Considering that TMs no longer face Fading brought about by ageing, it looks like it worked.

Ah, okay, that makes more sense!

I didn't mind that. It merely drove home the concept that you don't piss off an vengeful great dragon by declaring a religious war / jihad against him and metahumanity.

If I were that dragon, I'd be rightfully pissed as well.

And that illustrates why I consider the IE/GD worship SR's greatest failure. Said Dragon should have had to use pawns and armies, not himself, to destroy Teheran. Even GDs should fear the military in Shadowrun, we're not playing D&D.

I agree that a GD should not fly about smiting things willy nilly; and they should be killable by military means if they're stupid. However, I don't think that the military should be the ultimate force of destruction either. While we aren't playing DnD, we aren't playing W40k either.

Meh, it was early 2011, and it was the Shadowrun-iranian islamists with poor weapons and shaddy houses who are nothing like their real-world counterpart 2009, that got wrecked by a Great Dragon. Sounds believable, as none of them had any idea how to battle magic, and I guess Aden will have used some spirits and a little bit of Invisibility (perhaps even Improved Invisibility) to make Teheran burn.

The fictional Iran in Shadowrun had crappy armies and crappy technology, just like the fictional USA in Shadowrun had barely an army left after withdrawing from all their bases around the world. Or the Japanese (with all their fantasy (porn) cartoons depicting sexy elves, cute dwarves, and other stuff that they really like) becoming the most hateful anti-metahumanists who put people with pointy ears in concentration camps, and forgo democracy and return to militaristic imperialism, as if the Diet never really existed.

After 1999, or perhaps even earlier, the Shadowrun world is totally different from the real world, where some nations have weird ecological disasters, a weaker army, or still exist while in the real world, they don't.

Aside from that, there was a Great Dragon who got shot down by airplanes in Germany, wasn't it?

So it balances out.

One Great Dragon trashes a poorly equipped army in a hazard-prone city in a surprise attack, another Great Dragon drops dead after trying to take over a modern country that retaliates with air fighters and missiles. Afterwards, one Great Dragon tries to legally become president of some corporation and turns it into number 1 worldwide.

Up till that, I'm okay with the Great Dragons and their roles in Shadowrun (quite powerful against poorly equipped sods with no experience against magical fire lizards, quite dead against anything above that).

It's Ghost Walker who stands out and disrupts the above-mentioned power cycle. Three modern armies who experienced the Awakening more than 50 years ago, and were nervously twitching their fingers, should one of the other nations sector try something funny, were stationed there. .
But then comes the self-proclaimed puppet master, destroying Aztlan sector, trashing around CAS and UCAS sector, and then claiming rulership over all of Denver, and everybody's totally okay with that.

Hmm....

What if not the military should be the ultimate force of destruction? Since the military (of corp or country) can be manipulated, and often has to rely on information and data gathered by other means to strike, I really do not see what would be an argument against making military means top dog in firepower.

As a tangent, a Shadowrun world where Dragons awoke and found themselves in a world where they were very vulnerable to humans, not top predator anymore, and had to adjust, and had to "go Dunkelzahn/Lowfwyr", meaning adapt to a media world, and becoming something akin to idols (magic authority, author/artist, history authority, pop/media star, politician, corp exec, cult leader) in order to secure their existence, and exert power through humans, not as flying battleships, would be very nice. They could still be driving forces in the 6th world, but their days of ruling the sky and the battlefield would be in the past. And Shadowrun is almost there, all it needs is to adjust a few pieces of the metaplot, like Denver's take over (rewrite it to some political master move, not stupid assaults) and Teheran (could have been wrecked by dragon cultists, or internal strive fostered by the dragon, or some bomber strike of their own air force, diverted or influenced by the Dragon, and similar incidents.

When Shadowrun was officially about chaotic-good superheroes who saved the world and/or took a central part in all of the world's most important events.

"Harlequin's Back" then?

3rd Edition: I thought I'd love it. When I read it, it seemed to fix all the things that had been burning us out on SR2. Yet somehow it failed. Every session I ran of it made me hate 3rd edition more and more. And the worst part is, I still don't know why...

