But by that logic, doing anything BUT stealing everything that isn't nailed down in D&D (particularly 1E/2E and OSR games) "isn't really playing D&D". Helping people? Achieving goals? Not D&D!

So that seems wrong. SR is an RPG. It is not "about missions". It's about whatever the group and DM want it to be about. Shadowrun Missions play is different thing from normal play (just like Encounters with D&D). Some groups love theft, others hate it, it's a playstyle choice (usually more mohawk than mirrorshades).

I agree re: 'ware prices though, and that more theft isn't the best solution to 'ware issues. More money helps the samurai more than the adept though, a lot more - the adept needs to spend a ton of karma to leverage his money. So it helps, a bit at least.

You can love something with flaws. The only reason I like it currently is because hero lab hasn't come out with their SR5 pack yet and I'm old and tired and sick of making characters by hand so the little bit of ease gained by priority is nice. Its still poorly designed, the attribute and skill priorities scale poorly and have too low of a bottom, the resources could probably edge a bit higher E as well, and the racial priority table just sucks. I get what they were thinking, Troll gets + 8 attributes, what would 8 more attributes be worth on the attribute table? Well it sure as hell isn't equivalent to the 20 points B attribute priority gives you. There is extra value in that it is additive, meaning a B troll a attributes has 32 attribute points effectively but B in what is game mechanics wise just a attributes priority modifier reduces the other priorities that actually do something on their own far too much.

I can't wait for the point buy or karma build system, priority really sucks for a lot of builds.

Actually the best solution is to stop making Shadowrunners that are the 'best of the best'. It is in the metahuman nature to seek security and stability, and waiting for your next payday or bullet is not a life anyone chooses without extraneous circumstances being quite severe.

(I can expand much further on this, but I rather not derail this threat further)

The troll combat monster is best build depending on the team you mean for him to enhance. If the team is low on support magics, become a mystic adept (weapons and alchemical spells). If it does have those, go all out Adept (perhaps a few bits of ware).

Making Cyber cheaper also means more awakened use the cyber again.
Which should not be a design goal.

You could always compensate for that by giving Awakened characters greater penalties for losing Essence.

Average Joe has just under 6 Essence to toy with before they kill themselves trying to cram more in. Maybe for a Mage or Adept it should be equivalent to about half that? The 'ware would still cost the same amount of Essence for a Mage of Adept, just make them suffer Magic loss twice as easily - for every 0.5 points of Essence you lose, your Magic drops one point.

Justify it with "because magic" and boom, you're done.

~Umi

D&D is high fantasy, although it is more expandable in setting than Shadowrun. Besides which, D&D has this really useful prybar called "alignment"; if you don't want the paladin stealing everything that's not nailed down, just nudge him with it. And even for those of evil alignment, stealing everything isn't usually worth it, because the encumrance outweighs the resale value of mundane items. The only time in D&D where stealing everything, including the nails, is acceptable is when you let a kender loose in a D&D game. And I feel pity for everyone else in that game if that happens.

At any event, Shadowrun is about Shadowrunners, who do Shadowruns. Not petty criminals who jack cars and steal office supplies. While there are variations on this theme, the core of the game is doing missions for and against corporations. The mohawk/mirrorshades divide doesn't actually matter, because both styles can and do take on Shadowruns.

I always felt sensitive system should be a 0 point disadvantage all awakened got. But I prefer the older editions feel where magic really did not play well with tech.

While a lot of this is certainly a matter of opinion, shadowruners are supposed to be *good* at what they do. Shadowrunning is supposed to be dangerous, and Darwinian; you become a good shadowrunner by being the 'best of the best'.


They kinda tried this with Shadowtech: Bioware didn't affect Essence, it affected something called the "Body Index", which limited how much bioware you could fit. Awakened characters, however, lost Magic equal to the body index. 3e went for an even more complicated rule, which never worked satisfactorily either. It's not a bad idea, but variable essence costs by archetype are kinda messy to use, and haven't worked historically.

Bioindex was fun in SR2.
Where it was straight up Body.
And there was Bioware that gave more Body than it cost in Bio-Index.
In SR3, Bio-Index was Essence+3.
And Magic was lost equal to Bio-Index/2.

