I wouldn't generally buy anything more than once, but some stuff is much more useful as a preparation than as a spell. What sort of implementation would be better in your view?

I suggest that a formula is a formula, but that one can either be fired off on the fly, or prepackaged. It's like the difference between improvising a shaped charge with C4 and a toilet paper roll in the field, and having one prepped and ready to go in your cargo pants. Both work, but one is harder and slower to use in the field while being shot at by an unsympathetic audience,

Make design free in karma terms, up the difficulty of extemporaneous casting, and make one shot fetishes the easy, safe, sane way of casting spells. That fits the canon image of the intellectual mage who can achieve incredible things given time, but who is vulnerable to being jumped.

Buy your spells as normal...
Create a Formulae for the Preparation (much like Magical Compounds were done in SR4 for Critter powers), and set its parameters with the formula. - Arcana Skill
Create the Preparation (usually takes a 28 day cycle). - Alchemy Skill
It lasts a duration like the Magical Compounds did (generally several weeks).

Done.

It worked well for Magical Compounds. Don't see why it would not work well for Preparations. Yes, it means you could maker however many preparations you had the time for, but they would only be good for a short time (something a bit more useful than a few hours). And you would need to plan a bit for those things that you are wanting as a preparation, since you would need to anticipate your inventory.

I prefer that to what we got. Probably just me, though, so...
But then, I also don't like the "Fix" for Ritual Spellcasting, either. One of the most useful skills I have for my SR4A Mystic Adept. Which becomes almost totally useless, as you now have to buy Rituals as well. Sheesh. But as you know, I don't play Magic 8 Spellcasters either, so... It might work out to balance the really high end, though I doubt it.

That's not at all a replacement for the current way preparations work. It would be a cool addition, but going from minutes to create one to WEEKS would kill it as a viable specialty.

What you're trying to suggest there is something completely different from what Preparations are supposed to be.

Preparations are Dumb as Written. You asked my opinion, and what I gave you is what I would do as a replacement... *shrug*

Well, yes. For SRV, for the reasons I mentioned.

Yes, but "Dumb as Written" doesn't mean that the way to do them right is to completely scrap the design goals and create something that fulfills and entirely different role. I was kind of curious to see what you'd figure on to fix Preparations on the assumption that Alchemy is to be a valid specialty (which, as an Aspect, it absolutely must be). While that's an interesting suggestion, it's not a different way to do Preparations but an idea for something else entirely.

"One-time fetishes" would basically be alchemical preparations with a longer lifetime, yes?

Pretty much, yes.

Broadly, I agree with TJ on this issue.

You are looking at a broad redefinition of how much of the game works, so you don't really have to be concerned with the role of preparations in the present system. That fact that the change would more preparations far, far away from the role they're supposed to have and destroy the focused Alchemist is a valid concern for the system as it stands, but not strictly relevant to what you're looking to do.

Novatech was created in 2059 by the merger of Cambrdige Holdings and Villers International. Erika entered a partnershipt with Transys Neuronet to develop the Wireless Matrix Initiative in February 2063, that was followed some times after by a full-fledged merger. Novatech and Transys-Erika then merged to form Neonet in 2065.

However, you're right that the 4th edition wireless matrix was supposed to be based on a technology developped by these corporations. And so did the previous editions described the Matrix based on ESP Systems' ASSIST technology and Matrix Systems' cyberterminals (both owned by Fuchi Industrial Electronics) and data storage developped by Keruba International (renamed Renraku Computer Systems).

I guess the competition between megacorporations is a lot less prevalent than it should be, for the sake of avoiding a specific set of rules for every grid.

I think the reason why everyone went with NeoNET's wireless Matrix was because they just so happened to have their systems offline during Crash 2.0, so all the other Megas lost a lot of infrastructure and needed to rebuild fast, so just used the only thing left, which just so happened to be NeoNET's wireless Matrix. I recall that's also how Horizon was able to become a AAA was because they licensed the tech from NeoNET and got a bunch of contracts to rebuild CalFree, LA, and the PPC's Matrix.

And while on the topic of where the Matrix came from, I think Cyberterminals and decks came from the surviving members of Echo Mirage after the US government attempted to kill them. So the reason why its relatively unified is that the source always came from the same place, and not from competing corps trying to one up each other in making protocols.

