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Message: <blockquote data-quote="kigmatzomat" data-source="post: 2872703" data-attributes="member: 9254">I guess I'm an SR grognard.  A buddy bought an SR1 BBB (big blue/black book) as the store clerk was unpacking the first case from FASA.  We played later that night.  Our game was quite a bit more grim'n gritty than Hellhound's; our GM's first action was to review character sheets and make sure every player who forgot to buy ammo's gun go )CLICK(.  Much fun ensued and whenever we weren't sure how the world worked, we thought "Hey, what would Edison Carter see?"SR1 was a nightmare of dice.  The initiative system was kludgy, damage had variable thresholds and stagings, autofire was like pulling teeth, and I seem to recall every character had like 4 different combat dice pools.  We almost killed the GM when he let the sammy pick up a minigun.  magic was kinda fluffy since it was so....different from what anyone else knew.  But gawd was it fun.   Nothing by RTal was stocked in our game stores (I didn't know it was a game until a friend introduced me to CP2020 in the 90s) so it was our only cyberpunk other than Gamma World.  SR2 was beautiful in comparison.  Autofire was streamlined, staging was simplified, and the combat pool was a much more elegant system.  It was also anime.  You could load on the armor and combat wares to be a living tank and we did so.  Physads were kicked in the crotch and then gelded but otherwise magic was a much more comprehensible beast.  The skill system was simple...perhaps too simple.  Characters tended to quickly become powerful.  Possibly too powerful, too quickly.   They seemed to run headlong into the freaky statistical events that occur in the "exploding d6" system.  SR3....is the AD&D 2e to the AD&D 1e of Sr2.  It had the same base mechanic but tried to nerf the rampant overkill that was present in Sr2.  Not a bad system on its own but a bit too granular after the simplicity of Sr2.  SR3 characters seemed to improve like CP2020 characters: virtually never.  SR4 is a mas muy bueno system and is the d20 of the SR systems.  A total rewrite but pretty much the same in spirit.  It seemed the longer it had been since a person had played SR2/3, the smoother the transition to SR4.  Six people made characters, learned the system, and ran a simple scenario using just two books in a couple of hours.  We've played several different scenarios since then, but not a serious campaign.  The setting has been tweaked so that the megacorps are still powerful but that the governments are stepping up to the plate.  In a way, they are competing with the Megas and helping to setup a fractured Orwellian state.  Someone is probably watching you at any given time but who that someone is varies from block to block.  The Crash 2.0 that destroyed 90% of the world's databases on citizens makes it feasible for so many fake IDs to be floating about; industrious scammers registered hundreds, if not thousands, of personas with a multitude of nationalities and left the paperwork in some snafu'd state that they untangle as they need to create a new ID.  he system works well and without some of the statistical "edge cases" that a few of us could exploit.  the wireless network enables hackers as party-centric characters now, riggers can be useful without their cars, drones are now inexpensive RC devices with great electronics but light armor, and mages don't burn excess amounts of karma on learning spells at different forces.  There are a few problem points as certain aspects of the matrix rules seem inconsistent with core mechanisms and PC-owned AIs seem to futz things up, but overall it is a solid system.  It would be nice if they would RELEASE SOME FREAKING SUPPLEMENTS but hopefully that blood-pressure reducing event will occur at GenCon.Hackers, the old deckers, now crack into systems fairly quickly, or at least simply.  They eseentially try to "sneak" into the device without being noticed.  They need a certain number of successes to get access and the target's system tries to "spot" them getting in.  Once they are in, even if spotted, commands tend to be much more streamlined and affect a larger  array of devices.  In short, if you log onto a corporate network as an Admin, you can do anything he does (move/copy/delete files & users, run network attached devices, etc) without that irritating TRON-like node hopping.  Since lots of combat gear is now computerized (smartguns don't need cyber, contact lenses can provide HUDs, trode-nets for internalized voice/audio, etc) a hacker can try to break into a security guy's gear  or hack the enemy's tac-net.</blockquote>

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