|
Inflation must be absolutely hosed
|
#
¿
Sep 10, 2019 23:17
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 21, 2024 01:08 |
|
|
The queen and witch are very good but I haven’t heard of anyone actually playing one.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 30, 2019 23:17
|
|
|
The chosen is great but it pushes against the social drama since it gives a bigger enemy than each other. That might be something you want but it cuts back on the uniqueness of the game.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 31, 2019 02:27
|
|
|
They really should have canonised the Dad.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 4, 2019 00:52
|
|
|
Part of the issue with dragonlance isn’t the good vs evil axis, it’s that they didn’t consider Law vs Chaos. Most of the gods consider the Law as paramount and keep it way too tied to the idea of Goodness. The kingpriest got to stay so long because he followed the Rules, and the gods made a massive inflexible judgement afterwards that they couldn’t easily work around, aside from the Chaotic Evil tahksis. It’s pretty similar to the forgotten realms with Ao but without the gods working around the rulings a bunch.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 4, 2020 02:34
|
|
|
Night10194 posted:Do not, under any circumstances, give Blood Dragons positions of civil authority. The consequences will be funny, but also kill dozens to hundreds of people. At best you get a town in perpetual, terrifying training montage. At worst, boredom. judging from shadow of the demon lord the guys not great at writing balanced adventures in general
|
|
#
¿
Apr 13, 2020 22:35
|
|
|
Imperial guard are the best because they actually have room for “fascism is bad and inefficient” in their stories and when one of them does something cool it lands because they aren’t stated to be inherently badass like everything else.
|
|
#
¿
May 21, 2020 23:03
|
|
|
Dallbun posted:
I actually have been in a 13th age game where that would have been relevant, my character escaped from a crazy mermaid cult and wanted the necromancer's help to talk to his non-escaped siblings. ADND tends to have less stuff like that when you don't do 1 unique things, of course.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 30, 2020 00:04
|
|
|
The something awful pen and paper rpg community has a reputation for being fans of lighter, modern games, and rejecting the grognardy tendencies for percieved realism, a fetishisation of how much early medival life sucked, and really powerful wizards being the best at things, in favor of being a cool competent person with clearly designed mechanics and modern, friendly design. But I know better. Deep at the heart of every goon, past the lancers and legends of 5 rings is a desire to play a weird middle ages rear end in a top hat and gently caress with customisable magic systems through characters who got their hair cut by putting a big bowl over their heads and scissoring off everything outside, and die from a combat with absolutely no balance considerations. For all you cryptogrogs, I bring you https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-xlt0cNnd_c reccomended listening for this post Ars Magica is a series of psuedo spinoffs of Mage the Awakening set in Mythic Europe, 1220 AD where you play as powerful Magi, their Companions and a pool of minor Grogs dealing with all sorts of magical, divine and mundane circumstances. It was originally written by Jonathan Tweet and Mark Rein-Hagen, which should set off some loving alarm bells in your brain for what this is going to be like, although this is going to be about the 5th edition and will be a lot more reasonable. I should admit I haven't actually played it, this is mostly getting done so I get get a better handle on the rules, and I figure if I get things blatantly wrong it will actually provoke discussion. The book starts with the standard Whats an RPG paragraph, but it does point out 3 very unusual features of the game. 1. The game doesn't balance the different sorts of characters. Magi are extremely more powerful, and companions beneath them get more stuff than Grogs. We'll get into the specifics of how they work later, but it's all ok because 2. You'll probably have more than 1 character. The game ideally works off a 'Troupe' player group structure where people rotate storytellers and who plays what in each adventure. So it might be one player breaking out their wizard, another plays their companion, and another takes a couple grogs for flavor, and the next time the GM swaps to something else. This was definitely super innovative only really coming up a bit now with Blades in the Dark, and leads to a great episodic structure alongside the downtime mechanics. 3. The game centers around a specific organisation/place called a Covenant, a shared space for wizards to hang out, do weird magic experiments, and live. This leads to strong sense of community and driver of narratives compared to wandering murderhobos. The core mechanics are fortunately simple enough, although there's a bunch of special rolls built as variants that seem a little overwhelming. Simple rolls are just Stat+Skill+d10, a standard modernisation of BRP-derivatives or Storyteller. If there's an actual risk or pressure involved (which should be everything you roll for except wizards researching in the library or something esoteric, my modern rpg brain tries to scream past the Grog Lizard parts of me) if you get a 1, roll again and double it, increasing exponentially if you get more doubles. If you get a zero, though, it's not great. Depending on how much things can go badly, you then roll a number of Botch Dice, and if those get zero as well, you critically fail. Definitely a lot more friendly than World of Darkness's take, and gives a little more granularity. Plus with the different sorts of characters, things going very badly can have a little more nuance. If a grog dies, laugh it off and grab another, and Wizards have their own specific catastrophes that they can mostly deal with.  honestly a lot of the art is pretty bad so I'm only going to post the cool stuff that's either public domain medival artworks or from earlier editions that had a lot more white wolf steeze Next Time: An overview of the Order of Hermes, the broader sect of Magi the game revolves around. Wrestlepig fucked around with this message at 09:10 on Aug 1, 2020 |
|
#
¿
Aug 1, 2020 01:14
|
|
|
Leraika posted:edit to actually provide helpful commentary: ars magica is one of those games I've heard about and been vaguely interested in reading about, but not enough to do it because I've heard it's a bit too complex. it's relatively simple at it's core. Those dice mechanics are basically everything for non-wizards. Combat has opposed rolls, character generation is a little involved and there's downtime periods for sorting xp, but that's basically it. Wizards are more complex but not really that much more, so you'd probably be fine leaving them in the laboratory doing their thing while you figure things out through the grogs and companions until you're ready.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 1, 2020 01:33
|
|
|
Mors Rattus posted:Complexity in Ars is heavily frontloaded into chargen. Actual play isn’t that bad, but first you have to assign a giant pile of XP. it's going to take like 3 posts, it's very extensive and there's a lot of things to comment on.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 1, 2020 01:41
|
|
|
ARS MAGICA 5E Part 2: The Order of Hermes Even with all the extra characters and stuff, the game revolves around Wizards, who at least in the core rules are members of the preeminent Wizard Society of Europe called the Order of Hermes, following their rules and teachings to a greater or lesser extent. This chapter goes over a lot of how they operate and their history, which is very useful for establishing a lot of game concepts and how to play as a wizard.  theres no art and a lot of words so here's a woodcut Historically speaking, there's always been people with the Gift of magic, although it was rare for them to organise. One effect of the gift is a serious case of Bad Vibes that provokes negative reactions to you in other people, so that alongside with the inevitable megalomania led to most wizards getting murdered or isolated. It also affected other wizards, so most mages that met each other just nuked each other or got ready to betray the other, and because knowledge wasn't standardised, mostly stemming from individual research that they weren't willing to share. The only group of wizards that really got off the ground early was the roman Mystery Cult of Mercury, the god of messengers, and that was because they mostly just sent letters. When the western roman empire fell, the Cult of Mercury disintegrated in magical violence, and nothing took it's place until 3 centuries after. At that time, a very clever mage named Bonisagus figured out a very clever spell known as the Parma Magica, which granted protection from other mage's magic and from their magical Bad Vibes. Wizards could finally talk with each other without getting on each other's nerves, and couldn't just fireball each other when an argument started. Bonisagus's student, a sorceress named Trianomma, realised the political possibilites this created, and went around Europe encouraging the mages there to meet with Bonisagus and work together. She also destroyed a lot of those who didn't. Bonisagus talked and dealt with the mages Triannoma brought back, and incorporated a lot of their knowledge into the theories of the Cult of Mercury while teaching the Parma Magica. From this, he was able to develop the theory of Hermetic Magic, and the wizards met at a great tribunal and formed the Order of Hermes. From there, they spread out across Europe, recruiting apprentices, organising and threatening people until they basically controlled the magical side of Europe. The order has weathered multiple crises as it grew and changed. Early on, they had to deal with a guerilla war from an evil (or just protecting the isles from the continental invasion) british wizard named Damhan-Allaidh. He was defeated by an apprentice of one founder by the name of Pralix, who copied Damhan-Allaidh's tactics and formed her own order from the converted survivors. That order got incorporated as a new house in the Order of Hermes named the Ordo Ex Miscellanea, a grab bag of individuals and traditions outside of standard Hermetic branches. Later, House Tremere tried to entrench themselves as the leaders of their order through political alliances and duelling really well, until suddenly a huge chunk of their leadership went mad shortly after Tremere himself was left as the last living founder of the order. When they went, so did everyone's obligations to them, and Tremere decided to cut their poo poo out. In earlier editions, this clan turned themselves into Vampires, although this edition cuts out the ties to the World of Darkness. After that, House Tytalus started loving around with Demonology, always a bad idea, and their leadership got decapitated by the Quasitores, who are the wizard judge dredds. This got everyone even more paranoid and exploded when the House Tremere declared war on House Deidne, a sect of druidic pagans none of the other christian-influenced groups liked very much. After a Grand Tribunal to figure poo poo out, the Deidne got kicked out of the order and ordered exterminated. Finally having just one enemy led to stability, and the arcane disruption led most wizards to prefer peace. Nobody really seems to comment on that whole thing being pretty hosed up.  thats a lot of lore that probably won't impact much, although theres a few campaign hooks for people The rules of the Hermetic Order are relatively simple, although it gets complicated because Wizards love arguing and there's lots of Legal precedent. Its worth going over them, since Wizard Politics is a big driver of what goes on. No Depriving a Member of the Order of their Magical Power. This also gets expanded to doing things that would indirectly reduce a Magi's magical power, like loving with their stuff and forcing them to deal with mundane problems, but mainly it's no removal of other's magical power. No Slaying of other Hermetic Magi outside of Justly executed Wizard's War. Wizards War lets two mages temporarily go outside of the regular rules and break out the fireballs until the next full moon, as long as it's organised properly with a proper declaration of War. Abide by Decisions of the Tribunal. Tribunals are wizard senates that get called occassionally, where they vote on certain things. Do not interfere with the Mundanes. Wizards unfortunately have to interfere all the time so mostly this is fine unless it causes problems or puts you into positions of mundane political power, like being a court wizard. Do Not Deal with Demons This is the only rule they don't gently caress around with. Hell is real. Don't annoy the Faeries. This one isn't enforced much since they have such nice Vis, a magical fuel, so the precedents are kind of a mess. It's totally ok to deal with faeries normally, unlike demons. The book notes here there's no rules about any other sort of magical creatures. No Scrying on other Magi. This also includes stuff like turning invisible and hanging around nearby, or scrying their servants and getting it indirectly. Wizards really dont want you scooping up their manuscripts. Next Time: The Houses of the Order of Hermes.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 1, 2020 03:08
