Depends whether the rest of the rules makes up for the fuckup. Fortunatly, fixing this by saying "all wireless boni apply all the time, without being wireless" and reintroducing skinlink with it's stats from SR4 is easy.

It'd take a bit more work for my satisfaction, since I didn't like Sr4 that much anyway. Cheaper to just play Sr3 more.

SR3 comes with it's own heap of problems.

Yeah, but they are "currently owned" problems, and ones most people who still play it fixed a decade ago, lol.

SR3 at least avoids the massive world update that pulled Shadowrun out of cyberpunk.

Some are very hard to fix. But I agree, SR3 is the devil you know.

I'm sorry, but Shadowrun still fits into the cyberpunk genre. Perhaps not your definition of cyberpunk, but the generally accepted definition.

Ahh, yes. SR3, where I'd summon Force 12 great form spirits at Initiate Level 2, get one task, and then wear the damn spirit as power armour to crush my enemies. No, SR3 was juuuust fine.

Don't forget that the spirit stacks with your dikote'd heavy security armour and adds it's force to you whacking people with your dikote'd rifle's bayonet at +2 reach (either -2 TN for you or +2 TN for the enemy).

SR4 was cartoonishly adventurous, and rather unlike the nihilistic cesspit that cyberpunk typically thrives in. See JF Sebastian's "accelerated decrepitude" in Blade Runner.

You must play a different game than I do

Probably correct. I play SR3.

SR4 is a game where you're shot nearly to death and you're back on your feet in a couple days. Information is much more freely available. Gadgetry exists to solve most of your worldly cares.

It's a setting where a common pastime is an AR shooter where you run around the streets of Seattle and go 'bang bang' at other players.

SR3 is a game where if you run down the streets of Seattle going 'bang bang' you get shot and Lone Star shoves the corpse in a gutter because calling the meat wagon out to get you is too much paperwork.

Ah. That's where your misconceptions come from. Alright then, go on

Apparently you never read Augmentation.

SYL

SR4 is too.

If you run it that way.

But it isn't written that way. Shadowrun 4 isn't Cyberpunk. The Revolution happened. The Man won. The survivors sold out. The people looking to burn the whole thing down are now HVTs to be killed or captured by the independent contractors who've adopted the moniker of shadowrunners, rather than the heroes that the protagonists rally to the banner of.

What misconceptions?



You're right, I didn't. I stopped buying supplements after Street Magic.



Well you can't get away from certain details in the core system without drastically house-ruling.

The bottom-line is this: SR4 is a world of interconnection, and SR3 is a world of isolation. The backlash that everyone is feeling with regard to their wireless gear is the same sort of backlash I felt toward the rampant interconnectivity of the world at large.

I love this analysis.

We all tend to love words that reinforce our beliefs.

It doesn't change that my world is, within the rules very much cyberpunk, thank you very much.
But as this is neither the topic of this thread, nor helpful to the discussion, this is the last thing, I'll have to say on that particular issue.

Which is why you keep repeating the same thing over and over: that it's cyberpunk. It's been pointed out where it's diverged, but you haven't made any indication of how those divergences are still cyberpunk, or how you read them differently. If you don't want to talk about it, don't talk about it, but for chrissake don't just sit there and say "nuh-uh."

Is Johnny Mnemonic not cyberpunk, then?
What about The Matrix?

The simple fact is that I've had this discussion so many times with hardcore SR3 followers that I don't want to rehash it in a thread where it is not the topic.
If you're interested in my views, you're welcome to PM me. Until then: Yuh uh.

Both stories have a core theme of revolution against the oppressive, high tech Big Brother state by a trampled underclass living outside the established order, subverting the mechanisms used to oppress them. Both are very cyberpunk. But the protagonists both end up being disconnected from "the machine", which spurs their transition from pawns to radicals.

Now that's funny, because I heared the exact opposite argument a couple of times: SR3 was too cartoonish/superhero like (hello Ryan, hello superelves, hello nipples!), and SR4 took SR back to the neon-lit backstreets, console cowboy bars and drug-enhanced misadventures of the Sprawl.


