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Swags posted:Monkey King idea I hope Swags is still checking this, because this is a really cool character concept and I think it's very doable. Have you considered not using cyberware and instead using Metagenic Qualities and making him a changeling? No Essence cost and you still get monkey-like limbs, a prehensile tail, and the simian features. If you want, I can whip up a quick character sheet of a changeling Monkey King and post it here. e: poo poo, I didn't pay attention to the fact that you want the character to be a Burnout. Well, if that's not a central requirement my idea still would work. Martello fucked around with this message at 05:40 on Dec 19, 2012 |
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Dec 19, 2012 05:32
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I'd do play by post. I won't be available until 1 February though, I'm at the shithole known as Fort Polk, LA until then.
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Jan 22, 2013 18:31
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I posted in the other thread, thanks for pushing the deadline back.
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Jan 23, 2013 00:15
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I would advise the opposite, and say to attack her safe zones the way a few others suggested already. Then again I got fed up with how broken magic is in the game and how all my players wanted to be mages, so I had an insect spirit queen kill all of them and then outlawed magic for new characters. 
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Feb 27, 2013 16:49
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Gertrude Perkins posted:Actually she's the party's street-sam, with no augs or magic in sight. I actually have been having a lot of fun with magic and matrix stuff! I was just giving an example of how evil I was as a GM so to take my advice with a grain of salt. I just fine magic to be so overpowered - anything meat can be fried with a manabolt. It's like, what's the point in using anything except mana spells when faced with living opponents? Sure, drones are good foils but then you have powerbolts, etc. If you build your character right, drain becomes almost a non-issue as long as you're careful.
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Feb 27, 2013 19:07
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Erased (1 week) means that after a week, everything the character has done will be erased from the Matrix. Erased (24 hours) is the same but every day, so you're right on that one. Technically I suppose he could do what he wants to do using the quality, but as the GM you can just figure out ways to gently caress it up for him. Maybe the bank has an isolated records server and transfers loan information into there daily using a dumb datastick. Let him do that loan scheme and then have the bank come after him. Just because his Matrix data and records are erased doesn't mean the loan agent who set him up (make sure it's a metahuman agent!) won't remember his face and the fact that the loan was taken out. Don't tell him about the offline hub, just do it in the background and then boom, Lone Star or some bounty hunters or the bank's personal recovery agents come after him during a run or on his downtime. For stay-at-home hackers, just make your target building security a discrete network, kind of like the bank server. There's no particular reason why security cameras need to be hooked to the larger Matrix, so just don't hook 'em. The hacker has to leave home to get within wi-fi range of the cameras and locks and whatever. Or better yet, make everything wired so he has to plug directly into the system to hack.
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Mar 6, 2013 12:21
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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?
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Mar 14, 2013 23:26
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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.
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Mar 15, 2013 19:21
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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...
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Mar 15, 2013 20:09
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DeclaredYuppie posted:Also- at what point did they name the international bank the Zurich-Orbital Gemeinschaft? Not to get all Minority Issues in Gaming here, but I'd really like to know who thought it would be a good idea to have the initials for the international bank to be ZOG... I'm gonna give them the benefit of the doubt and say they didn't know what ZOG was. I know I've never heard of it until I looked it up just now and I think I'm fairly well-versed in conspiracy theory horseshit. I know it seems like Zurich and banking point to some sort of "Jewspiracy" thing but I really doubt it. For one thing, there's really no inkling of any other Jewish parallels for the Corporate Court or Zurich-Orbital, and in the fluff it's always referred to as Zurich-Orbital, never as ZOG.
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Mar 18, 2013 19:53
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Young Freud posted:Edit: Jesus, I never saw the opposing triangles that make up a "Star of David" in that symbol before Yeah...I was halfway through this post accusing you of parallelomania and then I took another look at the TOG symbol.  e: in other news, is there a way to "take" a drug in Chummer? As in, calculate the drug effect in the program? Google wasn't any help and I can't see a button for it or anything. Martello fucked around with this message at 01:09 on Mar 19, 2013 |
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Mar 19, 2013 00:59
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Mordaedil, I sent you a PM but I have another recommendation - download and use Chummer, not just you but everyone in the game. It will make life easier for you and all your players.
