...except that Jennifer Harding just stated that before she left there were hardcopies of all the files, including Sugarbroad's invoice(s).


Because we can? Because that's the point of the thread(s)? Is this a rhetorical question?

Catalyst still holds the license to Shadowrun, and they are working on renewing it.

At this point, I suspect that no matter who maintains the license, there will be SR5 before the end of 2012. You can get in a LOT of gaming with SR4 before then.

I plan on getting in over 260 hours before then, myself. But that's just an off-the-top-of-the-head estimate.

Jason H.

I'm sure that Tiger Eyes' statement is accurate to the best of her recollection and she may very well experience the fun/joy of getting subpoenas and being deposed so that it can be admitted/challenged in court. It certainly casts doubt on the claim, but whatever was the case isn't necessarily the situation now. She hasn't claimed knowledge of what transpired with respect to record keeping after her departure.


I've consistently said that we should avoid speculating about legal rights, obligations and consequences since we're neither members of the Washington bar nor familiar with the factual situation. That's why I've not offered an analysis of the filing or of the answer. The court will get around to that in due time. Sure, the thread is entitled "CGL Speculation," but I think random guesses as to other potential licensees and misstatements of law aren't beasts of the same breed. You obviously disagree. That's fair.

JH: I do hope you mean game hours and not work hours. Assuming you work on SR full time, a new edition in a month and a half sounds like a terible idea!

On a totally unrelated note: how many hours of SR do you play in a week?

OK, CGL has the liscense. Topps owns the rights? Where does WizKids come in? That is the only logo I see on my SR4 book. I've never kept up with stuff like this, but seeing all the conversation has gotten me interested, as well as very confused. (by the way, is this the same Topps that does sports cards? how did they get involved with shadowrun?)

WizKids WAS the owner. Topps bought WizKids, which still retained the properties as a subsidiary of Topps. Topps closed up WizKids a couple years ago. Then, last year, they split the Shadowrun and Battletech properties from WizKids, and sold WizKids to NECA. Really, the change to the copyright notices probably should have happened back then, since WizKids was, at that point, no longer involved in the Shadowrun and Battletech licenses in any way. From now on, new books published by Catalyst or any other company will probably have the Topps logo and not WizKids.

I totally meant playing time! It's based on having a biweekly game that lasts about 4 hours or so a session.

My brain is not allowed to think about how much work time a new edition would take. Down that path insanity lies. One hour at a time . . .

Jason H.

If your concern is the possibility of a new edition, then the best bet is to hold off for a month or two to find out what will happen to the license. With any luck, everything will have worked out for the best by then.

Only 4 hours??? Pfft... amatures

Biweekly? Pfft lightweights.

You people are brutal.

Jason H.

Hey, the days of my 70+ Hour gaming Binges are long gone...

We have a weekly game of 6-7 Hours for My Shadowrun Fix...

Keep the Faith

You might have difficulty legally buying PDFs. Or maybe not.

Dude. I need gym time. If I game too much I'll get fat, and I want to have a cute booty:)

There are always ways to get the material. I doubt hardcopy will sell out immediately (SR tends to be shelf filler in stores I've seen - they get a few when it's new and one or two never leave the shelf). PDFs are another matter, and I'd never encourage buying them.

Given the level of paranoia, are you sure we won't just skip a version and go straight to SR6?

A 6th edition for the 6th world of 2012 and beyond.

If that were true, that means that it would be being worked on now, since a new edition takes 2-3 years.
I remember it being said previously that there were no plans for an SR5. Admittedly, I could see 2012
being a year to release alot of cool stuff for the setting, maybe even a sort of "Retro Edition" with rules
for using the SR4 mechanics back in older periods of the game world.. Sort of like how L5R's new edition
is supposed to be Timeline Neutral.

I seriously doubt that it'd take 2-3 years to write a new SR5.

Let's be honest, SR4 only *really* needs two areas to be worked on. The first is rigging and vehicles, and the second is Matrix. Everything else generally works pretty damn well. Remember, SR2 & 3 were so similar that the books were nearly interchangable.

