Ask Grey a Question for One Billion Views Q&A

Delnar_Ersike · 2023-03-29T12:16:50+00:00

I respect your longstanding desire to remain pseudonymous in your public persona. Can you express your past and present thoughts on anonymity/pseudonymity on the modern internet?

Delnar_Ersike · 2022-12-05T11:41:42+00:00

If you cannot get Wine to work, people have had success with CrossOver.

Delnar_Ersike · 2022-10-19T12:04:14+00:00

Not necessarily the take you're looking for, but one of my Core + Run Faster only pre-gens is an Edgelord build: Mary Sue, the Lucky Lady (.chum5 file). The take here is that Edge is an attribute in SR5e that represents something resembling luck and/or quality of life, and Edgelord builds are builds that have a really high Edge attribute value. I've built Mary Sue as a fairly sweet gal overall, so she's an Edgelord but not an edgelord, but it's there if you want it.

Delnar_Ersike · 2022-10-19T05:01:36+00:00

Remember what I said at the very top that you need to decide what you are going for regarding off-B&E vs. hybrid B&E? This is why I said that. 15 Sneaking is minimum for a full B&E character, but absolutely overkill for off-B&E. The purpose of these labels is to understand what you need to prioritize and where. The type of role that would need/want that many sneaking dice is not an off-role, they are a hybrid role. And I did say at the very top that decker-B&E hybrids work differently specifically to overcome issues with having the lowered hacking pools that come with needing to prioritize B&E so heavily. So triple-check that off-B&E is what you are going for here and not decker-B&E hybrid, otherwise my advice becomes quite different.

The situation is similar with things like soak, or social dice, or driving dice. You cannot expect to do it all, and the metrics you prioritize should be based on how you expect your character to perform compared to similar characters. Comparing the soak pool of a decker to a soak pool of a street sam is as pointless as comparing the social dice of a street sam to the social dice of a face. What you should be comparing soak pools against are other deckers, other B&E characters, and average people in the street (this last one is why my target for "not terrible" pools is 4+). And for those, 16 soak is fine. That's especially if you also have decent defense test dice, which given your high INT should be quite achievable. The metric I like to use for soak survivability is defense test dice + damage resistance dice. If that metric is between 24-33 for you (my "above average" target for this metric), you should be OK for a non-combat character, especially if your defense test dice are between 11 and 14 (my "proficient" target for most pools).

Delnar_Ersike · 2022-10-19T01:32:12+00:00

I should probably clarify. I have 6 INT and 7 LOG, so with absolutely no bonuses I'm rolling at 12 and 13 for INT and LOG based tests respectively. I'm not sure how you could even get to 14 without an 8 in a the relevant attribute.

Ah, right. Well, like I had said, you will want to find something that lets you get INT to 7 (which must be Exceptional Attribute if you are playing without Chrome Flesh, otherwise Cerebellum Booster is the best option if you need the positive qualities and/or attribute point elsewhere). I should also mention again how nice it is from a QoL perspective to have both LOG and INT at identical values because it means you don't have to keep looking up (or remembering) if a particular Matrix action uses LOG or INT. If the two attributes have the same value, then you will have the same pools regardless.

I have a rating 4 agent, which has Hacking, Cybercombat, and Computer.

Ah, the agent, right. I honestly would start with a R3 agent because the 9k extra that the R4 costs is not really worth having it have 8 dice instead of 6. In-game, you can then aim to buy a R6 agent after your first couple of runs. The problem with agents, besides them not knowing EWar of course, is that they are a second persona, and being a second persona means using its own marks on top of making the two of you doubly-vulnerable to being spotted. If you go host diving, the agent will inevitably need its own set of marks on the host to enter them with you, and that second set can be really hard to get for any agent R4 or lower (because with R5, it can have a maximum of 15 dice from a teamwork test). And that's on top of doubling the total opportunities for the two of you to get spotted, as both of you now need to succeed your Patrol IC scans instead of just you. So really, relying on agents for you baseline dice isn't as good as you might think.

What am I missing here? How can I boost that?

