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The answer is there is no right answer. Which is a lovely non-answer but the truth of the matter is "should Shadowrun be a game of stealthy, low-profile operators ghosting through security and slipping out like the wind, careful not to trigger a single alarm or alert a single guard or you might as well consider the mission blown or should I bring the plastic explosives or the missile launcher, gently caress it I'll bring both" is a debate (and frequently an argument) that has gone on at least since I was first into Shadowrun which is coming up on 15 years and three editions ago now. Whether combat is a good idea is going to depend heavily on the GM, the sort of game he's interested in running, and possibly how clever/sadistic the GM is feeling. Combat in Shadowrun can be dangerous, especially to characters not crunched for maximum killosity, but it's not even so much "this one particular fight might be the end of you" as "if you go around shooting the poo poo out of things you can expect the situation to escalate rapidly." Killing average corp security jockeys may not present a terrific challenge, but dealing with an elite corporate rapid response team could be a serious threat. Start a running gun battle in the middle of the city and you can expect Lone Star or Knight Errant to start deploying SWAT teams once you hit four stars. It's often a good idea not to go in guns blazing unless your aim is wanton destruction; discretion isn't just safer, it's also cheaper and a lot of 'runners are motivated by the bottom line. But if a fight breaks out it shouldn't be the end of the world, and having some crazy gunfights isn't a guaranteed recipe for instant character death provided they're doing sensible things like wearing armor, taking cover, looking for opportunities to fight dirty, making use of things like covering fire, etc.
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Aug 3, 2013 11:02
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ProfessorCirno posted:While "how many fights should I have" doesn't fall directly into this, overall campaign building should note what your players want from the game. If they're in this to be 80's-esque semi-anti-heros who know they could make more money doing something else but more just want to stick it to the man, the campaign would run very differently from a group of consummate professionals who are in this for the cold hard cash. The former is more likely to have big, bombastic fights then the latter, while the latter is more likely to have small, localized fights (if not just assassinations). It's possible to cross the streams too. In children overboard's game we're in the middle of pulling off a dataheist against an Ares subsidiary. The planning and infiltration were (mostly) pretty mirrorshades in spirit...a combination of free-jumping onto the roof of the building from an overhead tourist monorail after some magically-enhanced fast talking to clear the car of passengers, some grappling gun action to help get the less athletic hacker in with the rest of us, and a conveniently timed distraction in a nearby shopping complex to get the guards focused on other things while we sneak in, grab what we came for (and maybe some extra goodies on the side), and get out. Currently the shopping complex is on fire, a panicked mob of proud firearm owners have had a brutal shootout with panicking security forces and there are probably at least a dozen fatalities, the data-hub is filling up with dangerous hyperfreon gas after a tased security nerd collided with some OSHA non-compliant coolant ducts, we have a rescued sasquatch in tow after freeing it from a live-fire weapons testing range where we liberated a prototype assault rifle and a stock of vicious corrosive chemical rounds, and we have two HRT teams inbound by helicopter, one of which is likely to be eaten by the devil rats we released from the testing range's cages before gluing door shut behind us. Oh, and the lobby's security turrets are currently being cleared with grenades by the guy who charged an Firewatch sergeant equipped with an Ares Alpha using nothing but a survival knife and barely came out on top. But we did get the data we came for which means that technically we've hit all of our primary objectives.
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Aug 4, 2013 08:36
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That was actually the groundwork job. The actual job that we did this one to get intel for is extracting a high-value asset off of an inbound prisoner transport coming in by sea. So imagine all of this happening again in an enclosed space surrounded by the ocean. At least with the IFF security codes we're significantly less likely to be shot at by automated point-defense guns as we board.
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Aug 4, 2013 12:55
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Mystic Mongol posted:I don't know how you think we'll ever act as a team while you keep downplaying my casualty count. A dozen!? I've killed at least three times that many people already. Hell, there's ten dead guards, plus all the shoppers they killed, plus everyone hurt in the stampede away from everyone that got set on fire. Speaking of being terrible at PR. 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.
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Aug 4, 2013 22:29
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I just think it would have been neat to see Aztech finally have to deal with some fallout for all their poo poo. Like, all the megacorps are basically evil to greater or lesser degrees but Aztech is literally a corporation run by cartoon supervillains who sacrifice people in blood rituals to bring about the dark spirit apocalypse. Don't get me wrong, I think they're a neat addition to the setting and all, but they seem to benefit from a bit too much plot armor in regards to their over-the-top evilness and I think it could have been fun to see them try and deal with a backlash of bad PR and a stern eye from the Corporate Court. Imagine the rebranding efforts alone. 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. Even in the grim cyberfuture marketing is still a pretty big deal given how there's still a lot of competition among the megas even if the free market isn't all that free. Shadowrun's a dystopic setting but not to the point where the corporations don't care about that stuff. Horizon as the corp in the background, selling their services to anyone who wants to pay and nudging things along from behind the scenes, sitting on vast storehouses of consumer information that even the other AAAs don't have indexed as well, using state-of-the-art predictive modeling software to always seem to know when the Next Big Thing is about to happen...plus brainwashing, psychological torture experiments, vivisecting technomancers, that sort of stuff.
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Aug 5, 2013 00:07
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Megacorps in Shadowrun are all basically terrible, yeah, but they operate on a sliding scale of terrible ranging from Aztechnology's "we literally kill puppies for satan, come on Horror apocalypse, blood magic woooooo" to Renraku's "we will kill you and your family and your pets in order to send a message but, y'know, we aren't Aztech" to Ares' "we're bastards but mainly we just make guns and poo poo, and also we nuked a bunch of bug spirits so that should count for something (until the writers decided to hand us the idiot ball anyway...)" I just like the idea of a megacorp that rose to the level of a triple-A without actually making anything in the traditional sense. Like, Ares manufactures weapons and aerospace stuff (okay technically all the megacorps are big enough to make anything, but they all have areas of expertise), Shiawase is big on energy and power generation, Novatech does computers...but then you have Horizon, and Horizon probably makes some stuff, but by and large they deal in intangibles. Information and the exploitation thereof, predictive modeling, consumer psychology, media manipulation...basically Google but (more) evil. Done right they could be simultaneously less threatening (because they aren't as in-your-face as the other megas) and suitably ominous (because they're a triple-A megacorporation which isn't something you get to be by playing nicey-nice, what's their trick, what are they hiding).
