/srg/ - Shadowrun General

Negative, chummer.

If you have a social limit of zero, you might be a razorgirl.

I've always wanted to play the classic low essence razorgirl with a broken safety on her wired reflexes who jumps at literally every sudden sound, with a host of cyberpsychosis-induced ticks and the chance of flying off the handle and carving up one of her neighbors (before being put down by the cops) CP2020-style.

But it's been like 7 whole years since I last PLAYED Shadowrun as opposed to GMing it, and the dream is probably dead at this point.

There are roller skate feet. Go with that for a couple of them (the old school players, the ones who are on defence and need better footing, etc). I don't know a lot about derby, so I couldn't say what kind of mods they would need (and whether it makes sense to have some big orc chicks with bone lacing and other density-enhancing mods as a brick wall, elves going at high speed, etc).

>nd whether it makes sense to have some big orc chicks with bone lacing and other density-enhancing mods as a brick wall, elves going at high speed,
You'd want both I think. The way derby works is you have two teams, and each team has one person whose job is to go around the arena in circles really fast. Everyone else in the team has to stop the other team's person from doing that.
So you want one really fast elf girl, and then a bunch of orc chicks capable of beating up the other team's fast elf girl.

Would you also want some midrange girls? People who can keep pace with your runner (or whatever they're called) and protect them from sudden assault, or who can catch up with the opposing runner and slow her down enough for the heavies to get her?

>Yes but I thought the 3rd frame assumed there was no dude.
Yet.

>webm
Omg did he died?

There are two people in the ball, one of them died to spinal trauma and the other made it out with some cuts and a concussion. The ball rolled like a mile downhill before they were recovered

How did one manage to survive with just minor cuts and the other broke his spine? Was the one who died a retard perhaps?

They were both retards for taking a zorb ride from an unlicensed guy trespassing on a ski slope in russia. One of them just happened to have his spine facing one of the rocks they slammed into on the way down.

It's actually a good indie miniseries and TV series. Kinda strange, but also different.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexx

>Sam & Max redux.jpg
First time I ever saw that pic with the filename. It makes a lot more sense now.

You should probably do them up as a team of combat bikers. Same sort of principles, but established in the Sixth World.

Meh, I liked farscape better.

Something something Fuck nugget.

GMs, have you ever had the situation where you made an encounter of which you thought that it would be over quick and which turned out to be a lot harder than you thought?

Because I have today
Memo to self: Fear Power is fucking bullshit

Happened the other way around in my most recent game. The party mage got off a nice ball lightning that killed 2 support drones and highly injured 3 out of 5 mooks. The combat didn't last much longer.

Has anyone put up a list of comparisons between bioware and cyberware for the purpose of making street samurais? I can't find anything in the pastebin like that.

Wired reflexes is cheaper than synaptic booster but the hit to essence is much bigger. I'm looking for a list that makes similar comparisons for other augmentations.

Make her a major antagonist NPC, or ally npc, or just random rival npc! (that last one tends to last the longest in my experience.)

Opening of it killed it for me. Sorry, while I don't usually mind weird, I draw the line at nonlethal crucifiction followed by an organ slicer for removing everything just because you missed your taxes.

Crispy.

If that put you off, it's good that you left the series before the bug cultists liquified and ate literally all humans.
Or before the chamber of talking brains was devoured by a cannibal.

Yeah, I prefer my gore tastefully done rather than in my face splattering. If I want that I'll go watch bad 80's action flicks where at least it's over faster.

Also the biological ship probably would have given you great discomfort.
It's not like moya, with clean mechanical interfaces.
You gotta manhandle that weird alien dick into giving you a shower.

I prefer cocksleeve or rapebait.

>"We need to distract that troll security guard, so..."

>samsung pushing firmware updates that remove the galaxy note 7's ability to charge entirely

The megas are finally bringing exploding commlink user to justice.

As a general rule, cyberware is cheaper, costs more Essence, and has slightly higher numerical bonuses, where relevant.

it also tends to be easier to get flat out than bioware or nanoware. Like even if the price is the same on a piece of cyberware and a piece of bioware, chances are you'll have an easier time finding somebody who sells the cyberware and can install it than you will with the bioware.

>A torso crawls around the corner
>"Help help someone stole my arms and legs"
>Guard runs over to help
>Abandons his post and the team sneaks in behind him

I could see it working

What would the rolls be to hack a device with DNI and a hotsim module, upload a personafix file, and activate it on them? Turn someone with trodes and a commlink into a techno-mind-controlled zombie?

