/srg/ - Shadowrun General

Tell me about them!

>Helleb0re Invite.contact
Smashing!

seattle DM here.
Well, recently my players sort of rescued a runaway kid who happened to be a technomancer. After giving the kid back to his mom and getting a very small reward, they saw the mom selling the kid to a corp

so they went in, rammed the shit out of the van with the kid, grabbed him and female sniper decided to "adopt" him.
So now we got a gender swapped "the professional" thing going on (without the pedo subtext).

As the DM I'm not sure what to do about all of this. I didn't expect them to try and do that.

Not the SDTJ gm, but the player. Holly's infiltrated and blown up a super secret Firewatch lab, kidnapped and executed a government official (jaguar priest) on camera for a 16 year old yakuza princess who wanted to impress daddy, and is about to hand the corporate regional director of Aztechnology hogtied and unhappy over to the Yaks (after shutting down the entire city's power and causing the azzie stock to drop). Hoping this will be enough nuyen for him to leave the biz, marry his troll girlfriend, and go back home to Essen.

Meant for

Hi I just started reading the 5th edition Basic rulebook since some friends want to play some Shadowrun but they are too lazy to DM, anyone got advice on what to write down and learn in particular? Or any resource collection for stuff like maps or shop stocks etc. ? First time being a DM and first time doing anything related to shadowrun would appreciate all help

I forgot the part where he walked into a KE HQ and erased his crew and another runner crew from the facial recognition software in their security database, or the time he scooped out someone's cyber eyes because they failed to pay up for their cyberdoc.
Those two didn't go so well.

my.mixtape.moe/qadtwb.pdf
Also check the pastebin and the mediafire link

Look into how everything has wireless nodes and turn them all off.

That pdf doesn't really help.

Here's the rules.
1. Skinlinks
2. Tag Erasers
3. Moral Ambiguity
4. No Technomancers
5. Priority System is lame, use the alternate CG methods
6. Shoot Dragons
7. Conserve Deals
8. Never Straight a Cut with Ammo

Are Technos really that bad?

I just had a really odd experience today.
I was out shopping and a group of black men in peculiar clothing started talking about how they hated the government or something.
I was about to just go on my way when I noticed they were covered in anks and called the I guess leader Pharoh.

Is there anything as silly as this in the future?

Unless you master the rules,know their limitations and weaknesses and can work with or around them; yes.

In 5e? Definitely. There is supposed to be a TM book in the works but in the mean time they have some flaws. You take matrix damage directly, your virtual stats depend on your attributes, you cant shift them around, etc. In a straight fight Decker vs. TM the Decker wins. The only way to play a TM well is as a Sprite herder: get your Compiling and Resonance up and then try to summon and register some high level Sprites. Then you let them do the hacking

>They're simply cuffing a dirty subhuman
>This is called police brutality
Damnit Deutschland

Well, the corp is obviously going to be a little pissed. They might accuse the mother of setting up a doublecross, or your team may not have covered their tracks up well enough.

Either way, sounds like the Mom is gonna be at least as far up shit creek as your runners.

Be happy. You now have a NPC "decker" to help the party out/get them into trouble at your leisure.

What's it with players and adopting kid mages/technomancers anyway?

>cyberpunk in a nutshell

Fucking faggots

Is this A YugiOh reference?

I'm guessing 2 reasons
1. They want to cultivate the kids so they can help the team in the future
2. They want to save them due to not being too black hat.

For some it's both reasons, for some only one

Sadly most people who play Shadowrun aren't nearly as cool or as 80s as the pic you posted.

I bet you're some kind of nerd who thinks the 80s isn't the tightest thing ever.

That, or they want to do "Feel good" things, and bring justice or other pieces of bullshit vigilante-ism to the world, as with the story that user gave.

In the dark future of the 21st century, nothing is really dark because everyone who plays the game is a commie who can't make the future dark enough.

>5. Priority System is lame
No it isn't. Sum-to-ten is better, but it's much better then the hours and hours of math hell that is karmagen. Not to mention they didn't balance karma with cash so any cyber-character gets utterly fucked in karmagen. And life modules is has the problem of simply not having enough material published for it, so characters built using it end up all being similar.

Because it's unquestioningly good, which is fun to do in pretend and especially so in a game of moral ambiguity. Kid characters are also fun to interact with because you can tease them, and it takes a really committed GM to have anything seriously bad happen to them (and you can disproportionately respond to stuff like playground bullying, which is fun).

They end up being good sidekick characters who don't overshadow the PCs, the players can push them around into doing some favours without needing a big payback, as they often have some special quirk you can exploit (like technomancers/mage) and the GM usually doesn't want to have the kid be an actual kid you need to parent (which is a full-time job with a lot of mildly unpleasant drudge work) and nothing awful and permanent happens to them in most games.

Sup, /srtg/?

Make the stupidest, most nonsensical, ugly Class III Changeling you can imagine! If not, tell us about the stupidest, most nonsensical ugly Class III Changeling you ever ran with!

that's what I meant by N° 2
they (the runners) are not too black hat to do some good

>Kids under the age of 16
>Being competent at anything
Good luck with that.

