SR 3rd edition: FAQin' hell some rules are dubious!

[melquisedeq]

Chummeros and chummettes, brace yourselves because this might be a long one.

I've been running an SR3 campaign as GM for the last year or so. We've been through the whole of Dreamchipper, the first mission of Harlequin, and just last night trudged through the first few scenes of Queen Euphoria. Fade to black happened as the gang drove away from Pacific Towers with an unconscious Euphoria in tow.
Before this one I ran another SR3 campaign with a different group (the Amazonian mission from Predator and Prey, the same first Harlequin mission, and the group disbanded two thirds into Eye Witness).
All in all, about 3 years' worth of GMing 3rd edition.

In all this time, there still are plenty of frequent situations that I think I run as intended but can't stop finding them terribly confusing or unfair. Mind you, I am known to glaze over incredibly important specks of information, so it could be a case of that... But please help me out with these, by commenting whether my call was correct and why not. Let's kick it off with:

- Situation #1 -
Team's Decker Smoke the elf gets shot in the spine (in a glorious John Woo-esque moment of poetic justice) and goes down at +1 overflow. Rolls for Deadly system shock, 1 success, loses the right arm. Bleeds on the marble floor of the Pacific Towers lobby, likely the classiest bed he's ever had.

Team's mage Jimmy Wong runs up to his prone figure, and casts a force 5 Heal: rolls his Sorcery of 6 +2 spell pool vs a TN of 6 (10 -decker's essence of 5, -1 light stun). Magically (drumroll) nabs 5 successes nonetheless. That's 5 boxes healed, so he brings the elf's total wound level down to Serious +1. The elf still has that permanent arm loss, and will still be unconscious for a while, but is stable and not in need of immediate medical attention.

Jimmy Wong now has Drain to resist. He rolls his Willpower of 5 plus the rest of his Spell Pool for a total of 8 dice against a TN of 2 (half force 5 = 2.5, rounded down = 2). He is resisting Deadly +1, and gets 7 successes. He brings the +1 overflow down to Deadly, then Deadly to Serious, then Serious to Moderate, where it stays.

Jade Brown the kickass ork chick carries an unconscious Euphoria, and Kurt the dwarf rigger carries the unconscious Smoke. Properly loaded into their inconspicuous camper van, they get the frag out of dodge.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Now... Isn't Drain a trivial matter if one keeps casting at force 5 max for a TN 2 drain average?
This was the very first instance the mage suffered proper drain, and in only a couple other occasions did he even suffer any at all, both times Light. Mind you, this is a guy that casts Stunballs left and right, and Improved Invisibility willy-nilly, completely unscathed except for very few instances of actual bad drain rolls.

Another thing, how long does magical healing take to become permanent? Can't find it in the book, but I remember that it wasn't instant, that's why you could spend spell successes to divide the base time.

Just one more, for now... Isn't armour insanely powerful? Our ork chick, playing bodyguard, took her regular armour combo plus cyber for a total 7 ballistic. She shrugged off several Ares Predator caps like they were dodgeballs shot by 10-year-olds, with a body resistance TN of 2 (9-7=2). On the other hand, the elf was pretending to be a studio exec so he only had a lightly armoured tux, ballistic 2, and two quick shots later he was straight up dying. I understand there are plenty of ways to take down an armored character, but it's kind of annoying that the player himself now feels invulnerable to pistol fire, to the point where he often just walks up to people shooting at him, to kick their ass in style.

Last one, I promise... any interesting house rule suggestions for Knockdown tests? Rolling them EVERY SINGLE TIME is too much, for us.

Thanks in advance for any help provided!

[Lord Torath]

Drain can be trivial if you keep your force low. And as your target number for learning a spell is double the desired force, they tend to remain low. If you feel it's too low, you can change the drain base target to F, rather than F/2. You could also change the target to learn the spell to base force, making it more likely that people will learn the higher force versions.

Healing time: Looks like they forgot to include that table in the 3E rulebook. This is the table they used in 1st and 2nd Editions:

Deadly: 20 turns (1 minute)
Serious: 15 turns
Moderate: 10 turns
Light: 5 turns

Any successes they want to not use for healing can instead be used to reduce the time required to sustain the spell.

Regarding Armor: Yes, it can be pretty powerful. But give the next mook a pistol loaded with APDS rounds, or a Taser, and watch that smug smirk fall off your cocky player's face.

Knockdown: I tend to ignore knockdown. I don't think it's deliberate; I just forget it's there.

[comicshorse]

Like Lord Torath said when I was running 3rd I always made spells F because I found F/2 made things too easy for the spellcasters

I had rules for aimed shots so targets could be shot in the head to avoid armour and my P.C.s were initially quite keen. Then I explained the bad guys would be able to do this to and they decided they didn't want to include those rules.

