/srg/ - Shadowrun General

Are your people poor ?

Debil, Christmas isn't until January 7th. And though he doesn't eat solid food anymore, he'll probably volunteer to make everyone's favorite Russian Christmas dish: French meat. Made by taking a casserole dish, putting in a layer of meat then covering it with an inch of mayonnaise, covering that with cheese, and then baking it. Might spring the nuyen to get some onion, too. And of course, dill. Slap fat cuts of that artillery-clogging casserole onto some potatoes, and strong insist it would be best for them to eat it.

...

>Are your people poor ?
They had plenty of cash, their players just kept forgetting to pick them up during downtime.

Sooo... got interested in the game but it looks like only orks and trolls are good street sams.
Or are there any ways for non-greenskins to compete.

ignore pic. meant in melee.

>shadowrun
>melee

Human streetsam busted to the rim with ware and 6-7 Edge is a great way to beat both of these metatypes at melee. Especially since at Chargen you can get 18ish dice in blades as a human without losing any skills in other fields

Just pre-edge your melee attack and forget the accuracy.

Ignore the minmaxer propaganda. Anybody can be competent in any archetype regardless of their metarace. Magic and cyberware are great equalizers.

>Ways for non-greenskins to compete in melee
Monowhip.

Pic not related.

Bringing back the topic of the last thread, because of how utterly retarded it is: Rating 8-10 hosts are zero zone levels of security.

I've heard it's possible to run an optimal Elf Rigger/Mage in Hong Kong via a bug, but google ain't giving me anything. Anyone know what I'm talking about?

where have you heard this

have you heard this from these threads because that's probably me you're talking about

Yeah it was these threads. You had the pink colored character portrait, right?

there are two starting builds to choose from

a rigger, who does elf glitch and puts their initial points into rigging

or a mage, who does elf glitch and puts their points into being a mage

the mage is a weaker character but gets to pick up an induction datajack and orthoskin, which means +1 armour and an additional spell slot while the rigger starts with a datajack and thus loses a spell slot but is an easier character to play

basically at the end of each mission when tier 2 gear unlocks you want to buy a hermetic fetish each time until you have i think 5

your cyberware is going to be a datajck and wired reflexes

your spells are going to be flamethrower 3, flamethrower 4, chain lighting 1 and chain lightning 2

Personal sites, pirate archives, public education 1–2
Low-end commercial, private business, public libraries, small policlubs 3–4
Social media, small colleges and universities, local police, international policlubs 5–6
Matrix games, local corporate hosts, large universities, low-level government 7–8
Affluent groups, regional corporate hosts, major government, secure sites 9–10
Megacorporate headquarters, military command, clandestine head office 11–12

p.247 CRB

Not exactly sure what you mean by elf glitch, but I might just be stupid.

elf glitch is where at character creation you buy your totem with 9 karma (pick Boar) and then unbuy all those points

you can see i have 15 additional HP despite only having 9 body, this is due to elf glitch

i'm going to make a gamefaqs guide with all this info honestly and i don't even think this is a perfect character, right now i'm playing a rigger/adept/panther assault cannon character and it's going fine

Well except for Deckers. In 5th edition no metatype can be competent as a Decker period, because hacking sucks.

OP you lazy trogger.

>elf glitch is where at character creation you buy your totem with 9 karma (pick Boar) and then unbuy all those points
>unbuy
What did he mean by this?

Secure sites is code for 'zero zone'

All I want is a AAA Shadowrun video game. Is that so much to ask? I was looking forward to Cyberpunk 2077 but
>implying it'll ever come out

you put 3 karma into charisma then 6 karma into spirit control

you then select your totem and then unbuy your points by clicking on them

the other guy i explained this to intuitively got it
hong kong's pretty replayable man

>hong kong's pretty replayable man
Yeah but I've played it like six times, along with a bunch of the player created stuff. I love turn based games, I just want to see a Shadowrun game like the Witcher or something.

