Oracle, I will buy you cookies. That's exactly how I feel about things.

P.S. To all you people who say your worst fears have been realized? You don't know squat. You should see the SR4 I can cook up when drunk. Ever seen a magic system predicated on 'give the sake bottle back to the GM, or take 2D6+Punch In the Gut stun damage?'

And moaning. Can't forget the moaning. Wish we could.

So your entire defense is "It could be worse"? Everything could always be 'worse', that doesn't make it 'good' or even 'tolerable'. As for what sort of system can be cooked up drunk, I'm one of Kagetenshi's players so I'll (sooner or later) be subjected to SR3R.

Then why post to a thread that was specifically asking where all the negative threads were?

Because the damn thing keeps turning blue and coming to the top, doesn't matter if i click on it on not.

P.S. It sure makes more sense than you posting on an SR4 board....still.

I see I'm not allowed.

Well if you are reading the board anyway, have fun. So let me rephrase that to:

It sure makes more sense than you being on an SR4 board....still.

EDIT: And yes, this assuming that you intend to grab an illegal copy of SR4 to try retro fit stuff into SR3. Not that that isn't ripe with lucious irony.

What do you replace it with then?

Especially if it breaks beyond repair. They do have a history of doing that, they replaced the net with the matrix after the first crash after all.

Not read SF yet, so still don't know exactly what happened.

But just think, everyone else also has wireless, providing you with a wealth of new opportunities.

But the only way to take advantage of such opportunities have the ability to connect to them. I mean, if you want to make sure you never get a virus from the internet, the most effective way to secure yourself is to turn off your internet connection (you can do a similar thing in SR4), but if you do that, you can't take advantage of the net can you?

Having read through a fair amount of the book, I can safely say the answer is "no".

Ranneko: you set up something whose information-carrying capacity doesn't quickly run afoul of the Shannon limit.

~J

You mean the oddity that comes from rounding off the number of dice needed to glitch? *shrug* Perfection, nope. But the differences aren't that huge, certainly nothing that i'd hold back dice because i was worried about it, and 2 dice still have a greater chance to glitch than 3.

P.S. It sure beats the hell out of the old version of it. Two levels of screw-ups. Happens more often than winning the lottery. Etc.

So what was your reason for reading here again?

My apologies, for some reason i thought it might have been you that openly stated before that they were going to use an illegal copy of SR4 to retrofit things into SR3 (or SR3R?). Afterall i figured there might be some reason for you being here other than to push up your angst-meter, and intended theft was one that has been given before.

Now, now. Don't be taking my comments out of context. I didn't see moaning in your post.

That would hardly be true even if it were the worst thing, but it isn't. Far from.

~J

That's not pessimism, that's flat out ignoring what's already happened.

I'm not interpreting his statement, I'm offering a more likely path to the assumed goal.

~J

My worse fear is someone who makes wild accusations without reading the material and then attempts to provide fixes, without reading the material. You should probably run for political office.

What is you worse fear specifically?

I kid, I kid. But seriously, majority of the people who seem to "hate" SR4 or have come to "accept" SR4 haven't read the book and base their assumption on what the forums have stated. If I had done that, I would never have bought the book.

But I guess I am digressing from the purpose of the thread and everyone's mileage will vary. Different tastes for different folks. But the camp of people who have not read the rules, hate the new edition and are offering fixes.... seems a little odd to me.

As soon as I get the book (or I can read it) I will post my opnion on it. I was one of the more outspoken opponets of SR4, but I layed off after several people asked me to 'wait and see'. Well I am still waiting to get the book. But from what I can tell I am really not going to like it.

I don't belive there where ever 'hate' threads, just people who were vocal about being shafted. The hate thing was brought around by the blindly loyal.

HOW DARE YOU SUGGEST THAT THE HOLY GRAIL OF GAMING HAS A FLAW!!!!

BURN!!! BURN !!! BURN!!!!

I knew both the rules and the new setting. Complaining about something's flaws, when it's flawed, should not be viewed as a bad thing. The setting adjustments are acceptable (except for the insane loss of land mass in California, though I am under the impression that was a Photoshop error rather than grievous misunderstanding of the geography of the region).

Shadowrun 4th Edition has some nice things, has a good aesthetic (ignoring the cover art, sadly, and a few other internal artwork), good setting and world info (though there's a trailing SURGE reference with no substantiation to new players about waht SURGE is) but has rules that don't scale well (hence why hard limits exist that can be reached in creation) and don't work as they are intended (certain types of ammunition are just plain better than others in every situation, an adept with maxed-out combat sense is pretty much Neo, etc, etc...)

A lot of the problem was lack of developers understanding the system that they had created. Attempts were made to explain both the underlying math and the many manifestations of apparent misunderstanding, but not many of those instances were fixed. With ammunition types, for instance, you're gonna average one hit (i.e. +1/-1 DL) on three dice. If a type of ammunition drops an opponent's dicepool by 2, but reduces your damage by 1, then that ammo is going to do less damage (1/3 of a box). The opposite is true as well.

Ultimately, SR4 just doesn't thrill me. It plays with a sort of a nWoD feel, the rules don't work well, and... really, it just seems like shifting to a static target number was a bad call, with all the difficult-to-fix (hours of playtesting and brainstorming to produce good adjustments) and impossible-to-fix (hours of playtesting before admitting defeat) situations that cropped up as a lot of it. It might take me 25% less time to make a series of tests, but that faster play isn't free. I think the price was too high.

But, hey. I'm a SR4-hater. I should probably, you know, delete my Dumpshock account. It is verboten to speak of systems you don't like, or continue speaking of old editions after the eBook of the new edition has hit virtual shelves. The game police will come for me in the night, for my terror-loving, freedom-hating objective analysis of facts.

I've heard about this thing you should look into... It's called Turd 2.0.

I know it smells funny, and there are flies, but it's new, so it has to be good...

I've switched RPG editions a few times - in D&D , WoD and in GURPS - and I've yet to feel the same way about any of those changes. I thought D&D 3E was a great change, thought GURPS 4E fixed more problems than it caused and is a major improvement but could have been a lot better, felt that the new WoD game just replaced one shitty system with another as an excuse to print a lot of new books, and currently think that SR4 "fixed" a lot of things that never gave me trouble and did away with a lot of things I liked. Didn't realize I was blindly reactionary the whole time.

I'm curious, do we have any sales numbers? (I can only tell that my group loves it)