AE - I think we've got our wires crossed somewhere. I get the impression you think I was referring to you (or other DSers) in some way, when this is almost the complete opposite.

The "people" I refer to are those who, to generalise horribly, read the Daily Mail or The Sun, think that culture (and life) extends to nothing beyond Coronation Street and Eastenders (I know I'm picking especially English examples, but I'm not up on Finnish (If I've got that right) pop-culture).

It's the object of satire "put away those books and watch TV", but there are people, who I actually know IRL, who don't know or understand these things. These people don't read - especially not classics. The idea of a political philosophy is unknown to them.

One thing that characterises gamers is a geekiness - encompassing curiosity, which means that we read lots, are generally intelligent and imaginative. It's a stereotype, but I bet the majority of us who participate on this forum did well at school. Hell - if we weren't exceptionally literate then what chance do we have of understanding the rules of Shadowrun?

I've gone way OT and I apologies for that in addition to any offense I may have caused.

I'd be surprised if there's not a first-world equivalent of SINs in the next 20 years. A plastic ID card that replaces your driver's liscence, visa/passport/green card, library card and bank card. All tied together so you can use it to buy a plane ticket, ID for boarding/disembarking, pay for your hotel, swipe it through the hotel room's cardlock instead of using a key, then visit the local library's genaeology archives to look up your great-great-great-grandad's history.

Then again, I wouldn't be surprised if you buy your plane ticket, then find an armed SWAT team at the boarding gate waiting because their database got fragged by the latest virus, and they think you're Osama Bin Laden. (Yes, 20 years after today, he's still on the loose! )

And now for my 2¥

SURGE - Don't have YotC.. My current group is still in '53, because I want to give their characters plenty of time to adapt to the SR world before I start nailing them with the crap to come (Bug City/UB, Dunkie's death, Renraku Arcology: Shutdown, etc...) I can't really comment on this, but from what I've heard so far, it seems kinda neat, but if I used it, I'd enforce it.. If you choose to use SURGE for your PC, you're stuck with what you get, period.. No starting over until this PC bites it, and don't even think about just letting him die so you can start another SURGE PC afterwards.. This IS your SURGE PC, get used to it.

Otaku - I agree 100% with what Conner and Kagetenshi have said on this issue.

Cyberlimbs - I don't know why, but I find the idea of just having someone take MY arm and replace it rather odd... I wouldn't allow it, even if it would make me stronger.. Now, if I lost my arm in an accident and had to replace it, maybe.. But I'm sure as hell not going to give up my (currently) working arm just for a nice shiny chrome one.. Anyway, yes the essence cost is a bit steep, but I believe it's that way for a balance issue more than anything else.. I think .5 Essence is acceptable, and 20,000¥ for a basic limb is ok.. Afterall, it isn't an especially bad ass limb until you add all the other crap, which will make it expensive as hell..

SIN - Mark my words, we'll have a system very similar within the next 20 years. They're already working on getting the world down to 3 types of currency.. After that, they'll probably get it down to just one.. It shouldn't be hard to do the same with ID.. Face it, America is taking their 'land of the free' idea and running with it.. They want to save everyone from 'oppressive governments' and 'give them the gift of democracy' without a single fucking thought about what those people want... (note: And I'm a fucking American!)

Xirces - Fight the power, omae.. Poke big brothers eye out.. People should have a right to live their lives their own way (so long as no one is hurt as a result) without worrying about the government breathing down their back... Of course, the idea is appealing for the SR world, as it is the oppression that makes it so interesting..

Gotta say that, formatting aside , I agree wholeheartedly with Playing Games.

In my campaign I up the amount of cyber that your average corp/special forces/crack shadowrunner has.

Put it this way, all those guys who start the game with a million nuyen of cyberware (street value anything from 1-3,000,000 really, + surgery costs) got it from somewhere.

What's most Shadowrunners justification for their cyber? Usually ex-corp or military, doesn't that imply that a lot of these guys should have extensive chrome when you come up against them?

Cost price on cyber has gotta be ludicrous. If I have a corp give the PC's cyber at 'cost' instead of nuyen, it's usually between 20-50% of the list price, and the corp is probably still making money by the drekload!

