After the cool memories people have brought up in my other thread, I wondered what people's worst moments (in terms of gaming quality) were in SR.

For me, Prime Runners was an abberation I wish I'd never bought. The two South African characters (Jonty Geldenhuys and Kepler Malan) were named after cricketers with really obscure names in South Africa, but obviously the writer thought they were typical. McBean was Howling Coyote without the gravitas. Tyrell Gates was silly.

And then Year of the Comet. It's hard enough persuading some roleplayers to play a sci-fi game with elves and orcs. Throw in SURGE and you've gone OTT. I like the idea of Halley's Comet doing weird stuff, but not that weird.

This is pretty much it for me. I can't stand SURGE... it's one of the few directions I really wish the game had not gone, and it's unfortunate (imo) that it will now be included as an element of the game for all time.

I didn't play much 3rd edition although I bought the books and kept up on things. Year of the Comet seemed so out of character for SR and surge I think could have been handled differently.

I liked the YotC and SURGE. Some SR books have stuff I do not use, but it is primarily because the stuff isn't particularly inspiring to me, otherwise I have not read any SR sourcebooks that I dislike.

McBean was Hunter S. Thompson without most of the drugs.

I guess for me - and here I'm biased - the low points were the company handoffs, both when FASA closed their doors and the end of the FanPro days. There's always that yawning horror when you realize this might be the actual end of the game.

For the FanPro handoff, things were worse because I was in the freelancer pool by then, even if I knew less about what was going on than I do now. People were bitter and unpaid, there was no communication from the actual company so we could only guess at their motives and intentions, and there were horror stories from across the Pond...but really, it was the doldrums. No books for months on end. I'm a firm believe in the idea that it takes active support to keep a game afloat, and that kind of stagnation was the worst for me.

Worst moments in SR History for me?
The Change from 3rd to 4th Edition. .
Not even the new Rules-System alone.
No, i mean the actual way the change
was painted to have happened . .

Some of the Fans Reaction to changes like new Editions or Errata and Stuff.
No i don't kid, but maybe it sounds harsher than it is but so what?
The worst thing i ever encountered in Shadowrun. The one thing that has driven me to a Nerd Rage was the german change to diagnostics. Another thing... i have a deep hatelove for Technomancers rules. I wished that there would be some revising to make them more like the Otaku where, but i know that this won't happen (not because of spite, it would be much work and i can understand that) so i let it be and enjoy it as good as i can.

I think SURGE is on my list of least favorite things. I mean, I don't mind the concept (I've played IronClaw and JadeClaw for heaven's sake), it just doesn't fit with how I thought of ShadowRun. So while I accept that it's canon and RAW I personally don't pay attention to it.

SURGE also for me - a serious low point.

Also was (some) fans' reaction to the SR4 mechanic changes. I mean, this was before anyone read or even tried the new rules.

The cartoony art in SR3 was pretty bad too. Totally in the wrong direction.

My personal SR low was Brennpunkt: Matrix, the German translation of Target: Matrix. After reading is for the first time I originally registered at FanPro's forums just to complain about that totally botched book.
It had massive layout errors (wrong fonts used, font size changing in the middle of the page, etc.) an incredible amount of typos and grammar errors and, most annoying, just bad German.
You would stumble upon strange sentence structures and words on every page. It often read like a machine translation that faithfully translated each word but not necessarily the meaning. Basically, it was at best a rough initial translation that somebody forgot to then transform into actual everyday German. It looked like an absolutely amateurish work but according to the book's credits it had been done by a translator who had done much better work on earlier books.
After much complaining by me and others it was finally semi-confirmed that, as the company had "trusted the translator's previous good work", the translation had been rushed through layout and off to the printers without any proof-reading!

I gotta add my voice to the SURGE chorus. It just doesn't fit my vision of SR.

The art has always been a struggle for me, especially gun art.

Other than that there isn't a lot that I would have done much differently.

