/srg/ - Shadowrun General

The core says about the volume of a small book, and Data Trails puts the non-hackpack standard as a thin elongated rectangle 25 cm long.

But you can pay extra for non-standard forms including clothing, glasses, hats, purses, canes, cigar boxes, novelty lighters, and weapons.

Wanna be a real console cowboy? You can have your revolvers also be your cyberdeck for an assload (50% more) of nuyen.

Want to keep more than just files in your Aztechnology Emissary? Twenty percent extra and it's also a very nice briefcase.

Want to do your best sneaking with your deck on your head? Go and have your C-K Analyst put into a slouch hat and find out what evil lurks in the hearts of metahumen.

Keep in mind a lot of that size is for mods, keyboard, and a screen for non-DNI use.

Explain to me this: who decided it was a good idea to require the rolling of so many dice for such simple actions?

I think you missed the 'more about how stupid the rules are' part, but if we're still talking about that I'd like to mention how it also shows how terrible the stats for Great Dragons are as well.

The same one that decided that you can just buy hits for 4 dice a pop.

If you don't think that using a tupperware bin to roll two pounds of dice is the sickest shit ever then you're a fuckin' nerd and need to get up out my face.

Hey,help a newfag out.
I've just finished Dragonfall and hong kong vidyas,and i'm absolutely in love with lore and aesthetics.
Anyhow,what is a good place for a shadowrun-newfag to start?

Reading the pastebin is the best place to start.

Read all the books, all the character creation guides, all the recommendations, and then weep for you will never find a table.

thanks man,i never noticed the pastebin.

> weep for you will never find a table.
Why so?

Because there are a fuckton of players but limited amounts of GMs.

Funny, in my area (Rural Southern US) there are very few players. We all have to take turns as GM.

Of course, you could always GM yourself, but that drek ain't easy.

Reason for this is Shadowrun is really draining to run as a GM, especially if you have a group doing every possible aspect of the game.

The game itself is pretty easy to run, but there's a lot to remember and a lot to make notes of. You're almost playing 3 different games at once. It can get exhausting.

It's not hard either.

This is the experience IRL, this is the experience online.

It's really hard to get a table going in meatspace, because interest in Shadowrun is limited. Unless you live in a big city, it's hard getting people to commit to a very complicated and unusual game, instead of a more straightforward D&D or something.

Online, all the misfits beg for GMs, but running a game of SR is tricky and there's no great virtual tabletop that can handle it. In person you can generally badger someone into running, online it's just a bunch of baby birds calling for a mother

why is the shadowrun tabletop website so terrible?

what's the best place to find news on the Shadowrun RPG?

/srg/ and reddit, really.

They embezzled all their webdev money, had to have someone's kid design it.

So called shots.

Is the Max DV the total possible amount of damage including the net hits? Or does it just limit the base DV to its number?

And then regardless of that question the net hits determine how many Status effects you can throw on a person, right?

I'm pretty sure its the absolute limit on damage in 5e, net hits go to adding effects rather than more damage. I think the damage limits are kinda silly though.

Hello, chummers.

I started running a game with a group of complete SR newbies. I didn't impose any restrictions on their character choices since, while they're new to the system, they're all old tabletop players. Adapting to such a crunchy system is taking time but it is going well.

However, since matrix defenses and devices in general are such a big part of most runs, I find that it takes a lot of time to do the matrix shit in both the pre-run phase and in the run itself, leaving most of the players doing jack shit.

So I was thinking of making Matrix tests ordinary opposed rolls of varying threshold (no Marks) outside of combat situations and situations where the stakes are particularly high. Have any of you made any such changes to help the flow of the game?

TL;DR: Matrix and Marks slow the the game down to a crawl, will use opposed rolls, Y/N?

Can you guys help me with inspiration? I'm playing a hero system shadowrun game and after two initiations, the basic adept powers are getting pretty boring. Are there any strange or awesome powers from past editions? I'm a hand to hand physadept if it helps.

I can see it for "balancing realistically". After all if the team gunslinger wants to just disarm s guy by shooting his hand but rolls incredibly and ends up accidentally shooting his hand so it explodes and bone fragments rocket through his eye ball and into his brain that punishes great rolls and makes no sense (although it might be stupid awesome)

Elemental Strike/Aura, Spirit Claw, one of the animal friend powers, Adept spell...

It's impossible to say without knowing your current powers and initiations.

