5th edition, Chapter by Chapter

[Username17]

In SR, you basically want to assume that hackers can actually do stuff to defended systems, and yeah the best defense against that for the unskilled should be to avoid the matrix entirely.

No. That's a terrible model. The simple reality is that if the best defense is drop out, then people will drop out of the matrix during actual missions and the hacker won't have anything to do. The key is that - like with magic - the best defense needs to be to invest in defenses. Since you can put up shielding and put your computers in a protected vault, there just isn't any way to enforce a pure carrot model on computers. You especially can't enforce a carrot model on cyberlimbs - those things don't get anything from having wireless enabled.

1. They have IC/Spiders and they can't hold you off, in which case there is no defense against hackers.

2. They have IC/spiders and they can hold you off, which makes hacking basically suck completely since you can't really hack through defenses.

That's D&D thinking clouding your judgment. And it applies equally to street samurai and magicians too. If any player isn't expected to win their face off against the security measures arrayed against them, the players are't expected to succeed at their mission. There is however a third possibility. A very important possibility that is the basis for most shadowruns:

• 3. The hacker/mage/street samurai/whatever is expected to defeat the on-site security, but has a very real chance of alerting response forces. The response forces will have some response time, and are of sufficient total power to overwhelm the character and their whole team, thus giving the characters a stark choice between speed and silence, and the very real chance that they will be forced to adapt to a speed strategy if silence fails.

Magic requires a line of sight, which means you can just as easily shoot the mage.

Hacking doesn't require that. You have a functional range of about like 300 meters which can actively go through walls and in three dimensions.

Why do you believe that is a given? Seriously, that's a serious problem with your idea - not with mine.

Holo Hacking would be light dependent, so it would presumably be LOS dependent. Although it would probably actually be "around the corner LOS" like explosives. That is, you need to put the pattern at a point you have LOS to, and the camera/observer you want to affect needs to have LOS to the camera.

Ultrasound interference wouldn't be stopped by solid objects, but it would be pretty short range, and the presence of changes between solid/non-solid would drastically reduce range.

Radio hacking of course would go through walls, but it also would require a radio receiver - and it can be stopped by Wi-Fi blocking paint.

So yes, if someone turns on Wireless, they can be hacked through a wall. But they can also provide signal defense and fight back. If they leave Matrix immersion all the way off, they can only be hacked from points they can see (and can't be killed through that hacking, because they can only be hit with things off the holo hacking list). If they cover their eyes, holo hacking effects can't even get them - but they'll be literally running around blind. If they switch to Ultrasound, a hacker can feed them ultrasound interference, which means he hacker controls the vertical and the horizontal unless someone provides some signal defense.

-Username17

[Crissa]

If you turn off the wireless, weird things should stop working. Like the lights. The doors. The toilets. The coffee machine and the refrigerator. Cabinets and desk drawers and chairs and power outlets! Uniforms and hats and those snazzy buttons you downloaded onto your satchel holding your digital hanky.

Everything in the future is networked, using cloud computing and everything should be reporting its status to all sorts of things from outlets saying they've had a big device plugged into them which would notify maintenance to make sure the trunk lines can handle it and telling the power supplier its needs and specifications so they can plan to supply it with energy and power it down in case of power failure as well as offer the outlet's owner a discount on buying a more energy efficient version of the device!

Think of everything suddenly being like your cel phone. It probably completely fails to work when it is offline (many can't even use their contact lists when taken offline). Our smartphones right now work alright while offline, but in the future it will remain cheaper to have someone else's computer do all the work. And when you're choosing between a $5 device that works everywhere you live with the same features of a $500 device that happens to work on Mt Everest, you know which one people will choose.

-Crissa

[Username17]

Access to 24/7 VR porn and real-time updates on burrito recalls from StufferShack is ample and sufficient reason for Jake's House to have the wireless turned on for basically everything. From the front door to the trid to the fridge. Heck, rich people right now leave the wireless on for their garage doors, even though it's an 8 bit code that a hacker can run through in seconds. Homes just aren't very secure, they have windows, that are made of glass. And any lock or alarm you put on a house is basically just security theater, good for catching no one who is more skilled in intrusion than Beavis and Butthead.

So when the immediate mission is "break into Jake's house and gather clues about the disappearance" then it makes perfect sense for the Hacker to be able to do useful things, no matter what the relative security profile of leaving wireless on or off happens to be, or how easy it is to cover a building with wi-fi blocking paper or whatever.

