We banned all the mind control spells.

I have banned mimes and am considering banning clowns...

They're just too slottin' weird, even for a dystopian future.

Banned: Boing spray-cans. (Fans of the Judge Dredd comic should get this nod)

Cheers, than yeah I banned emotitoys on the grounds that fashion in the sixth world changes at the drop of the hat. But for the record I'm all about the bust-a-moves.

For Empathy programs/emotityos: There's just something wrong with the same program being 5 times more expensive if it comes without a case.

There are collective bans at our table.

The matrix - for reasons obvious to our party (it makes the game less fun for us.)
General abuses of the system that can break the game over it's back I.E. Voodoo traditions.
A tweak is you can only allow for 1 spirit pick out of this roster - spirit of man, guardian, task.
Divination, and mass animate is banned.
Possessing fly spies and using their boosted body attribute to strap two rocket launchers or LMG's to them is also banned.
Spirits using edge is also banned (because a force 8 spirit having 8 edge means they don't go down.... ever and if it has counter spelling... why bother fighting it at all.)

Ok... well it's not so much as banned as much as it is if a player tries to use these he will be smacked by the other three people at the table and told to do something else. It is more of a table agreement that no one will ever use or abuse what they have and whoever the GM is at the time will also not pull out complete bull dreck on the players.

There is such thing as power armor. It is called mil-spec armor and you can do some freekin' insane twink with it. A +4 to your strength mod, it is FFBA (1/3rd encumbrance instead of the normal 1/2) and all sorts of other awesome.

If I were to ever GM, I'd ban the Total Immersion Lifestyle from Unwired. I'd let a technomancer or magician use a life support system to keep their bodies alive when going to the Resonance Realms or Metaplanes (See Netcat's section in Runner's Companion), but that's about it.

EDIT: Mentioned the wrong book by mistake! Fixed it now!

As a GM, I banned Technomancers in my home campaign.

I didn't ban emotitoys or emotion software, I just dropped the last line from the description; the one where it says they add their rating as a dicepool modifier. They are still better than the lie detector soft, but not utterly broke.

I agree with Fuchs that it makes no sense at all for the standalone software to cost significantly more than the emotitoy alone, so I rule that the toy itself doesn't come preinstalled with the soft. No surprises, none of my group has bothered with them, although the Face does have the empathy soft running.

My biggest intervention has been imposing cycle rates on firearms, so regular guns can't be used in later IPs when they've already used up their shots for that combat turn. This encourages melee at my table, and means I don't have to equip every NPC with wires for them to stand even the remotest chance against my PCs.

I make emotitoys cost the same as emotion software. Other than that I allow everything at my table with the permission from the other players because the harder you make it for me to deal with you, the harder it will be on everyone else for me to challenge you.

Chris

Me thinks that there isn't semiautomatic pistol or rifle which has cycle rate under 240 shots per minute (3 sec per round, 20*3 = 60 sec, max 4 ip per round = 240 round per minute max, min 60 rounds per minute)

http://www.rhkr.org/equipment/weapon.htm

gives 500+ rpm for every assault rifle
exept old L1A1 which has cycle rate 40 rpm which still can be shot one in every 1.5 sec, twice in 3 sec..

though no stats for pistols.

The idea that you can't shoot a pistol fast enough, so you are better off using melee seems a bit... odd.

In my games, Stick'n'Shock exist as shotgun ammunition only concerning firearms, while there are also S'n'S-based throwing weapons in addition to arrow-heads.

Of course, the Empathy Soft is likely to be brought down to sensible levels officially.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XyipV03stDQ

EDIT: In case you were wondering, that last one is 6 shots, a reload, and 6 shots in less than 1 Combat Turn. Vanilla Human at that.

As GM of my group, I've banned the use of first aid to heal drain. It seems a little wrong to outlaw magical healing of drain but then allow it to be patched up with bandages etc.

"Oh man, that last spell gave me a headache..."

"Here's a Tylenol, 2071."

"Thanks."