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Mar 19, 2013 14:29
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Vavrek posted:I don't see an easy, built-in way. The program doesn't automatically calculate things for you. However, with a character sheet in Career mode, you can add custom status effects ('Improvements'), which you can toggle on and off. As a test, I made a status effect for each of the effects of Novacoke, then grouped them under the heading "Novacoke". I made the effects for a crash, grouped under "Novacoke crash". It can be finicky to get all of the effects to properly turn on and off, and you have to key it all in by hand, and remember to hit the Decrease By One button on your inventory page as well, but it's at least an option. Thanks, that should work just fine. I wonder if directly using drugs on a character is a planned update? Y'know, like the "FIRE!" button on a weapon. Swagger Dagger posted:Making the Predator would be great because it's basically the robocop gun and having a robocop gun would be the best. It is the RoboCop gun. They lifted it directly from the film. Compare this image from Internet Movie Firearms Database  With this one from Gun Heaven  They added rails on the dustcover.
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Mar 20, 2013 02:23
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I think melee combat should be weak. After all, this is a game set in the late 21st century and guns rightfully reign supreme. Playing as a successful melee character should be difficult and sometimes almost implausible, which makes the rewards that much greater. Alternatively, playing as a melee character is loving stupid and if they get their rear end shot up on a regular basis they should go loving figure and maybe learn to use a gun. The reason a melee action is always a complex action is because it takes longer to use your whole body to punch/kick/grab/whatever someone than it does to pull a trigger. One thing that might help even it out a bit is if the gunslinger has to take a Simple Action to Take Aim every time he engages a new target without getting the normal Take Aim bonus. That way, after he perforates the elf gunman across the room the first round, he has to take a Simple Action to swivel and acquire the ork adept charging in from his right. He can shoot the adept once before the guy closes the distance. As far as adepts are concerned, I haven't seen them to be weak at all. Maybe I was playing him wrong, but I had a Warrior Adept allied NPC helping my PCs in a campaign I ran last year, and that motherfucker was destructive. With 4 IPs and 10P damage on his unarmed strikes, it didn't really matter that each strike was a Complex Action because he was able to deal so much damage with each. He Great Leaped into the second floor of a drug house and killed pretty much everyone before the PCs could get up there. I probably should have held back a little but whatever. It was too cool to have him throw the main antagonist of the run out the second-floor window and have him land in the courtyard in a pulp while the runners prepare to clear the first floor. I made the same mistake PunkBoy did and discounted all of his Warrior Adept powers. Whatever, I guess. pre:== Attributes == BOD: 5 AGI: 5 REA: 5 (8) STR: 3 CHA: 4 INT: 3 LOG: 3 WIL: 4 EDG: 3 MAG: 6 == Derived Attributes == Essence: 6 Initiative: 8 (11) IP: 1 (4) Astral Initiative: 6 Astral IP: 3 Matrix Initiative: 3 Matrix IP: 1 Physical Damage Track: 11 Stun Damage Track: 10 == Active Skills == Animal Handling : 0 Pool: 2 Animal Training : 0 Pool: 2 Archery : 0 Pool: 4 Armorer : 0 Pool: 2 Artisan : 0 Pool: 2 Astral Combat : 3 Pool: 7 Automatics : 0 Pool: 4 Blades : 6 Pool: 11 Climbing : 4 Pool: 7 Clubs : 0 Pool: 4 Computer : 0 Pool: 2 Con : 4 Pool: 8 Cybercombat : 0 Pool: 2 Data Search : 0 Pool: 2 Demolitions : 0 Pool: 2 Disguise : 2 Pool: 5 Diving : 0 Pool: 4 Dodge : 6 Pool: 14 Escape Artist : 0 Pool: 4 Etiquette : 4 Pool: 8 First Aid : 0 Pool: 2 Flight : 4 Pool: 7 Forgery : 0 Pool: 4 Gunnery : 0 Pool: 4 Gymnastics : 4 Pool: 9 Hacking : 0 Pool: 2 Heavy Weapons : 0 Pool: 4 Infiltration : 2 Pool: 7 Instruction : 0 Pool: 3 Intimidation : 2 Pool: 6 Leadership : 4 Pool: 8 Locksmith : 0 Pool: 4 Longarms : 0 Pool: 4 Navigation : 0 Pool: 2 Negotiation : 4 Pool: 8 Palming : 2 Pool: 7 Parachuting : 0 Pool: 4 Perception : 2 Pool: 5 Pilot Ground Craft : 0 Pool: 7 Pilot Watercraft : 0 Pool: 7 Pistols : 0 Pool: 4 Riding : 0 Pool: 7 Running : 4 Pool: 7 Shadowing : 2 Pool: 5 Survival : 0 Pool: 3 Swimming : 4 Pool: 7 Throwing Weapons : 0 Pool: 4 Tracking : 2 Pool: 5 Unarmed Combat : 6 [Martial Arts] Pool: 12 (14) == Qualities == Addiction (Moderate) (Cram) Adept Bicardiac Day Job (40 hrs/week) Dependent (Demanding) Fame (Local) First Impression Geas (Must have performed a Santeria ritual 24 hours before using any Adept Power) Gremlins (Rating 3) Low-Light Vision SINner (Criminal) (Cesar Ramirez) The Warrior's Way Vomeronasal Organ == Powers == Astral Perception Combat Sense Rating: 1 Counterstrike Rating: 1 Critical Strike Rating: 5 Great Leap Rating: 1 Improved Ability (Combat) (Unarmed Combat) Rating: 1 Improved Reflexes 3 Killing Hands Penetrating Strike Rating: 2 Swift and Terrible Rating: 1 Wall Running == Martial Arts == Kickboxing ++1 DV on Unarmed Combat attacks Clinch Disarm Ground Fighting Kick Attack
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Mar 20, 2013 18:42
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Piell posted:Even using Warrior Adept discount on all his powers you've spent 8.56 points of adept powers. Also that guy only does 8P -2AP damage by my calculation. Also you could get an SMG and do a pair of called shot for damage and then a short burst for bursts for 10P/8P -1AP with the same/higher dice pool and fewer points spent. The values are all straight out of Chummer; I also discounted everything by using a Geas. Dunno if I did that right either, but he's a Prime Runner so it's not like it really matters. And yeah, an SMG is still better than unarmed with Killing Hands. That's kinda the point of my last post, unarmed shouldn't be as good as guns since, y'know, guns are loving GUNS. I don't agree but it's a personal opinion thing, I guess. Cutting dudes in half with your monosword should be awesome but only in certain situations, like when you drop from the ceiling on unsuspecting corpsec goons or jump a dude in a bar or come outta an alley behind some Lone Star officers and so on. But if you're a close-combat dude and you have to cover significant ground between you and your gun-wielding target then you should probably take a lot of damage if not die before you can get there. Personally, I like to have a modicum of realism for combat. I know, it's a world of magic and implausible cybertech and orks and blah blah, but it's like wanting a zombie film to have realistic weapon use. Talking about the Predator looking like an Auto 9 has inspired me to build a RoboCop character in Chummer. 
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Mar 20, 2013 19:20
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I'm not sure if you're saying that in real life bullets aren't as dangerous or damaging as fists, but it sounds like you might be. I sure as the gently caress hope not. Can you clarify your point a bit?
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Mar 20, 2013 20:00
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Dude, I've punched people and been punched many many times before, and I don't just mean during Army combatives training. Nobody I know has ever died from any of that, but I know more than one dude who died from just a couple bullets. It's "surprisingly hard" to stop someone with bullets, but that's not the same thing as killing them. A guy can take a number of bullets to the torso or whatever and not go down right away due to adrenaline and whatnot, and then bleed to death or die from shock a few minutes later. You can punch the poo poo out of a dude and he'll go down fairly quick - almost never with one punch though - and be just fine a couple days later when his aches are gone and his bruises are starting to fade. On actual Shadowrun stuff, I was just messing around with Chummer and I can't see a way to make a character into a cyborg without creating custom cyberware for the CCU. Am I just missing it somewhere?
