/srg/ Shadowrun General:

>Saints Row 2.5

Isn't that basically Pink Mohawk in a nutshell?

By the looks of it, yes more or less

>Isn't that basically Pink Mohawk in a nutshell?
Pink mohawk's often less tongue in cheek. You do over-the-top bullshit, but still take it semi-seriously. The Saints Row franchise intentionally makes itself the butt of its own jokes.

Still, makes for a fun SR campaign.

To the 4e user looking to catch up to 5e,

Don't read Boston Lockdown. That subplot is dying and for good reason. Read Market Panic if you want some actual setting progression and interesting hooks, then go back to BL if you have the time and the inclination to read about another bodysnatching metaplot.

For sure.

>Read Market Panic if you want some actual setting progression and interesting hooks
And a complete lack of knowledge as to how business and economics work

Are you the guy who\s still bitching about the Excalibur?

>Said pretty much the same thing in the last thread

My nigga.

>Connecting to Renraku Public Grid...
>... Sleazing Grid ID
>... Persona Mask Applied

I think I asked this a few generals back, but don't believe I ever got an answer.

Usually we start the generals with the login/connecting code sequence from SR5 and the likes - is there any noticeable difference between the type of code sequence that would go through between jacking into the Matrix during the 50's era of cyberdecks, versus the post-Crash 2.0 era?

That is to say, what would be written down if you wanted to emulate the jack-in/login code sequence during the 50's?

Given the op, what's the sleaziest character you've ever made?

I hate the way people always make their pcs handsome with flawless skin; made a rigger who watched porn and BTLs while waiting to be needed.

>That is to say, what would be written down if you wanted to emulate the jack-in/login code sequence during the 50's?
This shit was all made up off the top of a hat. Make up different shit if you want.

'Top of your head' is the phrase.

Made an actually racist orc supremacist once. He would go out with his buddies and beat the shit out of other metas they found walking around alone.

I keep trying to make a witch hunting radical Christian mysadept that specialises in counterspelling and banishing in Chummer but it feels like I'm trying to do too many things at once.

I'm sorry I expect a game about big business to know how big business works

Haven't played him yet, but I made a spy working for the North Korean government in exile (now basically a criminal organization hat specializes in drugs and counterfeiting) who is basically a drug dealer.

Huh. So it is.

>People unironically playing SR5 now
What happened to Veeky Forums?

Despite the explicit explanation, both in the books and elsewhere, that the Excalibur was a PR disaster that is necessitating a shift in Ares branding and backfired in the boardroom due to previously established rivalries, but did not actually have a huge effect on the finances of Ares beyond endangering their standing arms contracts with the UCAS?

Are "never cut a deal with a dragon" book any good?

Yes. That is all. In fact that's so much yes it'll now be the next run.

I wanna be people
>Be People
I don't wanna be people, I can't live in a world where I have to take a shit.

God AIs are so WHINY

A bunch of new-to-shadowrun players wanted to play, and I was the only one with any experience so I was running a game for them.

I didn't really put a lot of effort into everything because none of them had played SR before, and half of them had never played tabletop, so I just re-used some of my retired characters from when I used to play as NPC contacts that gave them jobs.

>TFW on the group's first face to face contact with my old rigger which was by far my strongest character, the group's orc who decided to be the group face threatens her
>Nobody in the group actually had a single point into social skills, the rigger contact on the other hand did
>NPC rolls intimidate against the group and since nobody had any social stats they all get 0 hits and take reduced pay for the job

Seriously though. The meeting took place in the rigger's own garage, full of home made drones that cost hundreds of thousands of nuyen as well as various automated defense systems and the orc player honestly thought it was a good idea to wave his gun around at the first contact they've had in the game.

I would understand if he had any skill in intimidation or if it was in a public place, but... what do you expect from somebody that's never played tabletop and is essentially playing a Chaotic Stupid character?

So many new players just try to strong-arm their way through games. I blame vidya, and specifically the fact that in a lot of western rpg vidya the PC can do whatever he wants and there's never blowback beyond someone saying something in the moment. You can be a complete dickweed and extort everyone you come across and you don't lose a thing.

Honestly, every group I've ever been in or run has had THAT GUY that has to be the edgelord that flashes his weapons in every encounter.