LOL

What Mäx is trying to say is that most firearms have cyclic rates of fire far in excess of what SR rules allow.




Because, if you have a reputation as a liar, and you lie, then everyone will assume that you're lying and believe the opposite of what you say, which would be the truth. Thus, by lying, you actually communicate the truth to people who know that you are lying.

On the other hand, if you have a reputation as a liar and you tell the truth, no one will believe you, and thus you will actually be communicating a lie.

Scenes from Labrinth floating through my head....you remind me of the bab....dance magic....grumble *disappears into an acid induced coma of dancing muppets, David Bowie and Jennifer Connely *

if they think i what i tell them is a lie, then the opposite does not make it true . .
and if i actually DO tell the truth, it won't suddenly be a lie either . .
the truthfullness of any sentence stays ecactly the same, no matter who utters it . .
and if people know that i do lie often, and they assume that i do lie right now . .
and they know that i know that they know that i do lie often . .
it's basically the perfect pokerface . .
and if they don't believe me when i am telling the truth about something and it comes back to bite them in their suspicious asses, then i get to do something very assholish.
i get to say:"i told you so. but does anybody believe me? nooo . . of course not . . i'm the old lieing dirtbag . ."
and then later on when i have convinced them, that it is only a rumor, only the REPUTATION of being a lieing scumbag . . i will lie to get an advantage for myself and all is good ^^

Our GM doesnt use the throwing weapons skill for grenades. He's actually thrown grenades and he was basically saying any idiot can throw a grenade while not every idiot can throw a knife. Especially if its just rolled into the enemy like an explosive toy. The skill can be used to boost your chances but usually its an agility plus logic. Logic for doing the basic math in your head to figure out how far you need to throw it to get it close enough to the enemy.

I don't think I'll be banning any thing from my games but I might start strongly advising players not to take what I consider to beuseless contacts after one of my players took a 1/6 porn star that's also the characters roommate.

The difference between truth and falsehood is not the quality of the statement but the intent of the speaker and the understanding of the listener.

If one intends to deceive, that one's statements will have the quality of deceit, even if they are accurate. And if the listener believes that you intend to deceive him, then the information you communicate is very different that what would be communicated by the same sentence taken at face value.

Of course, if you know that the listener knows that you are trying to deceive him, then you can assume that he will disbelieve you and be honest. But, it is almost certain that he knows that you know that he knows that you are trying to deceive him and equally probable that he knows that you know that he knows that you know that he knows that you know that he knows that you know that he knows that you are trying to deceive him, in which case everything you say is totally worthless to him and he's better off just ignoring you.

There are no useless contacts. You just haven't thought of the right plot hook yet.

Porn star Daisy is kidnapped while filming Vaginatown on location. A production company that is providing half of the financing for the audacious blockbuster sim hires the PCs to rescue her. Evidence points to some involvement by the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, which is certainly crooked enough to abduct a porn star. But, there are other possible culprits as well. Investigating the disappearance will only be possible with help from someone who knows the porn industry very well, and who had heavy connections in it.

I've actually got a play that has this one... and in our current run he's out of town for 7 days... So he's not getting paid for that week, and if it keeps up he'll losr the benifits of it.. Maybe even an investigation into why he's missed so much work.

As to the actual topic, I was banning assault cannon's for a while(I didn't like the fact that there's no recoil on something that fires small tank ammo because it fires SS and has a recoil mod of 1) So I came up with a knock down resist... Basically, body+Str test... not sure what it's oppssing yet. Was thinking just a set difficulty or bassing on the damage done.

Use the rules for shooting vehicle weapons from Arsenal. They resist Stun damage = to base weapon's damage, I believe it was. Something like that. It's in the 4 or less pages right after the Martial Arts qualities.

Skillwires are banned, but there is an effective under the table deal to make mundanes a bit better to compensate due to other changes to the ruleset.

The only thing that's banned in my game is banning things. And yes, my players hate me for it.

I am pretty new to Shadowrun, but we have gathered a decent group, where I am the only GM at the moment:( (want to play this game) and ofc my players stormed the internet to download books.