You'd need 2 Marks (in order to take Simple device actions), do one Simple action to transfer a file, and do another Simple action to run it. You don't have to be in Hotsim VR in order to run BTLs, so you don't have to change device modes.

You could do it in as few as 2 initiative passes, if you went straight for 2 Marks instead of coming at it slowly.

Also, I fucking love the idea of doing direct mind-hacking of people with DNIs. You'd have my full support in any of my games - doubly so if you decided to try this shit as a technomancer.

I recently played a Streetsam who had enough bioware to push him almost to his essence limit and then some cyberware on top of that. He was basically low level chemically sedated constantly when he wasn't in combat.

I want my players to fight a bunch of shitty low force spirits. How many is too many?
Also, can bound spirits say no to commands?

>I want my players to fight a bunch of shitty low force spirits. How many is too many?
How low of Force?

>Also, can bound spirits say no to commands?
No, but you can develop spirit Notoriety if you treat bound spirits abusively.

I am worried, /srg/.
I am going to run a game soon, but I only have two players who I know IRL. The rest will have to be scraped from the internet, possibly from here.
How can I mitigate the damage that will inevitably be caused by some of you chumps?

Have a Session Zero where you get to know them all, the characters they are bringing to the table, and how everybody plans on making the party work. Talk with them all so everybody is familiar with the tone you intend to set, your particular style of playing. Answer any questions and break the ice before getting down and dirty with dice rolling.

>How low of Force?
Like, 1-3. The idea is they're a bunch of task spirits intended to be doing work.
>No, but you can develop spirit Notoriety if you treat bound spirits abusively.
Eh, the summoner is evil and from one of the traditions that don't think spirits are people so that won't be an issue.

Problem: AFAIK, only Possession Traditions can summon Task Spirits, which normally can't manifest on their own. Unlike you plan to have them inhabit mannequins.

Also that tradition you're thinking of is Psionics.

>Eh, the summoner is evil and from one of the traditions that don't think spirits are people so that won't be an issue.

Until his spirits start trying to get him killed through neglect and charging tasks for every little thing.

Or other people's spirits take detours to fuck with him.

I should clarify: AFAIK Task Spirits are only summonable in listed Possession Traditions. You could summon it with a ritual or with a custom tradition

Yeah, they're a possession tradition. Going to have a bunch of zombies laboring in a super secret magic sweatshop.
Eh, the PCs should kill them before that becomes a problem.

>Force 1-3 Possession spirits inhabiting corpses
Man, don't even worry about it, then. A Mage can only have Charisma spirits bound at one time, and can only ever have 1 non-Bound spirit summoned, so he's guaranteed to run out of corpses before they run out of bullets. Force 1-3 is weak as fuck, especially in a Possession tradition.

Would you ever run with someone with a toxic mentor?

Not if I knew about it.

I would suggest they find a more healthy relation ship.

What are some things dumb guards can be talking about while an infiltrator is waiting in a bush for them to leave?

Also, how long does someone have to be generally annoying and unkillable, but not hostile, before HTR is called? Assume they are in the lobby of the building.

Talk about the sports ball game. Talk about the trido porn they passed along last week, the really weird one. Talk about their kids and how one of them won a that sportball game at the community center and how her new leg is doing good and how the cancer looks like it's gone. Talk about the last guy that they caught that was hiding in some bushes and that jumped out.

>Have you seen the new T-17?

>Talk about the last guy that they caught that was hiding in some bushes and that jumped out.
Then go about describing how the guy was basically the PC in the bushes.

>dumb guards talking
How genuinely terrified they are that another shadowrunner will show up. The last one put Smith in the hospital.

>HTR
Sorry, acronymn knowledge check failed me.

Might be a bit fresh, but anyone have a copy of Cutting Aces as a pdf?

So how hard a hit to your essence can you take before it starts SERIOUSLY affecting your persoanlity/emotions and such? Cause i've been digging through the corebook for fith ed and i cant find any clues. I dont need exact numbers just a rough idea of where the line between augmented metahuman and the terminator is drawn.

High threat response

Generally takes a few days/hours for someone to bother buying and removing the DRM. That said, this book seems kinda expensive compared to the other sourcebooks. $50 for 160 pages?

Probably pretty fast after they dodge the first few bullets and stun nades.

They appear to have marked it down to $25 for right now on DriveThru

I don't think they'd ever send the HTR for being -annoying-. They have low key guards for people being jackasses in the lobby. You need to -actually- be a threat, or convince folks you're a threat.

Maybe if you did some -really- convince illusions? But other than that I can't think of anything.

HTR would be sent against something that the normal rent-a-cops would die against.

