 What would you change?, Making the most of your reality |
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| Guest_Crimsondude 2.0_* |
 Dec 20 2004, 12:03 AM
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#26
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It just... is.
It's like CFS. I always assumed the authors were from Cal or lived there (specifically because of the UCLA bias in the L.A. chapter). But there is such a thing as an ignorant local. |
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Dec 20 2004, 12:16 AM
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#27
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Beetle Eater  Group: Dumpshocked Posts: 4,797 Joined: 3-June 02 From: Oblivion City Member No.: 2,826 |
Wow, all the things I consider comic genius (NAN, AGS, CFS, Islamic Jihad), people hate. :rotfl:
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| Guest_Crimsondude 2.0_* |
Dec 20 2004, 12:37 AM
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#28
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Well, they are comic, that's for sure.
So, when was the last time you read Welcome Back, Frank? |
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Dec 20 2004, 12:53 AM
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#29
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Runner Group: Members Posts: 3,314 Joined: 26-February 02 From: Lisbon, Cidade do Pecado Member No.: 185 |
You're entitled to your opinion, that still doesn't make it right. Same goes for Trashman's thoughts. While there's a certain amount of material that the EuroSBers had to compromise on because of existant canon (namely the sections on the AGS, TNO and UK), there's a whole lot more we managed to incorporate and quite a bit we managed to tweak (Switzerland and Austria for instance). In fact, one of the most common criticisms we recieved on both sides of the Atlantic was that a lot of Shadows of Europe was actually too plausible (and hence not "original" enough).
Shadows of Europe was not only written by natives for the most part but it was also developed, discussed, cross-referenced, reviewed and revised for more than 3 years by an eclectic group of 32 people from 14 different Eurocountries and all sorts of different backgrounds. 32 ignorant locals is a slight way over insulting. But, I'm game, both of you feel free to point out where the original material in SoE had inconsistencies or proves misinformed regarding contemporary and historical Europe, and I'll be happy to provide the references to back us up. |
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Dec 20 2004, 01:03 AM
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#30
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Beetle Eater Group: Dumpshocked Posts: 4,797 Joined: 3-June 02 From: Oblivion City Member No.: 2,826 |
Yeah, most of the books were. That's one of the things that made switching to third edition tough for me: way too serious. I stopped reading MitS the first time when I read the entry for Black Magic and it said "Not evil." I went "Pft, what's the point of it then?" It wasn't until I read some of the stuff in SR3 (yeah, I got Underworld - which is a hilarious book, really good - and MitS before SR3 as presents) that I could really start to get more in the mood for third edtion. |
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Dec 20 2004, 01:08 AM
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#31
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Runner Group: Members Posts: 3,314 Joined: 26-February 02 From: Lisbon, Cidade do Pecado Member No.: 185 |
DiDSand DiDS2 were actually written by German freelancers and the German FanPro crew - and not simply "fans". That said, a lot of German fans have a serious problem with the way the original DiDS presented Germany and with the fact that DiDS2 didn't "reboot" the setting but rather chose to stick with 10 years of continuity. Most feel that the shattered Germany depicted in DiDS (and the English-language Germany SB) was a result of the writers going overboard trying to apply the "coolness" factor of the US breakup in SR to the old world and completely missing the point. They might even be right. Similar mistakes were made with the German-language versions of Austria and Switzerland. When we started up on SoE, it was decided not to leave the German fans who had been using the published material to hang out to dry but instead, where possible, re-interpret the premise and pillars of the setting in a more plausible context. For instance, the "new Austro-Hungarian Empire" was explained and placed in a very different perspective. The Danube Union is a very different, and more "believable", animal than Leopold's Empire and yet the empire wasn't discarded but reworked. |
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Dec 20 2004, 01:35 AM
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#32
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Traumatizing players since 1992 Group: Dumpshocked Posts: 3,282 Joined: 26-February 02 From: Las Vegas, NV Member No.: 220 |
I thought the exact same thing when i read that! :D |
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| Guest_Crimsondude 2.0_* |
Dec 20 2004, 03:22 AM
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#33
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Ah, my bad. I forgot my "mocking tone" smiley.
Again, it was not intended as a jab at the authors, per se. More like a general observation.
Thank God. I was beginning to get sick of hearing, "Wha...? No idea what you're talking about" on various boards. RL is bad enough, thank you. |
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Dec 20 2004, 04:10 AM
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#34
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Traumatizing players since 1992 Group: Dumpshocked Posts: 3,282 Joined: 26-February 02 From: Las Vegas, NV Member No.: 220 |
Crimsondude noone on earth could have a name as bad as the criminal psychologist in that book! :D
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Dec 20 2004, 04:11 AM
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#35
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Shooting Target Group: Members Posts: 1,590 Joined: 11-September 04 Member No.: 6,650 |
sorry crimson but...
