I'm just curious on what people would change in their SR world (or have changed), taking it from canon to something more in line with how you'd prefer the SR world to be.

If I were to rewrite the setting, I would:

1. Overhaul the use of private security corps, such as Lonestar, as large scale police forces. Cop services would be provided much as they are in real life, by local cops. They'd fall under UCAS/CAS laws and have no extraterritorality. Lone Star and Knight Errant would exist, but they instead compete for the contract to assist the local cops, Seattle PD, for example, and would fall under the direct jurisdiction of the cops. This would add a wrinkle and in my opinion for my world, make runs a little harder. You wouldn't have the blanket overall corruption that's listed in LS. Basically I'm trying to make it harder for runners to get into firefights with cops and have no qualms about shooting them. Also, it gets rid of the silly situation of: What happens if UCAS decides to not re-up their LS contact? Do all LS personnel leave? Is there some sorta quiet transition of control to say Knight Errant? (Yeah right). Do all LS personnel in Seattle jump ship and goto KE? In changing services would that mean there's a period of time of NO coverage?

2. In a landslide victory of gun activists, history was rewritten, allowing current gun laws and the like to be more in line with how the pictures in SR texts suggest.: Alot of people have guns. They wear them openly. You're not going to get busted for wearing guns, to a degree. Having a pistol or two showing won't be too bad. In fact, wearing as many pistols/machine pistols as Neo did in Matrix won't be too bad either. Wearing big stuff openly, slung assault rifles, etc, will get you pulled over (so to speak). Establishments would still have their own rules, "Check your guns at the door!". Gun crimes would have slightly different laws. Don't blow up too much property. Don't hurt bystanders. Don't shoot cops. Otherwise, feel free to have a firefight.

3. Cyber essence costs would be about 60 to 75% of what they are now. Allowing more cyber. Cyber would also be more concealable than it is now. Higher boosts to cyberlimbs (quick and strength, for example) wouldn't have extra essence costs, but would be harder to acquire. Kinda going for a Ghost in the Shell setup, where cyber is much more present and much more concealed.

I'd use 2nd edition initiative rules and adjust the history significantly, preventing nonsense like the rise of the Native American Nations.

I'm actually having a lot of fun with my, "Super Powers, Corporate Whores" alternate setting where the planet is superficially dominated by a number of large nations (European Union, MERCOSUR, China, US, etc.), which are in turn pawns of non-extraterritorial megacorps. Shadowrunners are critical because the megacorps and their employees/owners are not beyond the law.

i fail to see how sr presents the idea that everyone is a walking armory. most of the time that is basicly a flawed presentation by the gm. its a question of day vs night and where you are a+ class area will get you into trouble any time of day or night but b- will maybe get you into trouble at day, but at night you maybe have a easyer time walking around like a gunshop on legs.

only place i can think of anyone walking around with a gun visualy displayed on his hip in daytime or similar is the barrens, and these are areas where the cops roll out like the us military does in iraq today.

take one quick look at page 274 for a very nice table to show the players the moment they get stopped by the cops. most of those will get you a fine and the disposal of the item in question by the law enforcement at best...

walking around with a gun, open or concealed, without a permit is transport at best. and walking around with them in the open will just draw to much attention in any zone above Z...

Remove VITAS. An overcrowded world is good for Cyberpunk.

#2 and 3 are why I don't play CP2020.

#1 is unrealistic. First of all, you have to come to terms with the fact that corporations are regulated by the states. The UCAS can't just kick out a corporation. Only states may revoke charters. If Lone Star loses a contract in, say, St. Louis, it sucks but they'll find other work. If Lone Star loses its Seattle contract to KE, then a few things can happen.

First, government contracts are notoriously time-consuming. The transition on a move that big would give plenty of room for KE to do any and/or all of four things: 1) move KE forces into Seattle from other parts of the world, 2) send more cadets from their training academies to Seattle, 3) recruit more cadets into the facilities they do have in Seattle and spillover to other centers, or 4) poach personnel from Lone Star Seattle who have no inclination to play Smokey and the Bandit in effing Quebec when they get transferred. Basically, they do what Lone Star did with SPD officers when they got the original contract.

