Drunken Review: Shadowrun 5

General questions, debates, and rants about RPGs

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Dean
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Post by Dean »

Ancient History wrote:Really the best version of "What has come to pass" was 2nd Edition.
I don't know Shadowrun. What does that sentence mean?
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Ancient History
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Post by Ancient History »

The history section of Shadowrun, where they explain the history from roughly 1990 to the current year (2050, 2052, etc.), is sometimes titled "What Has Come To Pass." Shadowrun 2nd Edition did a relatively good job at presenting this history quickly, concisely, and keeping up the reader's interest while glossing over the details; SR5's history section is so bad they would have done better to go back and pinch the SR2 version and use it instead.
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Post by Ed »

I'm unclear what Catalyst's rights actually are - if they'd had a notion to do something smart, would they be able to legally use that stuff from SR2?
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Post by Koumei »

Lago PARANOIA wrote:Our various grognards on the board have yet to convince me that specifically going out of your way to spite them (and only them) will do anything but improve the game.
This is one of the few cases where we totally see eye to eye.

As for the priority system, I can certainly see some form of it being able to work. It would be more like choosing your class in D&D, mind you, or perhaps like the [Clan]->[Attribute Priorities]->[Ability Priorities] of White Wolf, but being able to go "My big shtick is that I'm a Mage/Street-Sam/Decker/Your Mum" and then getting the specific stuff you need for that, then deciding what secondary/supporting things you want? That could work.

But it wouldn't just take "having base stats" and "having skills" as things you might or might not want.
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Post by Stahlseele »

The Dorfs losing Thermo was supposedly fixed with the Errata.
Which they actually put out last month or so if i remember correctly.

The Trolls paying double for lifestyle and ware was supposedly fixed with the Errata that was put out last month or so if i remember correctly.
But it actually was not fixed, the wrding of the errata makes it worse and now factors ware into lifestyle . . which means, yes, trolls pay double for ware AGAIN because they pay double FOR LIFESTYLE which the Errata PUTS WARE INTO for some reason!

don't want to believe me?
well, have it your way then:
Original: “Trolls receive Thermographic Vision, +1 Reach, and Dermal Armor, but they also receive the disadvantage of having to pay an additional fifty percent for gear because everything—including cyberware and bioware—must be specially modified to meet their massive physical requirements.”

Errata: “Trolls receive Thermographic Vision, +1 Reach, and Dermal Armor, but they also have the disadvantage of having their Lifestyle costs doubled to reflect the costs of adapting everything they use—especially their gear, including
cyberware or bioware—to meet their massive physical requirements.”
For the Trainwreck that is the SR5 Errata:
http://forums.dumpshock.com/index.php?showtopic=40229

Patrick Goodman at least tried and managed to get Errata out . . that it is this bad is not something that one could fault him for personally i guess.
Last edited by Stahlseele on Mon Mar 17, 2014 1:03 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by codeGlaze »

What, exactly, is DumpShock?
A TGD for Shadowrun, an RPG.net for Shadowrun or an official board of some kind?
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Post by Ancient History »

http://forums.dumpshock.com

Pretty much the main constellation of Shadowrun fansites for a long time, and it was the de facto official forum in the years when there wasn't an official forum.
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Post by Smirnoffico »

I hate priority system with a passion. Again it's a mechanic that achieves exactly the opposite of the stated desired effect (I wonder if it's made on purpose and authors are elaborately fucking everyone over). And in no way is it 'faster' and 'easier' than point buy. I don't even want to imagine how much time it will take to explain priority to new players
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Post by Cyberzombie »

Smirnoffico wrote:I hate priority system with a passion. Again it's a mechanic that achieves exactly the opposite of the stated desired effect (I wonder if it's made on purpose and authors are elaborately fucking everyone over). And in no way is it 'faster' and 'easier' than point buy. I don't even want to imagine how much time it will take to explain priority to new players
I've found priority to be faster (especially for new people), simply because it divides character creation into distinct steps instead of having people do everything at once. Point buy offers a lot of freedom, but it can be very overwhelming.

