|
Spirits are just horribly broken. Summon a force 12 when you have a metamagic centering focus and a few grades of magic and possibly a summoning/power focus if you want to play it less risky and an attribute buff spell. It's not going to get 12 hits on it's success test, so you'll take some damage, but if you're conscious you can now go astral with your moving nuke and pretty much wreck anyone's poo poo. It can literally be a one man run stopper except for the most highly tailored runs. You pretty much have to GM fiat with rules/setting to stop how broken spirit powers are. "Ok, a dragon starts hunting you". I really think how separate the matrix, magic, and the physical world are is a limit of the setting. 4th and 5th made it worse, though 5th tried to put a bandaid on 4th.
|
#
¿
Oct 30, 2018 22:30
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 22, 2024 14:36 |
|
|
Liquid Communism posted:Balance vs the opposition is never what I'm looking for in SR, really. You're meant to be specialists. What I'm looking for is balance in competence between archetypes. I doesn't help that most things are contested dice rolls, which can really mess things up. If you went by the skill descriptions, someone who's pretty drat good at something fails all the time.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 11, 2019 19:23
|
|
|
The alternative to not min-maxing is to play a technomancer who can't hack anything in what the book describes as a "lightly secured system". Because you have to overcome the randomness of an opposing dice pool before you can even consider any degree of success. It really does suck the fun out of it.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 9, 2019 17:18
|
|
|
Gort posted:I'd love to see a rewrite of Shadowrun from the ground up with a few design goals: When did I register the name Gort and begin posting on the forums? This is really critical in the SR experience. Especially the "keep everyone involved" stuff. I gave up on a long lasting plot, because so many people were checked out at the table when it wasn't "their turn to play".
|
|
#
¿
Apr 11, 2019 03:56
|
|
|
Poll, get some rest. None of those changes are that bad. The problem with house rules is that it’s hard to build a character around them since they tend to just “pop up”.
|
|
#
¿
May 8, 2019 08:42
|
|
|
No more +1 willpower for dwarves 
|
|
#
¿
May 22, 2019 07:56
|
|
|
Poil posted:My DM seems super hopeful they'll regress the initiative system. You know where the person who minmaxed/power gamed their initiative score gets multiple actions before everyone else so they can win at combat. Initiative hasn't really worked that way since 2nd edition. everyone goes in the first pass. People with higher initiative go first. When everyone else is done, they just keep going. That being said, if you have the top initiative, you still go first in each pass. Lord_Hambrose posted:Man, tough crowd. Being anything less than perfectly literal is tough in an online forum. I understood you
ninjoatse.cx fucked around with this message at 18:40 on May 22, 2019 |
|
#
¿
May 22, 2019 17:51
|
|
|
Crap, I didn't see that init change. That sucks.
|
|
#
¿
May 22, 2019 18:40
|
|
|
Gort posted:drat, the game would've been perfect but for this ...but it made them *special*.
|
|
#
¿
May 22, 2019 18:42
|
|
|
Ronwayne posted:Unfortunately, for the purposes of comedy, they stayed awake because insane toxin resistance and all the stun boxes, but I've noticed IC, usually *unintentionally* on the player's part, super high end transhumans start doing insane, either childish, or inhuman things because they're so divorced from consequences. Why cast physical mask on the johnson?