Cyber is just like modern day military tech, there is a huge market for it. Wired Reflexes 1 is common as muck in security/military outfits... the reason why Wired 3 costs so much is because it isn't as common. But if a corp has ploughed in the dough to research Wired 1, well, Wired 3 is just an extension of that and probably doesn't cost all that much more to develop... but they can charge a premium for it. So there aren't massive overheads involved, just tons of profit.

As for Smartlinks... seeing as probably 90% of military/security personnel probably have one installed that's a hell of a lot of people - the demand for smartlinks is probably a fair percentage of the demand for something like assault rifles, more than enough to make them cheap and affordable.

On the same topic, a Smartlink is NOWHERE NEAR as invasive as a datajack, the Essence cost is just whacked for game balance! A smartlink consists of a pad in your hand, some wires running up your arm to a processor which sends an image to be displayed on a small screen in your eye. A datajack takes a computer connection and feeds information to and from your brain directly. The thing has got to be wired into one of the most intricate and delicate parts of your body in such a manner as to translate information between man and machine! To claim that the smartlink is easily as invasive is ludicrous!

The only thing I really hate is the Immortal Elves?

Why?

BECAUSE THERE ARE ELVES EVERYWHERE! Ever fragging fantasy game has ton of elf drek. What about the other races? I do understand how some of us aren't liking all the magic stuff, but that looks like it's cooling down. I think we'll start seeing some cyber stuff again, although I'm not sure what it'll be.

I should have been clearer.

In every fantasy setting, elves get far more attention than any other race. EVERY SINGLE ONE! I want some variety.

And then there's the world of Myth, in which the closest thing to Elves, the Fir'Bolg, aren't very close at all...

~J

Yeah, well.

Myth isn't what I'd call main stream fantasy. As long as we're nitpicking, the only 2 noir fantasies can can think of lack elves (Black Company (which Green Ronin is d20ising) and Myth).

Go moosegod!

Although, it's not so much the elves themselves that bother me, it's the elven player mafia that's creating them most of the time. Some way, some how I want one of my characters to meet a regular, down to earth, unpretentious, non-immortal elf that isn't in the throes of some magical, Machiavellian plot with huge ramifications for world affairs.

And if that elf could be ugly that would be an added bonus.


In anycase, the thing that has bothered me since SR1 isn't the whole SIN system and the nuyen... It's the fact that you carry around what amounts to a dildo everywhere you go that just happens to have your entire credit history on it. And then there are certified credsticks that look exactly the same but don't have any of that info. My question was always "Why?" Wouldn't it be much simpler to just issue cards with magnetic strips to people? Credit Cards/ATM Bank cards already do this anyway. It's probably just an elaborate device that enabled an original playtester GM to look across the table at a player playtester and with a straight face proclaim "Fine, you make the purchase all you need to do is slot your stick, chummer..."

On the subject of money in SR, I thought it was pretty clear that the nuyen had reigned supreme and that most national currencies had been done away with at least according to SR1, I'm pretty sure. But for some reason some authors and many home campaigns decided to bring back not only national currency, but also *gag* paper nuyen... Now I realize SoNA is a fact of the game universe now and practically every nation in North America has their own currency but if we're going to have Credsticks can we not have a redundant set of currency for an economy that was meant to be fully automated/electronic?

Ok, those are my issues. Beyond that, I'm at least content...

I don't object to elves as long as they're not portrayed as near-mythic walking gods as per LotR.

Which, of course, they almost always are in most fantasy games.

-Siege

See, you're who I'm talking about Crimsondude 2.0!

Don't get me wrong, I think the credstick is as ridiculous as anything else in Shadowrun... See my initial comments for details.

But the original intention had been for a single monetary system to prevail in the industrialized world and that it would be electronic and linked to a SIN. People without a SIN were double hosed since they didn't even have the capability of maintaining a credit rating or possessing a bank account. On the other hand, if you talked to the right people and didn't mind doing some illegal stuff (i.e. Shadowrunning) you could get your hands on a certified stick and actually interact with the economy in a meaningful way. Allegedly, nations stopped using paper money, stopped printing it, and there was a set conversion rate and a deadline to make it all worthless unless you complied. Again, SINless people get screwed. So my thought on what the SINless use for "currency" was they either use illegal mob markers (with all of those associated risks), certified credsticks when and if they can get their grubby unwashed hands on them and in the deepest section of the Barrens or way out in the more wild areas of the world, a barter economy should prevail.

