Object of discussion: to determine whether SR4 is a good thing. My particular input: I know nothing about Fanpro's business model, so I'll give them the benefit of the doubt. Is it a good thing from my perspective? If you're not interested, don't read the post (wow that felt good, and really moved the discussion forward)

1) Wow, a heartfelt defence of "If you don't like it don't buy it". Allow me to respond by pointing out, again, that telling people that they have the choice not to buy a book contains no useful information, and is a completely pointless waste of bandwidth on a website devoted to criticm (in the broad sense) of SR materials. You'll note that film, music, food and literary critics manage to produce thousands of pages of conflicting opinions without anyone deciding that "well if you hate Adam Sandler so much don't go to see his movies" is a useful addition to the discussion. It's just invective without the profanity, which neatly explains crimsondude's follow-up "that's because you're stupid" argument. Stop it and engage in some criticism.

2) No, trading over from SR1 doesn't make me special, but it does seem to make me unusual around these parts. The fact that I remember what the changeover entailed seems to make me close to unique, and I'd like to know if anyone disagrees with my basic point that the changes in SR2 in no way justified a new edition and a new round of sourcebooks.

3) I totally don't buy, "it's been a while and it won't cost you that much" as a defence of anything, anytime, ever. Take a look at your shoes. You had them for a while right, and they didn't cost you all that much money in grown up terms right? So mail me ten dollars if you want to keep using them. Any other industry would be delerious with delight if it had a solid base of consumers who both believed, and told others, that they should shell out money every so often on the sole basis that it wasn't very much money and they hadn't had to do it in a while.
To clarify: 4th edition good (for me) because we (I) need a 4th edition: good argument.
4th edition good because it has been some time since you bought 3rd edition and it's only $100: terrible argument. Stop making it.

4) It seems you're totally missing my point that the old system is modular and the new system will be modular too. Not only have we lived through the false promise of "one book that will totally cover cyberware, and, like, fix all the confusing bits". Not only is Shadowrun 3.5 here, and a perfectly reasonable way of fixing the diverse elements of the game which, as people keep telling me, you don't need to understand to play the core version, but you are embracing shadowrun 4.5 - because you're going to get another stripped down main book that instantly ceases to contain the proper rules for gun design and electronic warfare. The only basis on which I'd see SR4 as justified as something other than a modular upgrade is if it totally and beneficially changes the core main book mechanics in a way which both requires and justifies (from a cost point of view) redoing every other rules set. Historically, neither of the previous new editions would come close to meeting that standard, and sr3 is justified (in my view) only because it was the first real overhaul of the core rules and because it compiled a bunch of sourcebooks which predated the post-SR3 cyberware-bible, magic-bible approach.

I survived the changeover from the SR1 to SR2 to SR3 and each progression was a vast improvment. I agree that SR4 must be a complete overhaul of the rules to be worth while.

Armour and staging "alone"?
What else was there? 2 pages from the grimoir maybe, new, marginally less crap opening story? Not a hell of a lot else.

As for staging, are you honestly telling me you spent your first edition days saying to yourself "I wish they'd just change all these numbers to 2 and drop them from the code" - is that the kind of grand, magesterial change that makes you happy to fork out for a new set of books. Because if so, then I predict you'll find 4th ed incredibly worthwhile.

Kanada - it's not a false analogy if you look closer, and consider the precise arguments I'm responding to. Consider the two options Fanpro has open to it:
1) keep making 3rd ed sourcebooks and implement modular change
2) shift to 4th edition so that all future sourcebooks eventually require me to own 5 or 6 new books, each of which is 70-90% identical to its forerunners.
I'm suggesting I prefer option 1. Some people are responding, as far as I can tell, "it's been a while since you had to pointlessly spend money on SR products you'd rather had not been published, and anyway you should be able to afford it". To the extent that this is what they're saying, their shoe cheques ought to be in the mail. To the extent that they are saying "it's not much money for a useful new addition to the system and anyway the system needs consolidating" then they've got a perfectly valid point, but they should concentrate on proving useful and consolidation, because "it's cheap and you're due" doesn't convince anyone.

That rather answers the question of whether this kind of thing is normal and indeed the basis of the economy. Lots of companies dream of planned obsolesence, very few pull it off, and none, to my knowledge have a consumer base who greets examples of a policy designed to degrade the value of their existing purchases (bearing in mind the alternative options I've layed out) with such glee.