|
|
|
The Lone Badger posted:Does anyone actually obey that "no demons" rule? it is an incredibly bad idea, and you're a wizard so you don't really need them. That said, you can do it, and demons can be persuasive.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 1, 2020 05:16
|
|
|
ARS MAGICA 5E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZS19DslkgQ Houses of Hermes. There's 12 different Houses inside the order of Hermes, made of a mixture of lineages, mystery cults and general traditions. The mechanical impact of these (mandatory free virtues and flaws) is listed later, and what those actually mean is listed later than that. Still we're just in the fluff zone. These aren't the limits of what magic can be, its just the sorts inside the order that follow their understanding of things. Pagans, non-europeans and individual weirdos do exist and follow different Rules, but this book keeps a focus on the Hermetics, even while admitting their philosophy of magic is limited. House Bjornaer are an unusual house focused on the animal and bestial. They have a very non-hermetic style power where they can take on the form of their 'Heartbeast', essentially a totem animal (or plant). Changing shape isn't that crazy, you can take it in a few ways at character generation, but the Bjornaer have it run deep and can cast while transformed at an extreme penalty, and it doesn't count as a magical effect, and spells that affect that sort of animal effect the wizard as well. You can't get familiars for some reason. House Bonisagus are directly descended from the father of the order, and either specialise in magical theory or Hermetic politics. They tend to be well respected and influential in the order. House Criamon is an esoteric mystery cult focused on searching after the 'Enigma' and understanding magic and the Gift itself. They get a special Enigmatic Wisdom skill that helps when they go into Twilight, but makes it more likely. What's Twilight? We'll get to that later. Also they tend to cover themselves in mystic markings which I always think is cool, so I'd probably play one of these. House Ex Miscellanea are a group of loosely affiliated minor traditions and independents, often barely hermetic. You some free virtues and a flaw of your choosing, so a lot of room to customise things if nothing else works for you. House Flambeau are good at Burning and Destroying things. Thats basically it House Guernicus are enforcers, judges and cops for inside the order. They have the most Quasitores (judge, jury and executioner for the order) even if anyone can join. They believe the order would collapse without their strict stewardship, and they're probably right. House Jerbiton are much more focused on the mundane world than other mages, and focus on arts, aesthetics and culture to prevent the order from isolating itself too much. They tend to have a pretty aristocratic background. House Mercere, known as redcaps, are messengers between wizards, and tend to be very important with how isolated magi tend to be. Un-gifted people can be a part of this house, although they don't get to vote at tribunal. House Merinita is a mystery cult tied to the Fae, and draw a lot of magical secrets from that. They rule a lot, getting new conditions and targets for magic like casting on an entire road or bloodline, tying spells to a bargain, or making the duration of a spell until a fire goes out or for a year and a day. You do have to have some tie to the fae, whether a virtue, flaw or initiation ritual. House Tremere, at least the new non-vampiric house of this edition, are political schemers who emphasise sensibility, planning and heirarchy. They tend to be experts in Certamen (Wizard Duelling) and unusually, hold back the voting sigils of their apprentices until they die or lose to them in a wizard duel. This means that there's a relatively small number of decision makers at tribunal with a lot of political power. House Tytalus seek to master Conflict, and love to innovate, change and struggle until they win, which must get really annoying. In the past this lead them to trying to pull that poo poo with demons, which lead to their leadership getting exterminated and the survivors not trusted. House Verditius are expert crafters and enchanters, but can't cast without the assistance of tools, which leads to people thinking less of them despite it not really being a big deal. It's an odd group of houses without clear specialists in many sorts of magic, which is interesting. Some things have an expert but few houses are going to be better at different sorts of magic, so there's a lot of room for self-definition. I think all the Mage players will see things I don't, though. Next time: Roundup of other Magi stuff before character creation
|
|
#
¿
Aug 1, 2020 05:21
|
|
|
ARS MAGICA 5e The order of Hermes and Society https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ch1aVmjvYTI The Order of Hermes, despite wizards generally being assholes and weirdos, is about as democratic as it could be. It mostly organises in Tribunals where at least 12 magi meet, presided over by a Quasitores and run by the oldest mage present, and they all cast their vote. On a larger level there are regional tribunals that cover rough geographic areas and boundaries, and a grand tribunal every 33 years where representatives of each region converge to discuss matters affecting the entire order. Most wizards would prefer to do their own thing, but politicking is necessary sometimes. The book then goes over a few aspects of the wider world, and how the wizards interact with middle ages Europe. Peasants generally stay away from wizards because they'd have to interact with magical bullshit and maybe get turned into frogs. Wizards still have to eat and profit, so they commonly do have peasants farm the land around them and manage affairs. Wizards tend to be hands off about the whole thing because they radiate antipathy, but they're often much better than regular lords or clergy because they can actually do things about plagues, disasters and dragons. Importantly, Magi covenants are good places for misfits: They don't care about gender restrictions, criminal status or social class. This game is groggy, but has plenty of room for lady knights and political outcasts. Wizards try to keep themselves away from the Church, because it could absolutely kick their rear end. God is real and can manifest with miracles and just say No to magic. The church doesn't take an official stance or anything, since plenty of wizards are fine upstanding christians and dealing with others would get messy, even if they harbour heretics and don't follow the rules. So long as they don't get in each others way, they're fine. Individual religious people cross the whole gamut, from Burn the Witch to friendly relations with fellow scholars.  sourced from @ebooks_goetia on twitter, a bot that generates sigils. this is for elanel, a demon of judo and warmness Nobles usually try to get along with wizards, since they're powerful neighbours who they don't directly control. Often wizards do a bit of work for the local aristocracy, and as long as it isn't permanent or involved the Order doesn't mind. Cities aren't great places for Wizards: The gift tends to make getting along with close neighbours hard, and there tends to be a strong Divine aura from all the christians that can interfere with lab work. However there's a lot of handy resources and skilled people there, so some wizards stick there.  The book has an interesting of Magical Items and trade. As of 1061 AD, it's illegal to 'Accept Money or Mundane Goods from anyone other than a member of the Order of Hermes or a Hermetic Covenant' and it's heavily encouraged not to give out anything Permanent. This does have obvious loopholes: If they get you something magical as a trade, or you go through a mundane middleman. This is probably a gameplay concession so you get the companions off, although itd happen anyway since wizards are terrible with resources. Other magical people do exist, either as those with supernatural talents or people with the Gift who aren't inside the order. The Official Hermetic stance is everyone has to join, although it's not often enforced, especially if the person's weak, noble or in the church. There are some powerful non-hermetic wizards around, although without the Parma Magica, they don't stand much of a chance. The Order often leaves them alone unless they cause problems or learn the Parma Magica, in which case they gotta join or die. Next time: Characters, part 1 of ????
|
|
#
¿
Aug 1, 2020 07:25
|
|
|
Angrymog posted:I think you've missed a bit at the bolded section, because it doesn't make any sense; if you get a 1 on what? the d10? Where do doubles come into if you're just rolling 1 die? if you roll a 1 on the d10, you roll again and then double the result. I think I missed the word 'It' after the line
|
|
#
¿
Aug 1, 2020 09:09
|
|
|
ARS MAGICA 5e CHARACTER CREATION PART 1 VIRTUES AND FLAWS  How to be this guy The first part of character creation is to pick what sort of character you'll be creating, so it's a good point to go over what they are. Magi are the core of the game, although not exclusively who'll see most of the action. They have to take a free ability called the Gift, which lets them take Hermetic arts and supernatural abilities, as well as virtues and flaws related to Hermetic Magic. It also comes with a -3 penalty to social roles tied to people liking you. There's been some commentary on it in the thread, where people commented they didn't like at as an inherent result of magical ability instead of the implications of hermetic life and being an rear end in a top hat. Ultimately I like it as automatic for mechanical reasons: It heavily encourages middlemen with the companions and grogs. They also get some extra bits in character generation to cover magic, but that'll come later. Companions are the allies and important people drawn into close ties with the magi and the coven, and can be pretty much anything. They get as many virtues and flaws as the Magi, although they don't have the Gift unless you really really want to play as an apprentice. Nothing stops you from taking other supernatural gifts, like being a werewolf or having enchanting music. Grogs, minor characters somewhere between Shakespearean minor characters with large personalities and hirelings, get a smaller maximum for virtues and flaws, and can't take the gift because that would make them important. They aren't supposed to be complex or important, but being expendable and clear in personality makes them a lot of fun. Plus, these characters are the most likely to be shared in troupe play.  the peasants in the stands are probably laughing their codpieces off at the bawdy dialogue between these two So now we've got that sorted, we need to get started on Virtues and Flaws, which take up an entire exhausting chapter of the book. It's very much a 90s designed section, with all sorts of wild spikes in balance. The unusual thing about it is that although the book treats this like a regular merits and flaws system, it's a filter for pretty much every aspect of character definition. It's where you establish what's effectively a class for your character, their social status and it handles getting powers and Hermetic House abilities. Virtues and flaws are broken into costs of Major and Minor, theoretically noting their impact and importance, as well as specific categories that define who gets what and how much. Magi and Companions get a budget of a maximum of 10 points of flaws, and a corresponding amount of Virtues. Magi also get the Gift and whatever freebies come with their house. Grogs get a max of three points instead of 10, to keep them minor. There are more rules for what specific ones people need. There's a maximum of 5 minor flaws, you can't have more than 1 major personality flaw, need one social status and you can't take too many Hermetic virtues. Finally we get to the actual lists, and it's kind of a mess, really. I don't know what I expected. There's a huge disparity in quality between different choices, and if you're going through the game in order, you probably have no idea what half of them mean. I don't think it's all fundamentally just bad balance, the game just stretches the virtues and flaws system to cover more than it usually does. Best practice is to pick a Major Personality and Major Story flaw, since those don't have any disadvantage built into them compared to the punishing physical and mental issues you can take. Some even give you an advantage, like access to specific skills. Virtues tend to be a bit more consistent, with most having some mechanical weight. There's too many to go over in detail so I'm just going to cover some that are interesting, worth talking about or representative. One very important set of virtues and flaws is the Gentle Gift and Blatant gift, which change how much your Magi Gift affects people. Blatant Gift basically tanks your ability to interact with mundanes, while the Gentle Gift means you get close enough to normal that you don't have a mechanical penalty and can even deal with animals. It's something every mage should consider as an option, either good or bad. Wealthy and Poor don't mean you just get more money, since the game doesn't have much focus on gear. It means you can spend less time off-season working, which translates to more experience points per year, and it even ties into other social status backgrounds. A lot of the virtues and flaws are More/Less XP for particular conditions, which sets off alarm bells in my head and I can't imagine anyone taking the flaws, unless it's just a way to make the skills section easier. The Knight social status and a few church-based positions specify you need to be a male character to take it. Thumbs down, everyone wants to be a lady knight and everyone is going to ignore this outside of groups it'd come up in. Hopefully. There's a few fortunate gaps, nothing stops you from being a female mercenary captain, bandit chief, and the True Love abilities don't specify the opposite gender. There's a lot of choices based on ties to the supernatural that have a really big impact. Having faerie blood in you gives a lot of benefits, you can have a ghost looking out for you with a big pool of its own experience points, be descended from giants and my favorite, having a Guardian Angel looking out for you that gives advice and magic resistance if you're acting in accordance with God's will. Magi are the most powerful, but a knight with true faith, a guardian angel and a big sword is going to put the fear of god into them. There's also Flaw equivalents, which tend to be "you have a magical being hanging around you. It has its own agenda and is an independent being." Most supernatural virtues and flaws give you access to a specific ability, like dowsing, detecting the divine and infernal, or changing shape into an animal. It's probably embarrassing to do next to the wizard, but having dowsing would be super handy for all the times you need a grog to investigate and it'd be funny to have him wave sticks around in front of Mandagora the Magnificent.  