Hi I'm an old skool player and I used to be on dumpshock all the time but not recently. 4e feels very ghost in the shell in nature but there no reason you couldn't take the rules back to 2050. Anyone done it?

I have some 4e reservations. Overall I think I like it better than 3e (the only improvement I saw in 3e was magic, the rest of it I prefer 2nd or 1st)
One problem I have is the WOW factor from a GM giving out a TN of 42 and watching all the players gather round as the player falls to 1 die, 6, 12, 18, 24, 30, 36, 42!!!!!!!!!
I've played a lot of nWOD and it doesn't have that WOW factor (I still like nWOD) so my fear is 4e wont have that same WOW factor. The other big thing is I miss priorities and whats with all these edges and flaws they used to be optional now it feels like if I don't have them I'm missing out. I don't think any of these have to be game breakers I'm just wondering if anyone has created some house rules or done things to tweek 4e in an old skool direction.

Thanks

What precisely of fourth edition do you want to keep? You don't seem keen on the settings or mechanics. Are you hoping to just keep the cover art?

Maybe I was unclear. I want to play 4e in 2050, I want to know if anyone has done any tweeks to give it that 1e feeling. I'm not moving back to the target number or anything else, I was simply pointing out things I liked in the old systems.

1e to me - Razor guys were the shiz, they could bring out there blades and run across the room before a guy could draw pistol. The world was bleak (more setting than rules) Orks and Trolls are 2nd class citizens. Mages were feared and magic was kinda rare (read priority A only). I liked the big generic skills like Firearms and you could concentrate and specialize. Seams like a small thing but when I think back to 1e the thing I remember most about creating characters was the priority system and skills. Is that better?

btw: Fortune when did you become the Immoral Elf? lol

Razor guys: you could alter Initiative so that it went 4, 3, 2, 1 rather than 1, 2, 3, 4.
Rarer magic: double the cost of the Adept, Mystic Adept and Magician Qualities.
Generic Skills: Erase the skills that make up skill groups, and have the groups purchasable for the same cost as a regular skill.
Priority system: That one you'll need to work out for yourself. Hell, you could just use it the way it used to be!

I have to say, all the things you want to change are things I much prefer in 4e. But I'd like to hear how this works out!

The flair of editions past will not be found by tweaking rules. It's totally up to the GMs. The inverse initiative order idea sounds good though.

Thats what I did when i ran good ol' Harlekin last year.

You need to cap equipment. Max rating of gear should be 4.
No bioware at chargen (and maybe not even later). No Alphaware at chargen (and increase price modifier to x3 or x4. Don't remember what it used to cost. Getting old).
Rename equipment (i.e. guns/cars/stuff). Old lists my come in handy. No Predator IV for you Pal.
Send wireless Matrix and Technomancers over board.
Use comlink rules for cyberdecks. But with lots of cable
Unless you have to much time use the same rules for riggers that are used in SR4. i.e. deckers with diffrent programs/skills.

Your pretty much alone with creating a priority system. I will advise you against it. The new system works just fine.
Qualities can be removed, but you should keep adapt/magician in game or for obvious reasons your players won't be awakend. Dump the Mystic Adept though.
Also threaten every player that tries to initiate

Thats pretty much all I came up with. Also, don't be afraid of the new system. It won't bite. Often.

My experience with SR1 was not pleasant. In my first session I had a Street Sam which I opened up with his FA assault rifle. 30 bullets in one round. I had to role for each @#$@ bullet!!! I thank God SR1 is no longer around.

Don't listen to the naysayers; keeping the spirit of 1e around is a righteous cause.

I don't know what the deal would have been with having to roll for each bullet firing full auto, unless you were shooting at 10 different people. But as for keeping the feeling of 1e with 4e rules, I'd probably start with upping the damage codes of most or all weapons. My first big shocker moving from 2nd to 4th was when the group's street sam, played by a guy who'd never played any edition at all, was able to successfully pick a fight with gangers who all had uzis. He didn't outthink them or anything. Their bullets just bounced off his orthoskin and body armor. He might have taken 1 or 2 boxes of stun. In my old group, if you were in a gang's bar, you played nice until you were at least near a door.

My bad. That was so impossible to do with the priority system. Because it prevented you from forgetting and did not simply predefined how many points you put in attributes and stuff. Witch is like 5 minutes work. Yeah.

