Drunken Review: Shadowrun 5

[Silent Wayfarer]

My experience with damage scaling comes from Heavy Gear, where the damage multiplier between scales was x20.

Most infantry assault rifles did about 25 damage, multiplied by MoS on a d6 roll, and vehicle armor was around 15 (150 infantry scale) for average soldier Gears. In practice it would take an improbably lucky infantry rifle shot to begin to do damage to a Gear, and even an average man (HP 50, not including armor) would need a pretty lucky roll to be oneshotted by a rifle. In contrast, a single shot from the basic light autocannon that almost all basic Gears had as a longarm was x80, which really would oneshot any infantry not wearing the heaviest possible armor... if it connected. Vehicles took a -2 penalty on a d6 roll to hit infantry with vehicle scale weapons, unless they were tagged as Anti Infantry, which let you make that roll normally. Most machine guns and frag cannons firing canister were so tagged, and area effect weapons like grenade launchers and flamethrowers didn't even care about that penalty.

Something like that.

[Whipstitch]

Maybe it'd be a possibility if Shadowrun's non-computer technology wasn't stuck in 80s futurism thinking. Is that just because of the retro 'charm' or is it a failure of imagination on the writers' parts?

Retro charm, mostly. It's hard to overstate how much influence Gibson had on Shadowrun, and Johnny Mnemonic literally opens with a man describing the home-made shotgun shells he's taking to a meet he expects to go bad. Shadowrun takes a sort of perverse glee in the notion that for all the fancy shmancy crap flying around physics are still largely the same and as such you could still feasibly be beaten to death with a tack hammer.

[Lokathor]

How about if the default assumption is that the goal of the hacker is to reduce the opponent to being a Luddite? (i.e., hacking a runner-grade networked device only brings it down to the level of a luddite device)

If you don't have a smartgun, people with cyber-reflexes will dodge you like they're in The Matrix, or block like they're Jedi in Star Wars, and if you don't have cyber-reflexes, smartguns will slaughter you like you're an infantryman in World War I.

That's silly though.

1) A smartgun links into your visuals and shows an AR display and stuff so it's like a video game HUD and you get an attack bonus. It doesn't have the magic power to predict where they'll be as they're dodging and flailing around, it just tells you where the bullets will go as accurately as it can, and then you still lead the target and stuff yourself. You might have an attack penalty without a smartgun or something, but you can probably still hit them. Or rockets/grenades of course.

2) You can get enhanced reflexes from bioware or from a spell or from adept powers or even just from combat drugs. Hackable cyber-reflexes are not even a thing people need to have to be awesome. Folks should stop jacking off this particular cock.

[Username17]

In many ways I found SR4 matrix more complex than its predecessors.

The only way you could possibly believe that is if you were forgetting most of the steps involved in SR1-3 Hacking.

Would it work if the matrix was abstracted to being "function-oriented" ?

That's pretty much what you have to do, yes. I would go so far as to say that when you hack to interfere with your opponents that you should make the roll to determine how much you interfere with them and then declare what it is that you did afterwards. So you'd make your opposed hacking roll, get a three point hacking effect, and choose some kind of penalty to apply like blindness or something. And then you could flavor that as bombarding someone with customized (and opaque) advertisements or rebooting their eyes or whatever.

Going at it the other way, where you pick things that already exist in the world and then try to work out what you can do with hacking from them is unworkable. SR5 spends a lot of pages on this, and it's still so incomplete that the Hacker isn't even playable. We haven't gotten to the part where it tries to convince you that it would be better to have your bone lacing connected to the matrix and then provides examples of things hackers can do to hack your bone lacing (seriously, that's actually an example), but it's dumb. It's a rabbit hole of design that you can never get to the end of and will probably break a dozen ways before you even get bored of trying.