SURGE: While I was down the awakening of new metavariants, like the minotaur, the random SURGElings were too much.

Big D for President: Yeah... I'm sorry, I liked D as a media-savvy sage-like figure. I didn't even mind his running for president. I just wouldn't has allowed him to win. I would have changed it so he died before election day.

Tehran's destruction: I really had very little knowledge of Iran until (quite) recently. After having seen some relatively unbiased documentaries and doing a little independent research on the subject... the destruction of Tehran seems to be a bit... I don't know. Sloppy? Callous? Knee-jerk?

Bug City: I just can't get into the whole Bug City plot. Which is funny considering how much I liked/feared Universal Brotehrhood and Queen Euphoria.

-paws

I think we are broadly thinking along the same lines Fuchs.

The things that would prevent armies from being the ultimate forces of destruction would be the same kinds of things that there are today. The sheer difficulty of bringing that force to bear on anything in particular, coupled with the necessity to answer to other people or organisations. I like to think of the 6th World as being a shifting network of alliances engaged in cold war with each other, where outright war is an impossibility. Wars are fought over negotiating tables, and in the shadows, and your best defence is paranoia.

For the record, Year of the Comet was released in 2001, at the end of the FASA-FanPro transition hiatus. Some of the authors may have started writing their part as early as 1998 or 1999.

IIRC, Shadowrun and the real world split history-wise in the 80s.

Thought I'd throw that out there.

The official date-of-split is 1991, with the breakup of the USSR (in SR it doesn't happen until 2030).
Due to the fact that it's a major world event, and any discrepancies earlier than that are relatively small.

I've never had an issue with the destruction of Tehran by Aden. I mean, it was 2020 when he razed Tehran. Most military forces did not have much of an active magical defense at that point and even less so a military that had explicitly persecuted metahumanity. And as has been mentioned, it's doubtful that Aden just flew in unprepared; he probably had a small legion of spirits with him as well as prepared spells.

Which is all very different from the Ghostwalker attack on Denver, where a dragon who was clearly unprepared (he'd just escaped from the Deep Metaplanes) took on a city with established magical defenses and state of the art military assets.

I don't know any of the specifics of Ghostwalker's takeover, but I count one of the things that allowed him to so easily gain control was the fact that there were three armies all ready to blow the other two apart, but lacked enough firepower to take them both out without being annihilated by the combined return fire.

Ghostwalker drops in on Atzlan forces and begins tearing holes left and right. The other two look on with eagerness, wanting to get in on some of the fun, but know that:

1) There's a great dragon over there, he might come over here.
2) U/CAS over there might turn on me.
3) Atzlan can still shoot back

The dragon only out-matched one side, but the other two didn't want to jump in for various reasons (say the CAS fires on GW, UCAS takes advantage and fires on the CAS. GW then turns around and starts ripping the CAS army to shreds, and what's left of Atzlan also fires on CAS; end result: no CAS army and a living (if wounded) dragon who returns to beating up on Atzlan forces, or possibly turns on the UCAS forces because they're shooting at him and what's left of Atzlan isn't as big of a threat).

I have a memory of reading somewhere that Aden was aided by "several powerful spirits" in his destruction of Tehran. I probably read it in Dragons of the Sixth World or Survival of the Fittest.

If you want to get really picky, the official date-of-split was a lot earlier than that (discounting Earthdawn):

From Shadows of Asia:

Then sometime after it comes back into line such that all of history for some 6500 years is identical...up until 1991.

We get it Draco, you're right.

I just ask for some sanity when it comes to Ghostwalker bickering. I can kindly link to the thread that's been made before - to sum it up, "he couldn't have!" "yeah huh!" "uh huh!" "yeah huh!"

Seriously, it takes like five minutes in the search bar

Man, I don't get why Great Dragons doing crazy things in the metaplot is such a big deal. When you're writing the plot, anyone can do anything. Corps can outmatch government forces on the battlefield, great dragons can raze cities, whatever. The characters do what the plot requires them to do.

