/srg/ Shadowrun General - It's A Breeder's World Out There

How so? The Snow Crash virus doesn't have much to do with CFD, in distribution method, effect, or history.

I'm pretty sure Seattle is done.

No, user.

Data Trails, page 48.

Well, the whole Shadowrun Returns thing might be done since I don't think HBS announced any plans to make more expansions, but to be fair both major endings to SR:HK end with the player back in Seattle and talks about how everything was going fine until you get caught up in the Shutdown. It definitely reads like a teaser.

I've never played 5th edition.

Who the hell thought that was a good idea for a quality.

Actually, can I ask about the Renraku Arcology shutdown? From what I can tell it seems like just an adventure supplement from back in '98, but I see it referenced a lot - was it especially influential or popular in some way? Is it some kind of introductory campaign a lot of new groups played or was its impact on the meta-story especially important to players?

C'mon, I think it's funny. Surely it's been long enough that some staler memes can wrap back around again to just weathered old jokes? Give it a few more years and the target demographic for gaming won't even know about old Leeroy.

I really don't think so. I mean, by that token the ending of Dragonfall could seem like a teaser too, and they opted to leave it at that. I think the restraint is a good thing, personally.
I also don't think SRR is done in general given the popularity of the series and the lack of popularity of HBS's other game, but I could be wrong, obviously.

I don't know, user.

Unrelatedly, is it possible to do pic related viably?

I don't think they're going to, but it might be a good setup for some enterprising modder to remake the classic printed adventure for SR and the Hong Kong player-character.

I think it was probably mentioned as a joke during a meeting about new qualities to include in the book, then some idiot ran with it.

It's a very well written adventure, that had a great lead-in and pay-off in the metafiction of surrounding books that continued for IRL years. It's generally considered the high point of SR adventure writing, next to Bottled Demon.

I don't even find new memes funny user

Easy. Anybody with some walking-around money can manage it in two stops. First, hit up a hardware store and buy yourself a chainsaw. Then, find one of the nicer costume shops (we're not talking those fly-by-night halloween deals here) and get a decent alligator costume. Profit.

>Give it a few more years and the target demographic for gaming won't even know about old Leeroy.
Wrong. Target audiences expand, you know.

>Costume
Nigga you don't understand.

I desire to be a cajun alligator man with a chainsaw, chasing down bounties through the swamps of Louisiana, cracking awful puns all the way.

There aren't stats for crocodile shapeshifters so Surge a Troll I suppose. And there are stats for chainsaws so you're covered on that aspect. Whether the term 'fucked' is currently canon is up to your GM.

What about the most insanely Halloweener character possible?

Well, if it's an established lead-in from the end of the official campaign as well as a popular and well-known module, maybe that IS a good motivation for making an SR module out of it.

I'm still pretty new to Shadowrun. Would this printed module convert well-enough to a video game? Is it fairly structured with a clear plot or more like a big open world to run around in?

What about them?

Hey man, on all levels except physical, you'd be a gator.

How do you play it properly, what do you grab, etc.

It already has a game.

Orthoskin, w/ scales, I'm sure there's a muzzle modification you can buy... and the chainsaw is just a chainsaw.

Actually, does anyone know what years the Shadowrun Returns campaigns took place in? All I've got is HK must be just before 2059 since that's when the Arcology shuts down.

There can never be too many "Rampant AIs turn a complex into a murder-pit you have to escape" games.

Returns is early 2054, Dragonfall is late 2054, Hong Kong is 2055 or 2056.

>I'm sure there's a muzzle modification you can buy

Junkyard Jaw.

If you want SURGE, there's Claws, Paddle Tail, Underwater Vision, Webbed Digits and possibly refluffed Beak as positives, and Scales, Berserker, Cold-Blooded as negatives.

Wow, really? So there's quite a time-skip involved with the Arcology tease at the end of the extension. I mean I guess ~5 years isn't insurmountable but still.

I feel like if you visited the Seamstress Union in 2059 a few things would've changed from 2054

What sort of personality does Deus have, anyway? Is he a stuttering Shodan psychotic or more coherent? Or entirely alien and above meat-people?

Oh, so you're dat boi

And you use your teeth as the chainsaw teeth, while only being able to painfully gum someone's arm with your muscular jaw?

Someone from HBS announced that they want to break away from Shafowrun for a while, and that if/when SR comes back it'll probably be in 3D.

so i have a few questions.
1. how do i do Rigging? (which of the four contradictory rigging rulesets do i even use and how do i use them.)

