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Davin Valkri posted:Why can't Shadowrun ever be about nice people? The Shadowrun world is totally salvageable. Aside from some specified toxic wastelands, the world outside the sprawls is actually pretty okay. The rainforests have been regenerating themselves. Clinical immortality has been a thing since 1st edition. Humanity's presence in space has done nothing but grow and grow as the editions roll forward. The Horrors have been stopped before they even began to reign. As far as humanity's future as a species goes, Shadowrun is nothing but optimistic. The megacorps might all be evil, but that's sort of the nature of the beast.
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Aug 5, 2013 21:20
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Cyclomatic posted:The ability to hack without a deck also seems like it would be pretty useful. There is zero evidence that the hacker is a hacker. Nor can they stop the hacker from hacking short of putting them in a faraday cage, and who randomly does that? If Vader was standing there gloating to Leia, and she cocked her head and dumpshocked the rigger right out of the interrigation drone, hopped inside it, and gave him the business, I guess that would seem pretty good? Just a few days ago, out in the Real World, I went through an airport security check that involved taking my shoes off, walking through a full-body imaging scanner and, the officers not satisfied with merely that, a pat-down search. All in the name of the achingly small chance I, out of millions of travelers, might be The Guy That Tries Something Stupid. In the crime-happy dystopia of tomorrow, everything like that is jacked to 11. I can totally see obtrusive security measures being used to ward against even the possibility that someone is a Technomancer in a high-security area. Especially since the fluff continues to bang home the point that Technomancers aren't just mysterious, they're scary mysterious.
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Aug 15, 2013 05:15
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ProfessorCirno posted:Actually, I'm pretty sure that's why technomancers are seen as so terrifying, or at least one of the big reasons: There IS no way to spot them. I'd have to read through the book again but, last I checked, there's no way to pick a technomancer out from a crowd. No way, at all. Corps like MCT have such a high bounty on technomancers because they have no way of easily filtering them out and need to rely on bounty hunters. Why do you assume that'd make the corporations less paranoid about them? They're so easy to miss that anyone could be a Technomancer, just like in the real-life example anyone could be the terrorist. The only way to be sure is to treat everyone as a threat, hence obtrusive security measures today that would be at least mirrored, though probably greatly expanded, in the Evil Capitalist Dystopia of Tomorrow. Cyclomatic posted:edit: also, mages generally don't man checkpoints in Shadowrun. They are too rare for that. You are dealing with a situation where a secure facility might have a mage and a spider somewhere on the premise, and they will come investigate IF the runners give them a reason to. If you take a plane trip, a mage isn't going to be at every metal detector in a TSA outfit. There'd probably be an astrally perceiving something at every checkpoint, bolstered by two things: 1) Checkpoints are probably even more hellish and slow than today to allow for added security (see previous Dystopia of Tomorrow comment). If magical somethingsomething is a threat, checkpoints would be rolled back until security can be achieved. 2) 1% of the population, the percentage routinely cited, is a lot of people to be Awakened. My parents' sleepy little town of 1,400 people would have over a dozen on hand. If you live in a major city you probably walk by one every few minutes. Being Awakened is a rare physical trait, but there are more than enough people in the world that it's still tens of millions of people who can astrally perceive.
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Aug 15, 2013 15:53
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ProfessorCirno posted:If you make your game set in such a way that Shadowrunners cannot exist you are very literally and objectively playing the game incorrectly. A friend of mine, who shall go nameless unless he wants to take credit for this one, had an argument with me awhile ago. He argued that the Hacker should always have an intrinsically important role in the group, even if the group has been dropped off in the African brush. My position was that a good GM doesn't drop a Hacker into the African brush unless making him useless is exactly where the story is supposed to go. Airports and bigger fish (like Zero Zones) should be immensely unfriendly to Shadowrunners, but the thing is that it doesn't necessarily follow in theme that Shadowrunners should be waltzing through a commercial flight or taking on a Zero Zone without serious, game-altering advantages. If being SINless and loaded to the gills with illegal and unregistered cyberware is easy, there's no game to be had.