But remember, you still got two other classic missions:

• Go into the sewers and fight a tribe of goblins armed with spears.
  and
• Go into a secure NeoNET facility where they actually designed the fucking security to be difficult to breach by skilled criminals.

And for that, you want and need for a diverse selection of computer thingies to be more secure than going full luddite or turning on a jammer 24/7. Also, you need to have the Hacker have something to do if their opponents are all meat.

-Username17

[A Man In Black]

Basically you want to make all technology hackable. The cost of having weak matrix security should mean that you lose electronic devices, and there shouldn't be some cheap substitute to matrix security like copper paint. But if someone wants to run their office pencil and paper, no cameras, no smartguns and no computers, they totally should be able to do that and basically not care if there's no matrix security. Of course, only very small offices could even afford to do that from a business standpoint. Fact of the matter is that any decent business needs telecommunication equipment. That means you have to interact with the matrix. Cutting yourself off from technology is literally not an option from any even mildly serious business.

Have you worked in a truly secure office environment, in the real world? Real-world secure installations really do use low-tech expediencies like just not using insecure technology at all. If high-end security in 2070 requires pencils, papers, and no technology more complicated than typewriters, ballpoint pens, and paper shredders, then extremely high-end secure installations are going to be running using no technology from after 1950.

That's completely out of genre. It's just not fun. But if you're building a fantasy world, you need to make sure the setting doesn't make castles in the cloud impractical or impossible.

I don't have a problem with handwaving this. A cyberpunk future doesn't make sense in a lot of ways. I can understand why Frank does.

[Crissa]

The thing is, in 2070 profits outweigh security many times over. In the real world, there are many times businesses choose more expediency over security or ethics.

Basically, there may rooms covered in anti-hacker paper and where you have to surrender your cel phone, but they aren't the majority. When all traders trade at speeds of our insider traders and the average worker has the equivalent to a smartphone and a cache of wikipedia in their head, you will want the wireless up so you can watch your corp drones - and by that I mean people.

The sewer will be just as wired as the office, because that will be cheaper than having workers go there. And even if they really are off the grid, every doodad you encounter will have a cloud configuration and every place will have its schematics online for the fire department.

-Crissa

[Murtak]

Ok, so what are the actual issues? Frank posits that Decker, Mage and Samurai are archetypes and all of them need to be viable. I think this is reasonable. "Viable" in this case means "is useful in the vast majority of situations" and "on average is equally useful as the other archetypes". So if a decker is to be viable compared to a mage he needs to be able to cool stuff on his own turf as often as the mage, or less cool stuff more often. Equality is probably better, but that may be personal opinion coloring my judgement.

Clearly mages and deckers have a turf all of their own - astral space and the matrix respectively. Seems fair so far (except for the samurai of course). Both can be shut down by background count or shielded facilities. Again, seems fair. Both can gather information. Astral scouting and spirit searches versus finding stuff online, snooping through wireless cameras and flat out hacking into records - looks like deckers win here. That leaves combat and utility. Mages get a fairly impressive array of levitation, healing, detection spells, suggestion, invisibility and so on. Deckers get to neutralize site defenses, if they are wired to the matrix. Even assuming they can get into most defenses and turn them off (or turn them against guards) that seems like a net loss. Overall I'd say mages have a very slight edge so far.

Combat then. Mages can throw fireballs, mana bolts, possibly even take over a member of the enemy team and of course summon spirits. Deckers can ... possibly hack someone's cyberware or perhaps jam a drone. That is not much. Of course grenades and assault rifles make up for combat spells a lot of the time, but mages don't need to lug around forbidden weaponry.

So the possible choices seem to be:
1. Leave deckers weaker than mages and make them cheaper. If they want to be effective in combat they can branch out into being a samurai or something.
2. Make deckers combat-effective. Holograms seems like a decent choice, because they already exist in cyberpunk sources and because they can plausibly be countered by having cyberware built into you.

Being able to mind-control or flatline anyone within range of your signal seems excessive to me. Deckers already have a crapton of stuff to do. If they need something to do in combat besides pulling a gun or lobbing grenades, I am fine with it being only temporarily disabling.

Of course all of this begs the question: what is the samurai's shtick? Compared to both mages and deckers he seems to be lacking in cool stuff to do.

[Fuchs]

Where does the rigger fit in there? SR4 seems to fold drone riggers and hackers into the same "category".

