/srg/ - Shadowrun General

Can I turn my cybereyes into recording devices? I'm making a decker gonzo journalist who got too deep into the whole 'living the story' part.

Chummer, Cybereyes are by default recording devices?

Oh they are? sweet.

Anyone have any links to Shadowrun Storytimes that aren't 2Ds? I'm about to start another game, so I'd like some inspiration if anyone has interesting stories or links to interesting stories.

If there's any interest, I can share the tale of my last game.

>If there's any interest, I can share the tale of my last game.
DO EET

Absolutely the right choice.

Smells like "that guy" all over.

>What archetypes does your team have?
MbW Skillwire Streetsam
Gun-fu Adept
Mindcontrol Mage
Probably a Technomancer and/or a Melee Troll on top of that, starting next session.

>How well do you work together?
So far, pretty good.

>What does your ideal team look like?
OOC: No Psychos without self control, no thatguys, no creeps
IC: No psychos without self control, no freaks, preferably most Corners covered, as few one-trick-ponies as possible

We have Hagrid except he's a fat elf decker
We have an ex-Rangers street sam with PTSD
Some B&E expert who's blown out of her mind on a cocktail of drugs 24/7, has an e-ghost in her brain and has a deathwish.
Then there's the spaztick elf technomancer with abandonment issue.

We work pretty well together ? We mostly fail forward into situations that involve Special Forces, Corporate blacksits, AIs and Saeder Krupp.

We're one session from the end of our campaign and boy oh boy, we're right about to commit the largest act of corporate terrorism ever made in the last decade.

>Ideal team.
All elf razorgirls party

Gonzo, our decker. A precocious NeoNET kid, Gonzo loved to play with explosives and computers, but he was a nice enough kid. He organized both his extraction and his sisters to escape the borderline Machiavellian life in the corp. Crazy as a fox.
Dantès. Our face/social infiltrator.. Youngest daughter of an old money family, her older, less talented brother, organized her 'accidental death' while she was away from home at university. She escaped into the shadows. Took the name of the Count of Monte Cristo as a reminder of her desire for revenge. Level headed and rational most of the time, but has a sadistic streak.
Vaal. Our gunbunny. Boer merc who was the only survivor of a disastrous expedition into the mysterious Congo. Name comes from the Afrikaan word for dull, a nickname his former comrades gave him before they got to know him and mistook his quiet social awkwardness for slowness
Sarajevo (or just Jevo). Our mage. A Bosnian who fell in with the wrong crowd in the poverty stricken slums of his home city. Ended up as magical support for a group of bank robbers before he left for more shadowy pastures. Has a massive poverty complex and puts on the act of a sophisticated gentleman.

We get along well enough now. At first it was rough, but Gonzo's little sister dragged us together kicking and screaming because she wanted to get to know the people her brother worked with 'in IT' (we still dont know if she believes that BS cover story or not).

>All elf razorgirls party

Have you read Transmetropolitan?

I'm the GM, but my runners consist of:

Jailbreak, the emoji-themed technomancer
Jericho, the mysterious and racist ex-military razorguy who loves his machine pistol
And a character without an alias this far, an obese dwarf Zoroastrian mage.

It's been fun, just done two sessions thus far. Looking forward to seeing how everything progresses.

A dwarf sniper and sneak, who loudly talks about his and everyone else's genitals. Useful in a fight, refuses to do legwork.

A troll with a claymore. Literal ttrpg and real life embodiment of the Free Shrugs guy. Likes to hit things. Like dwarf above, useful in a fight, useless outside of combat. Voluntarily stays in the Low end of living.

The mage mind rapes everyone. Refuses to actually learn a damage dealing spell. Extremely paranoid of everything.

An elf caught half way between rigger and street sam and ended up with the bad bits of both. Up until recently was the only one with a car. Quite squishy and ends up drawing a lot of fire due to full autoing APDS all the time.

