I miss the pink mohicans.

I miss the badass attitude of the "suck cheese shark face" street sam by bradstreet.

I miss the feeling of chaos from 1st and 2nd editions art, like that gang riding the car with a lone star cop.. on the outside and upside down.

I miss the "techno-tribal" aesthetics that mixed chrome, feathers and maya symbols.

I miss the logo with a skull and scroll on a chipboard.

I miss the Rocker archetype.

I miss the shadowtalk.

I miss cyberdecks.

I miss Fuchi.



So, who else think that with each new edition, SR got more and more sanitized, with too much cyber and too little punk ?

I definitely miss shadowtalk. IMO, that was the most entertaining part of the old sourcebooks, runners nattering about bits of gear and goings-on in the world. I kind of think cyberdecks were doomed from the get-go, even though nobody could reasonably have predicted the advent of wireless networking back then. I miss the multitude of spirit types that shamans could conjure. I miss hermetics having to bind elementals before they could give them orders. I definitely think Shadowrun has gotten blander over time, but I also continue to find it more interesting than most other games and settings.

I think all of those, except cyberdecks, are still there. It's just fluff, so you're responsible.

Don't miss the Rocker by any means. Rocker was stupid.

Do prefer pretty much everything else from 2e and 3e. Eliminating decking and cyberdecks from the game forcibly yanked an integral part of the universe out of Shadowrun. Everything about hacking on the fly via steroidal smartphones and Nintendo Power Gloves is wrong for the game. Miss the high tech, low life feeling. Miss when Magic had balance to it.

I agree except for the Cyberdecks... Nexi are the new Cyberdecks in my opinion... or at least they can be anyways...

Loved the Rocker... have one even now... awesome character...
Loved the change to the Matrix Rules, at least they are useable now...
High Tech, Low Life Feeling is Setting Fluff, that is your responsibility to highlight as a Player or GM...
Magic is unbalanced? Huh...

This results in a bland universe populated only by what the GM can introduce while performing all of the other tasks of GMing. The strength of a detailed world is that players can discover it without the GM needing to be involved at all.

~J

Huh? What do you want them to do, read SR novels? Or is the OP arguing that the presets are 'blander' than they used to be? Fluff goes in them, after all.

Isn't that the GM's Responsibility though? And should not some of that responsibility rest upon the Players as well?
Does at our table...

Problem was that sticking with the decks made the game look more and more dated for each year that passed. Hell, there was even a large errata at the end of SR3s print life where they finally modernized the weight of various pieces of gear (1kg "handset" mobile, anyone?). For a game that maintained internal clock of sorts, and was about the ongoing supersonic rollercoaster that was tech, maintaining such a static gear list will inevitably become its own caricature.

As for the shadowtalk, its still there. The main set of books had to forgo it tho to cram as much as possible inside their covers. If not, people would inevitably complain that fanpro/CGL was milking the fans.

Consider this, we are currently 3 years away from cyberpunk 2013, 10 from 2020, and 40 years away from the in game time of SR1. Yet some of the stuff that was supposedly high tech in those books are already old news.

What's kind of ironic about this sort of thing, to me at least, is that it seems to be the detailed world that some people take issue with. The more detailed it's gotten, the more some players insist the flavor is being leeched out, or that GM options are being limited.

Besides, the difference between a player and a GM is who runs the NPCs. They should *both* know about the setting, and they should both contribute elements. Don't blame the *rule*books for player failure. Now, I never read pre-mades or fluff documents, so I can't say if *those* are getting 'blander', whatever that means. Those kinds of books *should* have tons of setting details.

Well, the problem is, instead of advancing the Matrix and decking to mirror the advances in the real world, they simply massively retconned the entire idea of the Matrix into something that didn't even remotely resemble what it was before. Shadowrun needed a lot of retconning, but decking was not one of the places.

