Well, at least his belongs here.

Big Crow bought the first SR book available in Lincoln. Why? God only knows, well that, and he was friends with a storeowner who could rival Pete.
Big Crow and his friends spent years gaming SR, and after each session, Big Crow would say, "I talked to 'X', and we have been doing 'Y' wrong all this time...” Because SR 1 was written so badly...

That was the original essence of Shadowrun. Printing errors, mind-fcking mistakes, and no easy way to get errata. However, it was always better than D&D.

Then SR2. I still own the entire second, first runs. Sad. I never joined the RPGA, because, well, why? However, I was always invited, back then, to run SR for the Local Yokels
.
3Rd. Meh. I loved it, and still do. But I could never convinced enough people to lay out the cash (In the days before Drive-Thru) for them to make it interesting enough to continue. All the Cons at that point dreade3d me. I would always ruin a Gm's plot; take the easiest way out. I guess it was too easy to abuse. When you have a rules are full, the Power-Gamer will walk the Earth.

Time passes.

Incidentally, for a while, I thought FASA was tappin' my room. All my house rules ended up, in a way, in Game, or as a Card. Hand'o'God, lucky Rabbit's Foot (I think Dunk owes me, since I created the first Magic Item used by a mundy...) And Native Blood Magic (being both a Fan of ED and being Native myself...).

4th Ed?

To start. Man, I asked everyone in my pathetic City to order it for me. I support local business. But they said, "Shadowrun, come on, those Dolls killed that game". So I said, "I have money..."

Still I could not get a damn book. Luckily, I guess, a store owner I know over-ordered his allotment, and got six books when it came out. Did he save one for me? NO.

I had to wait another 2 weeks, and he still bitched, "I hope people buy these (3) books. *Sold out that day.* I will give him credit, he kept one back, and sold it to me at cost.

But still, will he look into future publications? No, "Let's see how it sells."

I told him, you sold 9 of this system within a month, through word-of-mouth, so explain why I should not buy from either the company, or Amazon?" I still have not gotten an answer.

Anyway, SR4, dunno yet, but I am game. I have been running (ruining) this game for, what was it, '89??? So 16 years. I do not know if it is just me, but, 4th Ed. reminds me so much of 1st Ed.; not through mechanics, but through presentation. I thought I would never, no mater how many classes (university) I took, be so lost in a subject. Then, and now.

Not badly written. In fact, I like the newer style. What I do not like, is flipping through hundred of pages, and back and forth, just to resolve a simple action. (When we made characters for our new foray, I was on the verge of slapping my players, and the editor.

I thought we were, simplifying. Just kidding, we have, but it is an ouch for the silent majority of us whom take what we are given. D&D is up to 3.5, after nearly 30 years, SR? Four rules systems in one head, no one can live at that speed.

I am certain/Thinking a Gm screen will sort this for me.

What a big change. SR4 Needs a warning label. "Caution: Experienced Players will Take about as Year to Get how much Better This Is Than the Last Edition."

And even after all this, I really hope a year from now I can wander to a local shop to get whatever is being published by FanPro.


Incidently, not to avertise, check out Great Idea.

I really feel you, I've been there myself.

But rather than just post a simple "me too", I figured that I'd nitpick:

Oh man thats to much to read first thing in the morning, but rock on brother.

I love how the complaints about SR4 have gone from:

"I can't stand to play anything so dumbed down" to

"I can't understand this"

But hey, man, try the conversion from D&D 3.0 to 3.5. THAT was a real screw job - never knowing if a rule had changed in some stupid little way.

I still can't quite see where this streamlining of the rules Translates to faster gameplay

I've gotta agree with Frank on this one.

I GM for a large group of 7 PCs. When we played 3rd ed., it was often painfully slow - that was my biggest complaint about 3rd ed. Now when playing 4th ed. it seems that the pace is much quicker, especially for combat. So far I've been impressed with how smooth the system works in practice.

-Robert

{hands Big Crow a glass of ice-water}

I know your pain, Big Crow. Ordering thought some channels is difficult at best & non-existant at worst. I use Diamond's Previews catalog system, thankfully my local comic shop does.
I too blanched at the aspect of having to re-learn everything, thanks to the so-called "upgrade" to SR4. But I see it as yet another challenge in my life, one I embrace.
It does NOT mean that SR3 is completely dead. Use the system that you feel is better, and adapt the new stuff to it. I think your right inyour assumtion that the upcoming GM's Screen will help. If not, then send a message to FanPro & request a PDF of a 'quick-start rules' that will ease the transition pain (ala GURPS Lite).

I don't see the problem. Its difficult to get used to after all these years of one system, but I haven't had any trouble figuring out the new system. The only complaint I have (and I make it grudgingly), is that it requires a LOT of dice. Usually I love big handfulls of dice... but this is a bit excessive.

