Shadowrun FAQ v0.99! Options

[FateBurn]

Question sort of prompted by one of my players.

Any chance we'll see AIs and other Companion races not banned in this season when they come out in 5th? We always figured a lot of the reason they were banned was balance issues, so hopefully with better balance we may see them playable? I know at least one of my groups players wants to play an AI and everyone is having to make new characters anyway

[Bull]

Honestly, probably not. It will depend on what happens with the expanded rules to some degree, but they can be problematic at the best of times, and it can be really tricky to play them at the worst of times. Plus frankly, Chicago is NOT a place where either of those characters is going to want to live, due to the feral and really nasty nature of the city. The Matrix is crappy at best (aka, there's a LOT of background noise in much of teh area you're going to be running in) and spirits will have a hell of a time due to background count issues. These characters would probably be running at a penalty about 75% of the game, if not more.

[j2klbs]

Hi Bull,

The FAQ mentions that the GM should not alter nuyen rewards. Specifically, it states ...

"... so please don’t give out more nuyen (or take nuyen away)."

This is a little vague for me. Clearly, runners get access to the negotiated nuyen for the run. That part is clear. But what if they find a bunch of loot on the dead corpses of their opponents. Can they grab that gear and sell it for 30% value to the fixer? (This could result in a big payday if there are magical items or cyberware.) What if they off the company rigger and steal the Ares Assaultmaster vehicle, do they get to sell that for 30%?

Some players can be very creative when it comes to trying to get a payday, and as a GM, I would like to know how much flexibility I should allow them. In my mind, I'm thinking nuyen rewards should be limited to the negotiated pay plus gear found on the bad guys (including cyberware at used values). But I wanted to make sure I am in alignment with the campaign's intent.

Thanks!
~Jason

[Bull]

This is a little vague for me. Clearly, runners get access to the negotiated nuyen for the run. That part is clear. But what if they find a bunch of loot on the dead corpses of their opponents. Can they grab that gear and sell it for 30% value to the fixer? (This could result in a big payday if there are magical items or cyberware.) What if they off the company rigger and steal the Ares Assaultmaster vehicle, do they get to sell that for 30%?

Some players can be very creative when it comes to trying to get a payday, and as a GM, I would like to know how much flexibility I should allow them. In my mind, I'm thinking nuyen rewards should be limited to the negotiated pay plus gear found on the bad guys (including cyberware at used values). But I wanted to make sure I am in alignment with the campaign's intent.

Thanks!
~Jason

1) The "no handing out extra nuyen" thing is basically saying "Don't offer extra jobs, or jack the price up because you have some players whining that they think they're worth more than the Johnson is offering them". Both Nuyen and Karma is somewhat regulated to help maintain a certain game balance... If a player has played X amount of missions, we can reasonably assume they have somewhere in the neighborhood of Y resources. This keeps players on an even keel.

2) Players are allowed to loot and pillage a little bit, but as a GM it's up to you to control this and keep it reasonable. Players should not be stealing quarter million nuyen vehicles, high force foci, or top end cyberdecks. Brick it, destroy it, whatever, but this sort of thing should not fall into players hands. They should have to earn this type of gear through regular gameplay.

Why? Because some GMs make things easier than others, and this type of gear is not put into Missions for players to steal and get their hands on. So it's not applied in any kind of balance. aka, it's not fair to some players who might benefit much more from this than others, because there happens to be a couple high end cyberdecks in this adventure.

3) It's not 30%, it's based on Connection rating.

4) Pathfinder and a couple otehr games use a flat-rate system, and don't allow looting at all. Instead they have an optional Nuyen/loot value available at the end of the adventure that players can get in addition to their pay or whatever, as a way of controlling what goes into the adventure more tightly. Frankly, I'd like to avoid this because it's a little immersion breaking. But it's something I've been considering and I may end up implementing if players continue to try "cheating the system" by going out of their way to steal high-value items and/or steal and loot everything not nailed down to get a little extra cash.

