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ProfessorCirno posted:So, I got a question: What's going on with Horizon? They basically took a zillion hits to their image, both in and out of the shadows. In the shadows it's well known that they never gave a poo poo about technomancers and only sold the "We are a kinder, gentler megacorp!" line to get technos to join them. They had no intention of ever really helping them, and when that got found out and technos got a bit angry they started killing them and blamed the entire thing on the technos themselves. It worked, to some degree, in the public eye. What didn't work for them was the entire business in the Aztlan/Amazonia War, where they tried to use their super l33t awesome PR abilities to gently caress over Aztlan. You know, the most evil country on the planet. Sadly they forgot that Aztlan is actually insanely competent where it matters, and can turn around any situation, no matter how dire. The end result is that Horizon looked like dishonest bastards that invented stories and staged atrocities picking on poor, innocent Aztlan, and Aztlan came out looking almost like heroes that defended humanity from a rampaging dragon. So they pretty much lost all claim to moral superiority on any level even *in* the public eye and really cemented their place as the most useless and powerless megacorp. They couldn't even make *Aztlan* look bad. In an imperialist war. What the gently caress is the point of a PR corporation that can't make the actual sacrifice human beings to eldritch horrors country look bad?
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Aug 4, 2013 17:31
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Kai Tave posted:The whole thing with Horizon seems kind of dumb and a bit of a waste to be honest, like the writers didn't really know what to do with them. I never figured that the setting would benefit from a "good megacorporation" so I always assumed they would be as dirty as the rest, but it would have been nice to have a sinister PR/social engineering corporation that was actually good at their job. It would have made an interesting change from the usual corporate approach of "solve our problems with judicious kidnapping and murder" and presented a different sort of threat for player to deal with, but when you can't make Aztechnology look bad it really undermines any sort of sense of competence you might have. The problem, beyond the aforementioned nobody having the slightest clue what to do with them and their entire purpose to exist seeming to rely on name dropping Dawkins and saying 'meme', is that in a dystopia nobody cares what you think. PR is, fundamentally, not a field of pursuit that would gain one power and influence. A certain stock level is fine, as far as things go, but an entire triple A based on it? No. All the megas already have functionally total powers of indoctrination over their citizens unless something goes *really* badly, and the masses beyond the megas are generally irrelevant. They'll buy whatever you sell, the end. There are like 5 bigger and badder AAs that by all rights should be killing every man woman and child in Horizon right now in a fight for their space in the AAAs. Zeta-ImpChem would quite literally send troops out in baby skin suits to secure that position. Triple A's die. It's happened quite a few times. Unless they have something massively interesting for them planned, it may be time to shuffle them off the board. e: And poo poo, that reminds me. Bobfly posted:Huh, that's quite the thing. Which book(s) is this in? Storm Front and The Twilight Horizon. Mulva fucked around with this message at 00:38 on Aug 5, 2013 |
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Aug 4, 2013 23:30
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Kai Tave posted:Horizon as a PR-focused corp seems kind of "well what's the point," but a corporation focused on things like psychology, marketing, social media, and stuff like that has some legs to it. Not in this setting. Seriously, like 50% of the planet that matters [I.E. has a SIN] flat out doesn't have a choice. In anything. They are corporate citizens, they buy the corporate brands, they watch the corporate network, they go to the corporate school, they marry a corporate wife, and their corporate kids do it all over again. Then you have fields that just don't have meaningful fight in them. All megas [Except Horizon really] are heavily diversified, sure, but they aren't *all* big players in all fields. Not everyone has a space presence, not everyone has a meaningful arms and security division, not everyone has a magical division, stuff like that. Then you add things like regional differences [I don't care if Horizon PR is powered by blood magic, Anglo-Saxon Corp taking ground in Japan? Not bloody likely], entrenched AAs, poo poo like that....there just isn't a *room* to move through opinion and marketing. You want to make space, you do it through violence and dirty dealing. Hence the entire ecological niche of shadowrunners in the first place. If someone like Horizon could *ever* have a place, it would never have lead to where the setting is today. quote:using state-of-the-art predictive modeling software to always seem to know when the Next Big Thing is about to happen Less meaningful in a setting where people can see the future well enough to make a profit on it [Or to do things like see the Crash coming]. Predictive modeling requires some information to work off of. Psychic powers require sweet gently caress all but power. It's a tool, but it's not a tool that would make you a AAA. It's one of the conceits of the setting really. The people in charge are both the shadowy Authority of the rich and powerful you get in regular dystopias, and also they are really big loving dragons that can level a city with magic without breathing heavy. Horizon just doesn't have a niche that is sharp enough to justify three As.
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Aug 5, 2013 01:01
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The problem with that is that the double AAs don't give a gently caress. What can Horizon do, burn some AAAs? Boo hoo, that's more space for AAs. And there are plenty of AAs that could be AAAs by size and diversity. It's just that there are only so many spaces to go around on the CC. Besides, Horizon just got burned for faking stories. What are they going to do, cry that people are up to some dirty poo poo while they are being slaughtered? Every other source will say "They are lying again" and keep killing them.
