What items or rules does your SR4 GM ban?

Example: Item ban - My GM doesn't allow Form-Fitting Body Armor (Arsenal - Gear Rulebook pg. 48) in the campaign.

Example: Rule ban - My GM allows Form-Fitting Body Armor in the campaign, but he does not allow it to stack with other armors.

I am the GM in my group. The only rule I acutally ban is the "Try Again" rule. I use a Let it Ride rule instead. Guess that's more of a house-rule than anything else, though.

Emo-toys are banned.
Unwired Activesofts mods are banned.
Must of unwired is banned,
Actually most of the matrix is banned.

I didn't personally ban them, but my table doesn't allow social Activesofts

We also don't allow FFA stacking. No-one has tried gel packs, but I don't think they would go over well.

I know one table where K-10 was banned after the entire table died.

our primary GM doesn't go for technomansers, so i supose it would be considered a ban and no material he hasn't read yet

EDIT: oh and i dont hate him for it.

Buying STR 30 Bows.
For your Plane
Which has arms.

Why ban the emotitoys? They make sense in world, IMO (but I'm not expert) they're a great time and money sync for players and they can get pwned so ver easily. We had it come up on a run and it became a tool of clever planning and really allowed the players to come up with an inventive idea rather than come up with the same old schtick. I'm pro my players having a variety of toys, they make things more fun from a formation of strategy end, I just make sure the constraints against availability and the like are enforced.

My GM banned the biowires TM echo (but only the part where you can permanently memorize the skillsoft by paying karma=rating). There is also an unspoken table agreement banning skill wires. My GM also ignores Notoriety & Public Awareness & Street Cred rules.

But worse of all... he has banned any rule or gear that isn't in print-or at least PDF. Excrutiating. Oh, the agony.

Excuse my ignorance but what would this exclude? Aren't all the main books, Ghost Cartels, Digital Grimoire etc at least in PDF?

Also my GM has banned the Restricted Item Quality.

Tiger Eyes is a freelancer, which explains her comment a touch.

Right my ignorance is maintained, freelancer in what?

She's a freelancer for Shadowrun. She wrote some of what you (probably) own. I think the implication here is that she has access to rules before they become available to the general public and that some of those rules are pretty cool.

Freelancer, more commonly referred to as an independent contractor, someone who does work for a company, usually on a per-job basis, without actually being an employee of that company, thus freeing the company from basic obligations such as providing health insurance and withholding taxes.

In this context, it refers to an independent contractor who writes material for Shadowrun books, and thus has access to stuff that was cut from books, for one reason or another, and stuff that hasn't been published yet. This includes rules and equipment, which if we knew about, Catalyst would have no choice but to send assassins to kill us all.

Ah okay, I know how content creation works for some other games but not Shadowrun I gotcha. It seems like there are alot of people on the boards who are intimiately involved in the creative process of the game. Is there like a listing of who these people are before I end up saying something stupid to someone who generated the content being debated? I'm a big fan of technical expertise as being paramount to argumentative success.

First off I'm against all "must have" items. If something is worth the cost in money/essence/weight to be in every runner's load out it's too good. Must haves also punish playing a character concept that can't/won't make use of the item. Which brings me to the exception to this principle: Theme. I'm totally ok with thematic must have items like com-links, DNI, guns, armor etc. The ubiquity and utility of those items help to make the world a cyber-punk world. emotitoys? no not really. Could you really see Henry Case, Motoko Kusanagi, Richard Deckard, Heiro Protagonist or any other inspiration for a shadowrun PC whipping out their emotitoy on the job? Maybe as a onetime comic relief stunt, but that's about it.


Also banned at my table (again not by me) is red-lining for body or agility.

Not a complete listing, no. The big dogs (actual CGL employees) are Vairdic, Synner (line developer), and Adam Jury. Freelancers include Aaron, Tiger Eyes, and myself.

