The Shadowrun Situation

[Longes]

In SR5 there is a mechanic for changing Ownership of devices you stole - Logic + Hardware (24, 1 day). So, after I killed the decker, took his deck, brought it home, changed ownership - it is now my deck. Legaly mine. Matrix recognises me as the rightful owner. I now go, and sell this second-hand deck.
The important thing here though, is that I don't need to steal high-end decks. Every hacker in the world, who is not a technomancer, has a cyberdeck, and those cyberdecks cost 50.000+ nuyen. Even if you are, for Buddha knows what reason, playing a Street Level Game, you either don't meet deckers, or they have those expensive Vertus on them. I wouldn't bother stealing someone's Ares Predator, or Lamborgini - those things are either cheap or unique. But gear like cyberdecks and foci are common to their professions, while being expensive.

Or worst case scenario, you take the shit to use it yourself.

The aforementioned salvage truck? That shit wasn't to make money. That was so my rigger would have access to new vehicles and/or mods without needing to come up with way more money than we were ever realistically going to make. I wasn't hauling away crates of Predators stolen from rent-a-cops, I only brought it onto the scene if we wrecked drones/vehicles that could reasonably be useful.

Frank even mentions, you get the camry and sell it as parts. Well we know that in universe supposedly most shadowrunning deckers aren't using official decks, but shit they hacked together themselves from spare parts. Because of this, stealing other peoples' official decks and selling the parts, or using them to upgrade your own deck, should be a feasible thing (note: I haven't actually read through SR5 enough to know if this is a feasible thing in that edition).

It isn't. The cheapest ipaddeck on the market is mere 3R availability. There are no rules for upgrading decks.

[JesterZero]

It isn't. The cheapest ipaddeck on the market is mere 3R availability. There are no rules for upgrading decks.

It's particularly galling when you consider the fact that the fiction they released to promote SR5 seemed to describe the decker's cyberdeck as a series of daisy-chained commlinks that he'd kludged together. When I first read that, I thought that perhaps they'd come up with a clever way to get from SR4 (commlinks) to SR5 (decks) by declaring that decks were simply collections of commlinks...and the more commlinks...or more powerful commlinks...you chained together, the better your deck. Of course, there would have to be some element of diminishing returns to prevent the decker from trundling along with their Red Flyer wagon full of sixth world cellphones, but it seemed like an interesting concept.

Of course, none of that happened.

[Seerow]

It isn't. The cheapest ipaddeck on the market is mere 3R availability. There are no rules for upgrading decks.

Wow, 3R? I was majorly misled by the previews then.

[Longes]

I still maintain that matrix players got a HUGE over boost in 4e. It was playable by all means, but built right, a hacker of TM could just out shine anything you could throw at them. This nerf relfects it. And Im sure while they seem a little over cooked now, when unwired 5e comes out they will bring everything back on line. Catalyst is good about publishing balanced material.

Emphasis mine.

I... What?

[Voss]

He's claiming that balanced is achieved by taking an over-powered archetype * in one edition and nerfing it in the next. The fact that you don't interact between editions is completely beside the point, as is apparently the unwarranted optimism that yet another book will maybe bring it up to whatever he considers normal. But the important thing is that balanced is only achieved over multiple editions and multiple books, and within a single book is just asking for too much.

You've probably already identified that he is batshit insane, and his opinion is worthless.

*I have no idea if the technomancer actually was. SR4 struck me as bad, the Matrix rules were terrible and I thought the technomancer was a stupid and unnecessary concept from its inception back whenever.

[Fuchs]

I got so sick of the micro-managing part of Shadowrun and D&D, I dropped gold/nuyen counts from both games I run. Players pick/earn a lifestyle, normal gear is assumed to be simply available, special gear is individually approved by the GM.

Less of a headache on all fronts. Of course it only works if people trust me, and don't freak out over having to "mother may I" to get gear, instead of saving money/gold and then hoping the GM doesn't have issues with whatever they want to buy.

[TheFlatline]

I did a similar thing in D&D once we hit the teens in a rather large campaign. I basically bought a bag of holding 5 and stuffed it with like 50,000 GP of mundane items. I then asked the MC if we could just assume that if it was mundane I "owned it" in the bag unless it was something stupid like a water clock or a mule. We worked out that I'd make a wisdom save depending on how exotic of a mundane item it was to see if I found it when time was a factor. Failure doesn't mean that I couldn't get it, but it does mean that I couldn't find it in 1 round or whatever.