2. how are AI as playable types and is an e-ghost a good idea for one?

3. How's AI using an anthrodrone to interract with meatspace? how do i do it and what do i need to do to make it work?

4. how exactly do the anthrodrone's stats translate to personal scale stuff?

What quality would represent a runner being a serial killer/vigilante in their spare time?

I assume they mean jumping from the isometric camera/tileset/3D characters method they have now to a full-3D setup, like how Neverwinter Nights followed the old Infinity Engine games?

Seems like a mistake if you ask me, when the whole CRPG industry went through that change the whole first generation of full 3D games were all pretty shaky and the tech costs were too high cutting into the actual quality and size of the games. Part of the point of HBS doing an infinity-style 2.5D game was it's easy and affordable to make it look good so you can cram your game with more actual game. Then again, I can sympathize if they feel like Shadowrun Returns is just done and they want to move onto something new.

>Cold-Blooded
Only so long as you never go anywhere remotely cold. Sub-20 degrees C is pretty harsh on top of any other penalties.

>How do you handle trolls in your games? Do you make sure that the undersized world they live in is always in their minds? Have the ever lamped themselves running through a door without ducking? Do you talk about the mods they made to their home to make it suitable for their frames? Has a dwarf even sat in a troll-sized chair and fallen into the cushions?
Honestly? It's been over 50 years since goblinization started. Almost every building, at this point, has troll-sized doorways, and most have at least one troll-sized chair, just for politeness. The real issue is that troll-sized shit is more expensive, not that it's harder to find or access.

>Returns
>looks good
No.

Why do you need a quality?

Man, Shadowrun's already a tongue-in-cheek, borderline post-apocalyptic setting full of sovereign corporate enclaves where organized crime went into semi-legitimate business.

Why would you want to make it even more like something as underwhelming as fucking Snow Crash?

Mostly so my sheet looks a bit fuller, but I guess I could fluff a mix of Prejudice and Day Job.

>four contradictory rigging rulesets
Wat.

>are AI as playable
No.

>AI using an anthrodrone to interract with meatspace, How?
Read. The. Books.

>translate anthrodrone's stats to personal scale stuff
Pilot = Mental Attributes & Reaction, Body = Body, Drone Arm Strength = Body, Drone Arm Agility = Pilot

>tongue-in-cheek
j e j

It's mostly just a dramatic device. You're supposed to go 'Oh no, I know what will happen there, that's not good!'. It's basically mugging for the camera.
1. Depends on the kind of rigger you want to be and which of the interpretations for your skills that your GM goes with. Generally speaking, get a bunch of rotodrones, stick ares alphas in their mount and tell them to shoot things you want dead.
2. They're terrible and e-ghosts are only for NPCs.
3. Still terrible, but you basically just make it your home node and take pilot origins.
4. Anthro stats are strength = body, agility = pilot.

So that he can get bonus karma for being a murder-hobo, obviously.

mhm. As the new gm, where are the various rigger rules?

Also why are AI's terrible?

Hong Kong is 2056

It absolutely looks good for what it is - an affordable, barebones platform through which to play some Shadowrun and tell a Shadowrun story. The simplistic style let a small studio make a fairly large and diverse game, otherwise it would've been hard to include everything from the Matrix to spirits to gangs and corps. Plus, it was easy enough for them to make a slew of new assets for campaigns in Berlin and Hong Kong. I respect the design decisions they made.

Go to bed hardfire, you're drunk

When am I not

>e-ghosts are only for NPCs
This misinformation needs to be stamped out.

>Only metasapient AIs can be player characters
Seems straight forward.

>The rules governing proto- and xenosapients are presented below to help gamemasters design and build NPC AIs.
No mention of e-ghosts as NPC only ...

>In terms of rules, e-ghosts are handled like metasapient AIs
... and rules that tell you to handle e-ghosts as metasapients.

>It's mostly just a dramatic device. You're supposed to go 'Oh no, I know what will happen there, that's not good!'. It's basically mugging for the camera.
It kind of is, although the fact that even if you choose to burn the warehouse and stay with your team and the Yellow Lotus, you end up in Seattle anyway, seems like they wanted to make sure the PC would be there for the shutdown.

To take a slightly different tone, perhaps a less extreme one, consider Aztechnology and either of the Tirs. They're both up to their necks in shady stuff, and they don't have a good reputation in the Shadows. user's point of not having a list of the evil groups is on the money. Any of the Dragons as well might work as well, overtly or otherwise. He also might have a reputation as a runner killer. If a runner screws up, or absconds with the pay data, your guy has a history of not being squeamish about taking the wetwork.

