Yule Shoot Your Eye Out 1 of 2
In the world of Shadowrun, holiday cheer and goodwill has been replaced by materialism and danger. For the members of The Omega Men, Christmas Eve means working hard to ensure the people of Seattle live to see another day. And no, they don’t get paid extra. That would be a miracle.
Intro Music: Cyberpunk Underworld by Futant
Fandible.Com is now on Patreon! If you enjoy our weekly blog posts and actual play podcasts, please consider supporting us.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:38:41 — 45.7MB)
Subscribe: RSS
Don’t know if anyone brought this up already, but would it be possible to get the start of the actual play added to the summaries when the episode comes out? Something like the actual time after the patreon spiel and intro music?
I’d imagine not as then a lot of people would skip passed the Patreon. I know I’d be tempted.
Hey guys! Patreon listings generally are only going to run a minute tops. We know people want to get to the juicy part, so we’ve learned not to drawl it out. This time, our Patreon ended at the 55 second mark. The music is usually about thirty seconds to a minute. So, if you’re looking to skip, the actual play will be around the two minutes mark. BUT I will say this, we will sometimes be announcing things at the beginning so you might miss that if you do.
However, we are not aiming to make our Patreon Thank Yous and Music anymore than two-minutes. We want to get to the action as much as you all.
I don’t know how I forgot how much I love the ShR universe, but these games are always a blast to listen to. Whether it was intentional or not, I dig the Cukoos homage that is the new Alpha Numeric. They still have a “This job seems below your pay grade” vibe, but less “because you’re insufferable ass hats who are angling to build a bullshit ‘by your own bootstraps’ narrative”.
Really enjoyed the AP. The only detracting factor to me was a lack of rules knowledge. Shadowrun is complex though, so I can’t gripe too much. What I can do is give a couple of pointers on tightening up your play for whenever you play next.
1) Know your abilities. If you have a weapon you need to know all of its stats (which includes writing range categories down from the table in the combat section or back of the book). If a weapon or spell does elemental damage you need to be read with the secondary effects (or have page numbers on hand).
Example time. Our driver is outside the train car with the rest of the popcorn crew while our paramedic is dealing with the ghoul. In walks blade like a badass and a fight kicks off. Up comes are driver. Assuming he is waiting at a side door entrance to the train he is likely no further than 1/2 to 1/4 down the car from this incident. For now we’ll say this is a 24 meter long train car and he is 12 meters away when his turn starts.
With an agility of 3 he is able to move 6 meters at a walk. A simple action is spent slapping an Augmented Reality button which kicks the door open with a hiss. He moves forward one meter into the train car and advances the last five of his walking movement. He is now 7 meters away from the back of the car and perhaps 5 meters from blade. Consulting his EX-Shocker’s range he notes that he is at Short range which means no penalty.
Our driver wants to shoot this turn, but has already spent his first simple action opening the train car. He could draw normally, but then he wouldn’t have a chance left to shoot. No problem, our driver fancies himself quite the electron cowboy and goes for the fast draw simple action instead. He pits his 5 reflex, pumped up to a 7 by some nova hot reaction enhancers, and his pistols of 3 against a threshold of 3 for a standard holster. With karma on his side, he pulls through and clears the holster before firing.
Gathering 3 dice for agility and 3 for his pistol skill he fires from the hip, sending twin darts lancing out at Blade. 2 hits under our drivers belt, Blade responded with his reaction plus intuition to dodge. Blade has it rough though, he has already defended once (giving him a -1 penalty) and is engaged in a Melee with the paramedic (giving him a whooping -3 penalty)! He rolls his remaining 5 dice and only gets one hit. Bad luck chummer. The EX-Shocker makes contact with one net hit, which raises its damage by 1.
Checking our stat line we find the shocker is a nasty piece of business with 9S(e) and a -5 AP. That means it does a base 9 stun damage (raised to 10 by our net hit) with the electrical subtype. That of course means secondary effects for our friend should he take damage. Blade has to soak with his body plus his (armor rating – 5). Blade has an armor jacket (12) on and an extra 2 armor from cyber. After our 5 armor penetration he has 9 armor left to add to his 5 body. He rolls his 14 dice and ends up with 4 hits. That reduces the damage he takes from 10 stun to 6 stun. Since he took damage he takes the secondary effects of -5 to his initiative and -1 to all action and defense tests for one turn. With wireless active our would be electron cowboy knows Blade has 4 boxes of stun remaining. Another hit like that and he’ll be toast.
Rewind it back to scene start. Everything is the same except the popcorn crew is waiting outside the door at the far end of the car instead of having entrance from the side. Starting distance is now 22 meters from the confrontation. Everything is the same except the distance once he stops moving is 16 meters. He can either take the shot at extreme distance (a steep -6 penalty) or use his free action to run, this extending his movement to 10 meters and medium range for the taser (only a -3 penalty due to range, but incurring a -2 penalty for the run free action). Down to 8 dice to QuickDraw and 1 die to shoot, Driver is out of great moves.
He decides to trust his luck (and his 4 edge rating) and goes for the QuickDraw. He manages to eek out his 3 hits on the draw and spends edge pre-roll to get 5 dice for his shot and the rule of six. He gets one success out of his roll and our chromed friend declares he will be taking full defense to add his willpower to his roll at the cost of 10 to his initiative. 8 dice latter and the net success is on the side of Blade. Uh-oh. Those taser darts are awful close to our paramedic who now has to make the same test to evade as Blade (at that gnarly -3 penalty, mind you).
2) I spent so long on one I’ll try to keep this short. When you do a car chase you need to determine a couple things. First is the environment. This sets the threshold for the checks to drive and decides if you use speed or maneuvering as a limit. Next you need starting distances (there is a table that breaks that down depending on speed or maneuverability). Finally you need to know that Acceleration determines how many range catagories you can cover in a single roll. Thus a 1 acceleration ambulance has to make every roll while their opponents fail them (he only needs one for each 2 you make).
3) You can hack any cyberware that is wirelessly enabled! Brick a samurai’s cybereyes and now he can’t see! 5th edition worked really hard to make combat hacking a thing that is possible. Go crazy.
On 3) the cyber cowboy is a pro of semi pro or just not stupid, so he’s turned off the Wi-Fi as a matter of course. So no hacking. Of course the same may not be true of the next wage slave, cop or Joe Chummer you happen to meet.
Incidentally, I liked the fandible stuff so much I started picking this stuff up …
Turning wireless off can have steep penalties in some cases. Many actions are made faster by a full action type. In my above example of the tazering I demonstrated just how important having a simple action open was. If you are wired up and need to turn those puppies on, you don’t want to have to wait a whole extra pass in order to get them active. It almost defeats the purpose. If you had wireless running though… Well then they would interface with reaction enhancers and be able to be flicked on with a mental switch (free action).
Also mind that not every guy with some cyber is a matrix security expert. It only takes a single free action to turn all wireless active devices to off. Those two things in mind could make a man mighty cocky. Besides, GOD is out there protecting the airwaves.
@Steve, I’m a crunch guy too, but that level of detail, from your example, doesn’t seem to be the Fandible crew’s bag (as a whole).
If David tried to run things that tightly, it might well be the death of Shadowrun as a Fandible game.
@Warren: Preach Brother, preach.
@Steve – Wow! Thanks for the information. As the other’s have said, we might not use everything you said, but it’s always good to hear what is out there for us to try. With us playing many systems for Fandible, we do sometimes have to ‘go light’ on the rules. However we do appreciate fans pointing out some things we could use in the future!