The Gaming Den

Wiseman wrote:Some more questions:

How much detail should we have to pay attention to or how much can just be handwaved. My game group generally likes "kick in the door" style game play, but a lot of the material suggests a picture like "mission accomplished! but you forgot to do X! Game over!

That's really up to the group. Some love to get deep into each and every details, some prefer to handwave everything that isn't combat. It will also depend on the composition of the group: a team of heavy-hitters should be able to kick the front door and shoot everything without too much trouble while a team of faces should rather try to find a way to get other people do the job for them.

However, unless you have a group that really know everything about Shadowrun security, I'd suggest to always have some level of abstraction. I doubt many groups enjoy spending hours on a plan that take nearly everything into account to get told "you raise an alarm because you didn't account for the atmosphere sensor that detected the increase of CO2 caused by your breathing".

A middle-ground solution is to allow for "flashback" resolution: the team faces an unexpected security guard? Let the face explain how he befriended him during preparation, and do the roll (and possibly spend nuyens to bribe him): if it's successful, then the guard will let them be, if it's not then the guard is still a problem.

If you want to put a limit on these things, you can add a limit based on the time the PC had to prepare the operation, or you can use a mechanism where PC roll during preparation and contribute to a "planning pool" that's depleted when they retroactively explain how they got rid of an obstacle during legwork.

Also what's the expected level of power? I'm pretty fine with characters being able to take out mooks with impunity but I've seen some level of debate on this. Is there a way to make combat less directly lethal for PCs? Chargen takes a pretty long time. (Mooks with less damage boxes? Quicker combat?)

(The answers below are for SR4, I don't know if they're still relevant in SR5)

This depends on the character and the playstyle of the players. A good idea is to start small and see how your group fares and then scale up the opposition accordingly. But generally speaking, many dangerous combat situations in Shadowrun can be avoided and even in combat there are plenty of ways to win a fight, even when the opposition has a better firepower.

In my experience, combat isn't that lethal. It's true that you can quickly get badly hurt, but a one-shot death isn't that common. PC who lay low once they have been badly wounded should be able to survive most fights, and even if they get into overflow, as long as there's a teammate with a medkit nearby, they should be able to survive.

Thirdly, how much is changed if melee attacks are made into a simple action. And is it bad if characters can be capable of dodging or blocking bullets? (thinking adding melee combat to defense roll against ranged attacks)

Having melee attacks into a simple action doesn't seem like much of a problem to me. It makes melee a bit more interesting, but doesn't break the game.
Adding melee combat to defense roll against ranged attack is more problematic, because it means that even characters who fight with guns should invest in melee in order to get a better defense. What you could do would be to offer it as an option for "full dodge" instead of Dodge or Gymnastic.

Wiseman wrote:Some more questions:
Also what's the expected level of power? I'm pretty fine with characters being able to take out mooks with impunity but I've seen some level of debate on this. Is there a way to make combat less directly lethal for PCs? Chargen takes a pretty long time. (Mooks with less damage boxes? Quicker combat?)

Looks like Blade beat me to most of the answer, but the power level (despite what the books tell you) is almost entirely based on dice pools. If the players are getting into even fights, they've got a 50% chance of losing. That's bad, and the odds of survival drop the more fights they get in.

Two dice fewer than the players seems to make for an appropriately-challenging group of opponents. Most fights being easier than that (fewer opponents, fewer dice, or both) makes the difficult ones seem more important. Most opponents are just security mooks who are hired to call in alarms and delay until the heavy-hitters show up.

The game is pretty lenient with character death, so don't sweat it too much if something turns out more difficult than you planned for it to be one time. It usually takes 2 hits to take someone down, then they can be patched up if the fight ends before they bleed out. There's always edge, but players probably won't be happy to burn it.

Over the years of me running Shadowrun, literally a third of my players have actively avoided guns and/or 'ware. One made an adept and avoided both, sticking to mono-whips and crossbows. Another made a cyber-samurai, but eschewed firearms for swords and bows - and has been actively annoyed at the system/setting discouraging this choice. Yet another player eschewed firearms & 'ware before even knowing adepts were an option for enhanced physical prowess.

