Continuity issues? Nah.

angry fanboys not liking that fact that since surge everyone wants to play a changeling for their pure min-maxing potential? Yeah.

How come I see more shadowrun art of changelings, the surged and furries than should exist? No, I don't think your transgendered foxgirl is cool... QFT!

So yeah, that's the problem with surge. Should we be mad at surge though? Nope. Should we be mad at those who overplay surged characters? You betcha!

Also, come on, with a new plot arc and epic story that happens every game year, there are going to be some off years... Not everything can be Bug City or Renraku Arcology Shutdown...

Learn to differentiate between people who like playing SURGEd characters and mindless furries.

Generally one and the same!

No, the furries don't do it because it gives them cool abilities cheaply, they do it because they think it is inherently cool.

I like the SURGEd just because it allows you to make such weird characters. When I looked at it I didn't think "man I am going to have such fun min maxing the crap out of this" I thought "DUDE! I am going to make a 4 armed dwarf climbing adept with an addiction to spiderman BTLs and call him Gimli the Midget Spider!"

But then again thats just me.

Heh... i had quite some contact with furries but i think there should be a difference between playing something mindless (wether for mindless min/maxing or mindless living out whatever you ride on) and other categorizations.

Granted... though both have bounced back and forth from the original creators.

Re: Furries. C'mon guys.

I like SURGE because it plays up the weird facets of the Shadowrun universe. Magic was getting too pat and too recognizable, and SURGE (and basically all of YOtC) blew that all to the void. SURGE allows you to play people whose goblinization didn't kick in all the way or they're a race that maybe hasn't, or even wont pop up in the Sixth World yet. Maybe magic twisted some part of their genetic make-up and they picked up some beneficial or superficial (or even dangerous) abilities. Maybe their ancestors did the horizontal nasty with a magic beastie back in the day and they got some of their traits because of it.

Either way, it's a way to play up how weird the Sixth World can be. Anything in SR can be twisted for min/max potential (and it drives me up the wall to see people do that around here) but just because Joe Random Otaku can make an anime catgirl doesn't mean that potential lays within the option given.

Anyone who plays a SURGE character should make sure that they are not min maxing. My SURGE character spent 5 of his surge points on a metahuman characteristic (elven longevity)... 5 pts spent worthlessly, but fits the character quite well.

Anyone who plays should avoid intentionally gimping their character. Optimizing, on the other hand, is the most in-character thing to do.

I asked people here what elven longevity be worth and they said 5 BP. What would you say?

I only like SURGEd for further min-max cheese. I'd personally be happier without the furbies in my games.

- J.

I would say nothing. Unless your game is very, very long-running, or skips forward several years every few months, it is not something that gives any kind of tangible in-game benefit.

I like the Runner's Companion version of SURGE. The previous version (I don't have YOTC, so I could have heard, or remembered, wrongly) had, I believe, random tables, which is lame in a point-build system. Similarly, I would not ever play a changeling if the GM insisted on picking out the negative traits for me. The whole point of build points is to custom-craft your character exactly how you (the player) want it! Especially for something like SURGE, where the player is likely to have a very specific concept in mind.

As for furries, you had them as of Augmentation (spawning a rather disturbing thread, I recall). SURGE only introduced the option to have a "natural" cat girl.

Nothing, though as it happens I was responding more to the first part of your post.

Ah, I remember that thread. I created my cyberkitty sex slaves... good for sex (of the kinky kind) and good for killing your enemies when they piss you off.

The rules for SURGE in YotC gives the option of randomizing the event, but it was by no means mandatory that it be random. However, the interesting thing that I wish they would have retained in the RC version of SURGE was the fact that you had to pick at least an equal point value of Negative SURGE qualities as positive SURGE qualities.

Except you pay the BP for the level of SURGE. This comes out of your positive qualities pool.

I didn't invent manatech, but gorramit I did work hard on it.

Yes, they did. The actual Changeling qualities (which you need to take before taking the SURGE qualities) require you to take a matching amount of negative SURGE qualities for no BP.

Nothing with matching reading here, only a set amount is mentioned but the Surge Qualities don't count against the regular Quality Limit.

Pretty much spot on.

My issue with surge is that, well, considering the options SR's Tech offers, the whole persecution just makes no sense to me, and even less sense makes the "I am stuck as a freak, woe me, since for some strange reason I cannot think of simply having this strange tail cut off and my humanity restored by a short trip to the next surgeon!" background.

Would be like if today some magic made people get strange colored hair, and we should flip out about those "mutants" and hate and fear them - as if there were not tons of people who dye their hair already, and as if anyone who mutated could not dye their new hair back to black or whatever it was.

