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quiet1mi
2010-09-29, 10:22 AM
Something has always bothered me in shadowrun games... the need to be as close as you can be to a cyberzombie...

For instance, my players who make cyberized characters only have .1 essence left. How do you roleplay that?!

From the book, I am guessing that would make you an emotionless husk, with no sense of a job well done, or the terrible feeling after losing a comrade... just 1 and 0.

Did we complete this operation? What is the next operation?

dsmiles
2010-09-29, 10:23 AM
Something has always bothered me in shadowrun games... the need to be as close as you can be to a cyberzombie...

For instance, my players who make cyberized characters only have .1 essence left. How do you roleplay that?!

From the book, I am guessing that would make you an emotionless husk, with no sense of a job well done, or the terrible feeling after losing a comrade... just 1 and 0.

Did we complete this operation? What is the next operation?

This sounds about right, but then again, I mostly played Shamans or Deckers in Shadowrun.

Tehnar
2010-09-29, 10:33 AM
Well I never played characters below 1 essence, but anyone seriously cybered I tried to make him aloof, distant. You might want to try and look at various mental disorders available to cyberzombies and try to extrapolate from there. Have a milder kind of paranoia or phobia, for example.

Grommen
2010-09-29, 11:13 AM
You are correct in that assessment.

It is, however, just a suggestion the game makes. I don't play my cromed people in that fashion. They are not fantastic public speakers and leaders of men, but they don't have that psychopathic disconnection to the human/meta human condition. They are by nature quite suicidal. Why? Well cause nothing yet has killed them even though things keep trying. As long as they manage to keep breathing long enough to get pumped full of something, a replacement part is only a surgery away. They should be dead already, but as the saying goes, "Better living though science.". They know that they will die violently some day. That day is not today!

On the note of low essence. Players see the 6 essence loss as the goal, not the limit. Nearly all I've ever played with has though almost the same way.

"Hay I got 3.1 essence! That means I can cram in 2.8 worth of stuff in here still."

The reality for the characters is that they don't know what the limit is. And if you read what and how the Cyber works. It should scare the pants off of a character. Think about it. They re-wire your nervice system, hack off arms, eyes, implant computers wired directly into your brain. That is some scarry %$$3 peoples! Read what happened to Hatchet Man in the Cybernancy 2nd ed book. Aside from fantastic writing it's just creepy.

I've only had one character ever get a piece of Cyber and then decide that they were never getting any more. He got a smart link. Player decided that it creeped the character out having targeting data scrolling across his retina all day long.

As players we just look at the cyber as what it does for the character. IE. Boosts initiative, strength, shoots better. You need to look at it also from the character's perspective.

Think about this the next time someone startles you in real life. If you had wired reflexes and they were not shut off. Who ever just startled you. Most likely you attacked them before you realized who it was. Friend of foe, you just smacked em. Perhaps even shot them.

Noedig
2010-09-29, 11:49 AM
^^This. Especially the last part. I was playing with a cousin who was cybered all to hell, and he forgot to turn his reflexes off. We were in an arcade and a gust of wind blew a door open behind us. He turns and unloads half a clip from an SMG with AP rounds into a 9 year old before realizing it was just wind. Turned the kid into paste, and he pissed the entire arcade off, and got us nearly killed.

dsmiles
2010-09-29, 11:52 AM
^^This. Especially the last part. I was playing with a cousin who was cybered all to hell, and he forgot to turn his reflexes off. We were in an arcade and a gust of wind blew a door open behind us. He turns and unloads half a clip from an SMG with AP rounds into a 9 year old before realizing it was just wind. Turned the kid into paste, and he pissed the entire arcade off, and got us nearly killed.

Ooo...getting kicked out of an arcade sucks. :smalltongue:

JaronK
2010-09-29, 11:54 AM
There are rules in IIRC Man and Machine for the Wired Reflexes thing at least. When startled, roll a perception test, at a +1 TN for every +d6 to your initiative. If you fail, you act instinctively, which can mean pulling a gun or striking the thing that startled you. Willpower test to resist if the action is too terrible.

So, you can mechanically represent at least that part.

JaronK

comicshorse
2010-09-29, 12:01 PM
I thought it was mentioned that Wired Reflexes now had reflex triggers installed as standard so they could be turned off when the user wasn't in combat. In order to prevent exactly these 'little accidents' .

nhbdy
2010-09-29, 12:03 PM
I don't know about the implants being scary, you do have a point and can roleplay however you wish, but implants are mainstream, most ordinary people (as in no magic or technomancy) have them. Having a TON of them should be scary, as it does take away your humanity, if I remember correctly the shadowrun core rule book can be summarized on the matter of essence as it being the amount of crap the human body can put up with.

That being said, I always played adepts... jittery... lethal... gun toting adepts... (always had 4 initiative passes and spent exp on magic to get more gunslinging powers). So personally my essence was always max.

