/srg/ Shadowrun General -Keep On Clubbing In The Sixth World Edition

Glad you liked it. Dumb jokes from last thread are best jokes.

>Implying the girl isn't running a badger game and the troll isn't saving me the effort to coming up with something to do to her too.

You've really got to buy off Paranoia soon, user, it's getting to you.

I also don't have another way of resolving the situation that doesn't involve either strapping a bomb to someone or unloading with machine gun drones, and I've been working on going an entire week without being branded a terrorist by the media.

Is it possible to initiate a character during creation?

Unclear. Ask your GM.

Most of the media is corporate owned, anyway. At least two or three thought that a Stuffer Shack being besieged by gangers last week was a terrorist-backed plot to destabilize Aztechnology's low-end retail chains.

Although it is odd how well armed the customers were... And didn't something like this happen last week, too?

>Food Fight every week.

I really hope it's the same Stuffer Shack every time.

>each time your group has a party wipe, you run the next set of runners through Food Fight as their first run
>each time against the same Stuffer Shack
>each time the security gets progressively tougher

And does the same Lone Star detective show up every time to deal with the situation, getting more and more outraged at the petty crimes committed by some of the most-capable criminals in the world?

Some day...

>eventually your group wants to try a change of pace and be a team of freelance security consultants.
>their first job is to work security for the most well-fortified Stuffer Shack in the world.

so, question about Deckers using a PAN to protect their gear in 5e.

I'm thinking about making a Decker / Face sort of character, but I'm having trouble with the cash flow in Priority Gen. But it occurred to me that I might be able to buy a strong Commlink, then slave a deck like the Little Hornet that's got lopsided stats to it to shore up that shitty firewall stat.

Would that work? Any idea what the problems with that would be? I know that in 5e you can't do most hacking with a Commlink but you'd still be able to use it's higher limits to defend your gear while using the actual Deck to point it's higher stats at what you want hacked, yeah?

It seems a little minmax-y and I'm sure there's a fatal flaw, but I can't find the rules that'd actually make it shit. Is it good for a budget decker?

You cannot use the Comlink's attribute as your roll's limit, only as dicepool when defending. This is not as hampering as it sounds with a deck that can switch attributes around, especially with the Quick Config and/or Perfect Time qualities.

Watch calmly as she flips him over her head and holds him at cyberspur-point. If he tries anything further, I wait about 3 more seconds for her to eviscerate his organs.
Dating the party razorgirl is fun.

Does anyone know where I can get my hands on the German pdfs for 5e? I can't find them in the pastebin.

Ahah, so that's how it works. So I'd get to chuck 6-7 dice at it, but the limit would still be 1 if that's what the 'deck set it's Firewall at.

Gotcha, thanks.

Kannst du lesen?
"In Deutsch" ist ein Ordner dort

Fuck me, thanks for noticing.

What are the top educational institutes that are still around in Shadowrun? I know MIT became MIT&T, are most of the Ivy's around?

Not afraid of receiving the worst handjob of your life?

This reminds me of that one time our razorboi got himself hired as a stripper in a strip-pub as a part of his cover and promptly glitched his skillwired performance roll

Laugh as his hand is melted/burnt by my girlfriend's acidic secretions of her skin.

Charles University in Prague is still around as a top tier magical university. They've got the Great Dragon Schwartzkopf there as a full time professor. He lectures in full dragon form.

Is the Alphaware Toolbox worth it physically for a new group?

Are there still horse races in shadowrun? Thought it might make a fun session where my players Jew the Kentucky derby in some way.

Horses have made a big comeback. Outside urban areas, especially in the NAN, people who need to cross terrain that isn't easily accessible by wheeled vehicles (whether they are rangers and sheriffs, cowboys, or just farmers surveying their land) use horses frequently.