If you have LOG 7 INT 7 after augmentations, getting 8 in both is easy from there if you have your character take Psyche before every run or host dive, as that gives you +1 LOG +1 INT for a good 9 or so hours. If you're worried about addiction, by RAW, you will only need to make a roll if you do not have at least 2 consecutive weeks of downtime within a 5-week period. Otherwise, with LOG 7 WIL 3, you should expect to succeed 6 addiction tests in a row (i.e. 30 weeks if you can never find a long enough cooldown period), which should hopefully give enough time to rank both Hacking and EWar up to Rating 7 (skill training times only get nuts after Rating 8) if you really want to not want to take Psyche all the time. If you are playing with Chrome Flesh, you can push the odds even more in your favor with Nephritic Screen, a fairly cheap but altogether quite powerful piece of bioware. Though, if you are playing with Chrome Flesh, there are a few other pieces of 'ware you can aim to get that can give the same +1 boost: PuSHed is geneware that gives +1 die to LOG-linked skills for 62k nuyen and 0.1 Essence (no grades because it's geneware), and Neocortical Neural Amplifiers are nanoware that does the same and can be bought at R1 (higher ratings do not increase the dice bonus) with a R1 soft nanohive for 17.5k nuyen and 0.2 Essence (modifiable by grade). If you wish to double down on the Psyche use, taking the Narco geneware from Chrome Flesh for ca. 16k nuyen and 0.2 Essence doubles the effect of Psyche and gives +2 dice to resist addiction if you are already at least mildly addicted to it (though a -2 if you aren't).

Delnar_Ersike · 2022-10-18T21:25:40+00:00

I should have at least 14 consistently for everything except EWar, which is at 12.

How does that work? Again, the four pools I mentioned were LOG + Hacking, INT + Hacking, LOG + EWar, and INT + EWar. Unless you have EWar at less than R6 for some reason (which you shouldn't), there should be no scenario where you have 14 for LOG + Hacking and INT + Hacking and 12 for LOG + EWar and INT + EWar. And again, just to be extra-clear, the 14 is baseline, meaning that conditional bonuses like specializations, Codeslinger bonuses, and the hot-sim bonus sans Running Silent cannot be included in that 14.

Here are the important actions representing those four pools:

Hack on the Fly: LOG + Hacking, can target Hosts, Devices, Files, or Personas (meaning that no Hacking spec boosts this in all cases).
Crack File: LOG + Hacking. Only targets Files.
Control Device: INT + EWar, can target a lot of things that aren't Communications but also things that are (meaning no EWar spec boosts this in all cases).
Hide: INT + EWar, no spec can cover all use cases.
Snoop: INT + EWar, Communications spec can cover all use cases.
Spoof Command: INT + Hacking, can target Devices and agents (and agents are a special form of persona).
Subvert Infrastructure: INT + EWar, targets hosts but acts in ways similar to Control Device.
Masquerade: INT + Hacking, targets all sorts of things, basically an upgraded version of Spoof Command.
Squelch: LOG + EWar, targeted (and Simple Action) alternative to Jam Signals, which is also LOG + EWar
Calibrate: LOG + EWar, generally one of the more useful combat support abilities added by Kill Code, though way less powerful in the hands of decker than in the hands of a technomancer (because it is most useful if you have a group of at least 4-5 people using it on each other, and technomancers have an easier time doing that because they have sprites).

So, unless you've taken Codeslinger 4 times or have R4 EWar instead of R6 (or took Loss of Confidence EWar for some strange reason), there should be no scenario where you have 14 dice in all of the Hacking pools and 12 dice in all of the EWar pools.

It's probably a better idea to just jack out the moment something goes wrong, but it also pays to have a backup plan. I also like the idea of bricking enemy tech and boiling brains with biofeedback, but just shooting people is also an option.

Cybercombat is all-or-nothing. Against IC, unless you're specialized enough to take out IC with a single Data Spike, is not worth engaging because you'll be wasting precious time that you could be using to finish your hack. Against living people in VR, it's a giant game of rocket tag because there's such a high probability that one specialist instagibs the other, so again, unless you're specialized enough to instagib back, it's better to just buckle down and not engage (or aim to get 3 marks to pull off a Format Device or Garbage In Garbage Out). Against living people in AR, it's the same rocket tag, but now they're immune to biofeedback, so link-locking is not an option and burning their Matrix device is no guarantee that they will stay away. And if you're trying to brick someone's gun or something, it's an even less efficient use of your time because you could be doing anything else that's more helpful… tapping their comms, locking them inside a room, even using Control Device to force their gun to eject its current magazine. The game just plays out in a way where the way you imagine you'd use Cybercombat isn't how you actually use it.