Spycraft 2 I believe does a similar thing with information (using an education check) and money. I know Dark Heresy at the Inquisition level lumps your wealth into something called Influence and has you make skill checks against it.

[Rawbeard]

What did they do to Technomancers anyway?

[Longes]

What did they do to Technomancers anyway?

Remade them to function like mages with crappy spells. But as a result, deckers are just better.

[Heisenberg]

Still at work on my free, fanmade alternative to SR5. Just as a status report, I'm currently 83 pages and over 36,000 words in. It should be reaching a "showable to others" status...soon. Or failing that, "soon". About halfway done with the magic chapter (not too many huge changes from SR4), almost up to the Matrix Chapter, which is going to be both "the hard part" and "the fun part".

[Blade]

You simply don't get a percentage of the retail value for stolen goods in anything even vaguely resembling the modern world. A stolen high-end laptop probably gets fenced for about as much as a stolen low end laptop. No one is checking a Circuit City flyer for similar models before pawning it.

That's bullshit.
A stolen iPhone of the latest generation gets you more than a stolen WM 6.1 smartphone, or even a stolen iPhone of the older generation. There's a reason why iPhones get stolen more than low-end smartphones.

[Username17]

You simply don't get a percentage of the retail value for stolen goods in anything even vaguely resembling the modern world. A stolen high-end laptop probably gets fenced for about as much as a stolen low end laptop. No one is checking a Circuit City flyer for similar models before pawning it.

That's bullshit.
A stolen iPhone of the latest generation gets you more than a stolen WM 6.1 smartphone, or even a stolen iPhone of the older generation. There's a reason why iPhones get stolen more than low-end smartphones.

iPhones get stolen for fences much more than laptops, despite being "worth less money." The Altima is an expensive item and it gets stolen a lot, but it's not an expensive car. The iPhone is not an expensive computer and its value to thieves is much higher than expensive computers are. The iPhone 5 is stolen far more than the Nexus 7 because it has a higher value to fences because there are established iPhone chop shops. But at the prices I can currently find online, a 16 gig iPhone 5 retails for two hundred bucks and a Nexus 7 goes for two hundred and thirty. Laptops that are stolen are usually not even sold as electronics - but instead mined for personal information by identity thief rings. The average take from a laptop is nearly fifty thousand dollars in fraud - no one gives a shit about how much the laptop is worth as a computer.

It is the availability of buyers, not the absolute value of the object, that drives the interest of thieves. Stolen goods are worth nothing but as physical evidence against you in court unless you can find a buyer. The turn around on an iPhone is actually pretty high, because there are established buyers already. Thieves can expect a quarter or half of the iPhone's retail value, sometimes fetching as much as a hundred bucks for a two hundred dollar phone. But they don't get nearly that much money for a stolen DVD player or a stolen diamond ring.

When people pawn stolen jewelry they get much less of the retail value, and they usually get caught. It's a shitty racket. Dealing in stolen property is a risky business and usually requires setting your sights extremely narrowly. The Apple Picker Gang in Connecticut steal phones. They don't steal cars, they don't even steal wallets. They have a way to turn around phones quickly into money, and they rob people of phones. Also bicycles, but they don't even sell those bicycles, they steal them in order to use during a few robberies and then ditch. Their income comes from stolen phones, and that's basically it.

Being part of a theft ring is pretty much a full time job. And it doesn't pay all that well. Criminals do not normally wander around with santa sacks to fill up with random shit that isn't theirs that they run across like they were D&D characters. That kind of behavior does not work in the real world, and it's deeply absurd to think it would work in a future with more wireless technology.

-Username17

[Nath]

It depends on where you are (and I guess also on what year). In Europe, thanks to multiple borders, there is a market for stolen expensive cars, which are smuggled into another country to be sold. Another niche market exists for stolen powerful cars (which usually mean expensive as well) which smugglers will use once for "go-fast" run, overnight trip to Spain or Netherlands for drugs, before discarding them. Firearms are also significantly harder to come by, so even a pair of handguns can fin their way onto the black market for several thousand euro (in the French military, if a single assault rifle or machine gun is missing, it is considered as a serious criminal case).

