Could just go back to the level 12 Skillwires days. Hell, techincally speaking, shouldn't there be some of those out there? I mean, just because the Matrix crashed (again) wouldn't mean everybody goes out and gets brand new wireless compatible wares, right? Nor would you change out your perfectly fine high level skillwires for these new crappy ones, that cap at 6.

I think I recall the book saying something about the "miles and miles" of fiber optic cable being rendered obsolete with the new wireless matrix, too. I put it to use via some savvy hackers setting up an old Matrix (1.0 I guess) for those who couldn't afford better. Pay essentially a monthly bill, and they keep your telecom, trid, internet, phone, etc. up and running for the down and out. Sure, it's wired, but so was everything else "x" number of years ago. And it's not as expensive as the new commlinks, or the suscription fees. It's mainly as a bit of flavor for us.

Argh!! I'd love it if we could agree that Crash 2.0 was an extremely poorly executed setting retcon, rife with blatant nonsense and inconsistencies. I would have preferred they just had the 'universe blink', as my group calls it when we choose not to explain the transition to a house rule that changes how something was previously working. Our group ended up agreeing "The Matrix has been a mix of wireless and wired infrastructure since the 2010s" and let it go at that.

I'm not trying to shut down discussion about which edition of the matrix rules was better, because I think both sides have valid arguments. It just frustrates me to see the clumsy retcon BS trotted out as evidence for anything.

Quick Edit: Please don't take my quoting of Jaellot to mean that I'm blaming him for anything. His post just made me think of the terrible retcon.

I totally agree that a bit of extra backstory would help tons. Completely for me and my group, personally. I don't mind outlandish concepts (like VITAS, and Dragons, and Elves. Oh My!) if there's at least some sort of story to go with it. That's the fun of these games, all of them, after all. The story of each game world. The stories you make at the table.

I would think that would be fairly okay. Perhaps the biggest problem would be that it would allow adepts to take extra points of improved ability, which compounds the problem a bit.

I do think there should be a bit larger scale or a bigger restriction on starting skill. I find it mildly annoying that you can start basically the top of your possible game in your specialty. I don't know that the skill needs to go up that much. Maybe up to 9. 12 starts getting a bit crazy, but it does fix the 'talented novice vs hard working expert' problem.

Personally... I would just go with Karmagen all the way. Get rid of pointbuy. That way you don't even need hard caps, you just limit the total amount of karma - and simple cost-effectiveness should do the rest. That and punishing super-specialists within the game. If you need a lot of skills, you just can't min-max too much at chargen.

If the system were better, it should balance out all by itself.

I wouldn't even introduce a hard skill-cap, at all. BUT I would perhaps limit the effective skill rank to the augmented attribute - if you don't have the raw physical abilities, you just won't be able to use the skill ranks.

That I don't like very much, because it is entirely possible to be highly skilled at something without natural ability. I mean, I have horrid hand-eye coordination, and couldn't shoot a basketball to save my life, but I can juggle and do a ton of tricks, because I've practiced.

Hence why ealier editions had a lower karma cost for skills below the linked attribute and higher cost for those that exceeded the linked attribute. Worked beautifully -- natural ability made it easier to be skilled but hard work was still rewarded. Now everyone wants to raise their stats because they affect more than 1 dice pool.

I seem to recall the problem with that being that it was possible to be better off with no skill than low skill. But even that can be true. You could have someone who is a natural at shooting a gun, but they are shooting it wrong, so they go down in ability as they learn the right way to do things.

Still, overall I think I like that old way to do it, where natural ability was easy of use so to speak, as opposed to a replacement for skill.

Used to be that defaulting cost half your Attribute, not just -1 die.

Ah, I thought it was full attribute with a TN modifier.

Even at half attribute, if you have a 6 or so, that means you need at least 3 skill to equal out.

Of course from what I understand, a 3 skill was fairly low back in SR3.

