...Identity Spoofed
...Encryption Keys Generated
...Connected to Onion Routers
>>>Login: *********
>>>Enter Passcode: *********
...Biometric Scan Confirmed
Connected to EmeraldGrid...

>Welcome back to /srg/, chummer
>Last Viewed Files: >>94404551
>The_Dead_Are_Rising.nwsft
>Remembering_Years_Past.infosoft
>"First Run? I've got a sweet deal on threads and arms".ad
>Golden_Oldies_and_Other_Classics.sndsft

Personal Alerts
* Your Current Rep Score: 2351 (32% Positive)
* You have 1 new private message, titled "Heard you're back in town. Come see me, we'll celebrate."
* Your Chummer > Tools > Options books list has been unchecked https://github.com/chummer5a/chummer5a/releases
* Cloud File Storage: https://pastebin.com/SsWTY7qr
* Running Refresh.BTL...

>Watch your back
>Shoot straight
>Conserve ammo
>Do not buy CGL books
>Never, ever cut a deal with a dragon

We haven't had a general since last year so I thought maybe we could do one occasionally, post for a few days and then once it dies give it a break for a few months again.

Anybody been playing recently? I tried to convince my group again but the fantasy elements still scare them off so we played another CPRed one shot again.

Sort of a thread question: what would you call a cyberpunk setting that's actually not that bad to live in, it has problems but everyday life is filled with more pop and hope than trying to survive the corpos and pay your rent.

How much cum do I need to be equivalent to one dram of reagents.
Trying to bind a spirit using only homegrown ingredients.

Every thread deserves one bump.

>>95891869
A lot. Making refined cum from raw cum also reduces the amount by 90%, and getting alchemically radical cum from refined cum does this again. You'd probably need to shoot off a hundred times to get one dram.

>>95894266
Depending on the edition, with some really good rolls you can end up with more than you started with if you go all the way to orichalCUM.

>>95894467
Alchemy: Cum Jars Are Magic!

I have a classic Shadowrun (1E to 3E) question.

I'm trying my hand at the cursed 90s idea of a Shadowrun to Cyberpunk 2020 conversion.
But I don't actually know the parametres that occured in classic Shadowrun magic before 4E revamp.

What is the normal Drain a combat mage can expect in a fight?
Is it normal to have no Drain after a damaging spell?
What sort of Force is thrown around to hurt someone in armour?

>>95896424
1. Depends on how they allocate the Magic Pool. Could be nothing, or it could be up to S.
2. Pretty normal, if you allocate dice correctly and aren't using something like Hellblast.
3. 3-4 if it's a Combat spell, since those ignore armor. 5-6 if it's a Manipulation spell.

What's your 7E wishlist, other than CGL losing the ownership?

>>95897685
A simpler and perhalps saner dice pool system.
Reverting back to 2050 and redoing the timeline, one supplement and plot at a time.

>>95891657 (OP)
Game's dead Jim.

It's been such a flip from SR to CP2077. Crazy to see the reversal of fortunes.

>>95897685
a game that is playable, including chargen, with just a pencil and character sheet
rules that arent shit
a rulebook that is not laid out like shit
an editor

>>95897685
Is this a joke? Is current edition really 6th?

Is there any official x-ray shot of a Shadowrun Troll?

>>95904600
6e is the current edition and a joke

>>95891657 (OP)
This makes we wonder, what system would be best fit for ZZZ and would it even work as a tabletop game without the music and visuals.

What are the best alternatives for running the SR setting between Cities Without Number and SINless?

>>95910868
Cities Without Number. Simpler, understands the point better and has a great plot building tool.

>>95894195
>10 years since Hong Kong came out
I wish we could have gotten more. SRR had flaws, but I really loved it as my personal gateway drug to the setting (and subsequent disappointment with the actual TTRPG).

Chromed bump.

>>95897685
An honest and this probably massive retooling of every system. Both in terms of rules and also the dice pool system itself. Idk if that means making it a d100 game or a funny symbol dice game but something massive has to change on a fundamental level. I love dice pool games but Shadowruns rot runs into it's very bones.

