/srg/ - Shadowrun General

Chummer you crazy

New to Shadowrun here. What else should I be reading after the Core Rulebook (5E)?

Also, do I have to read everything in the Core Rulebook? It's pretty jam-packed with info and I just want to know where to direct all of my focus (beyond Stats and whatnot).

Just read the parts that have the stuff that interest you. Rigging isn't going to be important to you if you're playing a MysAd and so on.

The thing is, everything looks really important/interesting to read - even the fluff.

You should probably take a look at Run & gun, and Run faster.

What skills could a burned research scientist bring to a running team?

Depends what kind of research

Nice quads, chummer.

Nice trips, chummer.

...

Depends really, first thing that comes to mind is rigging/decking but that's more of mechanical engineering. A researcher into magic might have magic themselves, who knows omae.

Drug manufacturing and toxins maybe?

It all heavily depends what archetype you want to play.

Deckers should read the matrix and decker portions. Assuming this is 5e you will also want to read data trails if you are looking to read another book on the matrix.
riggers are going to want to read vehicle rules and rigger section, rigger 5.0 is the rigger splatbook,.
magic/adept read magic part of book and the splat for that is street grimore.
Additionally as another user suggested, run faster and run and gun splatbooks are useful, run faster focuses on giving more options at character creation and run and gun gives you tons of new equipmeny and explosive and martial arts rules

All Ive got concrete is he was burned because he disagreed with his research partner on ethical matters and was forced to scrub all the data he coukd and run. With possible plans to finish the paetner off to keep him from using the work.

i could go all megaman on this with robots I guess, or all scarecrow with toxins.

Which archetype would you recommend for a new player? I'm assuming they have different levels of difficulty.

So is there a point where non-lethal becomes obsolete? So far we've been trying to keep casualties to minimum by using gel rounds and electrical alternatives and killing only people we were paid to kill but I wonder about the time when we will need to bust out APDS rounds and such

Simplest would be Street Sams, since their rules are the ones that apply to all others as well
Mages, Adepts, Deckers, TMs and riggers have additional rules as well

Also you should definitely read the Sixth World Almanac (4e) which is the go-to source if you need info on the setting. Since it's from 4e it's a bit dated but most stuff in there should still be the same
If you want more info on specific places the 3e books cover quite a bit

Also if you haven't before download chummer5 and check the OP Pastebin

You usually need APDS when dealing with Spirits or vehicles

>captcha: exit nissan
if it's being shot I'd rather stay in there

APDS is for when you are fighting spirits.
Or for when you have wetwork.
If you are a good nonlethal team, you probably won't get many lethal jobs. Fixers know to get you jobs that fit your skills.

Apds also comes out to play when you have a job to demolish a building and shoot anyone trying to escape, or assasinate a guy in an armored limo.

Data scrubbing would suggest he's basically a decker, so that's what you'd build and just flavour him with research appropriate skills/knowledges - Cybernetics for the megaman approach, Chemistry and/or Demolitions if you go a more Organic Chemistl route.

Thanks for the info! I'll be sure to put it to good use. I've only ever played the video games so I'm looking to try something a bit different with the tabletop.

I might go with the megaman approach. Now for important decisions.

Light or wily?

Is the treatment for massive spine and nerve damage wired reflexes? Or something else?

Wired reflexes aren't treatment for anything, it's hardware to make soldiers killing machines. Bone and nerve reconstruction are totolly possible in the 6th world without much of a fuzz. If you can afford wired reflexed, you can afford a new spine. But hey, you do whatever you want to.

Dang.
Im trying to think of some injury that takes a boxer out of the game and forces him to street sam with his new cyber.
If nerve damage is that easy to repair, I guess a rabbit punch based injury is too easy. Broken bones are likewise too easy to fix, so I can't just have him get beaten near death.

This is a real puzzler.

It gets tangled around you, i think, and you take the full DV. Pretty much ensures you're gonna get fucked up because you wasted a turn + took potentially huge damage.

That's only if you critically glitch, a normal glitch is that it gets caught on something while you swing it around.

