And rightly so! You can't get much more 80s cyberpunk when it comes to VR really...

Umm, that was 30 years ago. What is your target demo? If it's for 40-60 year old cyberpunk fans then TRON as a model makes perfect sense. If you have a different demo in mind then you might consider that rules that make sense to someone who has used real computers since before they could talk might be a clever innovation.

Given that every version of computer rules in SR has been essentially unplayable also suggests to me that putting out another version of the traditional incomprehensible TRON worshiping crap is probably not a good idea.

Computer rules from EVERY Cyberpunk game have been "essentially unplayable". SR4A comes the closest possible yet in my mind. And it still keeps the TRON worshiping crap as well.

I can't say I'm surprised. What I am surprised by is the amount of...apathy everyone else on the internet has had about this. The couple places I figured would be intrigued / discussing it are mum, and talking more about the video game kickstarter.

But no, I'm not surprised that current crew has suddenly leapt upon the idea of doing a retro-2050s buzz. They've pretty much admitted that they're not fans of the direction Peter Taylor steered the Shadowrun ship (see whatever thread it was a few months back where some of the writers described a game I and a good number of other people have never played), and surprise surprise, they're making their first full on attempt to go backwards. Yawn.

The hobby is graying, and they're starting to get nostalgic about the good old days. You've seen it start with the OSR, and now you're seeing it migrate outwards. Its like old comic fans getting their hands on Marvel / DC characters - keep what they like, screw whatever interesting tacks have been taken since they first started reading comics.

I'm already voting with my wallet either way. I haven't bought a product since the Catocalypse a few years back, and I'll just keep on keeping on, I guess.

ETA:



I gotta ask - why is this a good thing?

I had to sit down and physically write down every single rule - spread across the whole of SR4a - to even begin to understand the hacking / rigging rules. To run an NPC. Other players of mine have expressed interest in running the game, but are stymied by a rules set that is just...overwhelming.

Hell, the only thing keeping me from trying out the Shadowrun / Mouseguard hack I read awhile back is a) the price of Mouseguard (beautiful and well-written as it is) and b) my players not being as interested in trying indie games as I am.

Why is everyone so gloomy? I can't be the only one who's totally excited about everything that went down these last few weeks, right?

As for the matrix, the purpose of the rules is to facilitate fun. More realistic matrix rules will probably not be fun, but if they somehow manage to simplify them a bit the rules will be much better than they are right now. I personally love geeking out over interesting and complex gaming systems, but some of my friends who love the idea of technomancers, for example, are really dissapointed by the complexity of the rules.

Gloomy? Because this is either going to be awesome, or rape childhoods.

Think about the South Park Episode about the new Indiana Jones movie...

Yes. It would be like remaking the Goonies.

Well, you can count me amongst the excited. When I was starting 4A I found that I had all these old adventures SR1=>SR3 that I had never run so I just decided to do 2050 in 4A anyway. This would make it easier. Crossing my fingers for more comprehensive / easy to use Matrix rules though; I've never run into a set that I like.

You don't want realism, you want verisimilitude. And you want the rules on computers to makes sense to someone who has literally used a computer since before they could talk. The whole doublethink insanity you have to go through with the current matrix rules makes even trying to figure out what the rules are tying to say hugely painful. Computer rules based on the thoughts of a guy who never used a computer and wrote entire novels on manual typewriters in the PC/MAC word processor era has pretty much reached the sell-by date.

In other words, you need to throw out the anachronistic TRONism and Gibson worship and replace it with ideas that make sense and are at least vaguely plausible extensions of where tech is going. Of course, this is easy to say and harder to do.

Yeah, sorry, but I think VR is here to stay.

Frankly, I wouldn't want VR to go anywhere. I like the thought of jacking in and going into hot sim, full-immersion, Enter the Matrix style virtual reality

Actually that isn't a problem really.

The problems with the system and reality starts with the idea that in order to access a random host that random host will automatically "run your icon" on it. Essentially you are feeding it some arbitrary computer code and it is executing it. Having a remote system execute arbitrary code is what malware is trying to achieve, in SR that's what you get by default. Isn't it odd how people in SR have such a bad time with hackers?

That is really just a fluff change, but it is a kind of important one.

Nobody ever said that Matrix architecture made sense from a computer security point of view. Perhaps it's not even intended to - after all, the Crash Worm (the first one) wiped out all of our "modern" computers and it somehow got through every firewall known to man, most of which were likely smart enough to say "lolno" to random connections trying to run executable data.


