Crippling overspecializatoin is not what is assumed, here . And at the end of the day, it is the responsibility of the system to support any valid concept.

No way to survive an encounter with 2 mundane unaugmented opponents sound like a case of quite crippling overspecialization to me.

Ummm...what happened to the Rules questions?

Having the flaw work against you is not the same as having the flaw instantly kill a character. Running from a fight is an option, using methods that disable rather than kill as an option, using distractions or other methods to address the fight are all options. Conflict can be made harder as a pacifist, but it doesn't have to equal death. Just like having any other flaw makes other aspects of the game harder.
By that logic, a player choosing to play mundane should have to prove they have some way of dealing with a force 8 spirit. Because their "choice" to play a character that does not wield magical power is just a flaw and when that spirit rips them limb from limb they'll see how flawed their character is.

In fact let's just develop a list of things that all runners *must* do to be able to play the game:

1. You are at 1 box remaining and must be able to do a first aid check to save yourself. If you have survived on the street you should be able to treat multiple gunshot wounds.
2. You must be able to hack a medium quality commlink with black IC. How can you claim to be a runner if you can't hop into hot sim and face down some average defenses.
3. You must be able to summon at least a force 3 spirit. How can you be expect to run the shadows if you can't summon magical assistance?
4. You must be able to have a method to reliably hurt a force 8 spirit. That's what the corps are going to throw against you and if you're out in the barrens, some petty barrens mage will just kill you outright with his mages if you can't fend it off.
5. You must be able to hot wire a car and escape some gangers in a high speed chase. What do you think you're going in the shadows if you rely on grid guide?
6. You have to take on the two unaugmented mundane gangers.
7. You have to be able to walk into a club and immediately negotiated a reduced prices for a supply of drugs. How are you going to make money if you don't know how to negotiate?
8. You have to be able to set up a network of surveillance drones in your neighborhood and be able to jump into those drones to take action to better investigate and possibly subdue any threats. How are you going to have a safe house if you personally can't manage your security?
9. You need to be able to stare down a bull dog and make it whimper. If you can't intimidate a normal dog, how are you doing to stare down a troll?
10. Hit a bullseye at 100 meters from cover without being detected. You want to be a runner without knowing how to snipe, are you kidding me?
11. Spot a ganger with a camosuit hiding under your bed. You need to be ready, if you can't spot something under your bed, how are you going to spot the guy sniping you?
12. Jump out of a plane when it catches fire. You didn't learn how to parachute? Really, and you think you can survive in the shadows?
13. Get past the mechanical lock on the back of the stuffer shack.
14. Track the foot prints of a fleeing ganger to find where he went and then shadow him to find who sent him to take a shot at you. If you can't find out who's trying to off you, you deserve to be dead.
15. Deal with a guard calling for back-up. What do you mean you don't know how to work a jammer? Well, guess it's time to die.
16. Blend in with a crowd being scanned by facial recognition software.
17. Write your own code to hack (preferably with some sprites assisting you). Do you really think that the corps aren't tracking those widely available hacking programs that you can just buy? You're not paranoid enough to last a day here.

And those are just the minimum requirements if you want me to even consider not instantly killing your character violently for my own entertainment.

That wooshing noise was the point of the exercise going over your head.

Or possibly his point going over yours.

The world may never know.

There's a difference between not understanding and disagreeing. You seem to think that applying the exercise to other areas is absurd (and I agree). Though I could be misunderstanding you, since you've only added one snide line without much explanation. If you do think that it's absurd to require all those other roles of a runner, why does it make sense to require combat skill as several people have argued?

Nah. He's busy being butthurt and trying to invalidate the concept by taking it out to absurdity. I see his point, but don't find it particularly valid. Not every choice you can make in character generation, especially in a point-based system like SR4, is guaranteed to generate an equally plausible character.

It's one of the points where having such a wide open creation system trades off flexibility for a learning curve. SR5 seems to have nicely returned to the priority system, which should make creating a plausible and playable character much easier without complete system mastery.

Edit : Nowhere in my little exercise is combat skill required.

As I wrote originally, the exercise is to be able to deal with a baseline threat, unaugmented humans being the easiest of all threats a shadowrunner will encounter. Also the one they are most likely to encounter in their daily lives, given they are in a profession that will often take them to shitty parts of town.

This does not require combat. At all.

Social skills, rigging, athletics, these are all perfectly valid answers to this problem. Did you not -read- the actual post I set this whole idea up in?

Okay, to get this back onto rules. and since I'm in a weird mood and need some input for other projects: How badly did I munge critters, in the opinion of those with the book?

