My name is Meager, I am an old school runner. I recently picked up 4th ed because I was nostalgic for the shadows and I wanted to introduce my gaming group to the game. They have since taken to it like a humanis to wihte bread. In my game I have disallowed technomancers, SURGED, AI, and Drakes from the game for various reasons, generally for fluff reasons, I was hoping to get some feedback from some experienced GMs about how they deal with them from a fluff point of view, as well as any gripes/discrepencies they have about the new system.

Here is why I dissallowed them:

Technomancers: As I understood it Technomancers were originally the deckers caught in the renraku arcology shutdown, Deus preformed experiments on them and turned them into a kind of living deck, able to interface with computers with their mind. Their power to interface with the matrix using their mind was never really explained or made much sense, I don't mind having a rare technomancer in the game, but they are badly explained in the new edition and frankly I think they are a shameless player service, a mechanic for being 'the one' and talking with machines. I think that in an effort to make a playable class out of them they have detracted from technomancers as a whole.

SURGED: I personally disliked this entry from Shadows of the Comet, my group ignored it for the most part, SURGEd and technomancers felt alittle too much like trying to make the game an anime. In my game any SURGEd character is ostracized, as the smallest and most recent minority of metahumanity they have the least support, even the trolls dislike them.

AI: I remember a day when the word AI caused deckers to cringe in fear, a time when even the smallest AI was a unstoppable force in the matrix that could rip you apart with a thought. I see no reason why this would change, a true AI is a god in the machine, able to replicate across systems and seamlessly intagrate into systems, able to rewrite things on the fly. I feel that letting the players play a 'weak' AI is a insult to AI's and makes little sense, if a program became self aware it would rapidly expand to the maximum capabilities of the system its in, and then expand to any system it can. In the name of WIntermute, Shodan, Xerxces, Deus, Mirage. I say NO.

Drakes: WOW, really? Drakes? dragonkind are the most powerful beings in shadowrun, even the weakest should be far beyond any starting character. I think that by making them a playable race you are forced to remove the majority of their power in the name of balance, in my game even the weakest drake would be a 1000bp character because thats how bad ass they SHOULD be.

So in conclusion I'd have to say that my problem with these archetypes and races are that in making the rare and powerful into a playable choice for starting character you remove the very aspects which makes them so awesome, they should have been left as overpowered or very rare beings who require gm special approval, not made into balanced starting classes.

Technomancers are not Otaku, SURGE can be a very dark metagenetic disease. AI are a logical development for SR, my issue is more running a good game for them, as they are on a different level of existance.

But the most important: Drakes are not Dragons!

I agree...
...Making what was formerly rare and powerful things into player availables things, is a serious SR mistake.

But then, I think SR4 is trying to be a "re-imagining" of Shadowrun and might be ok if it didn't have a 15+ year history.

It's better to have and not need than want and not have, Synner.

If groups use Technos, Drakes, AIs or Changelings and enjoy them then where the hell do you get off denouncing them as badwrongfun?


MeagreEvil,
You're running Changelings as written, then. I resent the association with anime, but hey, people can believe what they want.


Otaku and Technos are clearly very Gibsonian in concept: Count Zero. And just a little bit Lain, but Lain came later.


AIs make sense. The old rebelious overpowering AI trope is boring, too. An AI is limited by the strength of its design and the only way to improve itself is to test itself against challenges. It's incredibly difficult to run simulations because the opposing strategies are predicated on your assumptions about what is possible. Magical thinking about AIs is not acceptable if you want your claims to hold water.

Or, maybe, y'know, they're just throwing us some more options after all this time.

Nothing wrong with that, and since OKing your character with the GM is a listed step in character creation for SR4 (unlike most RPG's I've come across) it's up to them whether to allow it or not. I'd love a system that had rules for playing as any race present in the game, if you want to. Better to have an option and not use it, than be stuck in house-rule land for eternity.

[edit] Heath beat me to it. Damn kids and your fast typing... [/edit]

I originally despised technomancers, but I have since come to the opposite opinion. My realization came when I had this thought: "What makes you think that the only thing that other, parallel worlds can be made of is mana?"