the art generally isn't great. I kinda get what they were going for with the shading but it just doesn't work. The woodcuts and older black and white works are much better. The disability-related flaws are written in a way that feels really mean-spirited. For example;  There's a Transvestite Flaw. It's very transphobic. I get that the middle ages were not exactly a queer-friendly time, but it's way beyond that in writing. this book posted:You dress and act as a member of the opposite gender, and expect to be treated as such. Note that this is not a delusion — you know what your physical gender is, but choose to live as the other gender. In Christian and Muslim lands you are regarded as a freak, and are often shunned, laughed at, or even chased out of town. However, these problems will only arise if others realize you are not a member of the gender you are living as. Because of your long experience living as a member of your chosen gender, attempting to live as a member of your physical gender will result in a–3 to all social skill rolls for as long as the character attempts to live as this gender And that's the virtues and flaws. You've seen it a bunch, even if you have no idea what the mechanical affects are. Avoid the huge mechanical downsides, focus on personality and story hook things for flaws, and you'll be fine. To make things interesting, I'm going to roll up a character to illustrate how things go, since it's fairly dry and intimidating so a bit more personality will help. I need a short concept for a Magi, their Companion, and a loyal Grog, and I'll see what I can do with them. Next time: More Character Creation. Skills and stats
|
|
#
¿
Aug 2, 2020 00:29
|
|
|
Xiahou Dun posted:That "transvestite" flaw (not gonna even start on the problems with the name) just has so many layers of dumb. Epicurius posted:Including that is a really bad choice by the game designers, but I will point out that in Ars Magica, "Flaws" aren't necessarily negative traits or bad things. They're just things that might complicate your life. So, "continence" (you don't have sex) or "Close family ties" (You're close with your family and they'll go out of their way to help you) are flaws too. Even ignoring the transphobia it's just weirdly written. If you're a cross-dresser or transgender person, you have a pretty significant penalty when acting your 'physical gender'. There's no mechanical effect if you aren't, it just says christians and muslims will really not like you (somebody tell me if there's a reason jewish people don't mind). There's similar options for being an outsider from mainstream christian europe if you choose to take them, and those don't judge you and just give a reputation among people who care. That's not even necessarily bad. If you want to have a conflict with existing power structures as a queer person, that's an interesting narrative and there's better ways of representing it. The other part is that it has some very specific assumptions about why you do it. There's no room for actual transvestites who don't identify as the gender but just prefer the clothes, only do it sometimes, are doing it for magical reasons or the classic "Woman pretends to be male so she can get into male positions in society". It is kinda free points if you stick with it, but it's 1 minor flaw and there's so many you can take that don't hate your character. There's not actually much I'd cut from the book despite the complexity, but this is mean-spirited, redundant and poorly designed.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 2, 2020 03:18
|
|
|
Epicurius posted:I mean, I entirely agree with you. I know, I didn’t mean to argue against you, I just thought the section needed a bit of further commentary.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 2, 2020 03:37
|
|
|
The Lone Badger posted:Is there anything stopping a magus from taking the Merits that are obviously intended for Companions, or is it just that they've got so much else competing for their points? The only real limit is that you have to take the hermetic social status, so you can’t double up on being a knight and hermetic magi. There’s no problem outside of that though. I don’t think the game has any issues with it, although you probably want wizard specific stuff.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 2, 2020 10:08
|
|
|
Dumb academic arguments and fistfights are like 50% of ars magica tribunals.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 4, 2020 01:09
|
|
|
ARS MAGICA 5th Edition Character Creation part 2: Examples I got a couple short character concepts from discord and I'll be whipping them up alongside the actual concepts. Sorry about ignoring the thread but I don't know anything about Beavis and Butthead so I couldn't really work it. The suggested magi I picked was a Criamon who got into Buddhism somehow. Another suggested mage was 'a huge bear of a man who really likes the woods and learned magic to make sure everything in it was safe. bad with people' which I can work better as a companion, and a grog servant who does all the hard work cleaning up after them. We first set up all the mandatory stuff, which only really applies to the Magi. As a magi of house Criamon, we start with the Gift, status as a Hermetic Magus, access to and a free point of the Enigmatic Wisdom ability, and initiation into The Enigma Mystery Cult. I have no idea how mystery cults actually work. It just seems to be you get more flaws and virtues as you get closer to the mystery at a pace determined by narrative, but it's all very vague. Then we start picking flaws, as a way to build a budget for the actual good stuff. The best thing to do is take a major personality and story flaw, because they're effectively free starters. Our magi, who I'll call Spiros for now, will take Driven, because why not, and Monastic vows. Specifically Buddhist ones, which are covered well enough by the book. Our bear of a man can be set up literally, so we'll give him Lycanothropy, along with compassionate as a counterpoint. Lycanothropy is versatile, so we can make him turn to our choice of animal, sized between wolf or bear size and on whatever roughly monthly event you choose. The Grog takes Indiscreet, needing to roll to not spill the beans when asked. Obnoxious but a good schtick for a grog. We round it out with some minor flaws to max out our possible virtues, because of course we do. The book encourages at least one hermetic flaw for the mage, so we grab Clumsy Sorceror which causes more botch dice, Incomprehensible which halves peoples scores when they try to learn from Spiros, Pious for a little more personality and Outsider to represent his non-christiandom. The Bear, guess he can be named Bjorn, takes Reclusive as an extra touch to personality (the book reccomends against taking this one unless the character belongs to the troupe's main story guide who probably won't be running them, as reclusives don't go on adventures, but I got hooks and I'm not playing this guy), as well as being blackmailed, especially Nocturnal for a minor penalty at morning to match with the werebear thing, Oversensitive about the forest and also a magical animal companion. That's a flaw since the game lumps Story Hooks along with mechanical penalties, all for the same points. That said, it's not a reliable ally directly under your control. Bjorn gets a little crow friend that does the talking while we get to the official advantages. Spiros the mage takes Mythic Blood to represent some sort of connection to a magical being or great wizard (which isn't rare, really) that protects from Fatigue when casting formulaic spells, as well as a bonus magical effect kinda like a spell along with a freebie Magical focus (boost on specific subject for a spell, let's go with one example choice of Lightning) and a personality flaw of our choice. I take Carefree, no big deal. We also run with Flawless magic for automatic Mastery of formulaic spells, which makes us very good at vance-style spells. We pad out with a few minors. There's a bunch of cute bonuses and things that help us tailor what sort of wizard you are. It's not really worth tracking all these for this, you can get plus 3 on a roll if it meets particular conditions or anything. They're all kinda dull. Other than that theres a few bits of extra experience or access outside of a couple oddities that don't fit this concept. Since Bjorn doesn't get any Hermetic virtues as a non-hermetic, we have a few different sorts of options. We need a social status so we grab Wanderer, and find some good majors. We go Shapeshifter for control over Bear Mode and Way of the Land, which gives us bonuses when in a specific terrain, to fit with our Forest Guardian concept. For minors, we take Large for a Size boost, which gives a good few stat benefits, Second Sight to get access to a skill that lets us see through illusions and into magic, and Animal Ken to be able to talk to animals. The grog gets Custos, a social status to represent being a higher up covenant staff member which lets us get a few skills, Clear Thinker to give a boost when thinking logically or dealing with bullshit, and a generic social contacts one. And that's the virtues and flaws. They're clunky and it really shouldn't lump in Story Hooks with Mechanical problems, along with every other issue with the concept, but it does let us sketch out appropriate but diverse characters. We have a dipshit wizard meditating and seeking enlightenment, a huge werebear that guards the forest, and the servant being the only voice of normality. Everything left is Stats, buying abilities and spells, and general frippery for setting stuff up, but after that we're pretty much done. I probably won't go so in depth for those, since they're not interesting close up, but they'll get a long discussion.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 8, 2020 04:39
|
|
|
SHADOWRUN 5E a few days ago I had a thought bubble up. “hey you should read and run shadowrun”. I have not known peace since. It’s a fascinating game. There’s a lot of things that are probably bad, a surprising amount of things that are Actually Good, and plenty of overlap between the two, but it’s always interesting. It’s a fantasy cyberpunk rpg emerging from the 80s about paralegal pro-criminals getting involved in bullshit, with multiple huge dicepools for nearly every action, bonkers lore and intense granularity, at least 3 nearly exclusive dimensions for things to happen in, and lots of gear. I don’t have any real experience with shadowrun. I’ve got a lot from osmosis: a broad overview of the concept and themes, as well as specific highlights like > There was a dragon who became president and then exploded in some sort of magical ritual and left a huge will that hosed with everyone in incredible/hilarious ways, including flat million nuyen bounties and big shadowrun opportunities. > There’s an elf called harlequin everyone hates. >Insect Spirits are bad news. I thought this was regular insects for a while but there’s apparently other planes of existence that hate this one and want to make it suffer as some sort of crossover with another fantasy rpg called Earthdawn. Not sure if that’s still a thing though. This is a good point to clarify I’m not familiar with the actual product directly. This is a first timer, though I have actually read the book in prep. I’m expecting to get things wrong, either ruleswise or with the story. There’s a lot to take in. The book starts immediately with an intro telling you how badass you need to be to become a shadowrunner and also are, and then giving you a slang dictionary. Tone could not be set better. Mostly its standard cyberpunk slang from neuromancer as well as hackneyed fantasy racism like Dandelion Eater (elf) or Squishy (non-orc/troll). Ones that aren’t those tend to be good, like Mr Johnson and Chummer, which is a lot stronger than Cyberpunk 2020’s Choombatta. It’s also got one of the frequently occurring short stories. It’s not badly written though it’s a lot of setting style at once: Weird out of date iconography, lots of proper nouns and a general aesthetic mixing pot that’s hard to take your eyes away from. quote:“So next time you geek the elves, end the firefight, an’ get here on time. You ain’t back in your precious Portland. You gotta earn your nuyen in Seattle, kid.” “Right.” Gentry sighed and rolled his eyes, ignoring that, if anything, he was probably a year or two older than the ork.  Lets go, chummers. Wrestlepig fucked around with this message at 22:24 on Oct 17, 2020 |
