• 5 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • CarPlay and Android Auto aren’t car OSes though, they’re merely an infotainment interface. You still need a way for the user to check the tire pressure, choose between sports mode and eco mode… Cars manufacturers could just implement the basics and let CarPlay/Auto do the rest but in that case anyone that doesn’t have a compatible phone is stuck without infotainment, same if you run out of battery.

    CarPlay and Auto being so good is somewhat to blame for first party interfaces being that bad though: why spend litteral millions on look and feel if you know the users who care won’t be using it






  • I think it’s canon that wether in DnD or PF anyone can learn arcane magic if they take the time to do so (and they have a way to pay for it, most people can’t afford to not work for 5-10 years)

    The thing is, even if someone has the money and the time maybe they don’t want to spend it, especially if magical scrolls/wands can let you cast spells fairly easily.

    To me it’s the same thing as saying to some kid “you can learn to be a robotics engineer and in 5-10 years and $100k of debt you’ll be able to make robots that can do anything for you, including being strong” and the kid just replies “That’s cool, but I think I’ll just go to the gym thank you”





  • That’s a very old post but yeah, it is, so is Ghidra (a retro-engineering tool). A lot of people have had the exact same argument of “the NSA made it, it has to be evil!” but lots of security people dissected the code (the fact that it was made by the NSA probably made more people look through it in fact) and no backdoor has ever been found in years. It’s safe to use.


  • I just realized I’ve totally forgotten to post about my own characters!

    Right, so the character I’m currently playing isn’t really that weird but has a few quirks: mainly, he’s a Tarot Mage and he’s trying the get the 5 Tarot Summoning metamagics. It’s especially not that great cause he has the Arcana mentor spirit, so he didn’t have a choice for his first two metamagics, meaning he’ll have to get to Initiate Level 7 (!) just to be able to possibly call a dragon to the team’s position… Definitely not the best use of Karma, but I live for the randomness! He’s also has a very weird way to be strongly-willed: as an Ogre with Exceptional Attribute, he has a Willpower of 8. His way of being so strong willed is to always let go, he’s the most zen person you’ll ever see. He figures if Destiny is already written then why try to force things, just go with the flow.

    I have another character already built for a mini-campain we’ll hopefully start soon enough, he’s a three eyed gnome, from a family of farmers in Tír na nÓg. He decided to run with his brother (another character in the campain) since their family of 8 rejected them (my character for having 3 eyes, the other character for being too big (he’s a dwarf)). He’s a 4 RES technomancer with the technoshaman stream and a love for explosive shotgun shells. He’s a christian and a strong believer at that, he believes resonance is how God integrates into the Matrix and he sees all his sprites as Angels, making good use of “Machine Angels” that help him shoot better through their divine intervention. As a technoshaman he has a Sprite Pet which he sees as his guardian Angel.



  • When in doubt, I always try to get some inspiration from action movies since I always immagined Shadowrun as basically the TTRPG version of them. For instance, you could do a “heist montage” where your players make a single test one after the other, and the number of “rounds” is a function of the run’s difficulty. After each roll, you say something like “Echo manages to hack the server, deactivating the doors’ bioscanners, the whole group gets in” without really getting too much into how they did it



  • One way would be to have him very differently with the runners compared to basically any other NPCs:

    • Since he’s head of security and he was raised by MCT he probably knows everyone in his team personally, maybe some of them would be people he’d call his friends. Maybe he has the occasion of saying goodbye to a colleague, and as he’s one the verge of breaking down the colleague doesn’t quite understand why he’s making a scene since they’ve been saying goodbye for each other for 35 years now. Maybe he has a moment when he leaves the armory when he remembers all that happened here, maybe he refuses to leave without the drone that saved his life… You know, show that he cares about people, about places and things
    • When he talks to the runners, have him be as cold as possible, if the runners argue or don’t seem coordinated enough have him give snarky comments. If the runners’ lives are in danger have him not care at all and leave them behind…

    For that added bit of realism if you have metas in your group have him stop mid-sentence while saying some anti-meta comments, to represent how his son is slowly changing him.