>>95900658
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8GPGQoR6f6w

I want to go back

I'm thinking of running Shadowrun 5E as a solo RPG. Is there any material out there that can help with this? I know there's oracles and such, but most of them seem very fantasy-centric. I'd like something that's tailored towards Shadowrun specifically, if possible.

>>95903852
CGL fumbled things in such a way that ought to be studied, while RTG received a huge boost from both a triple-A video game and a Netflix anime series. It's a shame, really. Shadowrun was my first TTRPG love, and I dislike seeing it slide further and further into irrelevancy. There's also something to be said about the edition wars and the smug elitism of the playerbase driving any potential new players away, but I don't think /srg/ is ready for that conversation.

What do you need skillwise to be a decent decker?

A few questions out of curiosity from someone who's never played, but wants to.

1. 5e Hydraulic jacks in lower leg cyberlimbs yay or nay?

2. How does one differentiate attribute tests for lower and full limb replacements. Like if I had a character with 4 agility and two lower leg replacements boosted up to 6 agility and I was doing a gymnastics test to jump a gap, logic would be that you'd use the improved attribute of the lower-limb cyberlimb right? The question comes from how you differentiate that from if the character had two full cyber legs with 6 agility? Are the mechanically considered the same, or would you use an average of ones natural agility and the cyberlimb agility for that test (e.g 4+6 / 2 = 5)?

Very specific question I know, and maybe I'm just retarded but I swear can't really find an answer for this specific example. Like using a 6 strength hand to crush something is obvious that the hand and arm or the same, but for stuff like this it seems to just be left up to player discretion..?

Anyway, hopefully this thread can stick around a while. I'm probably gonna have more questions before the days out.

>>95927758
It's even more amazing given how badly Pondsmith fucked up from the 20ish year stretch from 2000s to CP2077 and Edgerunners.

>>95932313
Outside of the disaster that was Cyberpunk V3.0, I'm not aware of anything else Pondsmith and company were up to during the 2000s. Shadowrun was certainly eating their lunch back then, however.

>>95934671
They weren't doing anything because v3 was a disaster, well except for dragging their feet on the Mekton Kickstarter for years before saying, "Yeah, it's never happening."

>>95927758
Yeah, there were some niche games - which may have converted some players to the TTRPG. But more then likely just appealed to existing SR players. The big AAA CP2077 title really gained the interest of people.

>>95940504
I’ve had people interested in Shadowrun bounce off when I tell them it’s nothing like the videogame and is dice pools.

>>95910868
seconding Cities. I switched my group over and it's very different - being d20 and 2d6 rather than dice pool - but it's insane how much better it runs.
Having d&d hp progression is a bit weird, and something I would consider houseruling, but everything else is just so much better. Balanced summons and magic, drone rules that are fun and powerful without being annoying.

We're one of those groups who usually handwave all hacking, but my decker loves the hacking rules in Cities.

Is it bad form talking about Cities in the shadowrun general? It's not a perfect system by any means, but after 5th and 6th edition ...

>>95927807
I would need you to have 2 cyberlimbs to use them for jumping or running I think, although taking the average between the 2 legs is a fine solution.

Cyberlimbs are cool but gimmicky like that. They're most useful for having 1 combat arm that's super agile or strong. Or a kicking leg, I guess.

>>95927758
>There's also something to be said about the edition wars and the smug elitism of the playerbase driving any potential new players away, but I don't think /srg/ is ready for that conversation.
I don't know about smug elitism, but the edition wars are the fault of the publisher in this case.
Each edition barely changes the game at all other than introducing a few new, barely thought out mechanics and a bunch of editing errors from where they copy-pasted the last edition.

