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I got into SR fairly recently, so most of the books I've had access to are the newer ones. However, "Dragons of the Sixth World" was the first shadowrun books I read. There's a lot of differences between the old plot/campaign books and the new ones. I like some of the changes- I appreciate that jackpointers have identities and aren't spur-of-the-moment names- but when it comes to the larger metaplots, there's a lot of criticism.

Mainly, this is what I've seen the most criticism of:

* War! - everything about it, it seems
* The CFD metaplot as a rehash of the bug plot
* The more recent bug plot as a rehash of the bug plot
* The handling of free seattle
* OK, pretty much everything in Cutting Black
* Year of the Comet

Was there a point for you where the SR metaplot hit the point of no return? Or was it just a series of gradual changes?

Alternatively- do you like any of the above?

If anything I'd probably go for the CFD plot line. We get teasers just before SR5 about this, little grains of sand, and with Lockdown we get the whole damned beach. It kinda had potential, but I feel it blew its wad faster than the god of premature ejaculation.

The metaplot died for me in late 4th edition / early 5th edition.

The dragon war in Storm Front (and its unfortunate name), as well as CFD being the umpteenth variation of body snatching, felt in turns too extreme / idiotic / lazy and made me completely disregard most of it. I haven't followed the metaplot since.

August 9, 2057 - the day they killed Dunkelzahn

specifically - the gimmick of having ballots in every new sourcebook you bought, so the fans could vote on who the next President of UCAS would be

give them a range of options where Dunkelzahn was clearly going to be the fan favorite

say, "yes, Dunkelzahn won! he's President now! ooops!!!! he got assassinated!!!"

that whole thing was... I'm not sure what language is allowed on these boards... but colorful language could used to describe the nature of what FASA did to the fans there

but more than that - the entire purpose of Dunkelzahn sacrificing himself was to stop the Horrors from coming across... which:

a) invalidates all the work that the players did if they ever ran Harlequin and/or Harlequin's Back

b) was rendered moot when Microsoft bought FASA and no post-FASA owner of the Shadowrun IP also owned the rights to Earthdawn



"Dragons of the Sixth World" was definitely one of the better / most useful post-2E splatbooks I've taken a look at

"Year of the Comet" I haven't looked at in detail, but in general I like the idea of Halley's comet flying by being the trigger for hand waving let's rearrange the setting a bit (compared to say, killing Dunkelzahn and having his Last Will and Testament be a giant middle finger to the status quo)

I was unaware that they made Seattle free, but it makes sense that it was headed in that direction

the CFD plot was a hard pass for me

...which paved the way for a departure from cyberpunk into a wargame with an endless array of ever more boring, err, I mean incredibly powerful and dangerous monsters that are coming to wipe out humanity - yet, for some unexplained reason, no one seems to care, and human life and strife and technological development continues unabated. Like, if England during WWII had turned its back on what happened in France etc. and insisted on having their 5 o'clock tea rather than putting up a fight.

For me, metaplot kind of died out around 4e when nothing seemed to really happen post the Corebook (technomancer Emergence). You could tell that they had plans for what happened next, but then...

The CGL blowup happened and the old team left for the new team to come in (around Running Wild). That's where my real line is drawn.

The most annoying thing about Dunkelzhan's death is that it's explained in a trilogy that has kind of crap writing. The protagonist's a Gary Stu, the author has no idea how to write women, etc. etc. (Well, a lot of the early books were written by authors that I swear had never had a conversation with a woman. I digress.)

His death itself never bothered me, but I didn't know about the ballot thing. If the Big D was more involved in the Harlequin series, or if it was foreshadowed in some of the game books, that might've helped a bit more. Or even have Harlequin sacrifice himself- I think that's one of the outcomes of that mission (Even though the sacrifice isn't permanent). Perhaps after one too many times going after the horrors, death finally stuck for the elf.

Come to think of it, how many canon deaths have there actually been? I know Aina died, but then in "Better than Bad" it turns out she's been trapped on another metaplane. Alamais died, for good this time, probably. Anyone else significant?

the only SR novel I've read is Just Compensation, because I was toying with an FDC campaign in the late 2050s... and it was pretty bad... though some of the plot holes were hilarious - like Wolf Blitzer being a military correspondent for NewsNet in the 2050s reporting on the attempted coup d'etat... dude would have to be ancient... and, yeah sure, leionization is a thing in Shadowrun, and 1E/2E canon has NewsNet descend from CNN... but how many other famous-in-the-1990s celebrities are running around in the Shadowrun 2050s due to leionization?