Neonet did not exist in 2064 when the second crash took place. And Novatech system was totally online during the crash, to follow their own Initial Public Offering.

I was using NeoNET as shorthand for Novatech, but I guess I can't find any signs that they did have their systems offline at the time. Maybe I confused it with Horizon. At any rate, the Wireless Matrix was all made using Novatech/NeoNET/Neuronet/Erika tech, which are all the same entity.

Actually, per Corporate Guide (p.150), it was Saeder-Krupp that managed to stay offline during Crash 2.0. Something about a kill switch that allowed S-K to take all of their grids offline at once all across Europe.

Very smart move on their part.

Just because I was curious about it. Horizon was offline during the crash too.

Corporate Enclaves p38

In other words, there is every reason to believe that competing corporations are wrestling for dominance, and producing competing products, trying to embrace, extend and extinguish each other's versions.

That day when corps play reliably and honestly with each other in a cartel situation - well, it's not impossible, but they must have no incentive to stab each other's backs.

Lofwyr hires the best, and is nothing if not ruthless when it comes to doing what is required to maintain advantage. It's almost admirable.

I recall someone speculating that the Loremaster has an artifact that allows them to break one of the magic rules and see in to the future. Which is how Lofwyr saw Crash 2.0 coming and why Dunk's will was so...elaborate, and caused Crash 2.0 to happen. I don't know if that's true or not, but it would make some sense.

So I've been thinking, with my economist's hat on.

In the world of shadowrun there has to be enough tame area, and enough tame population (or at least cooperative) for all these businesses to make sense pushing their drek on everyone. That means that at least a billion people (and probably billions) live under sufficiently stable or productive conditions for it all to work. If they don't have that, the whole thing collapses under its own weight. Mind you, this isn't limited to just suits commuting within arcologies. It also includes everyone working under relatively controlled conditions away from the arcologies, and including everyone who approximates that in territories which will trade with the corp controlled areas.

There are also vast uncontrolled areas, where the drek all rolls downhill. Terrible jobs get done there, just to get by. Insanely dangerous things involving toxic waste, garbage management, you name it. These have to be tolerated, rather than obliterated, because they're more trouble than they're worth, and because they have hidden benefits (basically their uncontrolled nature allows for a null space, legally, where corps can do dirty experiments, manufacturing, recovery and so on without paying taxes or answering questions). Their borders must be managed, for obvious reasons, but they also become a dumping ground for undesirables while piously insisting that they're not liquidating undesirables. It makes a lot of sense in the context of a penal system run wild, but doesn't have to exclusively arise that way. Slums are a natural factor where the rule of law breaks down and population density is high.

The tricky thing is what the existence of shadowrunners implies - they are not, generally speaking, common criminals. They are more in the line of mercenaries, and mercenaries need somewhere to go to regroup. This implies the existence of what amounts to runner havens - areas which are either tolerated because of their usefulness, or populated by people who would offer active resistance to being conquered and regulated. Either way, these runner havens must be productive, they must just be their own jurisdictions and sufficiently resistant to cross-jurisdictional pressure to be meaningful areas of respite.

I've always generally chalked up runners' havens existence to being too useful to be worth the massive pushback any corp would get for trying to come down on them. The megas -need- shadowrunners to do business (otherwise they wouldn't be tolerated at all), and coming down hard on a 'haven is a great way to piss off anyone who might be willing to work for you in the future.

That and any collection of successful shadowrunners is going to be incredibly dangerous to cross, on their own merits.

It'd be like declaring war on Jackpoint... and having Jackpoint declare war in return.

I think that the megas would likely prefer to leave conflict outside their calculations. Conflict is expensive - so in my view they'd do away with shadowrunning entirely if they could. My point with "populated by people who would offer active resistance to being conquered and regulated" was that the megas are not in a position, pragmatic or political, to do away with havens. The key is to figure out why not.

One plausible answer is that a sufficient community of civil libertarians, anti-authoritarians, neo-anarchists and so on supports those havens to make them viable communities in their own right, as well as (since the megas are great at making lemonade out of lemons) recruiting stations and laboratories for some of their weirder experiments.

I find it curious that people argue about the Shadowrun world not being realistic because it isn't perfectly controlled by the Corporations.

Point 1. Shadowrun is a cyberpunk dystopia. This inherently implies ineptitude, even, or perhaps even more so, from the ruling classes.