I am the GM at my (virtual) table. I ban shifters, AIs, free spirits, sapient critters, and sometimes the infected. If I don't own the book then I have a ban until I can talk to the player and understand what they want and how it will affect my game.

Houserules - Contact Points in lieu of Karma to purchase contacts.

Do my player hate me? They have never said so.

one of our gms(we have 3) attempts to ban several items,spells,or tactics at random points in the game. basically if a decker is no longer a complete necessity or godsend then he plays the unbalanced card.

Just recently banned Mana Static. Our GM didn't realize the awesome of the spell and I had purposefully avoided it eventhough my mentor is Sky Father because I would have shown him that proper application of it's awesome. He gave it to a newbie and we just laughed and laughed because he wasn't seeing why it was so powerful. His argument was that it affects you too...and then I explained that it also affects spirits and he was like "Ohhh...yeah, that doesn't exist in this game." The two rules lawyers of the group (me and the street sam) got a HUGE kick out of that reaction.

For the most part, he has dropped all of Unwired because he's unsure what works and what doesn't. He's definately dropping the 5th IP mod for Comms. The ergonomic program option is also toast (because why the hell wouldn't all of your basic programs be made that way). But he hasn't made a final decision and our hacker decided he didn't like the game balancing constraints placed on the Matrix and played a troll ghoul sam instead (he's a sloid transhumanist and figures that the tech level should allow him to do it, then why doesn't it), so the issue is moot.

So far he's seemed positive about emotitoys, which are a personal peeve of mine (too good for too little money; I'm ok with the software, since it's 10x more expensive, but the toy is just dumb in comparison), but no one in our group has one because we feel it's retarded.

A little piece of me dies inside everytime my Face is effectively penalized for refusing to bring a Furby to the meet.

As GM I don't really ban anything unless we have to spend the entire game working around it. Example: a party of infected, AI's, free spirits, or someone having WAY too much fun with the restricted gear advantage out of Runner's companion.

The other GM in the group never bans anything either because he knows how to use it against you to balance things out.

Have you seen the processor overheads on Microsoft Office?! Hell, just take a look at much of a ridiculous memory hog Vista is. Pretty much anything coded by Microsoft is ridiculously inneficient with system resources, but they still dominate the market. The software we use day-to-day is far from ergonomic, even outside of the usual Microsoft products; even Firefox is an ugly memory whore. Does that mean you shouldn't go out and get ergonomic versions anyway? Of course not. Any hacker worth their salt should be running the best damn system setup they can. That's what seperates a computer wiz from someone who just has the standard off-the-shelf setup.

Yep, in SR4 it's assumed your character is a smart shopper and actually gets what he pays for-- but he still has to pay for it. A Hacker can and should have the best setup available to him, but it's going to cost him either nuyen or effort. Joe Wageslave, on the other hand, doesn't really need a tweaked out commlink and ergonomic programs. Hell, the corps are probably happier with him coming to work with a POS commlink that couldn't hack its way out of a Stuffer Shack. With how much raw processing power is available in the Sixth World, I can't imagine your average Joe really needs that fancy of a commlink-- if anything, allowing all your employees to run a plethora of programs is a productivity or security risk.

I'm not trying to start a flamewar or put a kink in thread but several people have mentioned this and I don't get it. What's so broke, annoying, or powerful about emotitoys? The only person in my group that really used one was the technomancer who used in conjunction with the drone rigger so the rigger could do some B&E. The little sucker got popped by a pair of lightning bolts and given the sheer cost of putting it together, the group has been hesistant to buy one ever since.

Yes, sorry, I didn't make my post completely clear. Now, mind you, my GM is NDA'd (non-disclosure agreement) as is the rest of my roleplaying group (I use them for playtesting sometimes). So even if he's seen something new and awesome, he gets great pleasure in denying it in the game until it makes it into print. I didn't get to use anything from Unwired until he went to Gencon and bought the hard copy. I always play hackers & technomancers, so this was a source of great pain for me.

