The Shadowrun Situation

Stahlseele · Post by **Stahlseele** » Fri Dec 17, 2010 3:17 pm

nope, no maps, nowhere to be seen, none at all . .

Ancient History · Post by **Ancient History** » Fri Dec 17, 2010 3:20 pm

They lost their best map guy, Mikael Brodu, quite a while back.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Fri Dec 17, 2010 3:23 pm

Orion wrote:Does Reaction do anything but add to dicepools?

Yeah, your initiative is a calculated value that is your Intuition + Reaction + Bonuses. But you don't actually roll your Reaction, you roll your Initiative, which is a calculated number. So replacing your Reaction with Intuition would give you a great Defense pool, but you'd still go last.

Stahlseele wrote:What, no mentioning the Arbeit macht frei part? O.o

You know, that little segment is totally wrong for many many reasons. It's in poor taste and it doesn't fit with Shadowrun's magic system on many levels and it contradicts previously printed work on exactly that location in previous storylines. But you know what? I promised to treat this book like it was Ultimate Shadowrun or something. So the only thing that I would bring that up for was for being in poor taste. The thing about Romani occupation forces is probably just as tactless.

I actually think that the "You don't know where Poland is or who Poles are" is a bigger problem with that section in that light.

cthulhu wrote:Does it really not have a map? What the fuck?

Yeah. I don't even know what to say. If you're going to talk about war at all, you need a map. It's a basic requirement. It's not there. I can only explain it in terms that are unflattering.

-Username17

Fuchs · Post by **Fuchs** » Fri Dec 17, 2010 3:28 pm

The book should be called "War - the Failure", aka WTF.

Lokathor · Post by **Lokathor** » Fri Dec 17, 2010 3:36 pm

Orion wrote:Does Reaction do anything but add to dicepools?

Your initiative score is equal to your Intuition + Reaction. You then roll your score as a dice pool, and also compare it to other people's scores to determine who goes first if you and someone else get the same total and things. So technically yes, but most people might not care about said minor technicality.

Edit:
ninja'd

cthulhu · Post by **cthulhu** » Fri Dec 17, 2010 3:53 pm

Ancient History wrote:They lost their best map guy, Mikael Brodu, quite a while back.

Yeah.. but.. yeah. No map at all? Really? Wow.

I mean, a bad map is one thing, but no map is astonishing. I get annoyed when a 300 page fantasy paper back with no colour at all doesn't have a map.

mean_liar · Post by **mean_liar** » Sat Dec 18, 2010 1:50 am

I thought BT guys were supposed to be pretty familiar with war, or at least the trappings of how to pretend there's a war. The missing out on SR stuff (ie., the comm ratings et al) is understandable for a pinch hitter with no time to prep, but to miss out on war as a concept is pretty disappointing.

Since I don't feel like Googling, can someone share who the authors are and what they've done?

Ancient History · Post by **Ancient History** » Sat Dec 18, 2010 2:28 am

I've been over this before, but the writers are...

Aaron Pavao, who I think did most of the mechanics. Aaron has done some previous work in Shadowrun, notably in Unwired (where he hid a proposal for marriage to his then-gf), Runners Companion (AI rules, priority system), Running Wild, Feral Cities, Ghost Cartels, and a couple of the pdf-only products.

David A. Hill Jr., who has graced this forum before, and Filamena Young are both relatively recent additions with no previous writing experience in Shadowrun, but who have written a good bit for White Wolf's nWoD, as covered in this google-topping interview.

Michael Wich, who is also new and who I believe is a promoted Shadowrun Missions writer. I remember editing his stuff on 10 Jackpointers.

kzt · Post by **kzt** » Sat Dec 18, 2010 2:47 am

Didn't Aaron write the hacking rules in SR4?

Ancient History · Post by **Ancient History** » Sat Dec 18, 2010 2:49 am

He did the revamp in SR4A, yes.

Otakusensei · Post by **Otakusensei** » Sat Dec 18, 2010 5:43 am

Ancient History wrote:I've been over this before, but the writers are...