It used to be at least in SR2 and 1(I don't remember how 3 did defaulting) you used your full attribute but it was +2 on the TN for each move on the skill web. Usually at least 2 moves to get to an attribute, so +4 to TN but rolling a bunch of dice or normal TN and rolling only 1 die. I don't feel like working out the statistics of where 1 die at TN 4 beats X dice at TN 8.

For me on the house rule side I let people use their combat pool for any physical skill so that helped a little. But if you were caught stealthing even with your dice from the combat pool you started the fight down a few dice. The usual lack of a pool for many tasks made any TN mods a ridiculous barrier to overcome IMO.

Ahh, the Skill Web. Now that's something every game should have! We still laugh about that now and then. Oddly enough, it made sense somehow...

I actually liked it. It did make sense to me. Knowing similar subjects should help when defaulting. If you are awesome sauce with pistols you should not suck with automatics. Sure you wont be as good if you didn't train but it wouldn't be like you had never picked up a gun before. Were there implausible items in the skill web sure, but the idea behind it is sound.

Certainly *something* like that would still be nice for the firearms skills in SR4.

The Skill Web was frankly one of the most realistic ways of handling related skills. The trouble was that it was damned complicated, as it was a full-page directed graph. Not a simple lookup table, mind you - it was a directed graph - there were some one-way links. It was dropped in favor of game-speed, frankly I don't think many RPG players understood how to use it, and it sorta became the poster-child example of 'stuff that was too complicated' and subsequently dropped off a cliff.

Normally I'm a big fan of game-speed over realism, but even now, I often let players 'default' to related skills in a manner strikingly similar to the old skill-web.

That's also something I would like to see back. I mean, skill groups make it easier to get a lot of skills, but they are still rather expensive. Defaulting not only to attribute, but to similar skills would be very nice.

In SR3: Defaulting to another skill in the same group was +2 TN, defaulting to the specialization of another skill in the skill group was +3 TN, defaulting to the related attribute was +4 TN. The nice thing about this was, if you specialized in the Ares Predator you could use that skill to carry over for shooting your SMG just at a higher TN. Likewise, the street sam with 15 reaction was often as good a driver as the rigger (just not in combat).

Skill 3 meant you were Proficient while 5 was Professional -- so equivalent to 1 and 3 nowadays. Of course you only rolled the skill dice but, except for combat, you generally only needed 1 success.

Setting up defaulting in SR4 would be fairly easy by allowing you to default into another skill in the same skill group. So if you don't have pistols, but have automatics, you can default to it. Might be some 'out of group' defaults (Exotic weapons in particular) but for the most part I don't think you need to get more complicated than keeping it in the group.

Uhm, what is the difference between those two?


Saying "node A and B are connected by cable, that connection is the only access to B, accounts on A are not valid on B" hardly requires Unwired


Agreed, it's too easy to max out your matrix gear

I let it be known to my players that if they have a knowledge skill that it particularly relevant to the use of an Active skill that I'll give them a die or two in bonus for the FoRK (Field of Related Knowledge, taken from Burning Wheel).

My reasoning being that if you have "Redmond Barrens Area Knowledge" at 4 then you should get a +1 or +2 to Tests like Shadowing and maybe even driving that take place in the domain of the Area Knowledge. Same applies for Social tests if you have a relevant knowledge of the cultural subgroup you are dealing with.

That's another whole issue. I feel like SR4 isn't balanced for dice-adder Knowledges; if you want to add that back in, it takes some care. We all know the issues: free Knowledge skills are suddenly part of the crunch, everyone takes 'metahuman vital spots' and 'corp-sec tactics', etc. It's certainly a workable option, but I'm also okay with the current function of Knowledge skills (information only).

Hmmm... this and subsequent posts make me think I may be remembering another game, rather than an older version of Shadowrun. Too many games... too many rules.

Then comes house rules and such. It can become quite confusing over time.

1) Not too much except for the fact that you may stll not know where the SR4 node is. If it is running in hidden mode you still need to make a Scan test and in any case you need to make a Matrix Perception test to learn the AID. None of this is explained in SR4.

