/srg/ - Shadowrun General

>A street-samurai and remainder of a previous runner team sent in. All of his augmentations, once specially tailored betaware, is now barely functional after years of wear and jury-rigged repairs. Mentally unstable from the deplorable circumstances and his failing cyberware gnawing away at what precious little essence he has left, he alternates between a stoic melancholy and homicidal paranoia, attacking perceived 'traitors' with what remains of his once fearsome array of cyberweapons
>A psychotic but unaugmented Elf who broke into the mansion to lay low after committing a horrific crime, the sort that makes front-page news. Affable to the player-party, but positively itching for an opportunity to put some suffering down on another lifeform for his own amusement and to spite the mansion's owner for keeping him locked up
>A group of substance-addicted vagrants who mistook the mansion as being abandoned and made the mistake of trying to squat inside. After a long, long time of isolation the vagrants have became convinced that the mansion owner is a deity of some kind and feverishly worship him, following his indirect orders and viciously setting upon anybody who disrespects 'the voice from above and below'
>A few small rats running alongside the skirtingboards at the far end of a corridor. Before the runners can react, a Devilrat the size of a motorcycle lumbers into view, following the tiny rats and seemingly oblivious to the presence of the runners, who suddenly feel a lot smaller than before
>A makeshift laboratory filled with several dozen jars, each one containing a metahuman organ or bodypart and linked together via long reinforced tubing, with what appears to be clumps of wires, nerves and sinew flowing along those pipes. The eye in one of the jars appears to react and contract when one of your runners shines a light against it...
>Jack Black makes a cameo, eating store-brand nachos on an old sofa

>Jack Black makes a cameo, eating store-brand nachos on an old sofa
5spoopy9me

Because I wanted it.
Yup.

Nobody knows how he's still alive, let-alone how he broke in. He shares his nachos with the party and makes a few jokes, mentioning an upcoming album, but when you turn your back he's already gone and the party never sees him again.

>We have all the books as PDFs in the OP pastebin, why don't you use that?

Some people have inferior caveman eyes that get irritated when reading PDFs.

I'm GMing shadowrun (5e) for the first time, and I'm noticing too many things that are overcomplicated for no damn reason like limits

What are some things that I 100% absolutely must houserule?

>What are some things that I 100% absolutely must houserule?
Leave the decking to NPC contacts. Also, there's nothing wrong with limits.

Newbie question: how does military cyberware compare to what's compared on civilian market ?

I want to build a character that's an old solider with old military ware on him (all identification shaved off for later reveal) and would just use the cheaper cyberware to represent that while it's outdated it still can keep up with what's common on the market.

>Newbie question: how does military cyberware compare to what's compared on civilian market ?
Depends which items you're talking about and how elite the soldier is. The average soldier isn't going to get anything better than what the average civilian can, with the exception of some select forbidden ware like cyberarm gyromounts.

Your rank-and-file grunt will likely have civilian-grade prosthetics, enough to maintain performance but not enough for their employers to worry too much about insurance expenses. Being of a higher rank and thus a less replaceable asset would mean having choicer picks of cyberware, along with superior access to combat cyberware-accessories like built-in weaponry and gyromounts and the such. More prestigeous forces for a larger corp would have cyberware that would be considered beta-grade by the standards of its time (woefully outdated by now though, mind you) with things like strength agility and armor enhancements as standard.

Hey Yekka, when I try to add the dracoform quality in Chummer, it just closes the quality window. Any ideas?

Suicide?

Used Wired Reflexes 3?

>military vs. civilian cyberware
I don't think there is a difference. An elite soldier would have higher rating stuff than the average gun-nut, obviously they'd be allowed to have F-rated gear, and availability tests aren't an issue for a real fighting force, but I think that's just about it.

I'd think that smartlinks would be reasonable for all soldiers to have, just for the +2 to hit. DARPA would be tripping over themselves to get that kind of improvement for $4,000 per soldier.

Dermal armor should also fall into that category. I'm sure that armies would happily tank half of a grunt's essence to give him +6 armor for $18,000. You combine that with a full body armor set (18) and the dude's running around with 24 armor. That's even before considering things like a shield, milspec, or being an ork.

Cybereyes seem a bit much. Almost all of those enhancements could just be stuck into a helmet's goggles.

