It will come as no surprise to anyone that Shadowrun has a lot of parts. Most of them seem pretty interesting, but it takes a lot of effort to put it all together.

Vision modifiers are easy enough to justify, but it's pretty much a -X to everyone, unless you have Y vision type. That's not really very satisfying.

I've also never been able to do anything interesting with lifestyle, SINs, and languages.

Languages are "you have this, or you miss part of the story/can't talk to Mr. Johnson/don't know you're about to get jumped. I guess the last one is interesting, but it's going to get old fast.

SINs can be useful "if you get caught", which most players will be unwilling to do, or if you set up a checkpoint. Denver already does that, but we already have DWI checkpoints. Shadowrun can add in a few others easily. Again, only one use means it will get stale if you re-use it. Also, it would give the face and anyone with palming to get a bit of use.

I don't even know where to start with lifestyle. I guess you get robbed, or you don't? That feels pretty shitty to players, and outside of an ostentatious display of wealth or leaving packages just lying around, isn't likely to come up anyway (at least in my experience of living in less-than-reputable neighborhoods).


All of this stuff just feels like players and GM are tracking them for no real reason. I'd like to make use of them, but I'd like more varied ways to use them. Preferably without using them to take things away from the players. Anyone have ideas?

Any meaningful answer would, I think, require that we sit down and talk for hours about how you (like to) play, what your setting looks like etc., but I will say that in our little group, Lifestyle and (fake) SINs play huge roles; not just in terms of game mechanics, but in terms of how each character reacts to events, how they prepare and what they prepare for, and (particularly) who they (can) talk to and how they do it. And that's a part of roleplaying in the world of Shadowrun that we very much enjoy - your preferences may differ, of course.

We do have a tacit agreement about checkpoints in Seattle in our group: they can mostly be avoided. If not, no criminal and/or SINless would be able to do what shadowrunners do for long without getting caught. Same with credsticks: using them is possible, because if it wasn't, the world as we play it couldn't exist. If the players insist on going places or doing things that the GM says calls for a check, it is made clear in advance, so the player has a chance to come up with another idea, or at least knows that Fake Sin_03 is in danger of getting burned.

As for languages, I must admit that I can't recall a single instance in the 28 (oh crap, we're getting old!) years we've played Shadowrun where plain English didn't do the job. Sure, the occasional PCs and a few NPS have used English as a secondary language, but it's not been a relevant issue... yet.

Vision modifiers play a huge role in many of our combat situations, and can (and should) be used to make combat dangerous, difficult and slightly unpredictable. Again, your preferences may differ, but that's how we like to do it. But it's one of the very few modifiers that can be applied fairly easily, so we're big fans

Considering that vision mods are easy to get a hold of, that shouldn't be a problem. As counter intuitive as it seems, a Street Sam can get by with glasses and contact lenses housed vision mods while Mages are the only ones who need REALLY cybereyes if they want to cast in less than ideal lighting conditions.

I know I keep harping on my one character, but he not only has cybereyes (with Thermo and Lowlight), but has Radar AND ultrasound.

I think that this is really another symptom of the consequences of the setting not being thought through.

It's canonical that there's massive surveillance capability, and willingness. It's up to the GM to figure out why it's not actually being applied, which is presently somewhat mysterious.

Because in Shadowrun large amounts of the population (like 1/3 in Seattle) are SINless, meaning they don't show up on systems and databases and are literally non-people. This is a massive problem because it means they are limited to their lifestyle options, trading mostly in cash and barter and there's a high criminal element because there's literally no way to survive otherwise. This same problem is a boon for people who do not wish to be seen. Shadowrunners are classically SINless but they use this as an advantage with the cash (certified cred) / barter system and fake SINs meaning that their trails run cold and vanish. The Surveillance System is fine if it was centrally operated, but it's not, it's divided across multiple jurisdictional boundaries, territorial boundaries and rivalries (SnowCrash does a good job of demonstrating this as a thing), most of the time LoneStar doesn't share info with Knight Errant who doesnt share info with the Seraphim or Red Samurai and so on. people who have and use their valid real SIN for things are massively traceable, those who don't are less so. Yes some of it is a conceit to allow the game to work, but you see these things in play even today where local police/medical/administrative authorities can be really bad at sharing info with other local police/medical/administrative authorities and that's here in the UK where most of the time they are one organisation.

