I was thinking about playing a shapeshifter, but when I looked at the rules, I decided against it. They just seem boring to play. They regenerate, which takes almost all of the fun out of combat, and they seem to actually get a bonus for casting spells with a force over their magic rating.

I was sort of excited about playing a character who was really an animal, but these benefits just take away the magic of roleplaying games. So, does anyone play them, or even allow them in their games?

My group had a wolf shifter, and it was a lot of fun. Until the pissed off bat shaman came to deliver a little astral message and the wolf attempted to defend his territory. Astral mages with weapon foci should not be messed with by dual natured creatures.

I've played one before(about 10 years ago), and the disadvantages were a little horrifying for a first time runner.

you tend to ruin your clothes if you shapeshift in them, so plan on either wearing something disposable or doing a lot of runs naked if you're planning on shapeshifting.

shapeshifting takes time, and you tend to be very vunerable during the transition.

if you lose a limb you have to wait for a new one to be cultured for you because cyber appendages don't change with you. your brand-spanking new wired reflexes will fall out the first time you morph. (this is how my first gm played it. might be different now, though.)

and if you REALLY get into your characters, the prospect of walking around sans an appendage while they grow a new one for you is absolutely horrifying.

they aren't as munchie as you probably think they are. if having that much power with apparent invunerability bothers you, take a few flaws that will balance it out in your mind.

as much as I loathed my first ever SR experience (long, long story) I adored my shapeshifter.

oooh - i thought of the other big thing..... shapeshifters are EXPENSIVE. That really bites during character creation. Really, really REALLY bites.

i'm finding i'm having similar problems convincing myself to take a cybered character, so i'm working my way up to playing one in stages. (first a street mage, then a physad, then a shaman, then a physad subbie nut..... i'm trying to nerve myself up to creating a rigger next. wish me luck) Maybe this might work for you.

Firstly, the third edition rules suck horribly. Go with second edition. Secondly, get your GM to agree to let you do physical damage in melee with your animal form (my shapeshifter character had to be physad so I could get killing hands. Funny, the GM wouldn't let me do L physical with claws, but would let me stack physad powers for a +5d6 init and S damage).

Honestly, check out second edition... You don't get screwed over by having to buy stats twice. You don't regenerate in human form. You can't get armor that changes shape with you. You can't cast magic in animal form. Dual nature is a *HUGE* thing, and pretty much gaurantees you're awakened so you can get masking. That's kinda unfortunate, but talk with your GM about getting a masking type spell or something if you don't want to be awakened (not sure how you'll deal with cyber, but that sounds like a nice challenge). Also remember that weres have *NO* rights, are SHOT ON SIGHT and are worth quite a bit of money.

My character spent all her time dealing with the fact that she is an animal, but had to train herself to ignore her animal instincts and act like a human. She had serious regenerative abilities which were super useful, but she couldn't use them during combat (no armor, no guns, lots of attention, that's actually what killer he in the end). The fact that she was a shapeshifter rarely came into play in regards to mechanics because of that (she just would never need first aid), but it made huge differences in roleplaying. Go ahead and try it out : ) Just remember what your head is worth because of your species...

Here would be my suggestions for making Shapeshifters playable.

1) Forget the crappy split your points between animal and human physical stats rule. That's ridiculous. The forms should be consistent - if you have average tiger strength you should have average human strength. Use one set of stats.

2) Forget the crappy bonuses in SR Companion. Look up the type of animal in Critters and apply the difference between its physical stats and 3 (ie. Stat - 3) as a bonus (or penalty) to be used in animal form. Then look up shapeshifters and apply the modifiers listed there to human and animal form. Give yourself the initiative dice of the animal/shifter as well. There's nothing worse in a roleplaying game than one rule for NPC shifters and one rule for PC shifters (apply also to Ghouls)

3) Go either a full mage or physmage. If you have to play an adept be prepared to rarely use animal form as the lack of armour is awful - at least sorcerous types can use the armour spell.

4) Tell your GM you should be able to use physad powers in both forms. Point out that otherwise it seems totally pointless being a shifter.

