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MohawkSatan posted:So if anyone wants links, I expanded my Gun Heaven 3 and Machine-Gun rants over on dumpshock. Just gimme a shout and I'll throw the links here. Oh, that's you? Neat, I wasn't sure there were other goons over there. I did a little looking after you posted, and that Garand image you linked isn't even public domain. Wonder if Catalyst checked where the art came from, or just went with 'if it's on google image search, it's fair game'.
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Mar 7, 2014 22:20
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Most of his website seems to be over here now : http://danvolodar.ru/ancientfiles/index.html There's a pretty decent timeline on the wiki too : http://shadowrun.wikia.com/wiki/Shadowrun_timeline Also, try this : http://web.archive.org/web/20061202184642/http://timeline.dumpshock.com/default.aspx
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Mar 8, 2014 00:23
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Tippis posted:…I got I tried it a couple months ago, and gave up when I realized that 5e's Matrix is literally magic and just went back to GMing SR3.
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Mar 8, 2014 08:22
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Kai Tave posted:It continues to amaze me that wireless hacking gets the knock for being "too much like magic" while plugging your brain into Second Life in order to steal files while having to avoid the lethal brain-damage programs that are a feature of the future internet and not a bug is somehow perfectly sensible. It's not that, so much as it's the 'everything is magically better when connected to the internet' bits, combined with people suddenly forgetting 40+ years of how to wire poo poo together instead of using a signal than can be intercepted, and the absurdities of mental gymnastics required to think -anything- is secure on the wireless setup SR5 has going. Maybe the new matrix splatbook will have a complete rewrite ala Virtual Realities back in the day and make it make sense, but even the guy who -wrote- most of the wireless bonuses chimed in to say that -he- was under the impression that they were to be active when two devices were connected via wire or wireless, not when the device is connected to the greater Matrix. Wasn't what got published, though.
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Mar 8, 2014 17:59
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Gort posted:I always wanted wireless deckers to be able to hack wired-only systems. Fluff something in about nanobots. Otherwise, everyone is either a moron, or they turn off wireless access to anything important, which sucks for decker players. The funny part is that if you carry all Throwback gear that -has- no wireless ability at all, the sole thing you lose out on is the nonsensical wireless bonuses. Per the fluff, this is so strange and impossible that even enemy deckers will likely assume that you just have everything running silent and try to locate the hidden icons. :p
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Mar 8, 2014 20:09
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Gort posted:Yes. Were I designing the game, I would make sure the range on such a hack was limited and required line-of-sight to a degree, so you still have to infiltrate the facility before you can hack the whatever, but I think deckers should be able to (for example) hack people's cyberware, or scramble their car controls, or mess with their drones, even if they've been put into wired-only mode. Otherwise deckers are toothless unless your DM is playing the opposition like morons. In-world, this is what Technomancers are played up as. However, the idea of cyberware being -able- to be hacked implies a massive level of incompetence in the people designing it. Most of the combat 'ware runners carry around was originally military or corpsec designed. Why would they knowingly introduce weaknesses that a shadowrunning decker would be in a much better position than their own people to exploit? Not to mention that build/repair skills aren't exactly impossible to aquire, so why would a shadow clinic or designer leave such a vulnerability in when he could charge a premium not to?
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Mar 8, 2014 20:33
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Mystic Mongol posted:Exactly! This is why modern software can't be hacked; it would be foolish of Microsoft, the world's largest, most successful computer corporation, to introduce flaws and vulnerabilities that can be exploited by a criminal. To be fair, that's a matter of their acceptable levels of incompetence as well. Microsoft's programming policies are sketchy.
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Mar 8, 2014 20:53
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Tippis posted:My (current) take on the wireless mess is to just go back to main source of it all: Ghost in the Shell (2 in particular), and extrapolate from there. There is a lot of cyberware hacking going on there, and while it's usually the lowly criminal of the week who gets hit, the Section 9 people do get targeted as well and it's far more dire when that happens. Sadly, that's not the case. Per the current SR5 rules, hardwiring things together is impossible. Just not doable. Doesn't work. Which is why we keep calling it dumb.
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Mar 9, 2014 20:22
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Kai Tave posted:Yeah, the way SR5 has the numbers set up if you want to be a melee monster then all you really need to do is focus on being a monowhip master. At a sufficiently high skill level you're never going to practically run the risk of hurting yourself with it and it's basically the most ridiculous thing ever...like, both your spurs and the monowhip do 12P damage but the monowhip has an AP of -8 which is stupidly huge and it has reach to boot, plus its performance isn't contingent on your Strength score at all so you can divert points into other attributes/areas without worrying about it lowering your damage. There's no real reason for you to use the spur unless you're feeling sporting about it. Or you're ever going to fight in say, a hallway. I'm not sure if the SR5 rules are explict about it, but as a GM I'd be applying penalties to monowhip use anywhere you can't freely swing it.
