/srg/ - Shadowrun General

Depends on what you mean. There's a metavariant of orks called oni, with the bugged-out eyes and such. Actual demon oni, not so much.

first of all you have to understand that the system used in the SR:R games is a) based on the first 3 editions (I think 1e or 2e) and that b) it simplifies a lot
second: Yes, all those things CAN occur in a run, but they don't have to. We usually differentiate between Pink Mohawk (wacky, action laden, crazy play styles) and Black Trenchcoat (thought out, heavy planned, stealthy game styles). Think the difference between an action movie and a heist movie. For some groups an Ideal run is when you finish with all objectives done stylishly and no enemies survived (Pink Mohawk) for others a ideal run is where you finish the run and they don't even notice it until 2 weeks later
Most games play 3e (old system, some weird stuff but not necessarily unplayable), 4e (new system) and 5e (new system, current version)

Yes and no
Yes, oni are an Ork metavariant
no, they do not look like the 2hu in the op and more like pic related

and just to clarify: when I say "Most" I mean "you'd be hard pressed to find a 1e or 2e game"
of those I mentioned 5e leads, 4e follows and 3e is the least of them

>working with anything but established two digit accuracy
A shit.

So pink mohawk is more MGR:R while black trenchcoat is more classic MGS both still weird and fun, but how you play it is very different?

I have a question about the setting, how commonplace is magic? is it an everyday thing? is it an uncommon but known quantity? Star wars level where it's a known quantity but rare enough that it has its doubters?

Is a technomancer a magical decker/rigger? why are they hunted down?

>metal gear comparison
yeah, kinda

>magic
fluff wise magic is known in the same way hacking IRL is: everybody knows it, everybody has a image of it, and that image has barely any resemblance to the real thing
awakened themselves are also rare. IIRC there's a statistic that said that 1 in 1 million people are awakened, and that includes the MAG 1 mages and adepts and aspected magicians. As a shadowrunner however you should come in contact with an very high amount of mages, and you will want to make them come in contact with your bullets very quickly

Technomancers are more like decker mages. They can do stuff in the matrix the others can't do, they can summon Sprites (basically matrix spirits) and generally manipulate the matrix without any devices aside from their brains. In a straight up fight Decker vs. TM the TM will lose
heres a good post on it: shadowrun.com/forums/discussion/comment/181431/#Comment_181431

I'm not sure she's actually an oni, anyway. It looks like her horn is on her headband.

yeah, for some reason I though she was
she's a half-human half-phantom

My character has two cyberarms, made to be better than normal arms. The left one is star spangled and the right one is painted like a bald eagle. They're called Liberty and Justice

...

One in a million? That's way too low. I've generally heard 1/100 is some form of awakened (including all of your aspected magicians and low magic adepts and their ilk) with 1/100 of all awakened being full on mages and probably another 1/100 of that to get to similar or greater levels than those of PCs.

Are there any spells/adept powers for a mist form without being a filthy infected?

One percent of the global population is estimated to be magically active in some way. One in a million is actually being rather generous.

>that article
Neat. Playstyle-wise what's the difference between a gun adept and a street sam? Can Biocompatibility be used for zero essence installs (ex. 0.1 minus 0.01 rounded down) or do most GMs take fractional accounting into play?

As a general thing, an adept is going to throw more dice at things than a street sam, but the street sam is going to be tougher and probalby slightly better outside of what that adept's specializing in. (Unless we're talking a social adept, in which case they're doing things differently enough that the comparison's moot.)

And most people apply Biocompat in the same way as 'ware grades.

You can't implant cyberdicks or cybertits with anything. They TAKE UP capacity. They don't provide any.

Pretty sure they "have" capacity the same way a limb does.
The table on page 74 of 5e "Chrome Flesh" disagrees with you.

You're 100% wrong. Learn to differentiate between Capacity and [Capacity]. One fills capacity on things, the other has capacity for things to fill.

Good to know. I have to go tell someone that my cyber dick is illegal and that I should probably sell it.
Can I get a reference for the difference between Capacity and [Capacity]? I don't really understand what sort of capacity a cyber schlong takes up, thought it'd just be essence loss.

It's in the core book in the part about cyberlimbs, becuase for the most part that's what has Capacity for you to put [Capacity] stuff in.

So that means you could kinda keep your cyberdick with a gun in if you got a cybertorso and put both in with [Capacity].

If you were so inclined, you could put more than one of each, but that's a bit of Capacity spent for style.

Wait, are you telling me I can have multiple cyber schlongs per limb? I can squeeze the ratio of working brain cells to "functioning" genitalia even narrower? How does this interact with the "Euphoria" spell?

