/srg/ - Shadowrun General

>Try starting with more to go on, mate.

Fair enough. I suppose they're fairly obscure characters. They'd all likely by dwarfs with 0 points in navigation because, hey, they are The Lost Vikings after all.

Olaf: He's the blue guy. The toughest of them all by far but also the slowest (unless he's charging of course). Carries a shield to charge people with. Most likely would be built to soak as much damage as possible, whilst also doing good damage with the shield (somehow).

Baelog: Green guy. Does the most damage out of the group. He's a ranged attacker, so he throws those swords. Of course, this is Shadowrun, so you could trick him out with cyber-implant weapons if you preferred. Either way, he's probably built for ranged damage.

Erik: The red one. The weakest but also the fastest. Attacks with a measly slingshot, but hey, it's a ranged option, right? Perhaps the hardest to build for, but maybe that speed can be put to good use for zipping around a fight and launching utility items such as a variety of grenades? Could have good sneaking too.

Okay, so I finally got Payday 2 and Jesus, you guys were right about it being Shadowrun without wizards.

Just to doublecheck. I have strength 3 on my mage, I want to wear a berwick suit+ argentum coat (+3) and a ballistic mask (+2). I cant wear this outfit without being encumbered and losing agility plus whatever else you lose, correct?

I would have to get rid of the suit entirely and just stick with argentum coat (12)+ ballistic mask (+2)?

>it worked and that episode got really high ratings.
Well clearly.

>Full reward if you kill the target, partial reward if abducted alive.

No, you cannot. For each 2 full points above your strength, you take the penality.

So you either go Berwick + Argentum + Forearm Guards with no penality; or Berwick + Argentum + Ballistic Mask + Forarmguards and take a hit of 1 to AGI and REA.

Damn I really wanted to wear a suit, but the ballistic mask is amazing..

Fuck it I can just wear regular clothes under the coat and say its a suit.

That works too.

You can also add the forearm guards to that for that little extra armor and capacity.

What would you even put in forearm guards?

That said, if you got your strength up to 4, you could wear the whole lot without penalty. For some reason you can go one point over without losing any reaction or agility. Also, it only applies to things that add to your armour value rather than being flat: you could be strength 1 and still wear full body armour without issue, though the helmet would cause the hypothetical strength 1 person to have that penalty.

... On your forearms?

That said, why don't the make shin guards?

I want to make an adept. Which is cooler, a human monowhip expert or an elven gunslinger?

No I mean they give you extra capacity, what addons/gear would you put in them? The ballistic mask takes care of my sensor needs..

Shock weave/frills? More defensive mods? (I am genuinely surprised there isn't a way to add even more armour rather than it being element/situation specific)

I was checking up on that Shadowrun Chronicles vidya, shame it seems pretty crap :(, and there was a mention of a pnp module/campaign based off the story in the game: That a thing that's available anywhere?

There is. You look like you have a bunch of ketchup packets on your armour and you're easier to knock over, but you have a higher Armour score.

Usually shockweave, some kind of special armour, etc.

>You look like you have a bunch of ketchup packets on your armour
>only ever putting gel packs on the outside

Monowhip
At this time of the Year the morgues should be below room temperature

Because that's where they go. They're ablative, you need to be able to access them to replace punctured ones post combat. The closest to what you're describing I can think that would work is putting them on form-fitting body armour to wear under regular clothing, but the GM could argue that would make the armour more noticable.

You can't cast spells while jumped in, but can you give orders to spirits? I'm guessing not, that services can only be requested in meatspace/astral.

On a related note, best way for a Mage to have a great Reaction for driving purposes? I'm thinking it would be better to just buy up Reaction with attribute points, and Sustaining Focus Increase Reflexes, but I don't know it would be better to just got with Sustaining Focus Increase [Reaction], or if there's another option.

>They're ablative
They work by hardening and absorbing impact.

>Ablative armour is armour which prevents damage through the process of ablation, the removal of material from the surface of an object by vaporisation, chipping, or other erosive processes.
They can be damaged (and any pierced individual gel packets cease functioning instantly if so), but there's no mechanical ablative qualities to gel packs.

Their actual method of function works better the more they're protected from piercing.

>You can't cast spells while jumped in, but can you give orders to spirits?

You can only take Matrix actions while in hot-sim VR, so no (*). Riggers get a freebie in the sense that vehicle actions count as Matrix actions when you have a control rig implanted; but that's it.

(*) you could try to have the Spirit manifest before jumping in and give it verbal commands through a loudspeaker somewhere.

