/srg/ - Shadowrun General

What exactly are you going to do with this thing? It kills a room full of people REALLY GOOD, and you can trigger it remotely, but it's really loud and the custom work you need to build it means you probably don't want to leave it behind, and....?

It just seems impractical for a shadowrunner.

I tried to talk him out of it, I really did.

Mainly just for the shit of it, but partly because at this point I'm having extreme difficulty nailing down a character concept for a game I joined.

We've got a new player playing a sniperish street sam, a shaman that's summoning spirits, a rigger of some sort, and a catboy decker.

I'm trying to avoid direct combat because I don't want to overshadow the sam, I don't want to screw with matrix things, the shaman presumably has magical combat covered, and the rigger presumably has scouting/fire support covered, so I'm sitting here just kind of at a loss for what to do specifically.

Play a face or infiltrator. Then put ranks in demolitions. Your primary function gets you in, then you can blow shit up real good.

Can't do a face, Shaman's charisma based and has that covered.

Infiltrator too is likely covered by a mix of the sam and rigger.

Well, if your sam is playing a sniper, you could always be a close-range character. Physadept with a weapon focus or some such.

You can never have too many combatants when shit hits the fan so a secondary Sammy is probably not a bad idea, but if they're long range and Agile, you should probably complement them by being a heavily armoured troll/ or some other sort of tanky character, up close and personal either with melee or close support weapons.

Depends on the GM. If things go smooth (and they sometimes do, unless the GM invents things specifically to dick over players), then the 'sits in the van' Street Sam can be bored and not doing anything all session.

Game in question is a basically a casual weekend game by a GM with fairly little time, so he's running mostly premades.

I don't know. I keep trying to roll up characters, and I'll get partway done, and it just feels outright weird. It feels like there's some sort of a problem with it for some reason.

The only real constraint is that the character I make needs to be a magical character in some way. Other than that, I can more or less do whatever, just needs to involve magic.

Try harder. Unless you're 100% on top of the rules and both on the same page, it's going to repeatedly be a rude surprise for one or both of you.

Where do you all find games?

F-list.

Online or IRL.

Really helpful, user, thanks.

Where online? I've tried Roll20, LFG, the Shadowrun reddit, GITP, Shadowruntabletop forum itself, and even the Paizo boards, and there've been maybe 10 games total across all of them, most of them filled.

That's kind of it, bruh.

The only thing left is to run your own game. Maybe you'll inspire others to run like in /pfg/

>captcha: calle calle
I wouldn't be surprised to find numerous Street St. in future Seattle

Start your own. Find some players. Ask them to share GM duty.

Well he's planning on spending most of his time in an anthroform drone and being a face. Personally I'd much rather he just play a living being, but apparently being an AI is important to him.

I'm honestly on the fence about denying it because he once DMed a game I walked out of because he vetoed a character that I had been excited to play for months. On the one hand I kinda want to do the same to him, but it seems really petty.

>Implying I can GM
Ideas or not, the matrix rules are too much of a clusterfuck to make me want to really GM this.

Don't be like that, man. Going down that road leads to just all around bad-times for people. If you have a legitimate reason for denying it, then go ahead, but don't do it just to be a cock. That's not okay.

That said, what was the character?

Any word on when 10 AIs comes out?

If there's one thing more complicated than an AI it's an AI in a drone body.

Than you should stop bitching about not finding a group.

Probably as a tie-in to the Technomancer book ...

The one I was denied? It was fora pathfinder game. The class was third-party, but from a publisher he was a huge fan of. Basically magitek iron man. I did eventually get to play it in another game so I'm not too salty about it.

Is it really that complicated? My reading is that any physical skill check ends up being Depth + Skill [Handling or Body, depending on skill], or a normal drone skill test if you let autopilot take over.

Fuck it, then.

What's some good advice for trying to GM Shadowrun?

So never?

Food fight should be a good starting point. Splintered State as well.. They are aimed at new GMs. Understanding german also helps.

The rules are mostly a mess. The former autosoft advantage from Data Trails is a must, but that prevents him from taking Exceptional Entity.

Hopefully not.

I'm assuming you meant Pilot Origins. If that's true then it's workable, he wasn't planning on taking exceptional entity at chargen which means he'll probably never get it, but he's aware of that.

