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drrockso20 posted:So your GM was an rear end in a top hat who wasted your group's time for no reason except maybe to be a smartass? They said high school group, so... yeah, but also wasn't that everyone's high school GM? When I was in high school we played a bit of shadowrun and we were all jackasses who had no clue how to do RPGs well, it was the early 90s and we were 17. You know?
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Aug 18, 2023 21:23
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Leperflesh posted:They said high school group, so... yeah, but also wasn't that everyone's high school GM? Well in the early 90's I was an infant/toddler so not really
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Aug 18, 2023 21:36
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Rand Brittain posted:I finally got my new built-in bookshelves, set up and stable, and got all the books into them, which was several small ordeals. That is a really thoughtfully curated collection. Makes me wish I’d saved my 4e books.
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Aug 18, 2023 22:08
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LatwPIAT posted:Shotguns in prosthetic arms are cool and make for rad fight choreography in anime, but few games really emphasize concealability or rapidly changing to some weapon in a way where being able to have a shotgun in your arm is all that much better than just carrying a shotgun, or even whatever other, bigger weapon you can just carry with you.  e: or in some kind of horrible 5e hack allows you to sneak attack with it Splicer fucked around with this message at 22:27 on Aug 18, 2023 |
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Aug 18, 2023 22:24
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Nessus posted:I am honestly not certain if this is not how Shadowrun is meant to be played, given everything I have heard about it historically. At a certain point it stops being 'people being assholes' and becomes 'the nature of the game.' In general, it sounds like spending all your time gear-loving and having a fair chance of being instantly vaporized anyway during the run is... normative. SR has the problem, which I’m pretty sure can be blamed on 80s/90s superhero games, of the players having an incredible amount of crunch for their PCs but the threats they face having nowhere near as much detail.
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Aug 18, 2023 22:27
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Shadowrun sucks but to me that's the opposite of a problem. I don't want complicated villains if their role is to be alive long enough to get two rounds of fire off and then die. Games that require you to build the villains the same way you build the characters are another thing from that same time in game history and it's the worst.
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Aug 18, 2023 22:34
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Thanlis posted:That is a really thoughtfully curated collection. Makes me wish I’d saved my 4e books. Yeah, a lot of this was trying to reclaim things I had to give up when I had less space, or that my mom gave to the yard man after I had a disagreement with my tenth-grade English teacher.
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Aug 18, 2023 22:36
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theironjef posted:Shadowrun sucks but to me that's the opposite of a problem. I don't want complicated villains if their role is to be alive long enough to get two rounds of fire off and then die. Games that require you to build the villains the same way you build the characters are another thing from that same time in game history and it's the worst. If that’s their role, sure. But Shadowrun or cyberpunk settings in general tend to have the assumption that (whoever your enemy is) can respond with helicopter gunships or waves of soldiers or, or etc. and that’s why you have to do the whole shadows thing. There’s no stats for those, which sends the message to the GM that “artillery falls everyone dies” is not only acceptable but necessary.
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Aug 18, 2023 22:50
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hyphz posted:If that’s their role, sure. But Shadowrun or cyberpunk settings in general tend to have the assumption that (whoever your enemy is) can respond with helicopter gunships or waves of soldiers or, or etc. and that’s why you have to do the whole shadows thing. There’s no stats for those, which sends the message to the GM that “artillery falls everyone dies” is not only acceptable but necessary. Weird, I've on and off played Shadowrun since like 1996 and I have never felt like the game was desperately missing a rule for when the villain responds with a wave of helicopters. And even if I did what sort of ruleset would that even entail? If the whole point is to enforce a "remain in the shadows" doctrine, then the game should be y'know, saying so and then enforcing that with benefits or narrative constraints. Being irritated that the game doesn't do enough broad military parades in stat form to serve as an effective nuclear deterrent to players is frankly pretty silly.
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Aug 18, 2023 22:56
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hyphz posted:If that’s their role, sure. But Shadowrun or cyberpunk settings in general tend to have the assumption that (whoever your enemy is) can respond with helicopter gunships or waves of soldiers or, or etc. and that’s why you have to do the whole shadows thing. There’s no stats for those, which sends the message to the GM that “artillery falls everyone dies” is not only acceptable but necessary. Furthermore: https://cyberpunk.fandom.com/wiki/Category:Cyberpunk_2020_Helicopters There were definitely stats for the killcopters.
