The mood of SR4, how the mood of the game has changed. Options

[Alexandru]

I just finished SR4 a few hours ago, and I must say I am a fan. I used to run alot of sr2 games but my current group never got into the super drawn out complicated rules of the old versions. My group is mostly 19-22 year old girls, and they are big fans of story and killing shit really quickley. I like that I can now actually have one of them be a hacker without takeign 6hours of playtime.


But I sorta derailed myself. My favorite part of SR4 is the updated theme/mood of this future. Its no longer the future of the 80s(totall recall, robocop, etc.) but the future of the 2000s. I love the New Matrix, its all pervasive and privacy is limited. Everything is open, there is alwasy somebody watching you. The true monster of the Shadowrun future is not wonky monsters, crazy gangs, or seedy criminals. The evil is all pervasive corporations, sleek and powerful, without and checks and balances to their schemes. I like that in a world that is compleatley controled, all info is avaliable, you are a entetiy of our corporate job, shadowrunners are the ones that still hold on to a ounce of identity. Of course the irony is, that every runner works for money, money that comes from these corporations. Money that they plan on useing to eventually retire and join this system. Because in the end, nobody wants to live day to day, on the run without tangible assets forever.

[SL James]

...

I'm sorry. I'm still stuck on the idea of a SR group of 19-22 year old girls who like killing people.

But the corps were always the biggest threats. Everything else was icing.

[Alexandru]

I have to admit, my group of "gamer geeks" is a wee bit different than the typical sterotype. So Ill give a little background.

I got into the whole rp thing back when I was in middle school so 13-14yold, Im 22 now. My friends were big into White Wolf(Vampire, Werewolf) and also alot of Shadowrun(sr2, and I had alot of he adventures like paradise lost etc.

Well by highschool everybody split up, was too cool for rp etc. One summer, being stuck indoors due to lack of money, only one car etc. I dediced to introduce my gf, her sister, and a mutual friend to some rp. Started with old school dnd and than WW. To my surprise they became addicted to the whole rp thing, demanding to play a game like everyother day. They also made quite the bloodthirsty group. I expected the games to be toned down on the bloodshed and murder, but I guess girls have the same murderous streak as adolecent boys.

Either way, rp became quite our hobby, and we continued it together well into me moveing out and haveing my own place.

Reacently, I havent run a game, due to jobs, lots of school, and lack of people. I have been getting my rp fix from a local larp of vampire. But that died also after a few years. That gf of mine, now a ex but still a friend called me up demanding I set up a new game. So I have decided on SR4, being my all time favorite setting.

So yeah, my group consists of 3 girls ages 19-20, myself, and a bf of one of the girls. Gonna be a interesting group.

My ex-gf who demanded and set up the game official quote when she told me she wants to rp was.

"Ok lets play a rp game now, I want lots of killing and I better be able to hack shit up !"

[FrostyNSO]

Wasn't there another thread about this? It went something like:

"The chicks. I'm in it for the chicks."

:grinbig:

[Alexandru]

[FrostyNSO]

LOL! Guess you are new here. At least we havn't started talking about gas vs. electric stoves in this thread yet. ;)

[Grinder]

[stevebugge]

[Lord Ben]

This thread is useless without pictures.

[Alexandru]

QUOTE=Lord Ben,Jan 2 2006, 01:10 PM] This thread is useless without pictures. [/QUOTE]
Just cuz they will never ever most likley hopefully see these forums. I did accidentally open this can of worms.

My Street Samurai who wants to kill shit

thats the "let me kill shit one"

and this is the other, my current gf.. pictures are sorta myspace dramatic

GF is playing some ex joygirl mage.
hmmm pictures sorta suck, but I am at work right now.

And here I am

The one and only Gamemaster... me

[Taki]

Nice picture ... Your table surely hasn't a standard setting !
Lol :D
And who is the blond girl smocking cigarillos ???