You don't seem to understand the nature of cyberpunk very well. SR4 had the events of Neuromancer/Biochips happen - the first Singularity and the fracturing into small "Matrix gods" (called Paragons and AI in SR, and Loa in the Sprawl trilogy). As such, it is MORE cyberpunk than SR3 was, which emphathised the magical nature of the setting much more. Later, stuff was added, then crap happened, but from the outset SR4 was more cyberpunk than end-time SR3. Not as much as SR2 but hey.


You have been reading different books than I have. Well, concerning Johnny Mnemonic. The Matrix is as cyberpunk as Godzilla is hard SciFi.

And just to state it bluntly: brainhacks are a staple of cyberpunk and, as such, very cyberpunk, as are cyberware hacks. They are just a HORRIBLE thing to enforce in a role playing game system in the way they seem to be enforced in SR5.

Actually, they had cyberware hacking in Cyberpunk 2020. You had to hack a 'micronet' to do so, which made things very, very interesting. It only took an action, perhaps two, to do it. Rache Bartmoss's Guide to the Net was a lovely, lovely book.

And Cyberpunk 2020 had "The Menu" which I loved, as a mechanic. Simple test and bang, you had access to various nodes, as long as you had the right program.

According to someone at the Shadowrun Seminar at Nordcon last Saturday, hacking in SR5 will be done with about 3 dice rolls if i understood that correctly.

That someone was me, and the number of rolls was a very simplified example, not chiseled in stone.
I chose a low number to show the discrepancy between the number of rolls in SR4 and SR5.

Perhaps you should read the introduction in Augmentation? Because honestly: the dark and gritty cyberpunk world some saw in SR3 wasn´t there as well. SR3-Runners were no hooder, no cyberpunks (in the sense of revolutions and resistance), they were, just like the SR1 and SR2 runners corp-whores.

SYL

Cyberpunk never was about Revolution Against The Man. Spawl wasn't, New Rose and Johnny Mnemonic and Burning Chrome wasn't, and neither was Snow Crash.

Yes. But it is seen (for whatever reasons) by many people as that (probably because the protagonists are often independent and can and will choose their actions/allegiance and way of living and thinking. And that particular view was never really supported in SR1234 and 5, except for a minor entry for hooders. What was, is (and will be) supported is the freelancer / get-the-job-done-operative / troubleshooter / individualist / deniable asset,

aka corp whore.

CP2020 was much more in the resistance/revolution direction, and there are some elements like the "mage 2075 view" introduction in SR5 which tend to go into that direction again.

SYL

SR3 could get ridiculous, sure (though I admit I didn't get into the post-Comet stuff, which is where I assume a lot of ridiculousness came from). SR4 took away a lot of the grit and permanent consequences in the system, though.

My biggest issue with SR4 was that I didn't buy into all the reasoning behind the Wireless Matrix, or like the effect that it generally had on what I at the time considered Shadowrun-esque gameplay. It's a style thing. I thought it was too much too fast. Though I didn't really love a lot of the bleeding-edge tech that SR3 ran into really late in the product cycle.

As an RPGer, I'm not too big on making things hugely complicated, and by and large I find supplements tend to make games more complicated. You can see the trend with most game systems -- gameplay and general power balance inevitably get wrecked by supplements and then a new edition comes out and you start over.



I really liked it when the very far fringes of technology brushed against the singularity concept, but didn't drag the whole game over that threshold. Deus and Megaera were neat concepts to play with, because in-universe they were incredibly poorly understood. Taxi-driver AIs make me make frowny faces, though.



I actually haven't read Mnemonic, but I saw the terrible (yet somehow kind of awesome) movie. I don't actually like to read Gibson novels, but that's more about his writing style than his ideas. I read Neuromancer and Idoru and Pattern Recognition, but that was about all I could take.

I actually see The Matrix (the first movie, not the following trainwrecks) as a decent sci-fi story, but not really cyberpunk. You could read in plenty of new-wave sci-fi themes, though, since you've got a group of dissidents actively trying to tear down the shared common reality enjoyed by everyone. That brushes against some Philip K. Dick ideas, but the writing was kind of clunky.



Brainhacks and 'warehacks are okay as a plot device, but I can't imagine it'd be very fun to incorporate them as a commonly-faced threat in a game.