So you did totally miss the point of the scenario test, combat skills aren't required in the least, just a way to survive the situation, whether that is by killing the gangers, talking them down,escaping the situation or something else depends solely on the chraracter.

Critters or spirits?' I havn't seen anything screamingly bad.

I got the "deal with them", I was more responding to Shadowdragon's rapist/torture buddy/organ harvest scenario, which dismisses the non-violent means of dealing with this. Several others have used the original scenario to conclude that you must be able to physically defend yourself (i.e. combat) and characters without combat skills are not valid. For example, TJ stating that the pacifist quality is a flaw that should lead to a character being killed.

As you will see, I listed those same methods of surviving the combat at the start of my post. I'm not opposed to, "You need to have an explanation for how you survive in the barrens if that's where your character lives". I'm opposed to, "The only way to play shadowrun is that you live in the barrens and are constantly being physically threatened and any character concept that does not follow that background doesn't fit in the game".

As my work schedule slackens in the next couple days I will endeavor to answer any valid questions found in this thread. Also based on my somewhat limited reading of the book on the drive home and other times here are my thoughts on the system.

The core system is good and solid, it's the little bits and bobs that cause problems. On the whole even as someone who had serious reservations based on the previews I would now recommend buying the book.

Observations: It became clear to me that the developers when they sat down to write fifth were mostly looking at a list of problems from fourth and trying to fix them. Whether you feel the problems they addressed were the right ones or the fixes they put in were the right ones is mostly a matter of personal opinion. For my part they hit more high points they missed and even the issues I see (cheap power points, improved reflexes needing a nerf) are relatively minor sorts of things. The hacking system gets a lot of commentary because it's a radical change. On the whole I really like the new hacking system, it feels efficient without being binary. I am a little concerned about the ability to brick cyberware or guns but actual play has determined that it is actually pretty difficult to brick something belonging to someone that has taken precautions and rather easy to get someone just going for cheap bonuses. The only different tack I would have made was make the bonuses more in keeping with the risks involved. +2 dice to shooting tests isn't really comparable to the risk of having your gun or worse your eyes bricked. Likewise running your wires and reaction enhancers wireless so you can go somewhere near as fast as any mage with improved reflexes doesn't seem a good risk v reward scenario.

Personally what i would really like is someone like Bull or Aaron who were heavily involved in the design of the new matrix system to explain to me the system for hacking someones gear in both a slaved and a non-slaved fashion, just so I make sure my mental picture is right.

thanks, am sure many questions will come this way so we appreciate any help.


First question I guess. Just to clarify.. what kind of wires/reaction enhance bonuses can we expect to see with wireless and without as it sounds like from this statement to reach the full +4 extra dice is going to require wireless enabled?

Or am I misreading?

They don't work together at all unless you connect them both to matrix

You read more into my statement about flaws than was really there. A Flaw that is never exploited is not a Flaw. Pacifism will get you hurt in the poorer part of town in many situations, because you are not willing to do what is necessary to get out of such situations. And Yes, there are other options than fighting in those situations. But it remains; if you are in that part of town, and you are never put into a situation where the Flaw matters, then it is not a Flaw. *shrug*

I wrote the Helps & Hindrances chapter. That no one's thrown a virtual cow or anything at me gives me reason to breathe easier, but it could just be that people haven't gotten there yet....

It shows up every time there's a combat. She doesn't have a gun, she doesn't attack people, she ducks and covers, and wonders how to make herself useful. And at times, when she's deal with an enemy, she has to face the idea that applied violence isn't an option for her. She's also spoken out a few times against the other PCs using applied violence.

At one point, when she had stepped out of the PC's hotel room with the group, she came back to find out her bodyguard had killed a pair of assassins, and was in the process of dissolving them in the bathtub. She made a point of having her character be violently ill, and when she was asked what should be done with the leftover cyberware, she was ill at the thought of selling them - she gave them away for free instead, not wanting anything to do with them.

So yeah, the flaw comes up. Mostly in roleplay.

So, No worries, then.
My main points were for the scenario as presented previously, though. You know, the situation where the character is alone and in a pickle. I like the kind of roleplay you describe, though, so no worries. Bathtub? Really? Awesome.

Well, 99.999% of your possible playerbase doesn't have access to the book yet.

Okay, yeah, there is that....

Give us the tl;dr and we'll all throw a tantrum and tell you the myriad of ways in which you ruined the game, if you'd like.

Sure, I'm up for that....

Rearranged stat blocks, closed as many loopholes in critter powers as I could find, toughened up just about every critter, tried to fix Hardened Armor, and drugs are a bitch.

Why hardened armor? Because of ItNW? Don't have the book, just curious as to the thought process.

