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There's also a fairly good chance only allowing "melee" edged weapons is complete oversight with the book, too, mind you.
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Jan 14, 2014 08:10
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ProfessorCirno posted:There's also a fairly good chance only allowing "melee" edged weapons is complete oversight with the book, too, mind you. Well yes, but that can be said of many of the rules.  In fairness though, it does seem like the kind of oversight most games make at some point and any decent GM will adjudicate in a reasonable manner- similar to how I think most people would also let hidden arm slides be used for things like knives and monowire whips even though the item only specifies being able to fit hold outs, tasers and light pistols.
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Jan 14, 2014 09:08
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A little trick that I noticed. 1. Every matrix device has arbitrarily large storage capacity unless you're talking corporate databases and other ridiculously huge stuff. 2. Defending against your files getting hacked is based on your firewall, which is your device rating unless your device is a cyberdeck. (Technomancers can't slave stuff or store files with their living persona so they can't protect their stuff with it, except by going on the offensive against the hacker or using the hash sprite power.) 3. RFID tags can, according to the description, store at least some data. Security and stealth tags have a device rating of 3, can be accessed wirelessly, are dirt cheap, easily concealable and both can be implanted under the skin at no essence cost. Security tags resist tag erasers, which can be good or bad depending on whether you want to avoid losing data due to being scanned for bugs by paranoid contacts or want to use one to quickly eliminate incriminating evidence. Stealth tags are better at running silent, since they have an actual sleaze rating, and don't look like RFID tags even if they're found, but are restricted. Ergo: every shadowrunner who's on a budget and can't splurge on an Erika Elite commlink or better, like technomancers and most awakened characters, should keep their sensitive and criminally incriminating data on security or stealth tags instead of their commlink. E: Added the bit about tag erasers. E2, to avoid doubleposting: I've been working on a technomancer character. The basic idea is that he's a son of the owner of some Finnish ZZZ rated mom & pops corp who was dicking around in the matrix with his technomancer powers, when he ran into something he shouldn't have, got scorched with psychotropic IC, blacked out and woke up a year later in [location of the game I'll eventually submit him to] with minor addictions to performance enhancing drugs and a head full of knowledge and skills about infiltration and [the target that someone wanted infiltrated as determined by the GM]. Unable to contact anyone he remembers knowing besides his matrix gang friends who tell him that his existence just dropped out of the grid for a year. Here's the char gen sheet. Any comments besides the skills being spread too thin? The idea was to make a subtle jack of all trades character that could pass through checkpoints with ease, work as a secondary supporting face/infiltrator/sprite based hacker, shoot somewhat straight and compensated for the lack of initiative with cram and jazz. Also has that particular gdocs sheet been updated lately, since my copy of it is pretty old? I like it more than the other goon sheet, since it auto-calculates the chargen resources you have to spend, based on the chosen priorities. Oo Koo fucked around with this message at 17:18 on Jan 14, 2014 |
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Jan 14, 2014 14:42
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There was some talk a while back about deckers preferring to slave their decks to either RRCs (which are just generally useful) or Erika Elite so that you can safely dump-stat Firewall on your deck configuration and rely on the far cheaper device for defense. I feel like this is the "Street Sam" version of that, but the slaving rules are so vague that it's unclear what can and cannot slave other devices. If that will work, and RAW seems to imply it will, street sams should just slap security tags on everything they own.
QuantumNinja fucked around with this message at 18:20 on Jan 14, 2014 |
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Jan 14, 2014 18:17
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The thing is that you're not slaving anything to anything (the only things that can slave stuff are decks and commlinks). You have your jalopy meta-link with device rating 1 for communication and nothing else. Your guns and glasses and other personal electronics are at least rating 2 according to the general device ratings, which is poor but better than your commlink. And your sensitive and incriminating data is stored on rating 3 tags. All your devices are relying on just their built in protection, which isn't ideal, but if you're resources E Mage/adept/Technomancer you probably don't have much in the way of vital gear to get hacked. Sams still wan't a good commlink to protect all of their ware and smartguns.
