The Shadowrun Situation

[kzt]

his response regarding Barrier spell seems disingenuous given the long years he's been running Shadowrun. He has to know that Barrier is pretty lousy at stopping bullets, especially in comparison to the Slow spell, as written.

Hey, if the slow spell stops shock waves that means it impacts molecules. That means it only lets through molecules whose thermal speed is 1 meter per second or less, right? So it turns the area of effect into an area at .001 Kelvin, right?

[Stahlseele]

Entropy: The Spell!
The Kids love this Shit!

[Otakusensei]

By the end of the book, the exact location of the artifacts should be unknown, fueling anxious speculation about who has them and what they intend to do with them. The fate of the artifacts should be less important to the plot than the fate of various individuals involved, including characters from
Dawn of the Artifacts. The more people-centered plot ideas are, the better.

So the end point is a state where this whole business should be able to just start up again as soon as the interested parties are ready for another go? No ending or closure, no reckoning; just a constant, self-sustaining and by all rights geopolitically game changing magical McGuffin added to the setting?

Authors are also encouraged to take the focus away from items and forces that the players could utilize, and focus instead on characters that the players are not playing?

As a GM, having a couple of NPCs on hand is great. But I never use more than a name, a background and a motivation; and of course a stat block. Well fleshed out NPCs are only really good to read about in the books and can be a burden at the table. At best a skeleton of the write up, and worst an obstruction that will be killed, ignored or bemoaned at the players whim. I love Frosty and Harliquin; but they step into the scene, say their line, wink and leave. The spotlight should be on the players, their motivations, actions and the consequences because that's what CGL's potential customers are doing. We're playing our game, not reading thier novel.

If you want to leave some metaplot please do. Just figure out what the fuck it is, make sure it's internally consistent and tuck it in around the edges so we can wonder about it in five years when the foreshadowing comes to fruition and fight about it in ten when someone ignores it completely.

[hermit]

Something I distinctly felt, discussing Unwired with Aaron, was a desire to take uncomfortable conversations out of the public domain. Jason does the same thing. If you're making them look stupid they'll try to engage you in PM's rather than continue talking to you on a forum where the whole world is watching.

Maybe those PMs should just be posted in the open then. I so far refrained from doing so because it is bad manners, but if they always take it to private to flame when they have to face up their shit ...

Hey, if the slow spell stops shock waves that means it impacts molecules. That means it only lets through molecules whose thermal speed is 1 meter per second or less, right? So it turns the area of effect into an area at .001 Kelvin, right?

No physics in magic! Physics make Aaron unhappy. And if Aaron is unhappy, Aaron trolls you via PM.

[adamjury]

Only 14 days for a proofreader (singular) to proof the entire document and then send it to the printers?

I did some 'playtesting' on Running Wild and a couple of the Artifacts series that amounted to little more than proof-skimming, particularly with Running Wild which was very close to deadline when I got it and 14 days isn't enough time to proof a document of that size.

While the timeframe to produce AU is extremely short for a Shadowrun title, the proofing time is pretty normal. Not saying that's bad, or good ... just that it hasn't changed much.

[Otakusensei]

Only 14 days for a proofreader (singular) to proof the entire document and then send it to the printers?

I did some 'playtesting' on Running Wild and a couple of the Artifacts series that amounted to little more than proof-skimming, particularly with Running Wild which was very close to deadline when I got it and 14 days isn't enough time to proof a document of that size.

While the timeframe to produce AU is extremely short for a Shadowrun title, the proofing time is pretty normal. Not saying that's bad, or good ... just that it hasn't changed much.

How many staff members were normally put on that? Or is that time frame assuming community and freelancer support?

[TheFlatline]

\
btw, if certain people are really that worried about what Frank has to say, banning him from DS was about the dumbest thing they could have done. They've made an (admittedly small niche) internet folk hero out of him for standing up to the Man (whoever that is).

Actually, moreso than that, Frank and the rest of the Den has helped me to appreciate game mechanics and structure far more than I used to. Has it kind of ruined a few RPGs for me? Yeah, somewhat (unless it's a good MC, and I'll swallow nearly any horrible system in that case) but in the end I feel like I'm a better gamer for it.