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Mar 20, 2013 20:43
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Tripp, I think we probably are closer in viewpoints than it looks, we're just approaching from different angles. As for the realism thing in general, that's more just my pet peeve and I put more emphasis in it when I run games because I do a sort of half-Shadowrun where all the Awakening poo poo is gone and it's really just a cyberpunk game played with Shadowrun rules and gear and so on. I also agree that Technomancers should be more different from just a regular hacker. I wonder if that will change in 5th edition?
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Mar 20, 2013 21:52
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Super Rad posted:Martello's right, you're just misinterpreting what he's saying. Melee is bad - but having the Adept quality is very very good due to adept abilities such as improved skill and enhanced combat sense. Adepts do not have to use melee and if you're min-maxing melee should always be the "my weapons were stolen/confiscated plan b" That's pretty much exactly what I was trying to say. Melee should be weak in general, but being an Adept should outbalance it and I think it does.
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Mar 22, 2013 00:49
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Young Freud has it right with the muzzle velocity stuff. Speaking of "not to get all TFR," I'm gonna get a little TFR for a minute. It really, really bothers my gunsperg side every time I see the word "clip" used to mean "magazine." Then there's the "High Velocity" weapon class. Apparently in the dark, Awakened future of Shadowrun, high velocity means "high rate of fire." How the gently caress do you get that one wrong? You don't even need to be a gun expert to know that velocity is not the same thing as rate of fire. You'd think at least one Shadowrun editor would have handled a gun once in his life, but apparently not. And really, I think a lot of these problems are pretty easy to solve as a GM/game group. Just adjust the rules as you feel necessary to increase realism or balance archetypes or whatever it is you want to change. When I ran a campaign I played with the more lethal combat alternate rules, upping the DV of all weapons and disallowing Dodge to defend against ranged attacks. Is it still irritating that the game is built the way it is? Yeah, but it's still a great game at its core and tweaking it isn't hard at all. I'm sure I'm preaching to the choir here because if we didn't all love Shadowrun we wouldn't be posting in this thread.
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Mar 22, 2013 16:40
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Tippis posted:Simple: because HVAR sounds like a semi-technical name that kind of belong in the same world as HEDP and AICW and AN/PVS, whereas HROFAR sounds more like a dog being sick on the carpet. Haha, quite loving true.
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Mar 22, 2013 18:03
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children overboard posted:Argh... I have that affliction again. You guys know the one: that urge to run another Shadowrun pbp game, my horror at the matrix rules being overwhelmed by the awesome setting again! If you run one here I'll join. So does anyone know what vision enhancements for a smartgun camera actually does in-game? I was just looking at Arsenal and saw that you can add them but what's the in-game effect? Can you use the camera to take photos in low-light? I just can't think of a whole lot of utility for it.
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Mar 27, 2013 02:02
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Vavrek posted:I usually imagine that you could put Vision Magnification onto a smartgun camera and not need it on your glasses/contacts for negating range modifiers. I remember being able to get every basic vision enhancement type if I had glasses, contacts, and put Vision Mag on the smartgun camera (something goes over 12 Availability otherwise). Of course, being a camera, you can use it for all the other things you can use cameras for: taking pictures to run through facial recognition software, feeding the stream into your Empathy Software for all its uses, etc. That makes sense, and it's always nice to be able to super-customize everything even if the utility is limited or would work better with another piece of equipment. Since you mentioned Empathy Software and I saw some people complaining about it being a game-breaker earlier, I looked into it. I'd never even noticed it in Arsenal before. I guess adding 6 dice to any Social skill is pretty loving ridiculous, and three grand for a Rating 6 Empathy Software isn't even that expensive. I'm assuming those Emotitoys a couple pages before the software are the "bonzai buddies" everyone's talking about. I'd probably just disallow them as a GM, or maybe just put a Rating 3 limit on the software.
