Shadowrun Fifth Edition

Physical Attributes

Body (BOD)

Body measures your physical health and resiliency. It affects how much damage you can take and stay on your feet, how well you resist damage coming your way, your ability to recover from poisons and diseases, and things of that nature.

Agility (AGI)

Agility measures things like hand-eye coordination, flexibility, nimbleness, and balance. Agility is the most important attribute when it comes to scoring hits during combat, as you need to be coordinated to land your blows, whether you’re swinging a sword or carefully aiming a rifle. It also is critical in non-combat situations, such as sneaking quietly past security guards or smoothly lifting a keycard from its secured position.

Reaction (REA)

Reaction is about reflexes, awareness, and your character’s ability to respond to events happening around them. Reaction plays an important role in deciding how soon characters act in combat and how skilled they are in avoiding attacks from others. It also helps you make that quick turn down a narrow alley on your cycle to avoid the howling gangers on your tail.

Strength (STR)

Strength is an indicator of, well, how strong your character is. The higher your strength, the more damage you’ll do when you’re raining blows down on an opponent, and the more you’ll be able to move or carry when there’s stuff that needs to be moved. Or carried. Strength is also important with athletic tasks such as climbing, running, and swimming.

Mental Attributes

Willpower (WIL)

Willpower is your character’s desire to push through adversity, to resist the weariness of spellcasting, and to stay upright after being nailed in the head with a sap. Whether you’re testing yourself against a toxic wilderness or a pack of leather-clad orks with crowbars, Willpower will help you make it through.

Logic (LOG)

The Logic attribute measures the cold, calculating power of your rational mind. Whether you are attempting to repair complicated machinery or patch up an injured teammate, Logic helps you get things right. Logic is also the attribute hermetic mages use to resist Drain from the spells they rain down on their hapless foes. Deckers also find Logic extremely useful, as it helps them develop the attacks and counterattacks that are part of their online battles.

Intuition (INT)

Intuition is the voice of your gut, the instinct that tells you things before your logical brain can figure them out. Intuition helps you anticipate ambushes, notice that something is amiss or out of place, and stay on the trail of someone you’re pursuing.

Charisma (CHA)

Charisma is your force of personality, the persuasiveness and charm you can call on to get people to do what you want without having to go to the trouble of pulling a gun on them. It’s not entirely about your appearance, but it’s also not entirely not about your appearance. What it’s mostly about is how you use what you have—your voice, your face, your words, and all the tools at your disposal—to charm and/or intimidate the people you encounter. Additionally, Charisma is an important attribute for shamanic mages, as it helps

Special Attributes

Essence (ESS)

Essence is your metahumanity encapsulated in a number. In Shadowrun, you have ample opportunities to alter your body or push it beyond its normal limits. Such actions often have a cost, and they can result in a loss of a portion of your metahumanity, which means a loss of Essence points. Each character starts with an Essence rating of 6, and it acts as a cap on the amount of alterations you can adopt. When it’s gone, it doesn’t come back. It also affects the Magic and Resonance attributes, as losses in Essence are reflected by losses in Magic and Resonance.

While denizens of the Sixth World are accustomed to seeing a variety of augmentations and alterations to the metahuman form, the “uncanny valley” still exists. The uncanny valley is the disconcerting effect that happens when people see something that is almost, but not quite, metahuman. An animated cartoon with exaggerated features looks fine to metahuman eyes, but a computer program that closely, but not exactly, replicates human appearance is a troubling and unpleasant sight to most viewers. This is what happens when people see others with augmentations—on some level, people notice there is something less (or more) human about that, and they respond to it negatively. The change may not be exactly visible, but it is in some way noticeable—in one way or another, a person has become less human, and on some level other people notice this. This is why a character’s Essence is included in the calculation of their Social limit.

Edge (EDG)

Edge is a character’s luck, the favor of the gods, that unexplainable factor that allows her to beat the odds. A character’s Edge attribute represents the number of Edge points a character has to spend during game play. Edge points can be used for a wide range of benefits, as listed below. Edge points that are spent are temporarily unavailable (see Regaining Edge), as luck will only take you so far. A character’s Edge attribute never actually changes, even when Edge points are spent, unless the character permanently burns Edge (see Burning Edge).

Edge Effects

Edge can affect your character’s world in a lot of ways. When you want one of these effects to happen, you must spend a point of Edge. A character can only spend Edge points on her own actions; she cannot spend it on behalf of others. No more than 1 point of Edge can be spent on any specific test or action at one time. If you spent a point of Edge for extra dice and rolled a critical glitch anyway, for example, you cannot use Edge to negate that critical glitch since you have already applied Edge to that test.

