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Nyaa posted:Ah, that's why he's so powerful with magic. Is not in the rulebook at all! Yeah, it's one of the abstractions they made in the SNES version, unless I'm pulling that totally out of my rear end. I really should replay it to be sure. But from what I remember, you spent your karma on 3 different things: Attributes, where you basically pumped your Body up a ton because 1 body = 10hp, and then Magic because 1 magic = 10mp, and the rest was poo poo. Skills - You had to bump firearms to I think 7 to never miss (though it went higher), and then you had stuff like Negotiation for lowering runner hiring prices and Computer which gave you more energy in the Matrix and made you more likely to blow up ice. Spells - You could put points into individual spells to make them stronger, but they also cost more. Generally the effect of the spell scaled faster than the magic cost. Each one leveled by paying karma equal to your current level. So to buy Body 6 you paid 5 karma. You got karma stupidly fast by just walking around shooting things in the face, clearing set encounters, and the Caryards fights.
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| # ? Apr 23, 2012 04:17 |
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| # ? May 23, 2013 23:59 |
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Zaodai posted:Yeah, it's one of the abstractions they made in the SNES version, unless I'm pulling that totally out of my rear end. I really should replay it to be sure.
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| # ? Apr 23, 2012 04:22 |
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Young Freud posted:The tl:dr of it is Cyberpirates is the best Shadowrun splatbook. For me, it's a toss-up between Cybertechnology and Denver, mainly because of the Hatchetman storyline in the former and the “early matrix” nostalgia musings in the comments in the latter (even Saeletra's first message to the 6th world is a nice touch). There was a period when they actually managed to build a bit of mystery into the world and let you put the puzzle pieces together. …that, or the first time the GM springs Universal Brotherhood on a group that has never heard of this whole “bug” thing. Those black-eyed freaks will scare the bejeesus out of anyone. 
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| # ? Apr 23, 2012 05:49 |
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Did we ever hear from Hatchetman after Cybertechnology? I guess the bits that made him who he was weren't all there after.
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| # ? Apr 23, 2012 07:09 |
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Cybertechnology was the best because of the last chapter about cybermancy. The rumor swapping and the ominous way it was described made it really atmospheric. The in-world "posts" went from "oh, I saw a bouncer rip one of these cyberarms off a street sam and beat him to death with it" to "frag, is that kind of magic really possible? Are they still...alive??". And then a censored description of the intense corp-sponsored rituals and the stats for a -6.5 essence cyberzombie. It was great, probably my favorite piece of sourcebook fluff.
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| # ? Apr 23, 2012 07:44 |
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Tippis posted:I don't know… Holy poo poo, Universal Brotherhood. Yeah, that was some headfuckery. And the whole book is so ominous. Te adventure is pretty good, it comes around is fairly light and inconsequential (you're hired to get a ring back from a girl whose broken up with a mid-management exec) until you find the dead insect fleshform baby, then it quickly goes off the rails.
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| # ? Apr 23, 2012 07:58 |
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UB is also a great book because the cover isn't attached to the insides, which are two books bound across the top of the page instead of along the side and formatted as if they were printouts... because when the book came out, everybody had the old tractor-feed dot-matrix printers.
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| # ? Apr 23, 2012 09:26 |
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Pope Guilty posted:Did we ever hear from Hatchetman after Cybertechnology? I guess the bits that made him who he was weren't all there after. He would surely be long dead from the various cybermancy cancers. I think that book came out in like 1995, so he would have been dead by about 1998.
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| # ? Apr 23, 2012 11:04 |
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Zereth posted:EDIT: I'm pretty sure most people complaining about 4e are talking about the change to the Matrix and poo poo, or the change to the basic rules. I like the Matrix changes myself. The 80s take on the Matrix was neat and all but it never really 'played' well in the game. But otherwise yes. The 4e rules are kinda poo poo, especially the character creation rules. It's way to easy to cap your dice pools way to early on. The characters have to little room for growth. And Karma Pool is gone. The way a 100 Karma 3rd Edition and 4th edition character feel is miles apart. Don't get me wrong, there's a lot of things I like about 4th edition and a mature group of gamers can get a lot of mileage out of the system. But if you want to build a character that's a bad rear end gun guy odds are he's going to be as bad rear end as he's ever going to get, straight out of the gate. 4th edition plays a lot better when you start off as street thugs or nobodies working your way up then when you follow previous edition arch-types. Which is fine, it's the kinda game I tend to like anyway but it can be an issue for people who preferred the old power level (or for any group that has a couple of power gamers in their mix).
