/srg/ - Shadowrun General

>one of about three places
/srg/, The Gaming Den, and?

I hate AI rules so much.

I understand the need for this bullshit in the sense that shadowrun is an attempt at simulationist in cyberpunk magic fantasy, and to dissuade people from playing them but jesus fucking christ

Can cyber implant weapons be turned into weapon foci? Or does the Elemental Strike power apply to them?

How do detachable cyberlimbs and the astral body affect each other?

So, what would be the best way to get a modern-style plate carrier into SR5? Just the Chest piece of SWAT Armour is my thought.

I just like the look of Plate carriers.

reddit ?

>Can cyber implant weapons be turned into weapon foci?
technically yes, though remember that cyberlimbs have very high OR so you probably won't get too high of a focus out of it and still need to be awakened to use them
>Or does the Elemental Strike power apply to them?
Since you paid essence for them they are considered part of your aura, so yes you can use it through the limb
>How do detachable cyberlimbs and the astral body affect each other?
If it doesn't touch your body it's not connected. AFAIK grappling hands still count but barely

Well the 4e rules for them are bad because the freelancer that wrote them can't into math
And the 5e rules probably were just ported

>Can cyber implant weapons be turned into weapon foci?

Object resistance would make turning something like that magical ridiculously impossible and prohibitively expensive.

>Or does the Elemental Strike power apply to them?

RAW I don't believe Elemental strike cares if the arm is natural or 'ware. But I'm going to go digging, because this is an interesting question.

>How do detachable cyberlimbs and the astral body affect each other?

Once the limb is detached it's no longer a part of you, therefore not part of your signature.

So. SR doesn't take drawing the ammunition/magazine during reloading into account, does it? In that, by default at least, it doesn't matter if your mag is in your free hand, or deep in your backpack, right?

Whats the best way to play an artificer type mage? A guy with a bunch of magic tools & such.

yes

Thanks chummers

My anger about AI has turned into problem solving on how I'd fix it.

>AIs on matrix or devices are always calculated with the +2DP for Hotsim
>AIs do not roll to jump grids and may do so for free, and does not incur a GOD score for doing so
>AIs can 'reboot' themselves with a complex action
>AIs have Matrix Condition track equal to WIL*2+Depth
>If the Matrix Condition tracker is filled, the AI is dead and lost unless saved by another entity. ('saved' as in storing data.)
>Pilot Origins becomes Drone Protocols (Must be purchased for each drone locomotion type. Walker/Flyer/Ground/etc) allows AI to download onto a drone as a complex action that they have 3 marks on, acting like a normal character. Initative is unchanged. For the purposes of rigging priority, this is considered jumped in. Leaving a drone is also a complex action.
>Skill checks in a drone are AI Skill(or Autosoft, whichever is better)+Drone stat. (REA = Device Rating)
>Init is processed as Intuition+Depth+3d6
>If the drone is destroyed while the AI is jumped in, it is destroyed unless it USES an edge to escape to a nearby device it has marks on to reboot
>If there are no devices it has marks on it must burn an edge to escsape onto the matrix (No matrix access removes this option)
>An AI can survive on a device without a matrix connection, but they take a -2 Penalty to all actions.
>Autosofts, Programs, and Advanced Programs are integrated into the AI itself, and it has Depth rating in "Active" slots, and Depth*2 in "storage" slots. Active programs can be switched out with a standard action.
>Anytime a check calls for a device stat (ASDF) the AI can use the stat of the device they're on, or their depth.

>...Biometric Scan Confirmed
Connected to SeattleNet...
The local grid in Seattle is called Emerald City.

>>Pilot Origins becomes Drone Protocols (Must be purchased for each drone locomotion type. Walker/Flyer/Ground/etc) allows AI to download onto a drone as a complex action that they have 3 marks on, acting like a normal character.
This really seems like a 4 marks/Owner thing, not 3. You can't run your persona on some other guys commlink because you have 3 marks on it, either.

>AIs do not roll to jump grids and may do so for free, and does not incur a GOD score for doing so
That's not a matter of WHAT you are, but your status with GOD. If you're registered/licensed/sanctioned then you don't get OS, and if not it should be plainly down to whether you perform an illegal action or not. GOD doesn't discriminate by what kind of illegal or anomalous activity it detects, same way they go after sprites.