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Aug 5, 2013 01:01
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Seriously, look what's happening here; Cirno is agreeing with something I said in a Shadowrun discussion. That's what we've come to. Another point that Cirno brings up, and it's a good one, is that for being the sinister capitalistic cabals that run the world the megacorps are like half noteworthy but scant elevator pitches and half "wait, what do they do again?" Literally all I can remember about Saeder-Krupp just off the top of my head is that a dragon runs it. I mean yeah, that's a neat detail and all, but...that's about it really. I don't even know what the gently caress Zeta ImpChem's deal is or why I should care about them over Horizon. Trying to make a megacorporation that colored outside the usual lines is far from the worst thing the SR4 writers ever tried.
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Aug 5, 2013 11:10
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I like a balance in my games, personally. Some high-stakes corp runs one day, some street-roots jobs the next. The thing to remember is that there are more currencies that matter than cold hard cash. Making contacts and earning favors can be pretty loving valuable even if the money the jobs bring in won't pay the rent, and even if your table is full of amoral mercenaries with hearts of stone you can always point out that having a street-doc mage owe you a favor or three or networking up some new contacts (all the while earning sweet, sweet karma) and possibly getting a chance to score some swag on the side if you're sharp enough is still a pretty good deal.
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Aug 6, 2013 07:48
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It's kind of interesting seeing the reaction people have to the priority system. This isn't meant in an edition war-y way, it's just that 4th Edition was actually the odd one out in not using priority chargen as a default and I remember when 4E first came out that one of the immediate complaints a lot of Shadowrun peeps had was that priority wasn't in the main book, only pointbuy. I guess a lot of people got used to pointbuy since then.
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Aug 6, 2013 21:26
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And yet neither bone lacing nor bone density augmentations have anything to do with bone marrow.
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Aug 6, 2013 22:46
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I do wish they'd post a bit more fluff to go along with the corebook augmentations...not looking for a return to the days of biosystem overstress or potential heart attacks because your Sythecardium went haywire but it'd be nice to have a little more of that flavor, though I understand it's down to wordcount.
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Aug 6, 2013 23:22
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To be fair, some of the stuff in 4E was rather dramatically undercosted. Then again they seem to have swung pretty far in the other direction in an attempt to balance things. Skillwires, for example, used to be 2K a level. Now they're 20K a level...but they also brought skilljacks back for some dumb reason I can't figure out and those are also 20K a level, and you need both in order to use any activesofts...which have gone down in price, but that's small comfort when the barrier to entry has gone up by something like 20 times the price it used to be.
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Aug 8, 2013 23:05
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What happened in 4th Edition is it turns out magical elven kingdoms founded on an unjustified sense of self-importance and racial supremacy aren't actually immune to things like economic recessions and mounting social tensions. The Tir council or whatever it's called now has a number of non-elves sitting on it, including at least one ork or troll from what I remember as well as a dragon, and the infamous Tir border now has a lot more cracks in it though the Ghosts still generally aren't to be hosed with. On the other hand, it's still mostly Magical Elf Portland which raises the question of why you'd want to go there in the first place.
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Aug 9, 2013 05:39
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children overboard posted:We need more 5e GMs! There's a lot of interested players but only a couple games on the go. Honestly you could probably do something like this simply by having the PCs work for the Draco Foundation, which is pretty much one of the few genuinely philanthropic organizations in the Shadowrun world.
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Aug 12, 2013 07:21
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They didn't take away "plug your brain into a computer and have virtual cybercombat" in 4E though, so it's kind of weird to me that people are talking about 5E like it somehow brought decking "back."
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Aug 14, 2013 05:16
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That doesn't make even the slightest amount of sense to me given that nobody seems put out that anyone can have a sideline in, say, fighting or social stuff or sneaky stuff. I thought one of Shadowrun's selling points was supposed to be flexible archetypes. Also saying that a cyberpunk game made hacking too ubiquitous sounds pretty silly, I mean come on. And anyway, that doesn't really have anything to do with my point which is that if you wanted to plug your brain into a computer and hack the gibson in full hot-sim VR 4E already had you covered, including multiple ways a GM could plausibly force you to have to do that. Like, that isn't a thing that 4E excised in favor of all wireless, all the time.
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Aug 14, 2013 06:18
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Cyclomatic posted:Players might as well just shoot themselves in the head, because it is literally making it impossible for them to do anything. The technomancer isn't boned by what you describe, everyone is boned and boned harder. The Decker will get arrested because their illegal deck is found by the omnipresent oppressive searches. The Street Samurai will get arrested because of their illegal cyberware, the mage will get arrested for their illegal charms and spells, the face will get arrested because they have a pistol. Then maybe you shouldn't be strolling through the central security checkpoint at SeaTac with all your illegal poo poo and no excuses? Yes, that may very well happen if you try to board commercial flight whatever without either A). making arrangaments to ship your illegal crime gear separately or B). get your licenses up to date so you have a "reason" to be packing 5 essence worth of combat cyberware or a way-illegal hacking tablet. Or you find alternate means of transport. If Mr. Johnson needs you to fly somewhere then you tell him to book you a private flight and bypass that poo poo. Or you charter a private flight at an airstrip that specializes in that sort of thing. Trying to stroll through big security checkpoints with your standard shadowrunner loadout should be a bastard and a half. Like Conskill said, this isn't "boning the players," this is forcing them to not be completely stupid (or to kit themselves out with some appropriate advantages beforehand). Complaining about major airport security being super invasive and difficult to breeze past when you're carrying guns and chrome and glowing in the astral like it ain't no thing is like being a Paranoia player and complaining about how all those R&D inventions keep killing you when you try to use them.