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Mar 27, 2013 17:02
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I know the Gibsonian iconic cyberspace hacking concept is superfuckingcore to Shadowrun, but I can't ever read anything about it or see it during a game and not roll my eyes. I ain't no hacker but I used to live with a few and watched them do their thing. Granted typing into a command line is nothing exciting to watch, but in an RPG it doesn't matter because everything is representational anyway. At some point when I have a little more time I might run a cyberpunk game using Shadowrun rules and set in a similar universe, but no magic, no iconic cyberspace hacking or "matrix combat," and there would be much more variety in who the PCs can be. In other words, "shadowrunner" isn't a thing, but PCs could be "freelance security operators" or whatever who do pretty much the same thing, private detectives, bounty hunters, or mob associates and so on. It would probably be set in the NY Metroplex area. I already have a lot of campaign stuff for that from when I ran a campaign last year and from my own cyberpunk writing. A lot of Advanced Combat Rules would be in effect, especially More Lethal Gameplay. I might keep Technomancers, and they'd still be able to do the regular Matrix hacking instead of using a command line for brute-force and whatnot. Would anyone be interested in that kind of thing at some point in the future?
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Mar 28, 2013 19:29
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I'm just looking to run a plain cyberpunk game, not sure what's to be mad about that. Some people don't always like mixing fantasy with their cyberpunk.
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Mar 28, 2013 20:53
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SolTerrasa posted:The system is deeply coupled to the world. See, I haven't had that be my experience at all. After a few runs of magic being really stupid, we stripped it out of the campaign I was running and everything worked perfectly. Matrix stuff I don't know because nobody ran a hacker so we didn't really come across it besides my hacker NPCs rolling against other enemy hacker NPCs. Don't get me wrong - I love Shadowrun the way it is, it's just that sometimes I want to play regular no-magic cyberpunk with a little more realism. I like the rules and I know them, so I'd rather not learn a whole new system either.
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Mar 28, 2013 21:47
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Mendrian posted:If ICE were more like security protocols and less like programs that you fight, it would be interesting. If they behaved more like actual firewalls and security programs and less like a ten foot lion that shoots data-lasers from his data-eyes. Especially considering the experiment to see if you even need to do VR hacking in SR4 always came back as a conclusive 'no'. This is pretty much exactly how I feel about hacking. Along with: ProfessorCirno posted:As far as hacking things goes, I think quite frankly the sidebar should say the opposite. Turning the connection in your gear or ware is seen as dangerous, crazy, and illegal - the kind of stuff only Runners do. Most corpsec, cops, or not knowing any better gangbangers will not only have their stuff running, but also spawning the occasional advertisement. Just as in the real world, most people trust their firewalls, no matter how crappy or out of date they are and are really, really bad at following security protocol. DeclaredYuppie posted:I feel like this is also why a lot of people see new edition Shadowrunners being much more "all pro assassins" and less "expendible punks outside the system". This is another issue I have with how I see people playing the game a lot. When I started playing SR3e back in the early 00's, my GM was adamant that we were all just loving street filth with low skills, fairly low attributes, and access to only the most basic of gear. We could work our way up to better gear and better skills and attributes and so on, but slowly and with a lot of hard and dangerous runs. And we died. A lot. Not like how I've seen it now where players basically weep and beg you to reneg when you kill their character. PC death was routine rather than the exception when I used to play 