See, the cyberdeck never became "old tech" or "obsolete" because it is technology that still doesn't exist. The canon of Shadowrun told us that by directly interfacing the mind with the Matrix via a datajack, a hacker could become blindingly fast and able to defeat complex programs. There's no such direct neural interfaces yet, and we can't say how cyberdecks would function or what they would be like using modern tech because no modern tech mimics their function. Phasing the background tech into SR3 and SR4 was important. Those were tiny details that increased immersion by removing things that were no longer believable. But believing in Decking, Hacking and the matrix involved immediately accepting technology that isn't possible (yet?). There are good things about SR4. Giving a better idea and more believable face for the way the average person interacts with the Matrix. Massive wireless connectivity for mundane, day to day tasks and diversions like shopping and social networking make sense. Introducing common wireless wasn't the problem with SR4. It was the abandonment of everything that Shadowrun had ever said prior to that point. The game always made very sure to describe just how much slower and clumsier someone was who used a "turtle" like a workstation, or even electrodes over using a cyberdeck and a datajack for DNI with the Matrix. Taking that away took a very core element of Shadowrun and made it boring and bland. Deckers were the console cowboys, the guy who were shit hot and unstoppable in the Matrix and only with their tools and skills could they penetrate the rock solid defenses of the most secure networks. Now they're just random scrubs and data security is a joke.

What should have been done was a way to bring the canon into line with a more "believable" future. What was actually done was just to erase the game's past and construct an entirely new game universe in its place as an impostor. That's why I tend to agree to an extent with the people who claim there is no Shadowrun 4th Edition, and just FanProRun First Edition.

except that SR is also a game, and i wonder how many times i read that a group would basically forgo having PC deckers, unless some player insisted and both him and the gm had basically memorized the rules, because the VR rules basically ended up splitting the team the moment the decker jacked in (there was some cludes for improving decker to team communications, but overall there was little to bridge the gap).

With AR, the "decker" is instead free to move with the team rather then get dumped into some broom closet the moment they are inside the building.

But I disagree that that is what happened... "Deckers" are still the console cowboys (We just call them "Hackers" now instead), and the fluff is not gone, it has just been re-skinned a bit... it is still up to the GM and the Players to bring the setting alive. Just because "Decks" are not there does not mean that you hack any differently, in fact, the Original hacking is still there (Slow Hacks)... they are just very time consumming and leave out a lot of the FUN elements of hacking, which is why that is now in the forefront rather than non-existent. If you want to use the Old paradigms, just use Slow Hacks exclusively... problem solved...

I think it's also an attempt to keep up to pace with the current market/this generation of tabletop gamers. I know I would never played SR if you had shown me one of the older books. I want to play a magical mercenary not David Bowie....though the two could technically mix I would rather not go down that path.

Obviously, because David Bowie is a magical *supervillain*.

I still maintain that even though the old system was a little slow and clumsy for decking, it was mostly the product of poor GMs and whiny ADD ridden player that cause most peoples' issues with the old Matrix rules. We played SR1-3 with PC deckers quite a bit, and rarely had any of the issues with people becoming bored and feeling uninvolved with the game. The Matrix was quintessential to the way the runs were conducted, and a decker "shoved in a closet" was still as active in the concurrent game as the characters whose meat bodies were doing the work instead of their minds. As far as having to "memorize the rules" I kinda thought knowing the rules for a game was somewhat quintessential to playing it, and not some kind of hardship, lol.

Of course, with the current generation being raised on video games and television that force feed the brain instead of utilizing the imagination, I can see where the problems could crop up. Mileage, as always, varies. But taking the decks out of the game changed the feel of the world radically. There's no "fun" in hacking now. It's just a glossed over mechanic instead of a colorful part of the game environment.

Why didn't I think of making a David Bowie villain earlier....



That is where I politely disagree. Decks are just flavor, they don't affect the rules in anyway. In fact one player had his link hidden in an old school deck for that "retro" fashion that was coming back while we were playing. Hacking gives a whole new world to players and if it's not fun then someone isn't taking advantage of what it can do. Ripping into enemy tacnets and filling it with porn ads, taking a politicians AR feed at his massive speech and broadcasting a recording of his affair, heck just plain turning the enemies security drones on them. I don't see how any of that is bland.

