What's with the 'shadowrun is complicated' meme that I see going around here...

Agree with you on most of the other points.

Though mage supremacy is a bit of an overstated problem. It clearly exists to some extent but as many people noted its really easy to get rid of by banning a few options that remove any cost to sustaining spells.

Shadowrun is problematic. The setting is awesome but the rules... Combat should be exciting but every time it begins I just want to sleep. Optional actions are scattered across 30 or something pages. You want to fire your weapon? How will you fire it, there are about 10 different firing modes. In the end you just select one and stick to it forever and make sure your new weapon has the same mode.

I really don't know what it is, usually I pick up systems, even complex ones, fast but something in Shadowrun just doesn't click with my brain.

Id really love for someone to explain hacking, & mayne some tips & tricks. Like what options to avoid & what options are your bread & butter. Every time i try to read that bit of the book my brain fuzzes & i just dont retain anything. Im usually pretty good at this kinda stuff. I have almost all of Traveller memorized.

And I would like a cliff notes version of Alchemy. id really like to play a guy with a backpack full of situational problem solvers but every time i turn to the mechanics expecting to slog through it i just get bogged down by all the stupid little things like aqua vitae & what im supposed to do wih it.

Hacking is almost always a logic+skill roll to get the marks you want, and then a intuition+ewar or computers roll to do the thing you want to do.

How important your deck is depends on if you want to use cybercombat. Cybercombat is *really* good, but is deck dependant. You can be an amazing sleaze hacker with a crappy deck, but every single one of your attributes matters a lot in cybercombat, and you always need more programs, so you can't cheap out on your deck.

In cybercombat, the trick is to run high sleaze, high attack, and then as good a firewall as you can. You run silent in cybercombat, using logic+sleaze to avoid being directly spotted, while you smash targets to bits. You can trivially terrorize a host just by smashing ICE faster than it launches, and because failing a cybercombat roll doesn't grant a mark, people must spend an entire pass to locate you. Cybercombat is basically a submarine battle where its about locating your opponent and then instantly detonating them with a dataspike.

The Configurator, signal scrub, baby monitor, fork, hammer, lockdown, stealth, wrapper, smoke and mirrors, and bootstrap programs are all extremely useful. If you aren't planning on playing a cybercombatant to save on skills or nuyen, don't bother with hammer or lockdown.

The brute force action is generally not worth taking for most hacks, but has two really good uses. 1: If you fail, you only take damage, rather than a mark, and a mark is much more dangerous than matrix damage because it takes two actions to ditch being spotted after you are hit by a mark, meaning your opponents will always have at least one pass to blow you up with a dataspike. 2: It is a really good way to link lock a target you want to then use traditional hacking on.

To be continued...

The most important actions to understand are the following:

Running silent (Especially understanding when it is more suspicious to run silent. If an area has no silent icons running its a VERY bad idea to run silent to hide because someone can instantly realize there is a hidden icon in the area with just 1 hit on an unopposed matrix perception test, instead, use wrapper to hide, which requires someone to specifically examine YOUR icon out of the thousands in most areas).

Hack on the fly/brute force (mark generation), edit file, crack file, and disarm databomb for dealing with files, Control device and format device (with bootstrap) to manipulate devices in the matrix you do or don't own, matrix perception which gives you extremely detailed information on things without any opposed roll, matrix search for legwork, and snoop to listen in on other people's comms, and trace icon to find things in the real world.

If you want to do cybercombat, also understand how dataspike works.

The other matrix actions are useful, but the vast majority of things you will ever want to do are those 13 actions are 90% of what you will be doing.

Other tips:

Don't run with baby monitor on at all times. Instead just switch it on and off to check OS.

OS generation over time should NEVER kill you ever. You can reset OS just by ditching and getting marks again. Reset OS any time you can.

ALWAYS check for a databomb on a file before playing with the file. A databomb of any significant force, like say.... 4... WILL instapop your deck.

Any device slaved to a host is a device you have a direct connection to.