As for equipment limits, I'm... okay with them in a very, very limited concept. Basically, if I was going to use the concept of limits, I'd implement them when you're using the item in a way that is not intended. So a holdout pistol past say 5 meters is really fucking inaccurate, so I'd impose a limit when you use the holdout pistol at long or extreme ranges instead of dice pool penalties. Using a sniper rifle in melee combat would have limits, whereas long and extreme range brackets don't. I'm conceptually okay with this because I've never met someone who could snipe with a saturday night special at someone blocks away. It just doesn't happen reliably due to ballistics.

As Nath pointed out, that's actually the opposite of how Limits work. Limits cap your number of hits, which means that they actually matter less and less the more penalties you have. Limits make it harder to use bonuses, not harder to function when you have penalties. I could certainly imagine a mechanic in which tools became useless after a certain amount of penalties racked up, but Limits aren't that mechanic. They don't even look like that mechanic in a bad light. They are bad and everything they do is bad.

Also Frank, I'd be interested how difficult the scaling 1st ed damage system would be to graft into 4th edition. I really loved the LMSD damage codes, and miss the variable soak numbers of 3rd edition (though not the variable target numbers themselves). I liked the idea that some guns hit hard but were easier to soak and others were tough to soak but did little base damage.

No deal. When Shadowrun 1st edition came out, a weapon had three measurements of how much damage it did: Power, Damage Level, and Staging. For 2nd edition, they dropped Staging. For 4th edition, they dropped Damage Level. And in both cases, that was fine. "Doing more damage" and "doing more damage" just aren't different enough for it to be worthwhile tracking them separately. In both cases, you resist them by "being tougher" so there's no point in having separate numbers (or numbers and letters as the case may be).

Now places that you could provide extra granularity is accuracy and armor penetration. Enemies who are hard to hit are not all the same as enemies who are very tough, and vice versa. I can certainly imagine there being a difference between a tough creature and a not-so-tough creature wearing heavy armor.

Now, SR4 has armor penetration, but it's lame. Everyone wears at least some armor and the armor penetration is just a straight subtraction from the dice pool. Increasing AP by 2 has precisely the same effect no matter who you're shooting at, so it ends up being just 1/3 of a damage point and completely uninteresting as a game statistic. But it would be easy enough to make armor penetration into something more interesting - it just needs to have a greater effect on things with more armor. The easiest way to do that is to just make armor penetration be a multiplier. Say +50% armor for flechette and -50% armor for armor piercing. That immediately and obviously gives cutoffs for when weapons are better or worse to use against targets based on how much armor they have. Unfortunately, it also doesn't scale well outside the human range (remember vehicle rules fuckery). A slightly more complicated system would be to give things three armor numbers: one for low penetration weapons, one for normal, and one for armor piercing. That wouldn't be much more work than SR2's Impact and Ballistic armor, and it could actually scale pretty well if you jiggered the inputs right.

How about if the default assumption is that the goal of the hacker is to reduce the opponent to being a Luddite?

The goal of shooting someone in the face is a lot more than just making them a luddite. Taking away someone's bonuses can never be your end game. Your end game has to leave your opponents actually neutralized in some way.

-Username17

[RadiantPhoenix]

How about if the default assumption is that the goal of the hacker is to reduce the opponent to being a Luddite? (i.e., hacking a runner-grade networked device only brings it down to the level of a luddite device)

If you don't have a smartgun, people with cyber-reflexes will dodge you like they're in The Matrix, or block like they're Jedi in Star Wars, and if you don't have cyber-reflexes, smartguns will slaughter you like you're an infantryman in World War I.

That's silly though.

1) A smartgun links into your visuals and shows an AR display and stuff so it's like a video game HUD and you get an attack bonus. It doesn't have the magic power to predict where they'll be as they're dodging and flailing around, it just tells you where the bullets will go as accurately as it can, and then you still lead the target and stuff yourself. You might have an attack penalty without a smartgun or something, but you can probably still hit them. Or rockets/grenades of course.

I was thinking, "if your opponents are reacting at human speed, the level of computing power you have hooked up to the gun can predict their motion well enough to hit them every time."

