Ye Olde Meldinge Plague..e. : )

I really like Sengir's idea. I'm not running SR4, but I may use it in EP at some point.



That cyberware is bad is portrayed primarily in the language used, not in the mechanics. Unfortunately, SR has never really portrayed a 'cyberware drains your soul!' effectively, probably because mundanes already have a hard time keeping up with awakened characters. But yes, you're right that many players have always viewed cybernetic enhancement as a purely good thing, so taking it to the next level with transhumanism is just continuing that.

While I agree to a certain level, remember that a lot of the really nifty nanotech in SR came about after the dubious work of an AI...

Hey, and look at what a bunch of "People" who just got citizenships in certain Megacorporations are!

Something tells me that Horizon is behind the Nano-Flareup of technology.

Basically, yeah. If from the outset of the rule system there had been rules that gave as much of a negative as you gained a positive for augmenting - a constant upkeep cost, regular checks for further Essence loss (your system is starting to reject it, the parts weren't installed right, etc, etc) then yeah, I probably wouldn't be raising such a fuss over this. But they're not - the closest we get are optional rules on possible social modifiers, and then 4e/A stuck in cyberpsychosis rules.

And I could see why the public would shy away from it too. Who would want that kind of upkeep, when they've got their corporation's well-being to think of!? But, if all it took for me, Joe Sinner, to be able to be stronger than a troll, leap tall buildings, and laugh off bullets is to go under the knife and have a little (probably illegal in my country / corporation) machinery stuck in there? Sign me up.

But without said rules or anything to enforce the atmosphere you guys are talking about, you're stuck poking your toe in the dust and saying, "yeah man, people totally like, don't like cyberware? Yeah." Which is why I was kind of flabbergasted last night.

If, by the way, our "transhumanism" complaint is in regards to nanotech - don't care, don't use it in my games, ignore its canonicity, bloogablooga.


Right - society, but not the government. Remember, Kusanagi and Monkey Face get the team and the resources they wanted by basically holding out over the government that they know where the tapes are buried and showing that they're willing to pull them out into the light if need be. If ever a chaotic good (sic) group of spec ops runners there are, it's Section 9.

Not to mention that at the end of basically every permutation of the series the Major runs off as a hybrid AI child...

Which is a plot thread I'd certainly like to explore, personally speaking. : )



I have to basically agree with the statement that GITS isn't at all punk, although a better way to phrase that might be: GITS is very, very Black Trenchcoat, and there are no mohawks of any color in sight. IMHO anyway.

Agreed.

So maybe she merged with a free sprite and got technomantic abilities XD

Eh, I'll give it to you, I guess

Yep, only that while the Melding Plague acts like a malignant tumor (invades and destroys other tissue), my "recton virus" would be more akin to a benign tumor. No need to worry, just remove every last nanite from your system and don't ever touch that stuff again...

This is a topic I could talk about for ages, but I'm going to actively try to restrain myself. Basically, I agree that the mood of cyberpunk is not really reflected in the mechanics, which makes it a difficult mood to sustain. And of course, because of the tenuous balance between the Augmented and the Awakened, any penalties inflicted on augmentation to make it seem less personally desirable needs to be balanced on the magic side of things too. It could be done, but it just isn't really. Not in previous versions of Shadowrun and not in the current version. So while I like to think of Shadowrun as a cyberpunk setting, it is difficult to maintain that spirit with the players. Especially when we readily admit here that players tend to be exceptions to the rule and yet are the way the players see the game.

The slide towards transhumanism is partially due to the metaplot aspect of Shadowrun. Technology must keep advancing in Shadowrun because the timeline keeps advancing. It's problematic, because I really do think Shadowrun has lost something with the advance of technology, but it was equally impossible to keep the timeline advancing without introducing technological advancement.

Beyond all that, the metaplot has gotten to be a difficult beast. I haven't written for Shadowrun in years, but even when I was we were constantly struggling with reconciling new material with the tangle of past characters and plot developments. It can't be getting any easier as the metaplot continues to grow. As controversial a topic as it is, I personally feel like Shadowrun needs a reboot.

