/srg/ - Shadowrun General

Cheeki Breeki. im not sure my current mentor spirit, Uncle Sam, would like me hanging out with Tutor I hear he's not a nice guy.

Requesting follow up pic because this one by itself is 2sad4me.

Does anyone sell anything like Shadowrun-style mages robes IRL? I want to achieve maximum autism.

alas I do not have it...

Hey now, America nuked a bunch of people back in the good old days. They knew they had to roll up their sleeves and get their hands dirty if they wanted to build a world that their children could be proud of, where they could live in peace.

C'mon, I'm sure if you ask nicely he'll teach you Slay (Democrat).

>not Slay (Degenerate)

>What contacts does your runner have? what is their relationship to them?

Despite the games I play in never really going anywhere I like to flesh out my contacts just as much as my characters. I'll post some of my favorite ones.

Street Doc
Name: Jorda Bentley
Race: Human
Gender: Male
.Surly and aloof (horrible bedside manner)
.Functioning alcoholic
.Somewhat messy and unorganized
.Former Doc Wagon driver/doctor

Jorda Bentley was fired 4 years ago from Doc Wagon when it was discovered that he had been drinking the night that he crashed his vehicle during a Platinum Service SRT job. The customer ultimately survived but sued DocWagon Corp. Mr. Bentley was released from DocWagon as part of the settlement that was reached. His employers didn't care that the crash was more likely a result of the attack inflicted by the gang violence that raged in the location of his customer's pick up. Jorda Bentley lost almost everything he owned in the subsequent years and now performs unlicensed medical procedures out of his apartment two floors down to get by.

Cry more, bitch nigger.

Is that a different spell?

Drug Dealer
Name: Lil' J
Race: Ork
Gender: Male
.Local (wannabe) hustler
.Wants to be hardcore but his mother won't let him
.Convinced that the thug life chose him
.Young and naive

Lil' J (born Chad Lesner) gained the nickname when he tried gaining street cred under the alias "Ace". However being young and stupid, customers remarked that he was more like a "Joker". Unfortunately for Chad the nickname spread and stuck. In a feat of ingenuity he managed to spin his given nickname into Lil' J. He claims the J stands for "Joint" but anybody who knew him when he was small time knows exactly what the J stands for. Considering Lil' J has never been anything BUT small time (his "dealing" mostly consists of his buddies' prescriptions meds, refurbished BTLs, and a marijuana bush that he keeps in his bedroom closet under UV light), most people accept it when he calls himself Lil' J like most people will accept a six year old boy calling himself Spiderman. He and his family lives on the same floor as . His little brothers and sisters have been babysat by almost everybody in the tenement at some point.

Smuggler
Name: Ace "Hardware" Kimbala
Race: Human
Gender: Female
."Professional Recycler"
.Obnoxiously bubbly
.Shaman Spiritualist
.Collector and packrat

Ace Kimbala, an Xhosa tribe member from Cape Town, travels where ever she can when ever she can, seeing the world and collecting as much of it as she can in her mobile shop. Ace has kept herself somewhat grounded in the last few years since she arrived to Seattle and seems satisfied with wondering around the megalopolis to take in sights, people watch, collect stuff and sell/trade it for necessities and the occasional luxury or comfort. She mostly lives out of her Ares Roadmaster and can often be found setting up shop in any parking space large enough to park the monster of a vehicle.

im not quite sure I like how elves are done stat wise as well but im not quite sure how id really balance them out. how would you go about changing them?

Less STR and BOD probably

There's always the cliche of reducing strength and body maximums.

yeah I was goanna say that but I didn't want to go the obvious route of making them physically weaker.

Thats the only thing that could work without rewriting lore. Maybe drop WIL

Funnily enough, any game I play or see of shadowrun has significant racism towards elves, eclipsing orks and trolls in many areas.

Humans may hate Orks and Trolls, and Orks and Trolls may hate Humans. But everyone but Elves hates Elves. Dwarves are okay.

Also player bias

Hey, those long ears wear their hair long for a reason, gotta keep them covered so the normies think they are just pretty humans who probably get regular full brazilians

I feel this, combined with the natural poor luck elves seem to MYSTERIOUSLY have in games, is a balancing factor.
not even GMs like elves. They're the guys you love to hate.

I'd either ping them down to 1/5 BOD or 1/5 WIL (a bit weaker, or a bit weaker-willed, which does have the side benefit of making elf shamans a bit less 'best mage out of the box').

While I'm at it, take down their special attributes to Dwarf level; they don't need everything and Edge too.

My human character has an elf daughter whom she does care about more than is healthy for a runner.

