/srg/ - Shadowrun General

>That's getting covered by the "surprise in combat" paragraph. Basically, Alice and Bob would get a surprise test to see if they see Eva or realize they're being led to the slaughter before Foxy.

See, that's the problem.
Foxy might be shooting subsonic from a silenced rifle, and realistically poor sobs might not even notice amidst all the drek flying around until she hits someone. But by the rules they automatically home in on her and either dodge the bullet which has been already shot or drop what they were doing and stare into the headlights.

It just eludes my mind how you can possibly imagine rolling a surprise test against an opponent who reveals himself with a shot. You either need to be Neo or have a 6th sense.

Here's a player and PC archetype that I suspect comes up quite a lot in Shadowrun. I've seen it more than once. How many of you recognise it?

The player is more awkward than average, and they've made a tough, stupid meatbrick (almost certainly a troll). Their character's low Charisma score and lack of social skills exempt them from any sort of serious or tense roleplaying, leaving the player free to either remain silent or throw out deprecating comments without risking feeling stupid. Similarly, their character's extreme toughness insulates the player from taking combat seriously, as they are capable of literally and figuratively shrugging off attackers. Ultimately, the character prevents the player from doing much more than getting bored in non-combat scenes (which Shadowrun has a lot of), which prevents them from getting invested in the game and further encourages them to use their character as a barrier between themselves and the game.

I feel like Shadowrun leads a certain type of player toward this archetype pretty hard. There are entertaining, useful, well thought out troll characters, but these aren't that. I don't think it's even done maliciously, it's just a manifestation of being afraid to put yourself at risk during the game, but it does make the game worse as the rest of the group have to plan around the lumbering thug that keeps following them to all their jobs.

Has anyone else seen this meatbrick?

The point is, regardless of whether it's gaudy irl, the Sleeping Tiger counts as fashionable armor in-game and there's no reason beyond GM preference to treat it in the universe of Shadowrun itself as anything but that.

>archetype
jack of all trades, edgemaster to be more specific

makes sense to me

which metatype?

I'd say either AGI or INT
alternatively: why not bump up a skill or two?

>Now if you're referring to the interpretation that the Sleeping Tiger has a latex sleeves and the rest of the suit is some other material
If you want to call a literal reading an interpretation.

> that makes it even worse because now it's not even consistent.
Still coming at me with that 2010s fashion sense, bro. "Successful".

>So he's magically supposed to know about your homebrewed shit?
He can do what he wants. Assumptions about power gaming are poor form, tho.

>which metatype?
>edgemaster
I thought human would simply be restating the obvious. I'm using copious amounts of edge to make up for my otherwise-terrible rolls.

>I'd say either AGI or INT
Alright. I personally had strength bumped up so I wouldn't be hit with armor encumbrance, but we'll see.

>alternatively: why not bump up a skill or two?
See: Jack of All Trades. It doesn't kick in until post-karmagen.

>Still coming at me with that 2010s fashion sense, bro. "Successful".
A suit in 2077 looks like a suit from 2016, and like a suit from 1901 for that matter. Some things don't change.

>edgemaster
yup, brainfart there

STR can be useful, though you have to remember that it allows you to have 1 more armor without penalty, while 1 point more AGI increases your chances to hit and 1 point INT raises your Initiative by 1
so you have to decide if that one point of armor is worth more than the chance to go earlier or hit better

Good point. It's not like they'll be the main offense anyway.

Just gonna repost this until the pastebin is updated, I guess....

Here's now working links to the artwork and tokens folder from the Pastebin that have been dead for a while.
Again, sorry about that. If whoever is in control of that pastebin would add the new links, that'd be cool.

Here have like a thousand badly named tokens!
mega.nz/#F!pYtR0SQB!Cu4L3mvZhKno_U0oOeU7Nw

And like 1600, or so SR related images (Careful, a bunch of NSFW stuff in there)
mega.nz/#F!xAt3DSJK!nth6Vq8XZYUi-ixdkqwPTA

I'm gonna try to keep this updated as I make more pogs for my own campaign. Since I'm not otherwise using Mega, this time, they wont just disappear.

Lova ya!