>Init is processed as Intuition+Depth+3d6
Should be using the REA (or applicable substitute) of the physical form, as is usually the case in meatspace. As soon as you interact physically that stuff has precedence over the "speed of thought" matrix stats.

>If the drone is destroyed while the AI is jumped in, it is destroyed unless it USES an edge to escape to a nearby device it has marks on to reboot
>If there are no devices it has marks on it must burn an edge to escsape onto the matrix (No matrix access removes this option)

These two really just bring up the issue of Forking or creating backup copies of yourself as an AI and how to deal with them, which gets real messy real fast. In theory you could put up "sleeper" copies where instead of having to escape somewhere you simply send an activation code to that copy and it becomes the new primary character when the other form dies. Sort of a Dead Man's Trigger edge action. Would likely not have any memories of things that happened since the copy was made, though.

>Drone Protocols Marks

Can you invite 4 marks/ownership to someone else, or can there only be one owner? I ask because it gives the opportunity for an AI to be a rigger's helper in a pinch. Or maybe even take control of that enemy drone, but I see your point. Hmmm.

>Grids

Fair enough.

>Init

I am mostly trying to standardize the initiative for it as an entity, as multiple init adjustments (Adding and subtracting) for a single character in a single combat turn would get tedious if the AI is jumping around. Most likely you would have to involve the Data Processing (Device Rating) of the Device/Drone in use. (As they do not have REA)

>AI Death forking

I have multiple solutions in mind for this actually. Involving essence:
>Easy mode: AIs require essence to live (Start with 6). A drone 'death' reduces essence by 1. Copies of the AI do not have essence, and will not work.
>Hard mode: Same as above, but AIs can split their essence in whole numbers to create functional copies.

Maybe throw in a technomancy ritual to infuse dead AI code with essence or something - but make clear that it is not the same 'soul'.

Doc Wagon is a scam chummer. If your hoop gets fragged on a run & the corp really wants you dead a quick bribe will have the docs loading you up with feel happy & taking your organs. 1/10 would not recommend. CrashCart is the superior name in rescue & resuscitate.

You know, you can buy Brand Loyalty off

custom_vehicles.xml
github.com/chummer5a/chummer5a/wiki/Custom-Data-Files

Is there anything like Lichdom in the sixth world?

I read the entry on necromancy, but it didn't really have much in the way of actual substance

Cybermancy is sort of lichdom, I guess. At least the framework is there in setting.

Do any of the books actually explain cybermancy? I assume a magic or tech book, but we've had a few of those.

>Can you invite 4 marks/ownership to someone else, or can there only be one owner?
Transferring Ownership is a process that takes about 1 minute, but there can only be one owner of a device.

>I have multiple solutions in mind for this actually. Involving essence:
Maybe call it "Integrity" instead of Essence, since its a hard rule that Essence is something that never comes back.

Cyber-Lichdom by definition would probably be retaining sentience below 0 Essence in terms of Shadowrun.

Magic-Lichdom would very likely simply be something extremely Toxic, essentially achieving an undying corporeal form, likely more puppeteered from the astral than actually living.

Hey Chummers. Working on a 5e campaign of my own for my regular group, it'll be my first time running or playing shadowrun. Had a couple of questions:

How often do you have the Johnsons screw the players out of their money? I've got one or two lined up but they're definitely a minority.

What houserules do you use/are the best?

What alterations to the background & lore do you use/are most common? So far I'm planning:
>no SURGE (just get implants if you wanna be a catgirl that badly)
>KE got the HTR contracts for Seattle but Lonestar still runs the beat cops
>there's no Mafia in Seattle, they're boring, but there are Vory, Triads and Yaks, which makes more sense geographically
>Bunraku exist, but they're more a "buy your own sex slave as a wife" that some rich corps assholes do than something that has its own parlours. Actual brothels get accused of using bunraku as part of a general moral panic by Horizon and Ares Entermtainment looking for ratings
>no Ork Underground, and disregard 90% of the cringey bullshit about Dwarves/Orks/Elves from Run Faster. They just wrote a bunch of really racist screeds and then control-Fed the n-word out and replaced it with "orks". Real Jews have thousands of years of tradition, language and diaspora to draw on as a culture; Dwarves have been around for 70 years, have no language or culture and their only major gripe when it comes to being metahumans is "sometimes people forget we exist". Dwarves aren't going to be Fantasy jews.

