I went to school in 94.

Also, Pathfinder seems to be the most commonly encountered third edition offshoot, I know a couple of games in IRC...

I started here back in the early 90's, before it was Dumpshock. It was known as Deep Resonance back then. I still remember the Christmas-colored board.

I was in college, it was when 2nd ed came out--played 1st ed in H.S. Got a good campaign that lasted for almost 2 years. If I could do anything from my youth again, college would be it.

In '94 I had graduated HS, flunked out of college (after 3 years I might add), joined the Navy, got out of the Navy after 6 years, and had 2 jobs. Started playing D&D with the Red & Blue box sets. Played all the editions through 4th. Played Cyberpunk and then got into Shadowrun in 2nd ed. Played SR3E the most and really liked that. Played 4e the last 3 years and am trying desperately to learn 5e. Not sure I like everything about it, but as a CDT agent I need to know it.

At this point, I have no opinion about 5th other than they are publishing stuff way too slow. At this point, we should have one or two of the crunch books in our hands.

Then again, there was a really bad year for tabletop RPGs. Minimal publications for just about every major IP.

Let's not accelerate the issues with errata and editing and such by speeding up the schedule. Slow down, do it right. Then worry about the schedule.

Yeah. Catalyst is pretty much looking incompetent in the editing department right now. Don't rush them, maybe if they take six more weeks someone will think to run a spellcheck and properly label which draft goes to the printers.

I finally got a chance to play SR5 at Charm City Gameday. Overall I liked it. Some nice improvements over SR4, while still being very fast to run.

That said ... it's still not fast enough for a 'drop and play' game (but neither is D&D past level 5). And it doesn't have the tactical fun of SR3.

Errata doesn't make money to pay writers, editors, artists, and other staff. There's a clear winner when it comes to allocating time I'm afraid.

And wasn't the errata pretty much collated at this point and even incorporated into new (foreign) printings?

German printings do not rely on CGL for errata, for all I know. Pegasus just wipes CGL's ass for it consistently.

Nes.
No and Yes.
Pegasus Spiele technically gets it's errata (as far as rules relevant stuff is concerned) from CFL.
But the difference is that Pegasus Spiele actually implements it, while CGL has it and does not. .

And Pegasus Spiele basically says GTFO to the really stupid Crap CGL puts out.

So... no 5th Edition for Germany?

THAT particular Idiocy unfortunately wasn't stupid enough . .
I am talking about the racist bullshit someone decided to put into WAR! for example that made it look like it was being pandered to Klansmen and Nazis all around the world.
The hunting dead jew ghosts/zombies for the scalpell of a Nazi CLERK in Auschwitz and the poisoning of gipsy wells was cout out wholesale and replaced with something less offensive.
Hell, CGL was too chicken to go whole hog and actually make it the scalpell of mengele himself, because that probably would not have gone over well even in america of all places . .
Slow was also changed, as was the charge spell.

I know... was just funnin' a bit...
Indeed... that particular bit of writing was indeed beyond the pale, in my opinion.
However, not ALL of WAR! was that bad (though I am still confounded by Bogota's Docks and sea access).

Oh? Dare we ask what they did to them?

Slow was basically changed to Mass Levitation as it probably was meant to, so no more complete control over entropy and slowing down projectiles if i remember correctly . .
Charge i don't quite remember.

I suppose that does make more sense since the creative uses for such an kinetic energy sink were numerous, but probably more than a bit game breaking.

Bet they made Charge only work if wireless was enabled.

Crap, good point. Gotta cram a bayonet on the theoretical home defense shotgun I'm gonna put together one of these years. Gonna need to look into how to mount it and the flashlight in the same general area.

Maybe I can make Abomination from Monster Hunters International.

EDIT: On second thought, nope. I'll stick with my .45 and a Spyderco. And a 12 gauge.

Try this: http://www.tromix.com/images/S178inchLrg3w.jpg

That was not in War!. It was in Deadly Waters.

As far as War! and geography are concerned, people criticized the depiction of Bogota surroundings as "jungle" when it is actually highlands and mountains (though covered with rainforest, which most people couldn't tell apart from jungle).

Didn't Isaac Ashimov once say that 'Any sufficiently advanced rainforest is indistinguishable from jungle?'

I remember checking out a Saiga 20 gauge years back at a local shop. Seemed pretty darned fun, but I had little use for a 20 gauge, and they didn't have any in 12. Some day I do plan on picking one up for kicks.

::shudder:: War! That book. Man, it got me to swear off hardcover Shadowrun books for ever, .pdf's only from that point on. And I think I've only gotten 2 since.