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Aug 5, 2013 01:52
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Yeah, people that only got in on the 4th Edition train are really, really missing out on how brutally complicated every single aspect of the system was. They don't have to worry about the Essence Index or the effects of Bioware Stress or any crazy bullshit when they think about augmentations. It's all incredibly simplified for their ease of use. How I hate them
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Aug 6, 2013 23:08
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Well, Tir Tairngire got it's poo poo packed as far as the Immortal Elven Aristocracy went, but Tír na nÓg is still going....well, not strong, but as comfortably isolationist and weird as ever.
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Aug 9, 2013 05:51
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Well, Cleansing is a thing in pretty much every edition. There's also stuff like Filtering. So it's universally a problem, but it's not a problem without a solution. We'll see how it holds up when the magic book comes out.
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Aug 9, 2013 09:44
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Zereth posted:I dunno, the business parts of the crossbow sticking out to either side would seem to make it really hard to stick one in your pocket. We make versions now that have sides that fold up. They would be about as big as....hmm, a heavy pistol. In theory there is nothing stopping future developments from making something stronger and more durable that could come in light pistol sizes. Gameplay-wise there it shouldn't be too horrible to make a concealable crossbow.
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Aug 16, 2013 06:20
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Cabbit posted:That doesn't mean you should throw poo poo at the person who took Logic 1 nonstop Hi, you are a retarded person. Well, not *you*. The character you. You are a retarded person. That is a disability you have to deal with basically all the time. And you can....but that doesn't mean it's gone away. It's something you have to put up with in every aspect of your day to day life because you are *massively* less intelligent than *everyone* around you. Even the stupid mooks that make up the ranks of the most brutal and simplistic go-gangs? They are smarter than you. Like, *clearly* smarter than you. That's not just mild flavor. That's probably the single defining characteristic of your life. It's great to ignore things because it's a game, but you shouldn't get to ignore serious developmental issues. quote:What's the difference between Logic 1 and Logic 2, 10 Karma? It's a weakness on par with a moderate pollen allergy. Treat it as such. Or one could say it's twice as bad as Incompetent and treat it as such.
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Aug 24, 2013 06:25
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Kai Tave posted:Also I'm sure there were probably other sinister vampire reasons for doing so but gently caress if I can remember. Generally speaking the Ordo is researching anything that would make their condition suck less/give them more power. As a side effect they have some of the most technologically and mystically advanced medical facilities in the world, hence the deltaware. Also trying to genetically/mystically engineer new forms of the virus with new effects and things of that sort. Some random goon that got turned into a vampire may or may not be super organized and playing at the top of their game, but the Ordo is vast amount of power and knowledge and *total* amorality. Even the majority of the Megacorps have a slight interest in the continuation of humanity. The Ordo cracks the right tricks, gets a mystic substitute for essence stealing, they are absolutely willing to make the entire world some form of infected. Of course who knows what they are like in SR5 now that the infected got totally poo poo on. E: Oh and Kai Tave posted:The most disbelief-snapping thing about characters like Clockwork or Kane is their magic bullshit protected status that apparently keeps them from being killed off by any of the many, many people they must regularly antagonize in the course of their existence. Puck is responsible for the death of not just thousands to millions of regular people, but dozens to hundreds of shadowrunners and their friends. There is literally no justification for him drawing another breath. I mean I don't care how much some dipshit writer tries to insert someone saying "We aren't nice people, we've all done terrible things", because the end result of that path is "And that is the reason most of us get brutalized and dropped bleeding to death in a gutter before we reach 30". And to top that off they end SR4 with him participating in *another* massive loving attack against a giant group of Shadowrunners. It's gotten to the point where the little chat messages are just a giant list of folks to kill rather than meaningful color commentary on the setting. Mulva fucked around with this message at 08:28 on Feb 24, 2014 |
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Feb 24, 2014 08:23
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Poil posted:So... now they're just raving mindless evil monsters you kill for That can't use deltaware and have their vulnerabilities made more extreme and even the sentient ones are going around attacking regular people like giant small minded children, and the one infected nation broke apart because it was eating a ton of innocent people and had hordes of sub-sentient ghouls that rioted and blah blah blah. Evidently some writer was out with a bad case of stupid the day they taught infected history, which is basically "Ghouls are minorities in a world where skin color took a step back in the face of different species". They had an entire massive arc about their push for civil rights acceptance, but now that's gone because they are supposed to be NPC adversary fodder. Because there are absolutely no weird undertones to saying PCs shouldn't want to play minorities, and that minorities are sub-human monsters. SR5 actively turned me off so hard I nearly ended up back in SR2.
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Feb 25, 2014 05:00
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Doc Dee posted:To be totally fair, that IS the standard tabletop grognard frame of mind, isn't it? It is, it's just....amusing?....to see it applied to such an explicit stand in, rather than a more general undertone.
