Are you sure there's still a +1 or +2 IP bonus for going Hot VR? And that the VCR doesn't over-ride that, anyway?

Alright, I haven't bought a SR4 book since like Unwired, but I got the PDF of this one. I just had to read it, even if I never use it.

The gear chapter is amazing. (I haven't looked at the others: I'm a sam and flip straight to the shiny.) I have not laughed this hard and this pleasantly at an RPG book in some time. The Ares laser gun entry nearly made me fall off of my sofa.

My hero!

If you also included rules/mention of the in-universe reason why program carriers were removed, you will receive a gold star....

No, I am far, far away from deserving a gold star.

In general, I think that the book hits a lot of the right notes with me as a player who prefers the older style SR setting but finds the new rules more compelling. I didn't think that the cover art was brilliant, but I was very pleased at the content of it, and my friends who did not know older edition SR as well thought that I was strange for knowing who those characters were. Except the dwarf, no idea. In general it is something that I want to use, but numerous editing errors make it nigh-on unusable without extensive house-ruling or waiting for errata to come.

As I am sure has mentioned before, the lack of addressing the money scaling is harmful to it's immediate use, in spite of some archetypes being built on considerably higher =Y= totals than SR4A standard, so I am guessing the intent is there for BP to Spacebucks ratio to be different, but it is difficult to extrapolate the intended ratio. Lack of Edge attributes on the archetypes is a pain, but nobody uses those anyway and I just assume that after 20 years it is now in a design document somewhere that sample characters can't follow the rules, for consistency's sake.

I enjoyed the magic chapter, and the changes to hermetics and shaman did more to bring me back into the mindset of older edition magic than any number of other changes could, so kudos on that. Also solves some problems with 4th edition Magicians being super-duper spirit machines with a million charisma and all the bound spirits, as a side benefit.

CanRay, I very much enjoyed your work on the Matrix section. It feels very much more like something that I identify with, and is recognizable, while remaining relatively streamlined for play. Condensing numbers is a very good thing, and the programming on the fly fits nicely with making it desirable to be a smart decker rather than simply having skills and a stable of programs and being smart as a brick. There are a couple of points within the chapter that could be clearer, however.
1) Programming on the fly mentions that you can only improvise one utility of each type per run. Is this meant to be one combat, one masking, etc. or one of each specific utility?
2) Programming on the fly is not mentioned as taking an action, so I assume that it functions like threadding in that regard, but explicitly without the opportunity to retry, however clarification on this would be appreciated.
3) Since programs cannot be re-improvised, is it possible to load them into Storage s othat you can use another program in the mean time, and then go back to using the improvised code? Or is it one-and-done. Becomes more important because of the seemingly artificial limitation on how often you may improvise.

As has been mentioned, utilities have no costs, and deck upgrades have no costs. Deck upgrading isn't essential to making the game playable, but the other is. Also, I applaud you for adding direct hacking with a program carrier, but it is only ever mentioned in the entry about it, and in certain node types. No gear section entry exists for it for telling us the essence or monetary cost of such a thing. Also, since programming on the fly exists, if there are intended to be any differences from standard programming rules, some mention of that might be good.

Speaking of cyberware and the matrix, the Decker archetype shows that there was, at least at some point, the intention of having multiple levels of datajacks, but the equipment section does not corroborate this.

Overall it is a product that I think has potential to be very good in its second printing (I assume that the first has already gone to press) but would greatly benefit from some quick clarifications and errata so that it becomes a playable product and not a neglected (and frankly not inexpensive) PDF curiosity that never makes it to a lot of tables, where it most certainly belongs.

All the best.

I like the cover, but I can empathize with those who have problems with it. (1) I wish they'd included Dodger's ports. (2) I wish they'd had the Dwarf Rigger be either Rabo (their Ork Rigger), or a female (the gal they had later in the series), or just made it Kham, instead of a Rigger at all. (3) I think the lighting effects from Sally's spell are a little overdone. Instead of being dramatic and bold, it just kind of washes color over the whole thing, making the entire cover feel kind of pastel and washed out (if that makes sense). I'm not super-ninja art expert, but I think if it was a little darker, punctuated by a single bright light source, it might look a little sharper.

