It's time for [Shadowrun]
Rend
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Shadowrun: 4th Edition
What is it?
Currently in its 4th Edition, Shadowrun is a Pen and Paper roleplaying game set in a futuristic dystopia where the government takes a back seat to the only real superpower: Money.
The year is 2072, and a lot of stuff has happened since now.
Now you're a shadowrunner: Someone on the fringe of society that pulls jobs under the radar for corporations who don't want to be held responsible for their actions. You're a "deniable asset," and your services can be worth much to someone who has the coin to pay you, as long as you keep your wits about you.
After all, you can't get paid if you're dead.
The Magic
Some time ago the government declared eminent domain on the land we'd previously given to the Native Americans, giving the space to corporations in order to further their capitalistic goals. To make a long story short, magic is now a common and omnipresent part of society. Oh, and the Indians lost their volcano privileges.
Magicians -
Like Siegfried and Roy, except instead of a tiger, it's a fire elemental. And instead of a big crowd paying huge sums of money to see them... well, I suppose that would still be the case some places, now wouldn't it?
Magicians are born with the ability to harness the power of magic within themselves and shape it in the form of spells. These spells can do pretty much anything! They hurl fireballs, put people to sleep, make people invisible, confuse people, heal people, devastate entire city blocks, summon being made entirely of superhot blaze... etc. Though many are employed by corporations for security or entertainment purposes, a fair amount find their skills very lucrative to the Shadowrunning community. After all, who else can make themselves spontaneously invisible to security cameras?
Magicians also possess the ability to see into the astral plane, which is basically a sort of magic telescope: A mirror plane identical to ours, but in which you travel at the speed of thought and interact with others who are magically inclined. As well, magicians are the sort who can both perceive the astral plane AND project themselves into it, and both at will.
Adepts -
These guys are like magicians, but the power they're born with is manifest as a magical ability to improve their own attributes. Want to be stronger, faster, smarter? If you're an adept, you're just a couple of power points away. Who needs targeting computers when you fire more accurately than humanly possible already? Not adepts, that's for sure.
Mystic Adepts -
Because you couldn't be satisfied with just some magical power, you had to have some more. Mystic adepts are a hybrid between adepts and magicians. They aren't as powerful as magicians, but they're a bit more apt than the adepts are. They can perceive the astral plane but they have a bit of trouble when it comes to walking the walk, if you catch the meaning.
The Traditions -
So for all you magically inclined types out there, how'd you get your stuff? There's two basic ways to come across it, the Hermetic tradition and the Shamanistic tradition.
The Hermetic tradition basically means you went to college so long you can make stuff float in the air without using your hands. It's a bunch of people who thought they could make formulas and such for magic, well, i guess they were right.
The Shamanistic tradition is exactly how it sounds. Your power probably comes from nature, or spirits, or some weird such like that. Don't expect to find this stuff in books. You want to learn it, an elder will probably send you on a vision quest or something.
The Matrix
Kind of like that Matrix, yes. The Matrix (now in stage: Matrix 2.0) is a huge web of interconnected wireless networks, made up of nodes which communicate seamlessly to one another. A node can be anything from a bulky corporate mainframe to a broadcast tower, all the way down to a personal commlink. The Matrix is everywhere, though, almost everyone has access to it all the time, and as such it has become an integral part of day-to-day life in the world of Shadowrun.Commlinks and Augmented Reality (AR) -
Basically the lovechild of a Blackberry and a PDA that was having an affair with a wireless modem. Your commlink is a personal node, normally connecting wirelessly (or wired) to a pair of sunglasses or goggles which paints a HUD onto the world around you, ala scouters from Dragonball. Except these things actually tell you about power levels that mean something.
All around there are things called Augmented Reality Objects (AROs, or "arrows") which your commlink takes in and feeds to you, so while you're walking down the street you might be seeing adds for the next great Mitsuhama advancement, receiving messages and calls from your friends to hang out at the mall today, and privately accessing the club's tag over there to see when they're open, and more importantly, when you can get in.
Hacking and Technomancers -
Of course, where there's technology there's a hacker. These individuals specialize in exploiting the matrix to do pretty much whatever they want. They might hack a commlink to hijack an identity temporarily to fool security systems, they may shut those systems down altogether in a more overt manner, or maybe they don't even go near. The vast and omnipresent properties of the Matrix make hacking an incredibly useful tool for anyone willing to follow the path.
