Whatever happened to the cool made-up profanity like drek, slot, and hoop that was commonly found the the SR3 books? All you see in the SR4 books are Mr. Carlin's seven dirty words that we all love and enjoy.

To be honest, I'm not sure.

But when I heard Battlestar Galactica use 'Frag' every third word, I knew things would not be the same in Sci-Fi land. I kinna miss it tho, the fake lingo helped the world seem like a different place.

Best made-up swear word?

Smeg.

It was removed from SR4 due to fan complaints.

From wikipedia under "Fourth Edition Changes":

There were also other changes to Shadowrun society at large, as illustrated in the flavor text. For example, up to this point, cursing had been illustrated with a variety of colorful made-up words, such as "drek", "frag", and "slot". FanPro eschewed these in SR4 (to some player complaint, as many fans believed this added social color to the game) and decided to use their contemporary, real-world counterparts.

Count me in the "glad that silliness is mostly gone" crowd. I can sort of deal with omae (although for strange reasons not entirely explainable it makes me hungry for egg sushi when I hear it), I don't laugh uproariously at chummer anymore (even if I do still mentally picture someone feeding fish chunks to sharks), but the ridiculous kiddie friendly cursing always annoyed me.

Drek was always the one that annoyed me most, mostly because it's already a word, and because bulldrek is both patently obvious as a stand-in for bullshit as well as being completely non-lyrical.

Runners and shadowtalkers don't need to swear like sailors, but when they do I'd rather them not sound like repressed church ladies trying to stifle a hearty fuck with oh fudge.

Aaaaactually, they were saying "frak" on BSG. A tiny difference, but it's there.

Count me as well in the camp that's happy Shadowrun now represents profanity with, well, profanity.

I wonder what sort of sampling was taken.

/wavy lines and harps strumming
"Hey Josci, I hate the fake swear words."
"Ya, me too"

"The playtester totally agrees, we should be more like Cyberpunk ™"

/end wavy lines

Yeah, thats about what I imagine. I run a Fourth Ed game locally, play in another and know two other 3rd ed groups. Out of the whole lot, not one person hated the slang and we all still use it.

BlueMax
/fans my ass.
//"The events depicted in this movie are fictitious. Any similarity to any person living or dead is merely coincidental."

I miss the old slang. (Not that my SR club ever used it in game, back in the day, but it was entertaining to read.)

-paws

Myself as well. I use it whenever I play. I don't find it silly at all.

You know, I never used any of the fake swearing in any of my Shadowrun games even when it WAS in the books. Other slang, yes, but people have been saying fuck for several hundred years. I expect they will continue to do so for at least 70 more.

Seconded. The pretend words annoyed me from the moment I first cracked open a SR1 book 20 years ago. I'm glad to see the change and bemused there's complaints that players' complaints were addressed.

I don't miss chummer

I blame the vut dandelion eaters.

I feel I should mention?

"Drek" is indeed a real word, taken from Yiddish. In Yiddish... it means "shit." So it was actually the only one that never bothered me, because it was being used completely accurately.

Also because it'd offend the Haredim, and no one likes the Haredim.

I have a friend, who back in our high school Shadowrunning days was our usual GM, and who uses Frag and Drek in his regular vocabulary in place of their more traditional counterparts. I have never once heard him say Fuck or Shit in the twelve years that I've known him.

Some of us are actually worse with swearing in the new books than others. None of us have, to my knowledge, been asked to tone it down yet but it has been commented on that some of us have very potty mouths when writing.

I would like to point out that the Wikipedia article is, in fact, stating the exact opposite of your conclusion. The parenthetical comment "to some player complaint" is made in reference to the statement that "FanPro eschewed these [made up slang words] in SR4". What they are saying is that there has been some player complaint that the SR slang was removed, and this is borne out by the rest of the parenthetical comment noting that fans felt the SR slang added color to the game.

Personally, I always felt that the 'kid-friendly' SR slang detracted from an otherwise dark and gritty setting, and would quite often replace the SR slang with modern cursing when GMing.

No, that's pretty accurate. Many fans disliked the fictional offensives as kiddy or cartoonish, particularly since drek is essentially German for the word it was supposed to be replacing; when we brought the real swear words back in, many fans pined for the older lingo of their lost childho-er, early fandoms.

Personally, I like to think about the novel Shadowplay, with its own memorable take on the subject.