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Jan 14, 2014 18:28
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Oh, I misinterpreted what you meant. I still think you should be able to slave things to vehicles, and technically a smartlink system is a tiny "commlink" with a few devices slaved to it. There should be rules for integrated circuits and slaving: if you have a tiny tag, it would make sense that a smartlink system could filter its entire comm system through the tag. 
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Jan 14, 2014 18:42
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Datachips are even more secure despite being rating 1, since they have no wireless capability at all, but they're useless to a technomancer unless you plug them in to something with a wireless link first. But if you can't afford a good commlink, need to keep your data easily accessible and want at least some security, then security/stealth chips are the way to go.
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Jan 14, 2014 18:54
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Okasvi posted:The thing is that you're not slaving anything to anything (the only things that can slave stuff are decks and commlinks). You have your jalopy meta-link with device rating 1 for communication and nothing else. Your guns and glasses and other personal electronics are at least rating 2 according to the general device ratings, which is poor but better than your commlink. And your sensitive and incriminating data is stored on rating 3 tags. All your devices are relying on just their built in protection, which isn't ideal, but if you're resources E Mage/adept/Technomancer you probably don't have much in the way of vital gear to get hacked. Sams still wan't a good commlink to protect all of their ware and smartguns. Don't forget that RCCs work like commlinks but with more rigger capabilities. There MAY actually be a rule that says you can't slave links/decks/RCCs to each other, but I'm not sure right now.
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Jan 14, 2014 19:51
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Yeah I remember the earlier discussion about daisy-chaining links/decks/rigs for better Firewall, but I ignored it since it's kind of a question mark how the rules work regarding that. I mainly wanted to point out that security/stealth tags are a cheap option if you're only concerned about data security instead of protecting your devices from getting messed with, and can't afford to splurge on a good commlink. The easy concealability is also a plus. RFID tags are -6 dice to notice and stealth tags don't even look like RFID:s, so if you get caught no-one's getting anything even if they search you and take your commlink. You can even order your tags to shut down wireless and then no-one's going to find them with matrix perception either. Since microchips are made of non ferrous silicon and copper, they don't show on MAD scans either so you can just waltz right through pretty much any checkpoint with stealth tags full of stolen corp secrets. Unless it has a cyberware scanner and those can apparently be confused by carrying enough chaff items that they can't resolve the signal to any single model of an item, since carrying more items increases the threshold needed to score a detection. E: For irony, you can even hide a stealth tag in plain sight by sticking a sticker shaped one on the side of a datachip, so that even if the chip is found by security, the only thing they're going to find is cat videos and troll porn if they only do the obvious thing and plug the datachip in to see what's stored inside. Oo Koo fucked around with this message at 20:54 on Jan 14, 2014 |
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Jan 14, 2014 20:38
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Hey folks, my gaming group and I are looking for some RPG-fare that's different from the Pathfinder we play week-in, week-out. A friend mentioned Shadowrun, I've read a little up on the fluff (Elves, Orcs, et al. popped up after 2012, now it's the cyberpunk future that Gibson promised us but also dudes are throwing fireballs at other dudes and stuff) and I like how it sounds. It looks like I'll GM it, I've had a little experience GMing Pathfinder, and I was wondering if you guys could give me any advice? I hear that 5th and 4th edition are similar but certain things suck about 5th, so should I take the things from 4th that don't suck so much? Members of my group like combat, how forgiving is the system, considering it has guns? Sorry for the clueless newbie stuff, but you can really sell how you like your game to me! I was somewhat disappointed that the people behind Shadowrun have dropped the ball on getting the beginner's box set out, I'd have brought that in a second - the one Paizo made for Pathfinder was great, and if Catalyst are "taking" ideas from them, hopefully it'll end up half-decent. I've got the Core Rulebooks for both Fifth and Fourth Edition from DriveThruRpg when they've been sold cheap.
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Jan 14, 2014 23:43
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The 5th Edition needs a lot of editing and house-ruling in its current state, so if you don't want to worry about that you might try 4E. The system can be pretty brutal if you get unlucky / make bad decisions, and death is a very real threat against automatic fire. The general rule is hit hard, hit fast, and be gone before anyone knows you were there.
