/srg/ - Shadowrun General

If you let him play a technomancer, it will be shit for everyone involved.

Seriously. Don't let a newbie anywhere near the Matrix rules, especially someone who hasn't played a single RPG before.

I sent a brainwashed ex-red samurai, who owes me a life debt, on a mission to assassinate the Prime Minister of Jamaica as a suicide mission to get rid of him, so that our hacker would come back.
The hacker left the team because the ex sammy was involved in his sisters murder, she was an unexpected casualty in another hit I made him go on for my personal gain. The hacker is unaware that this is because of me, and as the party face, I intend to lie my ass off to cover up my tracks.

Oh, and the owner of a club that rivals my own just disposed of his right hand man and has hired me to fill his shoes, signing over my club to him in the process. As the party face, I intend to lie my ass off and eventually backstab him, taking both clubs for my own and disposing of him.

We also got word of a convoy being sent to Chicago by some radical magical group, my hunch is something buggy. We've been hired to assist in making sure it gets there safely, the whole team is feeling uneasy about it.
As the party face, I intend to lie my ass off and find some way to profit huge off of this so I can retire.

You could use generic mooks from the core books instead of the printed stats in the modules, that would be easy.
The Matrix, on the other hand, might be a bit of a hassle to convert, depending on how you want to run the adventure (playing the old Modules in 207x or playing 2050s SR with 5e rules).
If you plan on playing 2050s SR with 5e:
The HongKong Sourcebook and the GERMAN 2050s Sourcebook have rules for oldstyle Matrixshit converted to 5e Mechanics.

Runners were on a yacht for a New Years' Eve Party. Mr.Johnson was exceptionally vague about the parameters but the job was to play bodyguard. Vampire G-men showed up as the Ball dropped to kill the vibe.

We get around 10 Karma per Run which usually lasts a long session.

Financial rewards depend heavily on how not-stupid we behave and a bit of luck. So far i got a free Ford Americar and our group got the SINs we burned replaced with Lvl 4 ones (licenses included) and around 5-7k Nuyen for the each of the other Runs.
Could have been more if we hadn't been stupid/unlucky a few times, but the GMs generally seem to be more open with giving out gear compared to Nuyen.

What about using 4e with the 2050 sourcebook?

I feel like it would turn him off tabletop roleplaying for ages if he gets all excited to try one, finds a character concept he likes and then I just tell him no.

I'd like him to be able to play a technomancer,
is there any way to ease him into it?

Perfectly viable if you like the feel of 4e.
I personally wouldn't touch it over 5e, but your preferences may differ.

Question on Data Search,
when I do a search on a particular person, trying to find whatever information I can, where is that information coming from?

Does my search bounce from Node to Node until it reaches a Node designated as a public Data Haven, where someone for whatever reason, may have dumped that data I want?

Does this mean that if I was not in mutual signal range of any other device, I could not do a data search?

Meet up with him two hours before the other people and do a small matrix training run, so he gets a feel for how things work.
Also do him, the group and yourself a favor and use the new, reduced, fading values from the errata section of the official forum.

It will turn him off if he has a boring first session.

He will understand if you tell him "hey, this type of character is very complex to play. You should get a better grip of how the rules work before tackling him, since he works on a bunch of different subsystems each with their own little quirks."

Elf with a mullet, hulk stache, and tank top looking like he's about to swing a gun like a sword at a dragon - I think that dragon's fucked.

Make sure he understands the limitations of playing a TM before the game starts. Then throw him a few bones where he can use his mind computer to make the group's life easier during gameplay.

How do I creepy cult or sect? Probably, militant one. Bonus points: if it's not inherently evil and antagonistic.

Campaign is set in Canton Confederation, so I'd like something more deep and interesting then average New Age bug cult or Abrahamic doomsayer chapter.

Our group actually keeps the same rewards and just changes the price requirements for upgrading stuff; skills cost an equal number of Karma to the rank you are upgrading to, and Attributes twice as much as the rank you are upgrading to.
It means they have to save up for higher-level skills but lower ones are significantly easier to upgrade.

Oh, that's easy.
Make it an militant esoteric Buddhist cult, like the kind that the Shaolin Temple would always fund and lead and then ultimately get their temple burned down again because nobody wants a bunch of uppity religious militants in their country training and arming random civilians.