Street Level campaigns, while somewhat limiting in their scope are good for both novice GMs and players looking to get their feet wet in the system. The runs are more down to earth and the threats are not as fantastical, but I personally find them just as compelling (if not more so) than the usual black-trenchcoat plots.

Avoid the matrix completely if possible. Technomancers are mechanically terrible and Deckers slow the game down needlessly with their bullshit, though its not as bad as it used to be in prior editions. All the same I recommend doing what other anons in the past have recommended and make matrix actions a simple skill-based test with targets based on the device rating of the gear they are attempting to hack and manipulate.

Food Fight, Food Fight, Food Fight.

Also not just for shadowrun, but with running games in general. Help your players understand their roles and what their characters can and should bring to the table. Then prepare yourself (and a cheat sheet of rules) on how to accommodate their more common actions. Also you don't have to memorize the rules, just know where you can find the rules when you need them.

>Street Level campaigns
Don't do Street Level rules by themselves. They can't do mixed magic / tech groups on an even footing.

Either use Street Scum (GM section p350 or so, depending on which print your book is) with Street Level, or use Street Scum alone.

>Food fight should be a good starting point.
How's the rest of the stuff from First Run?

It's literally two or three rolls, people. Hacking is not that fucking bad.

Why exactly do you need to be magical?

Is it actually okay to just be like, "Hey, I'm sorry, but I don't really want to fuck with the Matrix all that much. If you lot could avoid deckers/technos, that'd be great. For when it DOES come up, just treat it as a normal skill test instead of whatever insane bullshit is typically there?"

As far as magical threats go, I know that "realistically" magic is fairly rare, but given that runners would be doing shit in places where it'd be likely that corps or other people would go all
>Shit nigger I need to protect my dank loot, I should hire a security mage
How often should magical shit really be in practice?

GM asked for a tech person and a magic person, and I got in on the magic slot.

>Is it actually okay to just be like, "Hey, I'm sorry, but I don't really want to fuck with the Matrix all that much. If you lot could avoid deckers/technos, that'd be great. For when it DOES come up, just treat it as a normal skill test instead of whatever insane bullshit is typically there?"
Yep. Think Dragonfall's first run, where Monica is the official team decker, and the focus shifts over to what the team needs to do to enable the decker to do their shit, protection, and what to do while the team is waiting / risking discovery.

You don't even have to give them a real decker; it could be a drone or custom commlink dongle with a hacking agent.

Never actually played Dragonfall. I technically have Returns, but when I originally played it, it was on release and I was less than impressed. Did it ever get fixed up much?

Are you running an SR3 game? The SR5 version of Food Fight is n Plots & Paydata.

Deckers and Technomancers aren't the most popular roles anyway, so you should be fine.
You might want to avoid drone riggers as they are matrix based as well.

Dragonfall and Hong Kong are very similar to Returns but also vastly superior in storytelling.

Yes, the sequels are greatly improved. If you absolutely hated the original, though, you may still feel the same.

Doesn't really matter, as the basic idea is there whether you've played it or not. Remove hacking minigame, introduce external complications while team waits for hacker, possibly force team to defend hacker mid-hack.

>Are you running an SR3 game?
I'm not actually that guy, I was just wondering if the other adventures from First Run were worth converting over.

Although if I ever were to run an SR game, it probably would be SR3.

I just remember the mechanics being fiddly as hell and annoying to do with, to the point where it actually interfered with the portrayal of the story.

Worth pirating or taking a look at then?

>Worth pirating
Just download it already, ya bitch. Don't like it? Delete it and move on.

>I'm not actually that guy, I was just wondering if the other adventures from First Run were worth converting over.

Never ran them.

I'd strongly advise against 3rd edition, the changing target numbers are utterly stupid. If you don't like SR5, use SR4A.

Actually now that I reread the section I could use some clarification.

Lets say I take pilot origins 1 (direktionssekretar). This gives me the benefits of a control rig, but only for that specific drone. It also lets me program autosofts into myself. So I spend 5 karma on a Direktionssekretar maneuvering autosoft, mostly to get WTLM since I'm trying to be a face.
1. Chummer doesn't support ratings for autosofts obtained in this manner. Can I get a rating 6 autosoft - equivalent to a rating 6 skill for a specific drone - for 5 karma? The book seems to imply so.
2. How do I actually USE this? In particular, if I was jumped into a Direktionssekretar, what would I roll for defense, or gymnastics?