One House rule I stuck with making Physical Adepts enhanced senses count as being 'natural' to give them some advantage over cybered types

[LibraryOgre]

In case of the spellcasting, it looks like they're not having to use it for anything BUT resisting drain. If there's nothing on their case requiring their spell pool, their drain gets a lot easier to deal with.

[melquisedeq]

First off, thanks for all the replies. I appreciate it!

Yeah, I think I'll be using a lot more called shots from now on... And a lot of social obstacles to the use of armour, as well as constant checks to spot it. Otherwise, there's no real reason not to go "full-form-fitting + lined coat" or some such - and there should be, because if Ballistic 7 is supposed to be the norm we might as well write off pistols from the game entirely. Which we already kind of did with Light Pistols, actually. I like street-level opposition to came up from time to time, so Light Pistols sometimes still show up... but no PC ever thought of using them, is afraid of them, or takes them even remotely seriously.

- New question, regarding Drain: when a drain code has a power modifier, does it apply to the force the spell was cast at, and THEN divided by 2, or is it applied to the already divided drain value? Because like I said, our mages goes around force 5 stunballing people like a crazy 2055 mana bomberman, and barely ever got any drain from it.
Is his drain really f6-1=5, 5/2=2.5, 2.5 rounded down =2 ?? Which would still be TN2 for a force 7 Stunball ?? Hardly fair, no?

Because versus average Wilpower values, he can easily afford to cast it at Serious with just his 6 Sorcery dice, realistically counting on one stage-up for complete naptime, and then use Will 6 plus all his Spell Pool 6 to easily get the 6 TN2 successes he needs to clear all drain.
Or, if he's feeling lucky, burn his Spell Pool on the Sorcery test for a Moderate Stunball, easily get the 4 successes to scale it up to Deadly, and blow off the drain with his easy 4 TN2 drain successes on a Willpower 6 roll.

We once tried Drain equals Force like comicshorse suggested, (out of ignorance, not innovation) but one stunball later the mage was floored... So I'm thinking of house-ruling that drain is rounded up instead of down, in order to have base Drain TN3 start at Force 5 instead of 6.
However, in the case of stun spells, with their -1 power modifier, this would keep a force 6 stunball at TN2 drain if it really is the case that the -1 applies to half-force, rather than force.


- Another sitch I'd like to submit: someone has a gun drawn on you and a held action, but you want to turn it into a mexican standoff by drawing a gun before he can act. Or the mexican standoff is already happening, and everyone has held actions against each other, and then one decides to shoot. Does the guy with the held action get an automatic action before yours, no contest, or is there a way to try to win out these moments?

I've been doing an opposed open test, Reaction vs Reaction, highest single roll wins (don't know why, seemed clever at the time), whoever wins acts first (draws favouring the held action guy). But it does seem highly simplistic and if there's an official ruling I'd like to be aware of it.

[LibraryOgre]

- New question, regarding Drain: when a drain code has a power modifier, does it apply to the force the spell was cast at, and THEN divided by 2, or is it applied to the already divided drain value? Because like I said, our mages goes around force 5 stunballing people like a crazy 2055 mana bomberman, and barely ever got any drain from it.
Is his drain really f6-1=5, 5/2=2.5, 2.5 rounded down =2 ?? Which would still be TN2 for a force 7 Stunball ?? Hardly fair, no?

If it's a force 6 spell, with F-1/2 drain, then that's what they cast at, yeah.

- Another sitch I'd like to submit: someone has a gun drawn on you and a held action, but you want to turn it into a mexican standoff by drawing a gun before he can act. Or the mexican standoff is already happening, and everyone has held actions against each other, and then one decides to shoot. Does the guy with the held action get an automatic action before yours, no contest, or is there a way to try to win out these moments?

I've been doing an opposed open test, Reaction vs Reaction, highest single roll wins (don't know why, seemed clever at the time), whoever wins acts first (draws favouring the held action guy). But it does seem highly simplistic and if there's an official ruling I'd like to be aware of it.

He's got the gun drawn and a held action. Unless you can make him unhold the action (distraction of some kind), he's got the drop on you.

[comicshorse]

[QUOTE=melquisedeq;18034038

- Another sitch I'd like to submit: someone has a gun drawn on you and a held action, but you want to turn it into a mexican standoff by drawing a gun before he can act. Or the mexican standoff is already happening, and everyone has held actions against each other, and then one decides to shoot. Does the guy with the held action get an automatic action before yours, no contest, or is there a way to try to win out these moments?
[/QUOTE]

I remember a rule (though I can't remember which book it came from or even if we made it up ourselves). Where if the guy had held an action you made a standard Initiative roll where the guy who held the action gets an automatic +10 to the roll. So it was possible to go first but you had to be lightning fast

[melquisedeq]

Thanks for your help, Mark Hall and comicshorse.