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| # ? Apr 23, 2012 14:59 |
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Zereth posted:(Expensive time-consuming therapy to restore it up to 6, if you got the 'ware removed, aside.) The what now? In canon as far as I am aware there is no way to regain essence. Period. An "Essence hole" can be made if something is removed so different ware can be put in the same "essence slot", but essence once reduced is gone forever.
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| # ? Apr 23, 2012 16:58 |
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Tippis posted:I don't know… Denver was so great when it came out. It had that box set with a ton of great material for all kinds of scenarios with a good story. I also really liked Bug City, that area was super fun to run in.
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| # ? Apr 23, 2012 17:17 |
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Young Freud posted:Holy poo poo, Universal Brotherhood. Yeah, that was some headfuckery. And the whole book is so ominous. Te adventure is pretty good, it comes around is fairly light and inconsequential (you're hired to get a ring back from a girl whose broken up with a mid-management exec) until you find the dead insect fleshform baby, then it quickly goes off the rails. The adventure needed some… ehm… “adjustment” from the GM, but then again, most SR adventures did. The actual source book part was spectacular though — it did the whole “left-behind apocalyptic log” thing perfectly, and was very nice thing to hand out in pieces to the players as they dug deeper. With a bit of additional cutting and redacting and a few more file transfer errors injected, it was possible to really ramp up the paranoia.
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| # ? Apr 23, 2012 19:06 |
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BitBasher posted:The what now? In canon as far as I am aware there is no way to regain essence. Period. An "Essence hole" can be made if something is removed so different ware can be put in the same "essence slot", but essence once reduced is gone forever. It's from the 4e armory book iirc.
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| # ? Apr 23, 2012 20:44 |
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Bigass Moth posted:He would surely be long dead from the various cybermancy cancers. I think that book came out in like 1995, so he would have been dead by about 1998. BitBasher posted:The what now? In canon as far as I am aware there is no way to regain essence. Period. An "Essence hole" can be made if something is removed so different ware can be put in the same "essence slot", but essence once reduced is gone forever.
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| # ? Apr 23, 2012 20:49 |
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Zereth posted:It's in the back of... Augmentation somewhere, I think. It's new, just barely not experimental, incredibly expensive, and very very slow. It's right next to the life-extension treatments and such. Awesome! I'll add it to the list of why I will never, ever play 4th edition! It's exactly the kind of pampered "no consequences for actions and decisions" that really detracts from the game atmosphere in the long run. Now all they need to add is raise dead/resurrection and teleportation!
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| # ? Apr 23, 2012 20:52 |
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BitBasher posted:Awesome! I'll add it to the list of why I will never, ever play 4th edition! It's exactly the kind of pampered "no consequences for actions and decisions" that really detracts from the game atmosphere in the long run. 4e is just as deadly as 3e. This is just fluff that can be added into your game for flavor. I don't know I really do like having the decker with you on runs instead of just doing his own thing while everyone else is doing the job. I'm pretty sure it required a genetech operation which takes like 2 months of you being in a vat and I think the facility to do such a thing is on the same tier as deltawear clinics.
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| # ? Apr 23, 2012 21:29 |
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AllanGordon posted:I'm pretty sure it required a genetech operation which takes like 2 months of you being in a vat and I think the facility to do such a thing is on the same tier as deltawear clinics.