While hackers use the matrix with keystrokes and code, technomancers are a bit different. The force of Magic has imbued them with an odd power to effect technology through sheer force of will. Uh oh, a corporate security drone is following you! It really should just fall over.
Well...
That was easy.
The Megacorps
Well folks, we're running out of time, but here's a primer of the "Big 10," the ten AAA class megacorporations that make up the Corporate Court, the only authority around who actually has a chance to have a say in things.Ares Macrotechnology
Aztechnology
Evo Corporation
Horizon
Mitsuhama Computer Technologies
NeoNET
Renraku Computer Systems
Saeder-Krupp Heavy Industries
Shiawase Corporation
Wuxing, Incorporated
So this is the place to discuss shadowrun of any sort. Share character concepts, stories, anything really. This place lacks a Shadowrun discussion thread. Or, well, it used to. So here it is!
OP to be updated with details on the megacorps when I get the chance to update it.
Rend on
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I play 4th edition. I've played all of the previous editions for a number of years. Our current campaign is suspended until everyone chimes up interest again (right now, we are playing Earthdawn and Castle Falkenstein on alternating weeks), but Shadowrun is always our "go to" roleplaying game. We geek the mage first. We waste trolls, not ammo. We never deal with dragons.
4th edition is like a love-child between 3rd edition and new WoD/Exalted. It uses a simple scaling mechanic, with all target numbers as a 5 and bonuses and penalties represented by increasing/decreasing dice. I liked this (once I wrapped my head around scaling dice pool rather than target numbers) because in reality, 3rd edition's target numbers were the following: 2, 3, 4, 5, 6/7 (7 is identical to 6), Anything Above 8 (pretty much the same). This made scaling much more difficult... tasks were usually either hellaciously easy or hellaciously difficult, unless you magically were able to get a sweet spot number from 4 to 7. While you CAN require more successes to accomplish a task as a GM, the whole basis of the system is "if you get a success, you succeed at the task". And don't get me started on Open Tests or Opposed Rolls. I loved the hell out of 3rd edition, but it probably would have worked better with d12s/d10s rather than d6s. d20s cause cancer, so we'll leave those out of it. *grin*
4th edition removes exploding dice for most rolls, except when you use Edge (Karma Pool in previous editions). The game world and mechanics are pretty much the same, remarkably so ("Everything is Wireless!" aside). They did well in Drone/Vehicle construction, but totally messed up on the Vehicle combat rules (except for very basic vehicle-to-vehicle combat and chase sequences). Drones work well, for the most part. Once again, they messed up Hacking/Decking and made it so unwieldy that you have to house-rule it to make it work. Fortunately, it's a no-brainer to house rule, because the unwieldy sections become completely obvious upon first hacking.
My main gripe with 4th edition is that they missed the point of having the simple Pool and single target number system. The idea "behind it all" is so that the players never have to say "What's my target number?" They can simply roll, tell the results to the GM, and the GM will judge what happens. This happens for the vast majority of SR rolls, but when it comes to applying bonuses and penalties, it's all over the place. Ideally, you'd have a situation where all of the player controllable bonuses/penalties (gear, taking aim, magical enhancements, cyberware, etc.) are adjustable by the player and rolled by the player, and all of the GM situational bonuses/penalties/thresholds (environment, range, etc.) are adjustable by the GM. This is so the player doesn't have to say "Is my target in full cover? Is my target 50 meters away?". But the application of said bonuses and penalties are detailed and myriad, and often a GM has to say "stop, you have to apply such and such penalties for X situation". This is not a problem for most Opposed tests, but it is a problem for a lot of basic tests (like combat). It slows down the flow of the simple Pool mechanic, and pretty much negates the benefit. In other words, you might as well go back to the situation of "What's my target number?" again.
Still, I love playing Shadowrun, under any edition. It is possibly the best mechanics system tied to a game universe out there.
