It takes much more than stating an edition preference to offend me . I've been playing since shortly after SR2 came out, myself, but I happen to like SR4 just fine. I prefer its view of computers to that of previous editions, and there's lots of other aspects I really like, but there's also lots of interesting stuff on SR2 and SR1. As I said, I pick and choose from whatever elements interest me when I plan my games, and a SR2 adventure wouldn't feel "less fun" to me if I changed it to use commlinks instead of cyberdecks.

One thing old editions of any game don't do is mysteriously vanish when a new edition is published, so of course anyone is free to play their preferred edition. Many of those books are even still being sold as PDFs, so it's not like newer players are missing out on anything. As long as everyone's having fun, it's OK.

Your quote said that decking wirelessly did not yet exist. Even in the places where the wireless matrix existed.


And there's the problem. You don't update the tech in Buck Rogers or Star Wars in response to changing modern technology. When you've got something iconic, you stick with it. I don't see people complaining about the lack of an internet in Star Wars, where Leia could have easily send the Death Star plans in an email.

Cain,
That last paragraph is 200% win.

BlueMax

Interestingly enough, the ONLY time that I owned a Cellphone was in 1992 (They did exist then you know)...
Just because it is not world-wide penetration does not mean that the technology did not exist... There are Books stating that Wireeless infrastructure existed, in some cases including entire countries ... why are you fighting this?

You are so right Cain. When you've got something iconic, you stick with it.

People just dont seem to care about those 'sudden' changes, the switch should have been done definitively more cleanly and with more respect. I mean just remeber how well the new matrix rules worked in 4e first print ... HA-HA, they weren not even functioning properly, Unwired fixed things. This just showed me how much the devs really cared about the changes they where doing.

But you see... The Holonet DID exist in Star Wars... it was just controlled by the Empire, so it was safer to send the data through a courier...

Anyways...

You don't spend much time on Star Wars fanfic boards, do you?

Honestly, I wouldn't have cared if they stuck with the old way, even though it broke immersion for me. But I'm much happier to see them moving away from the slavish devotion to Gibson's ignorant techie nonsense. Stick with what was strong about the books; namely the societal things, and dystopian feel. And, there's nothing stopping you from GMing that comlinks are required to look like tech-accordions if you want^^

And you're not offending me if we disagree, i101, but I'm not some noob to the game, I'm much like Bira. I have been interested/played Shadowrun for about 15 years now. My major time in the game was literally the entire length of 3e's existence. Hell, I remember picking up 3e and bitching because they fixed spell locks to make them not so broken and grumbled about riggers being more complicated than ever (which even nowadays all I really do is rip that whole section out and simplify it for myself). I'll even admit that 3e is my favorite edition since that's what I've got the most experience from both sides of the table in. But I've always, ALWAYS, been more into the story. That's the thing that's always kept me into games like Shadowrun, L5R, and old Deadlands, because they have a continuously evolving metaplot. The game doesn't stagnate in one time period like a lot of other games have a problem with.

Hell, just one example: as time went on and knowledge of them changed, bug spirits have become this creepy mysterious thing to a seriously major enemy and now ebbed down to a serious problem. That's natural progression of history.

And sometimes that means technology has to advance, and even now (like it or not) most cyberware is starting to get phased out for nanotech and genetech because in the SR world, cyberware's been around a while. The first successful cyberlimb was implanted in 2019, which makes it 53 years. Think of the quantum leaps in technology we've seen NOW in 53 years. They haven't removed it though, but it's starting to show its age.

I suppose one solution would we could just have the game stop in some arbitrary time, but when do we do that? 2050, when the game began? 2060, so at least the books up to 3e would still exist? 2070 to incorporate the best 3e books? We'd just be starting a whole new argument.

Evolving story and tech is part of the game. Even by 3e stuff that was around at the beginning was looking hokey; think of how few chrome cybereyes you saw even past 2e, and how most of the 80s style of clothing had been modernized by the turn of the millennium. Hell, by 3e the Big Eight had gone to the Big Ten, and old stalwart Fuchi had gone boom. Are any of those changes bad?