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| # ? Apr 23, 2012 21:48 |
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I reorganized paragraphs for ease of reply:AllanGordon posted:4e is just as deadly as 3e. This is just fluff that can be added into your game for flavor. The fluff has nothing to do with it, it's the psychological implications of something being permanent versus something that's not. There's a massive difference in perception when comparing one to the other. Someone who has now and forever given made the decision to reduce his essence and cyber himself up for an edge in combat has a made permanent and life altering choice to separate himself from humanity. He has given up the very essence of his aura, parts of what effectively is his soul, forever and in perpetuity. If essence can be returned, for any reason, then you take what was ultimately in some way a tragic character and a life altering choice that drives the person's future into what is typically a further spiral of more and more cyberware and further disassociation and turn it into just another short term choice with no real lasting consequences. The difference in setting the atmosphere for the journey of a character down the road of his life is profound. On one road there only lies a path into the abyss and survival of the status quo. The other road is lit with hope, the knowledge they can return to who they were simply for time and cash. It is a removal of consequences for decisions. It doesn't matter how hard it is to find or how much it costs, simply the fact that it is possible is completely attitude changing when viewing characters and the world. AllanGordon posted:I don't know I really do like having the decker with you on runs instead of just doing his own thing while everyone else is doing the job. A lot of the places *really* worth breaking in to should have their research data on decentralized systems the Decker has to physically plug into, meaning their fragile meat bodies have to go with the team anyway. Not everything is online or even matrix accessible, the same goes with vanishing SAN's and one way datalines. BitBasher fucked around with this message at Apr 23, 2012 around 21:53 |
| # ? Apr 23, 2012 21:50 |
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BitBasher posted:I reorganized paragraphs for ease of reply:
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| # ? Apr 23, 2012 22:25 |
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Also it's expensive and hard to get enough that the chances of any runner chasing it actually getting it are statistically insignificant.
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| # ? Apr 23, 2012 22:31 |
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Strudel Man posted:Yo, that's dumb. Even running with the slightly silly conceit that sticking bits of metal in you takes away from your humanity, it's totally unclear why taking the metal back out and healing up wouldn't restore whatever vague spiritual thing was lost. It's not a vague spiritual thing at all. Your aura is a thing, it's clearly visible and tangible on the astral plane. Getting cyberware makes a permanent alteration to that astral template of your body, or rather, it did for decades of this game. The meat regrows, but the aura doesn't. I mean, it's a mechanic as old as the game itself, in a quite literal sense. It's not just cyberware, either, other things in the game also lose you permanent essence. Vampires and other creatures permanently drain essence, extended drug use permanently drops essence permanently, etc. It's a mechanic for someone just becoming "burned out". There's also associated mechanics where a person feels withdrawn from humanity the lower their essence gets and they start suffering penalties to social rolls from low essence. There's no reason to think it would grow back, really. I mean we're talking about a thing that is entirely fictional here. One conceit is generally just as silly as the other. One of the two was canon for around 20 years though. BitBasher fucked around with this message at Apr 23, 2012 around 22:42 |
| # ? Apr 23, 2012 22:39 |
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Oh, who cares, you're just looking for something to complain about. It's sourcebook extras, people. They're optional. If you don't want your fox-men recovering essence, just don't do it. Leave it out of the game. It'll be okay.
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| # ? Apr 23, 2012 22:41 |
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Thematically it makes sense for me for there to be a crazy expensive and experimental way to cure essence loss if only because it's cyberpunk, and a lot of what cyberpunk is about is portraying the way that economic disparity between the rich and poor will continue to grow at exponential rates in the near-future and become an even more difficult social ill to cure as access to wealth means instant superhero strength, an endless supply of artificial perfect clone livers, or even immortality (read about leonization and Damien Knight in some of the older stuff).
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| # ? Apr 23, 2012 23:23 |
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God I fucking love Diablo 3 gold, it even paid for this shitty title
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Zombies' Downfall posted:Thematically it makes sense for me for there to be a crazy expensive and experimental way to cure essence loss if only because it's cyberpunk, and a lot of what cyberpunk is about is portraying the way that economic disparity between the rich and poor will continue to grow at exponential rates in the near-future and become an even more difficult social ill to cure as access to wealth means instant superhero strength, an endless supply of artificial perfect clone livers, or even immortality (read about leonization and Damien Knight in some of the older stuff). Shadowrun really isn't really that cyberpunk. Random citizens in Shadowrun don't have it much, if any, worse off that today. Cyberware isn't glamorized. Quite the opposite, obvious cyberware causes someone to be shunned and feared. That superhero strength either comes with a loss of essence and disassociation for cyberarms or an increase on how often they get sick, diseased and so forth for bioware. It's not pennies from heaven. The endless supply of cheap clone livers does occur, but the cost of them is actually a good deal less than it would cost to get a liver today. Many basic medical things are cheaper and easier in shadowrun benefitting everyone in general. Immortality, leonization from shadowtech (2nd edition), comes with explicit limitations. It has a hard cap to the amount it can extend your life and in the flavor text comments it's directly stated that Damien Knight was supposedly reaching the end of his ability to extend his life. His cash wasn't going to stop the inevitable. Furthermore, leonization caused substantial permanent essence loss so that you were trading your essence and humanity for a not unlimited extended life span. Most of the power shift in Shadowrun IMHO wasn't between rich and poor, it was between Corporate and Government. The Seattle Sourcebook is full of middle lifestyle neighborhoods with competent quality of life, just like today.