I liked the original slang because it added extra detail to the world and made it a little more real and different. I never had a problem with it being kiddified or afraid of real swearing because I never realised that it was. Maybe it's growing up in Britain, but I just assumed that the words were introduced purely for flavour and it never occured to any of us years ago as far as I'm aware that it might have been an attempt to avoid swearing. I just assumed that if the writers had wanted to write "fuck" then they would have done it. If I had thought that was the reason, I probably would have hated the slang with a passion because I loathe censorship (and still do).

As it is, I still pepper in-character dialogue with "drek" and "chummer" and other phrases. It helps establish we're in a different setting when we're playing in my brightly lit living room sitting on fat sofas. I need every drop of immersion I can get, quite frankly.

K.

As usual, the crotchety grandpas of Shadowrun's early days feel that, if they didn't want a change, there's no way it was based on fan feedback. After all, as the oldest, most crotchety fans, only their opinion counts, right? I seriously feel like some of you geezers are hostile to every change, no matter what. If everything went your way, the game would never change, and therefore would never grow or improve.

I for one think that real profanity adds to the grittiness of the game. Words like fuck and shit are hundreds of years old, and have done very well in withdstanding the test of time. It shatters credulity to think that intense social upheaval and the steady downward slide into dystopia would actually cause people to clean up their speech. If anything, there should be cusswords in Shadowrun too filthy to be uttered today, like pisscunt and pusfart (irony intended ). It's one thing to introduce foreign words into the vernacular, because those signify shifts in cultural dominance. If there were swearwords based on Japanese or Amerind words, those would be worth saving because it really is part of the world. Frag and drek are not sensible outgrowths of a sane time progression however, they're toned-down language written for the censors and concerned parents. Unless someone's got a fluff based reason why time-honored words like fuck and shit were actually phased out of use in the Sixth World, I call bullshit on claiming that they were sensible, valuable aspects of the game world.

I will give a nod to knasser's idea that they help with immersion. That might be a reason to keep them. But I don't think they're necessary for immersion, and as they reduce grittiness, we're better off without them.

It's a mixed bag in my current game. I have one old-school SR player who uses the 1st-3rd edition vocabulary, and I give him credit for it in the form of role-playing karma. He always wins the award for "staying in character". However, recently as things have gone gritty and we've been dealing with themes of kidnapping, drug abuse, and cold blooded murder, traditional profanity has reemerged--even with this old-school player. I also think that my players who are new to Shadowrun are more comfortable with traditional profanity as a means of expression.

At the same time, we're also playing a game set in Los Angeles and Las Vegas, so I've been slowly introducing Spanish slang and profanity. This in itself is a unique experience because we're living in Atlantic Canada. What's really funny is when slang from this region creeps into the Los Angeles setting by accident.

Larme,
How dare you attack my families breeding rate! So what if I am already a grandfather?
Not really.
As for the more important claim, can you point the assertion out for me? Really, I just want to see the type of sampling and weighting used due to my lack of exposure to shadowslang haters. At least here on the Left Coast.

Shadowslang was something unique to Shadowrun, and it kept Shadowrun unique. When you grew up playing Shadowrun one night and Cyberpunk the next, it was good to have differentiation. Now that there is only one thriving game, it can probably do well by cannibalizing the other games crowd. This however, comes at a cost.

In the brewing world, we call this "Least to object to". That is to say the beer with the least flavor, has the smallest market segment who will object. Beer with flavor, strong flavors, unique flavors, will have limited distribution as someone at the event can object. And this doesn't apply to the initial recipe alone, Budweiser from 30 years ago will contain noticeably more unique flavor (being generous). Each unique flavor removed after discovery in the market.

The more you know...

BlueMax

I never actually saw the flavor words like drek and frag as nessissarily being complete replacements for their more longstanding relatives. I had all ways viewed them as if they were just another peice of popular slang. i.e: badonkadonk will never replace fucking huge wobbling ass, or grill will never replace a shit ton of messed up dental work. They were sort of childish sounding but so are a lot of popular terms and phrases. I just thought they were suplimentary.

This is the internet - we're here to bitch and moan. And especially we do son on dumpshock.com, as you may have noticed.

And of course do I dislike that frag and all the other nice words seem to be gone, despite the fact that I like SR4A with all its changes very much.

I play in French. The few times I've tried to use English SR-slang it felt as ridiculous out of place, so I've never used them much.

Am I a crochety grampa?



I'm not arguing one way or another. If I had realised (accurately or not) that the words were essentially censorship then my feelings as a kid would actually have been different on the matter. So I can see where people are coming from. I don't know if they actually are for this purpose or not though. I can't place the source, but wasn't there a bit of cannon fiction where a character says "fuck" and another character thinks she's so quaint and parenty for using such a staid old term? That would partially answer Larme's query about fluff justification for it.