And just does anyone have any general advice for a first time Shadowrun GM?

Pretty sure cyber zombies were at least started somewhere in 4e. It's not really a PC sort of thing so we don't have a lot mechanics on it.

Screw them out of their pay maybe 25%-33% of the time. But then again I also pay my players a bit more.

>general advice

Don't let anyone play a decker as their first character unless they can demonstrate they really really want to play one and learn all the bullshit matrix rules front to back

Man & Machine from 3rd has a Cybermancy chapter too.

Here's how you make a Weapon Focus cyberweapon.

You take the blade of a Spur. Not the whole apparatus. Not the entire piece of cyberware.

Just the blade.

And then you make that into a weapon focus.

That way, you're just dealing with the Object Resistance pool for an alloy (same difficulty as a steel katana or knife) instead of something ungodly high.

Then you attune to that, screw in the screws, tighten the bolts, and get that bitch implanted.

Harder than getting your fists enchanted with weapon focus tattoos, but worth the extra effort, I think.

And before someone argues that you need to enchant the entire, final object, and not just the weapon part, let me ask you a question. What happens if you need to replace the silk and wood grip of your weapon focus katana, while leaving the blade and tang intact? Does it destroy the weapon focus, or is it just the blade part that's enchanted?

So, Forbidden Arcana broke the "no resurrection magic" rule, when do you think they'll break the "no teleportation magic" rule?

The trick to Johnson's and money is to think about how useful the crew is to keep around. If they don't fuck up, they get some nuyen so they come back.

The other trick is to remember that the Johnson is skimming off the top. Think of it like this:

Paul Marketing is sick of Halloweeners harassing his son.
He offers 11k to Mr Johnson to get them taken care of.
Mr J then offers 6k to the runners because they don't know any better.

It absolutely does. There are actions to draw/stash items.

The closest thing to Lichdom would be a homebrewed ritual to covert your Astral form into an independent Spirit of Man, then possessing/inhabiting a corpse, ideally your own. When that body is destroyed, you just get yourself a new one, ad nauseum.

Cheers, but by "screw" I mean try to get away with paying the players 0 nuyen - get them to do the job then not pay/sell them out to KE.

>no Mafia in Seattle
>Mafia is boring
Chummer, I don't disagree with much of what you had to say, but the Mafia is one of the coolest organized crime factions in the game and they absolutely fit in Seattle. You should read into them some more. They're a lot more than just the real-world Italian Cosa Nostra.

You don't actually need a homebrew ritual to do this - you can achieve the same net results by doing the following:

1) Get an Ally Spirit with Inhabitation and at least one other method of existance. Possession is a personal favorite, as it means you can have the Spirit inhabit a stick in an Astral Form and get Materialisation. This Spirit must have the Endowment power.

1a) Make this Ally Spirit into a Great Form Spirit. This is recommended only if you want to truly be bullshit.

2) Astrally Project. If you die whilst in Astral form, you get [Mag*2] hours to live as a spoopy ghost.

3) Have the Spirit perform a Hybrid Form Inhabitation on your body (electively reducing it's dice pool to 0, whilst you do the same). This kills the mage.

4) Have the Spirit grant you Inhabitation through the Endowment power.

5) Inhabit your body with a Flesh Form (electively reducing your dice pool to 1, edging any results of 1 to avoid critical glitches). This revitalises the mage.

6) Stop giving a fuck. This is doubly true if your Ally Spirit had Drain Force, as it means you can now advance infinitely without care.

Hey, if I buy the Metropole book, would you be able to de-watermark it for the pastebin? I fucking need that book, but I hate the idea of giving CGL money without somehow sticking it to them.

Could you break down each of those steps with a little more detail? There's some implications I'm not getting there, I think.

I read about them in Run Faster - it said they're a multi-ethnic and multi-metahuman thing, which makes no sense to me. If they were more like real-world La Cosa Nostra they'd at least be interesting. They have no theme, besides being a "criminal syndicate". By comparison:

>Yaks are the Yakuza, have the whole honour/japanese pride thing, plus connections to MCT, plus their pro-humanis attitudes
>Vory are multi-ethnic and multi-metahuman, but they're the polar opposite of the Yakuza. Bound together by their own brutality, unlike the yaks they absorb smaller gangs with threats of horrible violence. They're no line they won't cross, no family they won't murder. They're monsters.
>Triads are a bit boring too, but I have some interesting ideas for them. Mostly an old gentle chinese Johnson the players will meet in a park, feeding the ducks, who has inexplicably scarred and callused hands.