Sounds good to me

Not to get too deeply involved in this discussion because frankly I have better things to do but I basically feel like "Transhumanism"-as people seem to be describing it in this thread-can take a a long walk off a short pier. Obviously that's a pretty simplified version of how I feel-but yeah I'm great with Shadowrun just writing nanotech out of the game with little or no explanation because it's a part of the game I could care less about. If I wanted to play Eclipse Phase...well I'd play it.

I'm gonna be prophetic here: If that reboot should ever happen, Shadowrun dies because those who loved the Cyberpunk parts won't be enough to sustain it and those who like the Post-Cyberpunk flavor of 4 mistrust the system.

But lets see it happen. Maybe it will work. Though i'd rather see Pegasus do it.

I think you've misunderstood their intent.

They were referring to the kind of fucked up psychology and pressures that force someone to install more and more cyber just to stay in the game. For example, Molly Millions was always cranking her body right up to the point of total biological failure just so that she could get work as a bodyguard. There certainly can be a flavor in that. It's not about getting some cyber. It's about that race to .01 essence and the question of what is driving your cyber-monster to that brink.

Instead of "Yeah! Check out this awesome new cyber I got!" it's "No one hires a gunner without wires, so I had to get them or I couldn't even make enough dough to pay for last year's reflex enhancers, but with my twitch up this high, I need an attention coprocessor to keep me from jumping at every little thing. How the hell am I going to keep paying for this..."

The transition from 3 to 4 was a sort of reboot.

The problem is that the massive upheval happened in the 2060s with the Crash 2.0 and all the civil wars. Meanwhile the game picked up in the 2070s.

That upheval is where SR happens. That's the meat.

Society collapses everywhere. The mechanisms of control fall to pieces and anarchy presides while culture rebuilds. SR4 just started too damn late, after control was reestablished and society picked itself up off the floor, only to become stronger, friendlier, and more cohesive and secure than ever.


Why was Bug City awesome? Because it was a DISASTER and you could be right in the middle of it. The Arcology Shutdown? Same deal.

Why is the war! in Bogata not awesome? Because they're fighting with TANKS and BOMBERS. This is two major forces coming together to kill each other. No one wants to be in the middle of that. Going into an active warzone to do crimes is like breaking into Lonestar HQ to steal bullets.

Sigged!

I'd like to chime in on believability. Shadowrun is not in any way a believable setting - hell, a spirit of fire has an energy aura that produces essentially free energy, only paid for with drain; LAVs fly defying all laws of physics, etc. Nanites are not all that different in that regard.
The main difference between cyberpunk and traditionally understood transhumanism, the way I see, is that while the cyberpunk may be no less or even more technologically advanced, the tech is not used for the benefit of all, but for further enslaving the humanity.
Take, for example, real life. Sure enough you can now download the records of islamist rappers, but what do you know about what is actually happening in the world? We have a wordlwide network capable of instant information relay, but we mostly use it for pictures of kittens. New sources feed us with well-crafted propaganda (or let's just say "they're slightly biased"), and all in all the bandwidth is filled with entertaining rubbish. Meanwhile, wars are thought around the world we neither know nor particularly care about, military campaigns are launched with hidden motivations, and nothing of that gets adequate coverage.
Same way it goes with cyberpunk - sure you have great tech advances, but Matrix is full of corp snitches and honeypots, cyberware is slowly turning you into an amputee with lumps of dead matter strapped on, nanotech gives 99% of users degenerative neurological diseases in the long term, etcetera. But Shadowrun is not going down that road at all right now. While the previous editions (including early 4e) made a point of discussing the unpleasantness of essence loss, the dangers of being awakened and such, AE glances over all that in favour of "neat tech advances".

I think we were just discussing a reboot the other day. If handled correctly I think it could be successful.

Hm, why would it be? Shadowrun is a setting which is firmly grounded in old metaplot, so no dissing that. Revolutionizing the ruleset is hardly ever for the good, either...

Shadowrun has started as a cyberpunk game, but it had pretty soon started to mix a lot of different styles, from gutterpunk to high-fantasy/low-cyber and pretty much everything in between. Even in the first novels and the first campaigns, the setting varied a lot from one writer to another.