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Jan 15, 2014 00:05
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So I know a lot of people have been having issues with the build quality on the books (particularly pages falling out or the whole thing coming detached from the cover). So far my book has been holding up, but barely. I'm always really careful with my books, but the binding's already looking pretty terrible. One of my players bought the sourcebook too, and his is already falling apart. Even comparing the book to a Pathfinder book of equal size you can immediately tell the difference in the binding. Has construction quality been an issue with any of Catalyst's other Shadowrun releases? This is ridiculous.
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Jan 15, 2014 04:56
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Sapphaholic posted:So I know a lot of people have been having issues with the build quality on the books (particularly pages falling out or the whole thing coming detached from the cover). So far my book has been holding up, but barely. I'm always really careful with my books, but the binding's already looking pretty terrible. One of my players bought the sourcebook too, and his is already falling apart. Even comparing the book to a Pathfinder book of equal size you can immediately tell the difference in the binding. I bought my book used and I haven't had any problems, save the dents in the cover that were there when I got it. So I guess I can't really relate. Sorry. 
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Jan 15, 2014 06:21
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Doc Dee posted:I bought my book used and I haven't had any problems, save the dents in the cover that were there when I got it. I don't think the books are all made poorly, I think it's just terrible quality control. My book's binding was shoddy, but the copy my friend bought, from the same shop, was perfectly fine.
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Jan 15, 2014 06:31
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Hey, would a compulsion to make every attack a Called Shot count as some kind of Negative Quality?
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Jan 17, 2014 01:10
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Rockopolis posted:Hey, would a compulsion to make every attack a Called Shot count as some kind of Negative Quality? I wouldn't be surprised if there was an Obsession negative quality further down the line, but after chargen negative qualities just suck, and you have to pay double the karma value to get rid of them.
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Jan 17, 2014 01:25
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QuantumNinja posted:I don't think the books are all made poorly, I think it's just terrible quality control. My book's binding was shoddy, but the copy my friend bought, from the same shop, was perfectly fine. The binding seems pretty cheap and not up to the task of holding together 400+ pages. I don't think it'd be a problem if the book wasn't so long.
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Jan 17, 2014 02:12
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Doc Dee posted:I wouldn't be surprised if there was an Obsession negative quality further down the line, but after chargen negative qualities just suck, and you have to pay double the karma value to get rid of them. I can't imagine it's too hard to reskin Allergy as Obsession with the penalties being that you can't stop letting it tweak you rather than a physical affect (so no death)
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Jan 17, 2014 02:54
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Well, actually, now that I think about it, that Obsession or whatever is kind of the definition of a Geas, however that wouldn't make much sense for Rockopolis's current character due to being mundane. If Nurse Knives was a Throwing Adept though, it'd work as expected. Or would that even be a valid choice for a Geas?
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Jan 17, 2014 04:04
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PeterWeller posted:The binding seems pretty cheap and not up to the task of holding together 400+ pages. I don't think it'd be a problem if the book wasn't so long. The Pathfinder core book is around the same thickness and if you compare the spine side-by-side on each, it's really quite clear how cheap the Shadowrun print run was. So far this version I haven't been really impressed by Catalyst. I still greatly enjoy the system for all its flaws, but the material quality seems to be a step below what I'd expect. The material for the GM screen is also weirdly lumpy and shiny, the gear cards feel off, like they're not a thick enough cardstock or something (the boxes were also terrible but I threw all my cards in a binder anyway so that's moot). One of my players managed to get a paperback copy of 5th though, so we'll see how it holds up. I didn't even know they were printing paperbacks.
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Jan 17, 2014 07:59
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Sapphaholic posted:The Pathfinder core book is around the same thickness and if you compare the spine side-by-side on each, it's really quite clear how cheap the Shadowrun print run was. So far this version I haven't been really impressed by Catalyst. I still greatly enjoy the system for all its flaws, but the material quality seems to be a step below what I'd expect. The material for the GM screen is also weirdly lumpy and shiny, the gear cards feel off, like they're not a thick enough cardstock or something (the boxes were also terrible but I threw all my cards in a binder anyway so that's moot). It still sounds like a unique problem to me, honestly. How do you treat your books? Seriously, I bought my book USED (or at least "damaged enough to not demand full price for due to a few dents in the cover") and I'm not worried about it falling apart any time soon.
