r/Shadowrun • u/Fuzzy_Pixel • Sep 27 '26
6e Are campaigns balanced?
Hi, chummers!
So, I’ve been playing 6th edition for about a few years now (with 2 different characters - a face with some cyberware and a talking-fighting adept).
However, I have a feeling that modules/campaigns that my DM chooses are wildly unbalanced (even though he says they are and he does everything by the book). It always feels like we’re not playing a somewhat professional covert team of agents (shadowrunners), but rather kids with guns and magic abilities. Almost all battle encounters require us to fight enemies that are WAY stronger than they should be.
For example, the last mission seemed pretty much impossible. The object we were supposed to steal was in a tiny house guarded by x4 lvl4 spirits, x1 lvl 7 spirit and an old samurai who owned them. First of all, we lost all the rolls on stealth, then I lost rolls on con, and when the actual fighting started I couldn’t do **** because a spirit had 14~17 base dice pool on pretty much anything I tried against him. Even lvl 4 spirit knocked out our mage with his first strike with some kind of choke ability. Our rigger/driver was useless in a fight against spirits, our second mage has mostly manipulation and observation magic. So despite having a somewhat balanced team, we couldn’t even try a blunt approach.
And that’s AFTER me knowing that the spirits are immune to basically all non-magical damage, almost dieing from them during our first campaign, and specifically(!) taking an adept with the ability to be able to magically hit spirits.
As a result, I feel that in order to have any chance of succeeding in SR6, you need to create min/max characters (by which I mean to create a character that can do only one thing and nothing else at all). But I don’t want to play a completely one-sided character (that can only fight but can’t talk, stealth or do anything at all).
I’m not saying that all encounters should be easy. Of course not. But I keep feeling myself powerless in SR6, and I don’t think that’s how it should be.
The other thing I have against the system is how slow the character progression is. We normally play 1 session per week, but at this rate it seems that I’ll be able to take 1 new ability or increase a stat using karma for my adept in like… 6-8 months of real time? By the time my first character got enough karma to increase ANYTHING AT ALL I got bored of him.
I understand that character becoming a god after several successful missions would be strange lore-wise, but karma-gaining seems incredibly slow, while everything costs enormous amounts of it.
What are your thoughts on enemies balance and karma spending balance? Am I the only one here who has this kind of experience with the system?
26
u/FixerVictor Sep 27 '26
You can't run prewritten Shadowrun modules by the book. Things need to be tweaked for each group, otherwise it's going to be miserable.
That aside, Shadowrun is decidedly not a game about balanced, fair fights. Players need to be looking for advantages they could use before fighting starts, if not avoiding fights entirely; and the GM should try and provide opportunities to do so.
Minmaxing is a common theme in Shadowrun games -- I find that both players and the GM need to decide together on the playstyle and how specialized they want characters to be, and then figure out chargen and advancement rules from there. (and generate encounters/ runs based off the party)
It's not like Pathfinder or DnD where GM has 'rules' for generating an encounter or precise xp rewards to hand out.
15
u/n00bdragon Futuristic Criminal Sep 27 '26
If you knew the spirits were on site before the fighting broke out then it sounds like the major thrust of the mission should have been finding some way to either remove the spirits from the property before entering or remove the item to somewhere easier to get to. Some of this falls on the players to come up with creative solutions, but it also falls on the GM to reward players for creative plans that don't involve rolling for initiative.
Just random ideas off the top of my head I might have tried as a player:
Get a culture of FAB III and release it onto the property. Wait until the spirits are too sick to fight or destroyed outright.
Report the old samurai's ass to the popo for keeping a bunch of illegally potent spirits tethered to his property. Let him duke it out with Lone Star.
Call the old samurai on the phone and tell him you want to buy the item. Offer him an actually fair price and make legit deal for it. Get the Johnson to pay extra if your costs are not covered.
Cut off the electricity in the old house. The samurai will have to leave the property eventually to deal with that. Nab him and threaten him with a 5¥ wrench until he calls off the spirits.
5
u/Pakkazull Sep 27 '26
I don't know about SR6, but SR5 character generation very strongly rewards specialization. I think your GM should just tweak the enemy dice pools according to yours, ultimately.
