/srg/ - Shadowrun General - Vapourwave For All

Depends on how you do it, but at the very least it wouldn't result in things like the Control Rig echo in the core book, then the retard replacement in Data Trails for when they forgot (/wanted to get passive aggressive in shutting down how) Control Rigs also daisy chain into Data Jack rules.

I miss cheap 'ware. Sure, you can start with almost twice as much nuyen now, but things are triple or more the prices that they were, so it more than evens out.

I miss getting to play a troll without feeling like I was shooting myself in the foot. The other metatypes were probably too cheap in 4e, but they're way too expensive in 5e.

Most everything else is better about 5e, though.

>I miss the adept power that let you use a mental stat instead of a physical for skills and combat abilities.
Mind Over Matter. Shame everything but Logic = Agility was nearly useless shit.

I miss AI rules that were only below par compared to other options, and could reach 'situationally useful' when not pretending to be the street samurai.

And Unwired's Technomancer stuff.

The 5e matrix might be smoother and less 'pizza time' than any before it, but that's only because they dropped any pretence of functionality or making sense once you scratch the surface. They need to keep the simplicity of actions, but in a matrix that is more than the sum of its parts rather than less.

And give deckers sidegrade options to pulling out a firearm when shit happens - that fit within the speed of combat.

>I miss cheap 'ware
The problem with cheap ware was that it wasn't on par with the cost of attributes or adept power that raise attributes. Which meant that adepts could benefit from it better than anyone else.

GM allowed the (will I think) to Body apply to your condition boxes, so it wasn't total shit for me, but yeah, logic=agility was actually pretty solid for the most part.

I don't think there's a reasonable way to have the Matrix make sense from a CS standpoint while still keeping things like deckers who go in themselves on the spur of the moment viable. I'm alright with the 5e version; it's a lot of shenanigans if you try to riddle out the underlying architecture, but it's fine from a fluff perspective.

I miss the weirdness of 4e. For all that people bang on nowadays about muh snowflakes, 4e had a much more embracing attitude when it came to strangeness. 5e has a victimhood complex for everyone who isn't a vanilla human, which makes the world feel flat.

I like Limits. It was the kind of thing that's clearly a patch for a 4e problem, but they integrated it into the system successfully enough that people actually know their limits, or at least to check them when they roll 8 successes.

I miss the fluff of the matrix being an open and free Mesh Network, allowing for script kiddies to be a thing, and technomancers being viable as more than just sprite spammers.

What I dont miss is the matrix rules, which are way better in 5e. And the fluff of the Matrix being this thing that we mad and has developed past our undersdtanding, or may have always existed is really cool to me. Theres also the fact that CGL is starting to develop a half-decent metaplot since theyve dropped CFD, what with Ares screwing with insect spirits and seeming to be on the verge of civil war, NeoNET collapsing, the Horrors maybe being a thing again, and blood magic evolving into something more gray than outright evil.

Of course for both editions I use(d) Ends of the Matrix when Im the GM, so the matrix bits are kinda a moot point.

>I don't think there's a reasonable way to have the Matrix make sense from a CS standpoint while still keeping things like deckers who go in themselves on the spur of the moment viable
I like the immune system concept of computer security. You can get immediate effects, but they're short lived at best. To bypass that, you need to fool the system into thinking you're legit, and that's slow work.

>allowing for script kiddies to be a thing
I don't miss retard PCs buying hacker boxes.

I should carfiy: the fact that hacker culture was similar to our own, where all you needed was a rasberry pi and pretty good code to do this kinda thing.
The fact that 5e doesn't have rules for coding your own software kinda bugs me, i like the idea of someone whose dirt poor, but was able to scrap together enough parts and has enough coding skills is able to make it as a decker.

While I enjoy there being shades of gray in a setting, there's also something to be said for being outright, unquestionably evil.

I see the dilution of bloodmagic as a bad step.

>And the fluff of the Matrix being this thing that we mad and has developed past our understanding, or may have always existed is really cool to me.
There's promise in all of it; what we're judging is execution. CGL is bad at keeping writers who can do good execution or rules.

>What sort of casemods are you rocking?