But if you really want to fight a great dragon, go grab the stats, make up some runners to do the dirty work, and go to town. No one's gonna stop you.

I hate games with that attitude.

That's a joke, right? We can take an in depth look at Japanese fantasy if you want. I swear you're only going to see Elves and so on when it's explicitly borrowing the tropes and styles of Western fantasy. Even then, the most important Western styled fantasy in Japan is either curiously quiet on the existance of Elves and Dwarves, or else they're inimical to human life.

Assuming, of course, that you agree on the fact that Berserk and Slayers are significant cultural artifacts. Slayers; no visible elves or dwarves, most naturally occuring magic is inimical to civilisation. Berserk; nearly all magic is inimical to civilisation either by violent opposition or by requiring morally dangerous deeds to tame.

Vision of Escaflowne. Animalpeople are the only nonhuman civilised species and they integrate into human civilisation. You also see 4 significant nonhuman characters. Merle is the spunky sidekick to the young human prince, we have Dilandau's minder, Jujuka. Then we have Folkken's two catwomen minions. Notice something important? They're all subordinate to human characters.


Japanese mythology has names for the things we call Elves, Dwarves, Orks, and Trolls. Yousei, youkai, oni, ayakashi. None of those is seen in favourable light. At best they're not imminently destructive.

Need I point out that these are the roles that fantasy races occupied until the revisionists in fantasy literature recast them as less-than-inimical to humanity for use as the fantasy equivalent of forehead aliens. Traditional British folklore says of the Elves "do not go into the forest at night, and keep a horshoe above your doors to bar them entry". The Norse regarded Dwarves as smiths with few peers, but also as capricious alien beings beholden mostly to ancient agreements with their gods. Orks and Trolls have rarely been viewed positively by anybody.


When figures of myth walk amongst you, the first things you will notice are that the Elves are tricksy sons of bitches that will sell ice to eskimos and buy your coat off your back for the change in its pockets. Orks and Trolls can turn you into mincemeat with barely a scratch, and the Dwarves are stubborn, tough little people that demand an entirely new set of measurements. People always see the worst first, because it stands out. Virtues are forgotten because virtue is expected in society.

There was also serious concern that UGE and goblinisation were signs of serious contagious diseases that permanently disfigured their sufferers. I'm sorry, but you don't take chances with that. Just like you don't take chances with Polio.



There we go. I wasn't in the RPG scene at the time, and the publish date I got off Amazon was 2003. Still, only a few major series included catgirls at all. They aren't even a characteristic distinctive of Anime. I try to do things properly. Try to understand how frustrating it is to see people make greivous errors and not realise or care.

The thought of that makes me squirm.

Around the late Fasa- early Fanpro era, where every event was a big advancement of the metaplot. I didn't mind SURGE, I liked Harlequin's back, I liked Threats 2. I liked the Arcology Shutdown,But I hated every single one of them being some sort of mandatory set peice for every major event in the world. And Immortal Elves. Holy crap I could a lifetime without learning of yet another Immortal Elf brazenly displaying power in front of some group of anonymous runners for a 15 dollar pregen runs conclusion. IE's worked better for me when it was hinted in the fluff and the npc's who talked about them were dismissed as complete crackpots. It was like reading Amatuer fanfic where every new adventure/story tries to top the one before it in scale.
I am so glad the metaplot has taken a step backwards, and the focus is on the world again instead of just a few pet favorites in it.

Mechanical low: my first combat (in First Edition), where I ambushed someone, shot them dead in the face with a .44 magnum, and did no damage whatsoever. Generally, the mathematics of First Edition was pretty dreadful. Also, all of the pre- (and some of the post-) Fourth Edition matrix rules were horrible.

Writing lows: A tie

• DNA/DOA
• Prime Runners
• Paradise Lost
• the fact that no location book has ever turned out to be as useful as the original Seattle Sourcebook was.

