hmm, surge. was there not something in the talk about surge being part of RC?

if so, could the obsidiman be something attached to the surge rules?

Well at least we got something cool instead. Oh wait, no we didn't. We got thread after thread about who can make an anthropomorphic cat do the strangest things with adept powers.

that and what use runners could make of a marsupial pouch.

Eh. I still think Year of the Comet was cool, SURGE included.

I realize that I'm in the minority with that thought though.

(Seriously! SURGE, orichalcum, Ghostwalker, and Shedim? Holy plot points Batman!)

So can anyone tell me what's not cool about that?

Because while dealing with dragons can get you some notoriety. Dealing in dragons makes you the prey of Sirrurg


Now how would you stat those... i want one
Synner, get on this right away... pretty please?

dont get me wrong, i never understood the burning hatered that some here on dumpshock have for that books (but then i cant understand much of the burning hatered people have for most stuff posted on a web forum these days. it seems the word hate and statements on the same level is being overused). but i must confess that i never got hold of the book proper, so i may be biased or uninformed.

I dunno. Most SURGE effects, I would have genetherapied away, negative as well as 'positive' ones. I never thought SURGE was good for more than creating annoying Mary Sues, for the most part and from my experience with sURGEd characters. It's good for some nice NPCs though, like that woman in On The Run ... so it has it's uses.

Now, I'm no fan of SURGE. But hate the whole book? YotC overall was a nice book. WotC was disappointing, but meh, it was readable and even playable with some tweaking. I'd never use SURGE on my characters, but if it floats someone's boat? More power to them, I say.

Dragons and Obsidian Men what about windlings and T'skrang as playable?

I think it's just a matter of people's perceptions of the Sixth World being different. For some people it's still very cyberpunk; fighting the man, scraping together the money for your next piece of 'ware, trying not to get screwed by your Johnson (there's a double entendre if I ever heard one). For others its a John Woo action movie with lots of guns, beautiful women, and dangerous locations. For still others, it's X.

SURGE on its own is pretty benign. From what I remember (books are at home, I'm at work) you get a chance tweak to your character some. You could have a cyclops eye or become a little extra resistant to fire...or you could grow gills and have to spend the rest of your life living in sea water (or else you die). It was kind of a bitch that way. The problem is that these tweaks can be taken to an extreme, an extreme that can land you, the GM, with an anthropomorphic or anime-esque concept landing in front of you.

For some groups, that's perfectly fine. They want to run something out of Dominion Tank Police, and they've got the option for it. But to others that's just lemon juice to the eye: "Not in my Sixth World!"

I'm a fan of SURGE because it opened the Sixth World up for further diversification. Thanks to it, we're not as stuck in the Tolkein-pastiche as we might still be. Hell, with SURGE in canon, we've got all sorts of new background excuses for runners - take Zumi in the opening fiction of the BBB, for instance.

Like any metaplot shift in SR canon, it's going to irk some people. Adding cat / bunny / dog or Biggun Da Cyclops options to the game will only infuriate them further. And unfortunately, the Internet acts like a megaphone and gives them more presence than they may even have.

+1

Well, Windlings have been around since PAoE...i wonder wether they'll make it to PC status in this Ed.

Windlings would work under playable free spirit rules. T'skrang have apparently died out.

I want Klobb and Greenlings, though. And those furries. SR4 definitly is manga enough for furry runners.


Uhm ... I think you mix something up here ... Shirow has a lot of wild stuff going, but no furries. catgirls at most, and those always are gengineered (which was a staple of CP since Chromebook 1).


I guess you aren't aware that cyclopses (and Giants, Ogres, Oni, Dryads and Night Elves, among other things) were added before YotC with the Edition Runners' Companion?

Yeah. If you look, I edited Shirow out and put in Tank Police. I was trying to remember which of his cyberpunk work had "furries" in it, but was coming up blank with a name at the moment I was writing that post. I mean, there's the other stuff he's done, but I think it's probably against forum rules to discuss those....


Oh, I know about the meta-variants. I was just running with my previous example of a normal metahuman with one eye. That's all

1) Don't go too much into details and keep it vaguely SR-related and you're fine.
b) Catgirls are girls with cat ears. Furries are anthropomorphic animals. Big difference. And those two were definitly catgirls. I actually was thinking of them (and that gengineered feral cargirl from Appleseed) when I wrote this.


Ah, right, that effect ... nothing imbalancing there, if you ask me. Icky, and nothing I would have happen to my characters. But there's far worse around than SURGE. Especially in SR4 (vampires come to mind).

1. Well I mean, if you want me to start going into like, say, the horsemen and the cowgirl stuff
2. I'd say semantics, but I'll give it to you, though the girls from Tank Police were a little more than just girls with cat ears

I've never seen Appleseed - I kind of fell out of love with Shirow for some reason.


I'm not saying that there is anything unbalancing, but to some groups that may be more than what they want, y'know?

There's lots of "Man, I'm glad that's not me" moments in SR

Refering to the Manga, neither of the movies.

