Drunken Review: Shadowrun 5

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hyzmarca
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Post by hyzmarca »

FrankTrollman wrote:The obscurantist faction was pretty much out of control since before 5th edition was a thing. The reductionists wanted possession and inhabitation traditionsto be the same. There's honestly no reason why voodoo zombies and insect spirits have to use different mechanics. We have separate possession and inhabitation rules because the obscurantists threw a tantrum.

Now that they control pretty much everything, it doesn't really surprise that they are covering themselves in poop and demanding complex new mechanics for character types that are thematically interchangeable with already extant magical groups.

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There are good reasons for the two to be different. Namely that Inhabitation kills the host and Possession doesn't. That is to say, if you're possessed then it's always possible for someone to kick the spirit out of your body and you'll be good as new, if possibly horribly traumatized. If you're inhabited, the best case scenario for you is that you fully merge with the spirit and you both cease to exist as individual entities, while the most likely scenario is that you're consumed by it and nothing remains of you but a shell. That's a good enough reason to model them differently.

Especially since they want the Inhabitation traditions to be crazy guys who kidnap and murder homeless people over a period of weeks or months, and the Possession traditions to be playable and useful in combat time without the risk of starting Scientology or some other perpetual growth scheme that will inevitably lead to the apocalypse.
Last edited by hyzmarca on Thu Nov 23, 2017 9:44 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by souran »

Yeah that's bullshit. How often are the differences going to be relevant? If it's less than once a session the game would be better with fewer rules to remember. If the only difference is inhabitation is fatal and possession is not then that can be all the rules difference the game needs.
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Post by hyzmarca »

souran wrote:Yeah that's bullshit. How often are the differences going to be relevant? If it's less than once a session the game would be better with fewer rules to remember. If the only difference is inhabitation is fatal and possession is not then that can be all the rules difference the game needs.
Inhabitation as a spirit power is grandfathered in from 1E Insect Spirits. In order to function, it must be able to produce insect spirits that behave about like insects spirits that behave like insect spirits. And insect spirits have 4 editions and many novels of baggage behind them that you can't just get rid of. Particularly since those novels didn't suck.

This is a problem that a lot of RPGs have. If the new rules invalidate your old metaplot, then you've fucked up. You might not have fucked up at making rules that work, but you have fucked up at making rules that accurately model your setting.

And making possession and inhabitation different powers with different rules is a hell of a lot less complicated than making them the same thing, but with 50 different exceptions only for insect spirits. The entire reason the Inhabitation power exists in the first place was to codify Insect Spirits in a non-exception-based manner.
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Post by Username17 »

Inhabitation as a spirit power is grandfathered in from 1E Insect Spirits. In order to function, it must be able to produce insect spirits that behave about like insects spirits that behave like insect spirits.
Sure.

But in previous editions, Houngans were known for doing two things: getting themselves temporarily possessed by Loa spirits and making Voodoo Zombies. With the SR4 Summoning/Binding divide, you can in fact do both of those things if you Summon temporary spirits that have the ability to possess prepared vessels (you always count as one) and binding makes a possession into a permanent merge.

Combining Possession and Inhabitation in that way more closely matches the way Voodoo summoning works in Awakenings and also has less unique mechanics. The Obscurantists insisted on throwing Voodoo Zombies out altogether as a thing anyone would ever consider doing in order to make there be more distinct kinds of conjuring.

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Post by Longes »

I've read some of the fluff in Forbidden Arcana. The Horrors are not forgotten. Apparently the current canon is that mana voids in Aztlan are vacuuming mana to help the Horrors. Because clearly the Horrors and Aztlan being EVIL are the plot that needs to keep going.

Also Harlequin seems to be growing a neckbeard.
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Post by Longes »

A book came out today. A book that allows you to make an insect spirit runner.
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Post by Stahlseele »

Same deal as with shapeshifters and HMHVV. wait for it to turn its back. pump it full of its allergen and then set it on fire.
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Peculiar properties of spacetime ensure that the perception of the magnitude of Soon is fluid and dependent, not on an individual's time-reference, but on spatial and cultural location. A marketer generally perceives Soon as a finite, known, yet unspeakable time-interval; to a fan, the interval appears greater, and may in fact approach the infinite, becoming Never. Once the interval has passed, however, a certain time-lensing effect seems to occur, and the time-interval becomes vanishingly small. We therefore see the strange result that the same fragment of spacetime may be observed, in quick succession, as Soon, Never, and All Too Quickly.
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Post by Username17 »

Longes wrote:A book came out today. A book that allows you to make an insect spirit runner.
Bizarrely, I don't really have a problem with that. Of all the spirit types, Good-Merge Insect Spirits are the closest to being a normal playable character. They are dual-natured, look like humans, and have access to normal senses and tool use.