Agreed on the cultural source of the words. Some Japanese expletives would probably fit in well.

Did you try "Le Frag"?

I'm sorry, just a joke

I personally saw the profanities as extra fad swears aswell, kinda like you can always call a guy an a-hole but every once in a while it's fun to call him a Douche canoe

I'm pretty sure that's in Night's Pawn, which, coincidentally, I just started reading again, last night, after finding it while digging around for missing books on a visit to my parents' house.

As for the cultural source of words, Drek could work well, then, since German is about as big in Shadowrun as Shadowrun is in Germany.

I'm hanging with the crowd that uses both, but supports the OG Shadowrun flavor. Language is constantly shifting and changing, so the argument that the popular 'swears' would never change in 70 years is kind of weak. I've never censored a table, and often use both 'aspects' depending on the NPC in general. BUt it doesn't really matter if they're in the book or not, now, smoke 'em if you got 'em I say. That said, I -really- don't see the diarrhea river flow of 'pisscunt' and 'pusfart' to be *gritty* - I just see it as a teen, or poseur -trying- to sound hard. I'm not shooting to Flame, but what says grit and edge to me are time-relevant terms that've grown in use and the 'norms' don't quite catch.

Are Drek and Frag kind of campy? Yeah, definately. Are they overused? About as equally so as someone that says fuck every other word. You're just as likely to hear a growled 'I'ma gonna fuckin' kill you, bitch.' at my table as you are to hear a 'You bunch of fraggahs!'.

Favorite word that SR introduced me to: Slitch.

Oh and, re: German cultural use of Drek? I just got back from 5 years in Germany, and the only place I heard it was from German SR players.

I just meant that it's a German word, not that it's used in German in the same way that it is in Shadowrun. I've never spent any time in Germany, myself, but I have German friends here in the states who are not gamers, but I know use the word.

dont know why, but i cant find myself caring either way...

Here's a funny language lesson.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9U72QVCgh_Q

How about using it in English too? Tabernak for fuck and Chalice for shit.

I'll stand up for the old lingo. While some people might not have been able to absorb them properly, the fact is that Shadowslang added a unique element to the game. Modern slang actually detracts from the game, by adding in an intrusive bit of reality. I don't hear people using modern profanity at their fantasy games-- well, Shadowrun is part fantasy. I *do* occasionally hear a "By the beard of Zeus!", which makes the game just that much more fun.

The same applies to Shadowrun.

Really I was making a pass at age, not breeding rate. But not seriously



The call for sampling methods is hard to interpret as anything but an unfair jab. No RPG company creates editions through scientific sampling methods. They get email, they talk to people at conventions, they talk to people on forums, they decide what they think the fans what, they decide what they think would improve their product as professional game designers, and they make it how they make it. If you didn't want any change, you got your wish, because nobody held a gun to your head and made you throw out your SR3 books.



This is something of a red herring. So what if shadowslang kept the game unique? You're not seriously arguing that the game stopped being unique when they changed to real swearwords, are you? Because if you're not, then you're overstating your case. Sure, the swearwords stopped being unique, but that probably has almost nothing to do with the overall uniqueness of the game world. Out of all the cyberpunk + fantasy weirdness that is Shadowrun, the word 'drek' is a small part of its distinctiveness, if indeed you can call it that.



Huh. It's an interesting factoid but the analogy isn't immediately apparent... Are you saying that making the language of Shadowrun more offensive watered it down? That by removing the babytalk fake cussing, the game is no longer distinctive? That it was a commercially minded way to make the game shittier just so more people would drink it? I don't think so, and I don't think you have any way to back up that somewhat insulting analogy (insulting to the devs, not to me). I think a more plausible answer is that Shadowrun's audience, and the RPG crowd in general, is getting older. There are fewer parents around to object to the word 'fuck,' and there are more gamers who feel insulted by babytalk. It's just like what's been happening in comics. As the main audience ages and fewer and fewer kids are added on, the themes and language all become more mature. It's that simple, and probably a lot more plausible than the devs trying to make the game less objectionable by making the language offensive to a wider range of people.

BOOSH!

this word is from Frisky Dingo. and has since replaced halve of the normal words my friends and I used to use.