I could see a military being willing to put 100k or more into an elite soldier to get him a pair of cyberarms that both have AGI 9, armor 3, and a smuggling compartment . Then once the guy is done being in the military, they might give the arms to a new guy and give the old guy his normal meat-arms back. If they're nice, they might let him hold onto them with the understanding that he could be called back into service in an emergency.

Move-by-wire sounds like something that a military would do to someone as an experiment.

I don't think that hidden cyber-weapons would be reasonable unless the guy was some kind of assassin. It's generally not a problem for soldiers to appear to be armed.

Spies would be equipped with a tooth compartment full of poison and/or a cranial bomb, just so that they can't be captured. That's especially crucial since every spy agency in the world would try to get their mages trained in mind probing.

>tfw I'm doing chargen in person with my peeps so I can explain everything to them and even I am not sure of everything that must be done in chargen

Bring a laptop with Chummer on it.

Bring a flash drive containing the most recent version of chummer on it, tell people to bring their computers.

What are some problems with playing a Pixie in Shadowrun? I'm hoping to play a Shaman/Face for an upcoming game, and Pixie's look great for that. However, would being an unusual race like a Pixie be to much of a hinderance in social interactions?

Pixies are somewhat disliked due to a) being really overpowered and b) being usually used by Min-Maxers

I'm not talking about player attitudes, but NPC attitudes. Is talking with Mr. Johnson gonna be negatively impacted by being a Pixie? What about going to the clandestine nightclub that Mr. Johnson asked us to meet him at?

Protip: if Mr.Johnson can look at you and immediately identify you as something that can be captured for a bounty (moreso than just by being a shadowrunner, anyways), there might be a problem.

Thanks for the (you)s. To clarify I'm not planning something advanced, just normal stuff that will be fluffed as something like "looking at his arms you see some high grade but old cyberware; at a second glance it becomes clear that this stuff is military, top of the line a few years ago. the markings were scratched off purposely but rest carries signs of both wear and loving maintenance".

Basically top of the line 10-20 years ago, using stats for normal modern stuff as the technology available got better and better. Perhaps one or two expensive "spec ops" thing but that's it. A grunt in some European country civil war where the rebels stole stuff from the government and put it on their own.

I mean, there's also no fluff reason whatsoever for a pixie to be anywhere besides this one forest in France. If that counts as a hindrance in social interactions...

>Brocéliande

There be Irish pixies, me leprechaun!

>Perhaps one or two expensive "spec ops" thing but that's it.
Cyberarm gyromount is a must. There's enough recoil compensation technology in Shadowrun to make firing on full-auto all the time a wise strategy, and you can bet your ass the military is going to put that technology into the hands of soldiers.

>when your players all like different forms of the world and you can't decide if you want to appeal to the pink mohawk christfag hooder, the trenchcoat fedora, the one that is there to just rip and tear through places in a novacoke filled rage, hotline Miami style, or to the guy that's on the job because he's looking for his brother.

Whoever wins this week, everyone else loses.

I want to be in your game, user.

I want you to be in his game, user.

>and you can bet your ass the military is going to put that technology into the hands of soldiers.
Literally, even.

>the pink mohawk christfag hooder, the trenchcoat fedora, the one that is there to just rip and tear through places in a novacoke filled rage, hotline Miami style, or to the guy that's on the job because he's looking for his brother.
It's funnier if you interpret that as a description of the players and not of the player characters.

>Cyberarm gyromount is a must. There's enough recoil compensation technology in Shadowrun to make firing on full-auto all the time a wise strategy, and you can bet your ass the military is going to put that technology into the hands of soldiers.

Why wouldn't they just give him a normal non-cyberware gyromount? It's twice as effective, a quarter the cost, and isn't locked into the soldier. The only downside is that it takes up the underbarrel slot.

The cyberarm mount also eats 8 capacity that could have been spent on stuff like armor, agility upgrades, or a sensor array.

>Why wouldn't they just give him a normal non-cyberware gyromount? It's twice as effective, a quarter the cost, and isn't locked into the soldier.
Versatility. You can only use it on assault rifles and heavy weapons, it takes 5 complex actions (which is going to be anywhere between 3 and 15 seconds) to put it on and a simple action to switch which gun it's attached to. The cyberware version works with anything you pick up and activates in no time at all if you've got your wireless enabled.
>The only downside is that it takes up the underbarrel slot.
Which means you can't use it with America's favorite assault rifle, the Ares Alpha.

