sorry, but only option 1 is valid on dumpshock

No. It would be more accurate to compare it to the phrase, "the Earth is no less spherical than other planets."

That said, I'm just trying to be as pedantic as you are. Your supplied quote of "trolls are no less intelligent or mannered than other metatypes" specifically stated "no less." So if there's a Human, Dwarf, Ork, or Elf running around with Logic 6 or Charisma 6 naturally, there must be Trolls running around with the same natural scores... for "trolls are no less intelligent or mannered than other metatypes." There must also be Charisma 9 Trolls running around, too. And ones with Charisma scores in excess of 13-14 through augmentation. And all with exactly the same stat distributions and averages because, again, "trolls are no less intelligent or mannered than other metatypes."

Which is completely absurd.

That's the only way your argument can hold up, however, since that quote is the foundation for everything you're going on about.

Obviously. Your quote states otherwise though, despite the obviousness of how wrong it is, both as described by the setting and the game rules reflecting the characters.

See above. The quote isn't "trolls are often as well-mannered and intelligent as an average specimen of any other metatype." It's "trolls are no less intelligent or mannered than other metatypes." That's a hard, definitive statement.

Yes, because that's all exactly what everyone in this thread has been saying. You're spot on with that commentary. Bravo. How could anyone question such a clearly accurate and astute observation? I simply can't fathom it. You're quite clearly a god amongst mere mortals.

Torontroll?

Critias, have I told you this week that I love you?
I think you cause more potential trouble in my workplace than anyone else. Those are great.

*shrug* I suspect that at this point, the moderators are evaluating whether further posts on the average CHA of trolls in SR4 BBB would be useful to other Shadowrun GMs and players. I've made my points; anyone can take 'em, or leave 'em, or misinterpret them. You have evaded my point with 5 net hits, and scored a critical success!

As with many USA residents, my knowlege drops off fairly abruptly at the border, so if someone who knows Toronto says that it could become a haven for trolls and other 6W non-mainstreamers, I'll buy that. Could there be a Trolltown neighborhood in which material culture was troll-optimized from the ground up? eg parking meters have a height that goes above waist level for trolls? NYC might have that, if there was an area that became "temporary worker barracks" for troll construction workers, and then trolls never left and no one kicked them out. (Which any major player could - individually, trolls are tough, but long-range missiles loaded with lethal gas are a darn persuasive argument for relocation, and so is magic that works against WIL rather than BOD.)

As for visual descriptions... I can readily imagine some people describing a troll, in post-crisis police debriefing as "uh, she was a troll, and big, with horns... and an overcoat. What kind of horns? I dunno. Pointy?" Even if trolls vary as much (or more) as other metatypes, in skin shade, horn shape, and so forth, many people might well pay much less attention to those details. The phrase "they all look alike to me" is all too true in real life; it's not because they actually have identical features, it's because the observer is less experienced with that category. Meanwhile, a troll might habitually notice details such as "horns pointed forward, with outward arch, right one larger", because the troll has a lot more experience with noticing horns... but might parse dwarves as "short" and not notice clearly the distinction between 3'6" height vs. 3'8" height.

The city of Providence, Rhode Island really did have a contest for a six-word slogan to promote the city (sponsored by Chamber of Commerce, or Ministry of Propaganda, or some such). Students at Brown came up with "Near Boston! Kinda near New York!"

Then again, I live in a city with a major tourism economy, and our slogan has nothing to do with what makes our city distinguishable from, say, Torontroll. Perhaps it's better that way.

Why would you think that? Have you had any experience with Dumpshock's moderators arbitrarily cutting short an ongoing and on-topic conversation for no reason?

I thought SR was supposed to be dystopian fantasy-future with political correctness thrown out the window. It shouldn't be too hard to imagine a solid acceptance of justified racism (as in orks and trolls really are less mentally capable than others) in SR with all of the other assumptions we have to swallow (like the Shiawase Decision if you want a non-magical example).

And they're ruining all our message boards!!!

Well, to racists, all racism is justified racism.

That's neither here nor there except to say that its one thing to say that mechanically trolls have a lower maximum Logic stat, and another to say that trolls shouldn't be able to live where they want to live.

Ouch.

