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Kanfy posted:I'm not kidding when I say these guys would be in more danger pouring their morning coffee than in front of our weapon. The annoyingly hard-to-see red color for some of these combat texts was thankfully changed after this game. The obvious answer is that Renraku did it's research. On you, and assumed that anyone desperate enough to run with you had to be of similar competency. 
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Apr 27, 2017 05:45
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Kanfy posted:Wait, seriously? You swallowed that one without question just because I brought you a donut? You people are all hilariously terrible at your jobs. It's what the market will bear.
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May 1, 2017 21:55
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Poil posted:To be honest, the added Japanese feels kinda forced and reeks of weeaboo rather than any meaningful flavor. No surprise I don't remember any of it from the later games. Part of that was the 80's meme that Japan was going to wind up owning the U.S. The next two games take place in Germany and Hong Kong, so...
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May 3, 2017 21:59
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Poil posted:True but not many npc's in those games throw in German and Cantonese words. Heck in the third game hardly any of the dialog is actually in English. Narratively, the entirety of Hong Kong is in cantonese, just translated for the player's benefit.
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May 3, 2017 22:35
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He's loaded with anti-ap options, so if you build him right he can keep a considerable part of the enemy forces locked down for most, if not all of a fight.
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May 11, 2017 00:19
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I dont know posted:She is trying to will her metagenes, dormant since the last age of magic, to suddenly express. I would stock up on fresh zebra to keep her sweet if I was you. Shouldn't the pcs be able to throw the toys to get the dogs to fetch?
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May 13, 2017 05:59
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Lynneth posted:The hell are insect spirits? Can someone elaborate on those and why they're bad? Astral locusts.
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May 25, 2017 13:38
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Wouldn't the smarter thing be to restrain him (gently) before dumping him out of whatever dream world he was chasing the dragon in? I mean, I don't see how he was ever going to react well to getting cut off.
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Jun 3, 2017 19:58
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OAquinas posted:What I found interesting is the way Hong Kong presents BTLs. Bit more nuance there--plus an actual decision besides "smash bad thing." Well, those were perscription.
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Jun 5, 2017 22:53
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It's not a successful run unless something is on fire.
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Jun 5, 2017 23:59
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Ze Pollack posted:Oh, there's plenty of people who are hopelessly loving evil in the setting.The shades of grey are exactly how many hopelessly evil people you're willing to use to try to accomplish your goals, and the odds are good that your friendly local Mr. Johnson looks at you about the same way you look at someone like Holmes. Yeah, the shades of grey in Noir/Cyberpunk don't come from a lack of monstrous people, it comes from the way the narrative forces otherwise good or neutral people to rub elbows with them.
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Jul 21, 2017 18:21
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Look, some guys just really enjoy their jobs, alright? We should all be so lucky.
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Jul 26, 2017 17:00
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Poil posted:I wonder how this campaign would play out in pen and paper. Mostly mechanically because I am a terrible player. I expect the aircraft hanger would be a crater, and the hospital would be %70 demolished.
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Jul 28, 2017 23:16
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Glazius posted:Yeah, given how astral echoes work I wonder how all of Seattle hasn't already turned itself into a festering pit of murder-spite. "Turned itself into?"
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Jul 29, 2017 21:28
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Magic works when it's part of the punk architecture that the rest of the story is subject to; what doesn't work so well is when magic is used to ignore those conceits. Stuff like megacorps researching new spells, or trying to figure out why elves live so long so they can apply it to humans is cool. Shannon using magic to investigate what the gently caress is going on to point the way to the correct target is cool. Hell, even stuff like the magically returned races getting hosed over by institutional and cultural racism is, from a punk storytelling standpoint, cool. I think it's Dragonfall that first addresses the idea that even elves, despite ostensibly being the super awesome Mary-sue race that's loved by everyone, wind up getting stalked by weirdos who want to be them, because the cultures they live in don't value them as people, just eye candy.
