Shadowrun
Shadowrun Play => Character creation and critique => Topic started by: BlackwhipsAngel on <10-19-19/2244:15>
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So, doing up a character for the first time and I am not finding where they tell you how to figure base movement on your sheet. Am I missing a paragraph? Did they forget to include it?
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Everyone's got the same base move: 10 meters for a Minor action (pg 42), or 15+ meters on a Sprint major (pg. 44)
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Thank you very much.
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You use the Move Minor Action (p. 42) for 10 m of movement or use the Sprint Major Action (p. 44) which starts at 15 m and is increased by 1 m per hit on an Athletics + Agility Test.
There's a couple of other Actions (e.g., Avoid Incoming Fire) that will give you a tiny bit of movement as an incidental effect of how they work, but Move and Sprint are the main ones.
Shadowrun is generally not played with a "5' square" battle map, a la Dungeons & Dragons, given that it is perfectly possible for `runners (even those fresh out of CharGen) to have weaponry that can engage foes at 250+ m ranges, drive vehicles that travel at 100+ m per combat round, and to have combatants that are actually dozens of kilometers away from the battlefield and are "telecommuting" via drones, spirits, or matrix-presence.
In short, don't sweat it too much about a few meters here or there. Get used to describing the action in terms of "Close Range" "Medium Range" or "Extreme Range."
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Note that under the rules as written, you get either a Move, Sprint or Avoid Incoming in a turn. No second movement at all. (Which makes Avoid Incoming underpowered and grenades hell-a dangerous.)
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No slower movement for dwarves and trolls this edition? (I hadn't seen anything about that in the rules so far, but I haven't read cover to cover so I assumed I was just missing something)
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Some of the grunts have a sprint speed of 20, any word on that?
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As an aside street sams should be able to run 60 mph in 6 million dollar man fashion and these movement rules don’t allow it. So boo boo..
I honestly think the whole minor action for everything and max one minor action for movement is a flaw. When incidental actions get pulled into minors you don’t use them because you need your minors for more core actions. Which imo creates a less dynamic combat. The only one minor for movement thing bumps into defensive actions like avoid incoming and stops street sams from
6 million dollar manning it which I they have been able to do every edition so far. The last one I guess could be fixed if they made some kind of enhanced sprint action which cost a crazy amount of minors so only those with something like wired could do it.
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One of things that always annoyed me was the superhuman movement, and I'm kind of selfishly glad it's gone (somewhat- movement power is still a thing).
I get that it's not rational to complain about realism in Shadowrun, but this particular break with reality always was too far for my suspension of disbelief. What happens when you encounter a stairwell? A 90 degree turn? A closed door? A wet *thwack* is what happens, when you're moving at Flash speeds. Just because you can GO that fast doesn't mean you can stop immediately. Or that you're magically sticking to the ground as you try to take a corner.
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If this were Twitter I’d be putting up a 6 million dollar man gif right now.
Besides the idea is you are running faster but to you it seems the same so you can corner at those speeds as you can adapt to it. Also I don’t think anyone was doing it through obstacle courses. And even if you do trip I have no problem with super cyber dude being tough enough that he isn’t hurt anymore than a sprinter of today. That a default part of boosting your body is reinforcing it so it can handle its performance. It’s not like I want cyber arms to rip from people last bodies when they use super human strength.
If anything over the editions they have not gone far enough with ware and tech. Rheuthiam(ap) polymers to hide. Screw that it should be hide and physical mask. Cyber torso give them a damn jet pack boost or something.
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The Sprint Action gives you 15 m, plus one meter for every hit on an Athletics + Agility Test; Most Street Samurai will easily get one or more hits.
By way of comparison, Usain Bolt’s personal best time in the 100 m dash is 9.58 second. That’s 10.4 meters per second... By the man who is literally the best person in all of recorded history at running very fast.
Given that Bolt isn’t being shot at, isn’t wearing body armor, isn’t carrying a katana in one hand and a submachine gun in the other... and is clearly using every last point of Edge he has when he makes his world record run. Yeah, this seems fair.
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The Sprint Action gives you 15 m, plus one meter for every hit on an Athletics + Agility Test; Most Street Samurai will easily get one or more hits.
By way of comparison, Usain Bolt’s personal best time in the 100 m dash is 9.58 second. That’s 10.4 meters per second... By the man who is literally the best person in all of recorded history at running very fast.
Given that Bolt isn’t being shot at, isn’t wearing body armor, isn’t carrying a katana in one hand and a submachine gun in the other... and is clearly using every last point of Edge he has when he makes his world record run. Yeah, this seems fair.
Since you brought it up ... i thought about this a few years ago when i had a short liaison with SR 5th Edition.
Looking at 5th Edition Usain Bolt would become much faster at running when he gets Wired Reflexes.
If he rolls 41 Initative he gets one pass each
at 41, at 31, at 21, at 11, at 1
so five Initative passes. In 5th Edition you could roll one sprint test each Initative pass and each hit gives 2 meters for humans. That would mean Usain Bolt gets like ~4 times faster at running just because his nerves and reflexes got superhumanly boosted … personally i think the 5th Edition run/sprint rules are terrible :P
But at least the base run rate was linked to Agility x4 which seems a good idea.
So lets look at the best non-augmented human possible 6th edition.
Agility 7 (with exceptional Attribute quality)
Athletics 13 (with Aptitude quality)
Edge 7
15 m + 27 dice means he runs between 16 meters/3 seconds and 42 meters /3 seconds
Thats 5,3m/s raising up to - depending on hits - 14m/s
And thats why other RPGs use fix sprint values. If you use the buy hits for 4 dice rules it gets less awkward. 15m+ (20:4) =20m/3s
Thats 6,6 m/s
A lot slower than Usain Bolt - but if i may take myself as example – a fix sprint speed is far more realistic than one day 3 m/s faster than at the next day or yesterday.