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Feb 25, 2014 06:21
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ProfessorCirno posted:Come the gently caress on. If you wanted to play a minority, you could either a) play as an actual minority (they're still around!) People give so much less of a gently caress, the new minorities are orks and ghouls and to a lesser extent trolls [With things like vampires pretty much considered monsters even by a lot of ghouls]. Hence "orksploitation" and the entire thing thing with the Underground and the Japanese, and giving ghouls explicit MLK Jr and Malcolm X parallel figures, and the UN votes, and basically a whole ton of stuff over all the years and all the editions. It's not like this is some new thing in the setting. The less pretty metahumans and ghouls have always been the new minority stand in. quote:And ghouls are not an unfortunate human minority. They are literally flesh eating, hunger obsessed non-humans, infected with a magical plague. And? Give them dead flesh, and that's that. It's not their fault. Nobody goes out looking to become a ghoul. If the process [The quite literally insanely painful process] doesn't destroy their mind they are basically totally rational beings just like any other human. You don't call someone poor and starving non-human for stealing food, why call someone that deals with organleggers non-human for feeding themselves? Or for the other part of the process, do we call someone with syphilitic madness non-human? They have an infection that can destroy their mind too. The infected are still human, they still have human parts. Even something like a vampire can get someone pregnant. The fetus won't develop because of the virus, and it'll lead to a miscarriage, but it can happen. They aren't some entirely new thing just because they have a virus. quote:If you see that and your first thought is "Hmmm, yes, of course, just like real world minorities," then you can hardly blame the game. If you see things like ghoul ghettos and ghoul rights figures and pushes for UN recognition of ghouls and don't think "This is a stand in for real world minorities and their struggles", I really don't know how much more explicit they could have made it. It's a fairly standard tag for "The more things change", where even in a highly advanced society where you can flip gender and get an implant to change the color of your skin at will, people will still find arbitrary and meaningless distinctions to get hung up over to hate other people. Ghouls? They are a minority stand in figure. That's not even sub-text. It's just text.
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Feb 25, 2014 08:38
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Otaku were sort of ok as the almost literal children of the Matrix, some new not quite mystical evolution of humanity to a deeper connection with their technology. Their place in the world felt earned to some degree. Even the fact they lost their powers worked. They weren't what came next, they were just the shape of things to come. Unfortunately what came next was Technomancers. Techomancers were magic deckers, with rules lifted almost in their entirety from the magic rules in 4e. Everything about them was either a rehash of Otaku story beats pretending the Otaku had never happened ["LET US GET WORKED UP PEOPLE ARE EXPERIMENTING ON US!" Where was your outrage when they were cutting into the brains of children years ago, assholes?] or stupid. I wrote the entire thing off the second I saw they lost magic stat points when their essence went down. Why in the hell would the archetype whose entire purpose is to interface with technology care that they put some technology in themselves? Essence loss impacts Mages and their ilk because it's the interface between the body and mana, the handy dandy binding of your soul that makes all magic possible. Technomancers aren't magic though, and there is no reason they should care that they have a robot hand. It's just stupid bullshit to attempt to 'streamline' the rules that is utterly pointless in the face how much more awesome Magic is than the Matrix. A Mage can grab 5 spells and kill everyone, mind control folks, heal the team, fly around, and make his bike going an appreciable fraction of the speed of sound totally silent and invisible. A Technomancer can do pretty the same things as a Decker. At least 5e attempts to give them the whole "Overwatch who?" angle where they are less effected by things like that because they don't interface with the Matrix in quite the same way, but they still seem like treading water as far as the evolution of man and machine goes in the fiction is concerned....and kind of 'eh' mechanically speaking. Like I guess they aren't terrible, but they really don't seem as much of a difference from a Decker as the "Awakened yes/no" divide brings to other archetypes. They'd be a million times better if they dropped the pointless magic stat bullshit and got to use cyberware. e: I mean it'd be a lot more hilarious to see people randomly trying to hack people's gear in combat with that change. "Ha ha, stupid nerd left his cyberarm wireless open, he is totally going to get it no-" *is attacked by the 5 sprites the Technomancer left running in his arm* Mulva fucked around with this message at 14:30 on Mar 9, 2014 |
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Mar 9, 2014 14:26
