/srg/ - Shadowrun General

>Loving_Family.btl
Probably more embarrassing than a sex tape is a runner's short stint doing wholesome vanilla skits about corp life. Imagine your jacked up cybersam in a frilly pink apron baking a casserole for dinner and casually firing with their actor spouse over fish washing.

Hell I bet this is the basis for a lot of intermeta softcore porn targeting Humanis members.

>intermeta softcore porn targeting Humanis members

>implying they aren't all slotting BTLs to experience getting cuckolded by muscular ork chads

Gotta stoke the fires of hatred somehow.

Tough and Targeted!
The only neg quality that delivers loot directly to you! Even better (read as MORE LOOT) if you start game with a Tamanous contact!
It's completely foolproof! Check it:
STEP 1: Get Tough and Targeted
STEP 2: Kill everyone who fights you to try to steal your sweet sweet people juice/cyber/whatever
STEP 3: ????
STEP 4: PROFIT

>>ITS THAT EASY

>unlikely
theres a 0% chance it was legit they rigged the fuck out of it in their favor

Shit ideal, magerunner.

Thats very far away from being a problem.

>outside the renton humanis policlub local meeting there stands a rather shady looking human, eyes shifting side to side as he stands by the boot of a car

>humanis meeting lets out, one man walks up

>"step right up, we got your orc cuck, dwarf-hole-fuck, elf trapboi, and, of course, your troll-on-top. What's your flavor, chum?"

>"I-I'll take the sampler"

>Not immediately buying every elf trapboi btl he's got

Imagine how horrific BTLs are.
They're a program that you buy, it works for two hours, and then it self destructs.
We've got to get pirates on this shit.

which part is the horror, chum? the loot box style consumability or the self destructing? I figure that they probably plug out of your brain before deleting. It is probably possible to go hunting for the master files, as a btl addicted PC? There have got to be ways to copy from a master to a delete-able file or else producing btls for high level shit would be more expensive than anything else. Can anybody tell me if there are rules on what you have to do in order to create BTLs as runners? Hotsim modules are pretty much a given, but what else?

hey man, why not just go to the leather devils for that OG stuff?

Lads I need help. Haven't played in years and a mate convinced me to dust off my old 4e books and grab chummer and join in a game, and I don't remember shit.

Trying to make a Norse Tradition Melee mage because fuck the gm's high tech tokyo drift campaign I want to sing Galdr and swing an axe. Mostly goin for flavor but I'd like not to gimp myself. Help?

Give me your most munchkin build of adepts or street sam

Wired reflexes. Full stop. That shit, and all of its mystic equivalents, are broken as fuck.

Recently hit a dry-streak of no game, no life. Anyone willing to share a couple stories from their table to tide me over while I look for/try to start a new game?

I rigged our hideout to explode so I could kill the rest of the players if they double crossed me/ it benefited me?

I hunted down a young woman and broke her spine with my bare hands before immolating her with a molotov cocktail.?

I spent an entire session following the group without anyone but the dm knowing with a sniper rifle so I could kill our face if things went sideways?

I killed 4 Gangers using a bomb disguised as a hogie sandwich?

>I spent an entire session following the group without anyone but the dm knowing with a sniper rifle so I could kill our face if things went sideways?

Geez, that did the face ever do to you? Care to elaborate?

Always no, except in ED, in some of the situations OP mentioned. There is literally no evidence for reincarnation aside from the 'path of the wheel' cooked up by an arsehole, and another immortal rolling up and saying "no, this is all bullshit".

Put simply

>really important run
>all hinges on the face
>potential for backstab that would make him stupid rich and we had reason to believe would solve some of his problems
>face has debts and checkered past and is shady and untrustworthy as fuck (actually was a really great bit of roleplay)
>acting more shifty than usual. (Again, great roleplay by that guy)
>Several people are half convinced he's going to try something, but they are too used to the party mindset to really believe it or act on it.
> I'm not
>text gm and have him tell themy character is hungover/coming off of a bad drug trip (horse shit, my body was ungodly)
>wait until they leave, follow. Watch face through scope.
>nearly plug him when he deviates from plan, only catch on at last second he wasn't betraying us just reacting to changing circumstances.

Really nothing fancy to be honest.

>init enhancements
>broken
It makes characters relevant in combat, able to stand up to low-power enemies. There's nothing broken about it, it just makes street sams capable of doing their jobs.

I mean unless you consider "I can easily defeat basic mall cops" to be broken? They're not meant to be challenging in combat like a dnd encounter, they're just road blocks to slow the PCs down while HTR rushes to the scene.

>not double crossing them with a hail of gunfire and blaming it on the face anyway if you fuck up, keeping the extra money
???

