FrankTrollman wrote:
There have been a lot of dumb plot ideas over the years. But Ghostwalker is the worst.
-Username17
My campaign took a detour through Denver once. Ghostwalker arrived to enforce the law after a PC-instigated series of shootouts and running gunbattles (the dragon intended to intimidate, he wouldn't be bothered to directly smash anyone). The resident troll archer shot him with an arrow, aiming for damage in the eye. If I recall, the result was 7 boxes of physical damage to Ghostwalker. This pleased me greatly.
Year of the Comet was horrible, mainly due to the sudden influx of SURGE requests from existing and new characters. This is of course without me once mentioning that SURGE was occurring -anywhere- in the game world. "No you may not manifest Anime Hair." ... "No you may not manifest Anime Fur." ... "No you may not manifest Anime H... didn't you ask me that last week James?"
Last edited by attackdrone on Tue May 24, 2011 2:04 pm, edited 1 time in total.
There's no way a Troll archer should be doing that kind of Damage to a Great Dragon. Warp Fate alone should stop that stupidity. But even if it didn't. he's got 40+ dice of soak.
Sounds like SR3 to me.
And that's a Serious wound.
Sounds about right to me.
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.
sabs wrote:There's no way a Troll archer should be doing that kind of Damage to a Great Dragon. Warp Fate alone should stop that stupidity. But even if it didn't. he's got 40+ dice of soak.
Warp Fate is pretty damn pointless, since it just lets the Dragon spend Edge and actions to screw with your dice pools. In almost all cases, the dragon is better off spending Edge to reroll his own fucking soak. But in any case, he doesn't have a whole lot of Edge when compared to a team of runners, so the ability to spend Edge twice as fast by spending it on enemy rolls in addition to its own is rather small potatoes.
The only major issue is the hardened armor. Your attacks have to hit a very large threshold to damage him at all. If you can actually do that, he's hamburger. A team of Runners that can actually hurt his ass will run him through all his Edge in less than one combat round and then he explodes.
sabs wrote:My point is, they shouldn't. But that's probably my Earthdawn Bias.
That is you wanking to Dragons exactly the same way that some of the authors do. People like you are why the entire Ghostwalker plotline was stupid and ruined a perfectly good setting.
A Dragon, even a Great Dragon, is a flying tank and a powerful magician. That's impressive. But the actual armed forces of countries have a lot of tanks, both flying and otherwise, and the planet has literally tens of millions of mages on it. A Great Dragon is very powerful, but he's not the match for any major military. Indeed, if one of them makes the mistake of actually showing up for a tank battle, it is unreasonable to expect them to live.
Remember: even in Earthdawn people killed off a Great Dragon in a sky battle involving a handful of flying boats. Do you understand how completely bullshit that is compared to a 21st century carrier-based task force?
Being the most powerful thing in the Shadowrun Setting doesn't mean you get to win a fight with a any group. Because a group by definition has more than one thing.
Okay.. there is a HUGE difference between a Carrier Group, and a group of 6 Shadowrunners.
A handful of shadowrunners shouldn't get to murder a Great Dragon in 2 rounds tops. That's rediculous.
A fighter squadron? Sure, they can blow up a Great Dragon no problem.
Also, Those Juggernaughts weren't exactly ittybitty boats. They're flying fortresses with 100's of fire canons on them. It's probably on part with a modern day destroyer.
A Carrier-based Task Force gets to take on Multiple Dragons at once.
I was saying that a Troll Street Sam and his friends don't get to kill a Great Dragon. Not that a Regiment with heavy artillery support doesn't.
Last edited by sabs on Tue May 24, 2011 3:38 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Heh. Good memories; I remember doing that exact 'killing off a Great Dragon in two rounds' thing... presuming you're competent enough to play in that sandbox (most especially including all the augmentations that grant extra actions), all you really need to do is get your ambush done properly (being in the right place at the right time to even try is NOT something you can just take for granted), and pack enough heavy weapons (massive credit for burning of Fate goes to the Rigger, who spent his time making attacks far too dangerous to ignore, leaving most of the rest of us free to beat up the dragon with relative impunity). That wasn't the BEST experience I've had with Shadowrun (that prize goes to the 'stealing of nukes from a remote high-security Russian military base' adventure), but since both of those were career capstone events intended to finish off their respective campaigns, I've no complaints.
In my case, this particular act of dragonslaying was actually ordered by Saeder-Krupp... something about Lofwyr being rather annoyed with one of his fellows for violating the specifics of some draconic agreement. The moral of the story was that smart dragons know full well that they're not awesome immortal invincible monsters that get to do whatever they want with no repercussions or chance of failure, but they don't want anyone ELSE to know that, so they conspire to keep the hard truth of just how very easy it is to kill a Great Dragon under very tight wraps.
Last edited by Endovior on Tue May 24, 2011 4:26 pm, edited 1 time in total.
sabs wrote:My point is, they shouldn't. But that's probably my Earthdawn Bias.
Fuck Earthdawn. Fuck it until even the most stupid fans realize that a setting where swords matter is not a measuring stick for balancing things in a future high-tech setting.