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Well that too, but the fluff tied into other issues. Things like getting spells cast on yourself and cyberpsychosis and things like that. Essence had a clear meaning in the game, fluff and mechanical unity were served. With technomancers, it's just some bullshit they threw in for supposed balance [Which is fine in principle, it is a game at the end of the day. People have to play it and have fun]. The problem is there is nothing Technomancers have that requires them to be balanced against Mages. Mages in the long term are better than everyone at everything, so they have costs and restrictions to slow their growth to make them even with everyone else in the short, 'actually get games played', term. If you didn't include the Karma costs and the essence loss impacting their powers, there would be no reason to play anything else. A Mystic Adept is the best Decker in the game. He can boost all his technical skills and all his relevant attributes with magic in a way that even the most cybered out non-Awakened chump can't match. This isn't a problem because it'd take him a metric asston of karma to do it, and by the time he got all that karma...good for him, let him be that good. Technomancers, even in the short term, aren't better than Deckers. They are about as good. They have some benefits, but also some weaknesses. Luck into enough money and a Decker can make themselves a lot better real fast. No amount of money makes up for the amount of karma a Technomancer needs to advance. Moreover they are always open to personal attack. A Decker can make himself slower to lower the risk to himself while hacking. A Technomancer is open to danger from even the most well meaning non-lethal defensive actions, and there is nothing he can do about it. Sure they have sprites, but a Decker can use agents and botnets and the like. And a Decker never has to worry about fading. Technomancers are barely an Adept level of step up in functionality *if that*. They are far too weak for what they pay, and could stand to do with a few less restrictions. No fading, able to use cyberware, more tricks, *something*. Maybe justify their powers being effected by essence loss by letting them be able to hack things even if they are turned off. If they are a transmitter so delicate and powerful even a minor change to their internal balance causes them to stop functioning as well, they drat well should be able to hack some dudes arm even if he thinks he turned it off. e: Or let them microwave a dudes brain. I'm cool with that. You want to make me pay to be some giant energy direction device, let me blow up a dude's head like in Scanners. Mulva fucked around with this message at 15:51 on Mar 9, 2014 |
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Mar 9, 2014 15:48
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Kai Tave posted:Also I'm pretty sure they were some sort of weird experiment by the rogue Renraku Arcology AI called Deus who was trying to bootstrap his way into being a Matrix god or something dumb. Nope. Deus could make Otaku, but they were inferior to normal Otaku in that their powers only seemed to work in the Arcology. Mirage, the first AI, could make Otaku that functioned anywhere and didn't fade. The rest of the Otaku just sort of happen. Why? Nobody knows. At least it makes more sense than Technomancers, which is "Nobody knows and also they can project and receive radio waves now.". They are magic deckers but inferior to Mage Deckers by rules, and they are a straight Otaku replay by story.
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Mar 10, 2014 14:23
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I think the worst part is it's not 100% poo poo. Like there is some ok stuff there to work with, but it's *surrounded* by poo poo. If it was just total poo poo, it'd have probably killed the line by now. It's just good enough to keep going and get folks to go "Well I can work around the bad parts, maybe they'll release an errata" without actually being a good and worthwhile product. So you have to wait for the slow, steady decline of the line and pray there is still enough innate value when it dies so that someone else picks up the IP and does something with it.
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Apr 12, 2014 01:07
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I'd say compared to the company paying people money to gently caress up Shadowrun for you nobody here tries very hard at all.
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Apr 12, 2014 09:39
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It's a Shiawase line though, so there are places it's going to stick out like crazy. And PPP is another one of those things that says "I am up to some poo poo" in a lot of circumstances, so you either keep it in a bag and hope you have time to throw it on when things go down [And nobody is checking your bags, as said because it's a massive tip off you are a no-goodnik] or you wear it all the time and look like an rear end in a top hat. Part of the whole corporate culture thing is that they don't just say "People wouldn't be caught dead" in certain clothes. They absolutely do add you *would* be caught dead in certain clothes. And wearing certain corps clothing lines is what they mean. If you never intend to have a civil conversation with someone in a corp outside Shiawase, it's not much of an issue. If you only intend to have a civil word with a Johnson you are working for who isn't in Shiawase, it probably won't even be an issue. If you are trying to stay on the down-low in a corp not Shiawase wearing Shiawase though, it should very much be an issue.
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Apr 13, 2014 04:54
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LGD posted:I just think that it is so well rounded that it will almost inevitably end up being the most common option for people out of chargen, and will see quite a lot of use beyond that. Mortimer gear has the better Social Limit and better concealment, while also being cheaper. And the Ruthenium requires wireless to work, so there's that. So yeah, a stealth bonus that requires there being absolutely no Deckers or Technomancers scanning for you is situational at best, and ultimately not something I'd bet my life on working outside of dumbass gangers. So not a bad thing, but situational. Whereas the majority of the bonuses the Mortimer line offers aren't dependent on wireless. Can also add more crap to the Mortimer choice overall. And of course it costs many thousands less to go the Mortimer route. 7,000 nuyen you can be spending on other things is nothing to sneeze at.
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Apr 13, 2014 08:49
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QuantumNinja posted:What would be even cooler (and maybe this will happen in a future sourcebook) would be mentor spirits for technomancers, like the 'voodoo gods' in Count Zero. They are called Paragons, and they were in SR4.