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Aug 15, 2013 22:41
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None of that is helped by the fact that A). in-setting technomancers are supposed to be a big woah-scary YOUR NEIGHBOR COULD BE A TECHNOMANCER, HERE ARE THE SIGNS paranoia threat du jour, B). this is at least in part, supposedly, because technomancers are nigh-impossible to distinguish from the average citizen (THEY COULD BE ANYONE), and C). the game then goes and provides people with a way to distinguish technomancers from the average citizen (oh, uh, whoops). Like, if you want technomancers to be impossible to detect than just make them impossible to detect. Bam, done. Otherwise it remains a distinct possibility that Joe Security Mage at SeaTac is gonna roll his 5 hits on the day that Technomancer Terry decides he needs to grab a redeye flight and hit the panic button because TECHNOMANCER CYBERTERRORISTS WANT TO HACK OUR PLANES.
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Aug 16, 2013 01:41
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Might be. But as Hodgepodge points out it remains a distinct possibility that any technomancer who has to go through an area with active magical security, and I'd definitely imagine that a major airport qualifies, is going to get screwed on a "well statistics say it was unlikely" roll of the dice and there's nothing they can really do about it. You can't turn off being a technomancer, there's no such thing as a technomancer license to fake, and in-setting technomancers are the hot new thing to be afraid of. Should it happen all the time? No, but when it does happen there's not a whole hell of a lot you can do about it, nor can you take steps to mitigate it beyond "don't go through SeaTac in the first place," which is kind of lovely compared to pretty much everyone else who can at least take a stab at bullshitting their way out of trouble or flashing a decently rated fake license or something, and technomancers are already kind of a questionable payoff for the costs and hassle involved as it is.
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Aug 16, 2013 02:59
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WarLocke posted:Did spurs get re-imagined at some point or am I just misremembering them? I'm skimming the This got overlooked in your repeated complaining about wireless smartlinks but cyber-implant weapons don't cost essence if you put them in a cyberlimb, the essence costs are for if you put them in a meat limb. If they go in a cyberlimb then they take up capacity but the essence cost is ignored. If it doesn't state this clearly somewhere in the book itself then that's still how it's supposed to work, SR5 has bad editing. Also the description of spurs outright states "one to three blades," just for the record. Your spurs can look like whatever. WarLocke posted:What's wrong with it is that it doesn't actually 'fix' the stated 'problem' (forcing deckers to be on-site and then giving them 'something to do') because people will just turn it off. On top of it being dumb in a conceptual sense for most stuff. So it would be simpler to just let those 'bonuses' just be the normal base for the gear and forget the wifi stuff entirely. IMO of course. Look, you want to know the real answer why they changed it? Because VR-only decking loving sucks. It's a boring, unfun slog of the decker going off for 45 minutes to have a solo dungeon crawl using rarely-remembered fiddly rules while everyone else checks out to eat pizza and play WoW. I too got into Shadowrun around 2E and I remember "the decker problem" being Shadowrun's version of Vancian spellcasting as the number one thing everybody wanted to change, argue how to deal with, or flat-out ignore. So this is how they've attempted to fix it, by giving hackers poo poo to do that doesn't involve plugging your brain into a computer and slumping over like a vegetable. Or I guess we could go back to the good old days of "nobody wants to play a decker, time to hire an NPC." Most people aren't paranoid shadowrunners. If the GM is at all not being an antagonistic dick, he won't have everybody acting like one. Maybe some elite corporate hitsquads run without wireless (or other paranoid shadowrunners or similar types) but probably plenty of people do because it's convenient, because they like it, because they forget, or because they just plain old didn't think to, the same way plenty of people in real life don't always follow the optimal security procedure. Maybe they think having that extra edge is worth the typically minimal risk they'll run up against a hacker good enough to gently caress with their gear. There, that took 10 seconds of effort to justify. Why would they make wireless smartlinks? Because they're megacorporations and they do poo poo like that, gently caress you consumer, suck it up. Seriously, of all the dumb poo poo in Shadowrun people will trip over themselves to justify as verisimilitudinous the sudden obsoleting of old tech in favor of the shiny new (that maybe doesn't work the way you want it to) is maybe the most faithful-to-real-life thing they writers did. How many times has some software company (or hardware company for that matter) updated their poo poo in a way that has less functionality or broke things and it sucks but the old version isn't supported anymore? How many times has Google hosed with their stuff in a way that resulted in something worse without giving you the option of rolling it back? Kai Tave fucked around with this message at 07:53 on Aug 18, 2013 |
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Aug 18, 2013 07:43
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WarLocke is actually right though, just in a backwards kind of way. Wireless hacking in Shadowrun thus far doesn't completely address the "decker problem" not because everyone will just run wireless off all the time but because the stuff it gives hackers to do often isn't worth the opportunity cost when you could be, y'know, throwing grenades or just shooting people in the face. Like, you could hack a guy's smartgun, that's cool...you could also toss some pepper punch grenades and gently caress a whole bunch of people and then it doesn't matter. That's not to say that wireless decker tricks are totally useless, but they're more situationally useful than you'd expect from something that has such a high buy-in cost to do. It'd be one thing if hackers in 4E and up really were the "computer wizards" people like to try and paint them as because mages also have a high buy-in but in exchange get to do an amazing variety of incredibly useful poo poo, and they don't have to hope that the GM put enough hackable things in the area for them to work with, they can just cast spells and summon spirits whenever and however they want.
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Aug 18, 2013 08:41
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ProfessorCirno posted:Making armor 1 stat isn't what's leading to armor jacket overload, it's removing the Body requirement. Still though, Shadowrun's so-soft-it-could-be-made-of-marshmallows level of abstraction really seems to be at odds with their desire to play the gear porn game. In a game which actually used things like hit locations then buying an armored business suit might be worthwhile, but since putting armor anywhere on your body magically protects your everything and armored vests are A). better armor, B). cheaper, and C). basically totally concealable under regular clothing (including non-armored business suits) it's basically yet another iteration of the "spot which choices are actually kind of pointless" minigame.