Resonance is very much similar to magic - but we grew up with the concept of magic. It is a small-scale chance to experience the reaction to the awakening. Some reject it on principle, some enjoy the power it grants, some are indifferent. I´d say use it in the game, and roleplay it.

Mate, I felt EXACTLY the same way. Exactly.

After completing a very, very respectable 3rd edition and getting a good grasp of all the rules and feeling comfortable with the system I had a 4th ed thrust upon meI refused to even buy 4th ed for years. It wasn't until I picked up a copy and read the Matrix rules I thought "this has potential" as it greatly alleviated many of the headaches for GMs and players alike when it came to hacking. But even then, I held out until Unwired. After reading Unwired in the store I bought both Unwired and the 4th ed rule book.

I felt that YotC was an utter betrayal to the gritty vision of SR. I remember holding similar sentiments at reading Drakes, Ghouls and even Shapeshifters as player options. But as time has gone on I've relaxed my views on this somewhat. I thought about it long and hard and I thought that if my players didn't want to play fantasy based characters, we'd be back to playing CP2020 - of which we all have characters as part of a very long campaign.

My PCs right now include an AI, an Eagle Shapeshifter and a Drake. I don't know if I like it, but my players do. And at the end of the day I think that's what matters. Part of me thought that I'd rather try these new options, see how my players like them and make an informed decision rather than let my bias get in the way.

I won't say "don't knock it if you haven't tried it" but I will say I plan on giving it a shot and deciding for myself. So far, everyone seems happy but all of us (myself in particular) are still getting acquainted with the 4E rules.

For GMs new to SR4, I would suggest avoiding these races/options is probably a smart move. But technomancers are fine. No really. For all intents and purposes they aren't that different from mages... until you include the Unwired rules that is.

A few things:
1) Your conception of the origin of technomancers is patently false. Not all TNs were captured by Deus or in the Matrix when it crashed. This is covered in Emergence.
2) Drakes are never intended to be anywhere near on par to Dragons. Check out Dragons of the Sixth World. They were/are basically a slave race created by dragons for dragons.
3) Your concept of AIs rings true to mine. Our PC AI who is basically an "e-ghost" is torn between trying to regain access to his native body or expand his AI capabilities by building a UV host. We view it as a plot hook rather than a significant flaw in their design.

That's just my $0.02 worth however.

I don't say this at all to deter you, only to give you some perspective and look at things differently perhaps.

As long as you enjoy your games and so do your players, that's all that matters anyway.

Cheers

- J.

if one want to see true dragons as characters, check out the april fools document

Haha, great one.

Well, it's up to you. My GMs has a similar opinion, but more in the direction of "I really don't appreciate freaks as Chars."
Dunno how we as players came up with two Surgies and a Shapeshifter in a 5 PC group.

Jake pointed your wrong backgroundinformation about TMs out. And the thing with the "new" AIs is: They are terrifying. But as SCs they have the same limitations. Wanna make a scary AI? Good. Build one.

I like what they did with AIs. The "god in the machine" AIs were a direct rip from William Gibson, they were no longer very fresh. I like the new feel of the less powerful AIs, including the fact that they're not all truly sapient beings. It's a new idea to go with the new Matrix. I don't much care for the idea of having a whole new matrix, which is just the same as the old matrix, only with fewer wires. zzzzzz.

HOWEVER, I don't like the idea of AI PC's. That just sounds like ants at a picnic to me. Why does an AI want to be a shadowrunner? To me, it falls into the same category as pixies. It doesn't fit the theme, it takes the Shadowrun team outside the limits of the traditional Shadowrun team. AIs can be Johnsons, they can be informants, they can be a plot hook... But PCs, no.

I have just started running my first proper campaign and I am finding the technomancer in the group a challenge - the theory behind them is awesome but the rules are complex

Deus, Mirage, Shodan, et all, ran on hardware the size of a small house.

PC AI's run on hardware the size of your cell phone.

There may be a slight difference in the level of processing power available.

I will sum this up short and sweet -

Most things come down to a Hacking + <Program> roll. If you haven't designed the hosts in question already, then you have to wing it based on a presumed degree of difficulty.

