XRAB-1399

Of course, since this fictional version is a gateway to an alien universe and is used by the unseelie fey, and yet you have still somehow confused it with a real location, I suppose I can’t expect much.

http://ruscumag.wordpress.com/2009/10/18/eclipse-the-veltine-of-the-twilight-isles/

Point One:
“In 2070 the general populace should be mostly filled with unfit and slow-witted individuals and an attribute of 4 would make someone very attractive to corporate employers.”

Unfortunately, the game defines the average attribute as a three. It doesn’t define a three as “the average ability people could reach but most don’t”. That’s throwing in a house rule to make your assumptions work.

Point Two:
“As for skills – people you bump into on the streets and in the bars are going to have almost none of the skills a shadowrunner relies upon. Pistols, Infiltration, Hacking, Climbing, Blades, nobody uses these in their humdrum lives of night clubs and trid shows.”

1) As already noted, the “Average Joe” is most likely going to be doing a job for which they have an aptitude and some training.
2) As for your examples… Lets see. You live in a world with mutant rats, ghouls, vampires, and other supernatural horrors. How likely is the “average man” to have a gun and some practice? Seattle used to be the US. Have you looked at gun ownership in the US? (The same goes for blades). Infiltration gets used every time you want to get into new social group or get past that bouncer. Hacking is also known as “getting the computer to do something it’s not directly programmed to do”. In case you haven’t noticed, most kids do that, and some are pretty good. Climbing may be a bit rarer – but it’s an awfully popular bit of recreation, especially around Seattle.

Point Three:
“The Summon Crowbar analogy doesn’t really support the argument against the system”

I’m afraid it does. You just evaded it. What is the spell category and why should it change according to the purpose for which I summon a lump of metal? Talking about what skills are needed to use it is irrelevant to the question.

If you want another example, try “Electrokinesis” – a popular spell to research. You can use it to disrupt machines, to injure people, to induce epileptic fits, to recharge batteries, or to defibrillate a heart. All of those will call for other skills of course; the spell is simply a tool to allow you to apply them in ways you otherwise couldn’t – but the skills are irrelevant to the spell category. That’s a simple spell. Is it going to change category according to why I cast it? If it’s a sustained spell, and I’m charging a battery when someone threatens me and I use it to give him or her a shock, has it now jumped categories? The original system handled this nicely; it was a manipulation spell. The new one does not work with such spells – and if you don’t have players coming up with such spells, you have some very dull players.

Point Four:
“Things like dump stats and squeezing every build point to min-max a character according to the kind of tests the player finds interesting is essentially assuming the character has mapped his life out from birth and has spent every waking moment on personal optimisation for his career whilst actively avoided any distracting opportunities”

Basic statistics here. There are several billion people in the world of Shadowrun. Just like in the examples in the book, players are allowed some major coincidences in their backstories. What were the odds of Sidewinder, as a kid, stumbling across and downloading the master security codes for the entire megacorp? One in a billion?
That gives us a base figure: a character is too unlikely for the game if, and only if, you couldn’t expect to find such a person in several billion billion people. What you’re really saying here is “I don’t like creative backstories because they can result in characters who are hard for me to manage”.

Point Five:
“It’s all relative anyway, since the GM has to set an appropriate difficulty level – the player may be rolling a lot more dice but he won’t (read: shouldn’t) succeed more often because of it so playing the system and not the setting is ultimately a self-defeating exercise.”

In other words, you house-rule it so that a characters actual skills and attributes make no real difference – in which case, once again, you’re back to having no reason to bother hiring runners since anyone will do just as well. For that matter, there’s no reason to bother with character sheets. If you aren’t going to bother using the rules, there’s no point in defending them.

Point Six:
“On the subject of Edge, I was responding to the claim that humans with their single point of Edge bonus will survive miraculously where all other races will get splattered.”

By the rules all humans get edge. Most other noncombatants don’t. You may burn one point of edge to get out of a certain-death situation. If a hospital full of newborns burns down, and the neonatal wing is destroyed, all the human infants will survive while the metahuman infants all die. You can houserule it – but you should not have to.

Point Seven:
“It’s clear that we have radically different gaming groups”

Yep. I expect them to think, examine their environment and resources, to look for bits that don’t fit in and treat them as clues, and to plan so that random chance comes in as little as possible. If there’s a technology or ability in the system, I expect them to examine it’s implications and use it. Ironically enough, I’d agree that skills and dice aren’t too important – but it isn’t because I make sure that they’re useless, it’s because the players try to make sure that nothing important ever relies on random chance if they can possibly avoid it.

