The Shadowrun Situation

[adamjury]

Oh, and one more thing: if fans think "I'd really like this ... but it will probably get pirated a lot, so I'm not even going to bother to tell the publisher that I want it" -- that does a lot less good than telling the publisher and letting _them_ consider the financial potential for it.

[Neurosis]

Yoink to the power of yoink. Those maps/breakdowns are excellently detailed and the lone star station seems like an incredibly likely location to come up and will be invaluable for any future Shadowrun campaigns I run after my current one, which is winding down to its final adventure. Thanks for 'em.

You've never seen my stuff? I need to get a publicist. Check out my site at http://knasser.me.uk. There's still quite a bit of Shadowrun material on there. If you play it, you might find it useful.

K.

I've seen it actually (where do you think I got the Carnival adventure ( : P) but I think I missed the Lone Star map/it wasn't up at the time. I remember seeing the Yak House map before.

[Username17]

Mounted police are an anachronism even today. They have some limited utility for crowd control when you know in advance that you're going to need some and can show up with them. But primarily the purpose of mounted police today is to keep mounted police in business.

Now mounted police are already a small and highly specialist group. Your contention is that Unicorns would replace or supplement the horses used by these police. You think so? Let's consider:

Advantages: Magical counterspelling.

Disadvantages: Built in lethal-weapon with not-inconsiderable ability to use it, cannot be cloned, has valuable components worth people's time to steal (there is a trade in Unicorn horns). Virgin jokes twenty times a day.

First: you know absolutely nothing about police work, an should stop talking. Mounted police have a considerable presence not just in crowd control, but also in patrolling. In fact, they will continue to have a purpose as long as a large percentage of crime is committed by people on foot.

Second: horses already have a fucking lethal weapon. Horse hooves will fuck you up.

You are being completely irrational in your assessment of horses. For fuck's sake, your from England right? Before you shoot your mouth off some more, read up on London's own explanation.

-Username17

[Zinegata]

I fail to see holw a link showing that there are 140 Mounted London Police officers disproves that they are nothing more than an anachronistic relic from the past, when there are over 50,000 London police officers (including staff and support crews).

140 is seriously less than 1% of the entire London Police force.

Hell, remember the most famous Mounted Police Force? The Mounties?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mounted_police

A well-known mounted police force is the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP). The RCMP now uses standard police methods and does not use any horses operationally.

Fuck, the wiki even says that the entire US border patrol employs 200 horses... while at the same time having 290 airplanes.

In other words, knasser is correct. Frank is a retarded who just pulls random pictures off the Internet as "proof".

[Stahlseele]

If they are not mounted on horses anymore, are they still called mounties? O.o

[adamjury]

Yes.

[Orca]

Supposedly the NZ police has a mounted section. I've never seen any of them, at sports events or protests or otherwise. I don't think they have a major role any more.

In SR, being inside a vehicle with mirrored windows is safer than being on a horse with magic resistance, and I don't think concerns about treating the crowd being controlled well rate highly with Lone Star.

[kzt]

In SR, being inside a vehicle with mirrored windows is safer than being on a horse with magic resistance, and I don't think concerns about treating the crowd being controlled well rate highly with Lone Star.

Nothing gets a politician reelected like having the cops he contracted with beat up the kids of his voters and financial supporters. ..

[Jay Levine]

Heh, I'm not worried about Shadowrun's "realism collapse." First, the Dumpshock crowd plays up Shadowrun's realism considerably. I've never once killed an idea I thought was awesome because it might make SR less realistic. It's a setting with one foot firmly planted in fantasy. That said, there have been weak ideas that have been unfortunately justified because someone thought they were awesome. And there have been potentially good ideas weakened in a desperate attempt to make them realistic.

If there is a good story that involves a cop riding a unicorn, then it damn well should be in there. If a GM doesn't like it, they don't have to use it, but good stories shouldn't be sacrificed because a writer is trying to predict what is going to make someone happy with their realism level.

PDF short-form adventures would be a fine idea to me, but I don't think Catalyst has a good understanding of how to handle PDF-only work. Unlike Adam, they don't seem interested in thinking outside the box on that.

[Zinegata]

There's nothing wrong with a few of cops riding unicorns in SR. Maybe they're part of a ceremonial unit to improve PR. Maybe the cops riding them are a bunch of oldtimers who also use six-shooters. A cop or two riding a unicorn may make for an interesting story.