My most recent character is missing the bottom half of her face and has it replaced with a partial cyber skull and some other mods. It comes out looking like pic related wth no real mouth or nose. Eats/drinks through a feeding hole in her neck and talks through a synthesizer. She actually got her face cut off by Vory who her deceased father owed money to and was told she'd get to have an actual face back when she got them their money. After they killed her mother, she escaped to Seattle instead. She'd have gotten a new real face if she had the Nuyen to afford it and the functionality of her current face. She also secretly kinda likes it.

Are they suddenly wanting to portray Clockwork as Uncle Ruckus?

>There's powerful Orkatry at work here.

God yes

>I see the dilution of bloodmagic as a bad step.
It's harkening back to Earthdawn and some of the earlier novels, where there were things like a Christian priest who Awakened and wound up killing himself to summon a blood spirit "angel" during a fight with the Azzies.

earthdawn.wikia.com/wiki/Blood_Magic

What does Veeky Forums think of Forbidden Arcana?

Why did we get another mage book & yet have no technomancer book?

What exactly would you use as an example to depict how Wired Reflexes looks, /srg/? So far I've got Pointman from F.E.A.R and VATS from Fallout.

Are city background counts all Toxic, given that they're all polluted to shit?

...

Technomancer book was apparently killed by circumstance. The editor responsible for doing the ebooks had to quit CGL in order to make more time for his day job and the lead author left for personal reasons. With nobody pushing for it it's languished in editing hell. Word on the street is they're considering a new Matrix book that the TM book will fit into to come out sometime in 2018.
Not without GM fiat; Toxicity is a specific corruption of a domain, while pollution is more of a general miasma of unpleasantness.

>What does Veeky Forums think of Forbidden Arcana?

I like the references to Earthdawn in the Blood Magic rules, as well as at least some of the new Traditions, like the charismatic Christian one.

I really fucking like adept counterspelling and some of the fluff. Tons better than that shitty trog book

>Technomancer book was apparently killed by circumstance.

That scene from the old Spiderman where he catches the girl in one arm and her lunch in the other after she slips.

You culd always stage a datasteal from LittleMac, get her design notes. Hell, hacking CGL's shit seems to be babytime frolics, you could probably get it out of their servers.

>What does Veeky Forums think of Forbidden Arcana?
Not Veeky Forums, but;

>Forbidden Arcana, while filled with very bad mechanics, was filled with good ideas and clear efforts to "come across the aisle" and to reconcile some long standing problems with the community. For some people, the fact that the book is kinda bad takes precedence over the fact that there is a clear attempt to change. For others, the clear attempt to change means a lot.

>The editor responsible for doing the ebooks had to quit CGL in order to make more time for his day job and the lead author left for personal reasons.
Did the latter actually leave again, or just the first time?

Anyone have a website to handle the Tarot drawing of the tarot tradition? I have a player who wants to use it, but it's an online game.

Alternatively: Do we have a collection of decent res versions of the cards? I have someone who could make a site that does the drawing.

>Anyone have a website to handle the Tarot drawing of the tarot tradition?
Roll 1dX, where X = # of cards in the deck?

Realizing I don't even know how many cards are in a Tarot deck.

Let's see. It contains all the standard cards of a 52-card deck, right? And then you add the major arcana, which there are 22 of?

So 74 cards?

serennu.com/tarot/pick.php?nc=1
No scans of the cards as far as I'm aware.
Not sure unfortunately, I'm just parroting things I read on the official forums from Hardy and Bull.

Who are you quoting? Google only turns up this thread.

Editing. Reading 5e books is an exercise in frusturation.
Compare just the table of contents of Data Trails to Unwired and look how clear one is vs another..

When it comes to mechanics, the ability to have charbuilds with nuance/stray from archetypes without completely compromising effectiveness. In 4e, there were a ton of variation within builds that you could have a hilarious time with. The non-magic roles in 5e have 2 if they're lucky. Deckers in 5e have 2 options: Data Spike specialist and Hack on the Fly specialist. Sams in 5e have Tank, Arm of God, and to a lesser degree Inspector Gadget. TMs have Sprite Spam. There's very little variation to do something unique and fun without playing an Adept or a Mage. Magic is I can do in every other system, becoming a cyborg frying people's brains with the internet is not.

