Anyone up for some scifi D&D?

Hey, does anyone have a copy of Street Magic I can “borrow”? I’m working on an adept character (which may or may not see the light of day in this campaign) and I’m having a real problem finding it (my usual method of borrowing books is unavailable due to technical difficulties, and I’m striking out everywhere else). The Excel chargen file has a lot of really cool-sounding adept powers from Street Magic and I’m dying to know how they work.

Or, alternatively, can anyone link me to a website that has some explanation of (at least some of) those powers?

Of course you can borrow my copy, dude. I emailed you directions for you to pick it up.

Heh, so did I. :smiley:

Oh, Dio, I just noticed that I had 6 unused BP, so I reduced Cybercombat from 5 to 4 and added 1 point in the Mechanic skill group, which puts me at an even 400. Is that alright?

You had… BP… To spare?! And here I kept thinking they just didn’t go as far as they used to…

That being said, I just need to add actual personality to the contacts list, and Maestro will be finished.

Hurrah!

Well, in my defense I was a dumbass: I don’t know if you’re using the excel spreadsheet that I linked to earlier, but it has an entry for everything you could spend BP on, and it automatically deducts points for you and displays a running total. However, I didn’t realize that it had a slot for the nuyen you can buy with BP at the start, and so I got through about 50% of chargen before I noticed the thing and added my 30,000 nuyen.

Thing is, at this point I was used to mentally adding the 6 BP I’d used to buy nuyen to my total, and so I eventually forgot that I my nuyen was factored into the spreadsheet’s BP. I finished my character having spent 394/400 BP, but just as I was reviewing the version I’d sent to Dio I noticed that it had already taken money into account.

So my apparent inability to do simple math resulted in a shiny new skill group. :smiley:

BTW, I finished my adept. He’s a gunslinger who knows gun kata (look it up on YouTube), Jedi-style mind tricks, demolitions, stealth and thrown weapons; he’s an ambidextrous SMG dual-wielder with a Suzuki Mirage featuring a mounted AK-97, and he’s loaded up with grenades of various kinds, shuriken, a breaking & entering kit, and all kinds of other cool shit. I’ve sent it to Dio for approval.

Glad to see we have somebody proficient with demolitions. My rigger has enough hacking and electronics skills to handle anything wired, but she’s absolutely hopeless with physical barriers that her drones can’t handle.

She focuses on scouting and intrusion over combat, so she only has one drone that possesses enough armor and weapons to fight regularly, but I’m hoping the mix of intelligence-gathering acumen and moderate decker ability will make things worth it.

I hope we manage to find a few profitable missions though; I’m intending for her to eventually be a vehicle rigger first, and a drone jockey second, but that’s going to either require lots and lots of grand theft or enough nuyen to afford something we can take into combat.

I forgot to give my character the Infiltration skill. :smack: Fortunately, he has enough Stealth, Demolitions, and gear to break into anything we’ll encounter at first, and if all else fails he’ll have no trouble simply busting in with guns akimbo and lighting up the room.

Oh man, I am really looking forward to playing this Adept. If my calculations are right, I’m rolling 62 dice per attack before situational modifiers. 62! That means I’m likely to score 20 hits in the average initiative pass.

Hostile, please tell me many of your posts have been in jest. My whoosh-o-meter is a little off at the moment, but the idea of having someone who can seemingly do -everything- is a little daunting…

ArrMatey!, the trick is to load up on negative qualities. I maxed out on this one, taking Scorched, Bad Luck, Incompetent (Forgery)* and an Allergy for a 35 BP bonus. I didn’t spend any BP on Edge, because I’m willing to make a new character or switch to my sniper full-time if this one dies. Then my first goal was to get as many hit dice as possible, since I knew that dual-wielding meant I would have to split my dice between my two guns. Taking Ambidextrous would nullify the -2 off-hand shooting penalty, taking Automatics at level 5 with a specialization in SMGs would give me 7 skill dice for my shooting tests, and maxing out my Agility at 6 and then spending adept Power Points to raise it to 8 would mean I would start out with 15 dice total. Then I bought SMGs with no barrel modifications and folding stocks that gave +1 recoil comp, so I could then install my own rating-3 gas vents to bring recoil comp to +4 on each gun and thereby nullify most recoil entirely. Tracer ammo for my AK-97 Carbine would give me 1 to 3 additional hit dice depending on which mode I shot it in (almost completely nullifying full-auto recoil when you factor the folding stock and gas vent in), and explosive ammo for my Uzi-IV would pack some extra punch. Skipping the smartgun links and laser sights (which wouldn’t do me any good while dual-wielding anyway, at least for actually hitting things) freed up money for more surveillance, combat, infiltration, survival and subterfuge gear. As for gun kata and Jedi-style mind tricks, those are just specializations, and I’ll have to RP well to get the extra two dice for them. And I don’t know yet if Diomedes is disallowing them, which he is fully within his rights to do. As for the rest of the stuff, I can send you my character sheet if you’re curious how I made it all work out.

