I've been reading through some of the newer supplements, like Unfriendly Skies, Mil Spec Tech, and to a certain extent WAR!, and a question has been cropping up.

A lot of the vehicles and even some of the equipment are so expensive in game terms that the average runner couldn't possibly afford them, doubly so if you use the standard pay scheme in the core books.

So, what would you use these things for? I think it's a good idea to have stats for these kinds of vehicles for the GM, but I mean what runner would have the need or opportunity for a hover tank?

I can see the use in military games, but then why the vast variety, why not just have one big book of expanded vehicles with archetypes of vehicles?

Lets see, GM use is a large one. Another is loaned equipment for runs. And of course there is military as well. Heck, you could do an entire impromptu run around trying to successfully steal a hover tank from a base or something.

Overall though I'd say it is more there as a means to say "Hey, this exists" as opposed to because it is something runners are supposed to own, or even run into. Like the hover tank. The players may never use or fight one, but it exists, and that is something to know, something to make the worlds a bit more fleshed out.

It's kind of like how particle accelerators exist, but you and I are unlikely to ever see them in person, but knowing that they exist tells us something about the world we live in. Same for sniper rifles and tanks (I really hope you/I never run into a tank)

Aside from what Ghost said (which even if I never see or use the material in the supplements in a game), having more of the game world established like this is nice. Same goes for the metavariants in Runner's Companion. I've disallowed them in my games, but they still certainly exist anyway.

But for other things... Regarding War!, say the team has to do a run in a war zone (like Bogota or northern California) for whatever reason. Maybe they have to sneak into an out of the way outpost for something/someone, things get hot and the team has to... "borrow" something on the way out (maybe that Hawker-Siddeley Brennus sitting out on the tarmac?). Maybe they get to see a few of the new Azzie Halcons along the way.

Or maybe the team ends up in the boonies of the UCAS, or have to cross into and travel deep into the middle-of-nowhere Salish-Shidhe. Somewhere that's not really high priority for normal gear, but the fed uses low budget drones (like a Predator or Reaper) to monitor the area and the runners have to deal with it.

Then there's something more local, like hitting a dilapidated looking warehouse down near the docks of Seattle. Maybe the owner had to cut some corners in the security budget and got a great deal on a batch of older (and highly used) Ares Sentinel "P" Series rail drones as opposed to a few brand new "R" Series rail drones.

The advantage of lots of smaller stuff, that I see, is that one can select and buy what they need. Some certainly would be willing to save 5 or 10 bucks (or more) by buying a few small supplements that they're going to use, instead of paying more for a single and fatter book with material they might never use.

You can sprinkel the stuff in, now and again, to keep the runners on their toes, or send goons looking for them in such things (But, obviously, not finding them) ... when the team hears that a couple of tanks are trying to find them, they'll usually stay low. (Mind, some groups will instead try to figure out a way to take one over, but hey!)

More important, of course, is the simple act of world building. The fact that the CAS has submersable aircraft carriers isn't really going to factor into anyone's Shadowruns, but knowing that they HAVE Them is ... kinda neat.

If you can't think of at least a dozen answers to this question on your own, then I think you're suffering from a severe deficiency of imagination.


~R~

Hell, the number of uses I came up with the Propeller Plane were amazing.

What I could figure out what to do with a HOVER TANK, even a used and abused one without a cannon, boggles the mind!

Yeah, but could you afford one? I think that is more the problem than having uses for alot of the high end gear.

Afford... Steal... Loot off a battleground...

Potato/Zuchini.


~R~

If you're not stealing, you're not trying.

Getting away with it, though. That's the hard part.

Getting away with it gets a bit easier when you have a FRAGGIN' HOVER TANK to support your get-away.

Hiding gets harder, however.

The Hovertank is over twenty years old, however, and is probably in a few militaries that you can drive it away from and park it into a cargo jet and fly away. Then you have fun with flying drones and fighter jets.

There's no such thing as hoverbikes! What you saw were just A couple of huffies on a fishing line!

Did anyone get that? I'll be here all week.

I think GM use is the only reason. It's a good one, in certain situations.

With all this military gear, and with WAR! in particular, it seems the publisher/game designers were not only expanding the world, but also trying to expand the game concept. Now we can use the Shadowrun rules to play UCAS soldiers fighting a second civil war with the CAS, or Tir Elf pilots in jets hunting down Orc T-birds. In these games your players wouldn't be Runners, but Soldiers instead. Just a different type of game.

I think they're just expanding their product line, but yeah. That's still the same GM/PC question from above, so these WAR!/etc. things are for powerful runner opposition on increasingly crazy runs.

World building, I can understand. Needing stats for military games, I can understand.

But it seems more...economical, I guess, to have basic stat blocks for maybe a couple different types of military vehicles, but when you've got entire books FULL of different types of equipment with very similar stats it just seems a little...unnecessary.

It seems like it would be better to have one single book with sections like



I mean I dont see why you need 10 variants of fighter jets and cargo carriers that have very little variation between them.

I'm not criticizing the current deployment, there are a lot of great things in these books. I just find it...a little odd.

Beats the alternative of everyone using the same piece of equipment all the time, eh?

Wow. No love at all for a classic simpsons joke.

I agree with CanRay. Us Players need to be kept guessing in orderfor things to stay fresh. A hovertank is so far 'out there' that it could be a huge suprise at the wrong moment, and require an opportunity for quick thinking/brilliance. I have fond memories of campaigns that provided those kind of unique challenges.