They could most of that before. And much of what they couldn't, I don't think added to the game. 4e made hacking vanilla and commonplace. That's not special, it's just silly. And why there are endless threadw on this forum about how to avoid "Stupid Hacker Tricks" in the game.

Plus, what I think you're missing is not that I'm saying that in all cases 1-3>4, but that the transition to 4 was poorly constructed. Wireless is not bad. Even hacking on the fly isn't "Bad". What was bad was completely deconstructing the nature of the Matrix and Decking to accommodate some kind of ADD, "Everybody Gets a Trophy" for every facet of the game style of play. If you don't miss the old feeling of the game, then perhaps this is not the ideal thread for you.

Ahhhhh I see where your coming from. Least I think I do. Are you saying they made it so everybody and their grandma can rule on the matrix?

As for the transition part yes, I think they could have done that a bit more....fluidly and I didn't even play the older additions.

You seem to be projecting a lot of emotion onto this 'ADD' issue, but what exactly are you talking about? No more system maps?

-sigh- those were the good ol' days

The cyberdeck was special because it was this piece of state of the art, cutting edge piece of tech that could turn an expert user into a manipulator of the Matrix. That was always the background the Decker character. The smartphones and commlinks and all of that always existed in Shadowrun. Perhaps they weren't as fleshed out until 4th Ed because back in the late 80s and early 90s there just wasn't the kind of vision of the modern Internet, but it was always there. Pocket Secretaries go back to 1E, and in all fluff descriptions, were the 4th Ed commlink in all but name. They just weren't as heavily focused on because the concept of a wireless Matrix didn't exist yet. But the canon would tell you quite plainly that even if they were wireless Matrix capable, a commlink/pocket secretary would make you a turtle compared to a cyberdeck user because they lacked the DNI. Wireless, brainless, complexityless hacking did indeed take the hacker out of hacking.

Introducing the commlink and the 4th edition idea of the Wireless Matrix isn't a bad thing in and of itself. It would have been very cool forhte design team to finally show us "how" everyone interacts with the Matrix on an everyday basis instead of back in 1-3 where they just told us that because they really couldn't imagine how it would be done yet, only that it would be. So in that respect, I do like 4e. It gives a lot of good background fluff that was needed to bring the game "up to date" with the changes we've seen in the 12 years since 3rd Edition. However, what I didn't like was taking one of the core "truths" out of the game.

To be honest, I never even had a problem with the proliferation of NPC deckers. It seems that for many game types, a decker was better suited to be an NPC anyway.

I agree that the loss of cyberdecks made the SR setting much more bland, matrix-wise.

---

Some years ago I got totally disgusted by the fact shadowrun got obsolete tech-wise, because then I wanted it to be a projection of the future from the present day. I abandoned completely the setting, refused to play it for almost a decade, even began to sold some of my books.

When 4th edition anniversary came out, I got thrilled for seeing the setting was "updated". Then I got back to playing it, as excited as ever!

And then, last year, while cleaning my room, I stumbled with my old copy of SR 2nd edition, decided to flip some pages and.. it *clicked*. For the first time in years I managed to look at it from a different angle, one that showed me Shadowrun never needed to update itself. The cause I was hooked to the setting in first place, in my teens, was not for it being a mix of Sci-fi + D&D, it was the mix of Cyberpunk + D&D. It was the image of a badass looking Dwarf in dirty leather jacket with a sub-machinegun running through dark (and always raining) city streets. It had more to do with style and atmosphere, than with advanced tech.

So, in a way, I came to appreciate SR not as a "sci-fi" setting, but as its own thing (even if this "thing" is more correctly classified as retro/anachronist, than sci-fi).

No, ADD refers to this consistent mentality I see behind the distaste for the old decking rules that revolves around the concept of "I'm not doing anything at this very second, feed me a cracker and entertain me!" It's pretty common amongst the XBox generation.