This bit is my own speculation, but I imagine the Kentucky Derby still tries to maintain purity, i.e. no cyberhorses or gene tampering in the mounts. It's a bloodless sport, and reasonably classy (at least in the public image), so the people betting on it might prefer if it looks like it keeps it as a clean race, between well-bred and highly trained mounts, rather than a competition between 'ware manufacturers to come up with the latest mechahooves.

Gnome jockeys are allowed, though.

One can wait, 2D will deliver. We fa/tg/uys are patient creatures.

Slap his ass.

Also, typing 'shadowrun minotaur' into search brings up an image of Barret Wallace for some raisin.

The troll slaps your moobs.

This really annoys me. One of the background details from the Sprawl Trilogy that really stuck with me was the horse being extinct.

Watch The Killing directed by Stanley Kubrick

Do nothing.

My only girls are my snake-woman mentor spirit and a contracted force 7 succubus that I'm trying to feed.

But Gibson isn't equal to SR. You have Tir here full of faeries and shit, user.

>the horse being extinct

Always reminds me of this passage from Cracked, back when Brockway wrote there and it actually was good.

>Apparently the people in the past were pretty sure we would've finally gotten our shit together and won the war against Mother Nature that we all forgot we were waging. They saw a future where there were literally "no Mosquitoes nor Flies. Insect screens will be unnecessary. Boards of health will have destroyed all mosquito haunts and breeding-grounds, drained all stagnant pools, filled in all swamp-lands, and chemically treated all still-water streams. The extermination of the horse and its stable will reduce the house-fly." They not only thought we would have intentionally burned, paved over, and chemically sterilized all the world's marshland, but look at how they thought we'd reduce the house-fly problem: "The extermination of the horse." The horse. As in, the collective horse. The entire species.

>And they fucking loved horses!

>But the second the animals ceased to be useful, turn-of-the-century man fully expected our race to rise up and terminate all horse-kind, and then mount their mournful heads on pikes in our yards as a warning to the rest of the natural world: This is what we do to our friends, motherfucker, what chance do you have?

Err, someone correct me if I'm wrong, but shouldn't your mentor spirit prevent you from doing anything with a shadow spirit that isn't killing it dead?

>* Running GoingOutWithFriends.btl...

>there's a thread on /r/shadowrun asking people to compliment the freelancers because there's been so much negativity lately

Good lord, just HOW BAD is Howling Shadows?

Bad

Very Bad

"Wilhelmina Graff-Beloit after Lofwyr announces his shares" Bad

Good taste chummer.

Any advice on how to make pic related work in SR?

Like able to actually do a run, work with other runners, work with bad people, etc

Ironically enough, I already made this character.

Never used, however. Human. Adept. Skip reflexes and focus your PP and augs on raw strength and unarmed skill. Get a bag full of Kamikaze and Jazz.

It's got monsters. Wish it had more.
Drakes still suck tho.

Er. I say unarmed skill, but I guess you could do axes if you want to be completely accurate. Also Berserk trait with berserker rage power.

I was thinking Orc to reflect the size of the original character. Or even a Troll to really get the physically imposingness down.

Berserker power and drawback necessary. Mystic Armor perhaps and a Code of Honor.

There's no price or availability for any of the critters you might want to buy, because the lead dev wanted them to be harder to acquire than an availability test and corporations wouldn't release their breeding stock for sale.

People are also salty about drakes being impossible to make out of the gate in priority character generation, as they cost 75 karma. Doesn't all need to be purchased at once, but it means your first 25-50 karma pretty much has to be spent on actually becoming a drake.

Personally I don't mind the drake rules as they're pretty explicitly intended for higher-level games where you're gonna be getting that much karma quite quickly, but the /srg/ meta of street-level black-trenchcoat games doesn't suit it well.

Honestly the problem is that the only people we SEE are the freelancers, while the rules they write are compromised by decisions made upstream from them.

Guy making the Fate hack reporting in. How does my Skill list look so far?

