So it looks like the issue is really the disconnect between "future of 1989" and just "future". I'm not sure that one's going to get resolved.

~J

My main problem is probably that I am literally a child of 1989, as in born that year, rather than being a child of the 80's, as in raised during those years.

At the risk of getting strung up, I have to add my voice to this. I'm firmly in the camp of "when real life outpaces fictional tech 60 years in the future, it's time to update the future." I cut my teeth on Gibson and his ilk long before I ever owned a Shadowrun book, so I'm just as nostalgic for old skool cyberpunk as the next guy. I'm gonna buy Shadowrun 2050 the day it comes out like most of you. However, I started with SR4 and have read every single book that's come out since (except Gun Haven 2, don't have that one yet. Next payday though). Slowly, now, I'm going back and rereading the old ones as I find time. I find it an interesting exercise to read a 15 year old book describing events that took place 15 years ago in the fiction, but at the end of the day, it's still history. I want to play a game that set 60 years in the future, not set in a Neal Stephenson novel. Cyberdecks aren't that future, because we've got commlinks now. There are phones with processors that are literally as fast as current desktops. By year's end, there's going to be a wearable AR interface to interact with those phones. Both me and my players love the fact that we're living in the Shadowrun future now. It's so much easier for us to get why someone would carry a computer the size of a deck of cards around rather than a massive laptop. AR lets our hacker get into runs and lets him play more with the group. Our Techno is our Digital Magician, the gal that literally talks computers into giving her what she wants. To us, this seems so much more believable the old ways. When we go back and read the old stuff, we can see what came before and we respect that; but, like our Commodore computers and our StarTAC phones, we prefer to put them out of our minds and focus on what we can use to accomplish our jobs now.

To me, this argument really feels like the whole Vinyl vs. CD debate. Both sides have excellent arguments, but it really always boils down to one thing: Nostalgia. Nostalgia, unfortunately, isn't what drives sales in RPGs; it's putting out new, interesting material. What the developers did back in the early 2000s was take a game that had been going for 15 years (and had already seen a large chunk of the future tech come and go) and update the tech to be more reflective of what people would really expect out of a game set 60 years in the future. While it may have pissed off old fans, what they did was to ensure the survival of the game. When SR4 was being written, the iPhone wasn't even in the concepting stages. They were looking at what current then and extrapolating what they thought would happen, they had no idea we'd have the tech within the lifespan of the game. Now, when a potential buyer walks into a book or game store and picks up the book, instead of seeing 15 year old laptops, they see a future based on what they have in their pocket right now. They can flip through the book and understand what the characters are doing, they get attached because they think "Yeah, I can see myself doing that." That sort of attachment is sells games, which is what they're in the business of: selling games to make money.

Honestly, when I bought my copy of the SR4 corebook way back in 2006, the single biggest thing I remember about my first read-through was how it really felt like what the future was gonna be like in 60 years. I could see that they had done away with the old trappings of cyberdecks and replaced it with the future I wanted: A future where everyone is always connected via the wireless that was already so pervasive to modern society (Yes, I thought it ran on the old cell phone networks). I was sold for life at that point. Why? Because even the core book captured what I felt to be the entire message of the cyperpunk genre:

Evolve or die.

Quick somebody shoot bull and help him out by having his Ork die while he still remembers what a Deck is. Senility is a bitch.

Neko:
Wrong... the processors in phones or tablets are nowhere near as fast as desktops or laptops.

Another big thing is processing is always tied to power... you need power to flip bits... so battery limits how much you can compute in absolute terms... so yes I can see a solid reason for having decks. Even SR4 still has small nexus servers you can tote around with you which are better than commlinks in processing capability.

Personally, I prefer the older versions of Shadowrun; however, I can understand the desire to update as well.

The best anyone can say about this is, "To each their own."

Also, this is a most excellent video for the exact reasons you stated.