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Mar 10, 2014 00:30
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Doc Dee posted:Are you saying there is NOTHING that's incapable of interacting with the wireless Matrix? As of the current rules (SR5), those don't exist either. Anything 'secure' is simply on a corporate Host. The only things that -don't- explicitly have wireless are Throwbacks, which are incapable of accessing the Matrix at all. The grand total of the book's thoughts on non-wireless Matrix-capable devices is the following : Shadowrun, 5th Edition posted:Wired Security No rules or anything, just a two-paragraph screed about how it is dumb and no one does it. Yes, the above is deeply stupid. No, they have no intent of fixing it. Per JM Hardy, the current line developer, the rules are as intended.
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Mar 10, 2014 02:32
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AlternateAccount posted:The tech exists to detect wiretaps today, it's not like you can't tell when you get some random signal degradation. And it's not like you can't megaencrypt anything that's going across wire. These are some seriously lazy developers. SR5's Encryption program is just a +1 to Firewall rating (the Matrix Combat equivalent of Armor) anyway. Not even a speedbump to a technomancer or modern Cyberdeck. Hell, the Armor program is a +2 dice pool modifier to resist Matrix damage, which is outright better. Decryption is just +1 to your Attack attribute in cybercombat. I have absolutely no idea what the hell they were basing the abstractions they made this system out of on, but it surely wasn't how computers and cryptography actually work, or how they worked in previous editions.  I'm fairly certain that the game design direction on this was just being handed down the requirement that Everything Is Wireless Now, and being told to write it with that base assumption and they'd justify it in fluff later.
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Mar 10, 2014 05:38
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ProfessorCirno posted:Yeah, things made way more sense when you had to literally enter the digital world and create imaginary weapons for your samurai warrior inside virtual reality in your epic quest to find a file. As opposed to the guy on the bus loving around with his iPhone shorting out your replacement kidneys? 
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Mar 10, 2014 06:35
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ProfessorCirno posted:Yes. Oh, I understand completely that the older Matrix stuff is pure silly sci-fi. It's not realistic at all. I just prefer it to the SR5 version, where the Technomancers are literally using the mage rules (down to Essence loss somehow crippling someone who mentally interfaces with technology because... reasons) only with Matrix, and the Matrix stuff isn't even consistent with itself.
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Mar 10, 2014 08:13
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A bit redundant when Otaku were already a thing that did exactly the same thing minus the whole technomancers somehow being able to send/receive wireless signals with their heads. Not to mention how poorly that plays with the basic setting conceit that magic and tech don't mix.
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Mar 10, 2014 08:31
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Technomancers not suffering Resonance loss when they lose Essence would indicate that they -are- something new that legitimately changes the way magic works, though. As it stands, they're kind of a rules kludge that the writers have refused to explain in-world.
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Mar 10, 2014 09:16
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MohawkSatan posted:Jesus gently caress, why is a monofilament whip 10K now? I never noticed that before Because it is an 'I Win' button for melee with better armor penetration than anything but APDS. They didn't tone it down, just kept it in line with what it's always done the setting, so the only place they could game balance it was cost.
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Mar 11, 2014 23:35
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Add in a band of Radical Vegan Activists out to kill the PCs and set the pigs free so they can roam the land. Disregard all truth of the matter that pigs are an invasive and destructive species in the US, even if confronted directly with it.
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Mar 15, 2014 21:47
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Nyaa posted:I assume it's to not conflict with the multiple attack rule, which let you split your dice to attack multiple time with the same weapon or with multiple weapons (dual-wield). So you do can shoot more than once per turn if you are skilled. In the latter case of dual-wield, able to do three combat simple would mean you can shoot someone 6 times for one combat turn, and that would be OP. Bingo. There is a mechanic for multiple attacks, and it isn't 'use two simple actions'.
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Mar 16, 2014 03:29
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ProfessorCirno posted:Seriously though, spoilers: a lot of Shadowrun fans apparently like their games boring and hell and banal in every way. "Limits are fine because rolling hot doesn't matter. Like what if you're jumping over a small hole? When would rolling hot help you there???" The thing is that if you didn't play SR2 or SR3, you're not really going to grasp why Limits exist and are a good idea. The problem they're intended to fix is the age-old one of characters having such extreme dice pools that they can reliably one-shot tanks with a holdout pistol on sheer average successes. I see them as much more in place as a restriction on character generation philosophy than gameplay, as they are intended to put a massive crimp on the design philosophy that says 'bigger dice pool is always better than'.