Second, law enforcement in Shadowrun is a pretty mixed bag. In Lone Star, there are references to federally-contracted law enforcement--much as, I assume, the RCMP has a contract policing operation in Canada where the FedPols (and I am inferring from the text) contract out to cities. Outside of that, Lone Star and KE comprise 96% of corporate policing in the UCAS. Of course, at the time the remaining 4% included some notable exceptions (New Orleans, Atlanta, Chicago, Boston, and 2/3 of Manhattan). T:SH then goes on to emphasize that outside of the metroplexes, most law enforcement in the UCAS and CAS is handled by local government law enforcement. This includes probably half of the 3,142 counties in the U.S. (Texas, for example, has hundreds) with their respective elected sheriffs, state police (of various jurisdictional authority), and local PD. Then there are the Feds. Sure, CAS has one overall agency (with at least one sub-agency), but the UCAS still retained most of the 2-3 dozen agencies (No need for BIA police, anymore).

But the concept of privatized policing was a logical extension of the privatization wave in the early 21st century. It is also logical to the extent that it's happened before in the U.S., and on top of the private police forces there are already supplemental security providers which include extra contracted protection from LS.

Moreover, what makes you think a runner won't kill a cop because his paycheck doesn't get routed through Lone Star Security Services - Seattle Metroplex, Inc. but comes straight from the government? Besides, this also gives the (unrealistic, unjustifiable, and oftentimes silly) opportunity to make the government cops (in Seattle, just the Feds) look like elite badasses who put KE to shame in the Men-in-Black Johnny Hardcore role.

More to the point, government cops are just as corrupt, if not moresom than Lone Star. Lone Star hides its capitalist underpinnings really well, anyway, thanks to good PR. PR that they can afford because one corp controls 64% of private law enforcement contracts in the UCAS and CAS, and can afford to shore up its image in Seattle to protect its long-term investments. Something the SPD can't do.

Better yet, Lone Star can keep its employees from joining unions or other pain in the ass groups, and can more easily monitor the activities at the local FOP hall.

hobgoblin makes a good point--the pictures in the SR sourcebooks probably have as close a tie to reality as the idea that the pirctures in V:tM are pictures of vampires who are willing to pose in the shadows with an attitude like their LARP poseur counterparts.


Frankly, I would change the fact-checkers. It's rather annoying to read an adventure set in friggin' Tehran where people speak Arabic (OBTW, guys, which dialect?) instead of *ahem* Farsi...

OTOH, it's funny how people give Jak Koke crap for the DHS, but I'd be utterly shocked if, say, Kenson added the kind of detail that includes the fact that there are trees (albeit small ones) in the median on Virginia Ave. next to the Watergate, or that the Swissotel at the Watergate (that is, the hotel part) has sliding glass doors and balconies.

I can at least forgive him for the dismal portrayal of the Secret Service, OTOH. Besides, it was an interesting plot point. Kenson's, OTOH (in SotU)... Well, I don't like his work and I can't say I was surprised.

heh, yeah. i'm not a fan of koke's DHT, but i can understand why they were written, and his sentence structure doesn't make me want to stab myself in the eyes. most of kenson's stuff is not only uninteresting to me story-wise, he pushes SR in a direction i don't want to see it go (omg everyone is magickal, and hermetics r dumb lol!). and, on top of that? he can't put a proper sentence together to save his friggin' life. look at the crappy wording on how magician's way adepts advance (read one way, it says that they get 1pp and one metamagic per grade, and the metamagic can be traded in for a second pp), or on how many times you can use centering in an init pass (if you want to make centering usable only once per pass, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD JUST SAY SO).

one thing about lone star, the reason for haveing them there is to show that cops in sr isnt in it for serveing the public good, they are in it for the paycheck, and only the paycheck. its a corp set at makeing money. police services as they are today is a economic black hole...

It confuses me slightly why an individual loan star cop would be any more likely to be corrupt than an individual government cop would be.

