It wasn't a war, just annexation and police actions.

If it were possible to run a Motorola 80s brick nowadays I'd do it just as a fashion statement. I imagine having to have some kind of drop holster made for it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mXPUkrz7Uow

Well, less so when you add New Vegas into the equation. That one was more a Western, if anything.

Nvm that that one is the continuation of F1 and F2.

A lot of folks would be happy with one in Canada due to our massive array of dead zones. It is like getting service in the 1980s in some places.

Man, I lived in Vegas for 5 years. Rural 1960s Vegas out in the desert is as creepy old Americana as it gets...it's thematically right in there with red menace stuff.

Having played since SR1, this is about how I feel; although I haven't played SR5 yet, it's got a number of returns of SR3 that I like.

Once thing I do miss is dice pools that you had to split, ala SR3 combat pool, magic pool, etc... Really gave a tactical feel to things, in that you had to manage pools and allocate them appropriately. I realize that this is a turn off to some, and requires players who know what they are doing, but it's what I like.

After finally starting to get games in for SR5, I like it. Already added a few house rules (Technos and wireless bonii), and the missions errata, but they were quick and easy. As few house rules to be happy with the system as any other system I have played, less than many.

Second session of a campaign was today. Was able to make decent characters the players like in about 3 hours total with 3 people making characters and only 2 copies of the book. Another thing of combat, and everyone enjoys the initiative system more than 4th. While 1 or 2, I can't remember which, everyone agrees is slightly more simulationist? may or may not be the correct word, everyone agrees 5th is more balanced for a game.

New matrix rules are excellent. They may not be as "realistic" as other editions, but as far as usability they are probably the best right out the gate. So far every hacker prefers it being att and skill as opposed to program ratings, makes them feel like their character is more important to the task, which is a good thing.

Cyberware is good. I, and others, were saddened some of the too good for the price gear got fixed, but understand it was a good fix. Other gear is slightly more expensive than I would like but not unbearably so.

Having a price/karma per run table included in the book is an excellent guideline for starting GM's. The pay scale feels about right for starting runners, though it doesn't feel like it scales well as the runners become better known. Thinking of a houserule for streetcred acting as a multiplier as well, but we will see as the campaign goes on.

After more hands on experience, I think the worst thing about the book is some of the atrocious organization. The absolute most annoying thing I have found so far is the section on limits. Even the index in the back that references the sections for limits, does NOT tell you the page to go to for how to calculate them. It is buried in a single line in one of the pages it does reference finally telling you to go to 35 pages away, to a section not referenced anywhere in the index dealing with limits.

But short rant and a few houserules aside, I think I am going to enjoy 5 edition a lot.

I liked SR4/SR4A, but mostly cause I just got my hands on 5 and haven't read through it yet. Plus all of my supplements are for 4 and I don't like not having all the rules, even if its just some extra stuff.

But from the sounds of it, 5 will become my new favorite. Time will tell.

Seriously? The most efficient approach usually was 'get as many of those dice into your early rolls to prevent TN modifiers on yourself or get them onto your opponent'.

Maybe that was your experience. It was not mine.

One ting that you did bring up, indirectly, though, was that TN mods were harsh, especially as you got more than 2 of them. When you had to start rolling multiple exploding dice to hit a TN of 12+, well, might as well give up.

Hell to balance. Pretty much the main reason why we moved to SR4.

Godwin: Curious what those houserules are, you mind sharing?

And as an aside, I'm amuzed by how nice a curve the responses have formed.

Its interesting, isn't it?

Agreed. SR1 will always hold a special place for me; like the skill web.

Having now ran quite a bit of both: This.
Start with SR4, adept in the good things from SR5.

This.

What good things would you recommend?

the new Initiative system is a good place to start.

I like the idea of the limits mixed with accuracy as well. Add to that noise; really like that.

Edit: Background count as a dice pool mod.

I like the increase of skill ratings up to 12.

Initiative
Cyberdecks and the Matrix
Direct and indirect combat spells
Spellcasting and drain codes in general
Burst fire
Split dice pool for attacking multiple targets / with multiple weapons
Rigging / Control Rigs
Weapon damage increases (including melee)
Armor layering, also folding Ballistic and Impact into one value
Augmented maximum of +4 across the board

I like whatever SR rules the GM is running.

