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> Obsolescence is the name of the game
Ombre
post Sep 12 2004, 08:30 AM
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As I said on another post, I think that obsolescence is what the cyberpunk genre is all about...
considering the world we live in, it's not hard to envision what 2060s life will be as far as technological progress and fads are concerned.
In this fast-forward consumer society, the lifespan of any new product be it a rock band, a new European sportscar or your latest piece of wizzer cyberware should be like the proverbial 15 minutes...
People, and thus player character should feel this race against obsolescence acutely (and painfully).
Staying at the top of the shadowpile should be almost impossible on the long run: it 's a bit like computers today.
As soon as MeatGrinder the streetsam gets out of his favourite chopshop bragging about his new SOTA Transys Neuronet set of Skillwires, he hears about the latest Yamatetsu Prodigy Skillwire system and two months later he will meet runners sporting systems that send his to the junkyard...

Besides, all the techtoys (or magic breakthroughs for that matter) shouldn't end up in the players hands as soon as the gamemaster buys the latest SOTA book. Things should be introduced progressively in order for the players to get the hang of the technology curve.
Introduce the smartlink II system and the Ares predator 3 and let a few weeks/months pass before showing on the BattleChannel Ares troops equiped with the n,ew Ares Alpha combat guns in the Desert Wars...and then later the future in automatic weapons: HV guns...

As a final point, I also think that some piece of ware are not intended to land on the players' lap. They are here to set the tone, create a background of technological innovation...

Some things are meant to be the stuff of runners' wet dreams (or nightmares), chummers...
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mfb
post Sep 12 2004, 12:39 PM
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actually, that could be kinda cool. maybe create some kind of "SOTA Pool", to represent how 1337 your tech is. of course, then you'd have to go through each piece of cyber and tech and note what the SOTA Pool does for it--maybe you can allocate two SOTA Pool to your Wired Reflexes to get a +1 Reaction. or, maybe, just have the SOTA Pool work like an extension of your karma pool.
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GunnerJ
post Sep 12 2004, 01:12 PM
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SRC has rules for keeping up with the SOTA. Don't remember much about them, except they seemed sort of unweildy for my tastes.
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mfb
post Sep 12 2004, 01:18 PM
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i was thinking the same thing. they take too long, in-game, and since the GM determines how quickly time passes, SOTA basically becomes GM fiat. it's also no proactive; players can only respond to the SOTA, they can't go seek it out for themselves. pondering ideas, will post later.
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mfb
post Sep 12 2004, 01:40 PM
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here's what i'm thinking. anything you purchase can be bought as a SOTA version, at 250% price and 150% availability and time. alternatively, any item you own can be upgraded to SOTA for 300% of the original cost; finding the upgrade is like finding any other gear, with an availability and time of 150% of the original. gear cannot be made extra-SOTA, though once the SOTA 'wears off', the gear can be re-upgraded.

SOTA gear has one point of temporary karma pool attached to it. once spent in any way, this karma pool is permanently gone; though, as it says above, it's possible to upgrade gear to SOTA again, once that point is spent. SOTA karma pool can only be used in conjunction to the gear which recieved that specific SOTA upgrade.

SOTA karma pool cannot rise above 50% of your real karma pool, or 2, whichever is higher. SOTA gear can be purchased at char creation if the total availability is low enough.

these rules can either replace the existing SOTA rules, or be used in conjunction with them.

thoughts?
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Sargasso
post Sep 12 2004, 01:48 PM
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The SOTA rules for shadowrun are just fine as they are. Keeping up with SOTA costs a pretty penny already.
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RedmondLarry
post Sep 12 2004, 02:04 PM
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There are only quick improvements in an area that has only had a short lifespan. Computers are less than 6 decades old, mass production of computers less than 3 decades old. By 2064 the yearly improvement in computers will be about the same as the yearly growth in today's refrigerators. How often do you buy a new refrigerator? Microwaves aren't that old now, but how often do you buy a new one?

Growth in handguns will appear to be even slower, the technology is so much older. The greatest growth comes from applying emerging technologies to the handguns, such as cyberware smartlinks.

Growth in cyberware, bioware, and nanoware will seem to be amazing, as those technologies are so much younger compared to these others. If a technology is 10 years old, it's pretty easy for a society to add 10% additional knowledge to that technology in only one year. If the technology is 200 years old, it takes far longer to add 10% additional know-how to that technology.
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hobgoblin
post Sep 12 2004, 02:21 PM
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well if corporations get it like they would like to have it then you would have forced obsolesence every time they need a injection of cash. just look at some of the software companys, they are running out of new features to stuff into their wares and end up trying moves to force users to upgrade (changeing the file specs so that the latest edition can read files made from the earlyer editions but isnt backwards compatible and so on)

in many ways its similar to what the car industry does. every year they push out a new design thats supposed to be flashyer and more in. its a question of style over substance, where if you dont have the latest feature or design then your out. its fashion pure and simple...

that is what sota is, fashion...
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lokugh
post Sep 12 2004, 02:41 PM
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QUOTE (OurTeam)
There are only quick improvements in an area that has only had a short lifespan. Computers are less than 6 decades old, mass production of computers less than 3 decades old. By 2064 the yearly improvement in computers will be about the same as the yearly growth in today's refrigerators. How often do you buy a new refrigerator? Microwaves aren't that old now, but how often do you buy a new one?