Oracle_Hunter
2010-09-29, 02:07 PM
I thought it was mentioned that Wired Reflexes now had reflex triggers installed as standard so they could be turned off when the user wasn't in combat. In order to prevent exactly these 'little accidents' .
Reflex Triggers are death traps.

Recall that they turn off your Wired Reflexes until you disable them. In SR3 at least, that meant you needed to take at least one turn on an initiative pass before you could spend the Free Action to do so - which means that the cyber-assassin is going to take at least one turn before you get to act, and possibly more if you were surprised.

I don't know if this oddity of Initiative was ever addressed in a splatbook or Errata but it's something I noticed on my last read-through of the rules.

comicshorse
2010-09-29, 05:16 PM
Well yes if you get jumped by complete suprise they aren't going to be on ( but then again if the cyber-assassin catches you by complete suprise you're pretty much screwed anyway).
The very sensible idea is you only turn them on the the night of the Run and get to live your life without randomly shooting friends, lovers and contacts :smallsmile:

Lamech
2010-09-29, 05:17 PM
Reflex Triggers are death traps.

Recall that they turn off your Wired Reflexes until you disable them. In SR3 at least, that meant you needed to take at least one turn on an initiative pass before you could spend the Free Action to do so - which means that the cyber-assassin is going to take at least one turn before you get to act, and possibly more if you were surprised.

I don't know if this oddity of Initiative was ever addressed in a splatbook or Errata but it's something I noticed on my last read-through of the rules. I don't know anything about shadowrun mechanics, but I would assume you disable them when say... playing games in arcade or walking down the street. Are reflexes really going to save you if a good assassin gets the drop on you? Just turn them on when your walking through the dungeon a.k.a. dragons-lair a.k.a. dragon's corperation.

JaronK
2010-09-29, 06:08 PM
I thought it was mentioned that Wired Reflexes now had reflex triggers installed as standard so they could be turned off when the user wasn't in combat. In order to prevent exactly these 'little accidents' .

They do, but you have to pay extra, at least in SR3 (which is what I use). But seriously, if a cyber assassin gets the drop on you like that, you're probably dead anyway (he just spent two standard actions aiming and then shot you with a 14D silent sniper rifle with APDS rounds from a kilometer away using a Rating 3 scope, then got off a second shot, all before you could react). I mean, theoretically you could get your reaction high enough to dodge that with wired reflexes, but it would be hard. You need to roll more 4s with your reaction than he rolled 2s with his, and if he's a cyber assassin, we can assume a high reaction (Wired 3 + Reaction enhancers!).

Really, Shadowrun isn't about the dice. It's about out thinking and out planning your opposition. If they get the drop on you, you already lost.

JaronK

comicshorse
2010-09-29, 06:16 PM
Cyberpunk had a nifty idea, Reactive armour (no, not the stuff that blows up). Armour laced with sensors that detects the targetting beam of a smartgun, just the thing to enable you to dodge when the sniper lays his sights on your back
( and a guaranteed way to piss off runners on a assassination mission.
" I was a mile away in heavy cover man aiming at his back. How the hell did he know to dodge")

Grommen
2010-09-30, 11:24 AM
I thought it was mentioned that Wired Reflexes now had reflex triggers installed as standard so they could be turned off when the user wasn't in combat. In order to prevent exactly these 'little accidents' .

Not standard issue by any measure, it's a good option. Not a standard issue, it's a separate add on for your reflexes like adding thermal vision for the eyes. Don't trust your local street doc, make sure he adds the trigger. And if your campaign was before like 2062 ish or so they had not invented the triggers. A lot of your "First Generation" gun bunnies are wired "ON" at all times.

Might be different in 4th ed, but that time line is set in 2070 (see the above about first generation wired reflexes). They probably panzied it out knowing game makers now a days.

Happened to me once. We were sneaking in to a wharehouse all stealthy like and stuff. A rat moved across the gun bunnies vision. A clip latter we were running for our lives from the army of bad guys that were tipped off to our presents.

nhbdy
2010-09-30, 01:02 PM
In the new edition it always has an off switch, whether or not you use it is the real question, I know a couple people in my group who never turned it off out of paranoia, that got old fast...

hiryuu
2010-09-30, 01:24 PM
In the new edition it always has an off switch, whether or not you use it is the real question, I know a couple people in my group who never turned it off out of paranoia, that got old fast...

Yeah, especially since every time you walked into a club that cater to runners with them, the silent alarms went off and you got kicked out.

The simple solution is to just fire those guys. It's a surprise they're not dead or arrested already.

Alleine
2010-09-30, 05:55 PM
Nowhere in Wired Reflexes does it say you're so twitchy you have to kill everything that surprises you, but perhaps I'm just not thinking with the right runner mentality. I never did find constant paranoia entertaining.

JaronK
2010-09-30, 06:47 PM
Nowhere in Wired Reflexes does it say you're so twitchy you have to kill everything that surprises you, but perhaps I'm just not thinking with the right runner mentality. I never did find constant paranoia entertaining.

At least in SR3, it did. Not everything that surprises you, but it was certainly possible to twitch kill someone like that.

JaronK