2) You can get enhanced reflexes from bioware or from a spell or from adept powers or even just from combat drugs. Hackable cyber-reflexes are not even a thing people need to have to be awesome. Folks should stop jacking off this particular cock.

You could make the game that way. You could also remove the hacker as a runner archetype.

Basically, I was imagining your cyberware assisting you in dodging by, as with the guns, having more computing power allowing them to make better models of the opponent's motion and behavior, and then countering what you think they're going to do.

Oh, and not being (as) bound by the limits of cells, when compared to bioware/drugs.

(Magic is a separate thing)

[Cyberzombie]

The goal of shooting someone in the face is a lot more than just making them a luddite. Taking away someone's bonuses can never be your end game. Your end game has to leave your opponents actually neutralized in some way.

I would imagine you get around that by allowing the hacker to debuff multiple people at once by hacking a TacNet or something similar.

The hacker generally is a support character anyway, so a group debuff seems like a decent support role, you just have to make the Tacnet bonuses big enough that people care if you hack them.

[Smirnoffico]

The goal of shooting someone in the face is a lot more than just making them a luddite. Taking away someone's bonuses can never be your end game. Your end game has to leave your opponents actually neutralized in some way.

-Username17

I think I'm missing something here. Why is the end goal of hacker to disable people (in meatspace)? Can't he carry a gun for this kind of shit or a street sam? One of the recent threads here spoke about hacker's role as a force multiplier and that's something that instantly appeals to me. After all, if all hacker does is killing people with different skill than street sam, what's the point? By the same virtue I find Combat spells to be most boring in the game, especially compared to gamechangers like mind scan, trid fantasm, influence (I know that's not a spell, but still) and the like. Giving hacker something equally unique and viable to do in combat would make the archetype worth having.

SR4 (to me) stands at the point where group doesn't need a dedicated hacker at all. Everything can be done with a commlink loaded with agents, so street sam or a mage can be a hacker, which makes this archetype a secondary one, just like getaway driver.

Or, again, am I missing something?

[Username17]

Why is the end goal of hacker to disable people (in meatspace)?

The goal of the Hacker character is to take hacking actions so that it is relevant while they are acting that they are a Hacker and not some other kind of character. Therefore, hacking actions have to be worth using even though as you've noted there is nothing stopping the Hacker character from having a sub machine gun. Therefore, the Hacker's opponents are faced with a reality that the hacking actions that can be used against them are at least marginally more effective than shooting them in the god damn face with a sub machine gun, and will react accordingly. Therefore, if the opposition can avoid the threat of being hacked by turning the wireless receiver off on their bone lacing, they are definitely going to do that. Therefore, if the Hacker doesn't have anything effective to do to people who have flicked the WiFi switch on their shit to "off," he won't have anything to do. Therefore, if the Hacker can't do something to voluntary Drop Outs, you have failed your goal of having the Hacker actually be a Hacker.

It's a very simple Nash equilibrium. The Hacker needs to have hacking actions that are worth using instead of shooting a gun, and the opposition needs to take actions such that the Hacker has available hacking actions even though those actions are marginally more effective than shooting hot lead at their eye. There are only two answers to that, which are the Stick ("The Hacker can take actions against you no matter what you do, so turn on some god damn WiFi shit") and the Carrot ("There are various sundry incentives to turning on some WiFi, which we totally promise will lead to a stable equilibrium where WiFi is used and Hackers have actions to take"). I favor the Stick, because it's workable. I've looked at the Carrot approach from all sides, and it is too fucking hard. It is more difficult to design something like that than I am capable of, and anyone who claims that they can design such a thing is much more likely to be full of shit and suffering from Dunning-Kruger than to be actually correct.

-Username17

[Smirnoffico]

I get the logic that in order for a hacker to be able to do hacking actions in combat they need to be as effective as street sam/mage actions, that's easy enough. But does the game at all need this 'combat hacker' archetype? I know it was in there for that many years, but so was Captain Chaos before System Failure or FastJack before SR5.

