Speaking as one of the old school background nazis who was (in part) responsible for the Seattle emphasis on background standards (Hell, I coined the term "Not Shadowrun MUX Material" for crissakes), I repudiated my earlier stance on backgrounds a long time ago and now find the concept of lengthy backgrounds to not only be a barrier to entry, but also something that largely (in practice) goes unnoticed and unrecognized.

I love lengthy backgrounds, personally, for myself. ?I love writing them and I love reading them. ?However, they are like short stories in most cases. ?They're read once and never looked at again (for the most part) by the staff. ?Someone who can write an excellent background can be (and many times, IS) a lousy roleplayer in practice with other people. ?The skill required to write a lengthy background does not translate in any way to superior roleplaying ability; the functions are as different as those between a writer and an improvisational actor.

As well, and a common retort from many of my friends who don't like backgrounds, backgrounds have the disadvantage of locking a character into a certain initial mindset. ?Should you find your character involved in something that would (to the player) seem interesting but that (according to the background) the character wouldn't or couldn't get involved with, then you get screwed. ?Furthermore, as background writing is done in a vacuum, it restricts a lot of interesting character-promoting roleplay that could happen on grid. ?Let's say I, as a newb to the game, write a background that explains how I became a shadowrunner. ?Then I meet Bob in-game, and I really get along with Bob, who I never knew before. ?I'd like our characters to have a tie in our backgrounds somewhere, but I've already written mine. ?Or, alternatively, I'm involved in some roleplay on the grid and I want to become involved with the players who are already there, so I can invent a background element which inserts me into the action.

I don't mind PCs writing long backgrounds and I personally will likely continue to do so, but I do not approve of their being required.

Backgrounds are just that. Backgrounds. They offer a starting point, they are not what your PC is now, nor are they what they will be in the future. They are not all inclusive bibliographies. (sp?)

And seeing as acting and writing are the same thing on a mush, you'd best be pretty good at both to be any good at roleplaying on one. All you have on a Mush is your ability to write. It is your sole means of communication. You have no body language, no voice talent. All you have is your ability to form a coherent sentence. Writing a background proves that you know the basics of writing and communication.

I'm not harping on bad grammar, horrible spelling, or the inability to use proper punctuation which plagues the internet as a whole. I'm saying if you can't express yourself through written communication, you're not going to roleplay any better than anyone else. I don't care what your drama class teacher told you. To roleplay well, in a mush environment, you have to act and write with at least some ability.

Also, if you have a starting point, with a few solid facts, you can round out your character faster than someone pulling things from their arse on the fly. And without a background to back it up, they can change it on the fly to their unfair advantage:

'I know I said I was a 17 year old ganger kid, but I'm really a battle hardened merc with two purple hearts and a severed head in my jock-strap, so I'm not going to be scared when the ghoul rips off my teammate's head and deficates down the throat hole....'

I agree a background shouldn't limit your RP venues. Don't write them that way. They don't have to include everything about your character, just enough to get you started, with a few facts to keep you from pulling severed heads out of your pants...

-Hades, first dibs on pulling severed heads from his pants.

I'm all for not pulling severed heads out of pants.  You wouldn't believe how difficult the stains are to get out.

But Hades summed up my opinion on not having backgrounds rather well.  If you make things up as you go, there's nothing to say that you can't change the entire character concept from one scene to the next. Growth is good, changing to fit the current scene and come out on top isn't.

Oooooh. You've got a gun. Well....

...
.....

...... I've got chainsaw arms!

I very much disagree with that statement, RP and BG writing are two very different things. When in a scene and RP you have an envoirment, other PC's or NPC's and the situation as a whole to interact with, you get input and can react. When writing a BG you need to create something out of the viod without much of starting points and bringing something not standard to paper is even harder as a lot of things are around at least thousands of times from what I figured.
Don't get it wrong how much I hate BG's (I'm currently writeng one and didn't got more then 1 sentence within 5 days written down) I think they are importan but it is wrong to ste RP and BG as the same. Often it works out that someone who can write a very good BG is at least a decent RP'er lone for the reason that they have a) thought out their character and know how it reacts b) know the theme and the sorounding well but I it does not meen that it is always the case nor that is alwas the case the other way round.