See what I can do.
Specific Utility Program, not type.
Complex Action. I was sure I put that into the list of Matrix Actions... That's the problem when you're over-anal about back-up files, sometimes you save to the back-up by mistake.
One-and-done, the code starts falling apart as soon as it's loaded. Think of it as a buggy alpha version, well, actually, it's a buggy pre-alpha version that never gets to alpha to be exact.

Thus the joke: "Error: Program loaded, crash imminent."

This is also to show that it's designed specifically for the system you're currently in, not any other. Also, to prevent Munchkinism.
I remember specifically asking for it, and seeing it in there. Don't know what happened there, not my chapter, sorry. Not trying to pass the buck, but I did ask.

As for program costs, yeah, my bad. And, yes, I'm beating myself up over it.A lot of folks were asking where Kham was. I joked that he was in the van waiting.

Thanks for the clarifications CanRay. Yeah, the complex action for programming on the fly makes a fairly big difference. I turned up a couple of other questions, actually. Is there a particular reason that storage, and programs in storage, are measured in Mp by size, but Memory is unrelated to file size? I can't see how it would create problems, particularly, it just strikes me as a bit of an odd decision. Also, I realize that the "once per Matrix run" limitation in programming on the fly exists as a balance mechanic, but it seems kind of out of place and arbitrary. I realize that wholly unified and elegant computer mechanics are a bit beyond the scope of a P&P RPG but those things were nagging at me just a little bit.

Also, I'm guessing you didn't write the archetypes, but there are some further strangeness with the Decker that I noticed beyond the datajack, like the storage on her cyberdeck exceeding what is implied to be the possible expansion size mentioned in the Matrix chapter, unless the deck upgrade costs allow for expansion past that limit? Also program loadout on her, in addition to being limited and arguably questionable, is strange in that she can't actually make use of that Attack 6 utility on either computer she owns, which might be an issue.

Sounds like some of the same problems as the SR1 archetypes, so right on target there!

Haha, 'strue! Man, I don't know why I even looked at archetypes. I knew what was going to happen, but I couldn't stop myself!

This comes from my computer tech background. When a program is loaded into memory, the whole thing isn't loaded. If you want proof, look at games... It comes on a optical disc, but you don't have a disc's worth of space in RAM. (Um, well, some folks do. Actually, quite a few folks do today... But in the old days!). It loads the part of the program that knows how to access the data files in storage, and THAT is what is loaded into Memory.

The Rating of the Utility is the complexity of what to use, when, and where it's stored in the Storage. Thus, it's done by Rating rather than Mp. It's also why the I/O is different. I kept I/O and Bandwidth separate to keep the stats simple, and THAT ONE is arbitrary, I fully admit.What's happening is that the Decker is seeing how the code is set up in the network, and is writing a simple and cheap program JUST for that network (essentially taking advantage of the "handwriting" of the coder that built the security/network.). The network, just like the cyberdeck, however can recognize that this is being done and compensates for it heuristically. In the system, it thinks it's doing standard Error Correction (which is what happens most of the time) rather than it's being attacked, and set off an alarm.

The "Once Per Run" limitation is because the handwriting is now gone, and the Decker's tricks for that wouldn't work any longer until the system runs a bit longer and more errors creep in due to more "error correction" that makes holes once more. I didn't feel the need to write this out in the chapter (I was running out of wordspace, and page count mattered in this project), so I didn't add it in, but did have a reason in my head for it.

As I've always said (and got marks for in College), "It's not so much a miracle what computers can do, it's a miracle that computers work in the first place."