But that's the thing- 'child prodigy' is an established archetype, as is 'precocious savant'. It's fun the first time your orphan reveals they have an imaginary friend who is a F12 Guardian spirit, then it's established and can be used/exploited.

>Either way, sounds like the Mom is gonna be at least as far up shit creek as your runners.
Well, they did break her legs and stole the money she got from selling the kid. I felt that was kind of excessive, really. Guess selling parents children to corporations was over the line.

>Be happy. You now have a NPC "decker" to help the party out/get them into trouble at your leisure.
That would require me reading the rules on technomancery, which I really should do one day.

>cyberpunk in a nutshell

But that's such a fucking overplayed archetype. Never once have I seen a child in a game represented as what a child actually is: An idiot who requires someone to constantly look over them, and has dumb ideas about everything. Seriously, 99.9% of children are so incredibly unskilled it's the worst.

>LASER PINTER- hassle people in dark places
Gets me every fucking time

>Make the stupidest, most nonsensical, ugly Class III Changeling

Unfortunately, I automatically powergame whenever I pick changeling III option when creating a character.

it's a compulsion I can't resist.

Yeah, but actually being a parent is the Dependent quality, and frankly no one wants to spend their free time talking about how they tend for a child when they could be doing cybercrime. Child characters who aren't anchors are precocious and precious, them's the rules.

>Never once have I seen a child in a game represented as what a child actually is

Because games are for fun, and dealing with realistic children is not fun.

Their problem for adopting the kind. If they don't wanna deal with him, they should get rid of him.

>Shadowrun encourages you to make the Mary Sue-ist of characters

>Make Mary Sue characters
>The characters are all non-lawful because they go against MUH EVEL CORPORATIONS OWNED BY REPUBLICANS
>everyone's an edgelord tryhard that you'd find in their own corner of a bar sulking
>mary sue gear like robot arms just to make you feel unique
>cancer stick smoking

The cancer of all tabletop games. No wonder your generals move so slow, everyone knows how cringey people who like cyberpunk are and stray away.

Wake up, nerds. It's not the 80s, cyberpunk isn't and will never be in again.

Yeah sure lets encumber the entire group with shit they don't want to deal with because one player wanted to adopt a kid. Or even better, when the players decided to roleplay and adopt a kid they seen that is in trouble, the DM should just forbid it! Yeah, I'm sure that'll go over well!

In your irrational hatred for "overplayed archetypes" you are forgetting the whole "the game is supposed to be fun" every single RPG book explains at some point.

That's only true if your meaning for mary sue is "uses an archetype, ever" or "isn't a peasant/wageslave living a boring life".

I'm honestly more amused that you keep tackling this as a political angle.

You're 100% correct on all accounts except
>cancerstick
that shit is out of fashion, replace that line in this copypasta with something about drugs, everyone is doing not-cocaine nowadays

>It's not the 80s
This is perhaps the most horrifying revelation of my life.

No, the DM shouldn't forbid. The fuck you're talking about? I'm saying that if the players decided to go with this idea, they should be ready to deal with the consequences. If you think any complications arising from a situation is an impediment to fun, I don't know what to tell ya. Your players might be a bit oversensitive.

I also think making the fucking kid a savant just so he will be completely independent is a cop out.

I hate to tell you, but that's all modern cyberpunk. Read any credible piece of cyberpunk literature, and you'll find the main characters range from apathetic to sociopathic, and the corporations simply exist with loadsamoney and political influence, with intent for profit, not evil. In fact, in Hardwired, the main characters turned out to be pretty assholeish, destroying a shipment of Viral Huntington's vaccines just so they could continue their smuggling business in peace.

It can remain in your heart, user.

youtube.com/watch?v=1ud5yDjM63I

>I'm saying that if the players decided to go with this idea, they should be ready to deal with the consequences.
that's not what you said though.
No one is talking about not having consequences, people were saying no one wanted to roleplay interactions with realistic children. Because real children are terrible. The idea isn't to make him a savant to make him independent, it's so he's not annoying to roleplay.

He's still a kid and needs to be taken care off, I (as a dm) do not want to waste precious time in a game roleplaying childcare when I could be DMing shadowrun.

>Being unironically this much of a corpcuck

Haha, oh wow.
Fuck off, /pol/ack and go back to sucking cock.

But at that point, they might as well just be some up-and-coming 16-ish year old.

We were going to do Seattle, but since we all live there it be too meta for us. Ended up going with Istanbul, which is back to being Constantinople in the SR universe

>everyone is doing not-cocaine nowadays
It's called oxycontin, and it's more like heroin of the future

>Big Lebowski
But that film is just a dime-a-dozen noir plot, but everything goes to shit, characters are incompetent and it's dubious if the crime is even close to solved. I mean, "It's like Big Lebowski" just means "our game has turned into crazy pink mohawk shit on accident"

>Not Cyber-Moskva

Or you just accept that cliches are not evil, and use a child savant.

>It's called oxycontin, and it's more like heroin of the future
>The 80s
>Cocaine not being the biggest thing
>The world doesn't revolve around cocaine
Jesus christ Reagan is crying right now.