5) Take the attack from your animal form too. Tigers don't do (Str)M Stun in unarmed combat. Any other view on this probably deserves a severe beating. Don't have the book, but use the difference as a modifier again. Ie. if a Bear has Str 10 and the listed attack for a bear is 9S then your Bear form would do (Str - 1)S in melee.

6) If you want to fix regeneration a bit use stress points. Your shifter won't have cyberware, so use Cybersystem Damage on the stress chart as 'Power Stress' then make 1-2 Regeneration and 3-4 Shapeshift, 5-6 should be no effect. If a wound does regeneration stress then it has to be healed naturally and doesn't regenerate. Make up some effects along the lines of those for bioware (ie. Light stress is purely cosmetic, moderate maybe delays regen a turn, serious makes it take a minute per box and at deadly it craps out) and do likewise for Shapeshift (willpower tests of increasing difficulty to change shape is what we use)

Pile all that in, oh, and remember they get Essence 8, and thus have a starting magic rating of 8 as well.

Do that and a shapeshifter is still a waste of space till he gets some karma behind him... but one day he'll be playable.

Lessee if I can do quote tags right...

This was under SR2, so I'm going to leave the SR3 rules alone, cos we haven't used them. We had a character who played a Tiger Shapeshifter. Now I don't know how to make body armour in Real Life ™, but she had made a suit of armour similar to form fit that used sort of a lycra substance between the plates with the ballistic cloth sewn in strips around it. The plates were hardened (so it wasn't really form fit. She couldn't really wear it in polite company because it really was kinda obvious unless she wore very baggy clothes) so that it was all the armour she needed to wear. We worked it out as about 5/4.

But in tiger form it was all stretched out. Because of how it was designed it still gave her protection, but only at about 4/3 (or possibly 3/2, I can't remember off hand). 4/3, or even 3/2, was just about enough for melee combat (tiger form) with regeneration added in to boot, and 5/4 was plenty in human form where she didn't have the Body to soak it down.

It was custom made, and thus when it got damaged it was lots of fun trying to get it fixed, it gave her a slightly better than armour jacket armour rating in one form, and armour vest or lower ratings in another. Not at all gamebreaking, when you consider you're a walking astral target. We always liked the way Astral perception and shapeshifters was done in one of the short stories which were published, where the shifter could 'smell' astral things like mages, spirits, wards, spells and so on. The target numbers stay the same cos its an innate ability, but the game description changes wonderfully.

As for regeneration, as a GM I have a horrid tendency to roll a 1 any time something with regen goes down, except once, very recently. So that shifter didn't last past her first single unsoaked Deadly wound (which was actually after a good four or five karma pool's worth of game play). The point being regen made her LESS survivable than other characters - shifters don't have overflow. you get to D, you roll a dice, you live or die. With another character, there's a chance of doing something about it first.

One more thing, before I forget - remember that Shifters are animals FIRST. They are savage. Most DO hunt sentient prey (hence that shoot on sight, not letting them become citizens policy that everywhere I know of except amazonia has). If the shifter is in animal form I'd guess that's even more so as their sense are heightened. When they kill something, they may well just start eating it without thinking about it. Like security guards. That's a roleplay choice, but one you shouldn't ignore unless you're playing a shifter which has always made it a policy never to eat anything that can tell you a good recipe at the same time.

imho, etc.:

It also means that the shifter, even in human form, if it gets into a melee fight, is still going to fight like an animal. If I was Gm'ing I'd let 'em make a bite attack with a -1 reach and L physical damage if they wanted, because they will bite, scratch, kick, gouge, go for the throat, eyes, whatever. I might even put the opposition on pluses for the sheer unnerving-ness of the fight. That's obviously my call, and not a rule, but I think the roleplay choice in something like a shifter is greater than even a shaman, and its not a type of character i'd want in the hands of a player who would only be doing it for the funky powers. Not because its necesarily unbalancing. Because they don't deserve it.

regarding that point about NPC rules vs player rules - we now use the PC rules for Ghouls and Shifters, when it comes up, just like we would for other, metahuman NPCs. it works fine that way, and is completely fair. And karma pools are a bitch on an NPC shapeshifter...

