The Found Arcana [OOC]
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The Found Arcana [OOC]
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We should lie to him. That’s a good speech. Roll it up, maybe with Edge if you have some left.
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I’m guessing we’re on hold this week while Gilga celebrates Passover.
I’m also guessing that we’re getting close to the end of this chapter. As long as we’re pausing, are people still interested in smaller one-shots and interludes in the Found Arcana stream of things? Not full blown missions, but little open-ended encounters that can be as long or as short as we want. Just wanted to double-check since I know you all are already juggling both Shooting Stars and Forbidding Aegis.
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I was just pondering the same question. I want to continue, but it does risk kind of drifting with no overall direction. But we’d only know if we try, right?
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Yes, my attention is a bit spotty for the next two weeks. Passover, and then a vacation in France.
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Anyhow, since we’re a few posts from ending:
Everybody gets 30 karma for the run.
You can up the loyalty of Five Fingers Gau by 1. (or add him as a 1 loyalty contact).
You can add Cheng Mu Chou – Triad Lieutenant as an (L1, C6) contact.
You can add Bau Chou – Renegate Triad as (L3, C3) contact. -
Wiz. Thanks, Gilga.
I’m not quite sure how we split the pay for this. I think we’re getting paid ¥15,000 + ¥10,000 for a total of ¥25,000 (Gilga, correct me if I’m wrong), but then splitting it up is a bit wonky.
First half (15K): Jawsey + Bobby + Mato + Ginsburg
Second half (10K): Jawsey + Bobby + Mato + AMUnless we’re including AM on the first half too because she’s part of the team? And because Gilga shouldn’t suffer just because he GM’d it.
I don’t remember picking up any loot along the way.
For ease, let’s divide the 15K by 5 PCs and the 10K by 4 PCs. That means 3K + 2.5K = ¥5,500 for everyone. Does that sound accurate or did I overlook something?
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Wait! Yiur pay should be 25K from The sell+ the 15k credstick. 40k divided by 4 is 10k before taxes.
Did I miss anything?As for AM, she did a job for her creditors and should be paid about the same for it.
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Okay, thanks for the clarification.
I’m still confused about AM’s pay. Are we cutting Ginsburg out of the pay, or are we saying that he gets half a share and AM gets the other half? Or is AM’s pay coming in the form of reduced debt load?
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My feeling on how the GM’s character get’s covered is:
– They are not part of the split on the job
– They do get equivalent pay and karma as those who did play
(this is the model used in SR Missions: GM can assign the same karma and nuyen as the team earned to one of their characters)I figure is is a side job or something like that (most of us could well end up being called to do some work for our creditors …. ).
I do want to understand the logic behind 30 karma. Not that any amount of karma breaks shadowrun (as well demonstrated by Aria’s games), I just figure we should share our thoughts on this as stuff gets passed back and forth.
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Sure, using the SR Missions methodology works for me. So 10K per person prior to taxes.
What’s the question about the 30 karma? We earned 25 karma for the first chapter. It’s about the same Aria’s games, since the Chapter 2 IC thread had 288 posts and there were 4.5 of us playing/GMing. 288 posts divided by 4.5 participants = 64 posts per person, so very much in line with ~30 karma. Obviously we’re not accruing nuyen at the same rate as we do in Aria’s games, but I’m enjoying that we’re collectively climbing out of the In Debt hole together.
Ultimately, the Awakened (i.e. you guys) benefit more from karma than mundanes do (i.e me). I’m not too concerned about it right now. We started Chapter 2 on November 20th, so we spent five months on it. Play-by-post needs accelerated karma accrual if you ever want to feel like your character is progressing.
FYI, I’m in the process of moving Mato over to a proper PC sheet on Obsidian Portal.
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I’d go with Beta’s interpretation. First part work with Ginsburg, second with AM. So 4 runners in each quest.
As for the karma rewards, I decided on it to be on-par with Lorebane. He set a generous bar awarding 25 karma on the first run. So I wanted to award a similar amount. Since Lorebane is no longer around, we are free to set a different bar.
PS if you recall we started in SR tabletop so we have 70 more post to about 350 total.
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Ah, Gilga is correct. The IC post total is higher.
If we continue (which I would vote to do) then we can revisit everything, from Lorebane’s house rules to the rate of character progression to the length and scope of chapters. We can move things to Aria’s model for simplicity or we can keep doing things our own way.
I’m personally enjoying having this be a separate thing on its own, with karma and nuyen rewards at the end, but I’m open to ideas.
I’m still playing with some of Lorebane’s house rules, like the reconfigured skill groups. I think this affects Mato more than the rest of you.
I think once we get out of debt we can open the faucet a bit in terms of more nuyen, but I like the ‘lean and hungry’ elements of these early chapters. In my head I think of this as a ganger campaign of sorts – which is obviously ridiculous because Mato is a full-blown street sam – but there are obviously elements of a lower-powered campaign, like the Barrens setting and Jawsey and AM starting with less than Magic 6. Maybe a ‘less optimized’ campaign would be a more accurate way of thinking about it, with Mato again being an outlier.
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@Beta
Did that answer your question about karma or did you have other thoughts on the matter?@Jack_Spade, @Gilga
Did you have any thoughts about continuing and/or things you like or don’t like? -
I’m find with the current karma/money system. It limits us somewhat in our development, but adds the nice street level charm.