The latter, concealed by the former. The guy split his code into a million fragments and implanted it as hypnotic suggestions into people's meat brains. He pretended to be a god to the first Technomancers/Otaku, to the point of making them himself. All of that mixed with a hellishly effective understanding of operand conditioning and Hot Sim brain programming.

He's a pretty good take on the inhuman AI. He pretty much got taken out by sheer bad timing.

Have you opened up a copy of Vice recently?

I'm reading the Renraku shutdown supplement now, and it looks a lot more freeform than I expected. Has anyone played it before? Could you share some experiences?

The engine they cooked up for Mechwarrior is 3D so they basically already have something that works with turn-based combat.

Have you considered them working for a Insect Shaman in order to set up a new hive.

As the story progresses have the different johnsons actually start trying to sabotage the others in retaliation for runs the runners themselves did.

Have a yak hire them to abduct a exec of the Koshari so they can sell him as a bunraku. Then have the Koshari's pay double a week later for the party to kill everyone in that parlor.

Have the party suddenly find themselves on the wire knowing that people are very explicitly looking for the runners on the jobs they did. And if they find out who those monsters are...

Well...

I know Aztechnology has a bad reputation, although the specifics of how that affects running for them I'm not so sure about - whether the jobs they give are particularly evil, or they're known for stiffing their runners, or they give normal corp espionage jobs but people just don't like working for Blood Sacrificers.

What's so bad about the Tirs, though? I thought they weren't that different from anyone else apart from when politics puts you on the wrong side of them (A Californian might not like them much, for example). And I know there's that old adage about not working with Dragons but it seems like there's a ton of them of wildly varying agendas so that sounds more like a "they're above your paygrade" warning rather than a "they are evil" one.

No, I only know them through their coverage of Ukraine. Would they help?

I saw that Battletech pre-alpha footage, it looked pretty good. I suppose if that's the track they follow for a future game it could work.

Damn, didn't think of that. What other things would you use to emulate Snow Crash? Horizon virulent marketing gone wrong?

Those are all pretty good suggestions, in particular the Insect Shaman stuff - somewhat timing-sensitive based on how much people know by that point (even a vantablack hat runner would think twice about the consequences of an insect spirit infestation) but it's got that dirtiest of dirty jobs vibe.

It'd be especially interesting to have the runner community be out for your blood, and not just in terms of people gunning for you. Having to set up your own runner infrastructure even deeper into the shadows and some secure way to get gear, solicit clients and recruit the true dregs of society would be an interesting challenge, especially if you get big enough to turn the tables and try to run your "competition" out of town.

Here's a question. What does an adept look like? If an adept had a base strength of 1 and had a magical bonus of +4 would he look like he had 1 strength or 5? Does my player's orc adept with strength look like a fucking freak or just a really strong orc?

The Azzies are particularly cruel people. Blood magic is a low most mages dont sink into.

Its not that they DO it that's the problem, its that they are the kind of people that do them.

You dont fuck with the Azzies. They beat a fuckin great dragon.

Adept powers don't give any physical indication of their existence. They're unexpectedly strong.

Read it.

Pizza delivery boys start turning up dead in various gruesome ways, and the Police have set up a slush fund to recruit extradjudical assets to investigate.

A adept looks like a normal person unless they want to be "look im a badass ninja". Magic doesnt really physically affect you.

Otherwise Geek The Mage becomes incredibly easy "That guys glowing, shoot him". Instead of "That guy looks like hes doing something, shoot him."

So a str adept looks like Jackie Chan, a normal guy until he fights and people go "Oh shit thats jackie chan".

A orc adept whose beefy looks just normal beefy. He looks like a freak when he slams the truck into the troll's head.

drivethrurpg.com/product/75129/Shadowrun-Vice

This vice, not the mag.

Think DBZ. Their strength is more than their physical appearance. They'll probably look pretty swole, because they tend to overlap in terms of magical and physical development, but you could very easy portray a superstrong assassin type that's enhanced with magical strength, even though he looks like he has the body of an accountant.

Basically, runners are more than a little edgy when it comes to accepting known Aztechnology work. For one, the Azzies don't tend to tolerate failure, and have a history of asking runners to do some pretty heinous shit. Blood Magic is the most obvious one, but any sort of dodgy making, PR based black ops, or revenge plot fits them to a T. Adding to that, they're one of the most likely to do the ol' Johnson betrayal when it's time for payment.

