Sure, it is always in the mix. As for the PiMo Chainsword... Definitly crazy and useless... so definatly a PiMo.

Please tell me it is not getting increased accuracy becasue of Wireless Bonuses. If so, yes, it is truly insane. *shakes head*

Carrying around oversized melee weapons in a setting where guns are prevalent is unprofessional IMO. You're more recognizable, flashy and less effective than a gunman with similar training/ware/powers, since those weapons are as concealable as most large firearms.

Barring special settings such as Japan where swords are common and guns are outlawed, of course.



What else would be the reason? On a side note, you get immunity to normal glitches, so the bonus is quite nice.

d00d katannas are the best my character is a elven asassin and she dualwields the monofilament katana with dikote and vibro so when she makes a called shot to the head its +4 damage ignores all armor. katanas are the best they can even cut bullets in half so instead of dodge melee roll to cut what ppl are shooting at me and if I get a bunch cut thru there guns and swords and stuff. katannas can cut thru tank armor to its so awesome. the japanese in wwii used katanas against sherman tanks and the cut through the backs and killed all the ppl. its tru look it up. if you do a melee roll and stage up the damage a bunch you can cut through walls. why door when you can make a door?? lol losers.

Wow... not just Pink Mohawk.. NEON Pink with trailing LED Mohawk

Alright, who let 90's kid onto the site?

That's not right, around 1300 is when the Katana started showing up. Note that they were used in the roughly 100 year war in Japan (Sengenko period) from the mid 1400's to the early 1600's.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katana

Well...does it help if I tell you it also gets the "deployed as free instead of simple action" bonus?

Beautiful. I just put on Rock you like a Hurricane in the background.

I had to think of this when I read that.

Not really, no.

Why worry about the damage code of your blade? As long as it gets through armour at all they'll have to soak 15S from the narcoject you coated it with.

Pink Mohawk is FABULOUS for one-shots.

For any sort of extended game, I prefer more Black Trenchcoat gaming.

I believe you're looking for langseax.

Long Sex? Wierd...

He is looking for long sex? Who isn't?

Oh wait... nevermind

Doh.. ninjaed by TJ

No no, going by pronounciation he wants Long Sax.

See, the way I look at Vibroswords, they're pretty serviceable weapons if you need to be quiet (kill the power and there's no noise), and better weapons when you don't get to be quiet, which is the exact time that you need the more serious weapon anyways.

Unless you're taking issue with concealability - but Mirrorshades doesn't preclude an armament that you can't afford to be caught with; when the consequences of being seen are already pretty serious, you may as well pack the best damn backup plan you can carry.



It also diminishes the penalty for glitches (the whip retracts instead of the standard effect), implying that there's some sort of wireless-dependent controller/predictor on new generation monowhips that make the function better with less risk to the user.

Actually, the wireless bonus on the monowhip is one of the few I really like.

You're assuming all Shadowrunners are the same, though.

Yeah, some runners are just mercenaries out to make money by Shooting People In The Face™. For them, being as effective as possible for as little effort and risk as possible is the bottom line. But there are others who have different motivations. Some runners are looking for something, or for someone. Some are out for revenge, while others are out for redemption. Some will do a good deed just because it can be done, and others will gladly slit your throat for kicks.

Does a katana make sense for Joe Ex-Army, who doesn't know anything other than driving trucks and shooting people and who has to somehow make a living despite being unemployable? Not remotely. Does it make sense for Social Adept Steve to carry around a two foot long piece of sharpened steel? Nah, his tongue and wit are plenty sharp enough already. Does Decker Dave get any benefit from wielding an ancient style two-handed warsword? Feck no, he doesn't need such a neo-primitive tool to hack! Even most Street "Samurai" are really more Gunbunnies who can take a few hits and keep trucking.

So who is a katana suited for? Well, to be honest, not a whole lot of people. But at least a few.

Naturally you have your gangers and street punks who are gonna want to look awesome like the samurai in the action trideo flicks - most of them just end up looking stupid, but some of them actually kind of pull the look off. You're also gonna have people who just carry them as a fashion statement, or as a status symbol, or because they sell them and want to passively advertise their small business when people ask about them, or whatever. You'll come across six foot tall "American Ninjas" dressed like Chuck Norris. You're also going to have more serious adepts and martial artists who have chosen to train in kenjutsu, maybe having started out in a local kendo class as a kid or something. (Considering that fencing is really big in the corporate world, I imagine kendo must be as well, especially with the Japanocorps.) And you're even gonna have professional swordsmen for hire, ranging from bounty hunters to shadowrunners to Renraku Red Samurai.


Do remember that most everyone is armed in 2075. People wear guns openly. They have to have licenses for them, sure, but a heavy pistol in a hip holster is probably almost as common an accessory as a commlink. Surely there are people walking around openly wearing swords as well, as people did in pre-modern times. Who's gonna mess with the really big guy who carries around a machete, right? With a katana, it's much the same thing - do you really want to try your luck finding out if this guy is just a poser or actually a pro? And a katana is nicer looking than a machete - it has a certain class and style to it that would make it appealing as part of a fashionable outfit in addition to being an intimidating self defense tool.

