Drunken Review: Shadowrun 5

[silva]

Oh, and besides the scarcity thing, the AW intra-party conflicts is also something I think would fit Shadowrun nicely. If you notice, lots of heist movies have this kind of thing.

[Username17]

silva, this thread is really honestly about how 5th edition Shadowrun is shitty, not about the myriad ways that Apocalypse World is also shitty. No one fucking cares about Apocalypse World, please stop spamming this thread about it.

-Username17

[Stahlseele]

@silva:
don't have my books at hand, it's basically a series of D6 rolls and checking tables to see who does what for whom and what goes wrong.

There's also something like that for every day on the street encounters in there if i remember correctly.

[Red_Rob]

Just wanted to say I'm going to be using this table for all my NPC's in future games.

No exceptions.

[erik]

There should be a "roll twice" on that chart, then you're covered.

[shau]

Why stop there? I think players would enjoy the roleplaying opportunities inherent in the personality table. Shadowrun does not have the players randomly killing each other as soon as soon as they met in a bar like NWoD, but it could.

[kzt]

Then your fixer would show up with a job for murdering an innocent person and another one for robbing clean some honest local biz. "Sorry chum, thats all Ive got for the month" he would say. And then you realize that your scarcity metter would go up if you refuse and you could end up starving, or having your Rapier break permanently, or get a complication from some debts that could spill over to your innocent sister.

I had a GM who would do things like put together a run where we were supposed to burn down an orphanage, and when we refused the client would say something like "Good, I was just testing you" and then lay out the scenario where you were protecting the orphanage against this bunch of scum who were going to burn it down.

Of course he really was perfectly willing to run the game with us on either side, so if we had accepted the initial offer he'd have run with that.

[kzt]

Just to be clear, even before thinking about the food animals, for every 3 mages in the US, there is one rakasha and one barghest (or whatever else dogs/cats get to be). The odds that they awaken in the same house is low, so the US sees a 1% depopulation event alone from crazy-magic-cats waking up and slaughtering their owners.

I had a characters whose main hobby, after tinkering with the team's flying tank, was raising her little brood of (stolen) barghest puppies...

[Stahlseele]

They might be newly awakened, but they are still, at the base level, cats and dogs and as such, can be domesticated and used as guard animals. Well, dogs at least.
It's hard enough to get a mundane cat to do what you tell it to do, an awakened cat that can tell you to jump out of a window is something not many people want to try and argue with.
But if you treat them right, they will, like most cats, claim you as their own and act accordingly. There's several different sorts of both awakened house cats and domesticated dogs, not just cat>talis cat and dog>barghest.
cat>blackberry cat. There's a reason why cats have no natural predator in their own size category. Aside from other cats.
Dogs can also be hell hounds and gabriel hounds and cerberus.

And as of SR4, you actually have technocritters.
Yes. Lolcats are a viable race in shadowrun now.

Which means that yes, an otherwise perfectly -and i use the term here lightly- "normal" housecat can and will happyly hack and rig your stuff if bored

[Lago PARANOIA]

The whole 'awakened domestic animal' thing just doesn't seem very smart to me if you're trying to go for a gritty post-cyberpunk setting. Only someone who has had their mind curdled by Faux Awesome think that Howard the Duck and Rocket Raccoon would be immersive and thematic companions for such a setting.

[erik]

Decker concept:

[Whipstitch]

Actually, biodrones are a rigger thing.

[Koumei]

And as of SR4, you actually have technocritters.
Yes. Lolcats are a viable race in shadowrun now.

Which means that yes, an otherwise perfectly -and i use the term here lightly- "normal" housecat can and will happyly hack and rig your stuff if bored

You really should have included the picture, not just mentioned lolcats.


(In before someone asks what "that weird lower slot that looks like a mouth on the PC" is and reminds us how fucking old we are.)

[Username17]

The whole 'awakened domestic animal' thing just doesn't seem very smart to me if you're trying to go for a gritty post-cyberpunk setting. Only someone who has had their mind curdled by Faux Awesome think that Howard the Duck and Rocket Raccoon would be immersive and thematic companions for such a setting.

Howard the Duck is a comedy character. However, Raul from American Flagg is not especially. There is nothing wrong with Raul being a character in a cyberpunk series. In general, if you are a character written by Alan Moore in a piece of intermediate future political satire, you're probably an acceptable character to include in Shadowrun.

Beyond that though, there's nothing wrong with cockatrices, hell hounds, barghests, minotaurs, or gorgons, right? Those all seem like pretty reasonable fantasy monsters. But the way Shadowrun awakening works, those monsters should be way more common than monsters derived from, for example, eagles. It's not that there aren't eagles in the world to turn into eagle based monsters, it's that there are fifty billion chickens born every year (seriously: fifty billion). I'm sure humanity has developed pretty sensitive systems to note when a chicken is turning into a monster so they can kill it before it starts growing into a rampaging beast that is a threat to humans, but it's still an event that happens hundreds of millions of times a year and I don't doubt that some slip through the cracks.

The thing is that you can make a perfectly good set of monsters out of rats, chickens, dogs, cats, pigs, cows, sheep, and goats. There is plenty of mythological space covered there, and plenty of perfectly good monsters. There's no reason that things have to be "comedic" just because they have goat heads. Plenty of demons manage to have goat heads and hooves without being the slightest bit low comedy.