>(*) you could try to have the Spirit manifest before jumping in and give it verbal commands through a loudspeaker somewhere.

I thought about that, but I don't know if it's consistent with how magic works. I mean, you can't give a spirit a commlink, send them to Asamando, and call them up to use a remote service. I'm going to have bitching speakers regardless, but I don't know if electronically transmitted voices have the metaphysical weight to issue commands.

From memory, spirits can't hear electronically transmitted audio or video.

Figured as such. Manual controls and sweet drifting skills it is.

The question is, can their physical manifestation hear physical 'sound' even if it originate from a loudspeaker? (The actual air movement and not the EM pulse.)

If they can, they might be able to recognize a voice.

How big of a spirit would i need for it to posess a car?

Jury's out on whether spirits can actually see and hear, or just interpret the summoner's intent from astral impressions. There's no concrete answer, particularly once you go down the rabbithole of possession and what that implies. It's one of those things where you're best off just asking your GM.
Depends, is the vehicle ritually prepared? You need something like 40,000¥ in radical reagents to properly prepare a standard sedan for possession.

That's always bothered me. Are they incapable of hearing it? If so, can they not hear guns, considering it's artificial sound?
Is it the intention to transmit a message that gets disrupted by technology? Can they even hear sounds at all? And if so, can they hear the intention to hide?
How does spirits view the world?

>The spirit makes an Opposed Test by rolling its Force x 2 against the vessel’s Intuition + Willpower for living vessels or the Object Resistance dice pool of an inanimate vessel.

Object resistance of a highly processed object like a vehicle is 15+. So Force 8/9 is the very barest minimum where you'd get enough hits. As said, preparation give +6 dice, allowing you to reduce the Force to 5 or 6.

I assumed they could hear any physical sound, but that the fact that it's being transmitted electronically instead of coming directly from the conjurer means it loses the inherent magic with which the mage controls the spirit. You need real words, created and delivered from a real aura, to resonate with the spirit in such a way that they are compelled to respond.

IIRC, they can't see video screens and trideo projections, but I don't know about audio.

>IIRC, they can't see video screens and trideo projections, but I don't know about audio.
>From memory, spirits can't hear electronically transmitted audio or video.

Where are you guys getting this? Honest question, I've never heard this

Core book, 312

>Things that exist only on the material plane can be seen and heard from the astral, but they are blurred and muted as the emotional context of people and things registers more than physical properties of light and sound (in many ways they are a substitution for those properties).

>Objects that are neither magical nor living do not have an aura; they are featureless grey shadows of their physical form. They can, however, pick up impressions for a limited time from being in contact with living auras. A teddy bear in the Barrens might pick up a child’s fear, a wedding ring its owner’s sense of love and joy, or a murder weapon an aura of rage. These impressions are vague and fleeting, but you don’t need to assense the object to get them. Note that it’s the object that picks up the impression—a trid display used at an oppressive desk job would give the sense of stress, even if it was displaying a love note.

So either they wouldn't be able to hear a broadcast/see a screen at all (the featureless grey shadow interpretation), or they could, but they are muted and blurred by emotional context that may not specifically match that object.

What about if they're materialized? Or is this including that?

This is using Astral Perception, which spirits would use, not having any real eyes even when they are materialized (they may look like they have eyes from the outside, but the same spirit could just as easily be a whirling column of fire as it could be a glowing fox).

Huh. And here I thought spirits got mundane senses when Materialized

That's one way to interpret it. I've always gone with "these dual-natured beings have approximately physical forms made for the purpose of interacting with the physical world, but they can no more truly percieve it than a mundane can percieve the astral. Exception for possession/inhabitation spirits, which use someone else's senses (and explains why loa are so happy to party with us- they're using a whole range of senses they don't normally have)"

Is there a way to create an alternate set of rules? Since there's a dropdown menu to pick Default Settings in options, can we make others? If so, how?

Personally, in my games, I'm going to rule it that they get the standard five senses in my games.

And the way I always read it was that Possession spirits couldn't materialize, that's why they're happy to use a body. They get to actually experience our world rather than ghost through it.

Before I drop a bunch of other plans and start working on this, would you guys consider it useful to be able to search by tags for things like drones? Like filtering by [Large] [Anthro] would give you that sparring drone thing and such.
That's... odd. When the hell did that break? Um. If you make a copy of your existing default.xml file, then open it up and change what's inside the node, it should work. I'll look into why the hell that broke when I get a chance, I don't remember it ever doing that.