Don't mistake hope for glee. (And the analogy is still false, a closer one is cable tv).

You prefer something that's not happening. It's too late to not have a fourth edition. No one will stop you from playing 3rd, and many of the new books will still be of use just as SoNA and SoE and Dragons and SSG could work 99% fine with 2nd edition (and even 4th).

argh. lacemaker, please explain how putting out new sourcebooks that change all the rules is any different from making a new edition. i was hoping a sarcastic allusion to the fact that they're the same thing would get the point across to you. alas, no.

I spent a while saying to myself "why can't I kill someone with this laser when I can kill them with that knife", yeah. Also, "why can I wear so much armor that they can't touch me with anything less than aforesaid laser".

~J

Ah, so staging (other than a staging of 2) was a failure of the otherwise hyper-realistic shadowrun damage system? personally I think differential staging down with a fixed staging up makes more sense than either of the system's we've had presented to us, but it's the sort of thing you'll house rule if you care enough, like a lot of the supposedly cataclysmic inter-edition changes. (and apparently you possessed a first ed sourcebook, spent a lot of time worrying about the details of exotic weapons and then went and bought the same sourcebook again, with nothing changed but the damage codes. We disagree on reasonable expenditures)

Don't give me "much of the material will still be compatible", like I say, I've been there and I'm aware that you can by for quite a while with only minor inconvenience - again the defence of 4th edition for someone like me seems to amount to "it could be much worse, we could steal your wallet and poke you in the eyes in addition to introducing 5 new books which largely duplicate those you own but introduce annoying inconsistencies in notation" - I'm remaining open minded about SR 4, you guys are damning it with faint, faint praise.

What else: "it's already happened", well it's better than "if you don't like it don't buy it", but not by much. Ever discussed something you couldn't change?

"updating the rules by new edition is the same as updating the rules by SOTA book". No. No it's not. Trivially because the system is modular, so you can revolutionise magic without rendering someone's rigger book obsolete, but much, much more broadly because change with the scope of a new edition (which is, just to remind everyone, buy every page again) has not been undertaken to date, is not necessary and will not be undertaken by SR 4 - we are not arguing about the best mechanism to completely rebuild the system from the ground up, we are arguing about the best way to advance the system. The rules material past the bible stage, which are, to repeat, about to be duplicated, is enough to be mildly irritating, but it is nothing tremendously significant - there is nothing wrong with the SOTA/Target system for introducing minor new crunchy bits which sufficiently keen players can use, and if all you are saying is that you want a new index and are willing to buy every book again to achieve that, well then great, but you have a much, much higher marginal propensity to consume Shadowrun than I, or, I suspect, most other people do.

"I hate to use mulitple books to research something" then get a new system, because as I pointed out, you are not cheering on SR4, you are Cheering on SR4.5, which will comprise 1 basic book plus a bible for each other key subject.

:head tilts to left, conversation pours out ears:

Can I try to turn this around for a second, because I fear we may be at cross purposes:

The way I see it: we are about to be given the opportunity to buy about 1000 pages on new books covering similar subject matter to our old books. There will be some costs for those who wish to stay involved with shadowrun but who do not purchase those books, and while those costs are small, let's just agree that they are non zero for the purposes of this discussion.

In order for me to be pleased about the new edition I will have to buy the new books, since I can't gain and ex hypothesi I lose from their introduction if I never adopt them (ignoring economic flow ons from their success etc etc, which are potentially good arguments but beyond my, and I submit, your knowledge of the RPG market)

In order for me to buy the new books and be happy with them, they will have to contain a certain proportion of new, good material. I tend to find that most new stuff for SR is good, because the authors are pretty smart, so I'm less worried about that, I'm much more worried how much new stuff I'll get across my 1000 pages.

Does everyone accept, for the sake of argument, that there is a threshold level of new material below which they would not be happy with a new edition? That is, if you purchased a new edition and it made some rules changes that could be summarised in a few pages and maybe changed a bit of the artwork but was otherwise indentical you would not be happy- right?

Given the existence of Rigger 3 Revised and the conversion guide, I doubt they'll do that.

