The Great CGL Rumors and Speculation Thread Options

[Cergorach]

Even the most dedicated among us has to admit the emperor is lookin' kinda nekkid, right now.

*Looks at Emperor Bull* Argh! My eyes!!!

[Adam]

{later entry} I note with interest that David Stansel-Garner, Jennifer and Jason all bailed about the same time.

Jason Hardy is still with Catalyst!

[BlueMax]

Jason Hardy is still with Catalyst!

INDEED! Posting in this thread and in his native environs , the battletech forums.

Where I suggest you avoid. They take a low opinion of runners over there...

BlueMax
/I got friends in low places
// where we drown the marks
/// and the Star chases

[Centurion13]

Jason Hardy is still with Catalyst!

Agreed. I fixed the entry in error.

Cent13

[Patrick Goodman]

*Looks at Emperor Bull* Argh! My eyes!!!

This cannot be unseen....

[hobgoblin]

Amen. THis is one area I feel Shadowrun has been very "weak" in lately, and one area SR4 fell flat. SR got too grounded in "Realism" and the modern world, and in the process has lost some of the "fantasy" that made it such a rich, unique, and fun world to play in. It's slowly moved away from it's 80's cyberpunk roots, but that move has been more toward modernism and realism. Which I think grounds the fantasy too much for some folks.

i think i read a claim once that said that people need their real to be very real for them to accept the fantasy elements at face value.

[Centurion13]

This cannot be unseen....

It was no error. S' Okay, I hear CGL has some brain bleach left over from their own forums....

Cent13

[Patrick Goodman]

It was no error. S' Okay, I hear CGL has some brain bleach left over from their own forums....

I hope you won't object if I take a pass on that one....

[Method]

I note with interest that David Stansel-Garner, Jennifer and Adam all bailed about the same time. S-G is the former Operations Manager. At the risk of exposing my ignorance, wouldn't it be interesting if these three coincidentally happened to be the core of what was needed to form another company which could nail down the SR and BT license?

Well I wasn't going to say it...

[Dwight]

*Looks at Emperor Bull* Argh! My eyes!!!

On the plus side you now know why his name isn't Steer......

[Method]

i think i read a claim once that said that people need their real to be very real for them to accept the fantasy elements at face value.

At this risk of invoking the wrath of the topical gods (i.e.- Bull), I think this is true to some extent. If we wanted pure fantasy we'd play something else (like DnD). Part of what makes science fiction different is an internal logic that is sometimes missing in SR. I'm not saying I want a technical manual (because that would suck) but I think things could be done better and still be fun.

And to get closer to my point (which maybe wasn't clear, but in my defense *was* on topic): fact-checking need not be a drain on resources for CGL or a fledgling game company- there are plenty of smart people around here that would love to contribute, many for free.

[Penta]

Amen. THis is one area I feel Shadowrun has been very "weak" in lately, and one area SR4 fell flat. SR got too grounded in "Realism" and the modern world, and in the process has lost some of the "fantasy" that made it such a rich, unique, and fun world to play in. It's slowly moved away from it's 80's cyberpunk roots, but that move has been more toward modernism and realism. Which I think grounds the fantasy too much for some folks.

As soemone who's becoming more active in the freelancer pool again after too many years dormant, I'm hoping I can help reawaken some of that fantastic. Shadowrun needs to find it's voice again. And IMO, that voice says "Frag" and "Drek" and "Chummer" a lot. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

Bull

I'm going to disagree here. Maybe because of my age, but...80s anything just screams old to me, Bull. It's the stuff from when I was 5. The fake slang never totally worked or felt natural - the fake swears felt like false modesty even when I first read SR2 when I was 11. (I recall saying to my brother something along the lines of "I wish they'd just swear already.") Pink mohawks have always been ugly to me, hell, mohawks generally strike me as ugly.

If Shadowrun has changed, to me, that's a good thing...Because what Shadowrun tends to reflect uncannily is our fears. Sometimes not so uncannily, but sometimes in cases of "before we even know it, SR is screaming the alarm of a possible outcome". Usually, I should note, without explicitly tring to.

Re the Fantasy in what I'll judiciously call Shadowrun's blend of sci-fi and fantasy...All things can work, in moderation. I think bringing back the IEs would be a bad idea, but hey. That doesn't mean more exploration into magic would be a bad thing.

