The Shadowrun Situation

[Fuchs]

I guess they'll say anyone who wants to rig a sports car or bike should have their character killed off for being a dirty pwoergamer.

[TheFlatline]

More SR5 fun!

When you jump into a vehicle, you add the Rating of your Control Rig to both the Handling and Speed of whatever vehicle you just jumped into. If you check page 202, you have a chart that converts the Speed ratings of vehicles into Walk and Run rates.

So let's say you have a Suzuki Mirage, which is Speed 6. That's a run rate of 320 meters per turn, which is about 400 km/h. Now that's a pretty fast bike. But then you jump into it with your Rating 3 Control Rig, and suddenly it's Speed 9. You now have a Run Rate of 2,560 meters per turn, which is something like 3300 km/h.

Simply by jumping into the vehicle, you have increased its top speed by 8 times and have exceeded speed of sound by three times.

EDIT: and if you add a spirit with Movement power, then you can break speed of light.

Want to really bake your noodle?

Ram something with that vehicle. Check out the damage rules for collisions.

[Longes]

More SR5 fun!

When you jump into a vehicle, you add the Rating of your Control Rig to both the Handling and Speed of whatever vehicle you just jumped into. If you check page 202, you have a chart that converts the Speed ratings of vehicles into Walk and Run rates.

So let's say you have a Suzuki Mirage, which is Speed 6. That's a run rate of 320 meters per turn, which is about 400 km/h. Now that's a pretty fast bike. But then you jump into it with your Rating 3 Control Rig, and suddenly it's Speed 9. You now have a Run Rate of 2,560 meters per turn, which is something like 3300 km/h.

Simply by jumping into the vehicle, you have increased its top speed by 8 times and have exceeded speed of sound by three times.

EDIT: and if you add a spirit with Movement power, then you can break speed of light.

Want to really bake your noodle?

Ram something with that vehicle. Check out the damage rules for collisions.

I don't need rules to know what happens when two objects collide at light speed

[MisterDee]

Oh sure. You don't need that... if you want to play DM-fellatio and Magical Tea Party.

[RadiantPhoenix]

Want to really bake your noodle?

Ram something with that vehicle. Check out the damage rules for collisions.

I don't play Shadowrun, so I'm going to make two guesses:

1. It does some small amount of damage that will not reliably kill people, despite the fact that you're a relativistic weapon.
2. There are no rules

[sabs]

Worse.
SO much worse.
Basically, anyone IN the vehicle will be chunky salsa.
The pedestrian you hit, will probably die too, but it's really less clear. Ramming does more damage to the people inside the vehicle than outside.

[Longes]

Amusing thread of the day: Shadowrunners don't kill and don't loot because the MC might drop rocks on them

[Ferret]

Whut.

[Seerow]

Amusing thread of the day: Shadowrunners don't kill and don't loot because the MC might drop rocks on them

I had a GM a while back who when we tried to steal the van belonging to a group of people we'd just killed, arbitrarily decided that the van exploded.

From that point on nobody bothered trying to loot anything, though many jokes and references were made to the effect of "I loot that guy's gun that he's shooting, it explodes and he dies"

[Fuchs]

If the GM doesn't want runners to loot stuff he needs to make the loot worth less than the time lost looting - which means the payments for the runs should be far higher than the gear the guards use.

Don't want people killing guards? Tell them up front. Anything else is just a challenge for players.

[TheFlatline]

If the GM doesn't want runners to loot stuff he needs to make the loot worth less than the time lost looting - which means the payments for the runs should be far higher than the gear the guards use.

Don't want people killing guards? Tell them up front. Anything else is just a challenge for players.

I get the idea that running out of a building with 15 assault rifles slung onto your back on top of your gear is a little asinine. We jokingly had a mule and a cart in D&D to carry the loot with us, and then a *trained* mule that could follow us into dungeons and pack out the 200 crossbows, swords, daggers, wall sconces, and everything else we could pry off the walls or salvage.

[Seerow]

If the GM doesn't want runners to loot stuff he needs to make the loot worth less than the time lost looting - which means the payments for the runs should be far higher than the gear the guards use.

Don't want people killing guards? Tell them up front. Anything else is just a challenge for players.

I get the idea that running out of a building with 15 assault rifles slung onto your back on top of your gear is a little asinine. We jokingly had a mule and a cart in D&D to carry the loot with us, and then a *trained* mule that could follow us into dungeons and pack out the 200 crossbows, swords, daggers, wall sconces, and everything else we could pry off the walls or salvage.