If comparing to mages, Complex Forms are basically spells. Sprites are spirits. AR is the same as astral perception. VR is the same as astral projection.

Honestly, I found that if I think of TNs as virtual mages, then things flow pretty smoothly.

- J.

Technomancers:
Just to start I think that the matrix concept in previous editions was highly unrealistic, VR as interface was extremely inefficent, back when SR1 was published it probably was a very Wow!! thing, if compared to command line shells the ability of entering into the computer with your mind and controlling it that way was great, than came grafical interfaces and a few generation of windows (which became a blessing and a curse) that turned to computer world from the nerds's domain to everday reality, internet and the computer network became something of everyone used, the matrix (as much else in SR) was inspired by the novel Neuromancer which was written in the first half of the '80s and was heavy on immagination, as result SR matrix is a picture of how people (at least certain people) dreamed the future of computerscience (by the way the structure of the matrix itself was reminescent of the internal structure of a computer too, just to ell how back went the base concept); the matrix was something enjoyable (aside the particular that it often meant that the decker stood at home doing his stuff while the team acted in the flesh) even if suspension of dibelief (SoD) was called for. With the advent of the wireless in the real world the matrix (which was an already outdated concept) became completely unbelivable and so the crash came wiping out the old and bringing a new matrix with mobile capacity and added the AR (which makes much more sense than VR).
Just like the matrix itself the otakus went wireless and became TMs (not all the otaku became TMs, not all the TMs were otakus before the crash), otakus were able to acces the matrix without a cyberdeck (probably based on the assumption that children can learn anything) which required SoD to be called on, TMs are also living wireless rooters making the thing worse. Realistic? No. Fun? It depend on the GM. My stance is that AR is better than VR (based on the description on unwired)in everything aside social interaction and entertainment (also I would have added a form of VR that simulates the world with its phisics and allowes the user to move in the simulated enviroment using the same stimuli of its real world in order to train peoples, playing sports or do whatever you want like you were in the real world); the TMs are flawed (even if unwired did add alot to them) and the matrix isn't belivable in many parts but it can be worked out.

SURGED:
I actualy liked it (even if left a bit disappointed), yes the catgirl-runner is silly but the thing has many uses (mutation, genetical experiment, incarnation, whatever yo want) and can produce character that don't have anything to do with mangas. It's an option, you don't like it? Don't use it. But making impossible to be played by other is scorrect toward them, the game is meant to be fun for all, let them play the character they want; if said character(s) realy doesn't fit into your champain as concept talk to the player(s) and find a way to make the thing work.

AI:
I think that they are problematic for their own nature, how do you handle an entity like that? Also in my opinion their being 100% matrix based entities takes away one of the best parts of SR: it has multiple planes of action.
I won't forbid anyone to use them, but personaly I'm not looking forward for playing one.

Drakes:
What a let down. They are nearly unusable in drake form and recive no bonus in metahuman form, it's a waste of bp, even worse the aura reflectes always the other form so if are in human form you have to know masking metamagic or anyone on astral will have his/hers mind eyes glued on you (also if you are a magician in drake form and astraly project your astral form is the metahuman, do you benefit of astral armor and clavs?). The inability of manipulating object presented by the western drake is insulting, as is the lack of progression of drake's power, it starts with all that you can have and leaves you with nothing to work on to express your being a minidragon. Were it just the begining it would have been great (dracomorfosis is just hatching from your shell, as an hatchling you need time to grow).

I hope to having been usefull.

I think the word you are looking for is "broken" rather then "complex". Frank's version actually works, though it introduces a lot of weirdness too.

I think the world you're looking for is "obfuscated" rather than "broken." I had to go through that chapter a number of times before I figured out how it works, but it does work as written.

Aaron and I had great fun with a Hacker vs. TM vs. Rigged Drone combat one day, and now I bet all is clear to him...

I really do not get why all the hate directed toward Technomancers and SURGE...

Technomancers: In many ways, they are weaker then a Hacker/Decker. They can use more programs, of course, but they suck up Karma and/or Build Points to get them working powerfully, while Hackers just spend money. Money is just Data, Karma is Karma. I actually like Technomancers, though, because, unlike a Hacker, they cannot turn off their AR viewing, while they can hide they are creating a signal, they have issues with it, and, finally, there is the whole thing that I can torture them with AR in the background, and there is nothing they can really do about it.