3rd ed. Granted, our GM was so ruthless and brutal that our running joke was: Player: "I walk outside my apartment." GM: "Roll Body." But it was loving fun and it really felt like we were these dregs-of-society cannon fodder the corporate masters thought nothing of throwing at each other like so many grenades. There's definitely something to be said for both sides of the game though. Kai Tave posted:how they don't use the stupid PG swearwords in the fiction anymore. Apparently if your game of cybercriminals murdering, robbing, kidnapping, and everything else-ing under the sun for kicks and profit involves actual real-world swears then you're just "trying too hard to be edgy" or something, because sometime between magic coming back to the world and people sticking wires in their brains the word "gently caress" just totally falls out of fashion or something, I don't know. Haha, when I read my first Catalyst book and saw the wonderful word "gently caress," I was like "Thank God, I don't have to roll my eyes outta my skull every time I see the words 'fragging' and 'hoop' and 'drek' and all that other nonsense."  But it's atmospheric! It's like Clockwork Oran
Martello fucked around with this message at 16:43 on Apr 2, 2013 |
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Apr 2, 2013 16:41
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I think saying that bioware is vastly more powerful than cyber and "a bit more expensive" is a pretty big exaggeration. Let's compare the two equivalent REA/Initiative-boosting bio and cyber options, both from the core rulebook. Wired Reflexes: This highly invasive operation implants a multitude of neural boosters and adrenalin stimulators in strategic locations all over the body, catapulting the patient into a whole new world where everything around her seems to move in slow motion. The system includes a trigger to turn the wired reflexes on and off (taking a Free Action). When activated, wired reflexes confer a bonus of +1 to Reaction and +1 Initiative Pass per point of rating. Wired reflexes cannot be combined with any other form of Initiative enhancement, except Reaction Enhancers. Rating 1 2 Essence, 8R, 11,000¥ Rating 2 3 Essence, 12R, 32,000¥ Rating 3 5 Essence, 20R, 100,000¥ Synaptic Booster: With this bioware, the nerve cells making up the spinal cord are encouraged to replicate and lengthen, providing a wider “datapath” for the transmission of impulses and decreasing the amount of time required for the signal to traverse the distance. The booster confers a bonus of +1 Reaction and + 1 Initiative Pass per point of rating. The synaptic booster cannot be combined with any other form of Initiative enhancement. Rating 1 .5 Essence, 6R, 80,000¥ Rating 2 1 Essence, 12R, 160,000¥ Rating 3 1.5 Essence, 18R, 240,000¥ Pretty significant price difference there, which of course is supposedly balanced by the reduced Essence loss. Either way you wouldn't be able to buy Rating 3 at character creation, but you could easily afford Rating 2 Wired Reflexes and likely wouldn't be able to manage Rating 2 Synaptic Booster. Sure, bioware is often the better choice, but if you can't afford to buy it it doesn't matter. That and it's pretty easy for the GM to say, "hey guess what you're a street sam who's highest connection is a neighborhood fixer, you can't even get in the door to the kind of clinics that install cultured bioware." Also there are still a lot of things you can only do with cyberware. All the climbing enhancements, grip feet, internal air tank, cyberweapons, blah blah. And on the theme of REA/Initiative improving poo poo, there's that wonderful Move-By-Wire System. At Rating 3 you get +6 REA and +3 IP, and for the same Essence cost as the Rating 3 Wired Reflexes. Yeah, it costs 175,000 but that's still significantly cheaper than the Rating 3 Synaptic Booster. And unlike the Booster, you can combine it with Reaction Enhancers. Add those at Rating 3 along with Exceptional Attribute (REA) and you have a REA of 10 while not spending any karma on actually improving the stat. Granted, that costs 205,000 total (still 35,000 less than the Synaptic Booster) and you're down to .1 Essence, but I think you can see the point. As a high-level character improvement with high-grade cyberware options, that combination is very feasible in the long run. Become a Jazz addict and you add another IP.
