Off hiatus from SR, yes. Dumpshock, maybe? Not sure, don't really feel much desire to. I foolishly read a FrankTrollman post and the 'dumb' that collects and pools around here and convinced me to go on hiatus to start with all came vividly flooding back. So good chance it'll only be a brief hiatus from my hiatus. Sunday I started up with a new campaign. I just came here to see if I could find a character generator that included Augmentation. Was reminded what a PITA Community's location was and thought I might drop in here to voice that opinion.

No joy on the chargen (come on folks! I want my free stuff NOW! ) and was tight for time so I pulled out an old character (400BP, 145 karma earned) to play alongside the other new 400BP PCs. This character hadn't been seen in action by any of the other players or the GM before (played with a different group) but we are pretty sure he'll fit well as he isn't tweaked out. He's built for fun, not for speed. Only 1 IP, no magic (sort of), no drones, and rarely uses the Matrix (Scorched'll make ya kinda skiddish about doing that).

The campaign actually kicked off a session earlier but I had been out of town for that weekend. How it played out was they didn't know my character (I've spent a lot of Street buying his Noto down ) but when they came to do some wetwork one of the targets and some hanger-ons had my character stripped down to silk boxers and a tumbler of Sammy Hagar Memorial Edition Cabo Wabo in the middle of the bar. Had out-played the rat bastard who was trying to cheat me on a several thousand nuyen gamble. He figured I must have been cheating too, which I wasn't (did I ever mention Edge rocks?), or was just trying to frame me for it so he could take my money.

Faced them down on that successfully to clear my name as an honest gambler but when I went for my newfound cred on the table sticky-fingers-the-cheat and his goons tried to ice me anyway. Talk about poor sportmanship coupled with a generous helping of thick-i-tude, beat down twice and and still atryin'? A more strict lesson need be taught. It all ended up with my character meeting some new friends (hasty wireless deal from the other PCs to 50-50 split my winnings in exchange for their backup...giving them a nice openning to start shooting) and a very public flare gun sizzling, pepper-punch 'nade tossing, table-top hipsliding, screaming patron panicing, FA shootout that left a good number of their 20+ member gang, including the entire leadership (sticky-fingers wasn't even 2nd in command), crumpled on the floor. The GM didn't mention details on it yet but I just know this is going to end up costing me a metric pile of Street to buy my Noto back down.

Good times, good times. Reminded me of exactly why I think SR4 rocks out. If there weren't so many so-hot-they-are-friggin-cool P&P RPGs out there these days I would never play anything else.

@eidolon

Exxx-cel-lent.

BTW how have you been?

I was going to send a PM to ask but it seems a bunch of the pages here for pulling up user details of others (for the PM link), setting "My Controls", and so on are busted for me now. The pages come up total blanks. Might just be the default IE security settings for x64 Vista but I haven't run across any other boards that don't work with the 32-bit version of IE on x64 Vista.

What a quaint, intreging, and uncommon observation. So how are things stacking up for you anyway? Call it whatever; the Version With Suckier Cover Art Forum, the Not A Version Bogged In Minutia That Would Make The IRS Blush Forum, or the Version Where The Matrix Isn't A Separate Game Forum. It doesn't so much matter, it'll still be the one with the traffic 'cause it rocks so hard.

Thanks for the tip eidolon.

Wait... those happen in this forum?

Huh? No sweat on that I think. I was just playing with the Japanese soilder hiding on his jungle island, for old-times sake. I mean SR4 is on it's 5th printing or so, right?

Yeah. My comment/snipe about SR4 not being Shadowrun was completely out of line!

That's my point; the current names are all futzed up. SR4 is the 'general'. I guess you missed it but over the last couple of years about 30,000 copies of SR4 have sold. Oh sure there might be some that people said "screw this" and went back to SR3. But that sure isn't going to account for anything close to 30,000.

'News' is showing up in the Shadowrun Forth Edition forum and the posting volume is higher (5x higher? Or more?) because there are simply a lot more active players in SR4 and spliting between two forums is kinda a pain. The Shadowrun forum looks like it's getting 100 posts/week tops, so about a thread and a half/day. The rules are pretty much talked out. The only thing newish happening with SR3 are a couple of Community Projects and SR3R. I noticed the later got moved out on it's own due to pushing the copyright line so that leaves it to Community Projects which is a different forum.

Maybe not yours but I got the impression that isn't entirely universal. But then I was always used to skipping Decking threads entirely so maybe I don't get the problem to start with. *shrug*

I would expect they'd Archive the current Shadowrun forum for your faster, easier searching. The biggest pain I found was/is searching two different forums for stuff which has been the case the last two years.

I'm a bit surprised if the plan doesn't include a subforum for prior rules. Although I know there are technical reasons for trying to keep the number of subforums to a minimum and as I mentioned above the traffic for even SR3 rules stuff is very, very minimal. Maybe they plan on having a 'rules' subform off a 'general' forum but I can't say I've prefered setups like that in the past.

P.S. Any bets on what the eidolon pirate-bot is going to say next keep that post stickied? I'll place a virtual-bet on the 8:1 marker that the post includes a reference to a parrot.

Lots of forums == blah. Forums aren't "free".

A general forum + SR4 rules forum + SR1-SR3 rules forum == one totally dead forum, and guess which one that is. There just isn't enough traffic to justify a SR1-SR3 rules forum in that sense. Just look through the threads that have been touched in the "Shadowrun" forum in the last month, it wouldn't take long because there are only 53 of them. There are very few SR3 rules discussions and of those they are actually relavent to SR4 too because they are rules light (more to do with setting) and still applicable to the SR4 setting. Which is why it is screwy that it is split out from the actual acting general SR forum right now as side-by in the root of Discussions.

Just say it with me; SR3 specific rules discussion is D-E-A-D.

EDIT: I guess that's why no "Classic" sub-forum is in the plans? There will maybe be a Setting/Rules split?

No. We moved elsewhere because the admins wished it, not for any other reason.

~J

The admins wished it because of pushing the copyright/IP line.

EDIT: And yes, the admins moved it off the board. Then let you have private access to salvage the contents.

I am not aware of any ruling or legal statement to this effect. Or are you offering me legal advice (in the formal sense)?

The publicly-stated reason was that they had concerns about copyright issues. That is very different from there being copyright issues.

~J

Which is what my brief paraphrase was getting at. It was [re]moved by the admins because it was, in the opinion of the admins, too close to being a copyright/trademark infringement. I get the impression that the trend towards the wrong side of the line likely was a factor as much as whether or not you were over, so they acted proactively to keep DSF out of the middle. But that's reading between the lines and what I would likely feel in their position, so I could be reading too much into Bull's post.

Whether or not it is/was over the line is, technically, not something that has been determined with certainty. Because judges do that sort of thing and I ain't one of them. I don't even play one on TV. But if it is getting close to having to ask a judge, or even an attorney for that matter, to make the call then I suggest you are pushing the line. Just causing a forum that regularly has rules quoted verbatum out of source books (sometimes copy-pasted in the case of the newer books) balking at hosting it is IMO pushing it.

I don't mean you or the project ill will, never have. Hope for the sake of your effort that you can keep it clean enough to avoid an C&D. But I can't say I ever expected a lot of fruit from the project either. Primarily because it is such a daunting task for various reasons.

Not that any of these details are relavent to my initial point. SR3R was one of the very few remaining reasons for rules talk centered on SR3 and isn't here anymore.

It's that "in the opinion of the admins" that I was going for. Though it could be seen as implied in the original statement, it's still something I like to keep explicit.

~J