You see this same ADD mentality in the change from Street Samurai are special because they're super strong and fast and good at kicking ass to "I like the IP system because it's more fair and I get to kill stuff too!". Even though the Face gets to shine in all the social situations, and the magician has all kinds of cool powers he can use, etc, everyone was upset at the Street Samurai character because the one place he invested all of his blood, karma and nuyen into being awesome at, they didn't get to be awesome there too. Even though that Street Samurai player was usually twiddling his thumbs during much of the rest of the game letting them be awesome.

Im curious - are there any folks here who would be perfectly fine playing SR older editions setting-wise? I mean, with cyberdecks, wired Tron-like Matrix, heavy slang, pink mohawks, cumbersome electronics, etc. ?

I mean, would it be so hard to play SR anachronist/retro-scifi style?

(the same question applies to CP2020, LSD Industries or any other cyberpunk setting. A lot of people play 40´s pulp/retro-scifi and steampunk adventures. Why cyberpunk is not played this way too ? )

I've never moved on beyond 3rd edit, setting or otherwise.

I have a small cheatsheet (literally half a page in an A5 booklet) for regular everyday use of the matrix (didnt take long to work out at all ) using legal cyber terminals.

I've tweaked the weights and some of the descriptions of some of the more common items (the cell phones ect) to stand inline with current tech developments (or pretty much ignore them as unrequired numbers).

The rest? It's all 2052-2062 as written baby

For me the advance to commlinks seems natural, as the technology becomes more advanced of course it will be easier to build in DNI, what makes a shadowrunnr better isn't just gear it is skill, bravado and attitude. My hacker is the man because he is willing to go to the razor edge and hot sim while he slings code to get that pay data.

This sentiment has got me thinking.

The two PCs I play on DS right now are both built to be not in any way competitive with the street sam in his specialty. One is an update of the Rocker, and another is an SR version of The Fugitive. It is as if I subconsciously designed my play to bring back that feeling of specialties that mean something.

Interesting.

If anything, characters are more specialized in SR4, with skills costlier and more limited, and hyper-specialization being mechanically encouraged by the rules.

The street samurai change happened before SR4, though. I am unsure about SR2, since I don't have that book any longer, but by SR3, the initiative order had been switched around so that everyone went during the first initiative pass. SR4 actually improved the usefulness of multiple initiative passes. With melee defense not automatically including a counterattack, and full defense as an interrupt action, having multiple IPs became a very important thing for a combat-oriented character.

And that whole attitude was there before SR4, too - the attitude that it was okay for the decker to be a great decker, or the face to be a great face, but if the street samurai was a great street samurai, it meant that he was a powergaming munchkin, and it was awful how he dominated combat with his heavy firepower and multiple initiative passes.

I've got a player who runs the logical progression of the Rocker archetype in the form a a ghetto-ass pistol adept who shoots dudes dead and then busts freestyles about what punks they were.

His shining moment came when the team went to break up a hostage situation at a performance of Andrew Lloyd Webber's "RAP: The Musical" where Juggalos from the Halloweener gang had taken over the theater and started executing the cast and crew. There was a gun battle where he was held up behind a giant gold tooth stage prop shooting dudes in the head over and over while he spit verses.

Good times.

...heh, the awakening is just over a year away.

-----

...back to the OT. Yeah there are a lot of things that disappointed me with the rewrite.

The worst were the demise of Deckers, "Googleisation" of the Matrix, overpowering of magic, and general homogenising of the archetypes. Sammys could now hack the matrix *koff koff*, heck even Mages can hack the matrix [clears throat and looks for spitoon]

...then there's those matrix mages called technomancers [finds spitoon].

Futuristic games have never been able to outpace reality. What they need to do is stop trying to quantify or compare high tech to the current day. FGU's Space Opera made this mistake with computers. Right now I am typing on an older generation notebook that effectively has the power to drive the data/comm systems for an entire interstellar empire in the game. True, back then the centralised mega mainframe was the be all and end all. Nobody foresaw the inter/intranets powered by servers that could easily fit in a broom closet or supercomputers that could sit on a desktop.