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Aug 20, 2013 00:11
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Human (as in human human) average, on a 1-6 scale is 3, or at least it's been 3 in every edition I'm familiar with, so assuming that everyone starts with a 1 in every stat by default the "average" for any given attribute ought to be +2 points to whatever it is after modifiers.
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Aug 24, 2013 02:34
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Thus far, in the Shadowrun game children overboard is running, I've yet to make a single Logic based roll. Or a Charisma based roll for that matter. Okay, I think a couple of my knowledge skills are Logic based so I guess I lied there. But my character has a couple of significant areas where she's largely deficient...social skills, serious logic stuff...and hasn't yet had to deal with the serious repercussions thereof. I also get to have conversations and stuff with people too. In theory, up 'til now the points I put into giving her a Charisma of 3 and a Logic of 2 at character creation have yet to pay off in any meaningful sense and could just as easily have been spent on something else more relevant to her areas of expertise. I'm sure at some point the time might come where CO calls for me to make a social test of some sort or forces me to logic my way out of a problem but so far I've been doing pretty well by letting other people handle the real heavy lifting in those regards. So is CO being a bad GM here or what?
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Aug 24, 2013 03:12
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I should make it clear that I don't think there's anything unfair about a GM requiring a check of a player who's weak in that area; I'm not gonna pitch a fit if CO starts throwing social tests or hardware tasks at me or if I maneuver myself into a position where that's the only way to go, simply that so far thanks to the members of our band of miscreants having sufficiently broad portfolios none of us has really been stuck completely in a situation where we're forced to use our weakest abilities. But it seems kind of weird to me that people here are looking at a guy with Charisma of 1 no social skills and going "woah gently caress, that dude is in for SO MUCH TROUBLE man" while someone with Charisma 2 or 3 and no social skills would probably warrant a shrug, even though 2-3 Charisma dude isn't exactly going to be a super social powerhouse with his one, maybe two possible hits if that. Like, that possibility of miniscule and marginal success is enough for people to go "oh okay, that guy's fine" even though the distinction in terms of "how good is this guy at social stuff really" is largely meaningless.
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Aug 24, 2013 03:30
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BenRGamer posted:It can? I thought customization was only for if you had a higher natural attribute than the cyberlimb gives as a default--otherwise your gimped in that limb for that attribute. Welcome to cyberlimbs! Seriously though, this took me a couple tries to wrap my head around when 4E introduced cyberlimb customization too, it is quite possibly the most unnecessarily convoluted method of giving people robot arms they could have come up with.
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Aug 24, 2013 03:59
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Cabbit posted:The theory is that with a Logic of 1, any time you're called to make an actual skill check (i.e. whenever you are challenged in any way) in a subject in which you lack actual training in-- not things you're unaware of-- it is functionally impossible for you to succeed without pure dumb luck. Exactly. All paying 20 BP or 2 attribute points to set your Logic at 3 instead of 1 might accomplish from a practical standpoint is giving you the ability to completely suck fractionally less at defaulting to Logic skills...like maybe you could get a hit, maybe two if you're lucky, but you're going to fail a lot more than you meaningfully succeed and any successes you do get will be paper-thin. The same goes for having a Charisma of 3 and no social skills. But having a 1 in an attribute is like a neon sign to some folks that says HEY PLEASE SHOW ME THE FOLLY OF MY WAYS while having a 3 is like, eh, whatever, nobody cares. It's like an "under the GM's radar" tax, as long as you pay enough points to not look like you're being a minmaxer then nobody's likely to care as much about hammering home your lack of capability like an object lesson.
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Aug 24, 2013 04:47
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Mainly it's a convenience; goggles can get lost, stolen, dropped, not at hand, and depending on what sort of casing they're in not the kind of thing you walk down the street wearing without garnering some odd looks (though you can do the whole sunglasses thing if you want), but nobody looks twice at a guy with cybereyes, you always have them, and the only time they're likely to get lost or stolen is when you're dead (or if you're like me and let your cybereye drone get shot by security robots). There's nothing wrong with using goggles if that's your thing, but at that point why even bother getting cybereyes at all when you can get an image link in a set of contacts or the same goggles your other stuff is in?
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Aug 24, 2013 04:53
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I like cybereyes for the same reason I like a lot of other cyberware which is that it redefines the baseline abilities of your character. On a prepared job where you have all your stuff the difference between goggles and cybereyes may be moot, but in the hundred and one circumstances where things are less than ideal and you don't have all your stuff, having implant 'ware increases the number of options you can rely upon as a default. "I always have the ability to see in the dark and do other sensory tricks, I always move faster, I always have X amount of armor, I can hold my breath for an hour, I can fall three stories and take no damage, etc." External gear shouldn't be a constant pitfall waiting to happen, but opting to get implanted gear is basically you saying "I want to make this an always option." That said, I'm not nearly as up on SR5 as I am on SR4 but based on what I know I'd say that trying to make a character that stars with super cyberlimbs like that is going to be much more of a stumbling block to other stuff than it was in SR4 where the costs were lower. Cabbit's right in that both samurai and drone guys are kind of monetarily intensive concepts. My suggestion would be to forgo the cyberlimb idea for now, maybe keep the rest, then go back to the drawing board. I don't think that a guy who's fighty but also uses drones should be unworkable, but it might be unworkable the way you're trying to approach it.