Don't have a lame ass matrix avatar. The coolest part of being a decker is having a cool creativ avatar. Also make sure to play with the non-literal aspect of the matrix. My current decker is basically a Warner Brothers Cartoon style stage magician who makes dataspikes by pulling a giant mallet out of his hat and smacking people. Linkocks are balls and chains, ect.

>Did I get memed, Veeky Forums?
yes. neckbeards in 2017 howl out loudly when they have to read more than 8 pages of rules to play a game.

Okay, so in the matrix, it looks like a big MMO with other bits floating in the sky that you can travel to if you want to see that private system/island right? Each & every personal network its its own island. So like a building that sell furniture & has a decent matrix presence is a big floating chair with avatars of people who work there or are just checking out their catalog walking around on it right?

What does a silent icon look like?

Every time you do shit you have to put "marks" on the icon you use & it creates a link between you PAN & the icon which GOD & demiGODS can use to "backtrace" you personally & fuck you up?

What all constitutes an icon? Is everything your avatar "sees" an icon? Beyond set pieces i mean.

Can you say, disguise am important icon as a puplic fountain in the matrix & just hope no one interacts with it because it is camouflaged?

Final tips:

While you should own an agent of as high a rank as you can get with the avail limit of your game, if your first learning the matrix don't use your agent in cybercombat, and don't have your agent do anything more complex than assisting you while running silent/wrappered, or manipulating devices you own (Such as opening or closing doors you control, starting a car, detonating your wireless explosives to save your initiative...). If anyone spots your agent, log it off. Agents are powerful, but not necessary, and can serve as big weakpoints of your deck. As you get more experienced you can have your agent do more.

Understand the limits of mundane hacking. While mundane hacking is generally stronger than technomancy, there are some fundemental rules of the matrix you are unable to break. You are unable to steal a protected file as a hacker without either using social engineering to get the passwords to encryption and databombs, without permanently removing those protections and thus leaving a trace. Its not like anyone will notice for a while, but you can't do a traceless filesteal. You also can't permanently steal anything over the matrix, you can only borrow it.

Also understand your strengths. You basically have technokenesis, and can do things like remotely operate equipment, peek through cameras, run people over by remotely turning on a parked car.... all sorts of stuff can be done with merely the control device action.

That's the problem, the gorillion items and bonuses.

It's simple enough - Attribute+Skills - But then it's the miscellaneous bonuses that can add up. Then 5e adds limits, some bonuses don't stack and others do... It's not too bad but it's a lot to track, and there's too many players that try and add up all of their bonuses on the fly instead of just writing that shit down. So, lazy or new players have trouble.

The second problem is that the book itself doesn't do a great job of explaining or consolidating rules easily. The entirety of hacking can be explained as "Doing things subtly" and "Doing things aggressively / quickly" and use two different skills, but they're instead explained over 15 pages and use more than a dozen different actions you can take that all are used for increasingly specific reasons. It looks complicated and daunting, and someone still getting used to the system winds up flipping through a book trying to figure out which one of a bunch of specific actions instead of making it simple enough to remember based off of the skills used.

And the whole book is like that. Autofire is separated in four different settings for no real reason, martial arts got an entire book practically devoted to different techniques that all give pretty mundane bonuses in the end, etc.

It could use some good editing and another run through the writing room - Say what you will about D&D, it's writing is ace and it knows how to explain it's mechanics and edit it's book, and that's the kind of polish that Shadowrun needs.

>What's with the 'shadowrun is complicated' meme that I see going around here?
Okay so, every time you fire your weapon, the following things happen in roughly this order:

>First, you figure out what firing mode you're shooting with. This will add and subtract to the numbers in several subsequent part of this sequence.
Then, you make the attack roll using the sum of your weapon skill and the associated attribute. This is added to or subtracted from based on smartlinks, distance, and recoil
>(Don't ever forget to track how many bullets you're firing every turn of combat, because there's a cumulative recoil penalty that can stack up over the course of combat)
>Then, the enemy makes a roll to not get hit,
modified by cover. (if they choose to go on "full defense," which drops their place in the initiative order, this roll is a different roll from the normal roll)
>Then, if you got more hits to shoot them than they got to not get shot, they roll AGAIN against the damage of the weapon and your net hits on the test
>And THEN, depending on whether the damage you were dealing exceeded their armor rating, this damage is dealt to one of two damage tracks
>and THEN, this damage may or may not knock the person over depending on whether it passed a certain threshold
>Only then has this gunshot been mechanically resolved