Also, my edition is rather weird, it has a guidline in witch order to build your char. Like metatype -> attributes -> skills -> qualities -> gear -> contacts -> final stuff. Although I put qualitys before Skills out of habit.

For a straight adept, it took me 30 min or less using BP, and under 10 for Priorities. Other builds would take longer depending on complexity and gear needed. Granted, this is because I was very familiar withthe system, but I've created over a dozen characters in SR4, none of which have taken under 3 hours (and one that took over 3 days!)

Simply having 4 times as many points to allocate means you have 4 times the complexity, which usually equates to 4 times as long. In SR4's case, it's even longer than that.

I always hated the priority system and bought the companion just for BP rules. The time I take to build a character with both systems is usually almost the same and is vastly overshadowed by the time I take to buy stuff for her. Haven't built a priority based character in years though.

But feel free to ignore my 0.02¥. I'm too young for 1st ed anyway

I adored the Twilight 2000 lifepath system. If someone could figure out how to adapt that to SR4, a melding of the two would kick ass. (Mostly for its skill-packaging; If you did this career with these options, you got those skills.)

T2000 first edition?

From looking over character creation of 4e and 1e it looks like A on the priority system is around 160pts roughly. So my quick solution is to build up characters using the following

Metahuman = 160pts
Magician = 105pts (at Magic Rating 1)

I think personally that I will drop Magician to an even hundred and play around with the variance on metahumans per the 4e rules as I like that orks cost less. The metahuman cost also seams way too high perhaps if I use the optional rule from 2e where metahumans could be C rather than A. Although this would raise the amount of metahumans in a group compared with 1e groups I think I am ok with it being a bit cheaper. hurray I am on my way to finding something I can live with. I also think rather than priorities I will introduce a lifepath system.

Buying gear has always been the huge time-killer for me. Assigning edges, flaws, skills and attributes never took me very long, no matter what system I was using. It's also really nice not to be sitting there, having picked up priority A resources because you needed 600k or so nuyen, and then saying "okay... how am I gonna spend the rest of this?"

rather than calculate exact points I calculated the differnces between the priority levels moving from A to be is a difference of 10 skill points for example. Do this between all the possiblities and you'll start to see some vague patterns forming. The stuff in A is about 2:5ths of the whole. 2:5ths of 400 is 160. Attributes in the new editon are way more expensive than previous edtions because they do alot more. 1e it gave you some pool dice and that was about it. Now it effects your skills gives you more pools etc. Also gear is cheaper which will be another headache. from yesterdays builds I did skill groups seam to fall around 7BP and attributes fall in around 8BP but now that attributes do more I'm not sure converting them is a good idea.

Ive actually been working on a 4e priority system. However, ive been baseing it on 3e's old priority system.

I loved the priority system personally; I understand it's not for everyone, but it worked really well for me. (BTW, for those who don't like it, what were your reasons?) If i had any problems with it, i admit the resource jump was the worst(1,000,000 to 400,000 to 90,000 were pretty large jumps, as opposed to the much more reasonable jumps of attributes and skills. The million back in the day existed for deckers its pretty much known, and riggers to a lesser extent, but that was more a problem with the resource allocation rather than the priority system in itself.)

Anyway, so far im in the beginnings of it, and this is what ive come up with. I started with Attributes.

In the old system, the Attributes ran 30/27/24/21/18.

Attributes priority A, if you averaged it, could net you 5's down the line, if you were human(you could allocate 5 points to each attribute.)

Nowadays, 4 is what the old 5 was about. So, 4's right down the line can be allocated. With 8 attributes, if everything starts at 1, you get 24 points, if it starts at 0, you get 32 points. Pretty simple. Im keeping the limits of one 6/max level score at chargen, and making it so the final point costs 2 attribute points(since the last points in the BP system cost 25, or 2.5x10, i just rounded down.) So, assuming the attributes start at 0(again, not sure if i leave them at 1 yet), it's 5 points to hit a 5, and 2 more(for 7), to hit a 6. Seems balanced to me at first glance.

Priority B, or the old 27 points, allowed a human average of 4/4/4/5/5/5.

Under the new rules? This works out well for 3/3/3/3/4/4/4/4. 28 points.

C, 24 points, or 4/4/4/4/4/4 average? 3/3/3/3/3/3/3/3. Which, again, is...24 points(starting from 0).