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Aug 18, 2023 22:59
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Attack helicopters should be premade stat blocks that the players can shoot down as a boss battle. Does Shadowrun not have monster books full of premade mooks, soldiers, robots, etc to shoot? It'd be real pain if they all had to be built with player rules.
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Aug 18, 2023 23:00
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Terrible Opinions posted:Attack helicopters should be premade stat blocks that the players can shoot down as a boss battle.
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Aug 18, 2023 23:03
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Terrible Opinions posted:Attack helicopters should be premade stat blocks that the players can shoot down as a boss battle. To my recollection, not really, at least in the editions I am familiar with. Maybe 3 types of faceless guard or something. Certainly no way to create them on the fly or simplify them. The content was commonly quite scant in those games, at least until you get to something like the Threats books which were closer to Monster Manuals but they were also extremely dangerous things. It's like if a book was filled with Tarasques or something.
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Aug 18, 2023 23:05
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Shadowrun was both excessive in its supplements and conservative in its splatbook approach, from my experience. There was a splatbook for everything, every archetype, every approach, and some of the best options were in the splatbook, so you had to get it. OTOH, you only needed one and it was possible to share some (my physical adept and the mage went in together on a copy of Magic in the Shadows). The real frustrating thing about the gear splatbooks was one option was superior to all the others. Need a heavy pistol? Don’t bother looking at the 25 options; it’s an Ares Predator Mark VII or whatever. This is all based on 3E experience so it might not be applicable to later versions.
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Aug 18, 2023 23:15
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I mean I don't even personally see a reason to get bogged down in helicopter stat discussion, because it's just an endpoint for logical extension game thinking, and not genre convention game thinking. It's what happens when you're designing a quick villain for a setting and say to yourself "Billionaire villain? Well then obviously he'd own a fleet of Airwolfs with real missiles because that costs less than a billion dollars. And they'd be nearby because why wouldn't they be? And that response would be warranted for this event because why wouldn't he use his obvious best and most powerful option? And if I just tell all that to the players they'll do the adventure the way I wrote it this time Jeremy you fug." Except what kind of boring poo poo cyberpunk billionaire villain would do that? Instead you could be doing genre convention, and having him greet the party in his office wearing sleeves and suspenders, and then responding to their threats by shooting himself with a serum gun that makes his veins glow bright green and he can shoot radiation now, or revealing that he cloned all of you last year and now you have to fight beserker versions of yourselves, or that he hired the guys that hired you and now you technically work for him, and right as he says that your phone rings. Or hell, he calls in ONE cool cyberpunk helicopter because you had a neat idea for a boss fight. Going to the "He can just summon the army" level is just saying "There's an invisible wall that stops you going North here" but with extra rear end in a top hat steps.
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Aug 18, 2023 23:19
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In my experience with Shadowrun 4e, there's definitely enemy statblocks but they're mostly just a pile of stats attached to a short setting blurb. There's no good advice for how to actually use them in-game, and that's the real problem. If the game doesn't even try to teach you how to stage an interesting encounter, every fight in this cool cyberpunk heist game will boil down to "I guess I'll throw this many goons at you?" and "this is supposed to be harder, so I guess I'll throw more?". It's bad game design that the industry at large has mostly moved past, but Shadowrun tends to be a throwback in a lot of ways so I wouldn't be surprised if nothing has changed.
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Aug 18, 2023 23:32
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I don't know about later editions but prior to 4e you had plenty of mook stats and stats for various magical critters. There should be stats for various operators at different threat levels in the GM section of the book with the alarms and the sentry guns.
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Aug 19, 2023 00:21
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The PCs are instead attacked by a squad of awful boomer comedians who tell people that their gender is “attack helicopter.”
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Aug 19, 2023 03:16
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Gatto Grigio posted:The PCs are instead attacked by a squad of awful boomer comedians who tell people that their gender is “attack helicopter.”
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Aug 19, 2023 04:50
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One of the things Shadowrun was actually good at was providing stat blocks and adventure hooks via the infallible science of Posting. The joke with almost all SR content is that the in-world texts are posted on the Shadowlands BBS, with shockingly on-note commentary. Paranormal Animals of North America is spectacular for those kinds of adventure hooks.
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Aug 19, 2023 06:55
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Kwyndig posted:I don't know about later editions but prior to 4e you had plenty of mook stats and stats for various magical critters. There should be stats for various operators at different threat levels in the GM section of the book with the alarms and the sentry guns. Yeah checking the 1st edition books, there are tons of NPC statblocks, but for some reason they're all labeled as "Contacts". There's also a whole section on "Critters: which has statblocks for Banshee and Sasquatch and stuff.