So now you have many different playstyles, and the universe (and even rules) has been kept vague in order to support them all. The problem is that it leads to a pretty bland game if the GM doesn't choose his style. And even then, he'll have to do all the work to keep his player in the same atmosphere.

But if you were to release a new edition with a clearly defined style, you'd lose a big part of your player base.

That's why I think the "multiple settings" approach would be the best. You could have:

- Shadowrun Old School (Neuromancer) with a 80s cyberpunk feel, PCs are gutterpunks doing their best to survive (or stick it to the man) in a wild world. Ideally this would be set in the 40s, when having just one cyberware implant was enough to give you an edge, when being a metahuman meant more than just prejudice, when the world still hadn't recovered from the Crash and VITAS and was a pretty wild and dangerous place.

- Shadowrun Classic (Robocop?), closer to 1st/2d edition feel, set in the 50s/60s, a more stable world, more cyber and magic, metahumanity better accepted, Japan everywhere, except where there are Native Americans, more professional PCs (though still some dose of punk) but still a pretty cyberpunk feel, with little to no bioware, nano and so on.

- Shadowrun Post-Cyberpunk (GITS), set in the 60s/70s, with a stable world (except for the occasional big threat), cyberware leaving the way to bio, nano and genetech, metahumanity and magic is something everyone is familiar with and PC are professionals who shoot people in the face for money. Less Japan, less NAN.

But this would probably be too much work for a single line.

A system like Crafty's Spycraft 2.0 (or its more polished Fantasycraft) would probably work pretty well for Shadowrun. The problem with a lot of the modules and add-ons for SR is that it is more difficult to determine what to include and what to exclude for certain flavors or eras. Frank Trollman was dead on with his idea that every piece of ware and accompanying grades should be listed with date of availability so that if you were using SR4 to run 2050's you could easily exclude the new cyberware. Something similar should be done with playstyles.

For instance, a lot of the stuff in Augmentation, namely Genetech and Nanoware, transform the flavor of the game dramatically. As does a PC mage with Magic 6. Fantasy Craft has a whole Campaign/World building chapter where it lists what to include and exclude from the ruleset in order to achieve the feel you want for your game. So in SR if you don't want living coral/wood buildings and clean energy sources you pick the "Run Down Capital" and "Environmental Collapse" campaign tweaks which gives everyone (players and GM) a thematic idea from the get go and allows the GM to constantly reasses his game in order to avoid style drift or to embrace it (eg. you could have fun as gangers in the Barrens who transform their neighborhood from Run Down Capital into Working Capital and go block by block cleaning everything up).

Problem is, that would require a general agreement on how the 6th world looks like, how violent/run-down the cities are, et cetera pp.. The way it things are (and have been since 89) is that you can pick up three books and get four answers at least.

That's always been one of the odd disconnects about Shadowrun though. Even when Essence loss was talked about being bad, a lot of players readily gobbled up new cyberware for their characters. They were playing transhumanists, essentially, in a cyberpunk world. And if a gamemaster leaned heavily on the story costs of cyberware, it benefited Awakened characters.

I do absolutely agree that Shadowrun's edginess has dulled, though. I'm just not sure there's any easy solution to that.

And yes, I know a reboot is controversial, largely because of the metaplot and edition nostalgia. I still think it would be the best thing for the health of the game, even knowing it would probably piss off some people (when has an edition come out that didn't piss off some people?). It would also have to be handled very well and I'm not convinced it could be at this stage.

I think that it's another problem Shadowrun always had. Dehumanization is a central theme of Cyberpunk: corporations dehumanize society, cyberware dehumanizes the person (or does it?) and so on.

In that vein, Magic should be presented as something dehumanizing as well, and should have its own costs. But this has rarely been hinted at in Shadowrun, except when talking about toxic or insect mages...

Question is reboot to what and is the difference worth the effort? Any reboot would have to incorporate all styles of play (Escape from New York style guns blazing, to mirrored shades and trenchcoats of Ronin) other wise why bother? And at that point are you just reinventing the wheel? So then we go to game mechanics, matrix, magic, and physical. What kind of rules rewrite do you suggest would fit SR better. The one thing I do miss are the dice pools-but they simplified the skill rolls to be DICE+ATTRIBUTE+Other modifiers. Little more static and cost some flavor in the game, but speeded up game play?

