How do you explain this?, Creating Suspension of Disbelief for the SR Setting Options

[Stahlseele]

That's a pretty ugly, broad, brush you're painting with.

90% accurate though, as soon as you step out of the tourist centers . .

[Murrdox]

My only problems with Suspension of Disbelief with Shadowrun is Astral Space and Hacking.

The idea of Shadowrun I still think fits in well with a future Dystopia where Corporations rule and countries are mostly meaningless political lines. I think Blade pointed out many of the reasons why Shadowrun works.

Shadowrunners themselves are deniable assets. If you've been the victim of a sabotage, why would you bother hunting down and prosecuting the saboteurs unless it would lead you to the person who hired them? Unless you think those Runners "know too much" or that they might get hired to hit you again in the future, you're better off going after the rival corp, not the Shadowrunners. Even if you catch the Shadowrunners, the corp who hired them will just hire a different team for the next job. Then when you're sabotaged a second time, the board of directors is going to take a real close look as to why your reaction to the first event was so ineffective.

I think it helps remembering that the world of Shadowrun is practically post-apocalyptic. Billions of people have died as a result of VITAS and various other disasters. Some areas of the world are modern city sprawls, and others are burned out ruins. There are LOTS of places out there in the world to disappear in, even in the sprawl.

As I said in the beginning, my two issues are Hacking and Astral Space.

Hacking, I brush off as "this is cyberpunk". Realistically, hacking wouldn't be nearly as "easy" as Shadowrun makes it out to be. What a Hacker can do in a few minutes would realistically either not be possible, or take weeks or months of programming, social engineering, etc. But, we WANT to be able to hack stuff, it's cool, so we allow it to happen.

The second is Astral Space. Spells I don't have a big problem with. They can be worked with. It's the fact that Astral Space brings with it a total destruction of privacy that I don't think is evident in the Shadowrun world. There's no way you can have enough Wards for all the trouble Astral Projection or Spirits can get you. The Astral security in the game world is impractical to use on a large scale, meaning just about everyone's lives are out there to be observed by any Awakened.

I don't have a really big problem with either of these though.

[snowRaven]

Hacking, I brush off as "this is cyberpunk". Realistically, hacking wouldn't be nearly as "easy" as Shadowrun makes it out to be. What a Hacker can do in a few minutes would realistically either not be possible, or take weeks or months of programming, social engineering, etc. But, we WANT to be able to hack stuff, it's cool, so we allow it to happen.

The second is Astral Space. Spells I don't have a big problem with. They can be worked with. It's the fact that Astral Space brings with it a total destruction of privacy that I don't think is evident in the Shadowrun world. There's no way you can have enough Wards for all the trouble Astral Projection or Spirits can get you. The Astral security in the game world is impractical to use on a large scale, meaning just about everyone's lives are out there to be observed by any Awakened.

I don't have a really big problem with either of these though.

I wholeheartedly agree!

IMO, Shadowrunners get away with what they do largely because the police aren't police anymore. They're a corp. They're not going to waste resources anymore than any other corp out there. Because of the weird divisions in jurisdictions, the lack of local government law enforcement, everyone safeguarding their own intel, and everyone looking only at their own bottom line, the legal system is quite broken.

Joe Average accepts this because he or she has to - the Corp looks after their interests, or (more likely) no one does--so keep your mouth shut and your ass covered. Rich folks don't accept it - they pay for better service, and if you screw enough with them you're toast and you get to meet Bubba the Love-troll. The corps don't care because they cater to their own, and the breakdown means that they can do what they want - within reason. Shadowrunners accept it because, well, they'd be out of a job otherwise.

This break down of the system is the original reason Shadowrunners exist; both the black trench coat mafia and the pink mohawk crowd. They're just different levels and expressions of deniable assets, and for the most part it isn't worth the corps' money and time to chase after them.

That, and as was said - there is simply so much information out there that it's a pain to try and sort through it all. It's like searching google for the word 'fu' when you want to find a specific person with that name, only at the same time you are chatting on facebook, watching two newscasts, playing chess and word feud simultaneously--all while on the overcrowded subway on your way home from a very long, strenous day at work, being rubbed up against by a sleazy clown.