Hacking shouldn't be a mini-adventure for the Hacker, excluding the rest of the characters. 3rd edition is much better than 2nd edition in this regard (2nd edition hacking was literally walking into a mini-dungeon, mapped out like the Temple of Elemental Evil). In our current 4E campaign, I played a Technomancer-Pirate (as in the seafaring kind). Until we house-ruled it, Hacking took around 30 minutes PER DEVICE. This heavily cut into our gaming time and led to the rest of the folks sitting around doing nothing and getting bored.
Hacking shouldn't be fundamentally different from the rest of the game mechanics. There used to be jokes around the Dumpshock boards on how Shadowrun was really three systems in one... Rigging, Hacking, and Magic/Combat/Everything Else. If anything, Hacking should functionally work like the Magic rules (not identical, of course... taking "Drain" for a program would be awkward), in that they are fast, easy to resolve, and take up no more than a couple of dice rolls per task. There are situations where Magic can be bogged down, like Astral Quests, but most of these can be done during downtime rather than during gametime. Most Hacking tasks HAVE to be resolved during the game, and much of the suspense of combat and general Shadowrunning dies off if you have to break every so often for the Hacker to resolve his tasks. To put it in another way, taking apart a Maglock and rewiring takes LESS time to resolve than hacking it. It should be the other way around.
The way we have it set up in our house rules, there is a single roll (rather than a small set) for breaking into a device and a single roll (again, rather than a small set of rolls) for task resolution. We tried not to house rule it too much, but rolling 3 to 6 times (most Hacking tests are Extended Tests) for every little test that needed to be done for 4th edition Hacking got to be absurd (3 to 6 times for probing the firewall, 3 to 6 times for breaking the firewall, 3 to 6 times for Browsing and Analyzing files, etc.). Shutting off ONE camera took around 15 to 20 minutes of game time... it took so long that our mage said "Fuck it, I'm casting Invisibility on everyone and sustaining it, and drain be damned. We aren't messing with cameras." It gets worse if you use Unwired rules, too (although by the time I got Unwired, we already had our own Hacking house rules).
tl;dr Find out some way to remove Extended Tests from Hacking, and you'll be much happier.
4th edition does some things well, independent of the rules mechanics. One advantage of the Commlink and Augmented Reality paradigm is that you can have boots-on-the-ground hackers who aren't completely divorced from the team (even if you are in another location, you can still show up in AR with the party). This solves a lot of problems in past editions of SR and integrates Hackers more into the party.
On a side note, they greatly nerfed Technomancers (previously Otaku) except for the sprite summoning kind. Sprite Summoners are gods among hackers, if you actually play one... I actually suck at Sprite summoning, but even I can create a Rating 6 to 10 Sprite and have it wreck havoc on any system. I'm actually okay with the nerf, because I felt that Otaku were overpowered for player character use, and then there was that silly Otaku War behind the scenes that no one ever heard/cared about. The 4th edition changes made them more viable, if a bit underpowered as a starting character compared to actual dedicated Hackers. Again, Sprite summoning is the only overpowered part, and this is easily reined in by the GM.
EDIT: Sorry for the length of the post... erm, well, you asked. *grin*
Western-Gunslinger-style Street Samurai
Irish Knifefighting Adept/Face Elf
Asatruar (Norse God worshipper) Magician
I'd actually prefer to go with the simpler Street Samurai (Who also tinkers with guns) to get a hang of actual gameplay, but I'm up for other rolls as well.
The first wave of Technomancers came about from the second Matrix Crash (which involved a war between two AIs, the Novatech IPO, and Winternight trying to destroy the world). They were logged in when the Matrix crashed. Most of these people went insane, but some became Technomancers. Some of the "older" (read: pre-SR4 rules) otaku also became Technomancers post-Crash. There are cases of otaku in the fiction being created by the influence of AIs pre-Crash 2.0 (Mirage and Deus, in particular). This implies that Technomancers were created through exposure of some elements of the Matrix.
tl;dr Technomancers may be "magical" (unexplained through SR's fictional science), but they aren't "Magic" according to FanPro/Catalyst.
*shrugs* How each GM plays this element in their games is up to them. There are groups out there that outright say "Technomancers = Magic", while other groups are "Separate but equally mysterious". Catalyst certainly takes the latter stance.
On another note, if you use the default rules for Drones and Hacking, be prepared to take 15 to 30 minutes to resolve the "Drone falls over!" action. Not to mention that by the time you successfully do it in game-time, your sammy or mage has already disabled the Drone.