Point Eight:
“I can’t even imagine what sciences you’ve studied to come up with gravity-altering solutions to bandwidth issues… Truth be told, if you simply asked me to define bandwidth my answer would be vague and almost certainly wrong and I don’t much care”

It’s basic high school physics, and only requires a little thought.
To make a waveform carry information, you have to change it somehow.
The faster you change it, and the more subtly you can detect those changes, the more information you can put in – and the more secondary frequencies it takes up, and the more sensitive to background noise it becomes.
That is the “Width” of your frequency “Band” – although modern usage mostly refers to how much information can be transmitted.
There is only so much room in the electromagnetic spectrum.
Background noise is not decreasing. In fact, we’re increasing it.
The available broadcast bandwidth is fixed.
Forever.
There are ways exploit that possible bandwidth more efficiently – to keep signals separated better, to avoid as much noise as possible, and so on – but the limits of the available bandwidth are finite. That’s why there are broadcasting licenses, limited numbers of channels, radio stations that interfere, and so on.
The governing math was formally examined in the 1920’s – but any amateur radio operator, communications or computer technician, kid who’t taken a course in communications technology, and many others, will know the basic principles.

So; to get “infinite bandwidth” we can’t use electromagnetism. In fact, we can’t use anything which exists as waves, including tachyons.
Not being able to use waves means that our devices have to effectively be in contact.
How can we do that?
Lets see… we can:
1) Link them with “micro-wormholes”. Requires micro-devices with fine control of gravity – and by far the solution with the least major implications.
2) Employ “quantum teleportation”. Requires the ability to control quantum probabilities – and thus the ability to cause any desired event on command.
3) “Fold Space” to put them in contact. Requires entirely new theories of physics, unimagined technologies, teleport gates, and – almost certainly – travel between times and dimensions.

In other words, we could bypass the space, ignore the space, or eliminate the space. Not too many other options there – and gravity control is the LEAST of the super-technologies that could be involved.

Point Nine:
“I do feel you’ve neglected to allow for how much cheaper and more effective training processes would be. If computers are “effectively free” to megacorps then why aren’t VR training suites, virtual mentors, on-the-job-assistance agents etc. just as frivolously cheap, prevailent and effective?”

Actually we’re already assuming that; that’s why the expense is only listed as being double the base salary – but say we go to just the salary. It’s still cheaper to install Skillwires-3 and hand out every skill that would ever be needed than it is to pay an employees salary while they take a one-month training program. Given the need for a cyberclinic profit margin, I could probably justify Skillwires-4 – but I don’t need to. Most professional-level training programs take far more than a month. If you want to assume advances in how fast people can learn, you’ll need to give all the corporate types lots of extra skills – and the runners will be redundant again.

Besides, if you want to assume that VR training is virtually free, then it’s soon going to be available to everyone who wants it – and we’re back to “everyone is highly skilled in any field they’re interested in or feel like taking”. The characters AND NPC’s should all have an immense array of skills.

Oops, that’s both house-ruling and contradicting the setting assumptions again.

Point Ten:
“It’s still too soon to tell if it’s for me and my group, but it’s fun finding out and hopefully the fun will survive.”

You can have fun with pretty much any system, or without bothering with one – but if I’m going to pay for a system, I expect the authors to have spent at least a few hours researching each of it’s major elements and to have its background make sense. If it’s a new edition of an old system, I expect it to have fewer problems than the previous one – and for those to lie in the mechanics rather than the background, since the background is a lot easier to work with.

In the case of SR4 they have, indeed, made several areas of the rules that many people had trouble with, or house-ruled, easier to use. They’ve also added a series of problematic background elements, have thrown out a robust dice mechanic which could properly represent a wide variety of realistic situations in favor of a much more limited one (instead of simply streamlining the underlying tables of modifiers – the approach I took with the one-page basic SR3 rules), and they’ve neglected to cover the implications of the elements that they’ve added.

That makes the game easier to run for groups that are not interested in digging into the setting too much. For groups that are interested in such things, it makes it unusable – and losing a part of the potential market is never a good thing. SR4 gambled on pulling in enough new gamers to make up for the ones they’d lose. I haven’t had a single request to switch to SR4 yet. That’s hardly conclusive – but it’s not a good sign.