The problem is that the speed gain isn't a big deal when you're talking about Shadowrun, because you still have to buy gear regardless of the character building system, and buying gear takes forever.

Unless they want to vastly dumb down Shadowrun to the point of getting rid of the catalog of stuff, then it'll always take a very long time to make characters. The only real solution is to offer solid pregens for people to use.
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Post by NineInchNall »

Um ... Priority takes longer than straight point buy, because you have to consider the products of multiple priority arrangements. Is it better to put metatype at B and attributes at C, or vice versa? Or should I put attributes at A and MoR at B? Answering those questions requires statting each combination out to see what you can get.

On the other hand, with point buy you just put points into what you want. And then you're done.
Last edited by NineInchNall on Mon Mar 17, 2014 2:44 am, edited 2 times in total.
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Post by Smirnoffico »

Priority slows down chargen in two ways.

First, you have to explain the whole system to the player. It's rather easy if you have experienced and math-savvy players, but if they fail to register on any of these, there will be problems. Also it means you are doing the same work twice. Instead of saying 'you create character with this and this, then you get experience points with which you improve character according to the same system', we go to 'here's the system to generate character, it limits you here, here and here, when we are done here's another, different system for improving your character.'

Second, if I decide half-way through character creation that I want to change something, I need to go all way back and start over. If I later decide to change something else, I need to go back once more. With pointbuy I just adjust some point and don't need to change my metatype because I want to be a mage and have slightly more money.

Lastly, judging by my personal experience only, the longest part of character creation in SR4 is gear ('ware included). Obviously priory does nothing to speed up this part of the chargen, it just gives the player a fixed amount of cash

Priority seems to be faster if the player just picks up everything straight, without weighting his options, going back and forth with priority choices and thinking about character improvement. And players always do these things
Last edited by Smirnoffico on Mon Mar 17, 2014 2:44 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Cyberzombie »

NineInchNall wrote:Um ... Priority takes longer than straight point buy, because you have to consider the products of multiple priority arrangements. Is it better to put metatype at B and attributes at C, or vice versa? Or should I put attributes at A and MoR at B? Answering those questions requires statting each combination out to see what you can get.

On the other hand, with point buy you just put points into what you want. And then you're done.
For experienced players, yeah you're right. But with newbies, they're not going to go start a character from scratch. More or less they're going to complete step 1 of assigning priorities then go on to step 2. They probably are more interested in getting a character made rather than optimizing for a game they don't really know well in the first place.
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Post by NineInchNall »

You have an interesting idea of how someone new to a game will approach it. Being new to Shadowun myself, I immediately started bashing my head against the wall that is the priority system.
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Post by codeGlaze »

Cyberzombie wrote:
NineInchNall wrote:Um ... Priority takes longer than straight point buy, because you have to consider the products of multiple priority arrangements. Is it better to put metatype at B and attributes at C, or vice versa? Or should I put attributes at A and MoR at B? Answering those questions requires statting each combination out to see what you can get.

On the other hand, with point buy you just put points into what you want. And then you're done.
For experienced players, yeah you're right. But with newbies, they're not going to go start a character from scratch. More or less they're going to complete step 1 of assigning priorities then go on to step 2. They probably are more interested in getting a character made rather than optimizing for a game they don't really know well in the first place.
In-before-arguments-to-the-contrary.

