Hurray! I’m in for Shadowrun. Could someone please tell me, though, exactly which sourcebook we’re going to start from? I think I have the newest book, but it’d be awkward to get partway through prep and discover that half of us were using different books.
The newest is 4e. I’m not picky about which one we use; I’m only at all familiar with 3e but I’m quite willing to learn 4e, and I like the idea of wireless matrix access everywhere! (I want to be a decker/sniper/adept. 
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Fair enough. Lemme re-read the rulebook and think about what I wanna play… knowing me, though, it’ll probably be some kind of support role with moderate combat abilities.
All right. Give me a couple days to think up a Run. We’ll use 4e Shadowrun rules, and I’ll check out the OpenRPG, but I think we’ll just do a play by post in a new thread. Everyone can create a character and post it in this thread, and we’ll start the game in a fresh one either this weekend or early next week.
Our current (confirmed) team:
Omi no Kami
Hostile Dialect
ArrrMatey!
Three is enough, but it’d be nicer to have a few more (to increase our post density, in addition to allowing some more daring runs). Anyone else in?
To make things simple, we’ll have the run set in Seattle. Incorporating decking (they call it hacking in 4e, but it’ll always be decking to me) may be a little awkward in play by post (it’s suppsoed to happen nigh-instantaneously, but takes a while to work out), so I might want to just have a side-convo by some sort of instant messaging service (I have Gmail, AIM and YahooIM) with any deckers to work that stuff out.
If you’ve never used the system before, feel free to PM or email me for any help you may need, and remember to include a fixer as a contact.
Actually, now that I think about it, next week I’m going to have a houseguest whose pants I’m going to be attempting to charm off. It might be best for us to plan on starting 3/17. Gives us more time to see characters, and make sure we’ve got a full party and what-not.
Aright. Might I suggest we start talking character-types here, so we don’t get a tonne of overlap?
I’ve got four I’m willing to toy about with, depending on what other folks want.
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A shaman of the idol ‘Adversary’. This one’s a little tricky, depending on setting, as Adversary has a ban on respecting authority. Would specialize in manipulation spells.
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A physical adept specializing on the more direct, ‘power’ martial arts who’s a huge martial arts movie buff, even naming most of his manuevers with odd, esoteric attack names.
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A true chrome tin-can. Soldier with a lot more metal than meat, who has something of an immortality complex. (Hey, they can always ‘repair’ me!)
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A chipjacker with self-inflicted multiple personalities. He gets bored, so he slots himself as other things a lot.
I’m in for Shadowrun. I have old rules though. I’ll try to get the new ones, and determine what I would like to play.
Can I put in yet another request for JParanoia, the Java client/server for Paranoia? I have a mission all ready to go, customized for the Dope. As an Internet real-time game, we’re talking about a commitment of a few hours.
Paranoia! Genius! I’d be happy to play a real time game of that… I’ve got my fingers in too many pies to play in an ongoing (if any game of Paranoia can be considered ongoing, what with running out of clones three or four times through a mission) game.
Citizen, why are you paying attention to things other than what the computer wants you to pay attention to?
(No, you don’t have clearance to see that smiley)
To follow ArrMatey!'s example, let me mention some of the basic archetypes I’m considering playing. I’m not married to any one concept, so I’m waiting to see what kind of role would best complement the rest of the party.
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A Face whose non-social skills focus on explosives and traps. This would probably be a stuck-up, somewhat spoiled (well, as spoiled as an effective shadowrunner can be) young relative of an established runner or fixer, who by some vicious twist of fate’s left arsehole ends up stuck with the group on mission.
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A close-range gun tank to augment Hostile’s sniper, providing close-range cover to the rest of the team via the judicious application of several automatic weapons sporting (alarmingly bad) black-market mods. I’m thinking a neurotic dwarf with an addiction to hallucinogens would be the best for this… it fulfills the “Dwarf with a gun” ideal to a T, and a drug-addled dwarf suffering from the Wacky Mental Disease of the Day sounds like just the kind of person you would trust walking behind you while equipped with half their weight in munitions.
(At this point I should probably mention that I try to be a very considerate player: I don’t suggest flawed or unstable characters unless I’m fairly certain that I can play them in a way that will make the rest of the party like them as much as I will. ^^)
3) A medic who relies on a vast collection of Drones and related skills to do her recon and combat for her. I was thinking an upbeat, chipper sort whose sunny apathy in the face of danger is a good deal more unsettling that it probably started out to be.