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| # ? Apr 23, 2012 23:43 |
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Has anybody seen the gameplay in this yet? The claims they're making sound interesting but it's hard to picture how it's actually gonna play. Also did any of yall play Saga Frontier? It came out in I think 1998 and the setting was like a less self-serious Shadowrun, with folk mythology and capitalist technocracy and media imagery all melting into each other in this world that was diffused into disconnected zones floating in the void. It's completely baffling to play, there are large chunks of the game mechanics that went unexplained until people dug around in the ROM years later. Cool open world though; it didn't overexplain setting elements or try to systemize them too much, so anywhere you went you'd encounter something genuinely weird and new.
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| # ? Apr 24, 2012 00:05 |
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Never heard SF compared to Shadowrun but I gotta admit it makes sense. You even go decking at one point.
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| # ? Apr 24, 2012 00:09 |
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Haha yeah I forgot about that. Shadowrun as far as I can tell has been very self-conscious about its genre influences, it's explicitly cyber punk + tolkien + hardboiled/noir. Probably that's because in the pen & paper format the core question of "what you do" is defined by the players, so they lay down those genre tropes as guidelines. Whereas in a video game like Saga the player's tasks & options are built into the world itself, so the different ideas can intermingle more freely around them.
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| # ? Apr 24, 2012 01:04 |
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BitBasher posted:Shadowrun really isn't really that cyberpunk. Random citizens in Shadowrun don't have it much, if any, worse off that today. Cyberware isn't glamorized. Quite the opposite, obvious cyberware causes someone to be shunned and feared. I'm not sure if I follow your general train of thought. Neuromancer didn't spend a huge amount of time around 'the regular folks' but the impression it gave was mostly that the world was the world, if maybe a little overcrowded - and that heavily modified folks tended to be either: absurdly rich(the Straylight folks), Corporate(including Organized Crime), or somewhat outcast on the edge of society(Molly) - fringe elements whereas most of humanity just keeps trucking on. Also on a completely unrelated note one of the most memorable bits of in-character fluff was straight out of the 2E Core book, I believe. Characters talking about remembering that cyberware isn't really an excuse to act like superman - sure your arms might be able to lift a car straight off the ground, but what do you think happens to the fleshy shoulders they're anchored to, chummer?
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| # ? Apr 24, 2012 02:12 |
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Cyberware itself isn't directly shunned. A datajack is a very common requirement for mid to high level corp employees and nobody really bats an eye at it. Cybereyes are also fairly accepted, as there are people who get them even for vanity reasons in-universe. It more comes down to what you would have the 'ware for. A guy with cybernetic legs is unlikely to have them for peaceful reasons. Having recoil compenstators in your arms really only imply one thing. So the ware itself isn't the reason you are shunned, the fact that it shows you're probably a less than desirable member of society does though. [EDIT] Basically, Cyberware isn't seen like witchcraft from the Puritan era. It's more like being covered in gang tattoos. Tattoos aren't inherently "bad" to most people, but after a certain point it makes you seem like a violent criminal. Zaodai fucked around with this message at Apr 24, 2012 around 02:30 |
| # ? Apr 24, 2012 02:28 |
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There's basically two ways to run Shadowrun: Cyberpunk genre with fantasy elements or fantasy genre with elements of cyberpunk. The first is much more supported by the books, and the second is generally crap.
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| # ? Apr 24, 2012 02:47 |
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swamp waste posted:robably that's because in the pen & paper format the core question of "what you do" is defined by the players, so they lay down those genre tropes as guidelines. Whereas in a video game like Saga the player's tasks & options are built into the world itself, so the different ideas can intermingle more freely around them. Good pen & paper games have more fully and precisely defined answers to that core question as well. Join us in this cool thread for cool people to talk about them. e: 
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| # ? Apr 24, 2012 04:17 |
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I'll probably get beaten to this, but:Shadowrun Returns Kickstarter posted:One of the recurring themes in the stories we hear is how the music of the Sega and SNES Shadowrun games stays with you after all this time. Whenever we read your comments and whenever the team talks about it, the conversation always comes back to, “Wouldn’t it be cool if we could get the guys who wrote the original music?” This is very cool, since I've had the Renraku Arcology music from the Genesis game stuck in my head perpetually since elementary school.