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Jan 17, 2014 10:40
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It doesn't sound too rare: There's quite a few posts on the main Shadowrun forums describing similar problems. Sounds like most copies are fine, but some are falling apart after being read once (apparently the limited edition ones are more susceptible). I just bought the pdf this time around and didn't go for the physical book because I was too scared of misnakes.
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Jan 17, 2014 11:11
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Doc Dee posted:It still sounds like a unique problem to me, honestly. How do you treat your books? How unique can it be when more than one person has had similar problems? I baby my books like you wouldn't believe. I use bookmarks with cheap paperbacks. I own many hardbound RPG books by many different publishers, and the binding of the 5E Shadowrun book is very cheap. Whether or not a cover is dinged up has no reflection on the binding's quality.
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Jan 18, 2014 04:42
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Fair enough. Still not worried about my book falling apart any time soon.
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Jan 18, 2014 18:16
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PeterWeller posted:How unique can it be when more than one person has had similar problems? I baby my books like you wouldn't believe. I use bookmarks with cheap paperbacks. I own many hardbound RPG books by many different publishers, and the binding of the 5E Shadowrun book is very cheap. I'm the same way. I haven't had any pages fall out, but you can tell just by looking at the side of the book when it's open that if I didn't get one of the bad copies, it's still not very well made. I do feel bad for people with the really pretty red limited editions, though--apparently some of them are falling apart, too.
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Jan 19, 2014 00:59
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Doc Dee posted:Fair enough. Good for you. I am not being facetious. I wish I could say the same for my copy. 
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Jan 19, 2014 01:35
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PeterWeller posted:Good for you. I am not being facetious. I wish I could say the same for my copy. Gotta say, I mostly use my digital copy anyway. That might have something to do with it.
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Jan 19, 2014 04:57
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You people and your physical books.
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Jan 19, 2014 09:11
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A few days ago the Catalyst twitter said that they've gotten the layout for at least part of Run and Gun back, so assumedly it will be released sometime in 2014.
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Jan 19, 2014 14:44
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For all of those who think street-level shadowrun games where the players are gangers suck: Myself and one of the other players from the game I play on IRC are now negotiating what will basically be the Warsaw Pact of gangs for Puyallup. Myself as an ambassador between gangs already, the other player as the head of the player's gang, and an NPC representing the other two power players in the area. In addition to looking out for my own gang(which I can't really advance in)and the player gang(which I'm not a member of, just an ambassador who tends to get shot helping them), I'm trying to put myself into a position where I'm the neutral head of the pact, the person who represents the pact as a whole, has control of any combined Pact forces, and makes the final decision on things. Street level shadowrun is 100% better than the higher level stuff once things get political. MohawkSatan fucked around with this message at 23:11 on Jan 19, 2014 |
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Jan 19, 2014 23:05
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Can guns be used as foci? I know that Weapon Foci have to be melee weapons, but what about as a Spell Focus? I was thinking about whipping up a Gunslinger, except instead of an Adept making him a Mage who casts his combat spells through a focus made out of an old revolver. I guess now that I'm thinking about it there's no reason it couldn't be a Mystic Adept, but I still like the idea. Also, if I did this, would there be an offhand penalty?? I don't think offhand matters when casting spells. MohawkSatan posted:For all of those who think street-level shadowrun games where the players are gangers suck: This is pretty awesome, I like how there are so many different ways to approach the setting.
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Jan 19, 2014 23:17
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I don't think anyone is against the concept of street-level games so much as the fact that 5E's street-level rules are terrible.
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Jan 20, 2014 00:38
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Piell posted:I don't think anyone is against the concept of street-level games so much as the fact that 5E's street-level rules are terrible. We have some houserules for that that seem to guide us fairly well: http://seattlegb.wikispaces.com/Character+Creation+5th+Edition
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Jan 20, 2014 01:15
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Doc Dee posted:Can guns be used as foci? I know that Weapon Foci have to be melee weapons, but what about as a Spell Focus? You could use the gun as a foci, but you wouldn't receive any magical benefit from shooting it.