I kinda understand you, though I do still love his technical and architectural design. And GitS SAC, which at least partly is Shirow's direct work, too. I guess it's all that random fanservice-y sex in his Manga and his newly discovered love for crappy rendered backgrounds that drove me off GitS 2 (that and Technomancers).


Oh, it would be to me, too. that's where gene therapy omes in, and that's why I'd propably get a little fit if a GM forced me to roll on SURGE.

I am a supporter of SURGE, but that probably involves never having seen it forced on players. Forced on animal sidekicks with the approval of the player whose sidekick it is, yes. (no, the snake and horse didn't get to vote, but they did seem to enjoy their new lives)

I have chosen to have my characters roll for SURGE, and have always made sure I was willing to accept if I ended up with a .02 essense dual natured thorned dwarf as a result, but I do disagree with forcing optional character rules on people.

Just curious why you would put windlings as free spirits? They aren't spirits anymore than elves and dwarves are.

In SR, they are Fae, and Fae arguably are spirit-ish creatures (like Horrors are). Though PAoE isn't really clear as to what the sprite actually is,s o propably it COULd work as an ordinary creature too.

...I had to with Leela. All I can say is thank the goddess she had a lot of implants. The Troll Adept in our group wasn't so fortunate.

... and THIS is where I'd have a little fit.

My players do not get to roll for SURGE, they take it at creation as a series of positive or negative qualities. But if they do their character's history has to have some notes of when and how it occurred. Once created SURGEing does not occur.

Earth Dawn is a deceased game system, trying to implant things from it wildlings etc, is a bad move IMHO.

WMS

If by deceased you mean alive and kicking, then you might still be wrong. It is partially the same setting, so a hint from time to time is not bad per se.

*points to this link*

My meaning is that it is no longer in publication. All 1st ed books are 10+ years old. "Its Dead Jim"

It has a very small footprint of Internet publisher but not the same company as SR4, even smaller than Traveller. In the RPG game market it is dead like Traveller, numbers are so small to be meaningless.

So having Catalyst and Living Room Games play nice to allow ED specific races like Obsidiman, T’skrang, and Windling to be reproduced into SR4 will lets say be interesting.

Besides ED had many things wrong like the birth rate of Orks, do the math, each generation of 63, SR4 would be carpeted in Orks.

WMS

That always seems to be the way it goes...

Yeah, I've never been happy with orkish birthrates or numbers. It's like saying, "Oh em gee! People infected by this plague will double every day!" And then you let the plague sit and be a problem for three months without any resolution. It's just sloppy, or requires massive mortality rates.
(For those of you that don't do the math, assuming no outside interference, only 35 days will pass before 17 billion people are infected. Which is 9-10 billion more than actually are alive on Earth.)

Although it is certainly possible this is an April Fools joke, it seems to thorough for me to simply pass it off as such (if it was confirmed/denied earlier, my bad - only read the first page of posts)

On to the actual material, I view it as very useful, but primarily as a GM tool. Despite the admitidly large limitations, my first glance would indicate the build point values for dragons to be to low for proper balance. Ignoring the balance issue, allowing one or two players to be dragons in an otherwise metahuman group would almost certainly destroy the campaign, for a variety of reasons.

However, I will not complain about them including rules for a PC dragon, as it could be very fun in 1-shot games, or a campaign of all dragons. Further, it assists with a side project of mine (adapting the SR4 rules system for use in the Rifts world), although that is progressing very slowly...

Overall, I like the inclusion of rules for dragon player characters, but I doubt they would see much use as anything other than a GM tool.

I admit, at first glance, my internal organs melted.

I don't think it's a joke. It's awfully straight-faced to be a joke. And consider that this is the third version of this particular book; the developers had to be saying, "What can we do here that wasn't done in the first two? Well, how about dragons?"

But they're fairly well balanced. Yes, they're very powerful physically, but as has been said in this thread, they're a giant target. For talismongers, for rival older dragons, for Lone Star, for everybody. And their size is very limiting. And the BP cost for race is sky high, so contacts, skills, resources, all are going to be severely limited.

The problem is, the fact of the wyrm dominates the campaign. The story becomes who is after the dragon, who knows about the dragon, can the dragon get us invited to Ryumyo's garden party, when will the government send the LAVs to kill the dragon? It's not a character decision like, "My elf likes soccer!"

Okay, I seriously died laughing. Well said.

Ah, the narrow minded. Lovely.
Who is after the dragon? People (term used losely) he pissed of. Like any other runner.
Who knows about him? Everyone he told, or who assensed him as long as he did not mask himself. What a n00b, btw.
Can he get you invited to Ryomyo's garden party? Not more so than Joe Human can get you invited to Damien Knight's garden party.
And when will the goverment try to kill him? When he pissed them off good. Like, you know, anyone else that pissed them off good.

Seriously, dragons are just dragons.

I'm not pro dragon PCs, but I think most of the arguments against them are quite... stupid.

I don't understand the hate toward the idea of dragon PCs. What exactly is wrong with another option to possibly choose from?