Nothing to say that's not possible in Shadowrun.

In a different campaign where loot did not explode, I actually had a rigger who bought a big truck that was modded out to include a large drone rack. This large drone rack was loaded with basically a mini-crane/fork lift, that was used to pick up any large salvage (small vehicles, med/large drones, etc) that we created and pull it back into the truck. Didn't bring it everywhere, but generally had it somewhere close by as a backup. Best use of it was when we nailed one of the little one-man planes and I brought it around to pick up the salvage from that.

[TheFlatline]

If the GM doesn't want runners to loot stuff he needs to make the loot worth less than the time lost looting - which means the payments for the runs should be far higher than the gear the guards use.

Don't want people killing guards? Tell them up front. Anything else is just a challenge for players.

I get the idea that running out of a building with 15 assault rifles slung onto your back on top of your gear is a little asinine. We jokingly had a mule and a cart in D&D to carry the loot with us, and then a *trained* mule that could follow us into dungeons and pack out the 200 crossbows, swords, daggers, wall sconces, and everything else we could pry off the walls or salvage.

Nothing to say that's not possible in Shadowrun.

In a different campaign where loot did not explode, I actually had a rigger who bought a big truck that was modded out to include a large drone rack. This large drone rack was loaded with basically a mini-crane/fork lift, that was used to pick up any large salvage (small vehicles, med/large drones, etc) that we created and pull it back into the truck. Didn't bring it everywhere, but generally had it somewhere close by as a backup. Best use of it was when we nailed one of the little one-man planes and I brought it around to pick up the salvage from that.

Okay amendment: carry 15 ARs on your back and still be combat and/or stealth effective. If there's no resistance and you aren't in a hurry sure mule up. But that usually isn't the case.

And I'd reward the hell out of your rigger salvage truck. That's wonderful creativity.

[JesterZero]

Problems I see with SR5:
1. Matrix rules are still bad.
2. Wireless bonuses don't make Matrix rules any better.
3. Technomancers are nerfed into oblivion. I don't see any way to use Puppeteer complex form, for example.
4. Mystic Adepts are Magicians+ or Adepts+, depending on how you build them. Even with the hotfixed "5 Karma per PP".
5. Spirits are still OP, and still have their bullshit Immunity.
6. Bioware + Cyberware don't give you discount on Essence.
7. 'ware seems to be not very good.
8. Essence affects your Social limit.
9. The only social modifier is Tailored Pheromones, which explicitly make you full of yourself. CYBERNETICS EAT YOUR SOUL!!!!!1ONE
10. Technomancers are nerfed into oblivion.
11. Sample Characters aren't even legal. Street Samurai has 220k more money spent than he should.
12. Drones are made of paper.
13. Priority system.
14. Priority system enforcing classes archetypes. I liked SR4's homogenization of character archetypes.
15. Editing of the goddamn book.
16. TECHNOMANCERS BEING NERFED INTO OBLIVION.

I was going to make fun of Longes for only just now arriving to a party that started back in July, but since Shadowrun threads are my favorite, I just don't have the heart. And given his postcount, I don't know if he's new to TGD, or has been here for a while but just lurks (like me). So assuming he's new, welcome, and here's some some proposed fixes/commentary:

1. You should check out EOTM (http://tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=48836)
2. Ibid
3. Ibid
4. Yes they are. Don't use them as SR5 has written.
5. You should check out alt.War (http://tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?p=180998)
6. This is actually not the problem you think it is. On the surface, SR4 did that because way back in the days of the original Shadowtech sourcebook, cyberware was limited by your Essence (which was more or less constant), whereas bioware was limited by Body Index (which wandered all over the map, since it was based on Body; the Body attribute itself is actually stupid, but that's a story for another time). Over time, two things then happened: 1) numbers associated with certain item/abilities from previous editions were mindlessly carried over, and 2) copy/paste errors from previous editions were introduced even when the numbers were reconsidered. Fixing both of those issues goes a long ways towards resolving that. Of course, this is something no edition of SR has done to date.
7. This is largely related to attempting to integrate the limit mechanic (which is fundamentally flawed), as well as giving the new wireless matrix something to do. Dumb things breed dumb things.
8. See previous comment on limits in general.
9. See previous comment on cyberware in general.
10. See #1
11. That's just the tip of the iceberg (http://forums.dumpshock.com/index.php?showtopic=39991)
12. See #5
13. The priority system isn't quite as terrible as some people have indicated, and it certainly isn't as good as some people have indicated. The most intractable problem is still the inequality of value between chargen and post-chargen. There are pros and cons between the various forms of character creation that SR has experimented with, and I happen to favor linear point-buy myself. But as long as the currency used to created your currency can't be measured against the currency used to improve your character, chargen will always be a hot mess. The fact that SR5 further muddies the water in terms of referring to these different units by the same name is just adding insult to injury.
14. I'm not sure I follow this complaint.
15. Oh, no argument there (http://forums.dumpshock.com/index.php?showtopic=39006)
16. See #1 (again). This is something of a sore spot for you I take it?

