And this is the single greatest argument for why SR4 was a good move for the company. Teaching SR3 to new players was incredibly difficult. SR4 is smooth and easy to teach. Especially since I usually have 2-3 noobs and only 1-2 experienced players.

My FASA history is probably fuzzy, but I believe the whole print side of FASA was basically created to fund the development of the Battletech simulators, which is what the founders really wanted to do. So for them, ditching the print side for the digital side was probably a no-brainer. But it kinda sucks for those of us on the print side, not to mention those of us who would like to see more digital material that closely corresponds to the print products.

Nah, early FASA print product was mostly Traveler adventure books. That was like 1981 IIRC. Battletch was later. Along with the Star Track combat simulator, etc.

My understanding was that the members of of senior management that wanted to remain active in the non-electronic game industry didn't want to do it in Chicago and wanted to do other things. Like Clicks.

You know, I have to argue this point somewhat. I could teach SR3, minus the rigger rules, to a total newbie in a few minutes. Sr4 isn't noticeably easier, but I do have to give it credit-- it's much better laid-out and smoother to follow than previous SR editions.

This statement seems incredibly silly to me since SR4 has so far only released two core books. There is no way anyone is going to convince me Street Magic does not contain as many rules as say MitS.

If your preference for SR4 lies in not having some rules in some additional core books, you can thank FanPro for having a slow release scheme. Thinking all the rules will remain in a single book when all the core books are published and the product is as mature as SR3 is silly.

That seems to be extremely accurate, matching in pretty much all respects what I had heard from several people closely tied into the the company, some at a pretty high level. And from when I used to game with Andrew Keith when he was writing for them.

It leaves out Jordy screwing up fully playtested games by making arbitrarily changes right before printing (like the Star Trek Combat Simulator where one possible effect of getting hit by a photon torpedo was the ship undamaged but 100% of the crew dead), but otherwise it seems pretty much on target.

As Ediolon said, was that because you were expected to swallow all the books at once? Or was it because the system itself was hard? My experiences happen to match E's, in this case, almost perfectly. About a year ago, I started a SR3 game with some new players, and they expected that new players would instantly take in all their home expansions to create a coherent character. I can see how that would turn people off. But if your GM is careful, patient, and doesn't hand you too much at the outset, you can teach SR3 to a total newbie, time and time again, successfully. I've done it, Eidolon's done it, and many others here have done it. Teaching skills are just a bonus.

Also, was it easier to jump into because the writing itself was better? SR4 isn't any easier to teach, but it does spell things out better. And let's face it, FASA had some of the worst layout issues in the industry. I've discovered that well-written games are much easier to jump into; and like I said, SR4 is by-and-large a well-written book. That's the real "improvement" of SR4-- it brought the writing and layout up in quality.

But that's what Cain and I are saying. The rules you need to play the game, Shadowrun 3, are found in one book.

Now, if you have read the other books enough to see the options that they open up to you, you might feel like you need and/or are supposed to know all of that material, then you might come to the conclusion that you need the other books to play. That isn't the case, though.

The only reason this feeling exists in SR3 and not (yet) in SR4, is because the other books for SR4 aren't out there waiting to be picked up and read. I know people are chomping at the bit for Augmentation, et al, but they aren't there. Aren't you playing SR without them, though?

I agree. SR3 does have a bit of a learning curve for the GM, especially if that GM is only familiar with much simpler games. I came into SR3 from AD&D 2nd edition, in which we did not often use many additional rules supplements. It was a major shift for me to go from THAC0 and a die roll for damage to all of the mechanics of SR. But I approached it bit by bit, read voraciously, and learned the game well enough to start running it. There was a progression, of course, from "just combat" to "combat with magic" to "combat with magic and decking" etc. But I believe that this happens any any game with more than one central aspect.

I also sometimes wonder if our ever shortening attention span has led to a market that expects to be able to pick up the book and play five minutes later. There are great games that allow for that, and great games that do not. Shadowrun is a great game that requires a bit of investment.

And going by what Cain (and others) have said, they did a better job with layout, which can only speed up and aid the learning of the game by that first individual. From this aspect, you might be able to say that it's easier to pick up. I still wonder how much of that has to do with the fact that SR4 players are not yet having to cross-reference five books.

Note that I made no comparison of SR3 to SR4.

It is a very fair point that SR4 has not yet released all the supplements that SR3 wound up with, and it is likely that cross-referencing as many rules books as may be released will become a problem. This is the price we pay as players of a game that tends toward gritty, and has so many different aspects (eg. magic, matrix, 'ware etc.)

I do find the SR4 core book easier to read than the SR3 core, which is probably, as Cain says, due to improved layout.

Note that the "rules spread over a number of books" issue was/isn't the only hurdle (or even the biggest one) in many people's eyes. The bigger underlying problem was that those rules varied so greatly from one another and made referring to them mandatory. SR4 set out to streamline the rules, which many people mistakenly read as simplify (or "dumb them down" as many put it). In fact what the designers have been doing is removing redundancies and focusing on establishing common core mechanics.