@Falconer: You're right, that was a bit of hyperbole. It's not technically as powerful as say, an 8-core 3.6 GHz Sandy Bridge processor, but I'd be willing to put money that I could put a 4-core 1.5GHz Tegra 3 into any random schmuck's desktop and they wouldn't even notice. On paper, they're nowhere near as fast, but for what most people use their computers for, they're more than sufficient. Hell, considering Tegra cores are going to be powering Windows 8-based tablets and laptops by year's end, it's only a matter of time. At that point though, you're delving into ARM vs x86/64 architectures and the optimizations that can be applied to software running on the respective processors, which is a WHOLE other debate entirely. Anyway.

I can play HD movies, listen to my music, write emails, and surf the web; in fact, short of playing Diablo 3, what can I do on my PC that I can't on my Android phone or on my iPad? And don't say "use Flash," everybody says that.

@CanRay and all the other guys: Have any of you considered using Skype or something similar to run or play in games? I've played via Skype before (with players in Utah, Idaho, and Japan at the same time) and will be starting again this weekend. It's actually pretty easy to set up and as long as you have people who are willing to commit, it's totally worth it.

We use Skype for nearly every game session. It works quite well. I have a paid service so we can even do video with multiple people. Like you (@Neko Asakami) we have players around the world.

-D

1) Run a 2M line LSA and have it finish before I die.

2) I play with my friends in Brisbane over skype - well until I became a Diablo III orphan.

While true, unless your gaming or HD media editing (and the latter can be helped along with a special coprocessor in phones and tablets, as one can record HD video now on those buggers) the CPU grunt is largely wasted. I get as much out of my android tablet for casual computing as i do out of my desktop. And with the right setup, i could potentially rent render time on something like the Amazon "cloud" while operating it all from a smartphone.

Thing is regardless of whether or not tablets are "good enough" for hackers the real professionals ie deckers will be using the future equivalent of LN2 cooled overclocked monsters not some children's toy.

Shadowrun universe diverges from our history sometime in the late 80's, IIRC.

Honestly i'm not sure how you can come to that conclusion. A real professional strikes a balance between hardware power and actually having it when and where it is needed. If your need massive computing power for your hack no man portable solution will suffice (as man portable will never really catch up to server side) which is something that SR amongst all editions got drastically wrong. If all i need is to crack a local wifi hotspot with what I have on hand at the time then there literally is an ap for that, it just takes longer.

Humph.

<------ Old Man Jones is old enough to legitimately call them "hackers" because that's what they were called when he was growing up, in the pre-cyberdeck era.






-k

I find video chatting very exhausting for some reason.

You, me, and every frakkin' console cowboy from here to Zurich Orbital.

Trying to justify adding future tech to Shadowrun because 'we have something like it now' is a very idiotic standpoint. We're rolling along into our future. By this point in the timeline, the Shadowrun universe has already had food riots in NYC, which led to the court decisions that established megacorporate extraterritorality, Japan has declared itself an Empire again, North and South Korea have gone to war, the Native Americans are being rounded up into internment camps, several nuclear weapons have been fired and mysteriously failed to detonate, VITAS has killed 25% of the world population, Dwarves and Elves have begun to be born, and two nuclear plants in the UK have gone meltdown killing over 20,000 people.

And that's just by summer 2012, before the Awakening and the Ghost Dance. There are damn good reasons that tech has flowed differently in that timeline than in our own.

Remember, by the 2050's, most of the US major metropolitan areas are as bad as Detroit is today. The United States as a nation hasn't even existed for more than 20 years. The Crash of '29 wiped out untold amounts of data, crippling a lot of industry and research.

I swear people don't read the backstory. *shakes cane at the punks on his lawn*

Earthdawn stuff aside, the earliest divergence I've identified is that Chief Justice Warren Burger does not retire in 1986.


Not to harsh your mellow or anything, but they were called "crackers" then


Not to mention an earthquake that effectively ended NYC as a real city.

~J

I find it more fun to challenge the players though and have developing story line with long term enemies that they may or may not know about. Ohh, that reminds me, I need to go check my notes.....

Eh, "cracker" is a subset of "hacker".

At least in this usage. Other uses may have nothing to do with computers.



