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Kai Tave posted:This is a fair point, but then again buying a new spell isn't especially onerous in terms of karma. For, I guess it's still 5 karma as of the current edition, you can decide "y'know, I'd like to learn how to turn invisible." So it's true that a mage can't literally do everything magic, but they have a lot of flexibility when it comes to shoring up whatever gaps they feel the need to fill in their list of options. Which suggests the solution might be to introduce a proficiency system for programs--it's not just good enough to have a program that times traffic light changes to crash cars together, you also have to know how it works. Frank Trollman (of all people) actually made a hacking system for 4e which worked like spellcasting, in which hackers got effects like 'brick cyberarm' and 'jam gun' as standard actions. An interesting idea, and well filled out with goofy fluff, but it fell down when it came to answer the question, "why not take everything off the internet," because his answer was, "If you don't have a commlink running a firewall on your brain, a hacker can mindcontrol you wirelessly, reprogram your personality, or kill you by melting your brainstem."
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Aug 28, 2013 00:09
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Because flashbang grenades automatically bounce off all barriers, you can carry around a cardboard box. During combat, you throw out a flashbang and then get inside the box before it goes off and be perfectly fine while everything else in the room dies from all the stun damage.
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Aug 28, 2013 00:11
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I think you can ignore the floor counting as a barrier since ultimately there will be almost no situations you are ever NOT on some sort of floor. There was an interesting discussion on the SR forums about Max Magic rating and Essence. Since Max Magic is always = to Essence, you can have a practical Magic rating of 0 and not lose your abilities but just be unable to use them. It gets weirder if you take Exceptional Attribute (Magic), then you can have 5.99 essence of ware and still have 1 point of Magic Maximum. The rules actually back this up: quote:If your What's funny is that they explicitly changed this rule for 5th edition. All previous editions have had "Magic = 0, you are burned out forever and all Active magical skills become Knowledge skills." I honestly can not think of any good reason for the change, but here it is. I guess the question is do you pay 5 karma to raise Magic from 0 to 1? I guess so. Anyway, this opens up some potentially bizarre situations out of chargen, like lots of Magic D Adepts with a shitload of ware and a couple points of Magic raised with bonus karma.
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Aug 28, 2013 00:17
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Bigass Moth posted:I think you can ignore the floor counting as a barrier since ultimately there will be almost no situations you are ever NOT on some sort of floor. You can't ignore the floor, the rules specifically mention the six surfaces in a small room counting for chunky salsa.
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Aug 28, 2013 00:27
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I need a full guide on how to deal with ongoing/incoming grenade because this is just too deadly to miss out on any tricks.Bigass Moth posted:I guess the question is do you pay 5 karma to raise Magic from 0 to 1? I guess so. 
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Aug 28, 2013 00:48
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Nyaa posted:I need a full guide on how to deal with ongoing/incoming grenade because this is just too deadly to miss out on any tricks. Outgoing: Step 1: See a guy in standard room with 3 meter high ceilings (we will ignore walls for this, they aren't even needed). Step 2: Throw a flashbang grenade at his feet. Step 3: The initial upwards blast goes up 3 meters to the ceiling and bounces, goes down 3 meters to the floor and bounces, goes up 3 meters to the floor and bounces, goes down 1 meter. We'll assume he is less than 3 meters tall, so the inital upwards blast hits him 3 times. Step 4: The initial downwards blast bounces up after no distance for 3 meters up to the ceiling, down 3 meters to the floor, up 3 meters to the ceiling, down 1 meter. This also hits him 3 times. Step 5: Flashbangs have no damage falloff, so each hit adds 10S damage. He takes 60S and explodes, since stun damage overflows to physical and there isn't any way he is going to soak that. Incoming: Step 1: Be a guy in a standard room with 3 meter high ceilings. Step 2: Die You can't even miss with a thrown flashbang - the maximum scatter distance is 6 meters, and the blast radius is 10 meters with no damage falloff.
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Aug 28, 2013 01:16
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How do you square this with "Getting blown up with a grenade tends to suck really bad."? I mean, it sorta seems similar to complaining that getting hit by a missile tends to be a one hit kill. Grenades are kind of a big deal. Kinda reminds me of 4e Arsenal's blurb on IEDs; they're devastating, and there's not much that can be done about them. They suggest not including them in your game, so the Players don't have to write up new characters every session.
