|
Called shots to specific locations are dumb, everyone knows doing called shots for extra damage is the pro mode.
|
#
?
Mar 11, 2013 15:27
|
|
|
|
| # ? Jun 4, 2024 18:22 |
|
|
Wouldn't it just make more sense to greatly reduce the armor values offered for cyberlimb armor? Similar to how armored shirts offer less armor than armored clothing/longcoats?
|
|
#
?
Mar 11, 2013 15:58
|
|
|
The general problem is that cyberlimb rules are already kinda messy even before you hit armor benefits, with poo poo like cyberhands, it's just that armor benefits are the worst bits of all for how they stack while not actually making any sense at all. The easy solution would probably just be only allowing cybertorsos to take it. The easiest solution would be saying "Just take Dermal Plating you rear end in a top hat, christ."
|
|
#
?
Mar 11, 2013 16:34
|
|
|
Well, if you had cyberhands, move-by-wire reflexes, and uh, radar, you could probably rule that your character is slapping bullets out of the air. Or maybe you'd need some kind of skillsoft. 
|
|
#
?
Mar 11, 2013 16:39
|
|
|
ProfessorCirno posted:The general problem is that cyberlimb rules are already kinda messy even before you hit armor benefits, with poo poo like cyberhands, it's just that armor benefits are the worst bits of all for how they stack while not actually making any sense at all. I've noticed that. I'm playing around with converting Shadowrun to Savage Worlds, and the whole "cybernetics to increase your strength/body/etc" versus "increasing your strength/body/etc. in a given limb and that limb only" is really a mind gently caress that I'm glad I can just completely ignore.
|
|
#
?
Mar 11, 2013 17:04
|
|
|
ProfessorCirno posted:The general problem is that cyberlimb rules are already kinda messy even before you hit armor benefits, with poo poo like cyberhands, it's just that armor benefits are the worst bits of all for how they stack while not actually making any sense at all. I seem to recall that they tried to solve it in SR3 in a section about unbalanced limbs, which really could have been abbreviated by just pointing to GM fiat: if s/he says the bonus applies, it does, if not, that's your N¥ in the sea. But then, the whole 4th ed. is full of these oversights that can be traced back to their attempts at simplifying the rules kudzu SR3 presented in the end. The whole “adept:ify everything!” problem seems to be a direct result of them not wanting all the special rules that governed exactly how hosed (on a scale from properly to completely) magic users would be if you tried to hook up any kind of tech to them. While SR3 was a mess of legislation, it probably solved more things that way in a game that offered so many tweaks and odd cases as Shadowrun does than trying to cluster all those cases into general rule sets that (hopefully) cover all bases. Tippis fucked around with this message at 12:43 on Mar 12, 2013 |
|
#
?
Mar 11, 2013 17:35
|
|
|
Honestly SR just needs a new armor system completely. It's almost as if they had designed the armor system with location specific damage and then realized adding rules for shot distribution and loss of limb was like giving Sisyphus a second loving boulder to roll - so they simplified the combat but then never adjusted the armor. I really do think that if you could get some software to do the "rolling" for you, that SR with limbs popping left and right would be loving awesome (would also require limb replacement to be less prohibitive, IMO), but obviously that would be an impossible sell to the grogs to use some free damage spread software. I really hope they can somehow really stick to their guns with 5th edition and just remove the form-fitting stuff like they tried to in 4th. I like the versatility of having one million different types of armor pieces, but in the end they shouldn't all have unique stats, something as simple as torso-only / torso+limbs / full-body to designate all possible armor configurations - each of them get min/max armor stats based on materials used, player can get to that total any way they wish. So much of this munchkin bs could be resolved just by capping armor in the rules. Stacking probably needs to be re-addressed since orthoskin and mystic armor stack with armor without counting towards the encumbrance limit.
|
|
#
?
Mar 11, 2013 20:10
|
|
|
Super Rad posted:Stacking probably needs to be re-addressed since orthoskin and mystic armor stack with armor without counting towards the encumbrance limit. Why would they? Orthoskin is a skin replacement/enhancement, and mystic armor isn't a physical thing at all - why would either add to encumbrance?
|
|
#
?
Mar 11, 2013 22:19
|
|
|
Orthoskin and dermal plates both make your exterior a lot tougher - you could say that to some extent they are heavier or stiffer and restrict movement. Mystic armor has to be physical in some sense if it is able to repel physical attacks, if you have it active it even repels surprise attacks so it's not like you are consciously controlling the armor, it's "always on." In that sense, you could again make the claim that it can encumber. Either way the main point is to set a cap on armor so things don't get out of hand since SR likes to have at least 3 different ways to contribute to a stat that can stack, but just about every other stat gets capped, why not armor? (Or you could also say that soak rolls are covered by the 20 dice cap, but even then I think 20 dice is too much for soak in any case)
|
|
#
?