We can all agree to disagree on whether a good BG makes a good RPer, but I do have to throw my flag in with Noor.  The BGs that have always caught my attention as a staffer, the ones that make me want to read them, the ones that get through on the first try with applause, have always turned out to be good RPers.  If you can keep the flow through a BG, you should have the ability to keep the flow through RP.  Pull in NPCs fighting in a corner as something rather than just the static room desc and that gives the other people you play with some of that input. 

The input you get from RP, Licenser, comes from nowhere, the same place a Background comes from.

While I haven't been around for twenty years like some people, I did get started in online RP pretty early, at the tender age of thirteen.  This was about nine and a half years ago, and so I've gone through just about every stage of MU* maturity.  When I first started out, I hated backgrounds.  I'd played tabletop games with a terrible group, and thought that MU*s were terribly uptight about telling me I couldn't have a gun or a knife just because I hadn't apped for it or gotten it approved by staff, or mentioned it during a weapons search.

As I learned the ropes of online RP through osmosis, over a few years I flipped over to the other extreme.  While still basically a dumbass, I was a much more popular dumbass with staff.  I pulled the same stupid shit that I did to begin with, but since I'm an okay writer, some of the time, I got some really silly things approved, like the time I got a twelve year old werewolf with an extremely sacred magical weapon (and the ability to draw on his ancestor's knowledge to be a complete badass with said weapon without any training) approved with a twelve page whopper of a background.  It took me many hours to write, but it was long and detailed, and it got me on grid.  Staff assumed that if I could write that BG, I was golden.  (I wasn't really as terrible as I might have been, but I was bad enough.  This was on a World of Darkness MU*, for those who know that game, and the character was a twelve year old recently-changed Silver Fang cub with lots of Past Life and a 'family heirloom'.)  Within a couple of months, my character was entirely too hard to play within the confines of what I'd written...it was great in a story, but it sucked to play with others, because the character was locked so rigidly into the storyline that he didn't flow and adapt and grow.  I ended up retiring him, and somebody got a Grand Klaive off of his body.

As years went by, my RP improved, I learned what is a dumbass thing to do and what isn't (mostly), and I learned to get inside my characters better and play them in a more fluid way.  The more I played, the more succinct my backgrounds got.  I found that my characters were more believable, that I got into their skin better, and enjoyed playing them better if I left things vague in the background, detailing the important bits (He's from the Random Place, his family had Stuff Going On, they're now Doing This In That Place, Some Important Stuff Happened for Plot Hooks, Explanations for Important Stats, Now I'm In Current Setting for This Reason), and the more in-depth character quirks and personality tend to flow more easily once I'm in RP.  I start out with a shell of a character that slowly inflates and fills up and comes to life when I play with him.  If I'd artificially blown up that character in the background...well, he'd just be full of hot air, to stretch a metaphor.

What's the point of this thread necromancy?  Well, just to add in my two cents that backgrounds should be things to explain the basics of who your character is and how he got where he is now, to provide plot hooks for staff, to let staff know what you want to play, and to give you a foundation.  A background that does more, in my opinion and my experience, limits you more than it helps.  I'm sure for some people this is different...and for those people who -need- more...let 'em write more.

I've done app approval before...I hated the job, but I've done it.  I can tell from a short, succinct background that this person is going to be a complete idiot and this one is going to be all right.  I don't need pages and pages worth to sift the wheat from the chaff, if it's going to be good in ten pages, it's good in two.  If it's going to set off alarms in ten, it will set the same off in two.