As for the house rules: I build my char based on them and have no interest in rebuilding it. On the other hand I don’t want to refer to them all the time when I know the original rules. So I’d prefer to go back to the original and just keep our chars as is – if that makes sense.
If you want, I can take care of GMing the next chapter, so everyone gets to play a bit (also, Bobby will want to initiate, so it’s an ideal point for him to make himself scarce)
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@Tecumseh yep, that is questions well answered 🙂 (also I’d mis-remembered the first karma award as 15, so 30 had seemed a big jump. 25 to 30 seems about right for the length of the runs)
@Jack_Spade
– I was also going to offer to GM — Jawsey needs to spend some time to train up his magic attribute. But if you are up for running two things at once I won’t stand in your way.
– I agree that remembering the house rules could be a challenge. On the other hand, the skill groups are kind of built into the characters now?And I agree that I’m enjoying a ‘less optimized’ campaign. The characters came at things from different angles, it is sort of like instead of having blue-yellow-red we have green-orange-purple, you know? It makes things different, with different solution sets.
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@Beta
If you want to stretch your GM legs, I’m certainly down for it. Judging from your character posts, I’m certainly looking forward to it 🙂That’s what I meant by not converting the Char: Things that are written down like that (changed Skill Groups) should stay as is, but all the other stuff ideally should return to normal rules.
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A couple things.
First, I had proposed the idea of me running some mini-encounters that would be less like a mission and more like “a day in the life in the Barrens”. If we spend 5 OOC months on a chapter than these would be more like 5 days to 5 weeks, depending on how deeply we dive into the world.
I have a couple of these in mind but there’s one that makes sense for our current timeline because it relates to Lifestyle payments. In-game, the first two chapters took place in mid-to-late September, so my interlude would take place on October 1st. Then the next chapter could take place in October while [GM’s PC] is busy initiating and/or improving Attributes.
If we’re keeping a Missions-esque calendar of Lifestyle payments and training/improvements – which I am not opposed to – then one twist I’ve used in the past is to say that you get the benefits of the training/improvement immediately, but that you can’t upgrade it again for the duration of the training period. For example, Jawsey could go to Magic 3 immediately, but couldn’t improve to Magic 4 until at least three weeks have passed in game time. This keeps things moving without having to juggle incongruities between the IC calendar and the OOC calendar, especially when it comes to who is GMing when.
So, a proposed calendar could be something like this:
Interlude: Tec
Chapter 3: Beta
Interlude: Tec
Chapter 4: JackThat’s enough for one post. I’ll write up thoughts on the house rules later today.
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I do like the interludes idea. Give me a bit of time to stop branching neverending ideas and actually nail one down as the plot.
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Alright, house rules. I reviewed Lorebane’s original documents and they can be broadly categorized like this:
A) “Here’s how I do things as a GM”
B) Changes to chargen
C) Changes to gameplayFor our purposes, we can focus on C. Let’s review.
1) Arcana and Artisan are knowledge skills, not active skills. We can move them back to being active skills if we want, but this will increase their cost to advance.
2) Streamlined combat skills. Firearms skill group is Small Arms / Longarms / Heavy Weapons. Close Quarters Combat skill group is Unarmed Combat / Melee Weapons / Throwing Weapons. I like this one, although it occurs to me that Mato is not currently in compliance with it because I have Automatics on my sheet and I’ve been using it to cover SMGs and assault rifles. (Not in practice, as I haven’t attacked anything yet over the course of two chapters, but in theory.) I would probably ditch Mato’s AK-97 and stick with SMGs, since he has one in his arm. Or we could go back to the usual SR5 skill groups.
3) Sneaking specializations. “Indoors” vs. “Outdoors” instead of the usual “Urban” specialization. Only affects Mato right now.
4) Adept Ways are now 15 karma.
5) Combat style costs. 5 karma for a new style, 3 karma for new techniques.
6) SMGs get a free point of recoil.
7) Rebalanced damage codes for machine guns. This doesn’t really affect us. It’s more important in the context of #8 below.
8) Much higher Availability for Enfield AS-7 (14F) and Ares Alpha (16F). I actually like this one a lot.
9) 20% discount on Fake SINs.
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I think that the updated karma costs have little impact (and I find martial arts to be annoying as it requires a lot of reading and player knowledge to utilize instead of just getting +1 in unarmed combat. As a rule, I’d like to minimize the time I spend looking for rules as I find that time unsatisfying.
That said, aside for character creation rules which are no longer relevant. The rest have little impact on the game.
1. Arcana/Artistian – Let’s keep them as is, we have plenty of points of Arcana between us, but yet it is currently more of a fluff skill.2. I like the combat skill in general – but don’t like when I need to ‘force’ chummer to make the char. Which is why I suggest we return to normal.
3. Sneaking – I always thought that Urban was ‘outside’ – but perhaps that is just me. I don’t mind it.
4. I don’t see a particular need to reduce adept ways – but I am not playing an Adept. My take is that magic users do not need karma discounts. (They still benefit more from Karma compared to mundanes).
5. Martial arts changes – I find Martial arts annoying as they require a lot of reading for very situational benefits. If I was to make a house rule regarding them it was abstracting all these techniques into unarmed combat and just fluff them. Since I never plan to use them, I don’t care what their costs are.
6-9: I am fine with them- though I’d just revert to the original stuff for less backlog
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