/srg/ - Shadowrun General

>The worst
That would be simulationist or narrativist anything.

But you're wrong

So sincerely wrong.

Gamist rules lite shit gets boring after three sessions.

i have no idea what any of these words mean. what's the difference between 5e and anarchy

Name a single good simulationist system then. (ignoring narrativist because you can't really argue in good faith with lobotomized FATE and Apocalypseworld hipster-faggots)

>Gamist rules lite shit gets boring after three sessions.
Maybe if your idea of roleplaying is pouring over builds to share on optimization forums.

5E is a gamist system, albeit a poorly edited and overly crunchy one that feels it's necessary to spend paragraphs on rules on how to tread water while failing to explain in a sensible way (without the help of internet forums) how it's 5+ class-based subsystems are meant to work in actual play.
Anarchy is freeform shit built on a points system that you buy rights to describe what happens with. (the system it's based on is meant to do away with GMs entirely)

You can look at the Plastic-faced Man in Shadowrun Hong Kong for a good example of an artistic skull.

GURPS

GURPS doesn't really try to model the real world outside of old editions vehicle rules. It's pretty gamist in actual play imo.

GURPS is one of the most simulationist systems out there. You'd have to be daft to think otherwise.

90% of GURPS isn't simulating anything more than Shadowrun is. It's mainly a game with some mechanics to back up different settings being played in the same game system.

There's rules for non-simulationist stuff, but by and large the focus of the system is in fact on simulationism. You give off the impression of having no concept of what GURPS is.

Anyone got a DL for Anarchy?

It's not out yet

And before you ask: No, that means we don't have it

So I'm greener than a matcha roll when it comes to Shadowrun, and I'm trying to create my character. On the priority list in the meta type column, what do the numbers represent?

Tangential, but it's "poring".

Special Attribute Points (Edge, Magic, Resonance); You can only add these points into Magic or Resonance is you choose something other than priority E for the Third Column, but edge is free up to Racial Max+Lucky.

the number in parentheses is how many special attribute points you get if you take that metatype at thatt priority level

so, if you go human at priority e you get one special attribute point. if you go human at d you get three

Okay, thanks guys

Does anyone have any good city maps or encounter maps?

I love them. They allow PCs to be more colorful for more in-setting reasons. Halloweeners, for example.

Given that there's a distinct lack of melee weapon mods available officially, has anyone home brewed any? Or would there be any interest in whipping some up?

>melee
lmao...

quads of truth

>shitpost
>get quads and dub dubs
Kek is great

Threadly reminder that hooding isn't canon and if you're not playing Shadowrun as a group of amoral mercenaries willing to kill anyone for money then even the devs think you're not playing right.

Times have changed chummer. We cruise through worldwide calamities too easy since 2.0. Tell me when world changing calamities like night of rage and Great Ghost Dance happens

This is why I don't play shadowrun with most people.

Yeah but those same devs are the people who mess up the math on armor and weapons, think Infected are more interesting as feral rage beasts, came up with CFD, create a confusing mess of the Matrix, screw over Technomancers by design and insist on having an economy where a cyberdeck can cost half a million.

so why exactly should I care about their opinion? Why is the canon so important? The canon largely sucks.

>cyberdeck can cost half a million.
There's actually one that costs over a million bucks. Fairlight Paladin, 1,050,000

what are its stats?
>inb4 3/3/3/3

>what are its stats?
9/9/8/8

If you have to ignore the cannon of the setting to have fun, maybe this is the game for you dear.

as said in the last thread
>implying SR is perfect

Go-gangs4lyfe!

>tfw ganger scum shoots open your jelly bean pocket

So you confess that hooding isn't canon and mostly wish-fulfillment for people who want to keep playing Paladins like this is just D&D? Good.

Just use a different system, silly. Savage Worlds still exists.

What's hooding?

tactical sugarless gummy bears

And why not? Shadowrun is basically just D&D with dungeons made of concrete, glass, and steel.

Being Robin Hood. You're running to do what good you can. It's silly to say that it's an improper way to play the game because runners are still human beings and are as such going to possess a variety of perspectives on the matter.