Oh, and before people call me on the Heuristic Error Correction not having "handwriting" like a hand coder... Who wrote the HEC? That's right, a person, who would have "handwriting." ... OK, that sounded a lot more aggressive than I intended it to be, sorry.

I proofed the hell out of the first, oh, 140 pages or so of this book. I ddin't do any archetype stats (I'm useless at proofing stats), though I did clean up the fluff in that chapter, and just plain didn't have time to proof anything past the archetypes (my life has been more interesting lately, in a Chinese curse sort of way, than I'd like to believe).

What editing errors do you refer to, so I can tell whether or not I should take the blame?

Okay, I can buy those reasons, CanRay. I didn't really have an issue with the Memory vs storage thing other than the fact that one was a granular thing and one was abstracted, but I think that is just my weird compulsive need for symmetry. (That need does indeed extend toward trying to bridge the divide between memory and storage as much as possible! )

Patrick, as for editing errors, I did not note any particularly as I was going through the first part of the book that you would have proofed. I was reading that part very late at night so I probably would have missed more than I otherwise would, but nothing struck me as off. The editing problems I was talking about were largely things related to what I was talking about in my first post. Some of the archetypes are problematic, with more than a couple of them missing an entire stat. And the omission of any kind of guidelines for handling money during character creation was fairly glaring, especially since some of the archetypes are clearly built with more than 250,000 =Y=. CanRay's already taken probably more than his fair share of the blame for the misfiled matrix costs tables. So, really, mostly to do with the crunchy bits.

Hope life gets safely more boring for you.

You should have involved more proofreaders, I was only offered to proof pages 138-143 and pages 166-197, and without the other chapters it was difficult to catch missing things like deck upgrades and program costs.

In addition I've seen that not all my suggested proofs were used, even though some of them clearly should ( ÷ instead of / in two of the damage codes).

Lars

I don't think the "you" part is quite fair. It's not like Patrick's the guy in charge of all proofing or something.

Personally, the biggest errors/issues I've got with it are that a few archetypes are outright missing an Edge attribute, and what's already been mentioned (no modification to character creation/resources, to account for the old school costs but not the old school nuyen availability).

Other than those, though, I haven't spotted anything I remember.

Availability for bioware indicates that it was easier to get when it was cutting edge than it is now, nearly 25 game-years later.

The old availability ratings and prices (from SR1, Street Samurai Catalogue, Shadowtech and other books) was used as refrences, at least in proofing. Somtimes that could lead to availability rating that were very different from the 207X ratings, so some things will be cheaper, more expensive, easier to get hold off, or more difficult to get hold off. But it should all try to simulate how the 2050 setting worked.

Lars

Nope, you are right. Patrick is just a poor proofreader like me


I would have loved to check the archetypes, it's the kind of proofing I do best

Lars

Well, I had a boatload of proof changes. In excess of 20 pages of them. (Don't get too excited; these things take up a lot of room, so there are sometimes only three or four on a page, though the average per page for me is about eight). Mostly typos, but a couple of canon errors here and there. We'll call it 150 since I don't feel like actually counting.

I can count on the fingers of one hand the ones that were not approved and applied, and those were stylistic things that I can, in fact, understand even if I don't think they're correct. So I won a hell of a lot more than I lost on this book. I'm sorry to hear that you didn't have the same kind of luck, Lars.

Quick question from anyone who has gotten through this book or at least skimmed the relevant stuff:

What SR4 books do I need to run a game set in 2050 under SR4A rules?

Does this book cover the core rulebooks (Unwired, Augmentation, etc?) Obviously and setting stuff in 2072 is not required (but I have old books for the fluff kind of info).

The availability of the Suprathyroid in the new book makes much more sense than the one in the SR4A book. I mean, come on! 20F availability? What the frak for?

As an explanation, in 2050 it is possible that regulatory laws and restrictions had not yet been written for the new biotechnology, resulting in a time period where it was cheaper and easier to get before regulations set in.



-k

It also meant quality control wasn't as good, either.