Mar 11, 2013 22:53
|
|
|
Super Rad posted:Orthoskin and dermal plates both make your exterior a lot tougher - you could say that to some extent they are heavier or stiffer and restrict movement. The only problem I have with this is that Orthoskin, Dermal Plates, and Dermal Sheathing all take essence cost. You're making the player pay twice, especially for something that they can't recover from, loss of Essence. Magic armor has the cost of either taking drain to cast it or buying expensive foci to keep it running longer than a few turns. Young Freud fucked around with this message at 23:50 on Mar 11, 2013 |
|
#
?
Mar 11, 2013 23:16
|
|
|
Eh, they're getting two bonuses out of it though: armor points AND it's armor that can't be taken away (at least not without a sadistic GM), on top of which orthoskin has a number of useful "add-ons" not related to armor. Magic armor is even better since it works in astral combat on top of everything else (being able to activate/deactivate on a whim, invisible to most). My feeling is that if you're hitting armor encumbrance you need to spend more points in Body. If you can't spend more points in Body, congrats, you have max armor, start looking into boosting reaction/dodge/etc if you want to tank better. E: Whoops, forgot to clarify I was talking about the adept power, not the magic spell - although the spell really hardly has any downsides once you have the focus to sustain it i.e. it's essentially a one-time investment of karma and nuyen, just like buying extra armor - in that sense it's even better for the mage than the adept since over time a mage may learn every spell, but an adept cannot have every adept power. Super Rad fucked around with this message at 01:03 on Mar 12, 2013 |
|
#
?
Mar 11, 2013 23:39
|
|
|
I've always read Mystic Armor as basically an addition to your aura that you neither see or feel, and is always active. What you guys are describing sounds more like the Barrier spells.
|
|
#
?
Mar 12, 2013 11:50
|
|
|
Bigass Moth posted:Why would they? Orthoskin is a skin replacement/enhancement, and mystic armor isn't a physical thing at all - why would either add to encumbrance? Game balance. It's the best reason to do anything. I like REIGNs way of doing armour where it pretty much boils down to Light, Medium and Heavy but you can micromanage as much as you like and pretty much come out to those options as far as encumbrance and armour on particular hit locations go. To be more specific, you always take the encumbrance of the heaviest piece, and you can choose to wear whatever different bits to armour different hit locations you like. The core gear list pretty much lists, Leather AR1, Chainmail AR2 and Plate AR3 everywhere, with Wooden, Iron, Plate helmets for the head, and a couple of different torso, arm and leg armours if you wanted to specialise a bit more. Then it says "eh, make up whatever armour combos you like as long as you stick to the basic rules."
|
|
#
?
Mar 14, 2013 01:05
|
|
|
New Book is out, and major poo poo goes down. Fastjack retires (due to being possessed) Harlequin-Ghostwalker war Ghostwalker pretty much dethroned in Denver The Final Battle between Alamais and Lofwyr (major war, talking 10,000 a side battle) Ares loses a major factor (and there are hints that Ares will be bug city in 5th edition) Another dragon locked away for generations Oh yeah, and the Governor of Seattle in deep, deep stinky runny doo doo.
|
|
#
?
Mar 14, 2013 23:18
|
|
|
Does anyone else have that new-ish Hazard Pay supplement? I just downloaded it from battleshop and the editing is loving abysmal. Misspellings, major grammar and syntaxt erros, straight up accidental cut-and-paste word fragments where they clearly shouldn't be, and so on. Holy poo poo who writes for these people? And how can I get a night job doing it myself?
|
|
#
?
Mar 14, 2013 23:26
|
|
|
SirFozzie posted:New Book is out, and major poo poo goes down. Brackenhaven? I hope it's for good and I don't have to hear than name ever again.
|
|
#
?
Mar 14, 2013 23:44
|
|
|
SirFozzie posted:Harlequin-Ghostwalker war AAAAAAAAHFUCKNO.  God loving dammnit, no I do not want more Harlequin.
|
|
#
?
Mar 15, 2013 00:21
|
|
|
good news. He gets his rear end kicked, and only an Atzlan invasion of Denver and other things prevents GW from capping him
|
|
#
?
Mar 15, 2013 00:41
|
|
|
What's the story with the matrix possessions?
|
|
#
?
Mar 15, 2013 12:17
|
|
|
SirFozzie posted:Fastjack retires (due to being possessed) I, also, would like more information on this. I just figured Jack being weird in the previous books was Alzheimer's. The dude is getting old. PS, I hope brackhaven died in a fire or something.
|
|
#
?
