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I cannot even believe they brought Harlequin back for any reason, holy poo poo. The whole "immortal elf" thin in 2E was so dumb. Like, I dunno, I can take or leave the Earthdawn connections...I know some people really dig them, I'm not averse to them but I don't really miss them when they aren't around...but Harlequin was just the perfect example of a particularly stupid kind of NPC, the all-powerful dickhead whose purpose is to show up and badger your players into playing through the new module that your GM payed $20 for so by god we're going to be playing it Steve, stop bitching. Shadowtalk has always been a neat part of Shadowrun, and the way they integrated it into a lot of the setting info was definitely a pretty cool signature of the game. I agree with Cirno that I think once you start moving beyond snippets here and there that it begins to wear out its welcome. I dunno, I definitely think Shadowrun could benefit from a new edition, but at this point I don't have a whole lot of faith that 5E will be very good. Most of the people who seemed to really know what they were doing and had been working on SR for a while left when Catalyst had their financial meltdown and the output they've been putting out lately hasn't instilled me with a lot of confidence...sloppy, badly edited, uninspiring and boring and occasionally just bad. Perhaps I'm being overly negative and they'll surprise me with some amazing grand-slam but for now 
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Mar 18, 2013 08:33
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Bigass Moth posted:No doubt. If you ever visit Dumpshock (ugh....) you'll see hundreds of sperglords who would drop everything in their lives if asked to edit SR material, but somehow every book released is sloppy and inconsistently written. The overall writing has improved quite a bit since SR3, but the editing is beyond awful and it seems like Catalyst doesn't care. I mean they never even released an errata to Augmentation which had glaring mistakes and contradictions. You shouldn't have to consult a fan forum to find out what the rules actually are. Honestly, I think part of the problem is that Catalyst, even back before the Crisis of Perfidy, would hire drat near anybody. I mean poo poo, they hired Frank Trollman to do...something for them, I don't think it was all that much, but the fact is that Catalyst has never really seemed to care that much, that a lot of what was good about SR4 came from the old guard, people who had been working on Shadowrun for a good while and were passionate about it, familiar with the material, and knew how to get poo poo done and done right (not flawlessly, hell no, but better than what we're getting now). Then the implosion happened and most of those folks are gone baby gone and now Catalyst is left trying to get a new roster put back together and to be frank, I think maybe at this point the issue may simply be that rather than some new writers or a team of amateur proofreaders what Shadowrun needs is maybe a new publisher.
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Mar 18, 2013 12:14
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The thing is, most Shadowrun guns are either "like modern day guns only with some slightly different greebles and higher numbers in the name so you know it's THE FUTURE" or ridiculous poo poo that would either be highly illegal for you if you could make it or ridiculously impossible and/or stupid but it's THE FUTURE and Shadowrun bears about as much relationship to reality as D&D does so nobody cares too hard. Just make an Ares Predator, that's like the iconic Shadowrun gun and at heart it's just a semi-automatic pistol so you shouldn't hopefully be jumping through too many legal or technical hoops.
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Mar 19, 2013 08:05
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Mendrian posted:I think the whole issue is being approached from the wrong direction. Basically this. I think we actually had this argument in BWF not that long ago, and I agree with this assessment...if this was a GURPS: Black Ops game or something then sure, guns should reign supreme all day every day and melee should be that thing you use as a last resort or in very specific circumstances. Shadowrun is a game that sort of tries to come across as all slick cyberpunk black ops mercenaries and stuff but no, it's a crazy-rear end action movie. I don't expect guns to triumph over melee in Feng Shui because "guns are more dangerous in real life!" and I don't expect that to be the case in Shadowrun either, especially when one of the character types they've tried to shoehorn into the game is "badass magic kung fu dude." Or, I dunno, cyborg wired-up katana dude.
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Mar 21, 2013 01:12
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ProfessorCirno posted:I know Seattle is the vague "canon" place to do runs at, but has anyone played an SR game that took place in LA? From what I remember, LA running is suppose to be less professionals in black trenchcoats and mirror shades, and more Saints Row the 7th, where police video of runs in action are televised and runners are half criminal, half superstar. I've heard the LA section on shadowrunning in 4E get a lot of compliments but I've not yet heard/seen anyone actually run a game set there, it seems like it would be a pretty fun sort of deal, especially for people who got upset about 4E angling things more towards the "slick professional" side of things rather than "tearing down main street in a Bulldog Step-Van which is on fire while the troll takes potshots at Lone Star with an assault cannon."