I actually had a discussion with someone about the -punk, and what that meant. To them, it was the 'revolution' mindset, and I mentioned I knew a number of actual punks who don't have that kind of mindset. Then I showed the actual punk culture. Yes, there is a revolution aspect to it, but that's just a fragment of the whole. Cyberpunk, as I understand it, is the effect of technology on a person, and on culture / society. The isolation viewpoint is a good example, but it isn't the only example - it can be played a number of ways, too. People more interested in the media and in gadgets than on each other, or the disenfranchised being left to rot while the higher ups eat gold (figuratively or literally), or the disconnect between the social 'norm' and those who live on the fringe.

Yes, there's 'interconnectivity', but what is the price? As a kid, I knew damn near everyone on my block. These days? I know the name of my neighbour's kid because she yells it once or twice a day - but for the life of me, I don't actually know anyone in my neighbourhood. There's your disconnect right there.

That's cyberpunk.

There's a scene in Blade Runner where Deckard is sitting on a stoop eating noodles, and the streets are packed and dark and dirty and everyone is walking, but no one is talking to each other.

My OCD tends to make me collect all the books as they come out, but one thing I'm going to disagree on is the 'power balance' thing. I have very little interest in mechanical 'balance'. I want the mechanics to fit the setting - any means of trying to 'balance' this that isn't supported by the setting gets my vote down. Disparity happens, and as long as the GM is capable of giving everyone their chance to stand out, and makes the game engaging, that's where balance comes in.



The Matrix is actually a very decent cyberpunk film, funny enough. It pushes almost into 'post-cyberpunk', though I'm not too certain what that phrase means yet.



I'm gearing up for this in my Shadowrun campaign... just waiting for the right time to pull the trigger.

... and neither of you have read Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep, or you wouldn't mention Dick here. Also, Blade Runner is dark, post-apocalyptic SciFi. Where people have outersolar colonies and space battles on a regular basis. Not Cyberpunk, you know. For cyberpunk, the primary go-to is Gibson's Sprawl and Bridge trilogies (and associated shorts). And frankly, there is no revolution to be had there, anywhere. It is all about selling out - implants, skills, the singularity, in effect it is all about selling out. Seen like this, Shadowrun is more "true" Cyberpunk than CP2020/CP3/CP2070, though that too is far more about selling out than about revolution, except for the abomination that is Cybergeneration.


Uhm. No. No, it isn't. It is as cyberpunk as Terminator, Dredd, Alien, or Avatar.

The "punk" of cyberpunk relates to what a bunch of writers who only experienced life in North American universities and a bit of the 1960 counter-culture actually understood of the 1980 punk movement when they coined or endorsed the designation. The punk movement itself was not actually very sure of what it represented.

I mentioned Philip K. Dick because The Matrix touches on some of the overarching themes of his writing. Not well, mind you, but it does. At the core of a lot of Dick's work is the question "what is real?"

DADES itself isn't really all that cyberpunk, but it definitely influenced cyberpunk. Blade Runner is a neo-noir detective story in a thematically (somewhat) cyberpunk setting.

Of course cyberpunk is pretty damn hard to qualify anyway, because so little of it was actually ever written. As a literary phenomenon, it's virtually nonexistent. Most of what we do with cyberpunk comes in at oblique angles and shoots off on some tangent.

This is why I like to settle on core concepts such as social division, social isolation, balkanization (of several sorts), and technocracy.

Looking up 'Cyberpunk' for definitions, I'd say Matrix counts. Dredd might actually count too.

I also looked up to see if Matrix was classified as Cyberpunk before I posted.
According to the collective consciousness, it is.

Really, the question of whether or not it is cyberpunk is somewhat irrelevant.

What Shadowrun 4 wasn't, was Shadowrun.

It was something else entirely.

Yeah I woldn't have much of a problem with hacked cyber if it was done differently, like it just could be hacked. I'd come up with some fluff excuse for why it couldn't be done remotely so security hacker teams wouldn'
t just shut everyone down. I'd still prefer cyber not hackable, gear like contacts can be hacked. The current set up is if you wear the idiot suit you get a bonus but will get hacked from orbit, which basically means assuming no house rules no one goes wireless making the plan to make deckers combat hackers of cyber a fail.