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Apr 3, 2013 16:14
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Missed some things from earlier.Bigass Moth posted:When is the last time you saw someone not playing a street slime game take Muscle Replacement? I just took it for my character in children overboard's The Startup game. It's 10 grand and 1.8 essence for 2 points each of AGI and STR. That's versus 30,000 bones and .8 essence for Toner and Augmentation at Rating 2. Kinda hard not to see why Replacement was an easy choice for a starting character who's gonna be low essence anyway. ProfessorCirno posted:You do realize I very explicitly noted that IP boosters were exempt, right? Nope, musta missed that. Still doesn't account for all the other cyber-only stuff I listed earlier. With bioware you can do a lot of things but you can't have rollerblades in your feet or velociraptor legs or an air tank or gun implanted in your stomach. Mystic Mongol posted:Given how cheap initiative boosting drugs are no one is buying more than one rank in IP boosting 'ware no matter what. What lunatic gives up a whole point of essence plus huge pile of money boosting their two IP to three? The core book has two cheep, effective drugs to raise your IP from 2 to 4, and that's the limit on passes. The limit on passes is 5. Which drug are you talking about? The only one I can think of is K-10, which gives you +3 (getting you to that insane 5 IP) but pretty much kills you on the comedown. 18S unresisted, gently caress that. It's also a role-playing thing. If you don't want to play as the kind of character who would use drugs, but want to have high IPs, you gotta get it through cyberware or bioware. Also if your GM isn't completely worthless he'll make you pay for your drug abuse in all sorts of ways. Most of the IP adding and REA-boosting drugs have short durations and significant comedown effects. What if you're on a mission for more than an hour? Pretty much hosed. Kai Tave posted:I can't tell if the fact that drugs are so goddamn good in SR4 is brilliant or stupid. On the one hand it really does lead to games where criminals and people who've fallen through society's cracks frequently wind up using illegal drugs...so hooray for verisimilitude I guess? On the other hand, drugs are stupidly good to the point where you have people on future-meth bouncing around in the same way that you're supposed to have to spend tens of thousands of fun-bucks and have wires jammed into your central nervous system to achieve. See above. Tippis posted:I miss good old Kamikaze — the same effect on initiative as the lowest form of reflex boosting, and after 40 lifetime uses, you die. That's a proper cost of initiative boosting Yeah, pretty much like that K-10 poo poo, and Kamikaze the way it is now is still pretty bad. Tippis posted:I often get the feeling that the whole availability part of the equation is one of the most overlooked or poorly applied parts of the rulebook, when it really could be the GM's greatest tool against the gear escalation. It's also another area where the transition between old and new system somewhat missed the point of what the new system meant. This I agree with 100%. We bitch about a lot of things that a good GM can just fix with a house rule or how he runs the campaign. I know, "GMs can fix it" shouldn't be the answer to everything, but at the same time I also don't want to constantly have to relax game rules if I want to run a higher-power, higher-availability game or whatever. It's like all our rules in the Army - you can always add to them, but never take away. Bigass Moth posted:Also, for cyber weapons - do you still need to have Unique Weapons skills to use those, because that was a deal breaker in SR3 and I can't remember if they kept that bullshit rule around. No, just use the Blades skill. Then you can specialize in Cyber-Implant Blades and get that sweet +2 dice. DeclaredYuppie posted:What if the bioware upgrades that improved key pools/duplicated a lot of what cyberware does were capped at a rating of 1? Bone Density, Muscle improvements, Orthoskin and synaptic booster? yeah it would be stupid and make it so nobody would use bioware.
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Apr 4, 2013 11:49
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Hardwired is loving awesome. And yeah, it really does avoid the "sky the color of a television..." and the no cell phones thing that makes Neuromancer a little funny to read these days. solipSystem, the sequel, is pretty alright, but I much prefer Voice of the Whirlwind. It's only tenuously linked to the other two books, and it's quite a bit further in the future, but it manages to be pretty cyberpunk even with space travel out to Jupiter and aliens.
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Apr 5, 2013 11:25
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It's definitely worth the read. Like I said, I prefer both Hardwired and Voice, but solipSystem does really cool things with the idea of consciousness uploading. It's pretty loving creepy, too.
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Apr 5, 2013 12:54
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Mystic Mongol posted:There's also skimmer discs, which are Ground Effect Feet that let you fly at an altitude of twenty centimeters. There's no picture or description. How the hell do they work? Do you float on jets? Air? Electrical fields? Who cares, they let you move super fast! Another thing you can only do with cyberware!