This is, in fact, how a sizable chunk of new players will react to many games. Not necessarily representative of Dennizens.
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Post by Longes »

Stahlseele wrote: For the Trainwreck that is the SR5 Errata:
http://forums.dumpshock.com/index.php?showtopic=40229

Patrick Goodman at least tried and managed to get Errata out . . that it is this bad is not something that one could fault him for personally i guess.
And only a year has passed...
SAMPLE CHARACTER CHANGES
Several changes are needed to the sample characters, including
the following:
The Street Samurai should have a contact added: Fixer
(Connection 4, Loyalty 2)
The Street Shaman’s Social limit should be changed from
7 to 8.
The Combat Mage’s Physical limit should be changed from
6 to 5.
The Face’s Physical limit should be changed from 3 to 4,
and Mental limit changed from 5 to 6.
The Tank’s Physical limit should be changed from 10 to 9 (11).
The Decker’s Mental limit should be changed from 6 (7) to 7.
The Drone Rigger’s Physical limit should be changed from
6 to 5 (6), and the Mental limit changed from 5 to 6.
The Sprawl Ganger’s limits should be changed from Physical
8, Mental 4, Social 5 to Physical 9, Mental 5, Social 6.
The Bounty Hunter’s Physical limit should be changed
from 7 to 9, and Social limit changed from 4 to 5.
WHAT IS WRONG WITH THOSE PEOPLE?!
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Post by Rawbeard »

Everything. Why do you ask?
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Post by Username17 »

Combat

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Combat in Shadowrun has often been accused of being too fiddly and time consuming. This is basically a fair assessment. Shadowrun uses a three second combat round, rolls initiative every round, has multiple turns per round, multiple actions per turn, and has an attack roll, a dodge roll, and a soak roll. People get so many actions to track in a 3 second combat round that the nomenclature of time and action declaration is somewhat muddled. That leaves a considerable amount of space for streamlining. The minimum number of rolls to make combat not suck is to have an attack roll or a dodge roll and a damage roll or a soak roll. Any less than that, and things become shitty (see nWoD), but D&D works fine with just two and no games from RuneQuest to Exalted have made things any better with extra die rolls. It would be extremely easy to make Shadowrun combat less fiddly by reducing some of the granularity. That would be a good thing, and there would be much rejoicing. Unsurprisingly, the authors of SR5 elected to not even reach for such low hanging fruit, endeavoring instead to find ways to piss me off. And boy did they.

The big combat change is the attack limit. That thing makes no sense on first, second, or third reading, so I think it's time for RPG history storytime. For a brief period in 1st edition, Shadowrun gave people one attack each time their action came up unless they had a weapon that fired on full auto in which case things went crazy and they wanted you to track bullet walking and shit. It was very brief, because people pointed out that triggers could be pulled fairly quickly when it came down to it, and when the Street Samurai Catalog came out in 1990 they introduced the “reactive trigger” to let people shoot twice on their actions. This was such a popular mod that everyone did it, and by 2nd edition it was just assumed that all weapons came with one and shooting became a thing you could do twice per action when the great action cost reassignment came. So when someone comes in and tries to reassert the 1 shot per initiative pass rule, they aren't being all grognardy for 1st edition – they are being all grognardy for a period spanning a few months at the beginning of 1st edition. Someone is literally saying that they want to reset the clock to before the first expansion book for 1st edition. Really.

But let's do this shit in order. First we have Initiative. As mentioned earlier, SR5 has decided to go all grognardy on us and instituted a mechanic where you determine how many times you go by rolling a number of dice, adding the results together, adding some other numbers, and then counting how many times you can subtract ten before you get into negatives. It doesn't use mechanics used elsewhere in Shadowrun, it's clumsy, it's fiddly, it's swingy, and it's explained poorly. It would be pretty easy to make this system have less math steps (like increasing everyone's base initiative by ten and having the tens digit of your initiative result being the number of initiative passes you get with no subtraction steps), but really the bottom line is that we shouldn't be doing shit like this at all. SR4 gave people constant numbers of initiative passes that didn't require figuring or fiddling every fucking round and that worked fine. There was no need or desire to revert this shit.