Awakened World, Cybernetics, Magic, Immortal Elves, Dragons, Megacorporations, Bioware, Shadowrunners, The Matrix, Astral Space.

I'm apparently missing something?
See, the thing is, the setting evolves. As the setting moves forward, things advance, technology advances, magic advances, civilization advances. This is a GOOD THING. I'd hate to think that 20+ years pass by in-setting, and everything looks and feels the same as it did 20 years prior.

The 1960s vs the 1980s. The 1980s vs the 2000s.
2070 should not look like 2050. The technology should advance, magic should advance, and culture should advance. The 'new' Matrix
of fourth edition was a good start. The entire idea of connectivity was cool, and made perfect sense to me, considering what I see around me now. 5th edition, with the appearance of GOD, and wiring everything into the matrix? Makes perfect sense, this is something that's happening now, and I like that it's being reflected in Shadowrun.

See, the thing is, for cyberpunk to be relevant, it needs to reflect some of the fears of the modern age. That's part of what the genre is about - it's what the science fiction genre is about. It goes beyond 'hey, this is cool', and looks at how to reflect the modern age, with a degree of detachment, and Shadowrun's been doing that for over 25 years now. It had the whiz-bang of the 80s, then it started looking at the rise of the internet, then wireless internet, then it looked at the social network, and it's moving into the next phase. And as our technology evolves, in military, medicine, and beyond, the technology of Shadowrun is going to reflect that. As some of the social attitudes of our time evolve, Shadowrun's is going to evolve too.

This is a good thing. It means I won't look at the game in another 20 years, and go 'it was fun, but man, this thing's dated'. There's a number of 'futuristic' RPGs I look at, and I can't play them, because the disconnect between 'what they think the future is like' is behind the technology of the present, and the social view of the futuristic setting is unrealistic because it doesn't take into account how technology forces us to evolve, socially.

So, guess what? I like the Shadowrun of 4th edition. I am looking forward to the Shadowrun of 5th edition. And I hope, when 6th edition comes out, it takes into account how much further we've evolved as a society, and how our technology and understanding of the world has evolved. As long as Shadowrun keeps relevant, it'll probably remain one of my favourite games.

Yep. /shrug

The problem is, it should evolve from game lore, NOT real world.

I LIKED the SR123 game world (well, the good very much outweighed the bad, especially in SR2). I do not like the SR4 game world, where most of the metaplot has gone, etc. However, that's different than not liking the foundation of the game world changing - because of real life. I don't care that cell phones are tiny and carry more processing power than the first moon landing.

I don't want a game that's social commentary on whatever the cause of the month is. I want the game I started wtih. Updates are fine, rewriting is not.

I'll give SR5 a shot because they seem to want to bring back some of the flavor from earlier editions - deckers, differences in practitioners, riggers. But I'm not interested in how a writer thinks SR would look like if it was written in 2013 instead of 1980.

Doesn't mean I'm right and it's wrong, but it damn well doesn't make them right and me wrong either.

That statement makes all the difference - and on that account, you're right.
However, good science fiction IS a social commentary on the 'cause of the month' - or, more like a touchstone on society as it stands in the present. Shadowrun evolving is what makes it good science fiction - and to me - a game worth playing, because it remains, as I said, relevant.

I can accept that not everyone goes for that - but it is one of Shadowrun's strengths. It also means as younger generations come in, they'll look at the game and actually recognize it as relevant to them, too.

Traditionally, the Punk movement has been more commonly defined not by what it represented, but rather what it was against. Sort of a perpetual counter-culture, even when attempts were made to acculturate and include it in the culture. Artistic grades of "ugliness" as a counter to popular standards of beauty (shaved heads, extreme make up and hairstyles, etc.); loud, chaotic cacophony as a counter to the harmony and stricture of popular, modern music. Ironically, the lengths of artistry that "punk" can go to may, on occasion, put culture to shame.