>the changing target numbers are utterly stupid.
But I like the variable target number.

Can elves take the Aged quality? Has any of them even shown any signs of aging? Has anybody even found the upper limit of their mortality yet?

IIRC no elf has died from old age yet, since they are expected to live to 300 easily, and it's not 2312 in game yet.

They have a year-long gestation period, but I can't find any information on loli elves, or how long they stay children, or at what age they sort of stop visibily aging.

If you use Earthdawn info, elves reach physical maturity in their twenties and have a natural lifespan of ~300, with the oldest ones on record being ~400.

That sounds about right. So no immortal sixty year old little girls.

>Can elves take the Aged quality?

Yes. Spike babies (read: people who expressed before the big return of magic) are a thing, as are immortal elves.

>Has any of them even shown any signs of aging?
See above.

>Has anybody even found the upper limit of their mortality yet?
As far as could be determined, around 4 centuries (unless immortal).

Well keebs look effeminate anyway, so it's not that far off

There's nothing inherently wrong with a variable target number, but when modifiers routinely take you outside the range of the die type you're using, in both directions -rendering some taske ridiculously easy, while others become nigh impossible, you done fucked up.

With Adept Centering (or that 5e equivalent metamagic/power that I forget the name of) and Combat Sense, could you lessen the penalty for dodging full auto fire/suppressive fire?

It reads that way, but I'd like to know if there's ever been an official ruling.

Have some useful shit guys

i don't see why not, and I don't think you even need combat sense, though it would obviously help.

Combat Sense really doesn't lessen the penalty as it's a straight bonus to your die pool. So against auto, burst, suppressive, and so on, you're always at a penalty compared to if you got targeted by a single shot. Same for if you got tagged by an Active Sensor attack. The full penalty still applies, but with Combat Sense you're at a higher starting point than your other numbers indicate.

And absent Way or power trickery, Adept Centering only applies to Physical or Combat skill uses. So it should work (but could be in GM adjudication territory) if you are literally taking the Dodge action (Gymnastics) or took Acrobatic Defender and took a Full Defense action.

Yeah, my thought on combat sense was that there's something similar - a power - to Adept Centering that needs you to be doing something with an adept power before you can reduce penalties. I forget what it's called.

My second question is what the fuck is with false impression/manascape. If you use them, you need to mask the spell, or cast another spell to mask that, and then another, and it's turtles all the way down. Is there a ruling on THAT?

How far outside are we talking? There's nothing inherently wrong with having the modifiers be more important than the dice, it just makes stacking things in your favour much more important.

It might also make a +1 and a +2 modifier the same as there's no difference in probability between target numbers 6 and 7.

What's the most extreme shit you've ever pulled off in combat?

Still need an answer here. If I'm an AI, and I'm inhabiting an anthroform drone, and I want to dance, what do I roll?

Isaac Asimov in his grave.

Heightened Concentration. CGL error business as usual of Heightened Concern.

Shadow Spells.

>HEIGHTENED CONCERN, COST: 0.5
>The adept can ignore a single distraction while performing another task. This power negates a single situational modifer of a value of up to half (rounded up) of their Magic Attribute. It takes a Complex Action to activate and may be combined with the Adept Centering metamagic.

You don't need Combat Sense, but you always should take it - the ability to say "no, I always get a perception test before you decide it's a surprise attack" is gold.

Do you have the "Pilot Origin" quality?

Playing a bunraku/BTL chiphead. Has anyone tried it? Seems like it could be fun to slot different personalities, maybe stick in some skillwires, and suddenly you're a faceman with a dozen different personalities and specialities.

The only problem I see is that BTLs are ass from a crunch perspective compared to just creating a designer drug that buffs all your social stats by +3.

...

I play a hacker.
The most badass thing I've done was eject the magazine of a smartgun that a badguy was holding to the head of our fluffy chinese rigger during a tense hostage standoff so that our sniper could ventilate him.

For the sake of argument, yes - though I'm also interested in the alternative.

I went into a garage of some gangers, lights off and with improved invisibility on me, and stabbed them with a foci sword each of them before they could call for backup.

By the time lights came back since only me and the troll had any kind of darkvision, I was an invisible spectre, my features visible through a deep coat of blood, and the ground with at least 4 pierced corpses. The last dude alive, saw such a horrible scene change in barely a minute, and the monster who took them out in front of him. He passed out form fear.