I don't want to be a fan boy whining that they killed off a beloved character... they should have the creative freedom to kill off big names... but... the way it was executed and meta-plot pay-off was pretty poor

there were other factors, like the circumstances in which FanPro got the rights to Shadowrun but not Earthdawn, and Nigel Findley dying in February 1995 at the age of 35...



not involved at all... but the whole idea of the Harlequin series is you help the H-man hold back the horrors... there wasn't any real reason for the Big D to go to such extraordinary measures to sacrifice himself if the players had done their jobs...

The Transition from 3rd to 4th Ed . .
Because . . you know . . there WAS the Crash 1.0, not like people would . . i dunno . . LEARN FROM THAT SHIT?
And all just because they had to kinda sorta somehow try and get wireless into the setting because the real world
was outstripping SR in terms of personal tech -.-

yeah, really don't get that...

a) no biggie to retcon wireless (even if you're a weirdo like me who sticks with 2E)

b) it's pretty easy to hand wave that between the Food Riots in 1999 / New York City Earthquake / Year of Chaos / VITAS / Crash of 2029 / Euro Wars / etc. / etc. / etc. that there was an alternate tech-path where wi-fi wasn't as quickly adopted due to lags / setbacks in R&D (due to external factors, not the actual feasibility of the technology) and post-2029 security concerns... a Second Crash simply isn't necessary to explain a later adoption of wireless

hell, given that it's an alternate history anyways, I don't get why they didn't just keep the references to the USSR from 1E in 2E... a slightly longer Cold War could also explain a great deal of alternate technology development path (esp. w.r.t. the Internet)

Tricky question. First because asking "At what point did the SR metaplot "Jump the Shark?" is not the same thing as asking "At what point did SR "Jump the Shark?"

I would disagree with the death of Dunkelzahn being the moment the metaplot jump the shark, because it is the moment there actually started to be a metaplot. Bug City and the novel Burning Bright are the books where the calendar started to matter: on this day, this event happens and things change. Super Tuesday and Portfolio of a Dragon came right after. What was written previously could be moved up and down between 2049 and 2055 with little to no effect. After that, no, you had to play The Universal Brotherhood before the destruction of Chicago, Harlequin's Back before the death of Dunkelzahn, and so on.

To say the death of Dunkelzahn was the moment the metaplot jumped the shark is saying the Universal Brotherhood was the only worthwhile plot ever written for Shadowrun. Which I guess is one valid opinion, a bit... grognardy perhaps? But as said above, that's more like saying SR as whole jump the shark when it started having a metaplot alltogether.

I'd argue at least Renraku Arcology: Shutdown and Brainscan deserve some recognition, which would make me say the metaplot must has jump the shark at a later point. On the other hand, I can't help but think Threats, Portfolio of a Dragon, and Blood in the Boardroom, and the cargo cult built around them over the years, seeded the terrible mistake that writing only about important characters and global events was great writing.

The plots of Blood in the Boardroom are favorite of mines, but honestly they required a fucked-up amount of work to design adventures that allow the PC to just witness the significant events (most of the adventure ideas doing none of that). Ghost Cartels may not be the greatest plot SR ever got, but at least it is spot on making the player characters matter.

With that in mind, I'd say my Jump the Shark moment was Hestaby attacking S-K building in Dubai, starting the Dragon War. That entire plot is like, "look at us, it's important, we put all the dragons in there, it must be soooo important!" But Damage Control is four-fifths of an adventure about not getting involved in anything dragon-related, before possibly discovering there is one dragon-connected group in the very last part, and Storm Front struggling to provide an explanation as to why mortals are needed in a dragon clawfight. The issue of involving mere shadowrunners in immortal affairs has been established for a long time, as made obvious by Harlequin and Survival of the Fittest contrived, but somehow functional, solution. There is basically no excuse to willingly set up an event like the dragon war and not having thought it up.But what makes me point that at the Jump the Shark moment is the fact that, even after that, the CFD plot still fails at giving shadowrunners some agency, even outright holding off information from the game master to make sure they do not advance the plot.

