OK then.
Who wants to go and live in Earthdawn era? You've got the scourge, horrors, never-ending warfare, a fascist uber-empire etc, but on the other hand you might get to kick ass with your 'Blizzard Sphere' or your 'Leaping Tiger Downstrike'.

I would love the chance to live there for a set amount of time, perhaps a year. But more than that? No thanks.

Yes and No to the Earthdawn. One one hand you get everyone on the planet knowing some form of magic. But on the other hand there's no Umbrella Corp to work for that can mostly protect you from the horrors of the outside world. If I were to live in a Caern most of the time and could be reasonably certain of safety I'd do it in aheartbeat. Otherwise I'd probably still do it if I didn't have a family.

Not everyone in the ED world is magically acitve (an adept), but if you're referring to the shitload of common magical items you're right

I would like to live there, especially in a wild border country like Cara Fahd - i love Claw Ridge Important is to be an adept, that would make life much much easier there.

I'd like to go and live on the Event Horizon. I dig Neptune, and that magic metal ball thing was da bomb.

Nah, no elven chicks

Presumably I'd be a PC, and so I'd have a class and some circle abilities. I'd probably advance a circle once every 5-10 years though, since I'm not out killing stuff for XP.

Ok, I see Just bi living your life you gain some Legend Points over the years, so your advancement in lower cirlce would be faster then one every 5-10 years.

I'm nowhere near any ED books so I just grabbed numbers at random. If it's faster then that, sweet!

Always a pleasure to make people happy.

Btw, the "gain some Legend Points by just living your life" is a semi-offical rule, created by what we germans call "gesunder menschenverstand". Wait, "logical sense" or sth. like that.

Is NYC still so worse? I plan a trip to the Big Apple in September.

At this point, DC might be worse.

never actually been to NYC. i'm sure there are parts of it that are bad enough to do the job.

Anyone who thinks SR is just like today, except with cooler toys, hotter women, and magic, has not been reading the same books I have.

Come on, people... there's entire parts of the city you don't go near because the guys on the corner look at you and see 10,000 in body parts just walking around waiting to get picked up. There's ghouls living in the sewers that occasionally come up and kill sleeping families in their homes. That guy you're standing next to on the subway might have a bomb implanted in his skull that will go off if he calls the wrong commlink. And I can't remember the last time I saw a biker gang rolling down 405 shooting up semis for their cargo, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't recently.

Real life isn't ideal by any means. SR is fucking horrible. I think i'll stick with playing in SR, and living in this world, hopefully steering it a bit towards being a better place.

what Shrike30 said.

Why would former mercs get sweet consulting jobs after quitting?

Seeing as my dream job is private security contractor (see: mercenary) I think living in the SR world would be pretty much perfect.

I do not play the game because I hate the idea of living in such a world, I play it because it appeals to my fantasies.

just a few more years kids, and we might not have a choice

I voted yes, because there's a lot more ways to unlock people's potential and there are nifty paracritters running around (albeit many of them are vicious).

Heh, I'm one of those strange people who are actually hoping that something will happen when the Mayan Calnedar actually changes over in 2011/2012. Do I believe that something will happen? Not so much, more like I'll be very disappointed if nothing happens, shrug it off and get on with my life.

I'd much rather live in an Awakened version of this world than Shadowrun, any day.

I get giddy whenever there are mass casualty events. That doesn't mean I want to live in a world where it's more likely to happen to me.

Does anybody think that the Awakening is all that it'll take to screw the world up?

Who needs an awakening? All magic returning would do is make the screwups different than they'll be if we keep going the way we're going.

The thing is, though, once magic becomes real, it becomes verifiable. All it takes is a mage doing an astral scan to point out that somebody's a fraud, and once people start making fireballs and healing people, horoscopes won't matter unless somebody's doing shit with the zodiac, like more powerful ritual magic and stuff. The petty frauds will look like frauds next to the real thing, once the real thing exists.

There will be thousands more con men then there are Houdinis. And most of those will never think about going to The Barrens, much less actually doing it.

The point is, people will do things with magic, obvious things. It doesn't even need to be theories, there will be "luck," and then there will be a levitating car.

It may be poorly understood, but it's not that misunderstood. If nothing happens, then nothing happens.

After all, in Shadowrun, Krillian Photography actually works as advertised.

That said, no, I don't want to live in the world of Shadowrun. It's too depressing on too many levels.

I could get some cybor legs and get rid of theas dam broken one's
I reccon it would be a hard life to start with but hay ain't it already??
Can you imagen it all that excitement and interesting things to do, i mean don't like a part of your body or broke something.... don't worry just get some cybor ware and you would be fine.

ok the pollution and bullet dodging might be a problem but you could get over it, and wow magic well don't need to say much about that apart form awsom!

torz x

No, no, no, sometimes yes...

I said YES. There are several reasons for this.

1) For the vast majority of people in the SR world, life is no more dangerous than it is now. A lot of the objections I have read here seem to come from the perspective of players. In other words, we know how the world is stated and we see the inequalities/dangers of areas of it. Now forget all that. Imagine you are 21, just out of university (or college for our colonial cousins ) and looking for a job. A mega-corp approaches you and offers you a job. What do you say? You say yes. Why? Because that is the what you do. You get a job, you work and, hopefully enjoy life. How is that different to now?

2) Meta-humans. How cool would it be to live in a world that contained meta-humans? Not just elf-babes, but the whole lot!

3) Cyber-ware and Bio-ware. No longer are our bodies slaves to fate! Lost an arm? No problem! Sure it costs money, but what doesn't?

4) Better toys and the Matrix

Lets look at the downside of living in the SR world. Most of the negatives I have read on this thread all stem from the idea that you are stupid enough to place yourself in that location. Yes there are some very bad areas of the SR world, but then there are some very bad areas of the world right now. The difference is the location of where these areas are. I would still avoid them.

As for corp wage slaving, what do you do right now? How is that different?

I'm a parapsychology and cryptozoology buff and the world is, sadly, very lacking in those areas.

You wouldn't want the ability to realign the universe on a whim? Why not?

By the way, Tolkien didn't invent any of those, he just crafted magnificent stories using them.

One city and one mall is nowhere near a large enough group to invalidate a "vast majority" statement.

a) sure they do. in the real world, the vast majority of people don't have to worry about bugs eating their entire city, or insane AIs trapping them in a city-sized building and conducting horrible experiments on them. both of those are possibilities in SR, as proven by the fact that they've each already happened once. therefore, the lives of the vast majority of people in SR are measurably more dangerous, because there are at least two more dangerous events that could happen to them.

b) those were just examples. to quote myself:

I believe the "no more" was not intended to be a precise equation of "SR = now" but a more general "not noticably so." We're just reading them differently is all, but we come to the same conclusion: the vast majority of people in SR live their lives without ever experiencing a life threatening event. The rest is all semantics.

You're not answering his question.

Cool. Obviously a lot of people disagree with your interpretation of Tolkien, but that's what those pesky human rights are for: to stop us from burning heretics at the stake.

I'm sorry to say this, FanGirl, but your sarcasm detector is dead.

No, your mom's sarcasm detector is dead!

EDIT: Seriously though, I thought mfb was making the (sarcastic) point that the SR world is more dangerous than our own. Did I not read enough into it?

FanGirl, do the math. count up how many died on 9/11, and then look at how many people died in Bug City.