I (and a lot of other people) had some issues with the fact that Hardened Armor was kind of an all-or-nothing affair. Either you didn't damage the target at all, or you utterly destroyed it in one go because you had to use that fraggin' much firepower to get through, at least in my experience and in my testing. I think we've found a middle ground in how to make it work; it seemed to go quite nicely in testing.

And I mentioned HA specifically because it happened to be on my mind, and it seemed the most changed thing I did off the top of my head, in that moment as I was making that list. There's probably much more profound stuff, just nothing standing out in my brain right that second.

So since it's obviously on your mind already, how DOES hardened armor work now? Is it the (relatively common) houserule where hardened armor gets cut in half across the board, but 1 hardened armor = 1 auto success? Or is it something more original?

That's plenty vague enough to come up with lots of things to complain about. The new stat blocks absolutely ruin this edition, I'm going back to SR1 where all the stat blocks make sense.
Seriously though, I'm curious if dual-natured is still a liability or do ghouls and such have some means of defending themselves from astral kiting?

I've seen KarmaInferno quote a couple paragraphs in some of his posts; I think this is probably all right, but if the Game Police come knocking on my door ... well, it's all on you.



I don't know how original it is, but it's not quite the common houserule, either. Like I said, it seemed to test well. A juggernaut will not notice small arms fire at all, but it will notice a Panther assault cannon. And then it'll get really pissed off.

I liked the hardened armor change right up until the point when I realized spirits still had hardened armor.

I didn't do the spirits; that was someone else's chapter. I did barghests.

From the perspective of my last character.

1. Savior medkits and trauma patches are a hell of a thing.
2. Black IC is fantastically ineffective against someone running in AR, so if you have hardware access to the 'link, you'll get it eventually; or quickly, if you're slinging hacking skills at 4 and programs at 6. Black IC is even less effective against an Agent, and an auto-hacker that can overpower an R3 commlink shouldn't be too pricy, especially if you bought it with all hacked programs.
3. Okay, that's simply unreasonable. On the other hand, if you aren't Awakened and you need a Spirit, you call your Fixer and ask him to set you up with a magician who'll rent out a spirit no questions asked. (Also, my last character had a Free Spirit who had bound herself to my character's servitude, so she always had a Force 6 Free Spirit on call.)
4. Rating 8 spirits are actually going to be very rare. Fortunately, rocket launchers with antivehicular rockets aren't too expensive, nor even terribly hard to get hold of in the Barrens.
5. If you're on your own, you're probably SOL, hope you have some mechanics. But then, if you're on your own, why are you in a high speed chase in the first place? You're just being spiteful here, but it never hurts to have some Mechanics skill.
6. Lots of ways of handling two unaugmented angry gangers, from running fast to shooting.
7. Expecting everyone to be capable of filling literally every archetype's roll is just ridiculous. That said, if you're negotiating with random low-skill hacks, it shouldn't be too hard to come up with the Charisma + Negotiation to do it, especially with liberal use of lieing. Then again, my last character had social skills at R3 and Tailored Pheremones, so she was good.
8. You don't have to be able to jump into your own drones, and if your rigging skills are sub-par compared to the rating of the skillsofts you can get for the drones, it's actually a worse idea. Coming up with an R4 drone isn't too hard if the GM lets you buy R4 commlinks and install those as the drone's brains, and you can share hacked autosofts among the drones.
9. Staring down a bulldog is impossible and counterproductive. The bulldog isn't smart enough to recognize that the hand cannon you're wielding can kill it, while the Troll probably is.
10. Long Arms at rating 3 and a Smartgun Link are a minimum for all of my characters, so...
11. If he's under my bed, then he's setting off my pressure sensors. I roll a grenade under the bed. If he's lucky, it's a stun or foam grenade. If I'm ready to move on to a new safehouse, it's White Phosphorous. (Willy Peter grenades: a must-have in every Shadowrunner's emergency kit.)
12. The average Shadowrun does not involve aircraft, nor the jumping therefrom, as the average is contained entirely in the Sprawl. Now, if you were talking about a game wherein everyone specifically is supposed to be an Airborne ranger or something, then yes, this lack of skill is inexcusable.
13. There's a couple of ways to do that, depending on how much of a hurry I'm in and how much noise is acceptable. If I'm not in a big hurry and/or noise is inexcusable, I've got the Mechanics skill, I've got manual lockpicks, and I've got an autopicker that I can attach to the lock and let work on its own. If I'm in a big hurry, I've got a High-Powered "Light Pistol" that fires shotgun rounds loaded habitually with Shock Lock rounds for exactly this sort of occasion.
14. Eh, it's easier to just get away and do legwork. Less chances for him to realize you're on his tail and lead him into an ambush, and then you can show up at his hideout later when he's not expecting it.
15. How does a Rating 6 ECM program with a Signal 7 headware commlink sound? I always have a jammer.
16. Nanopaste, duh. Or a good Concealment power courtesy of my Free Spirit.
17. Programming 4 and all the best hacked programming suites. Gotcha covered.