Mind you, while there's a lot to keep track of (you're lying if you honestly try to convince anyone that your group is tracking cumulative recoil penalties even half the time during combat) this actually isn't too complicated once you've done it enough times. I play a lot of Shadowrun, so this is all second nature. But what you should keep in mind is that for most people coming to Shadowrun from D&D, the average combat roll is:
>Roll one 20 sided die, and add your proficiency in that weapon to the number on the die
>Did you beat a static number?
>If yes, roll your weapon's damage dice.

Comparatively, Shadowrun is a significant leap in mechanical complexity.

All other problems pale besides the four worlds problem.

One world? Fine. Two? Bogged down. Three? Better be in a play by post because this shit ain't going anywhere in a hurry. All four? You'd better have this stuff automated.

>Combat should be exciting but every time it begins I just want to sleep.

In my case somewhere very early on I missed the memo that higher initiative = more actions. I was the only one rolling 8+1d6 and everyone else was rolling 12+3d6 or something. I would get 1, 2 actions if lucky, then sit there the rest of the combat round doing nothing while the rest of the team did stuff.

>Okay, so in the matrix, it looks like a big MMO with other bits floating in the sky that you can travel to if you want to see that private system/island right? Each & every personal network its its own island. So like a building that sell furniture & has a decent matrix presence is a big floating chair with avatars of people who work there or are just checking out their catalog walking around on it right?

No. Personal networks mostly no longer exist in 5e. Its weird and dumb, but its all hosts now, which are more like their own "instances" of the matrix cut off from the rest for the most part.

>What does a silent icon look like?

Nothing. A spotted icon looks like the regular icon but maybe with an overlay based on your tastes. Maybe a metal gear style ! above their head, or a target lock, or just them being slightly hazy.

>Every time you do shit you have to put "marks" on the icon you use & it creates a link between you PAN & the icon which GOD & demiGODS can use to "backtrace" you personally & fuck you up?

Yes, you need to use marks, no, marks can't be traced back to you and erase themselves when you log off if they are illegal marks. Also GODs and DemiGods are mostly glorified script kiddies hitting the "OS orbital ion canon" button when someone's OS gets too high. Your marks MIGHT be noticed by spiders, but they don't trail back to your deck.

>What all constitutes an icon? Is everything your avatar "sees" an icon? Beyond set pieces i mean.

Any persona, device, file, and the enterances to hosts are icons.

>Can you say, disguise am important icon as a puplic fountain in the matrix & just hope no one interacts with it because it is camouflaged?

Unfortunately you can't pay homage to Psychopass in this way, as AR icons of real world things don't physically mask vision. You could change an AR billboard, or make a fake AR wall, but its trivial to see through. AR is not a full blown reality filter.

Sorry in the first bit i meant host

In the last, i mean, you log on the the matrix & join a host, inside the host it looks like a roman style courtyard or some shit, inside that market is a statue of Ares. Can that statue secretly be an icon into a secret host/cyber equivalent of a secret passage, as long as you know the password? Or does it flag as an icon?

Im pretty shit with understanding computers in real life so sometimes i struggle to grasp the nomenclature of the game especially since they give it all slang terms

Have you never played Shadowrun or is 5e that much easier?

Have you played RPGs before?

SR 5 is better than most other editions of SR, save for the matrix and to some extent rigging. The core rules are just stronger for the most part.

Buuuut.... it is still shadowrun.

No. Layered hosts don't exist. It wouldn't flag as an icon unless it was really an icon. And if it is an icon it is visibly an icon. However you could have an immobile hidden icon "inside" the statue that becomes visible like a switch if spotted, if you desire.