It's not the people with strange coloured hair. It's the ones who suddenly gained Ork tusks or Troll horns. The ones who have a second heart that means that it's absolutely necessary to exclude them from sports now that they've got an unfair competitive advantage. The ones who now look like kids, but have the mind and drives of an adult. We're looking at people who remind people of things they'd rather not think about, who have legitimate reasons for exclusion that are also profoundly unfair, or just disturb people.

There are fewer shadowrunners than there are Doctors. They're less than 0.1% of the population. The vast majority of people affected by SURGE are wageslaves, whose total blandness is a carefully calculated social move to avoid alienating people who might advance their career. Suddenly turning into a kid, or something vaguely Orklike is too weird, and you're going to see a glass ceiling if you're suddenly weird. Who knows whether Changelings are like us - they certainly don't look like us. We can't exactly promote someone we don't know if we can trust. I always thought that George was a little bit odd.

That's the thing. The whole process is deceivingly rational. You approach your data looking to confirm your conclusions, so after you've heard that James from Accounting grew horns, your memory dredges up every little awkward moment you've seen him have. Suddenly you're far more suspicious that he's not like the rest of "the gang" and it's best if he doesn't get to managerial positions. After all, he doesn't represent the rest of the team at all - how can you manage the interests of people you share nothing with?

Edit: Oops, missed a "not" in there.

It's not much about the changes per se but about the implications. Remember that nobody knew what was going on and many played the "Mutation" or "Plague" Card. Yes, you may get your nice little tail cut off, but what if it regrows or worse, gets bigger? And what if your whole family starts getting it because you transferred your "sickness" to them?
Adding the already in place Comet Hysteria, you can bet that some of the comet cults used SURGE as a Sign of the End Times or as Prophets of a new Time. Hilarity ensues.
And it would also make sense that some "Transhumanists" of the extreme type got beaten up too by some angry mob not knowing that this bastard just loved his new iTail G5.

Edith told me that Heath also made a good point.

Read the qualities themselves:

The process is not deceivingly rational. Not if you consider the fact that almost all of the mutations were already being done (and undone) by surgery by people who liked looking that way. It really is like if a sickness today started to turn people's hair blue, green, or orange.

And even if we buy the "people fear the mutants" - which I kind of can understand, though not years after it happened and pretty much everyone could get the "metagene activation, like UGE" explanation - why on earth does anyone, much less a shadowrunner, keep looking like a freak, instead of getting rid of it? Getting rid of the most common mutations is dirt cheap, less than a tricked out weapon in many cases. It's fine for those who go the "different and proud of it" route, but I have toruble wrapping my head aroiund the scenario of a surgling runner lamenting their fate, while having enough money to get fixed twice over from just one run.

That's my main beef with Surge: As a game option for player characters (aka: "this is important for you") it does not fit into the world of cyber- and bioware other than a "you look like this, and you like it" option. The "I hate looking like this, but cannot change it" simply makes no sense.

I did. 10 BP doesn't equal 5 BP, even in my deviate mathematical conception.

10 BP of Positve Qualites, -5 BP of Negitive Qualities, -5 BP for Surge I = Zero BP

I agree with Fuchs that the "woe is me" approach doesn't work for the more common SURGE traits. But PCs will tend to either get "pretty" changelings, or get ones whose freakish traits dovetail with their job (a prehensile tail for a cat burglar, etc.). The NPCs who mutate into something with a squid's head and bulging insect eyes, and who don't pull in thousands of Nuyen as runners, are the ones who will really suffer.

On a related tangent, the panic over technomancers made even less sense. "Oh no! These deviant freaks of nature can do exactly the same thing that a hacker with an implanted commlink can do! Burn the witches!"

Well, the technomancer "scare" plotline suffered from a serious case of metagaming. First, it was really too bad that TM's were included in the base book because by the time CGL got around to doing the Emergence plotline, TM's were "old news." Plus, players were already well familiar with their abilities and limitations, and they were perceived as "underpowered" further adding to the "TM's aren't scary" aspect. TM's weren't public knowledge until after the events of Emergence, and for quite some time after that, the full extent of their abilities were subject to wild conjecture. I think the whole plotline would have gone better if the game mechanics for TM's would have been kept out of the core book and released as part of Emergence.

Wasn't Emergence still made up by Fanpro??


Ah, i see what you did there.

Emergence was originally planned as the very first SR4 release directly after the BBB. Unfortunately, that timing didn't manifest...
TMs were included in the core rules so that you don't need an additional book to play them. Plus, the core book was supposed to be still in use when the Emergence plotline was over and TMs widely known.

I think the big question is: AH, you wrote the entry on Shadowrun on tvtropes, didn't you?