As a matter of interest, does the United States have a city everybody there likes to hate, the way Toronto is reviled by all Canadians who don't live there? (...because they're jealous, even those Vancouverites with their mountains and sea and fresh air and laid-back, west-coast attitude and ...) Or how about other countries? Is there a Torontroll in the UK? Do Aussies hate Sydney, do Germans hate Hamburg?

Sure...

But if I'm the corp building the apartment complex/residential community, I'm within my rights to put in 8-foot ceilings in all of the structures, trolls be damned. They can adapt to those living conditions or else find housing elsewhere. The same for workplaces and jobs. PolCor equality is gone in SR along with most other positive notions of cheerfulness and glee.

Detroit and San Francisco get a lot of flak for widely differing reasons.

dude . . i am from hamburg . . don't you dare . .
People LOVE Hamburg . .
actually, most germany hate either bavaria or the old eastern parts that were once soviet . . or Berlin because it's a huge disappointment in both being the capital and the biggest construction site in all of germany . .

People love hamburgers! You're just hearing what you want to hear.

Odd that when I lived in Flint (until '95), my friends and I wanted to move to the big city to find something better. That big city was typically Detroit (Chicago for the more ambitious among us). My hometown sucked bad. In many ways, Detroit was/is a step up from Flint.

It depends the type of flak.

LA is a soulless sprawl devoid of any good.

SF is a left wing nutjob factory full of queers and liberals.

Of course, both those statements are stereotypes, just like New York is full of assholes, Detroit is dirty blue-collar wasteland, Milwaukee is a beer-stained catch basin in the heartland of America, Kansas City is full of thieves and jackasses, Atlanta is the bland sprawl of the South, Orlando is a corporate wasteland full of old people and tourists, and don't even get me started on Texas...

Really, it all depends on who you ask. Every place has its charm if you actually ignore the stereotypes and look at it with open eyes.

True spoken, dude.

I agree; in fact, trolls not fitting in is a matter of de facto segregation, which is what I've been saying all along.

Absolutely, which is why there would have to be some external force to kick the community as a whole into change. The earthquake in NYC or the hypothesized massive refugee influx into Toronto would be two examples. Without that level of crisis, the status quo and existing prejudices/economics would prevail.

Absofuckinglutely.

Occasionally some of the sourcebooks have made assumptions about the presence of some kind of shared racial identity, and it's totally preposterous. The whole founding of Tir Tairngire is implied to have occurred because 'elves needed to be elves in their own elven lands'. This only works if I assume the Tir Tairgire sourcebook is not an omnicient narrator. Why? Because some Sinsearach elf who spent all 20 of her years as a NAN member is going to have about as much in common with the 20 year old elf from Detroit who deals drugs as I have with some Slovak mercenary. Which is to say jack. Thankfully, I DO believe the Tir Tairngire book was written to be unreliable in that regard.

It's the same deal with 'ork culture' in the more recent books. An ork in Ethiopia is fundamentally an african, just like an Ork from seattle is fundamentally an American. Just because they're both poor, oppressed by men with guns, and aren't averse to shanking you doesn't mean they share a culture.

's why I've always been careful to portray 'ork culture' in SR as largely a construction of corporate marketing teams, orksploitation media, and a small amount of shared culture via the matrix.

It seems that the real reason behind the founding of both Tirs as more to do with building a power base for IE from the ED era when there was a racial identity than any real modern need.

I agree that the actual shared identity based on race is more a marketing force than a reality in SR, though there is something to be said for the shared experiences caused by racism and class-ism in modern society. Two individuals from similar but separate cultures with a shared "deformity" in the eyes of their cultures might have a bond of similar upbringings, but whether they actually had anything to talk about after a few hours is doubtful. Still, such is the basis of many religious and cultural organizations in our modern world where belonging is a strong force against the alienation imposed by much of society.

Edit to add: To add that up, I think troll policlubs are more likely than troll nations, though there might be an outside factor that would lead to troll communities, such as the building of a housing development of troll-sized houses by a corp like Evo. That could be the start of a troll neighborhood (similar to a chinatown in many major cities) which could create a troll racial identity for that localized area over a generation or two. I see this in the Seattle ork underground, for instance.

I totally agree about the Tir.

That aside, the trolls do have 1 culture generating advantage that the races (other than orks) don't have: short life spans. This means that a change that normally takes many years to become enculturated in the larger human population could become "passed down for generations" to a troll community within about 90 years.