And welcome to the party.

I'll stand by my previous claim: there is no good reason to move from SR4 to SR5, and many good reasons not to.

[Longes]

I'll stand by my previous claim: there is no good reason to move from SR4 to SR5, and many good reasons not to.

I've lurked here before, but I only registered now.

There is one reason (though it is not good) - I can't find online GMT compatible SR4 game for the life of me.

[NineInchNall]

1. Yes they are. Don't use them as SR5 has written.

I say use them as written and don't use adepts, magicians, or aspected magicians.

Someone's quote tags need closing ...

[Stahlseele]

Wanna be even worse about the Speed thing?
Check out Thunderbirds. Yes, you can make the Trip Earth to the next star and back in a month . . going to mars would be just a trip of minutes.

i still play SR3 if i even get the chance to play . . going on about 3 years of only work and no play making me a dull boy by now i think . .
but things like these make me want to actually make a hillariously broken character concept like hall of mirrors and a fast moving vehicle all in one go.
and then go to one of the conventions and bug my really good buddies who iare the supporters for Pegasus Spiele, the German Shadowrun Crew ^^

[Concise Locket]

If the GM doesn't want runners to loot stuff he needs to make the loot worth less than the time lost looting - which means the payments for the runs should be far higher than the gear the guards use.

Don't want people killing guards? Tell them up front. Anything else is just a challenge for players.

I get the idea that running out of a building with 15 assault rifles slung onto your back on top of your gear is a little asinine. We jokingly had a mule and a cart in D&D to carry the loot with us, and then a *trained* mule that could follow us into dungeons and pack out the 200 crossbows, swords, daggers, wall sconces, and everything else we could pry off the walls or salvage.

Nothing to say that's not possible in Shadowrun.

In a different campaign where loot did not explode, I actually had a rigger who bought a big truck that was modded out to include a large drone rack. This large drone rack was loaded with basically a mini-crane/fork lift, that was used to pick up any large salvage (small vehicles, med/large drones, etc) that we created and pull it back into the truck. Didn't bring it everywhere, but generally had it somewhere close by as a backup. Best use of it was when we nailed one of the little one-man planes and I brought it around to pick up the salvage from that.

Different strokes for different folks but SR needs a better resource management mini-game. As a player I hated dealing with nickle-and-dime salvage antics that slowed the game down and it's not terribly fun as a GM.

[Longes]

Different strokes for different folks but SR needs a better resource management mini-game. As a player I hated dealing with nickle-and-dime salvage antics that slowed the game down and it's not terribly fun as a GM.

The big problem with this in SR5, is that certain items used by certain archetypes (foci and cyberdecks) cost tons of money (cyberdecks start at 50k, and go up into triple digits). So, either all enemy deckers have their cyberdecks implanted, or PCs loot cyberdecks and get tons of unintended money. It's like hacker car stealing, but easier and run related.

[Username17]

Different strokes for different folks but SR needs a better resource management mini-game. As a player I hated dealing with nickle-and-dime salvage antics that slowed the game down and it's not terribly fun as a GM.

The big problem with this in SR5, is that certain items used by certain archetypes (foci and cyberdecks) cost tons of money (cyberdecks start at 50k, and go up into triple digits). So, either all enemy deckers have their cyberdecks implanted, or PCs loot cyberdecks and get tons of unintended money. It's like hacker car stealing, but easier and run related.

In the real world, people don't normally run around stealing hub caps and lumbering under the weight of a sack full of stripped copper. When people win a fist fight, they rarely take the loser's phone, let alone jackets and pens. Quite simply: it simply isn't worth the time for an average person to loot stuff to try to pawn it later. There are people who make their living stealing stuff, but they rarely make a particularly good living. The resale value on stolen goods is shit, and the time it takes to turn that shit into money is considerable. There's a reason why most professional thieves are junkies and hobos rather than fire fighters and investment bankers.