The dumbest part of 4e's wireless, that they doubled down on in 5e in a huge way: It is inherently less secure than wired technology per the rules as written, yet everyone embraced it, even super-paranoid runners and corp dark sites.

Yeah, I'd much prefer "public matrix and your local stuffer shack use wireless, but anything secure is airgapped."

I never played 3e or before, but presumably there were things in place preventing you from hacking into a corp black site from your basement, or by tapping a nearby phone line? Or am I off?

Yes. The same thing that prevents you from doing that in SR1, SR2, SR4 and SR5. Presumably, also SR6 but you never know what nonsense they did there.
Because when the GM has critical systems connected to the Matrix like that, it's not the source material that's being obtuse, it's the GM
You can freely decide if you want to play basement ha/de-cker or take that squishy person with you and protect it at all costs, completely depending on the style of play your group prefers.


Excellent argument you're making there, and I completely agree. Of course, arguments could be made to the question when SR jumped the shark that it was right at the beginning with the inclusion of magic and metahumanity, but that defeats the point and people who do that (yes, they exist) should probably just go and play Cyberpunk instead.


I'd add Shockwaves to that list. It's an excellent apocalyptic plot book that involves player characters in a big and profound way, possibly as a hail mary requiem to successful professionals. You can be on the fence over why and how Crash 2.0, but I still think it was very well written (especially when opposed to the next Matrix overhaul which introduced "boom you're dead" GOD-deckers).
Year of the Comet? Eh. Take it or leave it. I despise some of the plot there (popup orichalcum islands, e.g.), and tolerate some other (Ghostwalker marching into Denver and making it his fiefdom is a bit beyond my ability to suspend my disbelief, but I can work with it). If you want X-Men in your game, the option is there, so that's nice. If you don't, you can simply use it as colour to pop up at opportune times, or outright ignore the furries.


At this point I somewhat disagree. Dragons attacking their rival's assets (be it indirectly as in the case of Hestaby's head[less] shaman or directly, like her nuking the tower after shooing everyone out) is well established, and having a Great Dragon show off a bit is a good and splashy introduction to showcase how high the bubbles in the cauldron are already. It's more of a thing to mention in the news though, backdrop instead of something you involve runners in. It's basically the same thing as the fight between Lofwyr and Nachtmeister over Frankfurt, only a bit less bloody. I think the subtlety of letting out all the employees makes it clear that there are degrees of escalation in play here.
And with the rest of your assessment, I agree again.


That mirrors my feelings exactly and is more well put than I could articulate in my last posting.

---

Additionally, since someone mentioned Harlequin's Back: I hated that campaign, even back then. I always felt that the save the world plots are not what runners are supposed to be involved in, Sam Verner and Dunkelzahn trilogies notwithstanding. I would almost call that a "jump the shark" moment, if there hadn't been such good material following later.
Don't get me wrong, I love the ED connection, and having glimpses show up in multiple forms is a guilty pleasure of mine, but I don't need horrors or their (direct) threat in my Shadowrun. For that I can go play Earthdawn.
Due to that, the sold off license doesn't faze me at all. I am the GM of my games and can fill them up with all kinds of nonsense that the books aren't allowed to acknowledge. And it's not like they're not still nodding towards the ED sources: Just take a look at the Artifacts campaign. It's all still there, it's just not called by name.

honestly, the second matrix crash doesn't bother me *that* much. I mean, I can't see why it "needed" to happen for wireless to be adopted; we adopted wireless pretty quickly irl once it came around, and no massive destruction of all of our technology was required. but the crash itself doesn't bother me. it had been a few decades; there is an entire generation (probably 2 ork generations) that didn't live through the first crash or at most have vague memories of it. those who did live through it have had time to pass it through their "good old days" filter. the new generation of matrix professionals probably mostly came up after the first crash, with entirely new technology that didn't exist in the old crash. the old generation of matrix professionals, those who made the transition from the original, had to learn entirely new tech... entirely new tech that was used to destroy the original crash virus by a comparative handful of people, for that matter. and frankly, a lot of them died as a result of the first crash, likely in greater proportions than the rest of the population.

but then a few short years after the second one, another crash. and they decided "hey, let's build the matrix on top of protocols that NOBODY UNDERSTANDS". really? like, not just "only a few people fully understand it" or "some people understand each part, but comprehending the entire system is beyond pretty much any normal metahuman" but literally the people that made the system have no damn clue how it works. within a few short years of having had repeated problems crop up in the old matrix, they decided "hey, let's use this new matrix that just popped up out of nowhere with no explanation whatsoever for its existence".

