Over the course of four editions, a lot of Shadowrun's rules changed. Some of the rule changes had no effect on the flavor of the world (guns still shoot), other changes had profound effects, leading to retconning.

One example is astral space. Back when astral travellers couldn't go through living beings - like plants - ivy made a very cheap and effective barrier to astral scouts. Earth was the same, first not allowing anyone to pass through, then requiring hours to pass through 1 meter of earth. So, in my campaign, many corp facilities were underground, completely safe from astral intruders, or had quaint ivy growth over their walls because that was more cost-effective than wards (and more secure in someways as well).

With the rules changes, that changed as well, since it did not make econimical or otherwise sense anymore.

What examples do you have of "world-changing" retcons?

Spell grounding was a surprisingly big one. Before using a foci was undertaken with some degree of caution because it was liable to blow up. Now everyone and their brother has a foci or two. Bah!

I think the passing through the earth was never forbidden in 1st edition just not explained on how it was accomplished until later expansions. Guess did'nt realize the plant issue until looking back over astral security in BBB, I see the ivy there is dual natured.

Some of other glaring changes spirit service times 24 hours for hermetics, sunrise/sunset for shamans and spirit domains for shamanic spirits.

Missing critter power Alienation that not only existed for several editions but was noted in Dunks will. I know it has glaring holes to be misused and simply reversed effect to make it viable again. (target cant see/touch/notice those around him as opposed to them not seeing him).

Narcoject weapons missing, few other pieces of gear missing too and probably replaceable with new toys but for converted characters who've been around since 1st edition they were an old standby.

Edit: Ahhh how did I forget that one, spell grounding..nothing like thinking you've gotten away and the adept with 8 spells locked and active gets targeted from the astral and a few massive Hellblasts go off in the get away car.

Grounding Spells.

Edit: Damn! Waaay too many windows open.

Vehicles - all of a sudden, modding just didn't work any more, all vehicles massively changed prices and stats during every edition switch.

Dikote - it's effects changed massively from 2nd to 3rd edition, and it just vaporized in 4th. Propably, all the diamond-coated surfaces disintegrated because computers crashed.

Spirits 3rd to 4th - because of massive computer problems, Spirits decided to completely change their classifications and nature.

Did anyone mention Spell Grounding yet?

The spirit change is because of the "Unified Theory", when Hermetists discovered they could actually summon without having to bind.

Grounding

Invisibility seems to have changed to my memory.. I know somewhere Thermographic vision was a defense against all forms... and now... bupkiss

I lament the elimination of Domains.
I really liked ivy covered or underground corp facilities.
I violently hate FAB and everything related to it.
Spell Grounding... ah, the good old days.
My SR world is not tied to Earthdawn.
Immortal Elves don't exist.

Hmm. Those are the biggies.

Well can explain many of the magic changes due to time passing and mana levels settling in and slowly rising. Hell given enough time and thought you can rationalize anything. LOL

I miss Shamans automatically having a totem... instead of having to buy a mentor spirit.

It's what made them different from Hermetics... and very very cool.

Sure, that's why nature spirits, before divided into wood, plains, forest, tree, and whatnot, now unify themselves into plant and animal spirits (leaving the plains spirits ... whereever ...)

Besides, this thread is meant to lament, not to argue anything.

Fluff: SR and Space. Noone seems to be able to decide - either there're 5 large Torus stations at the Lagrange points, a number of large Orbitals around Earth and several Stations on the Moon, Mars, and Mercury - or there aren't, and they just vanished somehow, eaten by wormholes or malicious Great Dragons from outer space. This has been retconned repeatedly.

I think spell grounding also deserves a mention.

I do miss the ability to cast from Astral Space to Physical Plane and take Physical Drain no matter what. Casting on the Astral was not done willy-nilly.

Summonig in Astral space...

Ah, Magic, the one thing that completely changes from edition to edition, and retcons the SR-world, whereas the Matrix evolves, and there's a whole end-scenario for SR 3, bridging towards SR 4.

Well, there aren't astral quests anymore where you have to reach the citadell of power (and where if the goal was to subdue the spirit, their Force would get doubled. CRAZY!!!) at the end of several trials.

running speeds! in SR3 (and probably 1-2), a Qui 1 character would take a minute and a half to run the 100m dash. at 9 Qui and 8 athletics, you could on average beat the current world record by a full two seconds. in SR4, if you allow double sprinting and blow Edge for an extra IP, the world record for the 100m dash by an unaugmented human will be 5.66 seconds, with a top speed of 39mph!

Well everyone knows people were shorter in the past, so as time moves forward, people get taller, then can run faster. Duh.

