Then I'll go out on a ledge and say that you'll probably be okay with how the Voudoun spirits are portrayed.

As to whether the Possession rules work or not in practice I'd suggest people wait and see. They were one of the most sections that went through the hardest playtesting and balancing.

I usually prefer hard copies. Is there a general timeframe for when the book will be out? About a month or so?

We should have some copies at GenCon, and when the rest of the books are in our warehouse, we'll post the date it will be available to stores on both fanprogames.com and shadowrunrpg.com.

Yes, but that doesn't mean I have to like it.

Seriously, as long as it's a playable option for PCs (unlike in 3e), I'll be happy.

Psionic tradition rules.Use logic and willpower for drain. You use task ( manp) ,gaurdien(health) ,man (illusion), beast (combat), and guidance(detection) spirits. Your spirits look like bla bla what ever you think psionic spirits should look like.

There psionic tradition.

Throw is some rules about how you don't like magic so other tradition don't work wel with you groups and rituels and you have you character. Really, that wasn't that big of a deal no was it?

Awesome! Dude that is exactly what i wanted to hear. Fanpro will be my first stop when the doors open Thursday morning.

/me chuckles.

Well struck, sir. Would have been prettier with punctuation and grammar, but well struck nonetheless.

I have to disagree. With the inclusion of things like auras and astral projection (especially naming these phenomena thus), I think a psionic (psychic) tradition is quite appropriate, and not at all a cop-out.

The idea of Arua and the astral travel and senses predate monotheism, yet alone psionics.

True, but not as named.

Oh yeah? What's the Force, then?

I've only seen two authors try and turn Psionics into a form of technology. One involved ubiquitous nanites which responded to human thought--read: "all-powerful mystical forces of the universe"--and the other involved people being able to selectively collapse quantum wavefunctions as they saw fit, which only works if you understand nothing about quantum physics. For everyone else it's just magic wearing a different hat and pretending to fit in.

Except for the principle of falsification. Pretty much the basis of all science theory. If you can't device a repeatable experiment that could fail and thus disprove your theory, then it isn't a theory at all.

Example: I claim that Newton mechanics is a scientific theory. You can falsify it for example by looking at 2 colliding pool balls, if they act in a different way than the mechanics predict, then the theory is proven false. Thus it can be falsified, and it is a scientific theory (and now people can start trying to hack it apart and find cases where it doesn't apply and all sorts of stuff, it isn't proven yet and no theory really can be).

Someone who claims that some people are able to predict the future need to think of an experiment that could disprove their theory. For example being able to predict the toss of a coin. This they fail, so they say that they can just predict the likely outcome. A way to falsify this would be to see if they can predict coin tosses at a statistically significant degree. They fail this too - so most psychics claim that it is only distant events or something, and their predictions of how many children you'll get you can still change because your destiny is in your own hands. Claims like that can't be falsified (they can always retort with "you chose a different path"), so it doesn't qualify as a theory - it is just mumbo-jumbo talk.

Same with psionics in SR - either their theories are proper theories that can be and are proven wrong by other magicians, or their theories are just mumbo-jumbo talk.

it was playable, its just that the player had to stay within a special kinda view of magic. not easy if the person next to him calls up elementals and trows around all kinds of strange spells. but thats why they call it roleplay i guess, and not tactical wargames...

edit:

the debate on psionics vs magic sounds a bit like evolution vs intelligent design

You mean how it isn't a debate at all because one is clearly right and the other is dogmatic anti-scientific bullshit?

heh, kinda. but it may allso be that evolution have been set into motion by a intelligence why does it have to be that it either evolved or was created as is?

hell, even our modern society have evolved

to get it back to the SR area. it may well be that the psionics are right, but not entirely in the way that they think

Thing is, the world of Shadowrun does have an "intelligent designer." At the most basic level, it's the writers. Though in an individual game, the GM also fills this role. While the real world has science, observation, and repeatable experimentation, the game of Shadowrun has the rules, as set down by the rulebooks and as tweaked by the gamemaster.

The rules of Shadowrun have been fairly clear in the past that magic relies on the manipulation of mana. Whether or not the mind or will is what manipulates that mana, mana has always been in the equation. That will be clear in Street Magic also.

