What about the Ares Beta?

They never really worked out the bugs, so it's fine.

That's what happens when you align yourself with Insect Spirits...

I don't miss the deck, I miss the wire.
If I want a deck, I get a nexus.

Yeah, good ol' Datajacks... *Sighs* I so wish I could have played back in the day...

Yaknow, another minor thing you can do is reflect today's reality just a little harder.

Cutting edge hardware of today is middle of the road tomorrow. So, have hardware degrade. Oh, it's not really degrading, it's just the newer stuff is a little better. But if you want to stay cutting edge you need to upgrade and upgrade and upgrade...

As a fast guide: Matrix Attribute rating drops one every (10-current R) months. R6 stuff is R5 in 4 months, R4 5 months later, R3 in a year and a quarter...

SOTA. We used to have that. Still do, for programs… unless you misread the errata.

Yep. SOTA, but applied to hardware too.

(And as for "used to", my experience was SR1 for a couple of months, then back for SR4.

eh, not unexpected it's an old idea.

Of course the big question is what do you accomplish by this? SOTA always seemed like a good way to punish people for not playing mages and technomancers. Magicrun is sooooooo much fun.

Just another reason to have prejudice against Magicians and TMs, even in the Shadows.

Razorboys and Grrls would hate Adepts because of this, and Hackers would hate TMs. Fixers that work with one group or another would have to charge more for prejudiced against groups just to prove "He's leveling the field", things like that.

Magicians just scare everyone. They can think you dead. Or steal your mind/soul. Or rip through your very psyche and find what you fear the most. Honest, I saw it on Karl Kombatmage!

The biggest problem with SOTA is armor.

Realistically, armor and guns drive each others' development. Better armor means better guns needed; better guns means better armor needed.

So what would that mean? Armor ratings and gun DV both rise every decade, while Body stays constant. Effect: after a couple of decades, people without armor don't stand a chance even against holdout guns.

Assuming that armor-defeating tech is equally Body-defeating, yeah.

Yeah, you could go with increasing AP, I suppose. But I just wanted to point out that SOTA's a very arbitrary thing, it's only in those parts of the game rules where it's easy.

Do you ever run across mechanics for simulating that that fireball spell is so last year?

That'd be hilarious. You should have to buy all your spell formulae for cash.

I gave program degradation a try, but I really hated all the bookkeeping. Sure, SOTA may be a cool concept in theory, but unless it's convenient in gameplay, I'll pass.

To me, it's an aesthetic problem, and one that has plagued many aspects of 4th edition. The second Matrix Crash was kind of used as an excuse to reset SR's technology extrapolating from what we have now: thus, wireless everywhere, lots of miniaturization, and programs will do all of the work for you (you can basically use logic as a dump stat if you're a hacker, since all you roll is skill + program).

Decks were this big, special things. Only deckers bothered with them. They had cool wires and stuff, and you had to plug them into things, which created tension because you were stuck someplace potentially inconvenient while you were off in VR land. Now, with commlinks and AR, you can basically run around with the rest of the group while you're hacking. On one hand, this is awesome for playability. On the other hand, it robs Shadowrun of it's "Future via the 1980's" flavor.

The future from a 1980's perspective was awesome. Neon lights, big hair, bright colors, pink mohawks, and a general "screw the man" attitude. The future from a 2000's perspective is basically just a variation on The Matrix, so everyone is dressed in all black. Personally, I think the loss of a real mechanical difference between Hermetic Mages and Shamans was way more painful for the system, but the transition to decks homogenized the player types as well.

Biggest Problem with SOTA was that they made it apply to cyberware too . .