shadowrun

[Peacehammer]

Hi all, does anyone play shadowrun?
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Everything in this world is an idea acted upon.

[Venator]

I used to be an avid Shadowrun player, though I have not played it recently. I can still talk the talk and compare notes though!

[Auzure]

[cykotek]

I used to play SR, back in 2ed, and when 3ed came out. Haven't played for a few years, know nothing about 4ed. Bit hard to find a game where I am.

[Peacehammer]

Well, I am playing 3rd ed. Owning about £250 worth of books, I am going to resist changing to 4th ed.

I hear that it is out, but I can''t get it in the UK except from the internet on PDF which I am not going to do. I do have pretty much the entire 3rd ed and supporting books on PDF which I can burn off and send to people if they want.

What is your favourite character type?
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Everything in this world is an idea acted upon.

[Venator]

I have not seen or played 4th Edition, so I have no data on that topic.

[Peacehammer]

Hmm, I too have created many characters, too many to list here, I didn't use many of them as I have only participated (GMing about half) of around 12 runs. My favourite character was a journalist/tech wiz/chem tech expert/electronics expert/face/something of a fighter.

I created this guy to plug a whole lot of gaps in the team, being as the rest of the group tended towards fighty characters. It was very satisfying to be able to do a bit of everything, and still keep game balance, it also helped the gm along as he could provide more varied runs.
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Everything in this world is an idea acted upon.

[cykotek]

I made a rigger once, it was a lot of fun. I loved toying with vehicles and drones. But those guys need the nuyen more than anyone else - upkeep is a (&#$@!)!

I also once made a combat decker. Decking was never big in the group I played with - too complicated, and too detached, the decking tended to be a disrution to the game rather than an addition to it. So, this character did the small amount of decking needed on a run, acted as backup muscle. Had skillwires and a crapload of storage, so he could potentially take on any task needed that the other members of the party lacked. As such, I never had to buy any skillsofts for him - the group bought them as needed.

I miss those guys...

[Venator]

Riggers do have some game-halting abilities, and they can totally unbalance the game unless some kind of limits are agreed upon.
- Most Shadowrun players I have talked to do not spend much time with Decking because it halts the whole game while the GM deals with one characters soloing. A Rigger doing recon with drones, or playing out the team's getaway in a vehicle also tend to halt the game for most of the players, so these situations are best minimized.
- Riggers also have the ability to totally unbalance combat. A military-grade combat drone like the Steel Lynx is totally immune to small arms fire and can carry a minigun that cuts people in half with ease. If a Rigger starts using these kinds of toys then the opposition will have to start packing anti-tank weapons... which will completely slaughter the other members of your team.
- As cykotek noted, a typical Rigger doesn't bleed... he takes damage in nuyen. Using drones in combat and getting them shot at starts costing money real quick. If you lose a good drone during one Shadowrun, you can easily come out with negative cashflow.

In a previous campaign I was in, we had a Rigger who NEVER left his armoured limosine during a run, and participated by operating his Steel Lynx in Primary Mode and pulverizing anything that moved.

To avoid all of these problems, my Rigger focused primarily on surveillance and he handled combat himself in person. His drone network consisted mostly of small recon drones with good Sensor and Pilot rations that could operate on their own and spot danger. He would have his drones cover all the entrances and watch the team's escape route while he went in with the team and ran the whole network in Captain's Chair mode. He had one gun drone that carried an assault rifle w/ grenade launcher. It usually covered the team's exit and did not follow along. He also had one cargo/utility drone that carried tools and loot which did follow the team. Actually, the utility drone often proved to be the most useful one of the bunch.

[Gromash]

for those it may concern Leisuregames in London updated their website with this weeks releases and it included Shadowrun 4e, so its out..

i have had two versions so far but never got round to playing it.. i might get this version too tho (it'll have to wait till i get the new Eberron book and a 1500pt wood elf army and a 1500pt chaos army and the Warmachine World Guide, Prime rulebook, and the Cryx & Khador battlegroups.. so it may take a weeee while!)

[Peacehammer]

Riggers and deckers. I think the only real kind of game that a decker would be good for is one that was designed for a decker, for example, a team of 3 deckers, a drone rigger and a team of NPC minders hack into a network of some kind. That kind of thing would be quite interesting, but limited to that kind of specialised run. I wonder how many of themwould be quad- or paraplegic?

As to riggers, the first group I was part of, I had a Phys Ad who was an ex combat biker and went by the name of Wolf, there was a sniper and a drone rigger. We were playing a gang level starting mission, and me with my gang level character and knowledge skills fitted right in. The rigger guy was so arrogant that he turned up late to everything, so the other two, decided that we would make the deal and arrange for some of the loot to be diverted into our pockets instead of his (Very painful for a rigger).