Mar 15, 2013 16:57
|
|
|
MRC48B posted:I, also, would like more information on this. I just figured Jack being weird in the previous books was Alzheimer's. The dude is getting old. To be fair, he's probably in his 80s but Leonization could keep him young/alive for a couple hundred years and he can probably afford it.
|
|
#
?
Mar 15, 2013 17:03
|
|
|
Multiple members of Brackhaven's staff are under arrest for various things, including corporate donation scandals, and the big one, hiring someone to be the copycat Mayan Cutter (a noted SR serial killer) in an attempt to derail the Proposition to make the Ork Underground an official Seattle district. They send a troll FBI agent to serve Brackhaven the subopena... which is a bit of trollery (no pun intended) SA would approve of. The possession stuff is as follows. A few years back in game time, FastJack and crew ran against a NeoNET location that was in the middle of a deadzone that was apparently crawling with metasapients (ie, autonomous programs that had varying levels of sapience, all the way up to multiple AI's in the system. FastJack's crew opened a wireless satellite connection for him to come in. The node was so overwhelming that even Jack got dumped hard after about 2 minutes in the node). Since then, he's been suffering slowly issues dealing with things, but he's noted that his crew (who all had wireless connections) have been affected by it. Jack isn't the only big name player suffering from it, let's put it this way, the situation's worrying enough that he lets MILES loving LANIER in as a Jackpoint Guest User to explain what he's seeing (he too is affected, blackouts, etcetera). So, apparently the programs have escaped into the wild, there's about 100 or so similar incidents to this that he's recognized The program infecting Jack is called SEARCH (or Self-Educating Autonomous Reasoning Combat Hacking) and has become more powerful over the years since, now when Jack sleeps, he takes over, leaving taunting messages for Jack, etcetera. Jack realizes that not only is his weakness affecting him, but he's giving something so apparently immical to humans access to JackPoint that he realizes that he has to step away, to spend his time fighting against SEARCH for control of himself. Part of his final post: FastJack's farewell posting posted:This will be my last posting to JackPoint. I will hand the banHammer to my unholy trinity, Bull, Glitch, and Slamm-0!, with three final requests. One, erase my access and purge JackPoint’s admin logs of all granted access so you may start over with none of my backdoors to be abused by unknown forces and so the three of you know everyone you let come play in your sandbox. Two, do not rename her. Let JackPoint stand as the monument to my better days. And three, the most important, don’t gently caress this up!
|
|
#
?
Mar 15, 2013 18:51
|
|
|
Pretty interesting turn of events. You or someone else mentioned there had been "weird posts" from Fastjack in recent books, could you point me to which ones? I'd be interested to see what kind of clues they dropped knowing how things ended up working out.
|
|
#
?
Mar 15, 2013 19:21
|
|
|
AI taking over the hacker's mind, it's began.  So the AI race can possess people now like possession mage? 
|
|
#
?
Mar 15, 2013 19:40
|
|
|
Nyaa posted:AI taking over the hacker's mind, it's began.
|
|
#
?
Mar 15, 2013 19:50
|
|
|
I hope they use this to sort of simplify the metaplot for the launch of 5th. I like the plot and all but letting it rest for a bit while putting out the core books would be swell.
|
|
#
?
Mar 15, 2013 19:53
|
|
|
Martello posted:Pretty interesting turn of events. There's a few cases of where Fastjack makes a comment, and someone says "Jack, you ok?" and Jack comes back and says "Geez, I don't remember making that post".. and/or typos, etcetera
|
|
#
?
Mar 15, 2013 20:04
|
|
|
I saw something like that recently in that awful Street Legends Home Edition PDF, where Riser posts "The red sun rises" and Kane asks if he's okay, to which he replies, "Yeah, I'm fine, why do you ask?" duhn dun dun...
|
|
#
?
Mar 15, 2013 20:09
|
|
|
For those of you wanting the classic novels.. you're going to be a very happy person. http://www.catalystgamelabs.com/2013/03/14/catalyst-game-labs-announces-new-shadowrun-print-novels/ Not only new ones, but omnibus releases of some of the best novels from the past (the one they show is a Omnibus edition of four novels from the late Nigel Findley (wonder if that's where Findler-Man ever came from), but they mention a couple other authors as well.
|
|
#
?
Mar 15, 2013 23:19
|
|
|
SirFozzie posted:For those of you wanting the classic novels.. you're going to be a very happy person. I hope they take the manuscript from Black Madonna and flush it down the toilet.
|
|
#
?
