Yeah, whenever people bring up build points or karmagen taking longer than Priority, there's always a huffy argument about it being from people trying to min-max every last point. But really, min-maxing is not terribly time-consuming; the optimal choices are fairly obvious for people who have played the game awhile. The time sinks are basically buying gear (I would love to see a lot of PACKS-style gear kits for players) and tweaking the character's background, both of which are independent of the character creation system (although some concepts might be more or less viable depending on which system is used).

I like the bonus Karma to tweak characters at the end of character creation, which lets you smooth some of the inevitable rough edges and unwanted underdeveloped areas away, but why, why, why do they have to needlessly complicate it by having "starting karma" that buys some things at a different rate than karma you get during game? I'm not even sure it was completely intentional - the "Qualities cost 2 * the Karmacost in Karma" for later advancement might be a copy/paste from SR4, where qualities were bought with build points.

Still, SR5's priority system's biggest problem, one that helps new players but might irk more experienced players, is that characters seem a lot more shoehorned into "classes" (some of the other rules, like bringing back expensive cyberdecks, also contribute to that). Some players prefer more homogenized/generalist runners - a bit of bang-bang, a bit of facing, a bit of B&E. I will concede that the priorities for skills cost them better (compared to Attributes) than build points does.

I've always liked Priority Gen in Shadowrun, it's always been part of the game/system for me, WoD had its primary secondary tertiary pattern, D&D was roll up, L5R was base stats and build points, WE StarWars was templates, StarTrek was Lifepaths, Mechwarrior was education packages and Shadowrun was priority gen.

Priority is probably the easiest for new people to get. Which is beneficial to the Core Rulebook. I was planning to start up a Fourth Edition game until I found out about Fifth, and I personally like being able to tweak characters more than Priority allows.

But my girlfriend, who has never played Shadowrun before? Priority is a great way to introduce character building without her needing to look at huge BP or Karma points, After she's accustomed to how the setting works, that's probably when shell be comfortable
With the full customization available with alternate systems.

I suppose my view on character generation is probably controversial here, given the absurd emphasis on 'optimization', but my idea is this.

No character should ever be complete out of chargen. A good character generation system makes it impossible to create a fully perfect character, simply because a fully perfect character has absolutely nothing left to struggle for. Characters must have weakness and things they simply can't do out of chargen, because without those factors they have nothing to strive for.

Too many characters I used to see come out of 3e point-gen might as well have just retired after chargen. They didn't need anything, and had no real room for advancement.

Actually, I've always viewed Shadowrun as the one RPG where you create a "finished", fully functional character as opposed to other RPGs where vast growth was part of the gameplay. Note that I don't mean that starting characters have every best in slot ability/item/gizmo, but rather that they are at the high end of the ceiling as opposed to the bottom.

I've always seen starting SR characters as being competent in their fields of expertise and capable in secondary fields. There is still plenty of room to grow into a Prime Runner, but you're not a complete novice. You're not considered a full professional in the Shadows yet, but you possess the skill and talent to get that rep (fairly quickly).

There is nothing in any char gen system that prevents such a thing, but some make a player work with tougher choices than others. The game isn't about creating characters for sure but char gen is a part of the game and it can be fun to work within the limitations presented to come up with a sat set that's fun to play.

I created two characters for an 800-BP character thread, and it was interesting in that it showed me how much a typical starting character cans still potentially improve. None of the character creation systems creates a "perfect" character, even 1,000 point karmagen, because they all give you a finite amount of resources. There will be weaknesses of omission, if nothing else. Even with SR4, which has the lowest hard caps.

One of the strengths of the system, to me, is that character's start out as professionals - they still have room to grow and improve, but they aren't first-level wannabes who have to work up to being shadowrunners. Low-power variant campaigns are easy to do, though, by starting characters out with less points and some other limits.

That's one of the limits of the priority system, by the way - it's not nearly as scalable. They tried to graft some high-power and low-power variations on to it, but they seemed clunky to me. Especially the low-power variant, which seemed to reign in some kinds of characters (tech-dependent) but not others (awakened, technomancers).

There is a VAST difference between a COMPLETE character and a PERFECT Character. None on my characters are PERFECT. However, after Character Gen, they are certainly all COMPLETE. They are a fully realized character.