If you check with your local gaming source, or wait until Spring/Summer for the first local Sci-Fi cons, you can get all the dice you need at very inexpensive prices. Every year, I attend ICON & Chessex always has a dice-dealership table right at the beginging of the first isle. You can pick up whole sets for a few dollars, or scoop up a coffee-mug of dice for under $5. By the last day of the weekend, I had a freind replace several years worth of lost dice for under $20, including the leather pouch he bought to carry them in.

My own 'set' of 6-sided I use for SR are small (8mm, I think), but I have 2 of almost every color, a full 40. Now all I need are the GitD's. Last year they had no individuals for sale. But I shall have them. Oh yes, I shall.

Don't forget. The other player makes the second reroll, dependant on their stats, which gets modified by the ork mobs weapon.

Yeah, and that's not even including the possibility of them using burnas as power weapons or the whole template dealie (who knows HOW many dice that thing will add?), the Nob having different stats and possibly a Klaw or something similarly evil...

Yeah. You wanna talk lots of dice? HappyA knows what I'm talking about...

roll dice for warhammer 40k???
my computer does that for me behind the scens, or are you not talking about the lovely dawn fo war game.

Miniture games always just seemed to expensive of a hobby to me.

I'll grant you that 40k's an expensive habit... a standard 1500 point army easily cruises around 400-500 USD if you buy all of your stuff at list price. But between the modelling, the painting, and the playing, I'd say I've gotten more than my money's worth out of it in fun alone.

It's kind of like owning a gaming console. Someone wants to cough up a few hundred bucks plus 50-odd dollars a game, that's their thing. I prefer to do it for little models that I largely get to shape and paint, and then mess around with them on a miniature battlefield.

Woo, getting way OT here...

I've decided to quit before my first game of 40k. I started assembling an IG army. I love putting them together and having them, but I get tired of painting multiple figures (I prefer to paint single character figs rather than armies, as it turns out). On top of this, I'm discovering that I just don't want to continually spend that much money on a game that I actually don't get all that much enjoyment out of.

Now I'm stuck between either selling off my army as is (mostly painted), or finish painting it and then sell it. It's hard to work up the interest when the end state is the same.

My brother plays IG. He might be interested.

Cain--I would say to look at how long each game has been played...every new system takes awhile to memorize and master all the various modifiers. I've been working with very specific skill groups and can almost rattle off each modifier without looking at the book because I've referenced it som many times. The same thing happened in SR3 and will happen eventually for everyone who plays SR4 regularly.

Well, I guess it wouldn't seem so severe if we hadn't tried Savage Worlds alongside of it. Savage Worlds is blazingly fast, and provides a lot of nifty quick reference charts. We hardly had to look up anything at all, and we went through a massive battle (*Nineteen* combatants!) in less than twenty-five minutes.

At any event, researching modifiers wasn't the only slowdown. There's a lot more calculation that needs to happen in SR$. Under SR3, I could calculate a lot of it on the fly, and give the players a final target. Under SR4, since modifiers affect the dice rolled, I *can't* do that for my players. That would require me memorizing every last stat of theirs, something I cannot do.

I happen to like my gaming group, so I don't think I'll have the chance to play SR$ for a long, long time. They'd rather stick with systems that they know, or are easier to pick up.

*shrugs*

Doesn't the chart in the back help with that?

I can't really talk in this discussion, as I haven't run SR4 yet due to situations outside of my control...

Guys, I think yinz are missing one of Big Crow's points. The editing on SR4 is quite possibly worse than in every other edition. I'm not talking about grammar here folks. The presentation of the rules forces you to flip back and forth through the book just to understand combat. This is what harks you back to SR1. You had to flip through and memorize every page to play the game.

I don't like that on nearly every page there are a minimum of three page references. However, I think in many areas the rules are easier. Its going take all of us some time to become familiar with the die modifiers.

Agreed! As I'm not someone who likes to bookmark, dog-ear, or otherwise mark up books (working in a Library for the last 10 years will do that to you), this edition of Shadowrun is just about the most difficult rpg rulebook I've ever owned. Perhaps not as bad as MERP - but certainly a close second.

It has its good points - no doubt. I like a decent index, and well... many of the sourcebooks I've purchased in the last couple years (especially for Dungeons and Dragons) are not indexed. At all. SR4 has what I like in that regard. Also, It is already looking like this hardcover book is physically holding up better than the paperback SR3 that most of the people I game with got back in 98-99. Also a plus. (Though admittedly, I always thought that the special SR3 BBB had about the best binding of any RPG book I've ever purchased)

However, the lack of (or seemingly haphazard) organization, information left out, typos and rules contradictions (as well as the over 2 dozen individual instances of errata that had to be put up before August was even finished) makes me wish they had just... spent more time on it. I understand that having it ready for Gencon made them a lot of sales there. heh. I was one of those who were just unable to get a copy. Every time I went by the booth it was gone. But the product just has a RUSHED feel.