But mostly, I just loathe the fact that all standard 5e Chargen has me feeling like a complete hobo who is a savant at one thing and one thing only.

Reddit.

Is this true with karmagen as welll as priority, or just with priotirty?

Worse with proirity but at least part of the problem is the widespread nerfing of gear and cost bloat, especially for deckers.

Karma gen hurts some of the archetypes even more, but it can help lower the overall powerlevel of the party, making some of the undervalued gameplay styles a bit more varied. But it doesn't help with the bigger issues.

All 3. Karmagen at 800 is the absolute worst for it. Every major item under 12 avail is very meticulously priced and the attributes are way too expensive to reach competency.

Let's say we do Automatics, the easiest skill in the game. We need to be competent with it, which /srg/ defines at 12 dice, but realistically is in the vicinity of ~16-14 to not be able to reliably miss.

Agility 6 is 100 karma. 700 remaining.
Automatics 6 is 42 Karma. We now have 12 dice to shoot. Basic competency . It's cost me 142 karma to be competent at just shooting my gun 648 remaining.
But as we all know, initative is king, so I need to pump that. Let's put REA/INT at 5. That is 140 karma for 10 INIT. But I need some INIT die on top of that. So let's do the easiest option and get Improved Reflexes 3. Adept is 20 karma and magic 6 is 100 karma. 398 karma remaining. Now I have Improved Reflexes 3. Because I'm AGI based, I may as well buy improved attribute and pump AGI. I'll use my spare .5 to boost Automatics, my primary role. Now I've got 15 dice in Automatics, 16 with Smartlink.

OK. Now I'm competent, have good initiative. Now I need to have survivability, so I don't get instantly melted when I get shot at or spelled. I need to grab WIL/BOD 3. Because I'm an AGI character, the group will want me to sneak, so I need sneaking. Might as well grab Palming so I can do more than see things when I sneak, so now I'm looking at Stealth Group 6. 243 karma remaining. 1 point in Firearms just incase I need another gun, 1 point in Athletics when I need it.

There is 235 karma remaining on what I would define as competence with the best character archetype in the game. That's enough karma left to afford a proper gun, a lifestyle, a car, roughly and 2 skill groups/4 extra skills at rank 6, which will likely be agility based. I have 3 attributes at 1, STR, LOG and CHA, and 2 Edge. This cost me 70.6% of my karma.

54618806
Addendum: Try making a decker, now. They require every mental stat at or near max, a chunk of edge, 5 skills from 2 skill groups, a 90k ware, and the most expensive item in the game. They require all of this to be utterly useless when outside of the van. Being just competent with a decker is hard, let alone good.

>Agility 6 is 100 karma. 700 remaining. Automatics 6 is 42 Karma.
Or you could go with Agility 5 and Automatics 5, and then just take a Smartlink in your glasses. Then some Muscle Replacements are, what, 30k nuyen for Rating 2? Then throw in some Alphaware Wired Reflexes, buy Restricted Gear to afford them, and you're sitting pretty. Buy some Jazz if you really want some more Initiative.

Bam, as competent as your example, but much cheaper.

So basically raise the starting karma level?

Or just not expect PCs to make characters that are literally one of the best people in the world at what they do and call it "competent".

How do you guys come up with an overarching plot after being rushed into being GM since nobody else wanted to step up to the plate? I have a general premise, and the first few sessions, but after that unsure where to take it.

The players will do something dumb you can use to grow a plot from.

But that isn't best in the world, that is competent, 12 dice is what you need to have a decent mathematical chance of succeeding at an opposed action.

Muscle Replacement is STR. Because STR is less useful, it's cheaper. It's Toner that increases AGI. Muscle Toner 2 is 64K, 32 Karma. Alphaware Wired Reflexes R3 +Restricted Gear are 260k, 130 karma + 15 = 145 + 32 = 177 for the total package. You save 30 karma having AgGI 5 and 12 karma for Automatics 5.

Total cost is 135 karma for the 'ware option at 12 automatics and 4d6 init vs 142 karma and 4d6 init for the Adept option, except the Adept option leaves me with maxed out at chargen stats/skill (Something I will likely not be able to karma bank to improve until like 6 IRL months have passed), leaves me with 6.0 essence, does not use those critical chargen qualities on restricted gear, and leaves me with 4 more dice in automatics.

