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Oh hey, I kept deliberating on making one and didn't notice this thread got made after all. Our RED game is supposed to start... soon. Was going to be today, but "civil unrest in dystopic America" is a bit of a rough thing to field for recreation these last 48 hours. This weekend we should actually be underway. "Reclaiming" (stealing) an old SovOil ship off the coast of Night City to immediately be repurposed. Solo, Fixer, Media, Rocker(girl), and Techie. Going to be interesting.
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Jan 8, 2021 07:01
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Molnija posted:RTalsorianGames on twitter has a thread (in this case, for the Netrunners Interface) on how to convince your GM to allow for Complementary Skills (p130 in da rules) for that sweet +1 to a skill check with the power of RP. Wow, that's... Really, really generous on what's "allowed" to boost checks. Overly so, almost. Maybe my Media will actually be useful on this first run after all outside of "doing Media things on a war relic".
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Jan 8, 2021 16:38
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Double posting for a question, oops. The lack of value for empty "real" cyberware (vs medical equivalent thereof) has already been discussed. Is there really any ware that the starting 500 discretionary budget for package-based character creation can get that's actually worth it? It seems like most of the base ware modules go into is that expensive short of individual eyes, not really giving a ton of room from there, and ware you can't afford on the starting budget is also easily replaced with external equipment by the time you can... I'm not necessarily looking at this from any role perspective (though I'm a Media), just generally.
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Jan 8, 2021 17:14
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DeathSandwich posted:I need to go back and look but I believe yes, quick character gen rules just give you a one and done list of starting gear and all you need to pick is cosmetics. Starting gear list and 500 eb to spend.
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Jan 9, 2021 03:20
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Dawgstar posted:They do. There's packages and everything with pre-calculated Empathy costs for cyberware. I would really have preferred at least some more fluff to go with them. 2020 did a good job of building corporate identity through equipment and setting-fluff items.
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Jan 9, 2021 04:51
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Control Volume posted:Are there any 2020 books that focus on cyberware? Im not planning on doing conversions, just looking for ideas for npcs Not a direct answer, but found a reference list for all the cyberware for 2020 that might help you focus down on specific books based on what interests you. Just name and location, though, no info in the index.
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Jan 9, 2021 16:38
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Control Volume posted:The reference list is probably more what Im looking for lol. Thanks No problem. Most stuff is in the Chromebooks for equipment in general, I think. Daily reminder to the thread that prayerware should have made the jump.
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Jan 9, 2021 17:19
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Prayerware was in Chromebook 2 as an incidental item. I don't have my book on me, so let me channel RTG as well as I can. Still need to practice your faith while getting ground into dust by 16-hour work days and Mandatory Corporate Fun? Get yourself some DDI Prayerware, a direct line to a real* priest of your mainstream denomination that fits in your hand! Handle confession on your lunch break, seek counsel in a cab. Two-way audio and video, safe and private. *realness not guaranteed The actual item is basically just a really cheap preprogrammed video phone that can only contact your church. It was dumb but reinforced the commodification of every aspect of life when I first read it, and it's stuck with me.
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Jan 9, 2021 18:39
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SniperWoreConverse posted:oh man you know how there's prayer wheels? 100% chance there's a hologram one, or even one that's completely within a local net, like you just pull up a page and can look at it. There are already electric prayer wheels irl. FWIW prayerware is used in the same sense as "hardware", it's not an implant, but I do like synthesis of religion and technology as a theme and like this train of thought. Sikhs would stay unaugmented (incidentally we're talking about incorporating a gurudwara into our Night City as part of a character's backstory, so good thing you brought that up). The "Christians" you're talking about are Jehovah's Witnesses. Authorial note: I have JW family and have strong opinions on them. This is not a broad medical issue but a specific interpretation of Acts as pertaining to blood itself. JWs are the weird branch of "cyberpunk faiths" where you'd actually probably see more cyberware than regrown limbs and the like, even among the very upper strata, because of how things get complicated. I'm not sure how synthetic blood interacts with doctrine in all regards, but if the blood in a regrow is "your own" blood externally grown & supplied to you, I think it would fall afoul of "abstaining from blood" in terms of body continuity. Engineered hemoglobin-based substitutes are permitted but have their issues, and that only replaces one element of the blood; platelets, white blood cells, and plasma itself all still pose problems since they can't be infused as whole (though constituent fractions are accepted). Plus the issue of growing a limb without a blood supply until after it's fully grown. Cyberware neatly sidesteps all of this by, well, not having a blood supply to worry about. As long as your doc is qualified for bloodless surgery (rare but not unheard of IRL) then getting an implant is completely acceptable under doctrine. This all assumes the official Watch Tower Society doctrine, of course, and also that little to none of it adapts to the future. This is also the most I've actually thought about JW doctrine in years and stances may have shifted.