Change happens. Hell, I rail against the manga influence in Shadowrun art as it's creeped up over the last few years, making elves go from Elmore art to WoW-style. I kinda miss the archaic swearing. I wish a lot of the old guard had survived the Crash 2.0 because their shadowspeak was distinct.

But Bira's right. The other beauty about metaplot is that you don't have to advance your timeline. As I've said before, CGL has not gone book Nazi and told us to burn everything before System Failure. The hardcopy might be a bit hard to get now, but even some of the better old books are being sold on PDF.

And I'd still like to write for it, see my name in a book. Lord knows if DOTA 3 comes out and our group was accepted even though it fell apart just after, I'll feel awesome to see it in the playtesting credits. (And believe you me, when we ran through that even I had problems with the plot, but at least it was nice to see Frosty active again because it implied that maybe old guard like Harlequin and Assets Inc might still be out there somewhere...) But meh, that's just my opinion.

I'll go on record as saying I understand 4e needed to make changes (both metaplot and rules) but I don't like the core book. Put the technomancers in the RC thats where all the optional stuff has been. As Frank said feel free to mention the catgirls and what not so you can know where they are going but you can keep your old guard happy by not putting the rules in the core book. I don't want point buy there either (though I understand some of the reasoning behind it) I want my Hermetics and Shamans to still feel different. I dont want my Mages hacking without taking a decent hit on their magic. Hackers and Riggers should both be assets to the team and not easy to make the same individual. Characters should never be able to start as the best in anything and I should be able to recreate my 500 karma characters without altering it too much. Hackers should have equipment to look forward to buying with that couple million nuyen they earn. Thats where 4e failed for me, most of that is somewhat fixable with book X and Y or a house rule or two but in my old age I'm lazy and I don't want to have to, I would rather put up with target numbers, its the devil I know. I also don't feel like presenting my players with pages of houserules. So as always I look forward to 5e hoping some of the mechanical flavor comes back. (not all though, streamlining isnt a bad thing as long as flavor stays)

As long as we're naming dates, I've played SR on and off since I picked it up at GenCon '89. My group of friends and I have loved the setting in every incarnation but had a love/hate relationship with the rules. Now that we're playing 4th edition we like it just fine. In fact the rules seem to us to be in the best shape they've ever been. As for updating the setting, it *feels right* to me. The cool thing about SR in 1989 wasn't the particulars like cyberdecks and cybereyes, it was about the whole package being a dynamic and dystopic projection into the future from the speculative fiction and pop culture gestalt of the late 1980's. It is absolutely fabulous to me that the SR4 development team had the vision to realize that the a major part of the allure of Shadowrun is the projection of current day hopes and fears into an exaggerated sci-fi/fantasy world of the future. My love of Shadowrun isn't about nostalgia. Shadowrun 1-2 were great in their time but by SR3 the whole enterprise felt creaky. SR4 makes the whole thing feel dynamic and alive again. SR4A is by no means perfect, but it is absolutely still essentially the same game I fell in love with in 1989. The details have changed but the spirit and essence (note the lower case) are still the same. If this thread has proven anything its that Shadowrun appeals to people in many different ways, none of them wrong. I'm just selfishly glad that the SR4 developers share my vision of makes Shadowrun Shadowrun.

I've been playing since '89 as well, and the rules don't seem any better to me. More polished, yes. And to give credit where credit is due, the writing and layout is significantly better than it ever was. This however masks the true issue: the rules aren't any better, they're just cleaned up and presented much better. To the casual eye, that makes them look better, but it's just an optical illusion. The rules are just as flawed as before, they're just shinier to look at. And that's also why the current SR4.5/CGL path is bugging me so much: they're destroying one of the things I actually like about the new game. Namely, the very talented writing pool they had working for them. Shadowrun deserves only the best writers, and CGL is doing a fine job of alienating them.