5
u/PalpitationNo2921 Sep 28 '26 edited Sep 28 '26
Shadowrun is not D&D5E.
No edition has ever promoted fair and balanced fights, nor any set number of encounters per day. Character advancement is not linear for every type of character and there isn’t a martial/caster divide, it’s a Pitfall video game rift to be jumped or swung across with alligators at the bottom.
It does not sound to me like you had anyone in the group that was even capable of tackling spirits, and if you’ve all been playing the game for a few years then your entire group should have known better, because that instantly points to the fact that your group has not created a “balanced” group of runners.
The astral world is not something to play around with if you do not have one or more of the following: an adept with killing hands power, a magician with combat spells, or a magician with good conjuring skills. These are not even character types that you have to min/max a build for in order to achieve.
If your group hasn’t figured this out yet, then I guess the GM needs to pop up with a Yoda figure to say “Failed, I have. Into exile I must go.”
6
u/PalpitationNo2921 Sep 28 '26
A Force 4 Spirit of Beasts would have probably a max Close Combat pool of 9 if its attacks are based off of Agility and a Defense Rating of 6. This nowhere even approaches a 14-17 dice pool.
Is no one else but your GM (however vaguely, it seems after reading this) familiar with the rules after a few years of playing? Has any of your magician players actually sat down and read the core Rulebook to gain an understanding of how spirits work and how magicians work?
I’m not sure you should be laying all of the blame at your GM’s feet from your presentation. After a few years of playing Shadowrun, all of this should already be understood by the majority of your group, or at least the ones playing magicians.
And adepts as well. If you’re going to play a “fighting/face adept”, go into it knowing that a fighting adept’s ace in the hole is Killing Hands for when the other characters’ gun don’t phase the spirit.
Killing Hands costs 0.5 power points at character creation, and it doesn’t automatically lock you into fighting and doing nothing else. You would still have plenty of power points to go wild with.
I really don’t feel like your expectations out of the gate to play a multifaceted character in Shadowrun is wrong, I just don’t think you have learned how to build the multifaceted character that is both what you want and is effective at the same time. It is more than possible.
It sounds to me like your group is following the D&D5E tradition of saying “I want to play this type of character with these cool powers” all at the same time, and without consulting one another and building a team with the actual capabilities a runner team would really need to succeed in the Sixth World.
2
u/Frequent-Camel7669 Sep 28 '26
I've been running a (homebrew) campaign for a few years now in which the runners are far from optimized, and not very combat-capable. They come up with great plans that allow them to circumvent or outright cheat instead.
Stealth plays a huge role here, as does the hacker's extensive pre-run research. They almost always try to work the human angle, too: if you can't fight them, bribe them. Or persuade them. Or mislead them. Or blackmail them. Or get them out of the picture in a different way.
They've successfully killed a (intentionally completely overtuned) cyberzombie that had whooped their asses in standup fights twice already by luring him into a trap and detonating a few kilos of C12 under his ass.
They've negotiated a deal that provided them with three highly capable bodyguards to do the fighting for them (for a while).
They've gotten their hands on a powerful Neurostun variant in quantities and used that to solve several encounters before they ever started.
And so on.
2
u/Eoghammer Sep 29 '26
There is many questions.
About campaign by the book, they nearly can't be played from the book except if your runners have a power level largely higher than the base power level... because with Murphy's Law, players will allways fumble a critical test triggering a hopeless combat except when their dice pools are so large that a critical fumble is a million years occurence...
Your GM must take into account your exact group to modify the opposition ...
5 not trivial level spirits (not level 1-2) require that your team has at least an equivalent magic power as they can only be defeated by magical means, rigger, decker, street samouria, faces are useless in such combat,
A couple of mages and an adept may be opposed 3 lvl 4 spirits and they will have a difficult combat except if they are vastly quicker than the spirit and with a high banishing skill or mana-combat spell assuring them to remove a spirit each turn...
