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TheMcD posted:Also, yeah, magic healing is really annoying with its "only the last wound gets healed". I'm currently playing a custom campaign where my three man team consists of my runner (a mage with a heal spell), a shaman with a heal spell, and somebody that can actually use a gun. It gets kind of iffy sometimes. It's definitely one element of the TT rules they could have just quietly retired. Especially annoying once DoT comes into play.
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Apr 26, 2017 23:17
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This is crazy. I never noticed anything like this when I played, which was a while ago. Could it be a bug introduced since then by a patch?
GunnerJ fucked around with this message at 11:42 on May 8, 2017 |
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May 8, 2017 11:40
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Brand name dropping to add setting detail and reinforce themes of corporate hegemony is a cyberpunk trope going back to Neuromancer.
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May 24, 2017 12:24
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Lynneth posted:The hell are insect spirits? Can someone elaborate on those and why they're bad? They're basically astral entity invaders from another plane of existence that take the form of insects. They possess people and body horror warp them into insectile forms. The fun part is that it's possible they're only invading our reality to escape from something worse.
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May 25, 2017 13:36
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Plus, it's not like a national government is going to go to bat for every shaman with Native ancestry in any personal altercation.
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May 25, 2017 19:36
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I had no idea that tab was there, somehow completely missing it every time I played this game, and did not understand what this "Nephilim Network" that guy mentioned was. Wow.
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Jun 12, 2017 20:16
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Fun fact about spirits in the PnP game (at least 3e) that would be hard to replicate in this game: they are typically immune to normal weapons you're likely to carry around unless they're weak spirits or you have a very big gun. But because they are magical beings, they aren't immune to belief. So if you had to deal with a spirit and had no magical means of damaging it, you could just run up and punch it, and if you believed in yourself hard enough, you'd send it reeling. Shadowrun is kinda of a goofy game sometimes. 
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Jul 1, 2017 16:14
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Yeah, that metagame utility of DocWagon made for a strange interpretation of it when I first started playing in college. DocWagon was presented as this all-powerful titan of the emergency medical field that no one, not even AAA corps, would want to cross for fear that their operatives' DocWagon contracts would be cancelled, which might even have the result of a corp's employees not being able to get access to any emergency healthcare. This included ignoring the idea that they can't enter corp property without permission, which I can now see as a useful conceit for simplifying the game. As I learned more about the game's lore this picture made less and less sense - why would Ares be afraid of DocWagon, do we really think it couldn't hire paramedics if push came to shove? Not to mention the actual existing alternatives (CrashCart, for example). When I told one of my fellow players about the extraterritoriality thing, he reacted as if I were making up some house rule. "What game books are you reading?" Well, as it turns out, ones actually written by the game's designers.
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Jul 4, 2017 15:32
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Groetgaffel posted:I don't know anything about Shadowrun beyond what's been said in this thread, but this makes it sound like it's counting down to the Warp from 40k. Kinda like if the influence of the Warp ebbed and flowed cyclically between "none" and "that one scene from Event Horizon".
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Jul 30, 2017 04:40
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Also "Can metahumanity in the 6th age beat the horrors?" was one of the longest running, most tedious nerdwank discussion topics on the old Dumpshock forums, which is saying something given what that place was like.
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Jul 30, 2017 04:42
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<WH40k parallels intensify>
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Jul 31, 2017 18:29
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GoneRampant posted:Just to put it into perspective for the non-Shadowrun players, Blood Magic is one of the biggest no-nos in the setting. Once you learn anything about it, I the DM can take your character sheet off you and make you roll a new character while your Blood Mage is turned into an NPC. What.
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Aug 1, 2017 13:12
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MechaCrash posted:The game sometimes shows you various systems and then clearly and explicitly puts ropes around them and says "this is absolutely not a thing players can do." This includes things like blood magic, toxic shamans, and the process to make a cyberzombie (installing cyberware reduces Essence, you normally can't go below zero, cyberzombies have negative essence and yes the results are horrifying). Yeah, I guess I just don't remember anything like this in the game rules, but then again I last played Shadowrun TT in 2004 when it was still 3rd edition so 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.
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Aug 1, 2017 14:51
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Keeshhound posted: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) Yeah I was thinking about this for some of these "bad magic" types that actually unavoidably making the character who engages in them insane. That's one thing. But I wasn't sure if blood magic was like that or the rules were just saying "this is too evil for your players to be allowed to do in this gritty cyberpunk game where where they may be conducting what amount to slave raids of prized corporate serfs."
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Aug 1, 2017 15:11
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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.
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Aug 1, 2017 16:01
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Ze Pollack posted:Didn't say unbelievably rich and powerful. Just said comfortable. Mike The Middle Manager who dabbles in shadowrunning on the side because his life feels empty is probably a decent character concept too! But you want to play him, you gotta get him fired first. Game requires a certain ground level of powerlessness in order to function. OK, but if the question is "what do you do to survive" then "be <someone>" isn't really comparable to "do <something>".
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Aug 1, 2017 16:26
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Keeshhound posted: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. 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.
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Aug 1, 2017 16:29
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Psion posted:"And you learned this blood magic where, exactly, Blood Mage Original Character Donut Steel?" Being implausible or impractical isn't really the same thing as "the GM takes your character sheet away."