- OK... so in our last session, in one instance the players shouldn't have had the ability to gain the upper hand during an impasse the bad guys forced them into, but the spinal shot should not really have happened either... I guess my crappy GMness is both a boon and a curse. lol
But yes, a significant bonus to the "defender" should enable this rule while still keeping it fair. It would require a huge discrepancy in Reaction, like say a normal bloke had a gun drawn on someone with Wired 3, or tremendous luck / balls on the guy trying it.

- Regarding drain value... sorry to say that I didn't get which one you're confirming as the correct one. Is it (F-1)/2 or F/2-1?

- And yet another question: Smoke the decker lost the use of his right arm. He's stable and already below Deadly because of a superbly rolled Heal spell... Does he still need immediate medical attention? Or is he good to go rest at the hideout?
If so, he'll be missing the rest of the adventure because they're supposed to extract and keep Euphoria captive for a few days.

If not, what sort of penalty should he be looking at, for not being able to use his main arm until he gets it replaced?
I'm assuming +2, like it is for an off-hand firearm, but what about decking, which has the whole retrofuture physical keyboard aspect of it besides the DNI environment?
And is he supposed to lose Essence now, that he won't then have to pay for when he gets the replacement? Or only when he does get the replacement?

As for the replacement, he sure as hell won't be able to afford one for a while - I might have to get him in touch with Tamanous (wink) - but what are his options then? I mean, he does have the arm, but the shot he took to the spine severed the connection between that arm and the central nervous system (at least that's what I'm claiming). I want to play it as mostly dead weight for now, and would also like for there to be some essence loss or bio index cost or something when he gets, respectively, a replacement cyber or bio arm.
Any suggestions regarding this matter?

[LibraryOgre]

- Regarding drain value... sorry to say that I didn't get which one you're confirming as the correct one. Is it (F-1)/2 or F/2-1?

(F-1)/2 is correct.

- And yet another question: Smoke the decker lost the use of his right arm. He's stable and already below Deadly because of a superbly rolled Heal spell... Does he still need immediate medical attention? Or is he good to go rest at the hideout?
If so, he'll be missing the rest of the adventure because they're supposed to extract and keep Euphoria captive for a few days.

He doesn't need more medical attention; he's below Deadly. Now, mind you, medical aid will HELP, 'cause he's still messed up, but he can survive for now.

If not, what sort of penalty should he be looking at, for not being able to use his main arm until he gets it replaced?
I'm assuming +2, like it is for an off-hand firearm, but what about decking, which has the whole retrofuture physical keyboard aspect of it besides the DNI environment?
And is he supposed to lose Essence now, that he won't then have to pay for when he gets the replacement? Or only when he does get the replacement?

He's still at Severe? He's going to have to deal with that, no matter what. I say +2 isn't bad for his off-hand modifier. However, his decking doesn't suffer that... DNI is the way to go.

Off the top of my head, he doesn't lose Essence now, but you might need to double check the rules for Deadly Wounds. Otherwise, he doesn't lose it until he gets the replacement (and there are replacements that don't cost essence).

As for the replacement, he sure as hell won't be able to afford one for a while - I might have to get him in touch with Tamanous (wink) - but what are his options then? I mean, he does have the arm, but the shot he took to the spine severed the connection between that arm and the central nervous system (at least that's what I'm claiming). I want to play it as mostly dead weight for now, and would also like for there to be some essence loss or bio index cost or something when he gets, respectively, a replacement cyber or bio arm.
Any suggestions regarding this matter?

Not likely to be an essence loss, but double-check.

How to pay for the arm? Lots of options. I'm fond of the "experimental tech" option, especially if he's got a cyber-doc contact who might want to test some things. You might also go with experimental magic. Second-hand tech is a lot cheaper (I don't recall if it made it into the 3rd edition stuff; I know secondhand cyberware was covered in Shadowtech.

[Lord Torath]

When we first started playing (2nd Edition), we thought that the Force was the total number of dice used to cast the spell. So if your Stunbolt was F4, and you threw in 4 dice from your magic pool, and 4 from your Karma pool, you'd be casting a Force-12 spell, and the drain target would by F/2-1, or 5. Which was really nasty.

In case of the spellcasting, it looks like they're not having to use it for anything BUT resisting drain. If there's nothing on their case requiring their spell pool, their drain gets a lot easier to deal with.

Translation: send some enemy magicians at them, so the PC mage/shaman must use some of his magic dice for spell defense.

[melquisedeq]

Back by unpopular demand (my players hate me), here are a few more questions. Brace yourselves, light readers.

- Regarding the whole spell impunity thing... I decided to test-drive the house rule "Drain is rounded up instead of down". The mage player is rather apprehensive of course, but prefers this to my other suggestion of just upping magical opposition (as it was suggested here). However, our debate on that second idea brought me some doubts. What do you guys think of the following:

How do you maintain a somewhat gritty down-to-earth tone, in which magic is perhaps not exactly rare but definitely uncommon, very far stylistically from "Forgotten Realms in the future", and yet have a need for every single opposition group to possess at least one awakened member, in order to keep the stunball fest from starting?