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Aug 24, 2013 05:06
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ProfessorCirno posted:THe problem is that logic skills also include "use a computer" and "anything involving academics." So is your argument then that everything a character does needs to involve rolling a skill? Because then you go on to play the "it's a roleplaying not a rollplaying game" card which seems pretty odd when you're the guy insisting that someone literally can't hold a conversation because if you read the rules they say Seriously, making someone roll "Use Computer" to Google a cat video is like making someone roll Athletics to not trip and fall every time they go to the bathroom. The context of "when do you make someone roll a skill" doesn't magically change because one person's attribute is FOO and another's is BAR. Yes, the person with Logic 1 will auto-fail Use Computer rolls. That only matters if you're cramming Use Computer checks in his face every 30 seconds, otherwise who cares? quote:And, well, the question still sits: are low attributes weaknesses? Or free points? Because they are either one or they are the other. They're free points if the GM doesn't relentlessly hammer you with HA HA YOU HAVE 1 CHARISMA YOU FAIL TO HAVE A BASIC CONVERSATION constantly. There, are you happy now? I already answered this for you earlier but here it is again. I have literally made no checks based on anything my character isn't geared for in five months of play and yet I sunk 30 BP into attributes that have so far been used 0 times. So was that a good investment on my part when it literally hasn't impacted my character in any fashion or did I waste points I could have put in things that I've actually been using so far?
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Aug 24, 2013 05:18
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ProfessorCirno posted:When the hell have I ever argued that? YOu've said this a few times. Stop shoving words in my mouth. You keep arguing in the context of "but you'll fail skill checks!" If you aren't constantly being forced to make skill checks in the areas you suck in, what does it matter if your stat is 1 or 100? Either everything your character could possibly do that relates to that area requires a skill roll to hammer home how much you suck or it doesn't and the person who doesn't plan on using a computer for more than reading Dangan Ronpa 7 updates doesn't need to care. quote:If your character tries to find something online then yes they would roll Computer. If your dude wanted to not be a blithering idiot, they would have to have higher then 1 Logic. I do not think saying "If your character has Logic 1 then they should act as if they have Logic 1" is a controversial statement! The problem is people are disagreeing with you on what "act like they have this attribute at 1" means, especially when you've been hyperbolic all over the place. All this "you should have to act THIS WAY or you're a bad roleplayer" reminds me of the D&D Dark Sun podcast the Penny Arcade guys did where one of them, I think it was the artist, had a character with Wisdom 8 and decided that meant he was literally retarded and ate sand and stuff. If characters aren't supposed to have a 1 in attributes because it makes them crippled and non-functional then maybe that shouldn't be an option for them to take. Like, comparisons to D&D break down because I'm pretty sure most editions of D&D don't let you start with attributes below a certain threshold. quote:Make an argument based on what I say or stop trying. How 'bout you answer my questions now since I did you the courtesy? Were those points I spent on things I haven't used a sound investment or did I basically spend a "GM please don't pick on me, I swear I'm not a dirty minmaxer" tax?
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Aug 24, 2013 05:33
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ProfessorCirno posted:Logic 1 isn't "8 Wisdom." It's 3. It is the lowest possible score. But 8 is literally as low as you can go in 4E as a player character, it's not possible to go any lower. Taking an 8 in a score is dumping it to the bottom of what's possible. So by that logic, since 8 is the bottom of the barrel, that means that someone who plays their 8 Wis Fighter as a sand-chewing retard is being a good roleplayer. quote:I don't know how you keep missing this. The average is 3. 2. 2 is "low." 2 is "I'm rather below average." 2 is "I'm kinda thick." 2 is the lowest that any NPC has. Then why do attributes of 1 even exist as a selectable option outside of things like Edge or Magic? You're mad that people want to take something the game doesn't explicitly tell them "no stop, don't do this" and then don't want to play their characters as mouth-breathing meat tubes. If 1 is supposed to be "do not enter" territory then maybe attributes should start at 2 by default instead of 1? quote:And I dunno if it's super minmaxy. You tell me. You said it yourself - not even you took 1 in any stat. Your Logic is 2, not 1 - why is that? Unthinking reflex more than anything else, upon reflection. Nothing I've done in-game has presented my character as highly logical (I mean, this is the game where our great plan for a distraction was "let's start a fire in a mall," so the bar may not be incredibly high, but still) so frankly I probably could shuffle that point around and it would make precisely 0 difference to either how my character has played and/or been portrayed so far.
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Aug 24, 2013 05:48
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Tippis posted:The whole argument started with the contention that such disadvantages should never show up as an obstacle in the game because that's somehow mean to the players. The argument came up because Cirno started asserting that having a Charisma of 1 meant someone was "incapable of having a conversation." Having weaknesses come up in play is fine, "you fail to have a conversation" is bullshit on par with "your Agility is 1 so roll to see if you trip and die while walking across the floor."