As far as I can tell, the 3rd edition was the only one acknowledging the possibility of offline systems in the corebook. The 1st and 2nd editions I think never touched the idea. The 4th edition only introduces it in Unwired, and the 5th edition in Kill Code.

I mostly agree with the people saying that when the plot became more important than the PCs, is when it became a problem. The plot can go along in the background, with some tie-in runs on occasion. Making the players go along with the plot means their actions are already determined, or can't affect anything.




Microsoft only only video game rights. Is it Topps that you're thinking of that bought Shadowrun RPG rights? FASA still owns (and publishes, slowly) Earthdawn, although they were published by at least on other company for a while. Although trying to combine to completely unrelated IPs was bad for both.




Yeah, that's when it went from not-great to terrible.

Yeah, I heard that "modern" FASA isn't even the same company as old FASA, they just bought the name and the Earthdawn IP. All sorts of weirdness with that

To me, there are two different issues here: setting consistency is one thing, the gaming experience is another.

The dragon war happening, Sirrurg, Hestaby, Lofwyr and even Alamais acting the way they did was (roughly) consistent with the established setting. But as you put it, it is written in a way that makes it a backdrop, a thing to mention in the news. What I consider as Jumping the Shark in that case is not the event per itself, but that they forgot to make it playable.

See, I do think Artifacts Unbound, Jet Set and The Twilight Horizon were riddled with mistakes, lazy plots and bad ideas, but at least the authors' intent was obviously to write gaming material, in no small part because that's what the book format ask for (except for the one who wrote "Technomancer Uprising" and "Friends in the Right Place" in The Twilight Horizon - that one was trying to smuggle setting changes into canon, using those adventures as pretexts).

But when I look at the dragon war in The Clutch of Dragons, I don't get that. Events happen and gets commented. Here and there you get one sentence that may hints at something PC could do. In The Clutch of Dragons, the Gaming Information about the "War at 10,000 Meters" does not even cover the dragon war, only some Ghostwalker-related stuff (that is, one and half page, out of a 23 pages-long chapter). The authors are having fun, making major characters move and altering the setting, but either they don't care about people playing the game, or they don't know how to do it. I can't help but see a deafening level of hubris in there.

Ironically, I think the dragon war plot would have been better used to write a trilogy of novels - even though it may have been difficult to turn the great dragons into relatable protagonists - because you don't have an expectation of playability when reading a novel.

Fair enough, we have different priorities on that part. I don't mind news snippets showing up in my world to tell the players about major events (and maybe get them to act on and profit from them?), and not everything - especially the world changing stuff - needs to be playable in my eyes.


I wouldn't call it hubris, honestly. Sometimes the major characters have to move and shake up the status quo, in order to advance the setting. We can argue about the quality, or if that is better put into novels than setting books with a handful of adventure ideas thrown in, but having to advance the plot (one of the strengths of the whole setting, IMO) isn't a circle jerk in itself, IMO. In short: I agree with you, but don't share your uncharitable judgement of the facts

I would also tend to agree that these things might go over better in a novel, where no player agency is required, but I can also understand and acknowledge that the novel situation at the time was pretty problematic for a number of reasons.
Another thing to consider is that most of the novel stories are not only not playable, but happen so deep in the background that the players generally wouldn't get to know about them, unless they have a pretty compelling reason to dig deep.

good point, I think I was answering more to "when did SR jump the shark"



yes, being a grognard, started with 2E in college, running a sequel to a friend's campaign, that was a sequel to another friend's campaign, that at least used NPCs from that friend's brother's 1E campaign in high school, some of my players ran sequel campaigns to mine, etc., half a dozen GMs, hundreds of shadowruns... cats and dogs, living together, mass hysteria