Try GMing it. Throw in Mages and you have three layers of reality to account for it slows the game down.

Eh. I never found the layers of reality issue to be that big a deal. Matrix is by its nature in 5e really intimately tied to the physical and is not really a layer of reality anymore so much as an alternate way to move and interact with objects.

And the astral plane is so watered down and terrible it basically is less a layer of reality and more a place to store magical threats.

I am not trying to say running SR is simple mind. Its more about how much you build it up in your mind and your ability to split focus, not on seperate layers of reality but on the various things PCs are doing.

Another big problem is going too big too fast. Its good to have your first few runs be stuffershack smokescreen runs.

I've been playing Shadowrun for about 25 years now. I won't lie, there's a learning curve. The joke in the Shadowrun community is "there's a rule for it somewhere."
But it's my favorite game, warts and all. Once you learn how all the layers intersect, it's a hell of a good time. Embrace the buckets of dice, go ahead and plan like nuts...and welcome to the shadows.

How many layers are there?
Astral
Matrix
Meat
Am i missing a few?

Emotional/Social

The motivations of your Johnson, enemies (would these guys run, stay, fight, beg, flank...), motivations of the NPCs you run into. It's a lot more complex in Shadowrun than most games.

Mostly D&Drones who basically have an IQ six to seven deviations under the average.

They are people who think 3d6 roll under is hard.

>D&Drones yelling and screeching like the mentally impaired apes they are

Meh, thats mostly Meat. Just a special skill use in the real world, like negotiating with Spirits in the Astral

You'll understand once you try putting it into practice.

I've never played Shadowrun but it occurs to me that houserules are for customizing a game to your particular tastes but shouldn't be a prerequisite for making the game playable.

>Why do people say the system is complicated?
>It has all these complicated bits in it
>Well yeah but you can just ignore those

Yeah, people tell me D&D is hardly a rules-lite RPG, but I dunno, me and my friends just sit around a table and take turns rolling a d20 and whoever gets the highest number wins and it seems pretty simple to us. Bob sometimes forgets that it's the high number you want and gets excited about a low number instead but somewhere in the middle of the 50 page document I wrote explaining which of the rules we don't use it pretty clearly mentions higher numbers are better so we can get him set right in just 10, 15 minutes of searching usually.

>Unironicly thinking 5e is better then 3 or 4
user pls.

Its a sidegrade to 3e.

Clearly better than "I use a machine pistol to out damage an assault canon and stunball everyone to death" 4e.

There is a crazy amount wrong with 4e: soak scaling, autofire, the way you could game 'ware to get an extra 1.5 essence before qualities got in the mix, elemental damage having partial or complete armor bypass breaking the damage scheme of the game, melee being literally unusable, longarms being unusable, pistols being unusable, any weapon besides an automatic being unusable, a completely broken dodge system that made it literally impossible for a ranged attack to miss unless the shooter was incompetent, the matrix literally just being the most boring piece of crap of any edition that by some miracle was made awesome by eclipse phase, the fact that deckers and riggers were completely obsolete because AI could objectively do their jobs better than they could, magic literally more broken than 5e, spirits literally giving mages infinite edge, toothless drain, and adepts who weren't burnouts not just being worse than burnouts but completely unplayable.

5e has problems. But a lot of those problems are a legacy of older editions, like mages having too many broken options like quickening. The only thing that 4e does that could be considered slightly than 5e is its matrix system, which is bad in almost every way and is better off replaced with EP's system if you really want to use it, and the fact that drones are much stronger, but drones in 4e were way too strong and that didn't help riggers anyway because rigging was purely a function of money and not skill so the best riggers in 4e were samurai who just owned drones.

When a man puts a literal crate of dice within easy reach, you know you're playing Shadowrun.

This. Shadowrun is the only game with so much complicated bullshit but dammit I'm going to run a game with these bells and whistles. Each time its fucking awesome.

Personally I'm glad my group is too lazy to go through this and break stuff.

>Rigging
>Decking
As soon as you get into those two the complexity skyrockets.

