A shot or two from a hold out pistol will fix the mentality on that... and of course the lack of any meaningful armor without encumbrance penalties.

Yeah I've never seen an optimizer dump Body, as having at least 3-4 makes a massive difference (it's just got diminishing returns as you get higher). Far more likely as a dump stat is Strength, Charisma, Logic, or Intuition, depending on what the character wants to do.

I have.
He was of the not entirely wrong opinion, that not being hit was better than soaking damage.
An adept with combat sense and sidestep and whatever else helped getting combat pool and dodging up sky high . .
He was icnredibly hard to hit, but when he WAS hit, he sure felt it. happened only twice in the time i knew that one. .

*edited* I'm pissed and grumpy, but that was out of line. Sorry. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/frown.gif)

Bull

OK, those examples were _slightly_ hyperbolic, but I am sure everybody got what I mean.

Then again, with Softweave FFBA and some cyber for better damage soaking the BOD 1 sam might actually work...probably would not be cheaper than just putting a few BP in Body, but on the first glance it sounds totally doable.

Min has always meant minimize downsides. If you're not doing that and instead dumpstatting everything else to raise one thing to the max that is far from min-maxing. One-trick pony and glass cannon are two variations where the min part of optimization are ignored.

--



Bad water?

--



In SR4, the majority of damage reduction was done via armor, augmentation, or avoiding the attack. Body provided a not significant portion of the damage reduction. The body stat was one of the worst in SR4. There is also no compelling reason to have an even value for your body attribute.

Priority is better than karma and vastly better than build points. It provides scaled limits for different aspects of a character, yet also enforces minimums. You don't need freedom in a character creation system for a game, you need reasonable upper and lower limitations. And you need it to not take 17 hours of fiddling.

There are 120 ways to prioritize a character. Each one of those priority sets contains at least thousands (this is actually an interesting math problem that I don't care to solve) of possible ways to arrange the points. Complaining about a lack of freedom here is like having a giant field to play in and then complaining when someone builds a fence around the edge of it to keep kids from jumping in the creek. The field's still enormous and it's more than you know what to do with, but all you can see is the fence.

It's OK Bull *hugs*
I've gotten like that sometimes too.

Ah, we can take it.
If somebody can't take it, he has no right to dish out.
We know you are grumpy.
You often are.
It's a bit hard to tell if you are pissed via Webbernets tough.
Well, untill you fly off the handle like that, then it becomes pretty clear.

It doesn't take 17 hours to make a character using BP. I can make effective and potent characters in about 3-4 hours and most of that time is spent looking through equipment to find the name and cost of that thing I know exists but I don't memorize.

There are certaily not going to be 120 ways to prioritize a character. There's at least 6 ways to issue priorities where the results are exactly identical to another method of priority. Further, there are combinations that are likely going to be measurably weaker and not worth considering due to metatype/awakened combinations. Finally, various archetypes are going to end up looking stupidly identical thanks to the priority system. A troll street sammy? Almost certainly is goin to be A on metatype, E on awakened, B on resources, C on attributes, and D on skills. Those D skills are all going to be in the same ones with very little variance between characters. If skills are far more valuable then attributes then flip attributes and skills. You're not going to see resources with a D and C are going to be exceedingly rare given the traditional costs of augmentation. If there is a variance on these narrow limits, then they're probably not well meeting their archetype which is a huge mark against priority simply based on how deadly SR5 has been reported to be. Finally, the variance within the priorities due to skill and stat arrangement is going to be extremely narrow in scope. There will be certain attributes that will be needed. There will be certain skills that will be needed. Those are truths that cannot be avoided and those truths will significantly eat away at whatever potential variance might be left.

The fact that the BP system that SR4 implemented was bad has no bearing on the merits of point-buy based systems nor does it magically makes the flaws of the priority or other rigid character creation system disappear. The simple fact is that point buy based systems are much more adept at permitting a player to actualize the character he or she imagines by removing floors and ceilings. Systems like priority introduce entirely arbitrary floors and ceilings which only serve a purpose to be in the player's way. The only players that I can imagine that would actually like priorities are those who hate people who are adept at optimization, and thus seek to penalize them, or have such narrow vision that priority suits it.

1st) Statistically speaking, Wikipedia is found to be just as reliable (or close enough as makes no difference) as Encyclopedia Britannica. So, unless you have something more accurate than Encyclopedia Britannica to back you up, let me know. Using a wiki source is no worse than using any other site on the internet, with the exception of peer-reviewed journals.