Yekka, bone lacing above plastic costs karma for some weird reason.

Thanks friend!

What happened to all the namefags anyway? This time just last year we had a pretty consistent community of personalities in these generals, but yekka is all we really have left anymore

I stopped namefagging, because there's honestly no point to it.
Also for a while Veeky Forums was a super toxic swamp of people pissing at each other over EVERYTHING, so yeah...

So, what's with people over-exaggerating how bad the sleeping tiger looks like when the books don't say it's that bad?
Is it just because it's overpowered and they want some way to inflict penalties on it?

Shush, I know what I'm doing. Updating now.

Oh, I guess it's because the bone lacing pushes me down another essence tier and and then the point I have in magic becomes a point to maintain that... or something.

Some things do.

Yeah, and humanity's preference for consistency isn't one of them.

If there isn't a direct reason to use a trip, then don't.

Sleeping Tiger?

It looked bad in previous editions and they don't really say conclusively how it looks in 5th.

It's a very highly armored business suit with some chains on it and popped collars.
People are grumpy that it's overpowered, and greatly exaggerate how bad it looks like in all editions.
But not nearly as bad as people around here describe it as. It's just kind of tacky. Not "literally made of garbage".

Does anyone know where I can get the novels in electronic format?

Yay

>greatly exaggerate how bad it looks like in all editions.
Nigger, the sleeves are made out of latex and the cuffs are made out of PVC pipe. It looks exactly like a suit designer made a suit with nothing but a dumpster as his supplies on a bet.

But it's got no social penalties, so it doesn't look that bad and people won't look down on it.

>It just eludes my mind how you can possibly imagine rolling a surprise test against an opponent who reveals himself with a shot. You either need to be Neo or have a 6th sense.

Or Alice notices that Charlie keeps trying to maneuver her into an open area, some place where he couldn't get a clean shot at her but her back is wide open. REA + INT is 'is this person savvy enough to realise what's happening, and fast enough to set themselves up for a proper defense'.

>But it's got no social penalties
So what? People get shit on for wearing a perfectly good Mortimer that's 20 years old get praised for wearing the most retarded shit to hit the walkway this week. Dice pool and social limit adjustment don't mean shit about whether or not something looks good.

You have this entirely wrong.

The 1st age, whatever it was, most likely predated dragons as we know them entirely. There's literally no records of them, because the first age was very likely the evolution of life on the planet at all, with the protodragons attaining sentience and only becoming magical at the beginning of the 2nd age, when they'd -really- get down to brass tacks, and then get hit by the horrors the first time.

Keeping in mind, technically the ages are 5000 years long.

Meaning that the 6th age begins (rounding out) in the year 2000,

3000 BCE is when the 3rd age ENDED, which also coincides almost exactly with the rise of human civilizations and agriculture on a massive scale, china and egypt were just getting their shit together, and mesopotamia was flourishing. This is when the last dregs of magic leave the world entirely.

go back another 5000 years, you hit 8000 BCE, which is when pottery was literally invented in the fertile crescent and this is also one of the weirdest periods in history because we have a whooooole bunch of the worlds populations who should have been hunter-gatherers, but we also got some weird ass cities popping up all over the damn place.

Keep in mind, the horror's don't show up at the end of a cycle, they start appearing around 800 years into a cycle, and get progressively worse the longer the cycle goes on until they wipe out most sapient life around the middle of the cycle and then the magic starts draining away.

That doesn't make the shadowrun timeline any less stupid desu. The epochs they give are so fucking off it's kinda staggering. Granted, a lot of magical fossils don't appear odd until the magic comes back and the DNA inside of them reactivates and does weird shit, but -still-.

It actually means quite a lot about whether it looks good, as that determines how it looks in world.

Also, the sleeping tiger has been around so long now that it has become one of those timeless classics, it seems. Never to gain the social penalties of the 20 year old clothing.

That actually sounds incredibly cyber-stylish. Only way it could get better is if it had glowing LEDs.

My first character with a human with 6 Body, ex-CAS Military, that was on the run from Aztechnology. He never spoke about his past because he didn't want information about him leaking out allowing the corp to track him down. Yet his military background and physical resilience made him a de-facto leader for the team, and those same background elements he tried to keep buried provided nice hooks for the GM and moments I remember fondly.

