NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Altalazar" data-source="post: 2123465" data-attributes="member: 939">I played SR from the start, though I stopped playing just before 3rd Edition came out.  It was my favorite system and my favorite game to run.  I at one time had three seperate games going at once (in the same in-game city).  It was great fun.  I did my own version of their news releases, and one group would read about the other in the "paper"  I thought SR2 was an improvement on the first in terms of rules, mechanics, etc.  I never played SR3, but I got the books and have looked at the rules, and I thought it was, in some ways, a step backwards - for instance, I thought threat ratings were a nice, simple mechanic that had a cool effect in the game.I really haven't had time to read any of the supplements post SR3 release done by Fanpro, so I can't comment on them.  But from looking at the plans for SR4, killing deckers, killing the Matrix, and "streamlining" the game, I have a very bad vibe about it.  I thought the "streamlining" done for SR3 was a step backward.  When I first read about it, about "hackers" and the general plans for the world, my gut reaction was that they are killing the game.  Part of the great thing for me about Shadowrun was that the world itself was so well built and had such great "flavor" - now they are changing that at its core.  I will probably get SR4 to look at what they did before passing final judgment, but as it stands, I have tons of SR1,2,3 material to use when I have time to run again and I am guessing that I'll never use SR4.  Of course, one other factor was the mention that all previous sourcebooks will be obsolete with the rules changes.  Now, if SR4 was truly an improvement and didn't kill the game world for me, that wouldn't necessarily bother me that much - though it still would rankle - but what it does do is, if SR4 is as I fear it is, it will likely mean I will never buy another FanPro product again - because then all new supplements would be incompatible with the old rules AND incompatible with the old world (since it has no Matrix).  Kinda kills the whole thing for me.  I really feel with this new version, they killed the gameworld.  Obviously, there are plenty of materials to play one's own game ignoring SR4 entirely, but then it is sort of like FASA (and FanPro) went out of business and the system is dead from a new material standpoint.  And I'm sorry - "hackers" just do NOT fit into the world of Shadowrun - a huge part of the flavor is all of the new terminology and slang introduced - it put you into the mindset of another world, the same, yet different.  "hackers" just drags me right back to the rather stupid (though stylish) movie of the same name with Angelina Jolie.  It turns the system to Drek.</blockquote>

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