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Jul 30, 2017 00:52
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Even that works to a degree, specifically if you use it as a global warming analogy (because of course the megcorps are going to do something to aggravate the situation by researching too recklessly), but it needs to be treated as an avertable catastrophe so that the plucky band of misfits can set things right by blowing up the right suit for a proper punk ending. It being an inevitable thing does gently caress the setting though, because if everyone's going to die anyway then there's not much point to resisting the rampant excesses of power-mad capitalists. In fact, one of these games does an excellent job of doing exactly that, but even that might be too much of a spoiler, so I'll delete this line if someone asks me to.
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Jul 30, 2017 02:17
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The Lone Badger posted:Technology has never been this advanced before, nor populations this large. It's just possible that metahumanity might be able to deal with the emergent Horrors by shooting them right in the face. That's more or less what I was trying to say; you can have eldritch horror in a punk setting as long as the eldritch horrors are a subservient horror to the monstrosity of people being commodified by imbalanced systems. In lovecraft, people get sacrificed by cultists who are so broken by existential horror that they can only think to accelerate the apocalypse to minimize their own suffering. In punk, people get sacrificed because capitalism already calculated that a human life is worth $70,563.448, and the horror is willing to beat that price.
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Jul 30, 2017 03:58
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Psion posted:so I don't particularly buy it. Hope is a concept that more or less doesn't exist in 40k, whereas it's a fundamental part of SR, I think. Punk as a genre is built on wrapping the smallest spark of hope you can find in the most oppressively bleak blanket of despair possible, and then at a critical story moment detonating that hope so that if only for a brief moment it illuminates everything and reminds people that there's still stuff worth fighting for.
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Jul 31, 2017 19:44
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GunnerJ posted:But in general I am kinda leery of rules like this enforcing what should be more of an agreement between players and GM about what kind of game they want to play. You can always agree as a group to ignore rules like that, but there's nothing wrong with using mechanical rules to reinforce the setting (doing bad thing makes you a crazy power-mad monster, don't do bad thing)
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Aug 1, 2017 15:08
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GunnerJ posted:But if blood magic weren't conceivably a thing you might try to do in order to survive in the shadows, there wouldn't need to be a rule against it. "Be unbelievably rich and powerful" isn't really even in the same conceptual category as "do a blood ritual" in terms of finding solutions to problems. It kind of comes down to my idiot ramblings about punk as a literary tradition. Punk requires that it's "heros" always be fighting something bigger than them, no matter how morally compromised they might be. Blood magic, within the shadowrun universe is fundamentally an expression of power over someone else; the ability (and deliberate intent) to use their life to fuel your ambitions. If you engage in it you're making the deliberate choice to stop punching at the powerful, and join them in eating the weak. You can, of course, decide that that's the kind of game you want it to be, but the creators of shadowrun were clearly intending for the game's stories to be in the punk tradition of punching up; in the earlier editions karma (your character advancement resorce) was literally something you only got for doing "good" (as it exists in the setting) acts. Being an obedient corporate soldier got you your payday, but swiping medical supplies for the free clinc is what would let you become a stronger character in the game.
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Aug 1, 2017 16:21
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GunnerJ posted:They weren't idiot ramblings! But I'm not really sure that I agree that "blood magic" is incompatible with "punching up." I mean it requires that you kill or harm someone in order to further your objective, but Shadowrunners do that all the time. I think the key difference is that blood magic involves the commodification of human life in a way that typical runner violence doesn't. Punk doesn't have a problem with violence as a whole (it frankly encourages it), but you're supposed to be committing it for a good reason. A runner might have to kill someone, bit it's that specific person, and for specific, personal causes. A blood mage, by the setting's rules and lore, foesn't really care who they're killing; a bum with the right characteristics is going to be just as usable to them as any else. There's also the issue of how the two view violence; a runner will kill someone on a run if the situation necessitates it, but the type of character that the rules are trying to encourage should look at combat as an unfortunate complication. Not even necessarily out of a moral aversion to killing; it's an impediment to the smooth operation of the run. Put another way, a runner can conceivably function without violence; most obviously by having a really smooth run. A blood mage can't do anything without killing someone. Violence is soemthing for a runner to overcome, but it's the foundation of the blood mage's art.