Meta-plot lows: I'm gonna go with Ghostwalker here. Not for the reasons others have given, but because it just didn't seem necessary, interesting or fun, and didn't really seem to have much of a purpose. I also really liked the Dunklezahn arc (the whole concept of his will, for example, wouldn't even have been possible in most other settings), and it seemed like the Ghostwalker twist sort of raped the whole thing.

Fandom lows: Another tie

• Physad vs. Samurai debates ad nauseum
• Edition whining. The 3rd vs. 4th, in particular, is the reason I stopped reading this forum regularly. (The idiocy demonstrated in some of the other threads that I've seen today reinforces this decision.)
• The move of rec.game.frp.cyber (and Usenet in general) away from being a useful tool for roleplayers.
• Being called a racist by a bunch of e-mails over the years, by people (all non-gamers) bitching that my fictional world map calls it the "Sea of Japan".

Personal lows: Year of the Comet, but not for the reasons others have stated. Ultimately led to realizations that made me stop playing SR, for the most part.

I brought this up in the first "Fasa talks about SR" at Gencon the year after SR1 release. The fan boys got all defensive and weren't buying it. But the examples in the books were insane, and the writers had clearly failed intro to statistics.

Teh Internets.

When (9*X)-(5*E) became less than (5*X)-(3*E) [for all positive solutions] due to the fact that (9*X) was larger than both of them.

(I.E. up until the last few days I considered this forum to be relatively intelligent, albeit some questions that can be answered by quoting the rules, such as "do mages need to move their hands to cast spells?" can be answered by the section on page 168 "Noticing Magic" (It can be overlooked, I understand). It was when basic math stopped making sense that I realized that no, October 1st, 1993 hasn't happened yet--today is September 5703, 1993 and the internet still lacks sensible, mature, and educated discourse).

You're finding fault with the game/entire internet because some fellow consumers may or may not be socially retarded/disagree with you?

Add me to the Immortal Elves/Great Dragons hate. I didn't mind the Earthdawn links per se, but the 'you cannot face an IE/GD, if the players try they lose' is just /stupid/. I agree they should be powerful, but able to be beaten. And definitely statted, not the ultimate GM-wank bait.

Give me Immortal Elves (and maybe a few Immortal Dwarves and other things, I never saw why it was just elves except for elf-wanky porn where elves are so speshul) who sit in the shadows, are as powerful as a high, high end PC but that's all, who got their skill and are rightly not wanting to die so don't challenge themselves anymore and manipulate the world. Give me powerful Great Dragons who can't take on whole nations 'because they're dragons, man!' Yeah, and that's a squad of Apache Assault Helicopters and Missile batteries. Verses the average runner, GDs are scary. Verses a strong nation's military, not so much at least in outright physical power.

No. This just happens to be the latest in a string of forums filled with people who have problems with common sense and/or basic math/science/etc.

There's only one forum I have been on since....oh, 2002 or so that hasn't had this problem.

One.

And it's not a fault with the game, but it is a fault with the game's community. There is in fact more back and forth bitch-fest rules pissing contests here over any other game related forum I've been on. This includes the 40 or so threads that Left 4 Dead's official forum had on the Melee Fatigue.

It's because dragons only like the lanky ones

Wow Draco. That's all I can say.

Well, I think I speak for all of us when I say we're terribly sorry we disappointed you so, but fuck off if you think we're all idiots.

I don't think you're all idiots.

No. That particular verbage applies to only one forum I used to go to (even the moderators all went on permanent hiatus and the admin forgot to renew the domain name...twice).

Well, let me say you can kindly fuck off if you think that not being as math literate as you also makes us retarded.

Not that I think you're saying that, mind you. I'm just giving you a pre-emptive finger if you do.

Math literate? I barely made it though calculus. And now I've forgotten most of it (I could probably still perform a derivative and an integration of one variable, but that'd be it).

I just happen to use Algebra and Geometry every day.

It's the point at which people start insisting that Math is wrong and then use irrelevant claims to back up their point.

