It's not exactly lowballed in the setting; GM's by and large just don't bring it to the forefront of the games. This ties into the 'humans are underpowered at chargen' debate that was going on in another thread.

Why don't they bring it up? Who knows? Maybe they don't want it as part of their game. Maybe they feel uncomfortable using racist overtones, coming from a society preaching acceptance. Maybe it gets in the way of more dakka. It's certainly there, and is something I recently started trying to explore in my games by using Humanis for something other than pinkskin mooks.

The Scary White Supremacists are not the one with Swaztika tatoos on their heads.

They're the ones in business suits, without any tatoos.

Indeedy. The guys with the torches, you can turn the fire hose on them.

The guys with the checkbooks, they're a little harder to ferret out since the hose just rains back down on you from that high.

I see this is as being one of the MAJOR pillars of SR that has been "sanitized" in more recent versions of the game. In my mind the quintessential element of all cyberpunk is "Us vs. Them". And there is just not enough hate, fear and loathing in the more recent versions. It makes things come off as cartoony. Elves are dwarfs are hated because they live for so long. Orks and trolls are feared for their strength and size. Humans are feared becasue they have the political power and numbers (for now).

They have no good reason to hate corporations in the new version. The old reasons are just not good enough and we have no new good ones.

Race has washed out because the game is now PG-13 instead of R. It is not politically correct and not enough people want it in their game.

Rich vs. poor has kind of fallen out of favor for some reason. I think that it has to do with power levels. At the proper level of poverty the PCs have to much power. Money is too readily available.

I'm thinking it has to do with SR4 being the most "kid-friendly" version of the game to date. I once played a Japanese ex-Corp street sam and the players had a REAL hard time with him being an out and out bigot. (Others were playing Metas so I wasn't a full blown raciest as the game would have suffered.) I ended up having to retire him because it made the other players uncomfortable.

The last Ork I played got Rodney King'd on a traffic stop when he wasn't even driving. That was a bit before 4A came out - like I said, the racism is there but it may just be we as players and GM's are uncomfortable portraying it.

Ok ignoring the argument over conservative daydreams. This is a good point, I have a few kids at home and if the wife had a littter of 4 at a time we'd have 8 preschoolers. Now right theres your birth control, after a point it becomes impossible to parent dozens of children. Even considering a large extended family to help, your reach a point of diminishing returns.

Maybe thats why orks have a shorter lifespan its all the screaming kids and lack of sleep. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/rotfl.gif)

Or'zet-American rights!

And well he should..
Dirty Ork.

I'm running a Lagos street game, and the pcs are all playing humans. They live in the Z-zone surrounding Lagos, in semi-permanent shantytown style buildings. He's never even really seen other Metahumans. Orks, and trolls are known to live in their own sections, and there is active raiding into both territories. I'm playing up the African Extreme Racism, but with a twist. Because VITAS I had a 75% kill rate in Africa, and VITAS II had a 30%-40% kill rate. The old tribal rivalries have mostly died. But only to be replaced with meta-human hatred on one hand, and fear of Foreigners on the other.

Another small thing... I've read though all the editions of SR.. and I don't remember ANY of them saying an orc started breeding at 6. Now.. it's been years in some cases since I've read the earlier editions but if memory serves the orcs become 'sexually mature' around 12 or 13. And they enter 'old age" in their 30s. They surely aren't breeding out dozens of kids before they enter kindergarten.

Another point is that many if not 'most' orcs are sinless. They don't have sin's to BE on walefare so they WOULD have to foot the bill to feed all of their children on their own, and most orcs are from lower socio-economic standings as well. In short. They're poor and can't afford these geometric growing clans of mouths to feed. Much less when they're children that can't even afford to feed themselves.

If you look at it as purely a math equation it seems scary and astronomical.

but much like humans don't breed every 10 months once they hit 14 or 15, Orcs wouldn't either. Taking it all to that extreme is breakin' the common sense rule. In my games when you break the common sense rule you get hit with the rule book. TWAP!

It imply s recently as in the last 10 to 20 years I think. It's not long or detailed at all. It's like two sentences tossed out, saying that the litters are no longer being born and that there's no natural cause for it, so it must be artificial but noone knows how or why.

Poof. On to the next thing.

People are putting out a lot of possible reasons but I think Arcams' razor applies here. The writers probably got tired of hearing people bitch about it being some racist thing and 'fixed' it to shut people up.