Y'know, there was a lot more to YotC than SURGE. I think that discounting the entire book out of a dislike for SURGE is unfair to the book, and potentially denying yourself other interesting stuff from it. And if you hate the whole book -- hey, that's fair. But hating the whole thing for what is <25% of it ... not so fair.

Hmmmm this reminds me of something i wanted to mention in the other thread.

SURGE is a weird deal for me-I wasn't too into it at first, but then, after I came up with a concept that ended up really facking awesome in my head, I kinda started to like it. (It was a retool of an old idea I had in SR3-the Demon Sam, with his Kid Stealth legs, claws, increases, horns, fangs, and the like, built with cyber.) After I built him via SURGE and realized that all of the flavor and the fairly gritty but still mangaesque feel was still there, I didn't think that SURGE automatically meant a parading freakshow of pink-furred penguin people.(Okay, so a 2.5 meter tall demon-elf who tramples enemies for his signature isn't exactly normal and certainly not for an everyday game...but...eh. I could have done it with cyber anyway. ) It's not for every game or every table, and I don't even like to use it all the time, but used for certain concepts once in awhile, or in bits and pieces it can be a lot of fun.

For me? I dunno what my low point is. I'd have to really think about it. But I can kinda agree knocking a whole book for one section might be a bit harsh. I wasn't sure what my aversion to SURGE was at first; I think it was just due to what I saw it being used for (90% catgirls, 5% catboys and 5% other. ) I suppose with anything, once you try something and realize ''hey, this is kinda cool after all'' one can warm up to it.

Speaking for myself at least, I was not discounting the entire YOTC book. I happen to like certain elements, particularly the probe race which in my game was the impetus for a new space age. And shedim are one of my favorite nasties. I just particularly don't enjoy SURGE is all.

{edit}: and for the record I have never disallowed a player from designing a SURGED character. I don't feel it is my role as the GM to impose my tastes on others.

I haven't discounted ever building a SURGE character, it's just not ShadowRun for me.

Like anything, it can be used in different ways. SURGE could indeed be used for a background piece explaining things; in the case of my elf, he simply could not get a job in any sort of normal society after changing into that...''thing'' which is what some folks might say, while others embraced his new look; an underground death-metal club might well be happy to hire him as a bouncer. The guy who suddenly sprouts quills all over his body is going to probably get ''talked to and with regret, let go'' from his current office job and forced to do work that doesn't mind a guy with quills. They then form their own little groups, much like many metas did; some of these guys are the metahumans of the metahumans in some ways. They might shadowrun because it's one of the few options left to them. Where before, it was color, then moved onto metas/humans, now even branches off and becomes ''who cares if the guy next to you has hands bigger than your head when the guy next to HIM looks like something out of the 2012 manga-adaptation of Dante's Inferno...WITHOUT cybermods?'' Especially with the general rarity of SURGED people compared to even metahumans.

It's pretty interesting, not wanting to get too off track, but how SURGE is usually a bit more shunned(by the players), than someone wishing to do cyber or bio body-mods. Now, SR has always been a mix of machine and magic. since day one. This is simply a case of what happens when magic goes awry(and it's only one of the things. Hell, paracritters came about long before SURGE.) Hell, even today people get body-mods to make themselves look like cat people(see the Engima's wife ), and all kinds of odd things. What's even more jarring with the SURGE is that some of these people didn't choose to be like this, unlike the guy down the street with his fox-demon cybermods.

Again, though, I can kinda see where some folks might find it a bit too odd even for them. Biomods are one thing, but actual transformation might be another. and squinting at it, it does add some changes into the mix that might just blow things a bit more out of proportion for some and give the game a different ''feel'', even though it's always mixed magic and machine.