I suppose they can be nice to use for a single job - Johnson's loaning it to you for just this job. So you get to do stuff with it that you normally wouldn't. It's a trope you see now and then on TV.

Yeah, we have had a run or two where we were loaned a high end piece of military equipment for an insertion or extraction. We were even caught in a military coup once, which was fun to play, but no fun for the characters on the ground.

Black Trenchcoat Face: "OK, we've secured the target, got the paydata, and drank all the booze in the CEO's private stash, can we go now?"
Pink Mohawk Troll Muscle: "*Loud Belch* Yep."
GM: "Suddenly the building is shaken badly as you almost fall to your knees in shock, the sound alone is enough to rattle the teeth in your heads as you look down from the railing of the open-concept office building and see a beat-up Scout Hovertank slide into the hole it just blasted, the sides of it covered in graffiti in a variety of different languages... Which Trog The Cyber-Barbarian actually recognizes as being Anti-Aztlan Slogans from his time in the Yucatan."
Pink Mohawk Troll Muscle: "Hey, I know that tank, that's the tank I stole and sold to the Rebels for a drekpot of nuyen, a hundred thousand rounds of assault rifle ammo, and a keg of beer!"
Ice Cold Hacker: "Was it good beer?"
Pink Mohawk Troll Muscle: "It was all right. Anyhow, heard they sold it to this Merc group that sometimes did Shadowruns and... Oh drek."
GM: "A voice attempts to speak over the speakers of the tank, causing bad feedback, then tries again, 'We have you surrounded on the grounds that we have a DAMNED TANK! Give up the target and the paydata, and we won't have to waste a canister of Hi-Ex on the supports to the floor you're on!' What do you do?"

Love it.

Okay, I just can't help myself because I think of this answer every time I see the title question:

If they weren't all PDFs they'd make a great door stop.

Not that I'd actually use a book for that, but couldn't stop thinking it

Still love "This Old Drone".

EDIT: And my MPUV.

Some of this is also a bit fan driven. The previous developers made a great effort to keep the core rules streamlined, which included limited duplication of equipment and a focus on things shadowrunners might routinely see and use. But after the release of Arsenal and prior to War! there was plenty of "whargarbl?! where R all teh tanks and big guns!?" Plus some of the old hats wanted stats for x,y,z from previous editions that didn't make the cut.

I think PDF releases are the perfect platform for stuff like this.

I agree. It's a nice little bundle of information that doesn't cost much and is highly focused in a way that only those who really want it need to buy it. Everybody else can ignore it. Or bitch about it. As is their want.

I think it's nice to sprinkle something out of the ordinary in your game.

After awhile, all the Sams and Mages and Hackers, statswise at least, start to feel the same. A hacker with a houseboat, however, or a Sam with an antique minigun can spice it up a bit without dramatically changing anything.

The vast, vast majority of that stuff isn't going to be used but picking up one piece of new gear can help keep things fresh.

This is Dumpshock. Bitch!

I agree. Plus, the pdf releases are, quality-wise, so much better than that crap from War.

Paperweights, mostly. War! has been banned outright from my table, and anything referring to it is treated with extreme suspicion.


I kinda agree here. I kinda miss Naval Combat, for all the hell it was on a game. Since most of the releases are pdf, they don't clutter up my bookshelf, and I can hide them on my computer. Still, it is power creep to a level the game isn't really meant to handle. Come on now, do we really need stats for nukes and THOR shots? That's the Shadowrun equivalent of "rocks fall, everybody dies."

The fun part is that the same page introducing them also says so.


With SR4, scaling should begin beyond body 20. So tanks would be subject to ship battles too, for all the hel it would wreak on the game. I fully agree, this power creep is far beyond what the rules can handle safely.

True.
You can't have rules stretching from a bunny fighting an other bunny to the death star blowing up a planet.
Thats always something people tend to forget. A RPG is not a novel or movie. You have always stuff in between.

Actually, there are rules for surviving a nuke. Leaving aside burning Edge for a moment, a nuke does 130P. The toughest aircraft carrier in War! has a Structure of 18 and an armor of 20. Nukes don't have AP, so it's just the blast vs 38 dice + the Edge of the ship's rigger. We'll call it 44 exploding dice. He gets lucky and rolls 50 successes. That leaves an 80-meter hole in the ship, slightly less than 25% of its length. The ship will start sinking, but not for 2d6 hours, long enough to do a quick and dirty repair on it and get it back to shore. It survived, and probably so did a good number of people aboard.

[Edit]Now that I look at the rules in War! again, there's no way a suitcase nuke can instantly sink a ship. In order to take the time down to 2d6 seconds, you need to do about 250P damage in one hit. Otherwise, they've got enough combat turns to attempt a repair.

THOR and Freya shots have an auto kill zone; but outside of that, the max damage is only 30P. I've seen trolls in 4.5 take that.

And finally, there's always burning Edge. Versus a THOR shot, they have to use Escape Certain Death. Versus a nuke, they can burn for a critical success on their soak roll, allowing them to get away completely unharmed.

"I burn Edge dice!"

"You look around wildly as the timer counts down, and you spot... an old refrigerator."







-k

It doesn't even need to be lead lined for a Thor shot.

At first I read that as "This is Dumpshock, bitch!", but I was okay with that. I figure, you're in Winnipeg, so you've already got it tough.




*groan*

I think quoting bad movies (as opposed to so bad they're good movies) should be an indictable offence!

We get three seasons here: Winter, Mosquitoes, and Road Construction.

We're lacking a bottomless pit in Dumpshock, otherwise I could have gone: "This! Is! DUMPSHOCK!!!" *Kick*