>Also, how long does someone have to be generally annoying and unkillable, but not hostile, before HTR is called? Assume they are in the lobby of the building.
Depends on how armed they are, their metatype, their skin color, and how much the local copcorp is looking for an excuse to justify charging the city for an HTR team.

Mechanically speaking, your social limit is [(Charisma x 2) + Willpower + Essence] / 3 (round up). Generally speaking, every two essence lost works out to one social limit lost, but it's VERY hard to have less than 2 Social Limit unless you're a combat autist.
Sure, but all the books started out that way. Honestly I'm considering not having anything to do with the cracking shenanigans purely because I don't hate the art and I'm not sure what to replace it with.

SHAMAN TUXEDO
A shaman tuxedo, as it is called on the street, is a set of ritualistic garb which assists a summoner in dealing with a particular type of spirit. Unique to each tradition, an assortment of various angles and baubles with symbolic meaning comprises the outfit. Each set is designed to affect one specific type of spirit that tradition is capable of conjuring. Not technically a full suit of clothing in itself, this garb is usually worn over other clothing (although ritualists of the Great Mother are an exception). Corporate dress code regulations usually make exceptions for these accessories as their efficacy is considered worth the breach in usual protocol. A conjurer wearing a shaman tuxedo receives one free hit on Summoning tests solely for purposes of determining the number of favors owed with the particular type and tradition of spirit they were designed to please.

This book has the most arbitrary collection of odds and sods.

Trying to find the social limit thing, maybe im just retarded but i dont see it, can you point me to the specific page?

Final Calculations, page 101.

Thanks.

Is it ever stated how pointy elves ears are?

Not that pointy.

(But biosculpting exists.)

Need some red herrings for my players. Is there anything you can do in your home that would generate lots of heat and use up lots of energy other than growing weed and mining bitcoin?

Cooking lots of food for some reason? Being a really hardcore gamer? Home machine shop?

>skin color
Skin texture is more important in the sixth world. Softer = better treatment.

trolls < orks < dwarves < humans < elves

That's why I mentioned metatype first.

There's still some standard racism though. Even within metatypes.

Prejudice based on skin colour is, each time it comes up, a localised phenomenon that doesn't reflect on the changed nature of the sixth world as a whole. Hence why particular foreign sub-cultures and places that aren't America get fingered as still being racist.

So does enhancements to cyberlimbs cause extra essence loss? Or do they only take up capacity in the limb itself.

Enhancements can only be put in cyber limbs
Take a guess
only capacity

Anything that uses the capacity of a cyberlimb does not cost essence.

Thanks. My confusion came from cyberweapons having both an essence cost and a capacity cost (seemingly?) though that might be an entirely different issue.

If a piece of cyber has both a essence AND a capacity it means that it can be implanted in either a normal or a cyber limb
You either pay the essence cost (in a normal limb) or the capacity (in a cyber limb) but not both

Dressing like a mage is a good way to get geeked in a gunfight.

>not having team uniforms

Dress as a footballist instead!

ARMORED TEAM JERSEYS
Because you never know whose turf you are tailgating in. Available for most sports but most popular with urban brawl teams that traditionally have the rowdiest fans (read: most likely to riot). + 1 Social limit for tests involving fans and hometown locals, –1 Social limit for tests involving fans of rival teams.

>Prejudice based on skin colour is, each time it comes up, a localised phenomenon that doesn't reflect on the changed nature of the sixth world as a whole. Hence why particular foreign sub-cultures and places that aren't America get fingered as still being racist.
American racism still gets pointed out all the goddamn time - they just make a point of avoiding black/white racism. They still talk about anti-amerindian racism. They still talk about anti-Mexican(Aztlaner) racism. They still talk about anti-Asian racism.

The idea that Shadowrun doesn't include traditional racism and has completely replaced it with metatype-bsaed racism simply isn't supported by the books, in this case. The only racism that I've never really seen present in Shadowrun is regarding black people - which I imagine is still actually present too, even if it's not really featured in the text.

You know, unless you just assume that the advent of metatypes have left traditional black/white racial divides to be bred largely out of existence, in which case judging others on where they fall on the skin darkness spectrum is still common in mixed-race communities like the modern black community or Brazil.

Point is, you're not correct about racism being erased in Shadowrun, except in the case of black people, because every other ethnic group has just as much - or even more - racism directed to it compared to the present day.

>So how hard a hit to your essence can you take before it starts SERIOUSLY affecting your persoanlity/emotions and such?
Extremely hard. Essence has roughly the impact of Willpower, or 1/2 the impact of Charisma, on your Social Limit. It has no other effect on your personality/emotions, by default.