Okay I'll try.
But i lurked through the last threads and wouldn't a shock glove be pretty good ?
sure it's not as easy to hide like a monofilament whip, but it wont turn everybody into minced meat.
So could i make a character that just walks around and gives K.O. handshakes ?

>wanting Triple A in 2017

Trogs must be stopped. Humanis was right.

Stun weapons are hilariously superior, both mechanically and ethically.

Exactly, so a government metropole-wide Host is warranted to be Rating 8

>Bringing back the topic of the last thread, because of how utterly retarded it is: Rating 8-10 hosts are zero zone levels of security.
"Local police" is 5-6.

Though if you ask me, it's pretty cheesy to have host'd drones going miles away from the facility associated with it. And if any of these drones gets disabled and direct-connected by a hacker, then the whole system is done for.

So wait. What exactly is so bad about a level 8 host? It takes at least 2, on average around 7 combat turns (2D6) until a host like that even makes a matrix perception to spot me. So I hack some minor device, get my mark to enter the host and look around for a few passes. If nothing is to my liking, I jack out again and try again elsewhere/-when. Sure, should the host spot and - assuming you are in VR - linklock you, you are in deep shit. But mostly it sounds more like "wandering empty halls".

But that's just wrong. Especially for street sams. Playing a cyberjunkie elf right now. I easily sling 18ish dice both in melee and with a sniper rifle, and 12-15 across the Charisma skill range.

And while it might be tempting to rip out the throats of your enemies, never underestimate the value of grappling. If you can devote an initiative pass or two to it, you can set up a grapple that's functionally impossible to beat and then just plug them for flat damage every round.

Veeky Forums i need help. Anyone knows if there's any spanish translation of the game? Don't really care if it's official or fanmade, just wanna run a couple games without having to translate everything every time someone wants to check ... well, anything.

In this case it isn't the local police. It's the regional MVD headquarters. The relay network itself is vulnerable and that's the big drawback of using a drone army. If intelligent runners cause the local relay to crash or short out, well the police response time in that sector is doubled. Of course whatever will be sent is going to be HTR's heaviest of heavies.

A rating 8 Hosts rolls 16 to 19 dice to resist your matrix actions. Failure means you got a mark on you and are immediately spotted.

Plus, this is local police that are explicitly designed to operate off of replacing beatcops with anthrodrones. And as far as the distance between Host and drone, I'd imagine they work off of network hubs bound to each precinct. So each drone's never outside its district and might just not go outside of that range ala old school spirits with domains.

>A rating 8 Hosts rolls 16 to 19 dice to resist your matrix actions. Failure means you got a mark on you and are immediately spotted.
So how do you deal with that as a decker?

Stalk someone who works at the target area, chat them up in a bar and see if they spill anything. During this time you can also try pickpocketing their commlink or keys or something

You find a direct connection to a slaved device, which uses its own (crappy) stats to resist. From there, you get 3 marks on the object's nonexistent defense. A mark on a slave is a mark on the master, so now you have 3 marks on the host and are considered direct-connected to everything: the whole host is your playground.

That's one of the ways the game tries to coax hackers into running alongside the team in meatspace: so they can direct-connect into the host and have access to the entire system. Part of the run is finding a slaved device

Going toe-to-toe with a host, spiders, etc is a bad idea and will quickly get you rekt.

What helps to keep the network safe, other than the difficulty in disabling a dronecop, plugging into it, and then backdooring into the Host? Not looking to completely block off deckers from being able to do something like that, but I imagine that if it's that easy to do, it would be done pretty commonly.

Would it basically just be an MVD spider hotsimming in to look for intrusion when a drone goes on the fritz in the field, and then having the decker have to deal with a spider?

we can only hope cyberpunk 2077 is good

See

>What helps to keep the network safe, other than the difficulty in disabling a dronecop, plugging into it, and then backdooring into the Host? Not looking to completely block off deckers from being able to do something like that, but I imagine that if it's that easy to do, it would be done pretty commonly.

