The Shadowrun Situation

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Otakusensei
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Post by Otakusensei »

I wonder if it hurts that the material being released on Shadowrun4.com is better edited than the products being released for Shadowrun 5?
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Aryxbez
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Post by Aryxbez »

Shadowrun4 hilarity aside, I've some essence-based queries.

1.) Via like Frank's Houserules, would it hurt much if allowed PC's to increase their essence via 10BP, possible max 12? It wouldn't matter for Magicians as I understand, cyber-awakened mix would suffer the same, Adepts could hyper focus a bit faster at PC creation, and I think even Prime-Runner Street Sams would only increase their Essence by 1-2? Although it would also allow Street Sams to take other crappy ware because now the cost isn't as limited now.

2.) What's an alternative houserule for the rule of highest Cyber/Bio ware essence cost being halved? I fairly like the rule, but seems most PC's should take Bio (cyber skeleton aside), and then deal with all that o-type blood & gene-therapy nonsense to get that reduced cost activated. A vague rule I can think of, is taking a cost of 1-2.0 essence or more, and halving it, in the absence of a Cyber/Bio comparison where could save more essence. Feel like there's probably a better way to help Street Sams save on essence?
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Post by JesterZero »

I'll take a couple stabs at these.

1) Remind me if I'm wrong, but Frank's houserule on Essence is just that Essence loss doesn't result in Magic loss until Essence < Magic right? We use that same houserule at our table, but I can't see how giving people the option to straight-up buy Essence wouldn't ultimately benefit awakened characters more than street sams, which is kind of the opposite of what you're trying to accomplish.

2) Ok, this I feel like I can speak a tad more authoritatively on. In SR1 - SR3, cyberware and bioware were on different limiters: cyberware was capped by Essence (as it is today), but bioware was capped by "Body Index," which was just a fancy term for unaugmented Body attribute (which is why orks and trolls showed up with even greater frequency). The exception to this was that if you were awakened, then you had to deal with all the Body Index issues, AND you had to pay Essence as well. Even then, it was an attempt to power-up the street sams who were getting kicked around a bit since Grimoire had come out.

SR4 rolled around, and they unified that into the single mechanic that you mentioned: calculate the Essence cost for cyberware and bioware separately, and only pay half of whichever was less. Again, the idea was to throw a bone to anyone who was going all-in with a mix of both. Mathematically, it just means that assuming you get your 'ware split to come out perfectly, you're working with an effective Essence of 8 instead of 6.

To get to your question, I honestly can't think of a single one-houserule-to-rule them option that would fix everything, because "everything" in this case includes some rather questionable cost/benefit issues for certain augmentations, as well as some copy/paste errors that have since made their way into 5th edition and are almost old enough to drink. In both of those cases, you're dealing with issues where certain local issues are wildly out of proportion with other (often similar) augmentations, and single no fix can address them all. Without some sort of baselines, you don't even know how disproportionate particular cases even are.

So that's the bad news.

In light of that, what we did for our game (warning: houserule incoming) was just bite the bullet, and write a document that basically lays out the rules for creating and pricing effect-based cyberware, and how that interacts with the various modalities of augmentations: cyberware, bioware, etc. I can claim credit for writing it, but the idea actually came from a thread around here a while back. That solves two major problems:

a) It allowed us to balance Muscle Replacement against Muscle Enhancement and restored sanity to Wired Reflexes costs (to name a couple of egregious examples), and fixing the other outliers was as simple as breaking down the effects and applying the math. But it even more than that...

b) It meant that players could fluff their cyberware to their heart's content, and we didn't have to worry about it. If someone wants a cyberweapon that is the equivalent to a cyberspur, but they want to describe it as cyberhorns or a retractable arm-scythe or whatever, they can just do that. And they can do it without feeling like a chump, because they don't have to deal with the fact that in official game, the person who wrote up that particular option in splatbook x decided to land on values that were closer to the local minimum than the local maximum for no discernible reason.

If you want to get into this some more, or just shoot me a PM so I'm not hijacking a perfectly good thread with our houserules.
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Post by Blade »

If you want to make Essence buyable, you might prefer to have exponential cost (similar to raising Magic/Initiation grades). You'll also have to clearly define how Essence loss/gain affects the magic cap.
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Post by Longes »

Theoretical question.
A spirit of the Possession tradition possesses drake/shapeshifter's underpants. Underpants now have ItNW and provide F*2 armor. The drake/shapeshifter tries to shapeshift due to the size difference between forms their new form tries to rip the clothing. How much damage does the spirit wedgie deal?
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Post by Blade »

That was discussed in Dumpshock after something like this actually happened in someone's game. I think the conclusion was that we didn't have enough information about the transformation process to handle it, but you can use the rules for when an astral form gets crushed against a barrier (the "shapechanger in an elevator going through a ward" situation)
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Post by Stahlseele »

Rigger 5.0 is out
http://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/168 ... -Rigger-50
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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 Longes »

Learned what?
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Post by Rawbeard »

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Post by OgreBattle »

Is there a beginner's guide to "How does magic and spirits work in Shadowrun"?

