So, talking with another Shadowrun player, we discussed 'Street Samurai', and why this is a thing. Really, you'd think "Ronin" would make more sense, considering the connotations of the word "samurai".

A samurai is a member of the noble (warrior) caste, rather than the noble (courtier) caste, merchant caste, farmer caste, untouchable caste, or entertainer caste, and serves a lord (daimyo). A member of the samurai caste without a lord is a ronin, and can be a ronin because he was disgraced, his clan was destroyed, his lord was slain, or because he is acting covertly in service to his lord.

That being said, I'm curious why 'street samurai' was used for Shadowrun, and that aside, I'm curious how the term caught on in-setting as well.

Because in the 80s we loved Japan, but we didn't always go to great lengths to understand the history/culture.

We just though it was boss, so ka?

I can accept that explanation to some extent. Though I'm wondering where the reference came from. I'd seen 'ronin' in cyberpunk before, so I'm curious if it was a need to avoid that specific term, or what?

That being said, I wonder how it cropped up in-setting.

1st edition especially pushed the 'code' aspect of street sams, bushido of the streets etc

This is complete speculation here but perhaps most ronin couldn’t actually afford all of the whiz toys needed to a modern cyber street fighter so they actually started off with a “lord” of sorts, whoever backed them with the toys. With this in mind the Samurai title is more appropriate, and when they broke away from their lords (for what ever reason) hey didn’t change their titles.

Again pure speculation, I don’t tend to read splat too much. But I love Shadowrun.

I believe it comes from Gibson's novels (Johny Mnemonic, Neuromancer, Mona Lisa Overdrive...). who are the main inspiration for the Cyberpunk in SR. Molly Million / Shally Shears is refered to as a street samurai at some points in the trilogy. Also as a 'razor girl' so that too comes from there.

Why Gibson used the Samurai motif? Ask him. I didn't even read the entire trilogy and didn't remember the samurai bit until I read the wiki entry. And why Street Samurai instead of Street Ronin? Street Samurai is a better alliteration (both with S and R instead of just R) so it sounds much better. Seriously, I bet this wy the use of Samurai over Ronin. It's not like Ronin is a particularly obscure word or uncool word.

This here is the main reason, I'd say...



coupled with this...



and this...






These days, the name is only tradition. Though, the code part is still there to some extent.

Bye
Thanee

I never really saw it in first edition - street samurai then were basically a bunch of cybered thugs who, judging by the character intros, thought that threatening the Johnson was the height of professionalism. Although a lot of the early archetypes were alternately threatening or condenscending - I kind of like that outlaw, maverick feel to them, to tell the truth. SR3 and SR4 were where they started giving the street samurai a code of honor, and some snippets of Japanese culture in their knowledge skills.

Personally, I think professionalism should be common among heavily augmented people. Either they were loyal and stable enough to get picked for heavy augmentation by a former employer, or they survived as a freelancer long enough to augment themselves piecemeal into a killing machine. On the other hand, that only means they were stable and professional at one point in time. The stress of their job and successive augmentations could certainly make some of them unstable.

Thank you all for the speculation and insight. This gives me food for thought, and I may need to consider this a bit more for my campaign. Much appreciated!

Because then you can describe a street sammy with prose that can be sung to the tune of "Sweet Caroline."

That's terrible Aaron. "Streeeeet Samurai, dun dun dun ..." and now it's in my head.

Because "Road Warrior" was already taken.

~Umi

It's a Gibson reference, pure and simple. Molly was called a Street Samurai, and the title stuck. The first Shadowrun street samurai, Ghost, had a strict code of honor that he followed, which he said was the difference between a street sam and a cybered thug.

I hate you so much right now...

Argent, Hatchetman, Ghost-who-walks and the Ork Samurai Archetype beg to differ. But it never was a "class" feature in Shadowrun, mainly because Shadowrun never had straightjacketed character concepts like D&D.

Way of the Samurai and Runners Companion reintroduced Bushido code and the "street samurai attitude" as qualites, by the way.

All those little bios are pretty bad though really, I wouldn't single out the street sam one. I mean, it's not like there isn't a looooong history of the sample characters being awful in just about every way or anything.

But touching on your second point, I really want to see how the CP game in development deals with the cyber-psychosis stuff, if at all.

Would you have preferred "Sweet Child Of Mine"?

She's got a smile, that it seems to me;
Reminds me of ice cold memories;
Where every night was as grey as Seattle skies....

I guess that it is fortunate that I cannot hear either of those songs in my head right now.

That. Is. Epic.