You're a fucking idiot. You are talking about swords that cleave through rock, shoot fire. We're talking about Magical Canons that can blow holes in mountains. If you think the /swords/ matter, as opposed to the massive amounts of magic.
A Great Dragon going down to a Troll using a fucking Composite bow is stupid. Hell, even going down to a single mini gun is dumb. You can masturbate over your 50 caliber machine gun all you want.
sabs wrote:You're a fucking idiot. You are talking about swords that cleave through rock, shoot fire. We're talking about Magical Canons that can blow holes in mountains. If you think the /swords/ matter, as opposed to the massive amounts of magic.
A Great Dragon going down to a Troll using a fucking Composite bow is stupid. Hell, even going down to a single mini gun is dumb. You can masturbate over your 50 caliber machine gun all you want.
A bunch of misisle launchers is not a 50 cal machine gun. And any shadowrunner team worth more than 500 nuyen a piece can get their hands on a bunch of missile launchers. And a bunch of missile launchers should totally kill any fucking dragon dumb enough to get into their line of fire.
sabs wrote:You're a fucking idiot. You are talking about swords that cleave through rock, shoot fire. We're talking about Magical Canons that can blow holes in mountains. If you think the /swords/ matter, as opposed to the massive amounts of magic.
A Great Dragon going down to a Troll using a fucking Composite bow is stupid. Hell, even going down to a single mini gun is dumb. You can masturbate over your 50 caliber machine gun all you want.
A bunch of misisle launchers is not a 50 cal machine gun. And any shadowrunner team worth more than 500 nuyen a piece can get their hands on a bunch of missile launchers. And a bunch of missile launchers should totally kill any fucking dragon dumb enough to get into their line of fire.
They totally do, yes; though the first few salvoes go poof against the dragon's fate pool. Then the dragon runs out of fate points, and gets murdered in the face by the first person to attack them with a reasonable (read: humongous) pool.
Fuchs wrote:A bunch of misisle launchers is not a 50 cal machine gun. And any shadowrunner team worth more than 500 nuyen a piece can get their hands on a bunch of missile launchers. And a bunch of missile launchers should totally kill any fucking dragon dumb enough to get into their line of fire.
I have to admit that my first thought wasn't, "that's about right for a tweaked-up archer", it was "didn't they have an anti-vehicle rocket on them?"
Why do people have problems with the Immersion with a Dragon dieing?
See Reign of Fire for example. Or if you must, Sucker Punch <.< . .
Dragons get killed in Fantasy due to Magic-Bioom. In SciFi/Modern they get killed due to Tech-Boom. Sounds about right to me . .
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.
Stahlseele wrote:Why do people have problems with the Immersion with a Dragon dieing?
See Reign of Fire for example. Or if you must, Sucker Punch <.< . .
Dragons get killed in Fantasy due to Magic-Bioom. In SciFi/Modern they get killed due to Tech-Boom. Sounds about right to me . .
Some people worship dragons, can't stomach when the big lizards die to puny humans, much less PCs.
Fuchs wrote:A bunch of misisle launchers is not a 50 cal machine gun. And any shadowrunner team worth more than 500 nuyen a piece can get their hands on a bunch of missile launchers. And a bunch of missile launchers should totally kill any fucking dragon dumb enough to get into their line of fire.
I have to admit that my first thought wasn't, "that's about right for a tweaked-up archer", it was "didn't they have an anti-vehicle rocket on them?"
That was my first thought too.
"Hmm... twenty or thirty shots of highly destructive missiles should do the trick".
As I said before. Lowfyr is the boogie man not because he's a dragon and can belly flop on you, but because he *is* Sader-Krupp and you can personally piss off an entire AAA megacorp by crossing him.
I never expect to actually meet a dragon in a game of Shadowrun unless I'm a major player, or I'm about to die.
Last edited by TheFlatline on Wed May 25, 2011 1:27 am, edited 1 time in total.
Lack of AP capabilities and no bursting keeps it inferior, but a troll spec'd for archery should be able to get in the 15P+ range for raw damage without too much effort.
mean_liar wrote:Are you using MRSI software from War?
MRSI? Sorry, haven't read War that closely. Pirated the PDF, but I'm considering deleting it unread.
Multiple Rounds Simultaneous Impact. It's a real-world concept. The idea is that each point on the ground has two ballistic trajectories- one at a sub-45 degree angle and one at a post-45 degree angle. The higher the angle the longer the flight. Therefore, it is possible to fire multiple rounds at pre-determined angles and pre-determined delays and be assured of their impact at roughly the same moment. On top of that, varying the propellant charge in artillery will create new angles of attack, which can be split up via MRSI.
For example, there are tanks/artillery that can put 6 rounds into the air and have pretty much simultaneous impact.
From what it sounds like, the software calculates those trajectories and delays for you so that you can get off multiple rounds which hit simultaneously and thus deliver more damage in a single hit.
Which is kind of frightening for an archer.
Last edited by TheFlatline on Wed May 25, 2011 2:43 am, edited 1 time in total.