>Academics, Athletics, Body, Burglary, Conjuring, Contacts, Deceive, Decking, Empathy, Hardware, Notice, Fight, Investigate, Medicine, Notice, Persuade, Pilot, Provoke, Resources, Science, Shoot, Software, Sorcery, Stealth, Will

So, what, the Freelancers write sub-par or "Okay" material and then it's edited into trash by CGL in house?

I have a hard time understanding who's to blame here. I wish I knew why people keep dragging their names through the shit to write stuff for a company that turns it into trash. Or alternatively I don't understand why CGL keeps hiring trash and spending no time editing

Maybe it's both?

Either way I guess we'll get another "We'll do better" statement while they get ready to shit out the next book.

.. Is there a next book? What hasn't been brought over from 4e yet?

>corporations wouldn't release their breeding stock for sale.
They also wouldn't release their experimental laser cannons and souped up hacking hardware, but those can be bought all the same.
Which is why it's dumb that they've somehow managed to be completely effective at stopping the black market from getting its collective hands on paracritters when they can't even stop it from getting literal WMDs once in a while.

>There's no price or availability for any of the critters you might want to buy

So.. What.. It's like "Here's some critters. You can only fight them. Did you want to have a pet or mount? Ha ha, too bad, fucker."

I've chatted to a couple of the freelancers about this, and generally they want to write Shadowrun material because they love the game and think they can contribute something awesome. Same reason we shitpost on here, just with more responsibility. I have to believe it's decisions that come down from above, as you can see from the utter refusal to release errata that's been pushed up to the editors by the freelancers.
See, that's the fucking infuriating thing; it's a tacit acknowledgement that the acquisition system doesn't work for shit. If it was setup from the start as 'You NEED a specialised contact to get your gear' you wouldn't see as many people just write it off as 'Yeah, I spent my three free contact points on a fixer, he gets me stuff.'
So the bulk of the book is essentially Aetherology, with a dozen or so pages of critter gear and ware, and how to train an animal to do tricks. But yeah, there's no availability or cost for any of the animals. Reddit made a list of prices for them.

That's probably because the scarcity prevents people outside ares from realising they suck.
Dev advice was to get your hands on the critters by shooting them with stick and shock

>tfw in our game we have had to work for a gang run pornographic studio whose best production is called Trolled
>it's literally just blacked but with trolls

It's bad enough that I publicly shared the book just to undercut sales. It's bad enough that I honestly considered kneecapping mac for it.

>People are also salty about drakes being impossible to make out of the gate in priority character generation, as they cost 75 karma. Doesn't all need to be purchased at once, but it means your first 25-50 karma pretty much has to be spent on actually becoming a drake.

More than that. Because you can't buy the 75-karma version, that lets you be a drake automatically from the get-go, you need to buy Latent Dracomorphosis for 5 karma, and then spend 140 karma in-game to fully activate it. It's impossible to do in all practical games unless the GM is a true Monty Haul, even at Prime Runner levels.

The funny thing is that they don't even have the prices for regular animals. You want a beagle, or a fish in a bowl? Load up on stick 'n' shock and start hunting. That's how people get pets, right?

The only prices in the entire book that I can find are for the biodrones. So buying a housecat is impossible, but a nigh-invisible, amped-up tiger you can jump into? That's fine, 600k.

They give the prices for all the cyberware, but not the base animals. You want a chimera? Pg. 170
>Costs for chimerics are triple the base creature cost plus twenty-five percent for each type of genetic modification and fifty percent for each chimeric ability.

So they give you the math, but not the basic numbers. It's retarded. I can't tell if they just forgot a table, or I'm a retard who can't find it.

C'mon now. Mac fucked up the Drake section by not making them a metatype like shifters (haven't done a straight comparison, but I think drakes may actually be worse than some of them), and by the fucking retarded MAGIC CYBERWARE THAT DISAPPEARS WHEN YOU SHIFT AND COMES BACK WHEN YOU SHIFT BACK HOLY SHIT THIS IS HUGE AND BREAKS THE LAWS OF MAGIC AS WE KNOW THEM, but some of her other work is good.