[kzt]

i think i read a claim once that said that people need their real to be very real for them to accept the fantasy elements at face value.

The readers/players are predisposed to accept whatever premise you are making, but it's a lot harder if the writers blow basic stuff. For example, if you are writing a story in Salt Lake City and portray the Mormons as pacifists who hate guns, and you also don't know that Provo is were BYU is located you are starting off deep in a credibility hole, so the rest of what you write has got to be astonishingly cool.


Holly Lisle:
"5. You only get one 'gimme' so don't waste it.

"In a world with magic, magic is your 'gimme' - the one thing about which your reader will unquestioningly suspend disbelief ... so if you really want to tell a story that uses faster-than-light spaceships, you need to drop the magic."


It's not 100% true, "Five-Twelfths of Heaven" is an example done well of someone violating it, but in general she's right and you have be really good to make multiple crazy things work at once. Don't ask the reader to accept too many things on faith at once.

[Adam]

Fact checking and other proofreading takes time and effort even if it's done by volunteers [which it has been, recently] -- not only because they simply need time to go over things properly, but then someone with thorough knowledge needs to go through all of the suggestions and vet them.

Volunteer fact checking and proofing can make for better books, but it's not magic pixie dust, and it's not "free."

[Enin]

I'm going to disagree here. Maybe because of my age, but...80s anything just screams old to me, Bull. It's the stuff from when I was 5. The fake slang never totally worked or felt natural - the fake swears felt like false modesty even when I first read SR2 when I was 11. (I recall saying to my brother something along the lines of "I wish they'd just swear already.") Pink mohawks have always been ugly to me, hell, mohawks generally strike me as ugly.

If Shadowrun has changed, to me, that's a good thing...Because what Shadowrun tends to reflect uncannily is our fears. Sometimes not so uncannily, but sometimes in cases of "before we even know it, SR is screaming the alarm of a possible outcome". Usually, I should note, without explicitly tring to.

Re the Fantasy in what I'll judiciously call Shadowrun's blend of sci-fi and fantasy...All things can work, in moderation. I think bringing back the IEs would be a bad idea, but hey. That doesn't mean more exploration into magic would be a bad thing.

And here we see the generation gap at work....

"Well back in my day...."

[Penta]

And here we see the generation gap at work....

"Well back in my day...."

...I'm not an old fogey, I'm only 26.(IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

[SecGuard]

INDEED! Posting in this thread and in his native environs , the battletech forums.

Where I suggest you avoid. They take a low opinion of runners over there...

BlueMax
/I got friends in low places
// where we drown the marks
/// and the Star chases

Hey, not all of us who live on the BTech forums are that bad.

[Dwight]

The fabricated slang had the same problems that drove the change to anachronistic slang being used in the Deadwood series rather than the real cussing of the time. Accuracy to reality, and the vernacular swearing and slang will almost certainly be different in 50 years, is something very different from verisimilitude. Plus people "knew damn well" (whether it was true or not (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wink.gif) ) that it was a dodge around censoring and weren't buying it.

Some times you can pull it off (see Firefly for an example) but ironically even there they are actual contemporary swear words, just in a different language. Most of the time it doesn't work, though. The path from today's language to that fabricated slang wasn't apparent, enough.

[Patrick Goodman]

...I'm not an old fogey, I'm only 26.(IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

But I am (relatively speaking; I'll be 44 in a couple weeks). I'm not so convinced as Bull that we need "drek" and "chummer" to make comebacks, but to an extent, I think getting some of the older feel would help my feelings about SR4, which are not altogether positive (though using real swearing feels more real to me...what this says about me is open to debate).

[zephir]

Dear Freelancers:
I have read accusations of "unprofessionality" in the CBT-forums, I think some of you have, too. I think you did the right thing. Your whistleblowing was apparent for any future employers when CGL had to make their first press release. And a good employer will like that. Perhaps you want to take screenshots of that press release.

I think you have shown a lot of patience and tried hard to find constructive solutions to this mess. I assume you did not press for payment for a long time because you thought SR was not making enough money and did not want to endanger the game's economic future. And then you found out about these bad business practices (nicest term I could find)... Frank Trollman's post was exactly right to bring this to light. Hopefully this will warn away the more intelligent in the next freelancer generation and punish these short-sighted business practices, in the long term hopefully getting the IP to a better developer. Some might think this hiatus is bad for SR, I console myself with the well-playable editions we already have.
Thank you!