...Grounding, most definitely "dat mage, he blowed up real good he did"
...Shamans being distinct from Hermetics
...Spirit Domains
...Elementals and health spells: There was no elemental type that controlled Health Spells, this changed in 4th ed
...Movement: at first it was unsegmented then in 3rd edition (I believe) divided up among the character's IPs
...Weapon damage codes: 1st ed had separate codes for weapon damage and staging
...Knowledge Skills being supplemental (& therefore more useful) to Active Skills (3rd ed)
...Karma Pool: replaced by Edge attribute in 4th
...Melee Counterattack: dropped in 4th ed
...the old Skill web: tweaked between the first two editions before being pretty much eliminated in 3rd. "I can make a Blumonge that can take out a bridge by defaulting to my French cooking skill!"

...if I am not correct, didn't object resistance against spells change (I think between 2nd & 3rd ed) making it more difficult for a spell to affect a non living item?

Actually: those numbers don't sound all that far out to me. Quickness 1 is like the fat kid huffing a puffing down the track, and quickness 9 is 'superhuman'... maybe we just haven't found that guy yet.

I'm not sure but I think you 'unaugmented' human would be a '6' yes? I've read 35mph as a 'top speed for humans' sort of number... and I'm tempted to say 6 seconds on a 100m dash isn't outlandish on either side... but I could be wrong.

Sorry: on topic all I can say is 'grounding spells'.


Which, really, is only my peeve. Nobody else even noticed, I'm sure.

6 is the cap straight out of chargen. 9 is the maximum number you can get naturally, so those people who have the absolutely perfect genetics and spend a huge amount of time focusing on it, sort of like Lance Armstrong or, in theory, Olympic athletes. This may have changed in 4th edition, of course, but a Quickness or Strength 9 human is quite possible. No data is given on precisely how common it is, however.

in SR3, 9 is the unaugmented human maximum. the current 100m world record is just over 9 seconds; the first recorded world record for the 100m dash, in 1912, was 10.6 seconds.

regardless, there are already several different threads about double sprinting.

Troll height... If they keep shrinking like that, they'll end up shorter than dwarves!

the language
I miss frag and chummer and hoop and decker
I mean i guess you can say it isnt retcon but it seems like it to me
they use f--- now
when the main characters in one of the old novels said that one of the guys trying to kill him said "He said f---, isn't that quaint?"

ah, spell grounding. nothing quite like summoning a force 1 spirit, have it materialize and the blast it with a elemental spell. btw, those have gone back and forth between combat and manipulation iirc.

Oh god, here I was reading the thread title, thinking if I might have missed any major timeline retcon like adding 9/11 to the SR-timeline or such... but calling the lack of Dikote in 4th edition rulebooks is hardly what qualifies as a retcon. Of all the stuff mentioned here, I find the shrinking trolls to be the most concerning to me. I like my troggies > 3 meters, my good sir!

*sings*
"LOOK OUT!!! for the shrinking trolls
Beware!! noone ever knows where they'll be!!!"

Like how you guys used to say "Christmas" for Xmas, and "ask" instead of "ax". Let me ax you, though, how can "hoop" mean "your ass" when it actually means a toilet seat? And why did Orks call humans "breeders"? Were all Orks gay? Don't Orks in fact breed way more prolifically than humans?

Back when we played SR1, we always cracked up at "chummer" and couldn't say it. I wrote an encounter where the team was meeting some grizzled old fisherman at the docks and when they first see him he's chopping up fish guts into a bucket.

Fortunately (um) for them, most of Manhattan got leveled a few years later. Then again, I don't imagine FASA was like "oh no, it's almost 2006 and a huge earthquake hasn't hit the east coast yet!"

Dikote is ... um ... oh yeah, it's now too cheap to mention. Everything that isn't edible is dikoted as a matter of course. If you want non-dikoted stuff you pay the same (economies of scale, chummer) and reduce the ratings appropriately. Seriously though I expect it will be in a supplement.



Ah -- also they have extra teeth, for a total of 32. So everyone else actually lost teeth. I blame the Unseelie Tooth Fairies.

I also think that Shaman's shouldn't have to buy their totems either. There are good and bad things about each totem. They shouldn't have to buy their totem.

I imagine Dikote has been around long enough that it's pretty standard in manufacturing applications for which it would make sense. Kinda like monofilament. Besides, if Dikote was going to be in SR4, it would have been in Arsenal, ne?

I think that totems, like any quality, is most effective when used properly. One aspect of mentor spirits that I've found to be underused is the aid one gets in astral quests.

Hey, no one mentioned "naked hacking" yet. Back in 1st edition, there was this special cyberware that was essentially a datajack only it had three prongs that popped out of your knuckles wolverine style. It allowed you to deck without a deck, with your naked brain. The origional dodger had one in the opening fiction and they made a big deal out of it. This got Retconned out of existence, primarily so they could introduce Otaku and have them be the uber cool naked hackers.