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Mar 21, 2013 02:05
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Yeah, SirFozzie has it. I'm pretty sure that all of that was entirely a 4E thing too as California was mostly wrapped up in some Japanese occupation metaplot-line from what I can recall in earlier editions, but when they did Corporate Enclaves they decided to go nuts with LA and I think it works out really well.
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Mar 21, 2013 02:23
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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" Which is fine only if you subscribe to the theory that awesome kung-fu adepts, which is a thing that's been pitched to players by Shadowrun since at least 2E which is when I picked it up, are actually some sort of system mastery style winnowing process designed to separate the smart players from the dumbasses who think "oh man, I'm gonna be a magic ninja and get to dim mak cyborgs in the cyber-face, this is gonna be so loving awesome."
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Mar 21, 2013 23:58
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If I had to guess I'd say that the problem, from a mechanical standpoint, stems from the fact that you can mix adept powers and cyber/bioware at all, and that the designers are afraid that if they make adept powers too good somehow that the same issue will arise only in reverse...except given the extant mechanics of Essence, Magic, and all that jazz you'd think they could come up with some drat solution that lets people who want to actually stick to what the fluff has suggested all these years...the totally uncybered adept who stands toe-to-toe with Joe Cyberdude and fucks poo poo up with his amazing Killing Hands and mad ninja skillz...without causing horrific Frankenstein multiclass issues or the game implying that they're a moron if they don't start auging up. "Technology is straight-up better than magic, suck it wiznerds" is not really how Shadowrun is intended to work I'm pretty sure.
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Mar 22, 2013 07:50
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Literally every time I think to myself "hey, I've got a neat idea for a Shadowrun character" I go and open the books, start looking over gear selection and BP costs, remember all the dozens and dozens of fiddly bits and "how do these two rules work together again, if I take these raptor cyberlegs how bad am I loving myself over when I want to get muscle toner, etc. etc.," at which point I remember why I don't actually make Shadowrun characters anymore and put the books away. Then someone else will pitch a Shadowrun game and I'll think to myself "hey, I've got a neat idea for a Shadowrun character" and do it all over again. It's like the candy corn of RPGs.
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Mar 30, 2013 11:05
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Mystic Mongol posted:I like playing character doctor... feel free to tap me with help for what you want to do. I mean, I'm sure I could get Chummer or Hero Lab or something like that, it's not as though it's impossible...I just feel like I've reached a turning point and may have become the grognard. I noticed this when Eclipse Phase first came out and I rushed to make a bunch of cool cyber-bio-transhuman dudes some of whom were genetically engineered sabertooth big cats; making characters in these systems is exhausting. My very first RPG ever was Feng Shui, which really isn't relevant to this thread at all. My second RPG ever was Shadowrun. I bought it from the same way-out game store I'd gotten Feng Shui from which wasn't really a game store per se so much as a miscellaneous junk and knick-knacks store that happened to do a brisk trade in Magic cards. This was in 1996 or so, so around the start of the Ice Age block. Friendliest guy ever ran the place, Bill Deschler out on Cape Arago Highway. I miss that place. Anyway they also had a small collection of RPGs that basically sat there and gathered dust, among which was a battered and well worn softback of Shadowrun 2nd Edition. Now, I was vaguely aware that Shadowrun was "an RPG" in the pencils-and-dice sense largely thanks to an article in some video game magazine or another talking about the Shadowrun game for the SNES (which I would later go on to get stuck on in my younger and dumber years then return to triumphantly defeat in all my full-body cyborg dog shaman decker glory), and it was enjoying the SNES game as much as I had as well as finally beginning to "get" RPGs thanks to Feng Shui that led to me purchasing that copy of the tabletop RPG. So Feng Shui had been my first game, but Shadowrun was the game that really made me "get" RPGs. I'd managed to understand Feng Shui after a lot of reading and re-reading and getting my head around words I knew used in different ways and contexts, but when I pieced together Shadowrun in my head that was apparently the key that led to me being able to go "oh okay, I see how this poo poo works" and understand RPGs in general. And once I got it I loving loved it, and I did what every dorky teenager without a group of