I agree that the Companion's rules for shapeshifters are pretty bad. Of course, I also know why: It was an attempt to allow the creation of a shapshifter balanced with a normal starting PC.

Problem: A properly implemented shapeshifter is such a powerhouse that it will not balance with a normal starting PC.

So we get poorly implemented shapeshifters, or no shapshifters as PCs. I generally go for the latter.

I did a shape shifter once, it was lots more role playing than worrying about effects. Lots of acting out that she wasn't human. And as for the clothes thing, I wore lots of coverall on runs that I could get rid of when I changed.

Regenerating was a bitch because I'd still bleed when hurt and aso clothes quickly got torn up and stained. I learned to play dead when shot (will power test not to freak out and go all bestial) becasue otherwise someone goes down from a blast and then gets up aqain gets more firepower on her faster thnvyou can say 'geek the mage"

One of my players is an Awakened Cat.

I had to come up with house rules on nudity just because of him.

I never thought of LD as nudist

In our four-year campaign, one player played a Shapeshifter Fox as his main character for over a year, until the team realized that during the last two months of play she'd been possessed by a Mantis Spirit and they killed her. Five times.

Four other players have played a Shapeshifter briefly, but never for very long. They have always returned to their other characters.

Shapeshifters may be considered animals, but that shouldn't mean you can just kill them any time. They are rare animals, so they should be protected, like eagles and whales. If they are completely illegal to hunt, people should at least need a liscence to hunt them. And just because an animal is legal to hunt, doesn't mean you can shoot at it in crowded city streets. Imagine if a shifter is in the streets of Seattle, and a person starts shooting at him with a pistol. Now, even if that person has a liscence, he is still going to get arrested for discharging firearms in a crowded street, which could easily result in collateral damage. After all, it is legal to hunt pigeons, but you never see anyone pull out a shotgun and bag a flock of pigeons for dinner, because bullets have to land somewhere. Also, people need permits for guns and spells over level 2. The world of shadowrun may seem like a really violent place, but keep in mind that as a runner you are only dealing with a small section of society. Most people in 2063 still don't pack heat all the time. So, anyone who just hunts a shapeshifter for profit is likely to be a criminal. And criminals don't walk around using astral perception all the time, because A) that leaves them open to astral ambush and B) It's harder to do stuff in the physical world while watching the astral, giving you a +2 target number to everything that doesn't involve your astral perception. Also, in 2063, animal rights and civil rights activists are a lot more militant than they are now, like everyone else. Anyone who is found hunting shifters or selling their body parts might just be targeted by an ACLU hit squad, or made an example of by PETA.

Since the awakening, preservation of endangered species has not been a common concern. Preservation of humans has been more popular. Quebec offers bounties on all paracritter hides, and most nations classify paracritters as dangerous pests.

Luckily, they are worth a lot more alive than dead, which provides chances for escape (or rescue). Unfortunately, if they can't escape, a shapeshifter's resiliency will prevent the tests from killing them, or even knocking them out for long.

Well, regardless of whether you are a racist or think of shifters as people, the fact remains that killing or kidnapping one can get you in trouble. Any shifter who lives in the city almost certainly has a few human friends, who could possibly seek revenge. And anyone who knows that your shifter character is a shadowrunner will probably not consider selling him for research to be worth attracting the ire of his teammates over.

As for balancing shifter characters, giving them 1 set of physical attributes to purchase and only applying the racial modifiers to make animal form any better would A) minimize the difference between human and animal form B) make shifters too powerful and C) not work because the cost of raising attributes would be different depending on which form they are for, and the racial maximums have to be different for each form. As for regeneration, I think it is too powerful. If I were GM, I would replace the power of regeneration, both for shifters and everything in the critters book, to one box per minute. Healing wounds within 3 seconds of getting them is insane. Maybe have stun damage heal a little faster and/or give them an extra damage resistance die to balance this decrease. As for skills, my GM has shifters default on athletics, stealth, and unarmed combat while in animal form, at no penalty, which makes sense to me. Seal shifters could default on diving and underwater combat too. Another idea is to have them use the same athletics and stealth skills while in animal form, but require a different unarmed combat skill. Requireing them to have a whole set of seperate physical skills for animal form would really screw shifter characters over though.

