So the utter uselessness of Orks has bothered me for a long time, as has the fact that Trolls are only useful in the very narrow role of "melee monster" (even if they are devastating in that role). Well, ok, I also did once see a Troll Adept with Missile Mastery that was pretty scary.

Also, the fact that Elves simply cost too much unless you play their strengths to the hilt—speedsam or ultraconjurer or uberFace or more likely some combination of the above. And the fact that humans are vastly overpowered in a long campaign due to the double-growth of Karma Pool.

Anyway, I've mused on these issues for a long time, and have come up with the following proposals which I'd like feedback on.

All: everyone gains karma pool at the same rate (whichever rate that is).

Human: every time they gain a karma pool point, they gain an additional point of regular karma that doesn't count towards total karma (for purposes of earning more KP). Alternately, an extra point of karma pool at chargen (though that seems to diminish too quickly)

Elf: gain thermographic vision in addition to current low-light. A small utility perk that doesn't overpower the preexisting roles, but gives everyone else a little more bang for their Elf buck.

Dwarf: as-is. Maybe gain automatic nickname "Stumpy".

Troll: use vehicle recoil rules (half recoil). Maybe still kick down to -1 Int instead of -2.

Ork: no INT penalty, maybe +3 STR instead of +2 (though that starts to horn in on Troll territory, but then due to the low value of STR giving them another +1 isn't out of the question).

Thoughts?

~J

Er, What? Orks (in SR4) are hands down the best metatype on a "bonus for BP" basis. Unless you absolutely need to have top tier mental stats, they typically cost less BP for the same or better stats as any other metatype. Same goes for trolls, assuming you wanted a body and strength at least equal to troll minimum. Even for mages, orcs and trolls often work out well, since you get a nice baseline body stat without spending many points, leaving points for other things.

Elves are intentionally not a very good deal, because it was found (in SR2 & 3) that they otherwise become the default player character choice (no penalties compared with human, natural low light, and players just tend to like elves). SR4 maybe went a bot far by both giving humans a bonus (edge) compared to elves and eliminating the advantage of natural low light compared to cyber / external vision systems.

I assume this is SR3? I don't think anyone is going to say SR4 Orks are useless.

It is, check the post icon.

Or the mention of Karma Pool, or the mention of Intelligence…


That's simply bad design in any event.


I've heard this from a lot of people—it's unfortunate, because Elves genuinely are underpowered but we get enough people drowning in Elves that any attempt to fix this meets with huge resistance. Sure Elves get no penalties, but they pay ten build points for roughly eight build points worth of return in a naive calculation, and you need to play a very narrow range of character to get value out of that +2 Charisma (or to get enough value out of the +1 Quickness to justify not making the most of the Charisma).

~J

Orks are great in sr3! I mean, little specialized equipment, tough as hell. Why on earth would you want to make them any better?

I think the problem is creating a character that is highly and narrowly focused on being extremely good at just a limited number of things, and at the same time have the potential to be a well-rounded jack-of-all-trades character.
Non-Humans races are deliberately specialized in specific things relative to Humans. So, the game mechanics makes it very difficult to build a well-rounded non-Human PC.
This is not a bad thing...

Penalties to the single most important stat in the game, bonuses to the least important stat and a middling stat. If you want "tough as hell", the Troll over there is doing it better than you could ever dream of. Even the Dwarf trades only two points of Body for the elimination of the penalties and a point in a much more valuable stat (Willpower). Hell, they don't even have the good kind of vision!


Because they're miserable.


No, the problem is that the range of effective characters you can build with these metatypes is very narrow. If you tell me your character's an Elf, I can tell that you're playing one of three things—a Face, a Conjurer, or a poorly-made character. If you tell me your character's a Troll, I can tell that you're playing an archer, a melee monster, or a poorly-made character. If you tell me your character's an Ork, I can tell that you're playing a poorly-made character.

Compare this with a Dwarf—you show up and say you're playing a Dwarf, there's a whole range of character types that are legitimate possibilities. It could be a mage, using the extra Willpower for drain and shoring up weaknesses with the physical stats. It could be a Rigger—physical stats are mostly wasted in this case, but the Willpower for resisting dump shock makes it workable. It could reasonably be just about any number of things except for certain types of melee character (due to the difficulty of closing with an x2 running mod).

