Are there gear, powers, spirits, spells, metatechniques, cybreware and others, that in principle have cool effects, but that nobody ever uses?

If so, what is it and why does nobody ever use it? What should be changed to make it viable?

In SR5: Skillwires. Cool concept, ruined by the current authors gratuious swinging of the Nerf Bat. Rules should be changed back to SR4, where they were actually viable gear.

Generally agree with you here. One of my favorite 4th edition characters was a Wires character, and I tended to put them in any other character I could manage it for, but the price of skill programs (or the subscription option in 5th edition now) makes it prohibitive to use in the cool ways you might imagine (downloading the skill you need right when you need it.) 5th edition wise, I'm still waiting for updates to the 4th edition skillsoft clusters, and the cyberware implant that lets you have limited use of Edge.

I'd also say radiation rules. 5th edition in particular now has a variety of radiation related rules and qualities that aren't especially common in play.

Similarly, there are a variety of rules for orbital/space stuff and that's not very common in my experience of Shadowrun gameplay, even if it was a big deal in Neuromancer.

Jar heads. (full cyborgs, brains in a jar rigging robot bodies.)

I've never used cyberzombies.
cool concept just haven't used them.

Most equipment I buy is for the character concept with plans to use and I tend to be a practical person who tries to use practical things in really cool ways.

I need to make a really big hole behind me as I run. I just happen to have 1 detonator; a can of foam explosives and some C4. Set the detonator to the C4 attached to the can of foam explosives; toss like grenade and run like hell. BIG BOOM!!!

Although we always thought it was sweet to drool at, the milspec gear was never used in my groups (except for the cyborg mini-campaign). Mostly because the runners usually prefer subtle runs instead of the hardcore military violence.

3rd edition:
You haven't felt the joy of wearing a full hevy milspec armor with 7 ballistic armor points and simply laughing in glee at your GMs thinly veiled attempt to kill your character by having minigun pop up right around a corner suddenly. It was glorious. he was already calculating the damage and i reminded him that it had to hae a BASE POWER OF 8 OR MORE to actually hurt me. haven't seen his face fall that quickly ever again ^^

also:
MBW. Something that will sooner kill you than it will keep you alive despite kinda massive bonus numbers is just a big no no . .
Same for ANY KIND of weapon where you have to actually roll on the blasted scatter table <.<

2 Trolls
1 w/ Vindicator loaded with APDS rounds
1 w/ Panther Assault Cannon

IIRC GPMMG and GPHMG also covered this...



I never considered the MbW a practical purchase until:
A) the rules for dying were removed
B) After the game started due to only being able to buy a Lvl 1 at the beginning.

Even then I think I still stayed with Wired Ref majority of the time. (Something about agreeing with Smiling Bandit's comment about putting the body in a constant state of seizures)

Had he actually been trying to kill your character, he'd have used AV ammo and laughed in your face. Because SR3 really was all or nothing with armour: while you could just ignore anything below an M110 or a Panther cannon with regular (or explosive) ammo wearing a properly tricked out milspec or similar kit, if AV ammo (ignores base power, halves armour value) is popped out, you suddenly could just be wearing aluminium foil for all that your armour mattered. Oh yeah, same with lasers. Put a Firelance on a Night Glider rekitted as a drone - remove seating, add camo coating and a turret (and some spare energy packs), use remaining CF for speed mods, Fly-By-Wire, and armour - and have it circle slaved to a Rigger with a VCR 3 and a powerful deck (using the rigger's 16ish+4D6 initiative even in autonomous mode!) around a target. The shooter is impossible to see and will kill everything below a true tank with one or two hits.

Oh yeah, I never really got to use (or even actually build) this drone. But it's a nice idea, given how much you can harass enemies with simple roto drones with hunting rifles circling them, using their sensors to negate distance mods and shooting from the rifles' farthest possible distance.

And here I thought I was being a bit on the cold side by pitting heavy weapons against them......

But a drone at long range sniping with a laser...... That's just icy..... I like it.

You could have a lot of fun with riggers in SR3. Here's another of my ideas I never used:

You neeed a tricked out rigger, top-end VCR, high reaction while rigged, and a level 70 console (nothing's stopping you from buying a level 70 console). Take 70 small drones - Ferrets, Arachnoids, what have you - and arm them with Uzi III or similar cheap, small machine guns, loaded with whatever ammo you want (or kit them with Yamaha Pulsar tasers smarted and tricked out for maximum ammo of you feel really devious), RuPo them, divide the drones into 7 swarms of 10, and have the rigger control each swarm as one meta-drone in captain's chair. Super lethal security on-site intruders will never see coming, and if you play with MIJI, fit the console with apropriate countermeasure modules to prevent massie drone theft.

Never had a chance to pitch this against any runner. Probably for the better.

There is always the Sword-Handed-Ninja-Robot-Squad idea. What team doesn't want to roll with a Rigger that has two van loads of robot ninjas on call?

Name him Shredder and call it a day

And when they are all attacking; have "Flight of the Valkyrie" Playing out of their speakers in unison.
This that's too much???

So that is where one of my players got this idea from.

Smart player found DS.

...I used them in 3rd ed. Nasty, very nasty.

There are a lot of options we never used. Some of them had already been named:

- Move-by-wire-system (gymnastic dodge somehow made the skill doge useless and MBW benefits only counted towards the dodge skill)
- skillwire system (had some cool concepts, but the software was too expensive for starting chars. and afterwards there was no real use for it anymore)
- poisons (never made it into our game. Don´t know why. Maybe because physical damage in close combat is so hard to achieve?)
- demolitions (nice skill, but i think our group is more into direct attacks)
- face-character (see demolitions)
- physical combat spells (too much drain, no real benefit)
- quickening metamagic (spending karma is not worth the effect)
- divination metamagic (vague informations from the GM that give you little to no benefit, not worth it)
- familiar spirit (too much karma)

Yeah, I have this old concept of an ally spirit floating around... sad thing is, in completion it'll eat up between 70 and 100 Karma. That won't happen anytime soon.

The Ninjas-on-call-vans however... there's an idea. In SR4A, Manservants with monowhips and/or tasers will do that just as well.

My ally isn´t even that much karma-intense, but 80 points are "lost" anyway. Of course it is worth every point, but imagine the time you need to gather that many....