Which has let me to the point where I ban stuff I dont know anything about. and they seem to be fine about it.

...and we despise him for it. Not quite hate, but definitely despise. Banning the scatter rules for rockets and missiles (except when they miss) went a long way to make up for that.

How so?

That is a good idea,the player has dropped out of the game since he's too busy to play but I still might be able to use that.

Bah, that's just an extremely inefficient use of the character creation rules. If he wants a porn star roommate, he should take her as the Dependent (-10 for live-in lover) negative quality, and get points for it.

But yeah, useless contact. You might want to make it clearer to the players that contacts are only the useful people they know, and they don't have to pay for every family member, girlfriend, or ordinary schlub that the character slings back beers with. It's only a contact if the dad is a Lone Star dispatcher who tips his son off when the heat is about to come down, or the girlfriend knows the passwords for getting around the Ork Underground, or the ordinary schlub runs a blog on the latest megacorporate shenanigans.

I told him he could take her as a the perfect roommate life style quality and use the 7 points for something else but he wanted her as a contact so I let him. He also took the trust fund and I think the fame qualities but didn't really have a reason to why his character had them so I think he was just taking stuff he thought was cool with out thinking about how they interacted with his Runner. another Player gave his character a connections 3 loyalty 6 call girl as a contact which I feel would be of more use since she would have more useful connections and info such as whos, do what to who or setting up meetings with other clients who could be of use to the team.

Alternately

XKCD is fucking awesome.

Not related to the topic, but my personal favorite would be this one.

Yeah, I had a character who got fired from his dayjob for his running life intruding on his other life, ultimately this just becomes the source of information about the character, IMO because there's no reason or vested interest in protecting his identity.

Just because the character is a porn star that doesn't mean that those beefy Connections are useless. Connections 6 is still Connections 6, no mater the character's occupation. I imagine that she's a rather famous big-name star. She probably also has her own matrix site, where people can chat with her in real time while watching her masturbate for the low-low price of 2.99 per minute. Furthermore, given her Connections rating, it is likely that this site is about as popular as the old Shadowland used to be and it probably has similar visitors.

We could very easily be talking about someone who cybers with Damian Knight, Lofwyr, and Alachia often enough to call any of them up on their personal lines in the middle of the day.

I think that the six, there, is Loyalty, not Connection.

It is, I think the proper format for listing contacts is connections followed by loyalty at least that's how they're listed on the sample characters in the BBB.

Hmm... mostly unrelated, but I have been playing around with capping the total points spent on any single contact to a players Charisma score. Thus a character with a 3 charisma could only have a contact who's total loyalty plus connections was equal to 3. I might increase this to Charisma +2.

I justify this because shadowrunners are (in general) anti-social, villainous thugs, who commit crimes for money. Thus even a shadowrunner of average charisma does not tend to have terribly close connections with anyone. It takes a runner of above average charisma to develop a connection with an important (well connected/powerful) person. Or to develop a terribly close connection with anyone. Uncharismatic runners are lucky to have any contacts at all!

The main reason for this is to prevent some absurd situations that might develop with rating 6/6 contacts. If a Mafia Don is willing to take a bullet for you, why are you running the shadows again? It also helps to make charisma more important to some of my players who might otherwise dump it.

I'd argue you are better off dealing with these on a case by case basis. If someone can come up with a CONVINCING case then it's fine. Part of this is explaining why you are a shadowruner. If, in the case of the mafia don, the player doesn't have a worked out background and can't answer "so, why isn't your character a Capo?" then don't allow it. Push the loyalty down to a level that makes sense, or have the contact smeone other then the Don.

Having a high loyalty contact is restrictive too, as loyalty needs to run both ways. If your 5/6 contact is a Knight Errant commander your character had better walk away from ANY run that has KE providing security. Or you are likely to have serious issues.

Another thought, from Frank:
"Loyalty ratings go from zero to five, with descriptions moved appropriately.
-This makes the cost of contacts which give you no special treatment more reasonable."