What is it with playing grizzled, amoral mercenaries that makes a notable fraction think "better avoid guns and cybernetics of any kind"?

I'm glad my wife doesn't hold have this Luddite instinct. She plays a magician and will totally shove as much 'ware in her character that she thinks she can get away with.

Maybe because they understood that magic is just plain better?

If they were playing magicians that would make sense. The street sam who won't touch a gun makes no sense at all.

True.

In some cases people are married to a specific aesthetic while in other cases it's just another form of power fantasy. Some people just want to beat down their enemies without "cheating" with powers from a god, fancy kit and combat drugs even if that's tantamount to actively handicapping yourself in the setting. Whether cyberware or magic falls into the cheating pile depends on the person--some people feel like both are examples of outside aid while others find being a magically gifted ubermensch acceptable. It's sorta like how people think Batman is extra bad ass because he's not a Kryptonian.

With that said, I have a fair bit of empathy for melee machines in Shadowrun. Close Combat skills are basically just a niche trick that you use as a last resort or as a passive defense pool when some poor mook makes the mistake of bringing his knife to your gunfight. I'm fine with a guns>melee paradigm, but Shadowrun takes it so far that even highly trained cyber-ninjas are better off with spraying bullets even if the fight starts in a closet. Giving cyberspurs rough parity with pistols at knife fight range isn't much to ask but alas we can't have nice things.

Spike's gun kata cleanly wins him this face-off far more often than not in SR4 and that's a damn shame.

Well, in SR3 you could do some fairly ridiculous stuff with close combat.
If you think 18D AV Damage with reach 3 is OP, then you haven't really stated.

But close combat was more and more nerfed.
It used to be pretty much better in raw alpha DMG output but of course had the drawback of needing to get into reach, while guns did not have that problem and had a more constant if a bit lower damage output over time.

Now that the damage has been reduced by a pretty big margin, yeah, a dedicated close combat character needs to kind of cheat quite a bit and then still will not be as good as somebody who simply goes shooty shooty bang bang.

I actually consider SR3 to be even worse in the melee department than SR4 due to extra Reach being stupidly important and restricted by metatype. You can achieve useful damage codes in either edition, but doing so requires abiding by insultingly restrictive build choices. I know you're a self-professed SR3 and troll fanboy, but the part where 8 foot tall janitors used to run around with low target numbers thanks to long arms and a mop is actually just another good reason why everyone else should just punt melee skills and stick with the dakka. Molly Millions and her handrazors need not apply.

That seems like a rather petty reason to abandon melee as a concept. Especially considering characters of the genre like this:


It's called a street samurai. The first thing that comes to mind for most people is the fucking katana.

FFs, my point isn't that it's badwrongfun to play street samurai in Shadowrun, it's that it's marginalized mechanically and human variants in particular get marginalized even further in SR3 because random baseball bat wielding trolls are fucking with your target numbers. I'm OK with metatype being a decent tie breaker between otherwise comparable builds but sr3 takes it a step too far. SR3 has a raging hard-on for polearms and that's a really weird decision in a setting where razorgirls and kung fu masters are supposed to be viable combatants.

This is more a lore question, but what exactly does AR do, and what do you need simsense for? AR can affect your senses, so what is a simsense module for?

Also, what exactly is a commlink? do you need to manually activate it, or is it controled by DNI?

Wiseman wrote: AR can affect your senses, so what is a simsense module for?

Well, first of all, SimSense & ASIST actually predates 2070s style integrated AR in Shadowrun, so if nothing modules would still linger as legacy tech. But beyond that AR doesn't actually have to fiddle with your brain directly. Instead of using DNI or trodes you can just use eyewear to have the HUD and other images projected onto your eyeballs and use haptic feedback gloves, keyboard, commlink touchscreen or voice commands to interact with the user interface. By contrast ASIST & DNI via trodes or datajack is what you want to go with if you want your devices having direct conversations with your brain.