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Aug 28, 2013 01:27
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Rockopolis posted:How do you square this with "Getting blown up with a grenade tends to suck really bad."? A flashbang grenade is 6R and costs 100 nuyen.
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Aug 28, 2013 01:32
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Rockopolis posted:How do you square this with "Getting blown up with a grenade tends to suck really bad."? Honestly I would probably ignore the enclosed area/bouncing/whatever rules and just house rule it that 'grenades do X damage out to Y distance with Z falloff' and leave the chunky salsa stuff for cinematic effect as descriptors. I've only glanced over the actual rules for them but going by how they're being talked about in this thread they are WAY too deadly.
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Aug 28, 2013 01:33
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WarLocke posted:Honestly I would probably ignore the enclosed area/bouncing/whatever rules and just house rule it that 'grenades do X damage out to Y distance with Z falloff' and leave the chunky salsa stuff for cinematic effect as descriptors. Something like this is what I would do. Also, there's currently no way to dodge a grenade or throw it back, which is stupid.
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Aug 28, 2013 01:37
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Yeah, our low power street game is getting owned hard by the grenades. MohawkSatan have to burn his edge just because of that.
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Aug 28, 2013 01:42
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Missile Parry lets you grab grenades out of the air, but doesn't do much good since they explode anyway.
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Aug 28, 2013 01:42
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Rockopolis posted:How do you square this with "Getting blown up with a grenade tends to suck really bad."? I am not a trained law enforcement professional or military type person but when your system leads to flashbang grenades causing someone to die five times over then somewhere along the line you hosed something up. Flashbangs can cause physical harm, but they shouldn't be gibbing people as a matter of course. Beyond the incredible super-deadly "less lethal" grenade trick, there's the fact that, as Piell has shown, grenades are incredibly lethal even to someone wearing relatively heavy armor even not taking chunky salsa rules into effect and, as Milton points out, there's no way to dodge, dive for cover, or attempt to throw a grenade back. Someone lobs a grenade at you and you're pretty much hosed. Shadowrun's combat is all over the place at the best of times, but I don't think it particularly benefits from hand grenade spam being a thing for the system to encourage.
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Aug 28, 2013 01:42
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Mystic Mongol posted:Which suggests the solution might be to introduce a proficiency system for programs--it's not just good enough to have a program that times traffic light changes to crash cars together, you also have to know how it works. Is Frank Trollman actually known in Shadowrun? I know he did some writing for 4th ed, but I know he had a big falling out with the Catalyst dudes. He's been a pretty active contributor to a board I used to post on and have checked out occasionally for awhile. I read his matrix rules and they seemed written specifically to address the seeming imbalance between magic and matrix. You could fire stun bolts and do some control stuff, but it's not much different from magic. I thought about using the rules, mostly because they made a lot of the whole matrix being everywhere make some more sense, but I wasn't quite sold on going full hog, and didn't wanna mod them. Actually for the game I ended up running afterwards, nobody wanted to bother with hacking and left it to dudes they hired.
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Aug 28, 2013 02:31
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He hit that thing where he decides "Screw you guys, I'm going to make my OWN game! It will be a billion times better!" Last I checked it never got off the ground and every single thing they had planned for it was the most terrible thing.
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Aug 28, 2013 02:35
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alansmithee posted:Is Frank Trollman actually known in Shadowrun? Known for being a huge, obnoxious pain in the rear end and loudmouthed egotist, mainly. I know he wrote for them but, and admittedly this is all coming second-hand so grain of salt, his contributions weren't anything incredibly extensive and afterwards he basically kept pestering the people at Catalyst to use more of his "brilliant ideas" even when they weren't interested.
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Aug 28, 2013 02:39
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Yeah, if you throw a flashbag into an average-sized room, your average heavy in full body armor will be reduced to chunks of meat. Aside from being absurd and game-breaking, that actually prevents a flashbang from being a flashbang; The idea being that it's a grenade you can use during room clearing when you don't want to just kill everyone inside, as there are plenty of other ways to do that.