You know the guy, the one who designed his character with no purpose besides combat, and when he's not rolling dice to kill things he's not paying any attention to the game.

Fair 'nuff. Just figured I'd see if there was any kind of standard of generally-agreed-upon idea of what it'd be like before going off and doing something like that.

What's the wizzest thing you chummers have done in-game?

I'd chalk it up to mainstreaming, and a little bit of this SR5 tends to play pretty easily with the edgy 'do what I want without consequence' crowd, and for better or for worse that'll be what filters into even Veeky Forums over time.

When Empowering your attuned animal with Qi Marks, do those Qi Marks contribute towards addiction for you?

I'd hope not, since you're not empowering them for yourself, you're doing it for the animal.

Weirdly enough, I'm playing SR5 and I keep anticipating consequences. I've already compiled a list of things that could come back to bite us on the arse, called the "we're fucked, aren't we?" list.

Let him have armor mods at the least.

If he's going to do any real drone rigging (read more than two or three shooting drones) you may want to allow the swarm program if only because it's a fairly simple way of speeding up resolving a whole lot of shots going at a target.

So /srg/ how does this sound for a first time run for a group that's entirely new to Shadowrun?

>The charismatic fixer sits down with the group, talking in a heavy Brooklyn accent
>"Look, ya know I like you guys. But you're small time. However, I've got a certain Mr. Johnson knocking on my door, and he's asking for experienced shadowrunners. I dropped your names and told him about you guys's skills, and he liked what he heard for the most part. But you ain't getting the primo jobs without proving yourselves a bit to him."
>"This first one is simple enough; a secret datacache got geeked in the Barrens, and Mr. Johnson and his Corp can't claim said data personally without being suspicious. You just need to get in the morgue before they slice the body up like a Tofurkey on Thanksgiving, make a small incision above the left ear to gain access to the subdermal Data Lock, unlock and extract it with this cyberdeck. It's all that one's good for, and any other action is locked up with some serious AAA security protocols. Sew him back up, and leave. Low security, low risk."

>doesn't say "youse guys"

I shoot him immediately, clearly a bug spirit trying to lure me into a trap.

But seriously, it sounds fine as a start. What's the twist?

I keep seeing lots of pics of people with multiple arms through augmentation. Is that actually in one of the shadowrun books somewhere and I've just never notcied it?

Nope. The only way to have more than 2 arms, cyber or otherwise, is to have a metagene quality related to it.

No, it's just a cool looking thing. They don't want to put in multiple arms because they're afraid it will break the system. They also have Nartaki, because they're dumb.

The first couple runs are just proving grounds to ease the players into it, difficulty getting higher with each one. Deliberate plot twists don't come into play until they earn the trust of Mr. J through their fixer Benny

They don't really like multiple ANYTHING really. Multiple attacks are kinda awkward too.

You'd probably have to ask your GM. Per RAW, attuned animals are mundane and have no MAG rating of their own. A qi-mark would automatically trigger focus addiction for them.
The fluff template we use started with 4th Edition, as far as I'm aware there aren't any fluff bits from earlier.
>Being given a cyberdeck
Ehhhh. Even if it's locked down, that's a few tens of thousands of nuyen you're giving them. Make it a modified commlink or somesuch and you're more or less golden.
Nah, it's not permitted in Shadowrun, for Reasons related to a bunch of fluff that doesn't really exist anymore. Mostly we just like the art style.

Hey Veeky Forums
I'm new to SHadowrun (after having played the recent videogames) and a friend of mine is gonna run me and some others through a one-shot. I had this idea for a rigger that sets up inexpensive drones (possibly made from scrap) as "intelligent explosives" (think flying up to someone's face and exploding). How possible/viable is this? I know drones aren't exactly cheap normally speaking, but there's gotta be some way.

Good point about the cyberdeck. My reasoning was even if they're new players, why would they screw themselves out of a AAA corporate run "contract" for what is pocket change in comparison?

But there still ought to be something that makes things exciting.

Maybe the Mealtime Killer's latest victim is at the same morgue, and there's a news crew trying to sneak in at the same time as the PCs to get some choice footage. Or the Mob is holding a send-off for Two-Grins O'Flanagan, an old bartender with 5 decades of serving drinks to the Finnegans. Something that doesn't fuck them over, but makes it a bit more exciting than just getting into a building.