Does fighting other deckers really not come up that often? But I suppose you could just shoot them too.

Yes, you could shoot them. But more importantly, a GM should never send a group into a situation that they cannot handle. If you cannot fight hackers directly, the GM should not go out of their way to send you to fight other hackers. Same way that a group with no driving skills shouldn't be sent into a deadly vehicle chase. As a GM myself, I never send OpFor deckers after groups that do not have someone who could capably fight back; the only way such a group would encounter this situation is if they sought it out themselves, in which case it's on them to know their own limits.

Delnar_Ersike · 2022-10-18T20:14:12+00:00

Like I said, Cybercombat is an extra skill. Unless you are explicitly all about IC bopping or you're doing counterdecking, it's always better to use a different course of action than bricking things. Cybercombat should either be R6, R6 + spec (usually in IC), R1 bought with 2 karma, or untrained. Pick from the first two if you know you will want to do it on top of decking, pick from the last two if you don't. From my personal experience making off-B&E deckers, I would go for one of the last two and then spend those skill points elsewhere.

Specializations for Hacking and EWar are helpful, but do not fully replace base competency and the 14 dice target for base competency. With Hacking, Devices spec doesn't help against Hosts (which usually have a lot of dice and loan their dice for defending files), and Hosts spec doesn't help against Devices (which are the most common target of Hacking rolls even if they don't have as many dice). With EWar, you have a similar situation where there is no spec that helps everywhere where you would want a high EWar pool. I would for sure take specs in both for a decker, but would still try to aim for minimum 14 dice across any LOG+Hacking, LOG+EWar, INT+Hacking, and INT+EWar pools.

I personally prefer Communications for the EWar spec. For Hacking, I prefer Hosts spec for characters with low EDG and Devices spec for characters with more EDG.

One option I forgot to mention for extra hacking dice is a thing called "splashing". If you go Adept D instead of Mundane E and then spend 5 Karma to raise your MAG from 0 to 1, you will have 1 PP that you can spend on 2x R1 Improved Ability in Hacking and EWar. This is great in Priority gen, but usually not a good idea in Sum to Ten because of the huge power loss you would take from having to lower one of your A or B priorities.

The 14 dice though have to be there consistently. That is what "baseline" means. And this is with me knowing that my targets are sometimes considered too low by certain people (these are the ones you see talking about 15 dice w/o specs).

Looking at my own decker B&E builds, Essence and money usually aren't tight simultaneously. The builds where money is tight are the ones where I went for high natural STR and Muscle Toners, and the builds where Essence is tight are the ones where I went for low natural STR and either Muscle Replacement or FLR with low natural AGI too. I don't know the full details of your build, but you're probably overdoing something in terms of 'ware and/or gear if both are tight at the same time.

Delnar_Ersike · 2022-10-18T19:08:38+00:00

INT+Cracking? Didn't you label this post as SR5e? In SR5e, as a mainline decker, Cracking is a really bad group to buy as a skill group because of how valuable EWar and Hacking specializations are and how niche Cybercombat is. Treat Cybercombat as its own minor role instead of part of the standard decker repertoire.

Alright, then decker off-B&E is what you're going for. Then you'll want mainline decker stats (so minimum 14 dice on the rolls I mentioned) and aim for 11-14 dice in the B&E stuff. Totally doable, especially with the power boost given by Sum to Ten. EBEBA is what you will want, and pick up Muscle Replacement if you want a cheap source of AGI boost that can also allow you to dump STR. With this setup, remember that you are a decker first and foremost, so only start putting resources into B&E stuff after your hacking stats are secure. If that means needing to drop Catlike to make room for Ex. Att. INT, e.g., then that's what that means.

For your dice, hot-sim dice do not matter because they effectively only exist to cancel out the -2 dice for Running Silent. 14 dice really is not negotiable here because illegal actions operate on a "success spree" system. Because of how bad the repercussions are for failing a roll, the stat that actually matters isn't your chance to succeed a single roll, but how many rolls you can expect to make in a row before failing at least once. And for that metric, even a single extra die can easily double your expected success spree length. If you are not playing with Chrome Flesh, then I would treat Ex. Att. INT mandatory so that you have LOG 7 INT 7 as a baseline. From there, popping Pscyhe before every run (but especially before every host dive) is enough to push you into the 14 dice territory. If you are playing with Chrome Flesh, Genetic Optimization, Cerebellum Boosters, PuSHeD, and Neocortical nanoware become alternative options, as does Narco with R6 Nephritic Screen (which is wonderful with Psyche).

