/srg/ Shadowrun General

20th anniversary edition question.

what kind of fun interesting shit can I cram into a physical adept specializing into being a melee+infiltration expert

>equipment
I want do things with an extendable spear as my primary weapon and a staff for walking around with.
thrown and exotic weapons are a plus

>silliness
on the sliding scale of "full pink mowhawk" to "black trenchcoat and glasses" I want to play it someplace in the middle perhaps a small bit on the trenchcoat side of gritty .

>character habits
I'm thinking of playing the 'jovial wanderer' style of person.
the sort that strolls along in good weather whistling, dropping money in beggars cups.
I want this so I can try playing something other than a gritty drug-abusing cynic.

>random shit
no drugs
no artificial or after-market parts
no swords
no guns or very limited guns
WHAT QUIRKY BULLSHIT CAN I THROW IN?
bog standard karma-gen
any old splat-book will do for now
must have cash left over to buy, at minimum, a small reliable car.

Do we have an ETA on the next book? It's the techomancer one, I think.

If I have a pair of obvious cyberfeet to use skimmers, do they both need customized agility and strength to match the rest of my body, or will they drag me down completely?

Heat death of the Universe +5

Stats get averaged for stuff that uses your whole body.
So you should increase Agi. STR is fine to keep in your arms only though.

With your Wireless Bonus activated it's Heat death of the Universe +7.

>he thinks it's actually coming

>not using skates
>not ballerina-twirl slicing your enemies throats open

You could do that in corp buildings by taking off your shoes and sliding on the polished floors with your socks user.

I think he meant slicing through them with the skates, not just moving with them

My friend played a tanky character with 30-40 armor dice. I know that's not really that high for armor dice but stick with me and I'll tell you why its bullshit to run with a guy like this.

Typically a tank character puts his entire focus into being a tank and anything that's not combat related is stuffed into the garbage bin. So if you're looking for help in social interactions the tank is about as helpful as a potato. Likewise the tank will be mundane and not good at legwork and sneaking? Fuhgeddaboudit. I've had sessions where the Tank just sat at the table contributing nothing because he had no skill sets outside of combat.

The Tank will also refuse to take off his armor. You can't convince a turtle to come out of his shell and the same principle with the Tank. Good luck convincing the security drone that your friend isn't wearing milspec, he's just cosplaying.

There is no quiet getaway. There may be getaways, but with a Tank they aren't quiet. Inevitably during the run the Tank will get bored/panic and do his best impression of the Juggernaut (Bitch I'm Ketchup!). Suddenly you find yourself speeding down alleys and backstreets with the Tank in the back of whatever vehicle your driving and your desperately calling in favors that you can't afford to your contacts to find a safe secure way out of the hot zone.

The tank will never learn. Any exploded building or frentic shootout or metacritter ambush the Tank walks away from is a win but more importantly for him it validates his armor and inevitably his Logic (which will be his dump stat) will be 'I barely survived that HRT, DocWagon, and KE ambush, I guess I need MORE armor'

I would match STR with your natural attribute, just to avoid any hinky math - it's cheap to do and takes no capacity to Customize.

If you have the money, probably a good idea to Customize your feet with max AGI, just for the extra meters when you run.

Wait if I coat my arms in the dual natured plant fiber from Hard Targets does that mean I can punch in Astral?

The biofiber pocket just blocks Astral Perception - nothing says it is dual natured. It's a living plant, which is why it can't be seen through (living beings having auras).

Speed does not matter in the astral; it's still just plant fibre, but you can pick astral stuff up and otherwise be annoying to non-materialised/physical entities. Provided you have some idea where they are, and they don't kill your plant fibres.

>Living things in general are not active on the astral plane but still cast a reflection of themselves there. This reflection is called an aura; it appears as a shining, vibrant, colorful luminescence.

>Anything active on the astral plane, including spirits, active foci, dual-natured beings, etc., has a tangible astral form. These forms are more colorful and brighter than auras, as they are astrally “real.”

>This pocket is lined with biofiber, a bioengineered form of dual-natured plant life

>dual-natured (meaning you have presence in both the physical and astral planes simultaneously)

Unmm "a bioengineered form of dual-natured plant life" It is?