Things that I do as a runner:
* At character creation, you need a Fixer. In SR, the Fixer is your lifeline. He's like an agent for an actor (a LOT like one actually, including the grease).
* Buy (minimum) two lifestyles. A few months of pre-paid Middle or Low (never buy a permanent residence... they tend to be liabilities) and a lot of months (or permanent) Squatter as a bolt hole. Figure out an emergency kit that you might need if you ever get hung out to dry (cheap stuff, like a small holdout pistol and Stick and Shock, medkit, disposable phone, etc.), and throw it into a suitcase and dump it at your bolt hole.
* Rope and a Leatherman-style tool widget are almost always useful in life and in SR. I always have my characters carry around some med patches (Tranq, mostly) and some plastic restraints, too.
* Have two "sets" of standard equipment. One set of things you will take on a run (big guns, magical foci, high rating commlink/communications array) and one set of things you'll take on a meet (concealable and disposable weapons, nice clothes, a low rating dummy commlink or disposable phone).
* The more contacts you have, the better. On some runs, gaining a new contact far exceeds the pay that I get for the run, even if the run pays 5 digits or higher. Sure, you helped extract target X from his horrible megacorporation, but if you do it NICELY than he might be willing to return the favor at his new job with insider information or gear.
* Concealed armor is your new dayware. Get used to it. Invest in a good suit of Formfit body armor (with non-Conductivity, if you have a problem with stun weapons). If you like sneaking, get a chameleon suit with thermal dampening, but only break it out for runs (god, don't bring it to a meet).
* Your employers are ALWAYS out to get you somehow. The reason you are being hired is not because you are professional or you are skilled. It is because the employer wants you to do a job that THEY DON'T WANT TO DO. This is important. If the employer comes from a megacorporation, then you have to figure out why they can't spend a thumbnail of their nearly infinite resources on this tiny little problem and instead have to hire street thugs. If you work for a small corporation, then you are being sent to do a job that they don't have the balls or the resources to accomplish. It is up to you and your GM how far you are willing to play this paranoia. Nowadays as a GM, I can't throw out bizarro plot twists at my players without them doing some eye-rolling and saying "And this is where the bug spirits jump out and attack" or whatever... they know me (and SR) far too well.
As far as the 4th edition Technology stuff:
* Commlinks - Everyone has a cell phone. The vast majority of people have iPhones (called Commlinks). Wireless access points are everywhere, and people use them. This is not that much different than the current situation in the Bay Area, actually. *grin*
* Augmented Reality - Popups IN YOUR MIND. But you get to use a web browser anywhere, and web pages are tied down to physical locations now, too. Play it fast and loose. Some districts may have banned AR advertisements except on select billboards, and some districts may have so many popups, they obscure your vision and line of fire. And you can always turn it off. Also, AR doesn't mean that the Matrix doesn't exist anymore... it means that the Matrix is BIGGER than it ever was.
* RFID - Everything has RFID tags in it. There are organic RFIDs that Horizon Entertainment dumps into their food products for market research. RFIDs are used to mark prices on everything that you buy commercially. Some grocery stores are completely automated... you just pick up what you want, and walk out. The RFID tags are noted by the doorway and money is deducted from your account automatically. You can use this to your advantage (tracking someone in an urban jungle is easier than ever), and it can stab you in the back if you aren't carrying a tag eraser.
* Stick n Shock - It's cheap. It turns ANY weapon into a Taser. It's (mostly) non-lethal (my character has killed an adept with several rounds of Stick n Shock. It was an accident.). Learn it, use it, love it. But remember, it can be used against you.
* Drones - One important difference between SR 3E and SR 4E is that Drones are REALLY cheap. Almost disposable cheap. Thus, you can expect Drones with cameras to be EVERYWHERE. A corporation that can blow six figures on a single executive's luxury vehicle will most definitely blow the same amount of money on a small army of drones that can watch your every move, guard the chokepoints and entryways, and generally make your life miserable. Have a way of dealing with Drones, even if it's just Stick n Shock ammo.