That's exactly what we've done and it does impact significantly both people's perception of the overall complexity the game and the learning curve. Not only are we reducing the number of separate and distinct mechanics but rules folded under a common and intuitive mechanic. Examples include the way in which 20+ basic spirit types in SR3 have been streamlined to the 9 spirit archetypes in SR4; or the common mechanics for all traditions; or to cite an example from Street Magic, whereas SR3 had no less than 10 different types of "possession" powers/abilities each with its own rules variations and for the most part different mechanicsm in SR4 we have 2 different types of "possession" and will not be introducing any more variations.

Having drafts for Augmentation and Arsenal in hand, I can vouch for the fact that the same design philosophy applies there too (ie. toxins, diseases, drugs, bioweapons, weaponized nanites, etc could all use the same basic rules and mechanics, so why not?).

So, while SR4 might fall prey to a certain level of rule's bloat as more books come out, the overall complexity is reduced and the number of special situation rules needed introduced is cut down. Consequently Street Magic does indeed contain "less rules than MitS" while retaining just as many options (if not more).

This isn't just Hyperbole on Synner's part. SR3 had:

1. Loa Possession
2. Loa Zombie Possession (different mechanics from #1)
3. Insect Infestation
4. Insect Critter Infestation (different mechanics from #3)
5. Possession Metamagic
6. Free Spirit Possession
7. Imp Focus Occupation
8. Corpse Cadavre (spell based, despite explicit prohibitions of spells from doing that)
9. Ally Inhabitation
10. Shedim Inhabitation (different mechanics from #9)
11. Master Shedim Inhabitation (different mechanics from #10)

And that's excluding things that had SR2 rules that never got rules updates into SR3 such as the Horror Constructs from Harlequin's Back. The attempt to combat rules bloat in Street Magic was multi-level. Over and over again arguments were had "can we make a more general rule that covers all of these things". Some will say that we didn't go far enough, others will say we went too far (I know first hand that people on the riting staff, myself included, fall into one of those camps) - but the fact is that we did reduce all of those special instance rules to two rules: Possession and Inhabitation.

That allows us to have things like Golems without having to write even more unique mechanics that people would have to look up.

-Frank

There are a number of factors at work to prevent this. Like you mentioned, there is careful oversight. The editors know to look for new rules mechanics in material and call the writers out on it if they see it. The editors in SR3 really did not care if we added new mechanics. I know because I added quite a few during my time writing for SR3. If the mechanic worked, it went through. No one was checking to see if it used the same mechanics as past mechanics. No one was concerned about that during SR3.

Second, the books are clearly divided up between rules and setting material. This was not the case in SR3, where we were often encouraged to add rules material to the Game Information section of setting books. In SR4, a setting book is a setting book and a rules book is a rules book. There are no new rules in Runner Havens, unlike the new rules often found in the Shadows of... books. I imagine if there were some case in the future where we had to put some new rules in a setting book (and I know there are efforts to avoid this), those rules would be checked to ensure that they follow existing mechanics from the core rule books.

And yeah, sure you have to take my word that I'm telling you it exists now, but you can also take my word that it did not exist before. Consolidating mechanics really was not a priority back in the SR3 days.

Yeah? Now did this include the Decking rules as well? Or did you kind of gloss over that too? Or were you in one of those groups who didn't use those rules?

Cheap shot right there. Decking/Hacking has always been a bitch to manage. Regardless of rules.

You tease! You utter tease!

*sobs*

On the subject of 4th vs. 3rd, another great plus in fourth (I consider the rules a plus), is the quality reworking of the technology and setting to make it more palatable to people of today. No-one in the world of modern technology could take seriously the idea that you had to lug a great big "deck" around in order to do anything useful with computers. Nor that most people couldn't do useful research online or weren't connected to the rest of the world unless they had a big cable snaking from their head to a wall socket. Wireless, AR, commlinks and other bits and pieces make the whole setting much less jarring on a new player's sense of disbelief.

It's not just Magic In The Shadows. Check out the rules on Enchanting in Street Magic; there's material covering everything in MitS plus Target: Awakened Lands, State of the Art: 2063, State of the Art: 2064, and Man and Machine, among others. Not always a lot of material, but the rules diaspora adds up.

A fair point...mostly. Most "new" magic rules could be derived, if somewhat loosely, from previous material: sympathetic and symbolic links (Awakenings), animal materials in enchanting (Paranormal Animals of Europe), etc.

SR3 did, however, have some disturbing trends as far as rule-inflation went, grossly out of proportion to previous editions.

It's fun to watch the evolution (or fine-tuning, if you will) of aspects of Shadowrun's rule system (particularly magic, which has seen the most continuity).

This is absolutely true and the changes were absolutely essential. The problem with them was that instead of simply saying "Ok, you know what? It's always been this way, even back in 2050," they said "Viola! In 2050 you had to have a huge deck and a datajack to search the net. Not now!" Talk about jarring on a sense of disbelief. Similar changes between editions were never treated in such a way. Case in point: syncing spells through spell locks; suddenly in 2060 no one had to live in fear of their pals who had active foci. There was no "Oh, well, we have new magical technology to take care of this" -type explanation. It was just, "No, we don't want the rules to work this way so now the world is different." And everyone was ok with that... especially folks who had fell victim to whole active foci spell syncing thing.

