[All4BigGuns]

There is not even such a thing as move-by-wire: 4 any longer...

No real point in MBW 4 anyway. The Essence cost on it was ridiculous.

[The Wyrm Ouroboros]

Which didn't keep it from being desireable and useful, however practically unattainable it ultimately was.  As Glyph said - useful in the GM's hands.

[WellsIDidIt]

It's a difference in play style honestly. SR4A has taken a base play stance on light, rarely permanent, mechanical consequences to most things; the GM is the one who changes how his game is. The theory is it's easier to add grit than strip it out, and while I don't care for the light cuddly base style , I can't disagree with that theory at a design level.

Move-by-Wire isn't the only thing that got hit with the hammer of consequence smashing. Take a look at, for example Jazz. In SR4A you feel Disoriented after it's use. Whoopty doo, that's such a big thing. Back when it was introduced, you were penalized when you crashed similarly, you took stun damage, and if you didn't resist the stun you permanently and irreversibly lost a box off your damage monitor...both of them...for good measure.

I miss the metal shavings grit of the old edition. 

[lurkeroutthere]

This is not something I'd consult the player on; they knew the risks when they loaded themselves up with it.  Roll their month/quarter/half-year/yearly chance, then if the dice roll bad, hit 'em with it at the most inopportune moment.  Because isn't that what gaming is about?  Surviving the 'oh crap!' moments in style ...

There is so much wrong with this line of thought I'm literally flabbergasted. At least I got to use flabbergasted in a sentence.

[The Wyrm Ouroboros]

I won't say I'm sorry, Lurker, because I'm not - you and I have wildly divergent views and methods in regards to gaming in general, gaming Shadowrun, running it, playing it, etc.  If it doesn't work for you, then great - walk from the table, because it's always Rule of the Sandbox.  But 'wrong'?  Every player I've ever run has been duly and thoroughly warned about the potential negative consequences of getting a piece of gear, from 'your enemies might have it too' all the way up to 'this crap can cause sudden heart-attacks'.  And y'know what?  I've hit them with about half of those consequences at one point or another, almost always in the middle of a run, i.e. The Worst Possible Moment.

And y'know what?  Without fail, those are the runs they talk about most frequently and with the most enthusiasm.

So yeah - doesn't work for you, great.  Works for everyone I've gamed with.

[Twitchy D]

I won't say I'm sorry, Lurker, because I'm not - you and I have wildly divergent views and methods in regards to gaming in general, gaming Shadowrun, running it, playing it, etc.  If it doesn't work for you, then great - walk from the table, because it's always Rule of the Sandbox.  But 'wrong'?  Every player I've ever run has been duly and thoroughly warned about the potential negative consequences of getting a piece of gear, from 'your enemies might have it too' all the way up to 'this crap can cause sudden heart-attacks'.  And y'know what?  I've hit them with about half of those consequences at one point or another, almost always in the middle of a run, i.e. The Worst Possible Moment.

And y'know what?  Without fail, those are the runs they talk about most frequently and with the most enthusiasm.

So yeah - doesn't work for you, great.  Works for everyone I've gamed with.

"Hey, remember the time just before finishing the mission where we were backstabbed by the Johnson, betrayed by three separate contacts, and were riding on top of a fleet of MCT earthmoving zepplins where we were jumping from zepplin to zepplin without parashutes, and almost making it to the T-Bird alive before the GM tells me that I had gotten TLE-X and that just before I landed on the last zepplin I had gotten a seizure which caused me to fall off and drop a mile to my death? THAT WAS FUN! RIGHT, DAVE?!"

(groans from a moving duffel bag)

"See, Dave said it was fun! He should know! He GM'd that mission!"

See, now I'm thinking of THAT example as what a GM might do. Beleve me, this happens with some players who are unfortunate to have certain types of GM's, the ones who throw far and above too much on their players. What would be a proper example in your own opinions, and what limits do you put on having bad things happen at the WORST POSSIBLE MOMENT? What is a good time for a sudden onset of TLE-X, and what is a bad time? Is it acceptible to have it out of a mission if you think it might be better for their non-mission downtime moments? Please, I would like to know, as I am genuenly curious. I just don't think that the WORST POSSIBLE MOMENTTM is the defining time for that to happen.