Bull

[PittsburghRPGA]

The karma requirement is effectively 1. If you've played the character at all in any of the 4th edition seasons, you have to either promote to Prime or retire.

At the risk of going slightly OT, it's going to be interesting to see how the Prime missions are going to handle the folks who made characters at SIBCon back in the spring and have 25 karma when they're facing stuff written to challenge the die hard Season 3 cheese weasels (a remark I will admit to resembling) who slipped under the bar to finish Season 4 as well.

COSCon was in March. SibCon is Sept 20, 21, and 22 and will be running Season 5. (Both are in Butler, PA about an hour north of Pittsburgh for those of you not familar with either con.)

And related to that, GASPCon is Nov 8, 9, and 10 in Pittsburgh and will also be offering Season 5 Missions.

I suppose if there is interest enough, we could do additional Season 4 Missions for those PCs from COSCon before converting them to Prime Runners. I know I didn't get to do all of the SRM's with Road Rash Doll. There'd also be the runs in Elven Blood. I know they were CMP's, but since it's available on rpgnow and battleshop, those runs are now legal for home play or game day play, right?

Cordially,

Eric Kiefer

[DWC]

My mistake. I meant COSCon. You'd think I'd get them right since I went to COSCon for the day, and am headed to SIBCon as well.

[PittsburghRPGA]

My mistake. I meant COSCon. You'd think I'd get them right since I went to COSCon for the day, and am headed to SIBCon as well.

Null sweat omae. Just wanted to clear things up for anyone who did a Data Search on the Trix. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wink.gif)

See ya there.

[Fedifensor]

I played Season 5 for the first time this weekend, and I'm trying to fix a few character sheet errors and figure out some solutions to problems I encountered. I enjoyed the game, but there was at least one point where I was taking a -5 penalty while unwounded (Background Count 3 + Mild allergy to Pollutants). Hopefully this is the right place to ask about these issues.

Background Count:
Is there any way around the penalties other than Home Ground (Astral Acclimation)? My Physical Adept was running with a penalty almost constantly in both adventures I played. It's at the point where I'm considering spending the 20 Karma to get the Home Ground quality.

Also, does Background Count affect Initiative? The way we did it at my table for the 3 adepts was to reduce the total initiative by the Background Count quality, up to the level of the character's Improved Reaction. So, if you had Improved Reflexes 2 and the Background Count was 3, you'd lose 2 from your total Initiative roll.

Pollution:
I went with Mentor Spirit (Eagle) for my character, which gives a Mild pollutant allergy. How often will this affect me in Missions (particularly the Containment Zone), and what sort of gear can negate the penalties? I assume a Hazmat suit would do the trick, but that's a bit extreme. Is a Respirator sufficient? Gas Mask? Chemical Protection on my armor? Chemsuit?

Contacts and Gear:
A character has a Fixer (Loyalty 6, Connection 1). Based on the rules on page 419, he can fence items for the character at 30% value. Does that apply in Missions as well?

Does everything you buy in Missions have to be overseen by a GM, or is there a system where your Loyalty and Connection with a contact can speed that up? I can understand needing a GM to purchase that Ingram Valiant (Availablity 12F), but a Ruger Super Warhawk (Availability 4R) shouldn't be that hard to find on the streets if you have the right contact. Both games pushed right up against the 4 hour run time, partly because a few characters (particularly the two riggers) were asking the GM to oversee their purchases. It would be a lot easier to be able to handle the simple stuff between missions.

How hard is it to upgrade components inside an existing piece of cyberware, such as adding Vision Enhancement 3 to an existing pair of cybereyes. Assuming the contact makes the relevant rolls to get the gear, how much does the character have to pay, and how long is the recovery time?

My wife's street samurai has a Cyberarm with a Cyber Holster, which says it can hold any pistol- or smaller-sized weapon. She has a machine pistol (Ares Crusader II) in it. Is that acceptable?