I really wish we could have a full reset with 7th, similar to what happened with 4th. Just throw out the golden calfs and rethink everything

>>95940504
The HBS Shadowrun trilogy was my introduction to the world of the game, and I fell in love with it pretty much at first sight. Cyberpunk is great, too, but I'm at odds with RED, especially with how the Red era has been portrayed, and I feel like I'm just marking time until a proper 2077 sourcebook comes out.
>>95941669
>I really wish we could have a full reset with 7th, similar to what happened with 4th. Just throw out the golden calfs and rethink everything
I would love that, so long as they keep the simulationist aspect. I like rules-light systems well enough, but Shadowrun 5E always scratched that itch I tend to get for something more granular, in spite of how frustrating that version of the game tends to be.

>>95940504
The old arguments used to be CP2077 was 'real' cyberpunk - it was possible to see their interpretation of the progression from present day to future cyberpunk dystopia. SR was argued that it was just for fantasy D&Der's that couldn't let go of the Tolkien races and required a lot of world building to make it work. I didn't care I loved the whole Shadowrun mythos.

>>95947472
I've always been strongly opposed to the labeling of Shadowrun as "D&D with guns". I think it does a disservice to the rich world and highlights how little a person who uses that label actually knows about Shadowrun.

Somewhat related to that, it's funny to me how no other science-fantasy universe catches the same amount of flack for combining aspects of the different genres that Shadowrun does. Why does no one have similar complaints regarding Warhammer 40k, Shin Megami Tensei or even Wolfenstein?

>>95948851
WH40K gets plenty of people noting that most of it is just reusing ideas from 2000 AD, but otherwise it basically exists as a sci-fi themed rock album cover of a setting. Shin Megami Tensei is too Japanese and "weird" for most normals and nerds to compare it to anything. Wolfenstein is just "Dude mows down normal Nazis, except there's Mecha-Hitler at the end", unless you mean the new reboot of it and even then it's just alternate history like Man in the High Castle.

Basically, 40K is too british, SMT is too weeaboo, and Wolfenstein takes a while to go full Dieselpunk but is otherwise still just "Kill the nazis with true american grit" at its core. Shadowrun was very much a product of its time, back when people thought the future was going to be more like Bladerunner, and even with the elves and trolls and shit that sticks out by a lot.

>>95948851
The choice of metahumans being lifted in large part from D&D is probably a big reason why. 40K only really has the Aeldari on that front being space elves but not, and the Orkz... Orkz iz lichens made fer krumpin' what talkz like football hooliganz, so they really break away from the D&D mold (and did from WHF too, until Orks in WHF got retconned to be lichens, too).

SMT is even further away from this and is an in-depth exercise in Gnosticism, like some softer video game version of Kult. Wolfenstein is even further away and has no elfs, dwarfs and what have you.

But instead of having Aes Sid or Alfar, Shadowrun flat out has elves. The return of magic breathing life back into ancient myth, and it's just tapping off of Gygax. Especially egregious in calling the practitioners of Daoism wujen instead of fangshi, since wujen is something that sprang straight from Oriental Adventures. If Paul Hume weren't a practicing hermetic IRL, FASA probably would have made the magic system way more Vancian, too.

>>95891677
I appreciate seeing the general again. Hard to believe how much 6e fucking killed its hype

For a flatter Target Number/Dc system like Cyberpunk 2020.
How do the Bonus Dice from modifiers convert over?
Say you get +2 dice from a Totem, that translates to what bonus percentage to succeed?

Finishing Renraku Arcology as I post this.

>>95954159
Don't attempt system conversions if basic math is beyond you. Mathlets designing games is how you get shit like 6e.

>>95940504
The 3 SR games > Cyberpunk 2077 by a mile.
At least Shadowrun is an RPG and presents itself as such by making your choices matter.

We beat the Arcology guys, the team only lost one hand and two eyes.
Being a Troll saved me twice from explosions.

>>95951676
>>95951684
I chose Wolfenstein as an example because it blends science fiction with the weird/supernatural. The Nazis in Wolfenstein are just as likely to summon literal demons and dabble in dark magic as they are to turn people into killer cyborgs, much like how the megacorps in Shadowrun deal in both the mundane and the magical.

Regardless, "I don't like Shadowrun 'cuz magic and elves in muh cyberpunk" has always been one of the most annoying criticisms against it. People can have their preferences, but I believe there's a difference in having a preference and treating genre-blending as an affront to the gods.