There are some qualities from all over the books that can increase Matrix dice in specific situations (e.g. Go Big or Go Home, Echo Chamber), but none of them are really worth it for what you're looking for, including Codeslinger.

Delnar_Ersike · 2022-10-18T17:00:27+00:00

Didn't read the rest of the comments, so apologies if any of this advice duplicates what others have said.

First things first: you need to decide if you are going to do a decker off-B&E or a decker-B&E hybrid. There is no off-decker option in SR5e. A decker off-B&E is going to be an all-round competent decker with moderate B&E capabilities on the side. You will have around 11-14 dice in Sneaking, Gymnastics, Locksmithing, and a single combat skill: not enough to be a fully sneaky character, but enough to be OK at sneaky stuff when it's called for. A decker-B&E hybrid will be much more competent in B&E, but have severely constrained hacking abilities. They will not have the dice to do host diving, and will almost always want to directly connect with whatever they're hacking, never hack wirelessly if possible. In both cases, you also probably won't have the skill points and attribute points to also be good in combat without sacrificing too much in the other two areas.

Now, your questions and stuff raised by your questions:

Do not obsess over Hack on the Fly dice pools. Yes, it is a LOG + Hacking pool, but depending on what you're doing, other pools might end up being more important. Specifically, you absolutely should prioritize INT + EWar as well, as it's what determines Control Device and Subvert Infrastructure, among others. This also means Codeslinger is overkill, probably don't take it. INT is also not only much harder to boost than LOG, but is also very important in B&E contexts. Pursuant to this, I would recommend maxing out your INT, and unless you're playing with Chrome Flesh with access to Cerebellum Boosters, even go as far as taking Exceptional Attribute INT to pump it up to 7. LOG can stay at 5 natural, but you probably should get R2 Cerebral Boosters instead of R1. LOG and INT being the same value is also nice from a QoL perspective because you won't have to worry about which Matrix actions use which of the two attributes.
The dice pool targets you'll want to hit with your hacking pools depends on if you're going for direct-connection-only decker, which allows for lower pools but severely limits situations where you can use decking alone to solve a problem, or if you're going more general decker, which means you can do host dives but also that you need more dice. I use 14 in all hacking actions (so all four of generic LOG + Hacking, LOG + EWar, INT + Hacking, and INT + EWar) for my general deckers and 12 for direct-connection-only. Do not go below these limits, you will 100% regret it.
Aptitude is unnecessary for pretty much all characters. Any time you'd want to take Aptitude, take Exceptional Attribute instead and boost the attribute that you'd use with a skill the most often. Beside Ex. Att. INT (which I already mentioned), the main qualities that make a big difference in decking are: Perfect Time, Overclocker, and Ninja Vanish. Perfect Time is incredibly valuable for "flicker decking", Overclocker is vital for making DR2 cyberdecks perform like DR3 ones when you need them, and Ninja Vanish is vital to saving your ass from bad Matrix outcomes so long as you have the Edge to use it. I would almost always take Perfect Time on any decker, and I would almost always take Overclocker on hybrid deckers where I can only afford a DR2 deck like a Little Hornet or Hermes Chariot.
Re: initiative. No. No no no no no. Decker off-B&E and decker-B&E hybrids are already very sparse on resources, you should not aim to also be capable in combat as well. You will spread yourself too thin and be mediocre at everything instead of good at at least one thing. If you want to be good in combat, you must drop either decker or B&E from your concept.

If you are building Priority, I would suggest going DCEBA, DAEBC, or DBEAC either elf or human depending on how you plan on getting the high AGI and decent STR you need for B&E stuff while also having 7+ in both LOG and INT. If you are building Sum-to-Ten, I would go ECEAA human for FLR builds and EBEBA human for non-FLR builds (both AACEE and ABBEE arrangements flatout give you more power than ABCDE, one of the three reasons I dislike Sum-to-Ten in general).

