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whoda thunkit posted:I haven't even gotten started on magic yet, but was thinking of making a magical assassin. What's better magic ninja or cyber ninja? Cyberninjas tend to be better out-of-the-gate provided you've heavily invested in 'ware. Magicninjas are still strong but progress much faster and have a more flexible limit to how great they can be. Essence and nuyen are the dual-currency of cybered characters and are the great limiter for Cyberninjas. You'll eventually be shelling out tons of nuyen to swap a part for the deltaware version of the same thing to give you that tiny shred of self back needed cram more metal in. Magicninjas instead spend karma for their upgrades and aside from the occasional initiation trial there are no downsides to becoming stronger. They also tend to heal better and have better luck with interacting with sapient beings (Social Limit takes how much of a cybered freak you are into account). Essentially cybered fighters start strong but ramp up slow and with a hard cap to their expansion whereas magic fighters start weaker but ramp up fast and eventually greatly outclass technology.
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Aug 3, 2013 17:50
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Forums Terrorist posted:Jesus there's a ton of interest in children's game. There's no way this is a child's game, you need a college-level reading comprehension in order to find any of the rules that you need to play. 
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Aug 11, 2013 15:10
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So last night we had our first game, wherein our all-magic group utterly wrecked our opposition by use of Invisibility/Concealment/Levitate and Edge-casting. We were hired to create a distraction at the front of a high-class mansion with a tall turret-mounted wall and a security gate while another team infiltrated a mansion and stole a maguffin. With the exception of a brief period where our stealth adept snuck up to the gate and planted explosives, our entire team simply sat invisible and completely undetectable on a levitated platform about 150 feet away as we flung magic and bullets into security while we kept them busy with incredibly-well done trid phantasms of spirits and a few very real spirits. My group has come to the conclusion that Edge-casting is going to have to be something we house-rule to be more fair to the GM. As it stands, casting and using Edge removes any Limits you apply to your cast. The Limit for your spellcasting is the Force of the spell, but the Force also dictates how much drain you take. By using Edge with a character with a high Edge attribute, not only do you cast with an incredibly high success rate but under almost all circumstances you are casting at Force 1 and take 2 Drain which you can buy away with no roll provided you have an 8+ Drain test dice pool. Our Edge caster was achieving 9-10 successes and taking no drain all game. Unless you really press a character to cast all the time all night, someone with 6-8 Edge is going to be hard-pressed to need to use it all. We're still not sure how to properly balance this, because for the time being it's incredibly powerful with almost no downside.
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Aug 12, 2013 17:38
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Mendrian posted:Would it be possible to HR that the actual 'Force' of the spell dictated by how many hits you garner when Edge-casting? That way it becomes a high risk/high reward scenario instead of a go-to always-good sort of thing. If you house-rule it like that, you're essentially getting no benefit from Edge-casting aside from breaking your limit. If you achieve 9 hits you're taking Drain equal to whatever formula your spell uses (Force - 3, Force, etc.). Edge-casting and taking 6 Physical Drain in return for a good success is rough. It's pretty easy to overcast in 5th Edition. If you get a number of hits greater than your Magic attribute you take Physical damage instead of Stun damage for any Drain remaining after your resistance test. A decent starting magic-user will generally have a Mental Limit of 7+ so overcasting from the start is possible. PierreTheMime fucked around with this message at 18:48 on Aug 12, 2013 |
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Aug 12, 2013 18:43
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BenRGamer posted:Anyone have any tips on building mages? Firstly, what kind of play-style do you want? Do you want a no-nonsense mage who deals in formulae and the "science" of magic? Do you want a caster who deals in spirits and the wills of the natural world? Do you want a combat mage, a summoner, or a support caster? I love building mages so I'd be happy to offer advice, but it ultimately boils down to your character, their backstory, and how min/max you want to get with your build. As the great magician Brillat-Savarin once said, "tell me what you cast, and I'll tell you what you are."
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Aug 12, 2013 23:54
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BenRGamer posted:Illusionist. Special Effects Wizard gets bored with just Special Effects so he goes Shadowrunner who views magic as less than formulae and science than just a natural extension of himself. The stats will be something along the lines of a Face, too. In all honesty, it would be a difficult and relatively ineffective gimmick. You'd spend one turn casting an illusion like Phantasm/Trid Phantasm and then another casting the debilitating spell like Agony. You could blow both spells in a single turn but that is insanely risky as each cast would be +3 Drain. This gimmick is also assuming that you're already Invisible or sneaking so your target doesn't automatically assume "oh this is magic bullshit" and just shoot you instead. This type of thing can be effective if your team members are addressing them on a more immediate sword/gun basis so they don't have time to try and shrug the illusion and deal with you. You could definitely pull it off, especially in a "soft" game, but you would need to rely on the support of your team members to run it effectively.