Similar story for Ghost Cartels. Oh, the pain! Oh, the angst!

Emotytoys don´t add to social skills in my game. (I love me for that. And they can still tell you. But they won´t help you mocking me.)

All items can be aquired, with some ingame effort. Including special shots at delta-ware deals. There is no availability rating, and no availability roll.

They're not broken, they're merely unnecessary and inflate dicepools for no good reason. An immobile rating 6 emotitoy costs a mere 600 nuyen, is small enough to dangle from a keychain on your commlink and is described as being an extremely popular and trendy item. I mean, seriously, my groups have spent more nuyen than that getting into swank nightclubs before, so I find the "the cost is prohibitive" argument pretty ridiculous. It's stupid for any serious Fixer or Mr. J not to have one, so it really doesn't do much other than inflate dice pool sizes. Remember, Social Tests are opposed tests, so everyone adding 6 dice to their pool doesn't really change the arms race much. And thematically, they annoy me since a rating 6 toy can easily give you a bigger bonus on your Intimidation pool than being a ripped troll with a custom look combat axe. The idea of the big guy cracking his knuckles, pulling out his Furby and rumbling "You, me and my li'l friend are gonna have us a chat" is funny the first time but after a while it gets a li'l tiresome. Or what if you arrange for a mark to lose their emotitoy before the meet? Suddenly, thanks to the power of your toy's +6 dicepool advantage the man's emotional state is mere putty in your hands. Seriously, it's pretty stupid.

Emotoys are banned in my game (Social Test pools are way too high as it is). Nanotech and Genetech are not in my game, but that's because we are running during the SR3 timeline and thus they don't really "exist" as of yet. Non-metahuman characters are also not allowed because I don't yet have a player that I trust to play them properly. Form-fitting body armor is allowed to stack with standard armor, but at its full value for calculating encumbrance. All weapon modifications are done under my extremely watchful eye. Social dice pool bonuses may not exceed the base (Charisma + skill) value. Skillsofts/skillwires have been tweaked to act more like Commlink programs (which is how I always thought of them) rather than a group of things that have all their own special rules. The effects of full-VR driving and the Vehicle Control Rig have been swapped (with the VCR now giving -1 Threshold, and full-VR giving +2) because I wanted the better benefit to reside with the VCR as I don't think Riggers are given enough due in SR4.

It makes me sad whenever I see that someone has "banned the whole Matrix" as I think that the wireless Matrix was the single best improvement in SR4.

I pretty much allow whatever they players want onto the table. Mind you, I still make them pay for it (including the restricted gear option, if necessary) and obey restrictions rules, but I haven't seen any gear/spells/'ware/misc. toys that I can't get around with a little creativity. That, and I want to reward my players for thinking ahead and coming equipped for a job. I feel its easy to simply ban gear, but its much more interesting and challenging for the players (and me as a GM) to come up with interesting ways around whatever toys are brought to the table. That, and I reserve the right to use your own tricks against you, and I match power levels appropriately. Massive troll with tons of biomods for inflating his body score come through the door? The corp in charge will eventually whip out firepower big enough to deal with it. Likewise, sick of your Johnson using an emotitoy to read your every move? A short range directional EMP or a little hacking can even the score. Remember: by the time you make contact with the Johnson, the run has already started.

I don't ban official items or rules. Banning strikes me as lazy or uncreative GMing.

Thadeus, just to make sure emotitoys and bust-a-moves are different.

Six extra dice on every social test. It isn't much if you're already a 30+dice pornomancer, but it is a huge bonus for a low price, and can be extremely overpowering in a pornomancerless game.

See, that's just a scenario I'm not interested in playing out, and Rating 6 is simply too big for my comfort level. I mean, seriously, the li'l buggers are twice as effective as Kinesics or Tailored Pheromones for 600 nuyen? Really? They're that good? I don't ban them outright, but I do limit their bonus to Judge Intentions tests and I do make them less discrete. I'm completely fine with your li'l mood toy picking up that someone is nervous, but that might mean your li'l EVO Imp may make a wisecrack at your Johnson's expense at an inopportune time. If you want a full suite of options and discretion, that's what Empathy Software is for.