~J

how, exactly, is the system "modular"? all the basic rules are in the SR3 book. if you change the rules, that makes parts of the SR3 book obsolete. that's not modular. there's no such thing as a modular RPG; all the rules affect and interact with all the other rules; in order to do anything really revolutionary with any part of the rules, you necessarily have to change and update all the other rules to match.

Let's see, the release shedule calls for a book which will be all you need to play and a new book which will handle the magic. I'd suggest that means that magic is being treated as modular by the 4th edition, much as it was in the 3rd edition and, to some extent, by the first and second editions. You'll get some basic rules in the big book, which will be almost instantly expanded, updated and outdated by Street Magic (or whatever it's being called) - the same will happen with Cyber, Rigging, Decking and probably guns. Changes in any one of those areas (with the possible exception of rigging and decking) have traditionally been, and will probably continue to be, made independent of each other, meaning that each of those rules sets can be, and in any case always is, updated in a "modular" fashion.

Take a look at VR2.0, which introduced matrix 2.5 (or 1.5, or even 1.0 depending of your views on SR2 or even the original, almost unusable matrix rules) without upsetting other elements of the game. It is not clear to me what is going to be done to, say, decking which couldn't have been done in "2070: The crash, introducing a new world of more matrix like decking and rigging for the Shaodwrun Universe". Rigger 3 and Matrix - out. Big book matrix and rigging, already gone. MITS, man and machince, rest of big book - untouched.

And yeah, I agree that it's a wait and see- I'm suspicious based on experience, but I'm not condemning it. What's odd is what looks to me like cheerleading form people who should likewise recognise that the jury is still out.

In relation to the "it makes life easier argument" which I don't wholely reject, which are the non-bible rules sources which you expect to see included in the big book, or, to much lesser benefit, in the relevant bible?

Two SOTA's worth of btis and pieces I guess, what else?

in SR2, there weren't enough elements that players and authors wanted changed to justify putting out a whole new edition. in this case, there are--hence the ever-growing list of threads about "i hope they change this" and "what are some good ideas for how they could change that". honestly? i'm so sick of the current rules that nearly any change will be welcome.

VR2 was a mess, it introduced totally new game mechanics and methods of play - it was a mistake. The Grimoire didn't change what was in the main book, it added to it as did MitS.

Much of Man and Machine would have likely been replaced by "2070: Reset" and that leaves only a little bit of the core book and CC (sans Simsense).

That's my reason for wanting a new edition to encompass a complete change in technology - every aspect save perhaps guns will change (needs to change) and guns need to change just as much as that.

The authors need to eliminate the little guns coming in regular and caseless versions thing. No firearm manufacturer in the world would do something like that. There would be certain weapons that fire caseless rounds I'm sure, but pick&choose for every firearm in the sixth world, I think not.

VR 2.0 was adopted more or less wholesale in the 3rd edition core book. The Grimoire introduced a whole lot of new rules and processes and rewrote things like astral combat completely. In any case, the rewrote/added distinction is spurious. Build a mage and play him without the Grimoire. Now do it with. Completely different character, completely different experience. I'd say that means that Grimoire superceded the existing magic rules, whether or not it "changed" them.

And no, I don't accept that a reset would invalidate much of M&M, but maybe we're imagining different things. I suspecting I'll still be able to get my Ares predator, post reset or post sr4, and at most it will have a new damage code which could have been listed on a 3 page index. But yeah, a lot depends on whether the 3 to 4 transition in any way resembles 1 to 2 or 2 to 3. If it does then 80+% of our material stands more or less unchanged.

And no, I totally don't buy, SR2 was quite close to perfect so it didn't need such a huge change. SR 3 introduced some pretty basic stuff that should have been in the system from the start, and I say that not just as a matter of opinion but on the basis that things like attribute linked skill development are pretty much uinversal across decent systems In any case, you're telling me the editions are getting worse and that I should be happy about a new one?

s'why i advocate replacing the damage code column with a calibre column, and then having a list of damage codes by calibre. it wouldn't be completely realistic (since different guns get more or less juice out of the same cartridge), but it give realistic, simple solutions to two problems: a) the ability to share ammo between all weapons of a given class; b) the idea of all guns coming in cased or caseless versions.

I don't think they are getting worse as a trend, they get worse as they bloat in their own stew. SR2 was a managable system, but shit like Awakenings, VR2, Cybertechnology, R2 mangled the system.