It could just be that by the time of the 2070s, telling computers not to run things that any random wanker tells them to run is a losing game. Otherwise cracking a node the way we do it - entering it and smashing the IC down - would be impossible, since the defending node could simply say "you want me to run an attack program that damages my firewall? lol no."


I don't have a problem with this.

This keeps coming up everywhere. Two examples - archaeologists and snipers.

Archaeologists find fantasy cultures silly because storytellers don't usually give them clear styles, and when you enter a tomb you just find unrelated imagery and monsters.
Snipers usually find rifle ranges in games ridiculous, because they can shoot much farther in real life. I actually had a couple of friends that were combat veterans argue this with me.

Game developers just try to make things fun, not realistic and boring. No one tells you that you have to work insanely hard to locate a tomb that isn't just a pit full of bones, and you really don't want the game to include sniping that much - "your head assplodes, make a new character".

I´ve lost another game to new dark ages before. Good that nostalgia is looking back and does not meddle with the future. The whole project could be a Retro-SR pdf instead of a new main book, giving SR4 rules sections for old modules.

- separating the matrix (wired) from rigging (wireless) again will be the hardest part.
- The mage/shaman thingy should stay in the past, so no trouble
- one would need a tech timeline and an event timeline


Do you have any more hints to find the plot-discussion-thread? As for the apathy, yes. We self-adopted a few of the old modules, but else there is little to no interest in going back.

Sorry dude, I'm trying to parse this paragraph. Can you repeat?


Start from here and work forward, noting some freelance responses. Bull, Patrick, Critias.

Patrick's post is specifically where I turned my head and went, "bwuh?". He starts talking about how augmentation is a thing you don't make a choice about and it only leads into a downward spiral of needing more to survive....which kind of contradicts many NPCs out there that have basic aug's in order to do their job or convenience, and they don't seem to have any weird cyberpsychosis thing going on. There's also no rules in the text about this - you take an Essence and nuyen loss, and that's pretty much it.

(Neurosis gets it, to balance things out here).

It's fine if that's a game that they want to write and play. It's just not the game that I want to play or buy.

So to go back to topic at hand, I'm not surprised by a release of a 2050 supplemental book, nor would I be surprised if suddenly it becomes its own line. I'm just surprised no one's been discussing it.

Yeah, wow. Patrick's post... Wow.

Sure, some people might have gotten their chrome the Adam Jensen way, but not everybody. Not by a long shot. Not when losing your eyes and getting brand-spanking new rating 4 cybereyes with all the trimmings and a datajack is a long lunch-break at a Nu Yu boutique.

Bull's post... I just don't agree with it. I don't really care about how the CGL folk meant for their world to feel, and here's how I see it.

The new world is a nightmare and a total prison for your mind and body. People work 12 hours a day, every day, and in their spare time they would rather lose themselves in some AR or VR paradise than do anything important. Children grow up alienated from their parents, their friends are mostly online (hang out in 4chan /b/ sometimes, in 2070 it's like that ALL THE TIME), everything is totally screwed.

People are warned about the dangers of identity theft and stuff like that, but they don't ever realize how FUCKED they are, because when someone's SIN is taken from him the crooked cops that arrest him sell his organs to tamanous and his existence has been deleted. The corps only implemented wireless because it helps them gain more power over the herds, they don't care about security. Most hackers either work for them or are hunted down like dogs - not all are "Slamm-O!" level. All the causes and all the hype you see on the trids, EVERYTHING is controlled by government and corp media, big brother sees you all the time and there's very little privacy. So all the info you get about something with your fancy AR image links and DNI was put there by corp content editors and designed by corp sociologists.

ONLY the SINless can find any sort of freedom from all this, and most of them live in urban jungles controlled by gangs anyway.
The illusion of freedom and awesome tech is spoon fed to you by megacorp PR in order to make you a slave. Freedom is for shadowrunners or others who are SINless but live inside the machine without being part of it.

1st thought: I´m happy that they are writing a 2050 book instead of bending the 2070 scenario to be different. Mechwarrior: Dark Age ruined BT for me.

2nd thought: Since the main selling point is IMO using the old material from FASA/FanPro times, an "Alternate Setting" book would be stronger. Less re-printing of hopefully identical rules, more place for actual conversions and new stuff. I´m not buying a new main book.



Thanks for the links. I shall now refrain from de-railing this thread.