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Aug 25, 2013 06:41
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Tippis posted:He was exaggerating to make the point that, no, having minimum attribute scores are not something that should never come up, or even only rarely, but rather is something that is a daily problem to the character and which should define their lives in general. This as a counter argument to the implication that you could min-max without actually suffering on (or from) the min end of the equation. ProfessorCirno posted:Logic 1 means you are incapable of using any electronics - posting pictures of cats on the internet is beyond you, you fail at any and all academic knowledge checks, and you may as well be unable to read. So when he said "at Logic 1 you can't look up YouTube videos and might as well be functionally illiterate," neither of which are actually supported by any text I've been able to find anywhere in either the 4E or 5E books on the subject, I should have realized he was actually just being hyperbolic and not trying to make an actual point, okay. quote:And yes, rules-wise, charisma 1 (and no skills) means you can never succeed at any kind of charisma-based challenge. You can still have a conversation, but unless it's under the right circumstances (time, preparation, guidance) any part of that conversation that entails convincing people, lying, fitting in with the crowd, or any similar non-trivial task will automatically fail. To what extent you consider that “incapable of conversing” is just a matter of how you define conversation. So literally any time anybody in a game you run has a conversation you make them roll skill checks to see if they manage to successfully converse? Seriously, the argument that Cirno has been making here, as far as I can tell, is 1). Taking a 1 in a stat means you auto-fail associated skills (okay fine, that's not really in dispute) 2). Therefore if someone takes a 1 in a stat it means that they are functionally incapable of even basic life tasks because of point the first. So either the GM is making his players roll to chat with the 7-11 clerk and order things off of Amazon.matrix or he isn't. If he is then frankly he's an rear end in a top hat. If he isn't then Cirno's insistence that someone with a 1 in a stat is fundamentally crippled is off-base. My point, which nobody has really addressed so far, is why the guy with a 1 Charisma deserves the GM stinkeye while the guy with 2 Charisma is A-OK even if the actual capabilities of Mr. 2 Charisma are, for all practical purposes, not that much better than the guy with 1. But put a 2 in a stat you plan on never using and nobody starts making bullshit hyperbolic arguments about how that guy's ready to fail at basic life skills even though his lovely 1-in-3 chance of a single hit (barring spending edge or whatever) means that he's probably not going to be accomplishing anything that really requires checks either, and therefore will probably be avoiding circumstances where he has to make those checks whenever possible. Which is, y'know, what Shadowrun characters do all the time. If your party Street Sam has a Charisma of 2 and no social skills then he (probably) doesn't make social checks whenever possible. If there's a 'run that involves a fancy party then he works around that rather than blundering in and loving things up for everybody, he lets the Face handle negotiating the payment with Mr. Johnson, sort of like how you don't let the guy with lovely Demolitions skill defuse the time bomb. Sure, if he says "hey, I want to do [THING] that requires [SOCIAL SKILL]" then the GM is entirely within their rights to go "okay man, then roll your lovely 1 die and see if you probably gently caress it up, and you will probably gently caress it up"...but most of the time a guy with a low attribute and no skills is going to not be doing that poo poo in the first place. And sure, the GM can force him to make social checks whenever he wants but the conclusion is fairly forgone at that point so I'm not really sure what's gained by that beyond "here, let me remind you that you suck at this, okay moving on." Someone with a 2 in a stat and no associated skills is essentially saying "I probably don't give a poo poo about skill checks here, whatever" just as much as the guy with a 1. So beyond the marginal chance of paper-thin success, what did the 2 Charisma street sam really get for spending those BP/attribute points beyond the Professor Cirno Seal of Approval? Because it seems kind of weird to me that people are treating the dude with a 1 as though that needs to be an active drawback, one that someone's entire character centers around, while the guy with 2 gets a shoulder shrug even though the level at which he's "more functional" is marginal.
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Aug 25, 2013 09:45
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Tippis posted:I don't know. I'd chalk a lot of that up to crippling overspecialisation. If the decker has nothing to do on the run, maybe that's because they've created a character that can only do one thing, and that one thing is only needed part of the time. Solution: build the character so that it's useful at other times as well. Shadowrun frequently rewards and encourages overspecialization, especially when it comes to things like hacking. Someone pages back actually said he felt SR5 was better in regards to hacking precisely because it had a higher buy-in and made it so people had to focus more on the hacking side of things if they wanted to be a hacker. If hacking is supposed to have a high-buy in and opportunity cost that's cool and all, but then hacking should probably be more than "that thing where you force the GM to split his attention and run you a solo dungeon crawl every time you want to open doors or disarm traps, and then sometimes you get to shoot pistols." WarLocke posted:So it's not really so much a 'decker problem' as it is a 'bad GM problem'. Oh bullshit.
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Aug 26, 2013 09:32
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Tippis posted:Well, then that's the design flaw they should aim to fix, rather than dive even deeper into the murky water of class-based character designs. All you'll ever end up with if you go down that path is that every character and build option will suffer from the same problem, only in their own specific realm. Part of the issue here, I think, is that when people sit down to be "the decker," that generally means they want that to be The Thing They Do 90% of the time. I know there's been a lot of back-and-forth over hyperspecialization in the last five pages or so, but it's not really unreasonable to assume that a guy who wants to be the party hacker is probably doing it because he wants to hack poo poo all the time, sort of like how somebody who plays the Face wants to do a lot of social poo poo and the guy who plays the Mage is going to want to be using magic as much as feasibly possible. Yes, it makes sense for everybody to pack a gun just in case, but Shadowrun bills itself as a game where people play as a team of specialists and even if the system provides you the wiggle-room to have a minor in something else, which various editions have been variably generous about, it's still reasonable to assume that someone is going to want to do the stuff they spec for as a matter of course and not as a "well, maybe." Another part of the issue is that while pretty much everybody in a game group is probably going to have some sort of "fighty" option to fall back on even if it's just plinking away with a pistol or your one combat spell you save for emergencies, decking in Shadowrun is almost always put squarely on the shoulders of one person. The decker may know how to do a bit of shooting when poo poo goes south but chances are pretty good that the street sam isn't going to know how to do/have the hardware to do "a bit of decking" and jump into the matrix alongside the hacker to back him up or whatever. Again, the high-buy in of hacking hardware and software doesn't really lend itself well to dabbling, so the decker is usually a one-man show. But really, the point isn't that "the hacker can't find ways to contribute outside