If you were so inclined you could put nothing in but. It'd be a bit better to put in other things (like armor and enhanced agi and/or str), but you could.

Although if you're going to go All-Chrome Man, you may as well get some Bulk on all those limbs for extra Capacity and looking like somebody out of Cyborg Justice (if you also got some case-mods).

If you go All-Synth Man, you're kinda wasting the main benefit of synth limbs with the extra twigs and berries.

Have you tried reading the book?

>Items that have a Capacity Cost [in brackets] may be installed in cyberlimbs instead, costing Capacity rather than Essence.

>Vision enhancements either take up Capacity in cybereyes or Essence in natural eyes, not both.

>Earware, like eyeware, is available either with complete cybernetic replacements (with the modifications costing Capacity) or as a direct modification to the inner ear, costing essence.

>Bodyware cannot be installed into cyberlimbs unless it has a Capacity cost [in brackets]. Bodyware with a Capacity cost can be installed in cyberlimbs, costing capacity rather than Essence.

>Cyberlimbs cannot hold any bioware, nor any cyber-implants that take up Essence rather than Capacity.

>Cyberlimb enhancements use up to the Capacity of the cyberlimb they enhance.

... Go read the gear section on augmentations.

Just to head this off, you can install approximately 105 cyberpenises.

Bless you, yekka. You're a gift to this world.
I feel right foolish.

Plz help someone who just moments ago thought Shadowrun was a shitty 360 game.

Can you be a gun/social adept crossbreed and be effective? Is it best to be an elf if you want to play such a class?

Does cyberware help or hinder adepts?

Speaking of augmentations, how many good excuses for rocking more chrome than Justin Bieber's Fisker Karma are there that aren't ex-military, ex-lonestar, or escaped corporate testbed?

I need to justify being a cybered-up catgirl/boy somehow

>Can you be a gun/social adept crossbreed and be effective?
Yes. Because they don't share many skills or attributes, you'll have to sacrifice a little on each side to do both.

They aren't called classes, but archetypes because you aren't forced into one, you can mix as you choose.

Elves make great Faces and Gun Bunnys, but you don't need to be one to be effective.

Cyberware is a trade off.

Read the corebook, chummer.

Gun/social adept is fine.

Elf has a lot of synergy with face and gunadept because of their charisma and agi bonuses and increased limits, but it's not a hard requirement.

Cyberware (and bioware) consume essence, which limits your magical ability, including adept powers. That's not to say it's unworkable - there are plenty of face builds that are adepts who get some cyber/bioware to make face duty easier (tailored pheromones are a favorite). Just know that you'll be making a tradeoff of your adept powers to get your new arm or robodick.

For someone new to the game, it can be difficult to specialise well in two roles. Combat and social don't have a lot of attribute synergies, but a social adept has a wide variety of powers they can use to boof their dicepool.
Backgrounds I've seen used to justify large amounts of expensive cyberware:
>Spoiled rich kid, wanted to be a shadowrunner and daddy wanted to keep his child as safe as possible
>Won a lottery, blew it all on chrome
>Charity case, was a recipient of experimental cyberware after a story about her condition
>Former Johnson, got betrayed by his parent corp and used his personal wealth to get his body rebuilt for revenge
>streaming-chan

>>i was happy little girl returning from school when without advice ten beams of steel crunched my body. The doctors had to patch up my body with chrome cos my family was poor, the near death experience made me make an astral trip in wich i meet my totem, a cat. Now im cybercatwoman heroine of justice.

>streaming-chan

As in Twitch and cam whores and such?

I think I can do better

>streaming-chan

Doesn't that mean I have to move to LA, though

More or less, yes. She was an electronic witness, constantly recording her life for anyone who'd watch her stream. All her cyberware aside from the recording gear was funded by patreon donations, including a skillwire network subscription that her subscribers could switch out, like those games with Twitch integration where chat can reward/punish the streamer. I think I have the character sheet somewhere, I'll have a scrounge.

so, Veeky Forums, what is the character you've had the most total karma with and how much?

Don't have a file for him in Chummer and I think the roll20 got deleted, but I once had an Elf Magician who was built around casting Direct combat spells at long range(and also sniping people). He had ~80 Karma by the time we stopped.

The GM was stingy as fuck with Karma, though, and I'd only been playing him for a few sessions by the time he died/the game ended(because I statted him up with the same amount of karma my last dude had when he died, so I wouldn't be objectively weaker than the rest of the group).

Most Karma I've ever GAINED on one character, I think, was probably the human Black Mage I played before him, who was originally built around using Illusion spells to disorient people while the rest of the group filled them with lead. The GM kept throwing magical threats at us, though, so I ended up learning more combat spells than anything, with ~60 Karma by the time he got blended into a fine mist by some anthro-drones that I wasn't given any chance to escape from.