[Irion]

Hacking, I brush off as "this is cyberpunk". Realistically, hacking wouldn't be nearly as "easy" as Shadowrun makes it out to be. What a Hacker can do in a few minutes would realistically either not be possible, or take weeks or months of programming, social engineering, etc. But, we WANT to be able to hack stuff, it's cool, so we allow it to happen.

This is something I guess very few people have problem handwaving. Because it just works like that in this world.
More "indirect" stuff is not that easy.

[bibliophile20]

90% accurate though, as soon as you step out of the tourist centers . .

Agreed. Do an image search for "president of Zimbabwe mansion". That's how the guy at the top lives--in a nation where the per capita GDP is about $400-$500 a year.

[nezumi]

Backgammon has it absolutely correct.

The setting is dystopia. That means it's all broken already; broken for the runners, broken for the corps, broken for everyone. If you're a corp, that means your security work is sabotaged by middle managers trying to make their competitors look bad, computer systems which your techies don't understand well enough to properly patch, police who rob YOU, and a boss who will literally have you dragged in the back and shot for passing a negative report up to his superior. Shadowrun shares a surprising amount with Paranoia.

But I'll also say, shadowrunners are pre-eminently replaceable. If you're a Johnson looking for someone to bust into your enemy's show room and grab the prototype, you don't care if they die. You don't care if they're idiots. You don't even especially care if they fail. They're cheap enough that you can just toss 'em. And even if a group of runners is publicly crucified, there's still a thousand more dudes out in the barrens who are willing to risk that at the chance of wealth, underworld fame, tail, or just a chance to flip the bird at the man. There is no punishment you can invent which will stimy the number of potential runners, or even significantly increase their cost.

Corps hunting runners is like sniping pawns as a chess strategy. You squish the pawns that happen to be in the way, but otherwise you should probably be paying attention to the queen.

[Warlordtheft]

To take that analogy of chess further, pawns that can be replaced pretty much as needed.

[Rip the Jackker]

Actually, I think this somewhat ties to a trend from the last 10 years or so. When cyberpunk came out, it presented a dystopia. Whats a dystopia? A place where everything that could possibly go wrong, had. It is insanity and lunacy of a broken system.

By definition, a dystopia cannot exist. It is unbelievable. Systems do not break. They are tested and the parts that fail get fixed. Nobody would just let it go along, broken as it is. So, when you delved into cyberpunk, you accepted you were in a fictional realm where the running joke was "lets see just how fucked up things be". Players accepted this, and perhaps more importantly, so did writers.

Somewhere along the ones, the trend veered off course. People wanted everything explained. Everything had to make sense, all the way up to the root cause. In this symbiotic relationship between readers and writers, writers started writing less cyberpunk and more "logical progression", albeit a bit cynical. And if you try to go a bit creative and back into cyberpunk roots where shit just happens because it's cool that way, people will reject it as "that could never happen".

Soooo... Thats where I think we are. Shadowrun was built on the premise of a future that is impossible, which we slowly tried to skew back not something we think should be possible. It's not terribly cyberpunk anymore, because cyberpunk is impossible and dysfunctional, and people today don't like that.

Systems can break down, and have in the world we are currently in. Examples include: Laos, Liberia, Somalia, Sierra Leone, Myanmar, and North Korea. All of these countries, at one point, had functioning societies. They are all collapsed sinkholes now. There was no repair when the parts of the system failed, because those in leadership had "More important" things on their mind.

Now look at the Shadowrun timeline. Starting in 1999 to the present day, there has been turmoil, economic collapse, near war, magic disasters, worldwide disease epidemics and twice the world information networks have been destroyed.

Shadowrun is not "The Modern day with cybertech and magic" Only a comfortable middle-class upbringing would make someone that blind. Shadowrun is after the collapse. It is a true dystopia, with walled enclaves holding peace and serenity at the expense of freedom, while death and disease rings the outside. It's not "How fucked up can we make it?" The world IS actually broken. What you're fighting for is who gets to rebuild it.