I’d love to play Paranoia – it’s another system I’ve never gotten a chance to play and always wanted to. If we’re still doing Shadowrun, I’ll do that too, though I’d prefer to do it live (ie OpenRPG) rather than PBP.
My Shadowrun character will be an ex-military elf on exile from his formerly beloved Tir Taingire for unspecified political reasons. He was trained as a sniper in the Army and has picked up decking (agreed, GM–it’ll always be “decking” to me) because the disassociation of the Matrix takes his mind off his troubles. He’s also learning(/learned?) how to write his own programs and build his own deck hardware, as he tends not to trust other runners without good reason. He is most likely destined to run the shadows for the rest of his life, but he’s not 100% comfortable with the criminal life yet, despite (or perhaps because of) being so well-suited to it. Of course, as a sniper, he’s typically stoic and level-headed, but there may be more to him than meets the eye. (How’s that, eh? 
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:mad: That’s my character. Usually, those unspecified political reasons are that he slept with the boss’ wife or something like that. I also like to play with the idea that he’s one of those elves that were always around, but no one knew about until the Awakening.
Still, I have 1,000 ideas. East Coast Native American rigger. Colombian ex-arms smuggler, mildly-augmented. Native Seattle private eye, no augmentations. Italian sorcerer. The combos of races, localities, and character archetypes abound.
By the way, could I ask what everyone’s opinion on our game’s format is? I’m fine with play by post, if that ends up being what people prefer, but I’ve seen games that were GMed on an IM client pretty easily, and so I think OpenRPG might end up being a lot faster, and generally more fun. You can even save the chat log, so if everyone involved consents we could log each session and post it on the SDMB for the onlookers’ amusement.
I’m OK with our sessions being logged. I don’t know much about JParanoia but it sounds like it has some sort of client-server IM protocol built in. As for Shadowrun, I’m still definitely a proponent of a live game like OpenRPG.
BTW, I played in an AD&D 1st Ed. game tonight to honor the memory of the recently-departed Gary Gygax. I LOVED it. Basically everything I didn’t like about D&D (ie D&D 3.5) didn’t apply. I’d be down for playing in or maybe even DMing a 1st Ed game here.
I’d love to use OpenRPG or somesuch- I’ve had good luck with bi-weekly IM-style gaming, and bad luck with play-by-post. If, for whatever reason, Shadowrun doesn’t fly, I’m willing to give a shot at GMing Hell On Earth.
Alright, an FYI to our other players… unless someone has a problem with it, or our GM comes up with a serious flaw in the way I’ve designed my character, I’ll be playing a rigger with lots of happy detection and intrusion programs. I’m building her to focus on being a scout and electronic jack-of-all trades, and obviously giving her some combat drones to make up for her general uselessness in combat.
One thing I’m curious about, however, is the rating of my various programs: is it generally a good idea to start out with your programs around rating 4-5, or do you start out at a low level and work your way up? I’m assuming it’s the former, but I don’t want to waste the 40 or so BP I’d be chewing up if it was overkill.
Oh, and I forgot to mention, I’m happy to play something else if there’s a good reason to, or if someone else really wants to be a rigger. 
Of course JParanoia maintains a session log. This feature is provided for your safety, Citizen, to show that the GM is fair and the mission is very safe and lots of fun.
JParanoia does have some kind of IM protocol built in; I’ve tested it locally and would love to get some volunteers for a larger scale test before running a full mission.
The session log and IM protocol were intended to respond to two different things. I only mentioned JParanoia’s IM protocol at all as a response to the idea that we would have to PBP.
Alright, chargen’s finished here, pending GM approval. Meet Lucia Sigrid, a rigger and anime fangirl specializing in scouting, intrusion, and robots with hugeass guns. I somehow managed to finish with enough points left over to make her into a damn decent hacker, too. I don’t think I want to post her sheet unless someone really wants to see it, as I’ve included a few surprises that should be a lot more fun if they come up during play, but I will say that she took Uncouth as a quality, and when you consider that she’s also immature and heavily armed, I’m predicting fun for everyone involved.