I'm not shooting for that level of generality for everyone—I think it would be fairly difficult to achieve, at least while staying vaguely close to current rules and flavor. At the very least, though, I'd like to give each metarace a non-niche solid role. Trolls fail on the non-niche requirement, Orks on the role one.

~J

I never found the races that unbalanced in SR3. Elves and trolls were good at certain niches, sure, but you could make a functional character outside of those roles. Optimized? No. Playable? Yes.

Dwarves got good bonuses and no penalties, but suffered movement penalties and required specially modified gear.

Orks got good bonuses - they made great street samurais, and decent sorcerers (losing one point of spell pool didn't seem to hurt that much). I actually played quite a few orks in SR3 games on the board, and they all seemed to do pretty decently. To be honest, when I made street samurai, the ork would often have a higher Intelligence and Charisma than the human, just because the ork would have that net 3 points more to go to Attributes.

That was the main weakness of humans - they had the least they could spend on Attributes, a problem that persists in SR4. Otherwise, they were versatile, sure, but the optimization of other races for certain roles kind of cuts down on their potential good roles, you know? Will you make a human tank if you can make a troll one? Will you make a human sorcerer if you can make a dwarven one? Will you make a human conjurer if you can make an elven one?

It's probably another situation of "Not optimized equals shitty character."

One time I tried to play an ork, but she was like "Hell no, You can either have a relationship with me or not get all up in this sweetness at all!"

Go play an Albino Nightone....

Or a Satyr Ki-Adept with Totem Horse

Hough!
Medicineman

That would be Elves, actually. They get six BP worth of attributes in exchange for ten BP.


Elves, sure. Trolls? The -2 Int, -1 Quickness is crippling if you aren't playing their strengths to the hilt. That's a point of Combat Pool and a point and a half of Reaction right there, not to mention the hit to Perception and needing an Edge to get a small arms skill to 6 without paying extra.


A third of a point of Spell Pool, half a point Reaction, half of a point of Combat Pool, and the fact that you're now a Sorcerer and spent 25 BP to not be able to astrally project. Meanwhile, what do they get? Strength for melee or Heavy Weapons, both of which are relatively niche and done better by Trolls, and Body which mostly just helps them soak the damage they take by being slower and less able to dodge.


This may be exposing a difference in our expectations—to me, a situation like this simply does not occur because Intelligence will always be maxed (6 points + Extra Attribute Point or Exceptional Attribute and 7 points)—the stat is just that valuable.


Heh, well, if you use the poorly-thought-out armor encumbrance penalties you will, because the Troll can't wear enough armor and TN mods are more valuable than extra Body dice. That aside, no, the "tank" role is clearly dominated. It's a fairly niche role, though—reliably soaking damage is pretty difficult unless you can expect some fairly strong guarantees about what your opposition is packing.


Well, aside from the fact that you won't make a sorcerer to begin with, sure you will. Dwarves have a lot of their points tied up in Body and Strength, and if you are interested in the +2 Strength it probably means you're cooking up a magical melee character, in which case the better running multiplier means you don't need to abuse Gecko Crawl quite as often. They don't dominate in any of their roles the way Trolls do melee (Reach) and tanking.


Aside from not making a conjurer to begin with (even worse than sorcerers!), sure. You only need 6 Charisma to keep F6 Drain at M, 8 Charisma only moves the L-drain mark from 3 to 4, and the skill isn't even Charisma-linked. This is a bad example, because the Elf simply isn't worth the cost in this case.

This is all before we talk about the ridiculous double karma pool that humans get, but I've proposed to change that anyway.


Mm. There is a fine line. I guess what I'm looking for is for the suboptimal bits to bring something interesting to the table. I have a player who made a Riggerdeckerconjurerface. Suboptimal doesn't even begin to describe it (though the character was still a highly effective face), but it was interesting. Taking an ork, like taking less than max Intelligence, isn't interesting. It's just bad.

