to me a Cyberpunk setting has to be based on a dark worst-case version of the present - the genre is about political/social commentary, after all).


As someone who comes from the German side of the SR fandom I must disagree. In 16 years of playing SR I've hardly used any of the SR slang. I must add that I've played almost exclusively in the AGS setting where using English pseudo-swearwords would've sounded even more silly than most of SR's slang did anyway. There's no need to use "drek" when the similarly sounding "Dreck" is a real German word anyway...

Actually, replacing real slang with made-up words in order to make it less offensive is in fact a thing that lessens the real-life connection of the setting, which, as stated above, is important to me. It takes away maturity. After all, it's a game about professional criminals with high-level violence as a common aspect but "swearing is bad, m'kay"?!
This reminds me of the US movie rating system where offensive language and nudity seem to be far more important than violence (here in Germany movies are primarily rated based on violence contained).

And BTW - the German dubbed version of BSG doesn't even use "frack". Characters simply use Scheisse ("shit"), the basic real-life German expletive.

I've said many times that I felt SR3 had too many various magic traditions and I think cutting down on them back to SR1 variety would be better. But they've essentially been cut down to one with very slight flavor differences.

Furthrmore, "Magic as Science". I just don't like that vibe. Shadowrun has always been a setting where magic is supposed to clash with technology, not where magic is another science of a new Star Trek type energy source. SR4 seems to be on a downward slope towards becoming mostly all cyberpunk with Dragons. Personally I like it to be exactly 50%/50% and I think the game has the most character with that mix. Shadowrun in all versions never had the arcane rituals like other RPGs but their nice dualistic magic system really brought a lot of feel to approaching magic from a technical or mystic approach.

People may want to play SR as a cyberpunk variant, but it will be a disappointment to me without the Shamanistic and ancient world conflict to it as well and I don't think you'll pick up any more old SR3 players that way. I expect you'll even lose some more as time goes on with that approach.

Why does everyone assume that the technoligy for a wireless matrix was devloped in less than 5 years? According to Shadows of Asia, Neo-Tokyo had wireless hotspots that were capable of Full-ASIST in 2064. That means that the tech was already proven by the time the Crash 2.0 rolled around.

As I said: Dragons of the Sixth World, pg. 52. The WMI was already getting under steam in 2063, HKB wanted to join in.

Sure rerolls, still 6 rerolls vs 2 (human) or 5 vs 1. How many rolls do you make in 4 hours (standard missions time)?
What I've noticed is say I'm making a human street samie, if I put firearms at 4 and take muscle augmentation (no book, i mean the one that raises agility) as high as I can and edge at 6.
Providing I can survive a few sessions My cost to go from agility 1 to 2 is only 6pts then to 3 is 12 etc.
This is the cheapest buy I can possibly have to raise my skill. By the time I drop 60 karma on this guy the person who took agility 5 at character creation will have a hard time keeping up. That is also 40 BP I can spend elsewhere.

What about descriptions of thaumaturgy classes at universities, first stages of manatech research and the like since SR1?
SR always had both to offer, spells that where said to inflame the target by accelerating molecular movement as well as taxonomists worrying about how to explain six-limbed vertebrates.



Having different conjuring mechanics (that are now also available to hermetics, as well as totems) made shamanism more mystical?

What made magic appear more tangible was the larger and better written fluff sections of SR2 (i agree with Cain here).
When i first read up on voudoun in Awakenings, i got a full glossary, descriptions of the loa that where as elaborate for each entity as the entire stuff on voodoo in SM, a nice overview of the metaphysics and so on, all written up in a great way.
When building the background for a santéro in SR4, i ended up with stuff from Awakenings, a wikipedia article, a novel by Umberto Eco and Perdita Durango, plus a whole lot of stuff i made up on my own, but next to nothing from SM.

The rules, however, work a whole lot better for him now.
The fact that a Quabalist has just a different drain stat and some spirits swapped out is not the problem, it's the fact that they had to include every tradition from 3 editions in one sourcebook, add some new ones on top and did not have enough room to flesh them all out convincingly.

Similar can be said for the other casters i have built in SR4 so far, it is never a problem for me to make them appear unique in the way they view and practise their magic, or to give their spirits a feel that is distinct and unmistakeable not only for every tradition, but for every caster, in spite of the fact that statwise, the iron-clad, brimstone-munching demon, the faceles, almost machinelike earth elemental, the benevolent mountain spirit formed out of the fundaments Apalachians, the mischievous, fox-faced kami of the woods, the aspect of Ganesa and the fierce, axe-wielding zwartalf are all the same (except for the fact that spirits can be easily customized at every summoning in SR4).
I use all kinds of sources for this, but the stuff in the BBB and SM is the smallest part that makes up those descriptions.


However, the rules have absolutely nothing to do with it.
Having different rules for some traditions, while you just swap totems for idols for others, does not help in the least.