Rigging/vehicles needs consistency, and the Matrix rules need a complete overhaul with a single, coherent design intent in mind. No more trying to have it both ways where you try to make a simulation and an abstraction at the same time. You start with the question: "What should the game experience of the Matrix be?" There's no "wrong" answer unless you come up with too many answers. Frank Trollman's Ends of the Matrix strikes me as a very "simulation"-esque approach, while my suggestion to run the Matrix as something abstract in the extreme using a "chase" system was intentionally the opposite end of the spectrum. Part of this answer will of course come from examining the rest of Shadowrun and it's systems to determine an overall level of simulation vs abstraction, and can serve as a starting point.

SR 4 (and I'll be honest, SR3) strike me as not having asked basic, fundamental questions like that. The setting is fleshed out wonderfully, and there's lots of detail, but the game itself seems to be missing it's core identity. My memory of SR1 & 2 are hazy, but there seemed to be definite moods and themes that as others have said have become outdated, commonplace, or trite. They've been laid down and I don't feel new ones have been developed. There's no easy reason why, and nobody to blame (if you can even "blame" someone for this, it's arguable that this is what happens to any ongoing story line if it runs long enough), but it seems to be running under inertia. The game evolves instead of being designed with the last couple iterations. Again, it's fine to let a game evolve so long as you check in once in a while to make sure the beast you've created is moving in a desirable direction.

Anyway, enough of that tangent.

Personally I'd like to see weapon damage move back to somewhere between SR3's damage codes (no floating TNs though, maybe instead of the floating TN to soak you have a soak pool modifier) and SR4's current damage ratings. I'd like to see the equivalent of L, M, S, D back again, which would probably mean static health levels. But that's a personal wish more than "this needs addressing".

Other than that, you essentially have most of SR5 written already. You'd write the fiction/setting, you'd get the artwork and layout, and let the mechanics that work stay by and large. You'd do some SOTA stuff, tweak cyberware potentially, and go from there.

I'd say 6 months to a year tops of earnest work if you ordered it right (ordered artwork before writing began, etc) and had the funds to run the development parallel. I might push it an extra six months and give it rigorous testing with min/max freaks, munchkins, nebbish number crunchers, and just about every "broken" player type I could think of (which I think describes half the people I game with) to see what the rules will do when they hit the public.

One factor in a new edition is how much work has already been put into a road map of changes and issues to address (I personally have a 15 page document outlining changes that are needed and which exceeded the scope of SR4A, I suppose Jason and any potential future developer will have something similar).

But that isn't the key element in development. The most cumbersome and time-consuming factor is the writing and rewriting of the entire book (even SR2 to SR3 involved writing 80% of the text). Assuming an upgrade of the current system rather than a ground-up revision, familiarity with the rules is as important to the timing as the quality/clarity of the writing (which might pose a problem in the case of Catalyst retaining the license since no one who worked on the SR4 core rules or the main supplements is currently working for them).

The second most time-consuming element is playtesting any changes within the wider framework of the SR4 system. One of the key factors in changing the core mechanic from SR3 to SR4 was that SR3 mechanics/subsystems were so diverse and even conflictual that changing small things had cascading effects on a number of systems that threw the game out of whack. SR4 is less prone to that but it's still a problem that a developer cannot afford to ignore.

Finally there's stuff like layout and artwork to be commissioned and coordinated. This can and does take months even when people involved are intimately familar with the game, setting, and styles to be employed (ie. you need someone exceptional like Adam Jury to bring SR4A together in anything less than 6 months.)

So yeah, you could see an SR5 in less than a year but I wouldn't count on it. Not if its meant to be an upgrade and something that will improve on and outshine SR4A.

So what you are saying is we need a series of runs that involve multiple extractions of certain Shadowrun ex-freelancers so we can lock them all in a room with beer, soda, & pizza until they churn out the perfect SR5?

If so, I'm okay with that. Anyone else with me?

