Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Abstruse" data-source="post: 6157896" data-attributes="member: 6669048">You've been on an RPG hiatus since 1989?! <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue    :p"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" />I do want to correct one thing you said and that's the word "villain". There are no villains in Shadowrun (well, aside from shedim, insect spirits, toxic shamen, and the Enemy). All the characters, from the CEOs to your normal runner to the great dragons to the ghoul living in the gutter are all being with their own agendas and are doing what they think is the right thing. Sometimes they do evil things because the ends justify the means, sometimes it's because of megalomania (the world would be better with me in charge), sometimes it's just that the evil thing seems like the right thing. And there are varying definitions of what the "right thing" is as well. Shadowrun is built on grey-and-grey morality, so remember that before you start casting Lofwyr as the Big Bad and Ares as the good guys because Ares has some demons in their closet and Lofwyr has done a lot of noble things.Anyway, the game system. The system is based on skills using a dice pool method (at least in the current edition of the rules). Everything you want to do is determined by a skill check, which is formulated as Skill Rating + Attribute Rating [Limit]. When you make a test, you add together the relevant skill plus the relevant attribute, then roll that many six-sided dice. Every 5 or 6 that you roll is a "hit". Your Limit is the maximum number of Hits you can use on any particular test. Your goal is to get more hits than the Threshold for the test, or to get more hits than your opponent if it's contested.For example, say your elf character want to sweet talk your way past the girl at the front desk of the hotel so you can get to the room your target's staying in. You have a Con skill of 5 and a Charisma attribute of 6 with a Social Limit of 5. Situational modifiers add or subtract dice from the pool, so say this girl happens to have a thing for elves. That gives you a +2 bonus. So you roll your 13 dice and get 8 hits. Because your social limit is only 5, you only get to count 5 of those hits. The clerk rolls his Perception + Intuition to see if she can see through your act and only gets 2 hits. Therefore, you succeeded with 3 net hits (indicating that not only did you succeed, but you did a pretty good job while doing so, so maybe the clerk not only lets you through but gives you a keycard to get into the private express elevator).So you go upstairs and try to pick the lock on your target's room. Your hacker disabled the electronic locks on the door, but there's still that damn bar that every hotel room has. So you have to try to get that off the door so you can open it. You roll your Palming skill (2) plus your Agility (5) against a Threshold of 2. You roll a 1, 1, 1, 1, 4, 5, and 5. So you got your two successes, but something else happened called a Glitch. This is what happens when more than half the dice you roll come up 1s. A glitch means "Something bad happens" but doesn't necessarily mean you don't succeed at your task. In this case, it means you managed to disable the manual lock, but you made enough noise doing so that the target (a grumpy dwarf engineer you were hired to extract) woke up. And is going for his gun. Oops.So you roll initiative and get to go first. You get two Simple actions or one Complex action on your turn (there's a big list of them in the back of the book and definitions are scattered throughout, so I won't list them all here). You spend your first action to Ready Weapon (drawing your gun, turning off the safety, cocking it, etc.) Thankfully, you remembered to load your gel rounds. With your second action, you fire. You roll your Pistols skill (4) plus your Agility (5) and get 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 2, 3, 4, 4. Uh oh, this is what's called a Critical Glitch, when you get a normal Glitch but don't get any successes. Instead of something bad happening, something REALLY bad happens. In this case, your gel round explodes inside the barrel and gums it up. It's going to take time you don't have to clear it out before you can fire it again.So that's the basics. I'd walk you through a full round of combat, but I'll probably end up posting that somewhere on here later in the week. For now, that should give you a good idea about the core game mechanics. If you've got any questions, feel free to ask.</blockquote>

Verification