Last time I checked, the GM was the one who determines which rule books are used and which optional and house rules will be enforced.

Seems an awful lot of people want to have the game hold their hands...

Me, I'm all for more options even if I never use them. Just because it's not useful to me doesn't mean it won't be useful to someone else.

Why does it all have to be centered around the concept of "Me" and not around "Us"?

What does being a dragon do to your lifestyle costs?

Depends on how picky you are on your sources of protein. . .

Who knows. I'd assume that would've been in the next section, where it starts talking about the negatives, such as Hording, etc etc.

ZOMBIE!!!!!!!!!!!

You did notice that a couple of new books had been released, like Ardanyan's Revenge, Burning Desire and even a new novel? Next up is a book about Kratas, followed by one about Cathay.



Yeah, it's not selling millions of copies like SR4 does, but it's still healthy and alive.

QFT. Same for Drakes and vampires.

It will only dominate if you want it to. Why should a vampire or drake dominate the campaign more then a technomancer, who is actively seeked out by corporation for further disection... er study? And same goes for everything else. Even a simple ork can dominate the campaing if the GMs so desires, by simply throwing in Metahuman hate groups. What kind of game is this anyway, where beeing in the spotlight from time to time is a bad thing?

Okay, yes, I ought to throw Technos in with them too. Thanks for notifying me.

And no, there are differneces between every corp, dragon and law enforcement out to get you, and a few haters. You can ignore Humanis for the most part, not least because orks outnumber them vastly, I imagine. You cannot simply wave away all the issues an infected, a dragon or drake, or a techno brings, if you don't want to seriously screw over the canon sretting or just play a no consequences style of game to begin with. Because these social disadvantages are supposed to kinda balance out some rather high advantages, particularily of infected and drakes.

Q.E.D.

The player/GM, not the character, is the problem.

But while you are at it, throw in awakend, too. They have access to world others don't even know exist, can summon monster from outer space, etc, etc. And Hackers should be in your stew, too. When they go into the matrix they start to horribly claim the spotlight, because they are the only ones able to do anything at that moment. Oh, and of course Streetsams. In combat they are the only ones to really rule. Damn spotlight stealers, what are they thinking.

Dragons have innate masking? Or are you just assuming that they start out initiated? Or that no one will manage to assense them before they get enough karma to (self) initiate?

No? I think I pretty clearly said that some mages will find it out. So what? It's not like a riots will start and people will mobilize for war. He will get a few point notoriorety and everyone who works with him, too. Big deal.

Uhm, no. The problem is that a certain type of player loves to play these characters, and giving them more options to create such characters isn't something I really appreciate all too well.

You are aware that you are repeating what I said, yes?

So, your argument is: Munchkins like this char type, therefore it must be unavailable to everyone.

Drek no.

Munchkinism is a psychological condition that cannot be solved merely by denying opportunities to twink. All the tails of successful demunchkinisation involved getting the player to reconsider the nature of gaming and let the others have some time to shine. Often, this happened during puberty, and occasionally it involved a 2x4, but arbitrary restrictions on available character types has been shown to have no statistically significant effect on the nature of the munchkin. In many cases, restricting a character type in reaction to munchkins leads to even more disturbing creations made from the acceptable rules.

Psuedo-psychiatrical rant over, your argument can be used to ban everything more exotic than human wage-slaves. Emotional reactionary responses to a player problem (possibly involving some game mechanic issues, which may be worth debating) is not a solid grounding for setting wide rule decisions. It may be good at your table, but needlessly oppressive elsewhere.

My position is not that a dragon PC is impossible. My position is that they should be considered carefully before being permitted or played, because they warp plotlines around them. Similar to technomancers, yes.

Dragons by their nature are part of the world of dragon politics. They are a lot more likely to attract the attention of Great Dragons than a jumped-up ganger, which is what a Street Samurai is.

Dragons, unlike other character types, are massively influential just by nature of being dragons. Even very young adult dragons of the PC variety are going to command a lot of attention locally. Many people venerate and even worship dragons. If you play a rigger, the local Yakuza and the Triads may or may not give a single damn. But if you play an Eastern Dragon PC, you will draw their attention. Either to curry your favor, or as implacable enemies because you are in the wrong draconic faction.

Additionally, a lot of people are going to kiss your ass if you're a dragon - because it's cool to say, "I was hanging out with my friend Lideriel, the dragon!, the other day..." Or because they're scared to death. I'd give dragons in their dragon form +4 Intimidation, minimum.

If I were the regional head of MCT security and counterintelligence, I would put special effort into knowing where the local dragon shadowrunner was every minute of every day. Just knowing he was out there, I'd order more autocannons. I'd even be inclined to terminate the wyrm preemptively.

Nah, just let 'em substitute STR for CHA for Intimidation tests.

Zen sums it up nicely, actually.

Oh, and while twinking options can't realistically removed entirely from a game like STR, that doesn't imply there have to be races that cater pretty much only to munchkin/mary sue players to begin with, does it?