Host managers are very aware of this risk, so they try to only slave devices in relatively safe places, like the inside of a secure facility. That's why you don't have a massive host covering hundreds of security drones; it only takes one clever operation before every gun in the network is taking orders from some fatass neo-anarchist with an ipod.

That kind of vulnerability is one of the reasons why security drones are slaved to riggers rather than their precious bajillion-nuyen-a-month R8 hosts which manage everything important. Or just not slaved at all. Worst case, a decker gets access to a dozen drones maybe, rather than every drone, workstation, door, camera, and commlink slaved to the host.

I'm new to GMing Shadowrun and had a question about bad guys.
So in the back of the 20th anniversary4e book there like most core book some monsters/foes. my question is are there really only 2 examples for each type. 1 grunt and 1 boss? Is that enough? Are they meant to be templates to spring off from? Is there more in another book? Thanks for answering my retarded question

In this instance, the drones are always monitored in batches by MVD cyber division deckers and riggers. A single sector would have 5 riggers with each having twenty or so drones, the equivalent of 4 foot patrols.

If a drone is disconnected (as often happens) the rigger calls up the nearest armored patrol (This one led by human officers) to the scene to investigate.

It's funny that you mention neo-anarchists having stolen lots of drones because that happened and it's a thing my players solved. This gang had stolen over two hundred police drones and put them on their own network to do crime for them. The police had no fucking idea because the aforementionned protocol isn't really efficient.

And yes, there's two layers of security like I explained, the drones aren't linked to the Host at all, they're linked to an RCC that's part of a city-wide relay of RCCs. The host is protecting that relay however and yes it's a very big mistake and yes it's a vulnerability. But who said every system had to be airtight. Just park ten heavy drones and gun emplacements near every relay and surely nothing will come to them right ?

they are mostly there to show the general power level of each PR
so that you know "a grunt of PR 2 should be this strong"

Honestly ?
Most player won't notice it unless you are blatant about it.
One security guard is a buff dude and the other one an average ork.
Most mooks also don't think it's worth the trouble after getting hit once or twice and try to run away or lay low and deal with their wounds.

As a GM it's easy to forget that NPC's dont want to die and that players don't usually lokk at your dice pools, unless you bring a street ganger along who throws 12 dice with full automatic fire.
fuck my GM
As long as it fits the narrative it fits.

i see so reskining it is.

ah the good ol fudging the rules behind the DM screen.

Two of the crew would decorate the lair (they may or may not be fucking like rabbits), another would do some charity work for the local church, and the last 3 would be doing some bullshit abomination hunt.

So what are the pros and cons of mundane/cyber faces and awakened faces?

Nah Not directly fudging the rules, rather the guards just happen to have attributes that can fit into multiple metas and the narrative makes the difference.

>NPCs don't want to die
Seconded. Unless drugged up thrill ganger or highly conditioned people, most will value their own skin the most.

My players have also before hecking terrified of drones, because they are the remorseless killing machines they are.

I don't need it to be AAA. I just want it to have modding tools that allow custom assets.

>hong kong's pretty replayable man
You mean rereadable. There's not much gameplay to it.

>3) They are full of holes such that they can be circumvented entirely. A Decker can be made entirely irrelevant simply by disabling the wireless on most devices. The game never specifies that it can't done so you could, in theory have situations where a Decker is simply unable to hack anything because it's running on its own network without broad Matrix access and you can't jack into a gun turret and disable it WHEN It'S POINTING AT YOU. The only reason GMs tend to ignore this is social contract. But in-universe there's no justification for not doing this.
Number one reason I hate the grid so much because, ostensibly, the reason the grid was put up was to -stop- shenanigans like this, and yet it was also suddenly illegal to not put wireless devices on every single item in the game for -reasons-