"4 is more than 2, would you like to earn 4 exp or 2 exp?"
"I'd like to earn 9 plz. It's more than both."
"I'm sorry, that's not a choice. 4 or 2?"
"9"

NEIN!

Could be a homonym issue.

I'll have 6exp please. As that satisfies the OR logically. (It is both 4 and 2 thus one or the other its a stretch though )

I'd expect that out of someone who doesn't have English as their first language.

But out of all the years I've spoken to a guy in Bangkok, Thailand the only time he's had an issue telling me something was when I asked him "What's for dinner?"
(It was Fried Rice and he didn't know what us Americans called it).

Sure, that's one person, but it's so frequent that I see a non-native speaker apologize for their bad English in a post only to have better English that most American posters.



Haha. But yeah. It's math like that that makes me just want to bang my head on the wall.
Like:

In SR4A, the cost for buying an attribute went up. It now costs 16 more karma to get [Attribute] to 8 than it used to.
Ok, but the amount of karma you have to spend went up as well.
But that's 16 extra karma I could have spent on something else!
No you couldn't have. You either gain the extra karma and have to pay the higher costs, or you don't gain the extra karma. You can't have the increased karma awards AND the lower karma costs, it doesn't work that way.

Oh! Is getting more and paying less for everything an option? I want that too! [/sarcasm]

It's almost as bad as this guy I corrected a programming error for:
(Flash actionscript)

if(_root.player, hitTest(_root.enemy))

Which doesn't work. If you do if(A, B) the statement is true if and only if B is true. A has no relevance (I did a test wondering why it didn't throw a compiler error, and I still don't know why, but at least I learned what the compiler thought it meant).

What he wanted was if(_root.player.hitTest(_root.enemy)) which caused the player object to call a hitTest on the enemy object not to see if A the player existed (???) and B the enemy was colliding with....some object, likely the stage (or possibly whatever object was calling the function).

I had to correct this syntax error four times, then he called me (and everyone else trying to tell him that making games isn't a copy-paste operation) a jerk (for not giving him the answer), then left and went off to make games in Blender.

My biggest gripe with Shadowrun v4 ??

The whole change from "Shadowrun is a rich and complex game, with many different types of character" to "Shadowrun is a game where everyone is a criminal".

Shenanigans!

I honestly like the idea that "every PC is a criminal" aspect of ShadowRun. It's so far removed from any other RPG I've ever played.

It's like playing Fable (or other "morality game") and always being forced into the "good" options and then playing again and realizing that no, you can be a douche bag and get away with it and have so much more fun.

Sure, you can be "chaotic" or "evil" (or even "chaotic evil") in D&D, but it's not that much fun. In ShadowRun I can run over 50 innocent bystanders while driving through the underground Renraku mall in order to escape a Lone Star helicopter firing anti-vehicular rounds out of a heavy machinegun and have the deaths hand-waved.

Only to come back a week later and put a wailing spirit on their cardboard memorial (making them keep it up) while we do an extraction run.

Best.

Fun.

Ever.

In D&D being evil and doing bad things is more comical, like being becoming litch and trying to kill the rest of the party (one of our former players did that in a game once). That's funny. Running over several dozen people is a sad and terrible deed, but normal.

Edit:
I should post the game logs of that SR game...

Sorry, but... no. I look at my copy of SR1, and for types of shadowrunners, it talks about whether you are a decker, or a magician, or a street samurai. I look at my copy of SR4, and it talks about Johnsons who might be other than corporate, runners who can be proactive, or politically motivated, or motivated by social justice, etc.

The only change affecting the "richness and complexity" is that the game is more street level. Not in the sense of weaker characters, but in the sense of characters who do their own thing rather than being railroaded through set-pieces for every significant event that happens for the timeline.

Maybe I'm violating some great unspoken rule, but my understanding is that the BBB and various other books provide rules and fluff for our enjoyment. There is an entire world described, and several sourcebooks have at least touched on how to play as something other than shadowrunners at all.