[Murtak]

So far, not at all. I started with Frank's premise of 3 original archetypes. If Hackers do get the rigging shtick, they will surpass mages in capabilities. However, let's have a look at rigging. What do you need to be a rigger? A semi-expensive piece of cyberware, vehicle skills, a reaction stat. Sounds like it fits the samurai at least as well as the decker.

Personally I am not even sure if this hard separation into archetypes is the right way to go. It is a reasonable way of approaching character abilities. But there are other ways. What if you could just mix and match shticks? Let every character have 3 shticks. Our iconic mage, Sally Tsung, has spirit summoning, illusions and combat magic - all mage shticks, but not necessarily the only mage shticks and there is no reason she could not pick non-mage shticks. Ghost has stealth, senses and combat. Dodger has hacking, electronics and data search. But there is no reason why an iconic mercenary could not have combat, mechanic and connections, a ganger stealth, negotiation and lots-of-friends and a mage detective senses, summoning and data search.

Of course the underlying system need not actually handle such a shtick as a discrete item. You can use the same or a similar system as 4E. But I believe a singular archetype as a balance point is too broad. While I have seen the odd augmented combat monster, most characters in my campaigns have been much more diverse.

[Username17]

Clearly mages and deckers have a turf all of their own - astral space and the matrix respectively. Seems fair so far (except for the samurai of course). Both can be shut down by background count or shielded facilities. Again, seems fair. Both can gather information. Astral scouting and spirit searches versus finding stuff online, snooping through wireless cameras and flat out hacking into records - looks like deckers win here.

I wouldn't necessarily give Deckers the nod there. The mage has got spirits, who can do some pretty amazing stuff as far as information gathering goes. But regardless, the point that they got their own turf is well established. And that's the key. The less the Mage or Hacker have to leave their own turf in order to contribute, the more the Street Samurai can be different. Which brings us to the next point:

Where does the rigger fit in there? SR4 seems to fold drone riggers and hackers into the same "category".

Shadowrun is a skill based system. Ideally, no two characters are going to have to be exactly the same. Furthermore, Shadowrun throws up a number of "optional" or "hybrid" archetypes that it uses fairly often. The most obvious of course are the Rigger (sort of a Hacker/Samurai), the Technomancer (sort of a Hacker/Mage), and the Adept (sort of a Mage/Samurai). But there are lots of variants - ideally several dozen concepts that you could throw out there and have that call to mind a set of skills and array of competencies.

But before you make sure that you can make a valid Bounty Hunter (a low-rent samurai with a lot of information gathering) or a Mercenary (a low-power Samurai that has more logistics skills and tries to make up for combat shortcomings by using heavier and less subtle weaponry); you got to make sure you can keep the big three in business. And the big three are the ones who were on the SR1 Core Book cover: Dodger, Sally, and Ghost.

There are an awful lot of characters that I would like to be playable:

• Bounty Hunter
• Street Ganger
• Tribal Warrior
• Rocker
• Bodyguard
• Rigger
• Spy
• Mercenary
• Former Company Man
• Former Wage Mage (with oddly mannish face and obscure reference)
• Adept
• Private Detective
• Face
• Burned Out Mage
• Technomancer
• Medic
• Eco Terrorist
• Actor
• Smuggler

But of course, the only ones that are absolutely essential are the Hacker, the Mage, and the Street Samurai. Hell, SR4 screwed the vehicle rules so bad that the Vehicle Rigger character type ceased to exist, and the game was fine. Really any of the individual classic archetypes can come or go, except the big three, that need to be supported.

Being able to mind-control or flatline anyone within range of your signal seems excessive to me.

It is indeed not super necessary. Making that not happen takes some doing, and specifically it takes rewriting the Trode Nets into being something other than a "real" DNI. The whole idea of Holo Hacking is basically predicated on the idea of that paste that sends the matrix into your brain from outside your head not existing. Or at least, capping it at projecting some meaningfully inferior second-tier matrix that doesn't send mind control or flatline commands (and by extension had better be noticeably inferior in some other key ways, because that's a pretty fucking huge advantage for the "second tier" Matrix).

-Username17

[Murtak]

Making that not happen takes some doing, and specifically it takes rewriting the Trode Nets into being something other than a "real" DNI.

That would be a good thing anyway, because it would explain why data jacks exist in the first place.

The whole idea of Holo Hacking is basically predicated on the idea of that paste that sends the matrix into your brain from outside your head not existing.