2) Again, design was supposed to be "no matrix dungeons." That wasn't as straight forward as you make it seem from the BBB. There were lots of fights and arguments here on Dumpshock from 2005 - 2008 as to how this worked. Unwired made a certain way official and those threads stopped. I guess you are just some genius who is smarter than most of Dumpshock. (BTW until Unwired and Runner's Companion I was actually a defender of SR4). Or, looking at your join date, working from hindsight and the community's increased expertise with the system.

It just tickles me no end that two of the most popular, most posted-in, threads here on the front page for Shadowrun discussion are one about how the NAN craziness was so silly and stupid and poorly written and how that could never happen and all the first edition fluff was just so ridiculous it ruins the game...and the other is about how serious and businesslike and taking-itself-way-too-seriously the recent books have been, and how all this overthinking by the devs and writers sucks all the fun out so much that it ruins the game.

On the internet, sometimes ya just can't win.

As long as there are Youtube videos of idiots on bikes/boards/etc. rendering themselves infertile on various railings around the world, you will always be able to win on the internet. That all the free porn.

And yet the "Matrix Security" sidebar in the 4th Ed BBB explicitly mentioned a tiered system architecture as standard security practice.

Arguments and fights about how the matrix rules work? No shit, this is dumpshock.

Ah, c'mon. The only difference between those "idiots" and the parkour guys we all love so much are the bikes and boards. Let's be fair about it.

I guess I should have said "sneakers" instead of "etc.", but that would take out the people who shoot fireworks at each other, get in shopping carts, take old treadmills out behind trucks...

I wonder what the 6th World equivalent of such antics would be?

I really can't find anything wrong with SR4. The thing I miss the most are the games I had over 8 years ago with my original crew (I was an inept player, then). The first time I ran a campaign (SR4) on my own I had an excellent crew, with a core of four brilliant players who let me GM an entire successful campaign from start to finish (I've learned it's a hard thing to do, the older we get). I learned the games inner workings, and didn't care about decker vs. hacker.

It's about telling hard stories. Giving the characters an obstacle, and letting them deal with the magnitude that is planning the Run. Watching the characters deal with torturing someone for information, when they all might not agree on torture. Shadowrun is a great game for creating genuine suspense and drama. The lethal nature of a gunfight makes each pull of the trigger critical to that character's survival. It's watching news reports and coming upon an interview of a devastated family who's husband died in a security shoot-out at the Ares complex you just tackled the night before... I could go on, but to me it was never too much or too little cyberpunk, never out-dated technology... It's all about a really good story. And I think SR4 lets me tell a really damn good story.

Indeed, That is exactly how we did it from the introduction of SR4... It does not take a Genius to determine that, just the ability to read and understand...

Arguing on DUmpshock, however, is a pasttime...

Dumpshock. No where in the galaxy will you find a greater hive of scum and villainy.

Of course to your statement I'd say "What recent books?" We have to rehash the same tired crap because there's nothing else to talk about.

@Sengir: Exactly. But we had developers and writers popping in here on the boards telling us such and such was a design goal and clearly that didn't happen. So, failed design.

YES, look at the bright sides of things. Shadowrun HAS a 4th Edition!! And it seems to work mostly fine.



The funny thing is, Shadowrun as a GAME doesn't actually do too much to facilitate telling good stories... There's fluff and there might be good GMs, but there's not much in the game (and, let's face it, there wasn't in earlier editions) that actually gives you rules and mechanics for creating a good story. The only thing that actually works every time is the obstacle course that is "THE JOB". And basically to me that got old a while ago.
Using SR to create a character-driven and player-centered game really stretches the available mechanics very thin. No, wait, there are no available mechanics to actually do that, you have to wing it, entirely.

I really don't need mechanics to tell good stories; any good role-player doesn't need an artificial mechanic to generate good storytelling. I think shadowrun does it so well because the setting established a mindset with the players that this is NOT going to be a heroic game. This gives them the freedom to explore different avenues, not just that one "chaotic evil" guy who dicks around with the other PCs. We're now focused on surviving, hopefully long enough to retire, and hopefully with enough humanity in tact to live with ourselves. But, to each their own. Perhaps I view the Shadowrun universe in a very different way than most people.