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Aug 13, 2013 01:00
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BenRGamer posted:Hm. Then I just have to find other ways to make Trid Phantasm more effective. Exactly like you discussed, but you will likely need a strong Con and/or Impersonation skill in order to effectively imitate a target. This is based on GM discretion though, as there are no rules covering this matter directly.
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Aug 13, 2013 01:45
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Bigass Moth posted:There would probably be wards at major security checkpoints and one mage doing astral security for the entire airport. That mage would also be one of the highest paid people working there. Not to mention a bevy of watcher spirits and bound spirits performing security services. A major security outfit isn't going to have a strict combat mage on staff. 'Runners are likely going to encounter a detection magic specialist who can give them some serious trouble, especially working in concert with gun-toting guards.
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Aug 15, 2013 13:23
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Very much like how even the most basic commlink has incredibly advanced functionality, a medkit has Robert Picardo telling you how and what to suture, etc. A Rating 6 medkit is professional grade emergency equipment and a character with decent wherewithal (Intuition) can figure out how to use it effectively. Bear in mind a character with strong Intuition and a First Aid skill will perform much better with the supplies a strong medkit will offer and will out-perform the emergency system working on its own. A new ex-Doc Wagon character, for example, could easily achieve a dice pool somewhere in the range of 14-18+ using a Rating 6 medkit.
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Aug 15, 2013 14:28
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Laphroaig posted:As a side note, the injection arrow has to deal at least 1 box of damage (P or S) after the damage resistance test to go off. A heavily armored and bodied Street Sam (a player at my table has a combined total of 37 on resistance tests) is getting like 12 hits on that, so they have a good chance to just soak the entire arrow and not get stuck. But if even a box of damage gets through, its 15 stun from a nacrojet and it is significantly harder to resist that with just augmented body. Or you could just use an injection round (p.434) in a dart pistol (p.429) and achieve the same effect by scoring three net hits against a target using your heavy pistol skill, which means you can stun-out someone with 37+ dice pretty easily. It seems like such an oversight, but apparently so long as you get a decent number of hits you can get that needle in a weak joint or something.
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Aug 15, 2013 21:00
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Bigass Moth posted:Sadly (and stupidly) the dart guns require Exotic Ranged Weapon skills. But tasers don't? They really should eliminate the exotic skills. Ah, I misread it. It uses Heavy Pistol for its range, not the skill. Still, negating all armor for the cost of a special skill seems pretty potent.
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Aug 15, 2013 21:38
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Gort posted:OK, I've run three sessions of 5e, and these are some things I hate: 1. Keep track of your "goons" in a single initiative pass if that's a problem. If you're taking generalizations and shortcuts (shortcuts are often very important in GMing--this is not a dig) for other things, there's not reason to get detailed on this. That's one of the reasons why drone riggers are typically employed by security firms: they are very effective at what they do. A good security team will have many drones that can go toe-to-toe on initiative passes, but likely not on damage output or capabilities. What most drones generally don't have is a real physical presence outside of a gun and a camera. In many instances you still need the metahuman touch to ensure that intruders are routed, interrogated, arrested, etc. 2. It is true that everything in Shadowrun uses boat-loads of dice. To me that's half the fun, but your system sounds like a fine way to go so long as it works for you. 3. Very much in the way you're generalizing other things, if you slip up and add/subtract some dice incorrectly due to recoil when using an assault rifle or something no one is going to notice. Unless you're intentionally hitting your targets with pinpoint accuracy on your third initiative pass of going full auto I don't think it will matter in the long run. Make it fair and fun. 4. For general gear, letting them purchase from the book can be okay, but buying most supplies, weapons, etc. in Shadowrun is a lot more important than buying a Shortsword +2. It takes a minute, but you can make a fun roleplaying experience out of having vendors and contacts deal with your people. You can ever make side-jobs for supply runs and doing people "favors" for equipment. Maybe occasionally offer them experimental or insanely dangerous stuff off-the-books, like a sawed-off rocket launcher for half off. What a deal! 5. Everyone is in agreement that their editor was either phoning it in or drunk.