12 dice in automatics is the competency level of a high level mook. It is tolerable, not reliable, and you'll be constantly letting your group down with having to full auto/missing not uncommonly when the enemy goes full defense. 12 dice is enough to usually kill just the one one guy you're shooting at. What if you need to split the dicepool to save someone and yourself? - Even full autoing, that's usually 6 vs ~2-4 dice, which fails frequently. What if you have a -2 wound/stun penalty and the guy uses full defense? You and your team are boned unless you edgespam, and relying on edgespam as a non-edge character means you fucked up at chargen. You're the combat guy, yet you're unreliable at combat.

>Or you could go with Agility 5 and Automatics 5, and then just take a Smartlink in your glasses
You could go even further, and do crazy, unheard-of-in-white-room-bs things like *aiming*!

>Muscle Replacement is STR
That's Muscle Augmentation. Muscle Replacement is Str & Agi.

>Muscle Replacement is STR. Because STR is less useful, it's cheaper. It's Toner that increases AGI.
I'm talking about the Cyber, not the Bio. It boosts both.

>12 dice in automatics is the competency level of a high level mook.
No, it's the competency of an elite special forces soldier on the level of the Navy Seals or SAS. Most enemies would have like 6-8 dice unless your PCs are dumb enough to piss off the elite of the elite.

OK, that's saving 7 karma. Correcting my totals, that's 127 vs 147 karma. for the cost of 20 karma you get 4 dice in your primary skill, save your essence, and do not have to burn 15 of your 25 total chargen quality karma on restricted gear. I'd say that's a good trade.

You're omitting the cost of the Adept quality and Magic 6 attribute. Try 127 vs 267. That's a much larger difference, don't you think?

Smartgun +2, Take Aim +2, Specialisation +2 that leaves 6 dice to fill in with Agility & Skill.

3 Agility / 3 Skill costs how much?

>you'll be constantly letting your group down with having to full auto/missing not uncommonly when the enemy goes full defense
Throw in some cheap recoil compensation and a firearm that can do FA.

>High level mook
yes, like corpsec, it's not a boss, it's a high level enemy.

Check enemies.pdf. R4 organized crime gang members have 10 dice in automatics and 8 to dodge, and they'll probably be using drugs. R5 Corpsec elites has 16 dice to automatics and 12 dodge. R6 Elite special forces has 18 to shoot and 14 to dodge.

Now keep in mind you will be outnumbered, taking wound penalties, taking running penalties, they have comparable or better armor, and they usually will be on the defensive, and they will possibly be using jazz. 12 is not enough to do anything but a dip-in-dip-out run against an 'eh' tier enemy and certianly nothing to expect out of your dedicated team combatant. Frankly I'd feel like the GM wasted my time with that combat if he threw 8 dice mooks at me.

Just made the characters in Chummer to check my math. Maybe my chummer files are wrong.
Sam with 5(7) AGI, 5 Automatics, Alphaware Wired Reflexes 3, and Muscle Replacement R2 = 534 karma remaining, 156 spent on nuyen, 70 on attributes, 10 on qualities, 30 on skills. 12 Automatics dice.
Adept with 6(8) AGI, 6 Magic, 6 Automatics, Improved Reflexes 3, Improved Physical Attribute AGI 2, and Improved (skill) Automatics = 538 karma remaining. 100 spent on primary/special attributes, 20 on positive qualities (Adept does not count against chargen pool) and 42 on skills. 16 automatics dice.

Adept is up 4 karma and the Sam has 0.0 essence remaining. This is pre specialization. Assuming my Chummer is right.

Now I must sleep. Apologies for taking up your nights, lads. Hopefully it's not too munchkiny of me to expect my primary combatant to be able to reliably hit and perform while wounded/in a pinch.

Correction. 15 automatics dice on adept. I don't think that defeats my point.

>R4 organized crime gang members have 10 dice in automatics and 8 to dodge, and they'll probably be using drugs

God damn 5e really inflated the foes.