-Chrysalis

Oo, good point. Let's see how he answers

No, but thanks for playing.

Spoilsport. Next you'll tell me dragons aren't real.

Oh, they're real. Granted, they just have a nasty venom and are fair cunnin' instead of fire-breathing and intelligent, but a komodo is nothing to sneeze at. Literally, they attack anything that moves.

Only if it pokes them enough while jabbering in an Australian accent. That'll warrant a tail-whipping.

This was the biggest thing to me. Folks had already had the rules -- Hell, even an archetype character in the main book! -- for a year or so before the "fluff" with Technomancers caught up to them. How do you handle that, smoothly and well, in a game? You've been playing with a character for a year and then suddenly their book comes out and you realize they're supposed to be the X-Men or something, hated and feared and blah blah blah, and that it was supposed to be the case all along.

That's just sloppiness, to me.

Boring.

Whereas gimping your character is actively working against the party.

This. Oh, Em, Gee, THIS. There's nothing wrong with playing a bunch of wannabes and fish-out-of-water, so long as the whole group is on board. If your group consists of a gang-banger, a wageslave, a chiphead, and a street shaman; cool! Sounds like a blast. If you've got a pornomancer, a troll with 40 soak dice, a concrete-melting mage, ...and a guy with 300 BP of languages; you're going to have problems.

If Boring keeps me alive, boring is what i will do.
See Work.

Like Z said, if the party's cool with it, who cares? There are no winners or losers here. Only those who know how to have fun and those who need to find a new hobby.

That's like saying you can have a party full of catgirls who go out into the Aztech lollipop-growing fields for a tea party with Funny Mister Dunkelzahn. You can do anything with party approval, but I'm assuming a party that wants to, you know, get something done -- i.e., one that isn't okay with you intentionally making the group weaker.

The whole "optimized versus gimped" argument is just yet another thing that comes down to OOC party dynamics and table's preference.

If your GM's running a cutthroat game where you need to be sharp as a monoblade to survive, then you pimp your character eight ways to Tuesday, scour every nook and cranny of the rules to find what works best, and you work at staying alive by the skin of your teeth because that's the level of competitive (for lack of a better term) play that's expected.

On the other hand, if your GM is kosher will scaling threats to the party, encouraging well rounded characters instead of uber specialists, likes to see karma expenditures go towards fleshing out a character instead of just making him better and better and better at what he's "supposed" to be good at, yadda yadda yadda...well, that game's just fine, too.

It's like comparing Dirk Montgomery and his noir-flavored, no-to-low cyber (and no magic), everyman detective character to...I dunno, Argent, the super-commando-move-by-wire, dual-smartlinks, yadda yadda yadda guy. Different strokes (and power levels) for different folks.

Not really.

The thing about optimization versus deliberate gimping is that optimization makes the party stronger, while gimping makes it weaker. Having a character that's deliberately weak in a team-based game doesn't work unless everyone's on board, because the rest of the party is going to have to pick up the slack for the gimped one. Which, to most people, isn't fun.

There's nothing wrong with everyone playing a lower power-level character, or even people playing with different levels of optimization. But when a person says, "Hey, regardless of whether the group's okay with it or not, I'm going to intentionally make a weak character," that's flipping a giant bird to everyone else.

Someone gimping their character doesn't always affect the rest of the party. But what irritates me is when someone makes such an individual decision, then, when the game actually starts, they get upset that the well-crafted characters do better than them. Then they whine to the GM about the powerful character, because they feel "useless." Hey genius, you made your character that way! I don't mind people taking disadvantages for their characters, for role-playing reasons, but they should accept the in-game consequences. If I ever, for instance, decide to make a "natural" adept who disdains bioware, then I will be prepared for that adept to be overshadowed in certain ways by adepts who have succumbed to the lure of 'ware.

It doesn't always directly affect the party, but it always affects it. An example: in a game I'm playing in, a character has taken an Allergy (mild, thank G-d) to a substance he's also Addicted to. Any time he comes up a hit or two short of doing something we need him to be doing, well, we're all gonna be frustrated about him not having those two extra dice he should.

If the game is mainly about the crazy hijinks the runners get into, and have to get out of again, due to their bad luck, flaws, and general stupidity, then making an optimized, smart, and professional runner only works if the character is accepted and expected to be the "straight man" to the loonies of the team. Otherwise frustration happens when the player flips out about the gunbunny blowing away the only witness they needed for being a threat (despite being in a coma already).

And of course, outside your usual, long running face to face group, people often have wildly different ideas about what's powerful and what's weak. One group's "gimped idiot" is another's "munchkinized monster".