Any way to cut a long story short, the rest of the mission went like this: Hmm, some sort of resistance eh? release the drones, shoot everything, take next to no damage on the drones, collect loot and information from the survivors and corpses. That was largely the plot line for most of the adventures that he was part of. Oh, and of course he had his 'rigger mobile' which was armoured up and could carry his fleet of drones.

Through player pressure, we got him to create another character. A troll with rating 5 skill wires and a light machine gun on a gyro mount. This meant that he could shoot a full auto burst with no recoil... He was actually tougher than some of his drones, for a laugh we saw what happened when we shot an assault cannon at him.

He took a light wound.

The rest of the time devolved into using street sam variations of some kind, hence my journalist.
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Everything in this world is an idea acted upon.

[Venator]

When I GM a Shadowrun game I tell people who want to make Deckers "Make a character that's fun to play in the real world, because I'm not halting my game for you to solo." My Rigger is fun to play because he's skilled and capable in his own right and his drones are just his helpers. Deckers should be the same way unless a campaign has been worked out to accomodate their solo adventures.

If you can manage it, one technique that works well is to do the "legwork" portion of a Shadowrun (checking contacts, doing recon) AFTER the first play session, by e-mail. Checking contacts is normally a solo activity anyway since everyone has different ones of their own. Recon can be done in a variety of incompatible and mutually exclusive ways: Astral, matrix, drone or simply going in yourself.
- Session 1: Characters meet with Mr. Johnson and get the details of the job. Meetings with employers and fixers can be either long or short affairs. If you have extra time to fill you can arrange a combat or other interlude which may or may not be related to the job.
- Between Sessions: Legwork and planning. No actual playtime is lost for the matrix dive, etc.
- Session 2: Plans are finalized and the run begins in earnest.

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I do not have the book yet, but I have looked into 4th Edition Shadowrun a little bit. As well as I can tell:

It seems that they have seriously reworked die rolling and success test resolution. All target numbers are now 5 and cannot be modified. The difficulty of the task is expressed as a threshold, which is the number of successes needed to pass the check. I do not know if there is any notion of margin/quality of success anymore.

Character creation is now point-based like the system used in the Shadowrun Companion, and the priority system is gone. Magic has been broken into a larger number of skills. It sounds like Initiation is gone. Decking and Rigging are now treated as different specializations of the same general skillset. Supposedly these kinds of activities have been integrated more into the normal game mechanics. Deckers are now called Hackers and do not use cyberdecks.

I never liked the point-based character creation system in the Shadowrun Companion and I do not think that being able to gain bonus points for defects encourages good roleplaying. Better integrated game machanics sound like a good feature. Rigging in 3rd Edition is so complicated that I always have to explain things like sensor-assisted Gunnery tests to the GM. Evening out the 6-point flat spots in skill test difficulty could be good... I guess that would depend on how they implement this new system. The 1st Edition system of Staging Numbers was a hassle but it allowed you to represent things in great detail... and some of that detail was lost when they fixed all staging numbers at 2 for 2nd Edition.

[Peacehammer]

In all the runs that I have been part of, here hasn't been much of a finding information and planning stage is very brief, with the runners making it up as they go along. I am trying to write something that will cause them to plan more (It will be an assassination that looks like an accident) so they will have to plan for that. My main problem when writing runs is not the ideas aspect, but the actual sitting down and writing someting.

As to the 4th ed. I lke the idea that all TN's are at 5, that means that there is more of a reason for higher skill levels, before, if all you needed was one success, then there was little point in taking a skill above level 2 for a low target number. Mind you, when shooting guns, having everything based on successes, things like blind fire, and called shot will need many successes and so make it prohibitive to do, depending on how they do it of course.

On the same idea, how would smartlinks work?

I am not keen on the point system either. I do quite like the BECKS system though (Bethagyas Complete Karma System) where you have something like 450 Karma and you have to build your character from scratch. This produces quite a balanced character as it avoids min/maxing and you have to think about the character a lot more.
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Everything in this world is an idea acted upon.

[Venator]

Since I have had some free time during my trip, I have purchased 4th Edition to give me something to read.

[Peacehammer]

The thing about jack of all trades is that they don't have any major talents, but I don't go to the extreme of having someone who can do everything. The closest I get to having an everything else-cum-decker is to get a cyberterminal (It costs 10% of a standard deck, but the programs are less powerful), this means that I can find information using Ettiquette but can't hack into anything. That is fine by me. My jacks of all trades tend to specialise with electronics and surveillance with a bit of chemtech thrown in simply because it is somehting that the rest of the group doesn't do that too much.

As to Mages having cyberware, I wouldn't have that, the need to take a high priority for magic outweighs any advantage in my opinion. I would rather take and adept (Of which I have many) and take astral perception for it with costs 2 points and means that you can get many of the advantages that you can with a Sam, plus some that you can't.
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Everything in this world is an idea acted upon.