You are playing a roleplaying game.
If your character is boring to play, think of how to play on their character elements better, ask the GM to draw some of their past into the story or kickstart some character development on your own.
The fact that you immediately equate how interesting a character is with the powers you have implies that you'd be better off playing tabletop wargames, singleplayer computer games or indeed anything that doesn't include roleplaying.
A character's powers are hooks, conflict resolution tools and ways to add a bit of flavor to a character - if a character's powers don't contribute to how you play them outside of using those powers, you're completely ignoring the purpose of a roleplaying game.
There must be plenty of things you can do. I hope and assume your character has a backstory, a personality, a few internal conflicts or some opportunities to change as a person?
If they don't, you've missed the point. If they do, you're missing the point by not playing on them instead of wanting more "speshul" powers.
Take this from a foreverGM - players like you can be good, but only after they've reformed. Try to get into your character as a person - what do they want, how do they want it and how much are they willing to do to get it? How do the things they can do, the way they live and the people they meet affect them and the way they act?
If you can do those things, you'll never be lacking for fun again.

The damage limits (and limits in general) came in because happened in 4e. An adept could specialize in pistols and cut his way through a full HTR team made of drakes.

4e was one of the most straightforward games to minmax, because there were so many ways to add dice here and there to your rolls.

Thanks I got the masking and because the-dm-is-nice-and-we-don't-have-a-mage-astral-projection iniations, plus my powers are basically elemental fist, mystic armor and movement stuff, really basic.

Thank you for the sentiment, though you assume alot of my intentions. The character is plenty developed and roleplayed, I just have fun both ways you know? I roleplay a lot with him, but come combat I find hittong thinhs has been growing old as.of late, hence the call for stramge powers. As a GM, have you ever seen interesting adept builds or powers used creatively?

My players are annoyed at me that I did something that breaks the rules in the Matrix.

The scenario:

The team approaches a locked up warehouse. In AR, he sees that there are many visible devices. There are loading drones inside, the "keypad", the door, the rotodrone security drones. Nothing is moving/functioning. The network is a complete cat's cradle. Every device is linked to every other device. There is no master or host. Decker gets 3 marks, and discovers that they are all listening for a signal from an external source.

The devices are waiting for instructions for it to re-organize the connections into a functional network and perform work for X hours. And then it returns to a cat's cradle.

He isolated the door and keypad, then bootstrapped every other device to format on reboot. And then he rebooted every other device. He solved the problem. They got in, they finished the run after a thing, etc. After the session, I get a 15 minute diatribe about how:

"It was weird, and I didn't like it. It was such a flagrant breaking of the rules, it was dumb. Decking is all about the rules." and "it's not good GMing to do that"

I thought it was a neat trick that bent/broke the rules in a way that doesn't destroy the system, and I wanted to give them pause to realize they're actually dealing with something very strange.

I even told them what the system was meant to do after the game, and they're still like "Yea, whatever. It was still disruptive and weird."

I thought my group was more "Storytelling trumps rules" than this, but I don't know, man.

Long time player of SR 4th Edition here. My group goes on long rotations of games and after a few years we're finally getting back to shadowrun. But my group is unsure if we wanna do the tried and true 4th or try out 5th.

So my question to you all are what are the pros and cons of each and which do you prefer?

As a 4e player like yourself, keep to 4e. 5e doesn't offer much and is missing a lot. It sends the setting backwards and removes a lot of good shit from 4e, namely that you can remotely hack stuff. 5e requires a hacker on site to do much of anything useful.

I'm not even really getting how the rules were broken here. It seems fairly normal to me.

5e is basically 4e with a few changes. The main one is there's now an upper limit on the number of hits you can get on any given thing, so min-maxing yourself an absurd dicepool only goes so far.
It also means deckers can't dump their mental stats, so that's nice.
You can get around some of that shit if you're willing to invest in a satalite dish iirc.

I'd suggest 5e, assuming you're willing to pirate the books. It's not a big enough change from 4e to be worth buying all the shit for again.

I heard the best place for shadowrunning is the Universal Brotherhood. Come quickly, do not bring guns,

New SR player here. I haven't gotten into any games but iv studied a good chunk of the 5th ed rules and rulebooks (partly because I just like reading the rulebooks for the fluff and what not) and have even made two characters that I will probably never get to play.

However, recently I found that a FLGS hosts SR games. which is great since I might be able to play the damn game( although im nervous about putting my special snowflakes out there) the bad news is there in 4th ed rules.

I guess my questions is how much of a jump is it to go back to 4th? is there a chummer for 4th ed (I might try to retrofit my snowflakes for 4th or make a new runner). and what would be the go to books for 4th assuming iv never played but have poured over the 5th ed manuals to a autistic degree?

thanks in advance.

Can things like pixies or ghouls that have astral perception despite not being mages put points in assensing?

can I bring lasers? their technically not guns.