I and others in my group are happier simply "reimagining" the first 20 years of SR having been wireless the whole slotting time.

Sidebar: Then of course there's the change in curse slang, but for another thread.

the vast majority of the decking rules in SR3 were easy-peasy. 90% of it was clearly laid-out, with simple rules and no more complexity than any other part of the game. granted, that other 10% was a real bitch, and (i feel that) if you ignored it, you were missing out on half the fun.

the real roadblock to learning the decking rules, for most people, was the fact that OHNOES ITS COMPUTARS. this is something i've learned after years of working tech support: most people don't want to be computer-savvy. any time anything related to computing comes up, their brain just shuts down and they completely lose all of their ability to learn anything. i've worked with lots of very intelligent people, trying to teach them basic things like checking their email and using Google, and it's like talking to a wall.

now, don't get me wrong. i'm not defending the SR3 Matrix rules, especially in comparison to the SR4 Matrix rules. the SR3 rules were pretty clunky, and they made zero real-world sense. i like the SR4 Matrix rules better. but there are still quite a few people who find them 'too complex'.

Well I think there's a difference in how deeply embedded in the history and matter grounding through foci and decks are. You didn't get many examples of exploding foci in the novels or setting material, but try and retcon decks and you have a major labour on your hands.

I think the way they moved things on was very well done. I think the truth is probably that most players and newer GMs don't have the long continuity that would cause it to jar with them. It's similar with the magic-fantasy aspects of 3rd vs. 4th for me. I think magic was too jarring for new players and GMs in the previous edition. The moment people open the book and see 'oh the president is a dragon' their minds immediately go into high fantasy mode. They sit there and look at you and ask you how much it costs to get a Unicorn mount with permanent invisibility. In SR4, magic is not downplayed exactly, but its rarity and specialness is stressed quite heavily and I think this also contributes to SR4's stronger feeling of grit and reality. Not only is magic rare, but it has become more sinister.

There are very few things about 4th edition that I do not think were improvements.

I have run across this many, many times over the years that I have played SR. You meet people that have heard that the decking rules are "too complicated", so they assume that they can't learn them. They tell someone else, etc., etc.

I'm in agreement with you guys on this point. But SR3 decking rules did take effort to learn, even the easy 90%, and a lot of people weren't willing to do that for one reason or another.

Now you have a system where every single user interacts with the matrix in the same fashion. There is very minimal difference between Probe IC in SR4 and any other user in the matrix. The IC has an Analyze program and it goes around making Matrix perception tests just like everyone else. Not true in SR3. Almost every single IC in the core book worked differently than deckers in the core book and needed their own rules.

Blue, Green, Orange, and Red. I didn't have any Red decks. BEMS versus ACIFS? Agent v. Frame v. Dumb Frame. Worms. None of it worked the same as anything else. It was unneccesarily complex.

I love that line...

However, battletech is complex? Oh well, that's a different forum all together...

Funny you should mention that. One of my favorite stories involves the time I took a complete Shadowrun newbie and taught her to play an *otaku*. It took about ten minutes total, with a cigarette break in the middle. Like MFB said, the basics were easy to teach; and I could walk her through the remaining 10%. I've had a harder time with SR4, since it breaks the skill + attribute rule half the time, and uses it the next; two different hacking mechanics; the effects of daisy-chained commlinks, and so on and so forth.

meh. the stuff you need to know to play a decker isn't much more than what you need to play an otaku--you've got more programs than otaku have channels, but that's about it. deckers only really get substantially more complex than otaku when you're trying to a) build one from scratch, or b) improve one.

...[2nd try due to Windows crashing Firefox again - I want a speed bag with a picture of Bill the Gates' head on it]

...True, but it was an option I took to make my Otaku Akima more Shredding in the Matrix. When she achieved her first Submersion, I took the ability (don't remember the exact terms anymore it's been so long) to substitute her Willpower for Body when dealing with Black IC. This made her a real badass in the Matrix...

...out of her "room", she usually ended up hiding behind the Troll Sammy and was more a liability to the rest of the team.

Even 2s are not all that great though. The best you could wear was a leather jacket without exceeding your Quickness score. That meant even a wageslave with a light pistol could take you down. Heck a Troll's bad breath could do you in. In the end, I didn't find Otaku viable as a PC member of a "normal" runner team. I did however often use them as effective NPCs to mess with the PC deckers.

well, lemme optimize for you: you're not going to be able to be very effective in combat, pretty much no matter what. you'll have a high combat pool (thanks to your high mental attributes), but not enough skill to use it effectively on offense. so stack on the armor--you'll still have a decent amount of cp left over for dodging, and you're not going to be rolling any Qui-based skills anyway. for offense, go with grenades and launch weapons. grenades don't require many (or any) successes to use effectively, and even if you don't spend points on the LW skill, you've got a gigantic intelligence to default to.

that said, i agree--otaku don't make good party members. they weren't originally intended to be, and the rules for using them as such reflect that fact. as much as i enjoyed the original otaku flavor, TMs are much easier to integrate into a party. i just... fuck, man. radio brains. hell no.