>Before I drop a bunch of other plans and start working on this, would you guys consider it useful to be able to search by tags for things like drones? Like filtering by [Large] [Anthro] would give you that sparring drone thing and such.
It'd be nice, but not that big of a deal. I wouldn't waste my time on it if I were you.

It's just a plain latest version of Chummer, the latest release you did last night.

Basically just go Tools>Options>Setting File in the top left, and there's a dropdown, but you don't seem to be able to make a new one?

I'll go test the copy thing.

>Okay, so I finally got Payday 2 and Jesus, you guys were right about it being Shadowrun without wizards.
Have you played the Hotline Miami job yet?

Make sure to crank its custom soundtrack and enjoy.

Would 1200 karma and like 30 avail, with Nuyen per karma put up to 5k per karma be about the level of a high-end military campaign?

>What would you even put in forearm guards?
Forearm Guards have the Capacity to fit both your commlink and a biomonitor.

dndjunkie.com/chummer/wiki/Settings-Files.ashx
HA! I didn't break it, it's always been fucked Oh, the delight that that gives me.
Fair point, back to arranging matches I go then.

It depends on whether your GM lets you take a monowhip weapon focus at chargen. If he does, then it's the year of the monowhip, baby.

>Have you played the Hotline Miami job yet?
Nah, haven't gotten any DLC other than one character who I thought looked cool.

Do people in Sixth world rent themselves to Baukku (or however the hell its spelled) willing? I know there is a lot of stuff around about people being forced into service but I haven't heard of anyone willing doing it.

>rent themselves to Baukku
Bunraku. It's japanese for puppet I think?
Anyway, it can be presumed some people do, if only because the concept was stolen from Gibson, where Molly apparently willingly worked as one to pay for her ware.

Oh, I'm not 100% sure on this, but the +X speed per hit for sprinting thing might be off?

How hard is it to transform SR5 Characters to SR4?
Because as far as I know the Attributes stay the same, some skills have to be split and you take half of the SR5 skill rating for the equivalent SR4 Skill
anything I missed?

The Hotline Miami job is the most Shadowrun heist in the game, and it has the best soundtrack too.

If you're going to buy any of Payday 2's DLC, there are worse ways to spend $4.

Wait for a sale. Hotline Miami is good, but all the DLC is like 75% off every other month.

Yeah, some people do. Some people don't. Some people are somewhere in between, where their lives are in such a place that they have no real choice, despite not technically being forced to do it.

You know, like normal prostitution, just with personafixes instead of heroin or cocaine.

Dwarves and trolls get different sprint speeds, if that's what you're referring to.
Well, the main benefit of bunraku girls is that since the personafix is psychologically addictive and has severe side effects when used for prolonged periods, the girls WANT to stay and don't need to be paid. You could probably find a kink parlour or whatever that'd be willing to pay you a proper wage, but it's substantially more common that you'll be kidnapped and chipped because you match the physical characteristics of Nadja Daviar.

>Wait for a sale.
Definitely this. Hotline Miami is arguably their best mission DLC, but there's no reason to pick it up off of a sale unless you're willing to pay the Impatience Premium.

Nah, I meant this.

i.gyazo.com/ed900f4961ead1e5b1def80c1441030a.png

And here's a non-celerity version

gyazo.com/fed9d8e0da2332732386d1214a4bfc6f

+21 and +14m per hit seems... off.

That could be an interesting spin on the concept that stirred so much shit in the last thread or two, now only without the shitstorm about addiction rules.
Some jobless sucker who lives off soyfood takes up an offer from a friend (who may or may not be a Seoulpa ring goon) and willingly signs himself over to bunraku work with only his life guaranteed. He gets paid a fair amount for being fine with everything, and the amount that the gang can fuck with and biosculpt him (completely legally, no less) more than pays for itself.
At some point in the six months he signed up for, the bunraku operators get in a gang war and have a smart idea - they have someone on their payroll who signed over his legal rights to them, so they can have whatever they want installed in him and they're only going to have to get in trouble for facilitating trade of illegal cyberware (if he has any) and not anything else that might normally result from forcibly cybering somebody up and forcing them to murder people.
They planned on turning him back, just as a show of honor that might compel others to do this (and to get back the cyberware), but the whole shit-show goes south and the gang gets more or less eliminated.
He wakes up just as his personafix burns out, five months of his life gone in a completely unknown body (and it doesn't even have to arouse suspicion at the table - bunraku dolls aren't always female, and some people would be very unhappy if they were). Moreover, he's hurt, covered in blood that might not be his own and feeling the itch for a personafix he's not sure exactly what was about, and he hits the shadows in search of a home, a stable environment, a fix and perhaps the address of the underground clinic that has his original limbs and body composition data in storage.
All that's needed to not make this trigger certain people is to make him a male bunraku prostitute or have his employers be an illegal laborer contracting company who used him for extortion.