like-mindedly dorky friends does when he has an RPG and an overstimulated imagination and I spent what I can only imagine must be dozens and dozens of hours making characters for games I would never play on an old Apple II (a "cs" I think, Christ I can't even remember). And at one point, for a while, I owned drat near every sourcebook for SR2E and a number for SR1E as well. Didn't need'em, bought'em anyway, loved'em regardless. And every new sourcebook gave me more ideas for more characters, all of which were made by poring over combinations of books, flipping through pages and punching combined Essence costs and modifiers into a calculator before typing the finished product up nice and neat. And then somewhere along the way that just...stopped, y'know? Part of it is doubtlessly simply getting older, very marginally wiser, and going "hey, why are you wasting your time doing this? You should be wasting your time arguing about elfgames and discussing Let's Plays instead, that's a much more valuable use of your time," but somewhere along the way I feel like without even having some grand epiphany I just lost whatever urge I had to really dig back into a character creation system like Shadowrun's again. I'm probably not going to pitch to children overboard's game and I wasn't likely to anyway (no offense intended children overboard, I'm already waiting to hear back on a game and I'm in a couple more already) but seeing it go up got me kinda thinking it'd be cool to crack open the .pdfs and give it a spin again and...yeah, like I said, as soon as I start actually start to get into the process of making the character I just check out. I remember the same thing happening when I last had a tabletop group and the GM was like "Shadowrun!" and everybody was like "Aw yeah, awesome" and then chargen happened and the game just sort of stalled on the runway (at least it wasn't only me that time). I still like Shadowrun the setting, and I'm one of those people who actually likes a lot of the changes that went on in 4E. And of course people have made a bazillion hacks for "Shadowrun in [SOME OTHER SYSTEM]" but none of those has ever really appealed to me either for various reasons. I dunno. tl;dr  blah blah blah, today I am the grognard.
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Mar 30, 2013 12:27
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DeclaredYuppie posted:Maybe it's just the rose-colored glasses of youth, but Shadowrun has always felt to me a system that, for all the issues it generates, begs for its overly intricate and usually unwieldy system. I actually agree with this and had considered going into it but that post was already word city. A certain degree of, for lack of a better way to put it, "shopping list syndrome" feels right for a game like Shadowrun which is all about tweaking and tuning yourself into a finely-honed black ops mercenary along with a healthy dollop of consumerism and "gotta spend money to make money, gotta chase the cutting edge." This is, I think, why I'm never quite satisfied with Shadowrun hacks that use ultralight systems or where character creation is abstracted too much. Like you, it could be nostalgia talking, but there it is. At the same time, I feel like that while SR4's chargen isn't hard, it suffers from being unwieldy ("Take your 400 starting points...") as well as married to a system that both encourages hyperspecialized Buckets O' Dice and makes players jump through a lot of other hoops to do things that could stand to be simplified a lot (like practically anything to do with cyberlimbs, holy poo poo. Eclipse Phase at least got that right; you want a cyberlimb? Fine, one of your arms is made of robot, done, no messing around with "all your cyberlimb attributes start at 3 and you have to buy them back up, then you have to take the average value of your stats whenever you do something involving all your limbs, but the stats can't go too high without this other piece of cyberware, hey where are you going, you still have 150 more BP to assign..."). I don't know if there's a way to have that feeling without it inevitably leading to fiddly chargen hell though, but I am not a smarty-man game designer so.
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Mar 31, 2013 01:52
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DeclaredYuppie posted:For Shadowrun at least, it might just make the most sense to drop the whole of capacity and buying cyberlimbs independently, and make the whole cyber-system about buying things that "upgrade" you (nebulously defining that as either more general enhancements like a +1 to strength or having a cyber-weapon available to you). Make all the costs in essence and nuyen, and at the end simply suggest to players a general description of your cyber-ness to your player's body. 5.5 essence might mean light, generally unobtrusive wiring through a part of the body or a single cyber-hand. 4 Essence might mean light wiring/connections through your torso and limbs, a partly augmented torso or a set of cyberlimbs. 2 suggests etc etc etc. That actually sounds like a reasonable and well thought-out idea, which is why I'm almost certain that nothing like it will ever be incorporated into Shadowrun.
