/srg/ Shadowrun General

Think about Elemental Strike & Elemental Weapon (knuckledusters), and talk with your GM about whether you get an Armour Penetration (AP) bonus or not.

Don't go with Elemental Body, as it does (Magic + 1/2 Magic) drain damage, and costs twice the PP of the other two. If you have access to Run & Gun, put shockweave on your armour instead. Similar effect, much cheaper.

Thanks for the advice
>GM
Sadly I just enjoyed the setting in the videogame and I'm trying to get familiar with the rules, no actual game in sight

I'd advise you mount anything expensive to either a drone or a heavily armored vehicle so it can run away when things go bad. Rotodrones and that one blimp whose name I can't remember are great for this, cuz they can just fly straight up and mock all those fools who forgot to bring anti-air guns.

What are the important things to know when trying to build a rigger who A. can drive and B. Has several support-y drones like the wasp to scout or a rotodrone with a sniper to plink at people who get sassy?

Okay, so you need high REA, LOG, and WIL. You can skip on wil if you aren't going to jump into any of your drones.
You need an RCC to control your drones, and a piece of headware whose name I can't remember to jump into things.
If you want to jump into things, you need the appropriate pilot skill (so you can drive it) and gunnery (so you can shoot folks).
You also need autosofts for your drones to give them skills. If you have a lot of one type of drone, you can put the autosofts on your RCC and share them. For example, I share pilot(rotodrone) autosofts with mine.
Drones are, on the whole, really fragile, but if you can get their armor moderately high, than they become almost indestructable because any attack that would be converted to stun on a person is just ignored.

A) You can't mount an assault cannon on a rotodrone

B) Everyone has anti-air guns. They're called guns. Your drones aren't going to be flying at plane height, they're still within range of a guy with an assault rifle if you want to have the drone within range to shoot at the guy with it's own assault rifle.

C) They have their own drones. Your Mini-Zep is floating overhead at 0.5km an hour, then a pair of Dragonflies come up and rip the balloon open.

Okay. The Reaction is for driving, Willpower is for resisting damage and shit, but what's Logic for?

Can you get an RCC implanted? Is it worth it if you can?

I plan on jumping into vehicles almost exclusively, but they have been tricked out with guns and stuff, so I will be needing Gunnery. Does that apply to every weapon on the vehicle/drone?

Any recommended autosofts?

My drones are not tanks, got it.

>What level of bullshit Shooting-From-Car type stunts can you pull off before the negatives become so great that it's not even worth it?
Shooting from a moving vehicle only gives you a -2 to hit, and it gives you +3 Defense, plus probably having an additional +2 Defense from being behind partial cover, in a car. Combined with an automatic weapon, you can pull off some fucking crazy shit with that kind of protection and that minor of a penalty.

>Would it be possible for a Decker to effectively operate an assault cannon or high powered rifle for support sniping? If so, would it fall into building a Decker/Rigger hybrid?

Assault cannon needs lots of STR for recoil and AGI to shoot. Sniper needs AGI. Neither are generally considered the traditional strengths of a decker. You wouldn't be a rigger unless you used lots of drones. Getting a single drone to shoot, or a Firing Platform, doesn't make you a rigger anymore than owning a personal firearm makes you a street samurai.

Wow, I botched that post. The decker/rigger bit was meant for controlling a vehicle with a smart firing platform while I'm in with my team doing a run as a decker. I'm still not familiar with the game systems, so I'm mulling over different character concepts.

So, a thread or two people were talking about shadowrun online/shadowrun chronicles bostonian voice acting edition.

I actually had a lot of fun with it, and while it played something like shadowrun x-com with a dash of hairbraned combat ripoff, I liked it and thought it was fairly well executed.

THAT BEING SAID, I'm going to offer to take people on magical rides for karma and free loot. If there's any new players that want a helping hand out, feel free to give a hollah here for Santa Claus, driver of the karma taxi.

>any attack that would be converted to stun on a person is just ignored
And importantly, according to the core rulebook, drones and vehicles soak first, then compared the post-soak damage to their Armor, rather than comparing the pre-soak the way it is with metahumans.

This really does make them borderline indestructible if you can get their armor into the mid teens, except when dealing with APDS and other armor-fucking ammo.

>Assault cannon needs lots of STR for recoil
They don't, actually. Non-automatic weapons have absurdly limited recoil.

What you need the Strength for is the rules regarding only being able to lift so many kilograms at a given strength rating. Most GMs will look at your Strength 1 character, scoff, and say you can't even lift the damn thing.