But beyond that, representing super speed as players declaring and resolving extra actions in early eighties thinking. Hell, that's pretty much what the original haste spell did in 1970s D&D. It's obvious, but it's not particularly good. “You're going fast so you act more” is something that is easy to explain to people, but in actual play it does not “feel fast.” It feels slow, because more action declarations slows the game down in a very real way. It's a tabletop RPG, so you move at the speed you can declare actions and roll dice, which doesn't actually change when your character is nominally moving very fast. Considering how central super speed is to the game (the Street Samurai, one of the primary archetypes, is virtually defined by having cybernetic speed enhancement), it would have been nice to see super speed in general updated to a more 21st century mechanic that actually felt fast in play. But instead we're not only seeing a rehash of a thoroughly 1980s vision of how super speed is supposed to look, we're also reviving clumsy 1980s initiative accounting for no damn reason. It takes four fucking pages for this book to explain this combat turn, and I think I should just move on.

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Super Speed!

One of the key things that has changed over the years has been how fast people move. With all the magic and technology being thrown around, the interactions can be pretty intense. Back in first edition, cyborgs could run at car speeds, because a character's movement was calculated per action. In later editions, people got so angry at the thought of the Six Million Dollar Man being able to run very fast* that movement rates were tied to combat turns. In fourth edition, a compromise was reached, where your basic movement was for the 3 second combat turn but you could take sprint actions to increase your speed on each initiative pass, so cyborgs moved somewhat faster than normal people but not amazingly so. Also of note: in 1st edition Dwarves and Trolls moved very slowly, and then in later editions Trolls were changed to moving very fast. SR5 grognards up the Troll movement (they are back to being slow), and then does a really weird patch on SR4 movement. See, in SR4 your base movement was divided between your initiative passes, but in SR5 your initiative passes aren't fixed, so that's hard to do. So instead they let you move however much you want whenever you want, but have to keep a running tally of how much you've used. Once you've moved farther than your walking limit, you are subsequently considered to be running. Seriously. But you still have the “sprinting” action which no longer causes you to move extra distance but instead increases your running distance cap for the turn. This means for starters that you can be sprinting and walking at the same time, and also that the game literally encourages “Scooby Doo” movement where you spend actions pumping your legs without going anywhere and then zip away.

*: That sounds ridiculous when you say it out loud, but that's what happened.

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Zoinks!

Astral Actions and Matrix Actions are referenced, but they have their own system chapters and we really need to devote a whole post to each, so we'll do that.

I should probably say something about “free” actions. You only get one, but the GM can choose to let you have more. This is how the game has worked for a long time and it sucks. Technically you aren't really allowed to talk during combat, which is boring and stupid. It also means that a lot of things in the game that seem like they do something actually don't. You get 2 simple actions and 1 Free Action during an initiative pass, so being allowed to do something as a Free Action instead of a Simple Action is quite often not actually an advantage at all. Historically, most GMs seem to forget the Free Action limit even exists in my experience, so whatever.

As I mentioned earlier, the big change in this edition is that even though you get two simple actions each initiative pass, only one of those actions is allowed to be an “attack” action. That's incredibly unimmersive and metagame, but it's actually worse than that because what exactly constitutes an “attack” is not defined. At all. Anywhere. When asked point blank about it, one of the designers straight up said that he would not and could not define “attack” in a satisfactory manner, and you should figure it out for yourself. It's like AD&D invisibility arguments all over again. But so much worse, because it's every character on every turn of every combat forever. Basic power gaming is thus reduced to figuring out something you can do that assists your allies in combat that your MC doesn't think counts as an “attack” because if you can do that your combat effectiveness almost doubles. More advanced power gaming involves automatics, explosives, and autofire grenade launchers, because attacking more than one enemy still counts as a single action so the single attack restriction doesn't really affect you much. Double tapping one dude in the chest is off limits, but firing a spread of grenades that catch all your opponents in the splash damage from several explosions is totally kosher. Why? No one fucking knows.

The one attack limit is one of the central changes of this edition. It has no balance justification, no in-world justification, no coherent explanation even of how it works, and it has no effect at all on the high end of firepower. I do not understand why this happened. I have read the designers explaining why they did it, and I still don't understand why they did it. It's one of those ideas that is obviously a shit idea because it's really obviously a shit idea.