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Apr 5, 2013 18:10
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The only LAVs you can even buy are the MIG-67 and the Skraacha. They both look like hovertanks in the Arsenal illustrations. It's odd because a smuggler is one of those things a shadowrunner could actually be, or at least it would be easy to set up a smuggling campaign. They have more high-flying aircraft in the books than anything a runner would ever encounter, and only two LAVs.
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Apr 5, 2013 21:22
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Yeah I was gonna say the same thing about the LAV acronym. Those are the stupid turreted things the Marines use instead of Strykers, not panzers from Hardwired.
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Apr 5, 2013 23:01
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There are a bunch of tanks, light and otherwise, in the various Milspech Tech supplements.
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Apr 5, 2013 23:42
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homerlaw posted:The LAV-103 "Striker" is only 50,00n from MilSpec Tech 1. It's 72 grand, but still. Ridiculous. An actual Stryker Infantry Carrier Vehicle costs right around 2 million American right now - I used to be signed for four of the loving things. Not sure that a more advanced vehicle would be a fraction of the price in the future.
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Apr 5, 2013 23:54
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Man, Runner's Companion is so much worse. I swear to god a dev team member had their 12-year-old son draw some of those illustrations.
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Apr 6, 2013 00:42
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children overboard posted:So, who's gonna run another Shadowrun game? There's obviously heaps of interest for one. Bigass Moth posted:I'd like to play a long-term campaign if anyone wants to start running one. I think I'll have the time to start one later this month if people wanna wait a week or two. Also can I get an interest check on magic/no-magic? I'm willing to run either, but I prefer no-magic. The other variable is street-level or jet-setting - either play as street scum with little to no bioware and miltech access, or a high-power game (500 BP or maybe more) where you get everything and do orbital runs and hob-nob with the Grand Tour but opposition are ridiculous and everything's more convoluted.
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Apr 6, 2013 15:39
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Bigass Moth posted:I'd prefer magic, and it's gotta be 750 Karmagen (with the errata: 5x rating for attribute raise; races cost karma=BP). I'd prefer a lower power level, not necessarily street urchins, but semi-pro dudes trying to get their name out there. I don't get the karmagen thing to be honest, what makes it better? I've always done BP and it always made more sense to me.
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Apr 6, 2013 15:56
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Vavrek posted:Not sure. Do you mean "no adepts or magicians in the group" or "no Awakening, no metahumans, etc."? I've got some interesting characters I've worked out that don't have a Magic attribute, but actual Homo sapiens sapiens may have slipped my mind. I'm interested in a game, certainly, but that interest goes down if it's a non-magical setting. I mean no Awakening or any of that stuff. Right now you, Moth, and Rockopolis are voting for magic. Chen's the only one so far with me on no-magic. If more people don't come forward wanting a straight cyberpunk game I'll run vanilla Shadowrun. However, I'm considering limiting the number of Awakened characters to maybe one, either magician or Adept. In Street Magic it says approximately 1 percent of metahumans are Awakened. So 1 out of 8 (or whatever the group size ends up being) is still way, way over the average which I'm not sure makes any kind of sense, but then again if we're playing with magic it's kinda unfair to not let anyone be magical or limit the number. That's one of the number of reasons why I prefer running a no-magic game. Also, direct combat spells are loving ridiculously overpowered and impossible to defend against if you're not a mage yourself. Emotitoys and all that nonsense are definitely out. Addiction will be a very big thing in gameplay if your character uses drugs. Drug-addict characters will suffer all kinds of negative effects beyond "6S unresisted." If the drug's particularly hard to get a hold of, like Nitro maybe, the character would have to role-play making the deal, possibly get attacked in the violent troll neighborhood, blah blah. None of this "you'd be insane not to just take a poo poo ton of Cram or Jazz to boost IP" bullshit. I'm also a big fan of highly flawed characters. So I would encourage players to create depressive, moody drug addicts or cybered-out nutcases with serious cyberpsychosis. Since I'm leaning towards a crime-heavy campaign - both street-level and organized crime stuff - all of that would make sense for the characters.
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Apr 8, 2013 18:08
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