LOL, that was great.

My final word on SR4. The more I hear other peoples point of veiw the worse things look. I will no longer read anything about SR4 or talk about it until it is out. Then I will go and sit in my local game store and skim through the book. If I like it, I will buy and run a game using it. If the game goes well. I will play SR4 and start saving up for all the books that will come.

SR1 wasn't deleted in favor of SR2.

It was refined and reworked to be more elegant. The changes were made within the existing system. Don't try to compare SR1 to 2 with SR3 to 4. Were talking about refining a system versus starting over with a whole new one.

They made SR better within the existing unique rule system with SR1-3. Sr4 looks to start over... and as with ANY brand new systems it will require patches and expansions to become fully functional. I haven't played all the RPG's out there, but so far they tend to get better as they get refined. I have yet to see one that scraps itself and everything it learned, in favor of a whole new ruleset.

Do you live in America? What makes you think we know 2% of the major undertakings of our government. LOL

Theres a huge difference between Spititng on SR4 and questioning the need. Or cirtisizing the faqs.

None of us have spit on SR4 - in fact there has been a great deal of discussion concerning the rules that we do know about - which is I believe the devs intent. I'd suggest that you just skim over the messages that you don't think you'll like.


I think that some of you are taking this a little too personally. It's ok to take it a little personally, but to get so riled up that you leave the boards, or make apost like this - you need to CHILL.

Oh, and thanks SR4-WTF - your handle and your DUck and Cover post made me laugh.

Good idea, I tender to get myself in trouble with that type of thing as well. Nice to see some one like minded.

You know, I still have friends who play 2nd edition AD&D. LOL. They have all the books and everything. My friend does not like to play a system until they are done with it, he says, that way you know all the books are out.

Oh, this is hilarious.

First of all, I have yet to see in the two and a half months and reading every thread in this forum anyone come out and say "I hate SR4." It's a strawman argument, and it shows. No one's said it. If they did, why the fuck would they post here? It'd be the intellectual equivalent of punching themselves in the nuts over and over again.

Ellery summed up most of the major concerns some people have in that thread which so offended you that you had to go and make this one.

You have to also consider how many of the people you may call "Anti-SR4" were ecstatic about it when it was first announced. I was giddy as hell that they would finally fix the one area that I don't particularly like--rigging--and merging it and decking together. But as more information came out, you can go through the old threads and see the day when those of us who were delighted at the idea of SR4--fucking elated beyond reason--and were defending it with a great deal more rationality and common sense than those who seem to delight in attacking people who are "anti-SR4" and bandying about strawman ideas such as that there are "SR4 haters" roaming the forum causing trouble. Our opinions changed literally overnight, and we became skeptical and hesitant. We asked for clarifications and offered up ideas for consideration--not based on assumptions, but based on what we felt might be lacking in perspective because we don't know anymore than any other DSer who is in the loop (be they playtester, freelancer, dev, or editor).

I still have a great deal of hope for SR4 because I don't want it to suck. I don't want it to become something that alienates existing players, and something which doesn't appeal to non-SR players. I don't like the idea that some people have mentioned that mechanics aren't important, because to me they are the most important part of the game. They were in SR1, SR2, and SR3. Some of us, namely Critias and myself, particularly like some of the dice pools. We've been using CP since SR2, and remember it's SR1 equivalents. We've become accustomed to using CP and using it effectively.

Another part of my concern is that FAQs are poorly written. Things seemed to be changing very quickly once SR4 FAQ 3 came out, and in response to a perfectly valid question, a question which could have been answered any number of ways, we've been treated to this instead.

Then we get the stupendous FAQ 5 attack on SR1-3 magic without actually saying anything about SR1-3 magic. It's all guess work, comments which I have to attribute to personal opinion on the parts of freelancers/playtesters because they can't give official positions--either because they don't make them, or because they are prevented under penality of litigation from saying so. I look at the FAQs, the content of the FAQs, and I consider that this is the official voice of Fanpro writing statements which aren't well-written. Then I read the GTM preview, and again it was poorly-written. I have become very weary of how well-written the materials could be if this is acceptable material to publish as an official position, be it incomplete or not.

I'm skeptical about everything. Nothing I have said here was made as an assumption. All I know about SR4 are in those five FAQs and the GTM preview. What else I know is that few major rules have been designed and implemented since Fanpro took over. I know that SR has only had one core mechanic, and it isn't the one in SR4. Everything else I've said has been under the auspices of, "since your're doing X, have you considered Y?" There are probably hundreds of playtesters for SR4 (there were 89 just for MitS). However, I can't, I won't, assume that they have mentioned everything that I have thought. No one seemed too offended in the early days of this forum when there were threads explicitly designed to offer nothing but unsolicited advice and ideas about SR4--ideas made when we knew less than we do now.