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Shadowrun has always had a problem with damage scaling in every edition. 1st Edition had a really innovative and neat damage system where everyone and everything had the same number of hit points and tougher things took less wounds from bigger attacks. Unfortunately, it was married to a vairable target number system, so to scale things properly to an attack with six more power, you'd need a defender rolling six times as many dice on the soak test. It got ridiculous fast, and the designers didn't realize nearly how ridiculous it was getting and supposedly tough enemies and vehicles weren't tough to high end weapons at all. Shadowrun 4 fixed that problem, but introduced a new problem called the “two shot problem” by having the wounds go semi-non-proportional. It now took twice as many hits to soak an attack with twice the power and that just wasn't fucking happening. In the reference range that players dealt in, almost any attack you'd actually use would take out almost any target you'd actually face in exactly two hits. Coincidentally, you got to attack twice on your action, so the game was basically “succeed at your dodge roll or go down.” At the high end, many more dice were being rolled and the number of hit points being tracked was larger and this all just worked to make things more deterministic.

Image

So the design space is actually well demarcated now. You could make the game scale damage adequately by reinstating 1st edition's proportional damage and keeping 4th edition's fixed target numbers. Scaling combat to children fighting with knives or hover tanks shooting gauss guns at each other would be a simple math problem. You could include the solutions for that in the basic book and people could use the system to have dragons fighting giant crabs or tanks versus giant octopuses or whatever. So at this point it probably doesn't surprise you that the authors of 5th edition did not do that. Their attempt to solve the two shot problem focused mainly on trying and failing to prevent people from actually getting two shots, and then following that up by cranking up damage so that you had a noticeable chance of dropping enemies in one shot. This makes the game incredibly lethal and combat incredibly boring. What you do is have two high speed characters with automatics blaze away at all groups of enemies and they all go down and some of them (mostly the people who didn't quite go down in the first volley) are dead.

The combat rules are incomplete. All ranged weapons need a firing mode, because it does various weird shit to how combat penalties would be calculated if battles ever went to a second combat round, which they don't. But some weapons (such as bows) don't have listed firing modes, and the system doesn't interact with them properly. There is a chain of three page citations that you can follow, each promising more information on bows, but at the end of the day you just get some copypasta from 4th edition and it doesn't tell you how it interacts with the new rules. There are a lot of available modifiers and the firearms rules (separate from the rules for taking actions and taking damage, and also separate from the actual firearms lists) go on for eight pages. I'm not going to go through all of these fiddly details. I'm just not. There is literally a five paragraph piece of box text to try to explain what happens when you fire what would have been a ten round burst and there are only 8 bullets left in your magazine clip. Hilariously, it doesn't seem to actually reduce the number of enemies you can target, so I think I can spread a 1 bullet burst between two enemies. Not that this is ever going to come up, because fights don't last long enough to run out of bullets, but whatever.

Surprise is a thing that you'd think would be very central to a game about technoanarchists doing heavily armed industrial espionage mercenary work. However, the actually written surprise rules have all been totally bug fuck insane in every edition of the game. What people have actually done is to make a perception test at the start of combat, with people who fail it being unable to act for the first bit of combat. Because that's sane and easy to explain. A new edition would be a nice time to make that the official rule, but they don't. Surprise rules take almost two pages and there is still a chance that an ambushing sniper is going to be surprised by the guy he is going to shoot and be unable to take the shot that starts combat until after the target fires back. Sad really.

There is no real effort at organizing any of this information. It comes at you in a stream of consciousness diatribe. There are rules for people with melee weapons to intercept people trying to move past them. You'd think this might be in the movement subsection or the melee combat subsection, but it's actually sandwiched between the surprise rules and special damage effects. I... don't even know.