-k

I'm going to invoke the Battlestar Galactica (2004) defense of the wired cyberdeck. When you have an expert hacker who can program viruses that completely cripple your computer systems your best defense is to go offline and make everything hardwired into the system. We don't really know what the pre-2029 internet looked like, hell it could have been the same or more advanced than ours today, but you had a mysterious virus that literally destroyed the world's networks and most of its data. In addition to that they invented a new matrix technology that they were incapable of streaming wirelessly -- the fluff is really wonky on this but a megapulse is supposed to be way more than a terabyte. So you have advanced computers that can't be wireless (mostly due to people in RL not knowing about the capabilities) and in game reasons for these networks to not want to be connected to a mesh.

Then Renraku makes Deus and Crash 2.0 happens. And the world responds by making it even easier to share between computers and even easier to crack a firewall? Nuh uh. Not fragging buying it chummer. The Wireless Matrix atually runs better using Matrix 2.0 than it does using SR4.5/Unwired. In a world where rogue AIs randomly fry the brains of millions of people NO ONE is going to want to hook their brains up and pray it doesn't happen again. Oops it almost does again in Emergence.

Okay, now OP, you wanna know what Program Carriers were?

And I agree with others, read some Gibson. The guy practically invented the cyberpunk genre as we know it today. Please do yourself a favor and skip the movies made of his work (Johnny Mnemonic, New Rose Hotel) until after reading them, if you watch them at all. And if you've seen Hackers, yes, hacking the "Gibson" super computer is a reference to William Gibson. Other authors to consider include Phillip K. Dick and Harlan Ellison, both of whom clearly influenced the genre before Gibson came along. Finally, if you haven't read the original Secrets of Power trilogy, they're the first Shadowrun novels, so totally worth your time. Between those books and Gibson's, you'll learn all sorts of applicable slang.

Although this statement is true, I feel it's potentially misleading. Michael Swanwick has a fairly persuasive essay floating around the 'net laying out the argument that Gibson, through Neuromancer, effectively killed Cyberpunk as a movement (in contrast to as a genre) by providing such a compelling vision of it that it ossified—that before Neuromancer, "Cyberpunk" was a frontier whose shape was largely unknown and which was being explored, while after Neuromancer, "Cyberpunk" was, well, stuff that looked like Neuromancer.

Which is to say that while I think the statement "The guy practically invented the cyberpunk genre as we know it today." (emphasis added) is accurate, I feel like a reader not versed in the history of the movement-turned-genre would focus on the first part of the sentence and thus take away an impression that isn't true.

~J

That is why I added the, "as we know it today" clause

Unless you're a true literature geek specializing in Sci-Fi, Gibson's presentation of cyberpunk is "good enough", IMHO. But you're correct to say that there is more to it than coffin motels, AIs, and Little Chiba.

Right. My point is that in the absence of prior genre knowledge, I would not expect a reader to be able to properly interpret the significance of that clause.

But anyway

~J

My impression is that Hardwired has had a greater influence on SR in both style and substance than the mirrorshades trilogy had.

There you have riggers, orbital corporate control and "deckers" riding the data.

Neko:
No offense but a Tegra3 is like a high rating response chip right now in commlink terms. (and when SOTA degrades it in 1Q next year the Tegra4 will take it's place). So I disagree with your assertion. The problem in mobile is issue rate per battery Amp-hour. If we go with SOTA as a 6 year degrade from 6 to 1.... look at your chips from 5 years ago. Most of them would be hard pressed to handle something like android or play HD video for any length of time on a mobile battery.

In game even a rating 1 commlink can play video and the like and run your editing program. BUT the hackers really want the rating 5&6 chips because they use it to crunch through their hacking and high end apps (and run multiple programs at once).

Overall, this is one area where I think SR4 has fallen flat... outside of some high discharge packs... we just outright ignore power on everything else which has struck me as kinda wrong... Even on things like drones it's just handwaved away... (all vehicles/drones get 6 hours runtime barring efficiency mods... by RAW)

What could be the case is that the same that that goes into the high discharge packs allow a comlink or similar to run for days of use time, never mind standby. Also, SR is optical chips. This means that current thermal issues goes out the window.