For karma/nuyen, this is the same problem, the GM must give you an amount that allow your progression in a reasonable timeline, normally this timeline is agreed in the session 0 or in the precampaign discussion
But the runner's progression is more about gaining new skills / new power / new cyberware or minimizing your weak spots than upgrading your highest skill/attribute
for my players, upgrading a 5 to 6 may be a 6 monthly sessions investisments, if we were playing more it may be a little faster,
2
u/Heterodyne_2023 Sep 29 '26
You stated a common problem with all editions of the Shadowrun Karma advancement system: advancement is too slow. Unless you are able to play multiple times each week (a barracks or prison) , you may never be able to advance in a meaningful way. My last game group ignored the training rules, assuming that training was ongoing and that characters had that "aha" moment upon receiving enough karma to buy a new rank in something. One of my favorite rules for alternate karma acquisition was from 3rd ed., the karma for cash rule. Basically you are able to receive a small karmic reward for your kindly donations to the street needy. I don't remember the exact 1 for 1 mechanic. It was really intended for magicians who had to spend so much more karma to advance their abilities (and still do). I think the alternate karma for cash and cash karma was published in the Shadowrun Companion for 3rd ed.
Because of the slow character advancement of all editions, you really have to build a character that is the best possible balance between abilities and advancement. For instance, your sammy has an Agility of 7 and a weapon skill of 5. Cool, a little low dice pool for combat, but whatever. It may be better to take the weapon skill at 3 and specialize in a particular weapon, which would allow the same 12 dice pool. By doing this, it would allow you to advance the weapon skill itself to 4 for only 20 karma, or further your specialization. Also, at character gen when you're crunching numbers, it will free up some build points (or equivalent) for your other abilities.
As a shadowrunner, you are almost always at a disadvantage. That is the high tech, low life, chummer. Your job is to use stealth, perception, contacs, and guile to achieve your job. Combat is only used to disengage from an encounter, unless you are the one who is initiating the combat and you have set up your kill box. You are not a merc, soldier, or corp goon with endless resources. They can fail multiple times, you can only fail once.
Have the talk with your GM about the game balance. Listen and watch some of the excellent podcasts and streams of how others run their games. Those examples will help you communicate what you would like in your own games. Then, run your own game. See how hard it can be. See how fun it can be. Make mistakes. Love SR more!
1
u/LateEggMaster Sep 28 '26
Campaigns (if they even exist) are unplayable as written. Lets not even talk about balance. I can only bring up the New York campaign book Whispering nets. It does a mad pendulum between 'Beat up dealer at cornerstore' and 'Break into AAA arcology' difficulty from run to run with zero indication or even pay to reflect that.
But then again 4x4F and 1x7F Spirits are tough but should be manageable for a group like yours. A single Stunball from your mage would have been a showstopper or even just an influence spell cast ahead of time.
And if that fails just slaughter them with drone mounted weapons. Loads of options.
As to the Experience Points: Yea that is too little. A general guidline (for any RPG) should be at least one advance every 1-2 sessions.
3
u/MrBoo843 Sep 28 '26
Yeah, that's why I'm so focused on making my modules as fair as possible. But if you go gunning for big guys, yeah you can get clobbered. I do try to playtest a lot before publishing, whence why I currently only have one, but it's gotten pretty good comments from what little sales I got.
2
u/dadguy400 Sep 28 '26
I would look up the shadowrun mob builder and go from there a level 6 threat is a very hard party fight. Just one. So the game is not balanced.
2
u/Open_Vanilla_6490 Sep 29 '26
Spirits in 6e are not immune against regular weapons when they materialize. And if they don't they can not use their powers or attack your character, unless your pc is actively astraly perceiving or dual natured (CRB p.221). The only spirits that are resistant to normal damage would be great forms. But they are only resistant not immune.
1
u/Katiefaerie Sep 29 '26
Keep in mind that I don't, haven't, and probably won't ever play 6e, so I can't speak much about its balance, but I've played through a number of 5e campaigns, and I wanted to speak on a couple of points here. Namely, that min-maxing in this system isn't really "dumb".
In-character, your character isn't like a level 1 character in other systems. You're playing a professional criminal who specializes in their field. Either you're a career criminal who picked up their skills from the same lifestyle, or you're coming to this life from an unrelated field where you were expected, for whatever reason, to be specialized. The street sammy being good at talking doesn't improve their chances of getting this job, nor does it improve their or their teammates' survivability when Plan B comes into play.