Aaron Pavao, who I think did most of the mechanics. Aaron has done some previous work in Shadowrun, notably in Unwired (where he hid a proposal for marriage to his then-gf), Runners Companion (AI rules, priority system), Running Wild, Feral Cities, Ghost Cartels, and a couple of the pdf-only products.

David A. Hill Jr., who has graced this forum before, and Filamena Young are both relatively recent additions with no previous writing experience in Shadowrun, but who have written a good bit for White Wolf's nWoD, as covered in this google-topping interview.

Michael Wich, who is also new and who I believe is a promoted Shadowrun Missions writer. I remember editing his stuff on 10 Jackpointers.

Oh God, who told Dave to bring his rape-face to the interview?

TheFlatline · Post by **TheFlatline** » Sat Dec 18, 2010 6:01 am

So here's my question: Without knowing who wrote what, is there writing talent in War! that just needs solid direction and/or experience in the IP? Or is it hack work?

Frank's review focused on the book existing as sort of a vacuum, which is useful, but at the same time, it sounds like a lot of that can be laid at the project head's feet for not really having a good path for the writers to stick to.

I guess what I'm wondering is: If CGL keeps Shadowrun, is SR5 going to be more crap, or might we see an improvement between now and then (assuming the project heads can stick to the narratives they've always used).

Otakusensei · Post by **Otakusensei** » Sat Dec 18, 2010 7:59 am

TheFlatline wrote:So here's my question: Without knowing who wrote what, is there writing talent in War! that just needs solid direction and/or experience in the IP? Or is it hack work?

Frank's review focused on the book existing as sort of a vacuum, which is useful, but at the same time, it sounds like a lot of that can be laid at the project head's feet for not really having a good path for the writers to stick to.

I guess what I'm wondering is: If CGL keeps Shadowrun, is SR5 going to be more crap, or might we see an improvement between now and then (assuming the project heads can stick to the narratives they've always used).

The common factor here, is Jason Hardy. He's calling the shots, he's putting his name on the books and you can saddle him with the responsibility for the quality of the work you're seeing. If you have a problem with writing, or layout or art; he's the one who signed off on it and started the press machine going. He's the one selling it.

If Jason does manage to get out an SR5, expect it to be more of the same here. If he's able to squeeze it out, my guess it'll be more of an SR4A.5 looking thing. All the core mechanics there, but with the errata folded in and a bunch of stuff that doesn't quite jive. Also skip the fantastic layout work and take a crap shoot on most of the fiction and art.

Either that or things will be rewritten from the ground up to the quality and standards set out by his previous work. But I honestly don't expect him to put that much work into it.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Sat Dec 18, 2010 8:07 am

TheFlatline wrote:So here's my question: Without knowing who wrote what, is there writing talent in War! that just needs solid direction and/or experience in the IP? Or is it hack work?

Yes and no. There are actually some essays in there which are reasonably strong. If you open the chapter called "The War" you can find a quite nice essay about how hijacking supplies works (although no actual numbers about how many supplies there are or have been hijacked). I'm not sure who wrote it, but it's a quality essay. There are even some mechanics and equipment pieces that are worth carrying over. The Leadership rules are decent enough, and probably should have been in the basic book because that skill doesn't do anything in the basic book. Unfortunately, the psychology rules show up twice indicating to me that more than one author wrote psychology rules and the developer left them separate because he is incompetent and doesn't care. And the rest of the psychology rules in the section with the Leadership rules (and presumably by the same author) are unusable (soldiers are expected to roll Will + Charisma threshold 3 to avoid panic).

Frank's review focused on the book existing as sort of a vacuum, which is useful, but at the same time, it sounds like a lot of that can be laid at the project head's feet for not really having a good path for the writers to stick to.

Well, most of the problems can clearly be laid at the feet of development. It clearly didn't go to editing. Or "editing" consisted of running it through a spell checker and nothing more (which would explain some of the floating English words in foreign language phrases). I stopped bothering to count how many times a required negative or comparative was missing, thereby completely changing the meaning of a sentence to something it obviously wasn't intended to say. Each chapter is just a pile of completely random essays that often have little to do with each other and nothing whatever to do with the nominal chapter title. There is seriously an essay about surviving in the deep jungle that is in the middle of the "Culture of Bogotá" section. It's sandwiched in the middle of some NPC descriptions and is next to a description of some corporate sponsored cultural festivals that happen in Bogotá. Why? I have no idea. There are writeups of street gangs and individuals in most chapters. But it's not some sort of theme thing, they are just randomly in there like every time word count on a chapter was low, the dev threw in random essays about gangs, tribes, or individuals until it was about the right length.