I've never gotten the "It's not Shadowrun" attitude towards SURGE. The whole premise of the game was magic causing people and animals to mutate and assume a wide variety of fantastical forms. SURGE is just the extreme, more random end of that. I don't have YOTC myself, but I got the impression that SURGE was something you rolled - if that's the case, then I much prefer the Runner's Companion version. I play a build point game so that I can craft a character the way I want that character to be - I would never play a SURGEling where I randomly rolled for SURGE traits, or where the GM insisted on picking out the negative qualities. If I wanted that, I would play Gamma World.


To me, fluff-wise, the overpowered immortal elves and great dragons, as implemented, were one of Shadowrun's all-time lows. I have no problem with them being masterminds in the shadows and personally powerful. But they were presented as statless, unbeatable beings. I could see a great dragon taking on a passenger jet, or a team of experienced runners, and coming out on top more often than not. But leveling major cities? Hell no. I'm glad SR4 has greatly de-emphasized IE's and given great dragons actual stats. I haven't read Emergence, but if the fluff has been accurately reported (technomancers suddenly become social pariahs who get kidnapped and experimented on, attacked by angry mobs, etc.), then I would call that a very low point, too.

Crunch-wise, I found the original (pre-errata) mnemonic enhancer in SR3 overpowered. Grounding through foci or spirits was also broken, since it gave a tactically-minded mage ways to attack physical opponents while safely in the astral plane. I find empathy software broken, and hope they fix it soon. And I am glad that the ludicrous revised rules for combat spell Drain have been relegated to the optional rule dustbin.

I like Surge. Not enough people saying it

For me, it was Unwired. They had a chance to fix the Matrix and blew it.

For me it was the (fortunately only borrowed) "Feind meines Feindes" (Loose Alliances). A spellchecker could have found many of the errors. A painful read, despite the great content.

Ok so YotC wasn't a bad book I guess I was just underwelhmed by the satelite storyline that seemed to end with a whimper rather then a bang. I don't discount surge It just felt out of place for me and perhaps colored my recollection of YotC which really did have some other great fluff.

President Dunklezahn

I liked him when he was a dragon. A dragon savvy enough to secure a large cut of the profits from initial interviews with him while he was still adjusting to a world with cameras and mass media. I disliked him as a potential president (how much suspension of disbelief am I being asked for by this game?) and I liked him least of all as a DMPC saving mankind.

Technomancers

Regardless of any game balance, they, by fluff, render regular Hackers obsolete. Don't like them and they smell of magic.

Other than that? The callous and off-hand destruction of Tehran in the fluff. That's about it. For the most part I've liked Shadowrun. I missed YoTC so have no strong opinion on SURGE. Artwork in Runners Companion was a bit embarrassing.

K.

I liked YoTC over all, and although I don't dislike SURGE itself but the over the top over blown fluff in the book kinda ruined it for me. So I would just chalk it up to bad presentation myself.

As I said in the other thread, I'm in love with SURGE. I liked how it was presented, how it was put forth, and the rules. The explanation even makes sense; either magic is trigging genes that have either been broken in sequence or screwed up over millenia from pollution, drugs, or whatever, or they were partial awakenings that sprung from races that either haven't popped out fully or don't exist any more. Not that gamebreaking to me.

The only real negative I can think of is listening to the endless complaints about rules editions. Gamers truly are one of the most conservative groups of people ever.

I really hate how lots of the SR4 artwork is taken from older sourcebooks (especially in Arsenal). The resolution of a lot of the samples is different, and the art style is different too. I really wish they'd either used all of the old artwork from one source, or just gotten a new artist to redo everything they wanted in the book. That lack of consistency just slays me sometimes.

The cover for "Blood in the Boardroom". Why the hell does an assassin ninja in a cyberpunk world have a goddamn PEGLEG?
"DNA/DOA". Not only is it a glorified dungeon crawl, the metagenic-causing virus? Lame.
My continual disappointment with every rigger book failing to present coherent, cogent rules.
99% of all the fiction. Especially anything to do with Dunkelzahn and that goddamned Dragonheart.