I don't even dislike elves, I just appreciate the value of randomly singling out a group to razz for no real reason

What's with nobody looking for players?
I posted earlier and some time before in previous generals but no one is accepting new players

Been hitting roll 20 for the past few months and no one accepts new players, what the fuck!

playing shadowrun is incredibly complicated, and running shadowrun is that complicated multiplied by how many players there are.
There are many good GMs I know who have "no shadowrun" on their list of rules, not because shadowrun is bad, but just because it's HARD.

In short, the standard GM shortage, but even worse because of the complexity of heist scenarios vs dungeon scenarios.

I play on an actual table with friends, sorry Omae
If you live in Dayton, let me know

Technomancers are better punching bags. Fuck Technomancers.

Why them? I am not defending them or anything I am just curious what the general opinion on Technomancers is is all.

This Plus SR is a tricky game for people to drop into. A cleric is a cleric is a cleric in D&D, but any one character greatly changes how an SR game goes, especially because so much of the game is legwork and covering your ass. People are happier to stick with what they have than to shop around for new players.

Shit man, I've been thinking about starting to GM it where for the sake of simplicity, I write up some characters and let the players pick them, but I feel like there is so much and I am trying to stick to just the core book at this moment.

Be honest, Clockwork. You don't have any friends.

on this note, I have actually been psyching myself up to run shadowrun for actual months.
NO PROGRESS HAS BEEN MADE ON ANY FRONT AND I AM TERRIFIED TO EVEN START.

I have to seriously hammer it into my players that they need to fucking learn their part of the rules. The Decker never bothered to learn that you cant just hack your way into an archive and royally fucked up a run.
Just keep watching John Wick. You'll find a game eventually (or find friends and play locally)

One of the few saving graces of SR is that the splats don't make it more complicated. They add a bunch of stuff, but it's mostly options (new ware, new spells, new gear) as opposed to new rulesets, unless you do something damn stupid like say that people can play AI.

The only ones I see being in play are the new vehicle mod rules (which are still garbage) any background count (which should be core anyways).

this is one of the problems with wanting to run shadowrun.
There are SO MANY THINGS I need to watch and read that will vastly improve the game I wind up running.
The A-team.
Black lagoon.
John wick.
Payday.
All sorts of cyberpunk and heist movies I haven't even heard of.
Goddamnit user stop reminding me of the royal mess they make of AIs in every edition.
I happen to really like AIs as a cyberpunk element and feel robomans should be a playable thing, but the entire system and fluff says no.

I am learning the rules currently and I have been trying to hammer how decking works to my GM and I am just playing a mundane face who tends to snipe.

My GM for some reason believes that noise only applies when operating on the public grid and I explained in detail how it works three times and he still didn't get it. This is also the same person who didn't get me explaining how to augment an arm or leg past your metatype limit six times, ending in me just slamming my head into the book in frustration.

I have played this game for less than a year and I am worried that I might just understand the rules better than the GM

The first time we played, I was the "knows the rules better than the GM" guy and it made the whole experience more frustrating than it should've. Maybe bite the dick and become the Shadowrun GM. Its a frustrating system to GM but boy is it rewarding.

Draw out in paper how the matrix works and the layers and how noise affects hacking. That seems to work really well for me.

For novels, only one which wasn't anything by Gibson I have read was George Alec Effenger's When Gravity Fails which I liked to call "fun with BTL's" since it featured something similar to BTL personafixes which were totally legal

You should think of the big classic heist movie Oceans Eleven either the one with Clooney or Sinatra both are good.

I am still learning the matrix since that little argument was actually yesterday. One thing is that I don't get how grids help or hinder you aside from the -2 penalty for public grids.

Man, I need to get some micronovels.
Something that can fit in a pocket.
I'm not allowed to listen to audio, and reading on the phone sucks, but I can totally read a book at work. As long as it is compact enough to haul around hands free.

Grids are roughly equivalent to ISPs today. Except the Grid you're on affects how the Matrix is perceived. For example, the Seattle Grid makes all the interesting Seattle stuff shine more and more green. IIRC Horizon runs the local Seattle Grid as well, so the Horizon run stuff gets preference over other corporate stuff.

Certain locations use certain hosts (Ares facilities are on the Ares host for example), so it would be prudent to match Grids.

I'm pretty close to it.
Bought doorkickers, downloaded Sketchup(and got Layout 2016 which works briliantly too.), checked GM resources, just need to work on tilesets and story.

But if I were to jack directly into a server or terminal, would I be on the grid my lifestyle allows or the corporate grid?

I'd recommend the Takeshi Kovacs books too. At least Altered Carbon- the other two go into a lot more sci-fi than cyberpunk, but the first is a good old-fashioned detective novel, but with people in resleeved bodies and weird cyberspace shenanigans.