The Companion makes the astral signature thing pretty clear. A shifter's auro is always shaped like their animal form, even when their body is in human form. This means that in human form, anyone looking at them astrally can tell what they are without having to roll for it, unless they are masked. In animal form, an assensing test would be required.

They regenerate stun. This is a common misconception.

In 3rd edition regeneration regenerates "damage" and is not restricted to either stun or physical. I believe it used to be in a previous edition, but that is no longer the case. Furthermore according to the companion Shifters regenerate drain damage at one box per minute.

Shifters regenerate stugn damage that is not drain just as fast as they regenerate anything esle, which is to say obscenely damn fast.

According to a strict reading of the rules, they'll regenerate all physical drain from conjuring at the end of the turn. We house rule against this.

I have had immense success and fun playing shapeshifting characters. My first character played in RPG's was a female bat shapeshifter. I have since returned and played an female aspected mage leopard shapeshifter and a male full mage fox shapeshifter.

The bat character was essentially mundane except for the dual nature and regeneration abilities. It was difficult to play, but I never admitted my shapeshifting to anyone and never had problems with authorities. At the end of the run, I was trapped, shifted to a bat and flew away. It was the only time I used the ability and I ended up being the only runner of the group to survive or not be captured and tortured.

My next character was an aspected (sorcery) adept leopard shapeshifter/shaman. She knew all the prejudices against shapeshifters and tried to keep her identity secret from all but the runner team. As for the problems she dealt with:

Nakedness: Improved Invisibility spell and an extra set of clothing in a small pack. Another possibility, create an ally spirit with 2 forms, 1. clothing and 2. a collar.

Bestial Nature: accept it, contain it in human form, release it in animal form

Armor: don't wear any and stay behind the bullet catchers (sams) or invisible, this also reduces any chance of being caught in your armor when you shift

Being seen from the astral as a shapeshifter: Get masking as a metamagic when you initiate.

As for making an invincible character: You can't, your attributes will be weak and you skills will be minimal, however this problem can be avoided with a little bit of intelligent roleplaying. Be sneaky, don't get shot at and avoid difficult conversations. Your regeneration power is the biggest advantage to living a long time, a botched mission or mistake can be lived through. Remember the one who runs away lives to kill another day.

Shapeshifter's are fun to play and tax one's acting abilities. My top two favorite characters (and I've made about 20) are both shapeshifter's.

I've played shifters before and the only real problem that came up was the starting attributes and regen ability. For the attributes we ruled that you make the character as normal (one set of attributes) and then split it into human and animal stats and apply the modifiers. Once in game, animal and human stats have to be raised separately. As for the regen, we ruled that a shifter would regen one box of physical damage per hour and one box of stun every half hour. Useful but not overpowering. Most everything else is just how you and your GM play the character. It can be quite a fun challenge to play out your instincts, even if it can lead to trouble.


Joe Silverhand
"It takes sense to write good nonsense" Mark Twain

Since you all are clamouring on the "shifter aren't human, therfore we can go hunt them down" bandwagon, anyone went on a spree hunting Mr Wolf of Wolf and Raven fame yet? Why isn't Wolf dead yet?

In his defense, he didn't say that was what the sorcerer did, just that it is another way to avoid the social problems. I agree that it should have been seperated somewhat.

So: Has anyone considered running a shifter game where everyone's a shifter? I was thinking that a pack of wolves could have become awakened in the wilderness by some big magical drek, and end-up fighting the big nasty resource-grabbing polluting corp?

OK: So it's a touch cliche but it could be fun. Hopefully they won't all end-up as physad wolves with the same powers.

LOL.

"Hello. I am the source of your magic! WORSHIP ME!"