|
#
¿
Oct 17, 2020 21:46
|
|
|
SHADOWRUN 5E Part 2: Setting Overview  I like shadowrun's commitment to places that never get attention in other similar media. This is Seattle The book makes an extremely powerful decision to follow up the prose with another section of prose. Then it gets into explaining the setting with some in-character writing going over everything with worrying insistency. I’ll translate as best as I can see. I’m well aware there’s more to it but I’ll work with what I have. Everything has a price: Apparently that’s the thematic core to the game. Solid choice for cyberpunk. Everything is heirarchies defined by conflict to control resources. And also in Shadowrun. The book then starts talking about magic, and how it returned to the world in force officially on 24/11/2011 (so I presume there’s some alt history going on). People had been getting born as Elves and Orcs for a little while, but a Dragon flew around in japan that day and made it official and not some weird genetic condition. After that people figured out how to be wizards, and fantasy stuff is by this point relatively normal, though wizards are rare enough. Dragons are apparently a big deal and tend to be in positions of power. You kind of just have to go with it. It mixes the formula up, and works for RPGs pretty well, at least. It’s dumb, but a dumb that works. Then come Megacorps: the book glosses over how these got started and just say they got a special legal claim to ‘Extraterritoriality’, which lets them act a lot like nation-states, and exert huge levels of control over everyone and everything in their grasp. The world is dominated by 10 different Megacorps, who control the Corporate Court, a UN-style system of arbitration between them. There are other corporations, but the 10 are the main powers. 1. Ares Macrotechnology: Very american style weapons, manufacturing and tech, with a lot of industrial power. Their CEO is named Damien Knight, a name that screams Metaplot. 2. Aztechnology: Kind of like Amazon in a lot of ways. They dominate low level consumer goods but get all over the place, including magic and military stuff. The book says they allegedly love blood magic and evil conspiracies. Also like Amazon. 3. EVO Corporation: Transhumanists looking to take humanity to the next stage of evolution. The next one after the whole magic and metahumanity. Lots of cyberware, genertic engineering and spacefaring, as well as services and products for non-humans. They have a touchy-feely corporate culture, so I hate them more than the aztec guys. 4. Horizon: Specialists in manipulating opinion via media, as well as pharma and real estate (moreso than the regular nation-level megacorp.) They’re apparently nice to Technomancers, unlike me. 5. Mitsuhama Computer Technologies: Computer and robotics focused, as well as a lot of magical goods. They’re apparently very closely tied to the Yakuza, and have a Zero tolerance policy against Shadowrunners, but pay well if they’re hiring and you succeed. 6. Renraku Computer Service: Japanese traditionalists who control huge amounts of data and the internet in Asia. They have some scary military guys called the Red Samurai. Guys I think cyberpunk has a weird relationship with japan 7. Saeder-Krupp Heavy Industries: A german megacorp almost entirely owned by a Dragon named Lofwyr, who’s apparently a tough one to deal with. Mostly in heavy industry, chemicals, finance and aerospace. 8. Shiawase Corporation: A Japanese Zaibatsu that is also traditionalist. More of a family business, which tends to have a lot of infighting that’s good for runs. 9. Wuxing Incorporated: A chinese megacorp that controls a lot of the pacific. Attempts to be very culturally chinese and steeps employees with that culture. No yellow panic there. 10. NEONET: I hosed up the alphabetic order and can’t be hosed fixing it. NEONET do the internet, including managing the Grid Overwatch Division, so gently caress these guys. They have a fractured board full of weirdos, including a dragon, and tend to be unpredictable clients for runners. Next time: The rest of the setting, with Cyberware, nations, crime and Shadowrunning. Wrestlepig fucked around with this message at 22:26 on Oct 17, 2020 |
|
#
¿
Oct 17, 2020 22:23
|
|
|
Madurai posted:It was the Eighties, everyone had a weird relationship with Japan. shadowrun still has it in a pretty incredible way with stuff like katanas being objectively better than regular swords. I love it as a weird retro period piece and part of shadowrun's weird aesthetic charm, but it is Problematic
|
|
#
¿
Oct 17, 2020 22:59
|
|
|
Ithle01 posted:As someone who has run SR in the past at the behest of a friend I can straight up tell you that the contrast between its own hype and the reality of playing the game are like night and day. It has all the worst elements of 90's game design, on top of a poo poo ton of problems that it creates for itself. Running this game was infuriating and if anyone asks me to run it again I might literally punch them in the stomach. SR is a game for people who enjoy the idea of growing up to be an accountant, but also love the Highlander franchise. It's a game that loves cyberpunk aesthetics, but only skin deep. However, it's a great game to go shopping in, I will give it that. rest assured when I get to the mechanics I will froth at the mouth, the rules are generally overcomplicated and super-granular nonsense. But interesting nonsense.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 17, 2020 23:13
|
|
|
SHADOWRUN 5e more broad setting concepts The setting chapter continues talking about Cyberware. Originally for prosthetics, it became another way to get ahead of your competition in the rat-race everything is now. Get a new hand so you can type faster, or directly interface with tech, or something. It hasn’t gone especially wild with the tech, there’s no Full Borg conversions like in Cyberpunk 2020, but it’s a prominent part of the setting. For whatever reason, getting your form altered affects your soul: draining away at something called your Essence. There’s been a lot of dialogue about this: It’s a metaphor for losing yourself by embracing tech and conflict, selling out in pursuit of power and so on that doesn’t line up with questions like: “isn’t this saying transgender people have less of a soul?” or “If I’m disabled and get life-changing medical treatment why am I a lesser being on some level” or “hang on, there’s elves and orcs, so the concept of metahumanity is pretty flexible, and they have the same essence, so why is tweaking Human-ness negative?” or “Why not just get this on a pair of glasses or my commlink?” Some of these have answers. 1. Its magic: If you lose essence you also lose a roughly equivalent magic stat. So there. 2. It doesn’t really have too much of an impact if you aren’t a Wizard or Adept. A Social character will want to avoid it to an extent as it has an uncanny valley effect that reduces your Social skills a bit, but you’ll come out ahead if you don’t go overboard. Other than that as far as I can tell it just makes it easier to survive a vampire attack. 3. 70% of the time you’ll want it on an external device. Unless you’re a Rigger and need a direct interface control to possess vehicles and drones, or a Street Samurai wanting the most out of a Smartlink and Wireless Reflexes, you’ll probably just look for some stat boosts and minor things. I would put ‘game balance’ as reason four but this game doesn’t give a poo poo and even if it did it’d gently caress it up somehow.  The game gives a little chat about the general lives of people. There’s a broad class divide between people who have a System Identification Number, or SIN, that gives them a place in government and corporate systems, and SINless people who form a broad underclass. SINners are generally wageslaves working dull 12-hour shifts in a faceless corp who suppress your freedoms and self-expression and keep you in their ecosystem, and SINless people, mostly people convicted of crimes, or victims of discrimination, generally anyone who ends up with a bad permanent record, who live as best they can in the shadows, generally in poverty unless they strike it big. As a shadowrunner, you’re probably without a legit SIN. It’s some solid flavour, though it’s a pretty big mechanical thing: Either you invest in a solid fake one if your GM is potentially going to gently caress you over or you like the taste of the flavour stuff, or you don’t care too much. All the nations of the world are still around: They’re generally interesting at least at this broader level. America was split apart by native american secessionist movements shortly after magic arose, and got shuffled up pretty heavily. They don’t go into much detail, which is interesting: The book doesn’t even mention the Ghost Dance or Howling Coyote in the broad strokes. The main players are UCAS, a united northern America and Canada that’s close to the current USA. There’s the Native American Nations, a broad banner of different countries built around coalitions of different first peoples. There’s a Confederacy but the book doesn’t say how racist they are, just that the security corp Lone Star is from there. There’s a couple other independent city states as well. California and Quebec seceded, Denver’s hosed up and there’s an Elven nation called Tir Tairngire.  Down past Texas everything is split between Aztlan where Mexico is, dominated by Aztechnology, and Amazonia, run by a eco-friendly dragon. Asia has Imperial Japan coming back, and it has a lot of megacorporate power sourced from it. Hong Kong is a runner’s haven with lots of action, and Russia is split up into pieces but has a lot of weight to throw around, including the industrial hub of Vladivostok. Europe is pretty lame: Germany has expanded under the control of Saeder-Krupp, but has a high Neo-Anarchist presence and a lot of ecological disaster. The balkans are politically unstable, but everything else is business is usual. It really says that. I’m pretty sure Ireland is supposed to have gone to the elves, no mention of that though. Africa has a lot of radical changes going on: Egypt has expanded though the neighbouring nations hold it at bay, including Ethiopia which seems to have grown. There’s a Ghoul Kingdom of Asamando (Badass unless it gets into weird territory with cannibal tribes, it doesn’t say), The Kingdom of Nigeria is expanded and has tribal infighting over oil revenue, Kenya is a hub for space travel, and the south is dominated by a growing but fractured nation of Azania. Pretty cool on a surface level, but plenty of room to go wrong. Oceania is wild: Australia has an outback swept by wild magic and has all sorts of strange para-zoology going on, and Tasmania is sentient and hates technology. They tried to annex Papua New Guinea and it only kind of stuck, so there’s a resistance movement there. It’s interesting since the core is clearly “This is what someone from 1980 knew about Australia” Governments still exist but generally don’t have much power to stand against Shadowrunners or Megacorps on a local level. Political groups are a big deal for Runners though, either as targets, clients or hired goons for someone else. There’s a lot of racial supremacist groups, like Humanis, basically the proud boys or Maga fucks of 2070, and a lot worse beneath. There’s metahuman equivalents of varying niceness, like the political Ork Rights Commission or the violent Sons of Sauron. I think the Elf equivalent was super successful since there’s multiple elf nations that are probably supreme assholes. Any runner I’d play is probably going to be cool with Ork Malcom X, they get discriminated against a lot in the setting. And also in the mechanics but whatever. It talks a little about organised crime around here as well, since you’ll engage with it a lot. The mafia is practically a megacorp, the Yakuza almost is since they’re so tied to Mitsuhama, the Triads are doing well since they’re decentralised, which helps them adapt to new demographics like metahumans and magic users. The russian mob, Vory v Zakone, are a lot more direct and violent than others, and the Koshari, the native american crime syndicate, specialise in smuggling and dealing magical gear and talismans. Regular street gangs and bikies are common, and generally have a dumb theme. There’s also Neo Anarchists, which is a broad label for basically the whole left. Since the world’s run by megacorps, they’re pretty reasonable. They get recommended as useful allies, if annoying.  There’s a couple broader conspiracies and other Shadow Groups it namedrops as well. Jackpoint is a super-expert hacker collective, The Denver Nexus is a hacker group guarding a secret haven of data, The Black Lodge is bad news: a group of secretive wizards that have a lot of secretive political control that you don’t want to cross. New Revolution is dedicated to bringing back the United States of America, a move that will piss off practically anyone with any point of view at all. As a minor note as well: Academia. Most universities are corporate training, but a few are still independent and useful clients and contacts, since they’re free thinkers. Magic is a big subject of study: there’s some relatively benign groups like the Draco Institute or MIT&T, or the Atlantean Foundation that appreciate a mage’s help, or need a run done to grab archaeological finds, magic critters or other useful info. Next Time: Culture and Shadowrunning