What if we decide that shooting a sub machine gun or throwing a manabolt is indeed king of combat and no hacking action can equal that in effectiveness. Would having an ability to buff his group be enough to make him needed in combat? What if he has ability to debuff enemy groups? For example, hacker can create effective 'Trid Fantasms' at wish like obscuring locations, creating believable holograms and so on.

And I suspect that I'm just repeating arguments that were discussed many, many times, so if there's a thread I should read, I would gladly go read it.

[OgreBattle]

What's the hacker suppose to do if the opposition is made up of magic users without cyberware, or you're in a nest of ghouls in some place without electricity.

Hacking seems like something that should only be a secondary character concept at best (with your primary being shooting people, having drones shoot people, shooting people with magic, or talking people out of shooting each other)

[Smirnoffico]

Which leads me to another question - why are rigger and hacker separate archetypes?

[Ancient History]

Back in the day, there were mechanical and setting differences. I know it, seems silly now.

[Cyberzombie]

I think the hacker problem is mostly about playstyle.

If your Shadowrun games are primarily about combat, where a PCs body count is the most important statistic, then choice of character role probably then you probably just comes down to various mechanical differences in how you kill people. If the concept of the game is just Diablo with guns, where combats are frequent and stealth is an afterthought, then you do probably want to give the hacker some kind of direct attack.

If on the other hand, your Shadowrun games focus on strategically avoiding combat encounters and trying to do a run as quietly as possible, then having a hacker be a secondary character in meatspace combat isn't a big deal. It's okay if your team isn't all equally competent in combat, like the group in Leverage, because the game isn't combat centric.

[Username17]

I think the hacker problem is mostly about playstyle.

No. That is a shitty justification for bad design. When the design doesn't work, you don't get to say "Well, I guess it isn't for you, because you have a different playstyle." The design doesn't fucking work. It's a fucking problem.

The concept of the three main archetypes is actually quite simple:

• The Street Samurai performs Street Samurai actions in action sequences and solves Street Samurai problems during legwork.
• The Hacker performs Hacker actions in action sequences and solves Hacker problems during legwork.
• The Mage performs Mage actions in action sequences and solves Mage problems during legwork.

This is not conceptually difficult, and if you were making a board game or drawing up a storyboard for a movie or a novel, this would be easy. Indeed, this is exactly how it's portrayed in the fiction, and it's fine. The problem is therefore at the design stage converting this to an RPG.

People call the game "magic run" becuase Mages are better than you. They are the only necessary archetype and are basically better than other people. And this is not because magic is necessarily superior to anything else you might be doing, but because of fundamental failures of game design. Simply put: no one has ever been able to adequately explain what exactly a "Street Samurai problem" might be during the legwork phase, and Hacker action phase actions are a rules clusterfuck. It's really that simple.

All having a lower combat admixture does is highlight how useless the Street Samurai archetype is. SR5 of course really puts the boot in on the Street Samurai - reduced social limits because go fuck yourself; reduced access to equipment because go fuck yourself; and an absolutely brutal beatdown on anyone who wants to branch out into secondary skills. But really the only edition which even sort of gave the Street Samurai a thing to do outside of shooting people in the face was 4th - because in 4th edition basic Street Samurai enhancements happened to come with pretty decent cat burglary and clue finding dice pools. But it isn't like Hackers and Mages couldn't cover those bases if they wanted to.

-Username17

[Smirnoffico]

What would 'street samurai problems during legwork' be? I'm genially curious

[Lago PARANOIA]

The goal of shooting someone in the face is a lot more than just making them a luddite. Taking away someone's bonuses can never be your end game. Your end game has to leave your opponents actually neutralized in some way.

I think that the point of making them a luddite was so that you then turned them into pink mist because your awesome shit still worked. I mean, once you have people fighting you with baseball bats and T-shirts and lobotomies and plastic prosthetics to avoid being hacked even an out-of-shape hacker who has never been to the firing range can easily mow them down with their l33t bargain basement gear he got at Toys R' Us. It's like having a 50 gp amulet that granted the Initiate of Mystra feat that only worked in other peoples' anti-magic fields.