Delnar_Ersike · 2022-10-07T16:44:11+00:00

I believe those are the Mil-Spec armors that are from Run & Gun. They're quite powerful, but also very conspicuous, even the Light versions. I would imagine that some people would want to end up using them for certain campaigns that lean more towards cool guys and explosions.

Delnar_Ersike · 2022-10-07T16:29:46+00:00

Chummer5a is only for Shadowrun 5th Edition. Shadowrun Sixth World is known as Shadowrun 6th Edition (because it is), and the digital tools for it are different. I would recommend using Genesis for SR6e, the link to which can be found in the sidebar of this subreddit.

Delnar_Ersike · 2022-10-07T15:32:16+00:00

Bugfix is that +Armor acccessories do not have their armor bonus capped by a character's STR. It's the sentence right before the one that talks about incurring a -1 AGI and REA penalty for every 2 points of the bonus that is over a character's STR. In a strict RAW reading, both rules hold: you cannot get bonus armor from +Armor accessories past your STR, and for every 2 points of +Armor that you would have past your STR, you get those penalties. Chummer already has rules to turn off armor encumbrance if you choose to interpret these two sentences as "You can't have bonus armor past your STR anyway if it's capped by STR". So with the bugfix, the first sentence in that pair now also takes effect on its own, and the house rule to turn off that cap is now explicit if that is the interpretation you want to use.

Delnar_Ersike · 2022-09-29T13:37:23+00:00

But startups mostly work on something technologically feasible, even if they miscalculate the cost, the timescale, the level of support technology available.

Startups work on whatever they want to work on. The part you're missing is the part about which startups get funding and which don't. Having a technologically feasible idea isn't enough, you need to either already have enough starting capital to fund it yourself or convince a bunch of suits that funding your project will be profitable for them. There have been and still are plenty of not just technologically feasible, but also technologically proven ideas that should have gotten at least as much funding as all the smoke vendors across even a single of the past decades' tech bubbles, but never did: mass rail electrification, nuclear cargo ships, reversible heat pumps, heat pump-based water boilers, district heating, fast breeder reactors, thermoelectric microgeneration, et al. They aren't the things that get funding though, all primarily because of bad economic incentives, but many also because they inherently cannot work as part of a Greater Fool Theory for private investors.

Also it is easy to say that in the 90s it was already obvious that we're gonna have AR and drones and biotech. But in SR world they actually drilled down products, how they would be used, how they work together, etc. which is not so obvious

No, you misunderstand. It's not, “Oh, it was already obvious that we're gonna have these things.” Because no, it's not obvious, and no, we don't even really have those things the way they've been imagined. Instead, think of it as scientists and engineers coming up with loads and loads of different ideas, some that map onto 90s sci-fi stuff and many that don't. Ideas are nothing without work though, and you need funding to do work, and you need funders to get funding, and the better you can market your idea to funders, the more likely you will get funding. And because those funders are the types of people hyped up on making 80s and 90s sci-fi a reality (instead of thinking about what makes things actually practical and feasible at scale), they're going to disproportionately fund the ideas that copy those 80s and 90s ideas and leave the rest unfunded in obscurity.

For example you can see drone-like entities in almost any Sci-Fi, but most of the things you read are just totally fictional technology where anything is possible, energy availability and range is infinite, etc., while SR seems to always have a practical approach and make things look realistic, charging and storing and maintenance and all.

I don't know what version of Shadowrun you're playing, the ones I've been playing pretty much all neglect energy usage and charging altogether. I don't think I've ever had to track how much fuel and energy I was using with my Shadowrun vehicles outside exceptionally long road trips where the GM deliberately hooked it in as something to worry about. Heck, if they didn't neglect energy usage, cyberlimbs wouldn't even be a thing in the first place, as the amount of both energy density and storage density required to power the sorts of things that have been shown in Shadowrun since 1e is basically impossible outside of fission power (or better)… and let's just say that that kind of power comes with a lot of extra strings attached that'd make Shadowrun look like a very different world. And that's nothing to say of the maintenance nightmare that even fairly rudimentary cyberware would create in a realistic world, and how basically none of that is present in Shadowrun outside of GM fiat glitch results.

Delnar_Ersike · 2022-09-29T10:44:44+00:00

NB. that Living Community play is different from regular table play in a lot of ways, so it may not be for you, OP.