>2am, January 1st, 2076
>face had barely got his gun out before being one-shotted into physical overflow
>face is now spending a solid part of his payout on medical bills
>rigger is wondering how to steal a cortex bomb from a billionaire who is staying in the same hospital as the face

>sammy shot repeatedly for all but 1 stun box and all but 3 physical boxes
>refused to go to hospital because it's expensive
>auctioneer suit has holes from multiple long bursts of armor-piercing bullets
>sets up his medkit to patch himself up in an alleyway
>still wounded as shit
>wipe off most of the blood using towel in his duffel bag, changes clothes
>dodge scoots home while bleeding somewhat
>stumbles into his cramped low-lifestyle apartment full of empty beer bottles
>looks at his silver credstick with ¥20,000 on it
>sends a text message to the other runners
>happy new year

>>rigger is wondering how to steal a cortex bomb from a billionaire who is staying in the same hospital as the face

Does the rigger plan on getting it implanted into the face?
he should

Find a new player to replace him when he inevitably quits.

We paused in the middle of it, but I think it's going well. It's an extraction mission and our first one as a team. Our Face screwed up and now some low-level security dudes are trying to kill her and us. My character wanted to show off and almost killed a guy through overflowing his Stun Track to drop him off at 8P in his PHysical track.

Which was unexpected by everyone involved, I was only expecting to knock him out. Not fry the guy

>Does the rigger plan on getting it implanted into the face?

If he manages to pull that off with his zero ranks in biotech and no access to friendly surgeons, then frankly he deserves whatever favors he makes the face do for him.

Surgeons can turn suprisingly helpfull if shown pictures of their family, taken by the guncam of an Autoshutgun-equipped Drone.

I can understand raising combat dicepools past the 20s, but why go so high for social skills or hacking? Are there really negotiations or device ratings so high?

There are, but there doesn't have to be - all you need is a situation in which you're facing a large penalty, then the high dice pools are justified.

Higher hacking skills allow you to speed shit up significantly by doing stuff like reliably placing three marks on a target with a single action.

High negotiation skills might be usefull to get high rating gear more easily.

Ah so raising things you're already good at is more about succeeding in shitty conditions than breaking world records.
Is there a maximum to those kinds of things? Like where in ideal conditions having more dice and no limit would be pointless?

Well, finding stuff on your own is an opposed test vs the availability Rating of the Item.
Considering those can go up to 24 for gear before you even factor in Alphaware and higher, higher pools are always usefull.

Average of 8 hits and it can't roll Edge. It's not too hard to beat that as a Face, even with less than stellar dice. Especially if you're willing to pay extra for extra dice.

But you do have a point

Paying for extra dice gets super expensive with higher grade gear.

Oh no question. I'm just saying it's easier for a Face to get high hits than it is for an item

Oh man, the covers were the best part.

Mage of Adept for an awakened face?

Adept

Meant to say or not of.

>negotiation
By the book, negotiation is supposed to give you extra money both when fencing items to strangers, and when deciding a run's payout. It's also handy for getting other people do things they wouldn't normally do, like letting you and your equipment pass despite being somewhat suspicious.

And as others mentioned, you need someone with amazing social skills if you don't want to dramatically overpay for that high-end gear you've been salivating over since chargen. You know, your 20F sniper rifle, 18F pain editor, that 17F folding SMG, the 22F hardened heavy milspec battle armor, 22R tricked-out laser microphone, 28F depleted uranium bullets, and so on. Items that really should never make it into your grubby criminal paws.

You can have all the money you want, but it doesn't mean jack shit unless you can actually find the items you need.

...

Let me clean up my library, I'll post the whole collection in a little bit.

u.nya.is/hochol.zip

Thanks, Chummer, it's much appreciated.

Well shit, that was great timing for me to check back, thanks again!

We spent three hours (real time) failing to scale a wall because half the team forgot to bring climbing equipment and kept flubbing their rolls. By the time we all got to the top, the area was swarming with drones, spirits, and enslaved naga, and one of our mages had been shot full of holes and was barely clinging to life.

Tonight we get to finish the run, which is to infiltrate a Z-Zone, looking for information we don't know the particulars of, with no Decker to get it for us if it's held on the matrix.

So I was looking at Cutting Aces and saw an archetype I liked: the fake magician.

What gear would I need to pull that off?