Then how an Astraly Perciving adept can hurt astral beings?

mb, didn't see dual-natured in the pocket's description

>tfw can't mod a shotgun to have high enough conceal

May as well use heavy pistols for that. Which sucks because I love the idea of suddenly drawing out a small double barreled shotgun and blasting someone in the face.

Remington Roomsweeper?

Well hot daymn I completely missed that one, thanks user.

The Roomsweeper uses the Pistols skill - it only uses Shotgun rules for spread of flechettes.

So if all you want is to spread shot around, go for it, but otherwise it's just an acceptable-but-not-great heavy pistol.

youtu.be/ZXFrWjySa6I?t=5

Yeah, just trying to decide over what weapons to use.
I'm building a tanky sorta dwarf who will lug around a shield in the off-hand and use a one handed weapon. Problem is the best one handed weapon is probably an SMG and even they're not that great.

>Then how an Astraly Perciving adept can hurt astral beings?
By attacking on the astral plane. Even foci need to be bonded and have a connection to the user to be effective. Moving fast isn't enough. Otherwise projecting mages would fuck anything astrally active up by ramming it at 5km/turn.

>Then how an Astraly Perciving adept can hurt astral beings?
Because he is then dual natured.

>mfw people complain about Concealment without knowing just how much you can stack it in your favour through bonuses, qualities, and palming.

I think a hip bracing system could work if you want to wield shotgun one handed and convince your GM
Or cyberimplanted one?

Just being dual natured isn't enough. That's the point. Dual natured biofibre pockets will not give you an astral attack. (assuming you have astral powder or eyedrops to get around the mundane astral perception issue)

I'll have to ask my GM if he'll allow one-handed shotguns if I shortened the barrels and removed the stocks. The Defiance T–250 does have a short barrel version that uses heavy pistol ranges. It's also core, so that range decrease may not apply for other shotguns.

Or a gyromount modified to fit shotguns and be used one-handed. Though that does fly in the face of concealability, but so does a riot shield (or a dwarf with a 40lb briefcase).

Damm you magic! You foil my plans to stop you yet again!

It gives the plant the ability to attack. Is the plant attacking when you swing it around?

Oh, the shield is only for loud and proud situations. The plan is to use skimmers to boost towards the enemy, attract attention towards myself, then become a one man shield wall.

If we need to be sneaky, suits are perfectly fine, and so are concealed SMGs. He's actually a face/tank hybrid of sorts. Should be fun, although I'm stretched a bit at chargen.

So, shadowrunning is generally mercenary work done while the corporations are not in a "hot" war.
How do you feel about mercenary work while the corporations are at full tilt war?

Sounds superfluous. Corps already have standing militaries, and shadowrunners don't offer any advantages like Armored Core pilots do with superior skills and tech.

Corps already own plenty of high-skilled mages and HRT units.

Only played 4e, Gonna be playing 5e, Can someone summarize limits for me so I know whether or not I need to get limit related traits or not?

Math is you get ~one hit per three dice you roll. If your limit is 3, then statistically you're going to be wasting hits if you have more than 9 dice in your pool. That said, it's trivial to raise your limit with decent attributes/gear. I always try to get at least one bracket above (if my largest social diepool is 9, I want a limit of at least 4) to cover situational bonuses.

If you make a decent character, your limits should be fine. They only really come into play with certain types of cheesebuilds (like minmaxed adepts), though occasionally you do roll really well and have to watch some hits go to waste. And stuff like your physical limit and knockdown, but if you are going to be a physical character anyways you very rarely have to worry about that.

And Accuracy, but that's so easy to mod that it's barely in the game in all, unless you use only the most crap weapons.

radiation elemental attack is 100% legit even for non toxic adept and is 100% nasty

5e is retarded, stay with 4e if possible.

Sounds pretty good to me. Both sides in the Amazonia war used runners in addition to their own troops. Runners get to do what runners do and Corps get to commit war crimes without using their own guys. Deniable assets and all that jazz.

So much Jazz, yeah.

