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Post by Username17 »

Stahlseele wrote:Some people do not like the idea of immortal elves and dragons in their cyberpunk setting. No idea why, because that has been the case before the earthdawn stuff happened as far as i remember.
That's not it at all.

The Earthdawn connections are crap because Shadowrun is supposed to be Earth plus Magic, but Earthdawn is some dude's AD&D campaign world. Earthdawn's history is totally incompatible with real world history, and every piece of Earthdawn connection they brought in made it just a little bit harder to do that.

As for the immortal elves and dragons, people didn't really bject to their being dragons or even immortals. People objected to the specific masturabatory properties those immortals and great dragons got. It's fine there being ancient immortals who have ancient secrets. What's totally not fine is having characters in the setting whose statline is "the players automatically lose." And it's not OK to have dragons who just personally rock out with their cock out and smash their way through the biggest military in the setting and say "my penis is too big, my rules now!" Because that's fucking retarded.

Dunkelzahn is fine. Ghostwalker is not. Harlequin is not. Fuck those guys. Lazy ass shit writing that crapped on the setting and player agency for no fucking reason.

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Post by Stahlseele »

OK, that i can respect.
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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 Nath »

There were four different levels to consider in the Shadowrun-Earthdawn crossover.

The first is the very existence of a crossover. As any crossover, it could be unnerving not to be given enough information to understand what is going in the line you were playing. What is an issue with any metaplot got turned up to eleven. The very concept of Shadowrun even add an extra layer, since the typical "no question asked" setup of the game may prevent the players from learning anything at all.

The second level is the choice to have this crossover with a several millennia-old era. The plots, and moreover the characters that are supposed to stay relevant over several millenias makes everything else in your setting meaningless in comparison. And that's not just making Ares Macrotechnology third quarter results irrelevant. Since Shadowrun is our world twenty minutes into the future, this extends to basically every event in History. You can accept that when the plot is the coming of alien evil forces that will torture and murder the whole world, it is more important than everything else. But that also means the killing of Aina relatives, her rape and that son she never desired are more important than the European colonization of Americas and the extermination(s) of Amerindian people.

The third level is the more specific choice of a crossover with a 7,000 years-old era. I'm not sure how that duration was chosen, but it seems it was done on purpose to be before anything one would think the average person may know about. That is, the Egyptian and Mesopotamian civilizations and writings. The problem, at least for a number of people, is that archeology is a thing. We don't know a lot of things about that period, but we know there were no stone castle and not even metallic weapons or tools to start with. It would actually be more credible to somehow have no trace of actual mages, orks and dragons living in 500 BC that no trace of castle and bronze swords in 5000 BC.

The fourth level is specifically how the Shadowrun-Earthdawn crossover was carried out. Characters whose personal stories are more important than anything else, as stated above, were also made more powerful than anyone else. Which is a hell of a problem in a game which is at its very core about the PCs doing something on someone else's behalf. You could rationalize that millennia of experience should translate into stats higher than the norm by several order of magnitude. The point actually is that you shouldn't introduce immortal characters in a game system that do not put a cap on stats.

It worth noting that this apply first and foremost to immortal elves. Earthdawn should not get the (entire) blame for the status of Shadowrun great dragons. Those have been made overpowered mostly based on interpretation of Shadowrun fluff (what I call the "Tehran precedent"). Earthdawn setting, on the other hand, posited that Great Dragons could be defeated or at least stopped by metahuman forces (which I guess I have to call the "Theran precedent").
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Post by Wiseman »

Reading this and looking back at older threads I think i get it. Age old immortals and super artifacts taking over the plot invalidating everything else? Making it all about magic and defeating the purpose.

I don't think it's as bad a problem as it seems, but If that's the case, then it also doesn't seem like that hard of a problem to fix.

If you don't want to go for the "get of my lawn" style of magic where everything older is better, then what about taking a page out of the MCU, blending artifacts and technology together, like the setting seems to want to encourage.

Like the Tessaract/Cosmic Cube/Space Stone. It's an artifact that has existed sense the beginning of creation. And while powerful on it's own, it's more impressive when paired with technology The red skull harnesses it to give Hydra disintegration guns in WW2. Tony Stark's arc reactor is based off of it. It was theorized that it could be used to provide infinite clean energy to the world. S.H.I.E.L.D. wanted to use it to create magitek WMDs. Loki uses it to power a device that opens a portal to bring his high tech alien army to invade earth.