>yes, like corpsec, it's not a boss, it's a high level enemy.
> R5 Corpsec elites has 16 dice to automatics and 12 dodge. R6 Elite special forces has 18 to shoot and 14 to dodge.
Those are bosses, user. They're not "high-tier mooks", they're the best of the best. If you're tangling with them, either you've fucked up, or you're attacking an area they're guarding and should have the advantage due to your legwork before the run.

More typical mooks would be PR2 Corpsec or PR3 police officers.

>typical enemies have 6 or 7 dice
Find me a game running against mall cops foe more than 2k user

They're the good ones - a step up from patrol cops, not the two bit fuckers waiting on the street corner. Those guys are Rating 1 bullet sponges.

>They're not "high-tier mooks"
They're literally high tier grunts, aka mooks, omae.

The average cop is likely 3-4 in his weapon skill and 3-4 in his agi. It's not really the primary skill for them (That would be perception) as 'Shooting people' is a part of the job a lot of cops don't have to do very often.

I'd go 4 Agi (As they have a lot more athletic requirements than shooting requirements), 3 Pistols (With a spec in whatever his sidearm he's used to) + Smartlink for the 'Average' cop.

But I think 'Bitching about Shadowrun NPC stats' has existed as long as Shadowrun NPC stats have.

Right. I'm still just used to 4e statlines.

Pretty much the same statline in 4e. p. 276 of the 4e corebook.

>'Shooting people' is a part of the job a lot of cops don't have to do very often.
Today. For shadowrun, you're conflating the fifth and sixth worlds. I'm not arguing they should be marksmen, but they have to be some seriously sheltered cops to not see firefights semi-regularly.

Agility 4 and Firearms 3 is still just 7 dice either way.

Yeah. add a spec (Service Sidearm) and a laser sight on the gun proper, and you have an "Average Security Joe" who's good enough to keep gangbangers and other lowlifes out of a place.

>I'm not arguing they should be marksmen
What's your point?

>I'm not arguing they should be marksmen

So since the last thread died shortly after asking.

What are some good spells i can buff my party with? Besides the good ol' Inrease reflexes ductape stripes (I'm also an decent alchemist)

Party consists of: Preperation/Combat mage (me), Face mage, Technomancer pirate and a Drone Rigger (need to test the new "Thorn" spell from FA on some flyspies)

In my opinion somebody who makes a living with his skills would have 7-9 (hovever he got that pool, be it gear, skill or attribute) dice in it and mostly just buy the two successes ,if he can, instead of rolling each time.

Improved Invisibility is a classic. Increase Attribute for that little extra oomph when facing a difficult task is nice. Physical barrier, while not strictly a buff, can be amazing in the right circumstances; same for Trid Phantasm.

The game disagrees with you. Normal cops/security - and I'm talking in Shadowrun, not just real life - don't even actually engage criminals unless forced to. They just call for HRT and employ delay tactics until they arrive.

>Buff
Deflection is amazing. It's an F-1 Physical spell that adds dice to your targets defense roll for every hit.

Increase Gear Limits can let your gunner characters use their crazy dice pools in a firefight by increasing accuracy on their guns.

>Assist
Clean [Air] is the bane of any smoke grenade and gas attack ever. At F -3 drain it's easy to cast and it cleans an area of Magic * 10 cubic meters in one go. Crazy effective given the right GM.

Can an ice wall stop suppressive fire?

Don't feel pressure to *have* an overarching plot. Shadowrun works better than most RPGs with self-contained missions that last 1 to 3 sessions (and 3 session missions are already very long missions).

Come up with jobs one by one and feed them, that's a shadowrunner's career. Once you have a plot in mind you can sprinkle plot related missions in with the standard jobs, until it comes to a head in one of those multi-session epic jobs.

I'm of the opinion that the best over-arching plots in Shadowrun are the ones that are personal. Fuck being dragged into some external plot that doesn't have shit to do with you, like Dragonfall. Sure, it might still be rad, but it's missing the point.

Shadowrun's real drama comes from your bonds, your friendships, your family - and your rivals, your enemies, your agenda - being what gets you caught up in shit.

Your brother got wrapped up into a horrifying cult trying to reenact the Great Ghost Dance? Some motherfucker did you wrong and you're going to bring him down even if you have to burn down an entire AA to do it? Maybe you're in love, but the Yakuza (and MCT by extension) are standing in the way of you being with him.