So walking down the street with a katana at your side or over you shoulder? I don't think anyone's gonna bat an eye. Seattle may technically be UCAS, but it's a giant melting pot of cultures. You can see salarymen in neo-Japanese business suits walking down the same street as leather clad bikers and punks, heavily robed hermetic magicians, Knight Errant officers in full body armor, NAN shamans in body paint and eagle plumes, Hip Hop wannabes in tracksuits and headphones, Buddhist monks in their signature red and orange dyes, Muslim women in burqas and hijabs, mohawked Goblin Rock BTL-brains with wires trailing from their skulls, neo-fashionistas in the absolute latest bright and garish designs, neighborhood kids in blue jeans and t-shirts, geisha girls in traditional kimonos, ultra-goths literally dripping with black mascara, neo-anarchists in cargo jeans and face wraps, the occasional fox tailed changeling or wayward spirit of air, troll bouncers in muscle-accentuating jackets, street cart vendors in colorful outfits and aprons, et cetera, et cetera. A katana is barely gonna register.

~Umi

I always hated the whole black trenchcoat all the time deal, personally that's not what I love about Shadowrun.

On to swords, we always carried things like that (and LMGs, and LAWS.. etc) into situations where discovery was FUBAR anway so it doesn't matter what you're packing, security is gonna get ornery when they find you.

Everything else it was more about concealable weapons and less mohawk. But if you lose the mohawk, you lose the Shadowrun, to me. Probably why I never cared for 4th edition.

As for 2075 swords, if your samurai gets his smartgun bricked, and his other smartgun bricked and you only brought one spare mag for the non smartgun, might be a good idea to have a non-wireless blade to have for backup.

** aside, as someone who regularliy carries a concealed firearm, I cringe when I read/see people carrying 2-3 different heavy pistols daily. Oh their aching back. And the discomfort. Then again, same goes for an armored trenchcoat, FFBA, and clothing in the summer... yikes.

That is a great description of how Shadowrun looks in my eyes. I feel that some of the more recent books have gotten away from that awesome melting pot of awesomeness. I recall a picture in the ... 3rd ... edition book with a scene just like what you described, and everyone was openly armed. That's what I always thought of areas that aren't AAA downtown and such.

I find the idea that the Buddhist monks would be openly armed to be a little bit strange...

I always see it as being a transitional thing, out in the barrens, walking with a shotty over the shoulder and super warhawk on your hip was just an accessorized style, Walking in the water front park in down town a nice Hamerlie in a concealed holster is less likely to get you geeked.

There's this little-known, pretty obscure group of warrior monks - maybe you've heard of them - the Shaolin?

~Umi

Its Shadowrun!! You've never made a combat mage following the Buddist tradition?

Depends on which goes better with your shoes though... Gotta be fashonable.

There are some places that not carrying a weapon is an invite for trouble.

Heh, was gonna post the same think, along with this nice quote from Andromeda(not exactly relevant but i really liked it whaen i heard it the first time)
"I know this may be a stretch for you, but think. You're twice as big as me, and you look pretty scary, but I'm still standing up to you, so either I'm crazy, or I am really, really dangerous.
Would you like to guess which? … I didn't think so."
--Trance Gemini to alien bountyhunter Hsigo in Andromeda episode 2.5 "Last Call at the Broken Hammer"

Well naturally, if it is a shotty and warhawk day just have to rock out with the jack boots, nothing else is quite right. hamerlie is nicely complemented with some loafers i find.

What makes you think the legitimate SINners who live there don't open carry? They probably won't have shotguns over their shoulders, but a heavy pistol in a holster that they aren't bothering to conceal? Why wouldn't that fly? Knight Errant gonna arrest them for open carry despite the fact they're licensed to have a gun? Is their parent corp gonna fire them for not tactfully concealing it?

It's a dark and dangerous world, chummer. Joe Corporate wears his piece openly at all times, so none of them SINless rats get any funny ideas.

~Umi

Depends on whether or not they have a carry permit, and whether that permit is for concealed or open carry.

In many places in the modern day, open carry is more legal than concealed. I imagine the same will be true in 2075.

That said, the point is that if people with the proper authorization regularly carry their weapons openly in upscale areas, why can't the runners do the same? Yeah, they'll need to make sure they have good Fake Licenses, and that they are properly dressed in nice looking clothing instead of blood-stained armor vests, but merely having a gun in the more "civilized" parts of town shouldn't be that likely to "get you geeked".

~Umi

Of course IRL there are states in the US where you can open carry without a permit, and only conceal carry with one. But I think Shadowrun carry laws are more strict IIRC.

In my particular town it is nothing to see someone on the street with a rifle strapped to their back (probably on snowmachine, and on the way to hunt something) in the winter, or a big .44 on their hip in the summer.