I think the problem is not specifically about troll bricks. A troll brick becomes exponentially interesting with the more elements you throw in that contrast with the rest, like a cute 8-year-old little sister, a love of poetry, or a gift for cooking.
The problem lies with being a passive player. You can have a passive gun-bunny, who will just do nothing all session until combat comes, at which point his only line on dialogue will be "I shoot X in the face". My current group has a passive mage, and every session I ask myself "How do I make her play a more active part in the story?"
In the end, it's really about making one-dimensionnal characters: character that are built for a purpose, for the rules, rather than characters that are nuanced and feel natural.

okay, correction. If you go back to the end of the 2nd age, the years of 12,000 BCE to 8000 BCE would have made up the 3rd age, the 2nd magicless age, and that's about when homo sapiens really started to get it's shit together.

The Homos genus however dates back a full freaking 40,000 years or longer though, which is what makes me really hate the shadowrun timeline because it makes no goddamn sense on the scale of years they have listed for each one, no matter -how- thorough the horrors are at obliterating stuff... we have some really good archeological records dating back this far.

If each age was 10,000 years long I'd be more ready to believe THAT.

Then you have to go all the way back to like, 50,000-40,000 BCE or there abouts to get to the second world and the dominance of dragons rather than only 18,000-13,000 BCE, which archeologically speaking is not THAT long ago, long enough that we don't have a perfect idea of what was going on, but not so long ago that we have no fucking clue what was going down in most parts of the world. That's a geological eyeblink really, at best.

You don't get it. The deal with the Sleeping Tiger is not about how good it looks, it's about how much you paid for it and how new and hip it is. It's showing that you have the money to waste on buying a new outfit every week in the pursuit of pointless, short-lived fads and that you care more about being fashionable than actually looking good. The Sleeping Tiger is like shitty modern art: it doesn't matter that it's literally trash. It's expensive and big names are making a fuss about it so it must be respectable!

Also,
>Also, the sleeping tiger has been around so long now that it has become one of those timeless classics, it seems. Never to gain the social penalties of the 20 year old clothing.
Fucking kek. "Timeless classic" is Mortimer's shtick, and the Sleeping Tiger is a freak of fashion that lived on much longer than it had any right to.

Newbie question, but what's better at punching things: a phys adept or a street sam with a lot of cyber/bioware?

Does anyone have any good images of attractive trolls in suits? I'm looking to make a troll face.

A phys adept with some bioware.

The Sleeping Tiger is trendy trash, modeled after (literally) orks who had to resort to wearing trash. The only reason it's stuck around for 20 years is because the writers won't ever stop beating a dead horse.

The fluff straight up talks about how it's based on orks and trolls having to make clothing out of trash, how it's seen as gimmicky and embarrassing, and how orks/trolls hate that they're expected to wear it when in a corporate environment because of the racist connotations associated with that hipster trash.

For fuck's sake.

...

...

Is that what constitutes attractive for a troll?

I'm about to get into Shadowrun, just got the core rulebook. Are there any recommended/necessary expansions or will it be fine if I just start with core?

Pick your archetype and look at the related splatbooks. Also, look at Rigger 5.0 regardless of your archetype, because cars and motorcycles are nice things to have.

What does a SIN have on it, at a cursory inspection? Looking to add a bit more personality to the ones I have besides just a rating and name.

Not really, but that's a troll in a suit. Considering the rather low amount of troll in cyberpunk settings, there a really few images of troll in suits around.

Thanks, will definitely look into vehicles. I rather plan to GM than play though.

Deckers and Technomancers need Data Trails
Mages of all sorts need Street Grimoire(Adepts included)
Riggers need Rigger 5.0
Faces and Infiltrators should look at Cutting Aces
Anybody that plans to be killing shit should be looking at Hard Targets
Anybody with Augs should look at Chrome Flesh
Anybody with weapons or armor should look at Run & Gun
Everybody and their mother should look at Run Faster

In that case, grab EVERYTHING

Good point

A SIN is just a social security number. It doesn't have anything else 'on' it. But it has the entire rest of your life linked to it.