[Mara]

"Hey, remember the time just before finishing the mission where we were backstabbed by the Johnson, betrayed by three separate contacts, and were riding on top of a fleet of MCT earthmoving zepplins where we were jumping from zepplin to zepplin without parashutes, and almost making it to the T-Bird alive before the GM tells me that I had gotten TLE-X and that just before I landed on the last zepplin I had gotten a seizure which caused me to fall off and drop a mile to my death? THAT WAS FUN! RIGHT, DAVE?!"

OOoo! MCT Has Zeppelins? *takes notes* Not going to do the TLE-X thing...but...I like that!

[Mad Hamish]

I am perhaps not quite as up-to-snuff on the intricate ins and outs of 4e the way I am (or was) with 1-3e, but I can't imagine users of MBW - especially at its higher levels - being completely immune to the danger of TLE-x.  Simply put, it's the brain seizing the way MBW makes it do so - just uncontrollably, now.  The higher your level of MBW, the greater the chance, until (at least in 3e) at level 4 you are straight-up GOING to have it eventually, unless you spend a week out of every month under the knife and healing up from preventative medicine, i.e. brain surgery.

This is not something I'd consult the player on; they knew the risks when they loaded themselves up with it.  Roll their month/quarter/half-year/yearly chance, then if the dice roll bad, hit 'em with it at the most inopportune moment.  Because isn't that what gaming is about?  Surviving the 'oh crap!' moments in style ...

Maybe because the high tech research labs who design move by wire systems have gotten much better at it over the 20 odd years since it was first introduced?
So the price is down and the bad effects are down.

[Noble Drake]

<brutal example>

I was about to quote you and talk about how intense that run sounds and how justified someone would be getting tweaked at their GM for having it happen to them...

But then I remembered Edge and the Hand of God.

Character lives, story is still kickass and memorable, and maybe the player starts paying more attention to potential negative consequences of his character's life choices.

[The Wyrm Ouroboros]

Maybe because the high tech research labs who design move by wire systems have gotten much better at it over the 20 odd years since it was first introduced? So the price is down and the bad effects are down.

Well, in part the way move-by-wire works is to put the brain into a controlled seizure state.  TLE-x is the brain continuing that seizure state, uncontrolled.  Seems to me that that's something that the cybernetics shouldn't have perfect control over - but again, that's me.

*extreme and basically snarky example snipped*

See, now I'm thinking of THAT example as what a GM might do. Beleve me, this happens with some players who are unfortunate to have certain types of GM's, the ones who throw far and above too much on their players. What would be a proper example in your own opinions, and what limits do you put on having bad things happen at the WORST POSSIBLE MOMENT? What is a good time for a sudden onset of TLE-X, and what is a bad time? Is it acceptible to have it out of a mission if you think it might be better for their non-mission downtime moments? Please, I would like to know, as I am genuenly curious. I just don't think that the WORST POSSIBLE MOMENTTM is the defining time for that to happen.

Pretty sure you are - or were - just looking for a reason to be snarky.  'Genuinely curious' doesn't start out with a Dennis Leary song.

While I essentially agree with Noble Drake's answer, your "example" is less one of 'worst possible moment' than it is 'GM trying to kill my character'.

The worst possible moment is when the team is counting on the MBW's samurai to be at the Face's side as the muscle for a meet with incredible potential to go bad.  With the Samurai down, someone else has to step up, and you have a Defining Moment of Cool - either for Replacement Guy (kicking serious ass with his martial arts/hacking the oppo's cyber/using drones with utter lethality/dropping the hammer of her magic) or for the Face (out-maneuvering untrusting Johnson and his goons with a great plan and balls of steel).

The worst possible moment is when you're under cover, on your way out and approaching the lab's last security checkpoint, and the TLE-x drops - and the rest of the team is smart enough to use the Samurai's collapse to pull the security out of the booth, either to schmooze their way clear because of 'the obvious medical emergency' or simply to cut the security down - because after all, you're on your way OUT and the Samurai is one of their guys too, right?

Or hell - just dropped in the middle of a firefight, like he could be anyhow, and with a sudden 'Man Down!' the rest of the team has to figure out and fast how to grab the uncontrollably-shuddering, now-useless Samurai and exit the fight without perhaps winning it outright.  Maybe they abandon the Samurai - and then the GM uses ideas from the 'captured! now what?' thread found elsewhere.

Either way, the team has to pull out the stops in order to make up for the Samurai's choice of cyberware catching up to him.  The run becomes complicated, the story made more tense, but not as, err, blatantly ... overboard? ... as your 'example'.