Point 2. Does the continued existence of failed places such as Detroit right at the heart of the most powerful nation in the world disprove reality? Surely, since the US is so powerful, it would have fixed such a gap as soon as it occurred?

That isn't my point at all. I'm trying to find out what structure does apply, and why it continues. Something which makes sense in terms of the power balance - because make no mistake, if the oil companies of this world could wish insurgencies, guerilla warfare, simple ideologically-driven vandalism and so on out of existence? They'd do it tomorrow and tell all their high dollar hired guns where the unemployment office is. In this world, they can't do it, because they lack the authority structure to do so, instead they frantically lobby the UN, local governments, local warlords, multinational powers like NATO and so on to try to bring stability so that they can just do business. They don't want to fight wars. They want to extract oil. In the shadowrun world, if Saeder-Krupp, Renraku and Mitsuhama decide that the Redmond Barrens need to be bulldozed, the populations `redeployed' or `neutralised' they could do it. Why don't they? There's an unexplained gap there which needs coverage.



Granted the dystopian part - but even dystopias have to have some kind of internal logic. And while some ineptitude, or blindness, or miscoordination is expected in large power structures, that has to be a degree of ineptitude which is consistent with their massive financial and industrial and social successes, and also explains precisely why they don't even try, as opposed to merely fail miserably. See? Verisimilitude. Just assuming that everyone wearing a suit is one step away from signing every memo with a crayon doesn't do it.



Actually if you look closely at what's happening in Detroit, you can see precisely what has happened, including some limits on the state, federal and local governments, multidecade shifts in economic and human activity, the effects of corruption - it's all laid out there for a student of society and economics to find. Again, that's the sort of explanation which should be available (even if 50% of the players disregard it as meaningless fluff) to enable a consistent picture of the Sixth World.

Verisimilitude. That's the aim here.

No, because while Detroit is pretty bad off there are some huge countervailing factors:
1) Detroit is not doing anything that really seriously threatens anyone outside of Detroit. They are not organizing raids on Ann Arbor, etc.
2) The people in Detroit are voters and taxpayers. Due to various historical reasons Detroit has actually been handled gingerly, with a lot of hope that things would work out. It has not because Detroit has consistently chosen it's government poorly and a series of bad things have happened over decades due to this. However you are allowed in the US to elect (obvious but as yet unconvicted) criminals and hustlers to govern you, it's just not likely to work out well.
3) There is a well understood doctrine as to how you can handle city governments that can't pay their debts, so the assumption (which may be wrong) is that things will eventually get fixed.
4) Parts of Detroit actually have a strong resemblance to a working city, so it isn't all disaster and gloom and lends some support to point 3, that there is real potential to get better.
5) If an individual or company really can't stand it, they can leave. Nobody will stop them from loading their property in a truck and driving.

Personally, I think the continued existence of the NAN is more of a wallbanger. All of that former U.S. territory, sparsely populated by squabbling tribes, whose advantage has faded now that magic has been adopted by everyone. Of course, there are lots of ways you can justify it. You just need to go beyond canon (and probably re-write parts of it) if you want anything really plausible.

Maybe the rebirth of magic has made those areas more forbidding - riotous plant growth, magical phenomena, and dangerous paracritters (like the Jungle coming back in parts of Africa, and similar things they have done for other countries). Maybe the UCAS is all but defunct compared to the megacorporations that rule in everything but name, and the megas either have their own plans, or can't come to a consensus on the issue. Maybe the NAN revolt can be revamped to include not just the comparatively miniscule numbers of native Americans, but all of the conservationists, neo-anarchists, and other people opposed to the feudal corporate order - making it more like the UCAS/CAS split. Maybe people think the NAN is still capable of the Great Ghost Dance - volcanoes and tornadoes and all. Maybe the CAS secretly supports the existence of the NAN, because regaining all of that lost territory would make the UCAS too powerful.

I tend to agree that the position of the NAN is precarious. That said, I suspect that they have a few things working in their favour.

The first is simple inertia. For the CAS and UCAS, who are also concerned about the influence of other players such as imperial Japan, chinese influence and possibly Russia, twiddling their thumbs while hoping for the NAN to collapse might be the politically easy choice.

A lot of it depends on the paleface communities which are there, and what kind of promises the NAN might have made them. I know that a lot of country communities would be overjoyed if they were told that they could largely police themselves, didn't have to worry about the feds any more, and had few or light taxes to worry about.