Seventy years ago in the states, people would use words like "Moxy", a popular "energy drink" at the time. Any of the SR-slang could easily be derived from similar situations. And I agree with the pro Frag chummers, but not at the loss of Carlins 7 words you can't say on TV

Larme,
Its hard to have a discussion on this topic when you continue to insult the words and those who use them by referring to them as "fake babytalk cussing". It insults those of us who like it, mostly through the use of the term baby. Unless its "Hey Baby!" said in the right tone

If you hit your favorite search engine and type in Shadowslang, you may find hundreds of pages dedicated to Shadowslang. Shadowslang was not limited to cursing, though it was laden with artifical cursewords. Shadowrun developed its own, unique, culture. Yes, it did this by gathering from those that existed before hand as nothing is created in vacuum.
There is nothing adult about cursing. Nothing. My three and five year old curse. On each occasion they do so without merit, I punish them *Tickle Attack*. Perhaps I have a singular view when I say that nothing is added by cursing in regular language. Certainly no challenge. When I play FPS games, one can tell the quality of the community on a server by the care taken on choosing when and how to curse, not simply outlawing the language. I don't think older Shadowrun books outlawed cursing, only offering more ways to get the job done in a Shadowrun way. Many have commented on BSG's frak. While I am not a fan, it would be impossible to deny the power the unique language gave the show.
As to my marketing commentary, I do not mean to imply that anything quite so advanced occurred by design. Instead, I could imagine some of the Cyberpunk™, and other failed near future games, fans and fiction writers being absorbed and bringing their methods with them. This likely did not happen, as Shadowrun has lost it rocker (Streetbeat for 4th Edition!) and has no Nomad ( never really had that kind of Nomad but Amurgsval did a great write up on how to add them) . It was offered as a possibility and thought experiment.
For the record, I think very little happens to Shadowrun mechanics and marketing by deep entrenched design. That sort of effort is left for the fiction, and sometimes the rules , or at least I hope so.

-50 Points BlueMax, taking the intertubes way too serisouly

BlueMax

Somewhat new blood chiming in. I was here for SR3-4, but not for 1-2.

I miss "chummer".

On the other hand. I'm glad to see most of the Sixth World swearing go. While it's true that The Sixth World is part fantastic, it's also part mundane cyberpunk, and I just don't see "fuck" becoming less common. To me. "fuck" being replaced by "frag" is a change on par with crossbows replacing guns.

But that could be because I fucking swear too god-damned much.

Maybe it hurts you to hear my opinion of "frag" and "drek," but I was simply stating in stark terms what I believe they are. They are not colorful, inventive parts of the scenery. They were invented in an era when most of us were kids, and our parents might read our books, and might forbid us to play if they were laced with profanity. It's just like Battlestar Galactica. They invented new cuss words not because that's what the writers wanted, but because they didn't want to run on HBO or Showtime only, because the FCC bugaboo would eat them if they said naughty words. Maybe, in time, they became part of the setting, but I do not think that adding uniqueness was their original purpose. To me, they are a relic of censorship, even if it was self-censorship. As a strong proponent of free speech, I despise censorship, and so I despise drek and frag. They are, themselves, the watered down, toned down language. To suggest that the scenery has been watered down based on the removal of watered down language, that just seems wrong to me.

Just as my 2

I like "chummer," both due to the "chum" (good buddy) derivative AND the shark bait derivative. A chummer is someone with whom you are friends with, but when shit hits the fan and one of you dies, you might as well be....fish food.

Hey chummers. I don't give a frag what you think. The slotted Devs can cram it up their hoop for all I care. Drek, just ignore them and say what you want, right omae?

I vaguely remember doing some eye rolling at the faux-profanity when I picked up the 1st edition BBB in the early 90's. Maybe it's the Alzheimer's or perhaps it is hard for me to recall because I was of a certain age during which eye rolling is the default reaction to nearly all forms of stimuli.

In the intervening years the SR slang has grown on me. I've still rarely been able to use it (in character or not) without cracking a grin, but seeing it in the books tells me that while the setting is serious (or at least endeavors to be) it does not take itself too seriously.

Of course when you are of a certain age there is almost no such thing as a work of fiction that takes itself too seriously. Woe to the widdle babykins who suggests otherwise because he's definitely not nearly as grown up as you are.

Never used them, frags where always just something we threw at some fucking cunt to wreck their shit.

edit- I always presumed that the made up slang was put in there to market it across a less adult audience.

How long you gonna pretend to wave that flag for?

Free speech? You honestly think this is about free speech? Someone invents a swear word, and it automatically oppresses your precious right to free speech?