I am the GM and I have amended Bows. They are stupidly powerful. An augmented troll with a bow can one-shot heavy drones with custom armour from Arsenal. They are apparently better than the best that 2070 chemistry, physics and technology has to offer.

And yes, I have been hated for it. I have a group of power-gamers.

Hmm...well, we never banned anything. We even nix Availability limits at chargen in our games, lowered the cost of Improve Physical Ability in the adept powers to half a point a level, and when we used BP(we switched to karmagen), we lowered the cost of maxing an attribute. Mind you, as I mentioned before, we've been the same group playing together for the past 15 years, so we all know each other. If anything, we add options to give more options to anyone, and are willing to let folks try about anything if we think it will add to the game. It might sound like it seeing it written like, but our games are not of immense power.

Wait, I think one thing was banned once. In one game, we weren't allowed to take the Yakuza Boss as a contact. Soldier, yes, but not the boss.

I myself had limited martial arts DV to +2, because it just sounded better like that(not that I ever had to use that rule at our table because no one tried to break it anyway, but if I were to GM folks I didn't know I would have used that houserule. BUT, after it was errata'd to a +3, I kept that(it wasn't that much of a difference.) But martial arts weren't banned; I simply had capped how much damage could be piled on. Im sure if I squinted, I could think of a couple of other things I sort of nerfed a bit, but it's hard to think of any; and again, these would have only been used if I had been GMing folks i didn't know.

We do things by game, than overall. If we are playing a particular theme(all one race, for example, if we did), then naturally, that limitation would be in place. It it's an ''all broke-ass ganger'' campaign, then money would be very limited. But besides that one thing that one time, we never used a blanket ban on anything.

For what its worth, I haven't felt compelled to ban or even restrict, really, anything in my game.

Of course, I also feel I can trust my players not to be asshats, so a draconian ban-hammer approach isn't really needed. At all.

-paws

(You know... I admit I cringed a bit last session when when our ork gunslinger adept and troll martial adept slaughtered a room full of Vory muscleboys before they could even get out of their seats. But they're not twinked out characters even, they had a solid plan and surprise actions...)

not really banned, but after i showed the GM just how powerfull the ares viper slivergun was even against para-critters, ALL critters suddenly were of the mutated kind that sprouted natural armor.

Gentlemen's agreement on no Mana Static. Also severe evil looks at someone using a dumpshock suggested build

heh, yeah, that too ^^
especially once i eyed the climber troll O.o

Banned:

- Unwired.
- Only one free action per phase (we allow a reasonable amount).
- Normal fumbles (critical fumbles become normal fumbles).
- Orgasm, Orgy, Goo-Transformation and Mana-Static will be added soon, I think.
- Stick'n'Shock ammo (too shockingly effective, especially in small guns).
- Emotitoys are not used for style reasons (see Whipstich).

I ban the Day Job Flaw. I cannot stand it, never could stand it, and aren't about to try and stand it. I can't tell if it's an edge or a flaw. It gives you money, and it really doesn't penalize the character all that much. I will freely admit that I ban it because I personally cannot cope with it, and not for some contrived in-game reason.

No don't get me wrong, you weren't under obligation to explain your position, obviously the forum community knows who you are, and I'm the odd man out. Its great that you post on the boards and keep in touch with those who play the game. And thanks for the explanation.

Well I meant the cost was prohibitive for modding the bejesus out of them. If they just up and add to social roles by virtue of being there, that's just silly. Trends in Shadowrun should shift and morph far faster than in real life, sure the emotitoy is trendy now, but it might be the opposite next week, or a month from now when you meet with that Johnson again. If you're going to start worrying about trends as social modifers than you're going to have to spend the money on a weekly basis prolly.