Anyway, I've learned to live with state sponsored cash and evern corp script in Shadowrun. But there isn't going to be paper nuyen in a game I run, it's simply retarded. For me, this issue is more of a highlight for why talking about "canon" plotlines and setting info is somewhat pointless. Over the years too much contradictory information has been put in by different authors at different times and the whole money situation highlights this problem.

I like cash and credit sticks in SR. In RL I have a bunch of cards I can use to buy things. Where I live I never have to use cash, anytime no matter what, if I don't want to, but I go to the ATM and get out cash and use that, I just feel more comfortable using cash. My paychecks get put directly in my account. I can pay bills on-line, I can swipe a card for gas, swipe a card for junk at store, even a lot of store in my area now have self serve lanes, you scan your own junk, then run your card through it, sign the little pad and off you go. But I still write checks, still tell the guy at the counter fill it up on pump 2, and stand in line to pay cash. I like to use cash. The only thing I use my cards for is getting money out of the bank (I can't stand banks) and shopping on-line. Really I got direct deposite because my bank never seems to be open when I am off, I don't want to give soem store 1% of my check as a cashing fee, and I travel a lot so I need money availible but don't want to carry large sums of money to strange towns.

Morale of this long winded speech, our games reflect our lives. We still use cash and credit sticks, because well we like cash in the real world and we like the idea of credit sticks.

There will never be one global currency. Ever.

It's too easy for a country to print its own money or form its own currency, and it is also one of those legitimizing features of sovereignty to say that a country has its own money. Besides, it's also a multi-trillion dollar enterprise for currency speculators.

Saying that there will be one currency is like saying that we'll bring back Bretton Woods. It's not going to happen. In that case, it last all of about 25 years before it became so unworkable to have every currency pegged to one standard, and so self-destructive to the international economy to have that kind of system in place when global economic performance was fluctuating wildly (IIRC, most of the blame falls on the West Germans) that it's just not going to happen. Not even a bunch of multi-national corps are going to behind it when they have to deal with the same economic conditions.

Finally, I like cash because, frankly, people who whip or their credit/check cards to pay for a $2 charge are assholes.

That's what they used to say about the Euro, Crimson.

-Siege

right now big corps loose out based on what currency they base theyre books on. the nuyen isnt for nations, its for the corps to have a stable corp to corp currency so that one cant suddenly go belly up based on the fact that my currnecy goes insanely high in comparison to your currency.

nuyen is stable, so a corp selling for 1M nuyen will not see a market lockout as the the corp they want to sell to have a currency that have gone into a dive and made the price of the wares skyrocket.

its in many ways what the dollar was in the 60-80, a stable platform to base things on. now its not like that any more, the euro is going up while the dollar is into a dive based on the politics of the respective areas.

from what i have gatherd the nuyen is suppose to be based on the avarage of the stockprices of the top corps. thats yet another sign that its suppose to be a level playing field outside of politics as when one corp goes down another goes up and the avarage stays.

lets say your joe wageslave that have never left the corprate areas, mutch less the contry. you dont care about currency prices as long as the credstick your carrying can keep you and your family with food, clothes and roof over your head. its only when your one day in tokyo and the next in berlin, paris, london, new york, seattle or any other place on the globe that its practical and maybe evne important that you know that the 1000 nuyen you have on your account will mean that wherever you are the prices are the same as its the baseline for the very economy.

as for stick over card, who cares? magnet strips are being fased out anyways for chips. rember that chips are very secure when there is on power applyed to them, more so then a set of magnetic fields on a strip. storage is allso bigger. and when its all on a chip then you slot it anyways, so why not a stick? it just adds to the feel of the world

bah.
only bad ones are the sourcebooks.
if i want to find new magic things i have to flip them all trough. if i want some new character things, i have to flip them all trough. if i want some cyber/bio rules, i have to flip them all trough.
if im GMing and i looking for history for some X related things i have to flip all the damn books trough, again.

ALL magic stuff to magic book, all combat stuff to combat book, all gear and its using rules to gear&stuff book, all matrix related to one book...
keep it simple, stupid.
i cant even find that magical edge that rises your natural magic attribute for cost of 8 (?) BP's. im 100% i have seen it in some book.

~

Mnemonic Enhancer
god damn, its CULTURED bio thus it SHOULD be better than simple muscle replacement. and because you have to get via playing the game (no culturued for starters), you also have to get the money to buy and "install" it too.

surge
best thing in while. my character has tail, gills and is dual-natured and he is the damn face of the party. i jsut wait for the racism to kick in.