>>95947472
I think the weirdest argument I heard for "cyberpunk is the real cyberpunk" is when someone said that shadowrun can't explore themes like racism and such since it has fantasy races and that cyberpunk can tell real stories like the one about a bunch of technobums living on a crossing of steel wires or something like that? I was at a loss of words after hearing something so stupid, particularly the race part.

FUCK Dwarven women!

>>95960758
For me, it's gotta be fomari trolls

>>95960125
I do think SR leans a little less punk and a little more escapist than CP. CP's metanarrative is about how corporations are choking humanity, everything is getting worse, and there is nothing anyone can do to stop the machine. SR still has megacorps that are powerful and dangerous, but they're portrayed less like inexorable maws of entropy and more like squabbling factions (except for AZT, who embrace being cartoon villains with open arms), with the metanarrative being about big, clear-cut doomsday villains like insect spirits or rogue AI.

This is not a bad thing, mind you, especially for a tabletop RPG - and there's still plenty of room to tell the usual, gritty cyberpunk stories in the small scale.

>>95956643
It's not just "because magic and elves", but "because why did D&D suddenly vomit its very specific take on mythology and legends into the world when actual, non-D&D mythology was supposed to be returning?" with a side of trying to very clever about what some of the details of legends "really" are. It's quite irritating to have pseudo-Tolkien elves, dwarfs, and orcs about, with undead actually being a magic disease and shapeshifters being as close as the setting has to werebeasts. The levels of twee can get off the charts.

>>95891677
>Anybody been playing recently?
I got my group in on the idea of a retro future campaign where they're private investigators during the early stages of magic appearing in the world.
Bioware isn't commercial grade yet, and cyberware is closer to SR1 though we are using SR2 for rules.
It's only a couple sessions in but so far so good.

>Setting name that's more optimistic
Near Future.

>>95894266
>>95894467
>>95895852
If there's True Fire and True Water and all, is there True Cum? What are its properties?
Do you have to get it from a dragon?

>>95896424
>What is the normal Drain a combat mage can expect in a fight?
In my experience a mage focused in Combat spells will have between no Drain and L drain.
If the mage is more like the Lone Star mages with Hot Potato and shit like that, they're better at non-lethal take downs but also more likely to have L or M drain.
Only manipulation memelords regularly end up with higher drain.
>Is it normal to have no Drain after a damaging spell?
As long as it's not an elemental spell, yes.
>What sort of Force is thrown around to hurt someone in armour?
Combat spells: 3 according to the books. 5 if you have minmaxers at your table. These spells bypass armor entirely though so even Force 1 is a problem.
Elemental Manipulations: it depends how hard they're memeing. For example a fireball by the book as long as it's cast with at least M damage, has a chance to cook off ammo/explosives with the chance increasing based on how the spell is cast. So casting a Force 1 D fireball is likely to do only L or M damage after resistance (except against Trolls), but is almost guaranteed to cook off everything.
That said if they aren't memeing the secondary effect table, then they're just going to use F3 Elemental spells if they want to avoid drain, F4/F5 if they're playing it risky or have a good Focus, F6/F8 if they accept Drain as a part of their life and want to absolutely murder everyone.

>>95927801
Computer
Electronics
B/R electronics
Program Design
Loads of Knowledge skills about various systems.

>>95954159
In old run it depends on the TN in general and kind of roll.
In new run each die is +0.5 hits.

>>95954747
Any fun twists and turns your group took?

>>95962436
I think SR also leans a little less punk, but that's more because even early on it makes clear that no one bulldozed the entire planet and rebuilt it with neon lights. As a result having real world style building next to new constructions is expected. That sets a theme of things change and get worse, but it's not the absolute 100% dystopian hellscape, yet anyway.

>>95962436

>>95962626
You should be ashamed. Either for posting bad bait, or for actually being that stupid.

>>95948851
Because the metahumans are a pretty lazy lift and ship from D&D at a glance.