Also, and this may come as a surprise to some, but the distance between many tribesmembers and fairly typical country folk is just not that big. Their concerns are shared because their environment is shared. It is just not a huge leap to conclude that a few good ol' boys would be happy to organise themselves as a paleface tribal equivalent to play nice with the new bosses, on the understanding that they don't get kicked out to live in some hellhole like NYC, and continue to farm because even the NAN recognises that food is a powerful trading tool.

Actually, if you go back and read the earlier editions, all of the above but the last bit about the CAS are true. The Treaty of Denver that created the NAN was based on Howling Coyote having the threat of a second Ghost Dance, and the wild lands have all had massive regrowth of flora and fauna since the Awakening. The UCAS government -is- pretty much a shell with little power compared to the Megas. Several of the NAN tribal states are quite willing to take in anyone with a trace of the blood, or adopt those with the right mindset who wish to join them. Not to mention all the farmers and ranchers who refused to leave their land when the NAN got jurisdiction, and who are tribal citizens if not tribe members these days. The old Denver book goes into it in detail.

Also, don't forget, VITAS and the Ghost Dance killed a huge part of the population, mostly focused in the big, congested cities. The population of SR's world is still well below our own, even fifty years later, simply because it is a much more dangerous place.

Realistically, you have to look at what the economic strengths of the different areas would be. The various NAN nations mostly rest on primary and some secondary industries. The industrial east goes to the UCAS, the creative West goes mostly to the UCAS (Seattle enclave), Calfree, and the Tir. Vancouver is in the hands of the NAN, but that's the one exception. After all the conflict, arguably Calfree would be in economic trouble unless the japanese effectively sorted them out and rebooted them. Given the nature of colonialism in history, I have to assume that the japanese would be extracting value from them, leaving Calfree in a fair degree of pain.

The limitations on water supply in Calfree would be an exciting problem to resolve.

I've been looking for a good resource map of North America since the topic was brought up. I don't know scads about geology, but it seems that the NAN got more mineral rich areas. The resources on the west coast are huge, but I don't know a lot about the east coast. How easy is it to mine minerals in the UCAS/CAS?
Looking over the old 2060s map in SoNA, I'm surprised that the NAN accepted so much terrible land. Not much growing territory in the Ute area. The UCAS kept most of the farmland in the Treaty. I know they took back a lot of territory specific to certain tribes, but someone should have been thinking longer term.
Speaking of the Utes, is it any wonder that they capsized? They had two tourist/gambling Towns, yet were the most anti-Anglo. Recipe for disaster, that.

Mostly it is famously appalachian coal, although there are some other mineral resources in the UCAS. However, denser populations and stricter regulations have put a damper on hard rock mining.



The NAN, by the map, took where they were most dominant in numbers and recent cultural influence. That counts for a lot in political terms. It's one thing to hold a Great Ghost Dance gun to a nation's head - it's another to live in an area afterwards.

Also, isn't Montana the Treasure State? Lots of minerals there. Lots of petrochemicals sitting around. The rockies in general are fairly mineral rich.

Don't discount the farming potential. A lot of the west, given any kind of decent combination of dryland agriculture and irrigation, is quite productive. More so if you do away with ludicrously unbalancing subsidies. Want a wool suit? That grew on a sheep's back at some point. If I remember correctly, modern day Colorado is one of the biggest USA producers.

IIRC, the whole impetus for the initial conflict was the resource rush, with imminent domain being used to seize tribal lands (kind of another wallbanger, since I don't think there really are any tribal lands with much in the way of such exploitable resources - plus, imminent domain wouldn't even work on reservations, which are sovereign land governed by treaty). One of the main tenets of the NAN was conservationism (with one exception, which left the NAN to pursue clear-cutting and strip mining).

So I don't see them doing things like opening up the Rocky Mountain Front to mining, or what have you. On the other hand, states like Montana do have plentiful agriculture. The questions are whether the original farm owners got to keep their land, how badly they might have sabotaged everything if they were forced off that land (or at least taken things like their equipment with them), who might have stepped in with the needed agricultural know-how (if anyone), and how much the riotous growth of wilderness impacted formerly arable land.