Alright im cooking up a run in the fae demiplane since the gm wont be able to make it and want the rest of the team to have something to play.
The idea is that they get spirited away for 1-3 hours real time which would translate to 1-3 days fae time. Reason would be that the tarrots have shown this and the seers have told that "the people who did X would be able to pass" referring to previous run.
The run itself would be ala The Red King's Dream where the runners need to get to this powerful fae in his mansion. The mansion is full of "living memories" that have manifested from the coimeádaí and the nightmare of the fae lord. Since the team would be face, decker and techno most of the stuff could be solved by talking, editing files and hacking.
Questions: Anything that sounds to shitty and needs changing? Which faction would be most likely to pull in the runners? What rewards would be reasonable?

>fake magician
A really REALLY good medkit

So did the errata just utterly murder any decent way to make a MysAdept? Cause if so, i'll be sad.

The fuck are you blabbering about?
If by "errata" you mean "MysAdepts having to buy their PP at the start of the game", then no. They are still incredibly good.
Just not THAT good anymore that it actually doesn't make any sense to play a normal Magician or Adept, like it was pre-errata.

Saviour medkit; sleight of hand nanite injections.

Last run (that I GM'd): Pretty well, the party took a feel-good job from the Ork Underground and started doing the legwork on it. we'll see where it goes.

Last run (that I was a player in): We blew up a children hospital. Literally. With missiles.

I can't even remember it. It's been a year since I last played Shadowrun.

>solved by talking, editing files and hacking.

Given how much Technology and Magic hate each other, I'm a bit lost how you're going to find anything that can be hacked in a magical demiplane. Like, i get what you're saying about the 'living memories' but... those'd still be magic, right? Why would it be compatible with the decker/techno?

He's talking about using the Court of Shadows rules. It's a retarded set of rules/fluff that basically lets deckers hack the memories of special servants that remember shit for elves that can't be bothered doing it themselves and gives riggers magical animal equivalents of the drones they had before, because reasons.

The coimeádaí/keepers are from Hacking the court section. They can be hacked and are using living personas for "matrix" combat. The "ghosts" are a manifestation of the memories stored in the keepers. You can't hack the ghost but you can edit the files to change them, attack the keeper directly to shut it down or talk with it acting out the memories.

Just describing it like that does make it sound retarded. But, it's been 50+ Years and we still don't fucking understand magic. If it's just for a fluff run, I don't see the harm.

So, basically, these 'keepers' are living hard drives for memories? eh, like I said, for just a single fluff run, I don't see too much harm in it.

Pretty good. Only one other person showed up, so our team was a mage and a face. We had to take out this toxic shaman in the sewers, and we eventually found out, through a convoluted mess of a plan, that he was being corp-funded to summon toxic spirits in the city.

The face is now in a DocWagon hospital but I'm fine.

As a street sam and rigger man I pretty much hate the fae stuff but I think it would be fun for the rest of the team. + we didn't have a game last week and dont wanna not play our character this one. Fae realms were perfect to stuff a full run without threading on the tight schedule of runs and meetings ahead.
Now about rewards and faction. What would be a reasonable one?

>Listen, I know we are down our tank and our backup tank, and our rigger and his literal tank, but Imma need you to soak up some attacks from this toxic shaman and his hilariously overpowered spirits while I do some of that magic hoo-doo that should solve this problem

Sorry, that's the only thing that came to mind with 'there's just a mage and a face, and the face had to go to the hospital, but i'm fine'

Eh, what can I say? I get very curmudgeony when it comes to things like the Foundation and Court. I really don't like special magic dungeons where all your shit is slightly different because lol matrix/magic.

No, that's fair.

Starting the third campaign with the same group, and can't think of a good starter run. After three years, we've already done the standards like "the Johnson meet is a set up", "the runners just happen to be in the way of somebody else's run" etc. What do you do when game night begins in five hours, and you don't have a run yet?

Food Fight?

Pic related, minus the Wikipedia download

What did I just watch?

savevsdm.com/pdf/SR4-101Scenarios.pdf

My GMing style

My players like it, so I guess it works?

Continuing to tinker with adept powers. Ignore the current compactness of the UI elements, that's just layout stuff. Search and filtering works in a similar way to how skills are implemented, allowing searching by name, filtering by things like rating, activation type (Complex, Simple, Free, etc.) or whether the power has any PP spent on it, allowing you to hide qi foci bonuses and such if the need arises.

Anything else you guys would like to see in it?

We did food fight three years ago. That was with different characters, but the same players. We reset once a year.