If someone, even by accident, created an artificial human that's merely awakened, everyone, and I mean EVERYONE, LITERALLY EVERY SINGLE AAA, AA or A company would want that specimen caught to examine and recreate it. Creating an artificial drake? Add literally every dragon, great or not, to the mix.

Sounds like a good time.

My team (all my players) consists of:
>Ace (Human, M), "David Copperfield"-Expy, Face and Edgelord. Hates Awakened, Boyfriend of the former Elf Sammy of the team
>Nock (Ork, F), Vory affiliated Sammy, Wields a bow. Likes to drink
>Selkie (Elf, F), Druid Mage, Focused on Illusion Spells and has the Incantation Geas. Likes to write songs and works at a bar. Player of the former Sammy (Amnesty)
>Script (Human, F), GMPC Hacker, Sister of the mage. High-School Student (16), works jobs for the local Mafia.
And after next session:
>Backdrop (Human, M), Infiltrator/Hacker. Doesn't like working for the corps, wants to stay pretty independent. First time player.

So far they seem to work together.
Selkie doesn't like that her sister is working the shadows.
Ace doesn't like Selkie because she's awakened, and she doesn't like him that much either (and told him that if he tried to mack on her sister that she would let one of her spirits flood his apartment).
Nock doesn't particularly care about either of them and likes to train and drink with Amnesty.

Honestly don't know what the ideal team would be.

>Creating an artificial drake? Add literally every dragon, great or not, to the mix.
I kinda want to run this story. But with the artificial drake as an npc, not a player.
>refuses to do legwork.
So, what does the player do for half the sessions?

My Team:
Sprite abusing Technomancer
Mr. Skillwire
Me (Shaman/Face)
My team consists of rules lawyers and minmaxing assholes. It's great fun.
The latest stunt was to put Machinesprites into the streetsams skillwire system and his smartgun. Our GM only allowed the skillwire build under the condition that he takes maximum of the buggy ware negative quality, to which the player agreed suspiciously fast. In fact. The TM proceeded to keep it in check with diagnostic sprites. Whole first session consisted of rulebooks and arguing, but it's all in good fun, we've been doing this for a while now.

>Whole Team of rules lawyers

Aylmao

Tbh, we spend our whole first "Session 0" to talk about rules and shit.
About 5-6 hours or so.

Current team
Pacifist, drug addicted pixie, specialized in Illusion spells.
Fuck-huge street sam troll
Sadistic Technomancer
Gambling addict gun-fu adept
and a rigger who's about as straight-edge as a runner can be.

We're a drug-smuggling ring. It's certainly a time.

>Steve
>not Dave from the adept decking shitstorm

>adept decking shitstorm
desire to know more intensifies

Yeah, tell us more.

Don't have time for long form, but essentially a GM and a couple others from the same group showed up for a couple threads to argue that adept decking was rules abuse because magic can't interact with technology, banned it at their table, and refused to acknowledge it as a houserule. The adept decker player was named Dave.

Wew, thats retarded.
Is an Adept Decker even good, considering you are missing out on the LOG enhancing ware, Reflex Recorder and the Arm-of-Awesome?

>Arm-of-Awesome
I am nub, what is this?

The dwarf and troll twiddle their thumbs until combat happens or until the mage and rigger/sam makes them do stuff. They are specced as combat monsters but have no active or knowledge skills outside of combat and even actively refuses to participate in Johnson meets or legwork ("user I don't have the skills to do anything").

Artificially created people Awaken/SURGE/Dracomorph all the damned time, proportional to the rate in the general population. The point is the corps have no control over it.

Think of it in reverse: If artificially created people never manifested magic, the corps would be one step closer to understanding why it happened. They don't.

So a transhuman drake? Rare (and cheesy), but completely legit. The corps will want to dissect you for SCIENCE, but not because you are impossible.

Cyberarm with ungodly amounts of agility and strength for shooting guns.