Also, my mage guy bought one level of initiation, and his metamagic feat was masking... in line with the above query, wouldn't I now have to include awakened PLUS initiated casters in every single opposition group if I wanted to make sure he'd be singled out for "always geek the mage first" to actually be viable? Because, by the player's own admission, it would be a huge penis move if I allowed him to buy masking to now start popping initiates everywhere and invalidating it. On the other hand, if one of the reasons drain is super tame is because "always geek the mage first", then isn't masking a sort of complete immunity freepass?

By rounding up instead of down, what it does is bring the "safe" force level down to the 3-4 range, instead of the 5-6 it is per normal rules, for most spells. There is absolutely no reason whatsoever to even consider casting a Stunball at less than force 6 because the base drain TN only gets to 3+ for Force 7 and beyond (F7-1=6, 6/2=3 while F6-1=5, 5/2=2.5, round down to 2). So by rounding up, I get statistically closer to my vision of casting in shadowrun, in which a Force 6 stunball (or a force 6 anything) is something you would think twice about doing even when you're totally fresh, but not really hard enough to absolutely knock you out of combat if you choose to do it anyway. Is there some glaring flaw to rounding up that I am missing?

- Another one that showed up in the meanwhile, but still regarding the lobby shooting I mentioned before... Is Spell Defence automatic, as long as the dice are alocated and the targets are pointed out, or does the mage have to actually see the caster and realize that a spell is being cast?

- Last one for now: because we only play once or twice a month, each adventure takes us an average of 4 sessions, and I really want the campaign to advance from 2055 to 2065 without it eventually happening in actual real-life 2065, I decided to implement much longer downtime between adventures. 4 game months passed from Dreamchipper to Euphoria, with a small Harlequin job in the middle. Players are now bitching because "it's not fair to pay 4 months rent" even though I adjusted the rewards to princely sums to amortise this (Dreamchipper paid 90.000 a head plus fenceable bounty, and the decker even made 40.000 on top from stuff he stole and kept to himself). Funnily enough the one guy with High lifestyle thought it was fine, the whiners all have Low or Squatter. How else could I fast forward the in-game time, while not ignoring lifestyle choices?

What I did was suggest a simple take on the Karma for Money rule: 1 Karma = 5000¥, either way, once per downturn. Buying karma means you funneled part of your financial resources to worthy causes that improve your environment (shopped locally, bought fair trade, gave to charity, volunteered, threw a neighborhood party, paid the mortgage on a condemned kindergarden school in the Barrens, etc). Selling karma means you spend the scarcer and (arguably) more precious resources of time and energy into achieving wealth by non-running means (helping your grandpa at the family sewer-grown-fruit stall, working as muscle for the mob, slanging dope in the corner, transgender prostitution, kindergarden teacher aide in the Barrens, etc). I think 5000 is fair because it pays 5 months of low, or one month of medium, and anything else must come from the shadowrun piggybank because THAT'S WHY THEY'RE RUNNING IN THE FIRST PLACE, to escape crappy lives. Am I even thinking this right?

The players, though, wanted me to come up with some way to let them use appropriate skills in some kind of roll that would determine the earnings from a variable potential, like the decker would be selling custom programs, the rigger would be fixing vehicles, the mage would probably be expecting some sort of stunball-based career in the entertainment biz judging from his run performances, and the razorboys and gals would want to get paid to just stand there and look badass. Any suggestions on how to implement something like this?

Still on the above, one of the players has been sinking karma into banking-related knowledge skills, because he wants to invest in the stock market, in-game. But that stuff is boring beyond belief, that is actually the single one reason I am not a millionaire investment banker right now (shut up, it is!) and therefore I have ZERO clues about how to cook up something that would please him, something with an appropriate risk/reward progression curve that, should he win, not break the game in terms of nuyen, but definitely break his bank if he loses. Preferably something with little book keeping. Takers?

And to end this, are there any interesting houserules regarding lifestyle bonuses and penalties? Let me quote a player of mine, so you'll see what I mean...

I don't have problem with it, but if you want to enforce gritty realism you should than enforce consequences that matter tied to the lifestyle.
Currently I don't see a single motivation as a player to say that my PC lives a middle lifestyle let alone high.
If I have to work that hard to maintain a middle lifestyle its easier giving up on it than to say I maintain it (which I did last session)...
If the only consequence is that my character eats tasteless soy, the utilitarian in me will always be happy to make that sort of sacrifices for his character while me myself would never do that, but like this its to damn expensive to maintain a middle if I also want to keep my cyberware humming and purchase gear.