~J

Sorry, guess I wasn't phrasing myself well. What I meant was, humans get to Priority A on Attributes and that's it (other than Bonus Attribute Point, natch). Any metahuman who gets Priority A on Attributes effectively gets 33-34 points, rather than 30.

For dwarven sorcerers, I was thinking more about their Willpower bonus. And honestly, the net +4 bonus meant that I could take Priority: C on Attributes and still have decent Attributes (high mental ones, no glaring weaknesses on the physical ones), and then take Priority: A on Resources, to pile on the foci.

For elven conjurers (or more like full mages - I have played lots of sorcerers, but never a conjurer), their Charisma not only changes the very Drain code (4L vs. 4M), but gives them more dice for resisting that Drain. Might be a playstyle thing again - I tended to play shamans, where conjuring on the fly was very important. For hermetics, it doesn't matter that much - they can just sleep off the Drain.

Ah well, sorry I missed that little ~500 pixel tag. Truth is, I know SR3 better than SR4...

Assuming you are using the priority system... yeah, elves are a bit over costed. As I mentioned, they were under costed in SR2 (especially relative to popular apeal) so things maybe went a bit the other way. Truth is they have great advantages though. Natural low light is just as good as thermo outside a few rare (and correctable) circumstances, and is BETTER than thermo one of the most common circumstances ("Partial Light"). Quickness is a god-stat for any type of combat wombat (you can move further, have better reaction, have better combat pool...)
Orcs get do as well as elves, for less cost, with only slightly less max reaction and combat pool. The extra body dice do come in handy, and the boost to strength is also nice (you can carry a bigger load without encumbrance). Both stats are commonly boosted with implants, so (for some setups) this saves you cash and essence / BI.



Yeah, but they also get a boost to maximum Quickness and maximum Charisma; is that worth 4 BP?



INT is a good stat, especially for mages. Its not crucial to always have it at 6+, though. It also can be boosted with implants (which orcs may have more essence / cash for, since they often don't need to augment body or strength). If you really need it maxed to 7+ implants.... well, yeah, an Orc won't work for you, although it is worth noting that you could just pay the double karma cost to take INT over normal racial maximums. My SR2 Elf samurai did that to raise his natural body to 7, so I think its obvious that body can be a worthwhile stat to have a racial bonus in!

Honestly, it sounds like all you need to do is tweak the BP costs a bit to reflect how they play out in your own games. Its worth noting that the priority system is really hard to balance metahumans in, and that everybodies game plays out differently. For example, we almost never had trolls in our games. Not because the stats were bad, but because if they went down, nobody could drag them back to the van!

Ah. Been forever since I used Priority, but yes, using the Priority System instead of BPs does permit a larger overall Attribute investment.


Right, but unless you're going to stack that with BAP for a total of 8 Willpower the human can get the same thing for 2 BP and not be saddled paying three BP for physical stats and toxin resistance.


This is why I need to change to BeCKS. It's pretty much not worth taking an attribute at more than 1 but less than 4, since it costs the same four build points to bring two other stats at 5 to 6 as it does to bring a stat of 1 to 3, but only 10 karma after chargen.


Only for the very specific case of Force 4. For most powers, F4 is still too low to be useful, and although it's nice to have an extra point of TN mod on Concealment and Confusion it's no kind of massive advantage.

Well, ok, that and with Charisma >6 you can summon Force 7 for the same difficulty and maybe give an extra TN mod, but Charisma 7 is within human reach.


Even leaving cheese like the Trauma Damper aside, it's not that big of an advantage. The big win is at Force 4, where 8 dice get 2 successes >96% of the time as opposed to 6 dice getting 4 a bit over 34% of the time. By the time you hit Force 5 and are both looking for four successes the difference is about 26% vs. about 10%—significantly better, but neither something a character would willingly risk in a non-emergency. Even allocating 3 Conjuring dice you're still looking at ~53% vs. ~35%. Not even allocating five dice to drain (typically leaving one for the actual Conjuring test) will take the Elf's odds above 70%.