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Some of the grunts have a sprint speed of 20, any word on that?
Honestly, I'm going to assume that's a copy-paste mistake since I see no possible explanation in their statblocks about why.
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Yes, but the dice are meant to be used only when there’s some risk involved. When there’s bullets flying, spells blasting, uneven ground, rampaging spirits, and what have you... Usain Bolt is normally just dashing in a straight-line down a flat track. Introduce the vagaries of combat and he’s not going to be as consistent.
Frankly, I think that Shadowrun would be improved if they just dropped meter by meter movement tracking. Switch to a more abstract Close/Near/Middle/Far/Extreme for everything... Let a minor action be enough to move a character on foot from Close to Near (or vice-versa) and a major action move them from Close to Middle. Give vehicles, drones, and certain critters a special ability to move further Like, say a motorcycle can move from Close to Middle as a minor or Close to Far as a major; a jet-fighter can go Close to Extreme as a minor; et cetera. (Oh, and ditch the “only one movement action” thing too. Let the Six-Million Nuyen Man be able to chase after a motorcycle on foot. Rule of Cool, chummer!)
The battlefield of Shadowrun is just too dynamic to be plotting it all out meter by meter.
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Your system would work but the official one works too .
In the current 6th CRB for close combat fights you can split the battlefield in grids of "3 meters" (thats melee range.)
I always use a piece of paper to track where everyone is in Pen&Papers(no miniatures just needles on a cork board)... when you have a sharpshooter place him at the side, write down how far away he approximately is. Thats very close to your system already. Just place them in the general direction and give them a number how far they are away. Kind of matters depending what weapons the group uses.
And if you want to be 6 Million Dollar Man running faster - get better legs ... better muscles means faster movement. Whether the muscles are made of metal or flesh doesnt matter. The Wired Reflexes have no fluff description that they enhance your muscles - only neural boosters and extra adrenaline. Enhancing muscle power is "Muscle Toner/Augmentation" Bioware and "Muscle Replacement" Cyberware or Cyberlegs (those are kind of bad atm, they should be alot faster than humanoid legs if you build them like bird legs for example)
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No slower movement for dwarves and trolls this edition? (I hadn't seen anything about that in the rules so far, but I haven't read cover to cover so I assumed I was just missing something)
That one question wasnt answered i think. They have the same movement like everyone else now. I think thats a good change since its either a huge disadvantage or doesnt matter at all depending on the groups playstyle.
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The Sprint Action gives you 15 m, plus one meter for every hit on an Athletics + Agility Test; Most Street Samurai will easily get one or more hits.
By way of comparison, Usain Bolt’s personal best time in the 100 m dash is 9.58 second. That’s 10.4 meters per second... By the man who is literally the best person in all of recorded history at running very fast.
Given that Bolt isn’t being shot at, isn’t wearing body armor, isn’t carrying a katana in one hand and a submachine gun in the other... and is clearly using every last point of Edge he has when he makes his world record run. Yeah, this seems fair.
That makes it worse imo. It works fine when my pot bellied mage is running but sucks for the Steve the 450,000 nuyen man. He’s got a 10 agility 5 athletics gets 5 hits and moves 20 meters in 10 seconds so basically bolt is 50% faster than him. Bolt is the fastest human but Steve is freaking superhuman. If after cyber muscled you get to a 10 strength and Steve’s deadlift was the same percentage less than the world deadlift record I’d think it was stupid bad 5e deadlift math. Now it’s a 1000kg before any test good 6e deadlift math. Which is about double the current deadlift record. And that’s before any rolling.
Speed should be about the same. A super cyber speed guy should be moving about double usains bolts running speed and that’s before dice are tossed.
A cybered up dude should be laughably trouncing bolts records. A cybered up guy focussed on sprinting in the cyber Olympics so he’s not only superhuman but highly trained at running shouldn’t even be referencing bolt it would be in a totally different category.
As a aside. I’d of made strength the test as opposed to agility but so be it.
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I think the easy fix is to drop the “only one movement action” rule.
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I think the easy fix is to drop the “only one movement action” rule.
I was thinking the same thing, it renders sprinting moot, but it rewards Sammies and other ID jackers.
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Using extra Minor Actions from Initiative Dice for Movement is counter intuitive.
Since no Initiative Boosters exist in reality we can look at the Critters. Dogs stay slow with 2 sprint actions allowed per round, cats get super fast (since they have 2 Major actions). [Critters; p.215 CRB] thats why i dont like houseruling too much. You change something - without thinking everything trough - and something else falls apart.
Synaptic Boosters Bioware makes even less sense to allow faster physical movement.
And personally i think drugs like the so called real life"Speed" dont actually make you faster, you just destroy your body more eagerly to get a bit faster (maybe). So "Cram" shouldnt make you run faster in Shadowrun either. Just doesnt feel right in a world shaped after real world physics.
Instead you could just look at the speeds achieveable with the stats you see as a "good samurai" - lets take 10 agility 7 strength 5 athletics as "good samurai stats"; base speed stays 15 m / per combat round
Since it was suggested we want double speed of the current world record:
we need 60 m / per Combat Round. That would be about 15+2*(Agility + Strenght+Athletics) = 59 m /s
And remember Combat Rounds are: CRBp. 60 "A combat round lasts for about three seconds of in-universe time." 3 seconds long.
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To be honest, double speed seems too much. We likely are in the realm of a curve here and a +4 on top should not even be near equal the double of what is likely to have been a 6 or rather a 7. Aiming for a +25% instead of a +100% should be more than enough. This is especially true if you concern your self with the fact, that most of the action will not happen unencumbered but with many many many times the added weight in gear, that our world-record-sprinter had to propel.