The cyberdeck is still a machine that interfaces with your brain. There's no modern tech equivalent to t, so it's really kind of pointless to try and discuss what it should or shouldn't have been updated to. If you look at a lot of the depictions of decks, they were relatively small. This is a portable terminal with all kinds of state of the art and high powered tech in them. I mean, a smart phone is cool and all, but it won't replace your home computer. So it's kind of silly to suggest that the commlink was the logical transition of the cyberdeck in "getting away from" 80s technology. The laptop is still modern tech, and it isn't going anywhere any time soon. Even the best tablets on the market, with best being a relative term, are pretty weak comparatively. You could easily argue that high powered tablet style machines would be the standard in home computing in 2070, but how do we say that the cyberdeck is "outdated" when it isn't even existing technology yet? The cyberdeck only became commercial technology in 2034, and the early ones weren't portable. They didn't even get reduced to keyboard size until 2050, so that means they'd already taken over twenty years just to shrink the components to that size. Taking into consideration the kind of power requirements a cyberdeck would have, they have to have some pretty serious business batteries on board as well. The average 3G smart phone has battery life of less than a day under what passes for "normal" usage these days, and all they are doing is base level wireless connectivity and running a low intensity operating system.

Of course, going too much further into it is falling into the same trap some of you have already fallen into, which is trying to equate modern tech to fantasy-tech. The bottom line is the commlink isn't the "logical progression" of anything. The cyberdeck has no equivalent technology to make it outdated. Maybe the old vision of the Matrix was a bit outdated, but that's because we already know and understand a real world Internet infrastructure that is more complicated and advanced (in some ways, obviously). The cyberdeck is still just as science fiction as it was in 1989.

Like I've said, moving to wireless wasn't bad. But taking the hacking away from hackers (or. more accurately, away from deckers since pretty much anyone and everyone is a hacker in the mysterious future that has no poor people who can't afford smart phones) removed the feel of Shadowrun. This wasn't some kind of devotion to Gibson's nonsense but instead an adherence to the established "reality" of the universe. In Star Wars, spaceships fly like jets and large watercraft. That's just the way it is. /shrug

This isn't meant to sound insulting to the old guard, but there's always a chance that the old guard moving out allows for a new batch of talented writers to pick up the pen and try to live up to their example. And maybe you'll get your wish and CGL will go down and someone else will pick it up. Once again, not being insulting, but is there a chance that your issue with CGL as they've handled things is putting you in a certain bias against things as written?

Dude, I've been playing Shadowrun for over *twenty years*. I've seen dozens of writers come and go. So, when I say that I think the writers who put out SR4 were among the most talented and creative I've seen along with Jay, I know what I'm talking about. Writers come and go, but good ones need to be cherished if a game line is to survive. Legends like Nigel have their place, but even he had to start fresh. Being "old guard" and being able to appreciate talent aren't the same thing, but they do cross over. I actually *liked* the crop of writers CGL had working for them, I just think CGL mishandled and mis-edited them. Hell, check out my reivews on Runner Havens and Ghost Cartels to see what I mean.

But those writers for SR4 would have never gotten a chance if the "Old Guard" did not move along... What I think he is saying is that some of the new writers may indeed surprise you if given a chance...

Just because some of the writers left does not mean that we will never have writers as talented as they were...

Just Sayin'

*sigh*

"Make new friends but keep the old; one is silver but the other gold."

Let's not mention CGL or Shadowrun for a moment. If you're running a game company, when you find talented writers, you need to cherish and nurture them. It doesn't matter if they're a new find or old guard, you treasure them. Mistreating your talent is just plain **stupid**.

I'm on record as saying that I think the writers who developed SR4 are highly talented. Some are flat-out amazing, and I published a review saying as much. However, not a lot of those writers are left. They were mistreated and mismanaged. That should not have happened. New writers will come in: some will be good, some will be bad, and a few may be amazing. But that doesn't excuse the mistreatment of past writers, or give permission to mistreat new ones in the future. If you can't manage your talent properly in this industry, you perish, and Shadowrun may go down with the ship. I don't think *anyone* here wants to see that.