That said, an assault cannon isn't like your picture - it's like a slightly chunkier sniper rifle, or a really fat shotgun, depending on the make and model.

...

>shadowrun chronicles bostonian voice acting edition.
Do you mean Boston Lockdown? Or is that one I don't know about?

thats the one.

Huh. Should probably install it, then. I downloaded it, heard everyone say it was crap, and didn't bother because I had a bunch of other games on the backburner.

Any recommendations to start?

If you're firing a Panther or something else SS, sure.

Assuming Krime Cannon (which is you should, one point of accuracy and one point of damage worse than the Panther for half the price and the ability to short burst which is fucking devastating, unless you prefer the AP of the Thunderstruck) or another SA assault cannon and 2 STR, you're taking double penalties. So you get two points off the top of recoil compensation, wiped out by the first round you fire. If you ever try and fire a burst, or shoot in two rounds simultaneously, penalties stack up fast. Even with the tiny magazine of a Krime Cannon, you're at -10 to empty it.

He can get that swivel mount thing to reduce the recoil, and some other mods for the gun, but it's still a bad choice for someone without a good STR.

And I know the picture is not an assault cannon, it's called "Grenadier Girl". It's just a picture of a weakling with an oversized gun.

Ok I'm too retarded for the character creation
If I chose priority A in metatype I get an Ork(7), where that (7) should be the point I can spend for special attributes (magic,resonance,edge)
But then I get to chose the magic/resonance, where I automatically get some skill and a magic rating

So, since the top starting magic is 6 if I choose priority B adept, the only way to spend the 7 from metatype is in edge?

>Any recommendations to start?
Spend the money on something else.

aand forgot image

Yes. Special attributes = edge, magic and resonance.

you'd be wasting meta A priority if you go B magic. Go C instead for 6 EDG 6 MAG.

If you choose Metatype A and Magic C (Adept), you get 7 special attribute points and a base magic of 4. You can spend two of those points to raise that Magic to 6 (or 7 with Exceptional Attribute: Magic), and spend the rest on edge.

It means that you don't have to buy top priority Magic if you'd rather forgo the advantages of the high magic priority (bonus skills in this case, spells for mages, etc), buy it up with special points, and still have lots of points for edge.

Get a friend or two to play it with you.

First few missions are tutorial/milkrun stuff with 2 people (and easier karma) before 4p opens up, though there's NPCs you can control.

It really encourages co-op though, in one of the systems I really appreciate more games did - you get extra xp for helping other people out without impacting your own campaign progress. There's almost no reason not to.

Its a little less polished than HBS stuff, but still similiar.

Starting character look doesn't matter, you get a near full customization later. and the power to adjust on the fly later.
The background matters a bit, but you have a few character slots to play around with, so it doesn't really matter to much.

Damage and speed penalties i found to be weightier than other modifiers. +mana is good if you want to be a mage.

Automatics are glorious, shotguns own. I like blades for the dash, and I've done hackers and riggers.

I think the only thing I'd caution against is pistols, unless they've been changed/buffed recently, and possibly using both mana-centric trees at once. You can, but it draws from the same resource pool.

Ok thanks guys

A Krime Cannon with Gas Vent 3, a foregrip, and a shock pad has RC 8 on a Strength 1 character.

RC 7 if you switch over to the Ares Vigorous (which I would, for the 12 round magazine, even if it loses one point of recoil comp).

Also, I'm dubious when it comes to the value of semi-automatic bursts. -2 to the target's defense in exchange for burning a Complex action and burning through three rounds in your extremely limited magazine is of questionable worth.

Stick with it at least through the end of Incoming!

Which edition would you guys recommend for a groups first foray into shadowrun?

>Your drones aren't going to be flying at plane height, they're still within range of a guy with an assault rifle if you want to have the drone within range to shoot at the guy with it's own assault rifle.
That's why I give them sniper rifles. Assuming they don't mind getting a -3 (I think) to shooting, they can be out of range of everything other than rocket launchers. Fuck, I need to check the range chart again
>other drones
True, didn't think of that.
>what's Logic for?
A lot of GMs rule that you use logic instead of AGI when rigging in a vehicle.
Gunnery applies to every weapon you got mounted on a drone or car. Machine gun? Gunnery. Flamethrower? Gunnery. Chainsaw? Probably gunnery.
The best autosofts are pilot(whatever drone you have the most of), gunnery(whatever gun your drones have) and smartsofts (which let your drones use smartguns)
Your drones can be tanks if you get their armor to around 15ish, but your standardass rotodrones aren't.
Oh, and one last bit of advice: the drone mod system in r5 is optional and you can use the vehicle mod system if you want. And you should because that lets you stick bigger guns on them.