But some of this is the fault of the writers and artists too. No one did any research for this book. The section on the weather doesn't mention the altitude, which is an entire kilometer higher than Denver. There is no map. Every single statement in the entire book is in vague generalities because no one did enough research to make a definitive statement about exactly where anything was relative to anything else, how many of anything there were, or how important any single thing was. At least, not without looking like an idiot. There are some nice pieces of art in there, but most of it is incredibly awful. Someone working on this really liked Poser software and made a lot of shitty digital renderings of people rather than actually draw. For example, let's look at the full pager on page 116. This is dreadful. It's like the cover to Augmentation or a screenshot from the Shadowrun videogame. There is a watchtower falling down that is literally just the watchtower at an angle, the four people close enough to the foreground to be distinct all look like digital mannequins in weird poses because that is exactly what they are. It has no motion, no depth, no artistic skill, it's like if you grabbed one of the people that makes those terrible 3d porn comics and told him to make a battle scene, and then you tried to digitally edit some of the people into metahumans.

I guess what I'm wondering is: If CGL keeps Shadowrun, is SR5 going to be more crap, or might we see an improvement between now and then (assuming the project heads can stick to the narratives they've always used).

I don't see any hope as long as Jason is developer. He insists on "editing" himself, and "editing" appears to consist of running an automated spellchecker and then piling essays written by the freelancers into completely random chapter assignments. His vision for where the story is going to go is completely stupid. And there is no light at the end of that tunnel as long as Loren Coleman owns IMR and Topps keeps giving IMR six month license extensions.

As for the current writing group, at least some of them can write well. But they don't know Shadowrun's story, they don't know game mechanics, and they don't do research. Getting good at something like "Shadowrun Mechanics" is just not very hard, but it doesn't matter how easy or difficult it is so long as the freelancers don't think they need to research anything. As long as you've got guys in there who are willing to write a 115 page opus on the disposition of Bogotá in the Sixth World without doing more than a casual Wikipedia search on Bogotá or Shadowrun's Sixth World, it's never going to get any better.

It's not that they don't know who any of the Jackpointers are and are writing new personalities for them. I expect that, because it is a new crew. They don't even care enough to do that. Each comment is written anew and assigned to a jackpointer seemingly at random. So you get guys who are seemingly arguing with themselves because the authors care that little for the subject matter.

-Username17

kzt · Post by **kzt** » Sat Dec 18, 2010 8:41 am

I really don't understand people who pay for bad artwork. I can do crappy poser art pretty quickly. Most of the bad poser art I've seen in SR looks like it was done using the quick preview or P4 rendering engines, not the firefly engine with ray-tracing. That's why the shadows look weird, among other defects. Why would someone pay real money for a piece of "art" that takes under an hour for an a casual user to do?

I can do reasonably decent poser stuff too, but it take a LOT longer. I've seen people who can do really excellent art using poser, but it's artwork done using poser as a tool, not "poser art".

cthulhu · Post by **cthulhu** » Sat Dec 18, 2010 8:46 am

If I wasn't lazy, I'd quote bulls post in the offical thread complaining about the 'Magnets, how do they work' meme and say 'clearly for the dev team, it's more like 'Maps, how do they work?'

Fuchs · Post by **Fuchs** » Sat Dec 18, 2010 9:14 am

kzt wrote:I really don't understand people who pay for bad artwork. I can do crappy poser art pretty quickly. Most of the bad poser art I've seen in SR looks like it was done using the quick preview or P4 rendering engines, not the firefly engine with ray-tracing. That's why the shadows look weird, among other defects. Why would someone pay real money for a piece of "art" that takes under an hour for an a casual user to do?

I can do reasonably decent poser stuff too, but it take a LOT longer. I've seen people who can do really excellent art using poser, but it's artwork done using poser as a tool, not "poser art".