PS: NERPS!

Word.

Oh, it's a very strong setting, and it allows you to create very interesting characters.

I still think it would be good to incorporate mechanics from other games to make it more character centered. Like the BITs from Burning Wheel, or just a virtues and vices system, rather than, or in addition to, the rather loose system of qualities we have now. Or maybe a humanity stat akin to Cthulu's Sanity, albeit a bit less mono-directional towards crash and burn .

Say, for example:

You incorporate instincts:
"I always take a gun", "I always scan the Johnson", "I always take leap into cover when shot at", etc. These allow you to always get specific benefits without having to mention them all the time. Of course they can also get you in trouble, which is half the point.

Beliefs:
"There are lines I won't cross", "I hate megacorps", "I hate magic", "What can I say, I'm a slacker." "I'm an evil motherf". These give you bonus dice when working along them, and subtract dice whenever you go against them. Also, you could refresh a point of edge whenever you act according to a belief, but only if that gets the character in trouble or makes him worse off than if he were to do the smart thing. Also see below, at Humanity.

Traits:
These are more akin to the qualities we have now. Maybe we can do without them. But maybe they could be expanded. Or replaced with..

Goals / Agendas:
"I want to become the richest motherf... on the planet." "I want to bring down Corp A to avenge my parents." "I want to build an organisation to rival the Yaks", "I want to get off the drugs, and stop other people from getting on them, too"
These allow you to refresh edge when coming to closer to completing the goal. They might also allow you to overcome certain weaknesses, for instance, ignore wound penalties when working directly towards your goal. They have to be more elaborate than "I want to get by, make some cash, and survive", because everyone wants to do that, anyway.

Virtues and vices: These make you give up some control over your character in exchange for letting that character feel a bit more like an independant person.

Empathy: You roll empathy to either get bonus dice or a penalty to certain actions, and to determine what the character might do in a situation
Ambition: You roll ambition when there is a chance to do something more difficult, or when an offered job isn't payed well enough, with penalties or bonuses depending on the situation.
Avarice or greed: You might roll that to determine the course of action the character takes, and also reward / penalize certain actions

Humanity stat:
You gain humanity when acting according to your beliefs, and lose it when you act against them. Yes, this might increase while acting like an evil motherf..., if that's what you are. When you lose too much humanity you might develop a psychosis quality temporarily or merely become irritable and take a penalty to social tests. Or you might even lose the belief and replace it with something else.

Now it's important that all benefits are awarded by other PLAYERS (the GM just gets one vote), perhaps upon request, while penalties are enforced by the player himself and the GM. The other point is that you can't simply go on playing the game "I wait until my fixer calls me, I go meet the Johnson, I do the job, I spend my cash on blackjack and hookers, or maybe some new gear". This game would actually incorporate turning jobs down, doing stuff on your own volition, aborting jobs because they took a turn you don't like, etc., and all while having something on your sheet for it. It's also a convenient "hook" for a cash for karma system, allowing downtime activity towards your beliefs or goals to cost cash, and award karma, or cost karma (do something dirty) to get cash.

And I think you need actual mechanics, because what usually happens as soon as the characters have accepted a new job is that the characters totally takes the back seat while the players get together to figure out how to win. At least that is what happens in groups I play in. I totally envy you guys who actually get good roleplaying in shadowrun. (I did get that, too, but only in a fun campaign.)

I think that depends on what kind of game you want. Compare to movies; in a typical action movie the character development isn't spectacular, but the movie can be fun nonetheless. Likewise, if you want to have an Action-oriented game, mechanics should focus on stunts, not on character development.

You could focus intensely on Story, in which intense character development isn't as important either; Lord of the Rings was a great story, but the character development was rather thin. Most of the important personages were more archetypes than real persons.

If you're interested in Character Development, yeah, then some mechanics may be appropriate. But are they really? I often find that they restrict me, because instead of letting me play with the character, I gotta jump through rule-mandated hoops.