Sorry this thread is bit OT--but back OT Catalyst seems to be doing well and probably means that they will stick with 4th ed for awhile. Unlike D&D, which with its 4E is now being outsold by the Pathfinder RPG from what I hear.

Yes, agreed. And toxic magic and insect shamans were always presented more as antagonists and plot devices than the costs of magic. Magic was just never integrated well into the cyberpunk flavor of Shadowrun. Which is odd, since other fantasy aspects were: dragons running megacorporations, an elven fascist nation, and the Ork Underground, for example.

And I don't know about reboot mechanics. Mechanics aren't really my strength. What I do know is that it became very difficult to write for Shadowrun because of the weight of twenty years of metaplot. I still feel like I can write far better Shadowrun material if I completely ignore the metaplot details that I would normally have to consider if I were writing for publication. Don't get me wrong, there are definitely gems in the metaplot and those are elements that I think should carry over even if the universe were rebooted. But a clean slate would be very refreshing.

Wouldn't that be the whole concept of Drain, how magical practice caused headache, unconsciousness, nosebleed, or even serious physical damage, as a price to pay. Only did the Game Mechanics failed to make it a significant price (especially with Fourth Edition). A mage should hesitate every time he's casting a spell, just like a mundane should hesitate every time the surgeon is going to remove a part of him.

Yeah, though Drain is an even weaker cyberpunk mechanic than Essence is. And has been touched upon in narrative even less than the impact of Essence loss. Most Awakened characters pretty much shrug off the Drain mechanic and some of them are hardly impacted by it at all (many physical adepts, for example).

Drain doesn't turn you into an individual who doesn't really consider himself human, who has empathy problems and all that kind of stuff that used to be associated with cyberware. Sure there's always one or two lines saying that most mages are weird and there are Mentor Spirits with some effect on the character's personality, but nothing that makes the Awakened the broken individual the low essence streetsam is sometimes shown to be.

But writing this I realize that with the exception of Hatchetman turning cyberzomb I haven't seen dezhumanisation pushed very far on canon low-essence characters. That's another problem I think SR always had: the main characters of the novels are pretty much clean heroes especially compared to other cyberpunk novels.

I think Initiation should lead essentially to insanity as the mage gets more and more desynchronized with reality as other people experience it.

Which is a neat idea for fiction, certain totems, or even as background fluff for the setting as a whole...but in-game, the problem is that you're essentially punishing a character for success. Your average RPGer probably doesn't want their character to get shittier the longer they play them and the more karma they invest.

In the fiction a lot of the magicians are a little bit... Odd. This is given off as "we're lucky to have a magician, period, so let's put up with them", even with the Megas.

But I like the idea of Initiation leading to madness. Power having a cost...Ninja'd.

Actually, that was a selling point for some players of mine in Deadlands when I told them about Mad Scientists. And it would be a selling point for me, gives some real character and value into them.

Of course, I'm seriously not your average gamer. I'd look at it as "I'm not shittier, I've got a character with more CHARACTER."

A mage getting more and more detached as they grow in power, I could see, but that's ultimately more because they're neglecting human connections as they focus entirely on their mystical abilities... and that's ultimately more an aspect and theme that WoD explores fairly well with their Morality mechanics; I don't see a need to bring the mechanic over to SR4. For an RP concept, thought, it's quite valid, but forcing it on all mages wouldn't jive, I think.

(Now, for the really obsessed magus, perhaps having a reskin of the Hung Out To Dry neg quality to represent how they've been driving everyone away and letting their humanity dry up in the pursuit of Total Arcane Mastery could be an interesting plot to run... And it would be intriguing to see if the magus takes the bonus karma from the neg quality (if you use that house rule) and then immediately applies it to learning/improving magic. "Who cares about those guys? They were just holding me back from my potential! Without their distractions, I was finally able to bond that Force 5 Summoning Focus!")