So as far as the Fifth edition is concerned, I'm pretty sure that with the Matrix overhauling requiring every gang and independent hacker to replace tens of thousands nuyen worth of comlink and programs by hundreds of thousands nuyen worth of cyberdeck, there should be a market to sell those at any fraction of their listed price.

On the other hand, stealing is not looting. Professional thieves target what their fence or gang wants. People engaging in other type of criminal activities may not loot as often as roleplayers do. Looting cash, jewelry, high-end cellphone might be common after some random brawl, but that's about it. Drug dealers raiding their rivals' headquarters may loot products along.
To an extent, shadowrunners looting everything would be like military contractors looting AK and ray-bans after a firefight. They may keep one for their own use (as one player put it during a merc game, "makes any warcrime you'll have to commit later look truer") but I wouldn't really expect them to try to fence anything that worth less than a full crate of gold bars or Mesopotamian antiquities.

Shadowrunners line of business ought to be closer to that of industrial spies for hire. As such, in the cyberpunk vein, their "loot" should primarily consist of the so-called datapay. The old editions of Shadowrun actually had specific rules for those, until people realized that 1° deckers did not need to accomplish the mission to retrieve those nor 2° did they need to tell the other about them, and 3° salvaged wired reflexes really cost a lot more.

But Shadowrun has a price problem to start with. It tries to use price for game balance for a number of game archetypes. It somewhat works in a fantasy setting by ruling the only valuable items are magical and rare (somewhat, as it actually barely stands careful examination, see Wish Economy). It doesn't work in a modern setting, where Seattle has a GDP of 78 billions nuyen. The money is there, within arm's reach, and every shop in the world to spend it is only one airline ticket away. You might just as well introduce in D&D toothfairies to give people XP for the teeth they bring back, and see people discuss on how acceptable it is to extract those from slain enemies or random townfolks and carry them around.
So Shadowrun rewards were set at an arbitrarily low level, and some rules were introduced (or suggested online) to deal with fencing. Which hit another problem Shadowrun has, as any attempt to explore the actual consequences of electronic currency and global identity registry quickly lead to a point where it is not just impossible to fence or acquire restricted gear, but to do anything shadowrunners are supposed to at all.

[Fucks]

I got so sick of the micro-managing part of Shadowrun and D&D, I dropped gold/nuyen counts from both games I run. Players pick/earn a lifestyle, normal gear is assumed to be simply available, special gear is individually approved by the GM.

Less of a headache on all fronts. Of course it only works if people trust me, and don't freak out over having to "mother may I" to get gear, instead of saving money/gold and then hoping the GM doesn't have issues with whatever they want to buy.

Say "hi" to FATE.

[silva]

I got so sick of the micro-managing part of Shadowrun and D&D, I dropped gold/nuyen counts from both games I run. Players pick/earn a lifestyle, normal gear is assumed to be simply available, special gear is individually approved by the GM.

Less of a headache on all fronts.

This one thousand times.

Take a look at Apocalypse World concept of "Barter" (translated to "Credits" in its cyberpunk hack The Sprawl) - its an abstract way to handle the issue thats a middleground between the bean counting and the more wide lifestyle concept of Shadowrun. Basically each archetype has ways of earning Credits like this:

The Decker:
"If youre charging someone for your services, 1-Credit is the going rate for: - a quick matrix data search on a subject, - a run on a low-sec host, or - a week of matrix overwatch";

The Street Samurai:
"If youre charging someone for your services, 1-Credit is the going rate for: a quick B&E job on a low-sec location, - a week of bodyguarding job; - etc. "

This way you can inter-link your characters needs and services between them (ie: youre playing with a samurai and need a decker to make a quick data search for you, so you know it costs you 1 credit; or you could be playing a decker in need of a bodyguard for a sensitive job, so you know how much credts it will cost you). Besides it, you have the goods translated to the credit system too, so (for example) an ordinary pistol is worth 1 credit, while a more sophisticated one ( Molly´s Flechette gun ?) is worth 2 credits, etc.

This system allows you to create a web of relationship between goods and services. And specially in Shadowrun´s case, it could give a more tangible and concrete way of valuing runs, something the original game always was opaque about. Taking a look at the playbooks here can elucidate the system more (notice the "Barter" parts on each playbook ).