Or the Mind Stone, which Tony Stark uses to create the Ultron AI, and later Vision.

On that note, I'm still trying to figure out setting details. Is there anything like magitek in Shadowrun? It doesn't seem like that so far, which seems like a waste.
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RadiantPhoenix wrote:
TheFlatline wrote:Legolas/Robin Hood are myths that have completely unrealistic expectation of "uses a bow".
The D&D wizard is a work of fiction that has a completely unrealistic expectation of "uses a book".
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Post by virgil »

Wiseman wrote:On that note, I'm still trying to figure out setting details. Is there anything like magitek in Shadowrun? It doesn't seem like that so far, which seems like a waste.
There is the anti-magic bacteria cloud they used in Chicago, which is related to that whole FoB chain thing.

There's also a flashlight that uses an orichaulcum filament, making dual-natured light that creates shadows where non-materialized spirits are. That I've debated as creating the potential for a dual-natured laser that can be wielded by muggles.

ADDENDUM: Oh, and cyberzombies.
Last edited by virgil on Tue May 30, 2017 2:52 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Whipstitch »

The fact that the worst problems are not that hard to fix or avoid in the first place is actually why it's all so galling. Many groups are actually quite fine with treating SR as a John Carpenter emulator and calling their campaign Big Trouble In Little China 2073: Year of the Cyber-dragon. The sort of person who is upset by weird urban fantasy mashups is probably going to give the franchise a hard pass well before you get to the Earthdawn & Elves part of the sales pitch. The bigger problem with the metaplot tie-ins was the part where the GM buys an official module that tells them to repeatedly jam Harlequin's dick in your eye.
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Post by Wiseman »

Whipstitch wrote:The fact that the worst problems are not that hard to fix or avoid in the first place is actually why it's all so galling. Many groups are actually quite fine with treating SR as a John Carpenter emulator and calling their campaign Big Trouble In Little China 2073: Year of the Cyber-dragon. The sort of person who is upset by weird urban fantasy mashups is probably going to give the franchise a hard pass well before you get to the Earthdawn & Elves part of the sales pitch. The bigger problem with the metaplot tie-ins was the part where the GM buys an official module that tells them to repeatedly jam Harlequin's dick in your eye.
That's kind of a shame, and doesn't speak well of the design team, if it's that easy to make it so artifacts and ancient demigods matter and are fought over without breaking the setting in half.
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Wiseman wrote:What spirits are the best to use? I'm constructing my own Tradition, and I have:

Combat: Fire
Detection: Guidance
Illusion: Air
Health: Man
Manipulation: Task
Drain: Willpower+Logic

Is this good, or is there something i should be trading out?
Drain Attribute mostly depends on what secondary schticks you're trying to synergize with.

It's been awhile since I've waded into the craziness that is SR4 spirit arrays, but I seem to recall that Air and Fire are somewhat redundant. You might want to swap out Fire with Guardian if being able to hand a machine gun to a spirit is a thing you're interested in doing. I'd personally swap Guidance for Water because in my experience Weather Control as a niche ability has more utility than Divining as a niche ability. Those are both situational though.

Honestly though, if you're rocking Man, Air, and Task you're already on the path the Real Ultimate Power because you can now Go Fish!(TM) for anything you need with Innate Spell and Skill...and Air Spirits basically bring the best utility kit to the yard.

Like I said...it's been awhile...but it looks like you're doing just fine.
Well, I wanted fire spirits because of the Endowment ability from Street Magic, so they could give me access to Elemental Attack. Probably not the most optimal thing to do, but throwing around fireballs at will sounds like a fun thing to do.



Also, what would it take to make the extra species in Runners Companion playable? I'm already working on Free Spirits (because I know that it will probably be something my play group would love to do), but what about other types in there?

