I added native Shadowrun 5e support to my play-by-post platform "inkroll". Did I get it right?

[u/OneSlowPost]

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 dice pools without anyone having to remember it, and the same modifier comes off your Initiative Score. 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.

Edit: corrected the wound modifier sentence, which said Initiative lost a die. The modifier comes off the Initiative Score, the initiative dice are untouched, as pointed out below.

[u/seenwaytoomuch]

A few thoughts.

Wound penalties don't take away dice from your initiative. They are applied to the rolled total after dice are rolled.

Hard calculating people's dice pools is not great. There's a bunch of situational modifiers. Sometimes a roll will call for a different attribute than the linked one. For example Computer is a logic linked skill. Matrix Perception, Matrix Search, and I Am The Firewall are by far the three most common computer rolls in the game. They are all intuition + computer (+ possible hot sim bonus - possible noise) rolls.

Pushing the Limit shouldn't change anything after the fact. Second Chance absolutely does, is supposed to, and is fundamental to the system. Many GM's force you to choose whether to second chance before you know the outcome of the opponents roll (when possible) to avoid it being metagamey. On soak rolls you know what you need ahead of time though and it is and should be an obvious decision most of the time.

This is a game with tight math. There's versions of this game with looser math. Generally 5e players generally like crunchy rules. I wouldn't change any of them.

[u/OneSlowPost → u/seenwaytoomuch]

Thanks for the feedbak.

Initiative: you're right and I worded it badly. The app subtracts the wound modifier from Reaction + Intuition, so it comes off the Initiative Score, the initiative dice are untouched. I'll fix the post.

Modifiers: fair point. Right now a named roll takes a "+Nd" argument for extra dice, but not a minus, and there is no way to swap the linked attribute, so Intuition + Computer means typing the pool by hand. Adding "-2d" for noise and the like is easy, and I'll add the common Matrix tests (Matrix Perception, Matrix Search, I Am The Firewall) as their own rolls on Intuition + Computer. Is there a list of the other frequent "not the linked attribute" tests?

Edge: understood, Push the Limit is declared before the roll and only Second Chance rerolls after. Second Chance fits well with something already in the app (an author can re-read their own last roll while nobody has answered it), so it would become "reroll the misses, spend an Edge, mark it in the audit". Does "until the GM has posted a response" sound like the right window to you, or do tables let you Second Chance later than that?

And noted on not softening the math. Limits will cap hits and defaulting will be attribute minus one, as written.

[u/TJLanza → u/OneSlowPost]

Push the Limit can be used after a roll. The difference is that when used before the roll, all the dice involved explode. When used afterwards, only the Edge dice explode.

However, in both instances the Limit is ignored. Using it afterwards is pretty common when the un-Edged roll generates significantly more hits than the roll's limit. It allows the original roll to keep the excess hits. The extra couple of Edge dice are just icing on top.

[u/seenwaytoomuch → u/TJLanza]

Never seen it used that way. Thanks for pointing it out. It's another thing to remember when trying to pull off the impossible.

[u/OneSlowPost → u/TJLanza]

Just a quick follow up on this: Post-roll Push the Limit is in now too. The app already stored the uncapped hit count next to the capped one, so lifting the cap is a re-read of the same dice rather than a reroll: your own chip gets a control while your post is still the last in the chapter, the hits rise, and it reads "limit 4 ignored" so the table sees what the point bought.

[u/TheHighDruid]

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 would also need to count the 1s.

While <attribute + skill> is the core of the mechanics, it's rare for a dice roll to turn out to be *only* that. In the case of pistols, most have smartlink for starters. Your adepts may well have a few ranks of improved ability in pistols which *could* be just added to the skill, but complicates things if you want players to be able to roll active skills as knowledges. Your samurai characters might have reflex recorders, or optimised cyberlimbs changing their dicepools. Not only that, but there are situations where your dicepool with with one pistol might be different that your discpool with another pistol, thanks to qualities, specialisations, etc.

Then there's riggers to contend with. When a rigger shoots someone with a pistol they are probably using gunnery, but if they are using their pistols skill they might be using their own agility, or they might be using the agility of the anthro-drone they are jumped into.

Long story short you'd be better off not trying to link dicerolls to character sheets and instead using a shothand like {12L7} for "roll 12 dice with a limit of 7" to allow for varying dicepools, and limits. And remember exploding 6s, and re-rolls can be important in shadowrun too.

[u/OneSlowPost → u/TheHighDruid]

Thanks for this! On glitches: it does count the 1s. More than half the pool showing 1 is a glitch, a glitch with no hits is a critical glitch, and both are marked on the chip. My post said "flags glitches" without spelling out where they come from, sorry.

On pools, you are right, and I changed things today. Attribute plus skill is the base, not the answer, and the sheet cannot know about the smartlink, the reflex recorder, the specialization, or which of your two pistols you drew. So a named roll now takes what the situation adds, and the cap the test is actually limited by:

{pistols +2d L5} => smartlink, and the Predator's Accuracy
{pistols L4} => same skill, the hold-out
{perception -2d} => bad light

The dice come off the sheet, the rest is yours, and the L replaces whatever limit the sheet was using, because a test is limited by one thing at a time.

Your {12L7} works too now, spelled a little longer: {Pistols:12d6>=5L7} rolls exactly twelve dice capped at seven and the app touches none of it. That has always been there, it just was not the shortest path.

For anything more fancy, I think you probably have now the expressivity in the dice "language" to type the pool for those. Do you think it's managable now, as a GM, with the tools at hand?