You're preaching pacifism at a gunshow mate. There's people getting off on 'look at my soakpool.' Regardless of flavour.
Although, that big frakkin troll taking gunshots and not even flinching is flavoury as well. It might not be your Shadowrun, but pink mohawk tends to dig it. Need it to survive, even. *shrug* To each his own, eh?


Flavour!
Also, cybermuscle is cheap, as opposed to cyberBody, which even tends to be forbidden. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/nyahnyah.gif)

Muscle Augmentation bioware is good value for money yeah. You could safely start with STR2, and if it turns out STR actually matters in the campaign, just buy an upgrade.

Ok, late to the game.

As a GM I require all players to take at least one point in every stat except edge and magic (automatically spend 80 bps). This cuts down on some of the worst min-maxing and creates a reasonable character who can default on most skills. I do prefer the Karma generation at this time, but again I require 1 additional point in each of the base stats, which seems to even out the races.

The other point for humans is it is like having the quality bland (try getting that quality with a troll and see how well it works out). In 90% of the situations humans blend in. Trolls have a very small community and being large makes it a huge pain to hide plus they are huge so they have other issues. Orks and trolls do not make the ideal spellcaster or technomancers.

Now edge does make a huge difference. I tend to go with the optional rule that your dice gain is based upon your unspent edge. Even if you don't then when you need to spend edge that final point can be the difference between success or failure. Try it with an extended test by putting the difference in BP cost into more edge for the human and you see players can really do more damage to the game if they are human (enchanting, equipmemnt design/modifications, etc.).

Example
Ork/dwarf edge 1 Human edge 3
Elf edge 1 Human edge 5
Troll edge 1 human edge 6

Then pick an extended test with similar build points into said stat and identical skills. In most cases ignoring strength or body tests the human will come out ahead if edge is used. They can also have some edge left in reserve.

Yeah, okay, see, now at that table, humans would be dead to me. Like, Rasputin dead. Well, with bp generation, anyway.

1) Define "medium armoring". Since 6/4 contains possibly the widest range of useful armors, I consider that the sweet spot, requiring 3 body. With the addition of FFBA, an extra 1 body (for a total of 4) seemed a worthwhile investment for the extra armor FFBA provides. With softweave, I can accept 2 body and all armor softweaved or 3 body with all softweave and FFBA, but personally, I still like that body 4 sweet spot for just getting armor off the shelf or for going with the softweave armor jacket and FFBA (something I consider more than "medium armoring").

2) Even with cover, indirect fire hurts. Hurting impacts the ability to hurt back and leaves blood behind for DNA and magic. Armor prevents hurting.

3) Even in the shadows, a firefight only happens when someone shoots. If you are the unaware target in the opening round, armor pays off.

---------------------------

Every time I read "Quickness" in this thread I twinge.

Medium would be the 6-11 total ballistic armor range (assuming FFBA). I don't have War!, so I can't speak about the softweave.

My favorite is the Auctioneer Business Suit along with FFBA, which requires Body 4; a bit more buff than the average Joe, but nothing excessive.



Your point being? I never said you should try to get shot at.




If you're caught unaware (as in, couldn't Edge the surprise test), you're DEAD. Because anyone who is good enough to sneak up on you (given typical PC Perception levels, which are quite high) will certainly kill you with a single shot if you can't even dodge. And they'll probably use some sort of sneaky weapon to do it too, like SnS.

Surprise kills.

You stated: "This whole obsession with armor is getting ludicrous in the first place. This isn't TankRun.".
Now, I'm not sure what you meant by "obsession with armor" because as far as I can see, the armor discussion has simply been a debate about how much body is preferred for basic armor with the lower limit being "1" (human minimum) and the upper level of the discussion being "4" (orc minimum).

If, as you later say, you're preference is for a body of 4 for basic armor, then you're on the high side (the same side you appear to be calling "ludicrous" and calling "TankRun").

The reason for the armor discussion, in case you were just skimming, is that from a numerical perspective, humans are at a disadvantage to orcs unless they're dumpstatting body and/or strength OR they need to hardcap (at human maximum) edge. In your case, since you prefer a body of 4 (orc minimum), it's hard to make a human (again, from a numerical perspective) cost effective.

I like Body 4, but 3 will do. I wouldn't want to dump body though. I've seen what happened to the (Body 2) Reaction-oriented Adept when they used wide bursts against him...

Dumping Strength seems fine with me. It's the 21st century, Strength is for backwards people; we have robots for heavy lifting, and shock gloves for hand-to-hand.

What I meant with TankRun is that people seem to be seriously considering making a "Tank" character (mostly Troll), but to me that sounds a lot like making a character who's only really shining when things are going quite wrong. And even a really heavy tank shouldn't expect to last long if HTR gets going for real.



The point I'm trying to drive at is, that this discussion is obsessing about resilience, and yeah, Orks are good at that, but it's only a part of the game, and not necessarily the biggest part.

Like I said, dumpstatting Body (as in, Body of 1) is a bad idea. However, trading Willpower or Charisma for body is just as bad of an idea, as the troll demonstrated. Even though he's got a ton of soak dice, he doesn't have the stun condition points to really take much damage. Going soft on Body is perfectly workable, though. With a body of 2 and Suoq's "sweet spot" of 6/4, you actually gain one defensive die even with the Quickness and Reaction penalty. Since the dodge test and soak test do essentially the same thing (reduce the power of an attack), they amount to the same thing.

Ascapelus is also right that Body is not the optimal stat for Shadowrun combat. If you're going to fight at all in SR4.5, you need a high Quickness. That is your most important stat, as all your combat abilities, no matter what they are, are linked to it. It doesn't matter how tough you are; if you can't hit, you can't take down an enemy faster than they can take you down. Reaction is almost as important, since it factors into Initiative, and speed kills in Shadowrun. It's also your primary defense in SR4.5, so you can't cut that one. If you don't rely on physical combat, Reaction is actually more important than Quickness.

Really, the best stats to dump are strength and logic; with strength being a better choice. Orks can't dumpstat strength, so they're less useful in that regard. You can go soft on a few attributes, though, and body is one of them.

(IMG:style_emoticons/default/proof.gif) Can someone PLEASE give me a book and page number in Shadowrun 4.5 for this stat Cain keeps talking about?

Check the quickness with which I kick this.

He is obviously referring to agility which in past editions was combined with reaction to create quickness.

Yeah, sorry, the kicking thing? The bottomless hole to kick people into is still covered. The painters are still working on the roof. Seems some smarthoop told them we wanted a painting of "The Creation Of Adam" with Dwraves and Orks rather than just bare grey wireless defeating paint so they're taking forever.

Thank you! That helps immensely.

Ups, was wrong. Nothing to say here.

You know, all this talk of adding "balance" and "disadvantage"... You guys aren't trying to fix the blatant unfairness in my favourite rpg are you? That's against canon and I'm telling!

In my opinion if your going to be making the tank troll you really need to grab a pain editor, because your stun pool will really never be where it needs to be to keep up and extra stun resistance seems a lot harder to pick up.

I'm a grognard. I call it like it is. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wink.gif) They didn't "split" it, they pointlessly renamed it. If you like classic Shadowrun you use the proper terms, not your newfangled stuff. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/nyahnyah.gif)

This is really getting childish.

Yep.