>6) Even if you do EVERYTHING right, then there's G.O.D. It will fuck you over no matter how sneaky you are, is a contrived solution to a problem with the flimsiest in-universe explanation that doesn't make any sense and is all around just another layer of tediousness that was absolutely not needed.
Number two reason I hate 5e with a burning passion. Asking us to believe the corporations would allow anyone at all to have oversight over them, rather than using the corporate court as a giant beat stick to fuck with anyone who breaks the rules too egrariously (such as when Aztechnology forced all other corporations out of Aztlan). The corporate court isn't something the corporations trust, it's just a necessary fucking tool to get the job done and make sure that corporate wars don't spiral out of control. It's got exactly as much power as it needs to have to do that and not an inch more. GOD would never be given enough resources to be more than a joke, and sure as HELL wouldn't be given the right to ignore extraterritoriality on the matrix. Nobody would trust that their rival corp's agents in GOD wouldn't abuse the position.

And shit like this? Which was expounded upon, in enormous detail in 4e, and barely touched in 5e as I recall, is the third reason.

A good hacker has some face and some rigger mixed in just because that's how you fucking get the job done.

Sounds pretty interesting. So you basically just have precincts with their own relays which are part of the greater Host? Where MVD riggers ping suspicious activity on their drones and MVD spiders stop pretending to work and actually do their jobs to look for intrusion from someone backdooring in with a disabled drone.

Sounds like a system that's devoted to getting the job done and efficiency being an afterthought. So a really talented Decker could potentially have some fun, but only do so much before attracting attention. You know, that actually sounds like an amazing set-up for a police-focused game. Playing as the flesh-and-blood MVD officers that aren't quite an HTR team but also don't just do tedious foot patrols all day, every day.

but human+lucky will always be the godmode option if they max edge. "EVEN I DON'T KNOW HOW I'M ROLLING 17 DICE TO SHOOT!"

Social Adept (a form of mystic or physical adept) tends to be superior in my experience. Cybernetics means you can -usually- get away with it without anybody knowing, even other mages, but a really -really- good social adept can also mask how much mojo they're pumping into it. The best face I've ever played with was a social adept who could roll, when he really tried, 18 dice to convince people of shit, but he was the most cowardly motherfucker in the world. You didn't even have to draw a gun, growling threateningly and shoving him into a wall tended to do the job. So he tended to sit out of runs and sip coffee at the nearest coffee stand while reading the news on his glasses until stuff started to explode.

>drones aren't linked to the Host at all, they're linked to an RCC that's part of a city-wide relay of RCCs. The host is protecting that relay

That's not how slaving works.

If drone is slaved to an RCC, and the RCC is slaved to a host, then all the problems come back. A mark on a drone means a mark on the RCC, which means a mark on the host.

Faces who rely on cyberware/bioware have a super high entry fee. Most of the ware is designed for socialites trying to edge each other out so it can get pretty expensive if you're trying to keep up with the Jones'. However, like most ware builds, you are given a lot of wiggle room to branch out into other archetypes so that you can fulfill multiple roles on a team if need be. The only limit cap on your progress is your money and your essence. Both you'll have plenty of if you play your cards right.

Magical faces are arguably superior, mostly due to the fact that the nature of the social magics are more difficult to defend against by most mundies. A half-assed pornomancer is a walking date-rape drug who can practically talk the guns right out of security's hands by asking nicely. And like ware-based faces, pornomancers can easily fulfill alternate roles in the team that allow them to stay relevant long after the cocktail party is over and guns are pulled. There is one substantial weakness of pornomancers that their cyborgsexual counterparts don't share. Its the weakness that all magical runners share: Their limiter is their karma. Where nuyen typically flows like wine in Italy, karma can be much more difficult to amass, especially for those who will see exponential costs in raising their Magic ratings and Initiations (which are needed for Adepts who need Power Points to improve or gain new powers). And of course, mages also suffer from the usual stigmas: fear and mistrust from the general public, fear and mistrust from the enemy ("geek the mage first!"), and a generally polite society that doesn't take kindly to the walking daterape drug using her daterape magic on them.