I'm not saying everything before they killed Dunkelzahn was worthwhile (early modules kept doing rocker / rock band themed stuff, for example... too much IMO), nor was I trying to say there wasn't anything worthwhile after they killed Dunkelzahn, just that the manner in which they did it was callous towards the fans (like that sportsball team in my area that had a poll on the new team name, then just went with whatever they really wanted to do anyways), the internal logic for why the Big D sacrificed himself contradicted previous material (Harlequin) and undermined the accomplishments of any players who actually went along and bought and played Harlequin...

and because that's where the metaplot started, and it started on such a sour note, and everything after that is at least somewhat contingent on it, adapting the metaplot from that point on becomes a tedious exercise in figuring out exactly what is and isn't contingent on the Big D's death and developing the alternate history of where the Big D didn't die

I'd posit that there were probably Chicago-area gaming groups in the early 1990s who used the Chicago chapter from Neo-Anarchist's Guide to North America, ran a nice Chicago-based campaign for a while... and then oops, Bug City happened... you have to decide if you are either going to ignore the cannon from here on out, or radically alter your campaign at the whim of these people who, in the final analysis, are just changing things around to force you to buy more books... which overlaps with the "this isn't an adventure book, this is a novel trying to be a splatbook" phenomenon

my problems really began when they introduced the Corporate Court in one of the chapters of Corporate Shadowfiles (the meta-plot I inherited from my friends campaign involved a near-war between the megacorps and circumstances in which it was averted that really cut against the notion that there was anybody sitting up in low earth orbit, keeping the peace)... you could literally read all of SR1 and SR2 main books and not see it mentioned, and only in late 2E materials and beyond did it become "oh yeah, Corporate Court, it's always been there, and it's always been integral to the setting"

for me, it becomes pretty easy to just draw the line somewhere in late 2E (plus ignoring the Corporate Court chapter in Shadowfiles), that line being the Big D's death, and just ignore 3E and beyond



Threats seemed like it was a bunch of good seeds for a campaigns that could translate into street-level action

I even like Portfolio of a Dragon as a springboard for ideas (even if I refuse to have Dunkelzahn die in my campaign, it's a bunch of ideas for things that are going on in the world that the Big D has an interest in and through his web of pawns would hire runs about)

Shutdown was interesting concept even if I feel meh about turning the Arcology from the cyberpunk megacorp setpiece (a la the Tyrell Building in Bladerunner) and into a house of horrors, and I'm still a little fuzzy on how I would adopt it into the Big D not dying scenario (like, Leonardo holding the Big 8 for ransom was a key milestone in the path to Deus gaining sentience? and he was only doing that to get funds to build the Great Ark to make sure some survived the Horrors? so if I come up with a scenario where the Big D doesn't have to sacrifice himself, then the Horrors problem is solved, and Leonardo doesn't need to build the Ark, doesn't need to hold the megacorps for ransom, blah blah blah, no Deus, no Shutdown)

never looked at Brainscan



agreed. looked through Blood in the Boardroom with an eye to how much of it would still be applicable in my "alternate history where the Big D didn't die" scenario, and found it really unhelpful in terms of spawning worthwhile adventures



never played any module (except Food Fight), but Harlequin and Harlequin's Back were at the bottom of my list to ever play out of anything from OG SR... for similar reasons to your distaste... but they also happened off in metaphysical la la land and could be ignored if you were GMing an OG SR campaign... it was with Super Tuesday that you were suddenly forced to pay attention it to "wait, they killed Dunkelzahn?" followed by "wait? they said Harlequin fixed this? okay, why the hell did you kill Dunkelzahn?"



never played Earthdawn or got into the lore, it's not really necessary to play OG SR, but I point to that ED/SR connection as part of the alchemy that made 1E/2E what it was, and then abruptly changed

maybe the severing of the SR and ED rights wasn't a jump the shark moment, but it was a jump from SR-that-was to something different



my feel, just from browsing Artifacts in the games shop, was that it was like a entirely different game... cyberpunk Indiana Jones... which was interesting, but not enough to draw me out of my rearguard action to stick with the 2050s / 2E



in 1999, FASA sold its videogame branch to Microsoft

in early 2001, FASA transferred the rights to SR to WizKids as it was closing it's doors

WizKids licensed the RPG rights to Fantasy Productions (who were already publishing for the German version), better known as FanPro, who made 3E (without having the Earthdawn license)

in 2003, Topps bought WizKids, then turned around and licensed SR to Catalyst Game Labs (a subsidiary of InMediaRes Productions)

still feel like you could insert a 2E-style shadowtalker spinning a conspiracy theory that this was all Bill Gates' revenge for how 1E and 2E mocked him with "Microdeck", but probably it was more that selling off FASA Interactive was part of rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic

..is that people never bothered to read neither 3E Matrix nor 4E Unwired. Or even the 4E main book with Skinlink.