The pay will be comparable (not great) and the job just as risky. You will still see people joining hoping to make the place safer and cops becoming jaded and corrupt.

The corporation will not profit by corrupt officers, in fact it will make them look bad because crime reports to cases solved will be taken as a measure of the corporations success.

I could believe that cops are typically corrupt in the setting (a combination of the bleak life and ineffective IA will cause this) but I don’t see it as a result of privatisation.

Edward

Well it's all based on two things.

1: the image of cops being some natural force of law and order... even SR players fall for it.

2: the idea that Lone star wouldn't try to give their employees that image


I personally find both laughable

i would rewrite the matrix and rigging sections from the ground up.

I'd probably get rid of the kiddie version of SR, aka SRIII.
No, seriously.

I would (or actually, that's what I did) portray Seattle as an ultra-modern and even more confusing version of 1920s Shanghai.

The technological advances (rigging, decking and bio/cyberware) seem to come on too fast. Understandable from a marketing point of view, still I'd add 20 to 40 years of development time to the standards as they are of 2060. Make my group go nuts over waiting even longer for the real gross uber-goodies
I'd also include even more restrictions on cyber (legal as well as biological).

Get rid of the - sorry to be so frank - idiotical Germany setting as it has been done in Germany in the shadows and Shadows of Europe. And while doing this send all the blabla about Islamic Jihad to the scrap yard of superficial ideas. I can't speak for the SR background on North and Middle America (being from the Old World), but almost everything on Europe is just unusable.
And even worse, it's uninformed.

(As a footnote: In the old Neo-Anarchists' Guide to North America, it was mentioned that Germany housed a northern and a southern state. That's the way to go!)

Go back to old style matrix rules- 2nd ed.

make the world less lbeak, givce metahumaity more hope. Definantly scale down violence and weapons, more work with hand guns and occassional shot guns or smaller smgs, less heavy weapons and long arms. (More James Bond, less Mad Max barrens)

In a perfect example of how you can't please everyone:

Make the world more bleak, give metahumanity less hope, emphasize the barrens as Mad Max-style anarchic free-for-alls, play up the siege mentality, reduce the tendency to assume that runners are uber-chill professionals or professionals at all, for that matter (return them to a generally assumed status of independent legbreakers with toys, basically), minor rewrites on Matrix and Rigger 3 (and magic, etc.) for consistency, kill any reference to the @#$%ing stupid wireless matrix initiative, have the rebels in the Yucatan start committing atrocities on or above the level of the Azzies, turn Texas into a police state watching the border, have Ghostwalker's control on Denver start to break down, more laws against firearms and more people breaking said laws, more playing up of the NAN/UCAS bitterness and hostility, and preferably the start of another corporate war.

Oh, and have some of the stuff Dunkie left behind start having a negative effect on people. Unethical magical experiments at the DIMR, perhaps, or the Draco Foundation starting to move aggressively towards undetermined goals.

Oh, and erase any mention of Art Dankwalther having done anything meaningful against Novatech. I liked the storyline before he started making progress, but it turned stupid in a big way.

~J

Then you shouldn't be a cop, quota or no quota. Yet another example of stupid people trying to force what should be taught in training (see the removal of fully automatic fire in some US military assault rifles).

~J

I increase and decrease various levels of technology. Higher use of combat drugs with addiction offset by virtual therapy and personality re-enforcement chips. Worldwide Wireless Matrix to full simsense bandwidth by 2062. Mass produced genetech services, much more common than cyber or bioware. Modest skill levels for all people in Computers and B&R, everything is 100 customized. Space vacations are almost affordable to B income level families. CCSS technology that actually makes sense and doesn't cut off normal security personal. Headware computers and induction credsticks including stick to stick transfers. Matrix chaos, billions of streaming 'Trix feeds from Uncle Joe's Home Cleaning Channel to 13-ttlynakkiddoingITjust4UU!!111. [edit] Oh, and integrated nanite makeup, wigs, and body sculpting. The wig feels weird when you first have it fitted, like millions of snakes slithering into your scalp, but null sweat for the ability to change color and length, even hold, by DNI. Not cheep stuff, but becoming more affordable.

