Shadowrun
Shadowrun General => Gear => Topic started by: farfromnice on <12-10-14/1832:05>
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Holographic Weapon sight is becoming common in movie and TV series and I wonder why Shadowrun didn't keep up
I presume that a Holographic Weapon sight will give a +1 accurancy who cannot be add to a Smartlink or laser sight and I pretty sure that no wireless could be apply
the problem with this idea is that a Holographic Weapon sight don't come with the normal malus of a laser sight, the easy to spot problem when using one
so I think that this piece of equipment was omitted to keep some kind of balance to the game but have no way to knowing, so it just conjectures
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Yes and No.
Your smartlink is sort of a more advanced form of this, but rather it projects the target reticle directly into your vision (or AR goggles) rather than requiring a bulky add-on sight, though some models may use both.
So I do not think it was so much game balance as they just jumped straight to the style they wanted.
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I wonder why Shadowrun didn't keep up
Because Shadowrun's setting is a split from the idea of cyberpunk in the mid-80s. Holographic sights weren't even a concept, but SmartGuns were. So with Smartguns, who needs a holographic sight?
I presume that a Holographic Weapon sight will give a +1 accurancy who cannot be add to a Smartlink or laser sight and I pretty sure that no wireless could be apply
the problem with this idea is that a Holographic Weapon sight don't come with the normal malus of a laser sight, the easy to spot problem when using one
so I think that this piece of equipment was omitted to keep some kind of balance to the game but have no way to knowing, so it just conjectures
Red dot sights were introduced in Gun H(e)aven 1, page 22. Bear in mind this was for 4th edition, so the rules from that book don't really translate well into 5th edition. But here's what the book said:
VINTAGE ELECTRONIC SIGHTING AID
Mount: Top Avail: 3 Cost: 200
The red dot sight is a precursor to the modern smartlink system. It was frequently added to military rifles at the beginning of the century, but was supplanted by modern aiming aids as technology progressed. The sight provides a +1 dice pool modifier.
If you were to try to implement this in 5th edition, it would probably confer a +1 to Accuracy. Also, it's worth noting that the beams from laser sights aren't visible unless the air is misty. Generally, the only part of a laser sight you'll see is the dot. Which is almost imperceptible if you're on the receiving end of one. Not to mention the awesomeness of infrared laser sights, which are totally invisible to normal sight.
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Imaging Scope (and Smartgun) come with a camera. The camera come with capacity. Fill the camera with a smartlink. Attach the scope to a wireless off smartgun and connect gun + scope with a wire. There you go, +2 limit without goggles or augmentations (as long as you aim through the imaging scope). If you also turn your smartgun wireless on and have DNI you get all the other benefits as well (including, but not limited to, +1 dice for having an external smartlink).
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by the way could someone explain to me why/how a laser sight have a wireless bonus ?
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Because Shadowrun's setting is a split from the idea of cyberpunk in the mid-80s. Holographic sights weren't even a concept, but SmartGuns were. So with Smartguns, who needs a holographic sight?
Unlike BattleTech (which also had a timeline divergence from reality in the last century), Shadowrun has done a good job of taking real world technology advances and integrating them into the game.
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by the way could someone explain to me why/how a laser sight have a wireless bonus ?
Because of reasons!
No, really ... they wanted hackers to have more to do in combat, so most of the boni are only available in wireless mode as a drawback to being hackable.
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To be more precise, they added boni as wireless ones to lure people into being hackable. While many of the boni resemble SR4 ones, the SR4 ones were transformed into Limit ones, so the SR5 Wireless Bonus of a thing is not technically the same as its SR4 normal working.
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That's what I thought
(let all take a moment to see the 666th post of Lucean)
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I forget if this was in a passage from the core rulebook or just from a podcast, but I remember hearing a justification for the wealth of wireless bonuses (especially in items where "wireless" makes no sense) was just a blanket term for the purposes of mechanics rather than RP, and, as noted above, was a way to make deckers more relevant to combat.
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In the first half of 2013, they released several developer blogposts, one on wireless bonuses. They pretty much explicitly noted many of them are simply to give deckers more shots at hacking.
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http://www.shadowruntabletop.com/2013/05/sr5-development-wireless-bonuses/
I remember some discussion along the lines of "orange coloured sticks".