Growth in handguns will appear to be even slower, the technology is so much older. The greatest growth comes from applying emerging technologies to the handguns, such as cyberware smartlinks.

Growth in cyberware, bioware, and nanoware will seem to be amazing, as those technologies are so much younger compared to these others. If a technology is 10 years old, it's pretty easy for a society to add 10% additional knowledge to that technology in only one year. If the technology is 200 years old, it takes far longer to add 10% additional know-how to that technology.

The one fallacy in your argument is that, even 40 years ago when refrigerators were still new items, people didn't replace them every two years (my grandmother still had her 25 year old Ozzie and Harriet fridge when I was a kid in the early '70's). But the basic premise is accurate, I think.

I think computer growth in SR has been modeled pretty well. The hardware for computers has pretty much reached maturity by 2060 (the improvements are all in miniaturization and implants, not improved performance). The improvements in SR are all software (the gradual move over the last 10 years...gametime...from rare sculpted systems to ubiquitous sculpted systems, etc.)

I don't think weapons tech has an upper limit. It has plateaus in between wars and in between major breakthroughs (the last major breakthroughs in firearms were smokless powder, percussion caps and automatic weapons, all of which are 50 to 100 years old...the next will be computerized firearms, like the new assault rifle being developed for the US Army, which you mentioned and/or railgun tech).
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Wireknight
post Sep 12 2004, 03:11 PM
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I disagree with the premise of comparing the advancement curve of computer technology in 60 years to refrigerator technology today. There's really little benefit to be gained from adding more than token, typically un-refrigeration-related features(such as an onboard computer with webserver that controls basic device functions). Once a certain plateau is achieved, refrigerators, in general, serve the purpose they are designed for and have no reason to reach beyond that into non-refrigerator realms.

Computers, on the othr hand, possess a much wider variety of applications(including refridgerators!), so many that I believe that computer technology will likely continue to advance as fast as our own knowledge base can be expanded. Likewise, that knowledge base will be driven to much more aggressive expansion than any other knowledge base short of biotechnology(and, in Shadowrun era, that encompasses cyberware and bioware) and probably nanotechnology.

The state of the art curve in media delivery/entertainment technology, which is at this point basically a subset of computer technology, computer technology itself, biotechnology, cybertechnology, and nanotechnology, really should be the only things in Shadowrun that truly develop in a way that being caught behind the curve can actually impact the effective functioning of your device.

A good example of biotechnology SOTA curve is modern pacemakers/artificial organs versus the ones of a decade or two ago. However, even that can be abstracted to improvements in microscopic(soon to be nanoscopic) engineering and computer miniaturization/improvement. A much more common computer-related analogy is the internet(or the Matrix in Shadowrun). Ever tried to browse the latest Flash-filled, PHP-generated, Javascript-laden sites(or sculpted/high-reality hosts in Shadowrun) with an older browser, or tried to run a recent browser, with the latest plugins, on an older machine?

I think that until Shadowrun announces that photorealistic multisensory wireless virtual reality is possible for every Matrix user, there's going to be a steep SOTA curve approaching this zenith, and if SOTA rules are going to be applied anywhere, they should apply to this sort of thing moreso than most anything else.

Of course, it shouldn't really apply to oldschool hacking, since you can hack apart a multiprocessor Xeon with terabytes of SCSI/SATA storage and gigabytes of high-clock-speed RAM with a 386 running a chopped down Linux distribution with no GUI. That's the problem with SOTA, insofar as that most of the improvements, while vaunted and desireable, shouldn't really help actual decking.

Of course, the cat-and-mouse game of security patches and bugfixes is a close enough approximation of the SOTA curve that there should be a time and/or nuyen based cost for keeping at the leading edge of the security game, one that SOTA rules are adequate for modeling.

All that said, I'm not sure I like SOTA rules, and am quite certain I disagree with the implementation of SOTA rules as far as reflex enhancers go. Sure, your non-SOTA reflex enhancement might not be as awesome as the equivalent enhancement purchased a week ago with the latest firmware tweaks, but should you be slower, in comparison to someone with no such augmentations, for it? Currently, as SOTA eats away your Reaction bonus, you are. I'm not suggesting an alternate way of doing it, only that the current way is bad and should be done away with.
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