I thought you just ripped that from Neuromancer. Presumably, with some sufficiently hand-wavy future tech you could just project actual holograms into thin air. The size (read: angle) and power of your projector would determine how far you could project how large an illusion and some cyberware could help you see through the effect. Producing static or blinding people (especially those without cybereyes) should be doable in combat, producing more sophisticated illusion might require more powerful hardware, close range, multiple projectors or any combination thereof.

Or at least, capping it at projecting some meaningfully inferior second-tier matrix that doesn't send mind control or flatline commands (and by extension had better be noticeably inferior in some other key ways, because that's a pretty fucking huge advantage for the "second tier" Matrix).

You could always just cap program ratings or make cybercombat checks impossible when using second-tier access. Or just make non-extended tests take more time (or limit the number of initiative passes). Any of these pretty much mean that if you want to crack a hot system you have to go DNI or you will just lose every opposed test.

[baduin]

Why not combine the Decker and the Rigger into one archetype? If the party are fighting spear-armed goblins and there are no electronic gadgets in their lair to take over, the decker can bring his own remote-controlled toys.

Some funny real-world toys:
http://www.bostondynamics.com/

BTW: if someone wants to be unhackable, he cannot have any wireless connection, even inactive. All cell-phones must be carried in Faraday cages - even a turned-off phone without battery can be otherwise used to eavesdrop.

I can imagine sewer-dwelling goblins with spears, but goblins without cell-phones would be pretty radical.

[Murtak]

Why not combine the Decker and the Rigger into one archetype? If the party are fighting spear-armed goblins and there are no electronic gadgets in their lair to take over, the decker can bring his own remote-controlled toys.

1. Because outside of extremely rare situations this leaves the decker being able to do next to everything.
2. Because this is not remotely a canonical archetype.

[Akula]

Moreover it would lead the decker to take much more concrete steps out of the Matrix.

[baduin]

Visual hacking in SF:

http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/blit.htm

BLIT
a short story by David Langford

It was like being caught halfway through a flashy film-dissolve. The goggles broke up the dim street, split and reshuffled it along diagonal lines: a glowing KEBABS sign was transposed into the typestyle they called Shatter. Safest to keep the goggles on, Robbo had decided. Even in the flickering electric half-light before dawn, you never knew what you might see. Just his luck if the stencil jumped from under his arm and unrolled itself before his eyes as he scrabbled for it on the pavement.

[endersdouble]

Have you worked in a truly secure office environment, in the real world? Real-world secure installations really do use low-tech expediencies like just not using insecure technology at all. If high-end security in 2070 requires pencils, papers, and no technology more complicated than typewriters, ballpoint pens, and paper shredders, then extremely high-end secure installations are going to be running using no technology from after 1950..

So for what it's worth, I have worked in such an environment. And let me tell you, what the rules say can go in that room and what actually goes in the room are...somewhat different. I could tell interesting stories about cell phones going off where they really shouldn't even exist. TL;DR: the rules may say no tech after 1950, but it's convenient enough that people will break the rules.

This isn't enough to save the hacker's job, but it's worth remembering.

[Lokathor]

The Melee Minigame: Does it really have to suck?

I've got what you might call an aspiring physical adept in my gaming group. He runs about 4 miles a day, works out a lot, recently got his yellow belt in kung fu. He wants to play a character with a dart taser and a katana, and wants to be able to chop fools up in melee. Except melee attacks are complex actions, so even though he's invested more BP into his melee skills, his taser ends up being more effective just because he can shoot at two people compared to one.

Does the melee minigame of shadowrun have to be so much weaker than guns? Could melee attacks just be simple actions and then have the fact that guns shoot you from 30 meters away keep them ahead?

[Murtak]

Yes, but that still does not make melee combat interesting. You still get hit by a higher defense pool, but more importantly Shadowrun has no precise placement of characters. You can still judge cover and lines of sight for ranged combat, because people are still a couple of meters apart, usually more. But there is simply no provision for combat within a couple of feet. Cover, reach, interposing, guarding, lunges, ripostes - all of that stuff is missing or highly abstracted. Pretty much the best you can hope for is to make melee combat worthwhile and then use the various special moves from Arsenal and the dice results to work out what cool and flashy stuff you just did.