-Username17

[Cyberzombie]

I can understand that someone plays a game where nobody gets a high lifestyle because the runs the GM writes up don't pay enough. I can imagine Street Samurai and Rigger players resenting the fuck out of that GM, but I can imagine it happening. What I can't understand is writing an entire basic book for Shadowrun that explicitly says that that is the one true playstyle and offers no suggestions at all for playing in any other way.

Cheap runs never made much sense to me, given the starting power level of Shadowrunners. Now, I realize you can scale back the build points in SR4, but prior to that you had a fixed power level, and it's certainly not a bunch of street punks living in a cardboard box. You're talking about a street samurai with around 1/4 of a million nuyen in hardware in his body, a talented hacker with a powerful cyberdeck capable of beating corporate spiders, and talented mages who are likely better than most of the corp mages.

If Shadowruns pay shit, why aren't these guys just getting corp jobs? They can obviously outperform the current head spider, head security guy, etc.

[Red_Rob]

The whole 'awakened domestic animal' thing just doesn't seem very smart to me if you're trying to go for a gritty post-cyberpunk setting. Only someone who has had their mind curdled by Faux Awesome think that Howard the Duck and Rocket Raccoon would be immersive and thematic companions for such a setting.

I always imagined the initial awakening of animals as having more of an effect like the HL2 Portal Storms as described in the Apostasy comic. You wake up one morning and there's something deadly and horrible in your house. Parents tucking in their kids with little Fluffy and being woken by screams in the night. Survivors being unable to sleep in the same house as an animal because you never know.

If animals can spontaneously awaken as adults I imagine that would put an end to the Pet business pretty quickly, or at least drastically reduce pet numbers. Farming would also become a high-risk activity, which I guess creates wildly expensive meat and an incentive for everyone to eat the vat-grown soy-nutrient so popular in cyberpunk fiction.

[silva]

Then your fixer would show up with a job for murdering an innocent person and another one for robbing clean some honest local biz. "Sorry chum, thats all Ive got for the month" he would say. And then you realize that your scarcity metter would go up if you refuse and you could end up starving, or having your Rapier break permanently, or get a complication from some debts that could spill over to your innocent sister.

I had a GM who would do things like put together a run where we were supposed to burn down an orphanage, and when we refused the client would say something like "Good, I was just testing you" and then lay out the scenario where you were protecting the orphanage against this bunch of scum who were going to burn it down.

Of course he really was perfectly willing to run the game with us on either side, so if we had accepted the initial offer he'd have run with that.

Interesting, but I would get bothered if its used frequently, because it kind of makes players choices irrelevant, no ?

Stahl, I will take a look at Little B B when I get at home. Thanks.

[erik]

On the awakened critters, are they as a rule people-maiming menaces or would some awakened critters remain quasi-domesticated or loyal? Could have runners hired to steal and translate the biologically-encoded encryption keys that Emily Elizabeth keeps stored in her giant hell hound's collar.

[OgreBattle]

If animals can spontaneously awaken as adults I imagine that would put an end to the Pet business pretty quickly, or at least drastically reduce pet numbers. Farming would also become a high-risk activity, which I guess creates wildly expensive meat and an incentive for everyone to eat the vat-grown soy-nutrient so popular in cyberpunk fiction.

"Your client is from Guandong, fetch him rare animals to eat" could be an entire Shadowrun campaign.[/td][/tr][/table]

[Username17]

On the awakened critters, are they as a rule people-maiming menaces or would some awakened critters remain quasi-domesticated or loyal?

Runs the whole gamut. A lot of awakened paraspecies are basically dangerous wild animals, which can be tamed only to the degree that like bears and tigers can be. But some paraspecies are like human-smart and you can not only domesticate them, but civilize them. You can straight up give a Naga or a Shapeshifter a job, and have them sign up voluntarily for wage slavery. And there are ones in between of course. Barghests are like a particularly strong and kind of mean breed of dog, no more and no less.

-Username17

[OgreBattle]

Can insects awaken?
Do plants awaken? Like getting treants and mandragora

[Rawbeard]

vampiric trees say hello.

[codeGlaze]

Can insects awaken?
Do plants awaken? Like getting treants and mandragora

Well... not to bring up another shit show... but one of the big contentions in WAR! was that one country planted carnivorous trees in the other country... something something.

[Seerow]

On the awakened critters, are they as a rule people-maiming menaces or would some awakened critters remain quasi-domesticated or loyal?

Runs the whole gamut. A lot of awakened paraspecies are basically dangerous wild animals, which can be tamed only to the degree that like bears and tigers can be. But some paraspecies are like human-smart and you can not only domesticate them, but civilize them. You can straight up give a Naga or a Shapeshifter a job, and have them sign up voluntarily for wage slavery. And there are ones in between of course. Barghests are like a particularly strong and kind of mean breed of dog, no more and no less.

-Username17

I honestly imagined that awakened animal intelligence would stay mostly within the same realm as their base value. I mean, how many human metatypes take not just 1 or 2 points of logic, but drops all of your mental stats straight to animal?

I can certainly imagine temperament being different (though I still question how different in temperament Elves, Dwarves, Orcs, and Trolls really are compared to base humans), so could see an awakened Dog acting more like a feral wolf than a regular dog. But a different type of awakened dog suddenly being like some sort of reverse werewolf with human level intelligence I find for some reason harder to swallow.

[OgreBattle]

Can insects awaken?
Do plants awaken? Like getting treants and mandragora