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Aug 28, 2013 02:45
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That's basically what Flash Paks do. Flash-Bang Grenades should be called Concussion grenades and have the power either knocked down or ignore chunky salsa rules. I mean this description doesn't exactly invoke "most potent weapon in the game":quote:Flash-bang grenades: Upon detonation, these “concussion”
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Aug 28, 2013 02:57
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Are there actually rules for like parachutes and wingsuits and poo poo like that, since apparently Free-Fall governs that type of stuff? I honestly haven't gotten much deeper into straight READING THE BOOK than the Skills section, haven't had time.Bigass Moth posted:That's basically what Flash Paks do. Flash-Bang Grenades should be called Concussion grenades and have the power either knocked down or ignore chunky salsa rules. I mean this description doesn't exactly invoke "most potent weapon in the game": This makes literally no sense. Did they just not want to errata the Flashbang rules to where they only do a bit of physical damage at POINT-BLANK because everybody loved gibbing mooks with non-lethal grenades? Doc Dee fucked around with this message at 03:53 on Aug 28, 2013 |
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Aug 28, 2013 03:49
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EDIT: Sorry, double post
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Aug 28, 2013 03:52
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Doc Dee posted:This makes literally no sense. Did they just not want to errata the Flashbang rules to where they only do a bit of physical damage at POINT-BLANK because everybody loved gibbing mooks with non-lethal grenades? It's kind of up in the air at this point how much actually "playing the game" the SR5 design team does or did during its creation. Grenades/flashbangs being instant murderbombs sounds like exactly the sort of thing that arises when you don't put your system through its paces in actual play, just write rules and eyeball them to see if they feel right.
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Aug 28, 2013 04:02
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Nyaa posted:Yeah, our low power street game is getting owned hard by the grenades. MohawkSatan have to burn his edge just because of that. Well, that and the AK to the face/shotgun to the chest. On a related note, never ever not be behind cover. Ever. You will die.
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Aug 28, 2013 05:04
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MohawkSatan posted:Well, that and the AK to the face/shotgun to the chest. Except for the part where partial cover can actually get you killed. See, normally a tie is a miss (though it still counts for touch-only weapons). But when you're in cover, a tie means the bullet goes against the barrier and then against you. Godd cover is always an advantage (+4 to defense), but partial cover is only +2, which is slightly less than one success on average, meaning a bullet that could have missed you completely can instead do damage to you if your cover isn't solid enough. It's even dumber if your "cover" is just something that blocks partially line of sight, like foliage or curtains, which don't actually have barrier ratings. In that case, taking cover always makes you MORE likely to get hurt.
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Aug 28, 2013 05:13
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Piell posted:Except for the part where partial cover can actually get you killed. See, normally a tie is a miss (though it still counts for touch-only weapons). But when you're in cover, a tie means the bullet goes against the barrier and then against you. Godd cover is always an advantage (+4 to defense), but partial cover is only +2, which is slightly less than one success on average, meaning a bullet that could have missed you completely can instead do damage to you if your cover isn't solid enough. It's even dumber if your "cover" is just something that blocks partially line of sight, like foliage or curtains, which don't actually have barrier ratings. In that case, taking cover always makes you MORE likely to get hurt. ...Would curtains actually count as cover? I thought cover means you actually have something there that can block the enemy fire.
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Aug 28, 2013 05:16
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ProfessorCirno posted:...Would curtains actually count as cover? I thought cover means you actually have something there that can block the enemy fire. Yep. From the book: "If the Defender uses a Take Cover action to get behind something where more than twenty-fve and up to fifty percent of the defender’s body is obscured by intervening terrain or other forms of cover such as brush, foliage, or various obstacles (crates, windows, doorways, curtains and the like), he benefts from a +2 modifer to his Defense Test." So yes, it's better to stand entirely in the open than to hide behind a curtain or brush that covers almost half your body.
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Aug 28, 2013 05:18
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Oh drat, if you miss an enemy who's in a melee with your ally, your ally then has to defend against your shot at the same penalties.