Query "Welcome back, Frank"? |
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| Guest_Crimsondude 2.0_* |
Dec 20 2004, 04:21 AM
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#36
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hahaha
It was the series of Punisher comics written by Garth Ennis and set after he returned from being Heaven's bitchboy. The Russian from the movie was a character in the series, only much, much cooler. Anyway, the joke here is that in the series the NYPD Punisher Task Force is two guys--a burn-out detective everyone hates and a behavioral psychologist who hangs himself in his office halfway through. The Gnocchi (mafia family bad guys in the series) Task Force is one female detective. |
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Dec 20 2004, 04:27 AM
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#37
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Shooting Target Group: Members Posts: 1,590 Joined: 11-September 04 Member No.: 6,650 |
ah punisher. Admittedly I got turned off punisher after reading "Archie vs the punisher"
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Dec 20 2004, 05:32 AM
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#38
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Moving Target Group: Members Posts: 190 Joined: 24-October 04 Member No.: 6,787 |
Actually, I did read that one when it came out. Didn't make the connection though. Mauled by polar bears. Ouch |
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| Guest_Crimsondude 2.0_* |
Dec 20 2004, 05:49 AM
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#39
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Indeed.
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Dec 20 2004, 06:09 AM
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#40
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Creating a god with his own hands Group: Members Posts: 1,405 Joined: 30-September 02 From: 0:0:0:0:0:0:0:1 Member No.: 3,364 |
Better than Devil Rats. :grinbig: |
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| Guest_Crimsondude 2.0_* |
Dec 20 2004, 08:45 AM
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#41
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Better than being kicked into a burning building and not being able to crawl out.
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Dec 20 2004, 03:36 PM
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#42
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Chicago Survivor Group: Dumpshocked Posts: 5,079 Joined: 28-January 04 From: Canton, GA Member No.: 6,033 |
Things I would change:
The overly static Magic rules, fluff text consistently portrays magic as effluent and ephemeral, yet we have an incredibly static mechanic system for it. The other thing I would do away with is the split storyline, resulting from national sourcebooks not published anywhere outside of the originating country. Game material should be done by those licensed by the parent company and published throguh them to all nations they choose to publish to. Not publishing it in other nation sis like saying they aren't good enough, even though the game originated there and the core material is centered there. |
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Dec 20 2004, 04:09 PM
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#43
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Moving Target Group: Members Posts: 637 Joined: 26-February 02 Member No.: 1,528 |
+ No Nannies. A splintering of the US with an even less powerful central government okay, but no "Indian braves" taking over
+ No Exterritoriality. Corporations use the same way to power they use today, the buy themselfsa politician and work from behind the scenes. + A strong EEC giving an alternative environment (running against a semi-police state) to the "corp rules US" + Less magic / less metas among player characters (Stressing their problems more in Fluff and in Scenario books) + More space/underwater elements. Think "Outland" and the last half-season of SeaQuest (with Ironside as captain) Birdy |
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Dec 20 2004, 05:25 PM
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#44
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Target Group: Members Posts: 36 Joined: 3-November 04 From: in the trenches Member No.: 6,805 |
Gawd, I should stay online more often...
The uninformed thing in my original post: The DidS-book was done after the wall came down and the GDR had gone terminal. In the book there is no mention of anything east of the old FRG safe for Berlin. And enlarging the 'anarchist' quarter of Kreuzberg into all Berlin and then having somebody put up a wall around it - please! It read like some provincial schoolboys had put their parents' fears to paper. Troll kingdom, Elven duchy (or whatever) of Pomoria? Excuse me, but until then I had been under the impression I was dealing with SR not with D&D. The less said about them the better. The two Tirs I always saw as an entirely different thing because of that typically dastardly Elven will to dominate everybody else. And it took away the good metas-bad norms attitude. Equally strange was the original sourcebook on France which had the country returning to royalism. Fat chance after four and a half revolutions for more democracy... It all appeared like the authors took medieval and/or sword'n sorcery stuff and flung them into one big pot to make it interesting, perhaps make it different from the North America setting. Everything I read about Austria in SR seemed strangely stale, devoid of the atmosphere of a country where dozens of nationalities met and mixed for centuries and managed to incorporate such unwholesome ideologies as rampant regionalism and antisemitism into a quirky softy socialism plus a tendency for collective historical blindness. Until recently a sizeable portion of Austrians were even willing to view themselves as pure victims of national-socialism ("Hitler was a German. We were occupied." This is a true quote). The Baltic states might become some of the most interesting parts of 21st century Europe, small countries selling out to bigger ones (Finland) or in SR to the corps, something like Pueblo. Due to the insistence on keeping in the Euro Wars they appear to be little more than refugee camps now. I got more usable intel on the Vatican from the Sargent/Gascoigne novel 'Black Madonna' than in SoE. Very sad. I had hoped for something akin to a rival power player to Lofwyr. I could go on and on. In the end of course it alls boils down to that thankfully liberal attitude of the developpers that one could twist around the SR world any way one wants. Not that we needed that 'permission' but it is a very nice touch. Something I always respected with FASA and then FanPro. |
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Dec 20 2004, 05:50 PM
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#45
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Traumatizing players since 1992 Group: Dumpshocked Posts: 3,282 Joined: 26-February 02 From: Las Vegas, NV Member No.: 220 |
Except that's not really true. magic has always been portrayed as following a strict set of rules by some traditions, such as hermetics. The other traditions follow the same physical rules they just don't think they do. For them the only thing different is the perception of how they do it. Magic is not fluid and ephemeral at all, regardless if some traditions think it is. "Magic works how you think it works" is only true within a certain specific framework.