The problem is that Shadowrun still basically operates on the D&D looting system. Everything you have in your santa sack at the end of the mission is more cash than you would otherwise have. It's not particularly realistic, and the designers of every edition have come out and said that they don't actually like the Greyhawking mentality it undeniably encourages. And so what they do is to unload the responsibility of reigning in unfettered looting to the GM. And so the GM, being basically asked to make up off-the-cuff restrictions and drawbacks to looting, goes ahead and does that. And the end result of course is players being pissed off because they are being dicked with.

What should happen is that there should be an actual formalized post-mission activities system like Ars Magica, and an actual formalized amount of heat that characters have on them at the end of a mission. Fencing stolen goods would explicitly use up time you could spend improving your car or researching spells, and draw the Eye of Sauron Lonestar, in exchange for a small amount of money. Then, most characters would not loot fallen enemy gang bangers because - like in the real world - it isn't worth the time or the risk for people who have skills to pay the bills.

But that would require actual game design, which the SR5 people couldn't be fucked to engage in. Which is unsurprising, because their own system of "drop a space cow on any player who gets too uppity" seems to work for them. Why would they fucking bother making rules that actually encouraged their preferred method of play when they can just terrorize people who get out of line?

-Username17

[Longes]

In the real world, people don't normally run around stealing hub caps and lumbering under the weight of a sack full of stripped copper

If I was a shadowrunner (hacker) with a fixer/fence I can trust, then yeah, I wouldn't mind looting the equialent of Vertu from the enemy decker. I mean, the good cyberdeck costs about 200.000 nuyen. Even getting 10% after fencing it, I still get more than the beginner level run pays.

The "Ownership" thing is stupid though. It raises questions like "If you stand naked, without -ware, in the wirelessless room - who owns your gear?"

[virgil]

I'm with Longes, there are times where I'd concern myself with looting if the gear was worth the trouble; usually for personal use though.

What should happen is that there should be an actual formalized post-mission activities system like Ars Magica, and an actual formalized amount of heat that characters have on them at the end of a mission. Fencing stolen goods would explicitly use up time you could spend improving your car or researching spells, and draw the Eye of Sauron Lonestar, in exchange for a small amount of money. Then, most characters would not loot fallen enemy gang bangers because - like in the real world - it isn't worth the time or the risk for people who have skills to pay the bills.

I'm thinking some kind of 'legal' notoriety system done at the end of each run, using roughly the same mechanics as SR4's general notoriety; the authorities use X resources to track down the runners, directly tied to how big of a score they accrue in the mission. Selling loot either increases the notoriety score or lowers the difficulty for the resources used to track down the runners.

[Username17]

In the real world, people don't normally run around stealing hub caps and lumbering under the weight of a sack full of stripped copper

If I was a shadowrunner (hacker) with a fixer/fence I can trust, then yeah, I wouldn't mind looting the equialent of Vertu from the enemy decker. I mean, the good cyberdeck costs about 200.000 nuyen. Even getting 10% after fencing it, I still get more than the beginner level run pays.

See, that's the problem. The whole idea that you get 10% for fencing loot is just D&D thinking. It's patently absurd to think that the world would work like that now, and it's more ridiculous to assert that it might work like that in the future. People do not normally buy expensive stolen things "on spec." Assassins don't normally try to augment their income by stealing their victim's Mercedes, because that doesn't work very well.

The most stolen late model car in the United States is the Toyota Camry, which in 2011 was stolen almost a thousand times.People don't steal expensive cars, they steal common cars. Because you don't sell stolen vehicles as vehicles, you sell them as parts. The only time anyone would ever get a 10% finder's fee for expensive stolen property is if there was a buyer already lined up for the item in question and the object was stolen on commission.

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.

Then there's the issue of police interest. Selling stolen goods is not only a way to get caught doing something illegal, it's something that creates a trail that connects you and people you know to crimes you have committed. Sometimes worse still, it creates a trail that connects crimes you've committed together.

Most career criminals don't loot their crime scenes. It has a significant risk, and the payout is pretty small. The D&D style "loot sells for a percentage of the retail purchase price" system doesn't adequately describe the incentives, so of course it encourages characters to behave like they were scavenging survivors in the post-apocalyptic wilderness instead of professional criminals in a science fiction future. And despite having created these perverse incentives, the designers publicly wonder why players are behaving "wrong." It's pathetic.

-Username17

[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.

[Seerow]

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).