There's a bit in the middle of the Life in 2050 part that addresses this a little, I think. Don't remember where exactly.

I'm not talking about the VCR side of things ...



... that's more what I was thinking. If I was GMing and you asked me for 6 IP rigging, I'd probably say something like "the page referred to in the VCR description doesn't say you get extra IP, it says you take Physical damage when you're rigging." That said, it's an RPG, so the rules are automatically malleable. Unless you're playing FATAL.

What is this "The Clutch of Dragons" and why can I not find anything about a book that supposedly has a similar release date?

Might I humbly suggest, then, that you develop the habit of doing a last=minute "file compare" among all versions you have, before submitting one as final? You'd save yourself a whole lot of heartache and headache.

An upcoming sourcebook / campaign setting, iirc. Out this summer (at least to my knowledge), topic should be self explanatory

To me it says someone copied/pasted the tables from SR2 and didn't bother to do any more than that.

On this note, if you want to be super-sure, I can recommend an application called "Beyond Compare". We use it at my work all the time, pretty simple to use.

I can assure you they were not copy/pasted from SR2.

Mainly Shadowtech was used for references, but they were not a direct copy/paste.

I wish it could have been just copy-pasta from SR2. Or Shadowtech. Or both. Instead, it was a lot of weighing options after flipping back and forth between SR1, SR2, and SR4 PDFs on a single screen. So everybody go buy a lot of copies so I can get a second monitor and make my life easier. =i)

Seriously, copying and pasting and then charging for it is really unprofessional. Aside from the part where it's a breach of the "original and unique" part of the contract, it's just downright rude to the original author to copy their work and claim it's your own. I know that if someone copied my work and submitted it I'd be quite irritated.

Current quick fix, better things on the way.

You're a real trooper, CanRay.

May the Gaming Gods show mercy upon your benighted soul, and grant you a real live campaign to join before the Awakening happens IRL. (Hey, that still gives them, what, five months? It could happen!!)

Has anyone figured out how much cash a PC should hav available to him at Chargen? 250K does not go far Ware/rigger/decker gear at Chargen, he comes out much weaker then a starting Mage.. But 500k+ seems to much for the player.

There's a their/there error in the Matrix chapter D:>

My deckers and riggers and often sams started with 1 million, heh. But I haven't gotten that far in the PDF yet.

Having a hard time figuring out if that Ratingx200 is trying to refer to program costs or a Program Carrier, which seems an odd thing to have ratings on since you are already subbing your willpower in for the stats.

Naga-nuyen, I am betting from the response on that page that there isn't going to be an official clarification on the money issue, because JHardy seemed fairly dismissive of the idea of it even being an issue. Which is extremely disappointing, and the defense that archetypes aren't meant to be starting characters seems fairly off, considering that the very chapter that they are in specifically states that these are entry-level characters. So, I wouldn't get my hopes up, and would just find a BP multiplier for money that seems right. It's never going to work out the same as older editions because essence mechanics right now are vastly different from essence/body index mechanics, so the power level of 1,000,000 nuyen or even half of that is significantly different under 4A rules.

Well, max in SR4A is 250k right? So maybe x4?

Bigity, I haven't done any math on it yet, but I will try to in the next day or two, but at a cursory look, I think 1,000,000 spacebucks put toward building a tricked out street samurai is going to take you significantly farther in 4A rules than under the older edition rules, so it's going to either cap out on available essence very early on and then have a ton of money left over for like five solid gold cars (Exaggeration. MAYBE.) or is going to fit a good bit more punch into it's impossibly augmented meatframe than an earlier edition Million Nuyen Sam could. I could be wrong about this, and if someone wants to do math on it before I get a chance to, I would be happy to be wrong.

Something I just though of to ask: Will there eventually be a Hero Labs module for 2050 characters?

Maybe this is just me, but looking through the matrix section it seems a complete mess.