Well, it's your game, use whatever you want.

No dude I'm talking seedy back alley whore types, because that's how REAL it is in the STREETS, man!

The classy guys would definitely be doing crazy future coke. Adderall

I think you're just not embracing Reaganomics, and in turn, the 80s, enough.

>oxycontin

What? Novacoke or nothing, chummer. Nobody uses Oxy, unless that's Bliss.

>
Is there anything you'd want to thread at +15 now?

You said I could give a non-answer.

Here's what we got right now:
>new fading values that aren't completely fucked
>internal guide to writing Paragon mechanics
>new sprite stats
>errata document

I'm pushing for some form of the last one to be released, as an apology for how long this is taking. No promises.

What about the technoadepts? Are those still a thing?

Also, it would be nice if in the fluff sections you give a how-to for things other than sprite herding. It would work better as an out-of-universe guide, but CGL is having enough trouble getting books out, you probably can't get out strat suggestions on anything other than forum posts.

That pic makes me uneasy, you can see her butt crack and the tail coming from below, as if it was coming out of anus or something even though the tailbone should be at the top of the crack.

>Errata

Talk with Patrick Goodman. He is managing the newly formed Errata group so he should have a say in this.

Well durr, its obviously some artificial tail fixed to her pantsu.

let me tell you a secret anons

those ears aren't real either

Speaking of kids in Shadowrun; how often do you all include pic related in your games?

They absolutely are.

We're doing something that lets us suggest playstyles through the setting fluff. It's actually really cool.

I'm more concerned with what Dylan and Jason would have to say on the subject.

... The tail is obviously attached to that thong-type thing. Like the ears on her headband, it's an affectation and not SURGE.

Good to hear you're explaining playstyles. I'm tired of linking Dezzmont's screed from the SR forums.

Call me a prude if you want but child prostitution not something I include in my games at all to be honest.

I don't even know what this is from

>Not wanting to show your players the dark future of the 21st century
Why even bother with Shadowrun if you're not going to go balls to the wall cyberpunk with it?

A cyberpunk text that isn't Shadowrun
It's generic enough to apply to Shadowrun, though, definitely.

>Why even bother with Shadowrun if you're not going to go balls to the wall cyberpunk with it?
If I wanted to go balls to the wall cyberpunk I'd be playing Cyberpunk 2020
Shadowrun is the family-friendly saturday morning cartoon filled with magic, special snowflakes, and dragons version of cyberpunk.

>expecting a CLG book to actually fix problems
>laughingredsams.jpg

I've always figured that, despite some differences in tech, and magic, both settings are fairly interchangeable. Maybe it's the magic that makes people more predisposed to make Shadowrun lighthearted.

Night City really pushes the hard 80's The Warriors/Mad Max/The Outsiders feeling. SR left that behind fairly early, and embraced the weird and the fun you can have with it.

>not playing in Seattle

Tfw I made that image you posted
I'm so glad people are using stuff I made. I also have an encounter list for middle eastern cyberpunk cities, if you guys want one.

...

I like the way you think, omae.

When characters can be literal sentient snowflakes it tends to bring down the grimdarkness.
That said, this specific text you posted is not relevant to shadowrun. Corporation children aren't abandoned to the streets by wageslaves, they're sent to school to be indoctrinated into being wageslaves in the future. And, shadowrun corps aren't literal boogeymen who want to destroy humanity. They're evil, sure, but they think of profit above everything, which means they actually do put some value into human life. Literally. Losing their employees means losing money so they don't let the children just get killed en mass before growing up. That's dumb.

there are no actual literal sentient snowflakes

Wait a second, if most kids are abandoned by parents and then form gangs and then die before becoming adults, who the hell is still working for the corporations? I think the author of this didn't really think the logistics very much beyond "how can I make the most grimdark thing ever?"

i'm about to have my first game and it's set in london

Nice.

>Wait a second, if most kids are abandoned by parents and then form gangs and then die before becoming adults, who the hell is still working for the corporations? I think the author of this didn't really think the logistics very much beyond "how can I make the most grimdark thing ever?"
That's low class unskilled workers who do that. They have another section on corporate children. Because you know, it being cyberpunk, the majority of people are low class unskilled shitheads who make minimum wage. The "wageslave" of 80s cyberpunk is someone who lives in a cube apartment and makes barely enough to feed themselves, nevermind their family.

The corporate children come from skilled workers. Techies, execs, etc.

>characters can be literal sentient snowflakes

?

Even the weirdest SURGE can't make you not a biological organism. We don't even have Obsidimen yet, let alone Olaf.

...

That's because no-one gives a fucking shit about them and if runners get one they usually drop them off at the nearest orphanage.

Yeah, Obsidimen when?

read the spoiler

Seriously curious as to why the old name is back. Do the locals still call it istanbul? Cuz it was called istanbul way before the Ottomen got around to changing the name.

>meta

I ain't got time to mouse over everything. I read the first sentence, then post saying you're wrong, as my father and Snacks taught me.

Hopefully after T'skrang master race. Hell, was anyone at CLG actually part of the team that made Earthdawn?