Like, compared to that, there's no real theme to the Mafia beyond "guys in suits". They just seem boring to me.

If you want inspiration for Triads, I'd vote going the Madam Gao route from the Netflix Marvel series

Cheers, I'll look that up.

youtube.com/watch?v=tivMVu6ChI0

The idea behind the Mafia is that of Families. In the face of the expanding power of the Yakuza, ethnic crime families like Cosa Nostra, the Italian Mob, the Jewish Mob, and Jamaican organized crime turned their guns away from each other and forged an alliance.

So now there's a Mafia made up of all kinds of distinct elements - which stay distinct. So, within the Mafia, you still have Irish families and Italian families, and so on, with all the old grudges still intact, a Cold War truce as they still make internal power plays, despite presenting a united front to outsiders.

On top of that, they're a recognized AA in their own right. You have people with Mafia (Sicilian) SINs working in Mafia-owned laboratories and shit.

They're the 'locals' in North America, pushing back and holding ground against the Yakuza and Vory (and to a much lesser extent the Triads, because there's no united Triad front, they're more of a threat to street gangs than the big organizations). But at the same time, they're still divided internally on ethnic lines, and that creates internal strife and power plays against supposed allies, in classic gangster movie fashion.

They're super cool.

So like the Cosa Nostra in Snow Crash?

Thanks!

I get why you think they're cool, but it still sounds ridiculous to me. Especially the "the mafia is now a AA corporation"

You can take some tips from Kindley Cheng in the HBS game set in Hong Kong.

If you're going to give the kind old man a bad side, I mean.

Wait, you find the mafia being a AA ridiculous, but not the Yakuza being a AAA? Because their status is less 'Mafia Incorporated,' and more the way the Yakuza controls MCT.

Thanks but naw. I was going to have the kindly old man be a retired Triad leader who left because he was tired of killing. He's a combat Physad, but nothing more. The run I'm considering for him is that he wants the players to steal the mask of Pursuit Ninja, a reality trid star and Physad member of KE's HTR. His grandson is a huge fan of the PN and his birthday is coming up.

I understood it not as "the yaks control MCT" as "the yaks have connections to MCT/the yaks work for the MCT". The mafia controlling a AA behind the scenes makes more sense, but its still not interesting enough for me to include it.

The entire board of directors and the controlling share of MCT are all Yakuza. The Yakuza essentially own and control the entire company.

The Mafia went the other direction, buying out a failed state in Europe and then incorporating it - you know, like what happened in Hong Kong and Manhattan - and then using that extraterritoriality and ability to issue SINs to their benefit for their Totally Legitimate enterprises.

Mafia has always been about business, the loan sharking especially. Since thats basically what banks are about anyway they're a lower risk than other banks might even be in that income bracket.

You've got a bunch of actual blood related families in a constant power struggle full of nepotism and feuding and secret traditions and street warfare. What's not to get? They can have all sorts of moral codes within their businesses too. Enforcing the letter of their incredibly exploitative contracts but no more. Or they only rob companies from out of town. Stuff like that's totally reasonable within different family operations.

They also police their own turf against unaffiliated criminals incredibly harshly. They run protection as good as any non-global security company and are integrated enough in that community to get into anyone's business to find people they're after.

Basically, in the Shadows, they're the banks, they're the cops, they have extraterritoriality, and the only reason they're not slitting each other's throats is to present a strong front against the Yaks.

That bank that you rob in Blitz's dumb mission in Dragonfall is a Mafia bank, for example - complete without teller kiosks, banker offices, and automated turrets in the lobby.

>MCT controlled by the yakuza

But then why be Yakuza???? You control a AAA Big Ten Megacorp??? That's dumb. I'm changing that.

Mafia still not that interesting sorry. If they were exclusively Italian and really worked the "Legitimate Business" angle I could get behind them, maybe give them connections to City Hall or something. But the Yaks already have the whole entirely-human pro-humanis deal, and fit into shadowrun's cyberpunk vibe a bit better than the mafia anyway. It's street samurai, not street cavaliere.