About slang, I find the attempt to whitewash out all the modern swear words offensive. It amounts to censorship and I do not react well to censorship of something that forms a part of my culture and upbringing. As Warren Ellis has written, "in England, the word cunt is punctuation." Now, I may be a reasonably well brought-up middle class white lad, but I am also an Englishman and all Englishmen should know how to curse no matter if they are a member of the merchant navy or an assistant to her majesty the Queen. It is simply done.

It is also true that people react more imminently to things that have the same meaning in the real world. The less getting into a "foreign headspace" you have to do, the more natural your reactions and the smoother the flow of play.


On the lack of detail on Magical traditions; it would be impossible to be unbiased in describing more than the very basics of each tradition. Since there are tens, if not hundreds, of variations on each of the traditions described, I prefer that the door be left more open. We live in a world where Data Search is a vital skill, one should be capable of using it to expand on your character information should you want to, if you don't then any writeup would get ignored anyway.

Made it very technical, I have no problem with both systems. I have a problem that UMT means that "everything is really hermetic".



Both are true actually. Shamans and Mages aren't just different because one is all stoic and the other dances around, the seperate mechanics reinforced that. Yes, having voudoun, druids, ways and path, idols, etc all made it way too convoluted for the GM but cutting it down to one basic mechanic has really diluted it. But one universal magic theory? Too simple to retain the dynamic that was present between the different types from SR1. Sameness = blandness

Besides magic before had a lot of ups and downs to picking both Hermetic and Shaman that a lot of magician players deliberated long and hard before picking which set of advantages and disadvantages they wanted. My magician players still playing SR3 list that as one of their major reasons for not wanting to play SR4.

You may not like having a difference. I've seen people on these boards who hate having the NAN in any form at all and write it all out of their games. For me it is part of the essence of Shadowrun that you have ancient Native tradition given power and fighting back against modernism in the guise of heartless megacorporate power.

That is great, but neither is the setting of Shadowrun to me. Look the cursing in SR is nothing like "Catcher in the Rye" or the Warehouse jargon down at my previous workplace. Thing is when I'm reading Shadowrun the words used to evoke a setting so perfectly in previous sourcebooks. Now they jarringly make me think of Navy Sailors or Warehouse personnel when it should make me think of Shadowrunners. It is like my neighborhood Meth dealer is trying to write a script for Star Trek... it just doesn't work.

So go to Hell you Bastard I want my fragging Shadowslang back. Understand now, kk?

Once again, in a book that was developed after SR4 was already greenlighted. In other words, a retcon. (I also can't recall: was that the one that came out *after* SR4 was released?)

And the problem isn't just commlinks. The problem is wireless *everything*. Even in Japan, they don't replace their fridge every three years.


Ok, I'm not British, but when I watch British TV, some of it just doesn't work without the British accents and slang. Culture and slang are an important part of the setting. Heck, one of my favorite BBC shows is Red Dwarf, it wouldn't be the same without the British references and the made-up word "Smeg".

When the created Shadowrun, they created it with a certain culture, mindset, and slang. All unique parts of the setting, all of which added flavor. SR4 has (deliberately) gone in the direction of a global monoculture, where everything is basically the same all over, and the slang is just late 90's USA. That really hurts the overall flavor of the game.


As I said, I actually don't mind the open-ended tradition system they developed for SR4. What I do mind is that it came at the expense of flavor for the other traditions. They could have easily increased the wordcount on Shamanism and Hermeticism in the BBB; in Street Magic, instead of mediocre writeups on a lot of traditions, they could have focused on really developing a few popular ones, and given shorter overviews on a lot more. I think emphasizing how to build a tradition more would have been better.

/signed.

Why does every religion have to come with a magic tradition of its own anyway?
That cleric thing belongs in D&D.
At least, they did not give Scientology and Pastafarism magic traditions of their own (mentor spirit Xenu, anyone?).

I would have preferred more unique stuff, approaches to magic that have emerged in the 6th world.
Probably that would have been too academic, obscure or artsy for most readers, i don't know, but Fluxus magic, Freudian thaumaturgy, deconstuctivist sorcery, postshamanism, mememancy, that's stuff i'd find exiting.
Probably that has been summed up under chaos magic, dunno.

Fortunately it's so easy to build a tradition of your own when you have good fluff at hand in SR4.

Unfortunately, we don't have that quite yet. Much of the fluff has been sacrificed, in favor of showing off the new stuff.

Well, having to cram all the stuff from old editions into 5 core rulebooks and including new stuff to prevent people from moaning that they're ripped off for being resold books they already own or having to buy several books to get all of their old magic rules back can lead to that.

I agree that there would have been ways around that, but its an understandable mistake and it doesn't surprise me in the least that SR4 supplements have seemed so...crowded until now.

Probably they'll put out a more fluff-heavy magic SB like Awakenings out somewhere in the future?
I'd especially love to see good writeups on wuxia and chaos magic, that would be interesting and they seem to fit the new take on the setting really well.

For me, it's not hard to flesh out a tradition of my own after nearly two decades of gaming, enjoying fantasy literature and films and reading up on obscure subjects, but for kids who just get started on all this, it will be much more difficult.