Just a though I might be mixing up emotitoys and bust-a-moves.

Things I've banned from my game:

-A variety of negative qualities from Runners Companion. Several of them are things that I think should be role played. I don't see any positive qualities for playing a saint, why should you be "rewarded" with extra points for playing an Liar? Not nitpicking the rules, but playing with my group for many years my players are more than likely not to roleplay these qualities and just take them for buildpoints.

- The standard, I need to read it and figure out what exploits it may cause before I allow it into my game.

- After reading the errata for Arsenal, the Thunderstruck Gauss Canon. holy crap, I both love and fear this errata at the same time.

Oh and I keep getting requests from one of my players for what he describes as "power armor" and says it's in one of the German SR4 books. I'm slightly inclined to believe it may be NERPS, but he swears it's a published SR4 armor and it's not just something he read on a website. I'm sure I'd ban it just for balance reasons at the moment, but I'm not necessarily opposed to the idea later on in the campaign. If only he'd tell/show me where it's in print.

there was something like this in Fields of Fire. Think Iron Man here. More or less . . maybe War-Machine is a better comparsion ^^
There was the Jym-Suit somewhere, which is basically a worn Vehicle. Think the Elemental Armor from Battletech Fame here. In that Reality, Elementals originated from Jym-Suits actually.
there is something like the Crysis Suit from the Crysis FPS Game in SR4 allready. Of course, Mil-Spec.

You must be, because an emotitoy comes pre-loaded with Empathy software equal to its rating, and Empathy software can give you a dicepool bonus equal to its rating for Social Skill tests. So a 600 nuyen emotitoy gives you a flat out +6 Social Test dicepool bonus before your GM even considers whether NPCs would think dragging a toy around is trendy or not; when I brought up that they were trendy I was merely pointing out that they're ubiquitous and that in many cases a runner can and should get away with using one by the RAW. Besides, even if people do think they're stupid, the emotitoy dicepool bonus can be so high that you should likely consider taking one to a job interview even if it was a place that required a high end business dress code. After all, having a rating 6 toy along can offset the by-the-RAW penalties for a hostile NPC (-3) and wearing the wrong attire/not having the right look (-2). Seriously, I just really don't see what these things bring to the table other than headaches. I don't mind the Empathy software so much since it's a more clandestine maneuver, but I honestly wish the stuff was less portable. I'd have rather seen it brought in as a high end and expensive sensor suite that the Star use in police interrogations as some kind of hyper modern lie detecter test. In my ideal Shadowrun world, these things would be bugbears that only consummate Faces routinely beat rather than a common item people everywhere are learning to live with.

Emotitoys don't add to your social rolls because they're trendy. They add to your social rolls because they have software that reads people's emotions.



Liar, though, isn't really giving you any points back for being a liar. It's giving you points back for having a reputation as a liar.

Also, what do you mean by "The standard?"

so?
if you allready HAVE the reputation of not being honest, then why BE honest?
lie, cheat, swindle and come out on top and get points for people clearly seeing you as being the conniving and deceiving rat you really are . .
but you do it with such flair, such eloquence, that they STILL like you, because you put the points you got from this into something face stuffy.
kinda like combat monster/berserk for fighting characters . . most of the time, the closest person IS the person they wanna hurt ANYWAY . .

Liar doesn't necessarily require any roleplaying on the part of the player, but it does require roleplaying initiative on the part of the GM. Liar doesn't impose behavior restrictions on the PC, it imposes behavior restrictions on NPCs when a die comes up 1. It really doesn't matter what you do if you have the Liar flaw; rolling a 1 at the airport security checkpoint can still end with a full cavity search regardless of your intentions.

Me I 'ban' nothing from my games. BUT I certainly make full use of the 'GM approval' that is necessary before allowing anything into my game. This is a subtle but important difference I think.

And there are some things that will never get my approval. Such as PC vampires.