But to go a bit meta here, SR4 was designed from the ground up to be more streamlined than older editions.

That resulted in things like infinite computer storage, removal of cargo capacity and fuel usage in vehicle, and the attempt at allowing vehicles and people to use very similar movement rules.

Sure, some of us loved spending hours with the deck and vehicle build rules to come up with crazy designs. Never mind the SR2 anchoring rules that was used for all kind of magical tricks. But in the end, RPG companies are in it for the sale. And with computer games removing much of the number crunching the designers see a need to slim down the rules to try and appeal to the MMO "generation".

Damn kids that need computers to do their thinking for them and can't do math!

GIT OFF MAH LAWN!!!

Hob,

You're missing two major points in there... one it STILL takes energy to flip bits... (optical or not). And two commlinks still have electronics for the signal (subject to EMP).

Vehicles still use fuel... only now there are no guides for what is going to burn faster than a Tbird on afterburner and what is going to sip it's energy generously.

When you're trying to do logistics... no this isn't easily handwaved away. How much does a supply drone like a kull carry? Prior editions would have given me a good idea in terms of volume/weight.

I agree with a lot of the sentiment about the lack of reality in thinking that a hand-held computer will be able to go toe-to-toe with a corporate security system, but I also really like the "feel" of the AR/wireless world (and I'm an actual child of the 80s (ie born in the 70s))

The way I handwave it is by saying that rating 1-3 commlinks are all pretty much hand-held consumer products, 4-5 are (at best) ugly, prototype/homebrew systems (similar to the phones in Gibson's Zero History) and to get anything resembling a rating 6 (and some rating 5s) you're pretty much using a "deck" (might be a single large unit, might be a "worn" computer with components in various pockets.) I don't really adjust the rules at all, it's just flavor.

Also in terms of system archetecture, I use a lot of passkeys, nested systems, and actively patrolled backdoors to balance between enabling wireless access where people would want it and maintaining off-line systems where it makes sense (like friggin security cameras and maglocks)

I've been toying with a rule that says a standard decker/hacker (i.e. not a technomancer) can only go full VR through a hardline connection to recapture some of that old school flavor, but I haven't gone all the way with that yet (haven't needed to since we still don't have a decker PC)

You just handed me a new web-comic. Thank you for that.

Sure, but a photon is way more cost effective than a electron.

If the electrical power supply feeding the photon generators is taken out by the EMP, no more photons.




-k

Could always get a quantum theurgist to summon maxwell's demon if you need power.

An electricity spirit can do that as one of it's powers.

I feel so damm old now.
I also miss riggers. The VCR was cool.

I only knew these things in novels.

Bigity... now you're moving into the world of Earthdawn where magitech was the rule. Anyhow electricity spirit doesn't exist in the setting... Also spirits bound to long term service get very surly and will look for ways to subvert their orders. Also they eat up a mages bound spot... so for every piece of equipment walking down the street?

War added a 'recharge' spell specifically to recharge things though finally. (which I think is fine). I was simply lamenting that more systems which use a lot of power (especially in short high strength bursts and the like... or over long sustained times like a really whiz deck/commlink don't really have power stats to limit them a little bit. That's not the kind of thing you can quicken though (not a sustained spell).

Quickening though needs karma, and a mage willing to invest it... (also think the quickening ends when the mage does... forget and too lazy to look it up for a quick post).

Lets face it... even a spell like temperature control quickened to permanently create a hot and cold sink... could power a stirling engine or turbine in perpetuity.

There's an old joke. There can either be no hottest part of hell or no engineers in hell. Because as soon as there was, an engineer would use the heat differential to build a heat engine and setup air conditioning.

Great Form Water Spirit/Elemental to power the Hover-Dam.
Great Form Air Spirit/Elemental to power a complete Farm of Wind-Turbines.
Great Form Fire Spirit/Elemental to power a Steam-Engine . .

You missed the hidden tongue-in-cheek tags around my post.