>What education does your runner have?
>Did he go to university?
He attended secondary school at Celisté ("Bringer of Light") at Serantaneyo (commonly known as Eugene), in Tir Tairngire. Before immigrating to Tir Tairngire his parents were fairly poor, being early-wave elves, so insisted he get a good education. He specialized in computer sciences and first developed his Adept abilities in the athletics program, but also was inclined towards social sciences which led to his later political views.
>Did he do an apprenticeship or joined the military?
As any adult in Tir he spent two years in the Tir Peace Force, but ended up liking the work so much that he stuck around. In addition it gave him access to training and contacts he realized he could use in his efforts to remove the Prince's from power.
>Did he even go through elementary school?
Yes, and high school, but his education before he attended college was not very good due to the low economic status of his parents.
>Or is all his knowledge self taught from the School of hard knocks?
Though he already knew how to shoot and fight and hack, a lot of his street knowledge came from operating covertly as a runner during his Peace Force reservist days and later after he went AWOL and started running full-time.

Any kind of contacts, really. Deckers are good at cultivating diverse contacts because they understand the value of information.
But an electronics store salesmen or computer expert who specializes in black market computer hardware would definitely be a useful one for a decker.
However, an availablity test would still be required from him, there's no real way around it.

Make Jack Black an ork.
It's fitting somehow.

Limits are really easy though, and unless you are rolling ridiculous levels of dice (20+) for something if a Limit is as high as 7 then you usually won't be hitting it without spending Edge.

Not that there aren't over complicated rules, just that Limits aren't one of them.

Other than a cyberdeck, which will vary because you take a -2 to matrix actions, is there a reason to not run everything you have on silent?
Also, if an item has wireless turned off, does that basically mean its losing some power to become unhackable outside of plugging into it directly?

So... I'm looking to get into Shadowrun proper. But I'm new to the game, and frankly, my tabletop experience is only a few years. Any tips, suggestions?

Read the books
Watch these: youtube.com/watch?v=9qcyTMJ0hPY&t=20s
Ask questions in here
GET CHUMMER
ALL BOOKS ARE IN THE OP

Thanks for the advice. Getting into new systems when no one I know plays them is weird. Everyone else in my group just does D&D.

Yeah, no worries man.
Check Roll20, LFG, this thread, and the Gamefinder thread for games. The official forum can have games, but is mostly dead.

Making all your devices run silent is a good idea, but it's not something you're actually gonna be doing most of time. If your devices are not in wireless mode, chances are they're part of a PAN, and you can't make only part of a PAN silent while the rest is loud (IIRC).
If you wanna do something really cheeky, though, you should buy 100 really cheap credsticks, have them all run silent, and keep them all over your person. When trying to find nearby devices that are running silent, you have to choose one of the devices randomly, so anyone trying to find your silent-running handgun or cyberdeck is more likely than not gonna find one of your silent running credsticks instead.

When something has its wireless turned off, it is unhackable (barring a direct connection). This means you lose all the benefits listed under the item's Wireless Bonus.

>Hot_Teacher_Private_Study_Session.BTL...

Ms. Grundy, you dirty girl. Teach me how to finger those strings.

Driven, Poor Self Control, Paranoia, Phobia... anything that mentally unbalances due to outside stimuli you could be a manifestation of cyberpsychosis, if you're going to do the same thing as you did with Flashbacks and rewrite the consequences to be "goes cyberpsycho".

I can show you how to finger A Minor

Asked this last thread but didn't get an answer.

I'm watching Corporate SINs on youtube, and the GM there has a set of d6s where only the 5 and 6 are pipped in with white, and the 1 is pipped in with red. None of the other faces are pipped in/visible at all.

Is there a place that sells this type of d6 in bulk for cheap? Or is this a potential home project down the line?

Yekka, adding rituals to your spell list crashes Chummer

I don't know of any place that sells those, and afaik it's not an official product (the CGL SR dice are ugly as fuck).