I don't really understand the significance of how they break down magical traditions as "Combat: Fire, Detection: Man, Health: etc."

Same with spirits summoning, spirits of man, fire, earth, etc. get mentioned.
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Post by Longes »

OgreBattle wrote:Is there a beginner's guide to "How does magic and spirits work in Shadowrun"?

I don't really understand the significance of how they break down magical traditions as "Combat: Fire, Detection: Man, Health: etc."

Same with spirits summoning, spirits of man, fire, earth, etc. get mentioned.
I believe that in SR4 this is only relevant for when you want a spirit to teach you a spell, or maintain a spell for you. In which case the spirit only does the category related spells. There is occasional fluff how GM should totally fuck you over if you send your Health spirit to murder people, but nothing in terms of the mechanics.
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Post by Grek »

Shadowrun magic is divided into Sorcery, Conjuration and Enchantment. Sorcery is spellcasting. Conjuration is doing things with spirits. And Enchantment is making magic items.

Sorcery is further divided into Combat, Detection, Illusion, Health and Manipulation. Each spell falls into a specific school. Everyone gets the same schools regardless of Tradition, but the stat you use to cast with (your "Drain" stat) is based on Tradition.

Enchantment isn't divided at all and is the same for everyone.

Conjuration is divided into Summoning (making spirits turn up to serve you), Banishing (making spirits go away) and Binding (making spirits who aren't serving you start serving you). It is also much more based on Tradition than Sorcery or Enchantment: Each Tradition picks 5 types of spirit off the list of Fire, Air, Earth, Water, Plant, Guardian, Beast, Man, Guidance and Task, and each Tradition picks whether they Materialize spirits, are Possessed by spirits or are Inhabited by spirits.

Voodoo, for example, is

Tradition Type: Possession
Combat: Guardian
Detection: Water
Health: Man
Illusion: Guidance
Manipulation: Task
Drain: Willpower + Charisma

All of its spirits are Possession spirits, and it can summon Guardian, Water, Man, Guidance and Task spirits. It uses Willpower + Charisma when resisting Drain from sorcery and conjuration.

The Combat: Guardian listing indicates that if you summon a Guardian spirit, one of the tasks you can ask it to do for you is help you learn and/or cast Combat spells. Likewise, a Voodoo mage can get help with their Detection spells from a Water spirit.
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OgreBattle
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Post by OgreBattle »

So "Combat: Guardian" only affects summoning, and does not affect sorcery right? As from what I can tell a magic user of any tradition can learn to shoot lightning bolts or fireballs.
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Post by Korwin »

OgreBattle wrote:So "Combat: Guardian" only affects summoning, and does not affect sorcery right? As from what I can tell a magic user of any tradition can learn to shoot lightning bolts or fireballs.
Yes every Tradition can learn to shoot lightning bolts.

It has nothing to do with "Combat: Guardian" (since every Tradition has an Spirit listed there, they are able to summon).

"Combat: Guardian" is only important, when/if you want your Spirits to affect your Sorcery.
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Post by OgreBattle »

Are possession/inhabiting/manifesting similar enough that one can be considered strictly better than the other, or do they excel at different things.

Same with the spirits, I've read on here that Voodoo tends to be favored due to them getting 'better' spirits, but I'm not familiar enough with the system to know what makes one spirit type/spirit summoning method better than the other.

I think that Genesis game that taught me all I know about Shadowrun only had sorcery. At least it informed me what the best pistol was...
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Post by Grek »

OgreBattle wrote:Are possession/inhabiting/manifesting similar enough that one can be considered strictly better than the other, or do they excel at different things.

Same with the spirits, I've read on here that Voodoo tends to be favored due to them getting 'better' spirits, but I'm not familiar enough with the system to know what makes one spirit type/spirit summoning method better than the other.

I think that Genesis game that taught me all I know about Shadowrun only had sorcery. At least it informed me what the best pistol was...
Materialization: The standard player option. You summon and the spirit appears in front of you as a physical entity and serves you for as long as you have services. Pros: Action economy. You take actions and your spirits take actions and more actions are taken per unit time on your team than with other options. Cons: Materialized spirits are very obviously non-human and can't be taken a lot of places. You don't get the ridiculous stat bonuses from Possession and Inhabitation.