Playing a broken game can be fun if you embrace the brokenness.

For example 3.5 is really bad at its intended objectives but if you start out at 3.5 and play it as high fantasy global superpowers in a person simulator its great!

4e actually has a few things going for it, but its overall done poorly and I can't honestly recommend it over Eclipse Phase, which took most of the good aspects from it and made it work overall better. The hacking is a novel idea, because its surprisingly brutal and easy to get into, it feels a lot like Ghost In The Shell where any random commando could suddenly own your entire network and have their agent botnets and cloud programs running on your devices, but EP streamlined it without removing the nuance like 5e did, and managed to both keep the idea of hacking being super accessible without invalidating skilled hackers specializing. In EP hacking is basically one skill, and literally every PC needs it about as much as a firearms skill and can afford to get it.

5e rigging isn't complicated. Its just bad, and that is why you don't see riggers in 5e. Drones in 5e are basically on par with disposable consumables for the most part, besides extreme outliers like the CU^3 which allow deckers to use logic and gunnery at will to defend themselves.

Hacking isn't complicated either, and is actually pretty streamlined as of 5e. It is "Complex" in the fact the lore behind it sucks and thus a lot of basic information *literally* doesn't exist in the game right now. Like matrix sites sorta don't have any way to be modeled at the moment because hosts are rather isolated from the main matrix and are not able to function as sites, because it is impossible to keep a host secure with massive traffic.

Its been a while since I've played but I remember whenever I tried rigger it just added a whole lot more to keep track of with the RCC and soft's and everything. Its why I preferred being a face.

RCC and softs are actually really simple, because you literally will never change what softs your running.

The main PITA about riggers in 5e is they require intense micromanagement of a couple of drones that each get their own turn thus meaning the rigger's turn is massively bigger than everyone else's turn, and for this structural cost to the game the rigger... was essentially worse in every way compared to any other role at pretty much anything. It is especially painful because the primary power source of riggers doesn't upgrade well at all compared to how they did in 4e (Which is understandable, in 4e you could basically make a roto drone into a nearly unkillable tank) and the main role defining purchases, rccs and control rigs, don't make drones better in the way they need to be made better (durability) for them to work as your "main thing."

It is why most 'riggers' in 5e are just samurai or deckers with a drone that fights alongside them or for them. It just isn't worth it to be all about the drones.

i GM'd 1st and 2nd ed, read 5th but haven't played it yet.

>shilling 3E/4E
only Bradstreet Shadowrun is real Shadowrun

Cyberpunk 2020 is the same. Good cyberpunk games thrive on all the hi-tech customization shit.

CP2020 at least has lower mechanical complexity.

Playing a Rigger is paper warfare at the table, I agree. I enjoy being able to play the cavalry with my character in any situation though. Way I see it there's three main Rigger build paths, all of which obviously have some overlap.

>Remote Rigger
More often than not a support character for the Samurai with rather good weapon skills to use his ridiculously high initiative to make denial attacks with both his drones and himself.

>Backup Rigger
Follows the group with one or two specialist drones that he jumps into when their assorted utilities are needed. Plays much like a Decker in many ways, except the combat drone you jump into deals real damage.

>Specialist Rigger
Often built with one Vehicle or one Drone in mind (More often than not one of the humanoid ones) this Rigger will excel at taking over a common job with little to no risk to himself.

I thoroughly enjoy playing the first type, scouting ahead, putting up cameras and pretty much controlling whatever facility we break in without having to deal with GOD or being unconscious. And assortment of Drones and my high initiative score make me a perfect partner in crime to our Samurai in combat too. My drones can lob gas grenades, offer suppressive fire and so can I, which makes the Samurais job at wetworking his way through enemy ranks a lot easier.

>And I would like a cliff notes version of Alchemy. id really like to play a guy with a backpack full of situational problem solvers but every time i turn to the mechanics expecting to slog through it i just get bogged down by all the stupid little things like aqua vitae & what im supposed to do wih it.
Alchemy's super bad. Preparations are way weaker than normal spells and they fade out of existence in a matter of hours.