No availabilities. A lot of the availabilities don't make sense (SR2's dice TN's and such worked a lot differently than SR4). This seems to lead to some extremely low avails for most things.

Not finding anything on the cyberdeck availability let alone the terminals and luggage. Or the upgrade costs.

The memory seems off. In my old SR1 book pulled off the shelf for the first time in a long while... Fuchi-4... ok changes in MCPC I an see... ditto hardening... but Memory 100, storage 500, and IO/Load of 20. With 100 memory you could easily keep 2 rating 5 programs loaded at once... with the mere memory 4 in 2050 though you're hard pressed to load even one.

I fail to see why the storage has been cut by a fifth while the amount of data stored in a Mp has stayed the same IIRC. (1Mp being like 3s of trideo which is roughly the same as it always was... given the changes in program size you'd think it'd be 5x larger since programs appear to be 5x smaller now).

I never saw a decker actually played until SR4 though... so don't know them that well and was really curious how well this would port. We always resorted to NPC deckers because of how often they'd end up being a lone wolf and non-team players while they did their thing under the old system.

If you read how he wrote Memory working now, it is the number of programs (not utiilizing the size of the program) that you can run at one time. Yes this is different from before, but it is simpler, more streamlined and frankly a better way to deal with it. As to the upgrade costs, this has been mentioned already, and the author of the chapter is working on it. To be perfectly honest, yes, it has flaws which have been noted already, but for the most part the Matrix chapter is well-written and more easily understood (unlike the way the Matrix stuff has been explained thus far across multiple editions).

No, it's the sum of program ratings you can run at once. A critical difference! All4BigGuns, You really should read the bits in question before wasting everyone's time and space by quoting a full post directly above then telling me I'm wrong. The example itself says rating 4 memory means it can load 2 rating 2 programs at once. or a rating 3 and a 1, or a rating 4 at once.

Memory 4 means I can run 1-4 programs at once with total rating of 4. Also I'm not certain this simplification actually helps... typically hacking programs were twice as big as common use programs.

Not only that, programs have different sizes in the original... (rating x3, rating x5, rating x8, rating x10... most hacking programs being x10... with common use programs being smaler). But with 100 memory... that's an awful lot of programs you can have loaded at once, completely different from this 'simplified' mechanic.

Not only that, but the memory amount is so small and granular and programs must be bought at a given rating! It's not like spells where you learn them at up to a force then dial the force you want them at. This means that if you buy a rating 4 program, you can't run any other programs at the same time as it. With the original SR1 matrix, you could stuff that program into 40Mp with 60 to spare! That is a HUGE disparity.

Mordant; I was the one asking those questions on the main site. His responses were really off the mark. But it is what it is:( I will still support SR because I love the game and they have a awesome group of freelancers who have gone out of there way to help us when we needed clarification with there products.

I almost think I will have my players use cost and availability from SR4a to make the PC. But use the list on 2050 for what is available. That way I keep the balance for PC archetypes fairly even.

I had to take two radically different rulesystems and smash them together. I used a 10 pound sledgehammer.

And I fessed up to my mistakes and they're being corrected.

Nobody is blaming you CanRay Just maybe a wider proofreader pool was needed for the final draft(s).

This would work pretty well I'd imagine.

That's probably a fair cop, though the balance of 207X pricing seems to favor some things over 205X pricing. But at the same time I ran into a little bit of a facepalm moment when I realized that due to the interaction of cyberware/bioware and that some things (like cybereyes) have been edited to be lower tech for 2050, but some things (Looking at you synaptic accelerator) have not been, that anyone who is trying to build a good samurai, or really even anybody with a decent money supply using the SR2050 rules and prices is never going to buy Wired Reflexes unless they are doing it because they feel it is a flavor choice, because Alpha Wired 2s cost more in both money and essence than just straight up Synaptic 3. Since initiative rules and passes work completely differently in this edition than previously, there's no real way to revert that to the same distinctions, so not much point in trying, it just is a curiosity of the way the game works now.