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Jan 9, 2021 19:58
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Following up first with an added comment with prayerware: cracked open Chromebook 2 and I appreciate using the PrayerWare to call the "Holy Fathers of the Perpetual Railgun" into combat. Thanks, Ripperjack. Anyway, campaign kicked off today (and wrapped up as of about two minutes before me writing this). What's the best way for a Rockergirl pop star, a washed-up war reporter, a slick fixer and his bodyguard, and a masterful techie to get out to sea and steal an old SovOil ship? Apparently, the answer is "strike a deal with a Trauma Team contact to swing back at REO Meatwagon, stage an impromptu concert outside one of their field offices, distract the limited staff on site, sabotage their TT intercept hardware, and steal a rescue boat while attention's directed elsewhere by TT". Everyone mostly got to pull some weight, dice rolled hot the whole way through, pretty good start to the campaign. Don't know that I can recommend the Foundry module we're using in place of Roll20 though (not sure the name off hand), I'd just do it manually.
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Jan 10, 2021 04:43
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SniperWoreConverse posted:Neat. Stealing one is probably the best option, and what works, works. But it could have blowback like now REO is pissed, so mabe it would have been better to make a deal with someone to get transport. Yup- this is going to come back to haunt us for sure. Fortunately thanks to some absurdly good rolls across the board (I don't think we had a single roll under 12 all session) the actual sabotage team did REALLY well and the hardware sabotage we had to do ended up netting a total 29 as a crit, so the only thing we have to worry about them being on our asses for is the boat. The best leads they have are basically "review the camera footage and try to figure out who these black-bloc-esque dudes are" and "hey it's really convenient that this singer had an impromptu concert in our parking lot right when our boat got stolen, and now she's making waves, follow up on that"... and yes, a Four Seasons Landscaping joke was made re: justifying why the hell they were trying to play a show in the parking lot of a music-themed-in-name medical corp e: regarding mapping, our GM has been using Dungeon Draft with modern/scifi plugins and it's working pretty well (a couple things that didn't have assets and needed sketching aside) for our purposes. Foundry handles the LOS stuff, and we just use separate maps for multiple floors. Moving between them gets finicky but it works okay. SkyeAuroline fucked around with this message at 18:05 on Jan 11, 2021 |
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Jan 11, 2021 17:05
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Can anyone point to some solid resources for Fourth Corporate War in-detail (as it's canon for RED, at least - I know some material has been quietly set aside)? Media for this campaign took part as a war reporter and is just now getting back "into the field", just want to familiarize myself as much as I can to pull from that. I'm sure almost all of it is 2020 supplements, just not sure what the "most important" ones are and metaplots tend to hide really important things where you don't expect.
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Jan 12, 2021 06:39
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Lawman feels right, yeah. Several roles could do zero-ware (rocker, media, and fixer should have no issue using external equipment, exec theoretically wouldn't if ware wasn't a social expectation instead) but I don't see any others that can do it and also be combat successful against their wared brethren.
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Jan 12, 2021 18:11
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DeathSandwich posted:Best 'in a nutshell' version of it is probably just the cyberpunk wiki: https://cyberpunk.fandom.com/wiki/Fourth_Corporate_War Thanks, desktop night mode extension, for automatically unhiding spoilers due to weird UI interactions. Thankfully I don't plan to play 2077 anyway so that's no big deal. Any case, yeah, guess that's the best entry point and then just follow up citations, figure out what's applicable to the character and all that. 2077/RED change much about the very end of it or is that all still played out the same as the older books? I had the guy arriving in the Night City area immediately in the wake of the nuke, so that's going to be about where local knowledge picks up for me; I know RED has a fair bit but not sure how much of that is whole cloth and how much is pulling from existing material.
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Jan 13, 2021 17:45
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DeathSandwich posted:I'm laughing at the concept of a character that calls an especially well armed neighborhood watch. Aight, if I ever take part in a pure(r) pink mohawk game it looks like I have an idea for a character. (Boarding action on a "derelict" but very much active SovOil ship as our first job probably puts us in that territory, but as usual I'm unable to not play the straight guy. Come to think of it, my group does a lot of boarding actions in any system..) Ah well, I'll put it in backup slot 3.