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Apr 1, 2013 10:18
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ProfessorCirno posted:Different strokes I guess. For me, hacking is interesting when it has an effect on the game and the world. Dicking around in some bizarre TOTALLY NOT AN MMORPG style thing so I can open a door isn't interesting. On the other hand, when the team is pinned down by a troll with the biggest machine gun he can carry, being able to not literally grab hold of his gun and have it eject all it's ammo - or even just momentarily shut it down so the team can advance on him - is way more interesting. Likewise, being in CYBER MATRIX COMBAT doesn't do anything for me. At all. But editing the buildings' cameras to make it look like our team is on the other side of the compound when poo poo starts to go down, or, in the middle of a chase scene, hacking into one of the vehicles and sent it turning sideways to block the others? I love it. This is sort of what I had hoped that SR4's shift in focus from VR hacking the Gibson to AR-based real-time hacking would be...I don't think I'd want a game where the hacker never gets a chance to fight off some wicked Black ICE to some thumping techno beats, but what I want to do when I think "I wanna be a hacker" is this sort of thing, real-time loving with cameras and traffic systems and shorting out someone's fancy cyber augs, Ghost in the Shell style, or hijacking someone's drones and security systems.
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Apr 2, 2013 05:52
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Well the good news is that according to the Shadowrun 5E devblog they're planning on changing the Matrix again in some sort of hazily-defined "it'll still work like it does in 4E but it'll be different...somehow" fashion that coincidentally also happens to require them to bring back cyberdecks (which are wireless-enabled computer devices capable of hacking things with the right programs...y'know, like commlinks...but which are a totally different sort of wireless-enabled computer device capable of hacking things with the right programs which means a whole new name is called for and by new name we mean old name) so who even knows what this will mean for the thrilling world of cyberhacking the datahighways of 20X6. Probably something involving shitloads of dice, is my guess.
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Apr 2, 2013 13:17
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Mendrian posted:I could get behind that. Piell posted:Watch Dogs is what hacking should be like. Yeah, basically. "Hacker as support caster" is a good way to look at it, or I should say that's how I wish it were and it's what I had hoped the shift from VR to AR would bring with it, but Mystic Mongol has the right of it that Shadowrun hacking is beholden to the "virtual reality with cyberlions" ethos and will probably be forever because holy poo poo if you guys think D&D spawns some vituperative grog by all means go to a Shadowrun forum sometime. Mystic Mongol's example of how hacking in SR4 works is especially disappointing because I would like to be able to make a leet hackzor who does things like cause peoples' smartguns to lock up or bluescreen their cybereyes but the game sets that up as virtually impossible because almost nobody ever leaves poo poo like that open (which is, y'know, smart, but limits the hacker's ability to do interesting things in an all-wireless world). gently caress, in that Syndicate FPS you can wirelessly hack peoples' guns and make them explode. How loving rad is that? Between that, jacking drones, and all the poo poo you can get up to in something like Watchdogs (messing with traffic/security systems, cloning commlinks, all that good stuff), that sounds like a pretty solid basis for a character role.
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Apr 2, 2013 13:26
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Mendrian posted:Yup. I mean, it's hard for me to come up with a way to rationalize someone leaving their eye replacements vulnerable to wireless intrusion that doesn't seem dumb as hell, because in a world where a dude with a fancy cellphone loaded with warez can do all sorts of crazy techno-poo poo why the hell would you? But at the same time it means you probably can't ever pull a Laughing Man and hack someone's cybernetic visual feed on the fly or make that security troll's smartlinked machinegun try and feed two rounds at once or anything like that.
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Apr 2, 2013 14:03
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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:
This is why I'm not a smarty-man game designer. These both work fine, and I even like the idea that in the grim cyberfuture turning your wireless access off is seen as the sort of thing only criminals do, so perfect. It provides the hacker with varying levels of challenge...the average gangbanger with lovely, second-hand 'ware is probably an open door, the cops and corpsec will be a tougher challenge but doable, while elite corporate hit-squads or other shadowrunners will need the hacker to do stuff like DeclaredYuppie talks about and get more creative with their hacking approaches...and while I agree that you'd want to fine-tune the system to make sure that you aren't seeing things constantly bog down into an arms race of "who can hack who's gun fastest firstest?" this is more or less what I'd like to see AR hackers doing when they aren't downloading Paydata A from Target Computer Network B.