Vehicles get their own 7 pages of garbage mechanics. But I'm going to wait on that until the gear section at the end. Vehicles don't have the same stats as people, so the numbers they are talking about here haven't been introduced in the book. You can't really make sense of them without skipping to the end of the book and reading what the fuck they are talking about. I hope I don't forget to work this bit into the discussion of the equipment section, because it's a whole world of fail.

The healing rules are in the combat section. Sure, why not? Arbitrarily, you are required to do mundane first aid first and cast healing magic second. Actually, post combat healing is really fast and incredibly effective. Most characters can be brought from near incapacitation to fully healed in seconds. If you don't quite rub all the damage boxes away with your first aid, wounds stay around for a long time. It's kind of weird.

Next up: The Matrix. Possibly the worst chapter ever written in a major RPG title. Certainly the worst chapter ever written in a Shadowrun book.
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Post by Stahlseele »

As for a Definition on what constitutes an Attack:
Attacks are defined as anything directly effecting the target.
straight from the Bulls mouth it seems.

so yes, Ice-Sheet, which you target AT THE GROUND, is now considered an attack on the people/vehicles moving over it . .
Because of course, there's dice rolls involved and it affects the people/vehicles moving over it . .
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Post by DSMatticus »

Making ice that people will slip on very definitely isn't directly affecting the people who end up slipping on it. It's just the regular kind of affecting.
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Post by Lago PARANOIA »

Frank, when using a proportional damage system like Shadowrun 1E's that's supposed to model knife fights between children to Godzilla v. Ghidora battles, is there any reason ever to assign extra hit points for shit like size or tankly class features? I mean, you want to make it harder to take down a horse with 9mm bullets than a police dog but assigning native soak bonuses for these things quickly makes shit go crazy unless you really inflate the base hit points across the board and make soak more granular. Like naked professional wrestlers getting 4 soak and schoolchildren getting 1 soak with both groups starting with 60 health boxes.
Last edited by Lago PARANOIA on Mon Mar 17, 2014 10:30 am, edited 1 time in total.
Josh Kablack wrote:Your freedom to make rulings up on the fly is in direct conflict with my freedom to interact with an internally consistent narrative. Your freedom to run/play a game without needing to understand a complex rule system is in direct conflict with my freedom to play a character whose abilities and flaws function as I intended within that ruleset. Your freedom to add and change rules in the middle of the game is in direct conflict with my ability to understand that rules system before I decided whether or not to join your game.

In short, your entire post is dismissive of not merely my intelligence, but my agency. And I don't mean agency as a player within one of your games, I mean my agency as a person. You do not want me to be informed when I make the fundamental decisions of deciding whether to join your game or buying your rules system.
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Post by Silent Wayfarer »

I wonder if the simplest way to handle that isn't damage scaling. Like say, vehicle damage is basically x10 infantry damage, so if you fired a handgun at a car and did like, 6 health boxes (S wound), it would be about 0.6 of a health box on the vehicle scale (less than an L wound).
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Post by OgreBattle »

Isn't whatever After Sundown uses already the die pool scaling solution for kids to godzilla level combat?
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Post by Rawbeard »

Progressive Recoil! Fucking A! I "love" this edition. Who thought that was a good idea? Other than justifying the existence of SS weapons in a "you can only attack once per turn" enviroment, this is just so much more beautiful, fiddly book keeping bullshit.
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Post by Smirnoffico »

Btw, why do SS weapons even exist in the first place? There's absolutely nothing they can do that any other gun can't do better.
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Post by codeGlaze »

So, wait, these guys did SR4... which in this review has actually gotten some praise for some of it's changes. But then turned around and completely ruined everything THEY produced earlier?

Did these guys have a similar shake-up like WoTC that got rid of all it's talent? Or was this a White Wolf thing where the company collapsed in on itself? (I recall a thread by Frank about embezzling... losing talent from money situations?)

I thought 4e was ... not liked, much, here and that 3e was considered a superior product(?).

Just trying to keep my mental references straight.
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