Sure, computers have done a much better job that people at information collection and control.    Yes, we have improved communication technologies.; I'll give you both.    But those changes have been done with primarily (imo) military applications in mind; and I'm sure that you're aware that what we know as the internet was grown out of the ARPANET, which had specific military applications.

As for cars, they still function the same way and the only major change has been to hook a computer up to every part.   Which ultimately leads to higher costs (both in terms of repair and replacement) as well as faster obsolescence.   From what I was told back around when this change started to take place (in the 1990s as you mentioned); the basics of the car still work the same, they're just now designed so that computers micromanage every component

The whole electric car "crisis" only serves to further my point; the technologies needed for a practical (not hybrid) electric car simply were never developed.   And every (any, really) technology we need for a Star Trek like (i.e. Roddenberry) utopia has yet to reach the public domain.    No, I'm not trying to front some sort of conspiracy; I simply feel that we've been 'stage magicianed' into believing the changes that we've seen represent fundamental improvement when they don't.

But back to Shadowrun.  ^_^

Much of what fills the Cyberpunk genre is strongly influenced by Shadowrun.  One only has to look at movies like Johnny Mnemonic to see.
This message was last edited by the GM at 00:16, Wed 21 Feb.

When I buy my groceries for my grandmother who is in another country I am not buying a gun or bullets. I can support her from a thousand miles away. Every day I use the internet for most of the day. I communicate with people in ten countries on my various work projects. I use AI to support about half of the tasks that I do. Sure the military wanted reliable communications, but so do lots of other things.

I haven't use money for four years ( literally) until I went to India last month. I didn't even have a purse any more... I didn't know what to do with those folding pieces of paper and what is a coin for? I pay for everything with my watch now.

Obsolescence is getting less. My last laptop lasted eight years. This one is already five years old (and it's still kick ass and it will be a few years before I replace it). I've replaced the battery in my mobile and it's five years old (and still response and awesome)

When I was a child we installed a telephone in the house. To talk to other people we often had to 'agree a time' as they would be in a phone box and we would call the phone box. When I went cycling I took coins with me for the phone box and rehearsed how to 'reverse the charges'. And had to remember where the phone boxes where (not every village had one). Now I can talk to my children with a verbal command to my 'PAN' while I am walking in the alps. And I play with them twice a week for a couple of hours even though they are in different countries.

My point about cars was that they haven't progressed the same. As I say if they had we'd get from New York to Paris is one second. But they are no longer understandable or maintainable to people without the dedicated tools. They are entirely computerised.

I think Johny Mnemonic was influenced by William Gibson and maybe Walter Jon Willaims which is I think the source material that Shadowrun came from too. Take a look at this if you haven't read it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voice_of_the_Whirlwind It's just 'wow' and massively shadowrun although without magic (and came out before)

Gibson is the God of the Cyberpunk universe and Shadowrun is a world in that universe.

The screenplay for the movie Johnny Mnemonic was written by the guy that wrote the short story of the same name, William Gibson. This is why the absolute badass Molly Millions was replaced by the useless Jane character because Molly is tied more to the Neuromancer novel, so he couldn't use her in Johnny Mnemonic.

I cite Johnny's breakdown and rant about wanting room service, which I can recite verbatim, as the perfect example of a corpo losing it after having to slum it.

One major change in Shadowrun is that wireless technology never happened until after Crash 2.0. Crash 1.0 is why phone booths made a comeback in universe and why you see them in the artwork, and land lines were still a thing until the 2060s.

As for the optimism, according to Shadowbeat, all media is controlled by 15 major corps. That's a lot more than now, and didn't get to a similar number until Horizon came on the scene. Frankly, CGL and to a lesser extent FanPro, retconned things to be less optimistic compared to the real world than the FASA crew had predicted. Of course, you can go look at GURPS Cyberworld by Paul R. Hume, and it's not difficult to see things too far off from that shit show of a setting.

In reply to Jobe00 (msg # 238):

SR was groundbreaking in its day.  It was a dystopia for a different age, really, and in retrospect that probably makes it seem more optimistic.
I bought the book in '89 when it came out.  I was about to hang up the RPG hobby because I'd gotten as much mileage out if D&D as I was gonna get but ShadowRun dragged me back in.  It was the first time I'd seen an RPG that featured other Native people that weren't strictly enemies or horde monsters!  The Native representation in ShadowRun was... problematic and really caricatured...but it was at least positive.  That and the rest of the SR world had me hooked.
In the intervening 30-odd years, the alternate history of ShadowRun has evolved a bit and progressed a lot.  A lot of that, I believe, is due to the changing nature of what we consider a dystopia (growing darker as society grows darker.)
Looking back at the SR timeline, there's A LOT of societal issues in there that seemed ridiculously impossible when it was written.  Now? A lot of those elements seem a lot more plausible given the way the actual world is trending.