By comparison, the elves had much more need to create a faux history, as elven generations take centuries to create true culture.

Even the dispossessed street example elf and troll would probably have fairly different perspectives, as the elf could have been living on those streets for 40 years and it wouldn't even be a fraction of his projected lifespan (meaning he's still got a young body to deal with what the street throws at him), while the troll could conceivably be not much older than 30 and on the streets for 2 years and he'd be starting to have joint problems in the winter.

Yup. Playing a troll PC in a campaign set in the JIS Occupation, I've been reminded of that.
With good gaming by GM and player, that can be good flavor... same way that you also don't take the guy with Claustrophia along on the tunnel mission ("Joe, we really oughta have someone guard the tunnel entrance, can you stay upstairs for us?"), you don't take the guy with Sensitive Neural System on the Matrix run, you don't take the guy with Spirit Bane: Invae into the nest, and so forth.

I have not had that experience. I stand nudged towards a more clear and fair statement: I suspect that at this point, the moderators might be evaluating whether me locking horns with Doc Funk on the topic of average Troll CHA would be useful to the forum's purposes. I myself have no objection to other perspectives on that topic - and I am curious what you, Fortune, think the percentages might be, in your own campaign, in Missions, etc. But even without fear of Moderator Thor Shots, I think it's time for *me* to drop the topic. I'm relatively new here, and I don't want to get a rep as a troll. So to speak.

Now that he mentions it, that term does seem a little racist.

I haven't noticed anyone arguing hard against roleplay challenges. I'm playing a troll PC and I expect DP penalties on most negotiations with non-goblins, plus DP penalties on interactions with orks and trolls who see the PC as a "pinky-lover" (aka non-human-hater). I expect that guns dropped by LoneStar will not be usable due to the trigger guard. I expect that "in this parking lot, surely we can escape in a stolen vehicle" is only viable my PC's in the back of a truck/van (with luck, he can run a fiberoptic cable to a dashboard rigging or Control port). I'm fine with Lifestyle costing more due to food needs and elbow room needs. (Oakland has "coffin hotel" rooms sized for trolls, at higher rates, but they smell as if pinky streetwalkers have been using them for double occupancy.) I'm fine with everyone else escapes out the window and oh damn, not an option for me. I'm fine with the PC having no "metarace community" option of emigrating to Tir nations, nor cashing in on the cachet of ubercool wizards and Tir Ghosts, nor becoming a full member of an ork gang, nor joining a wealthy and well-maintained dwarf warren. Those are good challenges.

That is different from my arguing hard that those challenges are not, in SR4 6W, due to a majority of trolls having INT, LOG and CHA of 1. If they mostly have 2 or 3, the above challenges remain. Indeed, if trolls mostly have INT, LOG and CHA of 2 or 3, and all the non-goblins treat them *as if* they had mental 1s, then the roleplaying challenges get more intense. Cf. Jacky Robinson.

...why wouldn't you?

I'd love to bring that guy along with me if I had to do a job on a nest! I just wouldn't stand very close to him.

And throw a tac nuke on him with a killswitch.

In my experience, the mods only step in, and generally with a warning first, if someone is insulting another poster, rather than that poster's arguments. So go ahead and drop the topic if you feel you have said all you can about it, but don't drop it because you are afraid of being argumentative. This board has seen much longer and more intense arguments over things such as running social skills vs. PCs, while still keeping the discourse relatively civil.

There is such a thing?

Speaking of which, in 6W 2070, after decades of armed struggle, has the Esperanto Liberation Front finally established a free and independent homeland, and if so, where?

And did any descendants of Orlando Bloom go UGE as elves? Because that would be kinda funny.

Yes. The face who actually has the agreement with Mr. Johnson. You need him, until you get paid.

Opening run of my first SR campaign, four PCs and a GM-PC go on a run, we score some biotech loot, the GM-PC is the only one with a street doc contact, he brokers the sale, the doc pays some up front and promises more after she can analyse the goods, we split up for a few hours of downtime... and a mosquito spirit strike team, having tracked him by a bite of his blood taken during the run, finds him and kills him, after the street doc sends him the payment, and before he splits it five ways. Somehow we choose not to file a claim with his estate. Bugger! That was major cred!

You say that like it's a bad thing. . .