[Fuchs]

Still too complicated to me. I wanted the whole money issue removed, and replaced with the players simply stating what they want, and the GM accomodating them in game in various ways. Not "I save up three credits to upgrade my flat" but "GM, I'd like to upgrade my flat" "Sure thing. Want to play out acquiring stuff or simply assume you bought it?"

[silva]

Yeah, thats cool too. Anything is better than the bean counting.

I remember char creation in 2nd ed was totally cool until the GEAR part. I still cant believe it was part of the official rules, and I still dont believe we did exaxtly as instructed. Nowadays I would totally let the players pick whats appropriated to their characters concepts and done.

[Username17]

Take a look at Apocalypse World concept of "Barter"

Not just no: FUCK NO.

Apocalypse World's barter system is a kind of shitty abstract money system at the best of times, and trying to apply it to a game where players can nerd out on which accessories they have on their guns would make it slow to a crawl and collapse into incoherence. It just doesn't make sense to try to collapse things into "money units" and haggling rolls or resource checks or any of that shit when a heavy pistol or rifle might be tricked out with one or more of 35 different gun accessories or loaded with one of 16 different types of ammunition.

Shadowrun equipment is based on catalog shopping, which is fun for a lot of people. People genuinely liked flipping through the Street Samurai Catalog and getting gas vent systems for their gun and shit. It's basically pretty pretty princess dressup, but it appeals to people on a very deep level. It is also time consuming, and not something people should have to do for every aspect of their character. But the solution to that is gear packages, not mass abstraction of everything.

If B&E is a tertiary aspect of your character, you shouldn't be forced to crawl through the entire catalog shopping minigame to determine what kind of glass cutters and rappelling harness you have. You should just grab a B&E kit of some rating or another and have some B&E equipment. But if B&E is totally your thing, then of course you should be able to nerd out about what kind of gecko tape gloves you have just like the gun bunnies can chortle away about their barrel mounted infrared flash light or their helmet mounted periscope or whatever the fuck.

The way forward was basically PACKS. Lifestyle packages for character archetypes for when players didn't want to play pretty pretty princess dressup but still wanted to be able to shoot bullets. Just like you could play house and get actual furniture and home electronics, or you could just pay for a lifestyle and assume you had that shit covered - you should be able to buy your ninja gear individually and upgrade it and shit or just buy ninja package deals and be a ninja.

-Username17

[silva]

Frank, the suggestion of AW barter was directed at someone which, like me, cant stand the bean counting and excesssive micro-managing of these games anymore (notice the anymore ? I was a fan of it in the beginning too, but with time its drawbacks surpassed any pluses for my group and we ditched it). So the abstraction is a feature here, not a bug. And I imagine this system may be similar to the ones cited by TheFlatline above (Spycraft, Dark Heresy). Also, Call of Cathulhu makes use of a similar concept if I aint mistaken.

And thats one of the problems of Shadowrun right there - a lot of things which is seen as "bad design" by people like me and Fucks, is well regarded and considered "good design" by the grognards. And the game keeps attached to its holy cows because of it - dice pools, complex sub-systems, modifiers gallore, slow combat, etc - edition after edition.

[Username17]

Frank, the suggestion of AW barter was directed at someone which, like me, cant stand the bean counting and excesssive micro-managing of these games anymore (notice the anymore ? I was a fan of it in the beginning too, but with time its drawbacks surpassed any pluses for my group and we ditched it). So the abstraction is a feature here, not a bug. And I imagine this system may be similar to the ones cited by TheFlatline above (Spycraft, Dark Heresy). Also, Call of Cathulhu makes use of a similar concept if I aint mistaken.

And thats one of the problems of Shadowrun right there - a lot of things which is seen as "bad design" by people like me and Fucks, is well regarded and considered "good design" by the grognards. And the game keeps attached to its holy cows because of it - dice pools, complex sub-systems, modifiers gallore, slow combat, etc - edition after edition.

No, you idiot. Higher or lower levels of granularity in equipment are not questions of good or bad design. If someone says that highly granular equipment is bad design, they are wrong. If someone says very abstract equipment is bad design, they are also wrong. Highly granular and highly abstract equipment are qualities that different games have. And being different qualities of different games they appeal to different people or appeal to the same people in a different way. You wouldn't complain that a short game like To Court The King was "badly designed" because it wasn't a long game. And you wouldn't complain that a longer game like Dominions 4 was "badly designed" because it wasn't over in a hurry. Games can have lots of minutiae to obsess over or they can be painted in broad quick strokes, and either way they can be good at being what they are.