|
|
#
¿
Oct 18, 2020 02:34
|
|
|
mllaneza posted:And there are a couple of FitD and PbtA Shadowrun hacks. Forged in the Dark seems tailor made for anything cyberpunk-related, especially the heist/caper setup that SR is built around. The modern hacks work very well, but the abstraction comes at a cost of having more interesting execution and decision making. I'd love to see the complexity done properly. I like the core of a lot of the systems, as well as poo poo like going through lists and customizing your gear to an absurd degree. Maybe something like the one-roll engine, or just a Heavy pruning of this one. Wrestlepig fucked around with this message at 03:12 on Oct 18, 2020 |
|
#
¿
Oct 18, 2020 03:08
|
|
|
SHADOWRUN 5E Daily Life and Shadowruns. quote:As he approached the front of the line, he saw a guy in a battered coat sitting on the curb, begging. Begging from the unemployed, he thought. Nice move. A dwarf with a black beard was standing next to him, hand on his shoulder, consoling him. Despite all the magic and advanced tech, the world of shadowrun sucks rear end to live in. If you’re lucky, you have a steady job and work 12-16 hours in a totally controlled environment and lifestyle without any major freedoms, earning a wage that’s probably dogshit and just company scrip. If you aren’t, you’re probably heavily impoverished and exploited in different ways, or just an obstacle at best. A lot of the concerns are a little old-fashioned, but they’re still generally the same as we’d have, just more extreme. That’s why you’re a Shadowrunner. If you need a distraction, the easiest way is online on the Matrix: the omnipresent internet connecting basically everything. Most people stay in Augmented Reality to have a constant overlay of information and access to media. Hackers tend to go full Virtual Reality mode to gently caress around, since it’s faster and more flexible. The internet went wireless pretty recently, and the corps have taken back a lot of control. Music is still a big deal: they really like rock bands, and punk is still cool. I have absolutely no issue with this, rock on. They also mention a couple other genres, like Orksploitation and Elven Folk. Once again cyberpunk media doesn’t reference the noise-reggae in Gibson, so boo to that. There’s also 3d immersive video and TV called Trideo for some reason, and Sports is very celebrity focused, with lots of social media and branding available. New sports include Urban Brawl, which is corp-sponsored gang warfare basically, and Motorbike Polo. Food is mostly soy-based: it’s a cheap easy to grow protein source. Most cheapish food is built on it, including stuff like ersatz coffee, and meat is a luxury. Cheap stuff tends to be packed with fake sugar, and franchises like Stuffer Shack sell piles of fast food. That one’s an Aztecnology subsidiary, so don’t get the soylent green burrito. There’s a bit on sex as well: prostitution is legal and people don’t really care about gender, which is neat. On the other hand, the brothel industry gets pretty messy when enmeshed in dystopian capitalism: they mention things like Bunraku parlors (japanese for Puppet) where the workers are given surgical alterations and personality-changing chips to resemble celebs and similar, which is pretty nasty. Stick to the VR chips that let you get a direct sensory exchange. Shadowruns have a pretty consistent structure, both in and out of the narrative. First you get your crew and meet up with whoever’s contracting and paying you. Typically this is someone going by Mr Johnson, a professional liason for a corp or similar, who’s in charge of introducing the mission and paying you. They’re notorious for loving you over, always hiding details or having other motives. Once you have the job, go do some legwork to get information for yourself and a plan. We aren’t playing blades in the dark, so this can take some time, so GM make sure to spice it up a little. Then you go do the thing, then meet up with Mr Johnson and get the rest of your pay, plus whatever bonuses you can squeeze out of him. Invariably something goes wrong in all this, but whatever. No wonder every shadowrun game is “I spend 3 hours covering my rear end in case the gm fucks me over”. Runs cover a variety of different goals, though the most common is Take something from someone, whether that’s taking data or prototypes or people. Other common ones are destroying things, killing people, delivery or protecting something. Sometimes you might be more civic minded and help out your community, or it’s done as a distraction. And that’s basically the setting. There’s more detail on specific things in later sections, but this covers everything the books think you need to know. There’s obviously a lot more than that, but I only care about this book. It’s an interesting dystopia, though it’s basically Cyberpunk 101: Capitalism sucks and conformity hurts the soul, and it’s insanely badass to be a pro criminal. Also magic is there, not really directly touching the cyberpunk setting from what it establishes. Maybe it’s different in Tir Tairngere, but as far as I can tell there’s 5 elves eating soy-noodles and hanging around online while smoking weed there as well. Next time: the rules begin.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 18, 2020 04:14
|
|
|
SHADOWRUN 5e The core rules. This is where it all starts to fall down a little. We’ll skip past the what is an rpg bit, I assume you know the basics, and get to the good stuff. Your standard test in shadowrun has a couple more things and a lot more dice than a normal test. Typically you add an attribute stat and a skill, and then roll that many six sided dice. Every one that comes up as a 5 or 6 is a Hit. Most tests have a Limit on how many successes you can have, to cut back on the absurd dicepools you were expecting. These either come from gear, or a derived statistic. Each test has a Threshold for how many Hits you need to succeed, and getting over that amount tends to give a benefit. Typical thresholds are 1 for an easy test, 2 for something average, 4 for something hard, and so on. If you get at least half of your dice as a 1, you Glitch, and something bad happens. This can happen on failures or successes, and if you still roll enough hits you still succeed. There are also Critical Glitches if you get at least half the dice as ones but without any Hits, and those are a lot worse. There’s some guidelines for these, basically ‘Don’t kill the party for these’. You can negate these with Edge, at least. We’ll get to that later. A lot of tests are Opposed tests, where instead of a threshold, the target rolls as well and the most successes wins. This system loves to do opposed tests whenever it can, which is going to slow things down and add complexity. There’s also Extended tests, where you can roll again and again every set interval until you have enough successes. Your dice pool diminishes by 1 every time you try. This lets you abstract a few things away, but a lot of things are too granular to use this to solve the 'Decker soloing in VR/Mage solo Astral Projecting/Rigger piloting a drone while everyone fucks around' issue. These tests have Glitches work differently, reducing the overall accumulated Hits by a bit. Teamwork lets everyone roll to see if they help, and each test that gets at least a hit gives an extra dice to the Leader and an increase to the limit by 1. This is capped by the Leader’s skill or attribute, but it’s a pretty huge deal. If you repeat tests, there’s a -2 penalty each time. Normally I go by the Burning Wheel principle of “If you fail, you have to try something else” but time is tight enough that this is fine here. Time is important: the game advises you its fine to keep as abstract, which it isn’t really, but goes into the general economy. Each action in combat, you can take at least 1 free action (more if it makes sense), either 1 Complex action or two Simple actions. Each turn takes 3 seconds, and you can have more than 1 Action in a turn. We’ll get to that later, Action Economy is going to be a fun thread through this commentary. We then get into the ingredients of a Character. We won’t be worrying about personalities here, so we jump straight into Races, or Metatypes. Humans are standard. Common baselines. They get a little extra Edge, which is a drat good deal. Dwarves are short and tough. They’re viewed as hard workers, which the corps love, but due to their size, they have a little extra cost to their lifestyle for things to get adapted to them. Elves. Tall, thin, graceful, fast and long-living. People reading this who know Shadowrun are probably clenching their fists. There’s rumors that some elves have been alive for a long time and hid during the long age of no magic somehow. Not sure how that works. Orks look brutish, with big statures, brows and horns. Often discriminated against for their antisocial, violent behavior, which some of them do, but they’re just as capable of things as humans. Aside from the inherent mechanical disadvantages that would justify the racism somewhat, of course. Trolls are even more Orky. They tend to have horns and bone spurs around, and are real huge and real tough. Mechanically if you aren’t going for a bruiser type, being a troll is mostly a downside. You also have attributes. There’s 8 general ones and a few special ones to keep an eye on. BODY is Constitution. Important, especially since this game doesn’t increase health as easily as other big games. AGILITY is Dexterity, and is used for every weapon skill and stealth. Do not scrimp on agility. REACTION is general reflexes, used for initiative, dodging and driving. STRENGTH is a bit of a damage boost, as well as athletics, swimming and carrying things. Generally not something you’d care about on it’s own. WILLPOWER is useful for a lot of defensive things, as well as a couple magic abilities. Not something to scrimp on. LOGIC is used for a lot of technical skills, and is important for some mages and hackers. INTUITION comes up for a few important tests, like initiative or perception. CHARISMA is a coverall for social skills, as well as helping some other sorts of mages resist drain. The special stats include Essence: Metahumanity points used as a budget for cyberware, and if it goes down, so does your Magic. MAGIC is raw magical power, used by Mages to cast spells and similar, and for Adepts as they turn their power inwards. RESONANCE is a special stat for Technomancers that shows how in tune they are with online. Lets pretend Technomancers don’t exist as much as we can, and just think of it as special internet magic for now. EDGE is a pile of bennies: you get a pool of Edge you can spend to help out with dice rolls. Edge can be a huge help: The main use is to roll your edge in bonus dice with exploding 6s that also means you ignore the Limit on the test, which is a massive deal and lets you pull off near impossible feats. You can also fix glitches, boost your initiative or squeeze in 1 last action before you pass out or die. You can also permanently burn edge to automatically succeed with 4 net hits or to not die. You get these back by GM fiat for good roleplaying, as well as on a critical glitch you don’t negate. There’s a few other things we’ll get into later: There’s a lot of skills, Contacts you can have, Advantages and Disadvantages, and a lifestyle. The rules aren't inherently bad at this point, though the dicepools have a lot going on. That said, I'm sure you can see the potential problem areas. Next time: Lets attempt to create a character and give up or get sidetracked
|
|
#
¿
Oct 18, 2020 07:25
|
|
|