Intracorporate socialism ending continuous automation, the bottom line meaning nothing beyond single departments, stock value determined by assets that include numbers of employees and efficiency, and lots more little things that melt the line between nation-state and corporation.

In a modified setting I was playing with before I read SoNA (which fixed the huge problems I had with SR's timeline for the most part, or at least reduced the chance of my suspension of disbelief shattering into a billion pieces), I got rid of most of the fracturing of the US -- it just became exceedingly isolationist, dominated by corporate interests, and for the most part more of a confederation of states than a monolithic federal government (sort of a throwback to the pre-Civil War years). The Western US had become largely uninhabited due to mana storms (sort of like the Outback in the canon timeline), and Amerind tribes had given up on the protections of the federal government, turning into nomadic tribes more like the gypsy tribes of the CFS.

I'd also changed the way corporate extraterritoriality worked; corporations were allowed to run law enforcement on their property and often kept government authorities from nosing in on their business, but when they apprehended suspects (those that weren't "shot while attempting escape"), they turned them over to the government justice system. Corporations were not above the law necessarily, they just had a great deal of influence on what the law was and how it was enforced. This is actually probably how I'm going to handle things in my upcoming game.

Probably would downplay the immortal elves, but I don't feel like they are being overused in the latest stuff. I think I would make magic a little less flashy and D&D-like and make it more mysterious, unreliable, and ritualized. I would not have made Dunkelzahn nearly as rich as he evidently was -- pushes my suspension of disbelief when one entity evidently can manipulate currency markets and crush economies with the wealth they have (especially so soon after coming out of thousands of years of hibernation). I would, like Kagetenshi, have not gone so crazy with the silly Art Dankwalther plotline.

I think I would have added more brushfire wars and conflicts between "minor" nations, similar to what is popping up in the more recent sourcebooks.

Bleh. I'd make a lot of changes, I guess, but really, the writers have done a good job overall. They made some stylistic decisions I don't agree with maybe, and made some things that stretch the suspension of disbelief, but really, you can't please everyone all the time and a lot of it is just a matter of taste.

I forgot to mention the Dankwalther thing. I actually like it and think it could lead to something very interesting.

I personally dislike the attempts to inject more real-life stuff into Shadowrun (Sometimes I get the impression they should have the disclaimer that Law & Order has that the characters and stories are fictional). First, it belies a thorough lack of creativity, and second it doesn't seem necessary with a game that diverged from reality twenty years ago.

That includes the addition of more national and transnational actors. On one hand, there is precedent: In NAGNA the amount of political or ideological violence and outright terrorism was just stupendous--and there were implied tiers of terrorists and violent extremists. On one hand, it's intriguing to see it be an issue in SR more. The problem is, no one seemed to care until YotC was released. And then it swings back, where SOTA64 implies frequent biowarfare attacks while one of the Ten Most Wanted is a man who organized the killing of 8,000 metahumans in Munich and only has a 50,000 euro price on his head from Europol, which implies an almost mundanity of his actions.

Of course, this is the same reality in which (AFAIK) Alamos 20K was never actually taken to task for blowing up the Sears Tower and killing 26,000 people.

I can't accept that atrocities by the Yucatan rebels will be emphasized so long as it is within the context of a Shadowland document. The bias is too deep. Maybe if they did a better job explaining it in the OOC Game Information, then it'd be more comforting. But given the context and the inherent anti-Azzie bias on SL, it's never going to happen. It's Aztechnology's Al-Jazeera.

But, OTOH, Aztlan did seem to subtlely remind people that the rebels aren't angels. Perhaps, though, it was too subtle.

As for DF: I consider the Who Watches the Watchers chapter of POAD: DS to be an introduction to what was probably a significant purge of disloyal watchers and fixers. I also think the attempts to "recruit" the freelancers once roughly 1/3 pledged allegiance to GW was underplayed in its potential for bloody violence.