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Aug 17, 2013 02:49
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Gobbeldygook posted:1. Don't take PierreTheMime's suggestion. This only works with small numbers of weak grunts. After a point, running with every enemy going on one init can result in the entire group being wiped out in one initiative pass. 1. When he mentioned major NPCs separately I figured that meant major threats got their own roll and this was the roll for the chaff. It's all based on the number of threats available--I didn't mean roll every single enemy into a single initiative. Break it up into blocks of initiative if your 'Runners are fighting numerous enemies. If your players are fighting 25 Knight Errant guards I highly doubt most GMs would track each NPC initiative separately. 2. I was assuming these quick rolls were for the GM only, not the players. I've never actually seen a GM roll for all their players, but I guess it might happen somewhere. I'm of the opinion that whatever happens behind the GM screen stays behind it and fudging rolls here and there to streamline the gaming process can be an effective time-saver. Like I said though, I roll all the dice normally. 4. That's a really good suggestion to keep things streamlined using contacts if the GM wants to free up time by not dealing with vending items. Easier for players to keep track of too.
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Aug 17, 2013 12:40
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Gort posted:Speaking of drain and such, anyone else always had a problem with how Physical drain is balanced? OK, so you're casting/summoning above your Magic rating, you're going to take physical drain! Oh no! Except, Physical damage is way less of a problem for a mage than Stun - a few combat rounds with a medkit or Heal spell and you're right back to normal. p. 278: "Drain damage, regardless of whether it is Stun or Physical damage, cannot be healed by any means other than the natural properties of the body—that means no magical healing and no medkits. If you overdo it, you’ll simply need to make time for some rest."
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Aug 22, 2013 14:41
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Gort posted:Oh right, that's new, then. So that means stim patches flat-out do not work for recovering your drain now? By the wording the Stim Patch "removes" Stun, not heal it. Stim Patching is not recovering anything, it's just temporarily delaying your injured state. This still functions for magic users and Technomancers because it returns the "removed" Stun at a later time with a +1 Stun tax.
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Aug 22, 2013 15:28
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tokyosexwale posted:I kind of came in here to address this. There's a lot of demand for Shadowrun right now. Three or four PbP games just filled up in rapid succession. I'm new but can't wait to get in on a PbP group either. Any GMs want to step up and run another Shadowrun to meet the demand from newbies and people new to 5th edition? I was actually just checking The Game Room to see how the SR5 population was looking for this reason. I may be up for getting another game together, though I'm going to have to read up a little more thoroughly on the Matrix-end of the rulebook before I'll be comfortable running everything. I might throw up a thread in the next day to get 4-5 players in line and then start next week when everyone has characters built up.
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Aug 22, 2013 18:45
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Cabbit posted:It's not as if the guy putting these things together gets to skip out on drain or anything-- hell, alchemy has more drain than straight up spellcasting. Plus, you know, you can cast again if you screw up your spell-- not so much with lobbing a hatchet inscribed with Control Thoughts. Potency is the great limiter here. Even is each alchmical preparation lasts Potency x2 hours, you're only going to get so many bullets enchanted with Death Touch or whatever before you are either out of time or almost unconscious. In a vacuum it seems insanely powerful, but in real-game practice it's more of a gimmick than anything else. A single Force 6 preparation using touch as the trigger is 7 Drain to resist--you're not going to be making many of those for your team before you are deep enough on the Stun tracker to be slurring your speech.
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Aug 22, 2013 19:54
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Cabbit posted:Well, Force 4's gonna last eight hours before losing potency and only takes four minutes to create, so potency wasn't a huge issue in my mind. I don't think you're ever going to reach a point where you can create something with enough potency that you can make it well in advance and rest up from the damage the drain causes, so you might as well just take ten minutes on the ride over from your safehouse to scrawl some low force preparation on your hanzo steel with a sharpie, some reagents, and an alchemical focus. Right, I was more saying it's the limiter for filling a banana clip with enchanted bullets which is the doomsday scenario people assume is going to happen. Having your blade enchanted with a single spell can be handy against one guard or in a sticky situation, but it's not going to break the game.