If you wanted to add Cyber to that, the style elements would typically fall squarely in the "pink mohawk" purview (anomalous piercings, psychadelic-color-change-hair, reverse-joint cyberlegs, etc.). The social aspect would include the Anti-Corp protester as much as the Anarchist railing against a sell-out government that's auctioned off all but a handful of rights to the highest bidders. The social side... that's where the Trenchcoats and Mirror Shades would find succor, always against falling into a neat little groove, whether for love of profit or desire to see the system screw itself over.

Punk has evolved over time, and traditional definitions might not do it justice anymore, just as Cyberpunk as a genre may have experienced a fair amount of cultural drift. While we're arguing about certain elements of Shadowrun, it's not exactly conducive to become pedantic about exactly how pure a work has to be to count as "Punk" and/or "Cyberpunk." Remember our Roots, but don't see that as the end of it all. Even for a selfish, over-chromed, glorified-barely-bio-gun-turret with social issues, there's plenty of encouragement to "stick it to the man," even if "the man" is paying also the one paying you.

Now, back on topic, Matrix bonuses (or boni, if you're a traditionalist-Greco-Roman linguist /hug ),

It's already been stated, as long as there's a good reason for why it's there, most people won't complain. From the sounds of it, the reasoning has been poorly presented and/or poorly abstracted. I can guarantee, a month after the "wireless only" protocol, I'll have an Anarchist decker/hacker pumping out firmware updates, at discount for runners, to bypass the most ridiculous ones (i.e. chemseal suits, cyberware, bioware). I'll have all my homework done to explain why I'm able to reprogram/disarm the stupidity, and maybe even sell through secure contacts to not-dumb corpsec, obviously for a mark-up.

- Processor packs, to handle any extraneous calculations (built from spare commlink parts and scrap armor).
- DNI-interface drivers for cyberwear to communicate with each other without wireless signals (might need to be custom-fit, but you can talk to your hacker/medtech to tailor it).
- Custom sensors. Link to your PAN for faster, more reliable data in your immediate area, without the greater wireless vulnerability. Anemometers, heat sensors, etc., custom designed to interface with processor packs and your own commlink/PAN. Wired connection as a default, can be switched through a hard-switch (not a free action). Subject to "gear limits" overloading your PAN, weight, etc.
- Custom sensors available as "DeckUps," or deck upgrades. This would allow a decker to provide all of the "wireless bonuses" to his team without exposing them excessively to lethal doses of stupid.

Let me know if anybody needs an in-game sweatshop job, cares to support their local chapter of the Anarchist Black Crescent, or wants to "stick it to the man." All proceeds go towards corp-removed medical services, progressive social programs in poor areas, and "sticking it to the man."

But most scfi authors don't change the story half-way through. They grow existing stuff.

I guess the most blatent example of how SR has done this wrong is decking. It was changed to 'hacking' and commlinks, because that sounds newer I guess? They are changing that back while keeping the wireless in SR5, and that is what SR4 should have done. Wifi makes sense (though not with the pitiful encryption/security in SR4) - but Crash 2.0 was just a plot device to make an excuse to add commlinks, and that wasn't necessary IMO. SR was already getting into wireless, why not just evolve that instead of wiping the matrix out and remaking it to change a couple of in-game terms?

The forcing of wireless into components that don't need it or make sense to have it rubs me the wrong way for SR5 too. Having your tacnet or communication devices open makes sense. Trying to say that a smartlink benefits from weather updates is awful.

I don't see the need to have deckers a unique role in combat situations outside of decking skills though, some people might. To me, it's like giving a mage in AD&D close combat skills. What they do already is enough.

*shrug*

ALL of System Failure was atrocious, and though I don't really support Retcons... a Retcon of that entire book would be wholeheartedly supported. It was just Fanpro trying to copy everything World of Darkness did as it slowly choked the life out of Shadowrun. To this day I'm not sure if I'm disappointed that Catalyst saved the 4th edition incarnation of Shadowrun or glad that they kept the Shadowrun RPG going. Either way I'm glad for the direction with 5th edition which is returning and re-emphasizing the things that made "Shadowrun" what it is.

No, you won´t. Because whatever you do, it won´t matter, it must be connected to the matrix (except for house rules of course, that would be the only way).

SYL