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Mar 16, 2014 20:12
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Kai Tave posted:It's kind of a clumsy patch to try and stick on a game that explicitly rewards players for stacking massive amounts of dice in a pool, though. If you don't want people thinking "more dice equals more better" then maybe you should look into fixing the fundamental issues of a system that equates a single degree of success to three dice on average and then requires multiple degrees of success for things like "shoot and kill a man" or "hack things and not waste your turn." Oh, I'm not going to argue with you there. It's a kludge. I generally solved the problem in my games by making a wide variety of skills necessary to succeed, so min-maxed one trick ponies didn't do well at the table.
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Mar 17, 2014 02:14
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They went ahead and broke in in Gun H(e)aven 3 right after release with the Rain Forest Carbine. A long arm that does sniper rifle damage out of an assault carbine, with a legality and availability below that of an Ares Alpha. Ultimax Rain Forest Carbine (SR5) Acc 7, Dam 14P, AP -4, Mode SA, RC (1), Ammo 18©, Avail 5R, Cost 2,800 Standard Upgrades/Accessories: Imaging Scope (w/ flare compensation, image link, low-light vision), Retractable Stock Liquid Communism fucked around with this message at 14:21 on Mar 17, 2014 |
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Mar 17, 2014 14:18
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That's what's puzzling me as well. SR5's abstractions don't break it down that far. Hence why cyberlimb armor stacks with your overall armor rating, because shot locations don't matter. The closest they get to caring is the bit about being able to apply cyberlimb strength bonuses requiring being able to use that limb for the task, but even that is explicitly a GM call that notes it should be allowed unless obviously impossible.
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Mar 18, 2014 03:20
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Poil posted:Sorry, I think I'm just overthinking it all. You are overthinking that poo poo by about six miles and 1,000 words. The system doesn't support the level of detail you're trying to extrapolate, that's all.
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Mar 18, 2014 14:28
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bunnielab posted:Hey now I want some Doc Oct arms. Has there ever been anything like this in older editions? You need a VCR, then. Build the arms as drones with dog brains, operate in captain's seat all the time. 
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Mar 18, 2014 21:53
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Tippis posted:Also, we already had shapeshifters and furry elves, was any more of that really needed? To be fair, this is because the writers have failed utterly. In SR2, the Night of Rage and Humanis were Very Large Parts of every metahuman in Seattle's experience. They remembered it first hand, and open racism was common and accepted. Somewhere along the line in SR4, during the shift from gritty cyberpunk to Apple-style shiny technofetishistic transhumanism, they lost the whole concept of hating on trogs, dandelion-eaters, and halfies. Probably because retarded poo poo like playable Kreiger-strain HMHVV ghouls trying to become part of society and whatnot. Nyaa posted:I would like to see a main villain of the game being a techomancer that constantly ruin your life. Hack your car to crush into a school, replace your ID with a criminal, have your gun misfire infront of the cop, etc. The current line developer has a six-mile-high hard-on for transhumansim. So of course technomancers, the special flower children who can 'magically' interface naturally with technology are being portrayed as the wronged parties. Liquid Communism fucked around with this message at 15:47 on Mar 19, 2014 |
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Mar 19, 2014 15:44
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Nyaa posted:I know, right? You want people to buy a new book, then give us a peek at the new stuff. Not the crap that suppose to be in the core rulebook. Let's be honest, they're probably still writing the rules for this book as they go. Remember, this is Catalyst. They're not competent enough to have done the smart thing that nearly any other RPG producer would have done, and have worked up the first 2-3 splatbooks in draft while finalizing the core book, then used the publishing delay on the core to revise and polish the splat. They're working everything last minute, which is how the core got published with so many glaring and unforgivable errors out of the box.
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Mar 22, 2014 22:59
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MohawkSatan posted:That may very well be because its almost impossible to do most of the missions quietly in payday. Even at the best of times, getting spotted once or killing more than four guards means you're hosed. In shadowrun, you actually stand a chance of doing it quietly. Yeah, I've successfully converted some Payday:The Heist missions into SR scenarios and had them go over quite well. Payday 2 is suffering from adding a guy to the team, David Goldfarb, who didn't like what Payaday 1 was all about and wanted the sequel to be more like Dark Souls. Hence why it's been patched into a 4-player co-op Roguelike where the RNG is your only real enemy because the developers are intent on patching out the skills for characters to deal with what it throws up. Goldfarb explicitly considers failure being the most likely result of every heist to be a good thing. Their level design is pretty stellar, though, and the basic bones of the heists are great examples of how to plan and execute a Shadowrun.