That is more or less the answer. Canonically yes, there's massive surveillance capabilities ever present everywhere. But most corps only get one small slice of that ever-present picture. It's one reason why I dislike Grid Overwatch Division. Because that level of interconnectivity spells an end to the setting.

Most of 5th edition is a flaming pile of drek. As I've said in previous threads, only good thing about SR 5e is the finer granulation of positive and negative traits (AKA not everything is a multiple of 5). Everything else can get flushed.


Now back on to what Geiger said about the Grid Overwatch Division... WHY would all the corps be willing to work like this? EVERYTHING, and I mean EVERYTHING from SR 1e to 5e had the Corps only working together when they ABSOLUTELY had to. They would have been more than happy to gut every other corp for nothing more that dreks and giggles.

I actually love lifestyles, SINs, and languages, but I grant that I really enjoy the "in between" times and spaces of what happens when characters aren't shadowrunning. To me it helps the Sixth World feel more alive, but I know that a lot of other players just consider them bookkeeping (like ammo counts) and only want to get to theit action sequences. Step One is knowing what your players like and enjoy. If they like RPing during the downtime between runs then these can be great plot hooks.

Going in order:

1) For lifestyles, I often use a carrot/stick approach. One idea I've used is to tie Edge refresh to your lifestyle, so that the better your lifestyle the more Edge you refresh (or the faster it refreshes). I find that this gives players a mechanical incentive to spend nuyen that they might otherwise try to save by cutting corners. Qualities like Hobo with a Shotgun might invert the refresh rate, so that lower is better.

I also like staging encounters at/near PCs' homes. Some players love drawing up floor plans and detailing where their goodies are hidden. They light up in excitement when some gangers knock down their door in the middle of the night while the character is naked in bed. That can be a really fun stealth / close quarters encounter, especially for a small group.

2) I change the way that SINs work so that SIN checks are more frequent but also easier to pass. Instead of an opposed test (scanner vs. SIN), I make it a threshold test of the scanner rolling against the SIN's rating as a threshold. It also means that I can roll more frequently without burning SINs left and right. That makes higher-rating SINs much more valuable and motivates the players to upgrade their SINs instead of trying to coast on what they bought in chargen. Again, more checks (not excessive, but more than "never") brings that element of the Sixth World to life.

3) Languages can be fun. My challenge is that I know what languages the PCs speak, so if I send them an NPC that speaks that language it's fairly obvious that it's intentional instead of just random chance. (I suppose you could come up with a d100 table and roll which language(s) the NPCs actually speak so that it IS random, but that takes some work.) Still, these can be good plot hooks, like when the beautiful elven woman in distress runs up to PCs and she can only speak Sperethiel. This doesn't have to launch a whole campaign; sometimes a one-off scene is equally immersive in what the Sixth World is like.

Iduno has talked in previous posts about Shadowrun being episodic, centered around runs, which is certainly the traditional way to approach it. I find that if you start exploring what happens the rest of the time then a lot of skills and qualities that might not normally come into play during a job start to emerge, which gives them an opportunity to round out both the characters and the world around them.

If it doesn't add anything interesting to your game, ignore it. These are just tools you can use to make the game more fun for everyone.

For example I'm not really into meticulous planning and detailed approach. So for me having the Johnson give the PCs some fake SINs is a way to tell them "don't bother about identity stuff", but other than that I'll rarely bother with random checks of their SINs or risks of burning SINs.
I could have SIN checks at the entrance of a fancy place, to highlight the fact that they're gating the area and also keeping track of who's there, but I won't bother rolling to check if a fake SIN is detected since it'll rarely add something interesting to the story.

When playing in campaign, the Lifestyle is great to give more depth to the characters and their environments. I've had a lot of fun playing slices of life scenes in the PCs neighborhoods.
When playing isolated sessions, what I'd like to do is have players spend karma to make their purchases (or other new gear they got) permanent. The rest, including left-over money, is discarded (unless spent in Lifestyle). This avoids having PC who steal everything that isn't nailed down and makes sure that a character won't get crazily powerful just because a GM left something too valuable in reach. (This is also used to avoid having a rigger PC become useless because he lost his main vehicle/drone). In that case, the "starting money" roll can be made at the start of every game, making lifestyles still relevant.

As far as how to use Lifestyles, I generally require a PC maintain at least a Squatter lifestyle if able. Once you go down to Street a clock starts ticking and if you don't get back off the streets after a certain time limit, things will get increasingly bad for you.