It'd need to be from a player I trusted, but that could be a very cool character if done right. It could also extremely easily be fucked up and turn into a shitshow, but that's true of a lot of interesting concepts.

Anyone got good suggestions for a face/sam hybrid? I'll be running with a team of just 3 and we're trying to cover all our bases. The others will be playing a mage and a decker.

Where is the Sorbic Theurgy tradition from?

Payday2 guy, if you want, drop your steam details and I'll take you through Hotline Miami's heists.

>face/sam
Bad Idea, CHA is a Sammy dump stat, while a face probably won't care about the physical stats
You'd have a good face but bad sammy, a good sammy but shitty face, or both being mediocre
What tradition is the mage? Maybe have him go for a CHA based tradition to cover that
Alternatively, what metatype are you playing? A elf sammy might be a better face than a human sammy

High CHA, pheromones, an init booster and 1-2 "Hand of God" cyberarm(s) should make you a workable hybrid.

In my experience, it only takes a single brush with a magical realmer or a seriously fucking heavy-duty neckbeard to get a sense for when you can't trust a player with a concept.
That's one of the reasons I always get character concepts done a fair bit before the game - that way, I can notice if there's an absurd amount of detail being put into the character or if the player seems slightly too obsessed with it. It's really surprisingly easy to get That Feeling if you're used to roleplayers, since roleplayers who go too far tend to get distinctly uncanny.
Just out of curiosity, if you had a new player coming to you with that basic character concept (sucker who signed himself up for a mostly-legal bunraku contract, got cybered to the gills for use in a gang war and snaps out of it when his personafix burns out because the gang got obliterated), what would make you disqualify it? What actions, in-game, off-game or pre-game, are you fearing that he'd take?
When watching for magical realm, it's all about the details. If the player prioritizes appearance, especially sexiness or sexual characteristics, it's a huge red flag. If they go at length about the character's lifestyle and how the potentially fetishy element impacts it, it's a red flag. If they get distinctly loud or alternately very quiet while they're describing their character, that's likewise a red flag. From personal experience, I feel that this is more than enough to catch people out in the earliest phases of character creation, but I'd earnestly like to hear other people's opinions.

He doesn't have to be the best face ever, I'm fully aware that I'll have to make compromises. I was thinking about suggesting a CHA based tradition to the mage player, but I think I like the idea of a gruff, charismatic soldier leader type rather than a lanky mage being the face.

Elf or human. I'm also debating physad to dance around the social limit reduction of essence loss.

Have a look at this guy for some inspiration.

Will do. Cheers love.

Not that guy, but it's not about him being the best face ever, it's about the two roles having literally no synergy, when Street Samurai is already an attribute-intensive archetype.

Face is more something that an archetype which already uses Charisma (like a shaman) or which doesn't need many attributes (like a mage or decker) can pick up on the side, because it has synergy or at least doesn't outright conflict.

Only 1 in negotiation and perception?

Tracking and survival for flavour?

No first aid?

Pumping REA instead of INT?

I don't mean to nitpick, I'd just like you to explain the reasoning behind those.

Also I think Full body armour is 14R.

Elf sammy who does backup social work is a totally viable build. An extra point in Charisma, some skills, and Tailored Pheremones, and he's already there.

>I'd just like you to explain the reasoning behind those.

You'd have to ask my player about that. When I said:
>Have a look for some inspiration.
It doesn't mean Ctrl-C/Ctrl-V blindly.

I wasn't going to. But those points just struck odd to me.

Do you let your players pick availability >12 items?

i.gyazo.com/fa3b13a13a79735e429b464068e40967.png

Response Interface Gear is taking up 2 in the helmet and 4 in the body for Heavy Milspec, and maybe others. Only other mod is YNT Softweave, so it shouldn't be doing that.

Normally not, but in this case the player joined the party a little bit after the start of the campaign (after the original face dropped the game) so the party "loaned" him the suit of armor that was meant for the original player.

So, I've heard before that making your own foci is prohibitively expensive compared to just buying them.

What makes that the case?

It costs a bunch of karma, and you need a bunch of skill points in shit that are no good for a runner.

Basically
>the cost of the reagents and materials cost more than the focus itself. For the price of the materials for a F1 Focus you can buy a few foci
>You need to spend karma on both creating AND binding
>To create even low Force foci you need an enormous dice pool, meaning you have to specialize in it

Man, tailored pheromones must be common as fuck in the sixth world.