>there are people in this very thread who stabbed their bro in the back and burned the Ares warehouse down
>just so they could keep hanging out with a dwarf and an orc neither of whom will ever ever ever ever fuck you

Cucked so hard you betray your family. Shame on you. Gobbet probably has like ten venereal diseases anyway and Is0bel would have sexual abuse PTSD and lock up if you touched her.

I didn't even know that was a thing. I'm not sure about the motivations for some of our group (I'm pretty sure the heavy weapons troll is just in it to rip people apart, use her rocket launcher, and at some point acquire a helicopter) but my character is literally in it for the money so that he can use it to restore his family's nobility.

Yeah, some people aren't wild about the idea of being a completely amoral mercenary. Really, I'm not sure what this guy's issue is. It's not like even mercenaries in the real world are entirely of one mindset.

>Being Robin Hood. You're running to do what good you can.
Aren't there several examples in the books about runners doing exactly that?

And ending up in shallow graves, broken and constantly hunted while mr amoral merc is sipping mimosas while fucking elven women?

Nice sales pitch for the hooding runner

So what alternate rulesets does everyone here use instead of the SR rules?

>tfw waiting for The Sprawl to add its totally-not-Shadowrun expansion

Fate and Savage Worlds have both worked well for me in the past. One absolute madman of a GM I played under used the Rifts ruleset for it (no, I'm not joking).

I slapped together a Fate Core hack in an afternoon that worked wonderfully, but I need to learn PbtA so I can try The Sprawl. There's also the Profit Engine, the system that Red Markets uses, that looks perfect for SR.

What's so funny?

Meh, kind of.

The current fluff pieces talk about but the JackPointers are edgy as fuck nihilists to a man.

There's amoral and amoral though. Our group has killed a good few people (though I think my character ended up with the biggest body count by proxy and semi-accidentally) but we try and get civilians out of the way first rather than letting them get caught in the crossfire (we set off a lot of fire alarms).

Hey man, I aint saying your way of doing it is wrong, just that some people want to be the good guy.

Though personally I see that going the way of Spec Ops in Shadowrun if the game goes long enough.

>my runner is a Hawaiian shaman on the run from the yakuza who murdered her brother for standing up against Japanese exploitation of the islands
>she was a normal teenage girl up until a year ago and is running the shadows just because she doesn't have an alternative and can't go home
>doesn't kill people because she's not a hardened lifelong criminal

>this is somehow wrong

o k

I didn't say it was wrong.

Hooding is fine, you just need to hire the shadowrunners to do goodguy runs.
>Mercs, we will pay you a lot of money and you kill things
>Hoods, the mission goal is to rescue someone being abused by an evil corp
Ez, win-win

Bug City or Arcology Shutdown, which is better?

Couldn't you just hire the mercs to do that as well? They're mercs, they'll do whatever if you pay them to do it.

Sure you could. But as an employer, I will exploit any hooding tendency in the runner teams I hire.

If I can make them think, they are doing good, while in reality they just make way for my corporate interests, that is the best constellation.
The best expedient cannon fodder, is the one that thinks it is a hero. Heroes fight harder and are not above taking dire personal risks.

Oh yeah I don't mind the existence of hooding either, I just didn't know it was a thing, and like I said there's degrees of amoral. There's bound to be a few who do the whole "nothing personal" thing, and there's others who are doing it for some long term goal (money, power, fame) and plan to quit at some point. And then you get the runners who do it for the thrill.

Counterpoint: mercs are more predictable, keep them well paid and make sure the cost-benefit analysis of fucking you remains heavy on the "cost" side and they're golden. If Hoods are using moral calculus, so if they rumble your game (maybe even before they do the job you give them) you can make an enemy that won't just be bought off. Maybe you can handle some angry runners, of course, but that's still picking a fight for nothing.

Might as well say mercs are great because you just need to convince them the job pays then sucker them too.

Meanwhile over in awakenedville, it is mostly hooding because karma>nuyen

That's exactly what I was saying, I was just pointing out how the same mission can have different objectives depending on who's looking at it. Therefore as long as you give the mission some sort of moralfag objective, the Hoods will be satisfied and Mercs are always satisfied as long as they get paid.

My players are going to help some anarchists boost a prized car from a high security garage. It's being kept in storage in Seattle for a short time before it gets shipped off to detroit. What they don't know is the owner of the car is Damian Knight. What kind of car should it be?