>Mob boss takes an interest in your fighting ability
>After your injury, he offers you the deal of a lifetime, implanting 'ware that'll not only restore you to full functionality, but make you faster and stronger than before
>He just needs to know you'll be willing to help him with a few trifling things here and there...

Oh yeah, it certainly is going to involve the mob. How else do you get the slow decline into debt and crime?

Though I am wracking my brain to think of a boxing injury that isn't either instantly lethal or 100% repairable in the 6th world.

It doesn't have to be unrepairable. If you're mudding around with a guy's spinal cord, you might as well put WR in when you're there. Saves the trouble of opening the guy back up.

Just because it's treatable doesn't mean he can afford the treatment proper, the Mafia could always pay for the expenses and then some. But as always, favors need to be repaid.

Are you suggesting the mob bribe a crooked doctor to put it in there mid operation?
Which nicely leads to his expulsion from the boxing ring. Which nicely leads into mob work.
And eventually finding out it was the mob that fucked you in the first place, depending on gm.

That's another good angle if I don't want to have to do mob revenge.

And while it's arguably more biomechanical engineering than research, you could be a cybertechnology engineer or researcher, and wear one or more limbs like pic related. The Modular Limb accessory from Chrome Flesh even lets you swap these out on the fly, which fits really well for someone who regularly wore different cyberlimbs for testing and demoing to clients. Possibly you lost the arm/leg(s) in a lab accident, and having to wear cyberlimbs gave you a new perspective and empathy for cyberware users, as well as a drive to make cybered life more bearable. This can lead into the sense of ethics that leads you to burning your research.

Biomechanical engineering totally counts as research.

Though it makes me wonder what abuse of cybertechnology could have prompted this ethical dilemma

cyberdicks
hundreds of them

Needs more pathos

Pushing combat oriented cyber ware on people who don't want it/can't afford it. People who would lose their jobs if they don't take it, and maybe some even lose heavy amounts of essence/get in lots of debt because of it. Maybe they didn't like the idea of someone being turned into a weapon permanently or losing control of their own body because someone else now technically owns it.

Physical damage has the unique disadvantage of sometimes being downgraded to Stun, which targets a completely different health track. In practical terms, that means that the only time you really want to switch to APDS instead of something that does Stun is when targeting something with hardened armor (like a spirit) or something that doesn't take Stun damage (like a drone or vehicle). Against organic metahumans always pack Gel, Stick-n-Shock, or tasers, because they have better stopping power.

Easy. Work for Aztech or Shiawase and had an accident there. Aztech angle's obvious, and Shiawase does plenty of work into cybernetics. Yakuza connection. Blam.

Crap. Meant MCT, not Shiawase. My bad.

There are absolutely injuries and nerve damage that are hard to treat conventionally, they're just not represented mechanically since you're not going to be receiving them in play - the same way you're not going to get your legs blown off by a landmine unless you burn edge to survive something.

Wired Reflexes would definitely not be a treatment for that kind of damage, mind you. That's just not what it does.

Move-by-Wire, however, could be. Move-by-Wire completely bypasses your normal motor functions, letting you puppet your body in the same manner as a Rigger Jumped In to a drone. So, it could have possible actual medical applications for someone experiencing some kind of motor control failure as a result of certain forms of hard-to-repair brain damage.

It's hideous overkill, mind you, but maybe after someone beats you in the skull until you can't walk or hold your piss anymore leaves you in the mood for some overkill, you get me?