>using Jazz in a warzone

K-10 or go back to boot

>Dose up on K-10 for sweet trip and kills
>Unit gets hit by grenades with more K-10
>Enter valhalla as my heart explodes from my chest and rampages on a shadowrunner massacre.
>WITNESSED

"Additionally, at creation characters can
only possess at most 25 Karma worth of Positive Qualities and 25 Karma worth of Negative Qualities" is this legit? 5e you only get 25 karma worth of shit at gen?
Or is it changed in another book.

Only 25 karma worth of Qualities, yeah. You can spend karma for contacts, spells, attributes, skill and other shit though.

It's capitalized for a reason, chummer.

I'm getting a hang of GMing shadowrun, but I'm still somewhat uncertain about making my encounters as challenging as I want them to be.
Coming from DnD where you can (somewhat accurately) calculate how challenging an encounter is this is even more of a "paradigm shift" to me.

Yes, there's some example grunts in the rules with professional ratings, and I also know that encounters don't have to be balanced, like they are in DnD, but without knowing roughly how a group of 3 runners will fare against 4 rating 4 yakuza grunts I can't design the encounter properly, whether the runners will get horribly slaughtered, or the yakuza are as good as dead – and looking forward, when thinking: "This is their base, it's heavily guarded, runners should have a really hard time breaking in through the front door" how do I know when I reached the level of "Kicking in the front door is basically suicide" without placing a literal tank at the other side of the door? (kinda hard to place in a mafia hideout cellar – plus shadowrunner vs. tank is suicide anyways)

What I've come to find over 3 games is that rating 4 grunts equal about one shadowrunner fresh out of chargen, and if it looks like the encounter the players should be able to beat is way too hard sneakily remove some on site reinforcements that the players haven't seen yet, or the other way around, add some, if its way too easy (then again, sneakily removing grunts doesn't work if they're all on the map, because the decker checks all camera feeds, or they have sniper overwatch, or …)

>tl;dr
How to balance shadowrun encounters, coming from DnD where I can clearly/with maths say "Grunt A and 2* Grunt B is a Hard, but possible encounter".

You don't. If they fuck up and HTR comes their way they fucked up and it is for them to solve and you can help them with some GM-magic but don't try to balance a world where money is power and they going against AAA corporations

When making NPCs compare a few things to the PCs:
>Do the NPCs outnumber the PCs?
>Do the NPCs have similar or higher initiative than the PCs?
>Can the NPCs consistently hit/damage the PCs?
>Can the NPCs consistently dodge/soak the players attacks?

0: dont even bother rolling init
1: cakewalk
2: speedbump/delay
3: tough encounter
4: TPK

neat, I'll look into it.

core ability?
or will I have to dig through splat-books?

You will rarely run into a circumstance where limits reduce your dicepool, so you can generally ignore them unless you minmax to hell.

I really like the idea of the berserker adept powers. Suddenly flipping your switch and turning into a crazy raging barbarian sounds amazing. Difficulty is I really can't find a proper place for those powers. Drugs can do a similar job (ableit with addiction troubles but that can be easily worked around) and if you're building to be a combat monster your physical stats will be high anyway, so your mental ones will suffer even more.
Only use I can think of it is inserting it into an adept build centered around being smart, then flipping the berserk switch when you need to fight. But really I can't think of a complete build revolving around that.

Don't worry about whether an enemy has a similar power level to your players, only worry about if they are a reasonable enemy to fight considering the circumstances.

For example, if your runners are running around in the Barrens they will more likely come against low-power gangers who can get killed easily. That's reasonable considering the area.

If your players decide to rush Essen and claim lowfyr's hoard for themselves they are going to come up against elite milspec and get totally curbstomped, and that's reasonable too.

If the mission your runner's are on has a chance of placing them against some hardcore enemies it is your player's job to AVOID THEM with legwork, stealth, diplomacy, etc. Player's don't have to 100% kill the opposition to succeed, nor should they.

I feel like this is one of the more important lessons of Shadowrun. You aren't going to win every fight, so better avoid them as much as possible.

It's also the more logical choice. Why risk your life in a firefight if you have other options? Dead security also makes retaliation way more likely.