Possession: The other player option. You summon and the spirit takes temporary control of a vessel and serves you for as long as you have services. This can be an object you've prepared, or a living creature. Pros: Possessed creatures get immunity to natural weapons and add the spirit's Force to all their stats. This is incredibly badass. Also, they can seize control over your enemies! Cons: Your spirits require expensive vessels to do anything physical. You lose out on Materialization's action economy benefits. If you want to keep your own skills while possessed, you need to take a special metamagic.

Inhabitation: The villain option. You summon a spirit and it takes over a vessel permanently and serves you until someone kills it. Inhabitation spirits make a Merge roll to decide if they look like the vessel ("Flesh Form"), like a materialized spirit ("True Form"), or like a blend of the two ("Hybrid Form"). Pros: True Form = Materialized Spirit that obeys you even without services and doesn't vanish in 12 hours. Flesh Form uses the skills of the victim, but with +Force to stats and immunity to natural weapons. Both Flesh and Hybrid forms can use a DNI, which means you can summon a matrix expert and have it hack for you. Cons: Inhabitation takes 1 day per force, is expensive as fuck, is NPC only unless you buy an Ally Spirit with Inhabitation, and kills whoever you use it on, including yourself. The only Inhabitation tradition that ever got a writeup was Insect, which is KOS pretty much everywhere.

Anecdote time: I got an Inhabitation Ally Spirit in my current campaign and have it Flesh Form merged with van. It has a body of 30, flies, breathes fire, is hardened against anything short of ICBMs and is willing to lay down Movement/Concealment/Guard/Magical Guard on the whole team all day every day forever. Its pretty sweet, but most GMs will not actually let you do this.
Last edited by Grek on Wed Dec 23, 2015 5:41 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Stahlseele »

SR5 is as bad as all of you have written before.
I am finding this out after having been successfully suckered into playing a character in a game set here in hamburg . .
The starting money is not enough.
The starting attributes are not enough.
The starting skills are not enough.
For ANYTHING BUT A BASELINE HUMAN.
Dorf Rigger?
Not enough money. Not enough Skills. Not enough Attributes.
Seriously. I think i spent, by now, 213k on only the Hovercraft. Strangely enough, the MILITARY ONE costs about 30 to 40k LESS than the civilian.
And going from an actually ocean going military hovercraft transporter to a civilian HOVER-VAN would only make it 10k or so less in the price range.
Or at least, i THINK that it would be going from an actual ocean capable military transport vessel to an amphibious minivan . . but i can't really reliably tell. BECAUSE THERE ARE NO MEASUREMENTS ON ANY OF THESE THINGS!
Originally, i was planning to go with a submarine, but fuck me, these Numbers are just off the charts of sanity x.x The only AVAILABLE ONE costs 108k and can't do anything you want it to to either.
Ork Street Sam?
Not enough money, not enough Attributes. Not enough Skills.
The Money actually runs out before the Ware does. And i am more or less restricting myself to ware that fits the Character Concept of basically the Monster from the Black Lagoon. An amphibious combat character. Because in Hamburg, that concept can actually be made to work for once.
Not enough Skills to be usefull for anything either. And the Attributes . . eh, mostly 5s natual attribute will have to do i guess. But still, not enough money to actually buy him the arsenal and a wardrobe full of armore and stuff.
And then we get to the so called "qualities" . .
Which have been called edges and flaws up untill SR3.
And now, appearantly, about half of them are incompatible with the most common pieces of ware. Skinworks for example. Or eyestuff. Or Earstuff. You know, better prosthetics. And most of these so called "positive" qualities should probably be found in the negative coloum instead . . .
Seeing how i am using the pdfs, because FUCK giving them money for this bullshit, i can't even throw them around the room, rip them up or set them on fire gods damn it! x.x
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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 Longes »

Grek wrote:
OgreBattle wrote:Are possession/inhabiting/manifesting similar enough that one can be considered strictly better than the other, or do they excel at different things.

Same with the spirits, I've read on here that Voodoo tends to be favored due to them getting 'better' spirits, but I'm not familiar enough with the system to know what makes one spirit type/spirit summoning method better than the other.

I think that Genesis game that taught me all I know about Shadowrun only had sorcery. At least it informed me what the best pistol was...
Materialization: The standard player option. You summon and the spirit appears in front of you as a physical entity and serves you for as long as you have services. Pros: Action economy. You take actions and your spirits take actions and more actions are taken per unit time on your team than with other options. Cons: Materialized spirits are very obviously non-human and can't be taken a lot of places. You don't get the ridiculous stat bonuses from Possession and Inhabitation.