How did you craft memorable villains in your games? I presume, working with PC backgrounds was involved. Did you start creating villains after the start of your campaign or did you plan them beforehand?

There was a lot more wrong with it than that. The lead-in story was fuck-awful self-insert shit, knowledge on drakes seems to have taken a massive step backward to the point where they're pretty much just saying it's a mysterious mystery of mystery, drakes are described as metahumans that can transform into drake form rather than vice-versa, (minor nitpick: it says metahumans can't be made into a drake, but that's exactly what Dunkelzahn tried to do; maybe not common knowledge, but definitely known, since metaplot characters frequently reference being angry at Dunk for his plans), the drake/dragon relationship is described uniformly as abusive/coercive (which isn't true), the line "Parents of would-be drakes often try to smuggle their children out of the sight of whatever dragon is behind their transformation", THE PICTURE OF AN ANTHRO DRAKE OH MY FUCKING MOUNTAINSHADOW, "For once, I’m not at all hamstrung in what I can say, because there’s no one in the people I deal with representing the free drake population and putting on constraints." Uh, no, Frosty and Ryan Mercury have had interactions, "That’s not to say dragons don’t want their property back. And yes, they think of drakes as property. That’s a universal notion, and it shouldn’t surprise any one of you." Big D fucking NAMED HIMSELF after one of his drakes (but ok, I guess dragon antipathy is universal enough to justify this line regardless of its truth), and then everything to do with the mechanics.

The good: "I know of a dragon cult operating out of the western UCAS, and supposedly the higher-ups in this little cult can transform into metahuman-sized dragons. I’d pin their activities on Ghostwalker, but they’re basically a gang with a spiritual bent, and they focus on turf wars, so I don’t see how that advances his plans." is an actual decent hook.

Help me out, /srg/.
How would you go about making a psionic dude?
I want to make a guy that focuses more on mind whammies and telekinetics than spirits or whatever, but have almost 0 system mastery.

Psionics is a tradition. It's also a posession tradition

Wait how does that even make sense

(cont'd)It's weird because Chimeras are explicitly things for people to buy.

>For the mid-range chimera owner, there are certain pets that have proven so popular that the demand had to be satisfied. A few years ago you only found Cerberus corgis on the arms of starlets and tinies in corporate gene zoos. This past Christmas, over 50,000 three-headed fuzzballs poked their way out from under the yule tree to the delight of children and spouses everywhere.

To the delight of children and spouses, but not Shadowrunners. They are doomed to a cold, corgiless existence. You could buy a modified pet now, but not in the future where they are explicitly a common phenomenon. It would be one thing if they had a table that walled off certain modifications, rating some things with F availability, but they didn't. It's the same price if you want your pet to glow, or increase it's physical limit by 1, or if you want to give it wings or venom or poison fangs.

Also, I can't tell the difference between 'genetic modification' and 'chimeric ability'. All of the things are in one list, are we supposed to tell from the fluff? Does Ink Extrusion count as modifying genetics, or chimerically adding squid buts?

The fluff stories are always awful. I know they changed some of the background stuff about drakes, but I never read close enough to the old things to care. Didn't know that stuff about Dunkel Donuts.

assuming 5e:

psionics is a intuition, possession magic tradition in stolen souls. so you'd be making a mage that views his magic as mental stuff.

blaster mages are not going to match firearms in most cases. having the option of spending edge to throw a force 12 ball lightning is very nice, but lower-force spells are much less impressive.

there are a lot of spells that can simulate telekinesis and telepathy - mage fingers being an obvious starting point. look through magic section of the core book a bit, grab street grimoire and stolen souls from the rapidshare, and you'll be fine

It was a whole slew of missed opportunities. It seems like the goals were:

* Make drakes non-disruptive to the gameplay narrative
* Make drakes balanced.