To be honest, Hermetics are another thing that we've been meaning to fix. It's been a long time since I've seen anyone play one since while they do get Giant Elemental Mob of Death powers they trade huge whopping amounts of nuyen and also significant flexibility in order to receive this—the power of a pack of four F6 Elementals doesn't seem quite so exceptional when you consider that most likely that was the only service on each of them and, even assuming you got really lucky and got two services on each the same price could have bought you a Great Dragon ATGM and ten missiles with 800¥ to spare.

~J

Yeah, in my experience, SR3's Shadows consisted almost entirely of Humans, Night Ones, and Dwarves, in about that order.

You're right about the Partial Light advantage, but it's all of a +1. It's better in Full Darkness and Light or Heavy Smoke/Fog/Rain, and is equal everywhere else except for Thermal Smoke (which still gives heavy penalties to Low-Light). Note also that the smoke categories are one of the highly portable vision mods.


Yeah, definitely. Speedsams are the Elf's biggest niche. Of course, the points you pay for that Quickness are only worthwhile if you end up with Quickness 8, in general…


Where by "slightly less" we mean a full point less of each—that doesn't sound like doing as well at all.


A few sample loads for discussion (note: I don't actually know how these are going to work out in advance, load may be tighter than I'd thought. Also, holy crap I'd forgotten how absurdly heavy ammo is in this game.):

Public wear: Secure Jacket (3kg), Secure Longcoat (2kg), Ares Predator-III (2.25kg), 75 rounds EX-EX (full magazine and four reloads; 5.625 kilos), 5 magazines (1 loaded, 4 spare; 2.5kg), silencer (0.2kg), quick-draw concealable holster (0.1kg), flash-pak x2 (0.4kg), Pocket Secretary (0.5kg), Transceiver (1kg), total of 17.575 kilos. You need Strength 2 to carry this without encumbrance penalties.

Assault: Secure Jacket (3kg), Secure Longcoat (2kg), Forearm Guards (0.2kg), Ares Predator-III (2.25kg), 45 rounds EX-EX (full magazine and two reloads; 3.375 kilos), 3 magazines (1 loaded, 2 spare; 1.5kg), silencer (0.2kg), quick-draw concealable holster (0.1kg), Ares Alpha (5.25kg), 126 rounds EX-EX (full magazine and two reloads; 9.45kg), 16 mini-grenades (1.6kg), 2 standard grenades of appropriate mass (0.5kg), gas-vent IV (0.75kg), shock pads (0.25kg), guncam or flashlight (0.25kg),Pocket Secretary (0.5kg), Transceiver (1kg), total of 32.175 kilos.

So even loaded for bear and with unmodified firearm/ammo masses, we're still only talking just into Strength 4 range; taking into account Shadowrun ammo expenditure, you could leave behind one of the Ares Alpha magazines to save 3.65 kilos and be fine with only Strength 3.

Re: boosting, for five build points you can boost an additional two Strength and two Body (three for soaking purposes), plus get Reach, which is going to improve most of the things you'd be getting additional Strength for anyway. Dwarves also get the same Strength without any of the penalties and with a bonus to another valuable attribute to boot. Finally, the boosting 'ware is pretty cheap.


Only if you make the max-boosts count by maxing out the attribute and then doing something valuable with it. Oh, and the something you do can't be too expensive, either—you'd think an Elf would be a good fit for a Rigger what with the bonus Quickness, but the points are simply spread too thin without leaving big holes in the character out of chargen.


I disagree—it factors into every single pool, Reaction, Perception, is the Linked Attribute for a number of useful skills including Electronics, B/R, and every single Knowledge and Language skill, sets the TN for Physical Illusion spells, TN for Negotiations, resists every Indirect Illusion, and resists Stealth (Theft). There's simply nothing better you could spend those points on.


But why not? Why do they need exactly as much as they get, but not as much as the Troll gets?


Right, but the thing is that Int is valuable enough that you pretty much do really need it like that regardless of what you're playing. Also, it's not double cost, it's triple—an Ork with Exceptional Attribute (Intelligence) pays 21 karma to get from 6 to 7 Int, while a human with the same edge pays 14 karma (or more likely got there at chargen).