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Aug 1, 2017 17:00
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White Coke posted:Aside from being undead what's so bad about cyberzombies? As I understand it, it involves the body getting chromed up past the point where the soul would just bail, then ritually binding that soul to what is effectively a corpse. Edit: Yeah, what wiegieman said.
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Aug 2, 2017 00:49
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AmishSpecialForces posted:I was thinking to myself - My character just shambles down into this dude's den/workshop, asks meandering questions, doesn't understand a tenth of the answers, then loses interest and wanders off to find someone to punch. Not the most believable of friendships. Friendships can be based on a lot of things. Sometimes people just appreciate having someone around who lets them prattle on on topics that they're enthusiastic about. Personally I think it was a missed opportunity to not have the player character stumble into a discussion between him and the other basement dweller; they're both easily the most scholarly and ethically flexible members of the team, so I assume they'd at least swap ideas from time to time. Keeshhound fucked around with this message at 20:19 on Aug 4, 2017 |
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Aug 4, 2017 20:15
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Necroskowitz posted:I'd say Dragonfall has the best overall plot but Hong Kong has the most engaging companions and gameplay. I lean towards Hong Kong, just because it's story places you in direct conflict with the corrupt systems of the corporate government, and as has been established, I am the biggest punk nerd. Also for the ending.
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Aug 5, 2017 01:51
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It's not so much what role you chose as it is understanding that AP damage is the most powerful thing in the game due to how the action economy works; -1 ap is crippling and -2 will stun outright for most of the game. Mages have the most varied access to AP affecting abilities, but a lot of melee weapons will do it too, and there's usually a late game stun pistol that is hilariously overpowered for just shutting enemies down.
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Aug 6, 2017 14:43
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Psion posted:The source is also quite biased, so it's up for debate either way. I didn't remember any mention of Sam getting more money when he had his "miracle" recovery, so my interpretation was that momma Watts might have been registered as an organ donor and committed suicide in order to save his life, causing Jessica to blame him for that, rather than Sam having an active role in it.
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Aug 13, 2017 00:27
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chiasaur11 posted:I gotta say, I'm not a huge fan of that angle. Jessica's way past that hurdle.
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Aug 13, 2017 21:17
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mauman posted:You should read up on a certain church/religion that begins with an S and ends with a Y. It's standard practice for pretty much all cults, not just the obvious one, along with having members give up their earthly possessions. Both are usually given pseudospirutual reasons that may or may not be believed by the cult authorities, and both serve the function of forcing the new recruit to be more reliant on their "new family," both for their social and physical needs, thus reinforcing their dependency on the cult, making it harder for them to leave if they have a crisis of faith.
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Aug 25, 2017 15:16
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Poil posted:There are so many people that even a 0.1% of the population is still hundreds of thousands. But yes, it can get silly. Such as a party entirely made up of adepts and mages. Which I have totally never participated in with pen and paper, coughcough. There's a decent argument to be made that you're only hearing stories about the notable crews (and that the players' crews are notable by virtue of the fact that you're all getting together and telling a story about them), so it's not that mages are on every crew, it's that the crews with mages tend to be notable, and the ones you hear about. And of course, a crew made up entirely of magically awakened runners would be an extremely storied group.
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Sep 1, 2017 15:42
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mauman posted:Those robes ARE very very armored. Personally, I think it's a mistake, but I guess that's mirrorshades for you.