But Frank is seriously arguing that mounted cops are prevalent in the modern day and see a lot of use in patrol duties. They do not. And he's a jerkass for calling knasser a retard for pointing out that mounted cops today are, in fact, are a largely ceremonial force whose main utility is crowd control for special events.

Again, even the fucking Mounties don't use horses anymore. And it's probably because trying to catch guys on foot on horseback is retarded. Horses are big. They also cannot go to places where people can. And you cannot fucking grapple a suspect from horseback.

If you want cops to catch criminals who flee on foot, you give your cops cardio training. Which is an actual requirement for most police forces worldwide, because that's what works and makes sense.

[Juton]

One thing else about mounted police, horses shit everywhere. The only place it makes sense to use them is downtown, horseshit is a great way to discourage foot traffic, so even if they where prevalent they wouldn't be popular.

[Neurosis]

Wow guys, that was a pretty heated argument about fucking unicorn cops. Anyway here is a real life story about mounted police.

I went to a liberal arts state college which had an annual concert/music festival which brought in massive quantities of people from off campus to do massive quantities of drugs and mischief. Throughout my four years at school the University Police Department continued to try to crack down more and more and more on the fun of the event until at the end they brought in several MOUNTED UNITS of the town/county cops to SURROUND the stage and the crowd area on all sides. Which was, as you can imagine, overdoing it.

I'd draw you a diagram, but the short version is horses on all sides, mosh pit in the center.

And it's probably because trying to catch guys on foot on horseback is retarded. Horses are big.

I heard stories--I am not entirely sure if they are apocryphal or true--of students being RIDDEN DOWN by the mounted cops like they were some kind of kill-crazed vengeance posse. I don't know if it was accidental or intentional but I am pretty sure at least one actual TRAMPLING occurred. All I remember is how terrifying it was at the time.

I remember thinking "the only thing worse would be police centaurs".

This is the extent of my comment on the 'unicorn cops' discussion.

PDF short-form adventures would be a fine idea to me, but I don't think Catalyst has a good understanding of how to handle PDF-only work. Unlike Adam, they don't seem interested in thinking outside the box on that.

Jay, I'm still finalizing my mental picture of who the players are and where they stand. Are you one of the few people still working for Catalyst? I'm just curious.

[Doom]

Mounted cops will always have some use...there are just too many places a car can't go that a horse can, too many occassions where not using car, instead using something that gives you a mobility and height advantages, makes more sense.

People that think horses are worthless just haven't used them, is all.

I'm near New Orleans, and the mounted police are used here, too. Heck, when I bought a Missouri Fox Trotter years ago, the competing bidder was the NOPD, who offered me more after I'd won (should've taken it, in retrospect).

But I do take amusement that a serious discussion of police mounted on unicorns can actually exist. Wuv de internets!

[TheFlatline]

The point which I shouldn't have to make is that if of those 5000 people pirating 2% would have bought it, that's 100 sales piracy has cost you. I sense a quibble about my arbitrary 2% figure coming, so I'll point out that the 500 sales and 5,000 people is also arbitrary. It's sufficient to illustrate a principle.

You can't control or know how many people pirate your stuff.

I was making the case that piracy hurts sales. I base that on probably around a third of the people I know downloading stuff in place of buying it. That figure is probably lower than typical for the target markets for this material because my rather wide social circles encompass a number of people in places where cheap home bandwidth isn't common. Now this is for movies and music. I don't have many friends who are into role-playing games so I can't intuit that one, but I do know that of the people who I know who do play role-playing games, a number of them are downloading products in place of buying them. So yes, I stand by what I said which is that piracy hurts sales. For something with a narrow target market like adventures, I'd expect it to be very vulnerable to negative factors.

Oh christ here we go with the pirating shit again.

I'll fast forward to the end of what I'm about to say and get it over with first: If you can be profitable with selling 500 adventures that are only on PDF, and you decide not to even try because you will lose 100 sales if you could magically prevent piracy, then you deserve to go out of business.

Now that that's done with, onto the issue of "lost sales" and piracy. In hard, concrete numbers, generally speaking you will see a minimum of 25% of any population of downloaders who absolutely refuse to pay anything for your product, and would never pay anything for your product. In more realistic numbers for something like an RPG adventure you're probably talking in the 95th percentile. Full image scans of 50 page adventure books are almost more trouble pirating than just simply buying. Also, let's face it, reading a 50 page adventure or god forbid a 400 page core book fucking sucks electronically. Dead tree is still a better play option. While printing out a 50 page adventure is probably feasible, that quickly adds up in printer toner/ink and paper costs.