Of course I don't want to see Shadowrun go down, that's why I'm planning on getting a portfolio together myself. I'm not condoning their treatment of the
staff either and if it gets together, I'll go in cautiously myself, but I want Shadowrun to continue so I'm willing to take a little risk.

.. In the end, I feel I'm getting absolutely nowhere with you, Cain, so I'll just leave it at my old post at where I was coming from and just shrug.

But from what I could tell, you were not talking about the mistreatment of the writers... you mentioned that the writers that left were the best talent in a long line of talent, and I would agree...

My position, however, is this: Yes, they were very, very talented, but they no longer write for the product line. This is indeed unfortunate, but that does not mean that future writers will not meet or exceed their standards. It is my hope that CGL will have learned from their mistakes, and will (or have already) amend their business practices to draw and maintain high quality writers. The past is spilt milk, the future is what awaits us know. I am looking to the future, rather than dwelling on what may have been.

Maybe "unimportant" was a poor choice of word(s). Obviously commlinks are very important in SR4. It's just that they don't feel like there's any...flavor...to them.

Cyberdecks needed an update, maybe. But I sort of agree with Kruger here. They are still science fiction tech, if somewhat rooted in what the 80's thought computers of the future would be.

So ok, you're going to update the cyberdeck - but do it with something equally interesting, equally iconic. Cyberdecks ARE iconic, players would obsess over every little detail of them, they were a symbol of the decker. Now everyone, from the lowest squatter to the greatest whatever, has a cellphon...errr...commlink.

Tell riggers that instead of all the cool vehicles and drones and options and such, their vehicles have been updated and they are limited to "A van, a car, a flying drone, a crawling drone". Give them no more real flavor or description than that. Tell sammies that they can have "a pistol, a rifle, a melee weapon".

But now we get into the question of how well those writers will do without guidance.

Jason Hardy said, flat-out, that the Shadowrun writer's bible didn't exist yet. And he's not drawing talent from Shadowrun fans, but BattleTech writers. So, there's essentially no one left who knows Shadowrun inside and out. Hence the fear of Lone Star cops on unicorns.

Well, you asked:

And the answer is no. CGL has put out some solid work, and my reviews reflect that. Read them and see for yourself.

Heheheh... You do have a point... Here is hoping that things stabilize and quality writers sign aboard...

I think Cain, myself and other all WANT to sign on with SR4A or whatever Shadowrun is out there but for perhaps different reasons we are all having issues with some of the direction. Honestly the direction was all over the place from Nigels death till Deus got introduced then it seamed to have focus again and then FASA blew up. Fanpro was all over the place again (not that some of the stuff wasn't awesome) 4e comes out Fanpro looses the license. CGL takes over and (sorry this is going to be offensive but I think it fits) polishes the turd (and kudos to them because Shadowrun has never looked this good, SR1 index: see combat chapter anyone?) You got some of the most diehard fans writting stuff, Steve Kenson does amazing work with Seattle 2072 giving a nice polish and update to one of my favorite Shadowrun books. Bobby gives Vice something that should have been in Shadowrun all along, your seeing the books comming out starting to take shape in a way I have not seen since 2e... and then everything blows up. Now none of this fixed my problem with the 4e rules but 2e had problems to its things like NA:GtRL, UB, and others that keep me loving 2e, if the book quality had continued to improve along the level it had eventually I would have taken the time to overcome the rules, like I did with 1e, 2e, and 3e. All that to say... I still want to like 4e and the new writers but only time will tell if we get more books like Vice or more books like Runners Havens (no offense to the authors, its not the worst Shadowrun book)

They did! Shadowrun still has metahumans, magicians, dragons who run megacorps, and, well, shadowrunners.

The Matrix has always been that boring, overly complex subsystem that took hours to resolve while other players went out to buy pizza and sodas. It has always been completely overhauled with every edition change, and sometimes even within the same edition. And the result was always still regarded as boring and overly complex, despite all efforts to the contrary.