>Also, I'm dubious when it comes to the value of semi-automatic bursts. -2 to the target's defense in exchange for burning a Complex action and burning through three rounds in your extremely limited magazine is of questionable worth.

Getting out of the way is the only practical way to avoid being pasted by an assault cannon. Using the short burst on the razorboy to increase the odds of hitting them before they mince over and mince you is a good trade.

3e.
Hear me out, for God's sakes.
It's what the HBS games are based on, it's what has the most sourcebooks, it's what has the best balance, it's the edition with the most cyberpunk feel to it (especially if you include one or two 2e books), and it's not as full of newbie traps as newer editions.
On top of that, a lot of people go on about how new players should start out with easier rules, but all that does in practice is keep them locked into games with those kinds of undemanding rules that in turn provide less flexibility and make for a less fine-grained and more clunky game.
Chances are that if your players want to play Shadowrun, they're imagining 3e too, not the modern fantasy with megacorps that is CGLrun.

>A lot of GMs rule that you use logic instead of AGI when rigging in a vehicle.
So does the core book, in the sections that were written by the guy writing about Gunnery. The guy writing about Matrix Actions? Not so much on the ball.

>That said, an assault cannon isn't like your picture - it's like a slightly chunkier sniper rifle, or a really fat shotgun, depending on the make and model.
Considering what caliber they're firing, those guns are scaled up to be troll-sized. Pic related is a real life "assault cannon."

and I was so hoping to get in before 3efag and his rose-coloured glasses about how 3e has best balance despite the obvious flaws, how it has best flavour because he doesn't like Year of the Comet

>Tfw Shadowrun will never have the crazy high caliber weapons 2020 has
All I want is a 14.5mm assault rifle damn it.

I'm a fan of 5e myself.

What would be some good enemies for a street scum campaign that would be tough, but not impossible to beat and require a lot of thought/planning?

I recently ended my previous campaign to begin a street scum one to neuter some dice fudgers and min maxxers so that way the game isn't horribly unbalanced and unfun for those who play by the rules. I'm just looking for some better/more intriguing enemies rather than throwing gangers at them and have a scaled down version of the previous campaign go down

Are there any benefits to a 20+ dice pool in (astral-)perception ?

I was thinking about making a perception based adept
>see ALL the things !

Smoke and other visual cover would still impose a penalty to attack rolls, no matter how good the perception is (oddly enough). so are there other uses for perception, that are mostly non GM dependent ?

Definitely 1e
I mean, you have to start somewhere. Why not at the beginning?

You could take some clues from Burn Notice

What's Burn Notice?

lmgtfy.com/?q=burn notice

a TV show, A-team mixed with McGuyver
with Bruce Cambpell as one of the main characters

Well, with Astral perception you can assense, which can give you some really nice info about people/things

That sounds pretty cool, but I'm not entirely sure how well it can mix with the campaign. I'm having the players make new characters using street scum rules and street level priority for nuyen.

Although I suppose I could pull of the same concept, just replace spy with hobos and lowlives

an actually low-key but modestly powerful Magician. possibly a possession one.

A la hardcore henry.

So it would be more in line to an infiltrator/face build ?

In every episode the main character goes around helping people who need it (a la A-Team)
The spy game is often marginal and just to bring the plot forward a little bit, most of the action is finding clever way to solve problems

>Are there any benefits to a 20+ dice pool in (astral-)perception ?

>0 None

>1 The general state of the subject’s health (healthy, injured, ill, etc.). The subject’s general emotional state or impression (happy, sad, angry, etc.). Whether the subject is mundane or Awakened.

>2 The presence and location of cyberware implants. The class of a magical subject (fre elemental, manipulation spell, power focus, curse ritual, and so on). If you have seen the subject’s aura before, you may recognize it, regardless of physical disguises or alterations

>3 The presence and location of alphaware cyber implants. Whether the subject’s Essence and Magic are higher, lower, or equal to your own. Whether the subject’s Force is higher, lower, or equal to your Magic. A general diagnosis for any maladies (diseases or toxins) the subject suffers. Any astral signatures present on the subject.

>4 The presence and location of bioware implants and betaware cyber implants. The exact Essence, Magic, and Force of the subject. The general cause of any astral signature (combat spell, alchemical combat spell, air spirit, and so on).

>5+ The presence and location of deltaware implants, gene treatments, and nanotech. An accurate diagnosis of any disease or toxins which afflict the subject. The fact that a subject is a technomancer.