One of the things that plays a role is simply the way the world is. When SR was first released, it had been developed in the later years of the Reagan Administration, which is clearly evident reading some of the old books, like Shadowbeat and NAGNA's depiction of the UCAS. The Crash seemed plausible because one doing research on networks would know that it'd already happened. Privatization, hyper-inflation, rising crime and its workings, combined with the militarization of law enforcement in response (which still continues) were beginning then. Frankly, the Seretech and Shiawase decisions probably seemed like logical extensions of law and governance at the time. SR2 material, OTOH, was written in what were, frankly, better times. Who wanted to focus on the bad when we can play with IEs? SR3, now, exists in the context of a strange mix of events in which a lot of SR's backstory has come to pass, and the world is leaning backwards towards pre-SR1 times.

The vast majority of Shadowruns are on corp exreaterritorial property and therefore not in the jurisdiction of Lone Star. Lone Star doesn't really have to deal with SR's very often.

It just... is.

It's like CFS. I always assumed the authors were from Cal or lived there (specifically because of the UCLA bias in the L.A. chapter). But there is such a thing as an ignorant local.

Wow, all the things I consider comic genius (NAN, AGS, CFS, Islamic Jihad), people hate.

Well, they are comic, that's for sure.

Crimsondude noone on earth could have a name as bad as the criminal psychologist in that book!

sorry crimson but...
Query "Welcome back, Frank"?

hahaha

It was the series of Punisher comics written by Garth Ennis and set after he returned from being Heaven's bitchboy.

The Russian from the movie was a character in the series, only much, much cooler.

Anyway, the joke here is that in the series the NYPD Punisher Task Force is two guys--a burn-out detective everyone hates and a behavioral psychologist who hangs himself in his office halfway through. The Gnocchi (mafia family bad guys in the series) Task Force is one female detective.

ah punisher. Admittedly I got turned off punisher after reading "Archie vs the punisher"

Indeed.

Better than being kicked into a burning building and not being able to crawl out.

Things I would change:
The overly static Magic rules, fluff text consistently portrays magic as effluent and ephemeral, yet we have an incredibly static mechanic system for it.

The other thing I would do away with is the split storyline, resulting from national sourcebooks not published anywhere outside of the originating country. Game material should be done by those licensed by the parent company and published throguh them to all nations they choose to publish to. Not publishing it in other nation sis like saying they aren't good enough, even though the game originated there and the core material is centered there.

+ No Nannies. A splintering of the US with an even less powerful central government okay, but no "Indian braves" taking over

+ No Exterritoriality. Corporations use the same way to power they use today, the buy themselfsa politician and work from behind the scenes.

+ A strong EEC giving an alternative environment (running against a semi-police state) to the "corp rules US"

+ Less magic / less metas among player characters (Stressing their problems more in Fluff and in Scenario books)

+ More space/underwater elements. Think "Outland" and the last half-season of SeaQuest (with Ironside as captain)


Birdy

Gawd, I should stay online more often...

The uninformed thing in my original post: The DidS-book was done after the wall came down and the GDR had gone terminal. In the book there is no mention of anything east of the old FRG safe for Berlin. And enlarging the 'anarchist' quarter of Kreuzberg into all Berlin and then having somebody put up a wall around it - please! It read like some provincial schoolboys had put their parents' fears to paper.
Troll kingdom, Elven duchy (or whatever) of Pomoria? Excuse me, but until then I had been under the impression I was dealing with SR not with D&D. The less said about them the better.
The two Tirs I always saw as an entirely different thing because of that typically dastardly Elven will to dominate everybody else. And it took away the good metas-bad norms attitude.
Equally strange was the original sourcebook on France which had the country returning to royalism. Fat chance after four and a half revolutions for more democracy...
It all appeared like the authors took medieval and/or sword'n sorcery stuff and flung them into one big pot to make it interesting, perhaps make it different from the North America setting.

Everything I read about Austria in SR seemed strangely stale, devoid of the atmosphere of a country where dozens of nationalities met and mixed for centuries and managed to incorporate such unwholesome ideologies as rampant regionalism and antisemitism into a quirky softy socialism plus a tendency for collective historical blindness. Until recently a sizeable portion of Austrians were even willing to view themselves as pure victims of national-socialism ("Hitler was a German. We were occupied." This is a true quote).
The Baltic states might become some of the most interesting parts of 21st century Europe, small countries selling out to bigger ones (Finland) or in SR to the corps, something like Pueblo. Due to the insistence on keeping in the Euro Wars they appear to be little more than refugee camps now.