Welfare transcends racial type. You'd do well not to accuse people of being racist, since you're the only racist here tying the idea of welfare to a specific racial group. I'll avoid picking apart your amateur analysis as it is well outside the confines of this forum's subject matter and you should have kept yours to yourself in the first place.

Oh, it's amateur night all right. I'd like you to point out precisely where, in the paragraph where I was refuting your provably false claim of welfare recipients having children to receive more benefits, that I tied welfare to a particular ethnicity. What, you can't find it? That's right because I didn't mention a particular ethnic group until the entirely different paragraph where I was using Latinos as a real-world metaphor for the fear of a minority of humans in the Shadowrun world of being out-reproduced by orks. I can make this analogy because I myself have witnessed pundits on national news shows warning of the Catholic Latino masses who eschew birth control and will populate the United States with their numerous children. I'm not making that up.

You think you can get away with calling me a racist by connecting two paragraphs on two different topics? You should have kept your bullshit crack about welfare mothers to yourself in the first place. I will not stand by and let people get away with repeating false damaging stereotypes like that.

You, on the other hand, by opening your statement on rapid ork breeding with your comment about welfare mothers *did* ,by inference, tie that statement directly to a fictional racial group. I did not call you a racist and no amount of cutting sentences out of my overall post is going to show that I did.

You're not going to pick apart my analysis because you're going to lose. You want me to start linking the studies and statistics that refute your welfare mother claim? You're right, it's outside the subject matter of this forum, which is why you shouldn't have said it in the first place. Now I suggest you back off from this topic before you get yourself banned for *actually* calling people racists.

Fixed it for you. Religion isn't need for kookyness just being human works 100% of the time.

As this thread now shows, sadly.

Yeah I ran a mercanary game in Afirca I had to can it as one or two players where really uncomfterable with it. I played it as it is now but with more racial tension due to metas. Some of my player enjoyed it the moral questions and the fact we all know we where just RPing. The other where too uncomfterable even though I warmed them at start up. I mean ercs are hired for ethinic clesning now do you really thing more racal tenstion wouldn't add to it. I mean it's not liek ou can work the other side in some of those cases as they just want the cleanse the one wanting to cleanse them.

I have them more moraly sturdy merc jobs but not enough. They had to make hard choices about who to get paid by and what for. Helping a corp heavy hand some resources or helping a nation fight off another all over ethnic issues. I also played on the impact of their actions. How hopeless tryign to fix the area with violence was.

Let the moderators do the moderating, that's why we are here. While I am discussing moderation, let me quote the terms of service and highlight a few of my favorite passages.



To be quite clear, I'm sure that our members who are hillbillies, who have large families, who are from Arkansas and who are conservatives are all pretty insulted by the attacks in several of the posts.

*blink blink* ookaayy . .

Or perhaps not. In any case.... The posts were definitely getting a little heated.

Well, some posters. I was personally all about the Sesame Street pun.

I truly think the portrayal (or lack thereof) of racism by metatype in Shadowrun is a problem rooted in sociology. It's not the systems, its the people running and playing that system. We see players getting uncomfortable when its in their face (which I hope is a positive sign about equality and all that jazz) and I think that's also translating to GM's not wanting to run it until you find those who have no qualms.

It certainly evolves the arc into a hooding campaign at times.

the current focus seems to be more
Leverage, the Italian Job..
Bad people doing 'good'

or a pink mohawk MadMaxx thing going on.

I stand corrected.

Oh shit. I mean, uh, sorry? (IMG:style_emoticons/default/biggrin.gif)

I have an evolving subplot about Ork rights with one of my tabletop campaign players that is getting pretty deep. They are currently in Vladivostok, where the state of the rights of SINless orks resembles some of the worst examples from history for indentured servitude/slavery/lack of rights. The protagonist player in this plot is an ork runner who gets involved in the Ork underground in every city he travels.

Agreed. My group, despite being all elves, are all militantly anti-racist anti-misogynist and take every opportunity to give the purveyors of intolerance what-for. It's part of the escapism and it is explicitly tied to their personal beliefs. They can play a character in a fictional dystopia where they have the personal resources to take a stand. Not a very convincing stand, being one small group of shadowrunners, no matter how personally bad-assed. I can understand that not everyone might want to explore the racism theme in SR by having their characters fighting it. I don't claim to understand the appeal of playing an overtly racist character but I fully support it if its in the service of telling a tale of redemption or as part of a cautionary tale, or other similar archetypes.