This is why it is better to come up with some disassociated generic term that is consistent within the the game's setting that isn't quantified in present day terms.

Yeah we have a wireless society today, but signal quality is an issue. For example I live in a half cellar flat and have a 3G connection. Some days it's OK, others it goes to total drek (yeah I love shadowtalk too), To perform any downloading, I usually have to find a hotspot with decent connectivity. I cannot stream a film from home, and there are nights that it takes upwards of fifteen to twenty minutes to buffer a three minute YouTube vid. Wireless is susceptible to a variety of environmental factors. How much worse could it become forty to fifty years from now with the climatological and other environmental changes as presented in the Shadowrun universe?

Next, there is frequency bandwidth. As more and more demand is made on the available frequency spectrum, like a freeway it will eventually become clogged, affecting communication traffic flow. For example, back in the 1970s when mobile CB radios became highly popular, they often interfered with RC modellers', in some cases resulting in total loss of control (and the model).

Then, there is a security issue. There have already been cases of signal eavesdropping in RL. How much worse could it become given future tech trends and extensive wireless proliferation?

So there is still a precedent for "hardwired" communication and hacking (ugh ,hate that term) existing even in a predominantly wireless world. Particularly so where a sensitive matrix is involved as most likely it would be a standalone system for security reasons.

As Kruger mentions, a Cyberdeck is still a unique piece of equipment. It can do what no wireless Netbook, pocket secretary or Droid/Blackberry/I-Phone like device could ever do. It is capable of DNI, a concept that is still at best today, pure speculation as we still have such a minute understanding of how the brain really works.


...raises hand.

Currently am involved as a player in 3rd ed campaign set in Denver. Am planning to GM my re-edited Rhapsody in Shadow campaign which is set in 2061- 2062 with my current group beginning in December.

Not sure how that is different from playing any edition using point builds rather then prioritization.

And magic was always overpowered. It's in its very nature. This largely thanks to any spell being able to match, and often exceed, any technical enhancement. Flexible spell ratings and overcasting may have made it more visible, but the issue was already there in the older editions.

Oh and sammies could hack, only that they could not hack and shoot at the same time.

Otaku with a wireless net connection? I really do not see the reason for the TM hate that bubbles up on this board ever so often.

Welcome to the Grognard Society!

Remember, you are not a *real* roleplayer until you can complain about a new edition of your favourite game.

Penny Arcade

Style over substance has become substance over style. As it seems the game has continued through 4 editions this seems to have been a good move even if it has alienated some vets.

Now that being said i certainly think a closer balance could be achieved.

Sammy's could not hack well. There is a big difference between being able to hack a Green or easy Orange system and being able to hack a Red Hard and not get brain fried. In SR4 anyone can hack anything no matter how hard. And mages were as shitty or shittier than a non-specialist decker because there magic did almost nothing (I believe they could boost their Intelligence to get more Hacking Pool). Now with AR they can boost their abilities as high as anyone else with cyber and be a "l33t" hacker.

It has absolutely nothing to do with hacking and shooting at the same time. There are big gulfs of difference in feeling and rules between the description of Z-OG then and now. Now, I could make a technomancer that probably wouldn't bat his eyelashes twice if the team asked him to hack Z-OG. Older editions just trying to hack SK Main or any other corporate mainframe was a death sentence. Now you do it in a mother fucking Denver Missions session.

Mostly a issue that cost of hardware have come so much down, and that a sammie can use his hardware and AR to match up with the VR using hacker (at least until the hacker goes all out on gear and gains 5 passes in VR). One could do the same in earlier edition, but the cost of the deck and skills for hacking came out of the fight budget. End result is that while possible you where unlikely to see the overlap at chargen, unlike with SR4. Imo, all SR4 do is allow for more diversity out of chargen vs having to wait for the karma and funds to build up before breaking out of the cookie cutter mold.

