Shadowrun 4e newbie questions

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MfA
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Post by MfA »

FrankTrollman wrote:We're seriously at Pun Pun levels of "it doesn't say I can't make up new abilities that are wildly out of line with the guidelines and common sense." No. Just: No.
Wish and the Word would be a far better metaphor here.
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Post by Username17 »

MfA wrote:
FrankTrollman wrote:We're seriously at Pun Pun levels of "it doesn't say I can't make up new abilities that are wildly out of line with the guidelines and common sense." No. Just: No.

Wish and the Word would be a far better metaphor here.
Not really, no. The Wish and the Word were based on explicit guidelines that happened to be very stupid. Pun Pun really is just "the guidelines aren't complete, therefore I put infinity into the undeclared variable," which is basically what this discussion is.

Anyway, as the guy who wrote the SR4 Move By Wire, I can tell you that the point is that it upgrades mooks into reasonable threats to Street Samurai at a relatively low cost. Player Characters don't care, because they are going to be hitting their caps and won't have a Dodge skill (they will use Gymnastics and jack it to fuck with Synthacardium like everyone else). But thugs of the week come with Dodge skills by default, and if you slap MBW into them their relevant dicepools all get pretty close to maximum with one implant.

MBW is an excuse for there to be what would otherwise be an unrealistically large number of enemy street samurai who are almost the equal of high end PC shadowrunners.

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Post by Stahlseele »

which, of course, again clashes horribly with the fluff of MBW being the be all end all of cyberware and only very recently invented for militars shock troopers that don't care about their life time of 6 months . .
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Post by Username17 »

Stahlseele wrote:which, of course, again clashes horribly with the fluff of MBW being the be all end all of cyberware and only very recently invented for militars shock troopers that don't care about their life time of 6 months . .
Not really. Very high end agents probably are the kinds of people you don't want dying of brain lesions in a few months. Medium-end disposable assets would be the guys you'd want to expend that way. You don't turn your top end agents into juicers, you turn your third from the top end warriors into juicers.

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Post by Longes »

Assuming a homerul of availability 15 being max at chargen, do the rules seriously allow a dwarf to start with all cyberlimbs (except for torso) having agi 9, body 10, str 12, and then spending the rest of his BP on mental attributes? What are the downsides of replacing every meat limb in your body with chrome?
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Post by Stahlseele »

Losing 4 to 5 points of essence that you probably never ever will get back and could have used for something more usefull like initiative enhancements and other such nice things?
And for many things you average your attribute, so if you dump stat your physicals and try to make up for it with cyber limbs, you are usually pretty damn hosed . .
also, limbs don't have the body stat. they have agility and strength and dexterity i think in SR4 and only quickness and strength in SR3.
Cyber replacement never had the body attribute. So you can't dump that either.
Last edited by Stahlseele on Sat Jan 24, 2015 12:46 pm, edited 1 time 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 Longes »

Stahlseele wrote:Losing 4 to 5 points of essence that you probably never ever will get back and could have used for something more usefull like initiative enhancements and other such nice things?
And for many things you average your attribute, so if you dump stat your physicals and try to make up for it with cyber limbs, you are usually pretty damn hosed . .
also, limbs don't have the body stat. they have agility and strength and dexterity i think in SR4 and only quickness and strength in SR3.
Cyber replacement never had the body attribute. So you can't dump that either.
Cyberlimbs have a Body attribute. They only don't have Reflexes. And averaging is not a problem if your replace everything with cyberlimbs except for the skull.
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Post by Whipstitch »

One day I'll figure out why Stahl insists on answering questions about editions he doesn't really care about with answers he doesn't really research.

But yeah, you can dump the shit out of everything and the only thing it really hurts is the fact that you've burned through a lot of your Resources cap and obviously aren't going to be a great mage. It's not as big of a deal as you'd think though because honestly out of the shit you just mentioned the only shit that's truly sexy is the agility and cyberlimb armor. It's kinda tricky to evaluate this shit in a vacuum because while your Resources pool is generally the cheapest way to buff the crap out of your attributes, your Resources pool is also the only way you're going to start play with a fuck ton of drones to murder people with. The competition is just really fierce in that area.
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Post by Longes »

What are the problems with AI PC rules and Free Spirit PC rules?
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Post by Silent Wayfarer »

I think they make characters which are super weak compared to what a starting metahuman PC can summon/whistle up.

I also have a flavor question: I have Intimidate maxed out on a 5e mage, but I also have Con from a skill group. Should I get another skill instead? I already have guns/melee/mundane and astral perception/spellcasting and conjuring maxed out.
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Post by Whipstitch »

From a metagaming pov intimidate is a skill you can pretty safely do without, yeah. It's handy, but like Con it's also a skill that can backfire on you pretty hard if you don't succeed and even if you do it's pretty reasonable for the MC to conclude you've made an enemy. I'd see if anyone else in the group has it and if so let them do the strong arming. Mages get to wear a lot of hats so it's fairly polite to let the big scary troll samurai rule the roost when it comes to that sort of thing.
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Post by Silent Wayfarer »

Yeah, I'll pass on Intimidate, then. ANy other skills you'd recommend? Is enchanting any good? Gymnastics seems useless with Levitate, and I don't see why I should plow points into Disguise (even though he's styled as an overdramatic cosplaying nerd) when PMask and Fashion exist.
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Post by pragma »

Sneaking is a gem, I recommend it highly. I like specializing sneaking for astral when I'm playing a mage.