[Lokathor]

As far as placement: We were kinda using 2m = 1square on the battlemat that I have. Dwarves can move 1 square every IP, Humans can move 1 square every IP and +1 square once a round, and Trolls can move 2 squares every IP (which is technically +1m to their speed, but whatever I think trolls should be cooler and there aren't any troll PCs). Those are all Walking/Jogging speeds of course.

Not having read Arsenal very closely (I just checked out the drone lists), what sorts of things should be used from there to make it extra interesting? I mean, I've never found any melee or ranged combat minigame to be what I'd call particularly "interesting" (DnD, SR, ED, WoD). It always just seems like you're rolling some dice and pushing a few numbers around to me. I guess I just don't know what you and others are talking about when you say that melee is or isn't interesting.

Side Question For SR4 then: Could melee attacks (and the Distance Strike Adept Power) just be turned into Simple Actions without the game exploding in my face unintentionally?

[Username17]

Melee combat is boned in four ways:

• The fact that it takes a Complex Action instead of a Simple Action means that the damage over time is always going to be bullshit.
• The fact that it doesn't reach across the street or up in the air means that it has severely limited utility.
• The fact that enemies get higher Defense pools, and in the case of enemies you really care about much higher defense pools means that it's a sucker's gambit.
• The fact of the two-shot problem inherently invalidates any fighting style that does not get off at least two shots in an action.

Now, simplifying the attack sequence by dropping the Defense Roll, and then adding LMSD damage back in to nix the Two-Shot Problem could by themselves make melee relevant. After all, a monowhip fits in a ring and does as much damage as an anti-material rifle. If it was possible to drop enemies with singular large attacks and melee attacks ever connected, such a fighting style could be totally workable even if pistols had longer range and a better rate of fire. Add in a rebalancing to make spirits suckers in melee as advertised and you got yourself something viable sounding.

But as Murtak points out: that's still not particularly interesting. You don't have any real decisions to make or tactical tradeoffs. There are no maneuvers to contemplate, risk, or expend. There is no positional imperative, no struggle for the highground, no cutting off avenues of retreat. Game mechanically, a monowhip attack is just like a machine pistol with a shorter range, a lower rate of fire, and a larger damage code. All you're doing is saying "Bang! You're Dead!" in the fine tradition of Cops and Robbers and then rolling dice to see if you are right.

Adding in tactical complexity should be a set of optional rules in the SR5 version of Cannon Companion/Arsenal. Whatever it ends up being called, it should have choices available for stances or maneuvers or something to make combat deeper - or at least more confusing so it looks deeper. But definitely have it be an optional rule in an expansion book. No one needs deliberate rules obfuscation in the form of extra modifier layers in a ruleset they are learning.

-Username17

[RandomCasualty2]

Why not combine the Decker and the Rigger into one archetype? If the party are fighting spear-armed goblins and there are no electronic gadgets in their lair to take over, the decker can bring his own remote-controlled toys.

That's what I would figure. Being a hacker isn't honestly very expensive. You need like one stat and a few skills, plus a cyberdeck/programs which is maybe like 50,000. That leaves plenty of stuff left over to either get combat skills or drones.

Seriously I just don't see why hacking skills need to interact much with nontech users at all, given that hackers can get secondary schticks anyway. And forcing the secondary combat schtick for hackers also leaves the street samurai with more room to have the support skills (face stuff, breaking and entering, etc.).

About Melee Combat: Yeah, melee combat definitely needs to be improved. The complex action melee attack was fucking stupid, I really don't know why it was ever implemented that way in a two shot game. There was no reason ever to use melee.

[Essante]

None of this is going to matter unless, of course, your feeble attempt to try and ruin CGL's chances of getting the license renewed succeeds.

You really should be less fucking transparent about being such a whiny little cunt, Francis. Though kudos to you for suckering all these other fools into thinking you're trying to do the righteous thing as opposed to, oh I don't know, manipulate things so you can build a new bridge to make up for all the ones you burned when you went and got yourself blacklisted for being the whiny little cunt you really, truly are.

That said, you might want to try being a decent human in the future so that it doesn't happen again. Being an asshole and getting fired, then being an even bigger asshole so you can get past your self-inflicted blacklisting, is just sad beyond all description.

Peace,
~E

[A Man In Black]

badly formatted gibberish

I know reading and formatting posts are both hard, but this is all a hypothetical discussion of a new edition. Such discussions are common on TGD.