I know what you mean. However, it was stated that Shadowrun let's people tell good stories, I wanted to elaborate on ways to make that better.

The question is also, who tells the story? Does the GM write all the plot for one giant train-ride? A lot of published modules are like that. Or can the players write their own story, that is really the point. Character development isn't the point so much as character involvement in actually CREATING the story. I want to see the character saying where to go, and not the GM. And to enable that you need mechanics, which are helpful, and as unrestrictive as possible.

I think you're mixing different concepts and problems together there.

There's the plot-driven vs. character-driven thing. Plot-driven has some advantages; it helps keep the group focused on the same thing instead of wandering off to do their own things separately ("don't split the party"). However, character-driven play has a lot to offer too.
Shadowrun is actually good for both; getting "The Job" from Mr. Johnson is a convenient way of kickstarting a campaign in plot-driven mode. This is nice because getting a character-driven campaign started can be harder. As characters become more developed, they'll develop more motivations for character-driven adventures, including ones that the whole group is interested in.
Railroading is a bad extreme, but a good story has a certain structure; it has a beginning, it builds up tension, and has a climax. Total character freedom feels meaningless too, to me.

There's the mechanics-for-personality thing. I'm not such a fan of that; you can't really force people to "roleplay well" by making rules about what their characters do or think. Most of the time, I think the player should decide for himself what kind of character he's playing, what his weaknesses are, and when he'll rise above them and surprise people by doing something different.
A good example is Fear; should there be rules about what's Scary, and when characters should run away? I don't think so. Real people vary in what scares them. Some fear public speaking, others don't. Some fear big critters, others don't. Likewise, a player could play a 'Sam that isn't really all that scared of the Cyberzombie, but gets real upset about needles in the clinic. Another thing: when is a particular thing scary? Joe Mage might be scared of fire, but if his daughter is in that burning building, he might still go in there to save her. As a GM, you can ask the player "wouldn't that scare your character?", but it's up to the player to decide.
There are exceptions; mind control and addiction for example. These are cases where the character experiences loss of control due to something external. But I prefer to leave the vagaries of the character's personality up to the player.

In terms of "who tells the story", I prefer a happy collaboration between player and GM. The GM should design his stories with leeway for the players, while the players should be sensitive to how their character can be a good part of the story. A railroad track laid out by character personality mechanics shouldn't be part of that.

Why did they miss the design goal, the new matrix can be handled without any dungeon crawling at all. The concept of nodes as an arbitrary set of devices and networks allows you to do old-fashioned matrix runs, but it also allows a simple "every device is an independent node in a mesh network, just pick the one you like and hack it directly", or even "the whole facility is grouped into one big node".

Oh, and could you be so kind and decide whether you want to complain about the lack of matrix dungeons, their presence or their vagueness?

Well.... depending on how you layout the personality mechanics, they can either force you into a narrow corset of actions, or they can give structure to something that is otherwise entirely in your head, and tends to get forgotten often enough.

While fear is a good example, there are of course differences: Is it just meant to be scary, as in atmospherically scary? Then you're well in player control territory. Or is it a mechanical thing, like a fear spell or critter power? Then you're in mechanics territory.

I'm all for letting players put these things on their own sheet as they see fit. In paraphrasing Burning Wheel, if you're introducing BIGs (with Goals, as before), then every player can pick a few, for example, one or two beliefs, three instincts, and one or two goals. That isn't putting him on a rail, that's giving mechanical benefit to things he should have fleshed out in his head, otherwise. You can also leave him free to add, remove or change any of those things on his sheet.