Anyway, I've rambled.  To summarize: Long, Detailed BG does not necessarily mean good player.  It just means long-winded, verbose player.  Succinct backgrounds that tell you what you need to know, I think, can identify a gem much easier than monsters that span novella length.  To quote Strunk & White: Omit needless words.  Omit eight pages worth, and everyone will be happier.

(P.S. - Yes, staff, I realize I'm playing a dumbass concept right now on SR:S.   I do not argue that Teethree in his current incarnation is up there with the guy with the magic silver sword.  He'll be more sane in the new SR4 game, -promise-!)

For clarifications sake, I thought I'd mention that the length of the BG doesn't matter to me...much.  A two paragraph BG isn't going to explain much of anything.

But to be a good background, no, you do not need pages upon pages of extra info.  A bad bg doesn't necessarily mean it's short.  Length does  not guarantee approval.

One of the worst curses that can afflict a Shadowrun MUX is the house-rule craze.  Too many house rules can end up being a barrier for new players- someone who's new to Shadowrun and barely has a handle on the original rules can hardly be expected to juggle dozens of adjustments to those rules.  But more importantly, house rules breed.  When you alter a rule for game balance, this usually screws up the tuning somewhere else, requiring a new rule, and another, and another...

The reason I'm mentioning this is that limiting essence at chargen is a house rule, and I feel the need to preface this statement with my argument why house rules are bad. The reason I say it's a house rule and not a mere background limitation is that there is no provision for it in the book.  On page 72, the book suggests the way for GMs to limit the level of starting characters, and that is to modify the BPs to start (which I would be against as well, as I have yet to figure out a game breaking 400 point character and don't believe it's really possible to make one).

Everything else that's been said about backgrounds so far has been valid, and I think everyone's on the right page more or less.  Only there hasn't been much said about the essence limit.  Maybe that's cuz everyone agrees it's going to go because of the new adjustments on cost and availability?  Maybe nobody's really thinking about it...  So that means I'll ramble a bit I guess, since it's of the most concern to me.


Another reason why an essence limit is a bad idea is the datedness introduced by SR4, which was mentioned waay at the start of this thread.  The fact that price and availabilities have been adjusted is, I agree, a reason why a low essence no longer signifies a character's endpoint.  I'd like to emphasize this point by saying that costs and availabilities haven't just been adjusted, they've been grand-slammed out of the stadium.  In SR3, alphaware was the standard for streetsams because even your omgwtfspensive items like wired reflexes 2 cost around 1/10 of your maximum starting resources.  You could, and I did, on numerous occasions make a character who never needed another piece of cyber or bio.  Getting beta was an option, but the retardedly high surgery costs meant that it was essentially infeasible, and probably would have netted a grand total of .3 essence if every piece was upgraded.  In SR4, however, alphaware is not the standard, it's the omgwtf1337.  Nowadays, your wired reflexes 2 cost you over 10% of your starting maximum resources, and alpha costs you (obviously) 20%.  Tricked out cybereyes cost about the same in nuyen that they did before (around 10k), except that amount actually matters.  Doubling that to save .08 essence no longer seems worthwhile.

Of course, everyone might already have realized this and tacitly agreed to move on, making my whole diatribe unecessary choir-preaching.  I will confess that I have an ulterior motive, namely that I have a 0.4 essence character already spiffed and polished, complete with a badass website BG and a custom created artsy fartsy character sheet who I'd like to create on Seattle when it opens (yes, winter break does these things).

Oh yeah.  An essence limit also favors adepts over sams in a system where the dichotomy is brought considerably closer.  The increased expense and availability of 'ware means that sammies no longer hands-down outclass starting physads.  Sams are now much more jacks of all trades with the ability to give a moderate boost to all of their attributes, which physads are the unquestioned masters of specialization with the ability to gain up to 6 bonus dice to a skill, as well as exceed their augmented racial maximums for attributes (like, whoa).

