Davin Valkri posted:

Why can't Shadowrun ever be about nice people?

Is "everybody is a bad person, almost certainly including you" part of the appeal of the game? Because I thought the genre in general has moved more towards "things are bad but still possibly salvagable" as the prevailing mood.

ProfessorCirno posted:

Yeah, gear has always been - and remains - the longest and most annoying part of chargen.

Quite frankly it's one reason I like adepts. Less gear to buy!

dirtycajun posted:

This is my first pass at the combat rigging monster. Please alert me of mistakes, chances there are some in resources. There is room for lots of more crazy stuff because I didn't use much floating karma so you can feel free to make this yours however you see fit. You are not THE frontline combat guy, but you can scout via drones, provide suppressive fire, and take 19 dice pot shots with a smartlinked warhawk. Your defense is pretty great, rolling 17 dice to make shooting miss you and can willpower to 20 and still have 5 edge to survive with. Armor is not the highest because I haven't really optimized this thing but at damage resist tests at 23 dice you should be doing all right. Initiative is at 17+3d6 outside of the matrix so minimum 3 passes unless you roll 3 1's.

So have at him or her. It should be fun!

BenRGamer posted:

Eh, could have a suicide pill in a false tooth if poison's not impossible? Tooth compartments don't cost any essence at all, so that should be fine.

PierreTheMime posted:

Astrally project and go find yourself an astral predator. If you're not a full magician then there's not much you can do if you're tied up and have a blind on.

Cabbit posted:

If you're able to cast, why not just chain cast spells until you drain yourself into a lifeless husk?

BenRGamer posted:

Yes, because you want the bomb in your head to be available online

Mystic Mongol posted:

The entire reason you PUT a bomb in someone's head is so you can kill them wirelessly.

Mystic Mongol posted:

Alright, but don't you want that bomb to have web 2.0 functionality? User generated content, plus a buy it now option where people can shorten the timer by a minute for fifty nuyen?

Mystic Mongol posted:

I'm just gonna bring this up again. A rotodrone, a sorta floating helicopter with a gun mounted on the bottom, can go about sixty miles per hour flat-out. But if a dedicated rigger with a level 2 VCR jumps in, that shoots up to two hundred and forty miles per hour. A Eurocar Westwind can do 475 mph flat out, but with a rigger in the driver's seat that shoots up to about mach 2.5. A level 3 VCR can double those numbers!

dirtycajun posted:

Only melee weapons can be foci

Doc Dee posted:

What would I have to do to have a dog companion, take some level of the Dependent negative quality, the Animal Control skill, and like a 6L/1C Dog contact, or would I have to capture a dog and bend it to my will?

Diaghilev posted:

We had an interesting moment at last week's game.

After our crew of runners posed as glitter-infested crossdressers and drug addicts to fool some club owners named after Shakespearean characters, my character accidentally handed them a commlink containing the REAL data they wanted, rather than the faked data we'd hoped to trade to them. They left the hotel. We realized our (my) fuckup when they were about three blocks away, moving on foot.

We responded appropriately.

My mage smashed the 17th-floor hotel room window with a desk lamp and levitated our gunbunny out the window with more or less adequate warning. She received an object lesson in BASE jumping, but made it down intact. Our adept decided that the window was also for him, and slalomed down the glass frontage of the hotel, leaving a wake of shattered windows and cracked bootprints in the side of the building. Hooray for wall-running, a profound gymnastics rating, and some amazing dice luck. My mage has a force 7 spirit of air gently carry him down to the ground.

Hard cut to the infiltrator and pistol adept calmly taking the elevator down, muzak playing blithely.

The gunbunny leaps on her bike and roars off into the busy night traffic of San Francisco. The infiltrator and I hop onto his crotch rocket motorcycle, and in a fit of sheer genius, I command my spirit of air to use his last remaining task owed to speed us up with the Movement power.

The bike, a Thundercloud Contrail, has a speed of 6. The spirit rolls for the Movement power and gets 8 hits. Funny thing, that.