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Apr 13, 2014 21:10
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Gort posted:Hitting ganger-level characters with sniper-rifle opposition might be part of why it's so lethal. The archetypal gangers in the books tend to have like, an iron bar and a pistol as their armaments. Yeah, but the Ancients aren't really a gang. Guys like the Ancients and the Cutters actually made it, and became something more. They are professional criminal organizations up there with the Mafia and the Yakuza, just a bit less ambitious. Real gangers don't have nearly the pull of those guys, they don't have the friends and connections, they fundamentally do not matter to anyone. Even a newbie Shadowrun has more than that going for them, they must have run into a fixer or a Johnson *at least* or they wouldn't be getting work. Low level gangers are the most disposable and irrelevant of all the criminal elements in the world. If some guys brother Awakens and can cast a single spell correctly a third the time? That can be a game changer for a small gang. A really bad day for a ganger is "They have a troll, the troll has an axe". Or "I'm too high to shoot straight, recognize individual people, and/or tongue.". If you are facing anything more extreme than that, it is the equivalent of a shadowrun where a dragon showed up, and also your Johnson turned into a dragon, and suddenly there are like ten immortal elves ninja kicking through windows. A really big near the end game for this cycle 'mission' for gangers is....I don't know, convincing a local Humanis group to have a rally, and encouraging a local Sons of Sauron group to start poo poo at it, all for the purposes of jumping the riot police for their gear when they show up. Just so that you can be armored like street rat tanks when you wipe out another small gang. That is the level of poo poo that would make you legend, at least for the time frame most gangers live on. The stakes are 'smaller', but they are no less dangerous for the people in question, and *any* victory is a massive leap forward. It's what makes playing gangers fun. If everyone picked up an AK-97 before a 'run, that's...shopping. That's what you do. It's not even that great a gun, who cares? If everyone in a gang picked up an AK-97, it is a massive statement of power and intent to the streets. You are moving up in the world, and you want to be taken seriously. That could attract serious attention. Bigger gangs, real criminal syndicates, Lone Star/Knight Errant actually giving a poo poo [Which could mean either hassling you more or less depending on who your crimes hurt], hell...maybe shadowrunners might give you call to cause distractions now that you are competent enough to register. Lowering the stakes makes everything more important organically. It also means that you have to lower the threats to organically challenge folks though, which can be tricky. When people are used to off-handedly dropping mall rat security with guns, trying to make them invested in the threat of "Your building has a devil rat problem. Sleep tight Chummer." can be an issue.
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Apr 16, 2014 08:26
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Davin Valkri posted:Oh, and do heavily magic-alized characters get the Doctor Manhattan treatment going the other way? Like, "Each time I initiated, the rest of metahumanity looked more and more like little bugs" or something? Realistically, no. I mean an rear end in a top hat that has magic is only likely to stay an rear end in a top hat, and anyone with power can fall victim to thinking they are better than people without it, but at the end of the day magic opens you up to the world around you and the people around you. You don't have to look, you don't have to care, but if you did care you are probably going to care the same amount or more as time goes on. That is the entire point of toxic magicians. The mana that magicians take in is quite literally the life stuff of the universe around them channeled through their body. Powerful events leave powerful marks, good and bad. Everyone picks up on it to some degree [Cyberzombies are so bad that even mundanes get wigged the gently caress out in their presence], but magicians are far more attuned to the universe. If you physically and emotionally pollute the world around a magician, taking that inside them can deeply torture a magician. So in a sense magicians are open to dehumanization, but it's not from pulling too far away from basic humanity, but by taking it in too close and how they react to that. It's the reason there are more eco-terrorists and such in Shadowrun. Pollution means more to the Awakened, as when you pollute the Earth you are polluting them. There is no distance for a magician between the world around them and who they are. Think about what that says about the average wage mage and what they put up with, and why there was more of a divide between shaman and mages in earlier editions. *That* is the mage version of selling your soul. Not physically, like people that get augmentations do, but the good old fashioned way of putting up with evil to get ahead. Just like the corp-rats around you, but the difference is you know what it all costs in a way they don't. People can subjectively talk about how soul killing a corporate environment can be, but you can objectively take a look and go "Yep, this really is emotionally crippling and destructive". And then you work for them anyway. e: The basic dynamic is that augmentation is inhuman, and magic is superhuman. Mulva fucked around with this message at 08:00 on May 6, 2014 |
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May 6, 2014 05:39
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Kai Tave posted:But no edition of Shadowrun to the best of my knowledge has ever had it set up out of the corebook so that losing essence did anything more to you than limit the amount of further cybertoys you could cram into your body. Except, of course, 5th.