EDIT: One more question for now. How do astral things affect mundanes? Mainly, can astral mages target mundanes with Mana effects? I couldn't find an answer.
Last edited by Wiseman on Wed May 31, 2017 8:58 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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RadiantPhoenix wrote:
TheFlatline wrote:Legolas/Robin Hood are myths that have completely unrealistic expectation of "uses a bow".
The D&D wizard is a work of fiction that has a completely unrealistic expectation of "uses a book".
hyzmarca wrote:Well, Mario Mario comes from a blue collar background. He was a carpenter first, working at a construction site. Then a plumber. Then a demolitionist. Also, I'm not sure how strict Mushroom Kingdom's medical licensing requirements are. I don't think his MD is valid in New York.
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Post by Whipstitch »

Wiseman wrote: That's kind of a shame, and doesn't speak well of the design team, if it's that easy to make it so artifacts and ancient demigods matter and are fought over without breaking the setting in half.
Part of the problem is that for the most part ubermensch get more screen-time than artifacts. Even low powered magical items that are more valuable as objets d'art than as tools are just plain rarer than they probably should be. You know, because Shadowrun games aspire to be heist films and unlike ancient sorcerers with centuries worth of built up karma you can plausibly steal some of this shit without getting Powerbolted into oblivion. There should seriously be shadowtalker conspiracy theories about the Louvre displaying a lot of fakes because too much famous history in one place can do wacky shit to the local background count. Practically speaking such things would be no more damaging to the setting than some random prototype you could steal, but the flavor is different and would be more unique to Shadowrun. Thus it's kind of a shame that they can't figure out how to let you steal magic items without also making you play ghostbusters with the spirits of a bunch of murdered Jews.
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Post by Wiseman »

so it's kind of a shame that they can't figure out how to do that without making you play ghostbusters with the spirits of a bunch of murdered Jews.
Wait. What?!
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RadiantPhoenix wrote:
TheFlatline wrote:Legolas/Robin Hood are myths that have completely unrealistic expectation of "uses a bow".
The D&D wizard is a work of fiction that has a completely unrealistic expectation of "uses a book".
hyzmarca wrote:Well, Mario Mario comes from a blue collar background. He was a carpenter first, working at a construction site. Then a plumber. Then a demolitionist. Also, I'm not sure how strict Mushroom Kingdom's medical licensing requirements are. I don't think his MD is valid in New York.
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Post by Stahlseele »

No crossing the planes. That has been done away with quite comprehensively.
And for good reason as well.
If something is not active on the astral plane, a projecting mage has no way of interacting with it.
You can target mundanes with mana effects when you yourself are not purely astral. So either by straight LOS casting or by using astral perception while still in your body.
Wiseman wrote:
so it's kind of a shame that they can't figure out how to do that without making you play ghostbusters with the spirits of a bunch of murdered Jews.
Wait. What?!
100% true.
why do you think it got such a bad rep?
you are going to auschwitz.
there you kill ghosts of people who have died. in auschwitz.
and you are looking for the scalpell of a clerk. because they did not have the balls to actually use the name mengele.
The name they did use, which i can not remember, is that of a clerk.
A pen would have made so much more sense to look for in that context.
And also would have had an instant storyline with it.
Find descendents of that clerk. have them write the names of people who died in auschwitz with that pen with their own blood untill they die.
If there are still names left to write, find next of kin and rinse and repeat.

And in another part of that mess, you are to poison wells of gypsies if i remember correctly.
Last edited by Stahlseele on Wed May 31, 2017 10:32 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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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 Whipstitch »

Stahlseele wrote: why do you think it got such a bad rep?

"It" in this case is an adventure hook from the book War!. You go Jew busting so you can recover a magical scalpel that you're expected to pawn off for way less money than the rigger spent on his van. You know that safe but sensible trick where Steven Spielberg only selects scripts filled with low hanging fruit to pluck so that he can lavish more attention on the technical aspects of his films? It's like that, only the exact fucking opposite.
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Post by Nath »