I am still a little sad that Private Agendas was never published. That marks a sort of turning point for me as far as the feel of the game goes. I started playing Shadowrun when the only book FASA had published was the first edition core rule book. I am not one to pine for the old days, and I certainly do not hate everything that came after the early FASA supplements. But the feel of the current game is not the same as the rough and ready early days when Shadowrun was The Lord of the Rings meets Neuromancer. The books don’t even smell the same (I am not joking here; those early FASA books had a unique smell that I still associate with the game). The Sixth World was a lot less defined then, a lot more open to interpretation, and a lot more focused on disconnected and loosely connected individuals and events than the current meta-plot driven game.

I made the change to Second edition, then Third, and now Fourth, keeping up with the game every step of the way. And I like a lot of the new stuff. But there is still a part of me that looks at the old books and wishes that the new books could feel like that. And, of course, that I could be 14 again for an afternoon too.

AFE

lol, I never even noticed it 'til you pointed it out. I think it is supposed to be a ninja swor, just poorly drawn from that angle.

I chalk this up to freelancers not knowing what SR was and doing a quick adaptation of a rejected adventure originally written for another game. All together a poor SR adventure. Many things I disliked about the adventure, but the biggest gripe I have, and heard others note, is the railroading needed to get the PCs into the ork underground following the ambush.

Really have to agree here, especially when sai books claim to fix the problems. Ditto for pre-4th edition decking books.

I hated Worlds Without End. Actually wrote FASA a letter asking if the author was married or sleeping with someone to get the book published. I, and I think I am in the m inority here, dislike the crossover with Earthdawn and this was a book that was in a series where the other two books were in the Earthdawn series. So not reading the other books, I missed a lot of what was happening, and although the book could stand alone, without the others it left a really bad taste in my mouth for several reasons. My dislike of the crossover is that it is a huge investment in money and time to keep up with just the SR proucts. I think it is unfair to have to buy another game to pick up on the subtleties of the game you love.

The cartoony feel of SURGE was one low point for me. It was almost a shark jumping moment, I felt, where I imagined someone getting a hearty buzz off some caffinated soda during a brainstorming session, watching a little too much anime just beforehand, and then going "Hey, you guys know what would be awesome? Catgirls. We need to fit in catgirls. And we'll make up a reason for it, too, of course...but...but...Hey. then we'll name it after this soda I like! Extreme!"

I'm sure that's not how it really happened, but that's just the sort of "Mountain Dew commercial" taste it left in my mouth, for whatever reason.

The missing five year gap (even moreso than the rules changes) between SR3 and 4 was a larger one, though. Much like DC's "One Year Later," I dislike following a timeline for years with near-religous fervor and then it suddenly skipping a beat and leaving me having to play catch-up. ZOMG LOOK HOW DIFFERENT IT IS, SOMEDAY WE'LL TELL YOU WHAT YOU MISSED is a jarring new approach for a game that was once very well regarded for its metaplot and real-time story progression in published works. It literally felt like that moment in a movie where the background music goes "squark!" as the invisible record


As one of the loudest anti-SR4 voices back in the day, please keep in mind that "anyone" is a strong word. Quite a few of us who were involved in the flipped cop cars, burnt down businesses, and general rioting in the street back in those tumultuous days were involved in the playtesting or otherwise did have access to the new rules.

Strongly agreed. I see the disdain but rarely the math or the play-testing to back up the complaint. But message boards that promote anonymity and "drive-by whining" rather than real discussion usually result in this sort of thing. Say what you will of Something Awful, where a small one-time fee is required to become a board member, or The V, where pseudonyms are prohibited, the discussions tend to be discussions and rarely devolve into shouting matches (and if they do, at least they're entertaining). The fact that Bull had to post an "anti-venom" sticky is a strong indicator to me that Internet anonymity isn't always a good thing. It's like sitting at a round-table discussion where everyone is wearing a paper bag with two eye holes over his head.

I have my own beef with some of the BBB rules but the optional rules in Unwired, etc. have provided me with reasonable work-arounds for more balanced game play. Naturally, setting/fiction is harder to quantify as one either likes it or one doesn't.