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Aug 22, 2013 20:23
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tokyosexwale posted:That would be awesome. Are you open to suggestions? I wouldn't mind trying a street level campaign. Maybe that would be easier on newer players? I'd probably prefer to keep it at the standard level, as that allows all the options on the table and gives people enough to work with to achieve good results. My personal problem with street level Shadowrun is that it limits the characters and not the world itself, making people learn the majority of the rules but not really be able to access the cool aspects of Shadowrun that makes it its own game. What I will do for new players is take the time to explain things and not just dole out a harsh in-game punishment for either making a mistake or misunderstanding the system. The rules of Shadowrun are tricky and take time to learn. I tend to scale the game-world to the players and not to the numbers, so if we need to start easy and ramp up from there it's pretty easy to do without making it look like child's play.
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Aug 22, 2013 21:18
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tokyosexwale posted:Right, I understand. Your game sounds great, and I will be eagerly watching the recruitment thread. You're in luck! The recruitment thread is open for business!
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Aug 23, 2013 14:33
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Bigass Moth posted:Bad Rep - 3 points of Notoriety, very little actual game balance issues related to that. Also who cares if you have a bad rep, you're a criminal. Notoriety actually has no penalty unless a GM enforces it by their own choice. Coming out of the gate being labeled as someone who has sold 'Runners down the river for a corporation before strongly influences how other players and characters deal with you. While it's only a number for the purposes of determining dice rolls, the roleplaying elements involved are where this comes into play. Your dialogue with NPCs and other players is going to be vastly different if everyone is always suspicious of your intent and your promises (well, more than other criminals). Essentially Bad Rep influences what options are available to you, not the numbers.
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Aug 23, 2013 20:02
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Laphroaig posted:post While I agree with some of this, are you implying that character flaws should not impact other characters? At what point should a players poor choices start causing problems? If a character is lacking in a specific attribute, skill, or equipment by design is this off-limits for a game master to use during gameplay? Highlighting a murdertroll's lack of social skills may be unimportant during a firefight, but if you're trying to interact with a character (such as getting questioned by security) this type of thing comes into play and can flummox the character and botch a specific angle of the 'Run. If you're trying to avoid all social contact because you have a Logic, Intuition, and Charisma of one and are literally being combat-dropped into a battle and do nothing else, I suppose that's your prerogative but I couldn't expect the severe flaws of other people not to impact you (and vice versa). Basically this: 
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Aug 23, 2013 20:35
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Mystic Mongol posted:Having a charisma of 3 and a social skill of 3 is not useful in Shadowrun. There's no need to punish people for not spending the points raising that stat and that skill to useless levels. I don't agree. So you should have either 12+ dice to throw or none? I don't know about you, but Etiquette and other social skills come up a lot and being unable to properly act professional, negotiate, or act in front of NPCs can be a source of major problems. At this point though, I'm going to go ahead and accept that we can agree to disagree on this as arguing the point further would be silly. You have some valid points, but I feel that there can be shades of grey in skillsets.
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Aug 23, 2013 20:45
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Poil posted:Are there any reliable and good ways to commit suicide if you're captured/disabled as an awakened and can't install a cranial bomb or any other ware? Preferably not killing anyone nearby. Poison might be impossible (unless you can burn edge to auto-fail a roll or something). Astrally project and go find yourself an astral predator. If you're not a full magician then there's not much you can do if you're tied up and have a blind on.
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Aug 23, 2013 23:27
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Rockopolis posted:And would making technomancers able to hack anything in sight, even with wireless off, take them from weak to overpowered? If depends on how the GM plays it off, but I would think so. Any imaginative player who isn't quickly reigned in would use that to incredible advantage. Technomancers already receive special powers no one else can do, they don't need the ability to melt your bones or brick your throwback eyes.
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Aug 26, 2013 14:11
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Emerald Rogue posted:Unfortunately, I keep missing the recruitment threads in here. There's a pretty big demand for games right now. I have a feeling more should be popping up soon--just keep checking for "recruitment" tagged threads.
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Aug 26, 2013 15:20
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Gobbeldygook posted:Spirits and Immunity to Natural Weapons If anyone's looking for the rule listing for this, spirits have this power because they have Materialization (pg. 398). Materialization states anything with the power has Immunity to Natural Weapons when materialized. I just caught up with the thread and spent a few minutes going crazy trying to find the rule that shows spirits have amazing armor. Turns out they do. Editing!
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Aug 29, 2013 12:47
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For those following along, that means a F6 Earth spirit has a Body of 10 and 12 hardened armor. If you deal damage to it, it gets 22 dice to resist damage and comes out of the gate with 6 successes tacked on for free, meaning on the average you need to do at least 14 damage to deal a single point of damage.
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Aug 29, 2013 14:23
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