Sorry if I'm tired and this sounds weird., but you wouldn't be on the grid, you'd be on the host.

Once you enter a host either with a direct connection or wirelessly, Grids don't matter.

Okay I dig that, but actions when inside the host and you are wireless, that leads to noise?

Sorry I am trying to fully understand this, since it definitely seems like direct connection is the way to go?

If we assume you're at the physical location of the host, then there won't be any noise due to distance, only location.

And in 5e Direct Connection lets you ignore the Master-Slave defensive relationship and hack things much easier. Downside is that you have to have a Direct Connection.

When I am talking wireless I mean like I am in Brooklyn and my target is in the Bronx, so like in the 1-5km area. That would add distance noise plus spam noise plus other modifies for noise correct?

Pg. 230-231 5e Corebook, but you're right.

Any of you chummers playing Va11-HallA?
The music is pretty great.

that the cyberpunk waifu bartender game? Is that out already?

Oh thank fuck I understand this shit thanks anons we'll all hold hands lewdly through the night

Yeah, it's out.
It's okay. The devs pandered to /v/ and/or /a/ really hard though, there's a fuck ton of Veeky Forums memes in it which I really dislike.

My cyber arm for Helleb0re is nearly done.

Very nice.

fist me daddy

What are you doing for weapon props?

Shit, man, that actually looks really cool. I'm impressed.

what are you making that out of?

It's good

It's on steam, go buy it.

So I really want to get into Shadowrun, the setting seems like it could be my favorite thing ever. But I don't live anywhere near a hobby shop, and the closest one is just a bunch of DnD and MTG anyway. I also don't have any friends around that are interested in TTRPG and all the roll20 groups I see pop up get mobbed by people rambling for a group right away.

In addition, I'm having some trouble getting into the groove of the rules and feel like being able to see it in play and ask short questions within the context of how and why something is being rolled would really help.

Is there any other way I can get into this game, or should I just buy the PC games and call that it?

There's a few actual play and rule explanation podcasts/youtube videos. Both can help with getting the rules. (But no matter how much you have them down, try and use the specialized sheets and cheat sheets in the link.)

But do get the computer games anyway. Base Returns is the worst of the lot and I'd still call it good.

If you haven't played the PC games (I like Dragonfall and Hong Kong the best), do that, they're pretty darn good.

There are some online websites for Shadowrun, Runnerhub and... Another one I forget the name of. Check them out if you want to play online.

It makes me sad seeing all these people who are missing a game. I wish I could invite people to mine, but we're basically full up (And run at a weird time of night during the week, and are on F-list)

Shadowrun has a monstrous ruleset. There's a couple gameplay podcasts you could check out, I've been listening to the Arcology Podcast games, which have been pretty cool.

Just keep your feelers out for a r20 game. You could put up a flyer at your LGS, you might be able to gather some IRL interest that way. The HBS games (Dragonfall, specifically) are good for learning about the setting, but not really the same.

Good luck to ye, chummer. Troll tits for luck.

what do drones roll for defence when Im jumped in
and remote controlling them and is it limited by handling.
Also do the drones get the bonuses from being in a swarm while Im controlling them or is it only when they are on their own and does the bonus apply to defence tests

>it definitely seems like direct connection is the way to go?
Congratulations, you got it!

Here are two of my more interesting/unusual contacts:

>Gourmet (2, 3)
>A plump, cheerful female dwarf with a lifelong obsession with haute cuisine. Going by the matrix handle 'Gourmet', she operates a popular food-blog, acts as an amateur food critic, and attends a prestigious European culinary school. With a steady stream of small donations funding her, Gourmet shares her passion for food by using her implanted simrig and taste-booster cyberware to create sumptuous sim-recordings of meals at pricey, exclusive restaurants and sharing them on her matrix page.

My matrix-illterate infiltrator needed someone to do Web Stuff for them, so I came up with an above-board but web savvy blogger to be their friend. No hacking stuff, but Gourmet can Data Search like nobody's business and she's excellent tech support for stuff the hacker is too arrogant to fix.

>Marionette (2, 4)
>A mysterious hacker, a member of [Hacker Node], and skillwire maniac. Marionette's icon takes the form of a beautifully sculpted porcelain doll, pale and inscrutable, wearing gorgeous Victorian-era clothing with a 'gothic lolita' bent. Glittering wires connect to her wrists, ankles, and joints, and fade out of view above her, giving her the likeness of her namesake. Her creepy fascination with the body-puppetry of Skillwires has left her something of an outcast among other hackers, High-Tier being one of her few friends. Though undoubtedly skilled in her area of expertise, she occasionally veers into yandere-grade obsession and clinginess.