of hacking," but that A). the all-VR-all-the-time hacking rules were an almighty pain in the rear end for everyone involved, players and GMs alike, to the point where a lot of groups just said "gently caress it" and hired an NPC to disable alarms for them and nobody played a decker, sort of like how D&D groups would say "gently caress it" if nobody wanted to be the Thief and hired an NPC to do their trap-disarming for them and B). someone paying a lot of money and opportunity cost to be "the hacker" and thus probably wanting to do cool hacker poo poo as much as possible, not only has to deal with point the first but also the fact that by and large hacking was like 90% opening doors, disabling security, and stealing plot coupons. You paid a high buy-in, you dealt with a time-consuming and fiddly minigame that only you could play and required the GM to split his focus between "you" and "everyone else," and in the end most of what you were doing was spending 30-45 minutes playing tabletop Nethack in order to do Thief stuff. (Oh, and another thing with hacking is that the hacker is pretty much always limited to doing whatever the GM has thought to provide him with. In other words the Mage has a high buy-in as well but in exchange the Mage generally gets to cast their spells and summon spirits wherever and whenever they feel like it, but a hacker can't just be like "I flood the room with knockout gas!" unless the GM is either cool with players making declarations like that...and while some may very well be, that's not the sort of thing Shadowrun actively encourages...or the GM has specifically put a knockout gas dispenser on the network to be hacked.) There are two ways to approach this sort of thing as I see it: 1). Drastically de-emphasize hacking as "a thing a high buy-in specialist does" and dial the hacking system back until it's basically on par with any other B&E-related set of tasks. Basically take hacking and put it on the same level as shooting dudes, a thing that anyone can invest in with a modest amount of skill points and resources and that takes very little time at the table. The problem with this, though, is that I'm virtually certain that even people who gave up on deckers wouldn't actually want this. People want to be "the decker," they want hacking to be a Very Special Thing with special rules and gear porn and poo poo. Boiling hacking down this way might simplify it and it might lend it more towards being a thing anyone can dabble in, but that wouldn't be viewed as a positive by people who want hacking to have its own mystique. 2). Give hackers more hacker poo poo to do in a broader variety of situations to make their high buy-in more worthwhile. This is what SR4 and SR5, to greater or lesser degrees, have tried to do. They haven't always succeeded in the ways the designers hoped I'm pretty sure, but it's still a better approach in my opinion than round four of full-VR-always decking. I mean, there are people here in this thread who'll argue that it's still probably better and/or easier to simply shoot or grenade a dude than fiddle around trying to hack someone's gunlink in mid fire-fight, so it's not like it's still not a good idea for hackers to pick up a combat skill to fall back on, but the wireless matrix hacking setup is at least a step towards giving hackers more poo poo to do with their primary toolset without forcing the GM to run a split party every time he wants to do his hacky thing. And the fact that so much more poo poo is hackable without plugging your head directly into it also gives the hacker more options in terms of "what can I do with the toys in the environment." They're still basically reliant on the GM to either provide them with stuff or allow declarations, but at least it's more likely now that there will be things around for the hacker to try and mess with.
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Aug 26, 2013 10:41
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Tippis posted:Maybe it's better to conceptualise this issue around the distinction of direct and indirect effects. The decker can't directly affect the orc merc squad across the alley because they're not stupid and and run their gear offline. He can still indirectly affect them through the myriad of environmental hazards discussed earlier. Likewise, the street sam can't directly affect the virtual environment, but he can still indirectly mess it up through the use of ewar or, hell, just cutting the power. So maybe the entire trick lies in the GM providing (and the players remembering) all those indirect options? Frankly I think the conniptions people have over hackers hacking peoples' guns is ridiculous in a game where you could, for the same sort of buy-in, be a mage and melt peoples' poo poo with waves of sorcerous acid or mind-whammy them or maybe just summon a big gently caress-off spirit beforehand if you know you're going to be having a fight or any one of a dozen other crazy things you can just do without having to go through an argument over why someone would leave their gunlink's wi-fi on. quote:So it's not really about deckers and having nothing to hack, but about having no direct means of attack, which is solved by having tons of indirect means instead. I think a better way to look at it rather than "direct and indirect" is "declarative and permissive." It's the problem with spellcasters and fighters in D&D...a fighter has to ask the GM "can I do this, can I do that?" and play 20 questions in order to find out whether he can do something, what it'll take him, what his penalties are, etc. Meanwhile the Wizard simply casts a spell and gets to do poo poo. Pit appears out of nowhere? Floor turns to mud? Suddenly tentacles appear everywhere? Sure, why not. The hacker operates purely as a permissive character...you have to figure out what around you is there to hack, is it wireless-active or not, no?, okay then what is wireless enabled, can I hack it to do [X]?, no?, okay then what can I hack it to do, etc. etc. Now hacking being a permissive sort of thing is fine, not everything has to be declarative in order to be good, but the more hoops hackers have to jump through to Do Hacker poo poo the less it should be costing them to do it, even though Shadowrun players really seem to like the idea of a guy whose sole focus is being the guy who hacks stuff. If you want the hacker to be a big, primary focus party role, then it makes sense to give the hacker more opportunities to do more stuff, direct stuff included.
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Aug 26, 2013 11:01
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Tippis posted:Sure, but that's just down to familiarity, isn't it? Anyone in their right mind can look at their tech toys and say from actual personal experience that, no, I don't need to open up this particular and massive security hole. Anyone in their right mind can look at the Matrix as it exists in Shadowrun and realize that it's a bunch of complete hooey. I have a hard time buying that "in the future, people make gear that has to utilize the power of The Cloud to work at 110%" is such a massive conceptual hurdle for people to leap when "in the future everyone spontaneously decided that it would make way more sense to turn the internet into a 3D virtual reality theme park that can fry your brain" is totally fine. Yes, I get that peoples' suspenders of disbelief snap at different tolerances, but "always online functionality!" is a thing that's happening right now here in the real world. How it suddenly causes a verisimilitude segfault when you bring that into the realm of cyberelfs is beyond me. Look, there have been reasons given here and in the last thread, plausible reasons, for people to leave their stuff's wireless on. 1). Not everyone is a hyper-paranoid Shadowrunner. 2). It is entirely plausible that most people in-setting know as much about computer security as most people do in real life, i.e. not that much, and thus they're content to keep their poo poo on and trust that their firewalls will keep malicious hackers out while they reap the benefits of The Cloud. 