The Attack program does not run on the target node, the target node only gets fed the data from the attack program. I tend to think of it as a modern Metasploit

The reversion of the identical mage/shaman/other systems to different mechanics (at least on the spirit front) is pretty ciritical for me to buy this product. Otherwise I'll still with what I already have.

With those and Matrix rules for deckers, I'm happy to purchase it and any future retro-style stuff.

Here's the thing.

Patrick's post was written from a genre perspective.

Neurosis wrote from a player perspective.

They're both right.

Augmentation in classic Cyberpunk has always been a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" situation. Having to continually get augmented more and more, just to keep up with the competition, is a pretty classic trope of the genre. As is the increasing de-humanization that comes with augmentation.

Cyberpunk stories are rife with characters that get some for whatever reason, and find that they're now saddled with sometimes crippling drawbacks they weren't expecting. As befits a dystopian setting, augmentation is that "quick path to power" which always ends in tears. Even those minor side characters that don't get heavily augmented, like the sarariman with the accounting implants, or the construction worker with an industrial jackhammer cyberarm, their implants serve as shackles enslaving them to corporate masters, even if they don't realize it.

This is why most Cyberpunk games place additional 'cost' on augmentation. Whether it's cyberpsychosis, or essence loss, or whatever, you lose essential humanity when you get metal to replace your meat. If you're playing a game where getting cybernetic implants does NOT somehow eat your soul, you may be enjoying yourself, who knows, but you're not playing a Cyberpunk game.

PLAYER motivations are different, however.

I am reminded of the scene from the movie 'Last Action Hero', where the protagonist Jack Slater finally meets Arnold Schwarzenegger. After considering his life so far, all Jack can say is, "I have always hated you."

Players want to play a cool character. They want to be powerful or stylish or badass, and often all of the above. RPG games are all about escapism, after all, so who wants to play Sammy Sad Sack, who is being forced into a life of pain and heartbreak and is doomed to die a whimpering death in some back alley gutter?

The trick is, of course, to somehow maintain that dystopian feel while still catering to player wants.



-k

Which is why I want to play. I want a dystopian feel as a player.

I'm with you there CanRay...

If I ever got the chance to play an actual game as a player, I would definately try to make something along the lines of 'Sammy Sad Sack' as KarmaInferno puts it.

I've always been drawn to the downtrodden, dystopic underdog who fights against all odds only to acheive a small symbolic victory and then die in the end...

What, you want an actual victory?

As an accountant, not having a Math SPU will be a severe disadvantage. Synthacardium and Sleep Regulator are must-haves for heavy-duty jobs. Mnemonic Enhancers beat external access to information by a mile. Implants should be common, there is no choice if you can afford them. The stronger you get and the more abilities you have, the less you can relate to unaugmented people.

Transhumanism can develop at the core of an augmented subculture, but I don´t see Joe Average embracing that idea. And very few would be able to afford following it. Greed and envy fit a dystopian setting well.


Maybe one can divide the time from 2050 to 2070 in phases with different tech access and attitudes towards implants. "Prototype years", "Gearing for mass production", "Everyone is doing it". Transhumanism would IMO be a very late development.

no...only a symbolic victory - like being stepped on by Lofwyr instead of being eaten by him

If it doesn't come with a trophy and a cash prize I'm out.

I don't really understand the need for this product. What do we gain from it?

Hopefully rules and guidelines for converting older SR products to SR4A rules.

Also, rules for older versions of cyberware and other tech - useful in creating more believable older pcs and npcs.

Personally i'm loving the idea, I'm just hoping it comes out before i start my game because i want to run my players through all 20+ years of SR in game history with the modules. I can just see their faces now finding themselves running the mission to steal Ehran the Scribe's manuscript, or getting dropped in Bug City just before the Cermak Blast.

yes i'm an Evil GM

QFT

I remember when I first ran into SR4... my biggest complaint was "what foolish company would put everything they need to protect onto a wireless network that any idiot with a long enough range could just hack at directly?"

I was told I didn't know anything about computers... I guess 16 years of working as a Network Administrator, Network Engineer, and Database Administrator disqualifies me.

Heh, I guess the one trick companies have is to put all the stuff they want to protect onto a system that is not hooked up to the Matrix, either wired or wireless.

Isn't that the reason for gathering runners together for a run?

Because if they used real computer security the decker/hacker types wouldn't be any fun to play. It would basically be them sitting around while everyone else ran off to do stuff.