I got more usable intel on the Vatican from the Sargent/Gascoigne novel 'Black Madonna' than in SoE. Very sad. I had hoped for something akin to a rival power player to Lofwyr.

I could go on and on.

In the end of course it alls boils down to that thankfully liberal attitude of the developpers that one could twist around the SR world any way one wants. Not that we needed that 'permission' but it is a very nice touch. Something I always respected with FASA and then FanPro.

The things I would change are quite major and will probably piss everyone on these boards off, just like it does whenever someone brings up a "SR is Dead" thread.

First, and probably most controversially, I would eliminate player character magicians. Having one character in the group who can duplicate the abilities of anyone else in the group AND be the only one capable of doing astral recon seems like having a useful character and then a bunch of sidekicks for him. Probably the height of my anger at player character magicians came the other day when I started reading Never Deal With a Dragon, and when it was describing how "only a street samurai could move that fast," my first thought was "unless it's a mage with increased reflexes anchored to him." Enough of that. If it were up to me, magic would be something strange and menacing that the characters wouldn't quite understand, and would probably grow to fear and hate. Ironically, I fully realize that this is the backwards attitude Shadowbeat describes most of the media as propagating, but that's fine. I just hate magicians and think they should pretty much just be in SR as villains. If my friends bitched enough that I did decide to let them play magicians, I would abolish spells that replicate the effects of cyberware, such as increase initiative, increase attribute, that phys ad power that gives you extra firearms dice (I know, cyberware doesn't do that, but it's the effect, increasing goodness at guns, that I don't like. Tech for tech, I believe).

I'd also do away with immortal elves and dragons. Elves and dragons would still be part of the game, just not as immortals. Even the particular elves and dragons would still be around, such as Harlequin and Dunklezahn (who would still be running his feudal kingdom in Canada, by the way). The way I'd rig it, Harlequin would be an elf, and he'd be an extremely powerful magician, but he'd also be really loopy, to the point where he's subconsciously projecting his delusions onto reality, which in turn has caused several other really powerful magicians (Ehran and his ilk) to think that THEY are immortal elves. Furthermore, the Enemy would also be hallucinations that Harlequin had imposed upon reality. As for Dragons, I would have them Awakened from normal species during the Awakening, rather than be leftovers from some previous world. I also wouldn't have any politics between them over silly things like "I'm the Loremaster" "No I'M the Loremaster" or anything like that. Still conflicts between them, but only because I imagine a fair number of them would be doing the corporate thing (like Lofwyr, though probably not all of them would be as good at it) or the political thing (like Dunklezahn, only not the president thing, just the feudal kingdom thing, because whereas most dragons probably don't have to care that much about human affairs, they all DO have to worry about their immediate surroundings).

I'd also add in a lot of cheap technological means to defeat magic. If I'd be relegating magic to NPCs, I would need to give the players some way to counter it without having to have a buttload of money, so probably a bunch of cheap cybernetic implants that help a little and a few really high end implants that make one virtually immune to magic that cost a fortune.

As for the gun issue that most people are trying not to bring up because it will start a 25 page argument, I'd leave it basically the way it is (at least as the way my group plays it), you can walk around with all the guns you want with near immunity from the law, provided you're in the barrens. We play Puyallup as being very Mad Max-like, and Redmond as very, very overcrowded, with neither having frequent guest appearances by Johnny Law.

All of Califonia.

I'd definitely lessen the role of IEs and dragons. Keep them in there, but they've got their own political bickering which is a thing apart from what us humans do.

I think the biggest thing I would change is shift the enemy a bit more. I don't see us as being threatened by the big corps. I see us being threatened more by our government. Take it for more of a 1984 Big Brother kind of thing, where the corps are still strong, but the government has a backbone and doesn't mind abusing your rights in the name of 'national security'.