The same Cyberarm has Armor 2. As I'm reading the rules, her Armor Jacket plus the cyberarm armor gives her a total armor rating of 14. Is that right?


Thanks in advance for any answers you can provide.

-Fedifensor (aka Breeze, Gunslinger Adept)

[bioram]

In looking through the FAQ, I did not see mention of initiation. Can characters use earned Karma (after character creation) to go through initiation as noted in the character improvement table (pg 107)?

[Bull]

In looking through the FAQ, I did not see mention of initiation. Can characters use earned Karma (after character creation) to go through initiation as noted in the character improvement table (pg 107)?

Yup! (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

[PittsburghRPGA]

I played Season 5 for the first time this weekend, and I'm trying to fix a few character sheet errors and figure out some solutions to problems I encountered. I enjoyed the game, but there was at least one point where I was taking a -5 penalty while unwounded (Background Count 3 + Mild allergy to Pollutants). Hopefully this is the right place to ask about these issues.

Background Count:
Is there any way around the penalties other than Home Ground (Astral Acclimation)? My Physical Adept was running with a penalty almost constantly in both adventures I played. It's at the point where I'm considering spending the 20 Karma to get the Home Ground quality.

Also, does Background Count affect Initiative? The way we did it at my table for the 3 adepts was to reduce the total initiative by the Background Count quality, up to the level of the character's Improved Reaction. So, if you had Improved Reflexes 2 and the Background Count was 3, you'd lose 2 from your total Initiative roll.

Pollution:
I went with Mentor Spirit (Eagle) for my character, which gives a Mild pollutant allergy. How often will this affect me in Missions (particularly the Containment Zone), and what sort of gear can negate the penalties? I assume a Hazmat suit would do the trick, but that's a bit extreme. Is a Respirator sufficient? Gas Mask? Chemical Protection on my armor? Chemsuit?

Contacts and Gear:
A character has a Fixer (Loyalty 6, Connection 1). Based on the rules on page 419, he can fence items for the character at 30% value. Does that apply in Missions as well?

Does everything you buy in Missions have to be overseen by a GM, or is there a system where your Loyalty and Connection with a contact can speed that up? I can understand needing a GM to purchase that Ingram Valiant (Availablity 12F), but a Ruger Super Warhawk (Availability 4R) shouldn't be that hard to find on the streets if you have the right contact. Both games pushed right up against the 4 hour run time, partly because a few characters (particularly the two riggers) were asking the GM to oversee their purchases. It would be a lot easier to be able to handle the simple stuff between missions.

How hard is it to upgrade components inside an existing piece of cyberware, such as adding Vision Enhancement 3 to an existing pair of cybereyes. Assuming the contact makes the relevant rolls to get the gear, how much does the character have to pay, and how long is the recovery time?

My wife's street samurai has a Cyberarm with a Cyber Holster, which says it can hold any pistol- or smaller-sized weapon. She has a machine pistol (Ares Crusader II) in it. Is that acceptable?

The same Cyberarm has Armor 2. As I'm reading the rules, her Armor Jacket plus the cyberarm armor gives her a total armor rating of 14. Is that right?


Thanks in advance for any answers you can provide.

-Fedifensor (aka Breeze, Gunslinger Adept)

I can answer a little bit of that.

The background count in the Containment Zone is very likely to never drop below 2 and in some places, it may go over 12. There are also various types of toxic aspected areas, and dead areas (affected by FAB III). Most of us suspect insect aspected areas will show up soon enough too. Not all Missions are in the CZ. The Home Ground Quality is a fairly small area, like a few blocks or a Mall perhaps. The CZ is a few hundred square miles. As such, Home Ground won't solve the issue you're having. Yes, in fact, the CZ does suck that much. It's a horrible, horrible place. The house rules used for background will be replaced when the Magic supplement book comes out with the rules assumed to be in that forthcoming book. As I'm not a playtester for that book, I don't know how those rules will be different.