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Jan 14, 2021 07:22
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SniperWoreConverse posted:somebody made a setup for tabletop simulator Beautiful. I'd hate to actually play an RPG over TTS, only really see its value for board games or wargames, but that looks well done.
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Jan 14, 2021 17:20
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"Raid on the FSO Pumpernickel" part 2 today, or: "racks pistol 'ship's haunted'". After last week's boatjack from REO Meatwagon, we actually made it out to sea and found the Pumpernickel intact, floating, and very much shooting at things including us. Survived and managed to board, though pretty sure REO isn't getting that little bost back; started booting systems back up with a combination of "very competent technician" and "literally the only person in the group who can read Russian, mostly", found a weirdly well maintained camera and a small swarm of kill drones, started piecing together what the hell happened 20 years ago... poorly, granted. Ship is definitely not under our control and the bridge control consoles were all rigged with servos and switches so even the analog computer lockouts could be automated (and we found a severed skeletal hand in one of the hardware boxes where that could have been disconnected), so our current task of "get the engines running again" is likely to culminate in disaster for someone. Also the ship is apparently "parked" over some huge indistinct radar signature which is REALLY promising. Next week we try to get the ship running and hold off the maybe-cops coming to claim the thing. Overall feelings two sessions in: there are weird oversights and quirks in the rules for RED but for the most part it works. Combat isn't incredibly impressive yet, but coming from Eclipse Phase so that's nothing new. Our campaign structures tend to make things go weird compared to the intended play method so no matter what we'll be off balance a bit. I do feel like we're missing out a bit by having no Netrunner, and I am concerned that despite our game plan being the rockergirl's idea she's not exactly getting a ton of mileage at sea yet (coupled with being our newest player in an established group I'm naturally worried about being exclusionary through extant group dynamics). Also, our GM seriously went pretty hard on these maps for having done them in a program never meant for cyberpunk on a day or two notice for some of the first deck maps. 
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Jan 15, 2021 06:40
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SniperWoreConverse posted:awesome, the hand is a gruesome af little detail, just brutal. It'd be cool to find out what that sig might be, i'm gonna guess prewar habitat, & they use the ship as some kind of staging / storage / automated defense zone. Maybe it's something like that and in that case the rocker could be pretty useful, at least as a smooth talker. If not simply drive the boat directly over the cops bing bang boom problem solved. Yeah, my money is on one of the old Sov undersea outposts. Ship's navigation chart and what we were able to pin together has the ship on an emergency run to the nearest friendly shore facility before "things" happened, and this ship appears to have been an automation test bed (logs of gradually reduced crew complements and adjustments/experiments with the new robots), so my personal guess is that when things went wrong the automated system took over for the closest safe harbor, coastal or not. Does not make the sight of mechanical keyboards tapping on their own and rapid-fire windows and prompts flashing up and getting activated any more of a comforting sight. Especially since the haunted ship is very much armed and tried to kill us once already. We have at least confirmed that this is not a Soulkiller ghost OOC, which is a tiny bit of peace of mind. (came up as an extended joke while we were wrapping up)
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Jan 15, 2021 15:27
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So how much of a difference does the full customization version of character creation actually result in in terms of character effectiveness?
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Jan 18, 2021 07:39
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Today in RED: cutting a business deal with the specter of communism at sea. The SovOil ghost ship was an automated test bed whose control computer, SPECTER, was fed banned literature as an unintentional part of its "learning" and ended up directing a mutiny/"worker takeover". We found the officer corpses in very bad shape. Now we have to get it off the ship. Having a good time.
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Jan 29, 2021 06:13
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SniperWoreConverse posted:sweet. That's a pretty wild twist. It was pretty surprising to find out, yeah. Fortunately it decided "20 years in a non networked ship computer system" is quite enough time and wants the hell out now. I'm pretty sure it's still going to try and gently caress us somehow, but it helps that our Fixer is an actual anarchist organizer in setting, so we managed to dodge the "corrupted understanding of revolutionary praxis" problem that would have had it actually scuttle the ship out from under us. Now the issue is how the hell to sell a small mountain of oil and cash out so we can fix the drat thing (and likely sink almost all the earnings into it in the process). In the meantime securing a replacement leg, fixing another leg since we kept getting leg crits, and having an Interview with the Yes, I know, I'm the one who was in the main chat thread talking about how cyberpunk games "should be" and how this sort of thing fails to live up to the genre - I'm not the GM and it's a good group, I'm happy with playing near-future action movie to have a good time with friends.
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Jan 29, 2021 17:35
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The subreddit has been getting custom maps every day or two, along with one user writing tons of drop-in hooks and content.
