Okay, its the last couple days, if you haven't heard about it or seen it yet, now is the time to check it out.

Do you love the RPG?
Did you love the SNES version?
Did you love the Sega Genesis version?
Do you want a new Shadowrun game, stories, and awesome swag from the original creators of the world?

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/161 ... un-returns

Its already going to be cool as hell, and the super extra last goal they have is 1.75mil. So far there's two cities, mages, street samurai, deckers, and riggers, fiction, a mission tying the SNES and genesis plotlines together the original composers of the music from both those games signed on to do music, etc etc, 1.75 will let them add in physical adepts as well.

I know most of you aren't fans like I am, but if you'd buy it, back it!

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I played quite a bit of Shadowrun from 1989-2003 or so. I stopped when they shifted to the 4th edition rules. I also played the Genesis version and it was pretty fun, (though horribly ripe for abuse - you had the ability to basically make a superdecker with only a few runs and then become 'egads rich' in short order).

I always enjoyed the concepts of Shadowrun, but basically 2 games killed the game for me:

1.) Character degradation. FASA was the first rpg company that I remember implementing this concept on a wide scale with their S.O.T.A. rules and I've always found the entire notion of it repugnant. Players have a vested interest in their characters and, as such, it is horribly abusive to tell them that the character they've invested so much time and effort into building up over time is slowly becoming worse simply by sitting there and existing in the world.

2.) The way they changed Decking from 4th edition onward. I always liked the notion that there was basically this totally separate world that was accesible only to a relatively small portion of the population and that you had to have special skill/equipment to access it. It was exclusionary, but it was meant to be exclusionary. The 'real world' was, in many ways, just as exclusionary to Deckers because the way the character was originally conceived, a Decker in the real world would get slaughtered by a competent street samurai or combat mage in seconds. Once they took Decking out of the virtual construct of the virtual world and made the Decker nothing but a semi-support character, the world of Shadowrun became a lot less special for me.

I have doubts that I would want to return to Shadowrun at this point. A lot of what made it special during the early to mid-90's was stripped away with the rule changes and the general trend toward having to keep 'topping' themselves with newer and more powerful forms of cyberware and bioware, which in part led to the creation of their punitive S.O.T.A. rules in the first place.

I must respectfully disagree.

1) If you don't use/practice something then you lose it. Add on that, nowhere, and noone that I have played with since Catalyst has controlled the franchise, has ever used nor mentioned this aspect.

My bigger disgreement with you though is on point 2
Deckers were a neat class, but as time rolls on, technology changes. There is an elite class of hackers called Technomancers now. The roll shift from Decker to Hacker makes complete sense, and actually makes the characters more useful in a fight, where one can now screw up someones AR or smartlinks because of Augmented reality and the wireless Matrix. Now add on that they are still needed to do their "old fashioned" decking stunts and you have a much more balanced and useful character. Yes I do play a Hacker at Cons in 4th edition rules, and I love it.

4th Edition also made combat and dice rolling a lot simpler. For me, also being a 4ht Ed GM, makes the game itself roll a lot smother. Now I don't have to spend 1 hour on 1 combat turn, and can focus more on the storytelling, character development, and keep everyone interested.

That is my $.02

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If life gives you mud..... WRESTLE!!!!
Twitter @SiliconShecky @DJ_Shecky
Blog: http://www.siliconshecky.com

One of the essential draws for players of any rpg is progression. In a nutshell, most games have an inherent mechanism built within them to allow for character progression. Character degradation rules require the player to devote a portion of that built-in mechanism, (whether it is experience points or karma or influence or money or whatever), not to progress... but to basically RE-BUY what they already HAVE.

Essentially, the thinking behind the Shadowrun SOTA rule is that a set of wired reflexes manufactured in 2065 is so inherently better than a set of wired reflexes built in 2062 that there will be actual differences in performance and functionality for two versions of the exact same thing. So as a player, you're being forced to squander the rewards you've played for... not to get any better... but to remain what you already are.