Why get excited? Most of us who love the 2050's setting are still playing SR/SR2/SR3. The chances of getting actual decent rules reworks in there to make deckers, mages, and shamans work as they did in those days, or a full rework of the gear to crank the tech bloat back down, are essentially zero. So it's something that'll sell to the SR4 crowd interested in having something 'like' oldschool Shadowrun on paper to scratch the itch for more after they play the video game, but that's about it.

Considering some of the security holes I've seen IRL, I'm not surprised that there are companies that foolish.

Always remember that the biggest hole in any security system in the human element. And when the boss doesn't know jack about computers, and the Network Admin, Engineeers, and such, didn't go to the same school as him, don't have 1,000¥ haircuts, and a low golf score, said boss isn't likely to listen to them, as they know nothing about "Business", now, do they?

Or it's been something that's been demanded. A lot. And CGL is listening?

Just a thought.

Hey, I'd like to hope so. I know I'm not going to make any judgement of it until I've got a copy to read. But I'm not exactly -expecting- it to be the fix-all for the new setting's drift in directions that are less fun for me, simply because that would mean reprinting half of the SR2 print line worth of rules, gear, and fluff, and I don't see that as likely what they're going for here.

Am I missing something? Isn't the security issue adressed right there in the core rulebook? low signals, wireless blocking walls, wired networks inside the office, stuff like that? I always assumed that if a place has only wireless, accessible from anywhere, it means it's not worried about security for some reason and therefore is probably a public system anyway. Even public service nodes such as traffic lights can be made as easy or as hard to hack as the GM wants. I personally favor letting hackers hack traffic lights because of the coolness factor.

Plus, I don't know much about the history but it mentions a couple of corps being responsible for developing the wireless infrastructure, so there was probably a hidden corp war about that and the wireless won. Maybe with the help of some future-resonance-machine-god who needed to be born and helped things along, or other kinds of involvement by emergent beings.

Not at all. People's assumptions about how secure modern computers systems are don't really correspond to the reality of how how insecure modern systems are. It does requires some thought and planning, but then again, in SR 'plans' on the order of "I'll walk into the police station and beat open the security door to their armory with a sledge hammer" often fail too.

Not that SR hasn't used the "We'll go out to get pizza now, try to be done hacking when we get back" model in the past. ...

Yeah. The little 'Anonymous' group's mayhem over the last couple years, including serious annoyances to several proto-megacorps as well as the US government, especially how easily they create zombie armies for coordinated DDOS attacks, should illustrate that. Hell, the things you can do by just sitting in a coffee shop, opening an 'unsecured' wireless access point, and packet sniffing are scary to think about.

Fake hacking is way more fun than real hacking. I think most groups would groan at the hacker dressing up as a janitor, walking into a bank, plugging a dreamcast into the network, and then waiting weeks for the data to come. Though dressing up as a firemarshal I hear is a blast.

This.

"Does no one respect the van?" - Hardison, Leverage

That's an interesting question, and I think that's one of the issues Shadowrun had. So did Cyberpunk RPG (and so did SLA in some way), and both did it completely differently.

A cyberpunk setting is a caricatural setting. As a caricature it is extreme, and not exactly realistic. For example, corps hire so many people that a large part of their customers are workers and vice-versa. Which means that if the corps sell cheap and bad food that makes people sick, they get a sick workforce. If they pay an extremely low wage, they won't get any customers. I'm convinced that with some work you can get a setting that will be both caricatural and still "realistic" and that's what I tried to do in Style Over Substance (link in sig.). Cyberpunk RPG just - mostly - ignored it and SLA used the easy way out.

The problem is that such a world is a world on the Edge, and specifically on the Edge of collapse. The Earth is polluted beyond repair, Nation States are all but extinct and the divide between poors and rich is bigger than ever. The problem is when you drag this situation for decades. In the Cyberpunk RPG, they just decided to go all the way and released a third edition that was more post-apocalyptic than cyberpunk. Shadowrun went the other way, deciding that things weren't so bad and that the state of the world wasn't very different from ours: yes, there are problems, but the system still holds.

Personally, I think there are two "good" solutions:
1. Fixed end: have a fixed timeline, with a clear end (which can be either a total collapse into a post-apocalyptic world or a transformation into a transhuman future) and just expand on the settings inside that timeline. You can then release spin-offs if you want, but you keep your cyberpunk game in a cyberpunk setting.
2. "The more it changes...": the world doesn't change a lot. Corporations are on top and there aren't any real technological advance (they'd rather spend money on advertising than R&D, and everytime a smaller innovative company comes up with something interesting they get acquired by the huge megacorps and their R&D get included in a bloated R&D department where every small decision takes years). There's just enough innovation to regularly push resource shortage or too heavy pollution levels a few years away. It always seems like the end is near, but it keeps getting pushed back, without things getting any better (or any worse).