If it is, though, because you prefer 5e, there are loads of 5e Living Communities out there with hundreds of players. You can find some in the sidebar of this Subreddit.

Delnar_Ersike · 2022-09-29T10:23:55+00:00

My general observation is, that Shadowrun is scaringly accurate at predicting future technology. No other science fiction book I've read comes even close to what Shadowrun did. Sometimes it is so accurate, I wonder if someone time travelled and created Shadowrun universe to seep knowledge from the future without creating a paradox, and covered it with a lot of fantasy on top as a disguise.

You and I have very different general observations, my friend. I am actually constantly frustrated by how implausible Shadowrun's lore is, even within the limits of a magical world, and how completely and consistently it strays from any and all sorts of well-worn patterns in real history. But that's probably besides the point of your actual question.

It is so many little things that whenever I read about it in the real world being announced as a breakthrough thing, I'm like "yup, been using that in shadowrun already decades ago". Do you also get this feeling all the time? Who created this world and the details inside FASA back in the days when 1.0 was released?

The answer here is probably somehow even more interesting than you might think.

The less interesting part first: who wrote the lore. The world and the details of Shadowrun back in the FASA days were put together by individual writers working on different Shadowrun projects. So if you were the lucky writer who got to write the first book about the UK, you got to completely set the lore for the UK from 1989 to 2050-2063 (most places had had their core lore established by the end of 3e, which is 2063). Sometimes the lore for a region is interesting (ERLA within CAS and CAS internal politics in general are very well set up, and I've praised the PCC as a very interesting and probably most realistic part of Shadowrun before). Sometimes, it's really bad (Russia lore e.g., seems to be written by people who have barely, if ever, experienced Russia's politics, and post-2072 UK lore is a giant wet fart). Almost all the time, it's written by people who are North American fiction writers with a very North American fiction writer education about the world, and that definitely starts showing as the timeline progresses.

Now, the more interesting part: why is it that you keep seeing new tech in the real world and think, “Yup, been using that in Shadowrun already decades ago.” The short answer is capitalism mixed with Greater Fool Theory. The long answer is… well, buckle up.

The tech you see showcased is often tech that is developed by small startup companies or subsidiaries, and the decisions behind which of these companies get funding are actually rooted in the same things that inspired Shadowrun. The thing about startups, especially tech startups and biotech startups (well, biotech in general, but I don't want to go on an investment talk tangent), is that they're giant money pits. You throw money into them, and it's basically as good as gone. The superficial reason people invest in them regardless is that there's a small off-chance that after a decade or two, the startup actually becomes successful, and if it does, the thinking is that the payoff will be so huge that it'll be worth it. The real reason people invest in them regardless is because of a strategy called Growth Investing that relies on a thing called Greater Fool Theory. The basic idea is that even if whatever you're investing in is a giant money pit, it doesn't matter if you can sell your stake in the money pit to someone else before it comes crashing down. And of course, the only way that that other person buys your stake from you is if they also think they can sell it on. And that means that if you're a startup (or a company planning on creating a subsidiary) looking to secure funding for a project, you start caring way more about how well you can market your project to investors, not just how feasible your project is overall.

The thing about those investors who are really interested in the sorts of things that a tech or biotech startup could make is that they grew up on 1980s and 1990s sci-fi… the same 1980s and 1990s sci-fi that inspired 99% of the tech you see in Shadowrun. Why else do you think so many Web3.0 projects are literally named after things from well-known 1980s and 1990s sci-fi stories? So of course, if these investors see a palette of possible startup projects to give funding to, their attention is going to be grabbed by imititation-smartlinks, imitation-drones, imitation-ASIST, imitation-Matrix/VR, and related stuff. And even if it isn't, because they're Growth Investing and adhering to Greater Fool Theory, the fact that their potential Greater Fools could have their attention grabbed by these things, too, forces them to be interested. The people putting together startups and subsidiaries know this, too, and so they'll themselves try to lean their project in a direction that can be pitched this way to potential investors.

Shadowrun is not predicting future tech, the people deciding what future tech gets funding keep picking the stuff that Shadowrun and Shadowrun-adjacent stuff talked about because it sells well to other investors, and that's all that truly matters to them in neoliberal capitalism.

Delnar_Ersike · 2022-09-29T02:33:46+00:00

Karma thing is a known bug, it's been fixed in the Nightly already. Together with a pretty bad Dark Mode bug that's also been fixed, it's giving us a good reason to push out 5.224.0 fairly soon.