SHADOWRUN 5E CHARACTER CREATION Character Creation in Shadowrun 5e is an in-depth, interesting experience that can eat my entire rear end in a top hat. On the plus side, you get a bunch of interesting things to play with, and a big shopping list. On the other hand, it’s a super-complex pile of different things everywhere else in the book. Shopping for cyberarms is my favorite thing in gaming, and I enjoyed parts of the process when I wasn’t going “Wait what the gently caress”, but it’s not exactly elegant, to put it lightly. First, you need to get a character concept set up: A broad idea of who it’s going to be, both mechanically and in the narrative. There’s a list of Common archetypes, which is useful since there’s no explicit Character Class, though in practice there’s main channels you’ll be going down without extreme crossover. I’ll put them here. A Face is a social character, doing the talking and negotiation. Classically they have a concealed pistol or two, but primarily they have a high Charisma and Willpower score, and not much augmentation. This mixes well with a few other concepts. Spellcasters are a broad category: They pack firepower and also deal with magic-related things, like Spirits. They also provide another angle for access: scrying, astral projection, that sort of thing. There’s different Traditions that will want different stats. You need a magic attribute for them and probably want a high one. Deckers are Hackers, packing a cyberdeck that lets them directly interface with the Matrix. This helps with any sort of tech obstacle, from opening a door to heisting data from virtual space. Hacking isn’t useless in combat: If you have access, you can hack gear on the fly. A similar archetype is the Technomancer, people with strange new abilities to directly interface with the Matrix without technology. You need good logic, intuition and willpower, and if you’re a Decker, a Cyberdeck and Direct Neural Interface. Riggers are people with a special cybernetic interface that lets them control vehicles and drones with their brain, as well as bringing in a drone or fifteen. Typically they’re a driver and combat engineer, and the drones let them scout and attack very well. You need a Rigger implant, a Rigger command console, and some vehicles and drones, as well as a good Reflex score. I didn’t really understand what they were for till recently. I’m going to go wild when I get to their chapter. Street Samurai are the equivalent of a fighter or Gunlugger: Heavily invested in combat to just mess up everyone. Stereotypically these guys will lean in on the Samurai side and have a code of honor or something, but mainly you want physical stats up as high as you can, and lots of weapons and enhancements. A magical equivalent is the Adept, someone who turns their magic inwards to get superhuman abilities. This isn’t everything you can be since it is a classless system. There's stealth experts and whatever a Weapons Specialist is that's different from a street samurai, mix it up between archetypes, or muck around and create something unique, but these are the classics for Shadowrun. The next step is picking your Priorities. To roughly balance out different aspects of the game, you pick the amount of different resources you get for things from a grid in order of importance, rather than have a consistent amount between each thing when everyone will value them differently: Adepts aren’t going to care about cash much while a Rigger needs to buy a lot of stuff, for example.  This grid is really not presented well, so try to imagine lines between the columns. Once you have your concept, pick what things are important to it. Here’s a couple of useful specifics. >The number next to the metatype in Column A is the amount of points they get for spending on special attributes: Magic, Edge and Resonance. Column C also comes with Magic or Resonance points potentially, so pick one that gives you your preferred species and enough magic or resonance to max out your stat there, unless you want more Edge or you only want to dip into magic for a couple tricks. >Stats are very important since they determine limits. You might not want this at max, but you definitely don’t want it low. Skills are also a priority. >If you’re not a magic user or technomancer, Column C is a freebie to put at the bottom. >Cash seems incredibly important for tech-focused archetypes and Street Samurai. Going RAW it’s not easy to get cash unless you gently caress around, so it’s best to start with a lot to make sure you have everything you need and more. Gear sets your limits for a lot of things, including attacks, so don’t cheap out unless you have a workaround. Next part: Stats, Skills and qualities.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 18, 2020 08:51
|
|
|
SHADOWRUN 5e The next part of character creation is picking out your Attributes, Skills and qualities. It’s in that order in the book, but you’ll want to go for Qualities first, since it’s probably going to impact your other choices. There are two sorts of Quality: Positive and Negative. Positive qualities cost something called Karma, and negative ones give karma. I’m pretty sure that’s the opposite of hinduism but whatever. You have a max of 25 karma you can take in both flavor of Karma, and it impacts your starting budget of 25 Karma that everyone gets. Seeing as it’s a merits and flaws system, we’re first going to max out on negatives. Most of the flaws are pretty standard, and I won’t go over everything in detail because I dont want to set a precedent about that. >Addiction is a big deal, potentially. It can apply to more than just drugs: Getting augmentations, magical foci, better than life chips and some alchemy can also be addictive. It’s not so bad at low levels, but getting it in extreme is a huge deal. This is part of a few balancing mechanics as a sort of budget, so it’s worth mentioning when we get to that. >Allergy is very gameable for some easy points: The bonus depends on how common the source is and how severe the allergy. Having a moderate reaction to something uncommon, like meat or grass, is an easy 10 points. >Code of Honor is a classic one and probably the easiest 15 points. You need to set a rule for yourself that costs karma to break, like a particular group that’s off limits (having it just be no Children is probably going to need gm approval). They add a few clauses to complicate things, like increasing awareness for leaving witnesses, and establishing potential Complications and collateral damage. There’s also equivalents like no unpaid kills, or no fighting unarmed people >Dependents take up your time, increase lifestyle costs and can complicate things. Surprisingly the book doesn’t encourage gms to target them, just use them to cause a little hassle. The more present they are, the more the karma and expenses are. >Distinctive Style makes you easier to remember or trace. Obviously your character looks cool as gently caress, I’m very suspicious of people who don’t take this. >Elf and Ork Poser are classics: Your character acts like they’re part of a racial minority, and people will think you’re a moron if they find out. Hey my shadowrun character is rachel dolezal wizard >You can be Racist, or Incompetent. Please don’t though, unless you’re swinging the Prejudiced flaw to be about Capitalists or something >SINs are a flaw that can be a big deal, if you have a legitimate record in the global data network, you can be tracked, hassled and identified, and worst of all you have to pay a tax on your gross income, which is actually lower if you have a higher-up corporate SIN. >Everything else is a difficulty or big barrier to doing a specific thing, mostly something to avoid since they added qualifiers to things to stop a wizard taking “Bad at Coding” or something. As for positives, you’ll actually want to be a little careful with these. Your budget for qualities is also going to be used for Karma later, which can do a lot of things. That said, there’s definitely stuff to consider. >Exceptional Attribute is a big deal: It increases a maximum stat by 1, though it doesn’t actually give the stat point. You can use this for Magic or Resonance as well. If you have a lot tied to one stat, this is a slam dunk even at 14 karma. >Jury Rigger enables you to do quick and dirty mechanics, which is a huge deal on a run. Generally building or tweaking things takes a while. If you’re going to be a Rigger this is probably essential. >There’s some fun ones for cheap, like Ambidextrous if you want two pistols at once, or Mentor Spirit if you’re Awakened and want a ghost buddy. There’s nothing else worth caring about, generally it’s just +2 dice on a particular test. Next you should pick your stat budget and get that sorted out. You get a pile of stats based on your pick for column B, and your special stats come from A and C. You’ll want to max out your most important stats, since advancing later is absurdly expensive and the cost scales, while it’s a flat rate here. You’ve played bad rpgs before, you know the deal. This is a good point to get into detail about Limits. Each character has a Physical, Mental or Social limit capping the amount of Hits you can get on a single check, which is derived from stats. This is both very important, but also not really. Attacks, hacking, driving and other similar stuff will have the Gear set the limit rather than the stat, and it’s rare that you’ll need more than 4 if there’s no opposed roll. Magic gets to set its own limits that are tied to Magic You can also remove the limit with Edge, and you’ll probably have enough spare to cover if that does come up. I may be missing things, of course, but as far as I can tell limits are mainly important if you’re going to be doing general skill checks that get a benefit from more successes and aren’t tied to gear, like medicine or social checks. Edge, Magic and Resonance are special and get their own budget. Column C gives a starting point for magic, and column A gives you points to spend on increasing that or edge. You either want to max out your magic, or get the one thing you want. You probably want some Edge as well, though you don’t have to go crazy. Skills have a lot going on. I’m not even going to bother covering every skill unless it comes up. You might start with some skills from column C, but otherwise you get a budget from column D. You might notice there’s two numbers there: The second number is for buying skill packages containing 3 skills that you can advance together. You can also get Specialisations, giving +2 dice to a subset of the category, like taking Katana as a specialisation of Blades. Skills max out at 6 otherwise. You get a free budget of (Intuition+Logic) times two for knowledge skills and extra languages. These tend to be specific, but the budget’s pretty solid for a flavour thing. Keep in mind you can google stuff with your mind or get it installed in your brain. It's all kind of messy. It all kind of feels like 5 editions of additions getting made, because it is. At least there's a certain logic to it. If you liked 80s design though, you haven't seen anything yet Next time: Lets Crank off to Gear Porn
|
|
#
¿
Oct 18, 2020 23:06
|
|
|
feedmegin posted:Tbf this is literally ripped right out of Neuromancer There's a huge amount of Neuromancer poo poo in shadowrun, I'd be keeping track but I'm halfway through a reread so I'd miss stuff. Rest assured if something is in Neuromancer it's probably in shadowrun outside of specific branding, the Rasta stuff and a super AI (though there probably is somewhere). E: Shadowrun does have tone issues, but it's well aware that it's a dystopia and that things are very bad due to rampant capitalism. Wrestlepig fucked around with this message at 00:26 on Oct 19, 2020 |
|
#
¿
Oct 19, 2020 00:21
|
|
|
SHADOWRUN 5e. GEAR part 1. To understand Shadowrun, we shall first buy a gun. The gear section is at the end of the book, but I’m going to discuss it here since it’s so tied to character creation. This game loving loves gear. It loves your stuff to be as detailed as possible, and to have a huge pile of poo poo to use on heists, either as new options or investments to protect against obstacles. I love it too, in the same way I love eating an entire pizza. It’s a lot, its gonna cause problems but it’s hard to resist. Lets go through the process of buying a gun. I haven’t bothered making a whole guy, but lets say we made a street samurai, and he needs to pick a gun. First he needs to find his preferred type of weapon. There’s a few core weapon skills: The more common weapon types are > Pistols, which are cheap, concealable and accurate. There’s Light Pistols that tend to be accurate and small, Heavy Pistols which hit hard, Holdouts that are very easily concealed, and Tasers for non-lethal use. >Automatics: Covering machine Pistols, SMGs and Assault Rifles. Probably the most versatile choice. >Longarms: big, low rate of fire guns like Shotguns and Sniper Rifles. >Heavy Weapons: big machine guns, Explosive launchers, everything fun and impractical. >Throwing Weapons: Mostly for grenades, but throwing knives are kind of wild: If you have them connected to you wirelessly you get a dicepool bonus the more you throw. I love dumb cyberpunk For Melee, you just have Blades for cutting and Clubs for bludgeoning, which includes staves. Some things will tie to unarmed as well. Katanas are almost always the best weapon for anyone interested in being a melee guy, though a polearm or Combat axe has upsides, and a knife is easier to conceal. There’s a couple unarmed options as well: Brass knuckles or shock gloves. There’s also a lot of Exotic Weapons that get their own skill. Bows and Crossbows are kind of useful: Bows tie directly to Strength so Trolls can be absurdly good archers, but otherwise it’s a flavor choice that might be handy for stealth types. Other than that there’s the classic monofilament whip, squirt guns full of drugs, dart guns that shoot drug injectors and a microwave pain projector. Cute. We first want to pick the right weapon for him from the list. Every weapon has a set of stats to consider. Accuracy is an important stat: It acts as a limit on the amount of successes we can get. The to hit role for every weapon is tied to agility, and extra successes mean extra damage, but we can’t get more hits than the weapon’s Accuracy. So to optimise, (and of course we’re going to optimise, don’t give me so many toys if you don’t want me to play with them) we want to get as much accuracy to stop us from wasting successes. The other stats are the Damage it deals as a baseline, which is either Stun or Physical, and the Armor Penetration that modifies the damage resistance roll, the price, and finally availability.  