>protecting wireless stuff without a decker
1. Get an evotech himitsu commlink (from Data Trails)
2. Get a program carrier running Virtual Machine(Signal Scrub, Smoke & Mirrors) and two packs of electronic parts
3. Get a receiver commlink dongle
4. Get a computer nerd to hardwire the program carrier into the commlink
5. Plug your receiver into the commlink dongle. Now you have 4 noise reduction
6. Crank up smoke & mirrors to the max (5 noise, +5 sleaze). You'll take a -1 from noise, but you don't care about that because you're not a decker.
7. Slave your important stuff to it. You can have up to six devices slaved to one commlink.
8. Run everything silent, including the commlink
9. (optional) hand the commlink to the runner with the highest logic stat
10. If you run into noise, turn down smoke & mirrors until the commlink functions again

Your important stuff now defends against matrix perception with 10+LOG, which is a lot considering you're not a decker. You probably spent ¥13,130 plus whatever it took to make the nerd work for you, and now you can run your smartgun or whatever with a reasonable degree of confidence that it won't immediately get fucked by an enemy decker.

how exactly is a cyber zombie maintained? I had to check it on the wiki and it just says "multi millions of nuyen".

what's really the purpose of maintaining a combat operative of that level of resources? especially when a magically gifted fucker can be pulled out of a military after a 10 year stint?

What happens to your real SIN when you die, or at least when people think you're dead? Is it possible to use your real SIN after thoroughly faking one's death?

probably gets deactivated after the proper forms are filed.

hell, IRL the IRS declares people legally dead all the time accidentally and that royally fucks up people as it's a motherfucker to get that fixed.

because IIRC they create a background level of their negative essence, that builds over time
plus you can cram a FUCKLOAD of ware into them

don't know why, but i'm reminded of the movie Universal Soldier by Van Damme...

Seems like nosferatu would be more effective for the purpose of maintenance. Just juice a bunch of employees you don't like, then send it out in the field.

>using HMHVV afflicted as soldiers
>especially one that will most likely want to flee or disregard you
>feeding your employees to it

chummer, get that LOG 1 fixed

The SIN needs to be deactivated, but the SIN registry is so incredibly huge that this takes a lot of time and it's easy for a connected person to sell the dead individual's SIN to someone else illegally.

>What happens to your real SIN when you die, or at least when people think you're dead?
The declaration of your death (plus all available details) gets added to your SIN and it stops working. They'd either keep it in the database or move all the data to an archive where it can be used purely for historical and analytic purposes.

>Is it possible to use your real SIN after thoroughly faking one's death?
It should be treated like a burned fake SIN. That is to say, it's useless unless you can convince the SIN database that you're still alive.

Though I agree with this , that a dead person's SIN would still work until the databases get updated to reflect the death. During that window, I'd treat it like a fake SIN if it's used by a different person.

Literally nothing he said indicates that he has autism, though.

>chummer, get that LOG 1 fixed

No way, he's showing some real supervillain potential. All he needs now is a research facility, hundreds of armed goons, and billions in funding.

So a Yakuza Johnson of mine has a little problem. An attempt on his life is heard of through a mole but he wants to move up the succession ranks without drawing suspicion. Is there a way to pull a 18 Count Saejima scenario where the assassins would get non lethals without knowing they are non lethals in a world where every runners knows what guns are?

Hm. So, whose palms would I have to grease to postpone my SIN's update indefinitely?

And what if you do have a decker? Just slave all the important stuff to the deck?

Multi-million nuyen isn't for a single Cyberzombie.

The difficulty with them is that you need the proper magically-trained staff to perform cybermancy, which is a ritual only four Megacorp possess. Plus you need to be able to have the cybertech doctors capable of making Delta-level augmentations to cram literally every inch of them full of ware. The facilities and retention fees for those employees are probably the highest costs.

A cyberzombie might be around 1-2mil but they're essentially made to kill everything, negative background count that taints the area, so much ware you could suplex a tank and tough enough to whistand stuff nobody can fathom of.

They're essentially something you send into a facility or after someone you really want dead/destroyed.

Our techno went to trade school
Shaman is a high school drop out
Black mage never went to school
face was home schooled
The street sam has a degree in kinesiology and wrote a paper on the merits of awakened intergrating cyber/bioware into their bodies

I've been throwing around ideas for a crazy cybered up face sort of thing. Burned Out quality, running on p-fixes and knowsofts to be anyone within the same metatype. Probably comes with its own level fucked up cyberpsychosis.

You could go with Incomplete Deprogramming or Blank Slate to show the Dissociative Identity Disorder that comes with masquerading as several people a day.

Ordo Maximus also has the ritual, and some elven group.

>whose palms would I have to grease to postpone my SIN's update indefinitely?
They call them "ID manufacturers". They're the people who you can go to to make fake SINs and licenses by exploiting the databases' weaknesses. Personally I'm on the fence as to whether to treat the resulting SIN as rating 6 fake or a real one, as there's an argument to be made for either interpretation.