Mar 16, 2013 01:09
|
|
|
So we are planning to start a Shadowrun game with a strange premise and I'd like to know if any of you would think it would work. It's supposed to be a satiric evil campaign in world of dark grays. The players are playing: Adolph Hitler, Ilsa Koch, the cryogenically frozen brain of Manfred Von Riechstoffen, Karl Eichmann and Mengele-Bot 5000. Basically, a secret Nazi bunker was unearthed in rural Brazil. Within the bunker are the frozen corpses of the WWII Nazi Elite being upkept by a 1950's sci-fi style medical robot. The archeologists sell the information to the Horizon Corp. The Horizon Corp decide to revive the Nazis. The Nazi elite have no idea where they are as they unfrozen. So they are taken prisoner and turned into feedsite "reality TV" pop icons. The Facist House show becomes successful, but still many groups of concerned activists want them dead. They try to stay alive as the world see's them as a mockable historic punchline while making money by shilling stupid products in commercials. . But not all is what it seems. In the moments where they are not being monitored, the unfrozen Nazis are plotting, scheming and taking actions... Their purpose? To rid the world of Mutant kind. Do any of you think this game could work?
|
|
#
?
Mar 16, 2013 11:14
|
|
|
That's the most outlandish, insane premise I've ever heard. I love it.
|
|
#
?
Mar 16, 2013 11:47
|
|
|
Bigass Moth posted:I hope they take the manuscript from Black Madonna and flush it down the toilet. Man, that's what got me into Shadowrun to begin with! I always had some inkling that Carl Sargent disappeared because Dan Brown read Black Madonna and stole the plot, so he disappeared Sargent to cash in on the premise 
|
|
#
?
Mar 16, 2013 14:39
|
|
|
Tinkering around with Chummer, trying to make a six-armed nartaki with all six arms as cyberarms. Might just go gun adept instead, but I'm testing it out first. What's the right way to do arms with max agility? Buy a cyberarm, customize it up to your base AGI, and then enhance it past that? Also, is nartaki worth it? I mean, it costs 25 points to get a 15 point Changeling advantage. Couldn't you just take Changeling III and get Shiva arms twice that way instead?
|
|
#
?
Mar 16, 2013 20:43
|
|
|
Man, not FastJack!  I am curious if NetCat ever found Puck. She and Pistons had a lead in Conspiracy Theories, but it turned out to be a trap by that rear end in a top hat Clockwork.
|
|
#
?
Mar 16, 2013 20:52
|
|
|
I've never played Shadowrun nor have I seen it run, so bear with me. I'm confused at how you guys mention gridless combat for Shadowrun. I know combat is touchy since the point of the game is to complete jobs and not kill people, but in the cases where combat does happen how is it managed if not by a grid? How is movement, terrain and other poo poo handled? I take it combat is fast and loose with no 'zones of control' or other D&D style skirmish mechanics? I want to run Shadowrun my with friends once 5th is launched but I'm very much stuck in a world of grids and miniatures, and I'm very confused as to how combat can be played without it.
|
|
#
?
Mar 16, 2013 21:21
|
|
|
Purgey posted:I know combat is touchy since the point of the game is to complete jobs and not kill people, but in the cases where combat does happen how is it managed if not by a grid? How is movement, terrain and other poo poo handled? I take it combat is fast and loose with no 'zones of control' or other D&D style skirmish mechanics? The GM keeps track of who's where and decides on ranges, cover, and movement modifiers (and other environmental effects such as smoke or glare or darkness). It's not rooted in any kind of miniature mindset. The only “zone-of-control”-like stuff is that some melee weapons have a (tiny) bit of extra reach, which gives them an edge over shorter weapons, and that melee and firearms don't really mix.
|
|
#
?
Mar 16, 2013 21:30
|
|
|
How much, "Winging it" should go into a shadowrun campaign? Furthermore, are there podcasts of succesful shadowrun games? And is there a way to simplify combat so it's more of a "You got shot RIP" kind of experience?
|
|
#
?
Mar 16, 2013 23:27
|
|
|
As far as winging it goes, I find putting an actual time limit on planning is pretty helpful. It creates some tensions and causes players to actual manage themselves a bit so they can get stuff accomplished faster, rather than spending 45 minutes out of their allocated hour stacking bonuses and hacking every last corner of the associated server ahead of time. That said, it's completely unrealistic and if your group has problems with that, it won't work. Now, winging it from the other side of the screen, I'm not sure sure. More than any other game I've run, needing to have some details on hand is pretty important. The players will loot and steal everything that isn't nailed down, so don't randomly include a pile of military tech unless you want them to sell it.
|
|
#
?
Mar 16, 2013 23:34
|
|
|
|
| # ? Jun 4, 2024 18:22 |
|
|
PunkBoy posted:Man, not FastJack! I seem to remember in one of the books FastJack mentions he has Puck working security for JackPoint.
|
|
#
?
Mar 16, 2013 23:39
|
|