3). This one is conditional and ties into point 2: are player-character hackers supposed to be unique individuals or are people like them all over the place? If PC hackers are their own unique breed of cyber-criminal than most people might not bother walking around all the time in wireless-off mode simply because they don't run into hackers capable of messing with their stuff all the time. Like, if a PC-grade hacker is a rarity then even the Firewatch team that's coming to ruin your day might not be expecting to suddenly have someone hacking their poo poo, just like they may not be expecting that one guy to wiggle his fingers and suddenly everything is on fire. If PC-grade hackers are a dime a dozen and nothing special then sure, everyone will go around with their wi-fi turned off, in which case the game designers have handily undermined their attempts at making wireless hacking a thing that happens. 4). Some places may mandate you keep your wi-fi on as a matter of course. Not that this stops cybercriminals outside the law but in a setting full of corporations dictating peoples' lives and such it doesn't strain disbelief that the Ares home office has a standing "keep your smartlinks networked at all time" policy for all their security staff (with exceptions applying to certain paygrades of course). 5). And in 5E they actually give you a reason to keep your wi-fi on, getting bonuses/boosted functionality, which is something 4E more or less lacked entirely and helped explain why nobody in 4E really kept their poo poo networked which was that there actually wasn't any compelling reason to do so outside of whatever the GM made up, not because everyone was paranoid about hackers. It is entirely plausible to conceive of a setting with ubiquitous wireless networked everything everywhere where people don't go around expecting a hacker to pop out of nowhere like the boogeyman and start taking over all their stuff. Today, in the real world, people have lovely computer security habits...even people in positions of authority who you'd really expect better from...and corporations are constantly pushing for more and more connectivity on a regular, if not constant, basis. The idea of people leaving their wi-fi open and trusting in their lovely firewalls to keep them safe and of corporations making gear that only works best when you connect to The Cloud is by far more realistic, verisimilitudinous, whatever you want to call it than anything Shadowrun has ever done with computers, it's just that everyone approaches the issue from the perspective of prescient hyper-paranoid NPCs who live in constant fear of having their guns hacked and thus declare it unworkable. quote:Then there are the things that just makes no sense — e.g. why does the carbon-fibre mesh embedded in my bones have wifi? Why does it even have any active parts?! It's mesh embedded in bone — that's all! But then again, it works both ways: yay, you've hacked my bone lacing. Good for you. Now what? Okay, the lacing itself can't be hacked. It may, according to one fluff example, have some sort of built-in biomonitor system which can be hacked. I'll concede the point, then say that the book goes on to give an example of what you can do if you hack it. Kai Tave fucked around with this message at 12:33 on Aug 26, 2013 |
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Aug 26, 2013 12:05
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Doc Dee posted:Also, you can't break someone's bones by hacking Bone Lacing, but you can trick the system into thinking their bones are broken, and automatically alert DocWagon. This is an example straight from the book, but I don't remember which page. If someone has a biomonitor that's broadcasting (which comes standard as part of a DocWagon contract) then that's potentially a thing you could do, sure. Bone lacing may come with micro-sensor tags to monitor its integrity (the example you're talking about is given on page 421) but since there's no real benefit to keeping that on all the time then you probably won't and don't need to, and there's no listed bonus functionality for doing so in the listing for bone lacing which means, in practical terms, there's no reason for you to constantly need to keep those integrity sensors networked to your medkit or biomonitor. And even in the gear description itself they don't mention anything about integrity sensors again, which means the exact degree something is networked if it doesn't specifically call out what its wireless functionality does is "???????????????????" Kai Tave fucked around with this message at 12:34 on Aug 26, 2013 |
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Aug 26, 2013 12:20
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dirtycajun posted:All I know is that if you have LOGIC 1 then obviously you believe all the corp hype and you will never turn off all your wireless capabilities. It is the ONLY functional way to play LOGIC 1 in Shadowrun. Man, I'm not even getting into that one again. But seriously though, having the equivalent of a biomonitor built in to take note if your titanium laced bones somehow get hosed up actually does make a certain sort of sense in the everything-is-networked future where your medkit is smarter than you are and you don't want to have to get a full X-ray workup if a troll bashes your ribs with a lamp post. I would not, admittedly, have immediately jumped to the conclusion that bone lacing has micro-integrity sensors built into it without them saying so, and sticking that gem 30-some-odd pages away from the actual description of how bone lacing works doesn't exactly help. That said, I'm now curious as to exactly how much a hacker can do even to someone who's a walking wi-fi hotspot. Like, earlier in the thread there was talk about hackers causing peoples' cybereyes to bluescreen or hijacking someone's skillwires and making them do the funky chicken and I'm kind of questioning exactly how well those things all work. Like, I haven't played a hacker in 5E yet, fair cop, but from what I understand there are really pretty much three main things you can do to a piece of hacked gear: 1). Control Device which lets you perform one of the device's inherent functions. This is how you trick a smartgun into popping its magazine. But you can only make the gear do things that it's actually physically capable of, so no hacking someone's skillwires and making them dance because skillwires don't actually work that way. Likewise, it's up in the air whether cybereyes come with a "turn off" function as opposed to, y'know, the user simply closing his eyelids. 2). Data Spike, which is basically the "gently caress it, break everything" option that lets you try and trash someone's stuff. This could potentially crash someone's cybereyes except you have to do it by matrix damaging their eyes all the way until they get bricked and I'm uncertain how simple it is to simply do that in a single action, and since turning a piece of gear's wi-fi off is pretty easy to do it seems like it's all or nothing...you either brick the piece of gear or the person on the other end notices what you're trying to do and locks you out. 3). Reboot Device, which can very, very temporarily crash someone's gear, but requires 3 marks to pull off and only lasts until the end of the following Combat Turn, so that seems like a lot of effort for not a whole lot of gain. At no point am I sure how you're supposed to hack someone's eyes to force them to see nothing but goatse or whatever. Actually gently caress it, how am I supposed to pull off the "hack a car and ram someone" trick everyone thinks is so neat? Control Device requires you to spend X marks to perform an action with a device. I'm assuming that "drive a car" is a Standard or Complex action so it would require 3 marks. Marks can be gained either through Hacking on the Fly or Brute Forcing your way into a system. This can gain you 1 to 3 marks but to get 3 in one go you need to take a -10 to your roll. Or you can get it by making two rolls at -4, or three rolls at your regular skill. And each of these is a Complex Action. That seems incredibly unlikely to be the sort of thing that you bust out on the fly when poo poo starts going down. What am I missing here? Kai Tave fucked around with this message at 13:29 on Aug 26, 2013 |
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Aug 26, 2013 13:09
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