Horizon Flying Eye has a flashbang version. It's super expensive to try to do that as a permanent gimmick, considering grenades are less than 100 nuyen and the Flying Eye with smoke and flashbang is 2500.

Just get a grenade launcher on a rotodrone.

Because players are often greedy and shortsighted; if they have literally any piece of equipment, they'll do whatever they can to keep it permanently, even if it fucks them over to do so.

How open are you in your campaigns to big plays that change the status quo?

The Shadowrun universe does not come off as a static place. The timeline is full of upsets, invasions, mergers, breakups, assassinations and so on. New editions also bring big changes. Do you keep that going in your games, or try to stay away from the big setting features so it's easier to integrate future content from the main timeline?

If your games have ever had big changes to the status quo, let's hear it!

Hmmmm.... How about it's the same night the anarchist gang decides to start torching shit with Molotovs, so now the runners need to escape while staying low and off the radar from the cops as well as the gangers?

and I say it "off the top of my ass"
people can be different chummo

it's how you can tell you're speaking a living language...

I can dig it.

> A qi-mark would automatically trigger focus addiction for them.

That's a huge drawback, and kinda defeats the point of attuning with your animal. (Hey let's make a deep bond with an animal only to make it an addict.)

They're probably not affected by it.

I always found it super weird the NANs still exist when they're obvious buffer states the real powers should be mulching through on the way to North American Reconquista
My campaigns basically always have a bunch of wars big and small where CAS, UCAS and Aztlan are all grinding their way through Natives to get into position for the next big war.

That would work nicely. Just something that throws a bit of a monkey wrench into their plan.

It's funny when people make a mistake, and admit it, then a couple hours later someone comes along and says "Nuh-uh, it's not wrong." Your choice to malform an idiom to fit in more profanity is your own choice, but that doesn't mean that you're correct. Living language is a spook used by people who are unwilling to communicate in the same way as everyone else.

What effect does focus addiction actually have anyway? The core book is annoyingly vague in that regard.

Yo, I'm making a Jewel Thief/heist infiltrator, I need a secondary function that'll complement my skills. I originally thought decker, but doing so would limit my contacts and skills, plus my group just got a technomancer. I was thinking poisons and drugs, any other suggestions?

>tfw you let the Adept have a drag of your Deepweed

Mistakes were made. Things were seen. He punched a hole in our van and that's coming out of my pay check.

Combat/gunslinging is easy with a physical infiltrator's AGI. Face is a possibility.

Hmm, how would martial arts play into gunslinging? For instance, using Gun Kata when in close range or disarming someone and using their own gun against them?

immortal elves are dumb, I never have them or use them

have none of those things come back yet?

that right there makes me like it less
actions need consequences...I WANT stupidity to bite me on the ass

I was collecting interesting Veeky Forums characters from these threads

maybe I should collect run ideas and intros instead...

or is someone already doing that?

there are round about ways involving drones and rigging, but thats super clunky.

if you have a GM that lets you get away with rigging that shit quickly from literally 0-cost scrap then it's an okay deal otherwise no...drones be expensive yo.

>malform an idiom to fit in more profanity
nah, I malformed it because of "doing lines of coke off some strippers ass"

and I told nobody it was wrong I simply said that people can say things differently. I've never heard "top of my hat" before but I have heard "top of my brain" and "top of my shit" and I know one carpenter who says "off the back of my hammer" all to mean the same thing.

to improvise

what possessed you to give, ANY superhuman, drugs of any kind in an enclosed space?

The benefit is mostly gaining Sense Link and the ability to use it as a material link for casting. You could make an argument that it's essentially equivalent to Quickening, but Adepts Don't Work That Way so it's kinda thorny. Besides, most rituals are garbage anyway. No real reason for Empower Animal to be any different.
Well, it's a psychological addiction with a threshold of 2 and an addiction rating of the combined force of all your active foci. Without getting into the specifics of the clusterfuck that is calculating how often you make the tests, you essentially have to get two hits on a LOG+WIL test to resist the addiction.
You're supposed to work with your GM to decide what that will mean for your character if you do get addicted, but in most cases it just becomes a death spiral.

Basically you gain addiction and because of the nature of that addiction turning off your Foci, even when needed, is going to be difficult to do.