I don't think it's that simple—Orks and Trolls suddenly become the cheap option, instead of being something to take in their own right. It could work for Elves, but, well, I don't see a reason to break from our nice 5-and-10 costs if they're the only ones changing in that respect.


Ignoring the fact that canon trolls are anorexic (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wink.gif) this is true of pretty much every metatype. The lightest metatype (Dwarf) is given an average mass of 54kg, and your standard elf and human of 70kg and up. Assuming that both runners are carrying ~20kg of gear to start and that the carrier only takes the time to dump half of that off of themselves and the carried runner (doesn't strip off their armor, for example), even a Dwarf requires someone with a minimum strength of 8 to haul them out without collapsing (otherwise at best after Body turns they take a box of Stun every combat turn!). An Elf or Human requires someone with Strength 9 or 10 to haul them out.

~J

Take a good elven speed-sam built tweaked for maximum combat pool and reaction. (Not sure what that gets you in SR3, but in SR2 it got me a 17 reaction and 12 combat pool, with something like 4.8 BI worth of bioware and 5.8 essence worth of cyber, not all of it entirely dedicated to speed.) Now take Orc as a race instead of elf. Still a pretty damn good character, no? You aren't likely to miss a single point of reaction, and the combat pool is just one die gone from your shooting on every other SA shot / 3 round burst. Some folks prefer the higher body and strength, some just like playing orcs. Its a viable option, I think.



Why would an elf would need body boosts, and an orc not? For me, the "sweet spot" for body dice seemed to be 8-10. At that point, you can stop most things that your armor provides useful protection against, because (after dodge succeses, etc) you typically are facing something like 2D or 4S. More Body dice are nice, but if 8-10 won't do the job, often 15-20 won't either, because the effective attack Power is just to damn high; against 10D, more dice doesn't help much. This is one more reason I stopped playing trolls in 2ed.



I'm not sure you have to be able to CARRY a characters full weight to DRAG them to safety, but I'm pretty sure that if they can barely fit through the doors, neither one is gonna work.

128 BP

Elf

BOD: 2
QCK: 12
STR: 2
CHR: 3
INT: 9
WIL: 6
ESS: 1.00
BIO: 3.00
REA: 17+4d6

Combat Pool: 13

Edges/Flaws:
Exceptional Attribute: QCK
Bonus Attribute Point: INT
Good Reputation 2

Skills:

Pistols 6
Assault Rifles 6
Stealth 6
Electronics 6
Etiquette 3


1,000,000¥

(Plenty of cash so as long as there's some left over I'm just going to stat out the speedsam stuff)

Cyberware: (500,000¥)

Wired Reflexes 3 (5)

Bioware: (250,000¥)
Enhanced Artwinkulation (0.6)
Muscle Toner 4 (1.6)
Brain-Meats (0.8)

250,000¥ left over for such vitals as smartlink, gear, etc. Also 7 Build Points that I'm not going to bother figuring out how to spend.


128 BP

Ork

BOD:4
QCK: 11
STR: 3
CHR: 3
INT: 8
WIL: 6
ESS: 1.00
BIO: 3.00
REA: 16+4d6

Combat Pool: 12

Edges/Flaws:
Exceptional Attribute: QCK
Bonus Attribute Point: INT
Good Reputation 2

Skills:

Pistols 6
Assault Rifles 6
Stealth 6
Electronics 6
Etiquette 3

1,000,000¥

Cyberware: (500,000¥)

Wired Reflexes 3 (5)

Bioware: (250,000¥)
Enhanced Artwinkulation (0.6)
Muscle Toner 4 (1.6)
Brain-Meats (0.8)

10 BP, 250,000¥ left over.


Eh, it's ok. You get some more attributes or an extra skill and two attributes, but you've lost a point of Reaction, two points of Combat Pool, and a point of Perception. It's weaker, and the weakness doesn't come with anything interesting.


An Elf wouldn't, IMO, but since so few skills are Body-linked this is actually cheaply available via cyber. Boosting other stats (apart from Strength) has to be done via Bio or else most of the benefits are lost, which is typically expensive and carries weird penalties (5.9 Essence and no problem, but a few points of Bio Index and you're laid low by the flu).