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May 6, 2014 08:05
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LGD posted:Yes, that potential -1 to -2 to your social limit really brings home the horror and dehumanization of having a functional prosthetic arm or being able to see after being blinded. I never said it was great, just that they did it. Personally I think it should hit harder, but that's not here or there. quote:I think it's really important to the integrity of the game that we emphasize the inhumanity of anyone who gets their crippling injuries fixed in an "unnatural" way. Clone limbs are cheaper and have no essence loss compared to new cyber-<blanks>, why wouldn't they do that? The only thing that is potentially cheaper is getting like fifth hand used cyber, at which point you *must* be a poor. And if you are a poor....life sucks, welcome to the point. quote:Except magic isn't really superhuman. Of course it is. They are humans in every single way but the things that are added to them. They don't lose anything in possessing their magical nature, they gain. And the things they gain aren't just things like 'the ability to throw fireballs'. Every magician has the ability to see the emotional impact of their actions and the actions of everyone around them. The very heart of reality flows through them, they channel the emotion and essence of every living being to enact change on the world around them. They are you but better, period, and they are connected to the world in a way you will never be. And through it all, still people. Which is where the loving up comes in. quote:while using human ingenuity to build better physical tools is cast as the mark of inhumanity and impending spiritual death. How are they better tools if they kill your soul, exactly? You can still use tools, by the by, technology is great. It's just that tearing down your body tears down your very real soul, and you can only do it so much before it has irreversible consequences on your ability to interact with others. Or, you know, it kills you. Something it can do no matter if you mechanically should be functioning perfectly, because the soul is more than the body it inhabits. quote:Giving up your humanity makes thematic sense in classic cyberpunk fiction that doesn't have literal magic elves and so on, but the dichotomy they're trying to draw just rings false. As I said, magicians have another path to inhumanity. When you absolutely know the consequences of the lifestyle of the world around you, know it in a way nobody else can truly understand, selling out is infinitely worse. It's one thing to intellectually grasp that the semi-capitalist system of oppression the corporations have is abusing the world and everyone in it to a vast degree, but when you can actually feel the impact of pollution to the point where it tries to drive you insane, when you can see the emotional resonance of a corporate work rim dim as humanity is stifled, when you can look at your bosses and know they are amoral monsters? It's beyond not having an excuse to support it, it's actively monstrous to feel what they do to the world around them and help. Power gives you options, but power also denies you excuses.
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May 6, 2014 10:11
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ProfessorCirno posted:Adept Ways are grossly overpriced for what you get - an issue shared with almost all the new powers. That's not true at all, depending on how much you use the powers each Way covers. As a purely mechanical issue, they save you more overall Karma then they cost by and large. What more would you expect? If they cost, say, 10 they'd be ridiculously overpowered. It's just sort of mediocre as is, it's not insanely terrible or anything. quote:I'm not actually sure what Elemental Strike and Elemental Weapon do. You are, you just don't know why someone would pay to do it. Give your attack an elemental effect for a half dozen turns or whatever. They'd do it because they've already got Killing Hands and Penetrating Blow, what else they gonna do? Or if they use a melee weapon, because they've already imbued their weapon focus so again...what else they gonna do? quote:And good christ, some of these are the same powers from Stolen Souls but with different rules. How do you do that? I'm going to say Stolen Souls was a bad book nobody cared about while writing SG. Or, indeed, that nobody cared about while writing Stolen Souls. No matter what else I give it credit for not being the same magic book we've gotten since 3rd edition, at least they mixed a lot of stuff up and added new options and such. Blood Magic got beefed up, which is cool both from the level of making threats and as showing a reason why people would actually get into Blood Magic. Dudes with magic blades that can cast massive spells with functionally no Drain? Yeah, even moral people might cut themselves to bank that sort of power for later on down the road. Or if you are the sort that cuts folks in combat anyway, why not? It's not like you extra super hurt them cutting them knowing Sacrifice. Or have a family of killers whose leader uses his brothers and cousins as his own personal 1-UP tokens to keep fighting. Also a bunch of magic rituals to actually put a bit more magic in the picture in general. Magic seems a bit more magic and less 'There are spells and there are spirits and you can look at auras and that's it'.
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Jul 2, 2014 14:22
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QuantumNinja posted:Also, adepts will likely take Critical Strike, which provides DV for the same cost as Elemental Strike. Or Improved Ability, which is going to similarly provide you the chance for more damage. And neither of those have usage restrictions or require a simple turn to activate. You can take 1 more DV, or you can add +1 to the dice pool, or you can add -6 AP and the [Probably fairly ok] chance to light dudes on fire with fire hands all for the same price. The only thing that doesn't make Elemental <blank> a no-brainer is the fact it needs to be activated. The only thing I think is bullshit is you can't combine it with Penetrating Blow. Because some highly focused guy that bought a half dozen melee powers throwing out -10 AP for a few turns, now that would just break the game. quote:At this point, I just sort of wish they had omitted the Adept section and released a separate book focused on them, because it's probably the only way they'll get enough love to be viable. They need to increase the armor penetration and damage of melee attacks by a drat near order of magnitude. That's the *point* of why it's scary for someone that knows what they are doing to get in close with you. It's no real effort for them to punch up behind your face mask or stomp in your joints to completely negate your armor in comparison to throwing any other type of melee blow. When someone that knows how to fight gets in close with you and your hands are full of gun, that could go bad for you. Add magic to the equation, and you should be mentally writing your will. Instead it's 'lol adept easy win'.
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Jul 2, 2014 15:06
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ProfessorCirno posted:20 karma for straight 1pp. 18, if you plan on using a weapon focus. And while it only applies to the first level, it also applies to the first level of multiple versions of the same power. So yeah, if you only raise a single skill you are only getting one discount, but if you raise multiple skills the first level of each gets the discount. Most people don't just get one combat ability. So no, it's not by nature a *maximum* of .75 or 1pp for 20 karma. It's slightly more complicated than that. quote:So Speaker' Way is 20 karma for 1pp Basically the same deal. It applies to the multiple ways you can use each power, there is a karma bonus for the foci you are most likely to get, and this one even gives you a single dice to masking abilities. Lighting the world on fire with it's awesomeness? No. Still not flat out terrible. Mulva fucked around with this message at 15:31 on Jul 2, 2014 |
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Jul 2, 2014 15:23
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ProfessorCirno posted:Only Improved Ability has different versions And Improved Potential.