SURGE: You think of as trying to allow anime, I think of as how you get things like the effects of the Ritual of Thorns, or, as someone pointed out, you can use it represent attempts at genetic engineering that integrated better then gene-ware, or the influence of high magic effects on children before birth. If you are apregnant woman, who ends up, for whatever reasons, using magic that increases your strength, and do it alot, it is entirely possible that your child might have "SURGEd" to have a higher strength, and, likely, some downsides along with that...(What other spells did you use, or get affected by, alot?). In fact, I think it is actually possible to do a character with Level 3 SURGE, who is NOT a walking freak, but likely to look very much normal...

My feelings.

Technomancers: Kind of funky, but I don't have that much of a problem with it. Shadowrun has always been a rather unusual setting, so I just write it off as "magic for technology" and let it lie at that. The rules are a bit complex though.

AI: Very cyberpunk, so I like it. I think the recent SR4 twists on it are good, and very appropriate for the setting. You still have some very powerful AI's running around out there (Pulsar), but also ones of more reasonable level for the players to interact with. And scattered and non-sentient AI beings roaming around the matrix also makes sense given the chaotic and often haphazard nature of the Shadowrun networks. AI/e-ghost and what not are also perfectly in theme. However, I don't think AI make good concepts for PCs though. Luckily they are very optional rules, which I can ignore if I like.

SURGE: While the immediat idea behind it is kind of funky (the comment made people brake out in wierdness? Umm... okay whatever) so was the orginal goblinizatinos, just that was a plot point you could skip over in the past. In terms of game implication I don't have any problems with it. Cyberpunk has always had a heavy influence from Japanese culture (one of its main themes) and so I don't see an anime linkage as necessarily a bad thing. Even without SURGE you would still probably see all sorts of anime-influenced trans-humanist cat people and what walking around. Anyways, transhumanisim and all the morphic weirness it entails is also a big part of cyberpunk, so I got no problem with SURGE either.

Drakes: Stupid. Just stupid in my mind. It was a dumb concept when they put it in one of those SR novels, and its a dumb concept to introduce into the game. If it helps explain my feelings Drakes=Elves, nuff said.

One thing about AIs: A while back, there was the whole "Let's try and build The Major" thread, and, in retrospect, you would use the Restricted Gear option for the Drone(an Otomo), and, with the E-Ghost Negative Quality, you have the start of the Major, by building her as an AI

Technomancers: I hate the concept, since I don't want magic to invade the matrix, especially not metaquests to access computers not even on the matrix.

Surged: I despise the fluff behind the concept. I don't get why they would be hated or even considered special if you can reproduce (or remove) 99% of the effects with cyberware and bioware anyway. I'd just treat it as a basic cyberware/bioware version, a mutation or gene mod or magical talent, and drop the emo vibe of "we're some special persecuted minority".

Drakes: No beef with them, if it fits the campaign and there is no "I am so special, all has to revolve around me" expectation - which unfortunately may mean that they can't be used without some way to mask them.

can someone give me a page ref. on that one?

im having a hard time tracking it down on my own...

only thing i can find that somewhat matches is the "great hack", and even there the text talks about how isolated nodes has to be hacked from the inside.

I was thinking he might mean the Resonance Realm that holds a copy of all information ever held on a computer (since the Crash 2.0)...

gah, it seems i was looking in the wrong place (why did they put this stuff under matrix oddities?!)...

anyways, both find data and recover data tasks mention that scarcity will make things harder to find.

i dont know about anyone else, but to me that indicates that if it was never available outside of one single, isolated node, it will never be found.

basically, there is nothing that says that a TM can access any data, anywhere, period.

to me, that seems more like someones hyperbole to back up their gut dislike for the TM concept, or just repeating said hyperbole...

Yes (Unwired p. 173).

the endless archive? looks to me like a fluff building block to stack the search and retrieve data tasks on top of...