"Go up, thou bald head." -2 Kings 2:23
I didn't read too much about 4e rigging, but I liked how in 3e you could make some pretty powerful offensive drones on the cheap but their survival was far from guaranteed. I think it (unintentionally) made the rigger really fill the role of rescue-man, since when the shit hit, the drones could bust in and make all the difference while you kept the chopper warm. I wonder if the rigger can fill the same role.
Edit: When I run, I try to mix in games where the bosses are on the level with games where the bosses are screwing you over. I've only run 3rd of course, but I try to emphasize the street dance; a megacorp can't use its own resources, because your orders aren't coming from the CEO. They're coming from a Cross-Applied Lead Programmer who needs this other office blown up because he's behind schedule and if Renraku gets their similar program out before his team finishes the project, there's no way he's going to get the promotion.
Maybe this isn't is first time; maybe he went to a professional Johnson who is part of the dance, and since he's a part of the dance, it's in his interest to play his role fair and square. It should be noted that not all runs come from a corp. Maybe Terra-First needs something sabotaged, or a fixer needs some tracks covered. A smuggler's in a jam, and needs you guys to help recover his stashed cargo. Perhaps another team of individuals needs to get into the basement of this security facility, and they need you to trip up security just long enough for them to get in and out, then fade back into the shadows.
I think a lot of GMs throw the employer-plot-twist a little too much, and it loses its strength. But runners should always be paranoid, because Johnsons can be dicks.
There are a lot of changes, but I found it to be mostly the same game, with different mechanics faults and flaws than the previous editions. As far as themes, the whole Wireless Matrix thing makes complete sense to me, and should have been updated YEARS ago. It simply brings computing in 2070 up to speed to where it is now in 2008. RFID tags are being used now (everything you buy at Best Buy or any other consumer goods store), and implementation of auto-pay is actually out there. Magic is almost identical, except Shamans can do more Hermetic stuff and vice versa. They were already heading that direction in the Universal Magic Theory in the 2060s storyline, as well as the options for alternate mage traditions in the 3rd edition rulebooks.
Most definitely, YES. Especially since the drones are so cheap. You will probably spend a lot more money on the weapons than you will on the drones. The vehicle rigging rules suck, but they are mostly the same from 3rd edition (with slightly different die rolls). Jumping into a drone and setting up networks of drones is much easier, in my opinion, compared to the whole mess that was the Rigger handbook (great construction rules, complicated mechanics). I'm glad they merged some drone rigging aspects with the hacking rules and simplified it... but the hacking rules are a mess, and so you need to fix those before you play.
I don't have the book; another player has one and our GM has one.
So, for example, I have an armour vest and formfitting body suit armour, for a total of 12/6 armour. If someone wants to take a called shot at my head, for example, what does that affect?
When it came up, we played it where the attacker dropped four dice (I think) to reduce four armour from my head. Since only the full body suit armour was on my head (the vest doesn't cover my head), I was basically just using my formfitting body suit armour, so it was -4 to that, leaving me with 2 armour for that shot.
There was some discussion on if that was right, or if all amour is always counted as a whole, or if it would even factor. I'm just curious how it should have gone down.
* Bypass Armor - Negative Dice Pool modifier equal to the armor's protective value. If your target has 6 ballistic, and you are shooting a regular ol' bullet, you subtract 6 dice from your pool and if you hit, your target gets no armor dice to roll. This is a 1:1 ratio of stripping defensive dice, and it's only worth it if you are shooting specialty ammo (Stick N Shock) against a target with special armor attributes (Non-conductivity), since the special armor coatings don't give additional penalties. Also worth it against some hardened armor (Stick N Shock versus a Steel Lynx). Some GMs may allow you to do "partial armor bypassing", which is a 1:1 ratio of armor versus dice pool modifier.
* Target the Privates - Negative Dice Pool modifier equal to the damage bonus, up to -4/+4 DV. Whoo, boy. This one strips on average 3 defensive dice (for the soak roll) for every single die you sacrifice. The only reason you DON'T want to do this on every single shot is if you are trying to hit a dodge monkey (in which case, you wide burst/wide full auto AND called shot), or you are a terrible shot/have extreme penalties, some of which can be remedied by "Take Aim". I usually burn Edge on rolls that are Called Shots, just to make sure my shot counts. If you can do this, the GM can do this, too; so all of a sudden, those Streetline Specials in the hands of those punks are doing 8 DV instead of 4 DV. You have been warned.