Now what you specifically suggested was for a game that had lots of equipment granularity go to a super simplified cash system. And that is bad design. Because as soon as you do that, you're going to have a very annoying and very shitty minigame where you have to comb through the entire giant equipment list anyway to discover which items are invalidated by the cost abstraction. All kinds of things are going to be like "No one buys Rating 2, because Rating 1 costs one money unit and Rating 2 and 3 both cost two money units, and Rating 3 is better." That diminishes the game, doesn't decrease the work load of making a character, and is just all around a shitty idea. It's stupid, and you should feel stupid for having championed the notion.

That being said, I'm not saying that Shadowrun's purchase system is a paragon of design. It does what people want it to do when they are designing signature weapons or vehicles or tricking out their body with the latest biological and chrome enhancements. But it's too much work selecting all the other crap you need that you don't necessarily care that much about.

But you don't solve that issue by going to bigger, blunter chunks of money. You solve that issue by having bigger, blunter packages of equipment to buy at your option. It's not a problem that you can purchase rope or a knife or a lockpick kit. Those are all things which a character might want to have, and which a game as detail oriented as Shadowrun would be diminished by their removal. The problem is that there isn't a "fast mode" to get your adventuring gear onto your character sheet in a reasonable amount of time.

If you want to play a Rigger, you should have the option of just grabbing a package called the "drone rigger package" that comes with a couple of basic combat drones with the accessories needed to actually shoot people with them and the signal boosters and repeaters and shit you need to actually pilot the damn things in buildings. So that you could actually put together a Drone Rigger in a reasonable amount of time. But if you want to custom crafter your own killer robots with different weapon layouts and sensor arrays and shit, you could still do that. Basically the PACKS approach that Ancient History championed, though hopefully better edited. That is the way to solve the actual equipment issues that Shadowrun actually has without just throwing your hands up in the air and designing an entirely different kind of game that obviously has completely different problems.

-Username17

[sabs]

When AH dumped all of his Shadowrun work onto the public domain (after he left) one of the great boons was the PACKS stuff he had in there. It was still a bit fiddly and occasionally hard to read. But it made building goons, and tricking out your character in equipment you wanted to have but didn't want to agonize over really so much faster. Even when using the character builders for SR4, I would do all my fiddly equipment/cyber in there, and then look through the packs for the basics I wanted, and then add the items in the pack I picked into it.

It made life /so/ much simpler, especially in games where if you forgot to have a glass cutter in your inventory, the GM was "so sorry" and wouldn't let you pull one out of your ass.

[silva]

Frank: Whatever. The current Shadowrun approach is a piece of shit for me, and to anyone averse to micro-management and bean counting.

And Packs dont do it for me, because once the game starts youre back to the shitty bean counting. In other words: no matter how nice looking your patch is if the system underlying it is a big mess, which is the case of Shadowrun through all its editions.

[virgil]

Frank: Whatever. The current Shadowrun approach is a piece of shit for me, and to anyone averse to micro-management and bean counting.

And Packs dont do it for me, because once the game starts youre back to the shitty bean counting. In other words: no matter how nice looking your patch is if the system underlying it is a big mess, which is the case of Shadowrun through all its editions.

Except he already pointed out that switching to barter or some kind of macro-economic set-up will not solve a thing when the equipment remains on the scale of beans.

[silva]

Except that the AW approach dont keep gear on the scale of beans.

You dont have to calculate buying 20 clips of bullets worthing 35 nuyens each one for a total of 700 nuyens - you just spend 1 Credit and declare "I replenish my Viper´s stock of clips" and thats it.

Nor you have to calculate each separate component for a shining new Uzi 3 SMG you want to buy. So instead of "hmmm... its 2500,00 for the gun plus 1250,00 for the smartlink adaptation, plus 750 for the handle customization, and another 700 for a stock of clips" you have to just spend 1 Credit (or 2, if GM and group judges it coherent) and thats it. "You know what ? I will be using this 1 Credit Im earning in this bodyguarding job with a new Uzi 3 with full suite of electronics".

[Omegonthesane]

...This sort of shit is why I have silva on ignore.

Has there been a single point he's made that hasn't ultimately been "I like the taste of Apocalypse Cock"?