I will say that the assumptions about competence and the rhythm of the campaign work out significantly differently than D&D in practice.

>>95962632
Yeah, we decided to play the Arcology as a Dungeon Crawler, we investigate floors till we find an elevator and then roll how many floors it can go up, when we were reaching the top floors we ended up in some empty floors who vacuumed us with pressure and one time everyone failed their save rolls to remain in the elevator which meant we were launched in freefall for 6 floors, luckily we managed to do a saving throw, the mage hooked me and herself with levitation and our Decker snatched itself with a drone he carried to the arcology, I blew up my armor tackling 5 drones overtaken by the AI to save our Decker (the ones that are like spinning prisms that throw iron darts) so we ended up having to make a pit stop in the floor 220 to order an airdrop from a local runner conglomerate in the city, so spend basically an entire session holding the line to get myself a new armor.
The final stretch was the most fun tho, our GM/Storyteller however you want to call it split us all, Decker had to fight Deus the AI in the Matrix, the mage had to blow up some power cells to basically lock down the AI in the matrix node where he was fighting our Decker so it couldn't just basically escape to another part of the building and i ended up facing in hand to hand combat the Labyrinth Beast which per book description our GM took liberties and decided to make it a drone with angel form (sort of in line with the rogue AI Deus) and I must say it was one of the best fights I ever had in tabletop, just be a Troll with 11 body hooked on Kamikaze trying to beat up a droid who is shooting at me point blank was crazy stuff felt very KINO, in the end I roundhouse kicked the head out of the drone after I ripped its arms off by punching them and doing arm breaking stuff, activated self destruct immediately so once again I ended up unconscious while my team was finishing their biz. Oh yeah Renraku and the President offered us work after beating the AI, so more adventures still to come.

>>95963963
Something wrong, anon?

>>95964595
That's so cool. I should throw my players into this pyramid one day

>>95965400

>>95965791
Took us 9 sessions to complete it but mileage may vary, it requires a very prepared crew tho, we spent months farming Nuyen and getting better gear, specially for the Decker my recommendation is that use it when your players feel they are ready for it unless you want this to become their last run, there are some really mischievous drones that will either incapacitate or kill characters with lower body and Hacking becomes incredibly dangerous and hard the higher you go, tho it's possible for you to just adjust at their level.
Personally I think it's best when it's treated with some serious danger in mind, as in this is a run that can kill and will kill unprepared players instead of your average run, the module comes with some nice ways to run it but we decided to just go and do something similar to what happen before the Matrix Crash 2.0 which was get into the place to stop the AI, the book also says you can use it so they can go in and steal some stuff, recover some files, etc. So stopping the AI is not exactly mandatory tho.

Do you fellas think 6e is something they just can't recover from, or is it possible a new edition might actually allow a general to be more consistent on here again? It's such a cool setting, I'd hate for it to die down

>>95962507
I have no idea what you're even talking about. In Shadowrun, the return of magic and the fantasy races happened at exactly the same time.
>>95964283
>Because the metahumans are a pretty lazy lift and ship from D&D at a glance.
That's kind of what I'm getting at. People who say those kinds of things don't really know Shadowrun, so their takeaway will be that it just rips off D&D or whatever.

>>95970911
That's kind of the wrong question to ask. Can Shadowrun as a tabletop game and a setting bounce back? Absolutely. Will it do so under CGL? Well, it's POSSIBLE... but that would require them actually investing in the franchise, to pay for at least decent writers, and playtesters. Which CGL clearly doesn't give a shit about doing.

The alternative would be that someone buys the IP off them, but even as neglected as the franchise is, I doubt that sale would be cheap. Which means that anyone able to swing that kind of cash would most likely be some kind of corpo ghoul interested only in monetizing what little brand prestige is still left.

Personally, I think the best hope SR has is for 7E (which will most likely be written and designed by ChatGPT) to flop so hard, the IP is devalued enough that an indie team run by actual humans can afford to pick it up.

