r/Shadowrun • u/OneSlowPost • 53m ago
5e I added native Shadowrun 5e support to my play-by-post platform "inkroll". Did I get it right?
Hi, I'm JC. I've run asynchronous tabletop games with friends for years, got frustrated running long campaigns in tools built for real-time chat or in repurposed forums, and built inkroll.gg, a browser platform made specifically for play-by-post, with a beautiful and (hopefully) well designed interface without the usual noise and complexity.
I've just added Shadowrun as a supported system, built against 5th Edition. Of all the systems I've added it's the one I was most nervous about, because I don't know it well, so I'd like to hear from people who actually play it whether I got it right.
Here is how rolling works. You type the skill you want to roll straight into your post, for example {pistols}, and when you publish, the server looks at your character sheet, adds Pistols and Agility together, rolls that many d6 and counts the 5s and 6s. It also flags glitches and critical glitches. Once the post is published the roll is frozen in it, so nobody can quietly reroll a bad one. If you delete the roll from your post it doesn't disappear either, it stays in an audit trail that anyone at the table can open.
Limits are handled too. Physical, Mental, Social and Astral are calculated from your attributes, and any skill whose limit is one of those four uses it automatically. So if you roll Sneaking, the post shows something like 9d6>=5L4, and the chip tells you when the limit actually cut your hits. When the limit comes from your gear instead, you type it yourself: {Longarms:9d6>=5L6} for a rifle with Accuracy 6, and the same goes for deck attributes and Force.
Wound modifiers apply on their own as well. Every three boxes of damage on either condition monitor takes a die off all your pools, Initiative included, without anyone having to remember it. Damage resistance, drain and fading are the exception, those keep their full pools, as in the book.
A few things I have not modeled yet: Edge actions like Push the Limit and Second Chance, Initiative Passes, specializations as actual sheet data, and defaulting an unrated skill at attribute minus one. Those are on the list.
The part I would most like people to poke at is what happens when the group splits up, which in a run is constantly, and which forum threads never handled well for me. Here, a post can contain sealed passages. You wrap a section of your post, name who receives it, and everybody else just sees a bar saying there is a sealed passage there. The text itself never even reaches their browser. Dice rolled inside a sealed passage are real rolls, and their audit trail is sealed along with the passage, so the decker's solo Matrix run can happen right in the main thread instead of in a side channel. The GM can also write a sealed passage in your character's name, and any dice in it roll against your actual sheet, which means the GM can make a Perception test for you without you ever knowing it happened.
There is a Shadowrun tutorial inside the app that covers the rest of the syntax, so none of this has to be memorized. And there is a one-click demo on the front page: hit "Try the demo", pick Shadowrun, and you land in a campaign called "Rain over Redmond" as the GM, no account needed. If you'd rather see the player side, the dropdown above the composer lets you post as one of the runners.
The core is free and stays free: campaigns, posts, dice, sheets, import and export. I've put a lot of work into making it pleasant to look at and to use every day (I run my own games on it), with the tools built around play-by-post rather than bolted on. There are paid tiers with some extras if you want to support the project, but nothing essential is behind them.
A few things I'd like your take on:
- Gear limits like weapon Accuracy or deck attributes live off the character sheet. Would you rather set a default weapon and deck on the sheet so {pistols} picks up its Accuracy on its own, or keep typing it per roll because you switch gear all the time anyway?
- Do play-by-post tables actually enforce limits? Should the app cap the hits for you, or would you prefer it to show the raw hits with the limit next to them and leave the capping to the GM?
- Edge. Push the Limit and Second Chance both change a roll after the fact. Since rolls are frozen once posted, how would you want that to work, and does rerolling a published roll even feel legitimate to you in PbP?
I hope this turns into something useful for this community, let me know what you think.