And then go on complaining about being surprised by wireless coverage.

Hint: 3E had cellular satellite service... so you could use your cell or deck with cellular interface anywhere in the world. Yes, including simsense. (And this CSS constellation was really the biggest thing that was destroyed during the 2nd crash.)

While Unwired goes into the detail that of course the 'new' matrix reused the fibreoptic backbones since those are kind of impossible to destroy electronically. While explaining that basically, the cellular network on top of that was replaced. You know... like 3G - 4G - 5G today.

I think a lot of this is a problem with my initial question- "jumping the shark" implies that everything after a certain moment is bad.

There can be plot elements that are disliked or bad, but have good plot elements come after them. This might just be a "low point" in the plot, or something that a lot of groups retcon.

It could even be a series of small "shark jumps," that are really just a shifting in themes (such as from cyberpunk to transhumanist). After a certain point, the genre and tone of the work is different, but it was gradual. It might be good or bad, but it is telling a different story and no longer appeals to the same audience.

I think this has a lot to do with it. In the early days, the tone and the setting were fairly specific: shadowrunners are disposable assets in a distopian world where powerful mega corporations control everyday life.

But then the world 'grew'. What started as a reasonably contained setting (shadowrunners vs. The Powers That Be in Seattle) exploded to encompass the rest of the world. Just scan a list of books from any edition and think of all the roles you can play and the threats you can face and and the stories you can tell: gangers, soldiers, organized crime, mercenaries, Lone Star / Knight Errant, pirates, Doc Wagon, pirates, corpers, politics, dragons, immortal elves, secret societies, spies, hooders, coyotes, con men, bounty hunters, rockers, urban adventures, redneck runs, pink mohawk, black trenchcoat, mirrorshades, brown business suit, etc. etc.

Add on the astral and the Matrix to the physical realm and the Sixth World is immensely, mind-boggling big. That's a strength, but to AquaBlack0B's point it also means that there's no 'genre' or 'tone' anymore. It's every genre; it's every tone.

My favorite games are ganger campaigns. Other people love hacking Zurich-Orbital and kicking Lofwyr in the nuts. I don't, but I'm glad the game can accommodate both.

As for "jumping the shark" I don't find it a helpful concept for something that's still in progress. It implies a point-of-no-return and I don't see any specific plot point that's so fatal that the game world can't come back from it.

I'm not up-to-speed on everything that happening in the 2080s but I'm pretty strong through the 2070s. I'll go on record as enjoying Ghost Cartels (playing through it right now, actually). I also played in and GM'd an amnesia campaign that was driven by CFD. It was one of the best campaigns I've ever played, so even if you don't like CFD I'll note that a good GM can spin a great story out of almost anything.

As for the wireless Matrix, the writers were very clear that the problem they were trying to solve wasn't the mismatch between current-day tech and Sixth World tech but rather "how do we get the decker integrated with the rest of the team throughout the course of the gaming session and not playing a separate minigame on their own with the GM for an hour while everyone else gets pizza". I think it was the right decision from a gameplay perspective, even if the execution hasn't been what I would hope for.

Wireless Matrix existed in SR3.
The Implementation from SR4 onward was trying to address a problem that did not need addressing. From somewhere in game design philosophy it was 'bad' for the characters to not be all together most of the time. Individual goals and achievements got muted down for group ones. The Hour Minigame is pretty much a myth - 15 maybe 20 minutes here and there? yeah sure, but everyone gets that - and people used to be (and often still are) interested in what is happening with other characters, especially when they may not be able to help directly.

I think the end of SR4 is where the shark got jumped. Internal inconsistencies run rife, ignoring or rewriting what has gone before is fine when you're rebooting, not so hot when you're carrying on from. A failure to let the people writing actually develop things into the world - just look at the differences between released work and what the devs at the time told us things SHOULD be. Reshuffling everything in overnight blips, a lack of understanding of what does what, or how in the process. As I'm typing this i think Jumping the Shark is the wrong term - I think Shadowrun got completely lost with itself .

also a failure to pay the people actually writing... or fire the guy who embezzled the writers salaries...

