I'm mostly a lurker here at Dumpshock, but it's always been a blast to read everyone's comments. Well, except for this forum, anyway.

Here's my take:

We don't really know much about the new Shadowrun, except for bits and pieces. People can speculate all they want, but it's pretty much just that. Most of us won't really know until the actual book comes out in August (which, BTW, is going to happen - a company can't put all this effort into something and then just drop it).

We have at least one playtester who's supportive of the new edition, and at least one who has concerns. I imagine that opinions are divided in every playtest of every game, so that doesn't really tell me anything.

The worst case scenario is that the rules aren't what you like. So what? Don't buy the rulebooks (i.e. the new magic book, the new rigger/decker book, etc.). It's not like the old rules stop working. There are plenty of people who still play older editions of GURPS and D&D and Star Wars.

You can still buy all the setting stuff - heck, most of the stuff that FanPro has come out with doesn't have many rules at all, and you already know that it's been quality work (Dragons of the Sixth World and Sprawl Survival as particularly commendable examples). And I'm sure that it the fine folks at FanPro won't mind putting out a conversion guide for people who want to use the new adventures.

It's clear that people are very passionate about this game, and I think that's a great thing. It means there's still a lot of life in Shadowrun, and that people are actually playing instead of/in addition to reading rulebooks. But I also think it's clear from everybody's passions that everybody needs to take a break. Just stop posting here for a while. Go back to the other forums and post about your latest run, or your theories on Dunk or the IEs, or why you ought to reconsider the stats on a Ares Predator. I think everyone willl feel better, and will be able to look at things more objectively in a few days or weeks.

You see a car heading towards a wall at 100mph.

You yell. The driver doesn't hear.
You wave. Maybe he doesn't see.
Maybe he hits the wall, maybe not.
Maybe he even waves back as he hits or misses the wall.

The point is you have to yell, you have to wave. It may not make a difference, but you can hope.

And Hope is all we got. Yeah, I accept that this will happen. I accept that it will hapen at gencon. Doesn't mean I won't yell and wave at the car as it speeds by on its way to the wall.

And there hasn't been much over a t the regular SR forums lately - Some stuff from AH, Kages's Sr3R, and an occcasional story.


Disclaimer: To all: This is my opinion, only my opinoon and should only be taken as my opinion. It is not fact. I do not Hate SR4 or SR. I question the descision to make SR4. I do not fear change. I question it's need.

There is no 'speeding car' - it is an analogy. Does it Make sense? It does to me.

I see it as a bumper car at the county fair. It is definately going to hit something, and Rob's candy cotton might fly out of his hand or the ice slushie he is holding between his thighs might spill. So I guess it is kinda important to warn him. But he probably already is aware that he is going to hit something. So maybe we should instead not to distract him. He seems distracted enough already by the ride attendant in the halter-top and tight denim cutoffs.

hehe.....we had a 2nd ed. game just the other night.....

still the same after all these years.....

don't listen to me though, because we still play boxed set D&D ( Rules Cyclopedia for the win!!!)

Your .02 Cents?

I didn't know you could have 2% of a penny!

Like I said earlier, it's the mechanics that keep me playing the game. I dislike a great deal of the storyline and setting books for various reasons, but I use them. It's a pretty sheer slippery slope for me. If I am going to be house ruling the mechanics now that I have an out (they're not supported or going to be 'fixed') then why should I stick with less important elements that I don't like?

Ah. I started at the bottom of that slope.

I have always skipped stuff I and/or my group found cumbersome, tedious, or backwards. Like the whole of decking rules in SR. Or applying D&D alignment game mechanics to anything other than a planar determined alignment. Ok, if you just ripped the head off a living infant to guzzle it's still hot blood that gets you the Evil tag for a bit.

So slide on down to where the cool kids hang, the water is fine. Much less stressful too as you need not worry so much about the occasional innane book, chapter, or paragraph.

It's harder to be at that side of the slope when you're gaming with random groups who aren't quite where you are. It's a lot easier to find a group of people who have the books than a group of people who have the books and also agree that the matrix rules should be ignored entirely.

Right. Some of us are in a particular position where it is just easier to follow canon that have a bunch of houserules for every different GM you may be gaming with.

There is your problem. You need to look for a group of people that don't have the books. Then you can tell them whatever you like about the rules.

I guess I have always been fortunate in that even with pick-up style SR games that the loathing for the Matrix was universal enough that nobody even suggested running a decker. Complete fudging or avoidance of the vehicle combat rules also seems fairly universal. SURGE nearly so. There was that one guy that wanted to play a feather covered female SURGE victim that drove around on a three wheel motorcycle. I was never quite sure about him, but the player didn't physically hurt or touch any one so I could let that slide.