Criminals out to make a buck? Easy. Non-criminals who need to survive and clear their names? Easy. SWAT team, hired muscle, street gang, military squad, assassins (political or for hire), or CorpSec? All easy.

But what about Humanis nutjobs out to kill all the degenerates? Or a cadre from a conspiracy trying to bring down all the megacorps, one at a time? Or a group trying to do it absolutely alone? Vigilantes trying to police the Barrens because Lone Star sure ain't gonna show up and do it? Yes, the rules cover all these as well. You may not go by the term "shadowrunner," but you've got all the fluff and crunch a GM needs to make a story and run with it.

How many different kinds of characters and Johnsons are described in the book don't make the world. The worldbuilding makes the world, and the four editions and dozens of sourcebooks have provided literally decades worth of world, from the mean streets to the corporate boardrooms to the hospitals and armies.

In my favorite SR campaign, all the players were employees of a shockingly innovative and lucrative tiny corp (garage level, home computers, and basement labs, really), and most of the campaign was about trying to keep the company from being swallowed by bigger fish. There wasn't a single "shadowrunner" on the team; shadowrunners were goons sent by the AAA enemies to make life hard. And this was in SR2. Were there rules for it? You bet: weapons, cyberware, combat, magic, everything! If you need the rules to tell you what your characters can be, you need to start thinking bigger.

My group plays civilians for the last half year. We all have sins, had nothing to do with the Shadows and don't plan to run because we all have SINs and regular Jobs. That's when the Assassins came and tried to kill us. So Yeah.

And now, for a little rebuttal:



That's fine, except that we were arguing that your equation didn't apply to the problem at hand. It wasn't a question of math, but of application.

BTW, since we're going around insulting the intelligence of others, I must say that it's wonderfully bright of you, after having a forum admin close the topic you are discussing (because the topic was getting too hostile), to go onto another topic in the forum and insult the intelligence of the people who disagreed with you.

Bravo.

Because I'm certain that your opponents from the previous topic won't notice what you say in this topic ... wait, too late.

What you have done is neither sensible, nor mature. In fact, I find it rude, and immature.



Now you continue to insult those who disagreed with you in the previous thread, but further generalize to attack everyone in a vague notion. You complain about sensibility and maturity while displaying neither. It's no wonder why people were giving you the finger. If the discourse on this forum is so horrible, perhaps its because people such as yourself choose to 'elevate' the discussion by insulting everyone else.



I didn't 'barely' make it through calculus. Nor did I barely make it through my statistics class. Nor did I barely make it through another class in which we spent time studying things like the time value of money, and how to do cost benefit analysis. (Which, apparently, was irrelevant to the discussion. Except for the fact that it was very relevant.)

(For those of you who want the crib notes version, my argument is that the changes in SR4A mean that you are better off when you must burn edge to live, but you are much worse off than in SR4 should you burn edge when you could get by without burning edge.)

The reason why your equation is wrong is because this is a comparison of benefits. The basic idea here is that if G - C > P, then the alternative is worth the cost. 'G' would be the gain, 'C' would be the cost, and 'P' is the 'do nothing' alternative (The result if you decide to NOT burn edge).

There are two possible values of P. Either your character is dead, and you get to restart, or your character survives whatever made you consider burning edge. At which point, your value is however much karma you would normally have (That 9 karma that you insist we can't have).

The value of C is obvious in both equations. It is either the 5*(rating) karma, or 3*(rating) karma.

G however, is an abstract. Why? Because you can't truly measure the value of burning a point of edge mathematically. This isn't a problem, however, when G is 'character survival' and P is 'Character death and replacement'. In this situation, you have two measurable quantities.

On one hand you have a starting character who gained 9/5 karma, but lost 5*(rating)/3*(rating) karma in order to survive. On the other hand, you have a completely restarted character with 0 karma. This tells us that if karma spent in order to survive exceeds 9/5 then you would be better off letting that character die.