>you can be a Free Insect Spirit in 5e, but not a normal Free Spirit
Why?

Arguably there's a transition path for an existing character to become a true form insect spirit that doesn't exist for free spirits.

>Where nuyen typically flows like wine in Italy, karma can be much more difficult to amass, especially for those who will see exponential costs in raising their Magic ratings and Initiations
what kind of games so you play in where this is true? because going by the book rewards that is untrue. Money given is small and is further reduced by side and maintenance cost, while karma is a steady stream, only used for advancing. most mages and adepts are able to initiate after ~2 runs, while the mundanes can hardly advance, if they advance at all

Face is basically a karma-generating class due to the heavy amount of roleplaying and deal-making it entails, which a majority of GMs are wont to reward with bonus karma. Making more nuyen is a matter of logistics and attrition, where more money equals more problems (bigger jobs, bigger hits, bigger targets, bigger heat), but dealing with people of all kinds is a consistent and low-pressure source of karma that comes into play regardless of what kind of runs you sign up for.

Even faced with the exponential costs, Awakened Faces get the advantage of scaling most of their abilities on two stats: Magic and Initiation. Throw on foci with a pittance of the nuyen they don't need to spend on augs, and you have a highly efficient pornomancer. Even outside of the mathemagics, sidegrades for edge and corner cases are easy to get at 5 Karma a pop - they're called spells.

Has any of your GMs ever used drakes in an interesting way?

once. We helped extract one of Lofwyr's drakes from Sader-Krupt. That was a wild goddamn ride, because we weren't told anything except that we were extracting an asset from the place, and they were willing to pay an AMAZING amount of money, there was no time table, and they garunteed protection.

Turned out the Johnson was Hestabee and she was trying to help one of Lofwyr's drakes get free and start his own life. Unfortunately we waited for the perfect moment to strike and while the operation went -perfectly- it happened on the same day Hestabee's lair got invaded by the dragon council thing.

>GOD would never be given enough resources to be more than a joke, and sure as HELL wouldn't be given the right to ignore extraterritoriality on the matrix.

Personally I find it fascinating after this many additional books in and G.O.D has not been explained in any detail whatsoever. There's this core mismatch between game mechanics and fluff, it's so gamey, like we're just supposed to accept this total contrivance for the sake of mechanics.

G.O.D is an absolute nonsense. Its agents supposedly have unrivaled and unparalleled lordship over the Matrix, they can go anywhere they want and detect everything given enough time. And they can't be interacted with in any way. It's not like a corporate Spider who you can whack on the head with a stick in meat-space and problem solved, it's like G.O.D's agents don't exist outside the Matrix. Like at all.

And for something so mysterious and influential, you'd think they'd go into some detail about it, but no. It's like it exists solely for the purpose of gameplay mechanics and I absolutely hate it.

But Hestabee would just enslave him.

Groups I've been in, or rather the GMs who ran them, were always generous with monetary rewards, whether it was from big jobs, side hustles, or whatever. I couldn't tell you if they were skimpy on Karma or not, but we generally all received the same amounts at the end of the mission, though I admittedly forgot that bonus Karma was a thing since it's never came up. In general though, it would take several jobs (a few months of weekly games) before any of my magical characters could make any sort of meaningful improvement. But we were usually rolling in fat stacks of cash. Enough to keep us and our guns fed while maintaining a comfortable lifestyle.

Unless they, you know, protect the cables. With concrete and steal. and therefore deny you the access points and only turn on wireless when performing Matrix maintenance.

And even if the wiring is exposed, you have to get to it first. I want to see you jacking into a gun turret that is pointed at you and shooting you from 30 yards across the square.

...