I really liked the sheer number of examples that SR3 provided - as long as they didn't have any mistakes in the examples, they were of great help. They explained how a lot of things worked - things that the rule wording itself didn't make clear. While I see some of the same examples reworked for the new rules, there are ALOT of places where details are missing, rules are left up to broad interpretation, and wording is a bit clumsy (as often wording for game concepts can be). Those would be great places for examples.

Unfortunately, all of this leads up to seeing a lot of "this is how I Interpret X" or "The way I See X..." in online discussions, where it'd be nice to see "Page Y says 'X' - Look there for clarification."

I'm not saying any of this because I hate SR or FanPro or whatnot - but because I really REALLY think that SR is about the coolest RPG premise out there. I've been playing since GenCon 1990 (or was it 1991.. hmm) and up until now, I've felt that the game has just gotten easier and easier to play. I remember whipping up my first character for SR3 by the END of the day I picked it up at GenCon. With SR4, I am finding that... not happening.

Unfortunately, as the book is already out, the only benefit from this post is getting my feelings and opinions on SR4 out there and maybe read by a group of people who may or may not agree with me. I've already dropped the money, and I'm going to be playing in a game of SR 4 in a few weeks. I'm just a bit disappointed at the state of the text. For sure, that disappointment is better than hearing that SR was done with altogether.

I think we all want to see Shadowrun have a long future ahead of it, but I'm just glad that this forum exists. Where else could I post my crackpot observations? heh.

Thanks for reading!

Skippy

I'm pretty tired of people suggesting that SR4 is faster than SR3 because you don't have to calculate TN# modifiers. You still have to calculate modifiers, they just affect number of dice rolled, and don't tend to scale as well through variable levels of play. The only thing that can make SR4 faster on a pure mechanical level is the "GM is encouraged to make up modifiers rather than checking reference material" fiat, a fiat that could be tossed at SR3 with equal speed increase.

The aforementioned aspect of SR4 might appeal to GMs who were okay with doing all of the work of determining final TN# based upon player dicerolls, and calculating degree of success themselves, but I'm lazy (and maybe a bit optimistic about the faculties of others). I expect the player to know their TN# based on the information I provide, contextually or explicitly. Given that, SR4 really hasn't provided any rules offerings that I find compelling, compared to the scaling flaws that have really turned me off.

I still believe that the system would have been better served with a revision of the SR3 rules to provide mechanical unification for contextually similar activities. But that's just my opinion, based upon my style of play and what I look for in a game.

In every edition of the game, and for that matter every game, there are essentially two kinds of modifiers: modifiers that the player knows about, and modifiers the player does not know about. If a character is standing in the dark, that's a modifier they know about, if the target is actually a little pixie using a hologram to appear full size, that's a modifier the player probably doesn't know about.

SR3 handled the integration of those two kinds of modifiers relatively poorly. Both affected the TN of each die, so the player was forced to say dumb things like:

Strange it's faster?

How do you explain it's faster? I've played my first game this weekend and even if i can say that keeping track of every single modifier is quite a task for me at this moment, i can also say that the gameplay is faster, and that is good because i can put more emphasis on the storyline and less on the magic/combat/clumsy matrix/ insane rigging rules...

I think it's okay to have some reserve on certain sides of SR4(compare to the SR3 rules and expansion), but i think it's not honest to say it's not faster.

-Spider

Why does the GM have to be the one responsible for all of this? I feel like the SR4 system allows for the player to be more involved in the roll. The player knows most of the +/- modifiers to the dice pool, the GM knows the TN.

All I know, is our game moved quicker. The final jury's still out, but it looks promising.

(Cowering in preparation for the flaming.)

From what I'm reading in this forum, the upcoming release of the GM screen will be the biggest benefit.

PS: Fanpro, you guys listening? Have some method.. anything, really.. to upgrade/update the GM screen as the supplemental rulebooks come out! That was my biggest issue with SR3 -- all the advanced stuff I loved wasn't on the GM screen.

My understanding, sorry if I'm wrong, is that it will have a blank panel for GM specific tables and notes. The other panels will be devoted to the necessary tables from the main book.

I personally think it'd be cool to have a "scrolling" GM screen, with a calculator built-in somewhere. Picture this:

Your whole screen on your laptop would be taken up by the GM screen, in panels for each major function. as you move your mouse left/right, more panels are revealed, until you reach the "edges."

Special places would be present for a calulator (both normal and threshold/dice, utilizing clicking on certain entries in the GM screen would add/subtract them from the calculator, as well as a running tally), and a note-taking section.

This wouldn't be terribly hard to program, would it?

Give it time, and someone will have something like that in web page form.

Not saying it'll be me, mind you. In addition to weekly SR I've got a full-time job, a wife, three kids, and 2 MMORPGs to feed.

I'm just saying that such would be an ideal program for a game GM...

I am also of the persuasion that GM tools for laptops are horribly underrepresented in the gaming industry, given how big of geeks we all are.