The exact mechanics of that, however, are a thing that I'd say really depends on both the nature of the foci in question and the addiction level. Except for this. Assume that given the chance a focus addict at a level beyond mild is going to keep them on and try to make sure to avoid situations where they'd be shut off in something of the inverse of how a dry addict it tempted to fall off the wagon.

Cowboy Way is what you want for disarming people. Gun Kata is not awful either, depending on what you want about tricking people vs. shooting really well.

My players and I are a bunch of softies, so we always start setting right what went wrong in my games. Lots of helping good people take power in corporations and governments and working up alliances between different good characters in the setting, along with beating on bad guys like Aztechnology or racist anti-meta organizations.

I want to piggyback on your question and ask people if you feel like you need to stick to the tone of Shadowrun? A lot of people seem to take it in a grimdark direction where everyone has to be amoral money-grubbers and things can only get worse but I don't think it has to be played like that. I don't even think the source material is supposed to be read like that, but the earlier stuff did look more lighthearted compared to now. I blame 40k for convincing everyone roleplaying has to be grim and dark.

>have none of those things come back yet?
>yet

I dread the day that the yet comes to pass. The list includes:
>blowing up the restaurant of a local mob
>stealing some kind of in-development simchip that was rumoured to boost the intelligence of the user permanently, but was under perhaps the least protection possible whilst still actually being protected. Ish.
>failing a job for the Triads through no fault of our own (the girl was actually dead before we got there)
>stealing the Yakuza member who was responsible for killing said girl and handing him over to the Triads
>killing a senator (which in all fairness we were hired to do. We even made it look like an accident)
>getting a bunch of civilians killed in the process of killing said senator (how were we supposed to know the troll bodyguards would panic and open fire on the crowd?)
>trying to rob a bank and failing
>causing a number of explosions and then pinning the explosions on the local mob from earlier
>robbing the same bank and succeeding, and then blowing the bank up
>stealing a magic scroll of Aztec origin from said bank (I know enough about SR to know anything Aztec is usually bad news)

And now we're in that god damn Renraku arcology. You probably know which one.

>You're supposed to work with your GM to decide what that will mean for your character if you do get addicted, but in most cases it just becomes a death spiral.

That's the bit I don't really understand about focus addiction. The rules are nice and simple, it's the actual effect of being addicted I don't know.

The big plot twist will ultimately fall on the players themselves. One of the later runs will give them a chance to download a copy of the Data from their first run, which will reveal that the Corp they're working with is planning to have faulty codes implanted across the globe into every personafix Simsense chip, that causes it's user to go into a murderous rage a la Deus Ex, however the Corp plans to make a big dramatic announcement while using a shutdown code they "worked on diligently nonstop since the malfunction" in order to shell out their NEW Simsense, which even though BTLs aren't exactly legal products, the new chips will be far easier to produce into BTLs. So now you'll have scared legal Simsense users buying them en masse, but crime syndicates buying them in bulk too to turn into fast and easily made addictive chips

Are there any hammers in SR5 that are actually designed for use in a fight rather than being improvised? I don't want to have to use a club and refluff it if I don't have to.

If they fail to get this information to stop it, or don't give two shits, they'll now also have to deal with enraged rogues who come from all manners of privilege

This story sounds unfair to the player. If you have friends who haven't played Shadowrun or even haven't roleplayed at all, you should do your best to set up a game that'll help them learn and have fun.

Having someone make a rookie mistake then turn around and tell a "get a load of this moron" story about them isn't a good way to promote your game.

I played a Decker once who
>wore suits over t-shirts with old band names or vintage pixel art
>was a gigantic hipster when it came to matrix games, music or anything, preferring "vintage" early 21st century stuff
>constantly rubbed that in everyone's face
>wore a fedora everywhere, combining it with a vintage gas mask on runs to conceal his identity
>used "that guy in a suit with the green apple concealing his face from the famous painting" as his Matrix avatar to show how refined he was
>was otherwise a sleazy coward
The gruff Street Sam threatened him with physical violence about five times per session. It was a blast.

Our rigger is addicted to porn, and his encyclopedic knowledge of Rule 34 helped us in a johnson meeting.

the triad, yakuza, senator, the dead civillians, and the number of explosives. shouldn't come back to haunt you if you did them right...cause you were hired to do them. it's bad buisiness to shoot the messenger or hunt down the runners who ran on you, if you are offended you hire runners to run on the guy that hired the first runners

>You probably know which one.
the name Deus comes to mind

mind the murder-drones.