Hey, I'm just saying what -we- were told and what the drake apparently believed! We never found out what would have happened because we said "well, you're out, we burned your sin hard, hopefully all of it, but we're done here, we gotta go to ground -now- because Lofwyr is gonna fucking eat us if we're in the same hemisphere as you. We don't want to know where you're going or what you plan, and we don't want to know because maybe then we'll be too much effort to track down, or he'll just brain rape ONE of us and then let the rest of us go or not hunt the rest of us."

Did you see the word slaving in there, anywhere, at all? I mean, look at the text you greentexted. The RCCs aren't slaved to the host.

You don't.

More precisely, you don't assail Hosts of Rating 5 and above. Ever.

You jack directly into sub-icons slaved to the Host and get the marks on the Host that way. Which yes, might simply be impossible, depending on how much of a faggot your GM is.

Hacking in 5th edition, once you strip down all the bullshit, is essentially left to the GM's discretion. You will be able to do exactly what he allows you to do, nothing more, nothing less.

GMs make up for a lot of the whiteroom antics that are spewed here like they were word of GOD, but GMs being individual humans can't necessarily be expected to perform consistently compared to each other let alone fairly (for any definition of fair). They're all statistical outliers that form around the rule and any reports concerning them are, naturally, anecdotal.

That said, it does help to regularly discuss GM strategies and house rules to account for the foibles of the Shadowrun system. If only the system didn't need so many.

Mostly by physically blocking access points to those devices. You know, with walls and floors. If a camera is watching you and the access point to jack into it is on the other side of the wall, good look hacking it.

at least she got to ride a dragon

>is essentially left to the GM's discretion
Why don't they just make it work like magic already

>by-the-book run payouts are small
I don't understand where this idea comes from.

A run that is worth mentioning (outnumbered 3-to-1, highest opposing diepool 12-15 = x4 price multiplier) is racking up 12,000¥ per runner before the unopposed price negotiation. A paltry 4 hits on that brings it up to 13,600¥ for a single job. A real face however would be pre-edging that roll every time.

Even for a milk run where the highest opposing diepool is 8, the runners still get 6,000¥ each before negotiation or cold-heartedness.

Which is absolutely fucking nothing, user. These people are risking their lives, and gear costs are FUCKING INSANE.

That is hardly enough to cover the cost of ammo used up during the run, most of the time.

>Did you see the word slaving in there, anywhere, at all?

Then explain to me how drones are "linked" to an RCC without being slaved to it. Or how a host "protects" an RCC without slaving it.

They did, for Technomancers, and it fucked everything up even worse. Technomancers are now completely unplayable unless they go pure sprite summoner.

That's mostly because of the fucked up shit with Overwatch which is a base Matrix thing

For Technomancers to work the whole Matrix has to work

like Deckers can, in theory, function. Technomancers literally can't because if they do a single thing with complex forms that's useful then it'll cause such hard fading they tend to pass out or even die immediately

here. How much money are you spending on gear post-chargen? I've never had a problem with maintaining stock, mostly because I am one of those shopping list sorts that buys a bunch of stuff at chargen "just in case". Real question, not a shitpost or any sort of accusation. I'm just curious. Beyond ammo and maybe the occasional grenade, what are you using that cannot be used again later?

That's per-runner. Every runner gets 13,600¥

>That is hardly enough to cover the cost of ammo used up during the run
Are you shooting nothing but missiles and EX EX suppression fire? My sammy got by with gel rounds and normal bullets just fine. Right tool for the right job.

CHRISTMAS MILK RUN!

Very new to Shadowrun, and currently remuz is down so I have no sources

What, exactly, do street sams and riggers do to protect against getting hacked?

Is it WIL? a skill?
Again, very new; it's my first runner

Getting shitfaced and trying to pull a santa (he's the infiltrator so it might work)

I'll be honest with you buddy, if a highly illegal and dangerous activity doesn't set me for at least a year of my life, it's not worth my time. I can just, you know, work. Like a normal person.