>what if you do have a decker?
Hand your cheesed-out commlink to the decker and let him add his impressive logic stat to the defense roll. Slaving your stuff to his deck directly is a much cheaper and less exploitative option, though it leaves you vulnerable to the inevitable crossfire when he gets into a pissing contest with IC or another decker. If you want to not be a complete munchkin, then slaving your stuff to the decker's deck a fantastic idea.

>Though I agree with this (You) #, that a dead person's SIN would still work until the databases get updated to reflect the death. During that window, I'd treat it like a fake SIN if it's used by a different person.

Apparently you can get the dead person's SIN indefinitely though.
That's why cheap Fake SIN's don't match up with your ethnicity or even metatype if they're cheap enough yet still check out as valid SIN's to casual checks rather then proper scans; because they ARE valid SIN's, just belonging to someone who's not the user. The SIN registry is mostly just a database, so it just notices there's a slight gap in that person's usage of money, then suddenly the SIN starts spending cash again. The database doesn't know WHY this happens (it's just a computer) and as long as nobody investigates it all it looks like is that the person with the SIN kinda stopped spending cash or stayed off the grid for awhile.

That's actually pretty basic identity theft tactics in real life, and as long as you're careful (as in don't try literally passing yourself off as the person you're pretending to be) you can keep it going indefinitely because all the thing keeping track of that series of numbers that is supposedly "you" knows is that that series of numbers is still active, which not in way suspicious.

>only four Megacorp possess
Right, "only". You could throw a dart at a board of megacorps blindfolded and stand a reasonable chance of hitting a correct choice.

You need an ID Salesman contact, a person who specializes in Fake SIN's.
Alternatively, just ask your Fixer for s new one and he'll contact his own guy for it and charge you a bit extra.

It's still a pretty exclusive club.
Requires a solid knowledge both of advanced medicine, top-grade cybernetics surgery, and access to very specific magical rituals that you can't just do on the fly that have been stated to basically require blood magic to even remotely work.

IIRC there are about 10 or 12 black clinics

It's probably failing to add a bonus, so it fails out silently. Assuming killing yourself isn't an option, which quality are you trying to pick?
In the latest nightly? I thought I fixed that in an earlier build.

...

>cyber-Dormer

I want

>DID
>Real
user...

>Blank Slate
That's the one. Always get them mixed up.

>You could throw a dart at a board of megacorps blindfolded and stand a reasonable chance of hitting a correct choice.

user, there are hundreds of megas. If you cut it down to only the AAAs, then yes you're right, but there's more business outside those corps than within them. They're the elephants in the room, but there's a whole fucking mansion built on the back of the world.

Whether or not it's real in real life, it can certainly be real in a world with personafixes.

>user, there are hundreds of megas
I don't know which definition of megacorp you're using, but it's wrong.

>It’s hard to decide just what the ideal number of AAA rated corps is. One is clearly too few—if there was one megacorp, it would run rampant over the world, exploiting people and resources and funneling any wealth it could scrape off the earth into the hands of a precious few.

AAA = Mega.

AA, A, Unrated = Corp.

Our group's elf face is pretty blatantly based off Natalie Dormer, complete with using that very picture as her profile.

No, AA's definitely count as Megacorps as they have multiple subsidiaries and all have extra-territoriality and thus their own private armed security force and everything that makes up a classic megacorporation.

Nope.

>Double-A corps may be as big as, or even bigger than, AAAs, but if they don’t get a seat on the court, they’re not as powerful. And that ticks them off.
No seat, no mega.

Remember, AAA =< Big 9. AAAs are probably comparable to modern-day Fortune 500 companies (although there are probably less that 500 of them).

Aren't some AA megas held back from the AAA ranking largely because the current AAA corps do their damndest to sabotage them JUST enough to say there's some doubts that they qualify and because the Corporate Court only has 12 seats and they refuse to give them up?

Just because you have head canon regarding this doesn't make you right.

There are 10 AAA corps, that's all.

Correct.
Some, like Yakashima and Monobe, are basically no less successful then the AAA corps but are held back from the seats because the AAA's don't want to give them up, and it pisses them off.

I think one of the minor plot points of some of the 5e stuff is that a lot of the long-running AA corps have created a conspiracy to fuck over the AAA's constantly just for stopping them from ascending to AAA status for so long, which is generally a pretty unusual thing for corps to do in SR.