Of course, that doesn't really work in Shadowrun since people in baseball bats and T-shirts and lobotomies and plastic prosthetics are still supposed to be a threat to other mundanes or even other FCs who don't specifically invest monetarily or character-point wise in defense. So while that would work for a setting like Star Trek or even Star Wars, it's not really a good balance point for Shadowrun as she is played.

I'm just saying.

[Stahlseele]

Nobody wants to talk to you because you are a gun toting armorfiend with metal bits poking out of your skin in questionable angles for example.

[Silent Wayfarer]

What would 'street samurai problems during legwork' be? I'm genially curious

I'm tempted to say perception and strategy; street sams can easily add a whole passel of +sensory stuff to themselves without worrying too much about Essence, and fluffwise they would probably be best at figuring out ambushes, gait problems, general streetwise stuff.

But ultimately, this isn't anything a sufficiently motivated mage or hacker can't do. They don't have an arena that only they can operate in and can be solely responsible for, like the mage or hacker. Which is annoying. Technically speaking they can be much more focused in killing things in the face because all their points go to being Super Fast and Kill Masterful but that's something the mage can do with 3 BP and line of sight.

It reminds me of Shadowrun Returns where they claimed that street sams would be able to see ambush points and tactical features, while mages could sense ley lines that they could occupy for magical advantage and hackers could play the decking game. The last two made it in, the first didn't. I guess it's only people like me who like being a mundane asskicker that'll play them.

[Smirnoffico]

That's the problem. There's hardly anything _street sam_ as an archetype has to do outside mission. He's a combat specialist. Without taking any other specialty like being groups face and 'sam or groups investigator and 'sam he'll have nothing unique to do outside mission.. Every street sam I witnessed was something more than just a gillette

[Username17]

What would 'street samurai problems during legwork' be? I'm genially curious

In Shadowrun fiction, it's generally not much of a problem. Street Samurai characters are "bad ass" and are able to contribute to the team's completion of the novel by "being a bad ass." The Street Samurai is able to progress the plot through "knowing the streets" or "being respected by other badasses" or "sneaking into places" or "averting disaster by being sufficiently paranoid." These are all things that Street Samurai do in stories, where they usually come off as a full or even star contributor. Basically, ask yourself "What would Molly Millions do?" Other than "get played by porn star Sasha Grey" (seriously, that is a thing that happened).

The problem isn't that Ghost Who Walks Inside doesn't contribute to the team alongside Sally and Dodger (although both Sally and Dodger get epic quests later on and Ghost Who Walks does not - food for thought). The problem is that when the rubber hits the road in an actual game there is nothing stopping any specific Mage character from being a paranoid ex-Yakuza enforcer cat burglar. All the badassery skills such as Etiquette: Street, Intimidation, and Stealth are actually open to everyone, and you don't actually need anyone to play a Street Samurai to open them up. Indeed, in some versions of the rules, you probably want a Shaman for those things, because he's the guy with a Charisma of seven and no essence loss social penalties.

Shadowrun 4 is the first and only edition that gave Street Samurai a specific reason to exist outside of shooting people in the face. And that was pretty much accidental: the mods you got to tweak yourself out to having high combat dice pools coincidentally gave you large dice pools for Climbing, Infiltration, Lockpicking, and Driving. And while you had to actually reach over and pick it up, it didn't cost you much to upgrade yourself to having some pretty high perception dicepools as well. They still didn't have any protected role, but they were quite likely to be considerably better than other people on your team at a bunch of basic breaking and entering tasks.

[Stahlseele]

Aren't street samurai supposed to be the swiss army knife jack of all trades master of none kind of characters instead of the specialist matrix and magic users?
If so, (why/how) should they HAVE a protected role at all?