But going back to this whole idea of the rabid "anti-SR4" crowd, I am going to have to stand with anyone you're attacking because this is bullshit.

They should have a voice just like any other. No one ever said that you have to be giddy about SR4. If that was true, the forum would have been shut down on March 15 when people with less information than we have now were attacking the very idea that SR needed a fourth edition. Moreover, in many cases they've earned their say because they've played this game for years, bought hundreds of dollars worth of sourcebooks, and some of them feel like Fanpro not only doesn't care about them, but doesn't want them around. That's a harsh concern. I'd like to think that no company would do something that stupid, but I know better. I've read all about people's opinions of what Fanpro is doing with SR4, and they're all opinions. I see no reason why those opinions shouldn't be challenged. Why decisions made by Fanpro shouldn't be questioned. Just because they are playtesters, they don't get to have a say from a player/GM's POV about what they know about or might speculate about?

A lot of what goes on here is speculation from ALL sides. For some reason, people felt the need to suddenly become a great deal more hostile to each other. I could blame that squarely on Patrick Goodman, but I won't because I can't. I can say that I think he contributed to it, and didn't help anything when he pouted about and stormed out of the forums, opened a new thread on the Shadowrun forum, and then for some unknown reason felt compelled to personally attack me and my gaming community based on zero information in said thread.

I don't understand the point of insulting people. It's stupid. Unfortunately, on the internet it's really easy as well. This is the crux of the whole situation, that someone wants "us" to leave because we don't agree with him.

Fuck that.

I'm going to say whatever I want because I can. I'm buying the SR4 book. I might even rip off the Hacking rules. However, just because I will never use the base dice mechanic doesn't mean that my opinions about it or anything else are so beneath yours that I should shut up, or that you or anyone else should tell me to shut up.

But it's probably best not to make assumptions and to just leave that kind of discussion out on DSF.

That's the forum header/intro/descriptor. It says discuss.

It doesn't say "Praise SR4." It doesn't say "Click here, if you're so puppy-dog excited about a new edition you just wet yourself." It doesn't say "Only post here if you have positive assumptions to make about SR4." It doesn't say "SR4 lovers, unite!" It doesn't even say "If you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all."

If your panties are so in a wad that people are worried about the direction their favorite RPG is headed in, then maybe you need to grow a little thicker skin. Not everyone agrees on everything -- especially on the internet -- and that's just the way life is.

You might want the whole world to like the things you like, you might want the whole internet to be one giant perpetual circle jerk, you might want everyone to always agree on everything, fluffy bunnies to hop around and be your friend, and your poop to smell like strawberries: fine, go on wanting that.

But don't be all "grr, leave me alone!" to the big, mean, world when it doesn't do what you want. Or your complaining is remarkable hypocritical, seeing as how we're not allowed to bitch a little about things we don't like.

Well, aren't you just Johnny Hardcore?

Save the fact that they added feat,changed all the classes, the rules for leveling,the races you can play, the power of the black hats, the rules for skills, magic, the rules for magical items, the rules for NPCs, the rules for basic tastes, the rules for weapons, the rules for just about everything.

I want to see the rules they kept the same?

Hopefully not, and yes.

Edited for Ninja clarification. Wow, a fast moving thread this is!

Which really wasn't a part of the original mechanic at all. The only thing that's the same is that you use a 20-sided die, and roll it against a number. In the original mechanic, that number could be anything, and you could be trying to roll higher or lower depending on what you were doing. And a lot of times it wasn't even a d20 anyway.

The change is about on par with the one between SR1-3 and SR4. Both AD&D and D&D3 had a "d20 vs. number" mechanic, and both SR1-3 and SR4 have a "multiple D6 success-based TN" mechanic.

In my experience guys like that are either all wind, passing the world by, because if they were really like that, they'd be inside. Reality check buddy, this isn't grade school. You start throwing down and win or lose, you end up in trouble. bad movies apart bars don't like jerks who cause trouble and like the signs say 'police take notice."

But GenCon could have gotten ugly.

which was the whole point of my put it off thread. Fanpro has handled it so badly that what was mild irritation and alot on people saying "I'm not happy but I'll wait and see" to far more saying "no damn way."

Had angst the fixer read what I wrote in that thread instead of just whining he would have realized that.

Dude you live on long island, home of Joey Buttafucco, the Consumer powerbase

And I suppose for the exceptionally spineless that might be a motivating factor.

Let's get one thing straight: some of us are perfectly willing to call a fucking idiot a fucking idiot in real life, to their face. I can also call fucking idiotic statements fucking idiotic, and there's one in the quoted text. If you'd like to meet in person sometime for me to tell you it again, I'd be glad to.

~J

You are really someone strange, Critias... why are we arguing in this case ?

No. Just a John Smallberries.