2nd) Can you back up your statement? Until you spoke up, I have never had anyone disagree with me on what a min-maxer is and I've been around for those 20+ years and have been hearing the term consistently used in the fashion that I referred to; and so, I have to go by the majority until you or someone else can prove me wrong.

Augmentation provides relatively little armor unless you actually used the broken cyberlimb armor rules (in which case, yes, you COULD get away with 1 body... but if you're using a full set of cyberlimbs already, that sets your body to 3 already, and a little bit of money can set that to racial max via optimized cyberlimbs. So 1 body + lots of cyberarmor doesn't happen). The vast majority of Damage Reduction came through worn Armor, which could be worn as a function of body unless you wanted to cripple yourself with encumbrance penalties. Soak dice in SR4 was basically Body*3+2, for any character that optimized his armor. You might get as many as 4 extra points from other sources, but 2 points of body is going to do you a lot more good than most augmentations would. This remains true until you hit the point where you just can't find extra sources of stackable armor (this happens around 6-8 body)

Avoiding the attack on the other hand is much more valuable than damage reduction. I agree with that fully. You'll notice I didn't list Reaction as a potential dumpstat either.

Related aside...

In game design there is a known phenomenon where too much choice in character build actually can often result in lower diversity in build styles. This is more visible in online games like MMOs but is applicable to most games with a decent player base.

This is because as a group, players tend to optimise. Given free rein, they figure out the best combos. This tends to result in characters, instead of the wildly varying designs you might expect, you'd see the same few builds over and over and over.

I was involved with beta testing an MMO a few year back. When they first started, they had a completely freeform character build system. Take any combo of powers and abilities that you want. Sounds great, yes? Two weeks after they opened up wider testing, the devs began to notice 80-90% of the characters were minor variations of the same few builds.

So they scrapped the whole build system. Re-wrote it from the ground up to force choices so you could not just cherry pick the best abilities. Overall, it was a lot more constrained than the freeform system. But you know what? It resulted in a wildly varying build selection from the players, nearly every power and ability being represented in a given group of characters.

Great for the players, sure. Great for the overall health of the game? Sometimes not.

Have we seriously gotten to the point where folks have to bicker about what things as fluid as slang terms mean?

Dwarves are now +2 star and bod?

I'm not sure where or with who you play, but around these here parts (where I live . . . . not dumpshock), min/maxing refers to maximizing your greatest assets and minimizing the assets you don't want to use, we do also refer to them as one trick poneys. Perhaps the change in definition hasn't reached us here on the planet that is farthest from the bright centre of the universe. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/nyahnyah.gif)

I'm still waiting for CanRay to pipe in about how Min-Maxing is some obscure Canadian ritual involving beer, geese, and a very tall, Nordic looking woman.

And a sheep.

And Canray wouldn't be wrong. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

No, we don't do sheep.

Given that the Oxford English Dictionary defined terms on a crowd sourced basis...

It actually involves finding a Beaver that has killed a Bear, and fighting it with only your hands in a mating ritual that predates the Inuit. Beer has been included when it was introduced into North America, admittedly, as almost everything Canadian involves beer.Read Sim Dreams and Nightmares to get at what he's referring to.

I'm not sure that's 100% accurate. What you're describing is a function of system mastery which leads to the ability to quickly parse and discard inferior options for the goal that is being strived towards. All that changing up the creation system did was likely force choices which didn't matter to the goal (and thus had an equal zero value) or the method obfuscated the crap out of what a given option did. Any computer based RPG will reach a point that at any given point in time there is exactly one build that is superior to all others. WoW has been plagued by this forever and it's not just limited to builds but also in the optimization of action orders. However, those are terrible comparisons when placed against a TTRPG. In one you have an unthinking and predictable foe which means that the best build and best action order is a state which exists and can be known and most importantly repeated. In the other your "foe" is capable of independent thought and ingenuity which makes the best state indeterminant. Finally, computer games are very poor choice of comparison against a TTRPG because computer games would actually compile while TTRPG ruleset would make a compiler vomit errors.... and sheep.

That's for sure. . . . I am a heck of an outcast. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wobble.gif)

No beer. No curling. No hockey. No skiing. No Tim Hortons.

And then there's the occasional variant involving curling rocks.