It's possible our experiences have been different. It's also possible my dm sucks at his job and I've never played real shadowrun, but im my experience that shit is broken. Taken more turns than everyone else, and jumping higher on the turn order, makes you just frankly better than anyone who can't keep up. It gets to the point where everyone has to have it just to stay relevent or the guy who has it ends up as a one man show who just waltzes through everything.

Ah, but I did not have the contacts to make the double cross pay off for me. I was getting more for doing the job than I would have if I tried to go solo.

That's about right: Having 2-3 initiative passes makes a character relevant in fights, having just 1 makes a character mostly irrelevant in combat. Anyone who wants to participate meaningfully in a fight needs 2 or more initiative passes per turn; otherwise you're just wasting space, soaking bullets, and maybe putting down suppressive fire sometimes. I think in game-design terms it's an entry barrier to the niche that street sams occupy, so that the face can't just put 6 dice in firearms and outperform the sammy.

You were probably fighting enemies who couldn't hold a candle to your street sam. That's not necessarily a bad thing; only powerful foes are meant to pose a serious challenge in direct combat. He might also have been rolling well or using powerful weapons or tactics..

If anyone thinks the Init arms race isn't trash, invite them to play Eclipse Phase, where they took Shadowruns init, removed any sort of dice randomization so its literally just "2 speed = 2 turns" and removed spending Init as a currency and see how you like having 1 speed with a 3 speed guy around.

Shadowrun is that but with mitigating factors still in place, and its already bad and eats up huge amounts of chargen resources.

"Here are some reasons why the thing might be the thing."
"TRAAAAASSSHHHH."

>be mage
>do all real legwork
>take out 1 guard lethally
>entire group freaks out
>psychopathic mys/adept attempts to PvP mid run
>PvP ends up eventually with 2 players out. 1 in a car, 1 in the hospital who will go to jail
>DM in a hissy fit kicks two players and kills his group because he doesn't like conflict 2 days later despite using /srg/ to recruit players

You know who you are =^)

He's still got 3 non-shit players. I'm sure they'll be fine.

If you did something that caused your whole group to freak out, and it caused all this shit, it sounds like you were 1000% THAT GUY.

Other guy here, I will say I did not conduct myself well at all here, but it became readily apparent that the two of us were absolutely not going to play well together in the long run. I finally got the boot for passive aggressive smartass comments as we discussed the fallout. I'm guessing he got kicked for being a creep in general. The incident itself came down to poor communication but it ended up revealing quite a bit.

Is it viable to make a monowire whip/grenade throwing adept?

Don't see why not. Adepts get quite a few things to work with throwing weapons and monowire whips are scary as shit.

Monowhips are arguably the best melee weapons in the game
>12P, AP -8
>no strength needed, only agility
>can roll up to in your fingertip

Only real downside is you basically can't justify doing stun damage with it, so any time you're using it is because you want something to stop being alive. Even the mishaps are pretty unlikely if you have the kind of diepool an adept should be rocking.

The problem was that no one had actually decided on a plan straight out or discussed in character really. Doing a basic milk run and offing a single guard shouldn't warrant people freaking out in shadowrun of all things.

Its not being that guy to force a group of passive players who can't make up their mind to come to a decision and see a fucking milkrun done in less than 4 hours.

You weren't bad at all. You roleplayed your character really well. Infact I would recommend playing with you again. Just gotta work on the communication is all OOC.

I know some of you here play in or GM text-only games of Shadowrun. Do you have any advice to give that differs from the standard stuff?

Text only can be really helpful for letting players feel more comfortable RPing. As such I encourage you to spend a little extra time with RPing mundane situations. You might find out some interesting things about your player's characters.

Always give your players something to look at. You won't have a map for every situation but at least have up a map of the city with their tokens moving around to the different areas. I find that when I'm just staring at blank screen for 10 minutes it gets really tough to stay focused.

I've had weirdly similar experiences with Dark Heresy through discord. Reasonable shit happens, an NPC dies, and the GM Burns it all to the ground in a fit of childishness.

Would you hug a honey bee?

I ran for /srg/ and 50% of the group bailed, one had to be kicked because they were threatening other players, one was a cool dude, and the last one was a 45 year old man pretending to scam nudes from one of the people who bailed and thus bailed once she left.

Pretending to be a girl to scam nudes*

I then ran for Veeky Forums instead of just /srg/, got two players and one player bailed midway through the first session because she didn't like rolling dice (Her actual reasoning) and the other one didn't know any of the rules but we had fun any way.

My players once got in a high speed chase down the interstate with the US Army and one PC ended up doing so many combat stims during the chase that he died from stun damage.

Glorious.

