Ok, so one of the reasons why Shadowrun really intrigues me is that your health doesn't go up as you gain experience. By this, I mean that you always (unless you raise your Body/Willpower somehow) have the same number of Wound boxes. Conceivably, this means that a runner with 200 something Karma can still be threatened by a character with only 5 Karma. Sure, the 200 Karma guy may have better equipment, and more skills at higher levels, but will have about the same number of Wound boxes and since both Skills and Attributes have a maximum allowed value, they could actually be on par with one another combat wise.

However, most other RPGs, especially computer RPGs and especially MMOs make it so that a character of level 20 will have substantially more hit points than a level 2 character. They will aslo do substantially more damage and overall be way better at everything else.

If they ever decided to make a Shadowrun MMO (not saying they should or shouldn't) do you think they would just go along with the system most other MMOs use, as described above, or would they try to keep that aura of equality like in the PnP shadowrun game? And how would they implement the equality thing, if that's what they did?

Ideally, obviously, my preference would be to keep the more-or-less non-leveled system SR has now. It would be quite easy to do, really - many MMOs and other computer games (thinking Diablo right now) have you distribute skill points among your varying abilities as you go up levels. They could just do it that way, and leave it out so that your hit points don't go up automatically when you level. Although that would lead to all kinds of badness when a stupid little noob kid with his level 2 fully min-maxed street samurai (and I'm sure we all know how annoying and rule-mongering most MMO players are) knocks off your level 52 character you've played for a year...

While non-level would be ideal, because of this sort of situation I'd think they might still end up going for the typical system. But I think I'd be OK with that.

yea...I figured...plus most of the RP elements of Shadowrun wouldn;t work anyways. I mean, don't get me wrong, MMOs can be great for RPing, but not with NPCs (we don't have super AI yet) and mostly not with other people(because most people don't roleplay, sadly). So I guess combat is really how you'd have to think about it anyways....*sigh*

Character advancement (statwise) isn't a must-have for a PnP RPG. Some players can't do without it and nearly all RPG have it (often using it as a reward or even a goal), but it's not that useful. Especially in SR4 (previous editions had the karma pool which made quite a difference) where there isn't a huge difference between starting characters and the same characters after a campaign, except maybe epic campaign with tons of nuyens and karma. Sure, the veterans are better than the begineers, but it's not the same as the difference between a level 1 and level 6 character in D&D.

But in C(omputer/onsole)-RPG, it's often a selling point of the game, even more so with MMORPG where it becomes the goal of the game, at least for a lot of players: people spend days doing repetitive and boring tasks just to have the biggest virtual dick.

So where am I going with this? PnP RPG and C-RPG (and MMORPGs) are two different beasts and even if they have things in common, it's a mistake to think that they have the same goal, the same target and the same mechanics. I'm not saying that you can't do a MMORPG without character progression, but that such a MMORPG will probably fail to attract customers.

Wow...that's pretty deep....

Is it unfortuate that your probably right? I love playing MMOs, but there are so many times where I just want to stop playing and go brain someone because they are acting like a complete @#$!tard online...."Dude, you're only level 40? I totally roxxors you, I'm like, level 65!" I have no problem if a guy is proud of the fact that he reaced max level, but please, take Liam Neeson's words in Taken to heart: "Now is not the time for Dick Measuring!"

If any MMO ever installed a /kick_stupid_people_in_the_face emote, I'd buy that game immediately