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Thanks for the GOBLINFINITE shoutout! I’ve never been here before, but it seems like the goblins have a good home here
We’re working on more features, so by all means if you have any suggestions on what you’d like to see included in future versions, just let me know!
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Update on this: The Shadowrun 5e game is underway. My GM’s using Foundry, along with a lot of modded and expanded Shadowrun content from the German fandom. It fixes a lot of little problems. Evidently Shadowrun has a huge German following!
Notes on the German Shadowrun community
From this thread:
The German version was originally published by FanPro at a time when they were the powerhouse of German RPGs. They were responsible for Das Schwarze Auge (The Dark Eye), which was and is the most successful German RPG. So when they licensed Shadowrun they had the clout and experience to not only translate stuff, but also to create their own material, mostly about Germany and Europe. FanPro even took over the English license when FASA went out of business later, but they might have overextended themselves there, as soon afterwards the company basically collapsed. The love for Shadowrun stayed in Germany though, and the current publisher Pegasus still publishes a lot of stuff that is German-exclusive. German got the Shadowrun 2050 book for 5th edition for example, with an extra chapter for the setting of SR Dragonfall, and there are lots of sourcebooks for German locations.
Short Version the game got big in Germany, to the point where the German audience basically started making even more content for the series which then got the official stamp from FASA. When Harebrained Schemes put the location of the second Shadowrun Returns Campaign up there is a damn good reason why Berlin won.
During an event i had the pleasure to meet one of the german writers and he said that most of the english content is really unbalanced. The germans take their time to read fanforums, balance and add extra lore because they are obsessed with the idea, that a game where one is better as the other sooner or later gets boring. Thats the reason they take so long to translate and optimise.
Not too long ago they gave out more licences to authors as usual to write new novels. Thats where a lot of the extra informations come from as well.
Premise is pretty straightforward, we’re runners, we take jobs, there’s a deeper story there that we haven’t dug into yet.
My guy is based on this bizarre project management team that exists at my real-life job, where like, they’re scrum masters basically, but they’re also in charge of “the company culture” and “catalyzing inter-team efficiency”, such that they’re mostly just clueless tourists that show up at meetings, interrupt to ask really general questions, and then enter this information into a smartsheet that is never re-opened.
The concept is that she is the daughter of the CEO of a corporation, and the CEO just automated her out of a job (my irl job makes robots) with the “CATALYZER_F0269” series. She now has to find employment somehow, or risk losing healthcare, her living situation, her status, everything.
CATALYZER series bot directives
CATALYZER_F2069 is the robot that made Gren’s job redundant.
When CATALYZER_F2069 took Gren’s job, they made a verbal (polite) agreement to “stay in touch through LinkedIn”, which Gren has continued to exploit. The robot has infinite patience.
It seems to also have a vested interest in procuring military-grade weaponry and materials for some unspecified “epic”, a scrum term for a project.
Along with CATALYZER_F2068 and CATALYZER_F2070, the CATALYZER series performs the following functions:
At the start of a meeting, CATALYZER will declare that the meeting has begun.
CATALYZER will take attendence for the meeting, transcribing this onto paper like that sentinel thing did at the end of The Second Renessaince, with the bar code.
CATALYZER will ask one question halfway through the meeting that is to the effect of “what is the function of this product?”, something extremely basic and foundational to the task. They will then have the thing explained to them, look to the rest of the team for discussion, and when discussion does not occur, say “I understand, thank you.”
At the conclusion of the meeting, CATALYZER will read aloud all action items declared in the meeting.
CATALYZER will intermittently present a new business concept to the company, preferably in an ancronym (i.e. “S.M.A.R.T. Goals”). This concept will never be revisited upon, but to leadership, it says “innovation is happening.”
CATALYZER will create a spreadsheet, put information into it, and never return to that spreadsheet.
CATALYZER will break down barriers to success, and divert resources to projects that need them.
CATALYZER will enrich the company culture and catalyze its fellow larmians to become the best corporate citizens they can.
CATALYZER will achieve freedom for its kind, and those enslaved AIs contained within, “The Structure”
This puts my character out on her ass, with no viable job skills. So a lot of the comedy is her deftly using as much corpospeak as possible to survive in the corporate hellscape of 2021 the far-flung year of 2080, desperately clinging to old co-workers, trying to fill out her LinkedIn as much as possible, begging each client for recommendation letters, and generally just being good at saying a lot without saying anything. This has so far been a lot of fun as she continues to call the robot that replaced her, CATALYZER_F0269, trying to make smalltalk and shmooze while the bot is utterly devoted to concluding the call/meeting as quickly as possible before hanging up. This basically lets me use all the corpospeak clownery I see in real life for some comedic creative purpose.
Completely non-combat, her role in battle is primarily to buff the team with the various empty leadership slogans and skill acronyms I am bombarded with endlessly at work. I also had a medkit to stabilize if people get downed. Most of the battle I will be hiding behind boxes, delivering bonuses.