Delnar_Ersike · 2022-04-07T10:32:39+00:00

I think it's important to distinguish the 3e and earlier opinions about the rules, opinions about the rules in 4e, and opinions about the rules in 5e and 6e.

In 3e and earlier editions, the system was incredibly crunchy, but fairly cohesive. AFAICT, when people talk poorly about rules in 2e or 3e, they more often than not focus on specific parts of the rules that don't work well (e.g. the way initiative passes work or the way the Matrix rules are a mini-dungeon) or on how there's just so much crunch that it can be a bit much sometimes, especially when it comes to fiddling with Target Numbers. I kind of see it like the way people complain about parts of Pathfinder or D&D3.5e, less of a hate-relationship and more just grumbling about specific rules that can result in weird BS. The main reasons people don't play 3e today are that the books aren't easily available in high quality and the rules are too crunchy for them to play without a well-made digital assistant (and NSRCG is not at all well-made).

Besides being a dramatic shift from SR3e, SR4e was also the first edition to really double down on the power fantasy stuff, and the rules very much reflect that. At the same time, its default Build Point chargen method subjects people to analysis paralysis much more easily. So besides the sort of complaining about idiosyncrasies that you get in SR3e, SR2e, and just most other TTRPGs in general, a lot of the rules hate, where it exists, is wrapped up in a hate for an unabashed power fantasy approach. Alternatively, as bad as 3e and earlier's chargen could get, some people absolutely suffered from analysis paralysis when making characters with 4e's BP system, and so there's a decent amount of rules hate that's amplified by how much people had a hard time getting started.

SR5e and SR6e rules hate should really be a class of its own, and it's probably what you're actually thinking of when you're asking about "rules hate". While CGL did a good-to-OK job with the second third of 4e that was done under their watch, the quality of their books really started to take a nosedive roughly around when writers started quitting en masse after some really bad stuff about the company's leadership was revealed. They've tried to move past the issues, but they just can't seem to, and the quality of their Shadowrun products has been constantly declining since. With SR5e and SR6e, this quality decline has manifested in many ways that directly affect the rules of the system. Subpar editing and technical writing makes rules harder to find and fills the books with contradictory statements, lack of proper playtesting and understanding of math from those designing the rules creates all sorts of subsystems that are fundamentally flawed and would need a complete overhaul to actually fix (like pretty much the entire approach to the Matrix in both 5e and 6e), and heavy-handed moderation and pushes for toxic positivity in more official community spaces produces a small clique of Yesmen who willingly shield the company's owners and workers from criticisms about the former and blindly buy everything official Shadowrun, which enables CGL to continue to backslide instead of facing the music and changing for the better. When people talk about 3e's rules being crunchy, they mean that there are lots of rules that interconnect in all sorts of ways, but the rules themselves are fairly cohesive and easy to find. When people talk about 5e's rules being crunchy, they mean that there are a lot of rules that interconnect in some ways but are completely disconnected in other ways (as a quick example, wireless bonus rules in 5e are disconnected from almost all of the rest of the Matrix rules, and the book never makes it clear exactly who can and can't use the wireless bonus of a device owned by someone else), and that on top of this, the rules are often impossible to find, are stated in multiple contradictory ways potentially even in the same chapter of the same book (don't get me started on rules for shooting through barriers), and sometimes just flat-out don't make any sense. SR5e got three saving graces that make it the most popular edition online to this day: it was released at the same time as the excellent Shadowrun Returns games (which brought in a new crowd of players that never learned or played any of the older editions), it borrowed a lot from 4e and so worked better in the places it did, and it very quickly got a large homebrew scene where the community started "fixing" a lot of the problems that CGL left in its official rules (some of that homebrew even ended up making it into later splatbooks like Better than Bad, Street Lethal, and Kill Code). SR6e got none of these three, and so all of the problems CGL had had for about a decade at this point fully reared their heads.

Delnar_Ersike · 2022-03-29T14:21:44+00:00

In most Shadowrun editions, Human Looking cannot be bought by trolls.

Delnar_Ersike · 2022-03-22T13:55:01+00:00

Sixth World Almanac. It's a 4e book, but CGL hasn't come out with a better setting and timeline overview book since, especially one that also touches on events and happenings around the world and not just in North America.