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Mar 23, 2014 01:55
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It's one of those things you have to do by feel. I generally scale things (SR3) to pay out around 10k 'yen per person after expenses, scaled up or down based on run difficulty and how well they negotiated with the Johnson. It's really hard to overpay PCs in Shadowrun, though. You can always find a way to make 'em spend money. The hard part is balancing karma and cash, since Awakened characters scale much faster on karma than Sams/Deckers/Riggers do on cash.
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Mar 23, 2014 03:06
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Yeah, but that's not rewarding per run. That's rewarding per scene.
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Mar 24, 2014 01:47
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Eh, I personally wouldn't allow it. Picking up those spells -after- creation is 5 Karma a piece, while picking up PP requires Initiation at a cost of 10 + Grade x 3. So a Magic 6 starting character has 50 karma of bonus spells known at creation, worth (13+16+19+21+24+27)120 Karma to the MA if they swap to get 6PP which is their max. Since the only way to get PP in play is actually raising your Magic, which makes your spellcasting better as well... Besides, as the rule stands, they can simply buy up their PP to their Magic rating at creation at 5 per, and still get spells just as if they were a Magician. Best of both worlds, as comes up often. The sidebar in the book isn't terribly clear about it, but the character building example on page 70 lays out that the MA gets free spells -and- then can buy power points equal to her Magic. The change makes that even more powerful, as the limit on MAs at character creation is that they'll be hard pressed to have enough available Karma to get all that starting spellpower -and- buy up full PP. It's why they errata'd PP to 5 karma per at creation instead of 2 per like the book published with. Liquid Communism fucked around with this message at 16:30 on Mar 28, 2014 |
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Mar 28, 2014 16:27
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LGD posted:I think it makes sense and would personally allow it in an SR game I was running. The Karma costs are equivalent at chargen and there's not actually any long term Karma difference if you're playing a MA with any given level of power points and spells- the initial PP are purely a one time deal, so the differences in cost between initiating and buying spells later doesn't come into it. All the change does is give a starting MA some flexibility in deciding to allocate their starting Karma to non-PP or Spell things, since the current rules mean any non-crazy MA has 30 of his 50 initial Karma spoken for. I like characters having options at creation so I like this change, and I really struggle to see how mandating a MA must take 6 spells at chargen (that have the same Karma cost they will later) is going to cause any new balance issues one way or another. The costs entirely come into it if you let the MA trade starting spells for PP, because PP are massively more expensive later, and spells are not. Period, end of story. Letting them get 'free' PP is essentially handing them ~100 karma advantage out of the box over other starting characters. It's like if you let Magicians trade their starting spells to start with metamagics instead.
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Mar 28, 2014 18:15
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Roll an Adept or a Magician. Or go back to the oldschool MA rules, where 'Spellcasting' was a 1 PP adept power that gave you a functional Magic rating of 1 for purposes of spellcasting. Build character as an Adept per standard, buy spells at 5 karma per in character creation. This does make them a bit less powerful than stock SR5 MAs, though, as they don't get to double-dip and get both PP and Magic rating for initiating.
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Mar 28, 2014 18:36
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LGD posted:It absolutely does not come into it. Starting Power Points are fundamentally not comparable to ones obtained later through initiation. They're a one-time-only offer that costs 5 Karma at chargen. You can initiate later for more power points but you cannot ever get the ones you could have gotten at chargen back via initiation or Karma expenditure. A MA's total power points are always starting PP (0-6) + those from initiate grade. Those starting PP currently cost 5 Karma, the exact same as a spell. Your complaint is about MA power level/consistency/costing in general, and that's a fine argument to have, but unless tying up 30 karma at chargen has some sort of huge balancing effect I'm not seeing (and no one has made an argument for) I don't see why letting an MA shift karma from one thing that costs a flat 5 Karma to another that costs a flat 5 Karma is in any way a problem. Pop quiz, wise guy. What's the in-game difference between an MA who paid 5 karma for his 5th power point at creation and one that paid 13 karma for it after a couple runs? I'd say it's that the first one got a nice 8 karma discount, wouldn't you? You're trying to make a false equivalency between starting spells (which are free at creation but cost 5 karma in play) and power points.