Every time I participated in some form of Shadowrun community (be it the old ShadowRN mailing list, or this forum, or Shadowrun discussions over on RPG.net), from way back into the SR2 days, there were lots of people always complaining about the Matrix. It was unrealistic, it completely broke the flow of the game, it was counter-intuitive, and so on. I think that, by the end of SR3, the online consensus seemed to be that the best way to use it in a game was to have an NPC decker which would do things off-screen, and suceed or fail as the story demanded, rather than bothering with even rolling any dice. An element that has to be pushed out of sight is hardly iconic. I've only actually seen people defending the old systems after they were replaced .

It doesn't surprise me that they overhauled things yet again, and neither does the extent to which they did it this time. I would have been surprised if they hadn't changed things around.

Guess you just haven't been looking at the right media, then . When I first read about how the Matrix worked on SR4, my mind immediately went to Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, which I love. One thing it has in common with more traditional movies featuring hackers, is that they focus more on the effects that this gear has than on the gear itself.

Plus, there's about as many ready-made commlinks in the core rules as there were cyberdecks before, with as many different OS's to choose from. And a variety of AR and VR gear to go with it, which is something you can't really do without if you want to get full use out of your commlink. Just because it has four attributes instead of 12, doesn't mean it lacks flavor .

Some people like this, and some don't. I think it leaves cyberpunk and moves into transhumanism. That's not bad, but if you want transhumanism, play eclipse phase. It's so much better for that. I think GitS and the novel Altered Carbon are great but have not place in shadowrun. It's a different focus. It doesn't work with shadowrun because of the essence mechanic. GitS and an unwired matrix don't take into account latency. You can hack the other side of the world instantly, instead of having a speed penalty from the sysop or AI that is sitting in that system. I find that it's just not realistic, and changes the flavour to something else.

Or maybe I've looked at too much media?

I've seen all of the GiTS series and movies, read Altered Carbon, etc. Yeah, maybe SR4 is reminding you of GiTS. But in my mind, my "classification" or whatever, they're different genres. GiTS is not cyberpunk. If they came out with some new rules that reminded you of Conan the Barbarian (best movie ever), would that necessarily be a good thing? (the answer here is yes, but you know what I mean).



This is pretty much what I mean. Hey, you got your transhumanism in my cyberpunk!

It's cool, we all have our opinions on this

(what's that saying, opinions are like *ssholes - everyone has one?)

GITS came out way before transhumanism was a "thing" in RPGs, with the original comic being from the early nineties, just as wireless as the latest iterations. It's pretty much hailed as the classic cyberpunk manga/anime, right up there with Akira and others. Our mileages obviously vary .

To me, transhumanism is the logical follow-on to cyberpunk. I've seen some people complain that transhumanism is too bright and cheery for the dystopic cyberpunk of Shadowrun. If so, I must be reading some seriously darker transhumanist SF than they are. You don't need to look far into transhumanist-tinged SF to find some pretty grim scenarios.

Now, I love the novel Altered Carbon and I love Eclipse Phase but I don't want Shadowrun to be Eclipse Phase. On the other hand, I don't mind at all that some elements of transhumanism have worked their way into Shadowrun. Those elements seem pretty limited to me, mostly limited to the Dawkins Group of Horizon and some elements of EVO's current mission statement. AI's are cute and fuzzy things limited to human intelligence. No one is uploading their minds and re-sleeving in a new morph. Nanotechnology in SR is laughably primitive compared to the vision of the *1995* novel The Diamond Age.

So if I want my post-Singularity transhumanist conspiracy horror setting with mature nanotechnology and complete digitization of intelligence, I play Eclipse Phase. If I want Shadowrun...well, I play Shadowrun; because to me, they are still very different games.

I think it comes down to which parts of Shadowrun a person thinks are the *essential nature* of the game. If, for you, it was the late '80s cyberpunk thing then you are inevitably going to dislike SR4. There's just no way around it because SR4 discarded that late '80s feel for something different. To me that hasn't changed the essential nature of the game, but I can see that for some the game has lost its special appeal.