This just isn't correct, Cain. Even the SR 5E core book has examples of campaigns that do not involve playing shadowrunners! Every previous edition has done too, and 2E particularly had an absolute profusion of sourcebooks which supported all sorts of campaigns which didn't involved "shadowrunners doing shadowruns". It is absolutely not wrong to run a campaign about stealing stuff. SR 5E has adequate rules for handling such a game (as did SR 2E, I can't speak to the rest).

You, as a ref, can run any campaign you want. If you don't want people in your campaign stealing and selling things, and you want every shadowrun to be against a corporation, that's coo. That's your game. That's not "what shadowrun is", though, it's "what Cain's campaign is".

Your "jacking cars and stealing office supplies" examples don't make much sense in SR 5E. Most cars are worth virtually nothing - only a few cars are worth stealing (those with an availability code - you can hand them over to a fixer or the like for loyalty x5% of the price RAW), and office supplies, none of which will have an availability code, are worth nothing, so wouldn't be stolen. What 'runners are more likely to be stealing is:

A) Light, high-value items possessed by their enemies - cyberdecks, RCCs, expensive guns and explosives, magic foci, some drones, etc. etc.

B) Vehicles they can use to make a getaway in and which have an availability code.

C) Maybe cyberware/bioware if they have the right contacts and a certain lack of ethics (or very odd ethical codes).

Frankly, runners who don't steal cyberdecks are kind of playing it dumb, RAW. A 400k nuyen mid-range cyberbeck at, say, 20% of value is 80k - only very dangerous runs will pay that much, RAW.

It is a mirrorshades/mohawk issue, too, because mirrorshades refs are likely to stress all the difficulties getting away with this kind of thing - i.e. checking all the devices for trackers etc. (still, faraday bags will sort that out), enforcing the hilariously long and difficult owner-change process etc. (24 successes on an extended test, suckers!).

Rating B troll = +8 attribs.
Rating E attribs = 12

Rating E human = +1 attribs
Rating B attribs = 20

Its more even than it looks. The human comes out ahead by and edge and a special attribute.
The biggest problem with meta table is the sillyness of even having a human a with +9 special attribute, that there is a poor pick.
Picking a high metatype forces you to play to that types strengths, if you pick troll as your B then make him a techie, hes gonna suck. But if you pack on some armor and a melee weapon, he's gonna be scary, frankly scarier than a human is capable of being in the same roll.



Any pick on attribute table above a D is above average. Every shadowrunner has an A, B, and C pick. If you dont make plain dumb choices, you are going to be good at what you do without having to be minmaxed for it. A good GM will match the adventure to you, and a pack of good shadowrunners with flaws is a lot more fun to play than a pack of munchkined 'perfect' shadowrunners.

Interestingly you could perform the far easier 'Format Device' matrix action then turn off your stolen goods.

This obliterates the software in the device and stops it connecting wireless - you make it a throwback essentially.

You could now use it, work with it, tinker with it, sell it, etc. safely as it no longer broadcasts it's location to the legitimate owner and the the legit owner can't send commands to it.

It would also mean that glitching or whatever on the test to change owner won't alert anyone so you can just keep on trying until you succeed eventually.

Also, potentially, get a mark on the device's owner. Use Spoof Command to send the device a 'change owner' command and a few minutes later you can now be the legit owner of the item. Dunno if that's a correct reading of the rules though.

More like format it, turn it off, and burn out any hidden RFIDs.

Just because you wipe the drives and disable the wireless antenne doesn't mean it hasn't been tagged as well.

~Umi

It was also fun for trolls, who could pack in more than any other metatype. A hugely augmented bio-troll, with 5.99 essence worth of cyber on top of that, was just scary to contemplate. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wink.gif)


Those examples are what I mentioned as "variations on a theme." The core of the game is about shadowrunners, and the default assumptions of every edition, 5e included, is that you will be playing shadowrunners. You can do other things, but that requires changing quite a few things.


Hey, I wasn't the one who said you could profit by stealing everything that's not nailed down. But, to clarify: in several editions of Shadowrun, but especially 4.5, there was a complaint that at the low payout rate for most shadowruns, the team would make more money by stealing cars and turning them over to chop shops. That argument lingers to this day. And if your table would rather play GTA: Seattle than Sahdowrun, that's up to you. However, it also isn't the default assumption of the game.