See, WAR! was not so bad after all.
Deadly Waters, on the other hand was apparently pretty flawed. Bogota and Docks... who would have thought...

A surgeon of my acquaintance (who spent quality time, in his long career, in some of the nastier inner city ERs of this country) tells me that the civilian handgun wound survival rate, when medical care is delivered, is well over 80%. This includes all calibres, and all hit locations, from head to toe, and includes all numbers of hits from one, up.

The topic came up when we were discussing Gabby Giffords's prognosis, and discussing the difference between an incapacitating stop, and a lethal wound. He pointed out that while she survived, she immediately stopped doing whatever she was doing (i.e. immediate flaccid paralysis, dropping like a sack of turnips to the ground) owing to central nervous system trauma. He informed me of a different case where a headshot was neither lethal nor even disabling. Apparently a criminal managed to snatch a gun from a cop, made him kneel, and then shot him in the head, but nobody explained to the criminal that angled shots are bad, the brain is in the middle of the head, and holding the gun sideways as per rap videos doesn't make it more lethal. The .45 bullet bounced off the skull, leaving the cop with a bad headache. The cop had had enough, got up, and turned the (astonished) criminal into a statistic.

Remember, a bullet can hit the head and just graze the cheek, or hit the leg and lay the femoral artery open. A headshot isn't a synonym for lethal (despite what the videogame industry would have you believe) and a limb shot isn't necessarily a minor and temporary inconvenience.

The usual reason for lethality being more than one might expect is that where civilian shootings occur they tend to be either gangland killings, or intersections between criminals and law abiding homeowners. Under these conditions multiple wounds are typical, and they often involve expanding ammunition, which the army isn't supposed to be using (spitzer upset in the body notwithstanding).

From what I saw in youtube shootout videos, that could as well be because of the shooters' leet skillz.

A lot was described about the rules. But does it matter the most?

What I like the most are the plots and the background. But no comments about that with a review of history. Does someone mind to share his thoughts?

Ares made a new assault rifle.
The assault rifle was not that good.
Interessting plot.

SYL

Alamais and several DOZEND other Dragons took over a Metroplex in Italy and ate more than . . what was it . . 70.000 People?
And started a Dragon Civil War.

Unless it turns out the Excalibur was designed and built by Insect Flesh Forms who wanted to try their hand at human tech design.

Could explain why it was so buggy.

And that threw Ares into a downward spiral, yeah.

Also, Amazonia and Atzlan had a war. They fought for a while, and Atzlan won, grabbing the entirety of 20 km of ground.
Oh, they also almost killed Sirrurg. Just not quite.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRmkF3VgYVU

Where can I find this gem? (trying it as much as possible to say it with a straight face)

Shitfront.

I mean Stormfuck.

Edit: Sorry for the words. I mean of course Shitfuck.

Edit2: SORRY - its so hard to come up with the right words. It is of course the wonderful Stormfront.

At least they don´t advise players to hunt down jewish zombies for the necromantic scalpel of Dr Mengele in Auschwitz as in BOGOTA!

SYL

No, they just expect people to kinda ignore the number of, i think, over 70.000 people having been eaten in the span of . . a month? in central europe, just next door to france, switzerland and germany . .

Oh, and it wasn't mengeles scalpell(*cough*bullshit, it totally was supposed to be but they were too chicken to actually use his name*cough*) but some clerks scalpell . . . who should never have had a scalpell . . which is why somebody here on dumpshock, might even have been me, no idea, really, came up with the idea to replace the scalpell with a ballpoint pen that requires the blood of his descendants to write and so shadowrunners get hired to, one by one, find them and bring them to auschwitz so they can be forced to write with the pen the names of all that have been killed there so their spirits can rest in peace . . with their own blood, untill they die from bloodloss. Then they need to get the next guy.

which is a 100 times better idea for this stupid shit they pulled than the stupid shit they pulled when they pulled this stupid shit!
there is simply no reason given at all why anybody should go there and actually get the scalpell . .

Which part is so bad in that short description? While I think storm front is epic lame in some areas the idea that a large powerful country/megacorp could threaten a great dragon doesn't seem that off to me. Its not like the tossed a few guys at him, they spent years researching weapons just to kill dragons and launched a gagillilon nuyen, 10's of thousands of men assault on him. If great dragons were so powerful they could shrug that off the game would be about Dragons ruling the world and the humans trying to find a way to survive and over throw the oppressors.