Shadowdragon, no one cares about your character. Even if I agreed with your overall point could you two have the discussion via PM's?

I think it is interesting to see another character's perspective. *shrug*

Developing lists of "must be this tall to ride" really is a pointless exercise, people.

Yeah, it is, since the only real "Must be this tall to ride" hurdle is "sooner or later, someone is going to take umbrage with your continued respiration. Later on it'll be someone who's better than you, but in day-to-day life it's gonna be a couple of chumps. How are you gonna survive a couple of chumps."

That said, there's a nuyen solution to most every reasonable problem in Shadowrun, if you don't have the Karma to invest in the Karma solution. With a well-versed been-around-the-block-a-few-times character, it's not unreasonable to have most of them available to you. That was the point I was trying to make.

Reminds me of a comic book I saw once, the heroes and a bounty hunter (all mutants... think it was one of the x-men spinoffs) were going after the same villain and were basically fighting over who was going to take him in.

The bounty hunter had pretty much thrashed all the heroes when he comes up on the last one standing. The last hero looks the bounty hunter dead in the eye and pulls out his checkbook and signs it out for the amount of the bounty on the villain's head plus a bonus. Bounty hunter left happy and the team got their man. Checkbook diplomacy at its finest.

And I did like the counter list for his character. Just because you might not start out as a decker/mechanic/fill in the skill class, doesn't mean you shouldn't/couldn't pick up things along the way. He is not saying he is replacing everyone else, but he can help fill in gaps or cover bases in a pinch while the main person for the job is otherwise occupied/injured/absent.

Just shudder to think what the karma cost for it all was though.

If that's a requirement, and a valid concept cannot do so, that sounds like a failing of the system to me.

Nope, just a failing of the concept. I have yet to be able to create a concept that cannot handle two mundane, unaugmented opponents in one way or another. *shrug*

Any concept that is incapable of such (and I am sure that someone can come up with such a concept, given time), in one form or another, is probably a concept best not played in a Shadowrun Game.

OMG! Not the stat blocks?!? How will I ever find anything ever again?!?! You've ruined ShadowRun forever! Now it's all going to be Shadowblock this and Statrun that. How am I supposed to play with such drek?!



Am I doing it right?

-Temperance

THERE'S the over-reaction I was looking for!!

You're a natural.

Now for a real question:

What is the drawback balancing Mystic Adepts?

What I saw of them so far seems pretty OP

Are you kidding? He didn't accuse you of being a woefully incompetant hack, rant about how you've undermined his table's unique "Statblock Shuffle" house rule, or made sweeping generalizations about how Shadowrun is "supposed" to be played!

I mean, heck, he could have at least invoked Bogota!

~Umi

Note the qualifier: "valid concept". If the concept is valid, the failing cannot be with the concept, it's either in the system or the test. Supporting every valid concept is more the sort of goal you approach than meet, but the point stands. Of course, I still question the validity of the test.

See, in my opinion, a Valid Concept should be able to handle the test as described. But yes, the test described is possibly questionable, though not in my mind. If the character cannot handle that test, they should likely be relegated to NPC status, rather than becoming a Shadowrunner who WILL come up against such a test from time to time.

It was a Karmagen character with a higher than usual level of Karma - basically, the idea was that we'd start out as Prime Runners.

My character was a bit of a jack of many trades, master of none, really. I had a powerful hacking 'link implanted, but most of my skills were of the "Mediocre but passable" level. The character was primarily a hacker, secondarily a gunner-face, and thirdly everything else. She wouldn't stand up to a novahot hacker with heavy metal the way the group TMs could, she wouldn't stand up to a soldier in a fight, but she could outgun gangbangers, do some Facing, etcetera. Basically, though, she was the "brains" of the group.

And I'd argue that if a valid concept cannot pass a valid test, some sort of solution needs to be brought in so that they can - if the concept and test are both valid, the failing has to be elsewhere.

Lucky for you, this has been solved at least partially in SR5 going back to priority character creation and the addition of limits. Makes it much harder to monofocus so much that you completely forget that your character has to actually do things other than their one specific narrow focused specialty.

But is the concept valid?
Because i would say it really isn't if it can't survive something as basic as that scenario.

Indeed...