So there can be no tech advancement where cyberpunk stays cyberpunk? I see 2070 as a more extreme version of 2050, and as far as I'm concerened this can go on forever, no need to changes genres if you don't want to. I already detailed a cyberpunk-galactic setting for a GURPS game I never got to run, for example, with escaped robotic AIs, cyborgs, psions and everyone being shadowy mercs living on the edges of society (in SPAAACE!). Sure there was a machine apocalypse, but it was ancient history at that point and just meant extreme life-banning for anyone who develops AI. We're talking megacorps (with entire star systems of their own to mess up), deniable assets, psionics running around messing people up and getting migraines, mutants and genegineered folk running around and blowing stuff up, the works.

First, there's a point where cyberpunk becomes post-cyberpunk: to me, it's (among other things) when implants start to be something relatively widespread rather than something a few freaky people (weird outcast tribes, high rank corporates and corporate elite troops) have.

And then you get to a point where (post)-cyberpunk becomes... something else. Once you start uploading brains, completely modifying the human being, using nano-fab everywhere, you're getting to a transhumanist setting.

I guess you could keep a cyberpunk core for a long time by finding a way to keep paradigm changes at bay, but you'll probably end up with something feeling a bit weird, like those old sci-fi settings where you can travel in space but you need a wired phone and screens are CRTs.

EDIT:
And there are a few elements that will stretch belief. For example, Cyberpunk megacorps are often portrayed as taking all resources from the land, and polluting it, without caring about the future. For the pollution, you can explain that they come up with tech to get rid of the problem, but then you wouldn't have the "polluted earth" element of this dystopian future. So you'd rather say that the tech they got only let them keep on polluting the same way without making things worse. Same for the resources (we found new resources, we found new ways to mine and so on) up to a point. Then you need something else: nano-fab, leading to post-scarcity which isn't exactly cyberpunk or going to space. But after a few generations in space, you'll have new social and political situations and probably new tech to make life in space easier. All these will probably lead to a paradigm shift of some kind, which means your world won't feel the same anymore.

Yeah, I actually planned to use brain-uploading as a horror element (protip - the upload result isn't you), available only to the very very rich. And as for the setting, I was actually aiming for a less anime-ish Cowboy Beebop.

Okay, two things - one, who are you to tell me what I'm playing?

Two - where's the mechanical support for what you're telling me here?

We have Essence loss, which is a fine mechanic for supporting the fact that 'ware is invasive and unnatural. It also screws non-magical types hard after enough play, but who cares about that, right?

...and that's it. I looked! The only other hardline, mechanical downside to 'ware is nuyen spent. There's also some optional mechanics in the corebooks (which is really where we should only be looking, as its the text that establishes the world and everything else is optional) regarding a social penalty to dealing with other people when you're heavily cybered...but that's it.

So it's great that you guys say "THIS is Shadowrun!!!" but there's nothing in there but fluff and one single hard rule to support it - and that's fluff that people pay as much attention to as they do the dark and brooding shit from Vampire the Masquerade.

Cyberpunk was an 80s vibe in a world where Watchmen was viable. Nuclear war, endless oppression, Japan was going to take over the world...and then the world grew up and things changed. So did Shadowrun, to its own benefit. It became its own thing. That's a good thing.

Trying to drag it kicking and screaming back to the 80s will do nothing but alienate the folks that want to play it now and make only a smaller niche happy. And besides, there are games that do a better version of what you want out there now - Technoir comes to mind.


Which is why, again, you support the genre you want by putting in rules that enforce that feel.

You're trying to tell me that this stuff is in there, but I own every corebook with the exception of the Blue Book, and there is no support mechanically for the game you are trying to tell me exists. Is it little surprise then that people don't play it the way you guys are describing?

I may have a little emotional investment in this for sure, but shit son, stop telling me that things are there when they're not. People have been playing Shadowrun differently for at least two decades and it works because that's what Shadowrun evolved into. All anyone is going to accomplish by hitting the reset button and pretending nothing past 2050 existed is like cutting off your nose to spite your face. It isn't going to work.


I guess this is a context thing?

"Tell me that's a smoke grenade."
"Okay. *pause* It isn't."

Great post, as are most of your posts on this topic.

*Sings "Welcome To The Machine" in the key of off*