SR3 didn't change enough, but it was still an improvement.

agreed. it just needs to be canon. i like Raygun's rules, but it'd be a lot of work to get everyone i play with to use 'em, so...

Well no, it wouldn't force anyone to do anything - because as we've established, one can play the game perfectly well with the 3rd edition book and expand as the desire takes you. But in any case, I'm not talking about what's best for new players, as I explicitly stated, I want to know whether there's any reason for me to be happy.

And I've been posting here since pre-3rd, so I can assure you that "back then there weren't a whole bunch of threads complaining about the rules" in not nearly as persuasive as you might have hoped.

Why don't you just answer your own rhetorical question 'no' and leave us alone then?

Well, that's wordier than "if you don't like it don't buy it", but kind of less helpful and more offensive. Congratulations! Fancy my posting on a thread about whether SR4 is a good idea, on a board devoted to critically discussing shadowrun, with arguments about whether SR4 is likely to be a good thing!! Good thing we've got you to keep things sensible and intellectually stimulating.

Now, to the extent you're interested in having a discussion (and if you're not, don't read this, and poke yourself in the eye while you're at it) I've asked two things - rules you expect to see consolidated in the BBB and for an acceptance of my basic premise, that you think theres a mininum threshold of new material which would make you (as an experienced SR player and 3rd edition owner) happy with the new edition from a personal perspective - ignoring Fanpro's business model, which no person who's ever said "if you don't like it don't buy it" is qualified to discuss.

*shrug* i'm not here to defend the decisions of the guys who were calling the shots in SR2. either there weren't enough complaints to warrant a new edition, or the line developer wasn't connected enough with his audience to know that a new edition was warranted.

changing out rulesets is not 'expansion', it's 'changing'. a character made and played with only the SR3 book can be played in a group that uses SR3, M&M, Matrix, etcetera. he won't be able to spend karma and nuyen in certain ways, but he'll be able to fit in. a character made and played with only the SR3 book won't be able to play at all with a group using Matrix++, MitS++, R3R++, etcetera.

and the reason you'll be happy is, SR won't dry up and die as its ever-increasing complexity and insanity drives off players old and new until WizKids/FanPro drops it for something more profitable.

Oh come now. The old rules may have needed a lot of work, but they were in no way that I have seen killing the game.

~J

they will be if they try to upgrade them a piece at a time.

I want at least 50% new rules.
I want at least 50% the vagueness.
I want at least 200% better examples.
I want at least 75% new text: at least mind you. 100% would be ideal.

I want 75% of all functional cyberware in the core book. I want simple rules for using all of it and sensible Essence costs. I want cyber all the way to android in the core book as a simple modular system. I want an end to Geas for magic loss. And bioware, I want Clones with mind transfer and hack and sew bodies (frankensteins) that can't use magic, but can make use of some metaware. And I want metaware, nanoware, genetech, bioware in the core. I want one core book, one Meat and Metal (rigger, decker, cyber, metaware, nanoware, genetech, simsense), one Weapons World (vehicles, guns, armor, mercenary, police, security), one Street Magic (adepts, initiation, spirit-meta fusions, magical threats, metaplanes), Running Wild (critters, threats), and then SotAs to cover developments for a while.

Ah, I see what you're saying. Yeah, I'd agree with that.

~J

And it's my contention that that's precisely what has always been done, and what will continue to be done. Want to see how mages increase their magic attribute? buy the Grimoire. Want to see how initiation is cleaned up? buy MITS. Want to see how all the new magical traditions are made to interface? Buy Street Magic. That's what's driving me crazy here - you're signing up for a modular upgrade to your game, which is fine by me, while simultaneous cursing modular upgrades. If they slim down the system so much that the bibles really are just extra crunchy bits and background (think awakenings, not grimoire) then I'll be wrong, and impressed. But I''ve only ever seen incremental change before, and that's what I'm betting on this time.

I dealt with how spurious it is to try to claim MITS "expanded" magic while SR2 (+grimoire? I'm not sure where you stand on this) "changed" it...

an SR3 decker can play in the same game as an SR3 + Matrix decker. an SR3 decker won't be able to play in the same game as an SR3 + Matrix++ decker. if you make enough changes like that, you may as well just put out a new edition, since that will cut down on the number of books new players will have to buy.

and don't try to take the business out of this argument. you can't have RPGs without business; boxing it into a discussion of only part of the equation is useless and pointless. the rules exist because people get paid to bring them into existence; that makes rules changes at least partly a question of business sense.