Some ideas (most of which probably suck):
- Your speciality is neural interface hardware, primarily focused on correcting phantom limb syndrome/psychological rejection of cyberlimbs by more natural interfaces. But your partner has been piggybacking your research into subliminal signalling to have the cyberlimb introduce subtle compulsions into wearer's heads - perhaps you noticed when after installing a new prototype unit you had the strangest craving for your company's soyburgers, even though they make you gag. You can't in good conscience let any tech that can do this end up in anyone's hands.
- Your speciality is anti-rejection drugs, used as part of physical or mental therapy for treatment of physical or mental rejections of 'ware. You notice some abberant values in a set of test data your partner's submitted, and with some digging (and a couple security tapes you accessed if you're a decker) you realise that he's been falsifying results. You confront him about this, and in retaliation he frames you for the falsification he's done. You nuke the research and bail.
- As an R&D powerhouse duo, you're more interested in the Research, and he's more interested in the Development - specifically, selling your work to corporate. You're working on a complex project - maybe some next-gen headware - but in its current state, it's still fundamentally dangerous to patients. Only problem is, your partner has doubled down with corporate that it'll be ready to ship, and has his reasons (pride, fear, poor rep) that he can't let you delay the launch. Corporate won't, either, they've already passed your friend's status reports up the chain. Knowing that the only way you can stop this dangerous tech from making it to market is scrubbing it, you punch the delete key and punch out.

Shittier ideas:

- Your main field of research is synthskin, and your masterpiece is a simulated dermis which can support a real, living layer of flesh over the synthetic muscle of the limb. Your partner, meanwhile, is focused on the development of a synthetic skin to go with it. But he's been taking shortcuts in his work - The moment you found out that the skin on your new arm was taken from a corpse you nearly ripped it out of the modular socket. Recognising the ethical implications, you scrubbed your research (This has an interesting body horror angle, but in a world where Organ Grinders is a thing it admittedly doesn't make much sense)
- You're in the lab late one night - inspiration struck, and you just have to try this new actuator design on the nanofab - when a 'runner breaks in. After a tense struggle, you kill them in self-defence, with a shotgun-equipped prototype cyberarm that you were tinkering on. That's when you realize four things: One, the local manager's kid has been moonlighting as a shadowrunner. Two, that kid has the previous prototype of the arm you have on right now on your arm. Third, the only people who have access to this lab are you, and your partner. And fourth, it wasn't you who was smuggling milspec cyberarms to criminals. Unfortunately, your partner's a smooth operator, and that's the manager's kid on the ground, who you just killed. You don't even think about the fact that you're still wearing the shotgun arm as you bolt to your barracks to grab what you can.

Small, ineffectual ones, then.

More unhinged:
- Recently, you've been stuck doing development of cyberlimbs for Renraku's CyberIdols, a marketing gimmick and musical sensation across Japan, Korea, and more. You always wanted to do something more serious, but this pays the bills, and still technically lets you do work in your field of cyberlimb systems for kids/teenagers, inspired by your own Hemiparesis, which you had treated with cheap, used cyber as a kid. Your new designs allow limbs that can morph to match the profile of a growing kid automatically. No more surgery or legs longer than the other. But the cyber idol industry is fucked - the augmentations you make are repurposed to serve as a "leash", keeping the poor girls and boys locked into nasty contracts, or worse. You can't let your research be perverted like that
- You find out that your work on child/teenager augmentations is being used as part of the Renraku CyberIdol program. You can't in good faith even indirectly support the creation of that terrible excuse for music.

I liek a combo of 1 and 3.
R&D powerhouse duo focused on interfaces. Shit gets bad fast when mind control gets thrown in there.

Then we can throw in runners wherever we like.

I would say to have the effects limited to just compulsions. Like, the idea is that the limb interface sends periodic subliminal feedback that says "yep you have an arm, it still exists", but you can tweak it to send "Man, don't you want a Renraku(TM) Kobe-Style(TM) SoyBurger?". Maybe after you find out your partner justifies it to you and himself as "Look, we need this kind of stuff to show to corporate to keep our lab funded. Don't you like your job?"

I feel like attaching a cyberarm and getting a suspicious craving for burgers is an almost perfect Shadowrun tone - dystopic and horrifying tempered with satirical comedy

Lethal tends to be a little faster. If you have a HTR team breathing down your necks and you dont have time to stun the armored security with your gel rounds, killing them is a lot faster.

One of my NPC's was essentially blown in half, having a ton of reconstructive surgery to keep them in one piece.

How would someone be able to fix the horrible spine and nervous system damage that would cause? Would Move-by-Wire work?

Yeah, but it seems a bit petty as well.
Evil, but not the kind of evil you set fire to a lab for most times.

