Many would consider that Sacrilege... Not me, mind you, but Many.

Many who don't know how to react to any situation that doesn't end in a gunfight.

Gunfights SUCK... not sure why anyone would want to seek them out.

It's not always the player's choice. For every combat monster who winds up desperately buying influence group: 1 and sneaking: 1, there is a well-rounded character who dies in a hail of gunfire. Specialization versus generalization is a continuum, and the right "spot" on it depends on what kind of game the GM runs.


Back to adepts, the (new) ability to turn passive powers off, and background count being relatively rare, keep adepts viable, which is a relief. Nice to know that in a rating: 4 background count I can just turn improved ability: 1 off, rather than being worse off than if I hadn't had it at all.

On the flip side, it sounds like there is some power creep in this book. Hope it's not all as bad as SUPERNATURAL PROWESS, which seems potentially unbalancing.

Looting corpses is a hobby of mine .

It is a hobby of Many.

you don't have to set up gunfights to loot corpses. it's much better to just set up shooting galleries. not letting the other guys fight back is a hobby of mine ^^

What is the point of 20+ dodge dice if you aren't going to use them?

Leading source of deck acquisitions

What is the point of 20+ Dodge Dice in the first place? ESPECIALLY if you try to minimize the occurrences of Combat.

Ain't that the Truth...

Same reason man landed on the moon.

Sorry, not seeing it. *shrug*

Because we could.

Can anyone confirm the size of the download? (just a practical thing....machine it would be most convenient to have it on has a cranky net connection that makes it slow to download things on.....if it is small enough I'll download it there anyway, if it is moderate size I'll download it to a memory stick and move it over, if it is enormous....I'll live with it on another machine, I guess.)

Also given that we are through character generation, so just really looking at improvement paths and interesting things for opposition, what portion of the book is apt to be relevent? I'm getting it anyway for the companion spirit (or whatever it was called) rule, the idea of which really interests the mage in my game, but I just want to brace myself for how pleased or disappointed I may be on the relevance of the rest of it.

My DTRPG download for the Street Grimoire was 17.1 MB. So not all that bad on space consumption.

-Temperance

I think I might have missed any discussion about this in this thread, but I went back again to read Street Grimoire to learn some of the SR4 metamagics in the SR5 rules set I found a few things I'm now trying to make sure I understand correctly.

Item Attunement: SR4 you gained a dice pool bonus equal to half your Initiation grade (rounding up) involving the use of the attuned item. SR5 you gain nothing?

Invoking: SR4 you use Binding to improve a bound spirit into a great form spirit (or bind a conjured spirit at the same time), beefing up its materialized Physical Attributes, giving it additional powers, and could gain additional services in the process. SR5 you use Ritual Spellcasting, the spirit must already be bound, and the great form spirit just gets extra powers (as opposed to also getting the Physical boost).

Item Attunement: You gain a limit increase equal to initiate grade and it stacks.



Kinda underwhelming, really. The only real benefit is that it provides the foundation for the Imbued Item ritual, as that ritual is limited to attuned items or bound foci:



Invoking: Looks like it's just new powers to me.

-Temperance

You obviously failed at the "find the relevant rules somewhere in the book, provided we didn't just forget them" game

Increase the relevant limit of the item by the initiate grade of the adept using it

Yeah, I guess I did, though honestly I was looking for something more valuable than a limit increase.

you're looking for a dice pool bonus in a 5th edition book?

well, i'm sure they'll eventually have something that gives such a bonus, but it will probably come paired with a chance for spirits to eat your eyeballs from the metaplanes or something like that. can't let you have an actual dice pool bonus unless it comes with a chance for you to need to invest huge amounts of your most important resource if you don't want to get screwed, after all.

Well, it's what the metamagic did in SR4.