Yet you think it’s noteworthy that a fictionalized timeline for a game involving magic, superheros, and dragons, is not entirely accurate.

Given that the Gobir family had working brains, I would have to say that your existence is not evidence of their survival.

Are you sure he eliminated the gobir family?

don’t think so, because we still exist.

On the ‘Average Joe’ subsection, even in today’s world people are neglecting their natural capabilities in favour of machines doing things for them, both physically and mentally. In 2070 the general populace should be mostly filled with unfit and slow-witted individuals and an attribute of 4 would make someone very attractive to corporate employers. As for skills – people you bump into on the streets and in the bars are going to have almost none of the skills a shadowrunner relies upon. Pistols, Infiltration, Hacking, Climbing, Blades, nobody uses these in their humdrum lives of night clubs and trid shows. swallowing what the megas tell them and hoping for as easy a life as possible. VR computer games might ellicit exceptions but they’re not exactly high-end, reality-focused training suites. Being an effective combatant without corporate ties still works as one of the main selling points of the professional ‘runner.

The Summon Crowbar analogy doesn’t really support the argument against the system. Go ahead and summon your crowbar, it won’t attack your enemies or pry open doors for you – you’ve just gained a sustainable shiny lump of metal and if you’ve not the skill to use it then good luck. Likewise you can cast a Create Acid spell, but it’ll just sit in front of you eating a hole in the carpet rather than envelop the guard and gush through the gaps in his armour. Spells are and always have been function-driven (e.g. Slay Elf, Detect Firearms, etc.) – they do certain things in certain ways and some have a lot more scope than others with drain being the equalising factor.

I cannot agree that players should be rewarded for their efforts in creating unrealistic characters. Things like dump stats and squeezing every build point to min-max a character according to the kind of tests the player finds interesting is essentially assuming the character has mapped his life out from birth and has spent every waking moment on personal optimisation for his career whilst actively avoided any distracting opportunities (You want to have sex with me? How’s that supposed to make me a better hacker??). It’s all relative anyway, since the GM has to set an appropriate difficulty level – the player may be rolling a lot more dice but he won’t (read: shouldn’t) succeed more often because of it so playing the system and not the setting is ultimately a self-defeating exercise. I personally think it’s also a rather trivial and uninteresting approach to roleplaying – RPGs don’t have winners and losers so why try to out-do anyone?

Overuse of GM discretion – I do consider it a valid point and had meant to say so. As you say, technically every rule in every system comes with this caveat and I agree SR4 abuses the notion.

On the subject of Edge, I was responding to the claim that humans with their single point of Edge bonus will survive miraculously where all other races will get splattered. There seems to be an implication here that Edge and/or Hand-of-God works differently for humans which isn’t true. Their luck lasts a bit longer, that’s all, and it is explained thematically. Don’t see what the problem is.

It’s clear that we have radically different gaming groups. My players tend to be happy enough to accept a setting that mostly hangs together in its own right whilst your group (if you’ll pardon the almost blind assertion) seems more like a collection of elite physicists impatient for the world to catch up with what’s theoretically possible. Neither is ‘better’, I truly have no criticism on this score.

I’m a self-confessed arch-pedant, but even I don’t need to have every detail rationalised. I can’t even imagine what sciences you’ve studied to come up with gravity-altering solutions to bandwidth issues but you have my earnest respect for out-geeking me! Truth be told, if you simply asked me to define bandwidth my answer would be vague and almost certainly wrong and I don’t much care. I don’t know much of the occult either but it’s fun to pretend magic exists in an arbitrary structure. I do fully understand where your dissatisfaction comes from and in all honesty I would share it if I had the time and education to take fiction just that seriously.

Similarly I can’t continue in the skillwires vs training discussion due to lack of real-life knowledge, but though you’ve given me much to mull over I do feel you’ve neglected to allow for how much cheaper and more effective training processes would be. If computers are “effectively free” to megacorps then why aren’t VR training suites, virtual mentors, on-the-job-assistance agents etc. just as frivolously cheap, prevailent and effective?

SR4 clearly isn’t for you so I sympathise that you feel let down. It’s still too soon to tell if it’s for me and my group, but it’s fun finding out and hopefully the fun will survive.

Happy gaming.

PS – You give me too much credit. ‘SmilingGM’ actually comes from an illustration on a card in Steve Jackson’s Illuminati. The full quote is “Never trust a smiling GM” and hey, who would? lol