Do a mix of both. You could take a point of essence loss for Nephritic Screen, Auto-injectors, Narco, etc, and also take the basic Berserking power. Then you can pick and choose which you need, or pop them both when you need to really go.

It's probably most viable for a close combat adept, since Berserk plus Narco Kamikaze hits your augmented maximum for Strength IIRC

To make sure your players don't accidentally accept a murderhobo job that's way out of their leage, give them a good Fixer contact.

It is the job of a Fixer to find jobs, vet employers for trustworthiness, and only offer runs that fit the abilities of your team (so no datasteals if all your team are catgirl punch-adepts).

If you miscalculate and end up pitting your players against an enemy that is suprisingly tough, create a backdoor escape mechanism. Maybe a perception roll reveals that the cyberzombie has a weakspot. Or Astral perception reveals the dragon is just a drone with realistic form and a mounted flamethrower. Be creative.

That's one of the problems I mentioned in the not-tl;dr though.
This way I have no idea on how to design my runs, because I don't know what runners are expected to be able to deal with, or what they would in hindsight call "This fight was [easy/medium/hard/our death]" applying the logic "You don't want to fuck up" would make all the fight rules useless, because HTR is always everywhere insta-kills the team the second they draw a gun.
>Mr Johnson wants team to go hogwild in a shopping mall; should be easy (if they leg it afterwards)
>Okay, whatever, he pays the money
>Shopping mall has 3 shopping mal cops
>Don't know how to scale this encounter … Okay, you don't balance encounters, because money is power
>Shopping mall cops are actually HTR
>Shoppers don't mind heavily armored assault gun wielding cyberninjas while browsing the 2075 summer collection
Yeah, there's a sample grunt for a shopping mall cop, but even with the grunts there's still no clear rules like: Four prof 2 guys insta-kill your team, so use them carefully.
You may replace the line "Shopping mall cops are actually HTR" with "There's 25 shopping mall cops in every store" because I still don't know how the rules would reflect real life security, and how it would fare against shadowrunners.

That's helps a litte, thanks.

Yeah, that's somewhat what I'm thinking too. Leaves me with the problem:
Special grunt in place X, that's neither Barrens, nor Lofwyrs office. Medium grunt with stats like shadowrunners? Prof 3 or 4? What would be the difference between taking the Prof 3 and the Prof 4 grunt, and how would it play out in the end?

Guess I should cling to this a bit more.
Running one-shot missions with changing players:
>First group was clever and avoided the fight, capturing the target while not secure.
>Second group did the meme of "2 hours of planning and then we kick in the front door" and actually got away with it.
Guess the next group who does the latter will get to see what yakuza does if you decide to go gun ho on one of their "bases".

Can anyone do a chummer a favor and give me some Nocturna images that one can use in polite company, Or at a table?
All the 'art collections' linked tend to err on the side of...Basically porn to literally porn so looking through them hasn't been useful.

They are flexible like a Raven. They got their own ladouts, their own operation styles that keeps most opposition hot off their tails

A difference in Professionalism rating of only 1 isn't going to ruin a run so long as your player's aren't complete chumps. After all, no run happens without at least one complication. While it's best to err-on the lenient side when it comes to mooks, a boss that is slightly tougher than you intended just makes a good story when they eventually overcome it. And if your players fail to overcome it? That's why they have edge. Make them spend/burn edge to escape, and now you have a plot device for their next run. Maybe their employer gives them a second chance, or your team wants revenge. Either way this is an opportunity for your players to do extra legwork and make a better plan than last time. This is the sort of 'screw up' that makes a campaign fun and memorable.

In other words go with your gut for what feels 'appropriate' for the circumstance. If you miscalculate offer an escape (because it's not the players fault) and give them another shot at the run. Your players will enjoy being the underdogs for a change, so long as you give them a chance to overcome.

I have this problem all the time. Trying to find cyberpunk female character art that isn't sluttish is a pain.

You're designing encounters like it's still D&D. If you want challenging combat encounters in SR and you don't want pants-on-head retarded shit like the mall is staffed exclusively by off-duty HTR, you need to give your players a better objective than 'go here and clear the dungeon.' A challenging mission is going to play on escalation of force and require the players stick around long enough for it to occur.
>go to the mall and cause panic for at least 18 minutes so my other team can hit the real target
>yes I know HTR response time in that area is 12 minutes tops, that's why I'm paying you

Its like they completely forget you're supposed to be playing a thinking breathing human or humanoid.
Sex appeal loses its power if you have it on display all the time. It needs to be used TACTFULLY!