A skilljack is a good investment for a face, if for no other purpose than learning new languages on the fly. I don't have much experience with BTLs, but I hear there are some in Chrome Flesh that are actually good.

Any advanced program you write into your self with karma is thereafter considered to have the same rating as your AI's Depth. It also no longer takes up a program slot.

Didn't have one in the chamber?

>See above.
Any canon ones you can point at?

So my options are be Depth 6 and write my own autosofts, or ignore depth in favor of using my own skills?

Once had a fight in a city street and a helicopter above it. My streetsam was engaded in melee inside the helicopter. SHe was a clsoe combat and demo expert, with ranks in boats and cars but nothing flying.
She did however have hydraulic jacks, high skills, agility and edge like a mtoherfucker.
She knew from her implants that her crew was just below her, or within close enough for her free falling skill to be relevant.

So she blew up a helicopter she was in seconds prior and then dropkicked a troll from one Fuck-aways-up.

The GM has a rule akin to exalted that when something is awesome, daring or just plain enough stupid you get bonus dice. Things being pink mohawk this was "extreme shit", thouggh my favorite.

Still broke one of my legs, but the face that had been chased by the troll for about 5 blocks paid for her repairs.

Well, if your virtual ass can assume direct control of the drone like a meatbag rigger would, you roll Depth + Gymnastics (dance) [Drone Physical limit]; either the skill if you have learned it or the rating of the autosoft if you are running one/made one part of your core.

If you are merely guiding the drone from afar, then you must use the "Control Device" Matrix action.

I sort of have, but... uh, he's really weird and I don't want to post him 'cause I'll get judged by strangers on the internet.

It is really more of a roleplaying thing than a build thing, since Skillwires require some bullshit to make viable (A Warez contact with the optional Open Source rules from Unwired lets you multiply your patching/hacking gains by the contact's loyalty as you proliferate stolen cracks for programs) and I didn't bother with that on this character.

Our resident /k/fag friend mentioned this after the fact, yes. None of the players or GM knew that at the time and didn't feel like retconning my hacker's moment of glory.

Depth + Performance (Autosoft or your own Skill, whatever you want).

As long as you STAY OFF THE MATRIX, it's more efficient to have high Depth and turn everything into an advanced program. Or at least the stuff you need most.

If you intend to go online, go low Depth and use normal skills/softs instead.

Cheers.

So a 1-depth AI is pretty much nonviable for drone shenanigans. Natch.

No.
If you have heritage, you can choose between karmaskills and software (+depth).
Think of it as skillwires, its an additional option

Addendum, it was very pink mohawk, but we basically decided from the outset that we wanted to have our own roles. A party of 3 with a decker/mage(hella weird build, but interesting character), Adept face infiltrator and a streetsam, stealth infiltrator was our runner team. We all did some crazy shit, the adept getting a motorcycle focus so he could ride bikes with wallrunning, the mage basically initiating into making sure an AI and a spirit could hook up by using the foulest magic to turn a spirit into an AI, and me the street samurai. Basically a furry with a sub-fetish for explosions.

We had a troll rigger get away driver, but he joined late and had nothing much to add to the table.

Not at all. A low Depth AI in a drone can simply ride shotgun and let the Pilot take over, while they concentrate on other stuff. Hacking, maybe. Although AI's make lousy Deckers (but awesome Sams).

Exactly
If you want an AI Drone, you want Depth 6.

What if I want to be a Tachikoma/spidertank?

Considering the character in question is attempting to inhabit an anthroform drone and be a face, I'm inclined to go with instead. I doubt a Direktionssekretar's pilot is good enough to negotiate with Mr. Johnson - even with realistic features and WATLAM.

>you roll Depth + Gymnastics (dance) [Drone Physical limit]
That's Control Device. With Piloting Origins and the correct type of vehicle, you're jumped in, and skill as a rigger.

Urdli and to a lesser extent Ehran the Scribe look old. Now, considering they're both immortal elves and that Harlequin (who is as old as them) still look like he'd be in his twenties if he'd been human, it's probably a personal choice rather than a result of biology.

A mage\decker. A troll rigger. I love it.

All players I ever run games for optimize, then overoptimize, then go back to the drwaing board, and minmax.

PSA to all GMs: Stop fucking using Priority Gen you goddamn niggers.