Actually, there are quite a few resources in tribal lands, because the original writers of the treaties weren't that knowledgeable about the mineral resources. Even today large parts of states like Arizona are in tribal hands. Eminent domain shouldn't work, but it wouldn't be the first time the palefaces ripped up treaties with redskins in the interests of greed, would it now? All it takes is one halfway plausible excuse.



That depends on how vengefully minded the tribes are, and how much they care about economic development. I can well see quite a few looking at the devastated rural populations, realising that they have the power anyway, and preferring to grant the farmers who are in place permission to continue farming (with some stricter environmental limits) as long as they contribute to the stability and wealth of the nation. I can't see the typical farmer turning it down unless he thinks he'll just be murdered in his bed.

The fact is that that history has proven again, and again, and again to the point of nausea that just giving land to people who don't know what to do with it doesn't magically convert them into successful farmers any more than giving some kid a computer turns him into a programmer. All you have to do is assume that the NAN prefer to run the show and collect taxes, and it makes a fair degree of sense to let the poor palefaces till the soil.

Umm, driving out everyone else is exactly what the NAN were said to mostly do. Since then they seem to have had a lot of bad luck.

Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.

This is known as “bad luck.”

Probably just a coincidence.

If that's the approach of an SRV canonical history, then yes, they would suffer massively because one doesn't just show up on the land with any idea of how to produce food.

Also: the rest of the world would be in real hunger pressure. The American West produces an astonishing quantity of food.

This reminds me of something I heard yesterday.

"Loser" is a modern, western, American word. Prior to our modern capitalistic democracies, those living in poverty were referred to as unfortunates. As in, "it is unfortunate that that is their lot in life." With our current--meritocratic--economies we reward winners: they deserve their wealth and lifestyle. As a consequence, we assume that the losers also deserve their position, that they are stupid, unskilled, and deserve to be poor.

Ah, the ever-popular Just World fallacy.

The World is Just? I must have missed that particular Memo.

Sorry Sir, I think I may have misfiled that one.

I thought it said The World is Justin Beiber so just threw it out.

Consider yourself on Report... And pack your bags for the Siberian Knight Errant Complex. They need an.... Administrator.

Just because it's a fallacy doesn't mean that it isn't so permeated into the cultural mindset that most of us believe it to be true.

The kind of "fairness" that many subscribe to is "giving everyone a fair start" but that everyone is on their own once the starting pistol is fired.

People want to believe it is, so they decide to believe things that make it seem like that - in general, you're more likely to assume that a person's misfortunes are their own fault because of this; the effect can actually be manipulated if you threaten someone's idea of a just world, too.

Part of the problem is that justice is a matter of opinion. The idea of justice is that everyone gets, good or bad, what is coming to them. Thus punishment and retribution and restitution and rewards are all aspects of justice.

The difficulty is that not everyone even agrees on what merits what. Some people firmly believe that every baby born deserves a long list of items, benefits and services. Some other people just as firmly believe that the fact of being born confers no privileges or prerogatives whatsoever, save at the pleasure of the parents, and so on and so forth.

This is strongly cultural or subcultural tendency, and people's views tend to change as their circumstances change. This is why the views of sociologists, anthropologists and behavioural economists have some relevance to building a notional SRV.

OK, so here's another question, and a different one from the milieu oriented, or the general mechanical questions above:

Which ruleset works best for verisimilitude? For instance, I'm keen on LMSD damage (perhaps with a few modifications around the edges). I tended to like the different systems of SR3, even though they increased the learning curve, because each system tended to emphasise some point of the milieu which I think that SR4(a) lost in its airbrushing and polishing.

On the other hand, I disliked how natural ability had little or nothing to do with outcomes in SR3 once you had a skill. I liked the SR2 style skill web.

Still, the clean nature of the SR4(a) rules has its appeal.

Thoughts?

Build off SR4. I personally don't like the LMSD damage system, as it just resolves to boxes anyway, "Oh, you're taking a light wound, that's 1 box" rather than "Oh, you're taking 1 wound box."

Attributes made your dice pools, which were extremely important to your success.



Well, L-1 M-3 S-6 D-10. There was no way to take 2, 4, 5, 7, 8, or 9 damage in a single attack so it wasn't just boxes. There was an increasing scale to heavier damage.

Granted that I was sloppy in making my point, but this does raise the question again: do you think that SR3 struck a good balance?

What I mean is that the former system can be converted to the latter, whereas the latter has more granularity.