[knasser]

i think i read a claim once that said that people need their real to be very real for them to accept the fantasy elements at face value.

Might have been me. I'm fond of saying that the presence of elves and dragons doesn't make realism less important in Shadowrun, it makes it more important. But kzt already said it better. A game setting like Shadowrun gets to say "this is our world but different bceause of X". If X becomes X, Y, Z and AA, then you no longer get to say "this is our world but..." You're just saying: "here's an arbitrary setting". That's my strong feeling anyway.

As regards this...

Amen. THis is one area I feel Shadowrun has been very "weak" in lately, and one area SR4 fell flat. SR got too grounded in "Realism" and the modern world, and in the process has lost some of the "fantasy" that made it such a rich, unique, and fun world to play in. It's slowly moved away from it's 80's cyberpunk roots, but that move has been more toward modernism and realism. Which I think grounds the fantasy too much for some folks.

As soemone who's becoming more active in the freelancer pool again after too many years dormant, I'm hoping I can help reawaken some of that fantastic. Shadowrun needs to find it's voice again. And IMO, that voice says "Frag" and "Drek" and "Chummer" a lot. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

Bull

I think I'd probably just get immensely alienated by this. I do remember the Eighties. I didn't think they were cool at the time and they haven't become more so by being a quarter of a century old. They were the decade when people wore giant shoulder pads and pretended to be moody. We got a handful of good music and a lot of tunes that sounded like a piano farting through a computer synthesizer. I wish I'd been a teenager in the 90's - they were much more fun. Yes, there were raves in the Eighties where you got to dance like crazy in a field until the police shooed you away and everyone was taking Ecstacy so a kid who didn't drink alcohol wasn't such a freak for once, but that's not the culture that Shadowrun was emulating. Cyberpunk is dead - why? Because it happened and we didn't care. Computers did take over - and we love them. Giant businesses shot across international borders and most of us didn't get crushed beneath their heel (at least in the West), we said "Woah! Job opportunities" and rushed to write our CVs. We no longer regard technology as some alien force that will crush our soles (well I never did, but that was part of the cyberpunk ethos), we think technology rocks and we look forward to how it could transform us. 4th Edition gets that - it's still dark and dystopian, but it's not all melodramatic about it. The Eighties 1st Edition Street Samurai is a bleak soul that has traded his body for intrusive technology that gives him power in exchange for his humanity. His 2010 4th Edition descendent is an superhuman parkour assassin who revels in all his cool toys. Cyberpunk has no edginess, it's just kind of... quaint?

The Eighties produced the Terminator movie and Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure. And Bill and Ted won.

K.

[Cain]

Some times you can pull it off (see Firefly for an example) but ironically even there they are actual contemporary swear words, just in a different language. Most of the time it doesn't work, though. The path from today's language to that fabricated slang wasn't apparent, enough.

What about "Frak" in the new BSG? That worked very well. Or "Smeg" in Red Dwarf. Both words are such an integral part of the show, things would go wrong if you replaced them.

The same is true of shadowslang. Love it or hate it, it's part of Shadowrun, and suddenly losing it hurts the game.

I don't mind change in the world; but it should be "organic" changes, that come from within the world itself. Things like the Arcology or Dunk's Will are good examples of things that change the world from within. Suddenly grafting a bunch of changes onto the world doesn't work.

[Dwight]

I used 'frak' before nBSG.


On Red Dwarf, that show was crazy over-the-top bonkers. A major cast member that evolved from the ship's cat? So why would grossly silly not work?


P.S. Plus, you do you know smegma is, right?

[Patrick Goodman]

What about "Frak" in the new BSG? That worked very well.

That was in the original Battlestar Galactica from the late 70s. And it meant the same thing back then. That it worked this time around and not back then is a comment on something, but I'm not enough of a linguistic sociologist to tell you what.

I don't mind the shadowslang, per se; what bothered me was the notion that it had completely replaced words that had been in the English language for centuries. I prefer real cursing, but I can see that there's a useful place for the shadowslang as well.

And we really need another frelling thread about this, because as many have pointed out, this is way the hell off topic for this thread.

[Stahlseele]

Why not Drok and Stom from Judge Dredd fame?
Also, how did Bill and Ted win?
Terminator had 4 Movies, Videogames and Books o.O