Of course, It's your character, not mine. Do what you want, chummer

Honestly, I'd give them a cybertorso, representing how much had to be replaced to keep them 'intact.' Mechanically, at any rate. Maybe one arm and one leg too. Synthetic, obviously, so he still looks more or less intact, until you start touching his 'skin.'

>Data scrubbing would suggest he's basically a decker

Deleting stuff is not hard. Even a computer novice can download something that overwrites a file with 1's and 0's, and have that loop while he pulls the fire alarm and books it.

It might still be recoverable, but what GM is going to pass up the opportunity of the research partner, half-mad and strung out on Long Haul after spending years trying to put it all back together, coming for the PC with a corporate team to capture him alive?

>I feel like attaching a cyberarm and getting a suspicious craving for burgers is an almost perfect Shadowrun tone - dystopic and horrifying tempered with satirical comedy
You're only about 20 years late, in setting. Subliminal advertising has been going strong with only minor limitations on feedback levels.

>a single cyberleg

>Deleting stuff is not hard. Even a computer novice can download something that overwrites a file with 1's and 0's, and have that loop while he pulls the fire alarm and books it.
How well does that work with optic-based computing systems?

Exactly the same. They're still just digital systems, even if they're optical circuits.

Quantum, on the other hand...

>get R6 hydraulic jack

>"Ladies and gentlemen, meet Skip."

Somehow I'm not convinced.

Oy chummers,

I am interested in playing a rigger with a single humanoid drone. He is wheelchair bound and jumps into it to go on runs.

How can i make this idea not shit or even op?

What's the best way to get Street Samurai-level initiative without having to sacrifice a bunch of Essence for Wired Reflexes?

I'm trying to build a character with cyberlimbs, and those chew up Essence like nobody's business. Is there some combo of 'ware I'm missing, or do I have to go be a drug freakagain?

I had a similar concept with a realistic featured anthro drone for an NPC, that the players ended up having to extract multiple times.

Direktionssekretar with maximum upgraded limbs and as much metahuman armor as you can pack onto it. Then get a multidimensional coprocessor for an extra die of initiative whenever jumped in and shit like cyber antennae and a datajack for arbitrarily infinite noise reduction.

1) Have a pimped out van on site; you can drive, shoot with a concealed weapon, and take your drone in and out of situations (and your meatbag teammates too, if you really want)

2) Don't have one drone, because it will be blown up immediately and make you sad. Drones are fragile. The S-K Secretarybot is the closest you can get to a great anthrodrone, and even then it's super expensive and kinda shit .

Get an I-Doll with Realistic Features as your facebot, and some Duelists (wearing Armour Jackets with Nonconductivity) for fighting. Jump around as necessary

man I love duelists so much.
I am going to get a gaggle of them and put them all in those fucking armored rice hats and use them to storm buildings.

High grade cyberlimbs with high grade bioware, preferably coupled with the Prototype Transhuman quality from Chrome Flesh.

Another way to do it is with a burnout adept with the enhanced reflexes power.

Yet another way is pic related

Shadowrun's Matrix uses quantum pulse technology, and has done since 1st edition.
Data scrub arguably only requires enough marks on the files in question to perform Edit File, assuming you're in 5th edition.
It's an expensive and not very effective archetype that is more or less intentionally discouraged. Essentially you would buy an anthro drone from Rigger 5.0 (The direktionsekrettar is best girl), slap the limbs full of strength and agility bonuses.

Prepare to weep when your hundred thousand dollar drone gets geeked in the first firefight.
Drugs or magic. Ask your GM if you can allocate some of the capacity from your limbs to your initiative booster.

wouldn't he literally have all marks on the file by default because he fucking works there and has to edit it daily?

That knifegirl is so dainty, her pose is so weird, it doesn't look like she's cutting anything at all.

>prototype transhuman

It's handy, but I don't want that narrative baggage

I guess it's spending lots of money and hoping for the best

I already said no drugs, Rockso.