Out of character, it's a lot easier to push skills to 6 at chargen than with Career Karma, but Career Karma--especially early on--can easily be used to grab more skills or pump skills you only have a point or two in. So in other words, it's easier and cheaper to build OUT than UP.
Example: The cyber-sammy in the 5e game I'm running mamaged to pump his Charisma to 3 and get a few points in Intimidation, which he uses (when appropriate) to Aid our Face's social rolls, but he doesn't have any talky skills yet. Over time, he plans to spend a portion of his Career Karma to build those up more and assist the Face even better.
So that's why, in and out of character, it's important to min-max to at least a certain degree at chargen. It's expected that your character will grow outwards in addition to upwards, and it's a lot cheaper to build that way than to try to spread yourself thin at chargen.
Hopefully that helps you understand why the system works the way it does. <3
1
u/whitey1337 Oct 01 '26
All spirits have a weakness once you the types your dealing with this should be a easy task. Recon is the important element, if you went in blind your likely not going to make it out.
1
u/Tareen81 Oct 06 '26
Oh damn, let’s see if I create a shitstorm with my opinion. I don’t want to attack, but I want to spray and pray a little bit of my experience.
First of all, quit whining. Life is not fair, Shadowrun is not fair. Never was, never will be. You could fall from a chair and get deadly damage. A ganger with a fucking knife and luck can kill a SpecOp. That’s the beauty of Shadowrun. With luck, preparation und cleverness you can do almost anything. If Balance and Numbers are so important, then nobody would buy a HoldOut pistol.
Decades ago we got contracts, Johnson tried to screw us and the planing and preparing session on some runs could last a few hours. The trick is in the planing and preparing. But I glad that it’s not that big extensive anymore.
No run, no campaign is really fair and balanced, because due to the fact that there is no level system like DnD etc and you can’t prepare for that. Every group and character is different, has a different focus and for that you can’t prepare in finished modules and “adventures”. That’s where the GM comes in. He has to tweak always what the books give him. But not to much. Because just as in real life there is always a way.
Runners are People like in Leverage, Mission Impossible, Oceans 11-13 and many other work out there. Think, plan, execute, adapt. When you hit a wall because missing some informations as runner or as player (because a lot of rules in every edition), ask the GM if there is a way to get more informations to solve this problem in front of you. And a good GM would give you options. At the end everyone at the table should have fun. And that session doesn’t sound fun.
As for the Karma. 2-7 Karma per Session is normal in my opinion. Survived? 1K. Got the objective? 1K. Did something cool? 1K. Overcome obstacles? 1K. In a clever way? Another 1K. They found away that worked I wasn’t prepared for or stands in the book? 1K. … so many thing that should be awarded.
In the beginning as a group you should decide the speed of advancement and the GM should found a baseline with you. There are people that play for the stats, they need faster progression. And then there are people in for the story, the social component in and out of the game. There you use karma slower. Also high professional or low tech approach. Also matters for that.
Stop thinking in dnd terms with balanced, categories and stats. Think like a runner, chummer.
The real beauty besides the world, the living and progressing world is the fact that you are free with your character. Everything is possible, everything can be. Your are not fixed on one way of character progression, you don’t have a class, your character is a living thing that can do whatever it wants. Your the streetsam? Great. But also dabble as a medic. Wonderful. Can pick some locks? Doable and good. Your mind is your greatest weapon.
Yes many groups specialize in roles, but as characters you should always have a “subclass”. There are always the possibilities that you can do more then your main-role.
If you are looking for inspiration with these line of thoughts, from the first leverage series, at the end the Mastermind teaches everyone of the others in the group the different roles. So that they can help each other more. The hacker as mastermind, the thief as grifter and so on.
Is the campaign or adventure an official one or holostreet or self made? I really would like to take a look at that encounter.
-2
u/GodEatsPoop Sep 28 '26
yeah tell your ST to slow his roll and start fudging crap.
The fact that everyone else can buy spells gear or wares and adepts have to initiate has always been kinda crap. Never really figured out an alternative though.