Once you start racking up enough hits, it gives you a stupendous amount of details information.

If you're that good at Astral Perception, you'd be a retard not to get the Psychometry metamagic:

>PSYCHOMETRY
>Psychometry is like experiencing flashbacks, a flood of senses and emotions that can be uncontrollable. Once the magician develops this skill, the door can be diffcult to close. Everything the magician touches generates this kind of feedback. Do you really need to know the life story behind every shot glass and barstool? The magician learns to put up mental shields to flter out distractions from all the input he would get from astral imprints. The magician needs only a few moments to raise or lower his shields to attempt reading an object. To read an object, the magician makes an Assensing + Intuition + initiate grade [Astral] Test; see the Psychometry table for modifers and results.

>When reading an object, the magician has a –2 dice pool penalty to all other actions. Unfortunately, while reading the object, the magician has no control over how long the reading takes, and she cannot stop until the reading is done. It can take 1 minute, 5 minutes, or longer. The gamemaster can roll 1D6 to choose the duration, or he can decide the duration based on the psychometric experience.

It's hard to find a singularly better legwork skill than Assensing, especially once Psychometry gets added to the mix.

Does any version of the SR4A techno echo that allowed you to get 5 init passes in meat still exist?

Mesh Realities? Nope. Wait for the Techno book. Supposedly details are coming next month sometime.

I wonder if they'll do the smart thing and do a playtest first.

>do a playtest first
>CGL

>g-gib 5 IPs
kek kys

Assume two things:

1) Party does not have a decker or technomancer and for various reasons they can't "just hire a NPC" or similar workarounds.
2) They are paranoid about the possibility of having their stuff hacked during a run.

How much sense would it make for them to turn as much of their stuff as possible into throwbacks or offlines with no wireless (i.e. requires directly jacking in to access)?

Of course losing all the benefits of wireless means you're shooting yourself in the foot massively, but is this paranoia justified or is the party being crazy?

>but is this paranoia justified or is the party being crazy?

Both.

I wouldn't be worried about being hacked myself, more that you'll be absolutely fucked because you're missing one-third of the world. You have no way to tell when the alarms go off, no way to avoid being seen on camera or detected by other sensors, no way to fake anything on a moment's notice, no way to get paydata, no way to get through any door that isn't mechanically locked, etc.

You basically can't do anything that requires stealth or removing evidence afterwards.

I don't know about that. You could still be plenty OPERATOR doing low-tech style and vandalism.

Cover faces, use gloves, pack jammers and camera neutralizers, cut the power first thing, etc.
You don't necessarily need to be connected to the matrix to interact with it.

Will take a long time to get that though since your first metamagic will always have to be Masking.

>Masking
Depends on how stealthy you prefer for your infiltrations to be.

Grey man philosophy. Learn it, know it, breathe it. What an awakened can tell about you by reading your aura is some scary shit, and you should do your utmost to hide it from everyone.

>Grey man philosophy
I once played a Human-Looking Bland Elf social adept with a focus on social infiltration and occasionally assassination. A former government spook who got burned, erased his own SIN, and went underground with a crew of criminals to build back up a network and resources now that he no longer had a support agency.

Great character, really enjoyed him.

Not all characters care, though.

What's the best way to be an unstoppable, unescapable badass, who can find you anywhere you go? Cyberware for tanking, Detect spells for tracking, and the ritual that expands your detection range out to miles?

5e DnD DM here (and a relatively inexperienced one at that) - love the look of the Shadowrun setting, but daunted of the plethora of material available... What's the essential books to play the game at its best? I've been told the starter set is garbage, but don't know if there's any truth to that?

Free spirit

Oh? Go on. Is that an option in 5e?

Well, you get the Trove, and you get Chummer.

Not for players

Alright, as a player character, then, a Detection mage with tanking cyberware? Would that be the best bet? Maybe Channeling to boost his attributes?

Why are there two Echoes for Technos to control drones?

Lot of books in the Trove, what would you recommend as the bare minimum? Just to shop the game.

The entire download.

Core is all you really need to get started. You can find a copy in the OP files.
Other books add a lot more options and some potential for minmaxing but the core has enough for almost every archetype to do what it does best.

If you have to add more options Run Faster and Run & Gun benefit everyone equally rather than being tailored to a specific character type but even they are probably option overload for new players.

Familiarize yourself with character creation and use Chummer5 to help you and your players. Probably strict to Priority Character Gen while everyone is learning.