Activesofts are stupid expensive. Having a Warez contact who is willing to share them makes skillwires way more useful. I liked the imagery of someone using puppets and marionettes as a metaphor for how skillwires can be used to guide and control metahumans.

Helleb0re doesn't like guns. i have a deck.
Thank you! Using craft foam, wax finish, and enamel, and ironing it out to heat form it. The fabric beneath is latex with 3d paint. It's been a really fun project so far.

>low-res image

Chummer please.

How do I burn up player money and lower their lifestyles?
I want a game where every new run, the players NEED this job if they want a dinner that includes protein.

Force them all to take In Debt (the negative quality from Run Faster) at the beginning of the game.

That's a good idea. I was also considering extreme repair costs, but that doesn't work on wizards.

One of them gets careless and is followed home, compromising the whole team. They all have to burn their SINs and go into hiding with no warning.

Somebody breaks in and robs them.

Pickpockets.

Substance dependency.

A gang that's bigger than they're prepared to deal with demands protection money, and it's not cheap.

>what do drones roll for defence when Im jumped in and remote controlling them.
REA + INT + Control Rig Rating + 2 dice for Hot Sim.

>and is it limited by handling.
Yes, but you can add your Control Rig's rating to that.

>does the bonus apply to defence tests for Swarms
Drones have to be targeted individually, so no.

Stat wise they are more powerful
But every elf i ran, or one of my players ran was never treated with respect.
Modt people are elf haters, even if it is just skin deep racism its still racism.
Most checks of charisma vs orks, trolls, humans and dwarfs i put a negitive 1, 2, or even 3 given how elfy gay they act.
Never trust an elf.
They can specialize in magic which is another thing not to trust about them.
The only elf one of my meta race NPCs like was an elf who was auged out, because that means they dont care how they look, and all elves care how they look.
Fucking,
Dandelion eaters.

>A gang that's bigger than they're prepared to deal with demands protection money, and it's not cheap.

As a gm, you shouldn't get too attached to those gangers.

I don't really have an issue with it. I mean, it's not like they are any more powerful than other races.

Honestly, if I was to do anything it would be to town down the disadvantages of orks and trolls. Elves are in a good place in my mind where you CAN do anything with them. Orks and trolls are more pidgeonholed.

Just another way to cost PCs resources. They may be fodder, but twenty five mooks looking to make an example for the rest of the street can make for a bad time. Stealing or gutting their vehicles, breaking windows, throwing fire bombs, or random drive by shootings all have price tags.

Sure - as long as you keep in mind that your group is most likely comprised of secretive mercenaries with the ability to scrounge up enough C16 to make a very convincing offer to the gang's leader. Or a rival gang's leader. Or organized crime. Or a corp interested in "revitalizing" the barrens.
It's pretty hard to make a gang not merely a bump in their road, especially with the uneasy equilibrium concerning organized crime in Shadowrun.

One other important factor to watch out for is an even amount of progress for karma and nuyen based builds. If your streetsam is still running with shitty second hand wires while your mage is summoning great forms with a snap of his fingers, you're definitely squeezing too hard.

For my players I have to fill in the personality of their contacts and to a degree the backgrounds too. I'm always afraid i'm making them boring.

How do you make contacts memorable?

What was a contact you really liked?

do they get the limit increase to their stats?

Start with pretty standard character-building.
Motivation, Background, Affiliation, Quirk.

One contact my players liked was "Biscuits" a crazy cat lady fence and smuggler. Loving Housewife turned Neo-Anarchist with a personal vendetta against AG Chemie and a penchant for self-made bombs.

Is that a fucking pony character? Please kill yourself.

That is an elf, user.

> Marijuana bush

Is this character a self insert?

Check the file name, then look again.

To the limit, definitely, since the rating of the control rig is added to both Handling and Speed of the jumped-in vehicle in every case.

The dicepool modifier is actually a question mark. Checking back on the description it says the control rig adds its rating to all vehicle *skill*¨checks. And a defence roll is attributes only.

>nose
>pointy ears
>fabulous coiffure
Looks like an elf to me. Ponies have snouts, user, not noses and pointy ears.

Lower the amount of BP by 10-20% and/or hardcap the amount of BP they can pour into resources. Just enough to squeeze any money out (most people will choose to abandon money in favor of better stats), and this way many of them will just choose debt by default.

Give them runs where they receive all their payments in the form of goods or temporary services (housing, teaching, etcetra.)

sorry I mean the limit increase that swarms give to the stats. do they apply when Im remote controlling