Ex ganger. You and your crew knocked over a semi truck full of off-the-record cyberware that they couldn't afford to risk shipping with something as flashy as real security. You kept the ware in your cut rather than fencing it.

How the FUCK does someone afford one of those monthly skillsoft subscriptions without going bankrupt after a month or two?

Kek that was the exact excuse I used for my Razorboi.

It wasn't a long-running campaign. I think we did four, five sessions all up? But yeah, she was pretty much scraping the bottom of the barrel for money, played it up constantly.

As it was explained to me the last time I was able to corner Wakshaani, the skillsoft network is more supposed to be something that a corporation would provide for their employees than something a player would generally get for themselves.

You take Trust Fund and have it be part of your free lifestyle, kek.

Just like everything relating to skillwires and skillsofts, they're for NPCs, not player characters.

>She was an electronic witness, constantly recording her life for anyone who'd watch her stream
I wish this hadn't become the general understanding of how Electronic Witness works.

Which general understanding would you prefer?

>If the character takes the Day Job quality, [...] they then sell the recordings to specialized data brokers
>If they opt not to take Day Job, then the character can do what they wish with the recordings.
That.

Sour mood may be somewhat caused by my group throwing a shitfit at the idea of taking EW.

I don't see the distinction that you're trying to draw, I think?

Oh sure, but the character was built to a concept, not a dicepool.
What he's trying to say is that Electronic Witness doesn't require that you share your recordings with anyone.

Not cyberware, but I recently played an ork with a shitload of bioware. He was raised by a bunch of wacko goblinoid supremacists who intended him to be the next step in orkoid evolution, an uruk-hai to their uruk if you will. He ended up falling in love with an elf girl and told them to eat shit. They spent so much money on perfecting him and other dead end projects they didn't have much left to hunt him down, though it is an ongoing plot point.

Oh, please, I don't give a fuck about character optimization, but you can't take a character option that costs 20k nuyen a month with a total disregard for what that means about how your character fits into the setting, then self-congratulate for sticking to your non-viable concept while implying that those who wouldn't are some kind of dice-chasing munchkins. That's super lame.

How rare should deltaware be?

Also that selling your recordings doesn't have to involve streaming or putting it up on youtube.

>Smartlink in the eyes to better aim the gun.
>not to enable dickcam

Whats the best build if you want to cyber yourself up to the gills?

That'd be an Imagelink, fampai

Stupid-rare. Aside from the increase in availability, it requires custom design and manufacture in a facility so exclusive that there are less than a dozen in the entire North American continent. It'll likely require a long-distance trip at the very least.

Give your meat body minimum Agility and Strength, take four obvious cyberlimbs, and tank up. Biocompatibility and Adapsin are both mandatory.

Smartgun comes with a video feed, the Core states that it can be used to look around corners.

Any good backstories to justify being a weak, reflex-less quad-amputee with shitty cyberlimbs?

I can think of a few like being an ex construction worker or a sickly dude who had his limbs amputated in early childhood or something.

The former would be good for a street sam, the latter for a decker/rigger.

It was barely more than a one-shot, we all went in knowing that the characters had no long-term viability.
I think the problem people have with it is that it doesn't really spell out that you don't have to sell *all* of your recordings. The assumption tends to be that at the very least, you're selling recording of all of your shadowruns, though.

Is Shadowrun more up to date than Cyberpunk?

>Cyber dick with an implanted SMG
Between this and the guy that was asking about external cyberlimbs the other day, I miss Spy Games.

Half the time, I just want to play around with spy gadgets at the prime runner level anyway. The other half I want to be dealing with poverty and shitty juryrigged gear as street scum.

You're a cyber-idol. True to form, your only real talents are singing and being attractive.

And then Renraku dropped your deal, and you ran before they could repossess their 'ware. Now you're chromed to the gills and all you wanted to do was make friends in high school.

So would that make me a face?

>The assumption tends to be that at the very least, you're selling recording of all of your shadowruns
True, but selling your recordings doesn't mean that those recordings are going onto the market - data brokers sell information, not sources or source material. If they're doing their job right, they shouldn't even get to the point of someone leaning on them to rat you out.

Possibly. But with those guns (ha), you can probably pull a good run as a gunbunny, sam, or both.

I've used that as the reason for a contact for both resonance and magic types.

War vet ex-con. You're old AF, and while you're mostly chrome and essence holes, being on parole makes it difficult to keep anything less legal. Still scary organised and tactical, though.

That is a bad advice.

It sounds like a good idea, but why are there shadowrunners doing security at the embassy? Why wouldn't it be the Marines or national equivalent?