Build Points
if you have a specific character in mind, this is a real day saver system.
real min/maxers use ABCD system, not PB.
PB is used to make characters that a excatly what you were thinking of. great system for RPG use.

Otaku
a physad version of street sam in matrix. coolest thing ever in this field.
e.g.:
cleaner boy walk trough MAD and cyber/bio scanners while going to his new work in corp.
scanning. . . .
datajack - detected
headmemory- detected
after few days the corp decker finds out that the datalogs are dampered and data is lost.
he gots so excited that he literaly runs to his boss and runs trough MAD/bio/cyber detectors too.
scanning. . . .
carnial cyberdeck - detected
multiple datajacks - detected
smartlink 2 - detected
...possible level Omega security breach.
alert security. immidiate counter actions? no/yes. threat level exceeds thereshold. yes
...intialize counter mesures.
the corp decker is gunned down by the corps own security turrets while the Otaku sells his data steal for nice profit plus he gets nice bonus from the corp because he is called to clean up the deckers blood stains from the carpet.

ghouls
if you got good dice luck it realy does balance the bad sides out.
but roll badly and you have to play half wited rat eater.
and anyway, can you say Vampire?
a Vampire who have came trough your door and impaled your wife with his sowrd against your favorite painting?
a REAL Vampire with gloving eyes, cold skin eating your son?
a Vampire when he leaps for ...you?

what else would simple pedestial think? they do watch Tv in 2063. even the old dracula.
the terror factor is just TOO cheezy.

shapeshifters
one with masking is realy creapy.
first, the charcter is never ill.
secondly, he is the most unsosial of them all.
thirdy, how can it be that this fragile human (B1/Q1/S1) made graund beaf of the Spikes "protection" colletion party?

insane amounts of plot twists and game possibilities.
think about.
fraging ShapeShifter is running the shadows with you.

Metavarients
like earlier said, we are not all from great glorous, mighty nation U.S.A. (please someone bomb this "holy" war wagers)
i specialy liked the Onis.
red samurais, even without armors. mmmm....

cyberlimbs
well not just the limbs but whole Essence and space thing.
e.g. replacing or lacing your bones with titanium should have no essence impact at all besides that it has no neural interfirece, instead it should affect your bio because it would hamper your bodys blood cell reproduction.
body does not reject titanium, it has as much problem with it as with natural bone, thus instead essence it should have bio cost of 1.
the whole rules should be writen again.
if it has no DNI impact it has essence cost of zero, but it has some bio impact. this would mean that DNI ecuiped stuff would get its essence price cranked bit upper (not much) but it would remove the sillines of having essence cost of cyber skull.
war veterans that have grenade fragments inside of their body, are they "less" human, more machine?
what about person that can go virtual and shut down all his senses? to me this sounds nonhuman thing to do...
or smartlink? you FEEL your gun. like you would feel your own hand.
i say essence cost at least 1 and no bio cost (its a damn wire that goes trough your body to a small box and to your brains, i cant see how it hampers your bodily functions).

to extreme
if i eat radio transmitter, do i lose essence? let see. is it inside of my body? yes. is it unnatural? yes. does it work even if im dead? yes.
sounds damn unnatural so i should loose huge load of essence.
also think about all those grandmoms that have their hips replaced and titanium legs because they have so fragile natural bones.
they sure feel like creepy vending machines.

magic
no, please. not some crappy cyberpunk copy again.
this game has magic and thats the one major things i like about it.
if someone wants less magic, ask your GM to run the game in places that have insane background, thus no magic would be possible. or just play orbital runs.
also keep in mind that one 1% of the world is magicaly active.
1%.
and from that 1% only part is realy capable magicans and phy adepts. other go insane or just block out their talents.
so if you think SR is like D&D, +X weapons and magical loot droping from the sky, think again.

new spells heightened learning TN's is realy good. you need only one success to learn the spell, remeber that.
previosly we didint even bother to roll the learning cheacks if he was trying to learn lower than 8 forces spell and having spells with force less than 5 was just plain stupid.