Medical records, credit score, tax returns, purchase history, current address, driver's license... Anything about you can be looked up or checked if you have someone's SIN and access to an appropriate database.

When your SIN gets run through a scanner, they're doing an automated check to make sure they you appear 'legit' in the databases they have access to.

>freak of fashion that lived longer than it had right to
so a timeless classic.

1/3

All of it. It's all free in the pastebin in the OP. Never buy books.

2/3

Look up the fake sin tables in corebook, page 367.

No it's "fashionable" in the same way the Kardashians are "famous": not by any virtue of quality, but because people with bad taste won't stop beating that particular dead horse.

Sounds cyber-stylish to me.

You have described literally all of fashion.

3/3

So are the Jews behind Sleeping Tiger as well?

All right, thanks. I guess I have some reading to do, but at least I'll have something to do during Christmas. What about different editions? Is 5 the best one, or is there some reason to look into older ones rather than the newest?

>best

It's the smallest garbage fire. At least you can use Chummer5, and you don't have to get through a bunch of ancient RPG design choices that are about as coherent as Tudor English.

For all of its faults and awful editing, 5e is still the best one available.

Now THAT'S a hot troll.

Yeah, 5e's the best edition. God help us.

High fashion, maybe. But for the sensible rich and all us not-rich, it's a different story.

user please, Jews have better taste than that.

Nah, pretty much all fashion is like that.

Are you telling me that trousers survived since prehistory because it was a dead horse people refused to stop beating?

As of 4e

It's definitely not, and the fact that you think so makes me think that you have a 'fuck being fashionable ever,' autistic-homely sort of fashion sense. High-fashion is absurd turbo-trash more often than not, but there's tons of classic looks that are as in-fashion as ever, and equal parts form and function.

Hey, at times it was togas and skirts.

Literally any form argument is beating a dead horse.
Function, sure, but that means the sleeping tiger is great. (Which is why it's withstood the test of time.)

Only in some parts of the world, and those areas inevitably re-accepted trousers. Trends may come and go, but there are some general forms and material and color choices are constant.

Honestly, it seems entirely variable based on winds of what dead horse society wants to beat right now.
I hope this isn't bannable. Sorry if it's against the rules mods

>lives with thorns
>doesn't wear pants
How are they still capable of reproducing?

I don't fucking know user.

>Literally any form argument is beating a dead horse.
Not really. Visual design elements and principles apply to clothing as much as they do to architecture and automobiles. In any event, the release of the Executive Suite is going to seriously damage sales of Sleeping Tiger, perhaps even driving it off the market before the decade is over.

SINs aren't like driver's license in that they have the details on it. SINs are like your Social Security Number in that they'll link up to a file with your information and background on it. Usually a 'cursory inspection' involves just making sure you're broadcasting a SIN, they don't run the file or anything, like when someone asks to see your licenses but doesn't bother to check the date to see if you're actually 21.

I don't think it's going to do anything to sleeping tiger unless it is just as overpowered.

Have you never seen one of those movies where the main character sees the reflection of light off the scope's lens or something?

It's got almost as much armor, is far cheaper and isn't perpetuating a bigoted stereotype. That's going to steal a serious chunk of the Sleeping Tiger market.

The only part of that which is important is the far cheaper bit.
Which really makes it come down to how "almost" it is in armor.

1 single point.

>Nah, pretty much all fashion is like that.
for a genre that has been as shallow/aesthetically motivated as cyberpunk is i would assume we can discuss fashion with more nuance than "it's all the same and anyone that tries to dress well is a tryhard homo"

That might do it.
I mean, it's not like it's initiative or something where you will totally pay more for the extra point.

Not to mention that it's all the AV of an armored jacket for only twice the cost, and it's got the second best AV to nuyen ratio of any given suit.

I could say the same for people saying some things look like shit when it's super fucking cyberpunk.

Yeah, if you try to defend shit that's "cyberpunk" in the same sense that a top hot with some gears glued onto it is "steampunk".

Can anyone suggest me a good book to rip off for a christmas theme run?