Before discovering the Den, I wasn't really a fan of Euro boardgames for instance. I'm really warming to their pure, sound mechanics, even if the themes end up being pasted on.

[TheFlatline]

Oh dear god...

So. This Artifacts Unbound book gives it's authors 19 days nominally to produce an entire act of a campaign, and a total of a little under 2 months to produce the final draft. There is zero playtesting time in this apparently.

So the joke of "what playtesting?" is actually not a joke.

Oh, and there's typos and inaccurate dates and shit in the document. Bravo.

I also dig how the end of a multi-book campaign setting ends with "one shot plot hooks". Talk about fucking your audience over. Imagine if you sat through 9 hours of Lord of the Rings movies, only to have some dipshit come out, sit on a stool, and end it like the Clue movie (Well, Frodo *could* have kept the ring and overthrew Sauron, or I suppose he could have been killed by Gollum who took the ring and disappeared. Oh, you know, maybe Bilbo decided to keep it all along. You know what else might have worked....) I also love as another has pointed out that by the end of the story arc, you have no resolution, no plot reveals, no character change nothing. Just essentially a zero-sum effort. The story should be on the *player* characters, not necessarily the NPCs.

Oh, and the "nothing is ever finished" thing? Fuck you. I can only take so many "to be continued?" prompts before it gets to be cliche, and after a while even the cliche dies and rots and becomes a festering mess.

SR4 is dead to me after reading this document. I had zero interest in where they were taking it (I played SR because it was a balance between magic and tech, but it seems the devs just want to make a future fantasy game), but now I see that they're not even steering it particularly well.

[Fuchs]

SR4 is dead to me after reading this document. I had zero interest in where they were taking it (I played SR because it was a balance between magic and tech, but it seems the devs just want to make a future fantasy game), but now I see that they're not even steering it particularly well.

That's it, in a nutshell. The way magic is dominating, both with overpowered spells and the plot focus, is sickening.

[adamjury]

How many staff members were normally put on that? Or is that time frame assuming community and freelancer support?

The latter.

[Username17]

So. This Artifacts Unbound book gives it's authors 19 days nominally to produce an entire act of a campaign, and a total of a little under 2 months to produce the final draft.

Pretty much, yeah. Now, 19 days is actually not unreasonable for a writing assignment of that length. An average freelancer can produce 10,000 words a week. Someone of "professional" quality like Mike Mearls can probably do two or three times that. 3 weeks of writing (minus the weekend at the end), gets you 30,000 words of raw product. Assuming Jason keeps to his "four freelancers" model, that's 120,000 words of writing in that period. In short: that's the normal schedule for a writing project of that size.

Of course, that's just writing. That doesn't include research time or plot continuity discussions or developer feedback. None of that is in the schedule because it is not going to happen. You might be able to get that kind of work out of Ancient History or someone intimately familiar with the specific topic you are writing about (who has presumably already done the research required on their own time), but expecting it out of their crew of overconfident and unknowledgeable hacks is unreasonable. We know what happens when David Hill sits down and writes 10,000 words without doing any research or having any direction - we get the Hot Spots chapter in War! It's not acceptable.

Yeah, getting 30,000 words on the page in 3 weeks is not much of a challenge. That's certainly no NaNoWriMo project, that's just people writing after work/school on the weekdays for a couple of weeks. But if you don't schedule in time for the writers to get on the same page, they won't be. Jason thinks he has found an exploit that will make this acceptable by selling the incoherency of the final product as a feature. He is wrong. The project will be a pile of incoherent ramblings and that won't be OK.

-Username17

[Fuchs]

Did they really add a spell which allows you to use magic to designate a target for indirect artillery fire?

[crizh]

Only 14 days for a proofreader (singular) to proof the entire document and then send it to the printers?

I did some 'playtesting' on Running Wild and a couple of the Artifacts series that amounted to little more than proof-skimming, particularly with Running Wild which was very close to deadline when I got it and 14 days isn't enough time to proof a document of that size.

While the timeframe to produce AU is extremely short for a Shadowrun title, the proofing time is pretty normal. Not saying that's bad, or good ... just that it hasn't changed much.

While I don't doubt your our word on the time available for proofing I have some observations.