If you are so poorly skilled in using a Monowhip that you worry about the glitch, you should probably not use it. *shrug*
And why such functionality requires Matrix Access is still beyond me

Well you see, TJ, the new monowhip has a proto-AI built into it which uses its immense intellect to calculate all the many, many variables that go into properly controlling the thing, but after about ten seconds of this it gets incredibly bored and takes a nap, so the Matrix Access allows it to watch cat videos and post on tabletop gaming forums instead, keeping itself entertained and awake.

~Umi

I actually remember one Halloween this came into play. I had a sort of 'black metal butcher' outfit going, and one prop was this butcher knife my roomate had found. The thing was huge and rusty and looked like something from Silent Hill. When I was at work, I had asked an officer who walked in 'Look, I have this halloween costume planned to go out about the city, but it involves a big kitchen knife.' He said 'Well, Halloween is okay, just don't conceal it. We've had people dress as Highlanders with swords.' So yeah, I walked around with my big honkin' rusty Silent Hill butcher knife and all was well. Concealing it though and they could have slapped me with something.

I wonder the same about Smartguns & Hidden Arm Slides, like why does a data cable perform worse than the wireless for the former, and why does the later have to be wireless to be good as it used to be?

I miss skinlink...

Careful, that opens a whole conversation line that can get really ugly. There's a lot of "At *my* table..." flavor that stretches between groups, one of the bigger ones being how dangerous day-to-day life is. Does everyone walk around in armored clothing and most everyone has a gun? Is the populace pretty much unarmed and unarmored everywhere you go? Do corporate sorts normally traispe around in armored jackets? Etc etc etc.

As for Katana? Why *wouldn't* you carry one?

(More seriously, there was a serious "Japan is awesome!" vibe in the 80's that carried into Shadowrun. By 2055, the Japanacorp domination of the world was faltering, and by 2065, they'd been rocked back on their heels and the world had fully moved on. Shadowrun's moved from an 80's movie vibe to a more nuanced approach as time went by. The Katana as AWESOME is still an echo of that 80's flavor that will never fully die.)

Because it's a monumentally complex bit of processing that has to complete in live time, using resources well beyond the capabilities of the monowhip? But if you use the idle processing power of the various devices in the area, especially including the currently idle graphics processing on all the commlinks not presently in VR, you're at a sizable advantage in processing speed?

Maybe I'm missing something, but it seems like a device trying to farm out processing work kills any real-time possibilities. Not to mention, why should Joe Random's comlink or other devices allow another random device to commandeer processor cycles? That would be moronic from a security point of view.

Live-time doesn't mean there's no processing time involved - simply that it runs fast enough to fall within acceptable-for-use delays. A good example is games - if running at, say, 30FPS, the "live-time" limitation there means that you've got roughly 2 seconds for processing each frame of video. Given the wireless speeds of SR4, transmission time isn't going to be long enough to be a concern. And as for why Joe Random's commlink allows that, it's because Joe Random doesn't have a choice. This is a built in part of the new Matrix protocols.

Cutting through cloth armor is somewhat different from breaking hard armor, so it´s not generally superior.

You can disguise a katana as training equipment in some places, just bring the full jaido gear instead of just the sword and in some places you should be golden.

For me, those concepts break the system and the ability to suspend disbelief. Sure, the processing times and transmission times should be faster than anything possible today, but those still take time, a precious asset when a monowhip is flailing about. A dedicated processor should be able to run it's own calculations much faster than the time it would take for the processor to track down a friendly device, give a list of numbers and the operations needed, get the results back, and apply the results to its own calculations, even if it's only farming out potential paths.

The "new matrix protocols" are one of the many reasons why I skipped SR4, and I'll likely be skipping SR5. Whoever designed that system came up with a supremely boneheaded idea from a security standpoint. (Some people thought it was great. Suit yourself.)

That actually depends a great deal on the specific processing involved. Look up parallel processing sometime - it's a similar principle on a local scale, where addition computing resources (a computer's GPU) are used for processing, dramatically decreased the required time to run.

And as far as security goes... SR5's Matrix is actually secure enough that stuff like this isn't much of a vulnerability - Joe Random fundamentally doesn't need to worry about security, because GOD's got it covered. That, and you need to either have very specific and difficult to get hardware or be a technomancer to EVER hack. And you actually need to have serious ability.

Joe Random also doesn't need a monowhip. On the other hand, the people who need monowhips and automatic weapons aren't going to trust GOD to cover their security issues, because they only go to work when traditional security measures have already failed.

Which is why they're have their own Matrix specialist.

Blah, Blah, Blah... the Technobabble Means Absolutely Nothing. *shrug*

The Key term there is LOCAL SCALE. Meaning Local Resources... Not Distributed Resources.

Only because you actively refuse to see any possible point.



Yes. Because it's an example of a SIMILAR thing, not an IDENTICAL thing. The 2075 distributed variant would have far, far, far, far more processing power to work with than you could hope to have locally.