I, too, am all for a balance of PC vs. Plot focused play. The problem is that SR has very little of the former, normally, and a lot of the latter. There's not even a balance. I understand you need to cut corners to bring PCs together as a team, and to not let each player drag his character from tangent to tangent. You also need an overarching story as a backdrop, that's obviously the GMs job. The sad thing for me is just that Shadowrunning isn't usually the means to an end for most character I see, it's the end itself. They have no other motivations. They exist only for their "job". I suppose I can improve on that by writing a good backstory. But even that very often just creates a reason for why the character is now a runner. It doesn't give him motivation. Well... it does, sometimes. The thing is that you also need to force the GM to give the characters enough freedom to follow their own agendas - WITH the team - during the game. My most self-motivated character had a very hard time pursuing his own goals. Of course I had taken precautions, I made sure that running WAS always a suitable means to an end, simply by providing resources the character needed. But there wasn't enough focus on the characters to even get a chance for him to call his team-mates and say "hey guys, I've got this problem, here. I need you to help me with it."

I guess one problem is the clandestine and secretive nature of a lot of character. Runners don't want to become actual people, even towards their team-members. They act as their shadow personas, without real personality. They keep their private lives hidden, lest someone get the drop on them that way. It's one of the problems with playing an amoral setting - there is no bloody reason for people to stick together for any longer than it servers their purpose. When for character driven play you need a good deal more than that.

So, yeah, my point is still, a balance. And we're not there, yet, in fact it's a long way away, or a lot of things ad-libbed to get there. I'd like to see some of that change, perhaps in a next edition .

Honestly, the new version of the Matrix, meshes much better with the reality of servers and computers in today's environments.

Once you're through a firewall, you still only have access to what ever nodes you can further crack. it's not a dungeon, it's like walking into the front door of a Wall Mart's and now trying to figure out which Aisle you need to go to. Except each Aisle is locked with different levels of security.

I think that's better done through structured background-writing. For example by answering the 20 Questions from Runner's Companion. The most important questions of course being "Who are you? and "What do you want?"




Mechanics are for external things. The player is in charge of the internal things. On later analysis, the character might be confused about his magically-induced fear; that's so not him.



That's what I'd consider part of structured background-writing; no need to apply mechanics to it.



That's the GM's style, not the game. Neither the rules nor the fiction mandate that you should always be doing other people's plots; that's between you and the GM. But communication is important: tell the GM you want to chase something specific, so that he can flesh out a story about it.



That's really a matter of the style you and your friends play in. From playing Vampire I've noticed that it differs a lot between groups how much backstabbing and paranoia there is. And personally I believ that paranoia leads to paralysis and loneliness.

Sure amoral characters have reasons to stick together;
* You need someone to watch your back; a long-term partner is better than a stranger
* People to get drunk with after a job, people who understand what it is you do for a living and don't freak out
* You just like them, respect them
* They do something you need, and they're good at it, so keep in touch
* They've done you a good turn before
* Shared hardships in the past create a bond
* Keep an eye on them

And so on. The Party of Lone Wolves afraid to show any personality whatsoever is a bunch of amateurs who won't last long before succumbing to madness or betrayal. If you show nothing of your true self, others have no reason to trust you.

I am a fan of Burning Wheel and used it for the game previous to the Shadowrun game I am currently running. I imported the Belief and Instincts from Burning Wheel and I'm quite happy with the result. Those two elements are totally system-independent and enhance any game that doesn't already have a similar system in place.

I don't think that systems like BITs are precisely necessary to have a rich roleplaying experience but they do help keep the players focused on what is really important to their characters.

How have you done that mechanically? Care to share?

That's just it. I didn't have to do much mechanically. I award bonus Karma if a character fulfills and reinforces their Beliefs. I award bonus Karma if a character lets an Instinct get them into trouble and they roleplay it out. Instincts still have the ability to bypass rules when they apply. Other than that I didn't see that there was much else needed to use them in Shadowrun.

I considered importing Steel but it ended up not feeling right for Shadowrun.

Hmm... I actually wanted to avoid bonus karma.

Steel is actually ALMOST in SR4, as it does say you have to make Composure tests when confronted with particularly jarring events .

More like penalty karma for failing to do these?

Oh, I've seen plenty of systems were basically everybody with access to the company gets home free. If administration via freely accessible C$ shares works, why invest in something better?

I would hope people at least lock down the c$ shares to admins
but that is certainly one example.