Chop off an arm, get cyberarm, max it out with str/agi boosters, give it a gyromount for laughs. Now you have a character that can shoot any one handed weapon with supreme accuracy, and punch out trolls in 1 hit. Useful for every non-combat build, since it's really good for a cheap price.

See:
You basically unload all the Agility and possibly even Strength into a Cyberware-Arm to easily get 9 AGI for Shooting a 1-handed Gun, making you not as useless in combat as you'd normally be, while saving you the Trouble to put Points into something besides your mental Stats.

I still doubt going the Adpet-Decker route is actually worthwhile, considering you need to spread yourself pretty thin between Ressources and Magic and also have to skip Implants.

Are there any good qualities for mundanes to pick up during gameplay?

My current Character has MBW 3, so Karma is next to useless for him, except for raising Edge.

Thought about getting a Martial Art, but besides that I'm sorta at a loss.

How does this interact with the (Natural Attribute + 4 = maximum) rule I've seen floating around? I think it's errata(?) from the last year but I'm a new guy, dunno

What are the most fun things to put into injection arrows?

Sharpshooter/Strive For Perfection/Hawkeye combo. Enjoy making every shot a called shot at long range, with no penalties.

Don't forget about buying off your negatives. I like getting Home Ground in play, because it's fluffy and you have a good idea what sort of circles thw characters/group are in

Same as usual.
Say puny decker has 2 str, with a maxed cyberarm he now has 6 with that arm. If he had 2 str he now has 6, that's some good recoil reduction.
He can now contribute well in combat by laying down endless semi-profwssional burstfire. Or just go full suppressive fire, nuking the enemies dodge die so the team sammy can 1-shot them.

Cyberarm of death is so damned useful it's even worth it for a lot of magic users.

In fact... if you specialise in Detection magic and buff up your Analyze Device spell...shit be OP. Same goes if you have machine sprites in it.

Why are skill groups listed alphabetically from the top now?
I still have the old layout on old sheets but I want it back for the new ones.

I'm not using the GH3 stuff because its usually bordering between cheesy and retarded, but sharpshooter might be a good idea.
I'm using Shotguns for all that its worth.

My negatives are sorta alright (Tough&Targeted, Faraday himself, Pie iesu Domine, Lightweight), so I'm porbably keeping them.
Homeground sounds nice.
If we Keep on playing in the same City, I'll probably be getting this.

Any more ideas?

The Arm has its own independent Attributes.
You can have Str1 and still rock a Str9 Cyberarm without problems.

Shouldn't the Ex-Con quality give you a free Criminal SIN quality, since that's what's explicitly called out in the quality?

Incidentally I am making a puny decker :D Inspired by Jerry from Rick and Morty

So let's say I have STR 2 but get a STR 9 cyberarm.

I take 2 drugs which each give a +1 to STR.

My mage analyzes my cyberarm device and gives +1

My techomancer diagnostics my cyberarm device and gives +1

Would I have STR 6 only?

I am guessing da drugs and cyberarm STR 7-9 don't stack (base STR 2). But dunno about da magic and sprites. Which in this case would raise it to STR 6 + 2 (8) if it worked

This makes me wonder, what's the shortest an adult troll can normally be ?

Everything you do that you do solemly with your Cyberarm (eg stabbitystab):
STR 9 or 10 with Diagnostics (i think Analyse spell only gives a Bonus for the mage using it himself)

Everything you do that uses all of your Body uses the average of all bodyparts with Attributes so (4x4+10)/5 = 5,x = 6.

Thanks!

You need to use your entire body (except maybe your head) to deliver an effective attack.

Realistically?
Yes

RAW?
(Sadly?) not.
Its actually explicitely written out:

>When a particular limb is used for a test (such as leading an attack with your cyberarm), use the Attribute for that limb (natural or cyber); in any other case, take the average value of all limbs involved in the task.

Not sadly, it's the only way cyberlimbs work. If everything that realistically involed using your body holistically averaged everything, getting a cyberlimb would be worse than useless.