Now, in a burn or die situation, I would agree that you are most definitely better off in SR4A. 4 being better off than 2, after all. However, the discussion was about whether or not the changes made it more worthwhile to just burn edge for critical successes, or even to create a character around burning edge. The 'recreational use' of edge, if you will. In this case, I was arguing that you were *worse* in SR4A because the value of P was no longer a guaranteed 0. True, the situation might end in your character's death (forcing you back to 0), but it might also be a value of X (where X equals the karma you have currently plus the karma you'd get at the end of the night) should you character survive. So, if you have a 90% chance of surviving the test in which you are burning edge, that would make P a value of .9X.

G, as I mentioned before, is hard to evaluate, but C is not. So, let's take an example, the cost of burning 1 edge with an edge of 1 versus the alternative, 90% chance of survival:

SR4: G - 3 > .9*5 or G - 3 > 4.5
SR4A: G - 5 > .9 * 9 or G - 5 > 8.1

Our value of G, of course, won't be the same. G being equal to an intangible (critical success) and your tangible karma level.

So, let's say that G = U + X (The tangible and the intangible). Using a starting character, with burning 1 edge with an edge of 1 versus the alternative, 90% chance of survival:

SR4: U + 5 - 3 > 4.5 or U + 2 > 4.5; 4.5 - 2 = 2.5 So, if U > 2.5 then burning edge is a good choice.
SR4A: U + 9 - 5 > 8.1 or U + 4 > 8.1; 8.1 - 4 = 4.1 So, if U > 4.1 then burning edge is a good choice.

What this means is that for SR4A, the intangible benefit must be worth more than in SR4 to be a good choice. Now, admittedly, the odds of survival without burning edge is a key factor here. However, it's one that is most difficult to calculate. Especially, since you can't put a number on how nice your GM is going to be.

So, I'm saying that SR4A, in comparison to SR4, encourages you to burn edge to survive, but discourages you from burning edge should death not be very likely.



We were discussing the cost of burning a point of edge, and whether or not it was more worth it or less worth it to burn edge in SR4A. Last time I checked, no one was holding a gun to your head and making you burn a point of edge. Even if the benefit of burning edge was the survival of your character, you can always choose to NOT burn the edge and recreate your character. (Maybe even correct the flaw that got you killed in the first place.)

In fact, I would counter that while 4 is preferable to 2, when edge > 2, 0 karma is greater than the amount of karma you would owe to return to your previous "0 karma" state.

I must add that I love how you leave out exactly what was being discussed while giving just enough detail in order to mislead everyone as to what the argument was about. This must be the wonderful 'educated discourse' you were talking about earlier. The one in which you obfuscate the truth in order to paint the opposing side as idiots.

Perhaps if you are truly interested in improving the discourse, you should start by altering your own. Everyone makes mistakes, even the brightest amongst us. Even if you could prove that someone is mistaken, that doesn't make it right to use that to paint others as fools and idiots. That's just plain rude.

I've been on a real SR nostalgia kick for the last month or so, (I'd gone into heavy withdrawl after running out of painkillers to counteract the side-effects of a chronic disease around this time of year, a few years back, while reading the Denver sourcebook. Needless to say, I think of SR whenever I think about that experience...in a weird, comforting, way), going back and re-reading at least couple dozen pre-4e books, and acquiring much of the 4E line I hadn't owned previously, too. Part of why I finally registered here a few days ago.

And I've just gotta say...the contributers to Shadowland have been calling themselves criminals, unabashedly, since 1e. I like it. Consider, a vital part of Science Fiction Dystopia (not including Post-Apocalyptic, here) is the overwhelming control various organizations (governments, corporations, etc) have over their citizens, far out of proportion to what we have today (or had back in the 20th century). To the extent where anyone that isn't not only a law-abiding, but WILLFULLY complacent and submissive, citizen is, by definition, a criminal.

In the world of Shadowrun in particular, that means anyone that's a shadowrunner, a mercenary, a smuggler, a hacker, a magician that doesn't work for one of those major organizations, or even a person that dares question, or even think a bit too freely, the wisdom of keeping those organizations in power. If you don't belong to them, you're a criminal. Simple as that.