Now, the GM can most certainly throw that out the window and make their own mechanics for how psionics works. But I wouldn't expect the writers to go back on their own system, especially in SR4, where the goal is to unify mechanics, not deviate from them.

As written, you can definitely interpret that as short-changing psionics. But Shadowrun was never really designed as a game about psionics. It is a game of magic and technology.

It doesn't have to be anything. It's just that most people don't just from thin air make up stuff. For example like coming up with the idea that the weather was controlled by georesonant radiation from tectonic movement that we can't detect. It's the same with ID.

i wasnt trying to start a debate on ID...

i just kinda found similaritys between SR psionics and ID

both can be seen as going on belief above "truth"...

psionics is basicly a roleplaying tool. sure it have the same rules mechanic as hermetic magic, but so what. the SR4 magic system was designed to keep mechanical difrences to a minimum so as to help speed of play. if you want to you can now even argue that shamans are hermetics with a mentor spirit...

there is a whole lot of fluff that you can wrap the mechanics in, and then step into the role based on said fluff. thats why this is called roleplaying, not rollplaying...

Don't you know we aren't supposed to think around here, just react? preferably in a knee-jerk fashion?

Oh do you really want to go down that line? The simple fact is I do not think you know what thefirst use and menaing of say, Hero, Tyrent, Awesome , Traitor, or many other words. So, yea we use a term Aura, withc guess what the meaning of the word hasn't really changed sence before psionicist were even thought of either. The idea what we should have psionics in shadowrun based on those terms is like saying we should have rules for playing imortla elves, or dragons, or vampires or AI's.

THe simple fact is that magic in shadowrun is not only provable it is impossable to disprove it.

Heh! At work the other week, someone made a very dismissive remark about creationists. I asked them where they thought the Universe had come from to which they confidently replied "The Big Bang." Ensuing conversation went almost exactly like this:

K.: So how's the Big Bang work then?
M.: Well... <thinks>... in the beginning everything was in one place and then it... exploded outwards.
K. : So what was before that?
M.: Nothing.
K.: So in the beginning there was nothing, and then the nothing exploded?*
M.: Well there wasn't nothing. It was just all in one place.
K.: So what made it suddenly explode?
M.: I think it got too hot.
K.: From what?
M.: I don't know.
K.: So it's just an article of faith, then?
M.: It's not faith. It's science.
K.: You don't understand it and you didn't see it or any evidence of it, but it's science? Not just a belief?
M.: Other people believe it.
K.: *cough*religion*cough*
M.: >.<

Now for a layman, I actually have a very good knowledge of cosmology and physics and could answer a lot of my own questions if I wanted to. But the point is that there are a great many people who can't yet still believe in the Big Bang to the point that they will argue dogmatically for it. Personally, I'm cool with the Big Bang, but I at least have read some Stephen Hawking. What I don't like is dogmatism in any form. It takes a pretty good knowledge of physics to be able to believe in the Big Bang without depending on the say so of others. Likewise there are quite a few people who believe in evolution but surprisingly don't actually understand it. They usually make the mistake of teleology to begin with.

Now what is really an article of faith is that I'm ever going to get back to talking about Shadowrun.


* I stole this from somewhere. Can't remember where.

Magic just is - yet some nutcases believe there is none.

This makes it sound like the only thing weird about a large flying whale is it's size

Heh! There's nothing inconcievable about large whales - they're supposed to be large. What would be weird would be small flying whales. Imagine them bobbing up against your window pane or swooping around your light fitting while you tried to chase them out.

Hmmm - character idea: Insane Illusion specialist.

I wrote the Astral Space and the Metaplanes chapter. So if the metaplanes seem more cosmic, I'll admit it's deliberate. That's how I've always played them. I've never been a fan of the "roll on a random table and let's see what your mystical encounter is." The things a magician experiences in the Metaplanes should shake him to the very foundation of his soul.

This explains why many magicians are "out there", either smug because they think they deal in things more significant than everything else or wise because they know there's a bigger world out there. But then the Sixth World always has a way of bringing them back down to Earth, especially when everyone they go up against tries to geek them first.

EDIT: And what, you've never seen a flying whale before?

WHAT CHOO SWATTIN' AT!? LIL' WHALES?

Hah! Not what I was thinking when I wrote it, but now I can totally see it too.