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Apr 2, 2013 14:24
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Hey man, I totally agreed with everything you said last page, you don't need to convince me twice. I like it, I think that's how they oughta do it. poo poo, if you wanted to you could even try messing with some of those "SOTA" rules they always flirted with for a couple of editions where your computer programs degrade over time if you don't update and patch them, maybe make it an optional rule that your gear will slowly (and I mean slowly) degrade slightly if you keep it constantly un-networked so you have to eventually turn it back on even if only for a little while, but maybe that's too much of a pain in the rear end so.
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Apr 2, 2013 14:42
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Mendrian posted:You mean sort of like DRM? And! And and and, this is the brilliant part, those shadow networks already exist in the fiction. JackPoint, Shadowsea, Shadowland, all those in-character chatrooms where all the shadowrunners make comments and bitch at each other in the sourcebooks? Bam, there you go. All shadowrunners who're serious about "the biz" will eventually wind up registering for one of those shadow networks in order to keep their illegal, off-the-books tech and cyberware patched up and up-to-spec with compliant codes, and that gives you a built-in hook for shadowrunners to know other 'runners, to network with people, get them involved in the underworld. poo poo, you could even make it a rule, every shadowrunner gets one free contact which is the underground network they subscribe to. Mendrian posted:Hacking-as-spells would be brilliant design. Particularly if the spells were as much attached to the item being accessed as the runner's programs. For instance, "Weapon Tamper" is a function of Smartlinked weapons, it's one of their qualities, as much as it is something that is part of the hacker's toolkit. It's like reverse spells. The weapon you're attacking holds the effect you want to use, not the other way around. This is exactly how I'd do it, including for things like cyberware. You could list the effects of things in the hacking chapter and then simply tag gear and cyberware with the names of poo poo you can do to them. So Cybereyes gain the tags "Remote Shutdown, Hijack Sense (Vision)," and "Remote Operation." Wired Reflexes get the tags "Remote Shutdown" and "Neural Feedback" or something.
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Apr 2, 2013 15:09
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Mendrian posted:This was precisely the problem I had with SR4. Yeah, at that point the issue isn't  hacking! it's Shadowrun! You want flatter math? Get ready to get the gently caress out then because apparently the current system approach they're looking at for SR5 is: 1). Increase the cap on skills from 6 to 12 to provide a bigger range out of the gate. Why? Beats the gently caress out of me, man. "Let's give people more bigger dice pools" would not be my first solution to Shadowrun's crazy-rear end problems but what the gently caress do I know? 2). Then the actual method for reigning things in seems to be imposing limits on how many successes you can actually keep in your assnormous dice pool, so essentially like a roll-and-keep system. The example they give is that weapons now have an Accuracy stat which governs how many successes on a shooting test you can keep. Sniper rifles have high accuracy while a streetline special has low accuracy. Which simply means that players now have two tracks of numbers to max out, dice rolled and dice kept. Actual chance that we'll see flatter math in an edition of Shadowrun anytime soon: eat poo poo.
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Apr 2, 2013 16:19
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Mendrian posted:Insane question: why don't they just nuke the whole thing? Reboots are all the rage these days... Because D&D isn't the only game that has a bunch of fans that will pitch an absolute bitch if you so much as change anything. People still gripe about wireless AR Matrix and, of all things, 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. Catalyst has had to deal with financial setbacks and a bunch of their talent pool jumping ship, they aren't about to risk causing a bunch of the people who continue to give them money for Shadowrun stuff to go into rage-spasms, they're going to pander like hell and pray it works.
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Apr 2, 2013 16:41
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Martello posted: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. I feel like the ideal Shadowrun should be able to easily accommodate both sorts of styles out of the box. I agree that it can be fun to play gangers trying to go big and script-kiddies looking to make a name for yourself, where $10,000 fun-bucks split five ways is a solid haul and there's a sense of working to carve out a rep and a name for yourself, and that it can also be fun to be the Leverage crew only Nate Ford is also a mage and Hardison is the nerdiest elf ever. Honestly, I wonder if build-points are even the best way to go about it, maybe a full-on return to the days of the priority system and simply have different priority choices for different "tiers" of play, like Street Punks/Up-and-Comers/Pros/Edgerunners, stuff like that.
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Apr 2, 2013 16:50
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DeclaredYuppie posted:Skirmish rules, I'm telling ya'! I like the dichotomy of the cyber/bioware divide in principle and I think it's one I'd like to retain, especially since popular science-fiction has embraced the idea of "human augmentation" in a multitude of varieties beyond "stick robot parts in people." The fundamental approach I'd take is: 1). Cyberware is relatively inexpensive at a base grade and provides a lot of bang for your buck, but is Essence heavy. It's also much easier to find, and today's cutting edge chrome become's tomorrow's off-the-rack special pretty quickly. 2). Bioware is more expensive and less overtly powerful but less Essence intense. It's also more subtle, for those that care...even high-grade cyberware gets noticeable past a certain point but bioware can mean that even a normal looking person is packing some powerful augs and only in-depth scans or really good mages can tell. But the numbers in SR4 are sort of all over the place. You've got cyberware which is way overcosted and underpowered (cyberlimbs, for example) while really potent bioware is actually not all that expensive or hard to get out of the box (muscle toner, synthecardium) and so yeah, it's kind of all over the place and an optimizer's playground of stepping around lovely trap choices and bleh. And of course this also plays in to how the interaction between mages/adepts and 'ware went from "this is a bad idea and will ruin your magic and lead you into being a burnout" to "you'd be dumb not to do this," but that may be because a whole other set of numbers is hosed, so.
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Apr 3, 2013 06:50
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Well like DeclaredYuppie said earlier, all you have to do is gin up some handwavey bullshit about how hackers can spoof a remote reactivation signal from the tech's manufacturer/owner that even hardcore awesome badasses can't ever completely block off to let them try and start loving with their poo poo, like do you think the corporations would ever truly let even guys like the Red Samurai get away with not having some kind of back door into their systems so Renraku could monitor them? So the hacker simply has to figure out how to crack that back door access, which might be harder than "push button, explode guns" or whatever but in theory fighting a bunch of Red Samurai would also be harder for the mages and shootymans of the group too, and "more difficult" isn't "impossible." Truly wireless kit should be the provenance of either older tech, which is comparatively not as good, or custom-made stuff which is both expensive and runs the risk of degrading over time and getting you flagged as a super-suspicious dude if you go through some sort of security checkpoint that flags you as being in possession of non-wireless enabled implants.
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Apr 3, 2013 11:44
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Of course some people think that they can skip all that "getting your implants hacked" business by getting bioware. Bioware is the new hotness in personal augmentation, and best of all you can't hack it. Watch some rear end in a top hat with a commlink try and turn your muscle toner off, right? But like always, whenever someone thinks they've come up with some great new foolproof protection scheme hackers learn to adapt to it, and the more difficult it supposedly is to crack the quicker they rise to the challenge. Which is how a single gangly orc nerd left an entire Ares Firewatch team dead on the ground by releasing a synthesized hormone into the ventilation system that caused their synthecardium augmentations to go into arrhythmic seizures that led to cardiac arrest.
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Apr 3, 2013 12:16
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Back when bioware was the New Hotness introduced in Shadowtech the prevailing trend in the fluff, a scant little bit of which actually got preserved over the years, was that bioware carried all sorts of side-effects that might not be immediately obvious, stuff like enhanced articulation causing your joints to be more prone to dislocation or how the superthyroid gland gave you a permanent case of the munchies and also I vaguely remember that you ran a constant fever as well which actually made you easier to pick out on infrared or something, there weren't many mechanics to all of it but a lot of that basically got dropped entirely in SR4 where it's just crapped in the gear chapter.
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Apr 3, 2013 15:05
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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.
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Apr 3, 2013 17:07
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If you mean like T-birds basically just go read Walter Jon Williams' Hardwired (actually you should go do this anyway, 's a good book) and just mentally substitute all the description there for whenever anyone starts talking about them in Shadowrun because that's where the designers But T-birds are basically like light tanks with Harrier jump-jet engines and stubby wings.
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Apr 5, 2013 06:20
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Y'know, I feel like an idiot but I didn't even know solipSystem existed until I went and checked out the Wikipedia page for Hardwired and I'm someone who owns both Hardwired and Voice of the Whirlwind (which Eclipse Phase fans should give a read...really, Walter Jon Williams is just a good author in general, I've found).
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Apr 5, 2013 12:24
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Being a panzerjock has always been one of those weird things where it's clear the writers intend to imply that's a thing that some 'runners do, but until SR4 the cheapest T-bird around was something like three million nuyen, not counting things like fuel, ammunition, maintenance costs, etc. Three million fun-bucks is pretty reasonable for a flying tank, sure, but for most shadowrunners that's "consider retiring" money. A permanent lifestyle was only, what, ten times the monthly lifestyle cost or something?
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Apr 5, 2013 22:17
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Doodmons posted:Also I've never liked the designation LAV. Mostly because I play a lot of strategy games and to me LAV means Light Armoured Vehicle so I got all excited when I read the contents page to be able to buy some straight up motherfuckin tanks. In one of the Rigger books, back when riggers got books to themselves (which, I admit, I kind of miss a little) they did actually have a light tank listed but I can't remember what it was costed at. There were always the Ares Citymaster/Riotmaster armored vehicles that could very easily be used as light tanks/APCs, but I think those were pretty pricey too. Shadowrun's pricing is all over the loving place, though. poo poo, you look through the guns in Arsenal and you can play a drinking game "take a drink whenever you see a gun that's more expensive than an equivalent weapon with less features/worse stats" and you can die of alcohol poisoning.
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Apr 5, 2013 23:37
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Tippis posted:That's a great game. Only beaten in lethality by “take a drink whenever you see gun illustration that would break your arms when you try to fire or reload it”. "Take a drink whenever you see a crappy illustration in Arsenal." Dead before you even reach the vehicles/drones chapter. Or you could just read the vehicles/drones chapter and kill yourself that way.
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Apr 6, 2013 00:39
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Doodmons posted:I get that they think about supply and demand in the future as well as game balance when determining pricing - hence why the katana is just a more expensive monofilament sword: you are paying a tax to be a cool anime dude - but yeah, I don't even get most of the statting in Arsenal at all. It genuinely seems like they just pulled some loving numbers out of a hat and slapped them together into a gun entry for some of them. Part of it is they got rid of things like variable concealability ratings. Back in SR2 (and maybe SR3? I never bought into 3rd Edition so who loving knows) you had two semi-auto heavy pistols in the core book, the Predator and the Browning Max-Power. The Predator was the classic hand cannon ripped off of Robocop with 15 rounds in a mag while the Max-Power only had 10 shots...but the Max-Power was more concealable, so you at least had something like a meaningful tradeoff to consider. But now they don't have that so the Max-Power in SR4 has no reason to exist other than "hey, remember that gun? Well here it is!" Same damage as a Predator IV (because all weapons in the same class share the same damage code which, okay, I don't really want them trying anything dumb like varying weapon damage within each class because holy poo poo would they gently caress that up) but with fewer rounds per mag and oh yeah, no integral smartlink. But it comes with a laser sight! And expensive embellishments that do gently caress-all! And now it's no more concealable than that Predator is, so eat poo poo Browning. Seriously, why do laser sights even exist in Shadowrun anymore? Back in SR2 it at least made sense because smartlinks were either things you implanted in your loving brain or you had to get kinda obvious bulky goggles and glasses and add-ons for the gun and even then the external version wasn't as good, so cyberware really was the way to go. If you weren't into cyberware for some reason though (like you were a mage or an adept or you were poor) then a laser sight was the cheaper alternative that honestly wasn't a terrible one if you didn't want to be wearing a big sign saying HEY I AM ABOUT TO START SHOOTING PEOPLE, YO OVER HERE, SMARTGUN COMING THROUGH. But now? Now all smartlinks, internal or external, work exactly the same, give exactly the same bonuses, you can get them in contact lens form, and there are an abundance of off-the-rack guns with integrated smartlinks that ensure you never even have to mod a gun in your life and you can shoot assholes in the face with your fancy FPS-vision all day long. Maybe the worst that can happen to you is if someone somehow disrupts or hijacks the wireless signal between your smartgun and your smartli- oh skinlink, never mind then. Arsenal's dumb loving gun catalog is an object lesson in what happens when you start changing things in a game system without stopping to consider the ramifications or ask yourself why poo poo was the way it was in the first place before you changed it; because you wind up writing a book full of new stuff, half of which is worthless junk before the ink even dries on the paper. (Though to be fair Shadowrun prices have always been nonsensical, Arsenal is hardly the first example of that.)
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Apr 6, 2013 14:18
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Tippis posted:…and then you have the PDF gear splatbooks, which manage to take it even further by often not providing even base information that it should have to fit in with the rest of the system. Most of the .pdf stuff came post-meltdown and seems to be indicative of the sort of quality that Catalyst was bringing to bear after the dust settled, which is why my hopes for SR5 are rubbing shoulders with my hopes for D&D Next at this point.
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Apr 6, 2013 15:49
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Basically back when Shadowrun was owned by FASA there were a number of subtle and not-so-subtle crossovers between it and their fantasy RPG Earthdawn, and the official canon position is that Earthdawn was the far past of the world that would eventually become Shadowrun's Sixth World when magic came back. The Horrors were the big bads of Earthdawn and a lot of background metaplot in Shadowrun was paid to "oh no the Horrors might return" but then that all got resolved by other metaplot and novel stuff and nobody really cared so. Things like bug spirits, Dunkelzahn, immortal elves (remember them?), and other stuff I'm sure I'm forgetting at the moment are/were all tied into Earthdawn.
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Apr 14, 2013 00:05
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Martello posted:I knew about the Earthdawn stuff, especially the immortal elves (Harlequin et al) but I didn't know about the Horrors and I didn't know bug spirits and Dunkelzahn were connected to Earthdawn. The bug spirits were called brought up in an Earthdawn sourcebook where they were called Invae, and they were treated there as a not-all-that-apocalyptic threat if I recall correctly as opposed to in Shadowrun where it was one of the defining metaplot "holy poo poo" moments. But Earthdawn was having to deal with no-poo poo Horrors knocking on the door, so it's all relative I guess. Also in Earthdawn one of the dragons known as Mountainshadow talks about how he has this servant that works for him called Darktooth which, in German, is what "Dunkelzahn" means, and Mountainshadow has a pretty similar personality to the Big D so it's strongly implied that they're one and the same. One of the paracritter books has some shadowtalk discussing dragons and people are theorizing that instead of dying off during low points in the mana cycle dragons would just hibernate and I'm pretty sure that's the official canon answer as well, so Mountainshadow slept through the Fifth Age and woke up in the Sixth and decided to go by Dunkelzahn instead.
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Apr 14, 2013 07:40
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I'll admit that while I'm sure it seemed like a good idea on paper, I'm still a little peeved that metaplot demanded that Dunkelzahn sacrifice himself before he could take office. The whole election thing was neat what with people actually sending in votes to FASA (not that there was much of a chance they were going to chose anybody else because hey, President motherfucking Dragon) and Dunkelzahn was one of the Earthdawn holdovers that wasn't actually annoying as hell (Harlequin)...and then they go ahead and
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Apr 15, 2013 00:51
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404GoonNotFound posted:We should be all thankful there was no 4chan back then, or we would've faced the reign of President Slamm-O!. It wasn't a literal write-in candidate system, there were...I think six choices? One of which was Dunkelzahn, four of which were people nobody cared about, and one of which was Kenneth Brackhaven. So if 4chan had existed then it would have probably been President Brackhaven of the Totally-Not-Humanis-Policlub-We-Swear Party.
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Apr 15, 2013 01:35
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I am actually dead inside, also I am actually made entirely of mirrorshades. I would also say that plenty of people have and continue to play D&D as Shadowrun. I mean, D&D is a game about (among other things, yes yes) invading secure facilities, dealing with the guards, and escaping with loot. Or extracting high-value hostages from their current dungeon of residence. Or cleaning up ghoul infestations. Meanwhile you steal everything that isn't nailed down, obsess over your gear, and spellcasters break everything. And something something psychic combat is like decking.
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Apr 17, 2013 15:16
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Bigass Moth posted:It's stupid and broken, but if it's in the game you basically have to use it. As written it is a thin body suit more or less that provides pretty good armor that stacks, but when you get down to it, how can it logistically provide nearly the same armor rating as an Armored Vest which is not listed as being form-fitting. Like, every armor on the planet should be made out of the magical FFBA material. This is because Shadowrun wants to have an abstract relationship with armor where you aren't using some locational damage system, you just have armor ratings and handwave it as some abstract process...and then the guys who write the gear section want to do things like Form-Fitting Body Armor, modular armor components, and all this other poo poo that would be more at home in system with locational damage. Also Shadowrun's armor system has always been kind of dumb and broken on a fundamental level in pretty much every edition.
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Apr 17, 2013 19:12
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