(In 4E it was much much worse, as the background reduced your Magic Attribute by that much instead of just the -X to dice rolls. And it reduced the Force of Foci by that amount. And when Magic went down, as an adept you lost that many power points and had to pick that amount of adept powers to have simply stop working entirely.)

Pollution is pretty common nearly everywhere in all parts of Chicago (Honestly, North America), but it's severity can flucate with the weather, atmospheric pressure, geography, which Nation you're in, etc. I would assume that considering what a hell on earth the CZ is given its history, that the pollution there is bad. There aren't hard and fast rules about it in the book, and is left to GM discretion. I would think to avoid the penalties of that drawback, you'd have to be wearing something that can have the Chemical Seal armor modification. However, there is conflicting information about Chemical Seal. On the Armor Table, under the Full Body Armor entry, it adds +6 to availability and costs an extra 6,000Y. On the armor modification table, it has a 12R availability and costs 3000Y, so maybe it can be fitted to an Urban Explorer Jumpsuit with helmet or a Chameleon Suit. Bull has the final word for Missions purposes for this sort of thing. And that might all go out the window when the 5th Edition Gear book comes out. Also, because of that GM variance, some other GM's might let you get away with just wearing a respirator. It's a drawback after all, and not just free Karma, and that's why I go for the Chemical Sealed armor.

As far as Fencing Gear goes, it is covered in the FAQ V.99 which is stickied at the top of this forum.

Upgrading cyberwear is also covered by that FAQ.

Buying items through contacts is also talked about in the FAQ.

The cyberarm holster will vary by GM in regards to machine pistols (it even says this is open to GM discretion on page 457). Some will say yes, fine. Some will say, no, just pistols and tasers. Some will say yes, but not with the magazine/clip inserted into it because that 30 or 40 round magazine is longer than an arm is thick (cause we're real life gun nuts and have an idea of the size of firearms and magazines).

Hope that's helpful.

Cordially,

Eric

[Fedifensor]

Pollution is pretty common nearly everywhere in all parts of Chicago (Honestly, North America), but it's severity can flucate with the weather, atmospheric pressure, geography, which Nation you're in, etc. I would assume that considering what a hell on earth the CZ is given its history, that the pollution there is bad. There aren't hard and fast rules about it in the book, and is left to GM discretion. I would think to avoid the penalties of that drawback, you'd have to be wearing something that can have the Chemical Seal armor modification. However, there is conflicting information about Chemical Seal. On the Armor Table, under the Full Body Armor entry, it adds +6 to availability and costs an extra 6,000Y. On the armor modification table, it has a 12R availability and costs 3000Y, so maybe it can be fitted to an Urban Explorer Jumpsuit with helmet or a Chameleon Suit. Bull has the final word for Missions purposes for this sort of thing. And that might all go out the window when the 5th Edition Gear book comes out. Also, because of that GM variance, some other GM's might let you get away with just wearing a respirator. It's a drawback after all, and not just free Karma, and that's why I go for the Chemical Sealed armor.

Well, it wasn't free Karma - it actually cost me points (Mentor Spirit)...

Anyway, for now I've gone with level 6 Chemical Protection on my armor, and have a Gas Mask (with 5 extra cartridges) when that isn't enough. I may also get a respirator, which will be amusing with my Pre-Trid Entertainment skill at 5, and my Adept Centering practice of reciting trivia (usually from 20th century movies). Hopefully GMs won't be too harsh - Common does not mean ubiquitous, especially when other characters can get a common allergy from seafood.

The cyberarm holster will vary by GM in regards to machine pistols (it even says this is open to GM discretion on page 457). Some will say yes, fine. Some will say, no, just pistols and tasers. Some will say yes, but not with the magazine/clip inserted into it because that 30 or 40 round magazine is longer than an arm is thick (cause we're real life gun nuts and have an idea of the size of firearms and magazines).

I compared the pictures of the Ares Predator V and the Ares Crusader II (from the Gear deck) - they seem pretty similar in form factor.