- I love those highly protected picture photo albums -

[Alexandru]

[Taki]

It is not !
Look : http://photobucket.com/albums/v609/SCleland/

Edit : By the way can you please explain "step sister" - I wouldn't rely on babelfish translation for this one !!!

[Alexandru]

Hmmm.. lets see.. step sister. Its non-biological sister from a parents second marrige.

[Bullet Raven]

[Darkness]

[SL James]

I'll just repost what I wrote earlier since no one seems to have read the goddamn thing in that thread:

Well, it might also be wise to consider that the perspective of the population was when Gibson was writing his books and when Cyberpunk 2020 and Shadowrun were being developed, and also consider that the fact that Fanpro Germany has any role in the development process along with a sea-change of perspectives in the authorship of Shadowrun books would inevitably lead to a conclusion that the thematic elements and tone of the setting will change as they stories change. To make a not-so-distant leap, it's like how Transformers is now written by people who watched the she as kids in the 80s. There were major socioeconomic themes evident in that cyberpunk which is evident in SR1 and parts of SR2, but which declined steeply with the release of the Germany SB and effectively died with Nigel Findley's passing and Dowd's moving on to Microsoft; and these are very American-centric themes at work which helped define the elements of Gibsonesque cyberpunk that aren't present elsewhere and which are so glaringly absent from books like Germany that is why some people (myself included) don't consider it cyberpunk at all (and more, frankly, cartoonish).

Consider when the sprawl trilogy was written in 1984. The United States had for several seemingly-unending years seen a simultaneous economic decline since the early 1970s, and especially made harder in the early 1980s under Reagan when the books were written combined with a massive increase in violent street crime with more advanced weaponry and fueled in much part by the increase in the drug trade which had been prior to that kept under control. The late 70s and early 80s were in effect a perfect storm of calamitous events which helped foster the overall depressing theme of cyberpunk of massive unemployment, massive amounts of violent crime, breakdown of inner cities, a right-wing sea change in the government which gave up on the War on Poverty and began cracking down on those same people with the War on Drugs, and all on top of massive inflation (a 20% interest rate on a mortgage and $2.00/gallon in 1982 dollars is a Bad Thing™). The Regan Revolution isn't just a cute term, it was a massive change in the direction of government leading to all manner of right-wing policies from deregulation to states' rights that we now take for granted but which at the time were novel and uncomfortable.

And of course this isn't even factoring in the Japanese threat (and I do use the word threat in all of its meanings. Books were written on the possiblility/inevitability of armed conflict). Japan was at the same time experiencing a prospering economy, it was buying out or buying up large parts of the western US, corps were expanding with no apparent limit in sight bringing a whole new management and organizational structure with them, and at the same time many old-fashioned and some particularly old American companies were being forced out of business by this horrible economy and/or because the Japanese were more efficient or just plain better producers.

Not to mention that the idea of extraterritoriality and massive corporate power were only beginning to be felt in the early 1980s in the US and Britain under Reagan and Thatcher combined with privatization of industries and the elimination and reduction of the scope of government oversight over economic actors. We take for granted how massive and powerful corporations in 2005 are, but in 1984 they weren't nearly as powerful and combined with deregulation and the japanese threat was the sight of Japanese corps which manifested a whole new level of market and social control encroaching onto the United States economy with freedom that had henceforth been unheard of in the United States. And while western Europe was seeing a marked increase in the power of Green parties, environmental regulations just put into place in 1972-73 were being rolled back and the environmental status of the US was falling back to where it was before the EPA was created. When Three Mile Island occurred, there was no rollback of exiting nuclear power plants. There have just not been any new plants built in the last few decades. How many people here are even old enough to remember the frequency of the term "acid rain" in the news?