Mind you, some people further develop negative qualities as their essence goes down. Antipathy, Superhuman Psychosis, Cyberpsychosis, and so on. But by default, it's just 1/4 of your Social Limit calculation.

>Is it ever stated how pointy elves ears are?
Pic related is about the standard in official art, but there's obviously as much of a range and spectrum among elf ears as there are among human ears. Some are big, some are small. Some tuck in, some stick out. And so on, and so forth.

>The idea that Shadowrun doesn't include traditional racism and has completely replaced it with metatype-bsaed racism simply isn't supported by the books
Really? Note I never said completely replaced. For the majority, though, it's not a thing. Other things have replaced it.

>Racism is ingrained deeply into the psyche of every Russian and is passed through a mother’s milk to each new generation. Unlike traditional racism, against trogs or halfers, the Vory draw their lines ethnically.

Traditional racism! Orks and trolls are THE traditional targets of racism after fifty years of discrimination and corporate history revision. Ethnic targets are the oddity.

>(Run Faster's Twenty Questions) Remember too that most racism in the Shadowrun world is
centered around metatype rather than ethnicity.

Et cetera.

>unless you just assume that the advent of metatypes have left traditional black/white racial divides to be bred largely out of existence
Not bred - beaten. The world has gone through some major fucked up changes.

VITAS killed your parents and grandparents generations by a notable percentage of the world population. If you go to Africa, they still get jumpy when someone is sick with a cold.

The sudden onset of UGE and Goblinisation, dragons, matrix crashes, paracritters, etc sent the world on a seriously different direction. Meta discrimination over decades resulted in the Night Of Rage, the largest anti-meta riots ever, sparking off terrorist acts across the globe. If you're over thirty, that's something you remember. If you were in Seattle, or any number of other places around the world targeted, that's something you have first hand experience with.

Skin colour racism went the way of devout Christian Ireland, Chummer.

I just want to make a big dumb punching troll who clobbers people to death with his fists. How do I do this? I'm sure this build has been posted before.

Bone Lacing/Density mod, Striking Calluses, and being an Adept.

That's cool and all, but again, the books are rife with examples of anti-Latino, anti-Asian, and anti-Amerindian racism. To pretend otherwise is to be willfully ignorant of the actual state of the fluff.

Racism against metatypes is even bigger now than those are, true. You only have to look as far as the Ork Underground or the Tirs to see how obviously that's true.

But those divisions, mistrusts, fears, and hatreds still very much exist, and still take a fairly prominent role in the writing of the setting, at least where North America is concerned. They don't eclipse metatypes as an excuse to hate and discriminate there, but they're going at least as strong as they are in real life.

And if racism towards specifically black people went the way of a honky Utah, that's because your typical UCASer in the 2070s is 1/4 black now, or something, and the distinction is no longer event socially comprehensible.

So, here's the thing.

Cyberware/Bioware offers flatly better bonuses to unarmed strikes than any form of magic does.

You're going to want Bone Lacing (Bone Density can offer you the same damage bonuses, but the boosted armor from Bone Lacing makes it far more effective for you) and Striking Calluses (as many as your GM legalizes, 4 is the typical maximum in my experience).

That'll give your unarmed attacks a base damage of Strength+5 Physical.

That's a good start. Begin with Strength as your metatype maximum (10 for a troll) and Agility 4, Reaction 5, and Intuition 4; you'll need those for combat. Get as much Willpower and Body - in that order - as you can with the remainder of your attribute points, to survive getting shot at a lot.

You're now looking at 15P unarmed damage. That's a good stopping point for damage, if you're comfortable with that, though you can get it up to 19P with Muscle Augmentation bioware.

From here, though, you should focus on getting some kind of initiative booster. I'd go for a Rating 2 Synaptic Booster.

After that, the remainder of your attention should be focused on getting as much Muscle Augmentation, Muscle Toner, Platelet Factories, and Pain Editor as you can at chargen, and upgrading the remainder with whatever money you earn during play.

...unless you want to be an Adept. If you do want to be an Adept, take Improved Reflexes instead of Synaptic Booster. Aside from that, though, all of the other 'ware recommendations remain the same. Being a combat punch is very much the sort of thing which lends itself to augmentation rather than magic, unfortunately, with Adepts being more the route of people wielding magical swords.

>the books are rife with examples of anti-Latino, anti-Asian, and anti-Amerindian racism
Ok. They're so wide spread that there's no reason to quote or reference anything beyond "so many examples!"