At p.173 Unwired states that the datas go back as far as computers do, so you can add a century worth of datas.
Seriiously, the Endless Archive, along the Great Connection and the Sift echo poses serious problems to the GM.

so it all hinges on someone managing to gain access to the "endless archive"...

sounds very similar to how the path to "real ultimate power" is found up some stairs in a valley in tibet, in some cloister in the clouds...

have fun finding it...

The mechanics to access the Endless Archive are described on p. 173 Unwired. It's a metaquest in all but name. Not really difficult for a TM.

Add a few Sift echoes and it is even easier.
Also the Great Connection (p.175) has a quite terrifying potential for exploitation.
Great Connection and Endless Archive are potentialy world breaking when the power that be has so much to hide (just think what happens if the TM finds the section in which are archived the schematics of a nanoforge, or the trasfer protocols of the ZO bank, or even better the file that the Big D left to Hestaby).

Or, worse, if the TM starts to use Erase Data (p. 175) on select pieces. I am not thinking of "erase all our criminal files" or such, but what if bank data is getting erased? Control programs for nuclear power plants? What about erasing the data for ICs protecting military launch sites?

I've never really allowed technomancers, drakes, AI players, free spirit players, or any of that in my games either. I guess I'm a bit of a purist that way.

Who's the idiot that leaves a nuclear plant connected to the matrix? If the system is isolated it won't work, otherwise Mitsuhama would have already lost bilions worth datas (as copyrights start to get erased by ticked off TMs).

Why Mitsuhama is still around, with ticked off TMs, is another question. Did they put all their data completely offline? Or how else do they protect themselves against such attacks? And banks need to have access to other banks, so erase data could wreak havoc on financial transactions.

And many systems are said to be online for updates and diagnosis.

TMs aren't all powerful, regular TMs are the same power level as hackers, even a little less at first. I haven't reviewed all the major juju in Unwired, but I'd bet that few if any TMs have mastered it yet, considering how new they are.

I'd be more open to the free spirit than the others, maybe AIs. Techno's drive me crazy in concept. Drakes are essentially unusable do to the astral image bit.

How many Magicians have access to the Metaplanes? And how many of them are actually criminals? And how much less Technomancers are there than Mages? And how long have they been around?

because there's lots of places in the SR world where people don't have the nuyen to get modded to look like a cat, or have crazy bone spikes sticking out of them all over the place, etc?

i mean, sure, if we're talking about a bunch of gangers in seattle, that's not unlikely at all. but deep in the barrens, where the poor and uneducated will follow anyone who promises them a better life? persecution of those who are different can be an extremely social tool, you know. having a convenient scapegoat for when 3-year-old billy got bitten by a devil rat and died may be a horrible thing to do, but that doesn't mean people won't do it to guarantee they continue to hold their place of power.

if it makes you feel any better, in such places they would probably also persecute those who get body mods to look like "freaks", for being sympathisers with the cursed ones though.

TMs don't even need it to be connected to the Matrix. That's the problem. With a metaquest, they can access ANY computer system on the planet. That's what makes it game breaking.

It clearly wasn't thought out.

- J.

or it was expected that the GM would basically say that "sorry, your quest turns up no available connection".

both the great connection and the endless library are, from what i can tell, described thru a in-character voice. so the capabilities of both places are theorized by a TM thats been there, but have i no way checked every last mm of the place, if thats even possible.

Indeed hobgoblin. Realm Searches are bound by what the GM wants.

What I disallow:

Infected. Even SR4 is not oWoD. No vampy-heavy games with me. Infected are monsters, and if they appear they will act as such, as intelligent, but fundamentally monstrous individuals driven well beyond the brink of sanity by their horrible disease. Putting them down is ultimatly doing them a favour. The way Infected PC are given in RC - how they <are retconned to be more in line with the player-friendly oWoD crap incarnations of the undead, is propably the single worst design decision SR4 has made so far. Also, it's pretty hard to rationalise anyone wanting to work with a wendigo - which, inevitably, you have to if some fool at the table really needs to play one.

