1 2013-10-26

Hey guys, last night was fun. Hope to play again sometime soon.

Below is a long brainstorm which you guys don't need to read, but I thought I'd share.

I started reading about Shadowrun 5 on a few sites (below). It looks cool. And then I started thinking about SR4. I think the main issue I have with SR4 is the turn/pass system. Though, to date I haven't seen one that feels perfect.

I think the best approach is to dig into what parts of the game are independent of each other. Or rather, to treat Shadowrun as a set of objects, just like one would while writing a program. That way I (or we) could try many different systems (or make our own systems), without sacrificing our characters or the SR universe.

The list of elements in any RPG might look like this:

1. The setting
2. The characters
3. The physics (as in game logic)

Obviously the setting is what we like, and there isn't much to change. The characters are things like the history and the personality of the character; they would only need changing as per the physics of a particular SR version. So it comes down to physics. So how would someone separate characters from physics? It seems like many of the stats on a character sheet are some kind of measurement. Some of these won't change with the SR version (though they can change from other things): height, weight, eye color, etc. But other measurements will probably change based on the physics, such as Initiative. So the answer might be that we cannot completely separate characters from physics, but we can probably reduce the coupling or the dependency between them. Maybe the solution is to create a new separate sheet (not that it necessarily needs to be a different piece of paper) for each thing related to the character.

We could easily break off other things from the character, proper, such as the possessions. Some possessions affect physics, such as armor rating, and other possessions might affect how a character acts (the one ring, albeit outside of the SR universe). I don't think it needs to be broken down as far as Tyler Durden's "You are not your job" quote because that's really just saying we are not socially bound to unchangeable (immutable) labels. I'm all for changing the labels, but I just want to keep some labels separated from groups they have nothing to do with.

So all of that being said, I think what I'm most interested in is decoupling characters from physics as much as possible. That way if we move to SR5 or back to SR3, it won't matter to anything but the game's physics. I'll let you guys know if I come up with anything.

• http://amzn.com/1936876515
• http://www.shadowruntabletop.com/2013/02/putting-more-people-on-the-streets-shadowrun-introductory-box-set/
• http://www.catalystgamelabs.com/2012/12/21/the-year-of-shadowrun/

2 2013-10-27

The character creation part of SR is linked to both the physics and the character, itself. Measuring the characters is easy for some things (height, weight, etc), but difficult for others. If I said, "Sir Bohart can pick up 200 lbs," even out-of-universe what does that really mean? Under what conditions? SR tries to define this with strength attribute ratings, but that might be too general. In the true meaning of the word, general means a rule that can be applied to everything. By saying a rule is too general, however, we show that the general rule does not cover cases aside from the norm. Freddy Rodriguez's character in Lady in the Water, who has one buff arm and one skinny arm, showed us how lopsided a general strength rating can be.

Most of the metatype constraints (such as maximum or minimum values for attributes) are really just racist. If a person is short, it isn't because they are a "dwarf" metatype and also if a person is a "dwarf" it shouldn't be that they must be short. That is not to say that there cannot be racism in the game; it is probable that there is racism in-universe. But out-of-universe, it would be biased to use some of the metatype constraints. The SR Primer, in the same paragraph, states both that all metatypes are all genetically human and that there are several subgroups (H. sapiens nobilis, etc). SR seems to be half-way to egalitarianism, by removing classes for archetypes (ie, anyone can carry a gun/sword, as opposed to D&D). But SR still seems to be relying on racism¹ to describe things that we already know are common or distributed on a bell curve for SR out-of-universe humans. What is different, however, is that all of these metatypes have either low-light or thermalgraphic vision and that some are also in a state of change; not everyone who is an elf was born an elf (both metatype and metamorphic! haha!). The out-of-universe, unbiased solution would be to keep the bell-curve as humans and to treat the vision abilities as a Positive Quality. Or, forget the bell curve completely; for example, all elfs now only have either a 5 or 6 Charisma.