I've found the novels to be fairly awful across the board but a) I'm a book snob and b) that's usually true of any licensed tie-in material so I won't selectively pick on SR for that. In my world of rainbows and lollipops, I'd love to see serialized, periodical-format fiction from the current freelance writers. Those 500-word vignettes are tasty and I want to see them developed into short stories.

Echo the Dragon Heart Trilogy. The love scene between Mercury and Daviar still makes me cringe. That was velveeta madness.

You guys are all just jealous because you're not as badass as Ryan Mercury, is all!

Catalyst changing the rules at the last moment due to fanboy whining. Does that mean we can get talking pink ponies added to canon if we just beg long enough?

You could try... whiner.

My personal low was when I realised how terrible the german books were compared to the originals. They even changed some minor rules they didn't like. I hate this so much about german roleplaying publishers. Friggin' houserule crap. I hate it with a passion you wouldn't believe.

Minority perhaps, but I too dislike the Ed connections.

Along with that, I don't like the President Dunk crap or technomancers. SURGE i was OK with - give me changelings over Drakes any day.

I'm not a fan of Drakes, AI characters, or free spirit characters either, and shapeshifters could have been done much better. Runner's Companion has some really good stuff, but it also has a good bit of badly edited and just plain odd material. You pay extra for fluorescent skin (Oni, and that really should make it CHEAPER - you stand out a lot more), but not for Ogre stomach (Ogre, obviously), which makes your Lifestyle 20% cheaper AND gives you +2 ingested toxin resistance? Fail.

Why do you think I had to add a sidebar on centaur sex?

Unless I'm mistaken, My Little Pony is by Hasbro, so expect to see them in D&D4e first!

This is the low point of SR in my opinion. The fans that see something happening in the metaplot and start screaming "OH MY GOODNESS, IT MUST BE ANIME INFLUENCE!!one!1!!" Most often, they're completely misled about current anime thematics, picking up on things that were only ever common in the early nineties. Wasn't YOTC published in 2003? When the big famous series would have been Ghost in the Shell : Stand Alone Complex and Naruto?

Clearly, anime is to blame for the inclusion of cybernetics in that book. Absolutely disgusting!


Okay, so let's look through the convenient list of catgirls and identify the significant series in there that came between 1998 and 2003 and hence might have found their way into the hands of SR fans whilst still retaining the least bit of cultural relevence.

• Yu-Gi-Oh, but only some random monster
• Inuyasha
• Outlaw Star
• Azumanga Daioh

For fairness, lets also throw up some Western series with catpeople in them from the same era

• Red Dwarf
• Animaniacs
• Multiple animated series of Spiderman

Now lets look at the origins of Catpeople and Animalpeople.

• Mickey Mouse, Disney (US)
• The Ballad of Lost C'Mell, possibly the origin of the catgirl (US)

Thank you for your time and rage, they provide sustenance for my blossoming egotism.

The low point for me was 4th edition in it's entirety. At first I was so jazzed about it, because I assumed it would be like the transition from 2nd to 3rd. Just a fixing and tweaking of the existing rules to make it a better game. When I saw the true horror of what was coming, then I was disappointed. I saw more of what was coming, and then I was pissed, and hated beyond all known hate that abomination of an edition that forever ruined SR for me.

Though I have to say that out of 4th edition, Technomancers stand out the most as it's lowpoint for me, second only to the rest of the god-awful rules system.

To be fair, they're kind of an improvement on Otaku.

Sheeyit, a whole god damn battalion of Azzie Leopard Guards, with Feathered Serpent Cheer Leaders and Cyber Zombie Accountants aren't as BADAZZ as Ryan Mercury. Plus he's banging a hotter version of Sarah Palin on the side? I won't be the first, and I won't be the last to say it, but FUCK Ryan Mercury... and FUCK drakes too!

Oh, human-on-drake action.

Kinky.