Does anyone else get a perverse joy out of taking "Poor Sense of Taste" as a Negative Quality and calling their character a COVID survivor? Too soon?

As long as you can tell the difference between poo and chocolate pudding, then you should be in good shape.

COVID didn't happen, but VITAS did, and it was worse. Though considering COVID is still going on (over 2000 deaths a week in the U.S. today) and folks didn't avoid it like the plague, I will once again say the FASA crew were way too optimistic.

In the GURPS Cyberworld setting, you had Tolliver's Disease aka Touchdown which was as bad as VITAS if not worse considering that everyone in Cyberworld's Australia are dead with TD being the primary culprit. No one is willing to go check, but in the aftermath of some Cyberworld games, one full conversion 'borg was last seen in his amphibious APC heading to Australia because he thought it would be safer than the consequences of his murderhobo actions.

In reply to witchdoctor (msg # 246):

Have you tried Coyote and Crow? I have a friend that has been playing and he says its quite excellent.

Yeah!  I backed it from the get-go and was not disappointed one bit!

It's a hefty book!  The system is pretty smooth and the setting is well detailed.  The only thing that I can think of that might be a downside to Coyote & Crow is that there's A LOT of on-boarding to do for players as a setting.  Lots of very different thinking that has to go into running it and playing it.

Hey, anybody wanna run a 6th edition game? I inherited a copy of the rules, but haven't had a chance to play, or even dive too deeply in. :)

Looks like I'm back in charge again for better or worse as Hunter has decided to leave the group again. Wish he would have given me some warning.

Well hello all. Im just looking for a SR5 game for a starting Human, female ~ Mystic Adept character.  Yes I use herolab and have almost every SR5 datapacket for my herolab build.
This message was last edited by the player at 22:03, Wed 17 Apr.

Shame we don't have the SR5 datafiles we were promised when we paid for them before SR6 dropped.

I have basically ALL of SR5 on PDF...

I do have all the SR1-5 PDFs and dead tree copies of SR1-4A.
My comment was about Hero Lab. I will always be salty that I paid money for a data file set that was never fulfilled, and why I am not as much of a fan of Lone Wolf Development these days.

I didn't know about that. Interesting and unpleasant.

I liked the old hero labs but I don't like the way the tool is moving.

The game is unplayable without it though (I don't rate chummer even a little bit and the game is too complex for spreadsheets) for me anyway. I have to admit I play out of nostalgia... there are much better rulesystems out there. (but the game world is great)

I still have a thread on the LWD forums that I used to bump asking about when we would get what was promised. I eventually gave up when it was obvious that it would never be fulfilled.
I have all the datafiles for Pathfinder 1E, M&M2 & 3, and SR4(A) & 5 for Hero Lab Classic. I have some stuff for Hero Lab Online, but I don't have a subscription, so I won't use it.

I had started work converting some earlier edition Shadowrun stuff to HLC datafiles, but I lost them somewhere along the line, so I would have to redo them again after I relearn making HLC datafiles. Unfortunately, I am neither playing nor running anything, so my drive to do so is nonexistent.

I have the M&M 2/3 and the Shadowrun 4/5. I didn't need pathfinder though, because I just use a spreadsheet. While still heavy weight it's doable. And at low levels (where I tend to play) it's not just doable but easy.

If you want a game you could try dumpshock. Old and dated tech but they are welcoming of new people.

In reply to Jobe00 (msg # 253):

Welcome back? =D

Anyone see what happen to hunter? They started a game and suddenly vanished.

In reply to Mortannis (msg # 262):

he took a break from rpol.

In reply to serrasin (msg # 261):

I never left. I became the mod for the group. I'm just back to being the primary again.

I had a shower thought a few weeks back. There has been a true megacorporation, and it wasn't modern.
The East India Company was around for 274 years, and until the UK finally nationalized it, it got to the point it virtually ran the UK government and owned India.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_India_Company

All very true. And the relationship between it and the Dutch equivalent is very interesting. It was a great example of 'it's yours to loose' and they did. Because of the structure of companies and shares the UK won. The Dutch were basically better sailors and exploiters. But the UK structured their mega corp better and thus 'won'. There was a time when Amsterdam was the financial capital of the world.... and lost because of 'how the shares were structured'.