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Jul 2, 2014 16:17
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ProfessorCirno posted:I think Speakers only get Improved Potential (Social). And mental. That's why I brought it up for them. Again, it's not lighting up the world with it's awesomeness but it's slightly less terrible than you are saying. Adepts get the least from the book though, no question.
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Jul 2, 2014 17:15
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KittyEmpress posted:This makes me sad because 'ware is gross and ugly and makes blending in with society a pain in the rear end, so I'd love to be able to hang out with magic instead. Magic is awesome in new and exciting ways. That just doesn't extend to punchyslashy Adepts. Non-punchy Adepts get some cool stuff though. Beyond powers there are a bunch of Initiation options for Adepts too. Like one that modifies Commanding Voice to make them carrying out your suggestion for a minute before they notice they are doing it, or the ability for adepts to double jump off air. Really though pure Mages or Mystic Adepts get more to play with than Adepts. Sucks to be them 
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Jul 2, 2014 17:31
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LGD posted:The issue I'm having is whether "active adept powers" means "power that an adept needs to make an active decision to use" or "power that actively does something magical beyond enhancing an adept's natural capabilities" or "adept power that is active- i.e. one that is currently affecting the dice pool in any way." The text and examples can be read in different ways, but the latter is much worse for adepts than the former two. It's the latter, apparently. If you use magic to do it, it takes a penalty due to the Background Count. Period. Improved Sense is one of the powers explicitly called out as taking a penalty, and that isn't activated at all. It's not even a conscious choice, it's the one that gives you new and improved senses.
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Jul 2, 2014 18:40
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You could probably use that blood to track down anyone related to him and kill them, if you were so inclined. Probably be blood magic though. Beyond that it's *possible* it could be a magical ingredient of some worth. More powerful enchanting processes get more esoteric ingredients. The crazier you want to make something the more likely it is to get weird. So if you want to make a no fooling magic sword that anyone can use, that might be something that calls for the blood of kings or emperors.
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Jul 3, 2014 06:14
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Doc Dee posted:Except it takes your own magic to make those magic items work for you. Nope, there are unique enchantments that do crazy poo poo slightly beyond the rules. One that was detailed is a weapon focus sword that anyone can use, no karma cost. It required a lot of Buddhist symbolism and a human sacrifice in it's creation, but there you are. Magic sword anyone could use. And that wasn't even 5th Edition, which is the most magical edition to date.
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Jul 3, 2014 10:23
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The ability to go really fast at someone and hit them really, really hard when they get there would be a nice place to start. The principle in the fluff is that a melee adept is scary because they are basically a living kung fu movie. All the crazy poo poo people imagined a trained warrior can do, they can actually do. If one gets up close enough to you to attack, that should be a really, really bad day for you. If an adept closes to you, you should worry that you won't be able to shoot him because his first blow paralyzed your hands. Or he kicked you through a wall. Or he just shattered the gun into a million pieces. A melee adept shouldn't just be a strong dude that hits hard, they are magic. They shouldn't work like sammies, they should do crazy scary poo poo and you should worry about them. As it stands someone can drop a shitload of money at a clinic and be as or more effective than them pretty much instantly. As it stands, there is no real reason to worry about them. They are something else you have to deal with, sure, but they aren't some existential threat to the entire concept of your plan. They aren't going to shake anything up. In more practical terms things like Penetrating Strike ignoring armor or Elemental Strike adding Magic in damage, and in general all powers being cheaper. Also no activation times longer than free actions. They are adepts, not mages. They make their magic part of themselves and just do it, they don't cast spells. Basically adepts need to be stronger, faster, and more broadly powerful as a baseline to start with.
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Jul 9, 2014 13:22
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A man jumps through a window on a motorcycle, starts autofiring off a shotgun, and screams "WHOOOOOO!" for seven minutes. Roll Perception to see if you notice him.
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Aug 4, 2014 21:31
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It's a way to quantify your place in the system, too. If you have a solid lifestyle and a good SIN [fake or otherwise], you have the ability to say 'I belong'. Belonging to the system means turning the system on people outside it that threaten you. You don't need some byzantine plan of social manipulation and high pressure cons to get lowly scum off your back. If you actually appear to be a person with money and social connections you can call the cops and they will probably do something because you are one of the people that matters. It's a way to highlight why so many people on the fringes of society are angry. They can play up the freedom and the idealism behind their choice to run for themselves and control their own lives, but at the end of the day there is a reason folks sell out. There *is* a benefit to appearing to be another cog in the machine. And most people in the shadows aren't there by choice. They'd love to sell out. Most of them have some reason that they just can't manage it though, and it rarely has to do with lack of desire to have an easy life. They aren't good enough to sell out, they don't fit in, they just can't go through the motions right. Now of course this isn't magic, and someone paying more money than you will always trump your ability to call on the system but, well, isn't that just an incentive to buy yourself an even better lifestyle? The greatest toy that comes with being incredibly rich isn't some fancy yacht or a mansion, it's social respectability. You *instantly* matter when you are rich, and those poorer than you [Read: Nearly everyone on the planet] doesn't. Better get running.