Possession: The other player option. You summon and the spirit takes temporary control of a vessel and serves you for as long as you have services. This can be an object you've prepared, or a living creature. Pros: Possessed creatures get immunity to natural weapons and add the spirit's Force to all their stats. This is incredibly badass. Also, they can seize control over your enemies! Cons: Your spirits require expensive vessels to do anything physical. You lose out on Materialization's action economy benefits. If you want to keep your own skills while possessed, you need to take a special metamagic.
In addition to that, Possession works better at low Force while Materialization is stronger at high Force. Dropping Force 2-3 spirits into puppets or dead enemies is a totally valid approach to combat. Summoning Force 2-3 materialization spirits will get you laughed out of the room.
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Post by Stahlseele »

@Longes
Are you sure you did not want that in the SR4 THread instead? O.o


Also:
At the very least, SOMEBODY circumvented the fucking wireless crap and there is an internal router in the chrome flesh book . .
0,7E and 15K Nuyen just so you can flip the GM the bird and declare yourself a NO HACKING ZONE basically . .
Because doing errata to make the wireless bonus into the intended PAN BONUS would be admitting that they were wrong <.<
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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 Longes »

Stahlseele wrote:@Longes
Are you sure you did not want that in the SR4 THread instead? O.o
What, is "Shadowrun Situation" SR5 exclusive? Besides, what I said holds true for SR5 as well as SR4.
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Post by Stahlseele »

OK, i just thought it was part of another discussion.
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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 Username17 »

Stahlseele wrote:SR5 is as bad as all of you have written before.
I am finding this out after having been successfully suckered into playing a character in a game set here in hamburg . .
The starting money is not enough.
The starting attributes are not enough.
The starting skills are not enough.
For ANYTHING BUT A BASELINE HUMAN.
The default starting characters in SR5 are very weak compared to starting characters in previous editions. Also the proposed advancement rates are glacially slow. And they've increased the caps on how big dicepools get, so whatever numbers you're at in SR5 are proportionately smaller than the same numbers in any previous edition. Where a starting character in all four previous editions of Shadowrun was approximately an 8th circle Earthdawn character, in SR5 the default assumption is that you play an X-Man from the 1970s comics. That is, you're basically a teenage fuckup, but you have a couple of tricks that punch way above that level.

I don't think that decision is really right or wrong, but it's weird. There are frankly lots of games where you start as a teenage fuckup. Hell, Dungeons and Dragons does exactly that, and has since the 1970s. I understand that there have been people who thought Shadowrun would be better if you started as weaker and shittier characters and advanced more slowly, but I can't say I've ever seen any evidence that they were a majority of the fanbase. The chucklefucks who actually write SR5 are not representative of the majority of the fanbase and do not have good ideas, so the fact that they are off in the reeds on this one is not surprising.

To an extent it doesn't really matter. In each actual game, the starting characters are at whatever level the group decides to start them at. If you want to start them at around the equivalent of 100 point SR2 characters, you can do that. It would take a bit of mathing to figure out precisely where that is, but it's entirely doable.

The thing that is actually bad about SR5 is its absolutely everything. So figuring out what kind of chargen points you'd want to throw around to get PCs who weren't a bunch of high school kids who inexplicably owned machine guns isn't really worth your time.

-Username17
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Post by Nath »

Stahlseele wrote:And then we get to the so called "qualities" . .
Which have been called edges and flaws up untill SR3.
This change was introduced in the fourth edition. I guess they really wanted to name the special attribute they added "Edge," which required renaming what previously were called "edges & flaws."
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Post by pragma »

Stahlseele wrote:For ANYTHING BUT A BASELINE HUMAN.
At the risk of repeating a point already well made, this is also one of my myriad complaints about 5e. I actually kind of like the priority system because it feels like a bit of Shadowrun history, but this priority table is a joke. Even modest optimization really quickly reveals that you should never play anything but a human, never take race higher than D, and never take magic above C. If you do that you wind up with a reasonably functional cast of all human characters. So I guess SR5 is great if you want to run a racist campaign?

Also, divorcing qualities from build poitnts puts them back in the territory of "deeply weird." The game's dumb on a lot of axes.
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Post by Stahlseele »

I think i figured out part of the reason why i have such troubles building an to me acceptable character . .
WHY THE FUCK DO ELVES SUDDENLY COST LESS THAN TROLLS; ORKS AND DORFS DAMN IT?
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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