* Shoot things out of a Hand - Pretty cinematic, and -4 dice pool modifier.
* Trick Shots - Mostly useless, but cinematic.
In your situation, there is no "called shot to the head". You either bypass armor or you don't. There are multiple ways a GM can play it:
1) You are stacking armor anyway... so the stacked underarmor doesn't count for the purposes of called shots. Shame on you for armor stacking! (This also goes for the Securetech Shinguards/armguards and other supplemental armor pieces). This can be considered RAW (rules as written), due to the description of both Funderwear and the Securetech.
2) The full armor value counts for the purposes of Called Shots. This is RAW (rules as written), and if you pursue this, then the GM has full rights to use it for his own heavily armored monstrosities. Eugh. It might not be a good idea when down the line you are fighting against, say, Red Samurai with Funderwear and Securetech.
3) There is a limit to how much of a penalty you can take to hit an unarmored location, dependent on location. -8 to try to hit a head or hand, -4 to hit a limb/chest, etc. This isn't RAW, but it's a reasonable choice, and a GM should try to come up with reasonable rules at the spur of the moment.
4) Screw the bypass armor rules and just go for -1 die = +1 DV to a max of 4. It's almost always a better option. Statistically, increasing the DV by 4 will nullify all 12 points of your armor anyway on average, for the same amount of penalty as listed.
On inanimate objects I just pulled a couple dice out of their dice pool, such as hitting a motorcycle gas tank with a high-ex round.
*EDIT*
You can play the entire game with just the core rule book. The armory book is nice though for additional things to trip up runners, as well as more weapon/equipment options. Hardly necessary though.
Another thing is to make sure that you're using the Errata'ed special ammo DV and AP values, because this makes a huge difference in the effectiveness of the individual ammos. Explosive is only +1 DV, while EX Explosive is only +1 DV/-1 AP, while APDS is -4 AP. The correct values are at the Shadowrun website somewhere. The ammo choice makes a big difference in what Called Shot you may want to take.
On another note, you don't need anything other than the Core Rulebook to play any character in Shadowrun except for possibly Jarheads (Brains in a Jar in a Robot), Cyberzombies (like Jarheads, but... well...), AIs (yeah... PC AIs... not in my game), and possibly overzealous Vehicle riggers (Arsenal has some suh-weet vehicle construction/customization options). Oh fine, there are dozens of "totems/mentors", metamagics, spells, and other toys in the Magic book, but none of it is necessary to play the game (since the Tradition rules are easy to make). Sure, the Core book doesn't have Move-by-Wire or NANITES (exclamation point), but it just adds more complexity to the game.*
Of the rulebooks available, I'd say that Arsenal is the most needed (fills out all of the REST of the equipment that isn't in the Core book) followed by Augmentation (all of the rest of the Cyberware). Our group only uses the Magic book for the funky spells/Metamagics/Adept Powers, but we rarely ever pull it out (but then again, we HAVE been playing Shadowrun for years, and we know all of the prior Magic rules). Unwired is probably essential if you are a Technomancer PC, but almost useless otherwise. The Runner Companion is used for making funky characters (but otherwise unnecessary).
* (disclaimer: My character has a full set of nanites and a nanite hive, and they are AWESOME).
Well, it's a good thing my GM is pretty awesome and goes for flow, story, and awesomeness rather than RAW.
Also, I don't know how it's lame to take (even though it's apparently decided that the RAW for armour is lame here) underarmour and an armour vest as 12 AP. Of course, I myself would only apply this to places where both armour pieces overlap, which is logical and I really don't think I deserve any shame for... :P I mainly love it because it's some head armour (6 on its own) and covers almost my whole body from the damned sun to counter my albinoism. haha...
Anyway, thanks for the breakdowns. Sounds like we do it an acceptable way in my game... or, rather, have done so in the past and will likely continue to do so, so it's cool. The game's on hold now, unfortunately. When we get back, though, one of our players--an Orc--will have to make an amazing grapple-gun shot to grab some ledge--any ledge--to survive a thirty or so foot fall. We calculated to possible damage he'd take from it before we ended the last session, and if he hits the floor, he smushes 45 points or so of actual damage. What a moment to end the session on, eh? lol!