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Aug 1, 2017 17:34
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Psion posted:Please note the use of the word can in that post. And also the rest of the posts expanding on why blood magic shouldn't show on your character sheet in the first place, regardless of whether or not a GM does things to a player. It was also an unsourced claim so for all I know they misinterpreted the rulebook. But what's not being misinterpreted is that blood magic is Very Much A Bad Thing. I'm not really hung up on anything other than this particular interpretation of the rules in principle, which as you say might be wrong. So if I'm giving the impression that I am deeply invested in players of a TT game I haven't played in 13 years being able to dabble in blood magic I'll stop talking about it.
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Aug 1, 2017 17:47
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wiegieman posted:Essence is a measure of how well your soul fits into your body. In universe, it's why people get phantom limb sensations, and it's why you don't lose essence when you lose a hand but do lose essence when you replace it with chrome your soul doesn't recognize. This concept always seemed thematically cool as hell, but kinda makes you wonder why not just build a robot. ETA: My favorite part of it is that it's not just magic keeping the whole shambling thing running. They get a special bit of cyberware to periodically dredge up memories to trick the psyche into thinking it still has a reason to be invested in this world.
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Aug 2, 2017 01:09
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Poil posted:Yeah the rules are very schizophrenic about whether you should play pink mohawk and open doors by driving a truck through the entrance and wreck the the place with your custom neon grenade launcher with an underbarrel chainsaw (because bayonets are for sissies) or if it's all mirrorshades and no one can ever notice you were even there. So, for those who played the tabletop game, which did your gaming group lean towards? Mine was hard pink mohawk, to the point where mirrorshades stuff, whenever introduced in a game, felt like a dick GM trying to screw us over. I get now that these are just two different play styles, but I never saw anything fun about being paranoid about your bullet casings or whatever. (I guess we weren't supposed to shoot at all...)
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Aug 4, 2017 12:33
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Other players swear by utility mages, and they are v. good, but I played through Dragonfall first time as a combat mage and once that gets rolling it's a hilarious carnival of artillery strikes everywhere your character can see.
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Aug 6, 2017 14:33
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Played HK as a pure punch adept and it felt risky but rewarding due to all the AP damage I could stack. So in that sense yes it was suboptimal but it was also pretty powerful and fun as gently caress. Can't really remember any good build advice though, sorry. (eta: Actually I remember one thing: prioritize anything that can increase your movement speed, although I guess that's pretty obvious.)
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Aug 6, 2017 15:13
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I have thought for a while that Chi Casting would be a lot better for adepts if it were based on Body rather than Willpower.
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Aug 7, 2017 16:00
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Deadmeat5150 posted:<snip> We probably don't want to talk about this right now, actually.
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Aug 7, 2017 16:16
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On release, the most broken build in Returns was a shotgunner. The kneecap ability let me solo a certain run before it got a cooldown.
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Aug 7, 2017 17:29
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I think it's a little weird that bug spirits in this game work more or less the way all spirits worked in the tabletop.
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Aug 31, 2017 23:14
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I have to say though the general system for that dialog puzzle is neat.
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Oct 26, 2017 00:16
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wiegieman posted:The Horrors do come along and mess the world up every magic cycle, but the world has never been like it is now. Like, a magic eating weaponized bacteria that's great at killing spiritforms? That's the perfect weapon against Horrors. This whole discussion really takes me back. One of the few good threads on the overall garbage Dumpshock Forums was an ongoing debate about whether the 6th World could kick the Horrors' collective rear end with magitech.
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Nov 2, 2017 11:59
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Glazius posted:Well, no. The mage still makes the fireballs. So, yeah, they can still shoot fireballs at you if they want to punch through the building in the process, but all the magic that doesn't shoot physical things from the mage to you can still get dropped on you. Security mages pulling this kind of poo poo are usually much better off using stunbolts and stunballs from a drain mitigation perspective anyway.
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Nov 9, 2017 10:26
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wiegieman posted:"Shaman" is a general term that really doesn't apply in the later tabletop editions, but yeah, there are. This hits on something that I've been wondering about with respect to time in the setting. When I played Shadowrun tabletop, it was 3rd edition. Most of the stuff that happens in the SRR games is set before the metaplot of 3rd edition, so the games have felt like they're... almost prequels to the "world" of SR that I know. So what the hell must these games' settings seem like to anyone who started in 4th or 5th, given how much time passed in the metaplot for those editions? (Also, why are there no shamans in later editions...?)
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Nov 13, 2017 01:57
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wiegieman posted:In 5th edition, people with magic powers are classified in four ways: OK, I see now. That's how it is in 3rd with maybe some different terms. I thought you meant, like, in-setting something happened to make the distinction completely moot. But yeah for anyone who's never played the tabletop, the way the SRR games define shamans and mages is really weird from a TT perspective, where both used basically the same spells and both could summon spirits, although the kinds of spirits and the way they summoned them was the major mechanical difference. Like, the consumable items you can use to summon elementals is more or less how mages summon except it takes hours.
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Nov 13, 2017 02:28
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...I don't have any recollection of those pillars. Pretty sure I just stunlocked Jessica with Kneecap repeatedly while everyone else bum rushed her.
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Nov 26, 2017 19:37
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Double Plus Undead posted:I feel like the later games put in mechanics to prevent you from doing this because why wouldn't you do that? I'm pretty sure they patched DMS to give Kneecap a longer cooldown to prevent this strategy, but I beat the game before that patch came out I guess. It really did need to be patched, that poo poo was broken good. Remember the optional side-run that Kanfy did solo with drones? You could solo it with just a guy who was really good with a shotgun using Kneecap before the patch.
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Nov 26, 2017 20:30
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