[Twitchy D]

While I was being a snarky ass for the first part, the only reason why was out of bitterness, with the kicker being that the snarky comment I posted was unfortunetly something that I would not put past my previous GM, may he still have that well-diserved limp. I do apologise if it was too much.

OOoo! MCT Has Zeppelins? *takes notes* Not going to do the TLE-X thing...but...I like that!

Yep. They brought 'em over to Tsimshian to mine the ever loving sh-t out of the place. When they were finished, the Salish-Shidhe snapped Tsimshian right up as a protectorate. Think of the USG Ishimura if it was stuck in atmosphere and wasn't filled with psychic mutant corpses and a random mute armed with high-powered weaponry mining equipment.

...I just got a brand new idea for a mission. Maybe a weapon as well...

[JustADude]

Maybe because the high tech research labs who design move by wire systems have gotten much better at it over the 20 odd years since it was first introduced? So the price is down and the bad effects are down.

Well, in part the way move-by-wire works is to put the brain into a controlled seizure state.  TLE-x is the brain continuing that seizure state, uncontrolled.  Seems to me that that's something that the cybernetics shouldn't have perfect control over - but again, that's me.

My big bitch with that idea is that there's a specific Negative Quality "Temporal Lobe Epilepsy" that accounts for having those seizures.

The way I see it, if a GM wants to just randomly force the Negative Quality, which is NOT part of the baseline of Move-By-Wire, on the character for getting implanted with MBW then that's them screwing with the player.  If they were interested in playing a character that had seizures, they'd have taken the TLE Quality to begin with.

It's even worse if the GM just decides to randomly make the character go into a seizure because they just feel like it's "dramatic." Without the Quality that's not just a screw-job, that's the GM being an outright ass for his own amusement. I mean, hell, he might as well decide the character's Cyberarm should just randomly stop working because there's no way that cybernetics should be able to have perfect fine motor control.

[The Wyrm Ouroboros]

No, there's a specific Negative Quality that allows players to get points for having that particular condition at game start.  Don't confuse 'has a Negative Quality' for 'can only take it at game start', or 'cannot be imposed in-game'.  Let's look at the specific condition, huh?

TLE-x
Vector: Special
Speed: See Description
Penetration: 0
Power: 5
Nature: Degenerative neural condition
Effect: Stun Damage, Disorientation, Paralysis
          Technically not a pathogen, temporal lobe epilepsy with complications is a chronic and degenerative neurological disorder resulting from extended neurological and metabolic stress (typically the result of excessive cyberware implantation, especially move-by-wire implants) and as such follows much the same rules. If a character develops TLE-x, she does not manifest symptoms immediately; instead, she becomes subject to acute epileptic seizures in stressful situations. When in appropriately stressful circumstances, the gamemaster may call the TLE-x victim to make a Body + Willpower (3) Test. If the test fails, the character suffers a seizure, and the “disease” effects above kick in.
          Initial onset may be resisted by a pharmaceutical cocktail known as AEXD (see Biomedicals below), but after onset TLE-x can only be treated via corrective gene therapy (p. 88) or brain surgery (threshold of 20 and a DV of 7P) — though in both cases it may return if the cause is not removed.

Underlining/bolding in the text is mine.

This is a condition that MBW users may develop - and from the sound of it ('initial onset may be resisted'), something that they will eventually but inevitably develop.  No, MBW doesn't say anything about it; I call that an error on the part of the writer.  However, presuming the GM is aware of this condition and that move-by-wire is a primary (but not solitary) cause, the GM should a) warn the player that this is very possible, b) inform the player about the aforementioned AEXD (500 nuyen a week), and then c) if the player doesn't take that drug cocktail regularly, should start noting this in his GM plot journal.  When the failure to take the drugs hits a threshold, perhaps 100/level of MBW, then the character develops TLE-x at the GM's whim.

Complaining that this is a random enforcement of a Negative Quality is, well, lack of research; I took two minutes and discovered the base information here, which is found in the description of the aforementioned Negative Quality.  Complaining that a GM is enforcing negative qualities (ones which are 'simply' accepting a future possibility as being present) on a whim or for his own amusement is like complaining that you didn't take a Negative Quality of 'Bullet-Riddled' and that the GM is imposing it on you when corporate security is working on filling you full of lead.

TLE-x (or epilepsy, really) is part of the baseline 'Move-By-Wire' inasmuch as a) it's a condition (like 'Blind' or 'Incompetent') that you can take at Game Start, and b) it's a condition that is like any other disease that the GM feels like exposing you to - except that in this case, you-the-player get to choose whether or not to expose yourself by taking high levels of reaction enhancers and/or taking the drugs that help suppress the condition.  Negative Qualities are not the only way for Bad Things to happen to you; they're just one way for you to decide that they're ALREADY happening to you, and you might as well get points out of it.