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Dec 20 2004, 07:19 PM
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#46
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Immortal Elf Group: Members Posts: 11,410 Joined: 1-October 03 From: Pittsburgh Member No.: 5,670 |
ugh. please tell me you're not in favor of different rules for every tradition. |
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| Guest_Crimsondude 2.0_* |
Dec 20 2004, 07:57 PM
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#47
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So, basically.... CP2020? |
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Dec 20 2004, 11:03 PM
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#48
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Moving Target Group: Members Posts: 830 Joined: 3-April 04 From: Columbus, Ohio Member No.: 6,215 |
The things I would change are quite major and will probably piss everyone on these boards off, just like it does whenever someone brings up a "SR is Dead" thread.
First, and probably most controversially, I would eliminate player character magicians. Having one character in the group who can duplicate the abilities of anyone else in the group AND be the only one capable of doing astral recon seems like having a useful character and then a bunch of sidekicks for him. Probably the height of my anger at player character magicians came the other day when I started reading Never Deal With a Dragon, and when it was describing how "only a street samurai could move that fast," my first thought was "unless it's a mage with increased reflexes anchored to him." Enough of that. If it were up to me, magic would be something strange and menacing that the characters wouldn't quite understand, and would probably grow to fear and hate. Ironically, I fully realize that this is the backwards attitude Shadowbeat describes most of the media as propagating, but that's fine. I just hate magicians and think they should pretty much just be in SR as villains. If my friends bitched enough that I did decide to let them play magicians, I would abolish spells that replicate the effects of cyberware, such as increase initiative, increase attribute, that phys ad power that gives you extra firearms dice (I know, cyberware doesn't do that, but it's the effect, increasing goodness at guns, that I don't like. Tech for tech, I believe). I'd also do away with immortal elves and dragons. Elves and dragons would still be part of the game, just not as immortals. Even the particular elves and dragons would still be around, such as Harlequin and Dunklezahn (who would still be running his feudal kingdom in Canada, by the way). The way I'd rig it, Harlequin would be an elf, and he'd be an extremely powerful magician, but he'd also be really loopy, to the point where he's subconsciously projecting his delusions onto reality, which in turn has caused several other really powerful magicians (Ehran and his ilk) to think that THEY are immortal elves. Furthermore, the Enemy would also be hallucinations that Harlequin had imposed upon reality. As for Dragons, I would have them Awakened from normal species during the Awakening, rather than be leftovers from some previous world. I also wouldn't have any politics between them over silly things like "I'm the Loremaster" "No I'M the Loremaster" or anything like that. Still conflicts between them, but only because I imagine a fair number of them would be doing the corporate thing (like Lofwyr, though probably not all of them would be as good at it) or the political thing (like Dunklezahn, only not the president thing, just the feudal kingdom thing, because whereas most dragons probably don't have to care that much about human affairs, they all DO have to worry about their immediate surroundings). I'd also add in a lot of cheap technological means to defeat magic. If I'd be relegating magic to NPCs, I would need to give the players some way to counter it without having to have a buttload of money, so probably a bunch of cheap cybernetic implants that help a little and a few really high end implants that make one virtually immune to magic that cost a fortune. As for the gun issue that most people are trying not to bring up because it will start a 25 page argument, I'd leave it basically the way it is (at least as the way my group plays it), you can walk around with all the guns you want with near immunity from the law, provided you're in the barrens. We play Puyallup as being very Mad Max-like, and Redmond as very, very overcrowded, with neither having frequent guest appearances by Johnny Law. |
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Dec 20 2004, 11:10 PM
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#49
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Running Target Group: Members Posts: 1,032 Joined: 6-August 04 Member No.: 6,543 |
All of Califonia.
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Dec 20 2004, 11:17 PM
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#50
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Incertum est quo loco te mors expectet; Group: Dumpshocked Posts: 6,548 Joined: 24-October 03 From: DeeCee, U.S. Member No.: 5,760 |
I'd definitely lessen the role of IEs and dragons. Keep them in there, but they've got their own political bickering which is a thing apart from what us humans do.
I think the biggest thing I would change is shift the enemy a bit more. I don't see us as being threatened by the big corps. I see us being threatened more by our government. Take it for more of a 1984 Big Brother kind of thing, where the corps are still strong, but the government has a backbone and doesn't mind abusing your rights in the name of 'national security'. |
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