I did send him a novel's worth of text (you know me) explaining and illustrating why his roleplay potential would be limited by his lifestyle choice, like if she (Jade) maintained a low-lifestyle but bought expensive clothes on the side and had super-high charisma and whatever and was bluffing her way into a middle-upper condo, I'd have people subtly snob her for the 2050's equivalent of saying "I axed you a question". But the truth is I probably wouldn't apply actual penalties to it, it would just be a descriptive limitation by which I would override his visualization of his character's social actions with a far less glamorous version of them, often comically so, by tainting them with lifestyle mannerisms. BUUUUUT truth is that, if he really wants to take the utilitarian approach, this won't bother him much, or at least not enough to justify those several extra thousand a month. Especially when he'll be taking it times 3 or 4 out of every run's paycheck. So I don't have an argument there. Do you?

Thanks for reading. I know I won't ever capture the hearts of the TL:DR crowd (lol), but the handful of replies I got so far have been tremendously helpful and genuinely appreciated. Keep them coming!

When we first started playing (2nd Edition), we thought that the Force was the total number of dice used to cast the spell.

I can't remember exactly, but I seem to recall that you did roll Force + pool, up to [Sorcery] hits, instead of rolling Sorcery + pool, up to [Force] hits.

[Kid Jake]

And to end this, are there any interesting houserules regarding lifestyle bonuses and penalties? Let me quote a player of mine, so you'll see what I mean...

One thing I've done is to make lower lifestyles less secure. I had a player that rolled his eyes and was like 'Pfft, I'm not blowing cash on that. I'll just live under the bridge and eat trash.' (way to avoid stereotypes Mr. Troll...) So I let it slide and when he came back from his run he discovered that someone had come along while he was out and and found his cleverly hidden stache of weapons (what mad genius would have thought to look inside the giant bedroll?), stolen meds and a spare set of keys to his bike.

From then on he not only paid for a decent house, he thoroughly investigated the local crime rates before he'd move in.

[Lord Torath]

- Last one for now: because we only play once or twice a month, each adventure takes us an average of 4 sessions, and I really want the campaign to advance from 2055 to 2065 without it eventually happening in actual real-life 2065, I decided to implement much longer downtime between adventures. 4 game months passed from Dreamchipper to Euphoria, with a small Harlequin job in the middle. Players are now bitching because "it's not fair to pay 4 months rent" even though I adjusted the rewards to princely sums to amortise this (Dreamchipper paid 90.000 a head plus fenceable bounty, and the decker even made 40.000 on top from stuff he stole and kept to himself). Funnily enough the one guy with High lifestyle thought it was fine, the whiners all have Low or Squatter. How else could I fast forward the in-game time, while not ignoring lifestyle choices?

What I did was suggest a simple take on the Karma for Money rule: 1 Karma = 5000¥, either way, once per downturn. Buying karma means you funneled part of your financial resources to worthy causes that improve your environment (shopped locally, bought fair trade, gave to charity, volunteered, threw a neighborhood party, paid the mortgage on a condemned kindergarden school in the Barrens, etc). Selling karma means you spend the scarcer and (arguably) more precious resources of time and energy into achieving wealth by non-running means (helping your grandpa at the family sewer-grown-fruit stall, working as muscle for the mob, slanging dope in the corner, transgender prostitution, kindergarden teacher aide in the Barrens, etc). I think 5000 is fair because it pays 5 months of low, or one month of medium, and anything else must come from the shadowrun piggybank because THAT'S WHY THEY'RE RUNNING IN THE FIRST PLACE, to escape crappy lives. Am I even thinking this right?

The 2nd Edition Shadow Run Companion had the Day Job flaw. You spend 10 hours per week on your "day job" and earn 1000¥ per month. A 20 hour/week job pays 2,500¥ per month, and 40 hours per week doubles that to 5,000¥ per month, enough to maintain a Middle Lifestyle. If their relevant skill reaches 9 or higher, I double the income (with Computer B/R of 9, you can fix double the computers in the same amount of time). The decker should love this setup, as it gives him more time to write programs and upgrade his deck between runs.

As far as your initiate mage, please reward him for his decision to initiate. He's sinking a fair bit of Good Karma into that, and if you instantly nullify that, he's (justifiably) going to be somewhat miffed. Yes, throw in a few initiate mages into the opposition (and as I remember, Masking is not automatically penetrated by initiates, but there's an opposed roll of some kind, yes?), but give him plenty of uninitiated opponents as well. Instead, use mages with area-effect spells. Or grenades.

[comicshorse]

That's a lot of text !
I'm on my way out so I'll deal with the easiest point (for me)

Also, my mage guy bought one level of initiation, and his metamagic feat was masking... in line with the above query, wouldn't I now have to include awakened PLUS initiated casters in every single opposition group if I wanted to make sure he'd be singled out for "always geek the mage first" to actually be viable? Because, by the player's own admission, it would be a huge penis move if I allowed him to buy masking to now start popping initiates everywhere and invalidating it. On the other hand, if one of the reasons drain is super tame is because "always geek the mage first", then isn't masking a sort of complete immunity freepass?