Since I started using DAZ Studio, my tolerance for bad art has gone down.

knasser · Post by **knasser** » Sat Dec 18, 2010 8:35 pm

Stahlseele - have you been a bad person?

http://forums.shadowrun4.com/index.php?topic=416.15

Don't follow the official forums but saw a link to the thread and thought I'd see what was being said there...

Useful post, I thought. (Not sarcastic)

K.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Sun Dec 19, 2010 12:17 am

Now this is funny. Some of the people apparently got so angry at how poorly compiled War! was that they started making their own book. I know this particular phase of anger well, I went through exactly that when Unwired came out. There is a certain brand of Stockholm Syndrome that affects game fans, where they assume that anything "official" has to be somehow of higher quality than something written by a random fan. And of course, this is not true. All the people who write for all the game companies are random fans. Random fans who get paid for writing, but not paid very much.

And yet, it crops up again and again. How many times when bringing up a problem with some game system or another has someone challenged you with something to the effect of "Oh yeah? It's not like you could do better!"? It has happened to me many times.It will happen to me many more. It's a weird feeling, since of course in my case I actually have. But there is always a niggling temptation to show them all and write a better version of whatever it is that is pissing you off.

Certainly there is a part of me that wants to help these guys. I wanted there to be a worthwhile military sourcebook myself. I even suggested one, back in the day. But of course, Dumpshock banned me forever, for realz this time, because of the controversy of this very thread and my association with it. So there is absolutely no chance whatsoever of me sticking my oar in and providing assistance of any kind on that community projects thread.

-Username17

TheFlatline · Post by **TheFlatline** » Sun Dec 19, 2010 1:20 am

FrankTrollman wrote:Now this is funny. Some of the people apparently got so angry at how poorly compiled War! was that they started making their own book. I know this particular phase of anger well, I went through exactly that when Unwired came out. There is a certain brand of Stockholm Syndrome that affects game fans, where they assume that anything "official" has to be somehow of higher quality than something written by a random fan. And of course, this is not true. All the people who write for all the game companies are random fans. Random fans who get paid for writing, but not paid very much.

In theory, the train of logic goes thus: The devs for a game that has fanboys willing to write for it could pick anyone willing to write for the game and pay them to make it official. Kind of an axiom. Therefore, when looking for fanboys to write for the game, they can cherrypick and get the best writing for the game that the community can produce.

There's all kinds of assumptions there, but that's basically the gist of it. The idea of "if the homebrew is so good, someone would hire them and make it official."

Ancient History · Post by **Ancient History** » Sun Dec 19, 2010 1:45 am

I probably burned whatever good will I just had left on my cross-post to Dumpshock and the Official Forums, but it amuses me to compare the two threads. Dumpshock: about 500 posts, 10,400+ views. Official forums: 110 posts, 1065 views.

Fuchs · Post by **Fuchs** » Sun Dec 19, 2010 2:21 am

Keep us informed whether the mods of the offical forums delete your post or not?

Stahlseele · Post by **Stahlseele** » Sun Dec 19, 2010 2:28 am

knasser wrote:Stahlseele - have you been a bad person?

http://forums.shadowrun4.com/index.php?topic=416.15

Don't follow the official forums but saw a link to the thread and thought I'd see what was being said there...

Useful post, I thought. (Not sarcastic)

K.

*nods* ^^
i could have been on that board in less than 5 minutes, seeing how it does not seem to register using a proxy server . .
but eh, i decided it wasn't worth it.
and getting banned for that posting was totally worth it.
i just wonder if they would have checked and noticed if i had posted that under any other name O.o

adamjury · Post by **adamjury** » Sun Dec 19, 2010 6:10 am

Otakusensei wrote:Oh God, who told Dave to bring his rape-face to the interview?

Dave is a talented creator and a great person. I know there's been teh dramaz with him and TGD users in the past -- but he doesn't deserve to be treated like that, dude.

TheFlatline · Post by **TheFlatline** » Sun Dec 19, 2010 6:38 am

I don't know the guy from Adam, but you have to admit, it's not the best picture ever...