As already pointed out, dreck is an actual curse work, not watered down in the slightest. So, the facts are that they aren't toned-down language. If anything, it's spruced-up language, because it takes us to the land of the fictional.

Oh and one other thing: WotC does that level of marketing research. Other game companies could profit from following their example.

I'm relatively new to Shadowrun (third edition), so I had a few years exposure to the terminology. At first, it grated on me (but so did frell on Farscape), and while I got over that, I don't think the books ever sold the faux profanity as well as, say, the new Battlestar Galactica sold "frak." Frag and drek I was okay with, but "hoop" always dragged me out of the setting.

I actually kind of like frag as a slang term, but it already exists as one, one that I think would have interesting currency in Shadowrun.

I don't mind the existence of new slang terms, as we're always adding new slang and abandoning old slang, culturally speaking. Omae doesn't bother me, nor does chummer, although I don't know if they'd stick around for 20+ years. Some slang that was pretty current 20 years ago sounds pretty dated now.

I didn't say it oppresses my rights. I have a J.D., and I know a lot more about free speech than that (and not to give offense, probably a lot more than you). I said that I dislike censorship, even self-censorship, because I like free speech. I like when people can speak their mind, without having to worry about censorship, self imposed or otherwise. I think that's the way things ought to be. I know that people censoring their own speech has nothing to do with my own rights, but that doesn't mean I like when they do it. Thanks for jumping to the conclusion that I was saying a vapid retarded ignorant thing, and not a well reasoned well informed thing, though.



Drek is an actual curse word... that doesn't offend most Americans. The only place it isn't watered down in the slightest is in Germany... maybe. Though a quick google suggests that drek means something more like rubbish. Even if it does refer to feces, from the very limited exposure to German I've had, drek seems to be to poop what schizer is to shit, i.e. not the same, even in German. Regardless, we're talking about American audiences here. Even if you were correct about their equivalency in German, you'd be wrong about it in Egnlish. If you think that "drek" and "shit" have the same emotional impact on American audiences, you're delusional. Same meaning is not same impact. If it was, then "poop" would be coequal with "shit" and wouldn't be allowed on TV either. I mean, are you being serious?



Market research could easily lead to a result that most of us don't like. After all, look where WotC ended up -- D&D4. It's the epitome of a dumbed down, watered down, stripped down mass market RPG. That's what happens when you use focus groups. It leads you to look at more than just your current fanbase, it makes you ask how you could pull in people who've never played RPGs before. If Shadowrun switched towards a newbie-oriented system, it would cease to be Shadowrun, plain and simple. What has been advocated here is not so much market research as it is game democracy, where we the players get to vote on every change. I'm not a professional game designer because I don't want to spend my time micromanaging an RPG's development. Maybe some people do want direct democracy on these issues, but I suspect that the results would be skewed. If the devs put questions like "should we change the slang?" to the fans, it would be a small minority of hardcore people that invested the time and energy to vote on everything, and not "the fans" as a whole. As I said in my first post, the people who dislike change seem to assume that because they're the best fans, any changes they didn't sign off on are contrary to the will of the fans. And that, to use the watered down expression, is bulldrek.

Anyway, this whole issue is a side issue, whether "the fans" wanted it or not. We have no way of knowing what Fanpro based their decision on, how much feedback they got either way, what its source was, whatever. It's not a question with an answer we can find out. The question we can answer is, how do we feel about the change? Do we like it or dislike it? Why? That's not a waste of time. But speculating on what "the fans" collectively wanted is almost guaranteed to be circular babbling. The only point I wanted to make on that issue was, don't assume that the opinion of yourself and the people you know is the same as every fan's opinion.

I didn't jump into the game until SR4, but I've read the "Slang" callout, and have been reading older books. The words that simply replace normal swear words never get used, but I like to say Chummer. It rolls off the tongue in a way that omae never will. And there are a number of shadowslang terms that I love, like slot, dandelion eater, gillette, glitched, slitch, vatjob, and wiz.

I do wish I saw more of these terms show up in the flavor text and shadowtalk.

If this post were a wrestling match, it would be five stars and I'd re-watch it three times in a row.

The best part of wrestling is the promos. Might be why the Macho Man Randy save is the greatest wrestler of all time.

"You call you self an Icon, Icon I don't even know what that word means. Is it a bird, like the dodo bird that has gone extinct."
are you curious?

"The curiosity is killing me like the cat that was killed by the curiosity."

In my DVD player, right now: http://www.amazon.com/WWE-Madness-Savage-U...5362&sr=8-1

I'm going to have to give you an Oooh Yeaaahh!!!