The dice pool limits are my main concern about 5th and why I haven't jumped aboard (that and all the 4th ed material that is out there), I always liked the fact that a light pistol could still kill you-despite wearing milspec armor (However unlikely). How does the adjustment to damage work out in practice? Are firefight deadlier than in 4th?

My precious has finally arrived. A collectors edition copy of SR5

...


...

The precious...

*Beats my mailbox with my cane*

They are not dice pool limits - you can roll a dice pool of any size you can manage to get, and that can get pretty high with the new skill cap (12). They are hit limits. Meaning that with, say, a Smartlinked L36 you could use up to 9 hits. Added to its base damage of 7, you could do 16 damage if no defense test was rolled and no damage was soaked. Meaning you would kill anything with a Body lower than 17, which is everything.

And yes, that's a light pistol. Even a smartlinked holdout could get you up to 13 damage. In general, in SR5, you get hit less often (only get one attack per action phase, defense is now Reaction+Intuition), but when you do get hit you get hit HARD. Armor went up, but damage went up more (and I mean in terms of RAW values, which means that armour increase doesn't at all keep pace with the damage increase).

Perfectly stated. I couldn't agree more!

You know, I didn't replay to this at first, but... It's important to consider that Fallout (a) was never once projected from the time of its writing and thus never drew relevancy from the grounding of its projections; (b) doesn't take itself too seriously, as the various outlandish projections are given a little bit of tongue-in-cheek - the ridiculously inaccurate ideas from the 50's are part of the charm; © While things in Fallout do progress a bit from game to game (look at the good endings in each game; the world gets a little bit brighter from the results of each protagonist's journey - I recall seeing a rather detailed write-up on the subject somewhere...), but the nature of the setting stagnates progress dramatically

I know a lot of people on these boards love 80's cyberpunk, but a lot of modern Shadowrun players weren't even around or aware in the heyday of 80's cyberpunk. I seriously question whether Shadowrun could have SURVIVED if it decided to stay there and try to take itself seriously, as with the march of time would make it all seem so ridiculous. Which means either a Shadowrun that doesn't take itself seriously or a Shadowrun that let's the setting grow and evolve over time.

That's the thing. There's absolutely no reason Shadowrun needed to draw relevancy from it's projections.

It isn't our timeline. 9/11 didn't happen in Shadowrun's world.

Instead, the Shiawase decision happened in 2000, and corporate extraterratoriality was firmly established in 2001.

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan didn't happen in Shadowrun's world.

Instead, the Native Americans rebelled and the Great Ghost Dance happened.

The Fukushima power plant meltdown didn't happen in Shadowrun's world.

Instead, a Great Dragon awoke from inside Mt. Fuji.


Am I clear enough, yet? The timelines diverged in the 1980's, and have absolutely no need to reflect one another at all after the split. Trying to make them do so weakens the things that made Shadowrun interesting in the first place.

A lot of gamers today didn't live through the Cold War, but yet Fallout's paranoid ramblings are still popular. I think you drastically underestimate the power of a well-developed setting.

There is a reason that Cyberpunk 2020 did not truly survive to today (There is a reason that it feels outdated). For the longest time they TRIED to stay in the 80's and the cyber-revolution... Eventually it stagnated and was passed on by because other games (like Shadowrun) moved towards its projections, rather than ignoring the ramifications of its ongoing technology....

Though I've know about the existence of shadowrun since probably 1st ed., I've never got to try it until 4A. So, making comparisons between editions is somewhat difficult for me. That being said, based on what I've heard, read, and learned about the different editions so far, my favourite atm is and remains 4A. 3rd ed. and earlier sounds overly complicated with regards to the rules, and though there are some OK ideas in 5th ed., from what I can understand, the implementations tend to rub me the wrong way. Some of them in a bad enough way that I'm put off buying and seriously looking into the game.

I grew up on 1st, 2nd and 3rd edition, playing 3rd edition the most.

I'm in a 4th edition and 5th edition campaign at the moment and like them both.

I went a head and voted 3rd because that is what I grew up and know.

Fairly poor comparison there, though. 2020's world was a much more direct projection than Shadowrun's is. The Awakening and how it changed that world are massively important.