Do your research, JustADude.  It'll help your game satisfaction.

[All4BigGuns]

No, there's a specific Negative Quality that allows players to get points for having that particular condition at game start.  Don't confuse 'has a Negative Quality' for 'can only take it at game start', or 'cannot be imposed in-game'.  Let's look at the specific condition, huh?

TLE-x
Vector: Special
Speed: See Description
Penetration: 0
Power: 5
Nature: Degenerative neural condition
Effect: Stun Damage, Disorientation, Paralysis
          Technically not a pathogen, temporal lobe epilepsy with complications is a chronic and degenerative neurological disorder resulting from extended neurological and metabolic stress (typically the result of excessive cyberware implantation, especially move-by-wire implants) and as such follows much the same rules. If a character develops TLE-x, she does not manifest symptoms immediately; instead, she becomes subject to acute epileptic seizures in stressful situations. When in appropriately stressful circumstances, the gamemaster may call the TLE-x victim to make a Body + Willpower (3) Test. If the test fails, the character suffers a seizure, and the “disease” effects above kick in.
          Initial onset may be resisted by a pharmaceutical cocktail known as AEXD (see Biomedicals below), but after onset TLE-x can only be treated via corrective gene therapy (p. 88) or brain surgery (threshold of 20 and a DV of 7P) — though in both cases it may return if the cause is not removed.

Underlining/bolding in the text is mine.

This is a condition that MBW users may develop - and from the sound of it ('initial onset may be resisted'), something that they will eventually but inevitably develop.  No, MBW doesn't say anything about it; I call that an error on the part of the writer.  However, presuming the GM is aware of this condition and that move-by-wire is a primary (but not solitary) cause, the GM should a) warn the player that this is very possible, b) inform the player about the aforementioned AEXD (500 nuyen a week), and then c) if the player doesn't take that drug cocktail regularly, should start noting this in his GM plot journal.  When the failure to take the drugs hits a threshold, perhaps 100/level of MBW, then the character develops TLE-x at the GM's whim.

Complaining that this is a random enforcement of a Negative Quality is, well, lack of research; I took two minutes and discovered the base information here, which is found in the description of the aforementioned Negative Quality.  Complaining that a GM is enforcing negative qualities (ones which are 'simply' accepting a future possibility as being present) on a whim or for his own amusement is like complaining that you didn't take a Negative Quality of 'Bullet-Riddled' and that the GM is imposing it on you when corporate security is working on filling you full of lead.

TLE-x (or epilepsy, really) is part of the baseline 'Move-By-Wire' inasmuch as a) it's a condition (like 'Blind' or 'Incompetent') that you can take at Game Start, and b) it's a condition that is like any other disease that the GM feels like exposing you to - except that in this case, you-the-player get to choose whether or not to expose yourself by taking high levels of reaction enhancers and/or taking the drugs that help suppress the condition.  Negative Qualities are not the only way for Bad Things to happen to you; they're just one way for you to decide that they're ALREADY happening to you, and you might as well get points out of it.

Do your research, JustADude.  It'll help your game satisfaction.

Actually the good GM would ask the player if he/she is willing to explore being affected by that condition. If the player says no, then the good GM will let it drop and not mention it again.

[Unahim]

Just like the good GM would ask the player if they were open to being dead? I agree with Wyrm, the GM is free to release diseases upon the player, so why not this? Mind, it should not be right away, a lot of time should go over it, but eventually... yes.

And just like a PC can heal up their physical and stun damage, they should be able to lose the disease as well. Since it's not a neg quality they got points for, they don't even have to pay any karma. In fact, if the player wants to get rid of it fast, the next session could even revolve into them breaking into a high tech facility alongside a less-than-legal doc they got a hold off, in order to covertly perform the surgery or something. Or a Corp learns of it and offers them a job in exchange for a highly experimental cure (and payment for the other people, perhaps).

It doesn't have to be any more permanent than anything else that can happen to a character, so I don't see why the player needs to give permission. It's not like we're making him play a character concept he may not like for eternity, after all.

(that's why I don't like "GM chooses negative metagenic qualities for surge", for instance. If I see a slim, deadly but enthralling character, and then the GM decides she's fat and has a horrid stench, well... buck that)