Can anyone tell me what potential a rigger has? What can they bring to the table no one else can, and how creative can you get with their abilities?

Anyone can be an apt driver and having a tricked out vehicle, while cool, is useless the moment you enter a building for a run. Mages and B&E runners can scout buildings for you, while street sams and adepts can handle fighting and Deckers/Technomancers can mess about with tech. Seems to leave riggers in an odd spot and I'm not sure what they're capable of other than driving good and piloting drones that do things anyone else can do.

Go read Rigger 5. The opening 30 pages are all about what riggers do well, what they do poorly, and why to play one.

>the cost of the reagents and materials cost more than the focus itself. For the price of the materials for a F1 Focus you can buy a few foci
But that's not true. A F1 Focus just costs 1 karma and 2-6 drams of reagents (40-120 nuyen) to make. The cheapest possible Focus costs 3000 nuyen per Force to purchase (Qi Foci), and only costs the equivalent of 2040 per Force to enchant (assuming Karma converts to nuyen at the standard 1:2000 rate).

And that price doesn't really scale up; crafting a focus is even cheaper relative to market value compared to the more expensive foci. Rating 6 Power Focus, for example, costs the equivalent of 12,720 nuyen to make, or goddamn 108,000 to purchase.

It's not just cheaper, it's hilariously cheaper.

>You need to spend karma on both creating AND binding
Nope, you only spend 1 karma per Force in the Drain phase, and not at any other - and that's only if you choose to keep it.

>To create even low Force foci you need an enormous dice pool, meaning you have to specialize in it
That's a fair one, at least. If your focus has any significant Object Resistance, you're in for a real struggle to enchant it. That and, since your net hits become the focus's Force, you really do need a hell of a dice pool.

Am I missing something?

I'd be asking the simple question of 'if you're a master artificer, why the hell would you risk your life running in the first place when you could just make a fortune selling foci to rich people and runners?'

>If your focus has any significant Object Resistance, you're in for a real struggle to enchant it.
To samefag onto this very salient point, in order to get that Rating 6 Power Focus? You need to get 6 net successes against a pool of (Formula Force + Object Resistance), with a Limit of the formula's Force.

In order to get a Force 6 focus out of a Force 6 formula, you'd need to roll 6+ hits and for the dice pool of, let's say, 9, for Formula 6 + Object Resistance 3 to roll not a single hit.

You don't really hit equity until the Force 9 formula, where if you assume it just buys 3 hits with its 12 resistance dice pool, that leaves you enough space left over before the Limit to get that Force 6 focus.

You need an ungodly dice pool.

The same reason master deckers risk their lives running in the first place instead of being low-risk, high-paid security contractors. Sometimes you go into the shadows on purpose, for personal reasons. Sometimes you don't have a choice in the matter. Either way, all types can end up there for one reason or another.

>You need an ungodly dice pool.
Or to try, try again, of course. It'd cost a new 720 nuyen for each retry on that Rating 6 Power Focus, for example, and you'd probably get lucky long before it added up to nearly 100k nuyen.

Who are the successors for the Alliance for Allah? Everything I find just says that they broke down into competing factions, but it doesn't say along what lines the Alliance broke down, and who the big parties or players are after the chaos.

Alternatively, does anyone know of a notable group in Turkey/Eastern Europe/Central Asia who would be openly racist to goblinoids, and who theoretically could have been attacked by a hobgoblin terrorist without having the power to just immediately crush said terrorist?

You'd be pretty hard pressed to find a good reason for someone who specialises in artificing to not take proper advantage of his skillset. That isn't equivalent to a decker doing runs, because he can use those decking skills on the run. An artificer however would not be getting any advantage out of it.

It takes years to develop skills to a rating of 5 or 6. Would you train so long in something and then simply not bother with it?

>The same reason master deckers risk their lives running in the first place instead of being low-risk, high-paid security contractors

Decking is a very hands-on skill, though. You have to run to be a decker in the shadows, in the same way that a combat mage would happen to run. An artificer in the shadows would make much more, and live much richer, by selling black market foci, just as a proper programmer would do better making black market decks and programs for deckers to use.

Given all the issues with making foci, it makes me wonder if it would be worth scrapping Enchanting as it stands and replacing it with something else? I'm currently thinking some kind of way to imbue mundane gear with magical properties temporarily (e.g. flaming weapons, armour that shocks enemies on contact, that kind of thing).