When the thought of making playable spirits first came up, these were my suggestion as the first ones to go to, which of course gave everybody the vapors. But it is of course historically true that every attempt to make playable free spirits in every other context has been a complete failure - not managing to make something remotely playable and also failing to capture even basic qualities that spirits have.

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Post by Longes »

What is strange is that instead of making rules for playable free spirits and saying that you can only play inhabitation spirits they specifically doubled down on it being a playable insect free spirit and have weird spiels about Mantis and shit.

And as usual, Dark Terrors (the new 'plot' book) disappoints me by going into alien world-ending menaces instead of just doing Man vs Society thing cyberpunk does best. But such is the fault of Shadowrun.

In other news - NeoNET has fallen because it got blamed for the dragon_ghost-AI nanovirus CFD thing that was taking over the world. NeoNET's place on the corporate court has been taken by Spinrad. Said CFD plot has also been finished because no one gave a shit about yet another zombie plague and because Boston: Lockdown was a massive failure of an MMO.
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Post by Trill »

Something that I only just now realized after someone mentioned it to me:

In 5e you can start mundane and become awakened during the game, without having Latent Awakening.
Because there doesn't seem to be a rule forbidding you from taking the relevant quality in game. Your GM still has to approve it like with any other quality, but RAW there is nothing against it.
So either they forgot to copy the particular rules text (likely) or they intentionally didn't copy it (also likely)
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Post by Stahlseele »

Also, HMHVV < = basically instant awakening.
Welcome, to IronHell.
Shrapnel wrote:
TFwiki wrote:Soon is the name of the region in the time-domain (familiar to all marketing departments, and to the moderators and staff of Fun Publications) which sees release of all BotCon news, club exclusives, and other fan desirables. Soon is when then will become now.

Peculiar properties of spacetime ensure that the perception of the magnitude of Soon is fluid and dependent, not on an individual's time-reference, but on spatial and cultural location. A marketer generally perceives Soon as a finite, known, yet unspeakable time-interval; to a fan, the interval appears greater, and may in fact approach the infinite, becoming Never. Once the interval has passed, however, a certain time-lensing effect seems to occur, and the time-interval becomes vanishingly small. We therefore see the strange result that the same fragment of spacetime may be observed, in quick succession, as Soon, Never, and All Too Quickly.
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Post by Longes »

Trill wrote:Something that I only just now realized after someone mentioned it to me:

In 5e you can start mundane and become awakened during the game, without having Latent Awakening.
Because there doesn't seem to be a rule forbidding you from taking the relevant quality in game. Your GM still has to approve it like with any other quality, but RAW there is nothing against it.
So either they forgot to copy the particular rules text (likely) or they intentionally didn't copy it (also likely)
There is no "Awakened" quality, so you can't actually do this short of becoming a vampire.
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Post by Trill »

Longes wrote:There is no "Awakened" quality, so you can't actually do this short of becoming a vampire.
But there are the Magician, Adept, Mystic Adept and Aspected Magician Qualities
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Post by TheSystem »

Strange content for a first post, but I always imagined the lower life expectancy for trolls and orks to be a combination of their size and the fact that they are depicted as largely poor in a future that is already dystopic as it is. The lower life expectancy rates in Shadowrun are supposed to be reflective of the setting's dichotomies. Sure, there are life-extending treatments for the super rich, and the technology exists to help everyone, but the world doesn't actually help everyone. What is "possible" is not directly related to what is "available" in Shadowrun. It's all part of the setting's blatant inequality. When we look at the rising lifespan of humans over past couple decades, we're looking at a world that has actually made great strides to create and make available health care. I mean, even in the US where we routinely decry the disparity in medical coverage, the level of care for most people is really good, often just in the ways society passively provides "healthcare" in the propagation of clean drinking water and health standards for restaurants and other food providers. No system is perfect, but clearly we're many levels about even just 100 years ago.