Transhumanism came out in the 50s or 60s... You mean before it was popular.



I 100% disagree with this. SR1&2 had the same matrix rules, VR2.0 and SR3 had the same matrix rules, SR4 is really the SR1&2 Matrix rules all over again with 2 changes (fixed TN and Reaction has been removed from your dice pool). The nodes in 4e are just not defined as SAN, CPU, etc and left up to the GM. They are still there and the matrix map still exists. Its easier to ignore perhaps but you could always ignore nodes and hosts.

You know what's awesome about strict genre definitions?

Nothing.

Especially when arguing these two particular genre's differences is so hair-splitting and tedious anyway. You seriously want to tell me you can't run a cyberpunk campaign with the SR4(a) rules? Or that the Matrix rules are what really makes that critical genre difference?

Sorry, I don't buy it. Now, I'm not going to lie, I like a little hope served with my dystopia, the feeling that somewhere down the line what I do might make some kind of difference. But it's certainly easy to remove that - most of the fluff is from unreliable narrators after all, so just ignore anyone aside from Kane as a Pollyanna^^

I don't think that is what we are saying at all. What I was trying to convey was that shadowrun 4 is less cyberpunk now, and more transhumanism. You can play cyberpunk with eclipse phase or even dnd. The source material from the developers has lost it's cyberpunk roots, and now is more transemo, I mean transhumanism.

The art work and production quality has went up. The grittiness that once saturated sr1/sr2 has been replaced with something else, more manicured.
It seems to be more appealing to the unindoctrinated from all of the spin I have digested.

I guess you've always been doing it wrong. /shrug


And realistically, nothing has changed about the Matrix other than the silly insistence that 4e forces/allows the hackers to go in along with the players. Except, in the older editions of the game, that was possible and done all the time. In fact, with 4e, it's even easier for hackers to sit at home and do nothing because of the overstated wireless capability. Now all you need is for one of the non-hacker characters to carry an extra commlink with them, and jack it into whatever hard-wired system is needed to bust into. The hacker can then log onto that commlink remotely, and go full VR from the safety of... wherever. Of course, a smart group of players would have figured out how to do that back in 3e.

But it's irrelevant in the end, because nothing about the new system makes the Matrix portions of the game run faster. They'll still be glossed over like they always were. Or, if they are done right, still take extra time that has to be managed. Or, if managed poorly, take up a lot of extra time the other players don't participate in. But if managed correctly, can typically be run concurrently with the rest of the action.

Shadowrun is just that kind of game. If the GM can't efficiently handle multiple threads in a game session, they probably shouldn't be GMing a game like Shadowrun. There's still D&D4 for you. And if the players are so ADD that they can't sit around and enjoy the game as a whole simply because they aren't rolling dice right now, then perhaps they shouldn't be playing a game like Shadowrun. There's still D&D4 for you.

Not sure which GitS:SAC you're referring to, but all their dives into the Net were done with the big clunky machines, far clunkier than a cyberdeck would be. They had some "wireless" tech like their communicators and they had the "pop up" style displays when they were talking to each other, or Saito's Hawkeye, but otherwise, very little in GitS resembled the wireless Matrix. If anything the Net in SAC looked more like the old Matrix, minus the huge scope and idea of big customized iconography.

Only the unaugmented characters used anything clunky, the Major always just jacked in with her neck jacks, and she didn't even need those for some full-immersion VR things (ref. Chat! Chat! Chat! for an example). And I assume he's referring to the AR components rather than the actual hacking sequences.

And I would say that the major difference would be that the whole team can participate in the Matrix stuff if they want to; for the first time you can run a Matrix centered adventure without sending the rest of the group home^^

Not constructive.

Different opinions and approaches does not make someone wrong.

There is a lot of very constructive and interesting discussion on themes and genres and memes and tropes relevant to Shadowrun that I, and I have no doubt others, would like to continue to read without this kind of unnecessary personally directed comment.