Thanks for reading my exhaustive post about an issue which may or may not be controversial.  I hope you enjoyed it ;p

I would support some sort of RP test requirment for an essence that low, and heres why. One... you really woulda had to work to get down that low. Most sample character's didn't even need 'ware. I'd also note that for player's who like, too resources at C, in SR3, Alphaware wasn't a standard. Kevlar Bone Lacing still cost me a chunk of change, and I never even thought of getting something as horridly expensive as Wired, then and now. Back on topic though, when someone's essesnce is that low, you have to be sure that there actually gonna RP that low essence, and not just playing with numbers. I remember seeing one or two oldbies with like... .3 essence that RP'd there character's as perfectly normal and emotionally stable and expressive folks. The reality should be that essence below 3.0 should start making you feel less emotional, and anything below 1.0 should just make you plain detached from life. A lowered range of emotion's if you will.

Not saying that they don't feel at all, but they wouldn't express it much, and they wouldn't feel it so strongly when they did feel things. It should be a /big/ limiter in RP, and you shouldn't be able to be among decent folk. You should have medical problem's, and you'd really need some justification about being psychotic to get that much ware in the first place. That last bit's just my opionion though.

Anywho, I'm not saying restrict it all together, but folks that go past a certain level should really prove that they know how to RP a low-essence character.

This is an interesting idea, Rheiv. I like it. Making an RP test the hurdle, instead of some other metric.

Also, you could expand it. Would it be possible to have an RP test instead of a BG? RP is RP, but BGs are only tangentially related to RP ability. Seems like it would be an interesting evaluator, and probably a lot more fun for the admins running it, too. Or maybe give people the option: written BG, or RP test with any available staffer? I'd figure running an RP test, from staffside, would be just about the same amount of effort as going through a BG, and more fun, and a better test of if someone's going to get along well in the game.

Just a thought, inspired by Rheiv.

I wouldn't know about replacing the BG with an RP test. Certainly, some BG restriction's could be replaced with an RP test, but BG's are more then just test's to see how well you'll RP or if you have the gumption to stick through writing a BG. BG's are necessary so folks know you have a feel for your character, and that you have some sort of hooks and the like already hoppered up. I mean, I'm all for being a little vauge in your BG, and winging somethings. That gave me some of the best idea's for my current character. But you should at least be able to hammer down some of your character's basic stats. How'd he get everything he has. Why does it he have it? How did he get to where he is today? Cheifly, why is this person doing anything as crazy as running the shadows? If you don't have answers to those basic questions, you end up with RP inconsistencies that could effect other player's.

Noting an unrelated pet peeve, inconsistencies do suck. I go about RPing that the Browning Max-Power is rather reliable, accurate, and well made, being a logical decendent of the Browning Hi-Power. THen someone can come around and go, "Oh, I don't like the Browning Max-Power. It fall's apart with the slightlest touch, after all." Or something as simple as how the military's organized, or who the crime bosses are. There's a fine line on BG's where you have to look at it and go, "I want to be unique, but I don't want to do anything that will /define/ the game world for another player. Or something. Man I'm tired.

Anywho, theres my .02 'yen.

Assuming such things as to how a person would be after many surgeries and implants begs a lot of questions. It seems it would be totally possible for a person to feel more alive and robust than they ever have before, just because they have finally reached a potential that they felt their meat bodies incapable of. I don't see how a lowered essence equals apathy, and desensitivity. I mean, if an AI, with no meatbody to speak of at all can feel anger, hurt, jealousy, then why should a lot of cyberware make that much of an impact on a living person?

What makes a person cold, and this can apply to any archetype, is dealing in death and mayhem; watching allies die in front of you; being double-crossed by those you trust; etc. An adept/mage/mundane non-cybered can be roleplayed every bit as cold as mr. .1 essence, hell, even moreso, because being in the thick of things is what leads to such derangements. Most veterans of wars sport the kind of mentality people seem so eager to place on street samurais, and some of them never even took a single wound, yet can be even more cold then they guy who is missing a limb, or some other disfigurement.