I've yet to meet anyone who has actually, seriously ran an adventure off of a PDF on a laptop, so we're going to gloss over that option.

Even in a big indie game offering that was done recently, which packaged together 80 bucks worth of games, and had a "name your own price" function, the average price paid was... $9.87. And a quarter of downloaders *still* pirated it. As in, they couldn't even be bothered to pay one *penny* to legally purchase software.

I guess my point is, there's piracy. Period. People fucking scan individual pages of the book and upload it and pirate the fuck out of it. After purchasing 2 copies of Dark Heresy for over 100 fucking dollars and still not being able to buy a legitimate PDF copy I pirated one for reference duty and it was an optical scan. You absolutely *can't* stop that kind of pirating, and I swear to god it happens, and is prevalent. People are that nuts.

So if you can't prevent your dead tree version of an adventure from being pirated, you can't prevent pirating period. As soon as one bored kid with a scanner buys your 10 dollar adventure, you're in the same boat as if someone bought the thing off of drivethruRPG.com and put it up on bit torrent. I'd suggest other avenues of effort however: Eclipse Phase offering their book on PDF for free literally made me say "fuck, that's awesome. I'll buy the dead tree version from them". Maybe a note or a link on your homepage/in said pirated PDFs where you say "If you pirated this book, we hope you enjoy it. If you do, please consider going to our web page and donating to us, whatever you think is appropriate for the book, down to one cent." I dunno... it seems like stressing out about something that is as inevitable as the tides and the sun rising in the East is silly.

It just seems... well... silly that you're stressing out so bad over a niche of a niche of a niche cutting into potential sales.

[crizh]

Hey Knasser, did you get a chance to watch the recent Martin Clunes show on horses?

There was a bit where he visited the horse training school for the Met I think. He participated as a 'rioter' in some of the desensitization training they gave the horses. I think he managed to convey quite well just how fucking intimidating a line of armoured horse is as it advances inexorably towards you.

There is something visceral about the experience that is deeply encoded in the brain of your average bald bipedal primate that causes those that haven't been trained to cope to seriously reconsider their life choices.

I distinctly recall thinking, now I can see why you would employ Centaurs as cops. All the upside without any of the down.

I agree with you that for the most part mounted police are an anachronism and might well be inflated in number by their own self promotion. However I do also agree with Frank that they do have a niche that they are supremely well suited to and that isn't going away any time soon, herding crowds of people.

On the point of vehicles with mirrored glass being better than counter-spelling. Good luck protecting a crowd from magical threats with that. A few Adepts on Unicorns would make any sort of magical shenanigans in large crowds extremely difficult and I can imagine any number of scenarios where that would be hugely useful.

[Zinegata]

This is a real strange set of responses to this thread. Neither Knasser or I have denied that Mounted Police have some limited use. My wikipedia link lists quite a few niche roles available to Mounted Police (and it already covers everything mentioned here, and a few more). Knasser was the one who initially mentioned crowd control, not Frank.

The real point of contention is knasser's view that Mounted Police are anachronistic and continue to exist mainly for the sake of their own existence, rather than their actual utility. Frank denies this and insists that horses are very useful for catching criminals who are on foot.

The problem is, knasser has been proven correct. Resoundingly. If Mounted Police were so hugely useful, why do they consist of less than 1% of the London police force?

Some have argued that people who dismiss Mounted Police "don't know what horses can do". But the Mounties certainly had decades of experience with horses, and they got rid of them entirely in regular policework.

So who should we believe, a bunch of Internet know-it-alls, or actual Mountie policy based on decades of actual experience?

The truth is, mounted police ARE a very niche branch of today's police forces, regardless of Frank's delusions. If you want to catch criminals fleeing on foot, cardio > mounts.

[Stahlseele]

i still hope the license goes to pegasus games in germany for a change . .

Call me an Anglophile but after the whole "nexi" thing I'd really prefer the license be held by a company that doesn't treat English as a second language.

Why?
You afraid you'll get to see/experience what we had to endure with the translations all this time? ^^

[Jay Levine]

Jay, I'm still finalizing my mental picture of who the players are and where they stand. Are you one of the few people still working for Catalyst? I'm just curious.