Well it certainly is shinny! And layout and index quality are 1000x better, you no longer have to see combat to see magic to see critters to see magic (granted it wasnt that bad by 3e) Reading the rules in 1/2e was like a choose your own adventure book.

What's your definition of "cyberpunk?" My understanding of cyberpunk is pretty well summed up by the first couple paragraphs in the wikipedia article:


Now, tell me which part of the above description does SR4 not fulfill that SR1-3 did fulfill? Shadowrun has always taken the focus broader than hackers for the protagonists and has never done more than dabble with noir but aside from those minor quibbles Shadowrun has had all of the signature elements of cyberpunk from SR1 to SR4A. While SR4 added a few transhumanist elements, I don't believe they removed any of the cyberpunk elements. Perhaps your bias against transhumanism, as evinced by your use of "transemo", is coloring your perception of SR4.

As an aside, what do you even mean by "transemo?" All I understood was that you meant it to be negative.

I don't know, maybe I'm just dumb and unaware, but I don't see any massive worldview changes in SR4, some tech got bumped up a notch, maybe it feels a bit less like the last world war is going to break out tomorrow, but really those just feel like we're arguing over shades of dark blue.

I mean, things like Harlequin, et al don't really feel cyberpunk to me either, but that's some of the stuff I enjoy most from 1&2e

A corollary to my point about cyberpunk being present in all editions of Shadowrun. The simple definition of transhumanism is using science and technology to improve human mental and physical capabilities. By that definition Shadowrun has had transhumanist trappings from the very beginning. In SR4 the actual word transhumanist starts to get used because it has become a bit more prominent in SF culture, but Shadowrun has been about enhancing (meta)humanity with technology and magic since 1989.

So I really don't understand the notion that SR4 is ++transhumanism and --cyberpunk.

Personally I see cyberpunk as an offshoot of trans-humanism that focuses on the world sucking and technology eating away at your soul rather than helping you become something more. Trans-humanism (evolving human, becoming more than human) can be found in Philip Dick novels, cyberpunk just takes these ideas and looks at them through the eyes that becoming more than human isnt a good thing. D&D is ultimately a Trans-humanist game, where when your hit epic level you are becoming more than human.

Well, SR has always been about exploring both, imo. Cyberzombies and ghouls side by side with the street sams and mages. I guess if those are your definitions I would have to say that SR has always been a little on the tranhumanist side of things though; Dunklezhan's fascination with metahumanity in large part stemmed from the potential he saw in technology to be a force for good, rather than the purposes we were using it for.

I dunno. Just because players have often opted out of the noir setting doesn't mean the game did. Heck, they kept the Private Investigators/Detective around long after it was pretty obvious nobody used those characters. The original Into the Shadows anthology starts with a short story about a former cop turned investigator and maintains a very film noir tone to it.

You look at the older published adventures like Mercurial, Dreamchipper and even Killing Glare from 1993. All have very noir-esque elements to them. Looking after a famous dame while investigating who wants to kill her and why. Hookers being murdered, seedy underworld locations, classic detective work. Two old criminals who've abandoned their pasts get outed by an old friend turned enemy and the protagonist(s) have to determine what's truth and what's perception? Sound pretty noirish to me, not just dabbling.

THe problem is, players have typically glossed over and abandoned the noir setting because, honestly, most of them probably just aren't familiar with the genre and were enticed by the cyborgs and wizards. It's not really a bad thing, as everyone has their play style. But the original FASA setting stuck to its roots.

For sure. Shadowrun even quantified it with an Essence attribute.

Well, first to clarify noir =/= cyberpunk; so new discussion direction.

I will agree that they've toned back the noir elements, but that's not the same as making it anti-noir. All of the basics are there if you want to run a noir campaign. I would suspect that it's fallen by the wayside due more to the fact that most people don't enjoy playing the "classic" noir style for more than a few games. Most roleplayers tend to play more for catharsis than "roleplaying" per se. And noir campaigns don't typically offer much of that.

