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Message: <blockquote data-quote="SteelCoyote" data-source="post: 4366954" data-attributes="member: 21543">Heh, I ran a "Shadow-Dawn" campaign once.  I started players in SR (2.0e) and then had SR's signature character Harlequin show up.  He (eventually) brought the party to a revived portal in Aztlan in order to transport them back to ED to "fix" some things that were going wrong in the SR timeline.  It was an utter riot when everyone figured out this was no ordinary shadowrun, and began to sense just what was going on.  ...though maybe you had to be there to appreciate it. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />FWIW, we (my group and/or coworkers at the time) often argued about the ED/SR timeline:  I thought that FASA's official cycle of "Ages" implied that SR was two 'worlds' after ED (ED, then modern/current/magicless world, then the Re-Awakening that was SR).  It seemed that in SR magic wasn't what it was in ED, (perhaps b/c humanity as a whole had lost too much Essence?), but there also wasn't a Scourge or Horrors (though, in another of my SR/ED crossover campaigns, I was slowly bringing SR into another Horror-infested Scourge as all the magic in SR is, essentially, Raw Magic by ED standards). <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f631.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":eek:" title="Eek!    :eek:"  data-smilie="9"data-shortname=":eek:" />However, I also felt it could be possible that ED does follow SR: SR's Raw Magic leads to the Scourge, and ED is the result.  The Kaers are what's left of the massive SR Corporate Arcologies...I played one ED campaign that way, with the various ruins like Parlainth holding odds bits of SR references that only the SR gamers in my group got--and loved.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />Man, now I miss my old ED group... <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f641.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":(" title="Frown    :("  data-smilie="3"data-shortname=":(" />I played FASA's ED since it's first handouts hit the gaming store I worked at (back in 1991?).Compared to D&D 2nd Ed, I definitely thought the core system was far more inventive and flowed better both in and out of combat.  I liked the "tougher" characters (more HP than D&D--especially at first level) and I felt the back-story and the involvement in an unfolding exploration lent to some really great RPing opportunities within the group.  I liked the Step-Action Dice, Karma, Combat Options, 3 Defenses, Talent/Skill set up, character races, and overall "feel" to the game.I actually preferred (and still do prefer) ED's combat system with the differentiation of DEX for Attack but STR for damage.  And, I liked the variance in dice/Step per player (or per Combat Option-like going Aggressive and adding 3 Steps to Attack).  I liked their movement system (tied to race and Dex) and I liked having a Physical Defense that was for how difficult you were to hit but which was unrelated to what armor you were/weren't wearing at the time, and I liked that armor was there to reduce damage (as it should).  I preferred ED's unlimited casting magic system (spells per day bugged me ever since the boxed sets, and kept me from playing very many mages in D&D <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":P" title="Stick out tongue    :P"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":P" /> )And I loved the "unlock the UNIQUE magic item" of ED over D&D's Monty Haul/GolfBag style of magic item collection.Really, my only complaint--and it was the game killer--was that after a few campaigns, you began to feel very, very limited.  The Discipline system just didn't really allow you to make vastly different characters.  After a while, every Swordmaster/Archer/Whatever in the group ended up more similar to any other character of that Discipline--whether it was one of your old characters or someone else's at the table.  Every example of X-Discipline seemed to be just another clone rather than something unique.  Whereas, in D&D 2nd, we had so many Kit Books that we'd play Single-Class-Only campaigns (ie All Clerics or All Rogues, etc) and never have any doubling.  In fact, if you looked at our All-Rogue party, you'd see the widest range of characters that just happened to share a very few baseline stats.Earthdawn suffered from the inability to create a new/different/unique character experience the second time you wanted to play your favorite class as well as having difficulty differentiating Swordmasters if there were two in the party.ED also suffered from an utter lack of D&D-style stacks of spells/items/etc., which also helped make each character seem overly similar to all others.  That, and it just got kinda boring to be so seemingly limited when D&D had 8 books of spells and magic items, plus 83 Kit Books and 3 jillion monsters in 17 Monster Manuals.I tried for years to alleviate the Discipline-Clone problem by just churning out as many new Disciplines as I could think of (I have 48 in my House Rules), but you still had the problem of "one-shot-only" Disciplines.  Once someone played one, they'd pretty much played them all.  The Talent selection was just too restrictive.     In my later campaigns, I simply did away with all but the core ethos of each Discipline, and let players simply pick Circle-appropriate Talents from any Discipline list (the ED PG had rules for what Talent could be obtained when) and that turned out to be something very much like picking Feats in D&D 3.0 and so, finally, you could have widely variant approaches to the same core Class/Discipline.Still, ED was ahead of its time in many other ways.  D&D 3-3.5 began to borrow/incorporate much of what I first saw in ED (even Eberron struck me as very ED-like), and MMOs and D&D 4e seems to have continued the borrowing.EX:Talents :: FeatsRecovery Tests :: Healing SurgesKarma Dice :: Action DiceCombat Options :: Combat Expertise/Casting Defensively (etc.)3 Defenses :: FOR/REF/WIL ED Heroes :: Points of Light..etc...I know I've talked about more than the list above, but those are all that spring to mind at the moment.Lol, and now (sadly) it seems like 4e is going down the same (wrong) path ED did by making seemingly more-restrictive classes than you could make in 3/3.5--at least that's been my experience playing and running 4e so far.Base/Core book to Core book I think the 3/3.5 PH had greater ways to differentiate two characters of the same class than in 4e's PH or in FASA's ED.I kinda skipped the re-hash of ED 2/3, I toyed with House Rules for a Homebrew "Dragon Dawn" ED/D&D 3/3.5 crossover/mixed rule game, but never finalized anything (ED core/combat system, D&D classes, Disciplines as either subtypes/specialists or Prestige Classes).So, anyway, I'm excited to see that there is going to be a 4th edition, maybe I'll gravitate back to that since I'm (so far) less than thrilled with my D&D 4e experiences...Heh...and, to be honest, I miss the sense of epic heroism when your Open-Ended dice kept coming up open and you really did look like a Hero!  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" /></blockquote>

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