Its not as bad as adventures where they have Ares setting up a bug/human hybrid research facility where surprise surprise the lead researcher becomes the queen and no one discovers it.(the queen didn't even have masking IIRC) I mean yeah I'd never have teams of astral experts sweep a bug research facility because like nothing could go wrong. By never I mean like daily, and the teams sweeping it would be checked as soon as they leave. And sure in my most secret facility evar the people I'd send to it would be raw recruits from knight errant because they'd be the most loyal and hardest to infiltrate I'm sure.

Trying to kill Sirrurg? Nah, that's business as usual for Aztlan. I meant the fact that the two major countries in latin america finally fight just to push the border 20km? I mean, how long this war lasted and how many hundreds of thousands of lives were lost so they could make a new North Korea-South Korea armistice and largest mine field in the world? Assuming of course that's how it happened.

Six months.

Dr Eduard Wirths. He studied medicine at university, so chances are he owned a scalpel at some point for the "cadaver class" if anything (and after that, he also served in the Waffen SS in Norway and Russia between 1939 and 1942). Bu as far as history goes, he never or very rarely used a scalpel in Auchwitz.

ah, thanks.
but that's still twelfty thousand people per month eaten . .

Had they killed him, it'd be less idiotic. Well, idiotic still because Atzlan spends the entirety of its military ...what, three?.. times over the course of Stormfront, but less idiotic than the whole Atz-Amazonian war ending in nothing.

I've read some of the reviews on drivethru. A friend of mine got the book, I think I'll borrow from him and take a look. But yeah, I can't see how such ideological opposing countries would declare war and accept anything less than the total surrender of the other. Unless, UNLESS the war cost enough money and lives that both sides decided it was best to declare a draw and lick their wounds for a round 2 later.

A lot of wars have ended with very little gained and massive amounts lost. I found that part very fitting for the setting.

That's the nature of war. Let's not pretend that all - or even most - wars actually achieve anything worth talking about.




That sounds about right for what I got the impression it was supposed to be like in there. Though I do find it strange that, say, none of the IE's decided to do anything about it.

Also, I'd like to point out that present day terrain descriptions might not be all that accurate. A river popping up would be a strange thing, sure, but as I understand it the Awakening caused a lot of stuff to change - suddenly kinda curious as to whether or not the Atacama desert is still a desert on that note.

War and Stormfront are among the most hated books in there. And I've read a lot about it here. But what about Ghost Cartels, Emergence, Dawn of the Artifacts...

Are they that lower than 3rd edition era?

When you read today lot of 2nd ed. books, they not that great to be honest.


When I read your reviews, I wonder in which plots characters could be involved. I don't see myself running a game where Lofwyr hires an army of shadowrunners to set an attack at a great dragon. It sounds like a stupid scenario to me.

Is that stuff at least playable? Did they find some room for gaming, or does it just suck?

That's not actually the scenario. The scenario is that Lofwyr gets a bunch of dragons together to attack Alamais and company, and both sides brought on runners as footsoldiers (freelancers of that sort being optimal for this sort of thing for various reasons). Then Lofwyr let the metahumans get the last shot in on Alamais as a purely political move.

The idea of modernized dragon warfare was interesting in and of itself, really. Still, Storm Front is more plot book than scenario book.

The only recent one I can recall is the Korean War, which, techinically ain't even over yet, they just signed an armistice. If that's what happened between Aztlan and Amazonia, then ok, I can cope with that. But what you are saying is like 1940 Russia and Germany went to war and Russia capitulated after losing Moscow. There's war and there's total war and I don't see two ideological polars like Aztlan and Amazonia pulling the guns that easily. Sorry, I just can't accept that. And I believe this is the part where we agree to disagree...

IIRC the implied reasoning was that the queen actively fudges with personnel transfers to get plenty of new recruits (and place the "converts" all around). What's really bad about that adventure is not so much the setting as the adventure itself, which basically describes a few settings but nothing the players might actually do there. The best way to solve the adventure is to screw up and get captured, at least then you know what do do -- get out and blow up stuff.


Speaking of doing nothing, I considered "well, nothing happened" a fitting end to the war were nothing happened and life went on as normal even in a city sitting right on the front line (aka the Nixkrieg).

Just one every 4 minutes. Who would notice?

I know but if Ares was run by someone who wasn't a total idiot things like that would not be under the control of people who worked at a facility who were potentially in the line of fire to become bug spirits. Its like if you have professor X locked up and you are researching telepathy, how many security/personnel decisions are you going to leave up to the people in the facility. The security and yes the adventure were so horrifically bad it broke my suspension of disbelief. I could of accepted bug spirits taking over Ares, but the way the adventure played out was just bad.

I could be mistaken, but I don't think the idea was that people didn't notice.

Well, it doesn´t seem to have any effects.

SYL