...

Yes, they can put points in Assensing. So can Adepts with the Astral Perception power. If your can astrally perceive, you can assense.

Knock yourself out. Because of how low their DV is, they're legally considered tanning devices in 14 different states.

Lasers definitely count as guns. They may not be firearms, but they're definitely guns.

In that case, there's a bug in chummer, cuz that skill doesn't seem to show for non-mages. Guess I'll add it as an exotic skill or some shit.

File a bug report.

That's what the Firewatch told me when I complained about them stomping around my Chicago batcave

Every device was slaved to every other device. There was no master in the system until it was triggered.

>Chummer for 4e
yes there is. The link's in the pastebin

>go to books
depends on the GM

What kind of armour upgrades are considered essential? I'm thinking of getting my hands on a Berwick suit and I still can't decide what to have fitted to it.

Gel packs

Whenever somebody has that mod on their armor/clothes this is what I picture.

yeah I found it a min after I posted. and I suppose your right aside from the core I should talk to the GM to see what he's doing and just go from there. no sense in knocking myself out over nothing.

According to the book, gel packs look like you covered the entire outer surface of whatever you're wearing in scale mail made of soy sauce packets.

I don't think the added soak is worth the increased knockdown chance, nor the increase in visibly caused by walking around wearing something so stupid-looking.

Big fan of Nonconductivity. Most low level security solutions at my table involve taser weapons as a go to.
Being able to shrug off those is always nice. And in a pinch, you can easily climb over electrified fences, if those are a big thing in your setting.

Nonconductivity. Stick-n-shock rounds are really useful, which means you need to count on enemies using them.

5e or 4e? Nonconductivity is mandatory in 4e because electricity is the absolute shit there, and everyone uses stick-n-shock. Electricity is hilariously less good in 5e, though, and nonconductivity mostly becomes about resisting guards armed with tasers instead of real guns.

Is it at all possible to splice together the best parts of 4e and 5e?

The best parts of 4e is really just some of the extended gear options, at this point, so yeah, easily.

What is the 'best part' of 4e? You can port equipment if you miss it (though lots of 4e books, especially the later ones, are some hot garbage), jettison the monads into space where they belong, and it's already the best of both worlds.

elf pussy

It's nice having rules for cyborgs and cyberzombies I guess.

If standard Veeky Forums lore states that elves are for rape and catgirls are for love, what is it's stance on SURGE catgirl elves?

Rape her until she falls in love with your dick.

On top of these if you don't like limits just don't apply them. Forget they exist.

Other than that I can't really think of anything I'd port over from 4e asides from some gear but that isn't hard to do at all.

>cyborgs

Never understood the appeal, honestly. You can already, through careful investment of essence, get yourself cyberware limbs, torso, and cyberskull. Why would you want to be in a drone instead?

>cyberzombies
NPCs. You just ignore essence costs for cyberware and say the guy has whatever 'ware you need him to have. If for some reason a GM is stupid enough to let you play a cyberzombie, it's a hell of a lot easier to say, "Treat your essence like you have 7 ESS."

>Other than that I can't really think of anything I'd port over from 4e asides from some gear but that isn't hard to do at all.
Not the guy you're talking to, but I personally really miss script kiddie hacking. But, then, I'd rather literally just not play the game than have to play a decker, so I'm super biased.

Drone sensors, are they basically all of human senses at human levels unless otherwise noted or do they default to the whole range of artificial sensors (eg. thermal, sonar, radiation etc.)?

What is the word on prosthetic sensitivity in shadowrun? Is it equal to bio standards in all ways, at minimum?

>Sensor array: This sensor package includes up to eight functions listed under Sensor Functions.
There's no default, you pick up to eight options for it to feature. For example, unless it has a camera it can't see, and so forth.

>What is the word on prosthetic sensitivity in shadowrun?
Extremely contradictory. Some texts seem to imply that there's a deadened sense of touch. Other that you can feel at least as well as with your normal limbs.

Personally I'm the other way; I'm glad we have actual deckers back in runs, instead of scriptkiddies and van deckers.

People get so upset that they can't hack everything from 70 km away, but Pepperidge Farm remembers when you had to escort your decker not only into the facility, but right to the terminal with the correct data, and hope that they bought all the cords.

Hackers not really needing to be on site, and technomancers actually being viable

Yeah, I definitely get that it's a difference of personal preference, it's just that personally I fucking hate decking, and much preferred having an agent and some scripts handle that shit for me.

>Why would you want to be in a drone instead?

The transhuman elements that cyberpunk should generally involved. Taking a step back from that weirds me out.

