New answers tagged shadowrun-sr4
1
Quite simply: They're runners. Your first few sessions should run like a heist movie. Shadowrun is a nonstop heist movie - that's its goal. If you've seen "Leverage", that's some perfect inspiration right there. That's a modern-era Shadowrun team. If they stick to runs for corps, that means that the corps will blame the other corps.
But let's say they ...
3
One important aspect of noir is that not only does it take place in a dense urban setting, the protagonists are of the setting. They are detectives, reporters, guys who do things for people. They are not down in the gutter, but every day they walk past a lot of people who are in the gutter. They a part of the city. It is their home, and as messed up as it ...
1
Looking back at this after a year, I think this needs a more refined approach than my first one.
Cyberpsychosis comes from the concept that intentionally losing one's humanity is intended as a step to distance oneself from one's "inferior" fleshy brethren.
This leads to three different interpretations in games, sort of inspired by different attitudes; the ...
1
TV Tropes covers the topic pretty well on the Cybernetics Eat Your Soul page. Competitive balance is called out as the primary rationale for cyberpsychosis, and it is pointed out that:
It's also notable that this trope happened in few (if any) of the
original Cyber Punk novels that inspired most of these games.
And that:
This trope usually ...
2
PC's that want to do good in SR are a GM's dream-come-true. If you are aiming for heroic-style PCs that are trying to be good, but not allow them to fix all of the setting's problems, there's a bunch of options.
You can present the PC's with an option that seems good on the
surface, but actually makes things much worse - and the group is then
faced with ...
6
Keep it in setting.
Shadowrun is not a happy place; if you forget this it'll be way too easy. If you've ever played the video game Deus Ex, that's how a Shadowrun campaign should be running; perhaps not even visibly to the players, but behind the scenes. The bad guys are impossibly more powerful than the players (who may themselves also be bad guys), and as ...
2
You may want to scale up slowly by making the impact level high throughout, while growing the size of the world in which the players operate.
Player characters who start out as small-time operators in a specific part of the Sprawl are known within their community, and from time to time they get hired for various fairly straightforward missions for ...
5
It sounds like you're viewing "saving the world" and "boring routine missions" as diametric opposites, and you're worried that if you try to avoid the former extreme you'll fall into the latter.
However, these two things are not really opposites at all. It's quite possible to have a boring routine world-saving mission ("Collect the 37 Lost Plot Tokens and ...
8
Mundane is a pretty tricky word for Shadowrun. I'm writing with the assumption that you're asking for the elements of a "baseline" game of SR.
I. Don't try anything fancy.
Simple as that, keep to the core book for a while - meaning less options to manage. You'll have plenty on your hands already anyway. An interesting run will include varied elements from ...
1
It sounds as if you want your first few games not to contain anything unusual. Nothing wrong with that, though it's the opposite of what most GMs worry about. I suggest you distinguish between what, in your campaign, can be introduced later (say paranormal animals and initiation), and what will be in from the beginning; the interplay of firearms, computers ...
4
That is to say that the your DV is a minimum of (arrow rating, bow base DV).
Bow base DV is confusing. First, STR min = bow rating. Second, it was listed in different printings as (STR min) + 2P and as (STR min)P; I personally go with the former. Third, rating is capped at 8 (or at 6 during chargen). Fourth, total bow damage (net hits included) is capped at ...
0
Actually a hacker, whatever his style, can use any commlink he wants to connect to multiple nodes. You could buy a billion commlink to overload nodes, slowing CI, Analyze program etc... So yeah, a technomancer can use his living persona and the one from his commlink at the same time.
You could enslave your commlink to your living persona to avoid having to ...
0
As a gameplay benefit, I read somewhere in the Unwired book that "Resonance never forgets", and a Technomancer accessing its Realms could retrieve any deleted file (assuming they were in a Matrix-connected hard drive, I think). Your character could also meet there precious allies (and deadly foes).
4
Actually technomancer DO need a commlink, because their brain is not a suitable place to store data, and whenever a security guard / drone controls his identify, he must broadcast his SIN.
Also, technomancer's biological PAN always operates in hidden mode, which is forbidden in some places and just socially frown upon in most other places. So having a ...
6
Already had a mute character at my table (gobelin ninja was his name, quite sums it up). In 2070 it's so easy to fix physical mutism that it can't be compensated with points. It's also very cheap and easy to get a voice simulator (most humanoid drones come with it). So it's really a matter of personal choice. That said, if you persist with your idea, and you ...
0
Truth be told, it's all in the GM's style. Ultimately, I would personally classify it as an RP issue as you are never far from a device with a speaker. Now, should someone go through painstaking preparations to not let a decker/rigger do anything then that would make for an interesting session.
Mechanically, I cannot seem to find anything that would ...
1
No skills would be needed for anything that the character owns and has usual access to. If you wanted to project from someone else's commlink or device that would start getting dicey.
I would probably ask your GM what the cost for a wirelessly enabled speaker-system to carry on your person. If your character had a hardware skill, you could probably build ...
2
So it's a "in medias res" combat-centric game of shadowrun. Ok. That's not too crazy. A "death match" style of play for a pen and paper game.
with a focus on implementing non-combat skills.
Well that's going to be tough. The social skills are out. The stealth skills are out(1). A large chunk of matrix-work and magic are out. The vast majority of the ...
7
Yes, unfortunately there is.
Runner's Companion p83, description of different HMHVV types:
When the character awakens, she has lost all Resonance and technomancer abilities
(rephrased a bit differently in 3 different infection types).
So much for infected technomancers.
BUT, and this is a really BIG BUT, I think you could do without this combo.
...
0
Electrical damage is one bit that few PC's ever buy the armor upgrade for - it'll be a roll against body, so the Troll in the group will still chuck 2 fistfulls of dice, but it'll be a bit more even than, say, bullets.
Poisons and gas are another fine way to deal with it - again, it's a body roll to resist, unless you have gas-masks or other equipment.
...
1
Take a leaf from the past, the very distant past... Horrors and their agents. Ristul the Action Eternally Corrupting is a good, dark, and unbeatable foe. Although, you can defeat its current plot, you will never get ride of it.
1
My first thoughts run along the lines of a technomancer with several pets so the party numbers don't get out of hand too quickly. The pets are dangerous and relatively disposable, especially if there are more machines to meld with in the immediate area(s).
3
Drain is a bit of a problem for mages who want to rely on spells rather than use them as an 'oh shit' button. Having your casting stat and willpower at a highish level is good, but drain (especially in a background count) can often scale much faster than even your attribute cap in both.
There are a few esoteric methods that help with this.
Fetishes. You ...
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