>>95962507
The pseudo-Tolkien Elves are actually a subculture in-lore, which annoys the shit out of the Elves who actually know their shit. One of the early Harlequin adventures features Elf posers who have a hideout with a mural featuring stuff from the Silmarillion and other elf-focused fantasy works.

>>95967381
My Troll casually strolls to the manboob guardian and squeezes his nipple.

>>95971208
For me they have to just simply go back, furthermore many tabletop RPG's who I consider stagnant and dying out are doing so because they "progressed" usually at the expense of the setting and aesthetic that made these games great years ago when they were at their prime (see VtM for example), 2E which is what we play in our table is great, it's not extremely bogged down by too many rules, hell I would say 2E IS the Shadowrun to play and the only thing it lacks is just more fluff books of shit you can buy with more visual representations.
It also lacks information in certain aspects of the game that are too open for interpretation, magic being one of those things that just wasn't well fleshed out compared to later editions.
Still for me 2E is peak Shadowrun and I enjoy the retro futurism more than the "modern outlook", I tried hard to fight my GM on using stuff only from the old books but he house-ruled some stuff from later editions for convenience (which kinda made redundant a lot of purchasable things from the 2E edition since it was pre Matrix Crash)

>>95972999
Fuck meant to say which I consider stagnant.

>>95972555
Only a Trog would do that

>>95972999
I like the old school keyboard decker kinda thing too but for me the best edition is still 4e. 5e was decent but man you could make some autistic shit in 4e and adepts and street samurai both felt really great

How can I make my character really fucking fast?

>>95897685
5e without limits. And Pegasus getting ownership.

I think they should just hard reboot Shadowrun. Something about its current status just feels like a guy in a hospital bed writhing and screaming in agony for hours and nobody's put him out of his misery because he MIGHT recover but it's been months and nothing's changed.

>>95971208
>The alternative would be that someone buys the IP off them, but even as neglected as the franchise is, I doubt that sale would be cheap.

This isn't even a possibility, because CGL doesn't own shadowrun, they license it from TOPPS, who acquired it from wizkids, who acquired it from FASA. I'm not sure if it's been confirmed, but the leading theory is that, in order to keep making Battletech, CGL have to keep Shadowrun in print. They don't give a single fuck about SR, but Battletech has managed to stay relatively relevant and always performs crazy well on Kickstarter, and I believe the current creators really dig BT, so they aren't ever giving that up.

>>95976375
but wouldn't that mean they'd have to flush a lot of the modern nu-writing and woke stuff? that's never happening with any captured franchise so long as it isn't bought and completely rebooted

There was objectively nothing wrong with SR4A, they should have just continued to revise and supplement. SR5 had some interesting ideas but I didn't care for the limit system.

Need tips for playing without a fake SIN.

>>95962642
>but it's not the absolute 100% dystopian hellscape, yet anyway.
I consider that a huge point in SR's favor, because if everyone already knows that there isn't any chance of anything but the worst possible thing happening over and over, there's no tension, not to mention it's just goddamn tiresome.

>>95980229
Counterpoint: there's a bug apocalypse that's only being held back by the Worst People You Know (elves and dragons)

>>95980977
Countercounterpoint: The bugs have started to reach a tenuous equilibrium and go native, kind of, and will willingly help keep the other bugs out so that they don't have to go back to... The Hive. (jarring chord)

>>95983087
Counter counter counter point; what if we use science to kill the bugs and dragons? There's nothing that can go wrong with that trust me I'm a scientist

>>95976462
Oh, well, then any future SR content will be released as sparsely as possible, and with as little effort as possible (again, probably written by AI). The only hope is CGL going under.

>>95983111
You actually can wipe out the dragons in one of the endings in Dragonfall. It, uh... it doesn't work out that great for humanity.

>>95954527
Nah. Dragonfall > 2077 = Hong Kong >> Returns

>>95995441
Returns was based and the reprisal of 3 A.M. on a summer night AKA Morgue was that perfect nostalgia Kino, also fuck bug Totems.
I WILL NOT EAT ZE MAGICAL BUGS.

>>95975784
just fill out your char sheet with random numbers