I was a play-tester not a proofreader, I think Larsine did the proofreading and he's usually pretty damn good, and fast. I got the play-test document, for Running Wild, on March 15th with a deadline of the 21st. AFAIK the document did not even get a pdf release before early September. Same is true of Midnight and PACKS was already in lay-out in March and it still hadn't been released by the time Bobby got his marching orders a year later.

Now I know that is mostly down to trouble paying printers etc but it still amounted to massively more than a fortnight to polish and proofread. And yet almost every release CGL has ever made has been riddled with proofing errors, War! just happens to be several orders of magnitude worse than most. Larsine usually posts a painfully extensive list within 48 hours of a pdf release.

That makes me suspect that the problem has always been that products only get one round of proofreading when they need at least two. Having checked Running Wild it has seven credited proofreaders and yet Larsine posted over 30 'screens' of corrections within days of publication. Stuff always gets missed in the first pass and more mistakes get introduced with the corrections.

Interestingly War! does not appear to have any credited proofreaders and none of the names listed as proofers on Running Wild appear anywhere in the credits for War!

[Username17]

Did they really add a spell which allows you to use magic to designate a target for indirect artillery fire?

Yes. Despite there being only 8 spells in the book (Grenade, Sending, Calm Mind, Designate, Flash, Cloud, Recharge, and Slow), the book has managed to offend people four times with incredibly poorly thought out spells.

The big one people complain about is Slow. Now, a bunch of the things people are ranting about are flat out wrong. Slow has no effect on planes or the moving parts inside your truck's engine. Shadowrun magic physics are such that it only affects or fails to effect whole objects, not individual segments. A helicopter is above the mass limit and is simply unaffected. But it really does stop an essentially limitless number of bullets at Force 1. It stops any number of discreet objects regardless of speed or object resistance, so long as their total mass in the entire area does not exceed 200 kg per hit. So if you cast it in an area with a moving plane, the spell simply instantly fails with no effect at all. But if you put it on a battlefield there is essentially no number of bullets or rockets that can be fired that will have any effect.

The next one people complain about is Recharge. Because what it does is fully charge whatever you point it at, with the only limit being that hits have to equal the object resistant. But there is no mass or size or total power limits. So since the transformers of the power grid of the entire city are probably only OR 3, it is an instantaneous would changer that invalidates most of the setting.

The next one people complain about is Designate, because it is a spell that fully integrates itself with target designation systems... somehow. This makes people unhappy because there is honestly no way for a spell to do that. Sorcery has a lot of limitations, and not being "intelligent" or interacting with technological sensors is way up on that list.

And the final one is Cloud. Its not really unbalanced, per se. The drain is basically way too high (+5). What it is, is an element ball that is sustained instead of instant that you can drag around as a sustained fire thingy. And yeah, you can move it around and probably do some impressive bug hunt shit with the fact that it's a physical spell that you can move to corners without having to reroll the to-hit dice each turn. But fundamentally the reason people are mad at it is that it is mysteriously a Manipulation spell, despite being obviously a Combat spell. Thus it feeds into Manipulation Bloat just like all the other shitty things like Shadow and Influence do.

So yeah, four spells that are really bad for the game out of 8 total spells. And in most cases it's because whoever was defining what hits on the spellcasting test did forgot to make those hits actually limit the spell in an incredibly meaningful axis.

-Username17

[Fuchs]

SR4 is turning into magic edition. It just needs a way to cross Technomancers and Magges now - and I am sure some hack already thinks that such a character would make a fine protagonist for a SR novel.

[Loki]

@Fuchs: I have to ask because your negative view of magic already puzzled me back when this thread briefly turned to the SR-ED crossover. Do you actually like that magic is part of Shadowrun or is it more of a necessary evil to you, a concession to the zeitgeist? Maybe I got the wrong impression but you seem to genuinely loathe any instance of magic superseding technology. (I'm not weighing in on the issue at hand, heck, I don't even want to think about the issue at hand, just asking for your point of view.)

[Fuchs]

I like magic. I simply think you should never be able to get rid of technology by relying on magic. Technology should not be rendered obsolete by magic (and none of the "oh, there's only 1% of magicians, so it's ok to make them more powerful" stupidity).