Exactly. There's a large difference between a character sheet that expresses a concept, and someone who comes out of chargen with maxed pools in his relevant specialty and every piece of gear that supports it.

As much as I love my Troll Adepts, the ease of making Awakened and/or Metahuman characters in the Street-Level Play option is kind of silly. It really flies in the face of how rare magic is supposed to be. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/sarcastic.gif)

I found the "Street Scum" option in the 5e GM section to be much more appealing. Basically, you're given the choice of two alternate priority arrays: B/C/D/E/E or C/C/D/D/E. That's it. No adjustments for Availability limits, maximum rating, etc. Build what you want and can afford to.

You can still make some pretty effective Street Scum characters too. You just have to be willing to commit. If you want to try and match the power level of a regular Priority Character, you might be able to in very specific areas. Otherwise, you can get close. If you want to play an Ork, a Dwarf, or, especially, a Troll, you really need to think about it. It reminds me a lot of SR1/SR2 in that way.

Great find tucked away in the GM section. That would solve the issue I had in my street campaign in SR4, i.e. "Gosh, there are an awful lot of extremely powerful magicians in this gang..."

-DrZ

The one thing that bothers me the most is the fixed, low number of skill group points.

Another thing to consider, should the high and low priority attribute choices be more or less restrictive? Perhaps having Attributes priority A could allow a character to max two stats, but only one stat may be at 1. Maybe having the lower priorities don't allow anything over 5.

Maybe I'm wrong here, but can't you purchase additional skill groups with leftover karma?

If you have 50 karma (25 to start, 25 from negative qualities), you could add 3 rating 2 skill groups, 1 rating 4 skill group, 10 rating 1 skill groups, etc. etc. etc. It probably isn't the best use of your karma out of the gate, but if you *have* to have those extra few points of skills it might be worth looking into.

-DrZ

Just for the people who really believe that SR5 Priority is more simple and faster than 400 BP

Take 400 BP

0) you get 35 points in advantages and you get 35 points in disadvantages (they cost/bring usually 5/10/15 etc points)
1) You can distribute 20 points for your attributes (1:1).
2) You can distribute 50 points on money (1:5000), connection (between 2 and 12) and magic (1:10)
3) You can distribute 50 points on race (between 0 and 40 points) and edge (1:10)
4) You can distribute 25 skillpoints (1:1, see #5 if you need more points)
5) You can shuffle around a bit. Ask your GM to check out the BP table in the book for the points you can shuffle around. Two attribute points less may give you 5 skillpoints for example.

Build your character in 5 minutes.

Only if you want to optimize or if you want to follow special concepts, then it will take longer than that. And of course it takes longer as 5 minutes as well if really want to optimize your Prio-System character and find the ideal priority distribution.

SYL

No problem! I have no idea why that wasn't used for the Street Level option. Another case of the right hand not knowing what the left is doing, maybe? I dunno.

-paws

I want to echo Glyph: gear is really, really time consuming for any resource intensive characters. It's like having hundreds of thousands of build points to map onto a much weirder space of costs vs. benefits. It is, hands down, the biggest wrinkle in character creation.

I'm not familiar with PACKS, but it sounds like an awesome thing. I've also kicked around the idea of making character creation and play with street sams a little more like adepts by allowing them to by cyber-frames which is essentially a big essence hole they can plug cyber and bio ware into (possibly during play using cybertechnology tests). Anytime I get too close to this idea I back down after considering the massive number of possible gear combinations I'd have to look at to get the numbers right, but I think there's a useful concept embedded in there.

All that aside, I think BP and priority are about the same complexity for character generation. Priority is probably a bit faster because it snaps you to a BP distribution (like the one recommended by apple) more quickly than if you start with complete freedom. I also like priority a lot for nostalgia reasons -- I started with SR3.

+1

You've put what I've tried to say into much more elonquent words (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

Thank You Kind Sir. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

Combining the two would probably get you closest to an actual street level campaign. Imagine having to fear a rent-a-cop!

-DrZ

Not sure I want to fear a Rent-A-Cop exactly, but being worried about some syndicate thugs or terrified of a full power street samurai or adept would be cool.

Maybe you could combine the two options for a SR-style "Cybergeneration" campaign?