Mugging deckers for cyberdecks in the schoolyard is also not part of the core game; you can do it, but it changes the game from Shadowrun to Lunch Money. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wink.gif)

And it covers both sides; Mohawk playstyle emphasizes team loyalty, so turning on your team decker to jack his cyberdeck is frowned upon.

@Cain:
I still remember squishy fondly.

@Cain:

For as much as you talk about what Shadowrunning is "supposed to be", you seem to fail to realize that humans tend to keep their best interests at heart and don't make fundamentally absurd choices just because a story concept calls for it.

Realistically speaking, Shadowrunning would not exist as a profession if it didn't offer rewards that were worth the risks. If a Shadowrunner has to go to twice the trouble for half the pay of something mundane and boring like stealing cars, no one is going to be a Shadowrunner to earn their living rather than a car thief. More pay and less danger? Who wouldn't do that instead?

Now, you're right - the entire idea of the game system is that you play a Shadowrunner, not a Carjacker. But if the PCs don't have a logical reason for being in their particular line of work, it all falls apart.

From a storytelling standpoint, it fails because it isn't believeable that these people would go to all the extra trouble of running for a mere fraction of the pay they could get elsewhere. If Shadowrun was a movie, people would be stopping and saying, "Hold up, this makes zero sense - this is a giant gaping plot hole. Why would anyone do this instead of just stealing cars or whatever? This is stupid."

From a game mechanics standpoint, it fails because a substantial portion of character progression comes from earning money - and since players want to gain power as quickly as they can, it then follows that they want to gain money as quickly as they can. If your game system rewards the characters more for doing things other than what they're supposed to be doing, then your game design is a failure.

~Umi

In the game I'm currently playing in we did a run where we got paid about 3K each to rob a liquor store and to steal 10 cases of beer to distribute to the local gang to frame them for the attack (The mafia owned the store).

The group happened to have a flatbed truck that we had ... /ahem.... aquired somewhere and so in the middle of the run we decided to steal considerably more. It ended up being about 6 pallets of spirits, as well as a pallet of beer for the gang.

So after we got paid we had enough money to buy a half decent sin (It's a street level campaign) and so as the face I got a rating 4 SIN as an alcohol salesmans. After walking into a mall with several bars I was approached by a few traders looking to buy. We ended up selling 4 pallets for 160K!!

Seems like alcohol theft is now the go (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

Which is why I get what they are getting at but it really does fall apart as you are spending too high in your resources to get a small boost in attributes. Yeah the 20 to 20 kind of matches up but 8 of your points are in a forced location and you have lowered caps in mental stats, along with heavily lowered options. It only pans out if you play to your strengths and even then you don't look great.

not to mention that just because attributes doesn't scale ridiculously in A & B doesn't mean that every other category doesn't.

skill A or B vs skills D is a stupid huge difference. D is barely enough to tie your shoes, A is enough to make you an expert in multiple unrelated fields.
resources A or B vs resources D is a stupid huge difference. D is enough to have like one piece of crappy cyber, A is enough to spend all your essence twice over if that was allowed, or start off with the best chargen-available cyberdeck and the best chargen-available bioware to pair it with. or basically as good of rigger 'ware as you're ever going to get (used muscle toner 3, reaction enhancer 3, VCR 3) with cash left over for a few combat and scouting drones.
special, well, not as big of a difference as the other two perhaps, but still huge. D is that you're barely special at all, A is that you're starting off as a highly skilled expert in the field (unfortunately, even a good technomancer still kinda sucks, but that's neither here nor there)

it's only race and attributes that kinda suck. well, them and technomancers, but that's a discussion that's been covered elsewhere numerous times.

It depends on what you mean by a good GM matching the adventure to the group. Some people take it to mean that the GM will upgrade the adversaries to the "level" of the characers in order to give them a "challenge". I take it to mean that the GM will not so much as modify the NPCs as run them to react appropriately to the PCs; if the NPCs as written are outclassed when the intent is that the NPCs outclass the PCs, then they will act appropriately outclassed by the PCs.

Seems like a reasonable reading - but it might leave a record of who you changed it to for the original owner, so you'd need to edit that too, I'd think.



... Why would you do that? That's a completely bizarre suggestion that makes no sense. You steal from the other side. Not your own. My point is that any 'runner who doesn't have a faraday bag to shove stuff like enemy cyberdecks into is kind of a chump.