Let me clarify: I think there's every chance SR4 is good for business, though I'm not immediately persuaded, and it's both complex and remote enough that I'm not going to argue it on an internet message board. If you're saying "it's good because it's good for business" and I'm saying "it's bad because, whatever it's business effects it will make me, personally (and gamers like me) worse off" then we're at cross purposes.

And no, it's too early to say that the update ought to require whole new characters - it might, but that's up for discussion. And even if you're right, and we are talking a paradigm shift (which vr2.0 accomplished without making characters incompatible) you don't replace the system, you replace Matrix, so that the 10% of the fan base who wants the advanced decker gets that one book.

And when you want to change every subsystem?

i'm not going to try to convince you that you, personally, will like SR4; it's a pointless argument for at least two reasons. one, i don't play in your game; two, neither does anybody else (discounting the ~6 other people who do). gamers like you are, at best, only half of the market FanPro needs to worry about; you're already into SR, and you'll more than likely stay in unless they really screw the pooch. the other half of FanPro's market are the people who think SR is cool, but are too intimidated by its horrifically complex rules to buy the book. attempting to 'upgrade' the rules piecemeal is going to take that second half of the market and punch them right in the pants. they won't buy SR3.5, and neither will their friends, and then you won't have any more SR3.5 to play. nobody wins.

and given the blurb and the comments by Patrick Goodman, i don't think it's too early at all to see that SR4 will at least require new deckers. the technology doesn't currently exist in SR for the types of things the blurb claims deckers (hackers?) can do.

Kanada - we agree that there are times when a complete revision will be the sensible solution - the revision you describe yourself as being happy with would likewise satisfy me - and generally if there are plans to radically revamp more than half the key areas and those changes will make it into the new big book then I'm more than happy to proceed that way. But I remember SR2, and, for that matter, SR3 - neither of those got close to fitting that description, so why is everyone so sure SR4 will?

partly because Rob Boyle and his merry men have put out books that, thus far, please me; i therefore trust them to do the same in the future. partly because the people i've talked to who are peripherally involved in the project have mentioned that there are, indeed, sweeping changes made to major sections of the game. (that's all i've heard--i don't know how sweeping, and i don't know what sections.)

here's a dichotomy: you're saying that this argument should revolve around whether or not SR4 will please you, personally, and discarding the opinions of those who have different... well, opinions. you've come out and said that you're not trying to argue about whether or not SR4 will be good for business, or good for players besides yourself and those like you, right?

then why is "don't buy the book" not a valid response? your argument pertains solely to you, and if you don't like the book and aren't interested in whether or not others do, then "don't buy it" is a perfectly reasonable thing to tell you. you're asking, basically, whether or not you should buy the book, and then calling it a cop-out when people tell you no.

Some thins I want to see in the new edition:
A style guide that is used from book to book, no matter what book I go to, I want the index in the same basic place, I want the reprint of all the tables in the same place, I want to nkow that the first couple of chapters will be fluff and storyline, the middle will be any new rules/skills/etc, and the third section will have the new gear/mods/spells/powers/gats/cars/etc. I don't want to have to go through 14 different chapters to find the rules on autosofts for drones. I don't want the rules on autosofts for drones saying one thing and be contradicted by a stock drone later in the book.
I want the fluff/tip-in plates/line art to match the rules, to hell with 'artistic license'.
I'd like the official site to allow me to register myself, and what books I own via some serial number or something, and when I log in, I have access to online version of the book with the latest errata corrections and hotlinks in the references to the other books I have registered. This might be asking for much, but I think it's doable.

Is sr4 a good idea. No - but that's my opinion. And all of these are just our opinions.

And our opinions don't really mean squat becuase it's a done deal. Fanpro's made the descision for us, and they obviously don't care for our opinion. They really just don' t care. DS is about as close to an official SR forum as there is (in English anyway) and I don't know that any of their developers ask the fans for their opinions.

Did they have to?? Hell no, it's their game.

Should they have? It's hard to say. I guess if it was a big industry secret, then no. But whats the point? Are they afraid that if they announce a 4th edition too early some one else will beat them to the punch?!?