As for ZOG, was that system even given stats back in the day? Sounds to be like the classic issue of gods in D&D. Give something stats, and someone is bound to find a way to kill it.

Venture Brothers anyone?

I want to be Brock when I grow up, and Dr. Mrs. The Monarch is totally hot.

That being said, I agree with the sentiment that's been said regarding GM responsibility to introduce the world and all that. I think it also crosses over to mechanics as well. Just as an example, I've pretty much done away with the concept of 24/7 AR interface, as well as 24/7 wireless, well, everything. It just gets in the way, for us. Given the constant mentioning of how hacking is done, so some companies have wired systems, I pretty much figured why don't all do it? The miles of fiber optic cabling are already there from the previous editions, after all. Why not still use it? At least in-house. Which brings back the thrill of the decker in the broom closet. Sure, there's the big wireless Matrix out there, and there would be a few dedicated comms in the given building that access it, but those would also have the most protection.

I think the other thing that bugs me about the new matrix stuff (and this is according to the 4E, not 4EA or Unwired) is that it is anyone's game to play. It's about your programs and hardware, not skill or attributes. Though, again, for our game I'm working on something like that, to make it more of a focused thing to be the hacker/decker and the mage who can also hack/deck like the legends of old.

Well, there are optional rules already in place that would highlight the contribution of Attributes... Just simply capping successes on any hacking roll equal to the Logic Attribute (For Skill + Program), or to Programs (for Skill + Attribute) would go a long way to bringing the Stats back to prominance.

The use of the Logic Attribute for capping hits is one optional rule that I really, really like, and often bring up in game. I think that it is an important aspect of the way the Matrix should work.

Magical wireless brains, negative impacts from Essence loss, clear reflection of the magic rules, so on and soforth.

Technomancers do not resemble Otaku except superficially.

~J

Except for one small point - custom software.

The expert hacker will not be limited to off-the-shelf stuff like any "fake" hacker. He will have his own code that gives him an edge over any budding "Count Zero"s that he might encounter. That's where you'll see the difference between johnny-off-the-shelf and the real Deckers.

Could you expand? There hasn't been a book that explained the rules of a single fictional sport, let alone two (Urban Brawl and Combat Biking), since Shadowbeat, but I don't hear anyone saying that the flavor was leeched out of that book.

~J

Except that in SR4 you are actually more likely to use off-the-shelf software than prior editions because of how long it takes to program compared to how easy it is to get. "Top" end stuff in SR3 was pretty much impossible to get so you pretty much had to program it yourself. And it was doable in a reasonable time-frame. In SR4, the cost in time to get anything above 6 is horrendous so it ain't going to happen. Meaning that all it takes for high end gear is an Extended Charisma + Etiquette + Connections (12, 2 days) test.

I wouldn't have called it 'reasonable' in the first place, though. It shouldn't be easy (or even feasible) for a lone mercenary to beat megacorp R&D departments. I do agree that (without using the Optional Rules right there in the book) Matrix tests are too reliant on bought programs, instead of Logic, skill, etc.

I miss my variable Target-Number.
I miss my Bioindex.
I miss my SR3 Vehicle/Weapon Contruction/Modification rules.
I miss Lord Torgo!
I STILL do play SR3 and i will probably not change to 4th in ever.

Bio-index is just a way to get bioware on top of your cyber. Which is fun, of course, but hardly 'the old feeling'.

Variable TN has that annoying 6=7 bug if you also have exploding 6s, but otherwise it's kind of a neat mechanic. Dice mechanics are just dice mechanics, though; they're all the same thing.

The lack of Rigger 4 *is* a huge deal, but again, not anything to do with the setting or its 'feel'.

Everything else worth missing had been said allready . .
I could more or less simply copy the first posting into mine and call it a day . .

Hahaha, okay.

I do think if there's any 'old feeling', it's pre-SR3, though. 3 is basically the same as 4, except clunkier.