So my last session brought up an interesting question.

When a Rigger jumps in, his "body" effectively becomes the vehicle, so what's the social opinion on when a Rigger is jumped into a plane and someone has to use the plane's bathroom?

No, I was pointing out that it's weird to try and take other people's word for what you're doing in game. Especially when the people handing down that mandate come up with a bunch more incredibly questionable random mandates as well, with speaks to a certain perspective and philosophy that you don't neccessarily share. It's an RPG, if you don't like part of the setting as described you're welcome to ignore it. Why the fuck should I care if a dev writer thinks every shadowrunner should be a murderous nihilist? And spare me the alignment paladin bullshit.

Shadowrunners pretty clearly choose which jobs to go on, so having standards or preferences or prefering one kind of job over another doesn't seem that weird. If you're 100% stone cold murder-nihilist robot who will do anything for cash, that's fine and that's how that works, but I can't see that being much fun long term. You're basically just playing a slasher-villain for hire, turning up to ruin some security guards day. What about new runners? Or normal people who got stuck in a shitty situation? The field is pretty wide. Also mercenaries get hired for a bunch of things. One character in a game was paid 2000 nuyen to find a cat, once. Our team once took 3 sessions to help a clique of street kids find an apartment after the building they were squatting in were in danger of being demolished. Granted, we needed them because one of them was a technomancer who turned out to be helpful but hey, still kinda charitable.

It seems kinda like a game style thing. I sold the game I'm currently running as "basically leverage, but with magic and robots" to people, so perhaps I pre-emptively forced them all into the mindset of semi-decent people.

It means you jave a scat and/or waterworks fetish. /d/ can help you further

A Nissan Jackrabbit
You read that right.

the car is mysteriously not obviously tagged and the onboard computer has no call home protocol
It does however have a spirit constantly watching it.
And once it gets stolen the spirit waits until they bring it to their base to report it's location

pic related

>make sure the cost-benefit analysis of fucking you remains heavy on the "cost" side

That's the tricky part, though. The c/b ratio is always vulnerable to sudden change, because to the mercenary the greatest benefit to them, worth any cost, is staying alive. The merc would much rather rabbit when the cybertrolls in milspec enter the room, because he knows that he can always try to evade his Johnson and keep working another day.

Meanwhile, the hooding runner might just grab that breaching shield and charge in, knowing it buys time for his buddies to evacuate all the blind puppies from their orphanage. It's not a guarantee, but it's a basic fact that someone who cares about their job will work harder, longer, and go above and beyond, while the guy who's just there to collect a paycheck will not.

And of course we haven't even discussed the Johnson who would prefer true believers. From eco-terrorists to Alamo 20,000 to a mother who's child has been kidnapped, there's lots of people who would prefer to hire people who agree with them and care about the same things they care about.

>Our team once took 3 sessions to help a clique of street kids find an apartment after the building they were squatting in were in danger of being demolished.

How the fuck did it take that long? It's not like there's a shortage of abandoned buildings in the Sixth World, or landlords who would take a fistful of nuyen to fake the paperwork and take no notice of occupancy limits in his tenement.

An original 1941 Jeep. Browning .50 machine gun attached

Well first we had to deal with the people hired to push the general squatters out of the building, which turned out to be a yakuza sub-group hoping to make big on the real estate.

Then we had to break into a construction company office and get them to transfer most of their revenue to several dummy accounts so we could actually get paid and also afford buying a decently secure apartment for our new friends. Plus we figured we could maybe sell the records of coming development for extra cash.

Then it turned out the construction company was actually a yakuza front, which at least explained the tuxedo clad rough-squad encountered earlier so by the time the manager responded to our polite request that she sit tight and don't move by pulling out a katana, we realized we just tried to embezzle the yakuza.

So having done that, we had to go beg forgivesness. They were willing to overlook the eighteen members (or so) we put in the hospital and hook up our tiny teenager squatter friends with a place to live on the tiny condition that we go take care of a spot of trouble in the harbor, which for some godawful reason involved a bunch of hellhounds having been container shipped to the dock. No, I don't know why. Or how. So we did that, and once the burns had healed up we helped the kids move into a suddenly available spot in the arcology, and the kids helped us with information on a biotech firm and we accomplished the original "get R&D from place" mission.