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Aug 11, 2014 10:47
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Of course it can be fine for really large chains to have certain ridiculously expensive gear, because in our real world people push to get their company an insanely lucrative contract by distributing <overpriced piece of crap> to someone....and someone *at* that corporation probably took a kickback to accept it. And in the mega-corporate world of Shadowrun, it's fine for some overpriced piece of poo poo they made that didn't sell and wouldn't even interest the streets to get pawned off on other corporate branches. The thing to keep in mind is that if it was *really* useful and they had someone competent to use it, they'd be selling it. So it can be surprisingly effective for the level of company in question, but it should have some massive flaw. Like a really powerful security system that is almost useless without a dedicated spider to work it [Which of course your local supermarket doesn't have], or a light and powerful SMG for security guards that has a tendency to jam and require clip ejection [Meaning it's only scary for a few seconds, then leaves an opening]. That's fair. Making any given corporate building into The Tomb of [Corporate] Elemental Evil? Not so much.
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Aug 31, 2014 08:20
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Liquid Communism posted:Not one that isn't much better handled by telling them to go play Vampire, no. But there is a both more and less social drama in that. Like being a ghoul or being a vampire makes you a non-person in most of the Shadowrun world, but it's a thing people know about and accept. So there's less drama because you don't have this massive social hierarchy of monsters pretending it's wonderful you are chugging blood from a hobos rear end every night, but there's more because you can actually deal with the wider world as what you are openly. And on the one hand sure, you can gnaw souls and blow that power to buff your stats. That's a thing you can do, right on. On the flip side, it's still technically legal to hunt you for a fairly sizable bounty in a lot of places. So how much of a badass do you feel when anyone on your team could drop you for tens of thousands of nuyen at any given moment? Like your life may actually be worth more than the job you are helping people out on. It plays to the social alienation of a lot of 'runners in a slightly different way than the default. The SINless may be second class members of society, but at least they are recognized as human. They may not have anywhere near the rights of an actual SINner, but people will at least generally say "That is a person with thoughts and feelings standing there I don't really care about". No matter what a ghoul or a vampire does, they will never be accepted, because society itself does not allow a mechanism for them to be. Any given street rat runner that thinks he's soooo oppressed could do a few jobs, jump through some hoops, and take their new SIN and just screw off to a normal life. No matter how dysfunctional he is, there's probably someone that would pay him something on the books to channel that dysfunction to a productive end. He could have a life. The infected can't....but on the flip side, there's also a lot of good reasons why they shouldn't. A ghoul may be lucky enough to come through infection sentient, but a lot don't. And there's no treatment for the ones who lose their mind. They are just going to wildly attack to sate their hunger, and if anyone survives their attack they could turn too. And they could turn feral, and they could turn folks, and on and on. There *are* real risks. And vampires tend to develop new personalities, anti-personal personalities at that. Pretty much every nosferatu is looking at a big helping of emotional detachment mixed with narcissism. When your main dietary staple is "souls", that's not exactly conductive to the public good. Should they really just be treated like everyone else when they so clearly aren't? So yeah, maybe they get some cool tricks, but they also get a dump truck of issues, and they have weaknesses too. And their themes are thematic to Shadowrun as a whole. You want the real out of place elements, it's changelings and drakes.
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Mar 25, 2015 05:43
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| # ¿ May 22, 2024 18:16 |
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....yeah, people can tend to forget how much of a massive joke shadowrunners are in the grand scheme of things. You know that really crazy run where you hijacked a tank and broke into the secret base to pick up the experimental weapon for the big pay out? That's called "a Tuesday" in a real war zone. You might have gotten a medal for that if you were in the army, maybe, but you'd be expected to do the same thing on Wednesday. Not "A few months later after you got time to plan the whole thing out.", immediately. That's what war is. Even in Shadowrun that hasn't changed much. What's changed is when you bother to send a real army, and how regularly people just throw mercenaries at the problem. For the really big and important work though, the things that matter and will take time, they still use armies. And those armies have logistical support systems to see to all their needs during a war. Now *outside* of a war, oh man. They would totally fob that stuff off on the cheapest possible option. Who cares what a soldier not fighting does? Have him rub some dirt on it and walk it off. Maybe it's magic dirt, he could be fine. Inside a war zone, where anti-air and truly heavy weapons are the norm and not an outlier? They'd need something a bit tougher than Doc Wagon to keep their troops alive, and they'd need it on a pretty massive scale. At least if you are talking about the 'real' nations [The Americas, Aztlan, parts of Europe, Japan, so forth] and not some third world hell. All the major nations would have their own troops to handle stuff like that, same as they do now. Anything else wouldn't really save money and it would slow down your ability to blow poo poo up. Bad tactics *and* bad business.
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Mar 30, 2015 13:16
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