Shadowrun's world doesn't care as much about that. If at all in many cases. There are entire classes of people in Shadowrun who don't officially exist to any government or corporate entity, and medical care is quite literally mercenary in some cases. You can't really dive into the geopolitics, sociopolitics, or economics of a world like Shadowrun without going into some deep rabbit holes, but if you accept that it is possible, Shadowrun's world is going to have a lot less regulation and oversight for health standards outside the controlled areas of the metroplexes. You get into the Barrens and the world looks a lot different than it does in the gated communities of Bellvue or even just the business districts downtown. Then there's the fact that large swathes of the mainland US at least are basically uninhabited and certainly unsupervised by any regulatory bodies. My meta-knowledge of a lot of parts of the 6th World has diminished with time, but I don't remember much of the rest of the world being presented as overly idyllic, so we can only assume the life expectancy hurdles faced by the impoverished and disenfranchised is on exacerbated in most other parts of the world. The average human lifespan (worldwide) being lower in the 2050+ of Shadowrun doesn't really feel too far off to me at all.

Now, the fairly silly fantasy trope of "immortal" elves is a different story, and I've pretty much always thought it was awful. From a "Okay, we get it, Tolkien and D&D inspired this" but also from the "They don't have anywhere near enough medical data about what happens to elves as they age."
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Post by Stahlseele »

No no, the immortal elves are literally that.
Aside from being killed, they are immune to age, poisons and diseases i think.
And nobody knows how old a NON IMMORTAL elf actually can get in Shadowrun.
No, not even in SR5. They have all died of non natural causes.
Same for Dorfs. They are expected to live really long as well.
But none of them have made it to that age as of yet.
Last edited by Stahlseele on Sun Jan 28, 2018 9:50 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Welcome, to IronHell.
Shrapnel wrote:
TFwiki wrote:Soon is the name of the region in the time-domain (familiar to all marketing departments, and to the moderators and staff of Fun Publications) which sees release of all BotCon news, club exclusives, and other fan desirables. Soon is when then will become now.

Peculiar properties of spacetime ensure that the perception of the magnitude of Soon is fluid and dependent, not on an individual's time-reference, but on spatial and cultural location. A marketer generally perceives Soon as a finite, known, yet unspeakable time-interval; to a fan, the interval appears greater, and may in fact approach the infinite, becoming Never. Once the interval has passed, however, a certain time-lensing effect seems to occur, and the time-interval becomes vanishingly small. We therefore see the strange result that the same fragment of spacetime may be observed, in quick succession, as Soon, Never, and All Too Quickly.
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Post by TheSystem »

Sorry, guess I should have specified the metahuman elves that awakened, not the really literally Tolkien immortal elves like Harlequin and such.
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Post by Nath »

Stahlseele wrote:No no, the immortal elves are literally that.
Aside from being killed, they are immune to age, poisons and diseases i think.
SR2 Harlequin's Back does mention "Immnity to Age, Disease, Pathogens, Poisons" on Jane Foster profile, and SR4 Street Legends Supplemental stats for Harlequin lists "Immunity (Age, Disease, Pathogens, Toxins)".

Funnily enough, Street Legends does not mention even immunity to age as a trait of Lugh Surehand. I don't remember SL ever receiving an official errata, so that would mean the current canon is that Lugh Surehand is not an immortal elve.
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Post by Longes »

With the ongoing quarantine I sought out a new game to play, which happened to be Shadowrun 5e. This led to me reading "Kill Code", a 2018 Matrix supplement for SR5e. And the things I saw there filled me with a burning desire to share. So here I am.

Back when SR5 released, the devs were really happy to throw around "everything is in the cloud" as magic buzzwords around the Matrix. Everyone pointed and laughed saying that the devs don't understand what "in the cloud" means. Kill Code's solution to this was to play a "no u" card.

As revealed in Kill Code, SR5 matrix is magic. Not "Magic" magic, but Resonance magic. Between SR4 and SR5 some corporate badman has captured 100 Technomancers and plugged them into a machine that forces them to generate a gestalt network. This network is the SR5 Matrix. The technomancers died in the process, but the network continues to exist, anchored to Resonance and Dissonance realms.