Gah! I have that. I'm actually familiar with pretty much all the material but it's still a problem. It irritates me on two counts. One - that they downloaded and shared all the Shadowrun books they could find: pisses me off. Secondly: went and bloody read everything including all the things I would use as a surprise as part of the campaign development (read: Insect Spirits). Basically, I inherited a group where characters were already in use and a lot of things I would have changed or set-out at the start are already in there. They're a bunch of powergamers - world level athletes and super-skilled experts living in a squat together (when they'd naturally hate each other based on Charisma scores alone), with rating 6 contacts designed to get round any limitations in the game (e.g. international arms-dealers, etc.). The sort of characters who live out of dumpsters and have large stockpiles of grenades and bullets. They've scoured Runner's Companion for all the most exploitable Negative Qualities.

BitTorrent has a lot to answer for.

I didn't even bother visiting the link. I've seen this kind of clip many times already, and decided to save my bandwidth.

The fact is you're entirely missing the point. Cycle rates in SR are already massively capped to save on book keeping. Comparing them with real world firing rates is just silly. A vanilla human can't empty even a light revolver in 1 turn in SR. By RAW, a human with one natural IP can spend an edge for an additional IP, and fire a Colt Asp* four times, which doesn't even get close to real life.

I appreciate that in RL guns trump swords in all but the most unusual circumstances, but this is a game and I got sick of having gun bunnies render melee specialists (and even the whole melee skill group) useless. I have just taken the RAW limitation a step further to say that having IP boosts doesn't magically make your gun capable of firing faster. So a gun will only fire a number of rounds over the whole combat turn that it can fire in 1 IP (and ignoring the number of bullets used by suppressive fire). If you want to throw a lot of lead, get a fully automatic. You can then make a lot more shots before running into the cap, and since the firing actions will be spread out over the whole combat turn, you avoid most of the recoil penalties.

This is a thread about banning, so I thought it an appropriate place to discuss my pretty serious house rule change. I accept that it might be broken, and welcome input from Dumpshockers. (It was one of you guys that pointed out the number of bullets used for suppressive fire, which I had previously missed.)



*p21 Arsenal - had to go to a sourcebook since there are remarkably few revolvers actually statted, bringing me to another bugbear; the semi-auto specialism for pistols. I accept it grudgingly, since it is a valid specialism by RAW, but it is way too broad.

My GM bans two items:
* Radar Sensor [From Augmentation] X-Ray vision 4tw!
* Ringu toxin [From Augmentation] Its so lethal it might as well say 'Lose 1 permanent karma from Hand of God when struck'

....and we have a polite understanding that Mob Mind and Mind Probe will cause a 'unhappy amount of power escalation' if brought into the game 'cause we've just figured out how to use them a leeeeetle too well. They aren't banned per se but quite unhealthy to bring...

I haven't banned anything yet. Though I'm about to ban the SINNER flaw as I realize that I could either be a complete and total prick of GM with it (no fun for players when they get tracked back to their Doss or ambushed at their day job every game session). When we started, 3 out of 5 players had this flaw (2 at -5 and one at -10 (criminal)). Also of note is the Spirit bane Flaw, I think there should be a reason for this flaw, and most non-magicians shouldn't qualify for it.

I'm also limiting the dayjob and warning players that it could pose significant issues. Also, of note I don't think my players have picked up on the emotioys and what they do, but I would probably make them useless as their bonus would only apply to certain very restricted situations.

The way our group uses mind rape... I mean probe is you only get one success at breaking into their head. Each net hit lets you ask a single question. After that you can't mind probe them for a loooong time. Makes it so that you can't get everything you want to know out of the character, but certain select things. It also makes the characters ask inventive questions, but in the end if they don't ask the right ones it gets them nowhere. Even with 6 questions you might not find out everything you want to know out of the person you mind probed.

