Morpheus posted:

It's from a pre-built adventure in the Runner's Toolkit: essentially, someone wants to buy a disk that the runner's have recently found, and are supposed to deliver to their Mr. Johnson. So they meet in a graveyard - something like four vamps and 7 flunkies. After the deal, a third party (or, uh, fourth party I guess) barges in that wants this disk as well, 7 runners including a mage, rigger, and a hacker, and start shooting things up. In retrospect I shouldn't have started the combat until the players were paid for the disk, allowing them to make a choice about whether or not to actually get involved, but the adventure book assumes that it's a big three-way melee.

Honestly I didn't really enjoy the adventure too much - there was mostly a lot of running around shooting people and not a lot of, you know, shadowrunning around.

Nalesh posted:

Okay, I did it right then.

How does this spell list sound by the way?

Heal
Improved Invis
Physical Mask
Trid Phantasm
Alter Memory
Control Thoughts
Levitate
Mob Mind
Turn To Goo
Shape Concrete

Kinda going for a semi face shaman(since both use charisma)

Here's what I got so far

Sanzuo posted:

We're playing anarchy and my group is really enjoying it so far. We basically don't worry too much about the rules as written, and I run it pretty much the same way as dungeon world.

My players have not played shadowrun before this.

communism bitch posted:

Just port the setting into an actually good system?

e: or that ^^^

Ice Phisherman posted:

Imagine using Native Americans as antagonists. Then put it on a book shelf.

The noble savage trope of a native that's "full of ancient wisdom" is an extreme, a stereotype and it's wrong. It's a pendulum swing away from bloodthirsty Indians on horseback who are hungry for scalps which men in white hats in Westerns (portrayed as good) gun down with impunity.

In actuality they're people who are from a different culture who suffered under centuries of genocide. They're inherently wise nor are they savages. They're people and you find people all along tons of emotional and social spectrums.

I had to pull back from using them as antagonists in the books that I'm writing because the implications of using them as antagonists are monstrous.

If there were a reboot, I have no idea how the NAN would be handled.

LGD posted:

so in addition to setting them up as antagonists (as pointed out) you've also got to look at how the game gets to the point where magical natives control the entire middle of the US/Canada- the entire story depends on them (as a cultural/ethnic group) being uniquely prolific and competent magicians, who after using a magical ritual (that the game expressly links to real-world religious practices) to magically nuke the US, are also able to effortlessly steamroll conventional military forces that outnumber/out resource them by an absurd degree (compare how the Awakening works for them vs. literally every other ethnic cultural group, including other oppressed groups with their own magical/religious traditions)

then after doing that and forcing a peace they politically take over pretty most of the middle/western portions of the US, with no real mention of any population movements/how the people living there respond to the change (despite this being a major event similar to the partition of India), and within a few decades the population is pretty much the same numerically, except now it has somehow made an ethnic/cultural transition to be predominantly members of native groups that in the real world have almost vanished due to, y'know, genocide

the "how would you like it colonizer?!"/attempt to redress past wrongs in fiction angle is clear, but while having a Native American state/political faction/whatever be a major player in balkanized post-magic/post-apocalypse US is cool, the problems with the above should be fairly obvious

Nomadic Scholar posted:

Holy crap. I wish I had known this sooner. That changes pretty much everything. A whole new world of biohacking.

jagadaishio posted:

Even aside from their deep mechanical problems, there's also the fact that almost nothing has been done to integrate them into the setting. That's the problem that nobody ever seems to be working to fix - giving them lore and setting integration. If they manage to do that with the new book I'll be shocked, but pleased.

oriongates posted:

I've never been shy about handing out wads of cash. Started my team of 5 with an offer of a 1,000,000$ reward (to be split). Even though they got dicked by the end and ended up with only half that still worked out to 100k each so the street sam who hadn't spent anything yet got his limbs hacked off and replaced with cutting edge cyberarms with all the trimmings, while the mage mostly payed for the cost of summoning so many elementals but had enough left over to shop around for some foci.

Next mission is going to be a long-term sabotage project and that still pays 75k a week (to be split).

Things get crazy, but there's always, always bigger guns on the other side and if the runners get too nuts that just means that they probably wreck their stuff and need to replace it. The team's driver nearly lost their customized citymaster when a troll adept punched through it. Just a hair's breadth away from wrecked in a single hit.

By the way, can you tell I play pink mohawk?

Goa Tse-tung posted:

Food Fight has leads?

wiegieman posted:

At this point sr5 has the medical option of "bacta tank full of nanites" where the only real problem is making sure you have a trustworthy AI running the thing (or a technomancer holding a gun to its digital head.)

jagadaishio posted:

Depends on the scale of AI. Pre-4e AI were digital gods. Literally, there were only like 3 of them and they had an unfathomable scale.