|
|
#
¿
Jul 30, 2019 13:33
|
|
|
Advancement in SR is also silly broken. 5 Karma? New spell! Completely change the way you fight! Want an extra die when you shoot something? 14 karma. For that type of gun. Only. Corp goon stole or smashed your deck? Just make a new character, it's faster.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 7, 2019 19:47
|
|
|
Conquest7706 posted:I didn't catch this on the first read through but 6E changed up spell opposed/resist/soak. That's not a bad nerf for indirect spells. Can they dodge area effect spells? Still sucks about armor being nerfed, but when it came to dedicated casters, huge chunks of it just went away anyway.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 12, 2019 19:31
|
|
|
Tippis posted:I still maintain that 3E was the best Shadowrun, but on reflecting on the matter, I think that has more to do with coherence — in the setting as a whole and between rules and setting — than with the systems themselves being all that much better. It was better edited and you could find things, and it was fully compatible with all the 2E splat books which is still where Shadowrun found its tone and stride. I also loved 3rd the best. Attributes were pretty much sub-stats to skills which determined what you could do. It also made the world pretty consistent in determining what was considered a normal thing to do with what skill level. In 4th-5th they ported a bunch of things in text without considering how they worked with the dice system. Lots of stuff was translated from +/- target numbers to just bonuses/penalties to dice pool, which never really directly translated. Almost everything having an opposed test just made for some super wonky results. Having a skill rating listed as "Skilled professional" and not being able to hack the public library because it rolled well. Summoning a force 10 spirit and only taking 1 box of drain because the spirit rolled like crap on the drain resistance test. If you got the modifiers wrong in 3rd, you an just adjust the successes. If you forgot a penalty in 4th/5th, you had to reroll, which can be demoralizing if your roll was pretty good.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 18, 2019 19:35
|
|
|
Ratoslov posted:As a longtime Shadowrun fan, lemme tell you, there has never been a good edition of Shadowrun- only shades of bad editions. Sixth admittedly is the darkest shade of bad, but don't kid yourself- your favorite one is also pretty terrible, you just get used to working around the broken bits. I never got how upset people were that 6-7 were the same target number. So you get a free difficulty upgrade if you roll a 6. Who cares? Anything that opposed it had the same advantage in the same circumstance.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 21, 2019 04:09
|
|
|
I think it was also realizing that there were players who liked a more stone soup approach to shadowrun, so they leaned into them whole hog. Play an Oni? A Gnome? An Ogre? How about a catgirl? A Drake? Why stop there? Vampires, and wendigos and pixies, oh my! It's an odd feel for a cybernetic dystopia, while acknowledging that any story that picks up halfway with "So we elected a Dragon president" can't be taken 100% seriously on its face.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 3, 2019 13:53
|
|
|
I don't think "drug addiction can ruin your soul" is super far-fetched. There's also fiction that living in a polluted neighborhood with no exposure to nature drops your essence.MuscaDomestica posted:New edition made it almost impossible to heal with essence loss. They increased the threshold by five minus essence which means you need six successes to heal one damage on any healing/medical roll. Is this a 6th edition rule? Even with a medkit?
|
|
#
¿
Oct 3, 2019 18:30
|
|
|
People also want to keep up with the state of the game, even if it's bad. I paid $45 for 5th, and even bought 3 of the splat books for $35 each, and they were all turds. I'm still playing 5th with my friends because that is what they know, but it's kind of a joke of a setting because the world and the rules don't line up. 6E is only 1 book deep and it's $20.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 15, 2019 18:42
|
|
|
2e actually had great rules as long as you only played with deckers and they read up on the two splat books. Making your own decks was cool.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 30, 2019 15:00
|
|
|
Vavrek posted:In a game of Dark Ages: Vampire, I had a pet tiger. Made a separate character sheet for him, based on the 'tiger' stats that I was able to find in some Werewolf sourcebook. The GM noted that my pet had Intelligence 3. Normal human average Intelligence was 2. In the animal/creature source books, they make it a point that animal mental attributes don't mean the same as human attributes unless it's noted that the animal is sapient.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 18, 2019 21:41
|
|
|
I'd probably rule incapacitate as knocking unconscious or killing them. They wouldn't go to end the fight right away. Anything else (binding, illusion spells() would probably be ok and not interfere with the totem's premise.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 30, 2019 16:39
|
|
|
The increased lethality in 2E/3E made it more fun to play. The characters could 1 hit kill most opponents, but even moderately skilled opponents could wear them down. In 4E and after, everyone just optimized their dice pools, and you ended up making NPCs that were silly in the world they lived in or nothing ever slowed them down. I still hate the armor changes, and the designer's armor choices. Armored jacket. Perfectly legal, perfectly affordable. Add 12 dice to your damage resistance tests. wtf. 2E/3E still had the flaws of every edition though. So much of the game is one or a few players do stuff and the others get to watch. The price/priority barriers for multi-classing made it pretty unreasonable to do so, as well.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 26, 2020 12:06
|
|
|
Liquid Communism posted:. That's the whole point of Dunkelzahn blowing himself up to try and put off the Horrors from making an early appearance due to all the blood magic being thrown around. Where is this expanded on?