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Aug 15, 2013 17:25
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Emphasizing the illegality of a runner's bread and butter equipment can also create an interesting vehicle for oppression. So a low-level team gets some kit to do their job and suddenly they aren't like normal people anymore. The magician can't eat at his favorite restaurant anymore because his quickened spells beat against its wards. The sammie can't go visit family elsewhere in the UCAS because he can no longer board a commercial plane. Of course Mr. Johnson can help fix everything... by binding themselves more tightly to the Man and becoming more dependent on his nuyen and his connections. The weak and the downtrodden suffer in the Dystopia of Tomorrow, and by trying to climb out of the gutters the runners marginalize themselves. For high-level teams this is barely an issue, since chartering flights to the exotic locale of today's run is going to be a standard operational expense when you're in the six-seven figure range.
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Aug 15, 2013 23:05
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WarLocke posted:Did spurs get re-imagined at some point or am I just misremembering them? I'm skimming the 5E pdf and they're described as Wolverine-style back of hand/between knuckles blades, but for the past two decades or so I've been imagining them as longer, single blades that extend out of your forearms. Pretty sure that was even backed up with the 'Hatchetman special' which was just a spur mounted backwards that extended out and back from your forearm (ie past your elbow, not towards your hand). In SR4 core, spurs are described as a variable number of blades extending from the wrist or knuckles.
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Aug 18, 2013 05:34
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al-azad posted:This is the kind of stuff I'm trying to grasp with the game. I look at the default characters and I get the idea that these are people who can reasonably live in a dystopian future. But I look at a character with dumpstats and all I can think is how often they're taken advantage of. Even if you can only get 1 hit once in a while you're still doing better than someone who has trouble functioning by themselves. From a gameplay perspective it might not come up because your weaknesses are covered by NPCs, but what about when you're alone? Pulling up my old char sheet (I was The Mage in Gobbeldygook's campaign), my character's lowest stat is a 2, which my intention was that it was a legitimate weak spot for the character. He rolled 7 dice for social situations, but had no Computers. I recall that the lack of computer skills didn't come up using the Matrix recreationally, but did come up whenever he wanted to do something more advanced than Google (I eventually learned to just tell other people my hunches and let them do the digital legwork instead). Though really, while dump stats are getting a lot of pathos in this thread, the biggest weaknesses (and I'm inclined to believe every character should have entertaining weaknesses) were part of his background. The one that requires no other long explanation is that The Mage couldn't speak or understand English. This hosed him over a few times -- linguasofts are nice, but you can't take them with you when you're projecting.
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Aug 24, 2013 06:07
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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? This would be entirely GM whim, but two things spring to mind immediately. 1) You'll probably have some sort of karma expenditure if you want it to be useful in combat. 2) You should probably expect the campaign's featured bad guys to earn Evil Cred by killing your dog to send a message.
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Sep 15, 2013 08:06
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I've never fully understood the aversion to oh my God the decker might brick my gun when, if the decker was replaced by any other archetype the round would go more like oh my God he shot me twice in the face. Spending complex actions to gently caress with someone in a non-lethal, non-knocking-out manner is already something of a fool's errand when you could be a magician or a troll melee monster or a handful of other cherished archetypes that can just kill the problem instead. Why on Earth do we want to dissuade someone from taking less powerful, but narratively flavorful, combat actions?
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Oct 11, 2013 03:49
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QuantumNinja posted:The crux of Trollman's work suggests the system is keyed off of Attribute+Skill instead of Program+Skill, and 5E is rewritten to use that approach. In fact, much of the mechanical section he proposes is a simplified version of the 5E stuff, except they can't induce seizures by hacking a person's fleshy brain in 5E. These rules suggest that my iPhone has a PAN with my human brain, and I can get my no-implant brain "hacked" You read it correctly, and my gut response to the rules was that it's way too Star Trek even for Shadowrun. Brains just don't work like that without some sort of insane Arthur C. Clark magic-tech poo poo going on. I'd be less against an implementation of naked brain hacking that focused exclusively on Technomancers, since they're basically magicians already anyways. Edit: Mendrian posted:I like that idea a lot. It gives deckers a clear advantage over 'mancers in a pretty narrow way. If you hack a decker, you get his contact list, maybe his bank account. If you hack a 'mancer, you can kill him. That seems about right. I meant the other way around; allowing technomancers to hack naked brains because of pre-established creepy magic psychokinetic powers is less offensive to my delicate sensibilities than allowing hackers to do it with newly imported bad science. I totally grant this is an argument from aesthetics, though. Conskill fucked around with this message at 01:18 on Oct 12, 2013 |
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Oct 12, 2013 01:05
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by a computer.