If I'd been in charge of writing it, what I would have done is:

1. Since drakes were only created in the 4th world and thus there was only one downcycle, this is the first time dragons have been able to observe the long term effects of drakes interbreeding with metahumans. As a consequence, it turns out drakes are a lot more common than first thought, but the majority of the drake population have powers that are diluted because their genetics are diluted.
1a. Consequently, great dragons ignore weak drakes and also have less need for non-elite drakes in general, due to inflation. In fact, it was largely this fear of inflation that drove Lofwyr to thwart Dunkelzahn's plan to Drake-itize everyone.
1b. A great dragon will still pursue a shitty drake if they feel they had a claim on them (like if you worked for Saeder Krupp, for instance).
2. Drakes come in tiers from pants-on-head useless (like, too unfamiliar/unaccustomed to their drake body to even use natural weapons effectively) to elite tier. At the game's beginning you pay an appropriate karma cost to buy both a floor and a ceiling to your character's development, with later karma costs to actually level up.
2a. Working for a great dragon naturally boosts you one level higher, no karma required, but counts as a negative attribute.
3. Since drakes are no longer so important to great dragons, there are now people who want to dissect them/whatever. But since the matter of determining which drakes are fair game is complicated, the situation is...complicated. Lots of outsourcing of tasks; no megacorp wants to assume the risks internally.

Go read Shadow Spells, pg 5.

Also, just go heavy in Manipulation. Mental and Physical. Levitate is the best one for moving shit. Control Mind and Mind Probe are also good ones.

psions are basically just deluded mages who gimp themselves by cutting out a lot of magic that they consider "impossible" under the made up rules that their "mental powers" function under.

Doesn't that apply to pretty much every tradition?

Most traditions don't decide that "We don't deal with spirits in any way whatsoever, we can only use certain spells (but they're not actually magic, mkay), and the astral plane doesn't exist (Which is why we literally can't interact with it most of the time)" is an okay way to deal with magic.
Other traditions just have stuff like "Don't be a dick to spirits" and have the capacity to understand that magic is magic and how it all comes together.

More like nitro.

man, I just wanna tetsuo shit guy

I don't like the idea of non-elite drakes, but I don't know enough about the metafiction around them to dispute that. I just always thought that drakes were the elite foot troops, very rare and powerful. Making them common makes them... less special, IMO.

I do like the ceiling/floor idea in general, and point 3. Nobody studying drakes was an idiotic thing to say, especially when they point out in that section that the same corps don't mind cutting up technomancers, changelings, shifters, or headcases despite what enemies they might make. Aztechnology did a dissection of a fucking dragon, for God's sake, they give no shits.

They do mention that it's a very rare tradition, basically used solely by narcissists who think they're the only ones who really understand how things work.

>More than that. Because you can't buy the 75-karma version, that lets you be a drake automatically from the get-go
>>The high Karma cost for this quality need not be paid completely during character generation, but the balance must be paid with earned Karma during the campaign before the character is able to shift into dracoform for the first time.
youtube.com/watch?v=bFtcLJVN8yg
Bred drakes are metahumans that shift into dracoform. True drakes are a different kettle of fish entirely.
Dunklezahn never managed to create new dracoforms because the Humanis burned his vaccine to shit before it could be administered to people. As far as everyone that isn't fucking Lofwyr is aware it was a longevity potion.
And then you'd get people complaining because none of that lines up with the rules that were in Running Wild, and it's a well-established fact that CGL will always take the path of re-writing 4e content over taking a new direction.

Oh, also this is only the "positive:" sins. There are many more in terms of what kinds of information was omitted

Do you want to be special or do you want to be a fucking dragon, omae?
.

Well, this isn't the setting for it.
Even if you do play a psion, you're still actually using magic. You're just really deluded and the butt of many, many jokes.
Psionics was big when magic first returned to the world, because nobody understood what was going on and "it's brain power" seemed to be a pretty good answer, because it seemed to actually work. Psionics got progressively smaller and more nonsensical as time went on and people started learning about what magic really is. Now it's really just a lot of bitter old psions who are too stubborn to realize they're wrong and some unfortunate young people that they've managed to convince.