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| # ? Apr 24, 2012 20:41 |
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Just saw that myself. Wow as if I couldn't get more excited about this game. Please oh please let this game be as awesome as I want it to be. At the very least the soundtrack should be fantastic. Edit - can't spell on my phone
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| # ? Apr 24, 2012 20:57 |
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The 'awakening of magic' thing feels unnecessary to me. I mean have you seen Second Life? deviantart? more generally, The Whole Internet?? When people have the level of technological control over their real bodies and environments that they do now over their virtual ones, the first poo poo they are gonna make is elves and dragons.
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| # ? Apr 24, 2012 20:57 |
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swamp waste posted:The 'awakening of magic' thing feels unnecessary to me. I mean have you seen Second Life? deviantart? more generally, The Whole Internet?? When people have the level of technological control over their real bodies and environments that they do now over their virtual ones, the first poo poo they are gonna make is elves and dragons. I think there's a very big difference in a setting where a bunch of nerds realize their nerd fantasies by genetically modifying themselves to look like elves, and a setting where actual magic forcefully invades the world, turning unwitting people into trolls and re-empowering the oppressed Native Americans, enabling them to seize control of wide swathes of land. And a world of difference between people stepping up their Second Life game and making realistic looking dragons and an actual dragon showing up, becoming the star of a talk show, and getting elected as President. The devious schemes of the dragons, the intense racism against metahumans, the political sovereignty of the elves, the dwarves that dress up as stereotypical dwarves with chainmail and axes to earn money from gawkers and who then go home and put on their '80s cyberpunk studded vests and jack in... you don't get any of that if you replace "Tolkien plus Stephenson" with "Second Life but with genetics instead of 3d computer models."
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| # ? Apr 24, 2012 21:05 |
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TychoCelchuuu posted:I think there's a very big difference in a setting where a bunch of nerds realize their nerd fantasies by genetically modifying themselves to look like elves, and a setting where actual magic forcefully invades the world, turning unwitting people into trolls and re-empowering the oppressed Native Americans, enabling them to seize control of wide swathes of land. And a world of difference between people stepping up their Second Life game and making realistic looking dragons and an actual dragon showing up, becoming the star of a talk show, and getting elected as President. The devious schemes of the dragons, the intense racism against metahumans, the political sovereignty of the elves, the dwarves that dress up as stereotypical dwarves with chainmail and axes to earn money from gawkers and who then go home and put on their '80s cyberpunk studded vests and jack in... you don't get any of that if you replace "Tolkien plus Stephenson" with "Second Life but with genetics instead of 3d computer models." Let's not also forget that a third (or a fourth) of the world's population dying over the span of a few months to VITAS (Virally induced Toxic Allergy Syndrome) plague causing a massive inflammation of racial hatred towards the various metaraces that popped up at the same time, as they were an easy scapegoat for the changing world.
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| # ? Apr 24, 2012 22:00 |
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What's the difference though, if a fake dragon and a "real" one are equally real? I dunno, this doesn't need to be a whole argument, I just think the bleed-over of mythology and fantasy and spectacle into the world is already happening with the technology we have now. You can go on tumblr right now and find hundreds of people who are convinced the semiotic & epistemologic systems of like Homestuck or Digimon are the underlying truth of reality. it's unnecessarily complicated to say "no this is a whole separate thing, which for some reason obeys the specific rules we the authors put on it" But whatever. They already designed Shadowrun, so that idea is not that useful
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| # ? Apr 25, 2012 02:26 |
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swamp waste posted:What's the difference though, if a fake dragon and a "real" one are equally real?
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| # ? Apr 25, 2012 02:48 |
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swamp waste posted:I don't like Shadowrun So then don't play it? I guess I don't quite understand what you are even talking about 
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| # ? Apr 25, 2012 02:49 |
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| # ? May 23, 2013 23:59 |
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KakerMix posted:So then don't play it? I guess I don't quite understand what you are even talking about he's pressing real world rules onto a fantasy game and then arguing while you are saying, "well sure, in real life, but this is how the game universe works within its predefined game limitations."
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| # ? Apr 25, 2012 03:22 |
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