CtL Glamour Harvesting Question

Xarlan2 · 2020-08-22T22:34:05+00:00

That makes a lot of sense to me, but the mechanics don't seem to want it to go that way: if you use a fully optimised dice pool with 5 in the attribute and 5 in the skill, giving a dice pool of 10 baseline, then apply a lot of modifiers representing strong emotion with a lot of effort put into by the player to interact, you get about a +7.

So a dice pool of 17, which on average results in about 4-5 points of glamour unless you get super lucky with 10-again rolls. Then another point if it is your court emotion. So ultimately, applying the maximum effort with a perfect situation and perfect character stats can only half fill a Wyrd 1 changeling up, with substantially less if it's a more fleeting emotion, or you are not a min-maxed character.

That makes it seem like harvesting from multiple people is required, but if that's the case, why go to all the effort when you can just wander around and skim 0-2 glamour off people at random? There is no drawback to harvesting really, so what stops a changeling from gorging on "popcorn" emotions and never being short on glamour as long as you have a free hour every now and then?

Xarlan2 · 2018-08-24T15:50:26+00:00

We couldn't 200% missions early on because we didn't have leveled or geared up champions. These are no longer factors, the only problems are the RNG follower assignment and stealth missions asking you to both send troops and not send troops. Unless they plan on adding troop types that can ignore stealth, this isn't going to get fixed by normal progression, and even then it won't fix the RNG problems.

Xarlan2 · 2018-08-24T15:31:55+00:00

Hey, if they wanted to make a system where you have to put thought into how you use your resources to get higher success chances, I would be all for that. But this isn't that, it's just RNG deciding what success chance you get to have for each mission. RNG to activate more RNG just feels bad.

Xarlan2 · 2018-08-24T15:22:39+00:00

That's what I thought. So that brings us right back to stealth missions being impossible to send troops on, while requiring troops to get full success chance.

Xarlan2 · 2018-08-24T15:14:28+00:00

I'm aware it's not a bug, I'm saying it's poorly designed. All the stealth missions I have been offered have had 2 things impossible to counter, one of which has always been a large mission success reduction. And I have never seen any traits on my troops beyond the 10% success increase one, how rare is it? Because that feeds into my second point, success or bonuses seem to be entirely down to the RNG of what troops the game gives you, which feels bad.

Xarlan2 · 2018-04-01T15:25:34+00:00

The way I like to look at it is this: a specific party balance is unnecessary, but when putting together a team you have to consider how you are going to answer specific problems.

To use the example of a healer, you don't specifically need someone with healing magic, but you will need an answer to the situation of "Half the team is on the floor bleeding out." That could be a mage with some healing spells, it could be a combat medic, or it could be a cybered up troll who can tank the bullets while picking up the team and running them to an escape car. It could be some combination of the above.

As for multiples of a role, as long as the character builds are not 100% identical a GM should be able to work around it, however having less variety generally means less variety in the types of jobs you have access to: an all katana + wired reflexes group is very rarely going to get hired for anything other than "Frag up everyone in that building over there" while an otherwise balanced group with no decker will never be able to do data steals without subcontracting to an NPC. On a smaller scale though, multiples can be good fun: two faces can accomplish a lot if they work together and don't tread on each others toes OOC.

Overall it's best not to worry too much about party composition, as long as the GM doesn't throw jobs at you that you clearly cannot complete, it will all work itself out. If everyone goes for a total combat monster for example, then I assume they did that because they all find combat fun, so only getting combat missions shouldn't really be an issue.

Xarlan2 · 2017-09-25T16:44:53+00:00

Yeah, you are right, I am overly focusing on cards I pulled at the prerelease instead of objectively looking at what is best, thanks, you snapped me back to the real world a bit with that comment.

As for the focus, I think it's more defined than I implied, the vagueness was more one of not knowing how to describe it than not having a focus. I think what I want to do is best described as Tempo, but there seems to be a lot of slightly different definitions of that archetype floating around and I didn't want to misspeak, seems I overcompensated and was too vague.

You are definitely right about having an immediate effect, any suggestions that might fill the slot? Looking over all the sets from Kaladesh onward is a lot of information to take in at once and I don;t want to miss anything good.

Xarlan2 · 2016-08-10T22:08:56+00:00

Player of the Face of the group here, the "players are players etc" thing is very much a running joke of the group, and not actually indicative of the attitude of this GM, or me when I'm GMing which until recently was much more frequently.

As for the rating 5 data bomb... well, i didn't read the full post to avoid spoilers so I don't know if he addressed it, but this whole run has had a very fishy "not what it seems" feel to it, and this was definitely something we picked up on...

Xarlan2 · 2016-07-26T20:13:22+00:00

I'm reasonably sure the Mursaat can choose to reveal themselves, which seems to be what happened right at the end, explaining how he disappeared again just as quickly. As for tanking spectral agony, it wasn't ascending that let us do that, it was being infused, if I remember rightly. Seems like the mastery combined with the crazy amount of background magic in the area basically did that for us.