Although I'm a fan of them, I blame the Shadowrun returns games for this. Throughout the three games you never run into an encounter that is completely out of your league, it's all paced to be at a similar power level to your team. That works for a railroaded computer game, not for an open world rpg.

Still leaves me with the problem that there's still shopping mall cops in the mall and they will at least try to shoot the shadowrunners (once – and then run away calling for HTR).

Guess I'll do what the other answers told me:
Making things too hard isn't bad. Teams fault if they don't do legwork.
Three stages of mooks: Below you (Prof 1 and 2), about you (Prof 3 and 4), above you (Prof 5 and 6).
Go with your gut based on what an encounter should be.

This makes me feel though, that my first missions won't be well done in some way, which makes me uncertain as a GM.
First encounter I build in DnD I knew: Okay, this is supposed to be medium. And it was somewhere around medium.

So I'm going to be running a street scum campaign this Friday for some friends and one of them sent me this monstronsity of a character.

Was wondering if this would be too cheesy or broken to allow in the game. I also realize that there's some mistakes on the sheet

>1 in 3 of 4 mental stats
>no knowledge skills

Kill him

>Still leaves me with the problem that there's still shopping mall cops in the mall
That isn't a problem.

just look up drow art and find one that isn't too fantasy

SOME mistakes? It's barely filled out and is missing importent info, some of the info present is plain wrong, and the player didn't care enough to fill out basic info that will allow you to rp NPC interactions.

Did you threaten to fuck his mum if he didn't make a character? Because this shows negative effort.

No it's not 'cheesy'. If RP'ed according to the stats this character will die on it's way to the first meet due to utter stupidity and lack of ability to interact with modern society.

Yeah he's not finished yet but to quote him he feels that all he needs is the armour and weapon and that's all he's starting with.
I don't disagree with the stupidity thing, it's kinda been a staple of his last few characters, except in street scum he doesn't have the ware to fully make up for it.

Ask him to take common sense to complete the ridiculousness

Is a combat decker or decker/samurai at all viable? I want to build a decker, but the team also needs one more really combat focused character. I also think it would be a cool aesthetic.

You can either have enough ware to be a streetsam, or have the cash for a decent deck. Not both.

Can work if you are optimizing like hell.

What he said largely, I get that what were seeing probably is a 'between friends' level of joking but goddamn. I would never submit something like that to a DM.

As said you are either a sammy or a decker, not both (unless you are playing some 2000 Karma/Sum-To-20 campaign)

What you can do however is get yourself a cyberarm, Customize it's AGI up to your natural max (6 for humans) and then use AGI Enhancement to get it up to 9 AGI. If you do something with only one limb you use that limb's stats, so you can now fire a one-handed weapon with 9 AGI. Get yourself a few points in automatics and a smartlink and you can fire with 12 or so dice

It's easier to buy into Street Samurai in career mode than Decker, so I would go "Decker who can shoot an SMG well" and build into street Samurai as you can. Hand of God plus Used Titanium Bone Lacing/Bone Density 4 helps, plus some Jazz.

Are Attributes in Chummer supposed to be completely fucked right now, or is it just me?

Lil' Yekkers fucked up the latest nightlies pushing some new strings or something. It's being hammered back into place.

That's mostly what I thought, having looked at the costs. Thankfully my GM bumps up the nuyen rewards so this will be less painful for both myself and the team. Thanks, I'm not super expierenced and am trying to branch out from just being street sams.

As an aside, does anyone have good art of SMGs?

Nope, I'm just terrible at my job. I pulled in a branch that wasn't as ready as it should have been that refactored a bunch of stuff with how attributes work and are rendered. I'd suggest you stay at 5.193.0 until I clear it all up, it may be a couple of weeks before the wheels stop wobbling.

Future SMGs, not really.

The P90 and Kriss Vector look pretty neat though.

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