Let me be clear, since I thought the inference was simple enough to draw in the first place: The difference between Shadowrun and Fallout in this respect is that Shadowrun started out doing that, and Fallout didn't. So Shadowrun can either stop doing that and cease to take itself seriously in the way that Fallout doesn't really take itself seriously (they have so much fun with how ridiculous it all is), or it can continue to take itself seriously by continuing to have that grounding. And for the things that Shadowrun brings to the table, taking itself seriously is the better approach. Fallout's paranoid rambling's are popular because they're amusing. In a lot of ways, Fallout satirizes paranoid Cold War ramblings, and I very much doubt that you're looking for Shadowrun to take the same approach to 80's cyberpunk.

No, that's actually not at all important to this kind of consideration. That kind of deep detail doesn't come into play for this sort of thing. When making their first judgements of Fallout, for example, people aren't aware of the ways in which it deviates from our timeline nor when it does so. They're aware of the content and the way it treats that content.

You're as full of shit as a Christmas goose.

Half of the setting is Tolkien-esque dwarves, elves, and trolls. The covers are full of guys hurling magic around, and manifest spirits.

The first judgements of Shadowrun aren't going to be 'oh, this is so 80's', they're going to be 'oh, this is a quasi-futuristic setting with magic and high tech, cool'.

That's why SR has stayed interesting as a thing, and jamming tech updates into it has served it no better than jamming them into the Matrix movies would.

It's a fantastic setting. The suspension of disbelief necessary to go with the Awakening is a lot more than to assume they use wired networking.

And if they hadn't done things like added wireless in SR4, the first impression would be very fucking different - it would make that whole part of the game seem backwards, and thus not interesting as a thing.

Shadowrun is a blend of fantastic setting and non-fantastic setting. The latter NEEDS to be treated appropriately.

But does it technically imply that SR could have stayed 80's cyberpunk themed as the fantasy part masks that flaw?

I find the cyberpunk 2020 comparison good. Cyberpunk kinda died. Shadowrun is strong. I guess SR's way for handling future was the better one. And back in the 90's, I don't think Shadowrun was the dominant one.

About an 80's Cyberpunk: honestly, it's a niche. You must love cyberpunk, you must love retro-settings. It doesn't fit to a premier class RPG.

This conversation just goes on to prove that Shadowrun should be split into three lines:
- Shadowrun 2035, for those who wants to play a techno-thriller with cyber and magic in a world that's not so different from our own.
- Shadowrun 2050, for those who wants to play a 80s cyberpunk game.
- Shadowrun 2065, for those who wants to play a post-cyberpunk game.

I come down on RHat's side in this discussion. There's another very long thread on the board at the moment about wireless devices and how they don't make sense to be wireless. All of that is discussed from a current world perception.

It doesn't make sense to people, when playing in a futuristic game, if current tech isn't available.

As an example, me and my group played Cyberpunk 2020 for years, only switching to Shadowrun 4th edition when Cyberpunk 3 was released (and sucked balls). But we didn't play the setting as written in all tech respects. In Cyberpunk a Micro Computer was the size of a book, with a full keyboard, and was awful. Nowadays we have uber-powerful smartphones. When we played cyberpunk, a setting still 10+ years in the future, why shouldn't WE have smartphones? Makes sense, so we did.


I always see it like this - In the 80's it was very hard to predict just how fast and how far computing would advance. If 80's RPG writers had know then those things would probably have been in from the start. The setting is based on extrapolating a view of technological advancement from the (then) current tech level. The now current tech level is vastly different, and so future versions (like SR5) should take now as their start point on a tech level. Otherwise you lose touch with new players. "So I can have a robotic leg, but my computer weighs 14 tons and can only store 10 minutes of video?"

I just roll with "Technical development in shadowrun diverged from our own in the year 1980 or so. All anomalies between modern tech and shadowrun tech are due to this."
Everything else I just say is either a necessary part of balance and put up with for the sake of gameplay or say "WHY WOULD THEY DO THAT?!?" and houserule it.

Point is that Cyberpunk tried to stay in that headspace, and the game world suffered for it...

Personally I'm with mister__joshua on what he writes a couple of posts above. Games, like Shadowrun, that take place in a near future version of Earth, have to evolve the technology so that it keeps appearing like a future version of the tech we know today. If it doesn't, it will end up catering only to old generations of players who remember the 80's. And that is not a sustainable business model. The game need to attract new players, even at the expense of the old ones, and the only way to do that, is to ensure that the younger generation of players can get the same experience as some people had when they sat down with the game back when the earlier editions came out. And that means that the tech (amongst other things) have to continue to look like a kind of technology that could believable be something that we can envision today as being available 50-100 years from now.