-paws

I have to say, IME, this was only in regards to Mundane Humans under 3e point-gen.

Any metahuman under Priority IME will likely come out with too many points if you try to copy them over.

I recently made and elf adept for a 3e game we hopefully might start to play over the next half year. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/nyahnyah.gif) (Decided to just remake a guy I made as an SR5 test character.) We're using Priority for old time's sake He was Attributes A, Magic B, Elf C, Resources D, Skills E.

If you converted this from the 120 BP in the book, he'd turn out:

Attributes=30=60 BP
Magic=Adept=25 BP
Race=Elf=10 BP
Resources=20k=5 BP
Skills=27=27 BP

Total: 127 BP. 7 over the 120 limit. If I wanted to keep him as his Priority setup, I'd have to drop two Attribute Points and take on 3 Flaw points. (He had Edges and Flaws, but under Priority they have to even out, so I'd lose 3 points of his Edges.) While he's not screamingly less powerful under the Build Point system, he took a small hit.

Now Flaws could add up to 6 Build Points, which between that and the 650k you could take could make Mundane Humans pretty impressive under the system. Once you added magic though, they weren't coming out any better than their Priority counterpart; they'd equalize at best(give or take; perhaps one might have an extra Attribute point over the other, bu the other has an extra couple of Skill points, they were essentially equal.) Take the Troll Combat Mage in SR3: Magic A(30), Attributes B(54), Race C(10), Resources D(5), Skills E(27). Total Cost: 126. He'd need to max Flaws or lose stuff or lose a couple things/take a couple Flaws just to exist under Build Points.

I always wondered where the whole 'Your characters can't grow in 3e' came from. Mundane Humans can come out of the gate with a lot, but even they weren't completely fixed. You COULD get up to 60 Skill Points, but that WAS half your BP. (It could be a godsend if you wanted to say, play a Macgyver-not necessarily too much in the ware department but ALL the B/R skills. Which there were a crapton of in SR3.) I DO admit that huge skill piles on a non B/R 3e character could mean they know how to do lots and lots(taking Skills Priority A.)

Sorry for the slight derail, but I occasionally see controversy about the 3e Build Point system and wonder where it came from(unless more tables than I think have players who love their Mundane Humans.)

Awakened characters tended to come out a bit weaker in build points (at least, at the suggested 120 point allocation) in 3rd edition. But they were still quite playable - awakened characters were probably at their highest point, power-wise, in SR3. SR4 weakened them, then SR5 weakened them even more (over-nerfing them in some areas).

One quirk/flaw of the SR3 priority char-gen system is that priority D metahumans (orks and dwarves) who were mundane could spend their A, B, and C priorities on Attributes, Skills, and Resources, the same as a human, essentially getting their metatype for "free", along with the net Attribute bonuses that went with it.


You got the "mundane characters have nowhere to go" spiel more in SR4. Unlike SR3, where the only limit was your karma, SR4 has rigid caps to skills, and it is easy to start out close to being "best of the best" in one area or skill at char-gen. Even in SR4, though, you hardly start out with no areas to improve - magic is still uncapped, there are multiple lateral areas to improve even within a specialty (such as sniper), and there are a few elusive dice pool points you can spend a disproportionate time chasing after, if rounding out the character doesn't appeal to you.

But I really think that if you go through it all once, you get through it again much faster the second time around.

I have modular cookie cutter equipment lists for all archetypes, which cuts down a lot on the time necessary.

@Elfenlied
Thats quite a good idea.


In general, the major issue with any kind of system which uses different kinds of calulations in the beginning than it does for advancement has ALWAYS loopholes.
In the 4. edition attributes were (before 4A) dirt cheap after Creation while skills, espacially skillgroups were quite expensive. This was fixed but after that it became highly effcient to buy high attribute raitings at the beginning. And of course the powerfocus 4 for starters, because binding was so damn, cheap.


In 5 you deal with high value attributes like Logic, Charisma and Intuition for bonus points. Due to the fact that buying up a skillgroup is as expensive as buying up a single skill (if you are allowed to) espacially Priority A grants you A LOT of Karma if you use it wisely.
I mean IF you go through the trouble and give the players a skill and attribute table, why not just go the extra mile and use Karma-gen to begin with. If you use printed out tables, it is as fast as Priority, probably even faster.