The first two Printings of the BBB SR4 in German
You wouldn't believe how badly they were made. Important Infos missing (Like base Attributes for Trolls !!) Spelling Errors Galore (Astrebene !! ),missing Index .....

with a sighing Dance
Medicineman

What I dislike from Surge is the "We can't undo the changes despite all the rules would say we could do it easily" rule - really, if we have full body replacements, then no change by surge is something that has to be kept - and the "We hate surglings, even though we can't really tell who is a surgling because just about everything could be a cyberware modification anyway" - really, does anyone think today's furries won't mod their own bodies with cyber and bioware in Shadowrun? Catgirls will be around as soon as those mods are possible, you don't need surge for that.



Exactly. All the dragon and IE worshipping fluff, and especially the "Nothing can stand against a great dragon" stupidity leaves a bad taste in my mouth. I'd really like it if Catalyst would have one of the GDs shot down by a random military, just to show that GDs are not gods, and that in Shadowrun, everyone and anyone can be killed if people get to shoot at them with military hardware.



I hate the ED crossover stuff. It's not because I hate having a 4th world - my game world has a magical past, and ties to it hidden in the metaplanes - but because I think ED's rules and setting doesn't mesh well with SR's rules and setting, and because it added a lot of "Old stuff is way better than anything we can do today" stupidity into a game where SOTA should be the case. That sort of Tolkien "We are mere shadows of the glories of the past, and will never be as good as the men and especially elves were back then" drivel adds a D&D flavor to Shadowrun that ruins it for me.

The lowpoint for me is: That Holostreets is not out yet!

I loathed all the houserule crap and extra German-stuff-is-uber-stuff equipment of the German books, too. I'm just so glad, that Fanpro doesn't do the job anymore.

But that's not nearly as bad as the final plot of the third edition: nuclear weapon foci? A conspiracy...
- with ridiculous ressources
- that no megacorporation knows a lot about, let alone can eradicate
- that tries to destroy the world
- with the help of the originally cool dissonant Ex Pacis (although they hate the matrix).

I loved Brainscan and the Network and Ex Pacis, but Winternight simply sucked the cool out of the plot. Me and my fellows just remove all the magic nukes from the history - the Network and the worm suffice.

To be clear, Ex Pacis doesn't hate the Matrix. Their goal was to bring down the existing Matrix and replace it with one of their own making. Which really goes back to Pax's all-consuming fear of Fading; it's believed that she thought that remaking the Matrix would stop that process.

She may have been right.

He means Winternight, they hate the Matrix. And it seems strange that a group with a fundamental hatred of the matrix and technology teams up with "worshippers" of that technology.

Hate is far too strong a word, but I was disappointed with Unwired. It made using all that tech even more confusing and complicated than the Wireless World section in the BBB. More opportunities to roll handfuls of dice in endless extended tests to achieve something that is either moot or forgotten by the time you actually finish. Not really what I wanted.

I find SURGE somewhat distasteful, not because of any link it may or may not have with anime, but just because I find it hard to really include in any meaningful way. There's not enough to it to really use as the focus of a story without it just being a dressing (lemme think; experiments on SURGEd folk, runners hired to rescue them - can be done with just about anyone; SURGEd Johnson hires runners to salvage something from his former life - again, plenty of other reasons for that to happen besides SURGE), and there's more than enough other stuff one can include as set dressing without resorting to strange animal people. With PCs it can just get silly, as can be seen from the characters Dumpshockers post. It doesn't add anything that isn't available through another route. I also second the comment that there isn't much that SURGE can do that 'ware can't. And if a person wants a character with goat legs, they can just as easily get cybered. I feel kinda similar about metavarients; if a player wants one, and they can do it without said character resembling twinked uber munchkin of death, I'm cool, but generally they're ugly and unnecessary.

IEs and GDs are interesting, but I prefer to keep my movers and shakers faceless. When they come out and start doing stuff for themselves I think it rather diminishes them.