[Harlequins_Back]

2 : a usually cheap exploitive imitation

At the nSR book's price, it's not cheap, but an imitation nontheless-- and as for exploitation, if people follow my advice and don't buy nSR until they can afford it, they won't be exploited.

HB, Jong Wong Kim *is* his real name. And you need to dial it back a few notches. I'm not overly fond of SR4 either, but you're making it sound like you've got a real mad on.

I liked your review. I think it was informative, and well-done for a first timer. Now, please stop thinking any contrary opinion is an attack on your baby, and we might all get along, mmkay?

You're right-- I was mad because I thought people were attacking my review, just because I didn't think nSR is the greatest thing on the planet. I took a few days off, thought about it, and I'll try to come at this with a clear head. But my review stands-- it isn't that great. It doesn't suck major rocks, but its not the second coming of Gnu, either.

I don't think he was bragging. I think he was saying, "Here's my character who is skilled in shooting people in the face. But, if it comes up, I have a decent number of dice to roll in a social situation." He's not going to be exceptional at it, but with 6 dice he should be able to avoid looking foolish, and might win a few favors or something.

Oh, and I can think of plenty of situations to use social skills that don't involve one's contacts, so I don't see this as a worthless addition.

But without contacts, he won't manage to get very far at all. That is the big mistake that Laz made, and one that will send him back to the drawing board for at least half an hour or more. I said as much-- make one mistake, and you're practically back at step one.

And we've shown that it's possible to do characters in tens of minutes (I doubt I could get it as fast as 10 minutes, due to the looking some stuff up).

From lurking here and on Dumpshock, I can tell you that "tens of minutes" is the rarity, and "several hours" is the norm-- at my fastest, I couldn't break two hours and have a character that covered all his bases. The people on Dumpshock make characters for fun, memorize Shadowrun books, and they're complaining about character creation times-- that, plus the layout problems I mentioned, are obviously a problem.