As it is, magic is far too prominent in SR, with a few spells and powers changing the world (movement, recharge f.e.) if not for the inability of the devs and their mindless cronies to think things through. It's also turning from the strictly limited magic of older editions to the D&D "It's magic, it works!" view, where anything important has to be magic: Plots centered around artifacts, spells interfacing with technology to an unheard of degree.

Shadowrun was "man, machine and magic", with cyberpunk and fantasy combining. It's turning into "Magic the Awesome" now, with technology reduced to windowdressing. Threats seem to be magic all the time, drugs need to be awakened, even the matrix was turned magical with technomancers. Instead of applying science to spells and be creative with it we now have to use "it's magic, it doesn't work logical" to avoid game breakers, and even that won't work too well in some cases.

That's a bad direction for the game.

[Fuchs]

If a cybernetically enhanced fighter can't do anything worthwile a mage can't do as well or better (through spirits, spells and skills), then the system failed.

[Loki]

Thanks.

[mean_liar]

The next one people complain about is Designate, because it is a spell that fully integrates itself with target designation systems... somehow. This makes people unhappy because there is honestly no way for a spell to do that. Sorcery has a lot of limitations, and not being "intelligent" or interacting with technological sensors is way up on that list.

This is surprising for me. Magic should be able to do it if you can beat the OR of your machinery - does Designate not require that?

Also, as someone that goes out of my way to joyfully custom-design every fucking spell I ever use as a twinked out mage in SR, "Sorcery... not being 'intelligent' or interacting with technological sensors" is only half-right. Spells aren't intelligent but they can be designed to do things, but in this case that only means giving information to a target designator. Interacting with tech only requires beating the OR threshold, nothing more.

SR magic is WAAAAAY open, certainly open enough to allow spells similar to Slow, Recharge, and Designate. The issues from my perspective are:
- Slow is overpowered
- Recharge is totally fair game, in one way or another. Summoning and biding a spirit with an Energy Aura or Elemental Attack as a method of power-generation seems to me to be genre-appropriate. It remains that casting a spell that can recharge anything to "full" (as opposed to generating an amount of energy commensurate with the Force of the spell) is stupid, but magical means of generating (near?) limitless energy should already have been incorporated in the setting at some point, and that goes as well for Task Spirits as slave labor.
- Designate seems fine to me

[Username17]

The issue with designate is that it is capable of guiding in munitions that are encrypted - as all such devices are in SR4. That means that it is a spell that is capable of bypassing the encryption on a weapon system. Or really any system, because sorcery isn't supposed to be able to handle electronic encryption at all.

Anyway, Movement is to me the perfect magic power. Used without tech its abilities are frankly uninspired. Speed up your horse from 30 kph to 150 kph? So what? A motorcycle still leaves it in the dust. But combining it with tech and you get amazing results. Speed up said motorcycle to mach 2? Yes please. That is a power that has demonstrable utility in a technological world, isn't going to displace technology ever, and has clear synergies between unrelated technological improvements. It is in short, the ideal power to place in the Shadowrun world.

Frankly, most magic in Shadowrun is basically ass. People keep fapping to enchanting in the fluff, but honestly there isn't a single fucking thing that enchanted objects could do that I as a mundane person interested in advancing humanity and my personal situation would give a flying fuck about. It's a serious problem. Back in the 1e days they tried to get us to care about swords with fire bolts anchored onto them, but we didn't. Because that was still too expensive and shitty compared to just having a ghost damned assault rifle. Later editions fell down on the job even harder when they made anchoring into something even rarer that you had to actively choose to research instead of just having it fall on you amongst a long list of other things that weren't shielding that you didn't care about.

Powers and spells really do have a narrow edge to walk. If they don't do anything that you can't simply reproduce with tech, they are a waste of time and no one cares. If they completely replace technological means of accomplishing things, they break the setting. They have to be useful within the context of having technological tools at your disposal, operate on a different principle, and synergize. In the basic list of spirit powers, Guard, Movement, Psychokinesis, Weather Control, and Influence all meet that high standard. Frankly, the spirit powers are very well designed.

But yeah, the people they have working on things right now have no idea what is wrong with or missing from the spell list.