It was late and we needed some time to figure out the math behind what that result meant, so we broke for the night and, once I got home, I did some math.

code:

Suzuki Mirage: Speed 6, Acceleration 3
Hits (8) *  Acceleration (3) = 24
24 + 6 = 30

I found that we had a small problem:



I asked my friend Funranium, a physicist, to help me grasp what had just happened in real-world terms. His reply, paraphrased:
Herr Direktor posted:

"I mean, being a hyperrelativistic muon soup could be a very rewarding roleplaying experience, but let's just imagine it's you and your motorcycle for the moment. From a human point a view, you instantaneously turn into a rapidly advancing ball of plasma shedding a rather lethal sheath of gamma radiation. Of course that radiation can't move faster than light either. Everyone around is dead from that momentarily before your FIRE OF ANNIHILATION consumes them and the rest of San Francisco. Look at the map, figure out which direction you were facing, and then, in three dimensional space, draw a straight line from this point to the horizon and into space because you will obliterate everything along this line in a 15-degree cone. You are a plasma jet carrying all the unfortunate matter that was in your way to make a new ring around Earth. The good news is that you probably don't trigger nuclear winter, but you have sterilized a good chunk of central California and Nevada with your gamma bath."

"Unless, of course, you hit the Sierra Nevada before you hit orbit. Let's say, for the sake of interest, you had a 300kg bike and you weighed 70kg. You, alone, are a ~8000MT nuclear bomb, focused due east. Welcome to nuclear winter. You remove Yosemite in an incandescent cloud. Molten silica sets off firestorms across the earth. You are a geologic event comparable to the K/T boundary or the Deccan Traps supervolcano eruption. Life will persist, it always does, but it may be a while until sentient life happens again to understand what you did with your motorcycle."

"Also, you will leave an interesting radiation signature in the rocks."

I suppose I'm looking forward to the errata as much as anyone. I find out what happens to my character--and all of San Francisco, I suppose--on Monday.

Doc Dee posted:

Do you have three Specializations here? Because you can only have one at chargen.

Gobbeldygook posted:

The authors of 4th edition thought the same way! Let's look at the wonderful rules they wrote.

Jump in and drive a vehicle: Response of your commlink + vehicle skill +2 for hotsim and -1 threshold on all Vehicle Tests.

Physically drive a vehicle: Reaction + vehicle skill, +1 if AR enabled.

Remote control a vehicle: Rating of your Command program + vehicle skill, -1 threshold to all vehicle tests

Drone driving itself: Pilot + Maneuver

Four different dice pools for the exact same action.

ProfessorCirno posted:

Those...those aren't all separate things.

Gobbeldygook posted:

Combat: Beasts means beast spirits are associated with Combat spells in that tradition. The only thing that mechanically affects is this:
"Page 302, under Bound Spirit Services posted:

Aid Alchemy, Sorcery, and Study: As a service, the spirit can add its Force as a dice pool bonus to your Alchemy, Spellcasting, Ritual Spellcasting (for spell rituals), and Learning Tests if its type matches the spell’s category, as listed under your tradition (p. 279)."

Beyond that it's just flavor

Doc Dee posted:

Gobbeldygook posted:

Shadowrun has consistently aimed for something more than Hollywood realism but less than GURPs or Rolemaster, albeit with a long term trend towards less realism and detail.

Kai Tave posted:

In Hollywood, protagonists can kick/throw back grenades though. Actually that can happen in real life too.

Here's an example of something that's impossible under Shadowrun rules (about 2:20 in).

Kai Tave posted:

What does that have to do with anything?

Kai Tave posted:

The problem though is that as you start moving up in 'ware grades the nuyen costs begin to skyrocket. Even if your GM is nice enough to let you simply upgrade a piece of standard 'ware to Alpha grade without having to buy a new piece of Alpha 'ware from scratch, you're still looking at potentially six figures to upgrade a cyberlimb or something.

Zereth posted:

... "or higher"? Since when does cyber go over deltaware?

Doc Dee posted:

I don't know what I'm doing.

Tias posted:

So I'm creating a character, and in the list of agility-linked skills in my book, I see "Herding". Which I cannot find a description for, elsewhere in the book

Another thing to chalk up to lovely editing, or is it supposed to be a skill you can have?