At character creation, we’re capped at getting things at availability 12, and later on our ability to shop for things is tied to rolling for max availability. Some weapons have a letter R or F next to them. R stands for Restricted: you need a license to carry it around, or a fake one, which is another item. F is Forbidden, which means outright illegal for basically everyone. Some really good choices are forbidden, so it can complicate the choice, but I can’t imagine the license system being relevant often. Also present is the type and size of the clip: the bigger sorts of clips take longer to reload, but don’t need to as much. Additionally, there’s the fire rates: whether the gun can go full auto, is it burst fire or single shot, semi auto, whatever. The more bullets in play let you reduce enemy defense and do suppressive fire, but there is a recoil system because of course there is. Some melee weapons have reach: more or less reach alters defense a little. Now that the weapon’s been picked, we get to Customise it. Ranged weapons generally get top, barrel and underbarrel slots for mods, (only the latter if they’re large enough) as well as different ammo types. The biggest one is a Smartgun mod, which gives a lot of benefits if it’s connected to you electronically: You can do things like eject clips and change firing modes with a thought, shoot around corners without poking out, and most importantly a boost to accuracy. If it’s Wireless you get an extra dice to roll, even more if it’s an augmentation that cost essence. You can even get an internal version of the mod, which is pricier and ups the availability, but saves you a slot. There’s also a lot of recoil compensator tools, a silencer, laser sights as a weaker choice than the smartgun and a few holsters with minor concealment or quick-draw benefits. There’s also an option that turns a gun into a turret, which is the only mod that gives interesting options rather than “The gun is better now”.  Shout out to Scopes as well, since they work by giving slots to use with vision enhancements and get modded like eyeware or cyberware. We’ll get to that soon. There rarely is a Best Gun option: Accuracy does mix things up pretty well. My instinct is to get around a 3rd of what you’ll be rolling as accuracy, probably over by a little for good measure, and then get the most damage you can. Or just get an Ares Alpha, which gets an underslung grenade launcher and smartgun built into it. You might want to buy a violin case too since it’s super illegal, but what more could you want? Next time: More gear stuff Wrestlepig fucked around with this message at 04:06 on Oct 19, 2020 |
|
#
¿
Oct 19, 2020 04:02
|
|
|
SHADOWRUN 5e Gear part 2: General Rules and Miscellany. We’ve still got a lot of things we want, and plenty of nuyen to spend. So lets talk gear. If you’re shopping for black market gear outside of character creation, you need to work a bit, and test Negotiation+Charisma (with a social limit) against the availability rating, and if you succeed, it gets delivered after an amount of time based on the price, faster if you succeeded well. Glitches cause things to get messy, deals to go sour, etc. Contacts can also do the shopping for you, if you have one. You can also fence gear, which is pretty tedious. First you need to do an extended Etiquette + Charisma check to even find a buyer, and then selling is 25% of the listed price, varying up or down based on successes on another opposed test. Alternatively you can get a middleman to handle it for you at a rate of 5% times his loyalty rating. The Face is probably going to want to invest in that. Concealment is a big deal for some characters and less for others. There’s a few things going on with spotting and hiding gear, with different tests for seeing or patting down, and bigger things make it harder to hide. I feel like most people are just going to try a workaround for the bigger hardware if they’re going in disguise, or ignore this, but it’s treated as a big deal and probably should be. The game is swingy enough somebody’s going to fail if the whole party checks though. One thing everyone has to consider is The Internet of Things. Everything is wireless capable: Even primitive things will have RFID chips to keep track of data. It’s not always on though: If you turn on the wireless mode, it can benefit from superfast data, which lets you track and get info on it, and a lot of gear gets an extra benefit when set to wireless: Mostly speeding up a few things. The downside is that it makes you vulnerable to hackers, who don’t have to plug in. It’s a good point to mention an important bit of gear here: the Commlink. It’s kind of like a smartphone, enabling communications, AR and VR Matrix access, and access to media and communications. Most importantly, you can use your Commlink to set up a Personal Area Network: linking your potentially vulnerable devices together so you can use the Commlink’s security instead of the devices. The weakness is that if you can hack the attached device, you get the network as well, but it’s more secure overall. Get your decker to fight off any infiltrators, and you’re probably secure. Maybe bring a backup that’s off grid, just in case. This isn't going to make sense till the hacking chapter. You’ll want armor, of course. It’s relatively simple: more armor is more dice rolled when reducing damage taken, and if the armor value is higher than the damage, turns it to stun instead of physical. It’s also cheap and generally not an obstacle to anything. Most wearable stuff gives armor and has capacity to upgrade against more exotic obstacles, but a few have a minor bonus as well. You can also grab a helmet and shield for a bit of extra armor. Armor is cheap and important, so everyone should invest. A fake SIN and licenses is probably essential unless your GM doesn’t care. As a shadowrunner you probably don’t have a legit one, so getting a fake is very important. Unless your GM doesn’t care since it’s a hassle. These have a rating that covers how good they are. You also need an undetermined amount of licenses: To carry guns, one for each restricted bit of gear, being a mage or having particular augments. This is just a tax for anti-GM protection, outside of maybe one comedy scene with a security guard. This is everything that everyone’s going to keep in mind, but make no mistake, there’s a lot of gear going on. There’s piles of breaking and entering gear, Comms tools, 5 seperate RFID chips, explosives, Credsticks that give a limit of wallet space, programs, software chips for your brain, cutting tools, toolsets, piles of survival gear, vehicles and drones (more on that later), a grappling hook gun with 4 different types of rope, superglue, medical gear, 4 levels of ambulance coverage, 3 different periscopes, and a system for handling Sensors. It’s probably too much, and a lot of it is just “are you insured for this potential obstacle” but I can’t deny the appeal. Next time: Getting Enhanced.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 19, 2020 08:09
|
|
|
8one6 posted:For the discerning Shadowrunner might I recommend the Victorinox Memory blade concealed in the lining of a belt. There’s really not many fun melee weapons in this, it’s just the medieval set and a couple cyberpunk classics. Not even vibroblades even though they’re in an example. You also don’t get any customisations outside of being a cool wizard/adept and making a weapon focus.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 19, 2020 08:57
|
|
|
LGD posted:yeah, the melee stuff is pretty boring (and the rules as written pretty heavily disadvantage melee combat) - probably worth pointing out the degree to which the Monofilament Whip is an outlier though I'm not really experienced enough with the system to really gauge balance beyond going "Wait what the gently caress that can't be right" but melee does come off worse than guns if you give them a look. Here's a quick comparison a katana's a very good example, since it's typical for a runner. It has 7 Accuracy, which is the highest for a melee weapon, and does Strength plus 3 damage, plus any net successes after you hit. It's got a pretty solid armor penetration of -3, which reduces the dice pool for absorbing the hit. To compare, we can grab an AK-97, a pretty basic gun. It has only 5 accuracy, but deals a flat 8 damage on a hit. It's only got -2 armor penetration, but you'll considering that it doesn't care about a stat, you're probably coming out ahead. For cheap, we can just make it a smartgun and bring the accuracy up to 7 for relatively little in Essence/Nuyen, as well as getting 2 extra dice to roll. That's not even factoring in rapid fire, or suppressive fire, or even better guns. You're vulnerable to hackers, but you can turn off the wireless part with a thought. Melee has a couple edge cases, like if the other guy sucks at melee you might want to charge, or you're a wizard with a weapon focus to cover low stats and stab spirits, or the Monowhip (12 damage, -8 to armor). Guns are better nearly all the time: Less stat investment, probably more damage. I always shy away from Exotic Weapon stuff, personally. It feels limiting. It's also boring design to not let people play with the toy.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 19, 2020 13:00
|
|
|
Another thing I wanted to mention is that every time you look at the gear section you'll find something new and fascinating. For instance, monofilament wire is 50 nuyen for a hundred meters, and does 8 damage with -8 Armor penetration if you touch it without proper protection. Just string up monofilament wire everywhere you don't want people walking through. This is the magic of shadowrun and gear porn: It stimulates the imagination. Of course once the dice start rolling who knows how long that'll last.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 19, 2020 13:04
|
|
|
SHADOWRUN 5e CYBERWARE  Cutting Edge tech Enhancing your body with tech to make yourself cutting edge was an effective metaphor for capitalism in the eighties, back when we believed corporate culture had any sort of cutthroat meritocracy or infighting. It’s also an insanely badass thing to do, so Cyberpunk games give us a nice catalogue. To get enhanced, cyberware costs Essence as you replace your metahuman bits. This is mostly a budgeting tool, there’s no cybertherapy or empathy boosting like in Cyberpunk 2020. It only directly interacts with Magic and a little bit of social stats, so it’s not a huge deal to invest in. Replacement bits and extensive cyberware tends to come with a specific Capacity for further enhancements that can use it as an alternative cost. If you get cybereyes, you aren’t less human if you make them better, but there’s only so much you can fit in. Most cyberware has a rating that shows general levels of quality and their inherent firewall, and better is more expensive and often more invasive. Some cyberware gives an attribute bonus which is capped at +4 per stat, outside of a couple edge cases. I can’t find the reference on that though. As well as level of quality, you can get different grades of cyberware that increase the price but cost less Essence, or the other way around if it’s Used. Also covered in the category is Bioware, which is a separate set of genetic/biological grafts that costs a lot of nuyen but is far better for essence. I also lump stuff like optical and audio wearables in the same category since it works in the same way. It’s no essence cost to wear glasses, but it tends to be worse than the implant version. Getting cybersurgery does three times the essence cost in damage but can’t start killing you, mostly to enforce downtime. Headware is a major category: it has a lot of the classics with a low essence cost. If you’re a rigger, you’ll want the best Control Rig you can get to directly interface with vehicles and drones, and the classic Skilljack lets you buy ratings in skills, though you’ll need to get Skillwires seperately if you want more than knowledge. All the general cyberpunk bits are here: data plugs, the Johnny Mnemonic thing, a bomb in your head, VR enhancers and implanted computers, and sensory boosts that don’t have their own housing, like smell and taste boosters, or sonar vision. Considering what I’ve heard about Shadowrun campaigns, spending change on a weird tool isn’t that bad an idea, even the crustiest gm isn’t going to expect getting tracked by scent. Eyewareis a solid investment for a low essence and cash cost. It comes with cosmetic options, a camera and streaming capacity, as well as more slots than you’d ever need. It’s got the standard tools like night-vision and defence against a few things, but mainly you’ll want vision enhancement for better perception tests and a smartlink to shoot better. For spicier options you can get a Drone option that lets you take it out and send it around, or retinal duplicators that can replicate other eyes for scanners.