I've found that someone being a complete stickler on D&D alignment is a sign of other issues to follow, bad issues. Short of that I am willing to flex enough in the vision of whoever is behind the screen. If I sense they might be of certain philosophical bents I'll avoid the more alignment sensitive classes.

Oddly I think some of my worst gaming experiences were in canon strict games. I think it tends to provide a bit too much of an openning for unchecked lawyering when the rules sit above the GM. Canon is still a good baseline but I'd rather let the GM have more leeway to keep the game on course.

That is difficult for Living campaigns and also makes things tough on players for one ofs. But for enjoyment purposes I have stopped playing Living campaigns. For one ofs take the view that my PCs death, life, or inbetween matters not, I'm just playing battle tactical senario.

Seriously how long of campaigns do you play in? Are you unable to find a group to string together even six months? You can't get enough in sync with a few other people well before then?

If you're addressing those questions to Ellery and CD 2.0, the "problem" isn't that our games are short. Heh.

The thing is that we play on-line, with (for lack of a better term) an often round-robin style of GMing. There's no single GM at all times; that responsibility falls on the page owner, or in the case of a private campaign (a much more traditional "GM and four or five players" gig) a temporary GM. The end result is that everyone GMs every now and then, everyone players more often than not, and everything about your character better fly with everyone who might end up GMing for you -- making most "create it yourself" stuff a no no, making "ask your GM before taking ___________" stuff off-limits, etc, etc.

We try to stick to canon, since we don't have any one person saying what's legit and isn't. Sticking to the books as much as possible is the best (if not only) way to be wholly impartial about some of those GM-decisions.

heh. he--and i--have had the same gaming group for, what, nine years now? it's all online, and the players tend to rotate in and out. so, like he said--easier just to stick with canon.

Six years now with the current group, everyone has taken at least one turn behind that screen. That includes a short stint by the most unlikely GM. She did really well but we scared her so it will be a long time before she takes another turn. We don't get too deep into the canon metaplots though, the PCs tend to be closer to the street.

We use canon rules as a baseline, but don't really have issues at all with rules flexing. We end up with communally developed house rules.

Mystery items and hidden threads that survive between GM terms get handed off. The new GM is at liberty to tweak the 'facts' about it as long as it meshes with what the group has already seen or found out.

I could see online being tougher though with the inherent limit on communications. But maybe that is only my personal dislike of internet gaming shading my view?

Or maybe you're just not reading what Critias said. It's pretty straightforward.

At its peak, SL had more than 1,000 users: 1,000 GMs and 1,000 people playing as many PCs as they want (I'm GMing 3 Private Campaigns, working as a demi-GM for a couple of locations in T6W, and running a dozen PCs in T6W and in Prviate Campaigns) all with their own houserules playing across as many games as they can handle in private campaigns and The Sixth World, which is the canon universe in electronic form. When Seattle went dark in BS, T6W Seattle went dark (that was amusing). When the suborbital carrying one of Fuchi's CC justices crashed in Redmond, it crashed in T6W's Redmond. When the Arc shutdown... It shut down with PCs inside (we had fair warning since one of the authors of RA:S was Dave Hyatt).

House rules at that level, or even when the user base has fallen to dozens, is impractical. Go ahead and make your house rule monsters in PC, but if they want to actually interact at all in The Sixth World or The Matrix on Shadowland and any divergence from the rules by one player makes their lives more difficult when they run into n PCs who adhere to canon.

It does.

I think you're still missing something in our explanation. And that's okay, it's easy to misunderstand (and no one's at their most eloquent, when it comes to explaining things, at 3:00 am).

The core of our gaming group/mob/army is "The Sixth World." It's one massive, sprawling, game, there, T6W is. People are allowed multiple characters at any given time (to make up for the generally slower pace of on-line play). If you've got, say, a hundred people playing and they each have three or four characters? That adds up quick, right? That's one big game, with all those people stomping around.

Yes, it makes it easy to try and find some people (or some places) that fit your character and your gaming style. No, that doesn't mean you can toss around house rules left and right, because it's one big game. If I decide I want an Ares Predator to do 15D, and three people I'm playing with all agree it should; that doesn't matter. There are ninety-six other people playing who don't want it to do that. Likewise, if someone thinks Initiative needs to go back to SR1's version, or whatever (chaos ensues -- in one little corner of T6W you've got hand cannons that a street sam shoots eight times before anyone else can blink, that same character goes Downtown for something and finds his pistol back to normal and his Wires not working quite right).