Another way to do this would be through the use of Spirit Pacts and GMs using alternate costs--rather than paying the karma for the cost of the Spirit Pact, take a negative quality instead.

Make a Power Pact and the cost is all the memories of a woman's kiss (Lost Loved One) or your joy (Poor Self Control, various Psychoses). If the BP costs balance out, it's fine and provide different angles for the shortcuts to power.

*yoink*

Spirit Pacts are a great tool for adding some cyberpunk to the Awakened. I'd love to see them as more of a core mechanic. The expanded rules on background count and aspect can also add some cyberpunk influence to magic, where magic that is "flavored" towards the local astral is empowered and other magic can be penalized.

An occasional composure check using their drain stats with a threshold equal to a guy's initiate grade shouldn't be game breaking. It's not like the guy isn't still getting all the benefits of initiation at the (relatively) discounted SR4a rate. Physads could have similar problems with different outcomes maybe?

Social penalties for mages is one way to do a more 'cyberpunk' feel to magic.

Mages are rare, and people 'know' that mages can kill with a glance, read your mind, control your thoughts, etc. Mages get more money and (seemingly) cushy jobs. Mages are freaks.

It's really no different from giving penalties to metavariants and people with obvious cyber: if someone knows that you are a mage, they'll treat you differently. Some will rever you and look up to you, sure - but even many of those people will be afraid of you...

Dehumanisation should remain an RP factor backed up by rules, not enforced by them. That's why the cyber social penalties are put in as optional. If it's something you wan to see in the game then talk to your players, get them to answer the twenty questions and get people to come up with some Quirks for their character that emphasises the dehumanisation of the character, things they have to role-play. If they play these quirks give them a karma award at the end of the session for Good Roleplaying.

Like the meerkat says.... "simples"

Horrors!

If everyone has to worry that the Mage suddenly gets hijacked by an alien entity everytime he casts a non-Filtered spell then that's a pretty significant drawback. Hmmm...maybe I should post this in the mundane/mage thread?

That's a BAD Cheops. We don't need to bring the Horrors into this, Uncle Dunkie died for our sins (but not our SINs) so we never need to see the buggers.

Well, it's fairly axiomatic that working on a clean slate enables (not guarantees) better results.

But I think not every major cleaning has to be a reboot. You CAN do some heavy deus ex machina moments and even outright retcons, you just have to convince people that the result is worth some suspension of disbelief and that it happens in a considerate way, instead of randomly trampling on plotlines because the authors simply don't know better.
That's basically what the new Berlin book did, coupled with a bit eye-candy in the presentation it made for an extremely positive reception.

This. So much. Lets say, for every two points of essence you loose and for every two points of magic you accumulate, you have to choose a quirk or a derangement, for example.

I agree wholeheartedly that the negative sides of both augmentation and magic are something to be roleplayed out. If your players are feeling that the adverse effects are making their characters "shittier", instead of adding some depth to them - perhaps what you're doing is, you know, not roleplaying at all?

This was such a nice idea that I just had to repeat it twice.

Too many "Rollplayers" in the world that would hate that.

I like that. It would certainly explain a few of my characters and why they're a little touched in the head. Well, other than the guy that had a building fall on him.

What I did in my last campaign was to force the Awakened character to link each of their Magic point to a belief in their tradition. This forces the player to learn about his tradition and to play accordingly, this also shapes the way the Awakened viewed the world. The more powerful he is and the more this tradition shapes him and the less resilient he is to things that clash with it.

Lets not forgetting the dehumanizing effects of Resonance. Its not simply a joke, when people say "Virtuekinects? They basically talk to their toasters. Freaks."

I think Shadowrun could be a great game to focus on the dehumanizing effects of 'ware, Magic, Resonance and "other" Powers. It would be a great theme.
You want to be the big kicker of a hypercorp? Great, just sign your compassion and conscience over.

Runners stand out in this in that they want to work outside of the system, half-chosen their way into being "less" of a human and more of a trans-human. If that is actually an ascension or descension could then be simply the flavor of the GM, but your unaugmented peers (be it augmented by magic or resonance) still treat you like something 'different'.