* You know, I’ve never actually seen any cyberpunk game mention getting big reflective lenses like Molly Millions instead of just robot eyes. They take everything else from Neuromancer but I’ve never seen that. Earware is pretty boring, mostly minor benefits outside of a perception boost and flashbang protection. Probably an afterthought or something you’d get with headphones, unless your runner is trying to become a catboy or elf poser. Bodyware is where we get spicier. You can lace your bones and skin with metal or graft more muscles for raw stat boosts. Bone Lacing makes unarmed combat a very powerful option, and gives a boost to survivability everyone’s going to want. You can replace a fingertip with a smuggling compartment that can fit a monofilament whip inside for extreme melee power that’s almost impossible to detect. There’s a couple other utility things like replacing a lung with an oxygen tank, smuggling compartment or internal grappling hook for some reason, but the spiciest option is Wired Reflexes. It’s pricy in both Essence and Nuyen, and narratively is extremely invasive surgery that rewires your nervous system to be faster and warps your perception of reality to make everything slower, and it gives you a boost to your Reaction stat and more dice at initiative rolls. This means you get more turns and shoot first. If you’re a street samurai, you probably want this. Full on limb replacements, including the skull and torso and partial limb replacements, have a lot of detail. Every cybernetic limb gives an extra hit point and lets you deal physical damage rather than stun for unarmed combat, and has capacity for more upgrades. One very big deal with cyberlimbs is they have their own Strength and Agility settings, and if you use it, that outright replaces the usual one. This either means you probably don’t want a replacement on a street samurai, since they’re probably already good for that, but it makes it a really good choice for a rigger or decker so they can dump combat stats safely. Make sure it’s in the budget since upgrades cost money and you can’t upgrade the stats later without a whole new limb. The baselines are the same as your physical stats and can’t go higher than your natural maximums. You also need to pick whether to make it an obvious or synthetic cyberlimb. Synthetics look real, obvious ones cost a bit less nuyen and have more space.  just gently caress me up, fam Once you’ve picked what part of your body you don’t like, whether it’s obvious or not and what stats you want enhanced (probably agility and armor, maybe strength) you’ll have some capacity to fill. Implanted weapons are the most common. They tend to be a bit weaker than the handheld versions, but are heavily concealed and come with inbuilt smartguns to make up for it. Cyber Melee Weapons are very effective since they’re tied to a physical limit rather than weapon stats: Going with the classic razor nails, wolverine claws or an inbuilt tazer hand for comedy handshakes. You can also pack an inbuilt gyro-stabiliser and storage spaces. You might want to implant your Commlink or Cyberdeck in as well, because that’s a cyberpunk thing to do. Biowareis cheaper on the essence: it tends to work with the body enhancing natural features, but it costs a lot more. A lot of it is just attribute or skill increases or boosters to recovery things. Some things are more exotic, an adrenaline gland that pumps up stats for a short time before crashing down, a skin pocket and super pheremones. The latter is fortunately non-sexual: It boosts acting and influence rolls, and increases your social limit, making it essential for Faces. There’s a special category of Cultured Bioware, which is the more complex and powerful stuff, but tends to be extremely expensive in nuyen. You can get Logic-boosting brain grafts, a sleep regulator and a biological version of Wired Reflexes. That’s pretty much it for the gear: there’s magical foci, drugs, vehicles and drones, but that’s best discussed in other sections. There’s already too much going on here. There's a reason for everything, but it needs an editor. Next time: Actually sorting out gear instead of pure abstraction. *Correction: There's very little benefit to having cybereyes over glasses since the difference in wireless smartguns is minor: everyone gets the accuracy boost, no matter if its wired or in glasses. The only real advantages are capacity, ability to stack vision enhancement and the ocular drone Wrestlepig fucked around with this message at 23:13 on Oct 23, 2020 |
|
#
¿
Oct 20, 2020 04:33
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 21, 2024 01:08 |
|
|
SHADOWRUN 5e Starting Equipment. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ii-_EtWBVSM this post is long and has no pictures, so you'll need something to break this up. Here's a japanese rap mixtape with a slightly racist presentation. It is good vibes for chill street samurai chat I’ve been going over the list of stuff, processing it at a pretty raw level, and from the perspective of a dork with lots of general rpg knowledge and time. But so far it’s been abstract, and we’re technically in the character creation part: So lets look at setting up starting gear for a character. For this, lets imagine I’ve bothered making a basic character: Jenny Spade, a human Street Samurai. We’re going to assume they're generic but optimised to a basic level, with max combat stats and skill in a specific weapon type, and that their GM is playing in line with the book. They grab the B priority starting cash and get 275000 nuyen to spend. The first thing to consider is getting what’s essential for everyone. Everyone is going to want a commlink to protect anything wireless, access AR and VR and do a huge amount of data work. There’s different commlinks listed as a product, each with a different rating. The better the rating, the more protection from hacking it gives to networked gear, so unless you’re on an extreme budget get the best one available for 5000 nuyen. We’ll also want a SIN: essentially a fake id. This costs 2500 nuyen for every level of device rating, and the better the rating the better quality fake. ID checks are run as a roll for the GM of 2 times the device rating of the testing program, with the rating as a target number. If that roll gets any extra successes, the SIN’s been flagged as fake and is effectively useless. That’s what the rules say, at least, I don’t know how much anyone is gonna care, even hardcore Shadowrun Gms. The rules say get at least 2. We’ll get one at 4, our maximum, and a burner for handling the illegal stuff at 1. That’s an extra $12500, bringing us to 175000. We also might want fake licenses for our gear, which works in a pretty similar way but more infuriating. Its kind of vague about exactly what it covers, but the main pain in the rear end is you need a license to cover having a restricted item, and you’ll have a shitton of those. It’s seperate from the SIN, and you’ll want a decent amount of your stuff covered if your GM is sticking to the book. You’re going to need a weapon. Probably more than one. The other essential thing is a lifestyle: a monthly upkeep that’s mostly flavour, especially since anything above an apartment is beyond the standard Runner incomes. You also want a credstick to hold money in an untraceable fashion. We then want to get what’s required for our archetype. Mages and Adepts don’t really want much: They’ll want to set up a magic lodge and some reagents, but generally they don’t spend much. On the other end, Deckers and Riggers are all about the gear. Deckers are going to want the best deck they can find, and almost certainly a direct Neural Interface to connect in. Deckers are also going to want to really customise their deck with programs and AI helpers because it can get real difficult. Riggers are going to go wild shopping: You need a Rigger interface, a Rigger Command Console, programs for that as well, at least 1 vehicle, and a lot of drones. Anyone doing more technical skills will want gear for that, and a workshop or lab to help out. You can either get a proper facility or convert the back of a van for that. We’re a Street Samurai, so what we want to go ham on the weapons, armor and cyberware. First we’ll get enhanced, because the best weapon for us is determined by our stats, and our stats get boosted by augments. We grab 2 levels of Wired Reflexes, 2 levels of muscle toner for that sweet sweet agility and aluminium bone lacing for more body, armor and punching damage. We also get a smartlink, directly implanted rather than in a cybereye because we can get goggles for cheaper later. This all costs 249000 nuyen and about 2 thirds of our soul, but we’re a certified killing machine with room for cutesy enhancements later. If we wanted something cheaper (and we probably do, tbh) we can swap out the bioware for a cybernetic version for more essence but less nuyen, or get the smartlink on some goggles with less benefit. Right now though, we’ve spent $266,500 on ourselves, leaving us with 8500 nuyen left. That’s probably enough. We then need a gun. We’ve got 8 agility, maxing out at 6 from character creation with an extra 2 points from our enhancements. We also have automatic weapons at 6, and we can probably get 4 extra dice from a wireless smartgun and a specialisation we’ll set later. Our attack roll’s adding all that together, so we can expect to be rolling 18 dice to hit. Since a third of those will hit on average, 6 is a good target to shoot for our accuracy so we aren’t wasting too much of those. This is a pretty easy choice: We grab an Ares Alpha. It comes with a smartgun and grenade launcher, and has 7 accuracy and 11 damage for only 2650 nuyen. We may want to replace this if we advance, but it’ll do us for ages. We can screw around a little here, so we grab a backup Ares Crusader machine pistol if we need something smaller, or our other gun gets hacked and a silencer, as well as 100 bullets for each gun. This all brings our remaining budget to 6770 nuyen. We give ourselves a poor lifestyle, bringing us to 4770, which is plenty of loving-around money to buy toys with. Grenades are absurdly cheap, so we grab 5 high explosives, 3 smoke grenades and 2 rather cheap gas grenades, which we load with a relatively harmless nausea gas that makes people throw up on breathing it in. You can also just put regular drugs into them if you’re going to a party or want to ruin a board meeting. This all costs 750 nuyen. We grab an armor jacket and helmet for 14 points of defense for just 1100 nuyen. We’ve got $2920 dollars left in the budget, so lets just start loving around. We buy some dynamite, because I just read the explosive rules and they’re loving stupid and I want to talk about them. To use an explosive, first do a Demolitions + Logic roll, capped by your Mental Limit. Each hit adds 1 to the destructive rating of the explosive. To figure out how much damage it does to a barrier, take the damage value of the explosive and multiply it by 2. Then roll the barrier’s Structure and Armor. Any damage remaining after that , divide the net damage by the Structure of the object and you have the amount of square meters of hole. That’s already too much, but if you use it on people, the damage is the rating of the item plus the hits on the role, multiplied by the square root of the number of kilograms used, and then reduced by 2 every meter away from the source of the blast. That’s not even factoring in the blast rebounding rules if it’s in a confined space. And there’s no actual rules about how much things weigh. The best thing I can say is that it was made badly to stop people from using dynamite. It only costs $100 a pop, plus 75 for a plunger, so we buy 3 sticks as anti-gm collateral. With our remaining $2545 (presumably, I may have lost track and so did you probably) we keep loving around. We grab a jammer, which lets us apply a dice penalty to electronic devices, 3 aerosol superglues, a gas mask to protect against the Ares Alpha’s underslung party starter, and a crowbar. To cap it off, we grab some goggles and headphones and get an image link to keep us in AR, along with room for upgrades later. We’ll probably want vision and hearing enhancements at some point, but we’ll be fine. After all this, we have 600 nuyen kicking around, plus 3d6 times 60 nuyen from her generally impoverished lifestyle. You can’t keep more than 5000 nuyen at the start, and you can up your budget with Karma at 2000 nuyen a pop, at a max of 20000 nuyen. There’s probably better things to spend it on, unless you decided to start with the minimum of 6000 nuyen for some reason (you were an adept and couldn’t be bothered, maybe). Money rewards from Mr Johnson tend to be dogshit, but with a side hustle (constantly robbing everyone mid-run, basically starting organised crime, just stealing things for yourself instead of using a megacorp middleman and just harvesting organs and cyberware from the many, many people who will die near you), you can get enough for more later. Now that Jenny’s completely rewired her mind, body and spirit, she goes out to the local Stuffer Shack, buys two TofuRitos and crashes on the couch with her girlfriend and smokes some bliss while loving around in VR until Mr Johnson calls up and asks her to rob an armoured car or something. Download a program called Chummer if you get anywhere near shadowrun, for your own good. Especially if you want to play as a Rigger. Next Time: Final Touches and character advancement.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 20, 2020 12:06
|
|