Hope that's helpful.

It's a lot of help - thanks!

[KarmaInferno]

...and have a Gas Mask (with 5 extra cartridges) when that isn't enough. I may also get a respirator, which will be amusing with my Pre-Trid Entertainment skill at 5, and my Adept Centering practice of reciting trivia (usually from 20th century movies).

Are you my mummy?



-k

[forgarn]

Are you my mummy?



-k

(IMG:style_emoticons/default/biggrin.gif) I love it!!

[bioram]

Eric;
Thank you for your post. It answered some questions that I was thinking of asking. I did want to ask about one thing you mentioned.

The Home Ground Quality is a fairly small area, like a few blocks or a Mall perhaps. The CZ is a few hundred square miles. As such, Home Ground won't solve the issue you're having. Yes, in fact, the CZ does suck that much.
Cordially,

Eric

The area you mentioned for Home Ground comes form 4e. I don't remember seeing a specific discussion in 5e about the size. In 5e, the benefits of the home ground quality are limited. In 4e, you got a +2 dice pool for all active skills, while in 5e the quality was broken down into a diverse group of more reasonable benefits. So, I want to ask if there might be a reconsideration of the area encompassing a home ground?

Robert

[bioram]

Question about Alchemy Preparations and Background.

In looking over the rules and the house rule for background count, I started wondering about alchemy.

I understand that background would reduce the dice pool if a character made an alchemical preparation in the CZ, but what of a preparation that was made outside the CZ and then brought in? The magic was put into the item, and is now waiting to be triggered, and when used, the dice pool is composed of the Potency + Force.

Question: Does background lower the dice pool when an alchemical preparation is triggered (Potency + Force)?

[PittsburghRPGA]

Eric;
Thank you for your post. It answered some questions that I was thinking of asking. I did want to ask about one thing you mentioned.



The area you mentioned for Home Ground comes form 4e. I don't remember seeing a specific discussion in 5e about the size. In 5e, the benefits of the home ground quality are limited. In 4e, you got a +2 dice pool for all active skills, while in 5e the quality was broken down into a diverse group of more reasonable benefits. So, I want to ask if there might be a reconsideration of the area encompassing a home ground?

Robert

That is what I've seen other CDT Agents say in a few other threads. Bull is the head of Missions and may or may not issue clarifications on the size of it. I'm just a schmoe who reads too many threads and runs Missions at Cons.

But it was a thread about figuring out how to overcome the constant background count inside the CZ, or at least how to deal with it.

Plus, the penalties we have now might go out the window when the Magic book comes out, or there might be a new positive quality in that book that might solve the problem too. I don't really know as I'm not one of the playtesters. Wish I was, but then I wouldn't be able to answer at all because of having an NDA.

To be completely frank, I don't recall the home ground quality from 4E at all. It's entirely possible the other folks in that thread were confusing the two versions and I've been given incorrect information. I just remember seeing that specifically shot down because of the size limitation.

Looking at the 5E, it does say neighborhood under that quality, and I know from running some of the season 5 SRM's that there are several neighborhoods mentioned inside the CZ.

Eric

[Dantic]

As a Technomancer with 5 Willpower, 6 Resonance, 6 Compiling, and 6 Registering, how many Sprites can I Cheese Monkey Compile and Register during downtime?
As I understand the process, my 12 dice gives me 3 hits vs 5 dice for 1 hit to Compile a level 5 sprite, owing 2 tasks. I resist 2 DV of drain automatically, by buying 2 hits from 11 dice. I then take 5 hours and buy 3 hits to Register vs 2 hits from 10 dice (2 X Level) adding 1 task and registering the Sprite. I then resist 4 DV of drain, buying off 2 hits, again, and then take an hour nap to shed the remaining two.
Rinse and repeat up to the ambiguous limit of my Charisma in bound level 5 Sprites, owing 3 tasks (2 if I spend a task to put them all on standby)