The Yakuza stay Yakuza both for the big-time honor bullshit, and so they can have both a legitimate right hand and a criminal left hand. They get to have their cake and eat it too.

Mind you, there are plenty of people in MCT who aren't directly Yakuza-affiliated, per se, but the ownership and the executive chairs are 100% Yak.

That's the whole deal of both the Yakuza and MCT - they're the organized crime group that's also a 'legitimate' megacorp.

Hell, that's the background of Aztechnology too. It was started by an alliance of drug cartels, expanded into a business empire, issued loans to bail out the entire country of Mexico, and then rebranded itself Aztech/Aztlan.

I wouldn't be surprised if the Vory are planning to buy their way into extraterritoriality the same way.

Again, that's really dumb. Why be gangsters when you can be execs? In the sixth world gangsters kill each other for a few shitty blocks in Redmond while corp higher ups are disgustingly rich, living in a world of impossible wealth where they want for nothing. It's not like they even need the yaks - they have Shadowrunners, who have more diverse skillset and are more disposable/deniable than the yaks are because they aren't your brother in law.

I was planning on having the cartels be a major gang problem down in texas actually. Maybe they clash with triads in the southwest?

I'm shit at de-watermarking - I just run the pastebin. Yekka's the guy to talk to about how to do that, as the method I use tends to remove bookmarks and turn a 5mb file into a 50mb file.

Steps 1 and 1a are pretty simple, as they're exactly what they say - you get an Ally Spirit and you make sure it can Inhabit something but not ONLY inhabit something - if it can only inhabit something, you're gonna need to do the summonning whilst astrally projecting. As for the Endowment power, it lets the Spirit grant you access to its own powers, including its various forms of existance (materialisation, inhabitation, posession). Making it a Great Form Spirit can get you Endowment for free, as well as bonus powers and some truly excessive tricks.
>Current Situation: You and your Ally Spirit exist.

Step 2 is important, as you need to be out of your body for Step 3. In SR5e, damage is carried from body to astral form but being set to dead is not, and you can survive having a dead body as an astral form for, as it suggests, twice your magic rating in hours. If you can extend this, prehaps by using the metamagics from Forbidden Arcana, you can use a much stronger Ally Spirit, as it'll take longer to complete Step 3.
>Current Situation: You are Astrally Projecting. Your Ally Spirit is just sorta sat about.

Step 3 is where things get fun. You have your Ally Spirit inhabit your now-inert body, and both you and the spirit choose to roll zero dice for the inhabitation. This is important, as it means your body gets a load of bonuses to physical stats and so on, as well as Immunity To Normal Weapoms. Hybrid Form is fun, yo. You are set to dead, but you still have that time astrally projecting. This takes a number of hours equal to the Spirit's Force, so use a low Force Spirit, or at most one with a Force equal to your Magic.
>Current Situation: You are Astrally Projecting, and on a clock until you cease to be. Your Ally Spirit is inhabiting your body.

I think what you're fundamentally misunderstanding is the difference, in Shadowrun, between a street gang and a major criminal syndicate.

In real life too, for that matter.

Your lower ranking mafia guys might have crews who run street gangs but they aren't like.... competing with them.

>I wouldn't be surprised if the Vory are planning to buy their way into extraterritoriality the same way.
Teeeeechnically they can't. Vory are supposed to have no dealings with authority, at least traditionally.
Unlock the pdf with a site like smallpdf.com/unlock-pdf, select each watermark object and delete it in a PDF editor like Acrobat or Foxit.

Step 4 is simple: the Spirit uses its Endowment power to grant you access to the Inhabitation power, ostentially so you can claim another body but actually so you can get your own body back. This is pretty simple.
>Current Situation: You are Astrally Projecting, and on a clock until you cease to be, but you have a method of stopping that clock. Your Ally Spirit is inhabiting your body.

Step 5 is the tricky part - you go to Inhabit your own body, currently with a Spirit in residence. At this point, the Spirit will be pissed, and as such will fight back. You, however, should elect to not do this, and choose to only roll one dice, using Edge to ensure you, at worst, do not get a critical glitch. This means that the Spirit, which you can choose to give +6 dice on its roll, will likely roll a lot more successes than you, meaning it'll probably get enough successes to force you to do a Flesh Form Inhabitation. You want this, as it'll make you look more normal and let you hide your astral signiature.
>Current Situation: You are now your own Ally Spirit, inhabiting your own body. The clock that counts down to death has stopped, as you have a body again.