Dodging and soaking seems to me like a worst-of-both-worlds situation; by not dodging everything you don't get to cancel out the base weapon damage for free, while if it was easier to soak with the combat pool you should have just done that. It's something that comes up when you fail to dodge, not something that gets planned for IMO. In any event, the advantage to high Body to my mind is that it moves a number of things into the category of "don't have to spend Combat Pool"; with 10 Body and 6 armor a 9M+1 attack is very soakable with no pool (>92%), while a 9M+3 attack is much more iffy (~55%). At 15 Body, that 9M+3 attack is soakable nearly 97% of the time. It's true that increasing TNs (by raising Power or going to burst/autofire) quickly outstrips Body, but that's really just an argument for the marginalization of tanks against non-gangers.

"Elf used the QCK CHKN. Elf's QCK increased by 3!"

~J

(12+9+6)/2 = 13.5
(11+8+6)/2 = 12.5

Why is the Elf's Combat pool rounded up to 14, while the Orc's is rounded down to 12?

I do kinda see your point about mixing high combat pool to dodge with moderately high body to soak being non-optimal, but its also pretty flexible; it lets you play tank against numerous grunts (which might otherwise drain your Combat Pool completely) while still having a decent chance to dodge a couple shots from king gun. Plus you have a nice high overflow, some rapid healing, a better shot at resisting toxins, etc. Its a Jack-of-All-Trades approach to defense.
Given this logic, I'd probably go with the orc and strip out the most cost-ineffective parts- it seems either can safely loose one point of INT or QCK without dropping reaction / pool. I like going against the stereotype; nobody expects an orc to be a speed-sam, or a speedsam to be able to take a solid hit.

It might be because I'm tired. I'll recheck my numbers in the morning (I knew not explicitly calling out sources of boosts would bite me); if the advantage really is only one point, well, I learned something new about Orks today—I'd still like them to have a role that they excel at, but being that close to another viable build is better than I thought they were.

Edit: still need to check, but I think I know what happened. I'd originally built the Elf with a Suprathyroid Gland for a +1 to Reaction and all Physical stats (and thus +1 Combat Pool and another point of Reaction), then started in on writing a paragraph about how the Ork couldn't take advantage of that because his Quickness was at the Racial Max, then realized that I was dumb and that the Elf was also at his Racial Max of 12 and couldn't reap the benefits. I think I remembered to revert the Reaction but not the Combat Pool.

~J

Yeah, that's my story and I'm sticking to it. Can't find anywhere else that the extra point of Combat Pool could have come from, and I don't think I would've rounded the wrong way.

Edit: also, I mixed up the math on the Elf; he has 7 BP remaining instead of 1, much closer to the Ork.

~J

Hmm. To me it seems the Ork is the more well-rounded character. As in, the Elf is a min-maxed monstrosity, the Ork actually looks almost playable. (With Dermal Sheath, maybe.)

That being said, I never played either race in SR3, somehow. In priority it was dwarves all the way, because they were basically free, in BP it was humans, obviously. I did make one Troll Mystic Adept, though, for a concept that simply would not have worked at all with any other race, and I don't remember what creation method was used, there.

As it is, though, I have to agree that Orks are lacklustre, simply because you need to spend too much to make them good in the Quickness/Int area, which I would not want to spend to make a really well-rounded character.

Look at it this way: I only need to shoot 6 shots FA to raise your dodge rolls to 6s, meaning the VERY unreliable range. With a subgun, the damage will be very manageable with enough armour, an AR will give you problems. Meeting attacks like that shouldn't happen every day, but that doesn't mean it never happens.

Er? Could you expand on that?


Only for Mundanes, it should be noted. If Magic isn't already taking up Priority E they aren't free anymore.


"Very manageable" isn't very manageable at all—assuming a 6M SMG you need at least 6 points of armor for the soak TN to be lower than the dodge TN, and you still need nine successes minimum. Compare to dodging where you still need to hit the hard 6 TN but you only need to match your opponent's successes.

~J