Are guns mounted onto swords and polearms a thing in Shadowrun?

Like a futuristic version of this:

If not how would you stat it?

Bayonets are a thing. As for how to stat - just give it two stat blocks, one for melee attacks and one for ranged attacks.

OgreBattle wrote:Are guns mounted onto swords and polearms a thing in Shadowrun?

Longes wrote:Bayonets are a thing.

Yeah, it's hard to understand our fascination with gunblades, because a mix of gun and pike has been Real Life's favored mook weapon for more than 200 years.

nockermensch wrote:Yeah, it's hard to understand our fascination with gunblades, because a mix of gun and pike has been Real Life's favored mook weapon for more than 200 years.

That's EXACTLY why gunblades are cool: they reverse the design from "gun with a pointy end" to "sword that shoots bullets". The fact that the latter is highly impractical is PRECISELY why people want their "totally cool badass" fictional self-insert character to use one. Watch any cutscene from Devil May Cry where Dante pauses from carving up demons to take an opportunistic shot with his pistol.

There's also the mechanical effect in most systems where this would be considered: usually, using any gun at all is a legitimate life choice, while your selection of melee weapon is a key aspect to the character build. It's certainly true in SR4. You can kill people just fine by double-tapping them with a light pistol, but the difference between using a knife and a claymore is significant.

Point of order: Dante has two guns and a sword. He does not have a gunblade.

Right, but that's the purpose people have in mind when they want a gunblade. "I want a guy with a big sword, who can still pull out a gun and shoot guys he can't reach." Few TTRPGs support switching weapons freely from one combat action to the next (contrast DMC where you can literally mix gun attacks into a midair melee combo), so players are looking for a way to have both in their hands at the same time without taking -$TEXAS to all their rolls. The bayonet is not satisfactory to these players, because it's intended (both thematically and mechanically) that the gun is the primary weapon and the blade is a backup, and they want it the other way around.

Isn't there just a -1 DP for using a weapon in your "offhand"?
So no real need for switching weapons right? Just use the weapon with the bigger DP in the offhand to make up for the lost dice.

Also, i think you can add a secondary weapon to your weapon as well, that would be a way to make a gunblade possibly. Furthermore, there is the melee hardening stuff for guns as well if i remember correctly.

When a mage manifests, can he cast physical spells on things?

No. I'm pretty sure he'd need to materialize for that.

Trill wrote:When a mage manifests, can he cast physical spells on things?

No.

Astrally Projecting mages can't materialize, only manifest

4e CRB, p. 184 wrote:If a purely astral form such as a spirit or an astrally project-
ing magician wishes to interact with the physical plane, she must
manifest. Manifesting is the opposite of astral perception—the
extending of the senses onto the physical plane. Manifesting takes
a Simple Action to engage or disengage. Manifesting characters
and spirits appear on the physical plane as ghostly, hazy images
and may freely communicate with physical characters. Unlike
the Materialization power of spirits (p. 289), manifesting does
not create a physical form, and so the character cannot physi-
cally interact with anything, nor can she be harmed by physical
attacks. Because manifestation is a psychic eff ect, manifested
characters cannot be detected, recorded, or aff ected by techno-
logical devices. Manifesting characters and spirits, however, are
vulnerable to mana-based magical eff ects on the physical plane.
Likewise, manifesting beings are still subject to astral attacks.

or stop projecting and return to their bodies.

I'm asking whether you have to return to your body and cast normally to be able to cast physical spells or if you can do so while manifesting.
I understand not allowing it from a balance perspective (Projection allows you to scout more space at the cost of only being able to attack astral forms), but I'd like to hear a second opinion on this

EDIT: Ninja'd by Longes
Why would you say no?

Because you're not there on the physical plane, you're on the astral plane. You can project a psychic image into the physical plane, but that's not the same.