The uses of Edge are:

Push the Limit: Add your Edge rating to your test, either before or after the roll. This can allow you to take tests that might otherwise have a dice pool of zero or less thanks to various modifiers in play. Using Edge in this way makes the Rule of Six come into play: for every 6 you roll, count it as a hit and then re-roll that die, adding any additional hits from the re-roll to your total. If you decide to use this function after your initial roll, only your Edge dice use the Rule of Six. This use of Edge also allows you to ignore any limit on your test.
Second Chance: Re-roll all dice that did not score a hit on a test roll. Second Chance cannot be used to negate a glitch or critical glitch, it does not use the Rule of Six, and it has no effect on limits.
Seize the Initiative: Move to the top of the initiative order, regardless of your Initiative Score. If multiple characters spend Edge to go first in the same Combat Turn, those characters go before everybody else, in order of their Initiative Scores; subsequently, the other players and NPCs take their actions according to their Initiative Scores. This move to the top of the order lasts for the entire Combat Turn (meaning multiple Initiative Passes); you return to your normal place in Initiative order at the start of the following Combat Turn.
Blitz: Roll the maximum of five Initiative Dice for a single Combat Turn.
Close Call: Either negate the effects of one glitch or turn a critical glitch into a glitch.
Dead Man’s Trigger: When your character is about to fall unconscious or die, you can spend a point of Edge to make a Body + Willpower (3) test. If you succeed, you may spend any remaining actions you have on a single action before your character blacks out.

Regaining Edge

Your character gets one point of Edge back after a fulfilling meal and a good night’s sleep (at least eight hours); additionally, the gamemaster can reward players by refreshing a single point of Edge in exchange for inventive or entertaining actions in the course of a gaming session. Incidentally, that’s refreshed Edge points, not free Edge points—you can’t go higher than your maximum Edge. Luck only counts if you use it.

Good roleplaying.
Heroic acts of self-sacrifice.
Achievement of important personal goals.
Enduring a critical glitch without using a Close Call (you get a point of Edge back to balance the scales a bit; this should be used judiciously, though, so as not to always let the players off the hook when they roll a critical glitch).
Succeeding in an important objective.
Being particularly brave or smart.
Pushing the storyline forward.
Having the right skills in the right place at the right time.
Impressing the group with humor or drama.

Burning Edge

Sometimes it’s not enough just to spend a point of Edge and hope for the best. Sometimes you need guaranteed results—or a miracle. In those circumstances, you can choose to burn a point of Edge, meaning it is gone and will not be recovered through the normal means (though in the future you can spend Karma to move your Edge up again).

Burning a point of Edge has two potential uses:

Smackdown: Automatically succeed in an action with four net hits. This has to be an action the character is capable of performing—he cannot, for example, score a success in a skill like Automotive Mechanic if he does not have ranks in that skill. Limits have no effect on this—the character gets four net hits regardless of the applicable limit.

Not Dead Yet: There are circumstances—a bullet to the brain, a live grenade in the pants—that by all rights should result in a shadowrunner’s inevitable death. In these cases, a player may elect to burn a point of Edge in order to keep her character alive, against all odds. Note that this does not mean she entirely avoids the effects of the potentially fatal action. The bullet still hits their head, and the grenade still goes off. Instead of dying, though, the character manages to keep breathing somehow and maintain a thin thread of a pulse, giving others a chance to stabilize her and hopefully provide some quick healing. The gamemaster should devise the exact circumstances that lead to the character surviving the

Magic (MAG)

If you intend to cast spells or use magic in any way, your character needs to have the Magic attribute. Most individuals do not have this attribute, meaning their rating is zero. Mages, who cast spells, and adepts, who channel magic into enhanced physical and mental abilities, need this quality. Their Magic rating measures how capable they are in the arcane arts and how much power they can draw down to help them in their efforts.

Resonance (RES)

Similar to Magic for mages and adepts, Resonance is the special attribute for technomancers. Technomancers interface with the Matrix using the power of their mind, and Resonance measures the strength of their ability to interact with and shape that environment (see Technomancers, p. 249). Non-technomancers have a zero rating for Resonance.

Initiative and Condition Monitors

As is the case with limits (p. 46), Initiative and the Condition Monitors are character statistics derived from attributes. They should be calculated during the character creation process (p. 62).

Initiative

Initiative governs how quickly a character responds in a combat situation. A character’s Initiative attribute is their Reaction plus their Intuition.

Initiative Dice

Initiative Dice, as described on p. 159, are extra dice used to roll a character’s Initiative Score. They generally come from gear, spells, or adept powers. Everyone has one and can get up to four more (for a total of five) from various gear, spells, and other effects. Hackers get extra initiative dice depending on how they interact with the Matrix (see p. 214).

Condition Monitors

Condition Monitors are used to track the damage inflicted on a character. Player characters have two Condition Monitors; one tracks Physical damage, the other tracks Stun damage. Each Condition Monitor has a specific number of boxes arrayed in rows of three boxes apiece. The Physical Condition Monitor has boxes equal to half the character’s Body (rounded up) + 8; the Stun Condition Monitor has boxes equaling half the character’s Willpower (rounded up) + 8.

When a row of the Condition Monitor is filled up, the player character takes a –1 penalty to all subsequent tests. This penalty stacks for each row of the Condition Monitor that is filled in.

Obviously, walking around with a damaged Condition Monitor is problematic, and characters will want healing as soon as possible. For possible methods of healing, see p. 205.