money
hey dudes.
those credsticks.
they are real.
OK, not maybe back in where money handling is in stone age some where of jungle (i mean USA. checks? i haven't even SEEN one)
i, personaly, haven even HELD cash for 37 days (i got some from santa, thanks santa).
i go shoppping, visa electra.
i get gas, visa electra.
i loan money to my friend, visa electra.
i pay my rent, visa electra.
i pay car parkin, visa electra.
i pay my cellphone bil, visa electra.
i get drunk and cut my self, first i show my electrical id card for the nice looking nurse and then i pay with visa electra or my employe pays for me.
my girlfriend goes to RPG shop and buy new dices, she pays with visa electra.

where ever i go, i got excatly one currency (except if i go to some unciviliazied countries where they handle this strange thing called cash) thus your comment about one currency beeing impossible is pointless.
dollars, frangs, gold dublons, squirell skins, marks, ruplas, anything - visa electra.

cops stop me and ask my driving lisence, "damn it is at home", but i give electrical id card and they see i have a standing driving lisence, "thank you and good day to you, drive safely. there is some black ice after the bridge".
i can see everything about all my records with electrical id card from any of the states buildings that have computers for it. also my id card works as a passport in 19 european countries. belive it or not
electrical id card it has initial cost of 40? and last for 5 years.

best thing about this that they are going to combine this all to one card (in year 2010 IIRC) thus i would have then only one card in my wallet.

so screw you about your "impossible" things-to-come.

now i go to sauna. my gfriends has "bad eye" glaring at me.

There's a great deal of difference between one form of payment (card) accepted at virtually any Point of Sale you like, and one global currency.

This comment has more to do with me than with the publishers. But I just don´t seem to be able to keep up with the meta-plot. Witch meens I get upset whenever some new, worldshaking event takes place. The difference between were I´m playing and were the plot is going is just growing. Of course my players now little of this. Its basicly an issue of me reading more and more Shadowrun books and finding myself addicted, wanting to now everything that goes on, all the while I´m gamemastering a few small time runs a year. I should play Shadowrun way more. Or read fewer Shadowrun books (first option prefered)

There is nothing in that list I cant show you how to use to make a more effective character. You dont like surge? Show me another way to make a sam with astral perception. You dont like cyberlimbs? Youve never considered using it with an independant eye tool laser or an dni adapted scanner and p-sec. They all have the uses, regardless of how it looks on the surface.

That doesnt mean some things subtrack from the fun factor, such as the ease it is to shrug off anything lighter than a significant rifle hit, but just saying "theres no reason to use these because it isnt min max" just means you havent thought of a situation where it applies.

List anything, and Ill show you a reason to use it.

Well said White Dwarf.

Istill think paper nuyen are assinine/redundant.

I never said anything about paper Nuyen. My previous comment specifically labeled it as both electronic and more prevalent.

To me the worst additions to the Shadowrun line are the monster manual I and monster manual II...errrr...paranormal creatures of europe and northamerica...i think FASA forgot to write the PX of each critter...100% useless...but of course you can swear that withouth megalodon your games were boring!!

the diffrence of a cyberradio and a radio in you stomace is the fact that your hearing what the radio is picking up, you can change channels with a thought and so on.

as for why stuff like bone lace have a essences cost? my pet theory is that its hooked up to your nervous system to be able to register any damage and control dedicated reapir nanites into the area.

and dont come rumbeling down on me with the idea that this is not so as nanites only showed up in SOTA:63. the text there states that while nanites where in use before, it was only in limited fields, it was only with the deus episode that pure nanite solutions became interesting and therefor showing up on the street...

as for why there are paper nuyen? ease of use. some times you will run into a situation where paper is easyer then card/stick, even for nonshadey areas for life...

Maybe bone lacing is "connected" to the periosteum neural pathways by totally silent dead ends. The bone lacing is in contact with the neural system but still unable to exchange information with other devices (as said in the router's Interconnectivity section). You get can't any data from the lacing, but it still causes a sort of "white noise" to the brain about the state of the bones, hence the Essence loss. The brain still get some data from a fraction of the periosteum nerves that get through the lacing, which is enough of the bones new resistance.

That or the Tenth Planet Proserpine...

This being said, the topic being "the worst addition" in this case it could be either (a) bone lacing or (b) bone lacing's Essence cost or © neural explanation of loss of Essence or (d) impossibility of connecting bone lacing to router. Bone lacing add an Essence cost long before they came with the explanation. On my own, because I'm not sure how the periosteum would react to "data cold" bone lacing, On my own I'd go for (d), considering the need for the brain to know the state of the body.

it is called thread hi-jacking.
:>