The Tirs are bad in the black ops wet work sense. They hate you, but they'll employ you, and their work has a very cold blooded spy work feel to it. You get a lot more of a 'disposable pawns' feel to them.

>dragons
Those things are broadly true, which is why anything involving a Dragon tends to be the first strike, 'should I accept this job' wise.

>implying mages don't glow and shoot off fireworks when they cast spells
The second a mage starts casting, everyone knows they're a mage. The trick is not looking like one so they don't geek you before you get the chance to fling some mojo.

As a GM, how do I properly roleplay as sprites? I've avoided learning about any resonance related things but now one of my players is making a technomancer.

Also, he wanted a free sprite as contact but I can't find any rules for it in 4e, and I'm not sure about their behavior anyway. Pic related is the free sprite I was going to build for him.

My point is adepts dont by default look like they are casting. Just like any other caster.

Formal rules don't exist, but there ARE the AI rules. I'd probably appropriate them, and maybe adapt them a little for Resonance stats. Alternatively, just use the Free Spirit rules, substituting stats where appropriate. Either way, it's a contact, so it's very open to you making things up on the spot.

Roleplaying wise, check out the TM Paragons in Unwired. They give some excellent ideas as to the general theme and nature of a given sprite, so that's a place to start. Like AI's, they don't always grok human concepts, varying with how advanced they are. Some are very alien, some might be able to pass as human in the right circumstances. It really depends on their purpose and context.

Clippy might not be the worst idea for a low level search sprite.

Hello, I'm going to be playing Shadowrun for the first time. It's going to be 5e, and I just want to know: How do I do I do dual wielding? Is it worth it? What kind of stats or skills do I need?

If you need any details on my character's build or concept so far, I'd be more than happy to provide them.

>How do I do I do dual wielding?
You split your dice pool into two smaller pools in order to hit two different targets in a single attack.

>Is it worth it?
Usually not.

>What kind of stats or skills do I need?
As enormous of a Pistols dice pool as you can possibly minmax and the quality to be ambidextrous.

>How do I do I do dual wielding?
You split the dice you would normally roll between the two weapons, so if you would roll 12 for a regular attack, you would instead roll two 6's.
>Is it worth it?
Hell no, between dice splitting, and how the game calculates damages it's almost always worse than just using one weapon.
>What kind of stats or skills do I need?
It's the same as what you would normally use for the attack, if you were using pistols, it's still the pistol skills, but like I said above, you need to split the dice which suuuuucks.

Really just do whatever you were going to do, only with one weapon. It's stronger, it's cheaper, and less weapons to deal with having around.

dual wielding is a way to make multiple attacks, but requires you to split your dice pool. this makes you much less likely to hit, and reduces the damage your hits do.

it isnt very strong, simply because having to split your dice pool really fucking sucks.

the best way is to use a pair of machine pistols or burst-capable heavy pistols with lots of recoil compensation, so you can use the defense penalty from firing a burst to help offset your diminished dice pool.

the penalty for using a weapon in your offhand can be offset by the ambidextrous quality or the bilatteral coordination coprocessor bioware

if you want to use two melee weapons and get some benefit without doing multiple attacks, there is the two weapon attack martial arts technique which has you use the lower reach of your two weapons but gives the weapon you do attack with +1 damage and +1 accuracy (so use two reach 1 weapons)

Rather then duel wield, just have two pistols and alternate, one for armor one for crowd control, and alternate between them.

What skills would a janitor concievably need?

Thank you guys very much! Glad I didn't even really dabble with the idea.

Well, let me rephrase.

What skills would a janitor need?

And what skills would said janitor need to also clean up full crimescenes?

If you want to clean crime scenes and shit, I'd go with chemistry with a specialization in Forensics. Regular janitoring is unskilled labor, and as such... doesn't really need any skill at all.

Is there a meaningful difference between Aztlan and Aztechnology? Or is the government basically just the civilian national management branch of the corp?

Apparently, there's a Forensics skill, but it's from Hard Targets, and hasn't yet been added to Chummer. Yeeka, pls. PLS.

Are you more willing to allow prototype transhuman if the character is not awakened?

It's pretty much only intended for characters with dice pools so large their weapon accuracy is consistently lower than the # of hits rolled. Or attacks vs unaware targets.

In general, probably.

What should you do if your Johnsons keep trying to stiff you on payment? Assuming "get a better fixer" isn't an option?

Ever since it got nationalized, the latter.

Get a better fixer, find a way to screw over the Johnsons without getting yourself too much of a shit reputation, and/or talk to your GM.

Find someone that will offer a job against said payment-stiffing Johnson.