That isn't a matter of using something or losing it. That is a matter of the game rules allowing the gamemaster to give you something and then immediately take it away again. What is the point? If FASA didn't want players to get rewards, then why institute a reward system in the first place? Just make it a rewardless game. That would be basically the same end result.

I will always hate character degradation rules. Character degradation rules were one of the things that led to players starting to be disassociated from the characters they played, which in turn led to so many modern players viewing their characters as nothing but a series of basically interchangeable 'toons.' Once the attachment that a player has to a character is gone, all the group is basically doing at that point is playing Craps. Or Magic. Or any other mechanical game.

you miss the point which you made. THE GM can do that if they want to. They don't have to. Heck I have seen plenty that ignore this rule or have the characters shifted (through conversion charts) to the next rule set.

Rule #1 of any RPG, the GM makes the rules. the book is just a guideline. Sounds like you have had a crappy GM.

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If life gives you mud..... WRESTLE!!!!
Twitter @SiliconShecky @DJ_Shecky
Blog: http://www.siliconshecky.com

Oh, certainly, I could easily continue to GM Shadowrun and ignore the SOTA rules, (or continue to play in a Shadowrun campaign that has house rules where the SOTA rule is ignored, as happens quite a bit if you look around the net), but that wouldn't really change the issue that I have with the game company implementing character degradation rules in the first place and then supporting those character degradation rules with additional supplemental material.

If the gamemaster is hypothetically going to just ignore whatever portion of the new ruleset he finds distasteful, what is the real point of making the leap from 3rd Edition anyway? Or even 2nd Edition? Just play whatever version of the game that you originally enjoyed to begin with.

The point you bring up is valid though. There ARE many bad GMs out there. I don't really think mine was one, because I enjoyed playing in all of his games for years. As a group, we decided to move away from Shadowrun in part because of the things I mentioned and in part because there were other games we just enjoyed more. Just because we ended up not liking how Shadowrun evolved is not an indictment of him as a GM or me as a player. But the bad GMs do exist. And when the game company writes rules like the SOTA rules, one of the things the bad GM will do is seize upon those rules to 'punish' players who create characters the GM does not feel equipped to deal with in his/her game.

So instead of actually sitting down and talking to the player about why the character should be changed at creation, the GM proceeds to passive-aggresively engage in several weeks worth of SOTA 'nerfing' to ensure that the player never gets to play the character he originally wanted to play and creates an adversarial relationship between the two of them that probably could have been avoided. And the game company has enabled all of this by writing the character degradation rules in the first place, thereby making the bad GM believe that this behavior is justified and supported by the rules.

There are bad players and there are bad GMs. But 99% of the problems with each can be solved in house without abusive rules imbedded in the ruleset of whatever game is being played.

Well, to be honest, in my reading of the rulebook, I have not seen the SOTA rules you mention, nor in playing Missions games have I ever heard it mentioned. That is just my experience, and as they have gone to 4a instead of straight 4, maybe it was removed or changed.

The majority of people I know prefer and love the 4th edition rules, but to each their own.

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If life gives you mud..... WRESTLE!!!!
Twitter @SiliconShecky @DJ_Shecky
Blog: http://www.siliconshecky.com

I so badly wanted the USB dogtag but just didn't have the $125. So I just threw $60 at the project. Most of that was just the part in the video where people throw stuff at the guy who executive produced that shit pile of an FPS.

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All I know is that:

1. Shadowrun 1.0e was the first game I ever tried to run. I was way way way too inexperienced in RPGs to have done it properly.
2. I tried playing the SNES version of Shadowrun and was hopelessly lost.
3. I know I spent four freaking hours trying to re-chargen my old character in 4.0e. Frustration.
4. If I had $30 today to spend on bumping this, I would.