Incorrect.

This is why the "God arm" is such an important thing in min-maxing on a character that is otherwise useless in combat. A single cyberarm with maxed customized/enhanced agility/strength can basically solve your combat problems with high enough skill dice involved.

K-10

With a strength 9 cyberarm, I can see a snap-punch being pretty effective.

Why not just ignore the body stats past a certain point? Like only averaging cyberlimb stats if you have 4 cyberlimbs and ignoring your 1 agi self.

But that means you need to have 4 cyberlimbs, which is a huge nuyen and essence buyin. If you don't allow the lone arm for combat, or only the legs for running, or only the primary limb directly acting for whatever task that can be argued has a primary limb, cyberlimbs are a liability.

You could still believably use only your arm of god for certain things. Like a snap punch, or holding a gun with heavy recoil with one arm, and so on.

Cybernetic characters need more support and less bullying by the system and setting. Redliner should let them break past their augmented maximum. Becoming a cyberzombie shouldn't be literal DM-fiat territory while the mage gets to become a god through constant initiation.

>K-10
Genius. Why didn't i think of this?

What do the different levels of essence feel like?

Hoi Chummers. Back from Hong Kong for a family trip and i got some things you can mention in shadowrun.

-There are no "food courts" in Hong Kong. At least not on the scale that American malls will give us. Most food joints have retail space with their own dining areas and surprisingly more options. Especially on the pricy side. I nearly bought gold leaf ice cream during my visit at Langham Place
-On retail, unlike here where only clothing boutique has their own stores. Companies like Nike have their own shops to hawk their own brands. No need for a sportschek to sell your overpriced running shoes
-The indoor older shopping malls are a disorganized mish mash of clothing stores and hot food kiosks. So you can shop for knockoff clothes and enjoy the smells of curry fishballs seeping into your clothes next door.
-Hong Kong Weather is like fallout. Nice cool interiors with a hellish heat outside.
-Surprisingly no panhandlers at the train station entrances or littered beer bottles where I walked. Not like here in Canada

Bags of milky sand.

I feel like we're on the same side, arguing past each other. I'm saying that it is not sad at all if you err on the side of letting cyberlimbs be useful (by saying that you can deliver an effective attack with just the limb, and not the whole body minus head like user said).

On a side note, I have never seen a magic character ever get anywhere near the level /srg/ suggests is common. I don't know if it's fearmongering, or if everyone but me plays with manaminmaxers.

I'm just saying I'd prefer it if four-cyberlimb characters got more nice things. Things that you could only get with the extreme nuyen/essence buying that four cyberlimbs entails.

the ultimate lifeform

4-limb characters already get the benefit of dumping meat AGI and STR, and some extra boxes. It's a stylistic choice, but not mechanically poor so long as you know how to still get an init booster (which should be drugs).

>extra boxes
You mean less boxes, thanks to redliner.

Between having 15/12 have just +1 dice to Agi and STR, I'll take the 15 boxes.

Redliner isn't that great of a quality, lose too much tankiness.

>+1
It's actually +2, to both meat and cyber.

>the benefit of dumping meat AGI and STR
That's what we just discussed was a problem. You don't get to do that, not really. Unless your GM makes a sane houserule call to let you ignore your body's ratings, you have to average meat AGI/STR with cyberlimbs.

What's a good way to handle massive amounts of enemies?
My players just failed at sneaking into an ork gang fortress and the horde is out for blood looking for them

Yeah sorry I was starting on the basis that you were using a 4 limbs human character with 9/9 in all limbs.

The +2 is kinda wasted then since you hit your augmented limit.

What's the best way to go full cyber? How close can you get with things like cyberware packages, adapsin and Biocompatibility? Do you run out of essence first or money?

Hence me saying
>Cybernetic characters need more support and less bullying by the system and setting. Redliner should let them break past their augmented maximum.