4e forward they're a fragmented mess of digital chumps.

I think what he's referencing is CFD, which Technomancers can '''cure''' by performing digital necromancy - stealing someone's e-ghost from the resonance realms and uploading it to the nanites overwriting their brain. Only Technomancers can do that because Deckers don't have access to the Resonance.

It's even dumber than it sounds.

Liquid Communism posted:

It did, but CGL remains incompetent so the only hard copies were at GenCon, no eta on actual publishing. They also have the .pdf priced at 45 bucks.

jagadaishio posted:

It used to have some pretense of being it's own thing with it's own set of rules. Now, though, it's gone so far that it has its own metaplanes and an Awakened-analogue that don't even need Mana. That's ridiculous in a bad way, and several steps being what it used to be. Where the Matrix gets fucky it should be because the Matrix is getting fucky, not 'magic and the metaplanes but oooh, Resonance, oooh.'

Cooked Auto posted:

I don't think CGL even sees any gain in making SR6. It'll be too much of a drain of resources that should be going to projects that matter more in their eyes.

Liquid Communism posted:

Too late for that. They've already announced a GenCon release for the book, and printing lead time is ~5 months, so that poo poo's been done and dusted since March.

Liquid Communism posted:

Specifically those AI were fragments of Deus.

So about 6e: It's farther along than we thought. They already have the proofs back from the printers.

https://www.instagram.com/p/BxNd7LXD81I/

quote:

Printer proofs for the Shadowrun, Sixth World Core Rulebook just showed up. Get to spend the next hour carefully ensuring all is well so the full print run can start!

Liquid Communism posted:

Goons Are Great posted:

All I can remember is Hardy saying "Oh well, just houserule stuff if it's not in there or you don't like it that much". I doubt he practices a lot of self reflection on how good his work is at this point.

Poil posted:

It's far worse, he is fully prepared to rewrite the whole thing into Shadowrun 5.5. It's kinda impressive actually and he says enjoys the challenge. I just wish he was less smug about it and stopped going on about how unlike the negative whiners he wants it to work.

He has access to adobe reader pro and opened the rulebook .pdf to make his changes. Apparently the book is horrendously poorly thrown together and a complete mess. For example something that would require one box is somehow using multiple boxes in a really inefficient way that makes any editing very laborious and it would be easier to remake it all from scratch. Is anyone surprised at all?

Liquid Communism posted:

That's just lovely translation of the early mechanic, which stays nearly word for word identical through the first four editions, and switches to pure game mechanics pablum for 5e and 6e. Essence is not Magic, although it serves as a cap for Magic (barring Initiation).

Let's look at some definitions, since I have literally every PDF for this loving game.

Goons Are Great posted:

Yup, they edited out straight up mistakes and cleared up what feels like the majority of rules by making the wording actually good. They didn't dare to really change given rules by Catalyst, perhaps they're not allowed to, no idea, but instead even openly suggested to use house rules or offered alternative, optional rules to use instead or in conjunction with what Catalyst gave them, if stuff was really bad.
Also the printed books are of much higher quality.

Basically they never just translate stuff into German, but rewrite, restructure and rebuild the entire source material as much as possible and needed, including the changing the general design and adding a ton of examples on pretty much every rule and detail and add additional stories and fluff.

In Fifth edition that effort of writing more than necessary culminated in Datapuls, a German-only ingame news letter to portrait what happens in the ingame world every month (they had to pause that recently because they were getting ahead of catalyst writing, so instead they switched to monthly game materials like runs and stuff) and the entire series of books in the Datapuls series, which are PDF-only source books for a total of 13 books with detailed information on various German cities and areas to use ingame.

Aeble posted:

Doesn't sound like I'll be making the transition, then.


We made this discovery pretty quick in my old group, and it's the reason that I was tentatively looking towards 5th to actually have a way of letting a player hack stuff. Oh well.


To be honest I wasn't even aware that a 6th edition existed. I'll continue, blissfully ignorant.

Liquid Communism posted:

use it to get an EMP.

Tippis posted:

I'd say it was somewhere around Cyberpirates that things started to really go downhill, not just because Kane was a nonsensically unkillable mary-sue, but also because it no longer served any real plot purpose and was more to advertise “great characters” the writers had invented and felt a need to share. Then again, Denver had much of the same, but at least the infighting in the Nexus served to progress the story a bit.

ninjoatse.cx posted:

Yes. I've made a few and had my characters play with and against them, just to experience the rules. If they inhabit a lovely device, they are sucky and lovely. If they inhabit a vehicle they are broken. Karma advancement still puts them way behind magicians.... but that's everything.

If he's never played a matrix character before, you will spend a ton of time looking up rules for the setting within the setting (the Matrix), and then the rules for how the AI works with both settings.