>it's okay for the mage to be the center of attention for arcane encounters, the hacker for virtual encounters or tech scenes, the face for social encounters and so on
>but the street sam must not dominate the combat scene!

Not him, but I can kinda understand his position.
>How often are arcane encounters? Not often
>How long do they take? Not long
So it's okay not to be able to contribute since the time will be short and rare

>How often are virtual encounters? Medium often
>How long do they take? Medium long to long
This is basically the complaint about pizzatime

>How often are social encounters? Medium often
>How long do they take? Not that long
Again it's okay to have it.

>How often does combat happen? Medium to very often
>How long does it take? TOO FUCKING LONG
so having the other players sit there and think "Man, this is so boring" for an hour is not okay

But the problem is less
>the other players don't want the Sammies to get their own time to shine
and more
>Combats are too fucking long for the rest to sit out.

streamline combats and I think most would be fine with the Sammy taking the lead and the rest playing second fiddle

Basic combat competency costs what, decent AGI (which you should have), a machine pistol (which is easy to get) and 11-21 initiative?

Your average player is probably rolling 1d6+7-9 for their init off the bat, so there's that. And a 3 in pistols, plus smartlink, will give them a guaranteed success or two to throw around. So yeah.

The amount of resources the sam invests in initiative is too damn much anyway.

Seriously what the shit is up with wired reflexes and essence?

Well, essence cost is so people who would be broken with multiple initiative passes (magicians for example) weren't as bro-

Oh wait, they have 5 karma spell for that.

It's the same problem the deckers and Riggers have: Trying to make it be a high entry price, to separate areas.
Too bad that it also means that once you are in, you'll be unlikely to ever advance.

3.5 power points, or 15 karma for a mysadept and you have the equivalent of 300000 nuyen and the majority of a street samurais soul.

The deck prices are just ridiculous for something that's basically a refluffed custom laptop.

they tried to "fix" the problem of everyone being able to contribute to matrix stuff (by throwing Hackastacks around), but ended too far in the opposite direction

>they tried to "fix" the "problem"
Fixed.
Others being able to contribute to decking is the closest Shadowrun has ever gotten to sensible hacking rules.

3.5 power points, or 15 karma for a mysadept

To be fair you have to buy MAG and Mysad quality too.

>Not using sum to ten.

>Not buying the mag anyway if you're going to be a mysadept

Why would you be a mysadept without any magic points?

>sum to ten
Karmagen is better, fite me fgt.

Karmagen is for minmaxing turbofaggots.

I wish life modules worked better, because then it would honestly be my favourite. I love it in systems like traveller.

There are no official rules to create your own BTL, but it shouldn't be that hard: trideo recording equipment and simrigs for the base recording, and then let a decker/programmer loose upon it to jack the relevant parts to eleven.

Post music that's good for fight scenes

youtube.com/watch?v=l9jLq26pV4A

According to what I can seem to find out, the grand ayatollah of Iran who declared a fatwah against magic was a fucking Sunni.

How do you fuck this up?

Shia islam and sufists are just fucking dead in Shadowrun.

Yes
with superior firepower

Okay from a scala from 1 to 10, how stupid is SRs application of technology?

Depends on what area, ranges from 2 to 9. The average probably being at about a 6.5

That's kind of hilarious. Esp. since Iran isn't even part of the Caliphate.

Ayatollah is NOT A SUNNI TITLE. The title is blasphemous as per most Sunni readings.

Okay, what would be the prime example ?
I'm asking for a friend.

Of stupid?

How about the fact that what is essentially a high end laptop costs anywhere between twenty thousand and half a million bucks?

How about the fact that silicone breast implants literally take away part of your soul?

How about the fact that you can connect your spine to the internet, and if it is connected to wifi it can interact with a reaction enhancer, but if it isn't the two don't work together.

How about the fact that you can connect your riot shield to the cloud to make it charge by induction?

>How about the fact that what is essentially a high end laptop costs anywhere between twenty thousand and half a million bucks?
High-end laptops are commlinks. Decks are specialized hacking equipment.
>How about the fact that silicone breast implants literally take away part of your soul?
More like "body association with itself". But yeah, at least cosmetic bioware should restore essence paid for it overtime.
>How about the fact that you can connect your spine to the internet, and if it is connected to wifi it can interact with a reaction enhancer, but if it isn't the two don't work together
Wireless was a mistake.
>How about the fact that you can connect your riot shield to the cloud to make it charge by induction?
Cars OF THE FUTURE charge from grid, so...

I mean, it's dumb, but it's plausible.

>Wireless was a mistake

Meh, if you start from the postulate "everything is always connected to the Matrix, all the time", then it make sense to have compatibility issues solved with external software than extra hardware.