I can personally attest that the Hour Minigame was NOT a myth. And that others did not find it engaging - either due to duration or lack of familiarity with the notoriously crunchy rules - and this was before the constant distraction of smartphones.

I like the combat hacker archetype from 4E and 5E and my personal experience is that it broadened interest in the role. I didn't know a lot of people who wanted to play deckers in 2E and 3E, both because of the micromanagement necessary but also because the GM would usually downgrade their role because it was so difficult to keep them involved while keeping the rest of the table engaged. Maybe that's possible to do when you're playing with life-long friends or established gaming buddies, but when you're trying to play Missions, or with a group of randos you met online, or with anyone else where there isn't built-in cohesion... then, yeah, group goals and achievements are more important than individual ones.

Yeah... 4E was the only time I saw people actually engaging with the matrix more than to contact their Decker.

I'm lucky enough to have an actual network security specialist in my group, and we've been working on how to make varying levels of secure facilities that are matrix connected but still reward players for actually being on site. for 20A, that is.

The basic trick is having the facility wireless shielded (generally using wireless shielding in/on the walls, which has the additional bonus of blocking UWB radar from giving the PCs a full headcount and 3d map), then routing all matrix traffic through one secure gateway packed full of IC, spiders and Firewalls, with a separate node for authentication of logins. Then all the nodes inside the building have to go through this chokepoint to access the outside world and vica versa, and only authorized nodes can connect.

More secure facilities use full wired and even air gap, less secure facilities don't. ect.

This means that while the network is pretty well defended, if you get your hacker on site they can rather easily hack any individual terminal, but cannot easily compromise the whole network. Thus giving them both a reason to be on site and some strategic choices: does the team try and find the authentication node and hack that first, thus compromising the network but likely needing to get past physical security to access it? Or do they just hack the terminals they need when they need them, reducing the time and physical security needed to bypass but leaving the network as a whole intact? It even makes stuff like the Pocket Hacker agent a decent option for character who want to dabble in matrix stuff without too much investment, since you just need to physically get access to the vulnerable terminals inside the facility for it to have a good shot at working.

It also forces Riggers to come on site since they need to wirelessly access their drones. No stay at home rigging for you! Smart teams will use stuff like retrans units and the like to bypass this bit of course but it makes having a plan that much more valuable.

I think the defining part of "jumping the shark" is not that dramatic changes alone, but that these changes are made in a failed attempt to stay relevant or hip.

The Blackout plot would be an obvious choice at first glance, but just like calling 6th Edition a dumpster fire, I feel that would actually give too much credit. So my candidate would be "The Year of Shadowrun". It was an attempt at a really big push for Shadowrun in all possible formats -- Mayan calendar hype! New editon! Deckbuilding game! Eurogame! PC game! MMO! Miniatures game! What actually was released in that year were Shadowrun Returns (great game) and Fifth Edition (YMMV). It might have stalled the decay of the IP a little bit, but nothing more.

They did eventually release Sprawl Ops, and I think everyone from the Kickstarter has probably gotten what they paid for by now. It's not a good game, but it's fine if you have exactly 3 players.

Exactly. The existence of wireless isn't the problem. The implementation absolutely is.

Hell, I've treated pocket secretaries like smartphones since before smartphones existed.

I think that anyone who understand security at all agrees with you 100%.



Was there ever a version of the pocket secretary that was implantable? I mean I know in SR 4a, the pocket secretary was replaced with a commlink, but in SR 2 or 3, was there a version that could be implanted?

Yes, but it usually involved stumbling up to a troll while drunk and making some pretty rude remarks.
Course this tended to reduce your movement rate afterwards due to reasons.

Teasing aside, I do not recall it being specifically listed for implanting, but as the Pocket Secretary was also your phone and mini-comp and you could get a telephone installed as cyber, I imagine it would have a similar cost to have stuck into you.

Reason I'm asking is that something like that would be very nice as a "always there" assistant.

Headware phones existed by SR2, so I don't see any reason why not. It's just a pocket sec with a DNI interface, and we're all about plugging consumer devices into our brains here.