[Smirnoffico]

In Shadowrun fiction, it's generally not much of a problem. Street Samurai characters are "bad ass" and are able to contribute to the team's completion of the novel by "being a bad ass." The Street Samurai is able to progress the plot through "knowing the streets" or "being respected by other badasses" or "sneaking into places" or "averting disaster by being sufficiently paranoid." These are all things that Street Samurai do in stories, where they usually come off as a full or even star contributor. Basically, ask yourself "What would Molly Millions do?" Other than "get played by porn star Sasha Grey" (seriously, that is a thing that happened).

Unfortunately I've read only some stories, Montgomery series and Serrin trilogy, so I can't speak for all SR fiction, but I've read fair amount of general cyberpunk fiction, and what you point out fits my impression - speking in archetype names, outside of the mission street sam is part face (using his badassery to get something from people, having contacts in specific places and so on), part infiltrator (sneaking, shadowing and so on) and/or part something else. If I remember right, Molly a lot of things first, street sam second - she was fixer-face-infiltrator-whatever AND a total mofo in capmbat. But I may be a little rusty on Gibson.

And that's is totally fine with me, btw. I see no problem in characters being diverse. It's confusing from game design viepoint as we have 'mage who does magick things', 'hacker who does hacking things' and 'street sam who does street sam things and also investigation/infiltration/whatever things'

[Silent Wayfarer]

Aren't street samurai supposed to be the swiss army knife jack of all trades master of none kind of characters instead of the specialist matrix and magic users?
If so, (why/how) should they HAVE a protected role at all?

They're supposed to be the cybered combat specialists on a team. This is an iconic role in the entire genre, on par with the whole Fighter/Magic-User/Cleric/Thief thing that kicked off role-playing to begin with.

Thing is, like the Fighter, he's not designed to do anything but fight, and every single archetype in the game can easily tap into that schtick with a gun in hand or creative applications of their schtick.

I'm wondering if it wouldn't be better to just prevent people from getting the stuff that makes you combat effective (IP augments, sensorium expanders, not counting armor because it's literally The Quick And The Dead unless you're a cyberzombie in milspec armor) without being an adept or a sam. But that just seems hamfisted.

[Longes]

Aren't street samurai supposed to be the swiss army knife jack of all trades master of none kind of characters instead of the specialist matrix and magic users?
If so, (why/how) should they HAVE a protected role at all?

They're supposed to be the cybered combat specialists on a team. This is an iconic role in the entire genre, on par with the whole Fighter/Magic-User/Cleric/Thief thing that kicked off role-playing to begin with.

Thing is, like the Fighter, he's not designed to do anything but fight, and every single archetype in the game can easily tap into that schtick with a gun in hand or creative applications of their schtick.

I'm wondering if it wouldn't be better to just prevent people from getting the stuff that makes you combat effective (IP augments, sensorium expanders, not counting armor because it's literally The Quick And The Dead unless you're a cyberzombie in milspec armor) without being an adept or a sam. But that just seems hamfisted.

No one would care. Hackers gonna rig, mages gonna stunbolt.

[silva]

I think the hacker problem is mostly about playstyle.

If your Shadowrun games are primarily about combat, where a PCs body count is the most important statistic, then choice of character role probably then you probably just comes down to various mechanical differences in how you kill people. If the concept of the game is just Diablo with guns, where combats are frequent and stealth is an afterthought, then you do probably want to give the hacker some kind of direct attack.

If on the other hand, your Shadowrun games focus on strategically avoiding combat encounters and trying to do a run as quietly as possible, then having a hacker be a secondary character in meatspace combat isn't a big deal. It's okay if your team isn't all equally competent in combat, like the group in Leverage, because the game isn't combat centric.

I agree. And I think the designers never answered that question themselves. I tend to adopt the Leverage/Heist focus myself, so in my opinion, the decker archetype should be about manipulating electronic devices an thats it. I would even devise a system that more actively protect the niches in that way. Ie: a Decker can only pick a Fichetti 500 light pistol or a Taser during char creation. Only the Sammy, Merc, Ex-Cop, Company Man, etc could get bigger guns. At the same time, no Sammy could ever get a Fuchi-Cyber 7 or other powerful cyberdeck.

(or just adopt Leverage RPG to play Shadowrun )