>High-end laptops are commlinks. Decks are specialized hacking equipment.

No, decks are literally an adaption of "Decks" from the 80s, which are primitive laptops. Their use is described the same way laptops are, including installing fucking video games on them.

Further, even if they were, this is a fucking society in which basic street gangs have hackers available with gear that costs tens of thousands of dollars.

Further, further, comm link are smart phones. Their prevalence and wide use is an adaption of the spreading use of smartphones.

>More like "body association with itself". But yeah, at least cosmetic bioware should restore essence paid for it overtime.

No, soul.
Because if essence loss was just dysphoria I'd be all about that, but it *explicitly* is not just that.
The only time it is dysphoria is the time its mentioned that sex change operations don't cost essence.

>Cars OF THE FUTURE charge from grid, so...

Why does my riot shield need to use cloud computing to active this feature?
Why does my fucking secret surgically implanted compartment have cloud computing software?

Commlinks are basically laptops in 4e. The only change in their functionality is they can't hack anymore.

Further, in 5e, they're described as doing things laptops do.

A smartphone is pretty much a laptop that fits in your hand nowadays. Computers are converging.

my GM just throws worthless punks at me, sometimes not even 1k nuyen of value. Fun quality, I'm just waiting for one to come after me while I'm bleeding out and burnt out after a run then we'll have a fair fight

I think there used to be rules for making BTLs. Maybe in 3e's Cannon Companion?

>What's the best Neg trait for RP?

Wanted, always and forever. It's the "Make Me The Main Character" quality.

I like lost loved one personally. Comes with built in motivation for the character.

Except doing it by invalidating actual deckers and technomancers is bad design. It's like if anyone could be as good as the streetsam by just buying a Smartgun X.

The best solution is probably between those.
On one hand you don't want to invalidate the decker (which is why just Commlink hacking can't be the solution. You need Skill requirements for it)
On the other you don't want pizzatime, which is that the decker parts are long and only the decker can do anything to contribute

So there are two solutions:
>People are able to help contribute to a decker's job, while still being secondary to him. A decker should be to matrix as Sammies are to combat: Dangerous forces that normal people can't compare to. Maybe have them provide him with more entry points, or let him use their brainpower to assist him, or whatever
>People are not able to contribute meaningfully, but it's short enough(see EotM)

How do I run a game where everyone is a captain planet villain?

>be GM
>unsure how to handle tough and targeted because I have basic craftyness abilities in real life
Does the rule get very specific on that quality?
Because there are SO many ways to kill a guy that are not based in combat.

Honestly?
I feel that if we reduce the cloud computing, and make decking take longer, suddenly people have things to do while the decker is decking.

Oh no! The decker is having trouble getting through a particularly tough part of the firewall! Good thing the firewall is kept on-site, and can be detonated whenever you feel like.
Oh shit, this one's swarming with ICE! Good thing there is a decker den in this building that you can disable the power to.

I like arranging runs to have numerous interlinked points of strength that actually have physical and matrix locations, so players can systemically take apart the defenses of a place if they like.

It is an idea I cribbed 100% off of cryptark.

so basically instead of increasing Speed and abstraction (pulling multiple steps into one/few) and thus making the decker take less time to do the same things, you want to slow him down to "mundane" speeds and make it run in parallel?

Eh, not a personal favorite, but I can see the appeal

It can lead to interesting scenarios like the face controlling the circuit breaker for the firewall, and toggling it on and off when the decker indicates to gib incoming deckers.

>circuit breaker for the firewall
Why the fuck would you make your firewall (a piece of system) connected to a physical part of the building and why would it be accessible at all?
Why would someone say "You know what would be great? If some dumbass could come in and remove the entire security of our network"

because the firewall is in fact like 6 bighuge computer towers that all have a range of technology on them that includes touch screens and tape-reel memory.

That sounds pretty dumb, Trip-dub-user.
A firewall is a part of your OS, not a physical part.
And I don't see a reason why it should be.

And even if it WAS a physical component, why should you be able to shut it down with just one circuit breaker? It probably has half a dozen redundancies to prevent it from going off. The rest of the system is not as important as the Firewall.

you are not prepared for the level of corporate hellscape I am here to provide.

I am not prepared for the level of SysOP Stupidity you are here to provide, yes

so i could see a corp having a series of servers that manage security negotiation between intranet and extranet machines and kill a connection if it inst doing things the way the corp wants it to be done, but this asks the question what the pieces of meat can do to make it easier for the decker. maybe they can bring a female to female ethernet connector or replace a member of the server rack with a machine owned by someone's fake sin, but this requires a lot of gm shepherding to even be on the table. It doesn't seem like an easily workable way to do things.