Shadowrun
Shadowrun General => General Discussion => Topic started by: Crimsondude on <09-07-10/2030:12>
-
I made a tumblr blog a while back for the few times I had ideas about SR after I basically stopped gaming. It covers a bunch of random nonsense, but it still might be useful for someone.
I've been writing up stuff in notebooks again (Never a good idea, since much rarely makes it to the computer and thus the web) about a bunch of stuff based on discussions I've had with a guy I gamed with on Shadowland who's now a PSC in Iraq. A lot of ideas I had about SR five or so years ago as I was winding down actually seem to be going on IRL. I mean, I wrote a proposal for Washington, DC for the Cities of Intrigue book idea that seems to be stillborn that was based on the private intelligence community that I learned about in the mid to late 90s, only to see the Washington Post take my idea and tell the world (to its collective yawn) that it's all true already (http://projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-america/).
Anyway,
http://crimsondude.tumblr.com (http://crimsondude.tumblr.com)
Oh, since I'm thinking about it.
All my contributions to The Sixth World Wiki (http://wiki.dumpshock.com/index.php/User:Crimsondude). Originally spawned by my frustration at reading a discussion about Operation: Reciprocity and not being able to comment because I was always an ass on Dumpshock. But I'm thirty-plus now. I like to think I've grown up.
-
Thank you for all this fine stuff, I really like this
Street Samurai is a Contradiction In Terms
I don’t get street samurai. There is no honor in committing crimes. Ever. “A modern variant of bushido is common among street samurai” (Runner’s Companion, 99). Yeah, one that ignores the fact that crime is an arch-dishonor. That’s like saying they practice a variant of pacificism—one that excepts murder.
from
http://crimsondude.tumblr.com
I think it was a really interesting point and must admit I never thought about it before reading this. Thanks again
-
I think the samurai is more along the lines of movie-samurais, like in Akira Turosawa's movies, than historical samurais. Movie samurais were more like cowboys than chivalric knights, and the code of bushido was more about personal honor and morals than abiding the law.
-
Whose law is he breaking?
So long as it's not his own, it's not dishonorable.
Here's a counter thought.
AAA corporations are states unto themselves.
Question: What kind of states are they?
Answer: Aggressively expansive Fascist states.
-
Whose law is he breaking?
So long as it's not his own, it's not dishonorable.
Here's a counter thought.
AAA corporations are states unto themselves.
Question: What kind of states are they?
Answer: Aggressively expansive Fascist states.
That would also be true, red samurais follow the renraku's laws and street samurais follow their own code/laws, make sense to me.
-
I think the samurai is more along the lines of movie-samurais, like in Akira Turosawa's movies, than historical samurais.
That's exactly how I understood StreetSams to be working. After all, this is (kinda) Cyberpunk (or was at least*), so everything is rather pulpish, gritty, modeled after pop and throwaway culture.
*I'm not saying it isn't anymore or could be played that way, but the Cyberpunk/Cybertrash aspect was more present in 1st edition, if only because the rest of the RL world was in the 90ies and every line written was immediately "grasped" at being cyberpunkish and the artwork was very sketchy/trashy at best. I like SR4, I love the current artwork (*whistles*), but I'm just an old dude with a run-down nostalgia implant that's pumping out some weird thoughts today...
-
Time to sit down an listen to the good old stories.......Yeah 4th is good but theres always room to improve.
-
Yep. SR without a burned out mage archetype just isn't the same :)
-
Burned out mages... I'd rather have the Ganger archetype back. Useless, but brings 2W6 pals everywhere ;D
-
I sometimes miss the ugly nose old artwork of the 7100 series...
-
I sometimes miss the ugly nose old artwork of the 7100 series...
Yeah, but only until you look at it. It's much like missing the elegant simplicity of old video games. You can rant about how much fun you had playing Frogger or Dig-Dug or It Came From The Desert or the first Tomb Raider, but when you actually fire up that old Cyberd... that console, nostalgia quickly wears off and you switch to COD. Or FarmVille.
Although, really, It Came From The Desert was one of the best story-driven sanbox-style games of all times, and the mood and theme were brilliantly executed... (I imagine that if that game was released today, it would need a multiplayer shootout mode in the corral and an option to play the Ants, at least. Oh, and of course a decent game of chicken were you can tune your car befvore trashing it).
-
Too true... I miss the artwork, then I crack open my old my old books and usually get about 5 pages into the archetypes before I need to put the book away again.
But there's been a huge revival of old video-games. I've been hearing a lot of people talking about playing Oregon Trail and I do find myself still playing the old text-based Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (http://www.douglasadams.com/creations/infocomjava.html) every so often. (20 years and I still can't get passed the Vogons...)
-
Guess i got low standards in my video games lol, i have all three big gamer consoles.....and have not touched them in over 6 months...but am rocking the shadowrun from sega on my PC as often as i like :)
-
What I would give for a GTA Seattle 2070 kinda game ... (I hope you're listening to this, Rock Star Games, darn you!)
-
Have you played Arkham Asylum from Rockstar? That's pretty good for showing how to play a sneaky-shadowrun type of game. Combine it with GTA elements, and you've got the perfect Shadowrun game.
-
Nope, I'm enjoying Red Dead Redemption at present (looking forward to PS Move with Peacemaker controller :) ) but thx for the tip, I'll watch out for it.
AAS
-
I just can't reconcile my thoughts about honor as a relatively universal term being applied to criminals like your generic street sam who is, for all their posturing, still just a criminal. I don't buy into personal honor because it begins to sound too much like the personal justifications of a psychopath.
Of all the tumblr topics, the one that still seems most resonant to me is that SR still seems to hate Africa. I don't know why, but I looked at the map of Africa from the Almanac and ... Holy Cow. I was disappointed to say the least.
Oh, and the fetish one. I'm still amused and amazed by how many characters and players seem to define themselves or their PCs by their stuff. That is wacky.
One of the other things I've been thinking about, and in part it came from being away from gaming and from even walking away from the hobby that took its place is that I am sick of violence. It's kind of a RL thing, too, but I am very much of the mind that I would like to try my best to pull off a run without violence. I know it can be done; I've done it as a PC and had PCs do it in games I GMed. But in the 15 years I spent playing SR I killed a lot of characters, including at least 20 of my own PCs and I ran a ton of assassination jobs on Shadowland. I never got the whole armed-to-the-teeth mentality or gratuitous violence because it's unprofessional, but like I said, I still ended up killing hundreds of characters over the years (And that's ignoring the fact that I made the effects of Crash 2.0 much more horrific, widespread and lasting on SL than in canon). Sure, most of them were criminal to one extent or another. Slavers were always popular targets on SL. But some of it was just brutal espionage pissing matches where glorified bureaucrats got offed because they got in the way.
So basically I'm sick of it. Anymore my ideal job is totally unarmed and preferably through an agent who already has access to a specific location. It's not so much clean because they were sneaky like ten ninjas. It's clean because it never really happened.
Oh, there's a supplemental letter I sent to FanPro about the DeeCee proposal that explains the tone in more detail. Linked in the OP.