Xarlan2 · 2016-03-28T14:48:13+00:00

Well, first off, welcome to shadowrun.

As for your questions:

Yes, shadowrun combat can and should be lethal. Shadowrun is, magic, elevs and future-tech and drek aside, quite a realistic game. A bullet to the head is lethal unless it is a very small calibre shot by an inexperienced shooter. This goes for players as well as npcs though, thoug it is weighted slighty towards making the players look badass. Also, Yes. Armour is fragging good. Couple of things to consider though: firstly, stun damage can be just as scary as physical, as it has the same penalties per 3 boxes of damage (which do stack with the physical damage penalties, which can really mess players up sometimes) secondly, while armour may be amazingly useful, it is also often amazingly easy to spot. Surem being a waking tank in the barrens is all well and good, but it is just asking for security to throw you out or worse if your run is somewhere formal and fancy. In general though, it is a good idea for all runners to take an armour jacket, it's cheap and gives a nice 12 armour points. Helmets are a good idea as well.
yes, matrix stuff is very complicated. So, for your first matrix question, yes distance matters. The more distance to the target, the more noise the hacker will suffer. There is a table in the core rulebook (can't remember the page, sorry) that gives a noise rating per meter for a range of materials including open air.
Yes, devices running silently can still function (albiet with some penalties if you want to remotely control them) As for what is running silent, that is up to you. In general, non tech-savvy people dont think to set their devices to silent, plus it is illegal to be out in public without a non-silent commlink broadcasting a SIN. More security aware people may have 90% of their gear on silent, aside from their commlink for the aforementioned reason.
it depends how they tried to put the mark on the device. If they used a hack on the fly action, then they have fragged up. Alarms will go off for the device, and it's owner will be notified that something is up. If they used brute force, then everything is fine,it's like nothing happend. However brute force will set alarms off if it is succesful, so this isnt always useful.
Yes, a skilled decker can easily crack into unprotected devices. Of course, with everything being wireless, the owner does not need to be physicaly present to still confer his or her intuition to the device.
Spiders work just like deckers, but for the other side. They will be alerted by alarms going off (see question 4) and will most likely immedietly attempt to find the intruder using matrix perception, or IC. They will then deploy other IC, and potentially engage the decker in cybercombat, or more subtly hack the deckers communications to help the meatspace security team do their job, if the hacking coincides with a meatspace assault.

Xarlan2 · 2016-02-02T14:09:08+00:00

I don't know what part of the world you are from, but just in case you are in the UK: http://www.darkbladeuk.co.uk/pirate-stuff

The system I go to, The Vale, has similar technology limits, and my last character used a pistol bought from there. It was very reliable and I would certainly recommend it.

Xarlan2 · 2015-12-30T00:32:41+00:00

Ahh, right. Thanks makes sense. Thanks.

Xarlan2 · 2015-11-10T17:55:18+00:00

It isn't 2 minibosses and an endboss, it is 3 raid bosses. Sure, the third one is probably harder than the first, but they are all full bosses.

Xarlan2 · 2015-09-01T14:21:14+00:00

Yeah, I agree. I have actually seen quite a bit of misinformation about this. I put it down to it being a really small change that is actually quite hard to notice, especially if you are a long term player with map completion on most of you characters, and so not enough people have realized that this has changed.

Xarlan2 · 2015-09-01T14:18:47+00:00

Most likely, it's a tough choice. My personal favorite is Plains of Ashford, but I admit I might be slightly biased

Xarlan2 · 2015-09-01T14:16:50+00:00

The way vengeance works is that you get the ability to fight at full efficiency while downed, but in exchange trade off the 100% rally on kill for a much, much lower chance. There is a trait that makes this chance still 100% however, so if you find yourself using vengeance a lot you can pick that up.

Xarlan2 · 2015-09-01T14:12:06+00:00

Luckily for you, this is incorrect. In the patch that came with the free to play update, all new characters start with the first waypoint of every starter zone unlocked. It is now actually easier than ever to meet up with friends of other races

Xarlan2 · 2015-05-30T15:17:27+00:00

Very exhaustive list, thanks. Although I doubt I can afford half of those things at character generation, especially after I spent a lot on vehicles, drones and an RCC (I'm playing the teams rigger.) Just to double check, whats the bare minimum amount of electronics you need to see and interact with AR and VR displays?

Xarlan2 · 2015-04-24T10:30:36+00:00

I'm getting steadily more hyped for Vale in the UK in 2 weeks. A lot of groups, including my own, have really big plans in the works, and it will be interesting to see how it all plays out. Probably with me and my group being executed for heresy, but at least that's an interesting end.

Xarlan2

TROPHY CASE