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Aug 28, 2013 05:20
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Piell posted:Yep. From the book: "If the Defender uses a Take Cover action to get behind something where more than twenty-fve and up to fifty percent of the defender’s body is obscured by intervening terrain or other forms of cover such as brush, foliage, or various obstacles (crates, windows, doorways, curtains and the like), he benefts from a +2 modifer to his Defense Test." That's a funky definition of cover. The example with the bush or a curtain is more concealment, since if it can't stop a bullet it isn't really cover, eh?
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Aug 28, 2013 05:24
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How about delay action to interrupt the enemy from throwing or just start running away while they are throwing a grenade? Or better, I cast levitate spell on the grenade that he just threw and have it hover right at his face. 
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Aug 28, 2013 05:25
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Or you could just cast Physical Barrier, since these stun grenades apparently do no harm to the walls they're bouncing off of.
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Aug 28, 2013 05:56
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The 'you can't defend against grenades' rule is a little obscure, because page 190 has a rule specifically for defending when targeted by an area-effect attack (explicitely mentioning grenades), but how one would go about determining the 'hits' garnered by the attacker is a little unclear.
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Aug 28, 2013 07:41
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We just houseruled the hell out of the grenade damage rules to where they made sense to us. 1. Floors and ceilings are already included in the damage, so if anything, you just get a damage reduction if you encounter them outdoors or in exceptionally high-ceiling rooms. 2. The damaging bouncing is already counted as omni-directional and this, too, is included in the damage. So you only ever track one shock wave. 3. If the base damage code is physical, we're dealing with a shrapnel-based grenade unless we can think of a very good reason why it wouldn't be. If the damage code is high enough, the shrapnel just goes through and/or embeds itself in the walls — no bounce. This has followed us, with some minute adjustments, since SR2 and there has (unfortunately) been very little reason to change it.
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Aug 28, 2013 09:28
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Anyone built an actual technomancer they care to post? Because I keep trying to build one, and they keep falling apart because it seems everything wants a high priority and it's all karma hungry as hell. Not having Skills A, because you need some stellar attributes to not make your head computer a pale imitation of a deck, is murder.
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Aug 28, 2013 09:51
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Tippis posted:We just houseruled the hell out of the grenade damage rules to where they made sense to us. I'll be honest, "chunky salsa" seemed neat the first time I encountered it some 17-odd years ago, but I can't for the life of me imagine why it's continued to persist beyond sheer cussed inertia at this point. Everything else in Shadowrun's combat is abstracted to the point where it warps back around into ridiculousness, where an armored vest somehow protecting your body better than a full suit of armored clothing is considered perfectly normal, but by god we're going to try and model the effects of explosions in an enclosed environment no matter what.
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Aug 28, 2013 10:48
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Cambrinus posted:The 'you can't defend against grenades' rule is a little obscure, because page 190 has a rule specifically for defending when targeted by an area-effect attack (explicitely mentioning grenades), but how one would go about determining the 'hits' garnered by the attacker is a little unclear. That's the kicker - grenades thrown AT you have vague defense resistance tests. Grenades thrown AT the ground near you do not and you are basically instantly dead if caught in their AOE.
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Aug 28, 2013 11:09
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But that's not how it reads, exactly.quote:Targeted by an Area-Effect Attack To me, the above text suggests you can dodge the explosion itself in some fashion as well (why would dodging the actual grenade be harder than dodging a throwing knife? Hence my interpretation that it's the actual explosion that's intended under this header). How it'd work is utterly unclear, though, this I'm not arguing, so there might have been a rule that's been removed, or they forgot to actually put it in. I'd almost suggest something like 'net hits = meters you 'dodge' away from the blast', though that'd be a little strong against some grenades and utterly useless against others, not forgetting that it'd still be difficult to determine the 'net hits' because the test to 'hit' with a non-motion sensor grenade is a threshold test, not an opposed test (and of course you could aim for the ground with a motion sensor grenade, less cool, though). As is, I wouldn't fault you for saying the rules don't allow you to defend against explosions (I actually agree with you), but I think there may have been some intention of allowing you to do it.