No, I haven't been writing for Catalyst since 2008. I still keep in touch with the freelancers, but I had my falling out with Catalyst before the recent drama and I just don't have any interest in writing for them again right now.

[Wesley Street]

I've yet to meet anyone who has actually, seriously ran an adventure off of a PDF on a laptop, so we're going to gloss over that option.

I'm running the Star Wars Saga 'Dawn of Defiance' adventure series off my laptop. I'd prefer not to but printing those layered PDFs has a tendency to freeze the commercial copiers and printers I have access to.

It's slower to scroll than it is to flip a physical page but it works fine.

Call me an Anglophile but after the whole "nexi" thing I'd really prefer the license be held by a company that doesn't treat English as a second language.

Why?
You afraid you'll get to see/experience what we had to endure with the translations all this time? ^^

Yes.

[Username17]

On Piracy: when Napster got big, CD sales went up. When they shut Napster down, CD sales went down.

If you give out samples of product and that product is good, people will be more likely to buy it than if you don't. This is a simple fact, even in a digital world where those samples can be copied and traded. People do not sell less CDs when their songs are played more on the radio. People do not sell less tickets to movies when clips show up on Youtube.

Piracy increases sales. If people pirate more, exposure is larger and more people will buy. People will purchase things that they can get for free. A lot more people would read and play with my D&D rules if I sold them than they do right now where I give them out for free.

-Username17

[Juton]

One point about the mounties, they aren't regular police (despite their name). Their function is more analogous to the FBI, they do domestic intelligence and investigate multi-provincial or multi-national crime. So they aren't doing foot patrols (except maybe in the territories). That type of stuff is left to the municipal and provincial cops. For instance the municipality of Wellington has a population of 200K and exactly 2 horses, and the mounted program has been cancelled and restarted once in the last ten years.

[Neurosis]

I've yet to meet anyone who has actually, seriously ran an adventure off of a PDF on a laptop, so we're going to gloss over that option.

I have. In only one case was it 'pirated' though, and even then it was more like abandonware.

[Doom]

Yeah, asserting that the Mounties don't use horses is much like saying our air force doesn't use horses...true, but not really relevant to the discussion.

Nobody's saying horses are good for everything in all cases, either. But there will always be cases where they come in handy. Some police cruisers have shotguns, and the 'jaws of life', if I recall correctly...useful every day? Nope, but still useful every once in a blue moon.

Similarly, if we had unicorns, it would make more sense to have our mounted police (those few that we keep around just for unusual circumstances) on those, almost certainly preferable to horses.

[Zinegata]

Yeah, asserting that the Mounties don't use horses is much like saying our air force doesn't use horses...true, but not really relevant to the discussion.

First of all, I've already shown that a "local" police force - the London Police force - employs less than 1% of its officers as mounted officers.

So your attempt to dismiss this evidence is frankly dishonest. It's totally relevant, because it shows even the police forces that use horses use them very, very sparingly in niche roles.

Secondly, Royal Canadian Mounted Police. They do in fact also patrol the borders, so the "catch people fleeing on foot" scenario is totally valid for them. Heck, the US Border Patrol uses them, but in such tiny numbers that they're outnumbered by the Border Patrol's fucking air fleet.

Moreover, you claimed that people who dismiss Mounted Police don't have experience with horses. Again. Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Are you seriously gonna claim they have no experience with horses?

Nobody's saying horses are good for everything in all cases, either.

*ahem* I present what Frank actually said, instead of what you claim he said:

First: you know absolutely nothing about police work, an should stop talking. Mounted police have a considerable presence not just in crowd control, but also in patrolling. In fact, they will continue to have a purpose as long as a large percentage of crime is committed by people on foot.

Less than 1% of the London police force is in no way "considerable". People who have shown actual numbers of Mounted Police in their locality likewise cite utterly pathetic numbers.

Will people seriously stop sucking Frank's cock?

[theye1]

The whole situation is freaking insane, not even a fucking a wrist slap for stealing 1 million dollars? From outsider perspective, It seems almost certain that other members of the company are involved or they're gullible morons. To be honest I am leaning towards the latter, you've got to be a fucking moron to embrace a person who burned you so badly.

On a separate note, how would go about a job application for senior management position for Catalyst Game Labs? I've got a mortgage to pay off.

edit: Sorry to come back, but it fucking bugs me that Loren L. Coleman is still involved with company even after basically admitting to either embezzlement or criminal incompetence. Either fucking way, he shouldn't be anywhere near the fucking company.