  • In my opinion, every character should be incompetent at something for RP purposes. I mean, who the hell can do everything?

ETA: 62 dice is assuming I’m firing short bursts from both guns. In reality, I’ll probably be using full-auto a fair bit on the carbine and laying down suppressive fire. And obviously, there are all kinds of ways I can lose or gain dice based on the situation. 62 may be a bit of overkill, but it also means that I can afford to take a lot of head shots, and I can also afford to trade in dice a lot (which I’ll probably end up doing anyway just to save everyone the agony).

By the way: gun kata, a (fictional) martial art somewhere between capoeira, aikido and just plain old Mexican-standoff pistols-akimbo gunplay, carefully calculated and calibrated to leave its user just barely outside of the trajectory of attacking fire at each point, and in the exact optimal position to return fire several times during the confrontation while outnumbered. I’m thinking a dice bonus to Full Defense dodge tests that then leaves me in a better position to fire back than everybody else, though how Diomedes wants to implement it (if at all!) in terms of game mechanics is obviously his decision.

I’m actually slightly relieved to see that we have a heavy combat-oriented character: it sounds like Dio favors well-balanced games, and so I’ve been working under the assumption that challenges will be extremely varied. I’m pretty sure that my character can handle the wireless stuff, and it sounds like **Arrr **has the social stuff covered, but I’m useless in combat and I’m assuming that Arr doesn’t focus on it either, so it’s somewhat reassuring to know that Hostile can probably make up for our lack of physical fighting skills. :slight_smile:

Two Adepts and a Rigger… I think you guys should fare pretty well.

I’m sorry I haven’t been as active in this thread as I’d like to have. I’ve got a nice little three part run set up for us to start with, and I think OpenRPG looks fine to use. Tuesdays seem like the best time for everyone… except this coming Tuesday for me. We can either run this weekend, or next Tuesday, whichever you guys would like. I could use the time to type up location and character descriptions (and not just the spotty notes I have) to cut and paste to make the game flow a lot faster.

I haven’t checked BPs and what-not for your characters (I assume you guys can both use a calculator and wouldn’t cheat in an RPG), but the character ideas are all great. We can continue to iron out details of your characters fully, and I’m fine with doing minor adjustments on the fly in the first game to iron out unforseen consequences. (Not the case in this game, but I once didn’t catch that no one in the group had the perception skill… defaulting would made for a lot of missed clues)

As far as taking negative quirks to increase your BPs… well, go for it… but do remember that I will make you ‘pay’ for them in game when the situation comes up.

For some setup details: This scenario starts out in Seattle, UCAS. The three of you worked successfully on a single run previously, a ‘Hooding’ run to scare some Triads away from the Redmond Plastic Jungle. I’d like everyone to post a paragraph or two of a description of your character, and perhaps a few things the others might have seen on that run. ‘Getting to know you’ scenes in-game waste valuable time that could be spent skulking, shooting, or running like madmen. :slight_smile:

Oh, crudtacular. Four of you, not three. D_Odds, can you email me your character sheet, when you get it patched up?

Read over ‘Runner Havens’, if you’ve got access to a copy. It should give you a pretty good idea of the world of 2070, and a very in depth account of Seattle. Email me if you want to borrow my copy.

A big part of Shadowrunning is stealing and reselling… if you know the right person, you can get two grand a body if they’re still warm. The only problem is that you’ll need to figure out a good way of transporting anything. As GM, I don’t mind if you pick up a pistol and tuck it into your waistband, but hauling around a turret will take a lot of time and some heavy equipment. Both of those an be in scarce supply if you’re already on a Run… and there’s not a very good chance of milspec hardware sitting around the streets waiting for you to come back after everything’s over.
I’m totally willing to GM a character-driven Run if you want to acquire something, but you’ll need to impress the need on your teammates that it’s worth their time and nuyen to help you attack that Yakuza headquarters purely so that you can get the APC they have in their garage.

I’m going to paste the quick physical description I scrawled down on my charsheet, and then I’ll elaborate:

Alright, so let’s talk about what would’ve been obvious on the run, hmm… well first off, it’s a little tough to figure out where Lucia comes from: sometimes she speaks with an unmistakable Slavic accent of some sort, sometimes she speaks with a British accent, and other times she sounds like any Seattle native. There doesn’t seem to be any clear trigger for one accent or the other, although the British accent seems to occur most frequently when she’s trying to be formal.