Your tune is going to change when you actually get around to playing it.

So, this question coming from someone who's never played 5e but is getting ready to -- what's the biggest problem that causes mage supremacy? I haven't looked indepth at a lot of the advancement options yet, but it seems like the stun damage should really wear them down over time, not to mention the stat loss they'll be eating from normal combat.

>what's the biggest problem that causes mage supremacy?
Two things.

First, spirits. Mages can have a corral of spirits - nigh-unstoppable - that they can throw at problems. And, given enough downtime, they absolutely will bind a bunch up.

Second, utility. Mages are super fucking flexible. A starting mage can have spells that:
>turn them invisible to both people and cameras
>jedi mind trick
>heal damage
>levitate over obstacles
>buff themselves up with super-high initiative
>create a perfect, physical disguise
>read someone's thoughts/memories
>detect the exact location of any object in a building
>detect the exact location of all people in a building
>turn a guard into a meat-puppet to open doors with his biometrics and then turn his grenades on his allies

All at the same time. Mages are a toolbox, but compared to something like a decker they just have way, WAY more broad of a range of tools. They have more flexibility, more utility, in that regard than any other archetype.

Hm, alright; I guess I was looking at mages more as distinct types, caster / summoner / adept, given the separate trees associated with each.

And I hadn't realized spirits were as powerful as they were, either. I'll definitely be taking a more indepth look at both skill trees and spirits to make sure I've got a firmer grasp on how to handle casters as a whole.

Just keep in mind that they also have glaring weaknesses. They have to contend with Drain whenever they cast spells. Their spells are extremely visible to anyone with Astral sight. Background counts can and will fuck their day up if they try to do anything. And, most of all, spells tend to be good tools, but not as good as a specialist.

A Street Samurai fighting using specialty ammo is probably going to do their job better than a spirit. A decker is going to be better at punching through security than clumsily body-controlling a security guard. An infiltrator will get through a building better than a mage using invisibility.

The power of a mage is their sheer versatility - the ability to have a tool that contributes in solving literally any problem.

>houserules are for customizing a game to your particular tastes but shouldn't be a prerequisite for making the game playable.
It is playable. If you want to use those rules, you can. I don't know what this board's obsession is with needing to use every single rule or the notion that houseruling somehow proves the game is fundamentally broken.
Honestly, my favorite system is GURPS and that's horrifically broken and unplayable by Veeky Forums's standards.

You forgot Magic Hands. Another one of the most annoying spells to deal with as a GM.

Astral scouting and the crazy utility that is Asensing is not to be overlooked either.

I know I'm beating a dead horse, but a lot of it came from the rush job they did with 4th ed.

The Drain change was huge. In true Shadowrun damage changed the target number of your roll to resist and you took a standard amount of damage from attacks. Rolling well on your resist downgraded the damage, but you needed to roll spectacularly well to downgrade it to nothing. Using a powerful spell was like shooting yourself in the face with a shotgun. In 4e they replaced that with a simple opposed roll, meaning you can easily build your mage to pull off high drain magic with a next to zero chance of taking damage.

In Old Shadowrun editions, shamans could summon spirits on the fly but they could only have one in any given area. Hermetic mages could summon multiple spirits, but it took lengthy and dangerous rituals that gave you an elemental for a limited time/number of uses. For 4e they combined the two such that any mage can easily summon a horde of spirits and summon more whenever they feel like it.

As someone who thought about the problem a lot, I would say it is 4 things:

Power foci, psyche, channeling, and quickening.

Mages and burnout adepts are the strongest archtypes to a noticable degree, but mages are not that much stronger than everyone else. Its a subtle jump, made more problematic by the fact that mages can sorta do everything AND are really powerful doing it.

The fact that sustaining spells and getting semi-permanent buffs on yourself is so trivial is what is pushing them over. Even spirits aren't too much of a problem because they do have downsides that make it non-practical to just swarm them. The fact that a mage can pop psyche, use a power foci, and just sustain 4 high end buff spells to completely surpass a samurai's 'ware is the issue.