Firstly as Lord Torath said Masking can be seen through by another Initiated Mage, its an opposed roll.
And yes while it would be unlikely for Initiate Mages to suddenly start popping up everywhere the fact this he's now an Initiate shows he ( and presumably the rest of the group) are moving up in the world. This means higher paying but harder jobs where the opposition will increase in proficiency. ( Just the fact he can Mask now makes entering other countries for international jobs easier as the Mage won't get noticed at customs).
So while it doesn't make sense for the street gangs to start having Initiate Mages as members the P.C.s sound like they've reached the point where they should now be operating on a higher level. Dealing with more dangerous and prepared opponents then ever ( but for more money !)
Also you don't need Mages to challenge Mages, grenades give street-samurai area effect blasts ( and gas is nasty if the Mage isn't prepared), Riggers can pack Drones with heavy weapons that can shred buildings ( and you can't stun bolt a Drone !). If you're feeling really nasty there's stuff like F.A.B. and the dual natured Ivy (can't remember what its called) to make Mage's life hell.

[LibraryOgre]

How do you maintain a somewhat gritty down-to-earth tone, in which magic is perhaps not exactly rare but definitely uncommon, very far stylistically from "Forgotten Realms in the future", and yet have a need for every single opposition group to possess at least one awakened member, in order to keep the stunball fest from starting?

Awakened, dual-nature critters. Don't include a mage... throw in a couple of hellhounds trained to go after wizards (and when they see the astral shapes of spells take shape around him, they know he's a caster even if he's masked). Throw in background counts (from all the psychic torture), FAB (basically, glowing airborne bacteria that absorb magic), and all sorts of other mundane counter-measures to magic. Have the place be warded, so he's got to shut things down in order to come in (no problem for their mundane staff). He can break the ward, but that's going to alert the wage-mage. Have there be a wagemage whose job is to sit in an office in the center of town, summon a watcher, and send it out to look; if there's a mage around, he sends in the elemental he's got on call. A security spider might specifically tag mages in people's HUD to know to concentrate on him.

Toss in the occasional initiated mage-killer adept, just to force him to fight (but the mage-killers are special ops types).

By rounding up instead of down, what it does is bring the "safe" force level down to the 3-4 range, instead of the 5-6 it is per normal rules, for most spells. There is absolutely no reason whatsoever to even consider casting a Stunball at less than force 6 because the base drain TN only gets to 3+ for Force 7 and beyond (F7-1=6, 6/2=3 while F6-1=5, 5/2=2.5, round down to 2). So by rounding up, I get statistically closer to my vision of casting in shadowrun, in which a Force 6 stunball (or a force 6 anything) is something you would think twice about doing even when you're totally fresh, but not really hard enough to absolutely knock you out of combat if you choose to do it anyway. Is there some glaring flaw to rounding up that I am missing?

Really, if he's safe casting, he's doing it right. However, consider that he's going to be subject to other things, which will carry their own penalties. He's going to be a lot more saavy with his casting once he's experienced an Ares Stunball (their line of concussion grenades, new for 2061!) or three. If he gets a light wound, his TNs go up. Once he gets a Medium, he's got worries.

- Another one that showed up in the meanwhile, but still regarding the lobby shooting I mentioned before... Is Spell Defence automatic, as long as the dice are alocated and the targets are pointed out, or does the mage have to actually see the caster and realize that a spell is being cast?

Automatic, IIRC. Basically, he's put a slight ward on them.

- Last one for now: because we only play once or twice a month, each adventure takes us an average of 4 sessions, and I really want the campaign to advance from 2055 to 2065 without it eventually happening in actual real-life 2065, I decided to implement much longer downtime between adventures. 4 game months passed from Dreamchipper to Euphoria, with a small Harlequin job in the middle. Players are now bitching because "it's not fair to pay 4 months rent" even though I adjusted the rewards to princely sums to amortise this (Dreamchipper paid 90.000 a head plus fenceable bounty, and the decker even made 40.000 on top from stuff he stole and kept to himself). Funnily enough the one guy with High lifestyle thought it was fine, the whiners all have Low or Squatter. How else could I fast forward the in-game time, while not ignoring lifestyle choices?

Downtime cash and karma. You're in 3e, so you don't have Edge (which would've been my go-to stat to roll for this), but have them roll a test each month based on a skill or a stat to represent the little jobs they did in the meantime. Your decker didn't slice any ultraviolet hosts, but he wrote some software for his fixer, did a bit of overwatch for someone knocking over a Stuffer Shack, stuff like that. Your Bear Shaman spent some time at a hospital and got paid in warm fuzzies and hot cocoa. The wizard did some freelance warding for his Yak contact, while the street sam did a few "Stand behind the Johnson and look intimidating" jobs. The rigger did a few deliveries around town, or played back-up spider for a friend of his. The bread and butter, boring as drek work that makes Shadowrun go round.