It seems the urban mythos behind the street samurai is what leads to social complications, not the ware itself. People seem to expect sammies to be cold and mechanical, but aside from being twitchy and chrome, which affects other's views, it doesn't seem to concretely denote that a sam must be as cold as the metal in his body.

As for calling someone crazy just for improving themselves artificially, even to a great degree, I can't help but feel that is well-concealed meta-gaming, because if such things were available today, I have little doubt that many who could afford them would sport them proudly. Cybernetic modifications have been available for decades in the SR world, and are so common as to be blase' to most folks.

Essence is merely a guage as to how much a body can take before the soul calls it quits, and heads on to the great beyond. One could even argue that it is merely an indicator of what the nervous system can handle before the brain is too drastically altered from its original pathways it was designed to follow neurally. The brain is designed to endure a good deal of plasticity, but everything has a limit. This isn't cyberpunk 20/20, where the rules are clear on what a certain level of tech will do to one's sanity. If a person has a .1 essence, it seems to me it would be excellent RP material, as that person has danced with death many times, and for some people, that is the ultimate thrill, especially for one who has the cahonies to run the shadows.

To nutshell this little piece of opinion: I think that cybernetics and a low essence should not guarantee a detached sense of self and personality, though it is probably common, being that is the concensus of many players I have encountered. Cybernetics are not available just because there are lunatics that crave it. The ware is tried and tested, and it is possible for a person to reach self-actualization through artificial enhancement, and thus be that much more jubilant for undergoing surgery and essence loss to achieve that end.

I am with Salvolio on this one. Yes, extensive cybernetics should change your personality. But it's not always to the cold/apathetic end of the spectrum.

I think the problem is that a lot of us players (myself included) have mentally imported the CP2020 thematics into Shadowrun. In CP2020, cyber is just how Rheiv has described: it detaches you, makes you not care about human things, unlikely to pass in normal society. In other words, cyberpsychosis. And while there are a few echoes of that in the SR rulebooks, it's nowhere near the same. It's just a bit of fanon: things that have gone assumed by the players for so long that we treat it like canon.

Also, for RP interviews: you can very well structure an RP test/interview to learn the same things as a BG teaches (although I do still reserve my doubts about how effective BGs are in the end). Why not do an RP session like a real interview, or a psychiatry session, or the runner dictating his memoirs. There's all kinds of ways that, in a non-binding way, a PC can RP his character and cement down what he did with his life, how he got his 'ware, what got him into the biz, all the things we want to know from BGs, and want BGs to make a player think about for their character. And it's infinitely less frustrating for the players who don't like writing short stories. Less stress on the staff, as well. I think it's a win-win thing.

Well, heres the thing. Yes, you can say that. Someone needs to delve into some books and look these things up, but I think theres some precident for real psychological effects to a big big amount of cyberware. Its not how you want to feel, its about limited range of emotion's that the lowered essence could give you. Its not insane to put one peice of cyberware in. But to go under the knife multiple times, get your nerves replaced with wire, your spine replaced with a superconductive material, and steel plate's sewn into an outer dermal layer... thats a lot to do. Some cybernetic enhancement is fine and all expected. But things like Wired Reflexes certainly arn't the norm, and .1 essence certainly isn't.

Its stated in the SRS's chargen, but also in a lot of the medico books like Shadowtech and Man and Machine (I think. I lost those books on my hard drive a long time ago) That essence just isn't the amount of ware you can cram into your body. Its the tenacity of which your spirit clings to your body, its how clear the signal reception is between your soul and your physical self. You /can/ 'lose touch'. If anyone can support my stance here, that'd be great. If someone can disprove it, that'd be great too.

Anywho, thats just my opionion. Even if you don't want to RP the change in emotion, you have to RP the disconnect.