Personality-wise she’s a little distant, but she has decent social skills and seems to be reasonably easy to get along with. Reasonably easy, that is, for a rigger: she always seems to be occupied with about half a dozen electronic tasks that the rest of the party doesn’t have insight into, and she has the maddening habit of ignoring or marginalizing anything that has the bad luck of not directly interesting her. She’s extremely professional when it comes to Runs, but during long periods of waiting or downtime she has the habit of tuning the world out in deference to her comics and music, and largely ignoring the party until it’s time to work again. She tends to strictly control her physical mannerisms, rarely showing any of the vague or distracted body language that people come to expect from some deckers, but she must have some fairly heavy modifications fit into her equipment, as she’s never removed her gloves or sunglasses glasses. (She does, however, occasionally pull her glasses down to glance around, and her eyes appear to be completely normal and implant-free.)

Regarding her actual tactics Lucia is somewhat useless in a firefight, but she utilizes a number of small drones as scouts and occasionally intelligence gatherers. While she’s produced a number of small drones from her vast array of bags when the situation required it, she only appears to own one large unit: the cargo drone that jerkily follows her about in public is actually a Steel Lynx that’s been equipped with a light machine gun, and covered with a fake cargo basket as to not alarm anyone in public. While on mission the drone moved quite smoothly and accurately, which would seem to imply that the awkward maneuvering capabilities it normally demonstrates in public result from conscious instructions from the operator.

In addition to her drones Lucia seems to have filled most of her bags with a startling array of electronics: microphones, cameras, jamming devices, and the like. She’s also a little paranoid about electronic security, as one of the first things she did upon meeting the rest of the party was to try and convince them to let her run a Tag Eraser over both of them, in an attempt to burn out any un-hardened bugs that either member had unknowingly picked up.

The second thing she did was to ask the party to turn on all of the electronics that they were carrying and intended to bring upon the mission. She cheerily forgave the party in advance if they intended to lie and “neglect” to turn on some of their gear, but it seems as if she wanted to get an accurate idea of the party’s electronic footprint, in order to tell instantly if a new signal started transmitting from the party’s location.

On the topic of her paranoia, she carries a pair of expensive-looking headphones that completely cover her ears, and she insisted on wearing them throughout the first run. She never seemed to have a problem hearing the party, so she’s apparently jacked into an external microphone or three, but it certainly doesn’t help her look any less eccentric.

Finally, Lucia carries a commlink at all times, but it’s an extremely basic model mounted with a cheap OS and no peripherals or detectable enhancements. She frequently pulls it out and pretends to operate it, and she does a very good job at pretending, but she has never actually used it to do anything that the party has noticed. This is probably because she doesn’t actually need hardware to interface with most of the hardware that the party encounters: in fact, she appears to be a technomancer with a really, really good Rigger/Decker costume.

Although she never mentioned this fact up front she doesn’t seem to be particularly concerned about hiding it, and will in fact readily admit it if asked by anyone in her party. However, her Rigger Act is extremely well thought out, and she does a very convincing job of selling herself as an ordinary techhead to anyone and everyone else. (In fact, it’s likely that she only admitted the source of her abilities to the party because they were Awakened: it’s impossible to guess how she would’ve acted if she wasn’t reasonably sure that her deception would’ve been instantly discovered.)

ED: Oh yes! And I assumed it was kind of implied, but she is an absolutely enormous fan of Japanese pop culture: her commlink is filled with various types of Swedish and Japanese comics, most casual conversations that she becomes involved in will inevitably turn to such topics, and she seems to be entirely unaware of the fact that 90% of the world doesn’t get her references.

Thanks for the offer, but I actually found a copy this morning… I’m reading through it now, and you’re right that it helps a lot.

I’m not sure how it will end up playing out, but since I’m eventually intending to make Lucia into a vehicle rigger, but she’s definitely in a position where she’ll try to convince the party to help her steal any particularly shiny vehicles that they see while on mission.

She particularly wants to buy a submarine to serve as a mobile base: she’s somewhat uncomfortable staying in one place for long, and surface craft are uncannily easy to find, so she’ll eventually make a point of buying a rigger array, finding the most suitable sub in or around Seattle, and trying to convince the party to help her nick it. (She would probably be happy to let the party take 100% of the profits gained from NPCs and loot in return, since she’s getting a pretty big damn gain from the mission.)

Failing that, she’d probably go for an aircraft of some sort.

And before Dio bangs his head against the desk, I should note that I’m not very sold on the idea: I completely understand if you don’t want the trouble of working out how an aircraft or sub wouldn’t completely break the game in the PC’s favor. :slight_smile:

Although hmm… it just occurred to me, she should probably skip the vehicle thing entirely until the party gets an idea of how it functions: chances are the rigger will end up being the Transportation Bitch for the whole group, and as such she shouldn’t gear up to steal a high-profile item until we know what kind of tech would best support the party. I could easily see an aircraft or submersible being more of a liability if the party doesn’t need to use it, since somebody could target it while the whole group is off doing something cool and PC-y. Either way though, I’m eventually just aiming for somewhere reasonably secure for the Rigger to hide while her drones keep pace with the party.