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"...his madness keeps him sane.": My Profile on VirtueVerse
Can You WIN the Internet? Arc #85544
Inhuman Resources - At Work with IE #298132
Task Force Mutternacht #349522 <-- Aeon Challenge Arc

As organizer for Shadowrun for....god, like 7 years for Dragon*Con I can say 4th Ed brought a lot of players back to the table, and returned Shadowrun to a game played by a party of people and not 6 individual fights that all just happened to be playing out at the same table The modern rules mean you can conduct a combat session with the hacker, the rigger, the mage and the street same all at the same time, with the same initiative countdown, without any funny astral/rigging initiative and people sitting around waiting for their turn with the GM. SOTA has been an optional rulesset for a very long time. You won't find it in Missions because of the nature of its design. It's being changed a bit to be pushed down to the weekend gaming group level, with CMPs taking their place at cons, but traditionally the seasonal nature of Missions and thier sporadic availability mean that in a year you were retiring characters or rolling them over which only allows for a certain amount of gear transfer.

If your GM ever used SOTA to compensate for not being able to give you tough enough opposition or to try and correct something they thought was broken after they let you have it, they were doing it wrong. It was always intended more along the lines of 'if you are seriously going to play this character through real time, stuff degrades'. Even using the slow Missions rules for timeline, you get to do a run once every week for 3 weeks, then a forced week off. On an average of a once a week gaming group.....SOTA shouldn't come up until literally the next real year.

And actually, quite to the contrary, when I've played games with SOTA effects that actually showed up, true RPers loved it. It was like when a new iphone or iPad comes out, the street sam is going 'its got quieter servos and comes in smoke chrome! Its a good investment!' while the rest of the group is going 'you just got the arm you have last year, you don't need a new one!'. But....that was also using a rule everyone conveniently ignores about pooling group funds and the like


But anyways! Shadowrun Returns is a single player PC/Mac/Linux game, and none of this is really important Yay XProm, you get cool swag! 12th, I am so sorry, 1st Ed was......an interesting exercise in dice....yeah....

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http://awakenedmmo.org/forums/index.php ... 364.0.html

This thread does a pretty good job of explaining the SOTA rule in greater detail, when it was introduced and when it was expanded, Shecky. The SR3 companion was the book that really took it beyond the idea of just an optional aside for some high-reward campaigns and assumed that most Shadowrun GMs had implemented it and were actively using it. The SR3 companion came out in 2003, which was around the time that my group and I stopped playing the game, so you may very well be correct in that the SOTA rule never made the transition to 4th Edition.

You'll see these developers' discussion of the SOTA rule and whether to implement a version of it into their proposed Shadowrun MMO start with a post by CrisLander about halfway down page 1. Their discussion provides a pretty decent insight into the rationale for using something like a SOTA rule, but you'll notice that each of them, at various points during the discussion, glosses over what proposed players' reactions to something like this would be.

So it might very well be that this discussion we are having is moot because you are talking about the current edition of the game while it seems that most of my negative reactions came from something in the prior ruleset, (the one that was published in '03), but I will say that when they expanded the SOTA rules in '03, the reaction of almost everyone in my group was uniformly negative.

Funny enough Kai I came across my 1st ed copy of Shadowrun while moving and kept it (unlike the vast majority of my White Wolf books). The cover art by Elmore is still one of my fave pieces he has done.

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I think I was like... 14? 15? at the time? No need to really apologize, I liked the background and the fiction concept on Shadowrun, enough for me to prefer it over other genre-blender RPGs (Rifts) and other dystopian future RPGs (Cyberpunk 2020) - and I was eager to take another stab at it when I did my rebuild a while ago. I've just never found anyone to run the game again for more than the one-off since my teenage years.

Of course, you could always arrange a PbP game for us, Kai...

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"...his madness keeps him sane.": My Profile on VirtueVerse
Can You WIN the Internet? Arc #85544
Inhuman Resources - At Work with IE #298132
Task Force Mutternacht #349522 <-- Aeon Challenge Arc