It's not an issue of there being dozens of games going on at a time -- those we run in a Private Campaigns area, which is largely a seperate beast from the core T6W reality. Those can have house rules, because they're organized more like a traditional (albeit temporary) gaming group consisting of a GM, a handful of submitted characters, etc. Even there, however, problems can arise -- if I first create a new character for a private campaign MFB is running, and he smokes a bunch of crack right before asking for our character sheets, and he tells me to double every number because I've got a nice ass...that house rule won't fly if I try to submit that same character to one of Crimsondude's games a few months later, and maybe in one of Ellery's games a few months after that she'll want me to cut all my stats in half 'cause I'm a jackass. There's no telling. Private Campaigns can have house rules, but then you're left out in the cold when your next GM (whoever it might be) doesn't approve of a previous GM's house rule.

T6W, though, we try to keep largely house rule free. It's public, not private, property. The house rules we have, we try to discuss very publically and gain general approval from everyone, before implementing it (or introducing a character using that new piece of cyberware, or a home-made Edge, or whatever). It's a cumbersome beast, our playing style, but one you either love or hate (and those of us who've been there, y'know, years and years? We're pretty obviously okay with it).

We never had 1000 users simultaneously active, I don't think; we topped out at a few hundred who could be considered active enough to contribute, and that was split between SR and oWoD (with SR having about 2/3 of the action).

It was entirely possible to find private games to suit just about any taste. However, that wasn't the main attraction--that was the public folder The Sixth World. All it took to become a GM was to throw up a page; and all it took to become a player was to post there. People would wander from bar to park to warehouse, and in doing so, would wander from GM to GM to GM.

You can't do that if everyone has their own book's-worth of custom rules.

So it is an online living campaign, with extra games on the side. The side games have more leeway in house rules, and the GM can tweak characters coming in or going out.

The core has communal house rules to deal with the worst of the canon rules that are widely seen as deadheads. So what I was talking about, just on a bigger scale.

EDIT: The bigger scale also leading to longer times to reach playable agreement on any given house rule.

Pretty much. We're not really looking forward to making all of SR4 run as one big custom rule, though--if that's what we have to do. In SR3, we could just grit our teeth and bear almost every canon rule, even the stupid ones. It's too hard to get consensus otherwise when there is no leadership.

Or when there's too much leadership. We have no indians, all chiefs! It's about time you people learned your place and just started doing what I say, after having acknowledge that I'm never wrong !!

we're planning on upgrading to SL 7.0 around the time SR4 comes out. SL7 will include die rollers for SR3 and SR4.

currently, we're leaning towards advancing the T6W timeline to match SR4, whatever ruleset we end up using--a matter of some debate.

Thanks for the info. That all makes me feel a lot less uneasy about SR4.

[EDIT]I just realized I might have miscommunicated. This post was not unlabeled sarcasm.[/EDIT]

I think that it is safe to say that SL7 will support SR4 rules and SR4 play. Even if myself and others involved in maintaining Shadowland ultimately feel disappointed and disenfranchised by the SR4 system, there will be a place for SR4 on Shadowland. The worst case scenario is that I sit back and take a purely administrative role in SR4-oriented play, and the new players, that SR4 is intended to bring in, settle in and have fun. Each game is what the players make of it. It always has been this way.

Shadowland does not tout one gaming system as being superior to another, nor will favoritism be displayed toward any particular system insofar as architecture for the enjoyment and use of that system go. The systems that see the most activity and most work devoted to them reflect the efforts and interests of the user base of the site. If SR4 draws new players to Shadowrun, and those players become part of the Shadowland userbase, there will be a place for them.

I took the liberty to stop by the Shadowland.org forums. I'd think that saying they are not converts is an understatement, at least the ones that actually post on the message system there. Those would likely be the most active members?

As you can guess I also noticed a strong correlation between posters there and the posters with a specific flavor of opinion on this board. Quite a bit of overlap actually. Coupled with the tone and contents of the SL messages, it cleared up a lot of things for me that I was having a hard time putting together before.

Depends on what you mean by "forums" and what you mean by "active users." There's a big, fat, line between what goes on In Character and what goes on Out of Character, on SL (same as here, same as most places you'll find on-line games). The difference is that DS is primarily for the yakking/discussing/arguing/whatever, and SL is primarily, overwhelmingly, for the playing. There are quite a few people that post IC very often (some of our most prolific posters), that very rarely bother with the User Pages or other General Discussion areas. Likewise, there are those who are self-proclaimed "lurkers," in that they'll take part in the OOC/general discussions, but only rarely dip their feet into the IC pool.