Correct! If your GM feels like being a dick he might arbitrarily decide that the parent corporation uses a push-pull checkout system in which the file he wants to edit is checked out and pushed to the local workstation and then checked in with error-detection algorithms to prevent exactly that sort of thing, but that's a rather painful stretch of the mechanics to justify standard computing practices in our world.
It's a geas! She must always strike a pose, vogue, vogue, vogue

That's not a problem, he is probably going to literally burn the research down.

Assuming you're going for 4 limbs and a cybertorso, your aug options are very limited.

Reaction enhancers and synaptic acceleration are a decent "budget" option that should carry you through minor encounters, letting you conserve drugs/edge for serious situations.

Rate my cybered up catgirl/catboy. Goal is infiltrator/pocket street sam

Some day I'm going to have to explain to my GM why all my characters end up ruining their lives with hard drugs.

So what is a recommended weapon for a rotodrone? Got a friend who's looking to outfit his rigger/face with a bunch. Was thinking about taking a Standard Mount with an Ingram Smartgun X, an ammo switcher, and a pop-up mount.

Trying to find something for general combat, that has a sound suppressor/silencer (as it will mostly be operating in urban zones) and ideally a smartgun system (unless mounted weapons come with one -- doesn't look like it).

Thoughts?

A suppressed Desert Strike. You want hovering drones to be able to fly outside of guards' weapons' Extreme ranges while silently picking them off. It can even disable vehicles when you load them with APDS, and shoot through floors at guards who you mark with AROs.

aks are the best drone gun. good range, full auto, good damage, and fairly cheap

smgs lack stopping power, shotguns lack range, and sniper rifles are more expensive, require a larger weapon mount and cannot use suppressive fire, and mgs are way too expensive

heavy crossbows are kinda fun as a completely silent option with a few arrowheads that guns cannot match

Any full-auto weapon can do for a rotodrone based on this simple combat routine.

First, have a few do suppressive fire. If you can get a good penalty, that's great, but you want at least two or three hits. The rest will do a Sensor attack (pilot+clearsight-3 because you're probably doing this against metahumans) and then next turn it's reversed.

At this point they should all have at least one or two extra points of defense penalty beyond what the bursts give, they've got better than expected RC because they're drone mounted, and at almost any point the rigger can try and do it with their own dice pools if better (noise allowing).

Sniper rifles don't require a larger weapon mount with Core or Building a Better Beast. Only the shitty optional drone-specific mod system.

the core book standard weapon mount holds assault rifle sizes and smaller. sniper rifles are bigger than assault rifles, as definitely confirmed by the concealibility modifiers table

That's not a bad idea for one or two of them. Have them on rotating overwatch. Tied with a person on the team doing the same it'd be damn near impossible to pick up where the shots are coming from.

All good points, except crossbows. They have limited capacity, fairly short range, and no way at all to reload -- so once they're dry, that's it.

RAW aren't mounted weapons converted to belt-loaded? If shotguns are by default so should xbows, which also use internal mags

Only in core. If you're using weapon mounts from Rigger 5.0 (and we are), they're limited to the normal capacity, and can take a mod that will allow the drone to switch between that source and another of equal size/type, or take another mod that grants the use of a 100rd belt.

How to do Black Magic without being a tremendous faggot?

Roughly the same way one can be religious without being a colossal faggot - you can have your thing and do your thing, just don't go out of your way to get that thing all over everything.

There's no rule that says mount weapons don't have to reload in core. Some groups just assumed it, because lol ammo for days.

>just don't go out of your way to get that thing all over everything
When your thing is bending others to your will and leaving them broken husks, getting it all over everything is kinda what you do.

Black magic is for tremendous faggots.

Dark is not necessarily evil. In the same way Black Magic is not inherently faggotrous.

If you're really deadset of saving money/essence and you don't mind being stuck with only 2d6 (not that you'd be likely to get to 3d6 anyway) you could try the lightning reflexes positive quality for 20 karma, which leaves you enough to get biocompatability as well.

Talk to your play group before hand and figure out where the group falls on the black hat-white scale. Then don't play a character who uses Black Magic as they're sole answer to everything/for amusement. Basically, have more depth to your character then 'Black Magician'.