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Aug 19, 2023 07:47
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Glagha posted:As complicated a game as Shadowrun is I don't believe there's any actual rules for dismemberment by damage, but I could be wrong. I'm like 95% certain there's no crit blows your arm off rule though. Of course that's all without getting into the can of worms that is getting a prosthetic without any superhuman augmentation RAW costs you essence which means you'll lose access to magic or lose your mind if you do it too much which is... Not great. That and the written rewards system is so stingy that it's not like you'll ever be able to afford an arm after character creation when they're like "oh yeah you can expect to get like 5k nuyen after a typical job. How much is a cyber arm? 30k? Oh. What about if the streetsam wants an upgrade on their wired reflexes? Oh like 700k cool cool cool cool cool" 6e had a page of examples of glitches and critical glitches which had a bunch of things like "gun explodes, destroys your eyes and or hands" also had things like "Your deck is permanently fried" and "you forget the spell you were casting and all spells of the category" people were surprised there were so many things that essentially erase large parts of your character in a book made after 2000. Always a fun thing when you can't upgrade your cyberware but the magic using characters can constantly buy new spells and initiate to get new powers. If you do get a huge pay day then they can buy magical artifacts that help them significantly for the cost of you slightly increasing your cyberware.
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Aug 19, 2023 14:01
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Gatto Grigio posted:The PCs are instead attacked by a squad of awful boomer comedians who tell people that their gender is “attack helicopter.” Bad PC idea: When the CEO decided you could declare your gender to be an attack helicopter someone actually did, then managed to flip that on the org chart so they are listed as an attack helicopter. The other PCs are listed as the pilot, the gunner, the mechanic, and the EW specialist. Bonus points: Their boss, who is in charge of a squadron of attack helicopters is fully aware of this scam. It turns out that a party of PCs is better at sending messages and causing property damage than an actual attack helicopter. And his boss only cares about results.
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Aug 19, 2023 14:46
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MuscaDomestica posted:Always a fun thing when you can't upgrade your cyberware but the magic using characters can constantly buy new spells and initiate to get new powers. If you do get a huge pay day then they can buy magical artifacts that help them significantly for the cost of you slightly increasing your cyberware.
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Aug 19, 2023 17:31
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Nessus posted:https://cyberpunk.fandom.com/wiki/Category:Cyberpunk_2020_Helicopters The only stats for helicopters I care about is if the blades are dull or sharp.
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Aug 19, 2023 17:46
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Gatto Grigio posted:The PCs are instead attacked by a squad of awful boomer comedians who tell people that their gender is “attack helicopter.” Being the guy doing the Only Conservative Joke like this in a cyberpunk setting is all fun and games until the CEO calls your bluff and has the R&D guys pop out your brain with an ice cream scoop to use as the wetware CPU of an actual attack helicopter.
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Aug 19, 2023 18:40
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Bucnasti posted:Yeah checking the 1st edition books, there are tons of NPC statblocks, but for some reason they're all labeled as "Contacts". Also every other entry in the Critters section has the sentence "the female of the species has two mamme" or a very close approximation thereof.
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Aug 19, 2023 18:48
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Admiralty Flag posted:There was a rule in 3E about trading karma for nuyen to help street sammies and riggers who needed bucks more than build points. No idea if that got conveyed into future editions.
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Aug 19, 2023 19:00
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Cyberpunk has doubled, tripled, and quadrupled down on the idea that "cyberpsychosis" is just the way society labels mass shooters, the same way corpo soldiers deal with labor activists by labeling them "terrorists" and killing them. It is possible to induce psychosis and paranoia by getting too much cyberware too quickly, because that's what happens to your brain when you replace half your organs. drrockso20 posted:So your GM was an rear end in a top hat who wasted your group's time for no reason except maybe to be a smartass? Long answer: No, he was as disappointed as everyone else. Acting from the same non-logic that makes some gamers think that they had fun illicitly if the ruleset they play with isn't "realistic" enough, he reasoned out what he thought would "really" happen in this fantastical scenario and felt a moral obligation to play it straight, even though he knew that all his ideas were bad. I didn't have the gumption to point out the artillery spotting rules. He's a rocket scientist now. LatwPIAT posted:Shotguns in prosthetic arms are cool and make for rad fight choreography in anime, but few games really emphasize concealability or rapidly changing to some weapon in a way where being able to have a shotgun in your arm is all that much better than just carrying a shotgun, or even whatever other, bigger weapon you can just carry with you.