There is a reason why a GM has the option of saying "No that quality is stupid," or you say "I don't care if you have unwired or arsenal we are going to run with just the BBB and street magic." Anyways suprise tests are just silly. What I did when I GMed is make everyone roll perception.... a lot. Based on what they got for hits is what type of scene I pained them. If they get a lot of hits they notice some interesting details in the scene, or hear something going on. That way if they get a lot of it every once and a while they might not pull up the rolls when there really is a guy crouching behind that plant with an SMG.

The biggest thing about exploits Knasser is that they are exploits. In a computer game that is why they have patches, an RPG book has erratas, and at a table that is why you have a GM.

The SINNER flaw is actually a cool flawfor a GM to use. Just make sure that they have a good backstory for the flaw so that you can use it as a plot hook, or be able to work it into your game in a prevocative way. If they don't make a good backstory then its a BP sink and they should do something else, but the SINNER flaw should always have a story attached to it. Always.

I'm always flexible if someone has a convincing reason as to why there character might have a contact with such high levels of loyalty. But in my experience such explanations have been few and rather flimsy. I can buy shadowrunners having close relationships with relatively unimportant people. Or being merely associated with important people. But not both at the same time. Having my base rule in place does effectively the same thing you suggest, but the other way around. Instead of such contacts being explicitly allowed unless I ban it, such contacts are explicitly banned unless I allow it.


In my experience contacts are rarely an extreme liability. Especially powerful ones. Whats more such contacts can begin to impose restrictions on me as GM. As I can't very well set the PCs up for many runs against Ares if I know that one of my runners will continually have serious qualms about taking such runs. A contact might have an associated cost every now and then, but they are by and large assets, which is why players pay points for them.

And powerful contacts can be very powerful assets indeed. The 5/6 KE commander you mentioned might well be able to whistle of a Firewatch Strike Team on the characters behalf. A Mafia Don has vast assets, connections, and personal, that he (if high enough loyalty) might be willing to exercise for the player for little or no cost. We accept the concept of limiting access to powerful items though availability restrictions, why recoil from the thought of putting similar restrictions on contacts, which can be much more powerful tools than any gun a character might buy.


I like the current contact rating system, where in I rate a rating 1 loyalty contact as willing to do business with you and not likely to betray you with out a pretty compelling reason (it would appear Frank opinion of loyalty 1 contacts differs). However, I think making rating 0 connection/loyalty connections open to my players is a good idea. Though as a player myself I would question the utility of such contacts, some of my players might see there viability differently.

I'm going to point out that there are plenty of canon shadowrunners with some damn high level contacts at high loyalty ratings. Take Hitomi Shiawase, for example. The Emperor of Japan is a Connections 6 contact, at least, and and being married to him I assume rates high loyality, at least a 4. I don't think she does any actual shadowrunning anymore - being Empress of Japan is as good a reason to retire from the business as any - but her old ganger buddies probably have someone they can turn to if they ever need any information about Japan.
And lets not forget Ryan Mercury, Dunkie's pet Drake and the Vice President's lover.



That's unlikely to be true. Even a powerful contact can't just squander his organization's resources. If the KE commander sends a team out into the field, he has to file a great deal of paperwork and have a very good reason. Likewise, the Mafia Don's men are going to start looking at him funny if he's just giving all the good stuff away, and your men looking at you funny is the first step on a path that leads an excellent view of the bottom of a river.



I've been watching Vengeance Unlimited (downloaded bootlegs because it isn't available anywhere else) and one thing that I have been considering is allowing characters to start with owed favors in additions to contacts. These would basically be disposable contacts with no loyalty or connection rating. They're only used once and they can't be used for the standard stuff that you use contacts for. Instead, their primary purpose is to facilitate unorthodox or impromptu plans. Lets say a bank manager owes you a favor and you want to make it look like your target is embezzling from his company, you can have the manager cook the books at the bank to create a data trail that implicates your target. But once that's done the manager is removed from your contact list. I'm thinking that 2 BP is sufficient cost for such disposable contacts.



Actually, I'm pretty sure that the ranged combat rules factor in the time it takes for the character to actually point the weapon and uses that as its main limiting factor. Thus, reflex enhancement allows you to point the weapon at the thing you want to shoot more quickly.