How to make a better..., Tips for character creation. Options

[Ellery]

I thought it might be useful to have a thread that points out ways to get the most out of the character creation system. If you like playing powerful characters, this is useful. If you dislike it when players have overly powerful characters, this is also useful--you may want to modify some rules or simply say someone can't do something.

Here are a few tips:

Buy Exceptional Attribute before raising a stat to 6. Exceptional Attribute costs 20bp, but you can then raise the stat to 6 for 10bp--30bp cost total, with the option to later pay 21 karma to raise the stat to 7. If you just raise the stat to 6, it costs 25bp--nearly as much and without the advancement option.

Load your mage up with bioware. For 1 essence, you can get a +1 boost to strength, agility, logic, one physical skill, and ignore stun while getting +1 to willpower and -1 to intuition (which you won't use so much anyway, as a Hermetic), all for only 75k (15bp). That's a 34bp bonus plus some nice effects for only 25bp cost (you'll have to buy an extra point of magic along with the price of the goodies). And you can still take the "sensitive system" negative quality for +15bp, since that applies only to cyberware. If you're going for Magic 5 or 6, you might want to think twice about this, but at Magic 4 you can still throw force 8 spells if you need to (which is probably as much as you can soak anyway), and you've only lost one die from your spellcasting test. Note: Synner, this answers a previous debate we had about the frequency of augmented magical characters.

For long-term characters, buy skills in character creation and attributes afterwards. During character creation, attributes cost 2.5x as much as skills. But after character creation, attributes only cost 1.5x as much as skills. So if your game plan includes a lot of skills, and you expect your character to survive for a while, buy the skills you want right away and work the attributes up later. (Kind of backwards--people normally develop attributes early in life and then spend the rest of their life developing skills, but never mind that!)

Cluster skills by attribute, and buy that attribute instead of building up the skills.We know this already, of course. For example, agility is used for no less than 16 skills (not counting exotic weapons) in unarmed and ranged combat, athletics, infiltration, and other cool stuff. If you spend the 60bp to get a skill of 1 in each of these skills, then raising agility by 1 (10bp cost) is as effective as spending another 60bp to raise all the skills by one. Very effective! 100bp will give you 6 dice to roll in 16 different skills. It's even worth taking Exceptional Attribute and hitting 7 before raising the skills separately, unless you don't care about a lot of them. Heck, with only a -1 defaulting penalty, you might not even need the skill.

Unless you're taking advantage of the attribute boost, don't buy skills at a low level. It costs very little karma to raise a skill from 0 to a low level. It costs a lot more to raise it from low to high. So raise your skills as high as you can (given the limits) during creation--that's skill 4 except for the 1 or 2 things you want to specialize in--or don't take them.

If you're not taking cyberware or bioware for some reason, get magic! It only costs 5bp to be an adept, and you get a full power point to spend (normally a 10bp value). You don't need any skills, either. Pretty cool! For an extra 5bp, get Mystic Adept and you'll have the option to cast spells later if you want to build up your magic.