-Username17

[Otakusensei]

The next one people complain about is Designate, because it is a spell that fully integrates itself with target designation systems... somehow. This makes people unhappy because there is honestly no way for a spell to do that. Sorcery has a lot of limitations, and not being "intelligent" or interacting with technological sensors is way up on that list.

This is surprising for me. Magic should be able to do it if you can beat the OR of your machinery - does Designate not require that?

Also, as someone that goes out of my way to joyfully custom-design every fucking spell I ever use as a twinked out mage in SR, "Sorcery... not being 'intelligent' or interacting with technological sensors" is only half-right. Spells aren't intelligent but they can be designed to do things, but in this case that only means giving information to a target designator. Interacting with tech only requires beating the OR threshold, nothing more.

SR magic is WAAAAAY open, certainly open enough to allow spells similar to Slow, Recharge, and Designate. The issues from my perspective are:
- Slow is overpowered
- Recharge is totally fair game, in one way or another. Summoning and biding a spirit with an Energy Aura or Elemental Attack as a method of power-generation seems to me to be genre-appropriate. It remains that casting a spell that can recharge anything to "full" (as opposed to generating an amount of energy commensurate with the Force of the spell) is stupid, but magical means of generating (near?) limitless energy should already have been incorporated in the setting at some point, and that goes as well for Task Spirits as slave labor.
- Designate seems fine to me

I think this is the problem:

Designate (p. 178) presumably also duplicates all encryption of the designators (otherwise it wouldn't work) which should let you spoof any enemy designators as well.

I wasn't going to post anything more in any topic that's even remotely linked to WAR, but I had to comment on this one.

It's brilliant. If I was GM at your table, you'd get a Karma just for coming up with it, and maybe another one for pulling it off.

[mean_liar]

Doesn't Designate still require line-of-effect to the guidance system?

I haven't read the spell so I'm groping in the dark a little.

What's the blow-by-blow of using Designate?

From what I know, this is the typical tech protocol for designators:

1. You paint a target with a coded laser burst
2. A munitions guidance system picks up the reflected burst and adjusts accordingly

How does the "official" Designate spell bypass the need for line-of-effect to the guidance system?

[Otakusensei]

Doesn't Designate still require line-of-effect to the guidance system?

I haven't read the spell so I'm groping in the dark a little.

What's the blow-by-blow of using Designate?

From what I know, this is the typical tech protocol for designators:

1. You paint a target with a coded laser burst
2. A munitions guidance system picks up the reflected burst and adjusts accordingly

How does the "official" Designate spell bypass the need for line-of-effect to the guidance system?

I believe the spell creates that coded burst of mimicked data complete with all encryption and necessary flags. It does so at the target, and for as long as the caster sustains the spell. So any device that would receive targeting info from a source mimicked by the spell could then lock on and get a bonus to indirect fire.

All fine a good on it's face, but once you start thinking about how that spell needs to work, what that means for the properties of other similar spells and (more importantly) why that spell needs to exist, thing get hairy. Why not just require the use of target designators? Why a spell? Is there a need for this type of spell or is it just a "cool thing"? It sounds military, but it doesn't jive with the setting or the mechanics.

But yeah, the people they have working on things right now have no idea what is wrong with or missing from the spell list.

I've been thinking a lot lately about what the conversations must be like when these products are in the development stages. And it strikes me that regardless of the opinions and intentions expressed in that post, I doubt that anything on that level is being said.

I don't mean to fawn over Frank by saying that. I'm not ready to join anymore cults and I'm not a fan of The End (if that flame-proofs me at all in certain venues). But I can't see Jason speaking on the delicate balance of magic vs. tech and the mechanical reach of certain abilities as regards their eclipsing other facets of the setting. He never really did that on DS, and I've never seen that from him since the official forum went into operation. I know Aaron isn't hesitant to make a change or suggest something, but that's the half of the battle that puts your ass on the line. The other half, the one that wins the war, is taking that raw desire to make and do, and developing it into something that is internally and externally consistent and fits with the setting.

I'm not seeing that in the present releases or in the leaked documents.

[Stahlseele]

If i understood correctly, you PAINT the target with the spell and tell the ammo you chose to hit it.
Be it your ammo, or the enemies.