Not only does SR sometimes contradict itself, but it contradicts what we already know to be true. The giant/dwarf labels as far as medical terms, whether or not they are accurate or politically correct, exist to describe conditions that make people tall or short. Ignore the medical conditions for now. The SR notes on giant/dwarf labels in Norse/Scandinavian folklore is not quite accurate with what we know. Most monsters in Norse mythology were just "Grendels" or criminals that were exhiled. They were seen as monsters (as in a simile). Younger generations changed the simile to metaphor and then to legend/myth. "Giant" isn't actually a term originally used by Norse people; it's a Greek word, related to giga- just like the SI "metric system". (1.21 gigawatts!) Norse people more often would have said "troll" for the general term, though that contrasts with the SR conception, though this is only because the general public has forgotten that elfs, dwarfs, and trolls are from Norse myth/folklore; SR has adopted them through the lens of D&D which got them from Wagner and Tolkien, the latter who was a scholar of Norse studies. These three types in particular have gone through some changes along the way. For example, the Norse dwarfs, or dvergr or possibly the elf variations (the Old Norse is "alf") were more like Hebrew Gollems (animated beings, approximately the same size as their creators) than Richard Wagner's little people. Obviously there has been no UGE, so we are not in the same reality. But the question becomes, when do our universe and the SR universe fork to create two separate universes? According to the SR Primer, it is probably easiest to fork in the 1990's.

Interesting to note that SR dwarfs are slow(er than humans), Tolkien dwarfs are fast, but Peter Jackson's Tolkien-dwarfs are slow. A Norse dwarf would be just like any other human, residing on a bell curve.

We know that there are plenty of cyborgs these days², but none of them are going crazy. In-universe could argue that they don't have enough cyberware. But out-of-universe, the idea that Essense is all that keeps a cyborg from going nuts is probably also racist on some level. As cyberware increases, Essense decreases. What about beings that are completely biomechanical/electronic? Why are they only NPC and as rare as a dragon? In a game half based on Blade Runner would it not have any androids/replicants? In terms of Ridley Scott, only a small number of replicants go crazy, though all of his sci-fi includes them going crazy. But to say they are all crazy is racist. It is odd that Essense and Willpower are not the same, though they both govern the player's control over the PC's actions. This is a hole in the SR physics. Or it is magic. Essense and Willpower (or other attributes, depending on the sorcerer) influence the Magic attribute and the sorcery abilities. But if they're bidirectionally affected, then they're either the same thing or the concept of the two discreet things is flawed somehow. Take a set E for Essense with elements a and b. Also take a set M for Magic with some element c. Set E and M might have more elements, but that doesn't matter for now. So for Case1, if E affects M and M affects E, it could simply be that a affects c and c affects b. Else, for Case2, if a affects c and c affects a, then either a and c are the same or they belong in the same set. The only other thing is that if some other element exists between a->c and c->a, but really that just means that we're refining either element a or c as a subset of elements. If not one else can think of another way that Essense and Magic can affect each other, then I have at least exhausted the fact that Essense is as a set is false or unfinished by SR rules, that Essense and Magic are coupled, and that cyberware is magical. But since we have cyberware out-of-universe, that means that in-universe something happened. Sorcerers (and the converse techozombies) almost sound like another metatype, rather than a completely separate thing. Even the game physics treat Magic as a Positive Quality.

But even magic has logic either by order or chaos and is governed by properties, thus physics; out-of-universe ignorance is splilling into the in-universe game. Both the in-univese and out-of-universe explanation of magic is simply a change in the physical laws. Haldeman used this in his book Forever Free. People dispute things, both true and false. I put it that people in-unverse SR would dispute that "magic" exists. See Clarke's third law ³.

Another note worth mentioning, is that enough of the SR documentation is written in first-person. Juxtaposed by the out-of-universe fact that SR has editions means that it is work in progress. I put it to everyone that most of the documentation needs to be taken with a grain of salt. SR documentation is either biased out-of-universe by ingorance or prejudice, written similarly in-character as someone in-universe would perceive it, or it is just not finished yet. Even the Shadowrun Primer is disclaimed as "designed for internal use" and "ain't proofread".