Plus, the term (in game, without giving Gibson the due credit), is really just another bit of slang that street thugs would obviously throw around with all of the Japanese corp influence the old editions had. Probably first coined by an Elven Hip Hop artist with lyrics like "Cook's in the kitchen, biggest slice of the pie, swingin my sword like a Street Samurai." Bam, new phrase in the barrens omae!

Yep.

Shdaowrun began life as the pairing of Neuromancer and D&D. Nearly everything from 1st Ed that was "cyberpunk" was ported directly from the Sprawl series, right down to the name "The Sprawl" for Seattle. I'm kinda surprised they didn't just go all out and set it in BAMA, lol.


But 1st Edition was a giant pile of 80s awefulawesome. The Rocker Archetype should explain anything and everything you need to know. A singer/musician who happens to be a covert street operative in his spare time to make extra cash.

Don't get me wrong. My time with Shadowrun goes all the way back to those lovely halcyon days when it was possible for three Shadowrunners to ride their motorcycles up to a terminal in a back alley, steal some data, throw a fireball at the corpsec who showed up, and ride off into the night on motorcycles, laughing as they go. But it was a ridiculous mess. The game didn't even really find its groove until about halfway through 2nd Edition, when they finally started to explore the idea of "Just what would high tech future security look like, and what kinds of people would actually be doing this?"

And Charon probably hit the nail on the head with "Street Samurai" as an alliteration. Gibson was all about language usage. So despite the fact that the samurai term really isn't a great analog, it sounds better than Street Ronin.

Frankly, I prefer a game with a bit of the 1st edition flavor. I like having rockers around. I like the idea of motorcycles and alleys. 1st edition wasn't assuming a professional type secret identity kind of situation.

If I wanted a full blown tactical simulation game, I would go play one.

That being said, you need balance, you have to fear 'The Man', but at the same time, if it's too scary to let your face be seen, then that's no fun either. It's a part of my problem with SR4. With the rules that are in place, it should be impossible to pull off a shadowrun. RFID tags, astral security, DNA, ritual magic, nano-drones, cyberware detectors, etc.

Street Ronin alliterates better with ShadowRun. Identicle syllable count though it's 1-2 and 2-1 rather than identicle for the matched alliterated letters.

Whoah oh oh oooh, Street Saaaamuraiaaai! Oooooo oo oo! Oh, oh oh oh, Street Samuraieeai!

To be fair, I won't touch SR4 because it lost touch with what Shadowrun was always about. It wasn't entirely SR4's fault. SR3 started show signs of going off the rails near the end and the guys at Catalyst just decided to run the throttle wide open instead of hitting the brakes.

Ultimately, there are different play styles and the goal is to have fun. So whatever version of the game you like to play, more power to you. In our most recent campaign, I decided to eliminate all the fantasy elements and rewrote the whole "And So it Came to Pass" story for the players to see if the game works just as a cyberpunk setting.

But there's no arguing that 1st Edition wasn't a "sillier" game than what Shadowrun slowly evolved into, and much less believable, even within the confines of its own established parameters.

But it was still fun.

One of the things that happened with me, as far back as SR1, was a disconnect between what the game seemed to say was possible, and what was actually possible. I saw no reason, as a GM, not to have cameras inside elevators, recording who used them, or motion detectors inside vents (mostly for dealing with vermin), and as my knowledge of technology (and the world's ability to use technology) advanced, I started seeing things like facial recognition software and the like.

So a part of me, early on, went, "How the hell do Shadowrunners keep anonymous?" and the answer was, "With a lot of work."

It's one reason I made Koryo. This was a character who believed that being spotted was the greatest sin. That having anyone notice you on a run was tantamount to failure, regardless of the outcome of the run itself. I bent over backwards to get the proper contacts, spells, and techniques so that he/she could ghost through a run without anyone noticing him/her. It is hard work, but when the run goes off without a hitch, I feel a special sense of pride.

I had to hit that special balance for running the game though - tailor the adventures and runs to the PC's skillsets. The PCs don't tend to do 'stealth runs', because they have no means to deal with the requirements of a proper 'stealth run'. Funny enough, the most recent run required kidnapping a rockstar, and to do that, they did the following:

1) Get a car that looks like the one the limo agency uses.
2) Get a second car and have it cause a traffic jam in front of the limo heading to the target.
2a) Have the technomancer block the 'call' going out from the jammed limo, indicating there will be a delay. Send a reply to the limo that says the call has been received.
3) Drive the fake limo up to the entrance, and get the target in.
3a) Stun bolt the bodyguard, and drive off, saying that the bodyguard is being attacked, and the target is being brought to a safe house.
3b) Really make those diplomacy rolls.
4) Copy the signature of the proper limo to that of the fake limo, for when being chased by security.
4a) Swap signature with actual limo, and 'vanish'.
5) Jam car departs, and security shows up at actual limo.