D, which was 21 before(3/3/3/4/4/4), i adjusted to average 2/2/2/3/3/3/3/3.

And so on. I don't have all the info here, but so far it's looking good. The most difficult part was coming up with a magic system. Since you add to your magic attribute, and also have Edge, which in the BP system don't count toward your raw attribute limit, i made a 6th priority, for ''special attributes'', in which you divide up between Magic and Edge. To balance out the fact that you only start with a 1 magic and must add to it, Full Magicians are priority B, and i reintroduced Aspected Magicians and Adepts in priority C.

I dont have in front of me anything, but with the Special Attribute priority(Edge and Magic starting at one and humans getting +1 edge), i was figuring out a good number to give. 7 points for priority A seems like a good amount; a human could max their magic(total 6 points, 4 to bring it to 5 and 2 more for 6), as well as have one extra Edge point(hey, the first priority SHOULD give something decent.). Mr. Lucky could essentially max out with this(the Lucky edge extending the max to . Again, this is still in the making.

Didn't want to threadjack, just wanted to input something if you wanted the 'old-school'' feel. Ill probably post this whole system when i tweak it up. the Skills are a bit challenging at the moment.

1E wasn't about Priority.

Street Sammies were death on a stick.

You got paid with a certified cred stick. And everyone had a credstick.

It was Mages only bind Elementals and can have a small pack of them, but boy do they pay in summoning time and summoning materials.

Shamans only summoned nature spirits or spirits of man but could do it at any time with no magical materials. Of course the spirits were limited to one per domain and using a spirit outside it's domain was impossible.

Adepts were rare rare rare.

Initiat... What? No one talked about Initiation and meta magic.

Deckers had to Jack in and they needed a deck.

Riggers needed serious hardware to be able to jump in.

I plan to keep the keep cyberware prices low and have some of the AR stuff. Also commlinks are common, but people use the more secure credstick and physicaly slot the stick to avoid problems.

Helll I played 1E and it proved if you have a way cool concept, lots of background material to keep the game going and you don't even need a rule system.

I've just started a 2054 campaign now and trying to work out the 1E changes needed to 4th now.

I'd ran a 10 year SR campaign that I wrapped up when the last original player moved away. 4th looks so good, I had to give it a try again.

I'm not doing away with AR or commlinks and the like. I'm just downplaying it while trying to do it in the 1E style (way too much great 1E, 2E, and 3E material to pass the chance to run it again).

I love the much more realistic price for cyberware.

I also like the more active role Hackers/deckers can take, but think they may have pushed the whole wireless thing a little too far. Still not a problem when you are running in the fifties.

I just require that a decker jack in to the net to get VR (hot or cold) because the bandwidth is too large for wireless unless you have special equipment like a satellite uplink. They can still hack wireless, but they do it at meat speeds.

I need to change the decker's commlink's name with the same rating deck's. Decks need to be a two or three times as valuable since they have a lot of special modifications and upgrades so that the decker can use hot VR and won't leave a trail. Commlinks are likely half the price since they don't do nearly as much. A five times difference between a deck ready for the shadows and a Commlink/off the rack Deck sounds about right.

Also a decker can rig a building or a vehicle using some extra hardware and running emulation software just not as fast as a rigger (max 2 IP)

Wireless stuff is common, but it is not trusted for important transactions so people keep sloting the cred stick. The commlink is a very advance PDA that nearly everyone has. Military grade drones use laser or satellite links to prevent jamming or being hijacked. Less drones... not so much. Surveillance drones depend on not being noticed.

For magic just play down the initiation aspect for now (as a GM that is no sacrifice at all) and have a lot less common spells. Make the caster work to get those new rare bleeding edge spells and techniques.

Play up the differences between Hermetics and Shamans.

I'm still trying to work out the details on how to handle the Hermetics only Bind and Shamans only summon thing. Plus get use to the new spirit rules in 4th.

Also playup how security people are still not use to dealing with Adepts.

Also keep the gear rating down a little (4 or 5 is good since the ratings are all relative and todays SOTA rating 6 gear is next years rating 4 gear. Also loose the contacts that are Flare compensation, IR, Lowlight, Displaylink, smartlink,... So contacts are usually just Flare Compensation and or Displaylink plus they are about 5 times the price (Can you say status symbol)


Finally With the way cheaper Cyberware (and me holding down all the increased reflexes for the adepts and spell casters) the sammies got nothing to complain about.