At the same time, there was a technology revolution with the introduction of the personal computer into the business world in the late 1970s, which was more readily (or at least seemingly) integrated by the Japanese compared to their more conservative American counterparts (wonder why the only American mega until Novatech was into Macrotech and considered weak on the Matrix?). There were also considerable other advances in consumer electronics from the Walkman to the presence of ATMs which become more noticeable and noticeably more... Asian ... at the same time to help give off that impression of Japanese tech dominance (because it wasn't an impression, it was the truth).

Combined with that, this was when Mexican and other American illegal immigration increased tremendously during the 1980s even though the US had been attempting to curb it since the mid-1960s with worker programs, and when the Mexican border became nearly (as opposed to mostly now) militarized due to the drug trade, and when the government also instituted a War on Crime which involved longer sentences, more enforcement, and a further militarization of police with the introduction of more SWAT units following LAPD's example of using them more and more often to literally block off and raid whole neighborhoods in South Central L.A. (One particularly amusing incident involved Nancy Reagan watching this go down and even patting down suspects in her LAPD windbreaker).

On top of all of this, you had white flight and the proliferation of gated communities and de facto segregation (there was actually a tipping point of blacks when a community would then begin to experience white flight; it was ~20% of the neighborhood) which further increased the social stratification along economic and racial lines; a social trend which had no comparable equivalent anywhere else in the world. Again, people take for granted what was happening at the time with the income gap growing ever larger and the increase in the numbers of millionaires and billionaires at the expense of wage growth for an increasing number of Americans. The rich got richer and the poor got poorer (between wage stagnation and cuts in social programs) and that was novel as well.

The time in which all this happened (about 1984) was a perfect storm of all sorts of horrible shit coming together in the United States that wasn't happening anywhere else in the world when Gibson was writing his novels (Reagan and Thatcher were as far to the hard right as could be imagined at the time compared to western Europe). So, naturally with a different temporal and geographic perspective, it's natural to see a shift in the perspectives of the themes and tone of Shadowrun as a new generation of authors, including a marked increase in non-Americans (from 0 to ... more) with no actual experience leads to considerably different setting being created now than was created for release in 1989.

Anyway, compare that situation with 1998-2000 and the tone and theme of the SR3 sourcebooks or SR4 in 2005 where the cyberpunk aspects cannot be reconciled with the fact that Neuromancer was a cultural zeitgeist for its time because it reflected many of the themes present in society. How could SR3 capture that in the late 90s (and since?)? Everything seems fine, mostly because we just got used to it, but also because most of the social shifts which occurred in the early-mid 80s have been toned down and replaced by other factors such as the collapse of the Japanese economy and the bubble bursting on their real estate (which won't be as severe here when it happens in 2006-07), the dotcom explosion and the significant improvement of the US economy combined with stupifyingly low energy and transportation costs, rapid decreases in other costs, increases in American worker productivity unmatched anywhere, commonplace technological changes and innovations, and the rise of European and Korean (mostly them now) corporations in advancing technology, most favored nation status with China and competition with India and the conflict over high-tech worker immigration and outsourcing, and the current political climate where everyday surveillance by private actors is ubiquitous and by government is being accepted as the cost of doing business while corporations remain large and relatively uninteresting to the average person while the left-wingers are virtually eliminated from public discourse and scattered to the wind amongst innumerable pet causes. If Neuromancer was released today, no one would care. That's what made it so influential for it's time, and instead of remaining in that perpetual state Shadowrun has moved on in its cyberpunk motif to attempt to reflect the cultural zeitgeist of 2005 rather than remaining stuck in 1984/1989, and in doing so minimizes or omits many of the very aspects of cyberpunk which were crucial in setting the tone in prior editions for, for lack of a better word, complacent shadows.

[Darkness]

Don't worry. I read it (twice that is :) ). And i think you are right on target with your analysis.

[Taki]

Thanks Alexandru !

For the mood I must admit I really like most of the SR4 version. Technology seems less stupid.
Even 5 (10 ?) years ago the limit of memory in sr3 computers (one hour of video on a normal computer in 2060) didn't fit in. Thanksfully the matrix is wireless and so on ...