SR5 Matrix is 100% hardware and energy independent. The jackpointers in the book believe that the Matrix will continue to exist even if every single electronic device on earth goes silent.

The Hosts that SR5 Matrix is heavily tied to rules-wise are organically grown from the technomagic Foundation of the Matrix, and no one really understands how any of it works. I also don't understand what the Hosts even mean in this edition, as they seemingly stand in for both internet websites and internal systems, and it's all just very muddled and confused.

Furthermore, since Matrix is technomagic, there are Wild Hosts out on the internet - Hosts that organically grew from the Matrix with no metahuman input. Kill Code doesn't really explain why you care and what loot these could possibly have.

In conclusion... I'm just baffled and confused. Over five editions Shadowrun went from Matrix as a gibsonian proto-internet to Matrix as a strange alien dimension where we just happened to store our porn. All while the role of the Matrix remained to be a minigame for the decker to turn off cameras. It's a strange ouroboros of headassery that I'd be more sad about if SR6 didn't conclusively destroy the franchise.
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Post by Username17 »

Sounds like someone read Mona Lisa Overdrive like twenty years ago and then smoked a lot of pot.

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Post by Trill »

There's also the fun fact that to change the style of the host you have to go into the Foundation, which is dangerous as fuck.

Better hope you're happy with the current style, chummer
Mord, on Cosmic Horror wrote:Today if I say to the man on the street, "Did you know that the world you live in is a fragile veneer of normality over an uncaring universe, that we could all die at any moment at the whim of beings unknown to us for reasons having nothing to do with ourselves, and that as far as the rest of the universe is concerned, nothing anyone ever did with their life has ever mattered?" his response, if any, will be "Yes, of course; now if you'll excuse me, I need to retweet Sonic the Hedgehog." What do you even do with that?
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Post by Username17 »

Trill wrote:There's also the fun fact that to change the style of the host you have to go into the Foundation, which is dangerous as fuck.

Better hope you're happy with the current style, chummer
That is a straightforward shit fit being thrown about Infinity Mirror. The chucklefucks who made SR5 couldn't figure out how to write rules that function in any way when people bring in a bunch of ambiguous looking icons, so they keep trying to flip the table over.

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Post by OgreBattle »

What's Mona Lisa Overdrive's take on the internet

So is dissonance like the toxic-shaman version of resonance?
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Post by Longes »

OgreBattle wrote:So is dissonance like the toxic-shaman version of resonance?
Basically, yes. The fluff is that Resonance represents ordered information, and Dissonance represents chaos. Or something. It's crazy evil NPC-only Technomancers and that's as deep as it goes.
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Post by Username17 »

OgreBattle wrote:What's Mona Lisa Overdrive's take on the internet
The internet itself doesn't come up that much in Mona Lisa Overdrive. It's been a while since I read it, but the gist is that there are super hard drives called alephs that are so powerful that they can contain whole universes. And then some people get transported into the hard drives and there are Voodoo Loa in there for no particular reason. But also the physical hard drive doesn't matter because the information includes the universe and the hard drive so it is able to exist within itself even when the physical hard drive is gone.

Also a prostitute gets cosmetic surgery so that she can impersonate a pop star after the pop star has her inherent connection to the computer replicated universe activated when she stops taking drugs and transcends into the computer universe. Look, it's not Gibson's best work and I read it like twenty years ago. I'm sure someone will tell me I'm wrong about which book in the series some of that shit happened in.

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Post by Ancient History »

No, you get it pretty much right. The Matrix in Mona Lisa Overdrive hasn't changed much. The original god-like AI at the end of Neuromancer broke up into a bunch of smaller AI that imitated Loa in Count Zero, and the AI worked to foster a new high-density data transfer technology (bio-chips), part of which involved creating a human who could "live" on the Matrix with genetically engineering tumors grown in her head, like a Shadowrun otaku or technomancer. These bio-chips in turn gave way to a new breed of AI that was somehow categorically different to the old AI, and the biochips could be used to create arbitrarily massive data storage units (the Aleph that Frank mentions). At the end of the book, we find out that what caused the god-like original AI to break up was encountering another AI from another Matrix in a separate solar system.
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