And DP bonuses do exist in SR5, but they're really elusive. Almost as rare as raw orichalcum

not that rare. just attached to arbitrary idiotic drawbacks, for the most part.

you want a bonus to your firearm skill? sure! just hook your gun including the trigger to the internet, because that ever sounded like a good idea to anyone to make as a required feature for full functionality!

what's that, you want to see things more clearly? no problem! we've removed all that pesky hardware designed to let your cybernetic eye work, and put it all on the cloud instead, because hooking up the delicate electronics in your eye to the internet, where only the law-breakers are equipped with the tools to make your eyeballs shoot sparks and smoke all over the place. what could possibly go wrong with that?

so, like i said... i'm sure, sooner or later, they'll have a version with a geas that forces you to be dual natured all the time or something stupid like that, but gives you an actual dice pool bonus. it's not that hard to get a nice bonus to your actions... all you have to do is have absolutely no security awareness whatsoever.

That would be Project WizFi™ from our R&D Dept actually.

We are looking at rolling this out by 2078...

Funny thing you should mention that. I noticed that now in order to use Reflecting you must be astrally percieving now.

You forgot that "everything has a price" means "everything that's not magic has a price". Nanotech turns into goo, cyber opens you to hacking and lowers your social limit, but nothing's ever wrong with magic (except for magical threats, but that's for NPC and you're actually more at risk if you're not awakened than if you are).

...And all the Mary Sues are Awakened.

Ghost Who Walks wasn't awakened (don't think, could be wrong)... Nor was Kham. Neither is Damien Knight, Fastjack, Bull, or Slam-0! So, no, not all the Mary Sues are Awakened.

i wouldn't call kham a mary sue. he's experienced setbacks.

for example, in the first secrets of power novel, iirc he gets KO'd in one of the fights. therefore, he can't be a mary sue, because a mary sue would have noticed the attack, responded, and defeated the enemy (hint: Ghost did just that )

fastjack got mind controlled by matrix ghosts. pretty sure that means he lost his mary sue status

don't know enough about bull to say, but I can't say there's anything I've seen about slamm-o! that suggests mary sue status.

Plenty of Mary Sues suffer setbacks. Look at Drizzt and Company (in Dnd) and Harry Dresden (Dresden Files).

name a fight that drizzt lost.

(excluding people who figured out glitches to kill him in Baldur's gate video games)

He was captured by his family at least once...
He was beaten by the quickling once (briefly)...
Had to team with Artemis Entreri at another time to escape a situation.
There were a few times.

Did not know he was in the Video Game.

But I would not consider just Drizzt to be a Mary Sue in his group of companions... THEY ALL were Mary Sues... and they all got beaten more than once. Some more soundly than others.

Yeah, but he was captured by his family specifically so he could angst more over his dad getting dead. Pure Sue.

As far as SR goes, I think the worst is some of the guys in the Street Legends book. Their stats really don't back up their reputations. Except Harlequin, but he's not so much a Mary Sue as exactly what he appears to be, no matter how improbable.

Not every powerful or heroic character is a Mary Sue. You need to look at the genre. If it's an action adventure, then yeah, the hero is probably going to kick some ass. Mary Sue traits come in when the hero kicks ass effortlessly, when he wallows in guilt over things that aren't his fault, when his buddies are yes-men and his enemies are straw men, and when he has special snowflake qualities above and beyond the norm for the environment (a superhuman killing machine who can also sneak, bluff, and change the oil in his car in not necessarily a Mary Sue in a Shadowrun book; if he has an ally spirit that takes the form of a motorcycle, then maaaybe).

Yeah, it's why I don't count Harls. He is a flawed individual who rarely gets entirely what he wants, despite his personal power.

Sorta. It's also a Mary Sue when he does face challenges, but develops new tricks out of the blue to deal with them. Superman is the archetypical Mary Sue; even if you face him with Kryptonite, it'll only hold him off until he either displays a new power/comes up with a clever use of existing ones and then blows away the challenge.

Tell that someone with Dual Natured