Step 6 is everything else - you're functionally a god, albeit a relatively weak one. If you had foresight, and got your Ally Spirit the Drain Force power, you can increase its Force, and hence your stats, infinitely, granting you massive bonuses that don't really have a cost or scaling cap. Have fun with that 2x10^50 STR, friend. You don't die of old age, you're immune to most poisons and diseases, you can easily get hard immunity to every form of mundane damage, you can get enough armour to shrug off most non-mundane damage, and if your body is ever destroyed, you go to being a Spirit that can just hop inside a new body.
>Current Situation: You're strong enough to be a legitimate world ending threat. Have fun with the Draconic plots against your everything.

No I understand the difference, but even a criminal syndicate is still several thousand steps removed from the kind of obscene wealth available to the heads of the corps, especially to the heads of a major player like MCT.

Like, I could understand the Yaks piggybacking on MCT shipping to smuggle their goods. But why would they do that when its THEIR shipping? What could being a criminal syndicate possibly offer them that they don't already get as a AAA? Apart from risking scandals? You could quit being a yak and just be an MCT upper exec. Shit, their skillset as ruthless assholes would be extremely useful as execs.

I think Shadowrun might not be the setting for you if you have a hard time accepting this concept. There's a whole fucking lot of shit like this. A lot more than a meager list of corrections you'd planned on making.

I'm talking more books worth of content than you have fingers of specifically this kind of fuckery.

No I'm fine with the rest of shadowrun its just... what the fuck. That's dumb.

Sounds more like you have trouble with Jap culture and their weird concepts of honor, propriety, and saving face.

I think the major difference isn't the actual measurement of funds or anything but the structure of the mafia that has benefits. They have a clear line of trust/blood running from the very top to the very bottom rungs of the organization. The mafia IS as connected as most megacorps/nations but their structure is such that there's no breaks in the chain of command. You don't pick up thugs off the street and give them seniority, they're hand picked by bosses and underbosses and subbosses and crew leaders all the way down. They're also tied into the communities they lead so there's more general support in every social and economic status except the people who are obviously connected to triads/yaks/vorys.

>What could being a criminal syndicate possibly offer them that they don't already get as a AAA?
You sell a shit-ton of drugs in [area] as [criminal syndicate]. You then offer to clean up the area as [corporation]. You profit twice, and continue to profit by decreasing the problem by fractions, but never entirely eliminating it for [plausible excuses].

>You sell a shit-ton of drugs in [area] as [criminal syndicate]. You then offer to clean up the area as [corporation]. You profit twice, and continue to profit by decreasing the problem by fractions, but never entirely eliminating it for [plausible excuses].
Not to mention that people who oppose MCT can get assassinated by the Yakuza, and people who oppose the Yakuza can get bankrupted and shit by MCT.

The left and right hands working together.

I really don't think you are. I think you're someone much less familiar with the setting than you think you are, if this is something that's throwing you.

Renraku is japanese and they don't have this bullshit.

No but.... the yaks are an entirely human organistation. And no criminal syndicate could possibly have as much influence in a community as one of the Big 10

Not even cartel-levels of drug distribution would lead to a level of wealth even as the same level as a AAA. Your essentially one tenth of the worlds economy.

Anyway, I'll drop it. But still... its dumb.

Not influential in an arcology or something, sure. As for money they are AA's. It's not a really huge leap once you have basically infinity moneys.

How likely am I to attract/create a batman if I start using a supervillain gimmick during runs?

With a good GM? 100%.

Now to think of a good gimmick that can work on runs.
Gotta make things nice and dramatic for batm'n.

Where would corps keep their most dangerous testing facilities?

I have a run in mind to pit my runners against some real bad shit, but logically this is the kind of facility you don't keep near a population.

Then you need to offer your players something else. Either in the form of connections, favours, or new locations. Something. If you want your Johnsons to screw your players, you need to create the conditions necessary for Johnsons to actually do so.

For example, after securing a prototype from a Renraku R&D Lab in the ruins of old Arcology, chummers now need to decide how to get their pay. If they decide to do a dead-drop or drop it off at the location Mr. Johnson decided, they're idiots and thoroughly deserved to be fleeced so long as you drop clues that doing so is a really moronic move.