It went... reasonably well, actually. The players put a lot of work into this, and they got all their rolls off. I thought it was a well-thought out heist job.

Because 80s.

Well, it is nearly impossible to be perfectly clean, but it's not that hard to make those runs in a way that is credible enough for the purpose of the stories we tell. .

The most important thing to me is just wear masks, nanopaste, magical illusion etc. during the most brazenly illegal activities. After that, suspension of disbelief comes easily to me.

Just as the setting throws you tons of obstacles, it hands you tons of Tools that real criminals do not have.

For example, in real life, if you kill a political figure, the manhunt will be intense and you will have nowhere to hide. In SR, you have the Barrens! In real life, the hunt will not let up. In SR someone (or something) will have done something even more horrible than what you did by the end of the week and take the heat of you. In a world with Alamos 20K and Sirrurg, just how homicidal are you if you are Public Enemy Number One?!

In real life, it takes forever for a hacker to do his thing. If he doesn't find a careless human error in the required time window, it might even be impossible. In SR, it takes seconds.

In real life, you get shot once, you are done. Therefore, a shootout is usually a doomed proposition. In SR, it means you have hit midsession! The Advanced medecine and outright magical Healing makes this more palatable, but the bottom line is combat in SR operates at a degree of realism between Heat and Die Hard V which means until the entire SWAT team is on your ass you are still in good shape even when the lead start flying.

In real life, a perfect fake is hard. In SR, it's affordable and part of your toolkit.

Finally, there are so many runners that it is a setting established fact that as long as you don't go out of your way to destroy property and be an a$$, most corp are not going to pursue runners because there are no profit in it.

So you don't have to be perfect, you just have to be in and out in a reasonable time frame, have a safehouse and not be an idiot.

Road Ronin.

Street has better imagery though.

Well, if a PC is going to insist on describing himself as a 'Sahdowrun Street Ronin', you have a solid point.

It also has much better alliteration though since the syllables that are stress have a much closer sound.

Dbl pst.

I understand that in an attempt to use the same starting consanant, Road Ronin and Street Samurai are discussed. Why not just Street Ronin? I think it sounds better than either.

Come on, Road Ronin was a joke. It evokes images of the Road Runner.

meep meep

RoboRonin came in a close second I suspect and I am so glad it didn't make first.

IIRememberC Street Samurai was always about THE or at least a Code to discern Muscle from Pros then becomming a trend (as each street muscle thought of himself as the real deal) thus loosing its "ring". Beeing called a "Samurai" by someone else suddenly ment something.

Every Street Sam has a lord; his name is Mr. Johnson.

We could rename them to Road Ronin

Razor Gorilla
Urban Knife
Metal Monster

How about Razor Ramon? No wait...

Hmmm. As some one who played SR1 from day one, I guess I never saw it as silly. Since Rifts was immensely popular back then, along with a few other much sillier games I saw Shadowrun as a very serious game, that was unlike others.


But that said, Street Ronin doesn't flow off of the tongue like Street Samurai.

Street Samurai
Street Shaman
Road Ronin
Metal Monster


Where's Stan Lee when you need him?

Making money hand over fist with films and now TV shows.

I want you to know this is all your fault.

She's got a smile that it seems to me
Remind me of ice cold memories
When every night was as gray as Seattle skies

Now and then when I see our Face
She takes me away to the Johnson's place
and if I stare too long
our Mage will probably make me die

Whooooaaaaa Street Samurai
Whoa oh oh oh Street Samurai

She's got cybereyes of the greyest skies
beneath Seattle's rain
I'd hate to look into those eyes and see their essence drain

Dunkelzahn's death reminds me of an astral rift
from which I would hide
and wait for the mana bolts and lead rain
to quietly pass me by

Whooooaaaa Street Samurai
Whoa oh oh oh Street Samurai
Woo oooh oooh ooh Shadowrun of mine
Ooooohhhhh Street Samurai

(Synthlink solo)

Aries is go, Aries is go now
Renraku oh, ohhh
Renraku oh now
HMHVV ohh, (Ghoul child) HMHVV whoa now
Aztlan oh, (blood magic) Aztlan whoa now
Aye aye aye aye where do we go now? Where's the saaaAAAaafehouse now?
Where do we go, Where do we go now?
Street Samurai
Street SaaaaAAAAaaaaAAAAaaaamurai....

Now which one of you chummers has the singing voice to make this cover happen?

Gilette Girl has better alliteration than Razor Girl.

However, Razor Girl has a cooler sound to it...

But Gilette makes Razors and shaving cream so it's great.

Touche...