I played a Halloweener with all Used 'ware. He had taken it over the years from Knight Errant/Lone Star, shadowrunners who stepped on their turf, and other gangers, and had the local flesh-chopper put it into him.

>Halloweeners
>not youtube.com/watch?v=_b9akEQQJng

Newb GM time.

So, how do I legwork?
I'm running a Pink Mohawk criminal-influenced campaign, and up to this point I allowed my players to get into rules without much thinking and run preparations. Runs were also simple and straightforward. Now is the time to get a bit more serious (still, Pink Mohawk style, though)

First - I'm concerned about my combatants. While Rigger, Decker and Mage (who's also a Face) able to handle themselves in social situations, Adept and Sam are somehow unfriendly, mostly silent and stiff. I may offer them some spotlights in intimidation-centered encounters, but that's just not enough.

Second - how do I make legwork dynamic, involving, and not too slow? I think it should sum up to keeping it simple, but I'm not sure.

Third - in every goddamn game I played, serious initial preparations often gone south, and GM asspulled main objective into something dumb, anticlimactic and illogical then, just not to kill players.

Approach the problem differently: Mr. J gives them an objective (and promises a lot of money if they pull it off), but he has only basic info. (i.e. *it* will be *there* at *that time*, steal *it* for me.)

Have a trusted NPC tell them they can't go in blind, and let them come up with ways to gather the intel themselves.

Set up the defenses around the objective and don't deviate from them. If they get decent intel, let it be a milk run. Don't complicate things for the sake of complicating things. On the other hand, if they go in spoiling for a fight, give them their big fight.

Make sure your players have character plotlines you can work of off.
I'm reading about a series of fun Shadowrun games and on occasion, their GM throws in something from a character's background to spice things up a little. Don't rely on this too much, but it could be a fun spanner in the works for some legwork.

thanks, !yekka

This is not the legacy I had intended for myself

This wasn't my intended legacy, either.

I made a character like that, but with Bioware. He was a serial killer changeling who looked like Slenderman.

So am I interpreting this correctly that a Machine Sprite running Diagnostics on a Drone just makes it better at everything? That seems insanely flexible and makes a Rigger/Technomancer seem like a tempting build.

Not quite everything - it has to be something in which the sprite can assist via teamwork test, and the teamwork mechanic itself limits just how much of a bonus Diagnostics can be.

... source? For research purposes.

Does anyone know if the Warhawk is actually single action or is it being SS an abstraction/game balance issue?

>approx 105
I believe we calculated this (with infinite nuyen) and we ended up with roughly 300 deltaware dicks.

Did that involve a full cyber body?

Fair enough, not necessarily shadowrunners, but a team who is providing security for the VIP during the extraction process.
Also cybered up girls in comfy clothes is a favorite of mine please post more

It involved getting a luminal centaur body with max bulk on the body and each leg.

It's an abstraction. Best damage (as pistol goes) but no burst fire to make it harder to dodge.

It's most likely DA but for game balance they didn't make it burst fireable.
It's got good damage, but with the drawback of no burst fire and limited ammo capacity, which is why most of my runners prefer the Browning Ultra Power™, combining power, magazine capacity, and semi-automatic fire in one easily affordable package.

Thats what I figured, thanks chummers.
Ultra-power a shit

What the fuck did you just fucking say about the Browning Ultra Power™, you little bitch? I’ll have you know the designers graduated top of their class in firearms design, and the Browning Ultra Power™ has been used in numerous secret raids on Aztechnology, and mine has over 300 confirmed kills. It is suitable for gorilla warfare and used by the top snipers in the UCAS armed forces. You are nothing to the Browning Ultra Power™ but just another target. It will wipe you the fuck out with precision the likes of which has never been seen before on this Earth, mark my fucking words. You think you can get away with saying that shit about the Browning Ultra Power™ over the 'trix? Think again, fucker. As we speak I am contacting my secret network of spies across the NAN and your Persona is being traced right now so you better prepare for the storm, maggot. The storm that wipes out the pathetic little thing you call your life. You’re fucking dead, kid. the Browning Ultra Power™ can be anywhere, anytime, and can kill you in over seven hundred ways, and that’s just with pistol whipping. Not only does it have a robust design, making it perfect in unarmed combat, but it has an easy to use and intuitive top mounted laser sight and I will use it to its full extent to wipe your miserable ass off the face of the continent, you little shit. If only you could have known what unholy retribution your little “clever” comment was about to bring down upon you, maybe you would have held your fucking tongue. But you couldn’t, you didn’t, and now you’re paying the price, you goddamn idiot. I will shoot 8P/-1AP shots all over you and you will drown in it. You’re fucking dead, omae.