Just thought the folks here would appreciate this.

Awesome.

Looks more like the precursor to the display headset and the image link

...It's Snow Crash...In real life...

...Kickass...

Nice. Time to get me one for snowboarding, and write a little script that draws targeting boxes around anyone on the hill below me.

I figure by the time we get to 2050, we'll have vaulted over the Shadowrun level of technology in a big way.

Don't get too cocky. We still have the Crash to get through.

Yeah, a lot of the really cheesy references in the SR history kind of annoy me. My least favorite aspect of SR is the history. Other games have airtight histories that are all intuitive while still giving surprises and not NEAR as many Deux Ex Machinas as the Shadowrun timeline has.

But yeah, about this first-gen SL. All they have to do now is put cameras on guns and a gyro somewhere on the soldier for angle measurement, then write the VERY small amount of software needed for bullet trajectories, and we'll have Smartgoggles.

And do you want to know why? Because it's all real (or "real" myths, depending on your worldview). WW had to spend a few months in a library. FASA had to pull 60 years out of their collective asses.

Hear, Hear. Then they made up a story about a secret society of (insert WW game here) that no one knows about.
Yep. mages, werewolves, vampires, wraiths, etc. all exist. It's just that every damn one of 'em is reeeal good at hiding.

I simply find Mage history much more believable. Sure, you can tout, "Of COURSE it's believable, it's REAL HISTORY". But that's not really the case. Mage, along with some other (in my opinion, lesser) WW games, created a system and a concept (i.e. Mages controlling reality in THESE ways with THESE rules), then went back over history and made EVERYTHING consistent with these rules. That's not two hours in a library, that's two years of history designing, and it's airtight. Sure, it's not entirely made up, and based on real events, but when it comes to running a game, I'll take "airtight, but derivative" history over "100% creative, but slipshod and full-of-holes" history anyday. It's why I stopped running Shadowrun. It's not my kind of history.

About the subjective thing. Personally, I can swallow seven different accurate accounts of history faster than I can one apparently completely accurate account. The victors write the books, and the losers write books discovered a thousand years later, and it completely makes sense that there's more than one history. Hell, if we were to add a dash of realism to SR history, the FIRST thing I'd do is say the Captain Chaos doesn't have his shit together, and left a lot of stuff out. It'd make it more interesting that way.

I understand I'm gonna get some flak for this (this is a SR forum, not a Mage forum) and let me just say that SR is a very fine game in a genre that I like more than Mage, which is cyberpunk. I love playing SR and the game, as its status quo in 2060-63, is very cool and very playable. I just happen to have a problem with the history.

If you take most ofthe things that appear in WW books as 'documents from within the world" and what 'some guy in that world said'. It it very easy to believe that they will disagree. Take a look at some of the 'spin' applied to news about... well most anything. People will always disagree on what happened. There are plenty of people on the 'net who think we faked the Moon landing. But I don't see you saying that the history of the moon landing is 'full of holes' because of this.

And sure, it's perfectly reasonable, and I suggest, to have your SR characters having a different view on history. Hell, most SRers without SINs growing up in anything from the Sprawl to the Barrens probably don't have the best education. It's a valid option in SR too, I know. My main beef is that it is completely unmentioned in SR, but friggin' encouraged in Mage.

Secondly, about the consistency stuff. No two different game lines agree with each other. Really, and truly, they are mutually exclusive. A Werewolf can play in a Mage game, but the GM's gonna have to decide who's wrong. I think it makes a much better game. If White Wolf didn't make the game histories inconsistent, it would be a lot like taking out huge chunks of the cyberware and magic sections of SR3 and putting in rules for getting corporate jobs and how different corporations pay, and how nice living in an Arcology is. It's a betrayal of the game's themes! Mage is about Mage, not about Werewolf. Just like Shadowrun is about Shadowrun, not Cyberpunk or Call of Cthulhu.

The inconsistencies and warped telling of history in the entirety of the Mage books makes for a very good game dynamic, with different Traditions disagreeing on the cause of a few events. The events all happen, or are left out, no history ever changes big events, but like any history where the results are tabulated by humans, it's colored, as it should be, by PO and the mindset of the historian. It simply makes sense that this passive group believing in the right for all humans to live would have a different slant on the war, than this other group who believes they are the enactors of Karma and reincarnation (read: sometimes-assassins).

This is the thing...first of all, all of Mage's history takes place over/under/next to our history, nothing beyond. SR's history goes 60 years ahead of ours. That, right there, is going to make it all a bit tougher.

Second, WW doesn't write history, they write "history options." When you can pick and choose from about ten different ways for one thing to play out, of course it'll seem more solid.