What I wanna know is language.

Do any non-native English sprakets attempt to translate the various terms of SR - like 'chummer' - into their native language?

I've been casually toying with the idea but haven't come up with anything that doesn't sound retarded

Hon hon hon salut :)))

So, has 5e been fixed yet or are all those editor-needing, shitty-metaplot-pushing grognard morons in charge still?

>...the yaks are an entirely human organisation. And no criminal syndicate could possibly have as much influence in a community as one of the Big 10

Unless you start off as a money laundering front for the Yakuzas before the Corporate Extranationality was ratified.

Chummer is a term, almost a title.
I do think it would be the same no matter the language.

It did?
I heard that the shit in that book looked to be something out of some entirely different setting almost, more like "house setting rules" rather then anything that felt appropriate to the Sixth World.

This is the SHADOW net

, , , , , , , The relationship between MCT and the Yakuza is significantly more complex then "same guys, different logo".
Basically, when the company got itself started they had influx capital from some various Yakuza oyabun, which meant that the Yakuza basically helped strongarm Mitsuhama Taiga's (yeah, the original CEO was literally named "Tiger") competition into joining his conglomerate in response for being "favored customers". Lots of important Yakuza have MCT stock, but they still don't actually own MCT in any way.
MCT tends to do them favors though, such as lending them a place where a new building is going up if they need to hide some bodies in a concrete foundation, or maybe if they need some shipping done and they can't arrange and ships themselves. In return the Yaks do a lot of below-the-table street level goonwork for MCT on occasion, and help distribute drugs and such that MCT needs street testing.
It's not always a sure thing because "Yakuza" isn't a single syndicate but dozens and dozens of crime groups, some one good terms with MCT and some one neutral terms and some operating in cities that MCT has no actual hold over at all, and it mentions in one book the father away you get from the IJS the more likely this is to be the case.

Basically you could say that the Yaks and MCT are both favored customers for each other, which is a mutually beneficial arrangement for both but is still basically a business arrangement at heart. They tend not to think of stabbing one another in the back because both have a lot of dirt on the other one at this point, but they also don't necessarily need to go out of their way to do each other favors, more like if a Yak shows up to do business he gets the store discount while if an MCT guy goes to the Yaks for help the Yaks won't fleece him dry on general principle.

>but they still don't actually own MCT in any way

Not true. The entire Board of Directors are Yakuzas.

>The entire Board of Directors are Yakuzas
From which Yakuza?

How does 3e hold up to 4e? And specificly, how do they compare in character creation, which one is faster?

If tattoos and piercings are a legitimate base for (qi-)foci then casemods on your cyber should be too, right?

I'm citing Corporate Guide for 4e where it mentions that the two are definitely in bed together, but the only mention of the board of directors is that Toshiro Mitsuhama (Taiga Mitsuhama's son) is now the majority shareholder as of 2071, holding both his original shares and Eiji Yakamura's %19 stock, making him by far the majority single shareholder even with the rest divided up amongst the Four Oyabun, who by the way are not LITERAL Oyabun. It's a nickname.
None of them, at least as of current info.
The Board of Directors aside from the founder's son are called the "Four Oyabun" due to their Yakuza affiliate ties, but all four of them have never been stated to be linked to any particular gumi or rengo at all.
So if they ARE full-on Yakuza bosses, then we've managed to go five editions without ever even hearing what Yakuza syndicates they work from.

Part of the reason of the dominance of Toshiro Mitsuhama over the Yakuza shareholders is simple time divine; running crime syndicates is time-consuming and takes up most of their attention, and MCT is stated outright in Corporate Download to make more in a day then every Yakuza syndicate does in a year COMBINED, and thus Taiga and his son are basically in charge because they have both the time and the inclination to keep the business running whereas the Yaks just own parts of it, mostly going along with what Taiga and Toshiro say since clearly both have done right by the Yakuza shareholders.
And as of 2071 Toshiro is the single majority shareholder, though the power dynamic probably hasn't changed much.

...

Some GMs get weird about cyber being used for Foci, I think since the high object resistance would make it extra difficult for artificing. This added difficulty isn't factored into the price of the Foci. I don't mind at my table because it's wiz as hell, but just be aware.