One of the many end results of that distinction is that, yes, when SLers are talking about something (instead of posting IC), we're remarkably blunt. Add to that the fact we've all been buddies for 5+ years, and yes, we're remarkably open and forthright. We try to handle OOC conversations brutally (for lack of a better word) in order to get them out of the way, and get back to posting IC. Then sometimes a few of us come to Dumpshock to kill time, and post -- and it comes out looking all "specifically flavored," as you put it.

SL is SL, and DS is DS, and only occasionally shall the two meet. SLers are amongst the first to admit (or almost brag) that we have our own view of Shadowrun and it's world, and our own style of play (remarkably lethal, very tactical and precise). Lots of the things we very specifically like as a gaming group are being stripped away by SR4 (if what we've heard so far is accurate). So, yes. We're opinionated about it.

*shrug*

None of which changes my last post before this one -- if people want to play SR4 over on the Land, they're every bit as welcome as anyone wanting to play SR3 instead (or as well), or d20, or WoD. Just because some of us might not be playing it doesn't change the fact they're able and encouraged to do so.

It is scary how much of the comments about SR4 sound like "bring back precasting bizatch", if you were ever involved with UO. But that is all mirrored here. Well except the part where mfb suggests that the basic dice mechanic is different than nWoD's in a significant way.

However it was some of the stuff said about Patrick Goodman and Synner, not about SR4, that I was thinking of. Plus some other T6W planning stuff that isn't directly SR4 related.

In any event it has helped confirm what mfb was talking about at the end of his comments about the playtesting was relavent to me. That what he considers bad could be something that I and a lot of others like. I think I've gotten all I can out of this place.

Now it is just a matter of stopping by my FLGS and finding out if they have SR4 stock coming in and when so I can swing by and check it out when it ships. I'm pretty curious about it now.

Now I understand the opposition to SR4 by CD 2.0 and mfb, et al.

Playing online makes it really nessesary to stick to canon timeline and rules, just so the varying GM's can all agree on what to do.

I always say it's easier to house rule in a house!

I hadn't realized that there were so many out here that play online. I've never done it myself, because I've always had a great pool of local players.

How is it same/different than playing old school? (sorry, prolly a diff thread)

It is very diffrent. Very different. I game primarily on line because I don't have local players. And when I first started online gaming it was a bit if a culture shock. I don't want to derail the thread so if your really interested start a new on and I will post there.

Of course T6W could run on its own entirely new ruleset. But that serves to function as a barrier, and SL already has relatively few users due to a lack of advertising and a lack of updating the client to work sensibly with modern browsers and the decline in the number of SR players and the growth of technically inferior but workable alternate sites for communal in-character gaming and so on.

Also, if there is a need to create such rules--in order to streamline and improve the SR3 mechanics--immediately after SR4 comes out, something is terribly wrong. SR4 was supposed to have those streamlined and improved SR3 mechanics!

One might be tempted to read a lot into SL people being against SR4. I think it's really rather simple. SL has a gaming culture that tends towards realism, that supports many different power levels, and that appreciates tactics. If SR4 fails to deliver a game that can support these things, all people who want realism generated by rules, many different power levels, and tactics will be disappointed. So far, it's looking like SR4 will fail to deliver.

And that creates perfectly understandable, largely justified, largely independently-motivated opposition from people who like that style of gaming. It's not that a bunch of people get together and decide let's all hate SR4!--rather, they all independently read the FAQs and decide that doesn't sound like something I'll have fun playing.

People who don't care about getting sensible outcomes from rules, who only want to play starting runners, or who want statistics not tactics to determine success, have less to fear from SR4, and perhaps something to rejoice over. We'll have to wait to see the final product before we can tell who thinks it's worthy of rejoice, I suppose.

I don't think the like and dislike is a symmetric situation, however. It's a lot easier to ignore rules or to make mind-numbingly simple rules than it is to get an elegant set of rules that work well. It's a lot easier to throw away tactics than it is to add them. Maybe the developers weren't up to the task of creating elegant, versatile rules, or they didn't think such rules were worth the effort. Either way, they took the easy way out--except they didn't, because they've had to create a new set of rules from scratch instead of modifying the old rules.

the house rules are a very new addition to SL. and, really, for the most part, they've been ignored. i have yet to see anyone use the spiffy houserule autofire rules in play, for instance. nobody i'm aware of has made a character using the new cyberlimb or commlink rules (i keep planning to, but i've yet to get around to it). some of the gear gets used, but that's because a lot of it was originally designed for the characters who now use it. the only rules that get used consistently are the called shots and the quickdraw.

resistance to change is definitely not a factor, at least not for me. i want a new SR game very much, and i've wanted one since before the SR4 announcement (another case of FanPro's damn thought-ninjas stealing my thoughts). based on the initial positive response that the SR4 announcement got from a lot of SLers, it's probably not a factor with them, either.