That works pretty well for some tech (e.g. wrist phone. I can buy that people loves wrist phone more than standart ones in SR) even if wrist phone doesn't look like they will be the common type of phones in a near future.


Now, I hardly can tell one of my player: "ok, you downloaded 200 pages of text document. 10% of your diskspace is now used. That means you only have 7 mins of video left. Don't look at me like this. Technology evolution is different from real world."

Some things need an update. But not a total wipe. keeping the setting is important (even with some stupid ideas that were written).

My group handled wireless in the past with a simple handwave:

Yes, wireless comms exist, but the encryption on them is state of the art. You need to encrypt and decrypt every single packet. This is fine for any use that in involves buffering, but when you need a real-time VR interface, when you need to go INTO the matrix, the extra milliseconds of lag from the wireless processing overhead become noticeable. If you want to jack into the matrix, then the lag makes even mundane legal tasks stilted and unpleasant. If you go into combat versus someone/thing running natively on the server, or jacked in via a wired interface, you're at an almost-crippling disadvantage.

My group had no problem with the concept that wireless existed, but was not as good as wired for the sort of reaction speeds required for matrix combat.

Which is pretty much SR3 wireless .

SR3 - but being the only one I've played, since that's when I started and I managed to completely miss 4/4A since by the time we'd wrapped up our long running SR3 game, SR5 had been announced (finally got my copy of SR5 this week). It's as much about familiarity as anything, though there are some things I like that aren't present newer editions (LMSD damage, Skill only tests) not that they are necessarily better, the maths on your average check works better in the newer editions from what I can tell, I just like some of the old stuff for various reasons.

On tech, I love 80's Cyberpunk and would gladly play a 2050's campaign forever. But I am not going to be able to sell a new gaming group, who might not even be familiar with cyberpunk, on it. It will seem dated and it isn't going to feel futuristic at all. I had a player comment in SR3 that it felt like modern fantasy to them because the everyday tech was starting to become dated and the actual advanced stuff fell into 'so advenced it may as well be magic' territory. The magic didn't cover up that the baseline tech was dated, it just made the advanced tech seem more like magic. So I think they made the right move on advancing things to keep them relevant, just maybe it could have been handled better.

I keep thinking of Ghost in the Shell. They updated things, and I don't thik it lost anything because of it.

SR3 required somewhat more game-knowledge to effectively run a character. You had to know how to use your pools in different scenarios. It was relatively deadly and unforgiving, and you couldn't easily drag along a lump-on-the-log archetype player who just wanted to hang out with friends for the night and smash bad guys.

Apart from some foibles, SR3 had lots and lots of charm to it. Watching someone scale a holdout pistol shot up to 7D damage against a guy in a Ballistic 2 leather jacket was generally priceless. Watching a mage fumble a stunbolt and get his arm sawn off by a security guard with an SMG made for some dramatic sessions.

SR3 allowed for lots and lots of different outcomes, based on a relatively simple system (so long as you could get the Target Number modifiers down to a science). Once you got the tables handled, it used relatively fewer dice, and dice pool modifiers were generally based on calculated choices rather than happenstance. You'd get the Street Samurai saying "I'm using all my pool and rolling 12 freaking dice at this because it's freaking important" and that would be impactful.

SR4 and subsequently SR5 make game decisions somewhat less meaningful -- you have a constructed dice pool every action that you can't influence except by Edge -- so you can't exactly go balls to the wall in the same way, and divest yourself of dodge dice to make one super-ultra-important shot count.



In the multiple timeline setting sense, the biggest benefit that SR5 brings to the table is the Matrix rules. These are easily adaptable to a completely wired setting -- all you have to say is that the wireless stuff is off the table. The deck attributes, hosts, and marks all work equally well wired or unwired.

This is largely the impression I've gotten. I would happily keep playing SR3 (I have sooo many books, and I've already got my houserules) but there are only 2 players in our current group who would be into that sort of game, and one of us will need to GM. SR5 looks promising overall.


I like the sounds of that.

Though I knew it was a pipe-dream I kinda hoped 5th ED would have signaled a split time system with common rules. They could release "historical" adventures/missions at any timeline then with only a few tweaks. Kinda like Battletech still releases books for the Star League Era, or 3025, or the War of 3039, etc.