Ridiculousness..., This is what I get... Options

[Laodicea]

....for inviting women and newbies to play. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wobble.gif)

So, my brother asked me to run an SR4 game. I agreed to do it if we could find some players. I have another group, but the time they meet doesn't work out for him.

I first want to say that my other group is great. Really good RPers, some of them are new to SR, but veterans of The Other Game. They all wrote detailed character descriptions and backgrounds, and then tailored their character to match it(I feel that this is the only correct way to build a shadowrunner for a real campaign). They needed some help optimizing, but that was no problem.


So this new group consists of:
my brother
my best friend
my brothers wife
my wife

Brothers' wife: She hasn't read any of the material. He talked to her a little bit about it, but she hasn't read it. She has zero understanding of the mechanics. They asked me to generate a character for her based on the criteria "She wants to be a kitty." I created a tiger-shifter physical adept for her. I wrote a little background for it. She played it, she got quite a bit more interested in the game as it went on. She even asked mechanics questions and setting questions over dinner afterward. I'm hoping she's interested enough to study the game a LOT more if she wants to continue playing. Otherwise I hope she'll quit playing.

Brother: He spent the time to read some of the material, He spent the time to generate his own character, but he didn't bother with a background, or even a NAME. He didn't bother with knowledge skills or contacts. He made an absurd mystic adept with Move-by-wire. It's actually not even a good character from a min-maxing perspective but I'm not sure he knows that. I'm almost assuredly going to kill this character in the next session.

my best friend: he created a deep and rich background for his character, a great character description, and built the character himself. Truly a good character that would fit well in almost any shadowrun campaign.

my wife: she read some of the material, actually seems genuinely interested. She was thinking of playing a Hacker of some kind, but got sort of bored of the idea. This is where things get really cheesy. Somehow the idea popped into her head to create a Free Spirit character that looks like a Luma from Super Mario Galaxy. The idea did make me LOL so I let her do it. I helped her build the character, but she did a lot of the legwork in researching powers and spells, etc.

TLDR: ridiculous newbie group consists of a Luma, a Tiger-shifter, a mystic-adept w/ MBW and no background, and a rather well thought out and complete physical adept.