It would have been just as interesting to describe the history of the Sixth World in assorted news reports, screamsheet articles, and History Channel segments as it would have been to do it in the matter-of-factly-this-is-what-happened way FASA chose to do it. They didn't have too much trouble doing that with Ghostwalker's appearance (even if they did decide to do both).

I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that. I'm just saying that White Wolf's approach was just as useful, if not significantly moreso. FASA's is cut-and-dry, it is and that's all there is to it. White Wolf's is open to custom tailoring by individual groups so as to make the gaming experience more fun and dynamic.

I am an SR fan to the core, all the way back to SR1 baby, but I don't think it has the depth of story of WW games. Those games are just a different style of play. I have played both, and I prefer SR, but can see the draw of the WW products. SR is an actions game, it is not about what happened in the past, it's about how many guys you can frag in the next 3 seconds. WW games are more involved and have more plot complexity. I am not saying you can't RP in SR, but why shoot hoops with a soccer ball. It just comes down to the fact that the two games are way different. One is set in a somwhat near future, and the other is set in an alternative past. I do have to say that the alien attack was pretty bad, but cheese can be a great thing if it is in the hands of a cheese master!

I really don't see the problem here.
No one ever said that Captain Chaos has his act together. No one ever claimed his collections where even close to complete. In fact, most of the time he reminds us to keep in mind that the documents he presents are personal accounts and most likely biased and at least partly wrong or incomplete.
And I just looked up Ghostwalkers entrance in YotC and it's completely made up of protocols, news articles, logged conversations, etc. The same holds true for most any event in YotC as well as RA:S. Even New Seattle is merely a collection of reports of a few locals.
Besides: like every RPG, Shadowrun explicitly states that everything written in the books is just a guideline and by no means a definite law that has to be adhered to under all circumstances. The Shadowrun timeline has enough gaps for you to build your own version of 'the truth'.
Yes, they didn't provide you with ten different timelines. I guess they where busy pulling 60 years out of their arses. And maybe they assumed that GMs might have enough creativity to come up with their own version of the truth from what they were handed but that assumption may be totally wrong for such uncreative folks like roleplayers... Damn creativity!
And being someone who does a fair bit of amateur writing I think I can roughly estimate that it's not much more complicated to write ten (contradicting!) timelines around existing and well documented history than to completely make up 60 years of history with not much of a framework and still make it seem consistent.

Just my 0.02

Especially making everything happen so *fast*. I mean, the US broke up into a good half-dozen little nationss in the span of like 20 years? Sheesh, it took almost that much time to get from the Articles of Confederation to the Constitution.

MrSandman, I agree with you. SR, like almosdt, or all Tabletop RPG lets the GM or ST or DM rewrite history as convenient. I don't have to go with the Trademark History if I don't want to, and for a while I even highly considered rewriting a history for a version of Shadowrun that I would consider historically 'fixed'. Main barrier is, I don't do a lot of amateur writing, and I'm lazy.

The availability of alternate worlds and histories was a point brought up a few posts from me ago, but I think we're really arguing the quality of the existing timelines. In which case, I simply find the Mage timelines more elegant, natural, and intuitive than the Shadowrun "crap here's where we gotta introduce magic, crap here's where we gotta somehow let the NAN get a hold of a nuke" timeline. It's too rushed, too many things don't make a lot of sense, and it's hard to rationalize or imagine some of the things (politics of course, not magick) happening in real life.

Anyway, wrong thread for this. As far as the smartlink precursor goes, I've always wondered if the SR technology is really dumbed down, or represents a direction I doubt we'll go in? Not that it's a bad view, it's hard to guess at some of that stuff, but I think as far as decking and stuff, we're gonna go for a much more wireless route.

Anyways, can someone explain to me in which way this new laser sight thingy is better than the monocles that airforce pilots (and others) have been using since the 80s?

The laser on the retina can give the illusio of depth that the monocle can't, also the laser is probably less subject to glare.

On the minus side, the laser is probably moer subject to vibration, so don't expect this to work as well when you are driving a car or something.

So the laser is not a monocle... I know there are "old school" systems (i.e. non-laser) that use *two* monocles to create this illusion of depth. I really can't see (no pun intended) how you can create an illusion of depth by using only one eye.
You might be right about the glare thing though.

The way I see it from this article the two systems use the same principle. A semi-translucent mirror reflects a ray of light into the eye without hindering vision. Just that the one system uses conventional ligt and the other uses a laser. The way I see it the only advantage could be a sharper, crisper image since the laser light doesn't refract so much like "normal" light.