Don't worry about sticking too close to the default setting but familiarize yourself with the way the world works so you can into it for yourself what might make sense when player questions arise.

And finally, make sure you understand the types of jobs shadowrunners get hired for and the kinds of security that your players should encounter. Tailor your missions to what they are good at. Fixers don't set Johnson up with a team that can't handle the job.

Food Fight is a simple introductory mission that sets players up to understand their roles pretty well. If you don't have a tutorial mission idea of your own that is a good start.

No. To get enough cyberware to be 'unstoppable', you'd be a shit mage.

The best way to do it is Shorn Ones style- One mage, one cyberzombie, working together. In a single character, you could be a mage, specialize in Ritual Spellcasting [Detection] and Longarms. Get a high-rating Agent to do hacking and track people through the Matrix, summon spirits to help you track someone magically, shoot them with the Franchi shotgun or Terracotta Arms sniper. Pick an INT tradition to help with fighting.

It's still going to be pretty stretched, because 'being an unstoppable badass' and 'being the greatest hunter' are two different streams with not a lot of overlap in terms of skills. Being a PI a whole thing.

One is supposed to be the updated errata version of the other. They are both awful though.

they totally are, but I can't say any more

They seem to basically just work like the normal Control Rig? What makes them so bad?

Let me correct that.

Are they going to do any form of public playtest at all, or is there any way to sign up to help playtest it?

>To get enough cyberware to be 'unstoppable', you'd be a shit mage.
I don't need to be a good mage. Just good enough to locate someone with Detection spells, and with a nice, big Assensing dice pool. The idea's to mainly be an 'unstoppable' tank-type character who has literally (or figuratively, if another angle would work better) magical abilities to find a target wherever they are and wherever they go.

It seemed like Remote Sensing and Detect Individual might be the best route for that, since with even just Force 2 and Magic 2, you're looking at a range of almost half a kilometer.

I'm looking to make a player character with a certain set of skills, not an NPC to harass a team of runners.

>They seem to basically just work like the normal Control Rig? What makes them so bad?

That the Control rig is just tiny part of the huge buy-in that is being a competent Rigger. Even setting aside the Cost of Drones/Vehicles/Rigger Control Console there is the issue of not having the right attributes for Jacking Into things (REA), not having the right skills (Pilot, Gunnery, etc.), and lots of other stuff.

And let's not forget Biofeedback with no Condition Monitor and no Cold Sim VR.

If you built your Techno to be a rigger it could still do alright, but Techno is a huge buy in to specialize in something a standard rigger does better.

What would you advise for a Rigger focused on jumping into one main vehicle that's modified to be a walker, then?

>>I don't need to be a good mage. Just good enough to locate someone with Detection spells, and with a nice, big Assensing dice pool.

Getting chrome is counterproductive, because Assensing is Magic + Assensing, and burning Essence reduces your magic stat.

Similarly, you need to roll magic + spellcasting for detection spells, and your targets get to resist with logic + willpower (+ counterspelling).

Have you even read the book?

Grab yourself a control rig, a nifty vehicle, the skills pilot(whatever you have) and gunnery, and a bunch of Log, Rea, and Will.

Also Reaction Enhancers and if you're going all the way on this an RCC might still be useful for cyberprograms/autosofts/noise reduction/PANs even if you only have the one Drone/Vehicle.

>autosofts
You can put those on the drone/vehicle
The rest still stands tho.

Did that one guy ever finish polishing that Adam Jensen character sheet?

I was only mildly interested before, but now I want to run as it after I realized
A. The DM literally does not fucking care what you bring to the table as long as it's "legal"
IE: nothing above R 12.
B. He's somewhat of a shitter who cannot stop using references instead of actual creativity, so I'm going to throw in jensen and stop trying to be creative on someone who doesn't deserve it.

I know jensen started out with a lot of shit and while my game isn't prime runner, but I doubt he'd notice.

Jensen would have Deltaware. There's no way to get around that at Char Gen. And there's no way he'd have the essence for all the Alphaware he is packing even with geneware and Prototype Transhuman.

At that point you might as well make a standard cyber street samurai.

That's fair, but I'd probably just rip out parts that aren't core/he starts with until it would work ar chargen.
It's less that I want to run a street sam, and more about the principle of the thing.

>I'm looking to make a player character with a certain set of skills

Is this a very particular set of skills? Skills he has acquired over a very long career? Skills that make him a nightmare for people like me?

Wait, what? I was 90% sure that Assensing used Intuition, and that detection spells were resisted with only Willpower (and counterspelling).