|
|
#
¿
Nov 18, 2020 10:12
|
|
|
Having 98% of the splat books before 4th kinda makes me sad as the narrative was always ambiguous enough to allow plot hooks and the like. SR in general now
|
|
#
¿
Nov 19, 2020 04:59
|
|
|
It doesn't help that in 5E, an armored jacket is cheap, readily available, and pretty much forms the bulk of everyone's defenses. The armor rules and armor presented pretty much suck, and was literally added as a.boost for the squishiness of magic users.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 17, 2020 18:03
|
|
|
Badactura posted:I'm starting a 5e game today, set in 2080 and just ignoring whatever lore 6th edition brought in. I have a player who wants to be an AI which I'm ok with even though they seem pretty bad. Has anyone had an experience with an AI PC in 5e? 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.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 5, 2021 16:44
|
|
|
bob dobbs is dead posted:basically retcon 6th out of existence. 5th is p doubtful too Pretty much this. The dumbest has to be Ares, after taking out Bug City, decides to find insect Shaman and try to WEAPONIZE the bugs!  They escape, and now Detroit is Bug City 2.0 kinda. Honestly, I understand why they ended bug city to update the meta, but it was a great setting. Shadowrun as dystopian survival horror. Had a bare bones street campaign that had a blast in it.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 7, 2021 05:58
|
|
|
The Lone Badger posted:Roll back to 3 imo, then do a new 4th. I highly recommend this. Fourth was an experiment that we can now kinda agree was failed. 5th tried to fix 4th, but just shuffled the problems around and added a few new ones. 6th was... take everyone's complaints about how 5th was developed and then double down.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 7, 2021 07:08
|
|
|
You kinda have to hand wave a ton of things, otherwise nothing ever gets done. Take real life, where everyone has a camera in their pocket. Now multiply that to the extreme of the future. The players would get caught in 10 minutes unless you do a bunch of GM handwaving.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 11, 2021 09:00
|
|
|
Cooked Auto posted:There's apparently an SR hack for Myriad Song, named Myriad Shadows, as another alternative. I hate when people mention new RPGs as Shadowrun Alternatives. I always have to compulsively go out and buy them.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 20, 2021 16:11
|
|
|
DerekSmartymans posted:Best is 2e. I have almost a complete collection of all the splat books (just like Gamma World and AD&D Planescape). I’m not saying this as a brag, but more as the folks I ttrpg’d with were some of my favorite times in Elementary School throughout College and I compulsively bought books for fluff and stat-comparisons, and by God if Elon tries to implant my Neurolink without just plugging it into the datajack behind my ear I will thrash him with my carbon fiber arm-bones! 2E had the best physical books. You can tell those books were made with love in a time when table top gaming was in a boom. No regard to page usage, absolutely beautiful layouts, and more world building in the margins than most system have total. It's a drat shame we'll never see the like.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 21, 2021 01:34
|
|
|
Tsilkani posted:It is fascinating that you can literally chart Catalyst's interest in making decent product decline over time just by picking up any given book and seeing how badly it was edited. Wish I had some idea on how much they paid Topps for the license.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 22, 2021 02:10
|
|
|
Liquid Communism posted:Yeah, I've always felt 12-15 was the sweet spot for dice pools in SR. Big enough to ride the statistical curve, but small enough they don't take all night to roll and count. It's also the amount you need for a reasonable chance of success. The game describes a rating of 6 as top ability/very highly trained, but you'll spend most of your time failing to do anything near what runners are expected to do without a dice pool of about that size.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 22, 2021 02:36
|
|
|
Ronwayne posted:5th ed becomes a lot more playable with a dice bot. I'd suggest a dice roller phone app if you're doing in person play, but i know a huge part of the draw is that fist full of plastic rattling around. usually dice bots become the only reasonable way to surprise players "Hmm, we're trying to ambush this joe schmoe, why are you picking up that massive amount of dice?"