So, they make a few tests, and tell you what happened in the meantime based on the skill they used. For every success (or every 2 successes), they get 1 karma, which can either be used as karma or represented as money in your karma-for-money scheme. If they have a failure, they get nothing... maybe they hit no work, maybe their boss fragged them over. If they glitch, well, something bad happened; your delivery drone got fragged. You lost a program to a tar baby. Got shot, or pissed off a contact. Set the TN at 4, modified by any damage they have (so if you're banged up, you're making less money). If you want to mix it up, set a "cooldown" for skills used in this test... they can't always get the jobs that use their best skill, but they can get something.

[Lord Torath]

I can't remember exactly, but I seem to recall that you did roll Force + pool, up to [Sorcery] hits, instead of rolling Sorcery + pool, up to [Force] hits.

Nope. Per the 2E Grimoire, your number of dice is Foci + Pool up to your Magic rating + Force (where your pool = your sorcery skill).

In 2E, drain (and damage) resistance targets were explicitly not affected by the condition monitor. I'm not sure if they changed that in 3E or not.

Don't forget the "Noticing Spellcasting Modifiers" table on page 162 (3E). There's a -2 modifier for being Awakened (meaning magician/adept or awakened animal?) and another -2 for astral perception, which always applies to dual-natured critters. So you're looking at a -4 target number right there, which is pretty close to automatic detection. Does masking help with that at all?

[comicshorse]

Still on the above, one of the players has been sinking karma into banking-related knowledge skills, because he wants to invest in the stock market, in-game. But that stuff is boring beyond belief, that is actually the single one reason I am not a millionaire investment banker right now (shut up, it is!) and therefore I have ZERO clues about how to cook up something that would please him, something with an appropriate risk/reward progression curve that, should he win, not break the game in terms of nuyen, but definitely break his bank if he loses. Preferably something with little book keeping. Takers?

Ask how much money he is investing around this month. Then make him make a Challenging (5) roll
0 successes- Lose 10 % of your stake
1 Successes- Draw even
2 successes- Gain 10 % of your investment money
3 Successes-Gain 20% of your investment money
4+ sucesses- gain 50 % of your investment money

This is also where being a Shadowrunner can help. Imagine the conversations with his Broker : " You want to invest in Renraku but they're share price is down because Ares are going to beat them to develop the high range laser."
"Yeah but I think Ares special projects division is going to suffer a set back soon."
(massive explosion in the background)
"Yep, thought so "
This could lead to all sorts of interesting spin-off's. The P.C. being sought ought for his 'gift' of reading the market, being investigated by the FCC for insider dealing or even hiring the rest of the group for a run. (" I'm telling you guys, we invest in Kord trucking then dig up dirt on their rivals for the NAN-UCAS delivery route and we will clean up ").

And to end this, are there any interesting houserules regarding lifestyle bonuses and penalties? Let me quote a player of mine, so you'll see what I mean...

Quote Originally Posted by Player of Jade Brown, one kickass ork lady
I don't have problem with it, but if you want to enforce gritty realism you should than enforce consequences that matter tied to the lifestyle.
Currently I don't see a single motivation as a player to say that my PC lives a middle lifestyle let alone high.
If I have to work that hard to maintain a middle lifestyle its easier giving up on it than to say I maintain it (which I did last session)...
If the only consequence is that my character eats tasteless soy, the utilitarian in me will always be happy to make that sort of sacrifices for his character while me myself would never do that, but like this its to damn expensive to maintain a middle if I also want to keep my cyberware humming and purchase gear.
I did send him a novel's worth of text (you know me) explaining and illustrating why his roleplay potential would be limited by his lifestyle choice, like if she (Jade) maintained a low-lifestyle but bought expensive clothes on the side and had super-high charisma and whatever and was bluffing her way into a middle-upper condo, I'd have people subtly snob her for the 2050's equivalent of saying "I axed you a question". But the truth is I probably wouldn't apply actual penalties to it, it would just be a descriptive limitation by which I would override his visualization of his character's social actions with a far less glamorous version of them, often comically so, by tainting them with lifestyle mannerisms. BUUUUUT truth is that, if he really wants to take the utilitarian approach, this won't bother him much, or at least not enough to justify those several extra thousand a month. Especially when he'll be taking it times 3 or 4 out of every run's paycheck. So I don't have an argument there. Do you?

I had a similar situation and convinced the player to only eat rice crackers and drink water during the guy. After several sessions of watching us eat take-out and fizzy drinks he snapped and declared he couldn't take the bland stuff anymore. I then pointed out his character was living on that EVERY DAY

[Kid Jake]

Ask how much money he is investing around this month. Then make him make a Challenging (5) roll
0 successes- Lose 10 % of your stake
1 Successes- Draw even
2 successes- Gain 10 % of your investment money
3 Successes-Gain 20% of your investment money
4+ sucesses- gain 50 % of your investment money

This is also where being a Shadowrunner can help. Imagine the conversations with his Broker : " You want to invest in Renraku but they're share price is down because Ares are going to beat them to develop the high range laser."
"Yeah but I think Ares special projects division is going to be suffer a set back soon."
(massive explosion in the background)
"Yep, thought so "
This could lead to all sorts of interesting spin-off's. The P.C. being sought ought for his 'gift' of reading the market, being investigated by the FCC for insider dealing or even hiring the rest of the group for a run. (" I'm telling you guys, we invest in Kord trucking then dig up dirt on their rivals for the NAN-UCAS delivery route and we will clean up ").