For the person that ask : I want to play sr4, but in 2055 what changes should I do to the settings ?
I would say : change only the background, but keep the technology (after all, in reality, the it. network will be wireless in the cities long before that).

Have fun playing anyway and good night :)

[Alexandru]

SL James excellent post, I apologize for not haveing the time to find it in other places. I just discovered these forums a few days ago.

The Shadowrun game has been around for what, 16 years now. Some of the current technology we have now in 2006 would amaze one of the writers back in 1989.

The issue is should Shadowrun keep stricktly to cyberpunk roots or adapt and make more sense with modern reality. I prefer the ever adaptable world and concepts. I find oppression from corporations is more palatable if the world isint that bad, give people what they want, even if its crap with one hand while limiting their rights makeing them slaves with the other. Thats the real scary possible future. True dictators ruleing over oppressed people is the thing of the 20th century, even with the holdouts we have today, it will be a archaic idea. True controll will lie in the hands of the hidden controllers of a complacent middleclass. Give em trid, simsense, all the shopping and entertainment they want, make their addiction lifestyle dependant in being your corporate slave, and you control the majority of the population with product alone. You wont even have to lift a finger. Thats our reality, and thats what the future will hold.

[Darkness]

I totally agree on this one.

[Bullet Raven]

[SL James]

Yeah, anyway Shadowrun isn't cyberpunk except in the most tangential sort of way, and hasn't been for a long time. That's fine. Call it post-cyberpunk or whatever, but calling it "where cyberpunk meets magic" (SR4, 16) is pretty blatant misrepresentation. Like I was just telling the folks in chat on Shadowland, "That's why Gibson is so famous. It's not because he's good, it's because he did the best job of summing up and extrapolating the whole swirling shitstorm that the US had been in for the last decade."

Shadowrun is extrapolating current world events, adding some mega intrigue and magic, and pawning it off as the successor to a game which was CP + magic. The problem with doing that is that the world changes, and the more I know about early SR1 and SR2 flavor the more they got it right with respect to RL and how much things written in the last five years, because they are so contingent on just ripping off RL (I once called Fanpro-era SR "Law & Order: Shadowrun" because it has the same ripped-from-the-headlines feel to it) that when RL does change, it's going to look just as archaic and cliche as cyberpunk SR did, only worse because it's built on a foundation of cliche rather than a good extrapolation of events from a time frame and sociopolitical perspective (which is why American cyberpunk is so much better, frankly, than other attempts at it) where Neuromancer wasn't just a piece of fiction, it was the fictional expression of the logical extension of what was a continuous decline of civilization (as Robert Bork called it, Slouching Towards Gommorha). SR4 looks, to me, almost indistiguishable from 2005 on a microcosmic level, which isn't creative or novel. It is, frankly, lazy and weak.

But at least it's easier to add your own flavor to the considerable gaps left in the book and for the forseeable future. Just visit any of the Gawker media websites, add the word "meta" or a specific variant, or "magic" and voila, instant setting.

[FrostyNSO]

[Guest_MK Ultra_*]

@SLJ
I am totaly on your side! I was unabled to get a feeling for the SR4-Setting ever since it came out, just could not put my finger on it. Now I think, I know why, thnx to you :nuyen: :nuyen: :nuyen: Also a very exhaustive and comprehensive analysis. I appreciate your work (in both threads) ;)
Not that I do not like the new rules, I think thay are great! Not that there is no room left for house rules, mind you :D

@Alexandru
Thanx for Your POV! Helped to aleviate my problem as stated above, at least a bit. (and for nurturing my fantasies about "roleplaying" with a group of girles ;) )

But what can we do about it (the mood not the girles)? Maby focus a bit more on the oldschool-SR social elements, while keeping the new tech & rules.

Edit: For myselfe, part of my problem with SR4-mood/setting lies with the mainly IMHO "not so good" illustrations!

Go Borg :cyber: