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Keep throwing money at them. The SNES music was wonderfull and for a cool million we get more music and a better editor. Speaking of cost of gasoline in Rowanda, I'm putting together a game IRL and want one of the themes to be "Seemingly worthless things (ie: the PCs) rising to their full, awesome potential". I want to give them a list of about 20 or so street-names to choose for their characters, each of which ties into this theme of seeming worthless or having fallen from grace but having hidden potential. The only ideas I have so far are: *Phoenix - Rises from the ashes. *Trash/Treasure - One man's trash is another man's treasure. *Diamond - The diamond in the rough. Any other ideas?
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Apr 7, 2012 08:29
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| # ¿ May 17, 2024 16:20 |
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Meh, I just thought it would be a bit of interesting flavor and wasn't planning on chaining them to the list. I like the drug cartel nicknames idea, it'll be my go-to for when I need a name for some important thug.
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Apr 8, 2012 23:03
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I bet some playtester came up with it in the early days of either SR or Cyberpunk as a get rich scheme for his character.
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Apr 17, 2012 21:17
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If you want braintapes; you'll either need to cut a deal with a dragon or come to the Eclipse Phase thread.
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Apr 18, 2012 08:49
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Go with a cat, then you could have the team's face distract people by playing Dr. Evil and pet you threateningly while you hack everything in the room. Or chase the techomancer birds/rats. Be sure to tell them that you were declawed though. There's this weird rumor going around that you can kill a mage with a cat and you don't want them getting any ideas.
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Apr 30, 2012 18:48
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Clouds of manifested watcher spirits swarming the 'invisible' mage and yelling "Shoot here!".
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May 5, 2012 20:49
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Hey guys! There's been a lot of rules discussion for a few pages, it's time for post-game reports and recaps! Remember that street level campaign I asked for some advice with a few pages back? I had some basic plans for gang warfare and carving out turf and smuggling drugs around. We rolled up 300 point characters and I've run the first two games and things have gone completely off my carefully built railroad tracks!  Dramatis personć The Dark Passenger1: Elven 'mage' with Lilith as his mentor spirit. All his spell effects are actually performed by demons he calls forth. Fears going back to prison after his stint for arson. He's also our face. Troll Taxi: Third generation Appalachian Mountains Troll. Sent into town for supplies long ago, found TV and never came back. Weak for a troll but focused on being the fastest trog you never see. Doesn't use guns due to a run-in with a buck deer and a gun misfiring that nearly cost him his life. Loves his cyber-swords and is moderately addicted to the home shopping channel.2 He's our heavy hitter. The Mundane: No cyber, no magic, just human potential and a Chameleon Suit. Focused on stealth and melee combat with some pistols thrown in. His player doesn't seem to be doing much other than trying to rip off the metal gear series for excuses to min/max without pulling any of the interesting characterizations from the game. Spam: Dwarf hacker with a 'focus' of being a 'Hack of all Trades' kindof tech wiz and scoring his next fix of some brain-boosting drug. His player enjoys RPing and get's enjoys the planning stages of the run a good bit, but will be moving to another city soon. Vector: The Other White Hacker™. Vector is focused more on using hacking to augment what his team is doing in meatspace. Hacking the oppositions PANs for GPS info and adding their location to the team's AR overlay, dicking with enemy comms and 'offensive hacking' like filling someone's AR with goatse and making smartguns eject their clips. GZG: Insane pimp I gave everyone as a common contact. Based in part on Rick James; his delusions include that he is the leader of the "Seattle Pimpocracy" by a birthright extending back to the 1700's and that it is his responsibility to construct an "International Pimpspiracy" to ensure that 'no matter where a man or woman goes in the world, they can always have fun'. He is obsessed with making sure everyone 'has fun' and 'knows his name' (has proper respect for his reputation) and enjoys turtle-based AR and VR themes for his comlink. Roughing up a rough jon. GZG has been calling upon the PCs for odd jobs, but this will be the first time he's ever pulled them together to do anything together. Rebecca, one of GZ's girls, was put into the hospital. The team is told to find the guy who did it and put him into the same shape he left her in, with a promise that GZ will make their reputations soar based upon how they pull off this job, but it must be done tonight. "You do this for me, and I make sure everybody knows your name." The team questions Rebecca and get's the following leads: -The Jon is lean, wiry human with no obvious cyber, red hair and a tattoo of a "broken shield and a knife" --Some research shows that variations on that theme of tat are used by two gangs and a UCAS special forces unit. -Directions to the bar she found the jon in, and that he had a friend at the bar who probably knows where to find him. -They 'conducted business' at The Usual Hotel. Taxi "Sounds easy to me. Let's just have a 'friendly chat' with his buddy and pay him a visit and tear apart anyone that disagrees." Passenger "No, GZ said he's gonna let the world know about how this goes down. Do you want to be known as just another thug or as a professional with a capital P. Spam "Pro's make more money." Taxi "And I kinda need to capital P, so let's go with that one." Mundane ... Passenger "Cool, I say we do this as a precision strike. No witness and only the target get's hurt. That means not even his friend at the bar can know we were looking for him." Vector "Sounds hard, let's do it." Thus our heroes go to the motel. GZG has an understanding with this hotel, meaning that they get rooms no questions asked and the manager get's his fee high enough to ensure that the security cameras don't see customers entering/leaving their room. They don't want cops asking questions though, so they scrubbed the room down with the most horrifying of commercial cleaning agents the moment they found blood all over the place. Passenger gets the bright idea of whistling up a low force spirit of man that inhabits the room they used and we all spend a few minutes trying to pull useful information on an assault, out of a whiteness that does not actually understand the concept of violence. About they only useful information they get is that the tattoo was red, narrowing their suspect pool down to the Rusted Stilettos. Half the team are relieved to not be going up against a special forces guy, while everyone that played the SNES game is happy for the chance to put a beating on a member of the Stilettos. The spirit described the perp as a 'bright man' who did not use any weapons in the assault, this has them worrying that he might be an adept. They don't have enough time to check all the gang's known hangouts, so they split up into 3 teams to cover ground faster. Passenger and Troll Taxi drive around, sending watcher spirits to check out their flop houses.  Cabbage Head, go in there and look around for our guy. Sure thing boss!...  You forgot to tell him to come back when he was done. Goddammit!Vector and Spam drive past a self-storage place used by the gang for reasons. Spam hacks into the security cameras and confirms that their boy is not there. Before they go, they browse the recordings for anything interesting real quick.  Sure thing. *dice clatter* You find grainy footage of a man in a suit giving the Stilettos a credstick and taking a brown paper package in exchange. He looks like your local rep on the Seattle City Council. Hooray for blackmail!Solid Snake clone 42719C is assigned to check on the out of business garage they use as an "office space". I describe what of the layout he can get from driving around the block and leave the floor to him. There's a open garage with two workbays and the main office/parts storage area. Bullet holes can be seen in the cheap tin siding and roof, as well as the plywood covering the windows.  ... What you gonna do? Is he here?Insert about five minutes of futilely trying to get him involved in playing the game, but yea, he's here with six other goons. Everyone sneaks into the alley behind the building Passenger astrally buzzes the place and confirms that the target doesn't look like an adept and orders his watcher, Cabbage Head to keep an astral watch on the target and manifest visually above the roof, to act as a kindof radar. They begin making plans through local text chat. "He's takin' a dump boss... do I hafta keep watching?" "Yes!"The plan changes instantly. Passenger peeks through a bullet hole to poltergeist the storeroom, driving the goons away from the target. Troll Taxi laps to the roof and uses his cyberswords to carve through the tin roof over the bathroom just as... Spam and Vector hack the target's comlink, take over the AR visual and audio. They fill his vision with photos of the prostitute in the hospital and crank the volume of his earbuds to 11 while playing a clip of GZG screaming "You know my name!" over and over again. Until he get's his contacts out he'll be blind and deaf. Taxi pulls the target up by his hair and throws him into the alley, where the rest of the team beat-down and drag him into their van before the other gangers can even run around the building. They throw him out the moving vehicle onto the curb of a hospital, after beating him nearly to death. The aftermath of this is that the Stilettos are on the warpath for whoever made them look like fools, but don't know who actually did the dirtywork. GZG is having fun playing up the "I've got a secret" bit of being the only person who knows who did the job for a couple weeks to pre-build their rep before letting it out. Everyone get's bonus karma for playing Mr. Clean when I had planned for a blood-bath. Next week opens with Passenger being sent to speak with John Long, Puyalup's rep on the Seattle Council. It's an election year, so even grainy footage like this could be dangerous. The background for this guy is that a combination of voter fraud and extremely low voter turnout mean that he was in no real danger of ever losing his position, and used his local influence to collect bribes and skim municipal funds into his own coffers and those of his friends. In his mind, a certain amount of blackmail is just the cost of doing business. The elven mage goes to his meeting while the hacker pipes his comlink video to the safehouse trid. The rest of the team makes popcorn and flops on the couch.  Councilman John Long opens the bidding at ťťĄ5k; rolls are made, and John succeeds in standing firm at that number, but get's a glitch. I decide that he'll let his racism slip through a bit and roll to see just how much he controls himself. Critical Failure. He comes to the conclusion that not only is Passenger a human, but he was at the Humanis meeting at the museum last month. He relaxes and starts up a conversation that is about 50% racial slurs about how he's glad the money's staying in the good ol' boy's club and not to some sub-human scumbog born greenskins and their daisy eating butt-budies.  Dwarves belong underground; six feet would be a good start. I had to leave early for business, did I miss anything? Hell boy, you didn't hear? I just engineered the greatest legal win we've seen in twenty years?*Explains the inner working of a few recently passed laws that look innocent enough, some even help metahumans in an affirmative action/tax incentive to employ them way.* Now here's the good part. Alone, all this does nothing, but in 64 days, Prop fsa1850 will pass into law. It's an anti tax-evasion bill targeting agricorps. What it does is make all things that are registrable as farm equipment for tax purposes actually be permanently recognized by law as farm equipment. Under the letter of the 'Affirmative Taxation' laws, that list will include orks and trolls. Greenskin bastards will fall in the same category as a donkey, and under Seattle law, have the same rights.Rest of team:  Passenger get's back home and arguments break out about what they're going to do. Everyone wants to kill him, but they want to make him suffer first; the question is "how?". The first order of business is, who of the people running against him should they leak the tape to? It would ruin his chances of winning instantly and make the person they choose into the top runner in the now-open election. I give them three choices: -Hippytron 3k: AI with an eco-agenda. "Make the Emerald City shine again." -David Lowe: Dwarf running on a pro-meta rights platform. "Equality for all." -Robin Harker: Human running on an anti-crime platform. "Make our streets safe again." They decide to put GZG into the race. His campaign slogan will be "Have fun!". The press conference to announce he was throwing his hat in the ring had free liquor, coffee and hot-wings for the press. At 7:15AM he ended the proceedings by commanding the tide to withdraw from the beach as a promotional stunt, and the ocean obeyed. Tonight they enact the first part of their plan to actually ruin John Long's career, eliminate part of the competition and make GZG into a joke candidate with a chance to win. Sorry about the wall of text
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May 8, 2012 21:55
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| # ¿ May 17, 2024 16:20 |
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I've been bugged for a while by SR having two distinct, mostly incompatible methods of (mechanical) character advancement. Those being Money and Karma. Typically a character in SR doesn't care about one and is desperate for the other. My idea is to disengage all permanent character advancement/enhancement from nuyen and bind it to karma. I haven't thought it through much, but I think it could work out and make party balance easier to maintain. • Cyberarm? It's fluff for that +2 STR you payed karma for. • Your bare-handed attacks to lethal damage? Pay number. You gonna explain it with cyber-spurs, ki-strikes or "I'm just really good at turning anything into a shiv"? • Your gun's Damage? Just another stat. You could cash that in to re-shuffle the points around in Damage/Rate of Fire/clip size/misc bonuses. • Thermal vision? Doesn't matter if your a sammie or adept, they cost and balance out the same.  "Ok, so in this communist distopia where all characters are equal, why would any player or character want money."Well, other than in-character greed and not wanting to live in a box behind Denny's, you can tie it to temporary mechanical boosts. • Combat Foci that will burn out or materials for summoning that Force 5 • Grenades! Grenades for everybody! •Bribing wage-slaves to leave that loading dock unlocked. • A couple clips of armor piercing/exploding ammo.  All the drugs! The more I think about it, the more I wonder why this isn't t already an option. Is there something stupid to this idea I'm not seeing? I'll play around with some numbers and see if I can get this to work... maybe. I'm starting a new job so we'll see how much "cyber-elf storygames" time I have left over. While typing this I randomly had the mental image of a troll security cheif yelling at the team...  "I'm gonna tear out my liver and shove it down yer throat so all the bad moonshine I've drunk can kill you too!"Just wanted to share.
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Apr 18, 2014 07:48
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