>the name Deus comes to mind

Yeah that sounds about right, though in game he's been referred to as "Father" or "The Great Father", and angelic named entities have been keeping us out of the computer system.

We have seen the spinning dreidel things briefly and ran from them, though I refuse to call them Whirling Dervishes on the grounds that if I keep mocking them, maybe I'll do some kind of emotional damage to them (and given that I'm the face of the party, I'm probably best equipped for that. Maybe.)

Also, we were never hired to cause explosions. They come by default with our decker/demolitions expert. Did I mention we blew up the Yakuza guy's super yacht too? Turns out rating 6 explosive foam stuffed inside 2 squeaky orc toys and placed near the engine does a lot of damage. In all fairness though the yacht in question was called "The Sea Fucker", so it kinda deserved it, if just to preserve some decorum and good taste. Standards and all that.

the dervishes aren't even the worst thing...

and did the team punish the demo-decker suitably for not explaining the power of the explosive squeakers

The explosive squeakers became the default explosive delivery device after the 1st run, which is where he got them from (they were the toy that came with the kids meals, before we blew the place to kingdom come, he looted a bag full of them). So yeah blowing up the yacht was intentional, but made it onto the list. That said, the demo-decker has been vigilant in hacking every camera he can, so that helps.

>bumblebee
So that's what stung our heavy weapons troll in the last session! I guessed it was some kind of bug but the little blighter was too fast for any of us to get a good look at.

So im planning a run where the runners a hired by Mr.Johnson to steal something out of a secured facility.

The clue is, that Mr.Johnson is the Chief of Security of the facility and wants to demonstrate the lack of safety equipment at his disposal.

Therefore he offers the job, but the runners have to keep it non lethal to receive the full pay, or otherwise they will have to suffer great pay cuts.

The Runners should be oblivious to the fact that the whole run is "just a test".

What reason could a Johnson give to make the whole run non-lethal ?

TL;DR Need reasons/lies for a non-lethal run from Mr.Johnson.

did it do the 10 lethal damage?

Thankfully, our heavy weapons troll survived (she took about 6 boxes of damage in the process though, thankfully the GM let her roll Body to try and resist the damage) though she's gone even further into "terrified Scooby Doo" mode.

>I don't want any bodies.

All that needs to be said. The Johnson's reasons are his own, you don't interrogate him about why he has certain specifications any more than you ask him what he wants the MacGuffin for. If they press him, he says that he doesn't want corpses that draw attention, just the job done quick and quiet.

It's up to the players to decide if they want to dig into the Johnson's fake identity to uncover motive

yeah, that place is STILL a hellhole

Are there any qualities, defects, or other effects that make it so you can't freely jack out of VR? I've got a rigger concept in mind, but it doesn't work so well if they can just hop out of a drone they're Jumped In to as soon as shit starts going wrong.

We've only met the dolls and the people with cold brains, and seen those dreidel things and half the party is already creeped out. Hell, the demo-decker refuses to even consider hacking one of the dolls to try and figure out what makes them tick, and like I said the heavy weapons troll (who is larger than half the party combined) is in full "terrified Scooby Doo" mode, complete with hiding behind smaller party members.

I know you can get Link Locked in VR, but that's something done to you by IC/spiders rather than done to yourself. That said, don't forget that dumpshock is a thing, so you usually want to switch to AR first before jacking anyway, especially if you're in hotsim.

The Johnson could even add that they're paying extra specifically because they want no bodies. It's pretty standard for Johnsons to pay extra for stipulations like that, or even include optional bonuses based on how it's done.

>his encyclopedic knowledge of Rule 34 helped us in a johnson meeting.
I'll take "What do you not expect as a character trait?" for 500, Alex

Am I reading Nine Paths to Enlightenment right? It seems to imply that, for the opposed test for a given trial, the GM picks a stat and that's the one you use, and then they use the other one. However, at first glance it reads like they pick a stat which they use, and you get the one that's left over.

holy crap what is this image from

A Quality or some kind of device fault that causes you to get link-locked through normal use is more what I'm looking for. Where once I'm Jumped In, I've got to stay in until I get some down time, unless I want to eat some biofeedback by jacking out.