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Feb 3, 2021 14:49
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Lifepaths: surprisingly difficult to fill out. Mostly the other characters. I've got the lifepath written out, I've got one shared enemy with another player, but I've got two days to figure out three friends and three tragic love affairs, and... wow am I bad at this sort of thing. Any advice?
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Feb 17, 2021 01:47
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SniperWoreConverse posted:well each block lifts the others. Did you try rolling to see what those fiends and lovers were like? Any chance they're friends or enemies of someone else? Maybe just NPCs that might come up in the campaign? Playing a Media, washed-up war reporter that settled down to document the rebuilding efforts in Night City. Rolled-up lifepath block (according to the book) ended up being, without narrative attached: quote:Cultural Origins: Eastern European (Ukrainian) The reason we're getting pushed to write all these up is so they can get potentially included, so making them relevant is an extra layer. Coordinating multiple people's friends/enemies is pulling teeth a lot of the time but thankfully one of those panned out at least.
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Feb 17, 2021 06:17
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Dropped from my game, so no more progress updates, sorry. Red just isn't clicking, setting or mechanics, in any way I can do much with. Glad it got the new edition regardless, even if it could have done... a lot differently.
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Apr 8, 2021 18:38
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My obstacles are more setting than system, though I'm very much not a fan of the respective attempts to simplify the economy with fixed price tiers and 1:1 buy/sell (latter confirmed by FAQ) and combat through collapsing weapons into a handful of archetypes with obvious standouts head and shoulders above the rest. Mostly I'm running into the same issues as I did with Eclipse Phase previously - "cyberpunk future", I understand, I've got solid mental images for and can work with it. Easy to work on characters, environment, goals, all that. "Cyberpunk future, but actually pseudo post post apocalypse where half of night city is still basically rubble but we're all living here anyway, where the global economy is in tatters but we're still consumerist cyberpunk citydwellers chasing big bucks and big gear" is a lot of little steps outside of my mental framework for this sort of genre game that combine to put me well off balance, and RED on its own doesn't do a very good job of actually building that as its own setting (since of course 2077 is post rebuilding and 2020 didn't have any of 2040s NC). Maybe ss more books release they'll do more building out "average person life", but even with the life path system in place it's hard to get a feel for "average person's experiences", and hence hard to define characters diverging from that norm. Just my views though. Appreciate that even if they still feel ill fitted, Rockers/Media/etc are still around and can still pull the campaign in directions other than "murder hobo for fun and profit". Nice to see in recent cyberpunk TTRPG content.
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Apr 8, 2021 19:02
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Fully agreed, this specific depiction just hasn't been clicking for me. Up to taste.
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Apr 8, 2021 19:18
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SniperWoreConverse posted:What do you mean by price tiers, how did that work out in your campaign? Got a link to the faq? There are no sublinks, but it's the 3.19 Mayor's Desk under "Selling Stuff". As far as price tiers, referring to the "cheap, expensive, very expensive, luxury" etc levels, where everything in the book by default gets some fixed bracket price tied to what "tier" of cost that's the same across everything in that tier. (I think the official term is "price categories"?) It's simple and straightforward to remember, but combining it with "everything sells for the same price it buys at" along with other unnecessary simplification just feels like wasted opportunities. But, uh, coming from a lot of Red Markets economy enthusiasm in my group (and my start-and-stopping F&F that happens to just now be reaching game economy) may be coloring our group's perspective. Form of the question that that Mayor's Desk responds to did remind me of the petty complaint of how base cybernetics are handled (medical and nonmedical being completely separate and functionally identical, except one costs way more for nothing but drawbacks until you pay even more to plug things into it; just put the drawbacks on the extra things! These didn't need to be separate!), and certain enhancements like eye mods requiring pairs to work even where that doesn't make sense. Though maybe RTG haven't heard of eye patches. (Things like flash resistance do make sense, of course. I happened to be playing a Media and considered a single eye for camera's sake, but so little of the eye mods work with just one eye and do anything useful. Opted to just keep my external camera.)
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Apr 8, 2021 20:09
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Dawgstar posted:I don't think they have it up on their website, which is a shame, but a while back on Twitter they went through what a blending of each class would look like although they just stuck with two. The beauty is you can 'multiclass' into everything and it makes sense. Fight, make your own deals, fix your own crap, etc. A lot of builds for V in 2077 would probably shake out this way. It started as a series of Reddit posts by JGray, this was the first and the rest are in their submission history.
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Oct 28, 2022 16:23
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