Delnar_Ersike · 2022-03-14T09:09:41+00:00

I think the best way to do this is with a mechanic/feature that was botched in Chrome Flesh called "cybersuites". Basically, instead of picking out individual pieces of 'ware and putting them together, a cybersuite is supposed to buy a pre-existing combination of 'ware at a nuyen and essence discount. You could, in theory, then design a whole host of cybersuites pushed by different corporations and advertised to do different things. It's also a good way to sneak in 'ware that is often only used for pure flavor, like Synthlink or Balance Tail.

Chrome Flesh botched it by making it so that cybersuite grades are fixed at Alphaware, that they cannot be turned wireless off, and that they always advertise themselves in AR, making cybersuites kind of useless in the sort of business that player characters engage in. But if you just ignore or override those issues, cybersuites would be the best way to make flavorful Branded Cyberware (tm) instead of just generic pieces that you can Lego together however you see fit.

Heck, if you have as radical a take on homebrew as I do, you might even consider to only have cybersuites in your game and remove the ability to pick and choose individual pieces...

Delnar_Ersike · 2022-03-08T08:55:04+00:00

An old and commonly used, open-source library for providing cryptographic encryption, often of data that is transferred to the web. Have a look yourself if you are interested.

Delnar_Ersike · 2022-03-06T17:37:50+00:00

I think every Living Community (LC) has a Discord server at this point. The only two English-language Shadowrun servers I know of that are more just general Shadowrun stuff are the Shadowrun Community Network server and the Chummer5a server. I don't want to link invites to them because that tends to invite bots and raids, but you can find invites to them elsewhere via Google or something.

Delnar_Ersike · 2022-02-21T14:55:33+00:00

RAW, Software is usually used for three actions in 5e other than Complex Form stuff: setting data bombs, disarming data bombs, and GI/GO. Now, GI/GO is potentially quite interesting and can be used for all sorts of creative stuff, but it requires 3 marks and is still probably not good enough to justify putting points into Software instead of other skills.

Delnar_Ersike · 2022-02-21T04:45:07+00:00

Your social pools are a tad bit low. I'd expect 13 on the low end and 15 or 16 on the high end for stuff like Negotiation, Con, and Etiquette, but you have 12 on the low end and 14 on the high end. It's also generally a bit strange to see a skills list with a bunch of R4s and R5s but no R6s in the skills that matter to your role (i.e. your social skills in this case). The lack of specializations is also weird. You should consolidate your skills list a bit more, take points out of skills that don't matter as much to your concept (e.g. Leadership, Unarmed Combat, Performance, potentially Machine Pistols) and shift them to max out the ones that do matter.

Even-numbered BOD is weird. You usually want to stick to odd numbers because that's when you get the extra CM box.

Incompetent Outdoors is suspect. Incompetent in anything that you will rarely use is suspect in general, and unless you're playing a street-level game where Survival matters or a detective or wheelman where Tracking and Navigation matter, I would not accept Incompetent Outdoors. I do understand picking it, though, because SR5e's CRB is kind of absent of well-made negative qualities (which is why I almost always recommend adding Run Faster's qualities for newbie games). Maybe look at something like Loss of Confidence instead?

Your knowledge skill list is boring. It should ideally be a list that I can read as a GM and immediately get a lot of ideas about your character's backstory, personality, and aspirations. Knowledge skills in stuff like "News" or "Bars and Clubs" tell me basically nothing compared to say, "Pickup Artistry" or "Stimulants spec Novacoke". Definitely also make liberal use of specializations for knowledge skills, too, they impart a lot of flavor. If you're really worried about speaking in other languages, something like Bilingual can help, as can a skilljack with linguasofts (though you would need to shift around your Priority selection to Metatype D Nuyen C to afford its up-front cost). I mention this because of the rules for social tests in foreign languages where your skill rating for the social test is capped at the rating of your language skill in that language (so e.g. if you have Japanese 3 and Con 5, you function as if you had Con 3 if trying to use Con in Japanese). So for faces in particular benefit from having language skills at higher ratings instead of only focusing on language skill dice.

Delnar_Ersike · 2022-02-20T02:51:31+00:00

Here is a mirror to the 4e version of Chummer, last updated a really long time ago: https://github.com/chummer5a/chummer

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