Just in case you missed it, the very first paragraph of the first post:

So lots of people ask me two similar, but very different questions. The first is what I think will happen with 5th edition Shadowrun, and the other is what I think should happen with 5th edition. These are very different of course, since I won't be in any way involved with deciding who does any of the actual writing, editing, playtesting, graphics, typesetting, or development of the new edition. So I'm just going by the things that you can get people in the design community as a whole to groan and roll their eyes at the mention of for things that will get hit with the change stick. There will - of course - be a lot of change for change's sake. There's really no way to predict any of that. But a number of people, including some of the people who probably will be making those choices, are genuinely curious what choices I would make. So here they are.

[Judging__Eagle]

If melee combat isn't as interesting as ranged combat, nor as balanced, then something is seriously lacking.

Comparing shooting a rim-fire rifle, handgun, shotgun, or high powered rifle; to swinging a machete, flitting a hand-blade, kneecapping with a baseball bat, or swinging a shinai/bokken; they're 'about' the same level of complexity.

However, the melee weapon needs less time to be accurate; and is actually faster than the ranged option.

You can seriously raise a cleaver up and down, with force enough to split a coconut, more times, and faster than you can squeeze off five slugs out of a pump shotgun.

The fact that SR has melee as slower is mind-shockingly boggling. I'm guessing that arm-chair fighters and arm-chair gun user got that to occur.

A system where melee is faster, and does damage based more on locations* struck by the weapon , than weapon used.

*:Normal, Important, Critical; as the designators for 'locations'. I'd rather not have a laundry list of locations; but rather 'groupings' of organs/body parts. Places like the gonads, throat, eyes, kidneys, heart and head are 'critical'. Places like joints, bleeding/blinding spots (foreheads bleed), feet, hands are 'important'; things that will fuck you up and leave you in pain, but not actively kill you. Everything else is 'normal', muscles, limbs.

While shooting is slower (in real life shooting requires aiming, that takes time), and just does a pile of damage, and damage is based on weapon used.

I know that's not truly accurate, and locations struck by a bullet matter greatly, but it's a compromise.

[Moonglum]

None of this is going to matter unless, of course, your feeble attempt to try and ruin CGL's chances of getting the license renewed succeeds.

Obvious troll is obvious, but let's make the level of incompetence here even more obvious.

RPG writers who are paid for their work -- and who depend on that payment as their primary source of income -- generally don't have many other marketable skills, or else they'd be employed in much more profitable professions. Rigorous logical thinking, engaging writing talent, and the ability to interact with people from outside your own narrow subculture and interest are all relatively rare and in-demand. [Credit here to mean_liar, who raised much the same idea on another thread a few weeks ago.]

By contrast, there are people who write well-regarded, well-tested RPG materials for free, purely because having better systems generally known increases the chances that you will be able to find a group of players running a decent game that doesn't require turning a blind eye to huge unexplained defects in the mechanics. RPG systems are somewhat like languages: if there's a language with a well-defined grammar and syntax and a rich vocabulary, and it's fairly widely-spoken, it tends to produce better literature, culture, and technology. But if only a few people speak that language, and the most common language is a bad pidgin mess, it's hard to rise above that shitty level.

If Pathfinder had been an actual improvement to 3.5, the general state of affairs for D&D players would be better. If Shadowrun 4E had better Matrix rules, the general state of affairs for Shadowrun players would be better. The fact that Ends of the Matrix has picked up a good amount of respect from SR players means that many groups who want to have a hacker are better off and will have more enjoyable games with more meaningful challenges.

If a whole bunch of managers at Topps suddenly have massive aneurysms and CGL keeps the SR license, despite CGL's head guys willfully committing actions that are now the subject of lawsuits and public records, SR players everywhere will be worse off because there will likely be few decent new supplements that get published, and some that may actively make games worse if SR GMs start using them.

Notice that in both cases here -- trying to write better Matrix (3.5, WoD, etc.) rules and trying to make CGL's public failures even more public -- Frank Trollman does not have the ulterior motive of payment, because there are other options open to him beyond "professional" RPG work. Medical doctors generally do not need to rely on imaginary hopes of crappy freelance RPG writing pay -- in CGL's case, *literally* imaginary hopes of pay. Ego may certainly come into it, but that's true for most people directly involved in this case.

[DragonChild]

None of this is going to matter unless, of course, your feeble attempt to try and ruin CGL's chances of getting the license renewed succeeds.

It's good to know that you think stealing from single mothers is OK, and ought to be defended and encouraged.