>The high Karma cost for this quality need not be paid completely during character generation

I missed that over the fold. So what's the point of Latent Dracostuff? It doesn't give a price point for how much you need to put in; everyone could buy that quality for 1 karma and wait and see if somewhere down the line they want to be a magic dragon-man. I guess it's if you decide to want to be a drake after chargen, so you need to pay twice the cost because reasons.

I should clarify- there's no amount for how much you need to put into the basic Drake quality.

Picking up Drake means you start out with the Wanted quality, with all the problems that entails. Latent doesn't incur that penalty, but you do gain the ability to unlock abilities for it over time. Some GMs might force you to pay double karma for Drake as well, I guess?

I need good advertisements. Im assuming mega corps cant just force... well they can't force everybody to buy their products, especially high end equipment like decks and home defense auto turrets.

>with a purchase of a premium durasteel Ares safe you can get up to 15% discount on select Ares wall turrets because the best defense is a good offense
>You watched her on trideo, you played with her on the matrix but now you can be her or with her with the brand new Elfy Mcface BTL chip for standard chip devices. Take your love to the max warning: disabling safety protection on chip or any device is illegal and will void any refund in addition to being prosecuted by our lawyers
>try my pork buns, made with real pork*. Make you real man, you'll love it or my name isnt Shogun Masamune. *5% pork byproduct

>Im assuming mega corps cant just force... well they can't force everybody to buy their products
That's exactly what they use simsense to do. Jack it up to just below illegal level levels, and let addiction susceptibility percentages do the work.
>especially high end equipment like decks and home defense auto turrets
Decks? No. They don't want citizens with decks. Too hacky. They barely want citizens with firearms - home defence ads are for dinky light pistols.

All these words, and complete sentences?! I can't be fragged to listen to all of this!
Icons, omae! I'm a busy man!

Bumping this.

Go back to futurama's intros for the first couple of seasons where they have advertising clips. Also look at national tourism ads, Mass Effect, and 'famous ads' on google.

Also old people. It used to be THE tradition for the first five or so years after the awakening. I can totally imagine an elderly academic who is running to fund his research.
Ares: we sell lasers. What more do you want?
Horizon. We know what you want.
Are you the toughest fucking trogger on the streets? Then you should buy the sleeping tiger(tm), lined with kevlar and with a ruthenium polymer exterior so they'll never see you coming.
They're coming for you. Don't let them find you wanting. Ares: the premier brand in self defense products.

Pistol Adept, what powers are necessary to be remotely effective?

Improved Reflexes, Improved Ability
Traceless Walk and Wall Running for style

Anything that makes you shoot better or faster:

- Improved Reflexes: makes you shoot faster
- Improved Ability (Pistols): makes you shoot better
- Attribute Boost (Agility)/Improved Attribute (Agility): makes you shoot better
- Combat Sense (1 rank): This does not allows you to shoot better by itself, but will make it incredibly hard to take you by surprise

If you do not take any cyberware and cannot see in low-light, the Improved Sense: Low-light Vision is a pretty useful one.

Nimble Fingers is nice if you want to "reload fastah".

- A man who never eat pork bun is never a true man
Pork Bun guy, Sleeping Dogs

Holy shit, %5 real meat? Get a load of Mr moneybags over here.

Real byproducts.
We're talking the outer shavings of the hooves and the most disease riddled bits of liver and intestine, ground up into a fine sludge, bleached of all flavor and color, redyed and artificially flavored, then reconstituted using a soy base and put into a styrofoam cup with some noodles.

That reminds me-

Soy is actually bad for the human body, I remember reading about that.

So in 2075, pharma companies are probably making shittons of cash.

Have you seen the anti-allergy products?

From what I've heard, 3e made allergies common.

>That's not even a tie, both of you lose.
That IS a tie.

>Soy is actually bad for the human body, I remember reading about that.
In Shadowrun or irl? The stuff about it being tied to estrogen was broscience.