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Sep 20, 2017 02:02
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mauman posted:Frankly, if I was the GM I would have punished you for choosing the goody-two-shoes route, and I'm personally glad that the game took that into account in the later games. Oh, no; you should absolutely be punished in game for doing it (client gets pissed, you get worse jobs, someone sends a "gently caress you" squad after you at some point, etc.), I'm just saying I prefer the idea that doing the "right" thing gets you more karma, since it gives you competing resources. Keeshhound fucked around with this message at 05:17 on Sep 20, 2017 |
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Sep 20, 2017 05:13
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Honestly, the weirder part to me is that all the rent-a-cops are so willing to die at the hands of people who are very clearly better armed than them.
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Oct 16, 2017 00:39
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Any spell that reduces AP is good. Blindness and mind wipe are brutally overpowered, use them liberally, ideally while standing on a ley line/dragon line. Any of your party members will be more than capable of killing enemies, your goal should be to shut down as many of them as possible, so that your friends are free to take them out. It seriously can't be overstressed just how powerful disables and AP damage are in these games. Keeshhound fucked around with this message at 20:06 on Oct 17, 2017 |
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Oct 17, 2017 20:04
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Poil posted:Why? Ghouls don't eat non-metahuman meat, same thing as that vampires don't drink animal blood. And frozen meat inside a sealed box like a freezer doesn't smell anyway. One of the pc's dialogue choices is something to the effect of "Really, what did they expect, storing organs in their freezer like that?" The impliction (to me, at least) being that the family was running a back alley organ grinding operation and had recently reclaimed hearts, lungs eyes and livers next to their frozen peas and soycream. Because that's the kind of place the Redmond Barrens is.
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Oct 19, 2017 17:20
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OutofSight posted:Thid is kind of the core problem with videogame rpgs.Want to have that alien and powerful enemy, who just doesn't keel over because he forgot to switch on the nokill script. Don't have a mage to damage astral enemies? Whoops. There are some manatech weapons in the setting later, but those explode just in everybodies' faces, like the "Excalibur" by Ares, discussed earlier in the thread. It's especially stupid because there's no real reason they couldn't have implemented other deployment methods to "fit" any other class (by actually just turning off the immortality mechanically.) Or if you wanted to be a little more in depth, make it a grenade with bonus accuracy and range that you use to prime enemies; hit them with it and then blast them with whatever while they're under the effect. It's a prototype weapon, so it doesn't need to match up exactly with the source material's final version.
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Nov 3, 2017 01:04
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paragon1 posted:That's not a bad approximation, yeah. The Big Mac thing is basically a general rule of thumb for game masters to use whenever their players insist on paying for some relatively small thing that should be rightly folded into their Lifestyle costs. Somewhat ironically, actually buying a Big Mac in Shadowrun would cost way more than it does now due to the ingredients. Wouldn't it be called a "Stuffer Stack," or something like that?
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Nov 4, 2017 04:22
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paragon1 posted:There's plenty of in-setting reasons that someone might not be able or willing to get cybernetics to repair a physical disability. Financial, medical, spiritual, and so on. Your girlfriend's hilariously overprotective dad had his goons break your legs and then blackballed you so hard that even the street docs won't touch you...
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Nov 8, 2017 06:55
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HardDiskD posted:Woudn't they have no essence from the start, though? Being in a way artificially created? Essence loss (as I understand it, anyway) is the result of removing a part of yourself, not whether or not what's being installed is synthetic. It's your soul rejecting what it recognizes as being not you, which causes it to unstick from your body, for lack of a better word.
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Nov 9, 2017 04:14
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Poil posted:This is the point I gave up on the game. A lot of bugs. And a genuinely funny ending to a long running plot thread.
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Nov 9, 2017 22:45
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painedforever posted:It's a Shaggy Dog story. The ending certainly makes up for any problems I had with the final mission... by first making me froth with rage, then reducing me to giggles as I caught on to the joke. Actually, not what I was referring to, but anything further than that would be spoilers. I trust Kanfy will show it off.
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Nov 10, 2017 02:21
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