| From: | lists@*******.com (Wordman) |
|---|---|
| Subject: | Timeline speed |
| Date: | Fri, 01 Apr 2005 22:49:59 -0500 |
> Is the Denver of 2065 covered by the Denver Boxed set? Nope, lots of
> that is already superceded by post-Comet changes. Is Chicago of 2065
> covered by Bug City? not really... And 2065 is current SR3. Lots of
> your
> sourcebooks are already out of date...
I just realized that this is the other reason I am no longer as
enthusiastic about Shadowrun as I once was. While I understand the
reasoning behind the "one year in real life (usually) equals one year
in the SR timeline" development strategy used over most of SR's life,
in retrospect it seems to me that it was a colossal error.
I think the game would have been better served by a slower advancement
of the timeline, where the types of books released to keep the game
"new and fresh" would be targeted at making the scope of the world
within that year deeper and wider, rather than making the SOTA of the
new year the focus. The depth of SR's world has always been its
greatest strength and could have been capitalized on more strongly. The
current system tends to leave little time to absorb and incorporate new
ideas introduced by canon books before the canon is off doing something
else.
Dunklezahn's will, for example, opened up a vast array of campaign
possibilities. I had barely began to even wrap my head around most of
the possibilities when the Ghostwalker stuff came out. I've been in
campaigns where a year of real time represents only a couple months of
game time and I suspect a lot of others have, too.
My guess is that very few people on this list play in the current canon
time frame unless they just started playing. I know that many choose to
play in pre-canon times, just because they liked the ideas in that time
better. The last campaign I was running was based around Mob War, for
example. I would have happily waited an extra year for the books that
came out following Mob War if it meant that I could have gotten, say, a
Mob War-era Japan Sourcebook or a book about how the FBI and similar
organizations dealt with the Mob War, etc.
FASA had a tendency towards pushing their timelines out of reach of
their players, to the detriment of their games. This absolutely
destroyed Battletech, for example. The release of SR4 gives FanPro a
good opportunity to change the strategy of their timeline. I hope they
take it.