Gah! Now I want to run a game that revolves around the PCs operating the most successful brokerage firm in Seattle.

[LibraryOgre]

Gah! Now I want to run a game that revolves around the PCs operating the most successful brokerage firm in Seattle.

Might be good for the "loud" style runner... do a very loud run against Ares, causing a share price dip, and then they buy up shares.

Personally, I would make a bit of a modification to comicshorse's numbers...

Botch (or glitch; I can't remember what 3e calls them): Shares drop 10% per 1 rolled.
Failure: Share drop 20%
1 success: Shares drop 10%
2 Successes: Shares break even.
3 Successes: +10%
More: +5% per success over 3.

[melquisedeq]

Two more sessions under the belt, and here's a fun "not-rulesy" question for a change.

The guy that plays Smoke, the character that lost an arm a few sessions ago, is being a good sport about it, has been gracefully eating up the penalties of being one-armed and now instead of just boringly replacing it with a vat-grown clone arm per the book's suggestion, he wants a proper cyberarm packed full of modular goodies (including a very apropos lighter - the character being heavily addicted to cigarettes).
So the question is in fact two questions:

- How would you go about statting and pricing such an arm? I'm thinking alphaware, no Strength or Quickness bonus, and perhaps room for 3 modular tools at any given time plus a little physical storage compartment or a storage memory cache he could tap into for emergencies (he's a decker). The tools would be the sort of stuff he's always carrying anyway, electronics and computer related, but now inside his arm instead of his pockets. Nothing too fancy.

- This is the fun one... He wanted to go down the friend-of-a-friend line to see if he can get a discount anywhere because he's nowhere near able to buy it himself at the moment. I want to come up with a credit provider for the arm, one obviously including hefty taxes in the form of a favour. I've been thinking about involving Tamanous somehow, my players are new to the setting and won't be like "Oh, those guys!" but I can't come up with a decent way to do this while keeping Tamanous creepy and evil. I want the players to after-the-fact realize who they dealt with, and get chills and regret. Can I bother you guys to post some suggestions for this?

Oh, and as always, thanks for everyone that supplied answers previously, they've been tremendously helpful so far.

[melquisedeq]

OK, nevermind the cyberarm math... Man & Machine has all that I should have checked before bothering you fine people with it.
I came up with a nice little alpha model running only slightly under 300'000 nuyen before street index.

Now... who can the elf be owing this to?
Should I portray it as a team investment and have them all chip in (in a way)?
Or run the contract solo, every now and again demanding that player to pay this amount, or that deed, all the while building up a climatic point in which he'll be asked to do something diametrically opposed to the welfare of the team - to force him, behind the scenes, into a position of being a traitor, or incurring the bad will of his creditors.

All ideas welcome :)

[LibraryOgre]

Say he went through a fixer to get this arm. Now, every time the fixer gives them a job, he passes the elf another task... a side job that's tied to his skills, that's not going to interfere with the job, per se, but does add another dimension. A thingy to grab, guard to kill (or rob), a datafile to grab, etc.

[melquisedeq]

Say he went through a fixer to get this arm. Now, every time the fixer gives them a job, he passes the elf another task... a side job that's tied to his skills, that's not going to interfere with the job, per se, but does add another dimension. A thingy to grab, guard to kill (or rob), a datafile to grab, etc.

Thought about this... thing is, I DO want something that would interfere with not just the job but also the character's morality (because that's the type of GM I am- mwahahaha). If it was like a vat-grown clone arm, OK no biggie I'd throw him the bone, but for the piece of hardware that it is? Nah, he needs to sweat for it.

So I ended up going with: Smoke got anonymously sent a tech file for this upper-shelf alphaware arm with all the bells and whistles.
The already salivating elf gets a call immediately after, a suitably faustian unknown caller, basically saying "You like it? I happen to have one lying around, all I ask in return is that you cram this datalock into your skull and every now and again we'll take you away for the weekend, no questions asked no answers given."
The man craftily deflects every one of Smoke's concern's, makes it blatantly clear that he's looking to invest in the elf's continued welfare, that there's no such thing as a 300'000 nuyen disposable tool, and even hints that he may personally know the elf... now this last bit, to someone who can't remember anything but the last half decade of his life (Amnesia flaw) really got him to bite down.

So from now on, every once in a while, I'll do a couple rolls and Smoke the elf decker will wake up in his apartment, mysteriously sore and exhausted, and will have chipped away a little bit more of that immense debt. Until the day when it actually matters.

Should provide plenty of potential for story hooks to grow out of, methinks.