|
|
#
¿
Apr 22, 2021 04:25
|
|
|
I loved Earthdawn's magic system. I really wish it was a more popular. I'm literally reading 4e on my iPad every night before I go to bed. Nobody to really talk about it or play with, though.
|
|
#
¿
May 18, 2021 04:49
|
|
|
Bullbar posted:I'm gearing up to run 3rd for some people online, because it's the edition I know and was in fact my first rpg. Best of luck. The people in your group who obsess about statistics will think it's absurd, but it plays very well.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 5, 2021 05:06
|
|
|
They actually did have wireless in third, but it had so many restrictions that it was kind of an ace up your sleeve type deal.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 6, 2021 04:58
|
|
|
Liquid Communism posted:Vehicle collisions and explosions as standouts. "This kills you. Here are how many boxes of overkill you take."
|
|
#
¿
Jun 10, 2021 05:54
|
|
|
Zombie Squared posted:Doing a run where the crew has to escort a terrible 00s screamo band. Looking for some good names for their singles. So far I got: Their Cybereyes Were Watching G.O.D.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 26, 2021 22:16
|
|
|
It's worth noting that both settings were retconned to be connected to one another. One of the biggest outcries in Earthdawn's history (back when fans communicated through webrings  ) was the release of the Thera source book. That's what put Barsaive on the map and showed the "known world" to be Europe. It also went into the different cultures of the regions of the Theran empire, which were analagous to real world cultures. Did you know there were a race of metahumans called [i[]jackalmen[/i], world were 100% human except they had the head of a jackal?! And they embalmed their dead? And they lived in Egypt?! Did you know that elephants weren't native to Barsaive. They came from from Indrisa, which is not India. They also have righteous multi-armed humanoid spirits who look like a particular Iandian god but they aren't because it's not india. There was more (don't ask about the suicidal fanatic city of brass dwellers, who are not arabs. They're not. They just coincidentally called their leaders sultans), but I can't remember all of it. Even when it came out it was considered a massive turd. You really have to understand that the different races of Barsaive all had their own customs and cultures and histories that extended long before the setting began. Reading the denizens of Barsaive books was legitimately fun, even if you never intended to play the game. You could make your characters backstory be as cliche as possible in that setting, and the setting wrapped around them to make them interesting. The Theran empire book just cribbed real world cultures in the most lazy half assed ways. Despite being based on earth's myths, they themselves just had no history in the settings. They live in these places, and they're just different, ok? Even without the cringe, it was just not Earthdawn. Even thinking about that book makes me so angry, since it was a work five years in the making (which was really long for a FASA release schedule) and it was such a massive poo poo on the settings as a whole. Most of Shadowrun's world (magical threats included) was designed before Earthdawn even materialized. The idea that they may be linked started with Shadowrun and then they began writing both Earthdawn and Shadowrun with the idea they were linked. Dunkelzahn and Mountainshadow were two different characters until the writers added links in the ED setting and the other dragons of Earthdawn into the SR setting. I don't mind them being linked, but much of it was sloppily done, as is SR custom. It's worth noting that they never call them "Horrors" in the SR setting because FASA gave those rights away to the ED rights holders.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 22, 2021 05:09
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 22, 2024 14:36 |
|
|
Zereth posted:PCs weren't all adepts, there were spellcasters too! Under the terms of Earthdawn, all of the classes were adepts, the ones that had spellcasting were magicians. It's also worth noting that even the spellcasters received some magically enhanced physical abilities, just nowhere near the amount the other had. Mr. Lobe posted:Might as well use that unspoiled essence. I'm assuming you aren't grafting swords onto the arms of characters by way of primitive cybernetics. Well, about that... some of the splat books got pretty crazy about what you could do with blood magic. It was out there, but it was part of the setting.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 22, 2021 13:30
|
|