>you will never shitpost on Jackpoint
>you will never make fun of Clockwork for being the friendless, kissless permavirgin that he is in any place that he can read about it

Oh, I am no stranger to just making shit up as I go along, but I need something to start with first. I can cook without a recipe, but not without ingredients.

You're looking for a jumping off point, yeah?

Maybe the players are out at a party/club/wahtever and, depending on backstories, one or more of hte players have an actually skilled (i'm talking not gangers) person attempts to assassinate them in a way that allows them to fight back.

How about "The Johnson want something stolen, but it's on an armored truck and driving through Ancients territory"

Reasonably well. Ran my players through Food Fight 5.0 while we all learn the system.

>Elf Technomancer camgirl fails a willpower + bod check vs. The Beast, McHugh's ultimate greasebomb
>Spends most of the run having explosive diarrhea in the women's room
>I mean goddamn it was like a cannon going off, man
>AI player drones around in a Hedgehog, neatly making every single stealth check despite having shit-all stats for it. Goes Sonic on the mage's ankles when shit goes down
>The Face busts out a mono-whip and reduces the mage to a pile of meat after posing as a hooker and trying to seduce his bother
>They rescue the girl, gtfo in time to see said brother running back to the restaurant after the Technomancer reduces half the McHugh's crew to paste with the security turret
>Pin the whole thing on the Yellow Lotus
>We were down a PhysAd since that player couldn't make it two sessions; they went on a side run that saw them beat up an Elf Rigger, steal his car, crash said car into a lingerie store owned by a cousin of the guys in the restaurant, then blow said car up, pinning all that on the Yellow Lotus as well
>Elf had stolen the Dwarf girlfriend of a Troll Rigger who paid them with a used Ares Duelist for those nights the PhysAd can't make it
>The Troll keeps calling blurting out elf slurs like keeb and dandelion eater in front of the Technomancer, then backpedaling to save his own ass
>They started a lopsided mob war on their very first day in Seattle

It's a shitshow. There will be egregious consequences. But it's a fun shitshow and I'm the guy dealing the consequences so I'm happy.

Are there any problems (besides lowered magic) with a mage getting a pain editor? Is it a good idea? I like the idea of not caring about Drain.

I wanted to make a houserule that wearing your god damned seatbelt protected you during a crash or ram, just how much protection should it give?

besides broken powerlevel?
Not really.

>organized by author

datsnice.jpg

Roll and run.

Being disgustingly broken is never a bad thing.

>Does this mean that if I was not in mutual signal range of any other device, I could not do a data search?
chummer, think about it
Where would it get the info if it's not already on your commlink?

Because purchasing goods is opposed by the item's Availability, selling goods gets you 5% of the item's value per hit, and you don't want any room for error when using Commanding Voice or lying to a guard who rolls surprisingly well to resist you.

Being a face is one of those roles where a single failed roll can tank the entire rest of the mission - where from that point on it's all combat. You know, like the decker accidentally tripping the alarm while trying to ghost the party all the way to the objective. With something like that - where each and every roll you make is mission-critical in some way - you don't have any room for error.

So what? Shake it up. My very first food fight, I played from the perspective of the kidnappers instead.

I don't need this kind of sadness in my life.

>not flubbing sometimes so the street sam has something to do

So if the speeds on page 202 of the core rulebook are supposed to be only the tactical combat speeds of vehicles and not their maximum speeds, what are the maximum speeds of vehicles?

>not purposefully making the street sam totally useless

>these images
Damn, that's silly.

>you will never tell Clockwork right to his Matrix face that with his personality he couldn't get laid at a bunraku parlor

A milk run where everything goes as it should with the caveat everything goes to shit the moment a player says anything akin to "well, that was easy"

Bonus points if you can lead your players into paranoia and have them screw the run themselves.

I fucking hate you types. All of you. LET THE STREET SAM DO SOMETHING. Allow yourselves to fail sometimes! Take negative qualities to help encourage this, like "Wanted by GOD" for Deckers, or "Did you just call me dumb?" for Faces.

If your gameplan is actually, literally, not letting him do anything... Listen, that might make some sense in-verse, but meta-wise, that's not fun for the player. It's annoying and aggravating to just sit around, wondering why you're even there while the GM refuses to rein in the other, overly-paranoid players, who don't stop to think about your time spent at the table at all.

>not minmaxing the hell out of your character so you have 40 dice on social checks and a limit of 15

ridiculous