Stahlseele wrote:And in another part of that mess, you are to poison wells of gypsies if i remember correctly.
Unless I missed something, the book never specifically mentioned poisoning anyone's well. The book does feature a "post" by a mercenary explaining how his unit fueled racial resentment between Romani and Czech people in the Marienbad Council.
War!, page 117
See, there’s still a lot of old beliefs about who the Romani are or aren’t, and it isn’t hard to get a grudgingly acceptant population to remember their old hatreds. So on one mission, we go in there and start spreading rumors. We suggest that a sickness that’s going around and making a lot of Czechs miserable is coming out of the Romani camps. Then we hint that the Romani are deliberately weakening their fellow countrymen so they can move in on the magical ore under the ground and steal away the only chance the locals have for fame and fortune. We point out when there are attacks on livestock—attacks that probably came from wolves, but we tell them it looks suspicious. We don’t have to be right, we just have to be believable.
So we do this work, and make it so people don’t like the Romani, but that’s nothing really new. If we want real tension, we need to make both sides angry. Luckily for us, the Romani are insular and kind of secretive. I realized I could stage some attacks inside the camps, and easily make them think its coming from the Czechs, and they won’t go complaining about it. No, they’ll just stage their own silent retaliations.
None of the adventure require the PC to use such tactics. The closest it gets is the adventure title "The Romani Job" which suggest the players should play an American smuggler and a Russian agent against each other, but never mention poison or well (or any other suggestion on how to pull that).

To the best of my understanding, initially someone on the forums only pointed out the aforementioned tactic of blaming Romani people as eerily similar to the accusation of poisoning wells that have been made against Jewish people during the Black Death or inside Soviet Union. Especially in a chapter that also made an adventure or remurdering Jewish ghosts in a extermination camp. And that led to the rumor that there was an adventure about poisoning wells.

As a side note, The Sixth World Almanac, which was released around the same period, features an Evo-backed virology research facility in Changchun, Manchuria, called Unit 100 and run by one Yujiro Wakamatsu. That is, a Japanese research facility in the same town, with the same name and whose head has the exact same name than a World War 2 war crime case. At the least the book doesn't try to paint those as good guys, but such mention did not strike me as particularly elegant.
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Post by Whipstitch »

There's all sorts of room for misquotes since in this case "poisoning the well" is literally false but metaphorically true. The mercs want to slander the Romani in order to sow distrust before using false flag tactics to set them against the local Czechs.
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Post by Username17 »

Poisoning the Well is an English term that refers to preemptively say bad things about someone to an audience. It doesn't involve actual wells being being poisoned.

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Post by virgil »

Presuming you make changes to Bug Spirits to keep them sane in SR4, what are some good motivations to give them? IIRC, the only official motivation is "make more bugs. humans go well with white wine."
Last edited by virgil on Tue Jun 06, 2017 9:06 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Stahlseele »

i'd advise on going with solitary bugs, much easier than the swarm variety to give them an actual different motivation than comsume and multiply.
And then you are at the same point as you are with shedim basically.
What does a being of pure magic desire in a world where it can't perceive a third of the world due to it being AR/VR?
Quiet and Peace? World Domination? A fucking VR Headset that works for it?
Remember, the motivation does not have to make sense to ANYBODY because it is such an alien thing. Hell, NORMAL spirits do not have to have a motivation understandable by metahumanity at all . . Well, free spirits usually want karma to get stronger and stronger . . .
Last edited by Stahlseele on Tue Jun 06, 2017 9:55 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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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 Blade »

virgil wrote:Presuming you make changes to Bug Spirits to keep them sane in SR4, what are some good motivations to give them? IIRC, the only official motivation is "make more bugs. humans go well with white wine."
In one of my campaigns, the insect spirits were just creatures from another plane that had consumed all the resources of their planet. A few of them took advantage of a rift in the metaplanes to enter our plane that seemed to have the resources they needed to survive and was close enough so that the recon teams could open portals to bring more people.

These Insects spirits weren't particularly expansionist, they just wanted some space to live in, and were able to live in harmony with the metahumanity.
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Post by DSMatticus »