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Aug 28, 2013 11:39
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WarLocke posted:That's a funky definition of cover. The example with the bush or a curtain is more concealment, since if it can't stop a bullet it isn't really cover, eh? Catalyst desperately needs a military adviser.  Concealment is not cover. It's a magazine, not a clip. High velocity does not mean the same thing as high rate of fire. What is a hip pad bracing system and how would it help you fire a machine gun properly, from the shoulder and preferably in the prone? and so on
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Aug 28, 2013 14:22
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Martello posted:Catalyst desperately needs a military adviser. Shadowrun is trying to have that 80s je ne sais quoi, where such terms were commonly gotten wrong all of the time. The game even makes fun of this in the definition of "spare clip", saying that yes, it is technically a detachable box magazine but the "cityspeak word for it" is so popular everyone just says 'slap a fresh clip into your tech-99X' Its a weird kind of legacy thing. Chunky Salsa, and the insanity of grenades, is an attempt at eyeballing "Well, grenades should be dangerous." without actually testing that out in practice vs. other options. But the whole book is filled with that kind of nonsense; its how we have the Mach 2 eurocar or the fact that fragmentation missiles only do stun damage to people with a helmet, a ballistic shield, and an armor jacket. In fact, anti-personnel weaponry like fragmentation grenades and missiles are LESS likely to deal physical damage to personnel; its all sorts of crazy because it was never fully tested and proof-read in its final form, but rushed to market with a "We'll-patch-it-later" mentality. Probably the right business decision, given the healthy sales and release along with Shadowrun Returns, but MAN is the game full of bugs.
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Aug 28, 2013 14:55
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To 99% of the population it has always been and always will be a clip. That's not even cool future city speak or some 80's thing. It's how everyone talks in modern times and how they have always talked and always will talk. People sincerely just don't care what the difference is, because why should they?
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Aug 28, 2013 15:10
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Reading the FAQ thread and the errata threads both on Dumpshock and over on Catalyst's official site is interesting. Augmented Maximum, for example, is referenced repeatedly in the magic section but never spelled out; for the cyberware section, the term is not used but all augmented stats cap at +4. Dev response via the FAQ was: quote:Quote from: Typhus on July 21, 2013, 01:52:21 AM So its off of base stat, not "racial maximum +4" as the highest you can go. This includes boosts from taking drugs. While this does make a lot of the stat boosting spells more sane, the best combat buff (Increase Reflexes) is still uncapped for the passive +2 initiative per hit. I amused myself with some math; a mage is capable of initiating and having Quickening after 3 modules of Shadowrun Missions (using the Work for the People option to convert nuyen into karma). You can spend reagents to raise the limit, or spend edge, and cast the spell at a low force if you want (the only bad thing with a low force spell is, the lower the force, the easier it is to dispel [disjoin if you walk through a ward] later. But its 1 karma, whoop-de-doo). Anyway If you get one off with all of the bells and whistles you can have a permanent 5d6+Reaction+Intuition+20 initiative - like a permanent 53 with 10 hits on an edge-cast spell. Other stuff: Spirits and Immunity to Normal Weapons. There seem to be 2 ways to read this; first, you just treat it as Hardened Armor vs. Normal Weapons. So a Force 6 spirit would have 12 Armor (Hardened) vs. non magical attacks. It gets automatic soak, modified by the AP of any attack against it, equal to half the remaining armor value rounded up. Add the immunity value to the resistance test afterwards. The second way seems to be to treat it as: As above, so Force 6 gets 12 Armor (Hardened) vs. non magical attacks, automatic soak modified by AP equal to half of remaining armor value, rounded up. Add immunity value to the resistance test. And then, get more automatic soak = to half of the Immunity value. The second interpretation is possibly the correct one, but it means that Spirit resistance to normal weapons increases dramatically with Force. I didn't see any replies yet on how to do it, so I guess in a home game, pick how resistant you want Spirits to be and go with the second value if you want them to shrug off a lot more punishment?
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Aug 28, 2013 19:05
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I think the hacking problem is even simpler than that. Not only does hacking have a prohibitively high buy-in, but sucking at it actively fucks the group. A hacker occasionally plinking away with a pistol will, worst case scenario, glitch or miss. A lovely hacker will set off alarms and boink the entire run. You need a specialist hacker if you want the hacking done at all. Conversely a mage-dabbler might have a poo poo pool and nothing but Stunbolt and still not be a liability.
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Aug 28, 2013 19:54
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