Sure, but those RFIDs should show up on your matrix perception check when you're playing with the item itself (you're surely checking the device out first right!) and so a hopefully simple action should allow you to deal with those too. Or, if the device won't be screwed by it, a Bug Scanner + Tag Eraser combo.

General other question. Can you turn the wireless off on a device that you're not the owner of? You can't just grab a top of the line cyberarm and turn the wireless off and run away with it right?

As Eurhetemec says, if you can do the Spoof Command to switch owner you'd need to Edit File too to make the records legit. However...if a hardware test is the normal way to change owner then that implies that the ownership is stored on the device itself, not on the SIN/Comm/etc. of the persona that has the device.

I.e.: the Ares pred. has an 'Owner' field populated with the owner's id rather than the owner having a list of 'owned devices'. It's a bottom up system rather than a top down system.

Otherwise how would tweaking with the electronics of the device change who owns it? If changing the hardware changes ownership then it can't also have a counterpart stored on some nebulous matrix location else you'd have basically every stolen item with a glaring paper trail somewhere on the matrix which is not implied anywhere.

What, you've never seen character turn on each other for money?

Look, you were the one suggesting that you could resell cyberdecks and cyberware for a huge proft, and not doing so would be stupid. Well, the easiest targets are the ones right next to you. If shadowrunnng was only about money, you'd see people mugging the decker and selling the street sam for spare parts a lot more often. Selling out your teammates can be profitable, but luckily, its not one of the assumptions of the game.

Umi: you're assuming that power is the primary motivation for a character. Shadowrunners can have a variety of reasons why they do shadowruns. In the early days, it was a kind of Robin Hood thing: you did it to strike back at the corps (incidentally taking their money was a side benefit). Granted, the low payout rates in SR 4.5 and 5 don't help matters, but that is easy to fix.

Also, cash doesn't equal power. I've run many low cash games; rewards were usually in the form of favors, which under the right circumstances could be traded for toys. So, instead of saving up for that cyber upgrade, the sam agreed to perform so many runs for someone else, and then got his new shiny. I found that worked much better than fisftuls of nuyen.

Dunno about other people, but I've never had PCs turn on each other for any reason - even RP based. I guess they've all just felt that their continued cooperation is more valuable longterm?

To be fair, though, my players are actually rather well behaved. I could easily see a more rowdy table having problems with loyalty. Heck, I could ever see the most reasonable team of runners in the world turn on one of their number if it was a real troublemaker - like, someone suffering from "Too Stupid To Live Syndrome" who is making life hell for the rest and/or going to get everyone killed.

I suppose I ought to count my lucky stars that my table is so pleasant.

~Umi

Same here. I've never had my players turn on each other in that way. Honor among thieves and all that. The worst I've seen was in CP2020 and that was macho teenage competitiveness, not backstabbing (we regularly saw two players who had competing plans agree to one plan only to revert to their own, diametrically opposed plan, when the actual run happened). So there were a lot of angry words and chest-bumps and finally after a ton of this, "Let's go into VR and settle this!" (which, hilariously, ended with them killing each other's avatar at the same exact moment) and so on.

Full disclosure: I was one of those two players (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif) Then I stopped being a teenager and suddenly it all seemed terribly silly!

Cain - I've specifically said "enemies" several times. I have no idea why you continue to think "enemies" means "friends"! (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif) You should be stealing from the enemy. It is silly not to, UNLESS you have a ref who ignores the default payout mechanics (which is fine, SR5 isn't really balanced by them) and pays you so much that stealing things is not worth your time. If you're doing runs for 10k/per PC and the like, though, you would be a chump to not take the enemy's decker's deck (after he's dead) and sell it (after appropriate repairs/precautions), especially on harder runs. Even a loyalty 3 fixer can give you 15% - if you had a loyalty 6 one, it'd be 30%! Of potentially hundreds of thousands.

I guess the lesson for refs here is, if you don't want your PCs doing that, either pay them enough that it's not worth their time, or make sure the enemy decker gets away, or his deck somehow gets fried beyond repair (not really possible from cybercombat RAW in SR5 afaik).

Personally I'm fine with them stealing that kind of thing and just figure it into the reward structure of the run.

Remember, I still agree with you that cyberware should be a fair bit cheaper in general!