That aside, the +2 isn't wasted since, as mentioned, the +2 is to both meat and cyber. Not only does this make grabbing cyberlimb enhancement for all four limbs a semi-feasible goal in-game (letting you grab synaptic booster for initiative in chargen instead of having to huff jazz), it helps out your averages since your meat is operating at a baseline 3. Redliner is still really good as-is.

>Do you run out of essence first or money?
Ideally both at the same time.

>Cybernetic characters need more support and less bullying by the system and setting.

At least we agree on that point.

At chargen you can make a four limbs character, I've played that a few times (pic related it's the base build)

I think overall the problem is how betaware and alphaware jack up prices for cyberware in general. Ware, and cyberlimbs in particular need anywhere between 25% to 40% markdown. Almost 84k for a standard cyberarm at 9/9 is enormous, especially when you consider that each limb takes 0.9 essence.

I've somehow patched parts of this in my game by making Omegaware the new flat standard. Saves money and essence. I don't really play on the whole "This is second-rate" stuff because I feel it's too gimmicky when awakened get all the goodies everytime they get karma.

Could a human duel-wield assault rifles?

Yes. Would it be worth it? No.

Yes. Following 4e, firing anything larger than a SMG one-handed is a -2 penalty. Unless you're a Troll, then there's no penalty. 5e is missing said rule so it's what I go off of.

Imagine you began selling ownership, but not possession, of the things inside your home, and then the walls, roof, and parts of the land it's built on. They stay where they are, but you can't make any decisions yourself about the things you've sold. You've got the money and power, but the vessel that holds you isn't yours, the things that you thought of as defining who you are aren't yours, and it's all starts to feel empty and pointless. You might resent it, hate it, or deflect those feelings onto other things or people.
That's obviously the far end of the essence loss, I wouldn't imagine non-awakened folk feel much different with minor work.

Soooo it seems Krautlandia might get an exclusive campaign book featuring APEX.

This is almost makes me want to take up Dragonfall again.

Getting more and more elevated above the
needs and wimps of puny fleshbags.

Talk about genitals, keep up.

As far as stats are concerned your cyberarm is it's own distinct entity with it's own stats, so no drugs don't affect them and the techno/mage effects don't alter your main body strength. that said if you're performing an action that only involves the arm(like firing a gun one-handed, only it's stats count. if you involve the rest of the body, you average the two scores.

See you say it's realistic to involve the body, and yes there's certain sense to that in that the arm is drive by muscles like the pectorals in the chest. Thing is "realistically" for a cyber arm to have stats higher than the main body at all, those muscles have to have been replaced or at least bypassed and the arm has to anchored to the body more securely than by just sitting on the shoulder joint, extending subcutaneously down to the ribs or even to the spine itself.

Let's say one of my players wants to play a robot like pic related. Would it be alright or would he be under powered like an ai?

What you do then is only get 8/8 limbs, saves precious nuyen and limb capacity.

Well the #1 problem is that good combat anthrodrones don't exist in the game. The Juggernaut is a failure and all the other anthros aren't particularly combat-oriented.

It's possible but he'd have to play as an AI rigged into a drone. I've never experienced with AIs so I can't say more than that.

Yeah that's what I had to do, I needed the LOG bioware and the extra cyberlimb armour so I had to skimp on the stats a bit.

>Underpowered

AIs make pretty good Streetsams, with ~17 Dice for Shooting, immunity to Stundamage and acceptable INI in meatspace.

The Direktionssekretär is a pretty fucking awesome base for a Combatdrone.
Always remember, Anthrodrones can wear human Armor.

Wait what they can wear human armour ? I assume it doesn't stack with their onboard armour

I thought the duelist was alright and yeah an AI rigged into a drone is what I was thinking would have to happen. Maybe make his whole thing that he's stuck in it so he has to be cautious with his robo body.

What's the stats on it?

Do the German goodies exist in a translated form or do I have to just make do with numbers alone?

>.950 rounds

Someone doesn't know how calibers work