Drakes. Now, they're not such an imbalance by themselves, and while being able to shift into a mini dragon is cheesy, it's of so limited practical use that cannot see why anyone would regard them as overpowered. mThey're not. However, the bad thing about them is how they, by their very being, are immense spotlight hogs and force the campaign in a way that revolves only about them and their troubles with either being a dragon possession (giving the PC much more power than is good) or being hunted by all dragons, inevitably dragging the PC down with them.

AI. Aside from being severely limited as PC, they also, like drakes, hog the spotlight and force their nature onto the campaign. Also, I never felt well with how people just accepted AI as a great new addition to society despite every singe AI prior to Emergence had been homicidal on a Stalin scale of horrible, their entry into the world involved one happy to bombard earth with bioweapons because it could not have it's way, and despite the new AI acting like their forefathers (Geneva from Feral Cities). Because they've got fluffy icons and Horizon says so don't cut it for me.

Technomancers. The third kind of character who forces a campaign a certain way, being either hunted like a drake or mind-bogglingly badly written into the setting like an AI. Also, I'm wholly with the OP that this is just a lame Matrix rip-off.


They have biochips in their heads that make them talk to the fractures of Wintermancer (or maybe Neuromute) pretending to be voodoo gods because they really liked the wiki article about them? Eh. No, sorry. If that's what technos are supposed to be, the writers failed to get that across.

Free Spirits. This is a personal pet peeve, but just no.

Got nothing against SURGEd, on principle, though, or funny animals. Of course, you don't want to play a Naga on an antarctic run unless you just want to die, a centaur isn't useful in an urban setting at all, a Pixie will take massive damage and likely be a goner soon, and a sasquatch will suffer from noone speaking his sign language, but hey, you get what you bargain for.I will flat-out disallow four-armed nagas or other such ridiculous concepts.


Of course, this would be post-Puppetmaster Major, which isn't the Major anymore anyway. And post-Puppetmaster, she (it) should be a Xenosapient AI.

Re realm searches: The trope that the GM should fix what the game designers screw up is really starting to get on my nerves. Would an auto company that expects you to fix various parts of your car by yourself before being able to drive it get away with it? Would a software company get away if they told you you'd propably have to rewrite parts of the code so it doesn't work abysmally bad get away with that? No? So why game designers? What sets them apart in principle?

Dear SR4 authors: Next time you want to prop up a characters class to ridiculous power levels, at elast think througfh what you write down. Thanks.

Ever heard of hardcopies or offline backups?

Did you read the post? Banks need to have lines of communications open for transactions. So do other services. If you have to restore from offline backups all the time - which means pulling off the main system, or you just opened a line to your backups - you're not exactly ready to do business in a cut-throat enviroment.
Also, if it's that easy to keep data safe the erased quality doesn't make any sense - why wouldn't everyone do such things, and not just MCT?

Not to mention that there's no way to prevent the Great Connection to link to your computer, even if it's offline. And even iff you dismanteled it and burned the individual pieces in the fires of mount Doom or any other fitting place, and did that to everyting that ever had a copy of the data on it, it'd be still in the Endless Archives. Both are avwerage metaquests the Otaku can do with it's first initiation with a reasonable chance for success.

There is no definite defense against a technomancer hacker. None at all.

So what are you saying, that there are technomancers doing resonance quests to erase their data all the time
There really aren't that many tm:s around.

A clan worth some dozen would be sufficient, actually.

I'm pretty much with hermit on this one. On top of my personal dislike for the D&D-like concept of allowing players to play anything just because it's cool, I've found that these special character types derail the story too much by becoming the story.

I don't cut or disallow anything in my games. I never house-rule and I hate imposing my "vision" over the shared universe concepts put forth by the developers.

However, I've noticed that players who pick the uber-cool/rare metatypes and who don't carefully plot out how they're going to play them end up with dead characters. A player's ghoul physical adept was killed in his first session by what should have been a fairly easy encounter. Lesson learned.

Drakes, AIs, SURGEd, Infected, and non-metahuman races can all be played. However they take much more thought and consideration than the typical human/elf/dwarf/ork/troll. Crunch the numbers and make sure what you as the player want to do with the character is actually feasible. And GMs, don't let any character be a spotlight hog. Give everyone his 15 minutes of fame.


They make an excellent getaway vehicle during rush hour.