Mr. Johnson ended up subtracting 30% of our pay for "Delays", but we didn't really argue too much about it because he sorta had a point.

Well unless you purposely put sensors in the bathroom like some pervert, all you would really know is someone is in the bathroom, it's not like their shitting on you.

How long could a runner reasonably expect to last if they committed warcrimes with a flamethrower on almost every run?

this is relevant to my interests

I was watching Silicon Valley and got to wondering, what sort of challenges and obstacles would there be for a startup in the Shadowrun world?

Universities still exist, right? And the SIN-having wageslave middle-class still has people with educations and a little bit of money and the right (at least on paper) to go found a company, rustle up some capital and release a product of their own?

The whole Matrix environment is confusing as heck so it's hard to imagine what startup software would look like. If it's something like a game it seems like a lot of that kind of development goes on through the Sims industry and looks more like movie-making than indie game development. Whether someone can roll out enterprise software, useful consumer apps or some clever and revolutionary compression algorithm I don't know.

And even if there are people who can make the company and a product they could make, how do the megacorps feel about startups? I figure it'd be easier just to buy out the ones that look promising and ignore the ones that don't succeed, with a dash of coercion and sabotage if any of them refuse to sell out. Might be a good way to interface with the Shadowrunning world.

I started building my first character earlier this afternoon, and I'm STILL going through and buying a bunch of shit, since I made my resources Priority A.
he's only gonna have partial essence, like less than 1. Good thing he's primarily a decker/street sam

PACKS are a good way to quickly buy useful shit.

That, a Docwagon contract, and an extra lifestyle as a safehouse are my go-tos for "Have money to burn".

Oh I'm likely in the same boat as you buddy, being ex KE and considering myself professional to a fault, I.E. no casualties at all, non lethal take downs only, etc.

Well, how good are they? If they're good enough, they could last a long time.

The problem with the plan is that a flamethrower is really distinctive and usually not easily concealed, so people will know when you were one of the people on the job which makes tracking your jobs easier (and giving them info to close in on you). The very war-crimes-y nature of burning lots of people to death on your jobs will create a lot of enemies, from companies outraged at the loss of personnel to families and friends angry at the brutalization of people they cared about. Plus if you haul that thing around town while you're moving people will see it, and that means informing people who go asking about a guy with a flamethrower. Fueling it up might even become a challenge since it means you've got a "watering hole" they can stake out. And even after all that, consider that a flamethrower is a real niche weapon and anyone who goes up against you expecting it will be ready with a strong counter.

My bet is it'll only be a couple jobs before some kind of bounty goes out on you, and then it's only a matter of time before you're ratted out and ambushed. Maybe a sniper, maybe some magical fire resistance or water spirit, something you can't reach in time or can't burn. I'll put the over-under at four jobs/eight weeks.

I'm sure he wouldn't be that way if Stick 'N Shock rounds weren't so overpowered

Man.
If you gave the guy adequate planning to avoid those eventualities, he'd suddenly be a good villain.

Unless you plan to do talking or magic, Essence is basically your dump stat. As long as you're above 0, you're fine.

What is the single worst intentionally immoral thing you have done as a Shadowrunner?

Nothing, I've never played a game and don't understand the rules well!
But I would really like to do both of these things!

Are Shadowrunners ever given contracts to take out other Shadowrunners? There's a whole sense of community among the group what with the Shadowlands and all but at the same time it's not like there's a vetting process or official exile. Maybe a contract where a freelancer who's been on a few runs and went needlessly loud has worn out his colleagues' goodwill and earned the ire of the corporate world for his collateral damage.

Still, would that be seen as some kind of fratricide or vulture-work? Or just policing your own?

If you don't have anyone to play with go play the Harebrained Schemes computer game "Shadowrun Returns" (I'd actually recommend the expansions Berlin and Hong Kong more, they're standalone titles you can buy without the original). It'll give you a good feel for the setting and gameplay even if it's behind a bit and you can do some misdeeds to contribute with.

Already done.
And the super nintendo game.
I did so many gladiatorial battles in that junkyard.