Etiquette and astral combat are good defensive skills in case you have to make an "oh shit" social roll or go a round with an elemental before you can get a spell off.

Counterspelling got nerfed to oblivion, but if you know a teammate is likely to be targeted by magic then it can pay off. You're just up a creek if you need to protect more than one person.

Palming, locksmith, industrial mechanic and demolition are fun, and I like to have them around to do general crime things.
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Post by Silent Wayfarer »

I never read about counterspelling nerfs, how bad is it? And do you mean Sneaking + Imp. Invis?
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Post by pragma »

The rules are cagey about this, but neither invisibility nor improved invisibility will work on the astral plane. Improved invisibility is a physical spell, so its out, and normal invisibility would conceal your aura but not its own. So you'd still be visible as a sustained spell floating around. If you want to surreptitiously inspect something on astral, the only option is to sneak into it.

Sneaking is also useful if you're sustaining something else and still need to hide on physical. Or if someone is trying to detect you via sound.

In SR4 everyone you were protecting just got your skill in additional dice. In SR5 your counterspelling skill rating creates a "counterspelling pool" of the same number of dice. You dole dice from that pool out to people on whom you've declared protection, and the pool refreshes once per combat turn. So if multiple of your friends are targeted in a single turn you need to split up your counterspelling pool.
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Post by Silent Wayfarer »

Wow, that's a big fucking nerf. Why even bother with counterspelling?

Also, I saw a bunch of characters in the Street Grimoire book, for some retarded reason there are people with skill groups at 14, despite 12 being listed as the most world class top notch 0.00001% of the exponents.

And these are second-string bounty hunters who go after noobrunners.

It makes more sense if you consider that it's stat + skill, but even so...
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Post by pragma »

It's still worth having counterspelling around in case you get into a mage duel on the astral. Spirits will target your astral combat, but mages will probably hurl stunbolts to try to disrupt you. On astral, you presumably only have yourself to protect so the effect is the same in SR5 as SR4.

For everyone else, it's nice to be able to toss out a save now and again. However, it's less important overall since direct combat spells have been nerfed as well.

I think the change was made because counterspelling came out of your sorcery pool in SR3 and everything that was old is new again. However, like most ports of SR3 rules, it's a batshit decision. In 3e your sorcery pool was often bigger than your skill, and people threw many fewer dice against much higher target numbers. You had fewer successes to cancel as the resident mage.
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Post by pragma »

And I hope those 14 dice are the pool and not the skill. It would be pretty nuts otherwise. Catalyst has been notoriously bad at editing, and labeling a pool as a skill is the sort of thing I'd expect from them.

Incidentally, I use pools to spec. all my NPCs now. It is way faster to write down the important pools than it is to make a collection of 8 stats + 10 skills even if I'm just making stuff up. I boil the NPCs down to Body+Armor, Reaction+Intuition, Perception+Intuition, and an attack or the key skill I expect them to roll and few other stats. It makes me wonder if you could get away with removing stats from Shadowrun entirely and having a skill only system. Or if it's possible to boil Shadowrun down to a much smaller number of key pools.

I suppose Orion is wrestling with the same thing over in his thread. His post about doing SR as an AS hack was inspiring.
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Post by Silent Wayfarer »

Wasn't AS basically Frank's idealized SR system in his take on an nWoDesque setting? I think Frank mashed a lot of skills down and outright eliminated the extraneous ones (seriously, do I need two different skills for Con and Impersonation?). Among other things...
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Post by Username17 »

Counterspelling is quite bad in SR5, but combat spells are unusable so it mostly doesn't matter. Counterspelling is pretty much worthless against a Stunball, but since Stunball is completely worthless under those rules, no one cares. Ghost help you if someone is powerful enough to cast Mob Mind though.

It's a bad edition, made by bad people who are bad at storytelling, shadowrun, and game design.

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Post by Silent Wayfarer »

Yeah, they nerfed the fuck out of direct combat spells but hardly touched the real gamewinners like the mind-related stuff, trid phantasm, etc.
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Post by Whipstitch »

Silent Wayfarer wrote:Wasn't AS basically Frank's idealized SR system in his take on an nWoDesque setting?
Which franchise it mechanically resembles most really depends on how you weight things. Frank certainly pulled bits and piece from Shadowrun but I'd imagine that he felt emboldened to do so by the fact that it's rather hard to fix the issues of one system without coming up with a good working example for the other to consider using given the inherent similarity between any two fixed dice pool systems.
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Post by Orion »

The impression I got from SR4 was the combat spells were already too bad to use with the exception of manabolt, deathtouch, and maybe powerbolt.
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Post by Silent Wayfarer »

In SR4, the direct spells were the best of the combat spells; they ignored armor and generally had lower drain too, and you didn't really care about elemental effects when you had the ability to bypass normal soak and roll your Magic + Casting + Focus vs their naked Willpower. Stunbolt and ball were good because Stun damage was costed lower than Physical damage, and everyone knows that a KOed enemy is just one coup de grace from being a dead enemy.

They turned it around in SR5E. Direct spells, while still ignoring normal armor and soak, now do your hits in damage, while indirect spells do Force + net hits vs armor, while costing less Drain too.
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Post by Longes »

Orion wrote:The impression I got from SR4 was the combat spells were already too bad to use with the exception of manabolt, deathtouch, and maybe powerbolt.
You usually want stunbolt, stunball and some elemental spell like Laser to use against drones.
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