Technomancers are as viable in 5e as they were in 4e; i.e. they work best as sprite herders with one or two tricks. Dezzmont's advice on the official forum still holds true.

Here, have a picture of an extremely gay troll.

Diff'rent strokes. I think the idea of switching out each body part for machine in an agonizing loss of humanity is more cyberpunk than just sticking a brain into a Steel Lynx.

Theoretical question.
How many people could an AI pretend to be simultaneously?
Could an AI be two people?
An entire band?
An entire music producing business?

>Multiprocessing
>Multiprocessing grants the ability to process information simultaneously from multiple sources while online. Combat still requires the AI’s full attention, but multiple types of other more mundane tasks can be handled simultaneously. For example, an AI with this quality is able to browse the Matrix and simultaneously hold a conference call online, providing full attention to each channel of information. Observe in Detail (p. 165, SR5) and Matrix Perception Tests (except when it’s an Opposed Test) count as Free Actions for the character. The AI also receives an additional Free Action per Initiative Pass when not directly engaged in Matrix or Vehicle combat. The AI can simultaneously observe a number of information sources equal to its Depth.
>Data Trails

So they could be a band, but not a whole company (unless they use false identities and pretend to be multiple people, or are a very small company).

man I am all about sticking brains in steel lynxes.
Especially if a corp is running a clone factory in order to mass produce a line of advanced drones with extreme problem solving capacity.

>An AI singer personality sues her AI producer personality for attempted rape.
>The whole courtroom is the same AI

Interesting.
I think I can work with this. Though it removes the "they were ALL THE SAME AI ALL ALONG" reveal.

This is more like what I was going for, but would require dumbly high levels of depth.

I mean, it's an AI. It can use different voices and manners of speaking. Fake some commcalls with a metahuman voice program and it can still pretend to be different people.

You could just fudge it for a Deus/Megara thing.

>No new music has been produced in years because all of the AI's computational power goes into running various life simulations.

Fanny pack, the attire of a professional.
Yes or no?

And this is where the runners come in.
To get the company make good on their contracts.

>Why would you want to be in a drone instead?
Fluff reasons. I want to be someone with moderate amnesia who is very unhappy about being a brain in a jar welded to a weird thing with knives and buzzsaws and is trying to figure out whose fault it is.
>NPCs just ignore rules
Cyberzombies are supposed to get nifty powers like a shitty background count that follows them around all the time, aren't they?
Eh. I think it's a lot more fucked up if the result isn't even humanoid, and it's hard to do that with replacements.
Eh, why not. My next character is going to wear a fedora, this can't be any worse.

Debating GMing for more players/groups on like suptg irc or something. I don't know if I'm confident enough in my ability to GM like that, though.

I want more players and things going on in my version of Shadowrun though, and I think it would be cool to have more players contributing to that.

But managing that many players and things going on. Good god.

As an elf infiltration mage, do I want 4 agility or 5 considering I can boost it with magic? 4 means I have a smaller target number on the spell but it also seems kind of low for an elf, especially one that's supposed to be sneaky

the drain for increase attribute is Force - 3, and the force must be equal to your base attribute, so you're taking 2 drain either way.

So /srg/ I may have a problem
I am GMing a SR 4e game (IRL before you ask) and one of my players can't come anymore due to their apprenticeship taking too much time. Now this by itself isn't the problem.

The problem is that they were the only awakened character in the entire group. My group consists of:
>Elf ex-bodyguard with a cyberarm and Phobia(Magic, Medium)
>Human sniper/possible future infiltrator with amnesia
>Human Face with a "Street Magic"-theme (think Copperfield)
>Ork Sammy with Cyberarm and Vory connections

I have a GMPC techno decker (using the EotM rules) helping them with the Matrix
The question: What should I do? Should I
>Turn her into a GMPC (which would mean that I control both the Astral and Matrix part of the game)
>Give some of the above mentioned players Latent "Latent Awakening" (of course only if they agree to it) or
>Have them go on without a mage (which I believe will not end well for them)
?

I have approximately 2 weeks till the next game

Rocuronium from bullets & bandages is pretty nice.
Assuming that the enemy didn't see you shooting them in the back/outside their main field of vision, they won't, notice that tiny prick.

And then they hit the floor like a brick wall.

except of course your GM is a dick.

Let them continue on without a mage. Either their Johnson stops giving them needs-a-mage type jobs, or the first person to die because they didn't have a mage rerolls as a spirit-murdering Adept with Astral Perception, Assensing, and a Rating 6 weapon focus.

Either way, the opportunity to kill one or two characters off should add some suspense and a sense of fragility and danger to the game.

any other opinion?
Or do you all agree with ?