Ah yes, the Program Carrier. I think it actually got replaced in SR2, by the Cranial Cyberdeck (now replaced by the implanted commlink).

I'm thankful they changed the cost of hermetic libraries. Rating squared times two grand for hardcopy? Yeesh. Though, it really made you feel like it was an achievement to get if it cost as much for a library as a sports car...

I miss trolls being giant and being able to dikote my weapons. I only have SR3 and SR4 core rulebooks, so I don't really know a lot about the expanded mechanics of the game.

I miss Aspected Magicians that don't suck.

Pretty realistic, I think. Consider how much academic presses charge now, and then consider that those books don't require heavy chains of silver and iron and aren't bound in the skins of ... creatures.

Actually the program carrier wasn't retconned. It's even mentioned in Runner Havens.

I find myself being nostalgic for past shadowrun moments and its fluff. Case in point slang, 20 years have past, we certainly don't normally use slang from the 70/80's except as a reference or joke. So we certainly cant expect 50's SR slang to still be in common use.

Did'nt it say it caused cancer or something?

Interesting note on Running Speeds: back in first edition your running speed was per initiative pass. If you got an 11+ Initiative score you moved twice as fast. If you got a 21+ you moved triple speed. If you got a 31 or higher you moved quadruple speed. Add in some good athletics successes and it was quite easy to run 100m in less than 3 seconds.

But regardless, my biggest peeve is the Ghoul. In first and second edition, Ghoul transformation is a SURGE effect that will never ever happen to PCs. Then bang they decide to retcon it into a disease that you can inject yourself with as a super serum. And to combat that, they make special rules for player characters where they have to ride on the short bus if they turn into Ghouls while NPC ghouls still ride around big pimping.

Secondary to that was the revision on Shapeshifters that turned them into totally weak sauce when used by PCs, but left all the cool powers on the NPC guys.

-Frank

Nope, I believe that was the D20 system.

the point of Nukes not working in a magical world or at least being able to disarm them through magic . . and then they went and gave winternight magically powered/altered nukes that did not so much damage but more EMP . . oh and the second nice retcon: optical systems that are susceptical(spelling?) to EMP in the first place . . and the fact that nobody thought to make backups after the FIRST crash . .

Frank: Given that I've never used Ghouls or Shapeshifters in my games, I gotta hear more details about what you mean...

Given that digging up my old editions would be a monumental task of herculean proportions that is... I don't even remeber there being 'PC' rules for shapeshifters. If you wanted to play one you had to more or less extrapolate from the critters entry.

I know it was an option in SR3 and IIRC SR2 as well. And yes, they were extremely gimped for PCs (not that I take issue with that. Nothing should make a PC Roxor without some drawbacks). As for SR1, I have no clue.

for SR3, look into the Companion, there'S rules for shapeshifters and ghouls . . and then compare to the rules of NPC Shifter/ghoul . .
it's more or less like comparing a usual SR3 Decker with an otaku in some aspects . . the otaku just get to rock in the matrix and the Decker has to spend LOTS of money for his Deck

@Prime Mover: Yes, cancer and maybe some brain damage too.



Well nukes (and nuclear power in general) in Shadowrun have always been complicated. Some did explode, some didn't (although we're not sure why), some did but not as expected...

As for optical systems, I recall that System Failures explains that the optical systems were immune to EMP, but not everything is optical. And there were backups, but most of them also held "backups" of the virus, IIRC.

sure they wouldn't use slang from 20 years before, but why would they use slang from 70+ years before, is my point, I guess
yeah chummer felt kinda stilted before but after you read enough sourcebooks and novels they all just kinda flow
or atleast they did for me
hell even the FPS community picked up on frag, of course thats for killing, but if you get fragged, you are fragged IMO

Yeah I had a Player run a werebear in SR2. He argued that he couldn't see why he couldn't be a werebear hermetic mage and have cyberware. I finally gave in just to shut him up. So I let him play with it for awhile but every person he met with astral perception looked at him like he was some abomination. His regen didn't work quite as fast as he thought it should have, various problems with things. Eventually it all built up and he had to go on an astral quest end ended up fighting against his cybered side. Basically he fought a mechanical bear made of gleaming chrome and wires. and he woke up to have his body having expelled all the cyber from him. By the time it happened, he kind of understood why I didn't think he should be able to get it in the first place.
kind of.

Let me add

Slower healing times...

Double Body per day... means that grievous wounds take a couple days and you're back to good as new.

I liked how a Deadly wound had a longer healing phase than a serious wound.

30 days base for a deadly wound... and then you had a serious... it took a while to patch up... which just made more sense to me.