Bats, sirens, either way it takes away the cyberpunk feel of the front cover and to me makes it feel more cartoony than anything else

Can we call it a dragon, then?

Or no, wait! I know! I know! It's a represnetation of AR!!! That new online game from Ares, maybe? (ahead of it's time, I know...but it's backwards continuity!)

Ouch.

Heh. You know, once again, SR doesn't have rules for horse-back riding (or "whale riding", as mentioned in SOTA:2064, for that matter). We were joking around that Pilot: Anthroform really meant riding animals as well as legged drones, so my cowboy character would have to pick up Pilot: Anthroform (Quadriped) for riding his Horse/Inhabited Ally Spirit.

The extension of this is that Pilot: Anthroform (Biped) would mean either piggy-back rides on trolls or riding large birds like ostriches. Though I remember reading in the Corporate Shadowfiles that ostriches were extinct.

We actually ended up making a new skill called Animal Handling (linked to Intuition) and had it based on that. It's funny that they have an Animal Empathy Quality, but no skills for dealing with animals whatsoever (except Longarms, of course).

I must confess that I agree with this assessment.

The chief complaint among players in my group was that SR3 had rules all over the place and a million special cases. Because we played perhaps once every month or two this was a real hinderance during gameplay and we were always stopping to look stuff up. One person would think they recalled it one way, another person would recall a variation on that recollection and we would all end a little fuzzy and felt the need to settle the rule one way or another.

Well if looked like a dragon sure Hell if it looked like a dragon it'd still seem outa place, weren't they in like a nuklear reactor type thing storywise or something? I'll confess i don't remember exactly since its been a bit since I've read that story so don't beat me too hard for remembering things incorrectly

Excuse my delay. I wanted to check a few things out first.

One of the main things with SR3 is the fact I did sit back and watch as these demigods that players could evolve into were taken out by regular police or other regular people, simply because of the chances of a good shot or superior tactics. However, that's also because it would take the average runner about ten years to achieve enough karma to think of approaching enough dice to do the impossible with regularity. With SR4, you can have runners from the very start who can have enough dice to buy 4 successes before even rolling. You have people capable of doing the impossible with regularity at chargen if you go by the system as written.

The fact remains that the system is built around a lower power level. It's not built to support a long-running character who does gain enough karma to move into higher power levels. In fact, I would say the system was specifically built with the idea the runners in general won't live that long. You have the problem of most of the modifiers simply becomming meaningless once you reach around 20 dice in most cases, and even opposed tests become a joke unless they are facing someone overpowered or just have really bad luck. Now, you have a character who has played for two or three years and you have somebody who has obtained enough karma to easily move outside the SR4 system.

Now, why am I focusing on this problem now? Because I've seen games try to handle the issue of players getting above the power range they set up to deal with, and it's never pretty. Take a look at how WotC tried to deal with the idea of characters over level 20 for an example of how much of a mess it can be.

Now, roleplaying fixes are not a problem. In fact, roleplaying fixes are easy. Hell, if I wanted to, I could roleplay SR turning into a StarGate variant. But, that doesn't change the fact that the system itself cannot handle higher-levelled characters without beginning to break down.

I never had this problem. But, then again, I tended to enforce the rules and use modifiers as they came about. And, when the shooting started, karma started being burned. Even the gods of SR3 ran out of karma within a short amount of time, and one well-placed shot could use all of it at once.

...

That has got to be the most stupid paragraph I have ever seen. It's like the entire discussions about adjusting the BP system that were had on here you simply either ignored or missed. But, I'll be nice this one time.

With SR3, I can look at the BP system and tell you exactly what an adjustment of 10 BP will do. With SR4, an adjustment of 100 BP may be enough for my people to build uber-adepts, enough for them to improve their attributes, enough for them to improve their skills, enough for them to increase the money they can use to buy equipment, enough for them to add a race on and some other adjustments, or enough for them to simply have more contacts. Now, what is the problem? Under SR3, the results of the adjustment are all equal, while they are not under SR4. With SR4, you have the problem of attributes being more important than skills (they were under SR3, but not enough for me to see a real effect), contacts not being that important (a good fixer, no matter the version, always makes up for a lack of contacts), the problems of an adept we have already gone over, the money itself only adding on more equipment, and skills not being necessary to ever raise above 1 until you max out your attributes if you wish to increase how good you are at the skill. The issue of race I'm not going into at this time, as it really isn't that important unless you like studies of how to use a troll to create a character impossible to really damage early on.

Now, keep in mind I only listed obvious affects. But, the problem is simple: I cannot raise the BPs and accurately say what affect it will have on the game, just going on what BP affects. I cannot say it will increase power. I can say it might, but might is not a certainty. In order to cause it to increase power, I have to add on rules to the ones already existing to regulate further how the players spend BP in order to make sure an actual increase of power happens. What we end up with is a form of rules bloat right off the bat.

Thats a myth. It specificaly states if you buy success, you do not get to roll. You get to do one OR the other but not both.

And yes you can have adepts slinging large amounts of dice. This realy isn't anything new. You could easily do it in sr3 as well.

I disagree completely with this point. I've watched a few of the discussions and read over them. And I've come to the conclusion that you can very much have professional level characters in sr4. The system as is is not going to support a character who's earned 1k karma, but then again, sr3 couldn't handle that either. 300 kamra? Sr3 didn't handle that well either. With say 5 karma per run thats 20 sessions to get to even 100 karma. If you were to game every single week and complete a run worth 5 karma every single week in a year you would accumulate 260 kamra. The likelyhood of that happening is rather slim. Our lives aren't that predictable, and sometimes runs take up more than one session to complete. 260 karma in sr3 was a rather large amount as well and well you could effectively do anything you wanted at that point. So i'm not seeing where sr4 did any worse in this regard.

Ever play with characters with enough karma to have magic of 13 in sr3? or chars with 500 karma? Yeah it certainly wasn't overly easy to beat any of them (talk about long lived characters aiyaiyai....

Actualy I saw them. And I've looked at the recent discussions. And as long as you don't break the current rules of chargen. It actualy looks prety safe. You know if you give them 500 points, up to 250 can be spent on physical and mental attributes. and you know 250 points can be spent on skills, specializations, contacts, gear and qualitites. They can have 2 skills at 5 or one at 6, groups can't be over 4. Makes for a prety good runner.

No you don't. What you end up with is a form of rules bloat right off the bat, due to percieved flaws.

And since you're so convinced about all this Sabosect how many games have you run at 400 bp vs 500 bp? Out of curiosity?

Thats why SR3 characters 'converted' to SR4 (done around 500-700 Karma) tend to get weaker in SR4, even when building them with 500BP only for Attributes, Qualities and Skills?

QFT. Hopefully, there would trickle out modules from smaller firms: Seems you can't enter a gaming store without tripping on 3rd party AD&D material. I'd be glad if SR4 achieved a miniscule fraction of that.
Besides, that would ease workload off of Fanpro so they could get down to important gameplay books or canon storyline stuff.