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Mar 28, 2014 18:47
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It is exactly the same 40 karma, but the MA who spent their starting Karma on skills will have a material advantage over the other because it will have 30 more karma of character advancement. How is this not getting through to you. Trading a resource that can be purchased after character creation for 5 karma for one only be purchased after character creation for 10 + 3x level is a massive gain in relative starting power. Also, PP at character creation are capped at the character's Magic rating, so I have no idea where you're getting the idea that one of these characters is always going to be up a PP. They're buying up from the same point, one is just paying a hell of a lot more. Liquid Communism fucked around with this message at 19:23 on Mar 28, 2014 |
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Mar 28, 2014 19:18
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LGD posted:What? Are you being intentionally obtuse? There's no difference in the total amount of Karma they can spend developing their abilities. Lets take the easiest case, where the second MA has exactly enough Karma to buy 8 spells (40). The first MA spends 30 Karma on PP in chargen and has 20 left over for other things, and then in-game spends 10 more on spells and has 30 Karma left over. All told the first MA will have 50 karma to spend on other things. The second MA spends no Karma at chargen and has all 50 of his Karma to buy other things with. Oh boy! But then all of his post-creation Karma goes into spells, so he ends up with exactly the same amount of Karma (50) available to spend on other things. The only differences are that the second guy has more flexibility in what he looks like just after creation. He has the same amount to spend because you have specifically constructed your example to avoid buying power points. The two characters have the same amount of karma to spend, but one will be unable to catch up power wise specifically because the cost of power points is in no way equal to the cost of spells.
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Mar 28, 2014 19:43
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Tippis posted:On their own, “all” you can do is an absolute technological terror that will just shrug off anything (short of a RAW relativistic motorcycle) that the runners can throw at them, while casually turning everyone nearby into red smears. The normal rules don't really allow for Ghost In the Shell or Appleseed battle-borgs — not even as proper cyborgs — Cybermancy, on the other hand, does. Only with inherent magical protection because, hey, every bit of 'ware in the book just isn't enough on its own. I'd treat them as a more of a campaign-level threat. They're not something you throw at the players and then they duke it out with heavy weapons, but rather something where the magicians research soul-rendering rituals that loosen the cybermancy bonds for a brief while; the deckers do multi-stage intrusions to inject life-rejecting stimuli into their Memory Stimulators; and the gunbunnies try to figure out how on earth to get close enough to pry all the armour plates off it… If you want to get really nasty, you make a full-conversion cyberzombie and -then- get one of the nastier blood spirits with Posession to inhabit it. Then everyone dies, and the spirit just gets stronger as the corpses stack up, and it wades along knee deep in the damned and dying. Note this is the kind of threat that nobody wants to gently caress with, as it is the next best thing to a straight up Horror. Your best solution is a Thor shot to cripple the 'zombie, but you're still going to have to fight the spirit once it gives up on the body and just plain manifests. It's basically a 40k Chaos Space Marine Terminator at this point.
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Mar 29, 2014 23:03
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homerlaw posted:But cyberzombies create an aura of background antimagic, could a spirit survive in that? The magic that holds them to their bodies is blood magic in the first place. The spirit would have a bit of trouble due to the background count... but it stands to grow massively powerful off of the sacrifices the 'zombie can make, so it'd be worth it. Plus, once the 'zombie dies, the background count drops, so the spirit spikes back up to full power just before it manifests to have a tantrum about losing its toy...
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Mar 30, 2014 04:52
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It can get worse. Trollerskates were a thing. 1.5x base movement speed from the skates means that 10 Ag Elf in the example walks at 36 km/hr and runs at 72 km/hr. Then get a spirit to apply a Movement power... Although that may be difficult, as the loving main book doesn't define any of the powers it names on the spirits in the Summoning section. If we assume it goes by the 20th Anniversary rules... quote:Movement So we have someone summon up a Force 6 (because really, that Elf won't have a body over 6) Air Spirit, and we get : Walking : 216 km/hr Running : 432 km/hr
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Apr 4, 2014 19:06
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It's why I've always used speeds as dramatic notes, not hard numbers. Ever since SR3, where we discovered that it was essentially impossible to kill someone by hitting them with a speeding truck.
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Apr 4, 2014 19:20
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| # ¿ May 22, 2024 11:49 |
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Right. It doesn't show up on a search of the drat document because they labeled it poorly and they didn't bother to put a reference in the section on spirits as to where you find how they do things. I hate this book so very, very much.quote:Movement Still the same thing, though. Sustained power that multiplies the target character's movement speed by up to the spirit's Magic rating, which is equal to its Force.
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Apr 4, 2014 19:33
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