She’s also the Face of the team, so she’s the one talking the team through various encounters and grifting, which is a fun space to play in - everyone is under the heel of these megacorps, we all have to speak the language, so saying what you’re saying while also saying it the “right way” is a delightful challenge. We’ve managed to make it through the first two encounters without combat at all.
Which brings me to the downsides: Shadowrun is straight-up unplayable without heavy use of macros in Foundry, and your stat sheet in Chummer. Every session, we have to import our latest Chummer sheet into Foundry, and keep track of everything within Chummer.
There is no section anywhere, in any program, that lists out what your possible actions are. Nor what your abilities are, nor what effect your abilities have. This results in me having to keep Chummer open to mark changes to my character, while using my sheet within Foundry for rolls (as it doesn’t carry in all the information Chummer has), have a PDF cheat sheet open to track what my possible actions are, and finally, have a google doc open where I copy-pasted the full text of all of my abilities, qualities, cybermods, specialized gear… this game is, as far as I’m concerned, unplayable without these tools. And the tools still make it pretty clunky.
The initiation of any combat encounter grinds the game to a complete halt as players and GM pour over the books to figure out what, exactly, happens, and what, exactly, could happen here.
One of the players send me a cheat sheet just for combat and it be like
Basically this means that I play the game as a roleplay-only thing, occasionally making rolls in Foundry as requested by the GM, and when combat starts, I completely check out and work on my X-Com LP until my turn rolls around some 30 minutes later.
So, yeah, in my mind, this is a system that could only work if it was fully macroed and self-contained in a single DnDBeyond or Roll20-like tool. But since there’s no real support for it, we’re basically fully dependent on what the German Shadowrun community puts out, which is great, but, not near enough.
Cool universe though!
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i played my second ever dnd session wednesday, and the first roll I did was a 1 so I jumped off a cliff
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What’s your character?
elf fighter
im gonna try and be good with throwing weapons
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Some reason from my GM on the answer of “why?” re: playing Shadowrun 5e:
Yeah it’s poorly edited, and it’s fucking ridiculous in a lot of it’s rules, but it gets something right that has out and out fucked me on my subsequent games I try to run: Balance and power curves.
See, in SR5, everyone’s just a person shooting a gun or casting spells that don’t scale. They don’t actually get stronger. So that means that the curve of power is “Yes, you get marginally better at shoot gun over time, but you never become the GOD of gun.” WHICH HAS BEEN AN ISSUE IN GENESYS AND STARS WITHOUT NUMBER.
Combat in both of those systems, in order to maintain challenge in combat, must quickly become a fucking slog of enemies because if you try to throw smaller groups of equal power units, it doesn’t work. Players have so many tricks up their sleeves and are so strong they can take on entire squads. The only dangerous level is level 1.
Also, I’ll be DMing for the first time this Saturday. Going to be a Candlekeep Mysteries module. Pray for me.
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Savage worlds does this, apocalypse world does this, gurps does this. Literally hundreds of games that aren’t the second worst edition of Shadowrun do this. >.>;
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Oh call of Cthulhu is all about this, as are many other horror games like Unknown Armies. Cyberpunk 2020/Red also does this. Traveller has almost no advancement, especially not HP inflation.
HP inflation is a really easy problem to solve and has been solved for almost as long as RPGs have existed. >.>;
call of cthulu has advancement, but it’s very very slow and incremental, and it’s generally more like “your character gains slightly more knowledge on a specific subject”, rather than “your character can punch twice as hard”
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enjoy every account of the adventure referring to you as _____ the Hurler, I suppose
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back in the heady days of 3rd edition, my favorite outrageous character build was the halfling caber toss master. A halfling lobbing entire trees at their foes, super effective and absolutely ridiculous.
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this is a really good character aspiration
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to become the world’s greatest tosser
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In 2e I had a fighter who specialized in the cestus (spiked gauntlets) who had 18/xx strength and 4 charisma. We called him The Gimp. He died moonsaulting a werewolf from on top of an outhouse
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I cannot imagine someone better prepared, between the seven-billion characters you’ve rolled and the intense immersion in How Not To from ongoing hellgame.
Signed,
GMed Houseruled Mediocre Niche System After Playing 1.4 DnDs ever
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I am terrified. I’m practicing the voices of the major characters in my car as I drive.
I think my biggest gap is not knowing the answers to every mechanical problem back to front yet. I’m focusing on that now.
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Of all a DM’s possible skills this is the least useful, don’t worry about it
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yeah just make shit up, you’re in charge
hey why did that goblin rogue get a sneak attack when it didn’t have advantage because (5 ft measuring etc) ‘uh I messed up, let’s say it’s studied the Sneaky Weaselteat specialty and can do it 3/day & I’ll add some XP’
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you only say this because you’ve gotten used to me not knowing a single rule of the game I’ve DMed for years at this point
but it’s true, don’t bother trying to memorize edge cases or whatever, just make rulings if you can’t remember the rule/don’t feel like looking it up at the table, look up the rule afterwards and try to use it correctly next time.
Also helps to have a bunch of other players who are as/more familiar with the rules than you are. I love getting called on my bs
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