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Aug 19, 2023 19:33
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fritz posted:The only stats for helicopters I care about is if the blades are dull or sharp. The blades should be razor sharp! If a PC gets decapitated, who’s gonna look slicker in the casket; Johnny Cleanslice, or Timmy Headloaf?
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Aug 19, 2023 20:01
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Nessus posted:Starting to think this cyberpunk thing was increasingly vestigal to provide you with modern-flavored things to be a D&D wizard at From my experience, all the Shadowrun fans I’ve met had little to no interest in actual sci-fi or cyberpunk. They just want D&D with guns and helicopters.
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Aug 19, 2023 20:03
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fritz posted:The only stats for helicopters I care about is if the blades are dull or sharp.
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Aug 19, 2023 20:16
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Nessus posted:Starting to think this cyberpunk thing was increasingly vestigal to provide you with modern-flavored things to be a D&D wizard at Shadowrun has always been Magicrun, in just different flavors. 4e and above just really ramped it up with Jason Hardy being a magic fanboy and really poor editing that never really got errata for the longest time. If the players have their hands on the rules, it's not difficult to eventually replace every team member except the decker. Unless you're playing 6e, then you can mostly replace the decker too. Someone mentioned that not having ways to build encounters was bad game design. I don't think there has been much thought to any game design in Shadowrun since the beginning on 4e. And only a hand wave at tone and theme since then. There have been some spectacular turds released in both rules and lore, which have pretty much butchered both of the above since the 1-3E days. The current metaplot is also mostly drivel and fluff, that can be described as "remember the tense atmosphere and uneasy peace that defined different relationships? well they had a big punch up off screen while the players weren't there, and now things are different but nowhere near as interesting as they were before. I'm a good writer" ninjoatse.cx fucked around with this message at 20:29 on Aug 19, 2023 |
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Aug 19, 2023 20:25
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Rand Brittain posted:I finally got my new built-in bookshelves, set up and stable, and got all the books into them, which was several small ordeals. That's a cool set of books! How long has it taken to accrue them? The bookshelves themselves look great too, like the house came with them.
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Aug 19, 2023 20:52
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HOMOEROTIC JESUS posted:That's a cool set of books! How long has it taken to accrue them? I've had some of them for a while (I finished my Planescape collection back in college), but it's been in the last four or five years when I decided to start seriously collecting physical World of Darkness books, and then moved on to "well, I have most of the games I actually like a lot, so I suppose I might as well get Vampire on the shelf" and then tipped over into total collector's madness.
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Aug 19, 2023 21:01
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fritz posted:The only stats for helicopters I care about is if the blades are dull or sharp. A man of taste I see(I'm in the dull camp) Gatto Grigio posted:The blades should be razor sharp! Heh Gatto Grigio posted:From my experience, all the Shadowrun fans I’ve met had little to no interest in actual sci-fi or cyberpunk. I like sci-fi plenty fine though I'll admit my interest in Cyberpunk as a genre is mostly an aesthetic one, I generally find the actual themes of the genre repugnant for the most part
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Aug 19, 2023 21:46
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I quite enjoyed the guide they put out for a braindance-based MMO in the setting of Cyberpunk RED, which included both a guide to the 'world' involved and a number of hooks and NPCs connected to that particular community. My favorite was the idea of edgerunners getting hired to interfere with a world-first race.
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Aug 19, 2023 22:13
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I thought the cyberpunk Forged in the Dark "Hack the Planet" was a really good setting. It's a search-and-replace Blades in the Dark when it comes to most mechanics so you either like or dislike the system based on that, but the story elements were mostly clever, and where they weren't it was often to try to fit an original Blades mechanic (like for instance these evil corporations just locking you up and having you ride a peleton for a week for terrorism). It's a game I played in that I think of a lot.
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Aug 19, 2023 22:27
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drrockso20 posted:A man of taste I see(I'm in the dull camp) Have some thoughtfulness.
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Aug 19, 2023 23:06
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Nessus posted:Starting to think this cyberpunk thing was increasingly vestigal to provide you with modern-flavored things to be a D&D wizard at Every magitech game has this kind of problem - they have to choose between: a) magic and technology are basically the same with different labels b) technology is limited by what the authors thought technology to do things would like like, magic can do anything and just goes poof
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Aug 20, 2023 00:45
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