These are the dramas that form the core, central experience of a campaign. A single scene here and there. A pro-bono mission done for a teammate. Focusing on missions that put you in orbit of your target, slowing chipping away at them and making money as you do it. Pushing your spare funds into advancing a needy cause.

That's the shit that drives a campaign forward. That's what forms a campaign's 'main plot.'

Now, maybe as you chase things deeper, there might be a lot crazier shit that you get into. Maybe your Yakuza Romeo & Juliet plot turns weird when it turns out the reason the Yaks are blocking shit is because your runner's boyfriend has been arranged to marry a youkai. Maybe it turns out that the ork aid program you've been donating to has been pumping the funding into a cure for Methuselah Syndrome - and they succeeded too well. Maybe your terrorist brother is just in deep cover, and you blew it by pulling him out of the cult, making them much more dangerous now that nobody knows what they're planning.

But that's the end point. The starting point is whatever character arc the players have baked into their PCs. And if your PCs don't have character arcs set up, they're bad characters.

Dragonfall starts with your old friend/ex-girlfriend accepting a job from a Johnson to unknowingly break into a mad scientist's lair and the situation progresses to the point said mad scientist decides to launch an assault on your home, making the conflict even more personal. How is it missing the point?

I really liked Returns approach since the financial incentive attached to it was pretty nice even if you had no attachment to the character dragging you into all of it.

See above. Had there been 2-3 missions with her before shit happened to her maybe the player would have cared. Introducing a character and going "Hey, you, player! You are deeply about this person!" doesn't really work.

Yes, since they have Armor and Structure ratings they apply for cover and blocking attacks and line of sight.

Because the only thing that was personal about Dragonfall was Monica dying. Everything that followed was deeply unrelated to you personally - something that you were chasing because you'd be fucked by mysterious forces beyond your control if you didn't. Hong Kong did a much better job of intimately tying the main plot of the story into who your character is and what their character arc is.

I'm not saying it was completely impersonal. I'm saying that where Dragonfall tried to hook you with a one-off gut punch and a hard left turn straight into the main plot, it's better to have your personal plot transition into turning out to have been a bigger plot all along.

Dragonfall turned out great in spite of that, but that style is a bad approach more often than it's a good one.

Overarching plots aren't going to be as obvious as they are in DnD, there should be clues sprinkled into runs, hit a couple Aztech subsidiaries and find a reference to supply deliveries to an unlisted site.

Make a passing statement about increased complaints of missing children in a C or D sec area. Cash in on the statement when your party gets the balls or a job to break in and all of the sudden they're saccing kids to power blood magic.

Suddenly Aztech's pissed about missing test subjects and research, Mexican mob's pissed about their community getting fucked with, hilarity or an all out war ensues

Does Suppressive Fire care about any of that once it has been set up, though? It tends to be quite "special" and frozen in time.

Yes it does. It's bullets. They go straight and don't just fill an area with lingering smoke.

An ice wall provides cover/a barrier. It'll provide the standard defensive bonuses/blocking effects.

Just saying because I'm pretty sure if you hit a guy who's currently considered to be spraying suppressive fire with electric damage for global -1 and some wound modifiers his suppression roll still doesn't get any lower, so it's frozen in time in the state he rolled it at regardless of circumstance it seems.

It never does that. The people around you are more effected by what happened to her because she's been with them for a long time. A lot of the dialogue options you get about what happened are far more withdrawn and professional. The emotional part of the conflict comes from your allies and neighborhood friends more than you. It's only when the conflict escalates to involve them does your character really feel like he's involved. The dialogue options you get when confronting Vaulclair range from professional to rubbing the fact that he got his brother killed in his face.

I don't see how trying to make me care about a character by making characters I also don't care about yet care for her works either.

I mean, do what you want at your table, but I consider your explanation retarded.

It's clear that the suppression roll doesn't get adjusted to avoid rerolling the dice every time the shooter gets hit, but that doesn't make his bullets magical.

Personally, I interpret "interrupted by any action" to include defense rolls, but that may be just me.

>Personally, I interpret "interrupted by any action" to include defense rolls, but that may be just me.
That would be nice. Knockdown is probably more sensible. Or maybe one of those shake-up called shots.