My personal fantasy plays out something like the first half of the Blues Brothers, gets mostly boring to watch for about two years then concludes with a massive car chase on the way to Gen Con.

The car chase is optional, most of my fantasies involve car chases.

...

My wife is a very understanding woman.

There is a chance I might be able to go to the hearing. If I do I will share my observations. I live in the Northwest.

Rojo

Someone should make you a Dumpshock press pass.

I wouldn't go that far. I am a lousy writer so I wouldn't want to be considered press.
rojo

Can we get Rojo off probation? I'm willing to chip in for gas/lunch to make the travel worthwhile, and that's best arranged privately

Urgru-

Don't worry about it, I have buddies I will visit and stay with. It is a good excuse to go see them. The only thing is it might take me a while to get back on-line to give you an update. I am guessing it won't be a long hearing, but we will see.

Rojo

Show up early! If its in the courthouse I think it is, the line can be terrible to get through security, of course unless you can go through the Fed/Cop line.

Is that?

Are we playing the question game?

Are you?

What are you playing at then?

Do we have to get another thread locked?

I'm really hoping we can make it to Friday before that happens. My guess is whatever happens we'll have a new thread by next week. But now I'm speculating about the speculation thread and things are getting entirely too "meta" around here.

But are we ready for number 8?

No. We'll skip 9 and 10 and turn the speculation up to 11.

...why not just make 10 more speculative?

Because this one goes up to 11.

I think it would be hilarious if the mods waited until through next week, then on the 31st, this thread gets locked and we suddenly have Speculation Thread #13 with a mysterious post that threads 8-12 were eaten by zombie unicorns chasing Knight Errant cops.

Or something that sounds suitably dire but is completely not true. It'd be cool if the speculation was about what happened to the missing threads. We could even have a book about it someday, and maybe get people to make up ideas of what were on the missing threads. Sell it through Lulu or Amazon. Make tons of virtual cash on the Mystery of the Missing Dumpshock Threads. @=)

My steampunk WWI story has me thinking some very bizarre thoughts these days. We need clanks in SR4. With butterfly wings.

Pixie clanks!

Pixie Clanks chasing a Lone Star Cop riding a Unicorn (decked out with cyber and armor) in search of the mystic Tiger Eyes Belly Button Ring in the cavern of the Missing Dumpshock Threads hired by a Mr. Johnson working for The Evil Twirling Mustache Company which is owned by the Great Dragon Trollman.


-M&P

hmmm... shouldn't he be an immortal troll or something?

A much wider playtest group, possible open, with encouragement to look at where rules break, or where the rules work and the game breaks. That the spirit storm trick survived to be printed is a pretty clear indication that the SR4 playtest process sucked.

And that makes you different from the "press" how?

Signature worthy!

Though not nit-pick proof.

Especially since most of the people bitching about Catalyst also bitch about how shitty the SR4 core rules are.

I am totally down but I want to be the rigger for the chase scene!

I couldn't agree more. Too many game systems suffer from a tester being stood next a dev who explains to the tester "no it works like this, see". You still need the in house test no question, but you also need to find groups that have no affiliation with the company there testing for so as to get a true read on the rule.

Testing is never given long enough and is always the first thing to be shortened when time scales get short (I speak from experience). I have one or two power gamers in my group and the first time they created characters one of them came back with an orc adept with a dice pool of 26 for his super heavy warhawks. the other guy came back with a sniper that has DP of 28 from half mile away (could be a mile not sure). I will hold my hands up at this point, when I ran the first time I was not fully up too speed on the rules and bull shitted my way through most of the problems. The players didn't seem to notice (if they did they kept quiet bless'em), as a result of this before I run in 6 weeks ish I'm looking over character sheets not so I can batter someone with a nerf bat but so I can I apply the official errata. Something that really did annoy me was that you had 2 core books and when you sat them next too each other they where different not just a little bit but a lot, DP mods and attachements or ammo rules where different, turns out that they where different print editions.

Damn it I'm ranting that wasn't intended.

From experience I can also testify that proofreading is never given enough time.

Lars