I continue to be a fan of treating hive insects like actual hive insects. Individual ants in an ant colony do not think about what they're doing or why they're doing it. They have a simple set of rules and they make observations about the world in order to decide which rule to follow at that particular instant. They give up (well, in their case it's more accurate to say they never had) any semblance of personal responsibility to an unthinking, impersonal system and that system makes them greater than the sum of their parts. I think that's a particularly appropriate take for Shadowrun, because "a bunch of individuals ceding personal responsibility to an unthinking, impersonal system" is exactly how corporations manage to do horrible things that would cripple any individual employee with guilt. Obviously, ant spirits need to be smarter than actual ants, and the rules they follow need to be infinitely more complicated and flexible, because there's a need to make them threatening in a not-stupid-brute kind of way, but the idea of an intelligent being for whom the very notion of personal responsibility, independent decision-making, and self-reflection are not only foreign concepts but biologically incompatible thoughts is pretty goddamn alien. Ant spirits invaded earth because the script says make more ant colonies, and that is as deep as the reasoning goes. The only room for thought is how best to do that - and even that thought is heavily regulated by impulses and rules that they would never question because that is fundamentally not how their brains function no matter how persuasive you think your argument is.

You can do pretty much whatever you want with mantis spirits and other solitary types, though. They can be mindless dumb brutes, they can be forehead aliens who are one good Star Trek episode away from seeing the error in their ways and learning to coexist peacefully, or they can be intelligent solitary carnivores who sort of need to eat you to live but are otherwise totally amenable to reason. In fact, you can do a different thing with each kind of solitary insect spirit. And you could even make different kinds of social insect spirits different shades of aggressive. Maybe wasp spirits want to lay their eggs in your paralyzed body, which is unlikely to be a negotiatable point, but maybe ant spirits just want to build a bunch of colonies and grow weird alien fungus, and if you'd just let them do that everyone could get along.
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Post by Surgo »

It's been said elsewhere that street samurai are just way too expensive compared to someone using drones, for less effect. How would you address this? Should ware in general just be made cheaper by some factor (wouldn't make them better but could make them more versatile)? Should key pieces be cheapened? Something else entirely?
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Post by Longes »

Surgo wrote:It's been said elsewhere that street samurai are just way too expensive compared to someone using drones, for less effect. How would you address this? Should ware in general just be made cheaper by some factor (wouldn't make them better but could make them more versatile)? Should key pieces be cheapened? Something else entirely?
The ideal solution would be a paradigm shift, where drones aren't treated as separate characters but are instead Rigger's 'weapons' and act like part of the Rigger.
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Post by OgreBattle »

Surgo wrote:The ideal solution would be a paradigm shift, where drones aren't treated as separate characters but are instead Rigger's 'weapons' and act like part of the Rigger.
An action economy kind of balancing point? Like samurai get a bunch of actions for cheap, and riggers use up their actions directing their weaker-than-samurai drones
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Post by Stahlseele »

Then you need to do the same for Spirits and Programs as well.
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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 Korwin »

Surgo wrote:It's been said elsewhere that street samurai are just way too expensive compared to someone using drones, for less effect. How would you address this? Should ware in general just be made cheaper by some factor (wouldn't make them better but could make them more versatile)? Should key pieces be cheapened? Something else entirely?
Anecdote: In actual play, the - few - played riggers (in our group) had the problem of not getting enough money, to replace their ruined Drones. So they where only powerful until their starting equipment ran out.

But in general, I would’nt try to reduce the power of riggers… If you do, you would also need to nerf all magic.


Make the streetsam more usefull and/or make shure he can do more things to do than fight.
Red_Rob wrote: I mean, I'm pretty sure the Mayans had a prophecy about what would happen if Frank and PL ever agreed on something. PL will argue with Frank that the sky is blue or grass is green, so when they both separately piss on your idea that is definitely something to think about.
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Post by virgil »

With skillwires and other augments, including data locks for secrecy, do you actually need trained specialists for R&D in Shadowrun?
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Post by Surgo »

Korwin wrote:
Surgo wrote:It's been said elsewhere that street samurai are just way too expensive compared to someone using drones, for less effect. How would you address this? Should ware in general just be made cheaper by some factor (wouldn't make them better but could make them more versatile)? Should key pieces be cheapened? Something else entirely?
Anecdote: In actual play, the - few - played riggers (in our group) had the problem of not getting enough money, to replace their ruined Drones. So they where only powerful until their starting equipment ran out.

But in general, I would’nt try to reduce the power of riggers… If you do, you would also need to nerf all magic.


Make the streetsam more usefull and/or make shure he can do more things to do than fight.
Yes that's what I'm asking how to do. I didn't say anything about nerfing.
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