Just my theory on it. I did enjoy the Maltese Falcon bit in the 4A book though

this all boils down to that in SR1 we had a very strong NAN love, Cyberpunk, Noir, Pink Mohawk game that over time has toned it down. By the time SR3 came around it had already changed and SR4 was an even bigger change. I really feel the parallels to what happened to Forgotten Realms are strong only the SR devs didnt dial the changes up to 11(like the D&D devs) more like 4 or 5. Its still Shadowrun at the core even if its missing many of the bits I found most interesting. Most of those bits are still valid and could be shoehorned back in but why bother, as long as I can still find people willing to play 2e

I still don't get what you say is missing in 4E?

Strong NAN love? NAN is still there, it still controls huge chunks of North America. It's still a major player in Seattle, Denver.
Cyberpunk - how exactly did they dial down the cyberpunk? Barrens, Gangers, Chromegangs, Powerful Haves, sheepish followers, destitute have nots. Megacorps running roughshod over local gov.
Pink Mohawk? have you read the LA source book It's got Mohawk galore.
Noir.. it's still there. The Investigator is still part of the game. None of the fluff or the crunch took any noir away really.

If you read until you hit the end of that sentence, you will see that this is precisely what I meant .



I can't really speak for SR1, but I'm pretty sure VR2.0 was a complete overhaul of the Matrix rules you found on the SR2 corebook. I think the first Virtual realities was the same for SR1. So yes, they didn't change as frequently as I initially thought, but there are enough complete overhauls of the Matrix system in the game's past that it's not really a surprise that it happened again.


As for Krug's "you've been doing it wrong" remark, well, I haven't been doing it at all, really. As I said, my preferred SR rulesystem is GURPS . I was just repeating what seemed to be the online consensus on Matrix rules from the days of SR2 and 3: "it's boring, it's too complex, use a NPC decker", etc.

Regarding Ghost in the Shell, I was actually referring to the first manga, from way back in 1995. There was plenty of hacking there, though not all of it was wireless. SAC itself has AR and wireless networking in general as a much more important element of the story. Everyone in that setting has an implanted commlink with a lot of extras, and one of the main antagonists managed to get away with a public act of violence by disguising his face and voice with an AR overlay (forcibly inserted into every surrounding commlink via hacking).

How about in terms of page count... Gather all the SR1 books dealing with the NAN vs SR2 vs SR3 vs SR4.... yeah thats a decline.
As for the cyberpunk, how many stories start out talking about it raining again or the red smog alert etc etc

I'm not saying it doesn't exist just that its been toned down over the years.



FYI, the first rule change was VR2.0 which is considerably into the 2e line, then it changed again (ironically back to the original rules more or less) in 4e. It did not change any more than 4e to 4eA from SR1 to VR to SR2 or VR2.0 to SR3. There may have been some slight clarifications and rewording but there have been only 2 major matrix changes and really only 1 as 4e is just a minor modification of the 1e rules.

[edit] The original VR was mostly fluff. It tried to give names to programs (think Ares Predator for example) added a couple optional rules but mostly left the matrix unchanged

Think of it this was. What was the tagline for Shadowrun 1-3?

"Where man meets magic and machine"

I don't know whether that's transhuman or cyberpunk, but I do know that it's about what happens when you push too far past being human.

This element is sadly lost in SR4, where it's about... something. I can't figure out what.

Now I'm really confused. How is that element your talking about not present in SR4? Maybe I just skimmed the fluff sections of SR4 too quickly and missed the part where the game no longer has Essence loss and cyberzombies and burnt out magicians. Hell, it's even easier to be a burn-out in SR4 now that not everyone starts with a Magic of 6.

I've found this discussion interesting but I'm having a really hard time grokking the sense of loss and betrayal on display. I'm prepared to be dead wrong but it *seems* like nostalgia for the sake of nostalgia; the sense that what came before is better for the simple fact of having come before.