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Jan 20, 2014 01:16
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Bigass Moth posted:You could use the gun as a foci, but you wouldn't receive any magical benefit from shooting it. Exactly, I was mostly just wondering if off-hand penalties would apply to using a Spellcasting Focus made from an old Colt Walker.
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Jan 20, 2014 01:51
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I'm working on a backup character for the street-level ganger game I'm in, and thought of doing a technomancer. After finally managing to balance everything else I had a nice little realization. Holy gently caress, technomancers are damned near worthless in 5E. Your only real advantage is sprites, because complex forms aren't all that great, submersion doesn't give any serious benefits, and you're seriously hurting to do anything aside from hack(which you can only do about as well as a normal hacker anyways). So now I need to come up with another backup in case my current character is killed in a duel in our next session. Goddamn it.
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Jan 21, 2014 15:46
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There's been some discussion about technomancers before and I remember one proposed trick to making them not completely suck was spending a lot of your downtime registering sprites, which you use to do everything so you only need software, registering and compiling and can't get caught by overwatch yourself, and using diffusion of firewall to gimp the defenses of whatever you're hacking so that your low-level sprites can successfully hack it. Also the drug psyche. E: Spelling. Oo Koo fucked around with this message at 16:06 on Jan 21, 2014 |
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Jan 21, 2014 16:00
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Technomancers are in a really bad place. The way to make them completely not suck isn't to try to use some giant laundry list of things to do every time in order to not be bad. The way is to completely rewrite them. Technomancers suffered a lot from this in SR4, too, though. Like, Otakus were a thing in previous editions but I dunno how they worked mechanically, and they wanted that type of character to continue in Shadowrun, but so far they've just been hot garbage.
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Jan 21, 2014 16:32
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Fluffwise Otaku were all young kids (like, ranging from 7 or 8 years old up to late teens) who had a ~mysterious connection~ with the Matrix and once they got old enough they lost their mojo and there was a bunch of speculation about what they were, spoiler alert it was all Deus because the Shadowrun writers really loving loved the Renraku Arcology crisis near the end. Mechanically you had to put Resources at your highest possible priority (A if Human, B if metahuman) and your magic at E, you got bonus mental attribute points and attribute maximums, and then you basically got five "skills" that acted like decker programs and you didn't need a cyberdeck at all, your brain was basically an organic hacking computer (still needed a datajack though). So you got a bunch of bonus points to put in all this stuff but only got like 5,000 nuyen out giving up your Resources priority as a pseudo-Otaku priority, it was honestly really fiddly. Then they had the ability to create things like complex forms and sprites which would get carried over to technomancers later. I don't recall too many people being excited over Otaku because A). playing one meant playing a creepy young kid by default and B). because you were still using 2E's hacking rules which were an enormous pain in the rear end. But there also wasn't a whole lot of compelling fluff surrounding them either, the book they were introduced in gave a quick overview and then a few paragraphs that boiled down to "But what are the Otaku and where did they come from exactly? Iunno, stuff." and then when they did write more it turned out to be boring stuff to do with Deus and some sort of hacker holy war that nobody cared about because Shadowrun's one cool metaplot event always has been and always will be electing a dragon to be President of the US.
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Jan 21, 2014 16:51
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To be fair, Shadowrun has then retconned quite a bit of that, as it's made it rather apparent that Otaku/Technos existed before and outside of Deus, and as the Matrix has gotten more widespread so have they (which is why they don't have to be creepy kids anymore, I think?) It's still setting itself up as a "how does this work/what is this WHO KNOWS" sorta thing, but I can see the fluff appeal. Too bad the mechanical appeal is "Do you want to be a really lovely Decker?" in SR5, and "do you want to do literally nothing more then jerk off in the Matrix while the hacker is also a samurai and a face at the same time because hah hah hah 'ware?"
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Jan 21, 2014 16:54
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