Rollplaying defended, gender examined, REAL MEN ROLL PLAY! RAARRHHH! Options

[SL James]

... And?

[emo samurai]

Dude, you resurrected it.

[SL James]

As much as it pains me to say it, emo has a point. Why'd you bring this monstrosity back from the dead?

[emo samurai]

So you could FYAD it do death and get banned, too?

I still stand by what I did; it was for the sake of funniness, and I still think my getting banned was hilarious.

[Lazarus]

[Kyoto Kid]

...it's not my fault, it's not my fault...you gotta believe me...! :eek:

I don't have a shovel...I don't even like archival graveyards...

[Wounded Ronin]

[Kagetenshi]

Perhaps it is better to pass from this world than to exist by trampling others.

~J

[Wounded Ronin]

[Kagetenshi]

Character creation is the best part. Sometimes I use the Sacrificing rules to deal D Naval damage to myself just so I can create another character.

And so I can imagine the looks on the rest of the team's faces as my character presses a knife to his stomach and then explodes into unrecognizable charred pieces.

~J

[Angelone]

So a character who's roleplaying is limited to "RRRRRAAHHHHH!!!!" and letting off machinegun bursts is optimal? A character who wants nothing to do with the others because "He works alone" is good? I can't speak for SL James, and he can't speak for himself, but I agree with him the reclusive, badass loner and the the maniac combat monster are retarded concepts.

Looking at his qoute he didn't say anything about gimping a characters combat effectiveness. I believe he was showing his dislike of two character ideas that don't work well as part of a team. If he was I agree with him completely. Combat is part of the game, a fairly large part sometimes, and part that I enjoy, however it is not the entire game.

I am not pulling a Creepwood here.

[Lazarus]

Nah I'm not saying that. I'm arguing against the notion that just because you create a character with "depth" doesn't mean he's worth a damn. It cuts both ways.

I think it comes down to professionalism as a being the baseline or standard if you will for creating a character. Who’s to say what sort of flavor is better when it comes to a character? It’s the same criteria as to whether or not you think a particular movie is bad or good. It's all in your tastes and opinions.

Having said that I find it odd that so many people think the solution to the problem of Stat character combat machines, which are a problem, is to make an equally crappy character on skill and stats but have a lot of background fluff.

Most of my SR games are professional ones. That means characters are usually basically the same. They are have similar backgrounds with little differences in personality and how they handle things on the surface. Sure we've played two or three gang campaigns where 99% of us weren't pros, but that was just to take a break from the main ones.

But just because you play a combat-oriented character doesn't mean you can't have depth. Hell Rambo had depth in First Blood. Conan had depth. But if those types of characters aren't your flavor then I would say look at the Neil character from HEAT; arguably the prime example of a gun guy with depth. He has a house on the beach in Malibu with hardly anything in it. When Eady approaches him for the first time in the bookstore he responds to her small talk with "Lady why is it you're so interested in who I am and what I do?" However he does several things that show his character: his vengeful nature which ultimately leads to his downfall, his loyalty to his friends at odds with his drive and pragmatism to see a job through, and his angst over his life and how he really wants to do something else. On the outside typical he’s gun-guy, badass, loner-type with a few friends but underneath substance.

I guess my point in a nutshell is just because you have a Neil type character doesn't mean he/she can't have substance, and just because you have a goth PIB Hope is Emo type character doesn't mean that there is substance other than fluff.

Of course if you have a player whose character walks around in Full Heavy Military Grade Armor armed with a Panther Assault Cannon and a Duke Nuke'em complex when you're doing a stealth datasteal then I think it's a problem of stupidity on your team's part for the same reason as if they let a little 12 year old shaman girl in pajamas who has her teddy "Mr. Boscoe" on the run too.

[Wounded Ronin]

[Lazarus]

[Talia Invierno]

[Whipstitch]

I think a large part of it is that sometimes people have a hard time creating a character background that isn't just an itemised laundry list of what/how/why their characters got their skills/attributes/resources. Blame it on creative burnout and the chargen app mentality; when you create a guy that's already got a 6 in Longarms (and therefore has probably crept past Tom Knapp and is currently sneaking into Carlos Hathcock territory), you also start struggling at figuring out when, exactly, he also had time to become an accomplished covert ops man (Stealth 4) and a highly tuned All-American level collegiate athlete (Athletics 4) without formal and intensive training. And that's not even getting into the "why is the character a shadowrunner?" conundrum, which only gets worse when you start looking at 50 resource characters and the Awakened in general.

Also, it's often hard to avoid getting pigeonholed when you're using an optimized character. After all, if you're good in a fight and have a ton of combat 'ware, people are gonna call you a sammy and that's that. As far as your fellow players are concerned, you've may have already ceded any potential mystique the second you finalized that sheet.

[Kagetenshi]

Why this polarised either-or? Do characters with depth inherently not know how to fire guns and hit targets?

Yes! Every build point you spend on your character's background is one less you have available to spend on skills. It's like this:

30BP: well-written novel
15BP: detailed background
5BP: brief background
0BP: laundry list of skill acquisition
-5BP: commonly-used, undistinguished background
-10BP: clichéd background

And who wouldn't want that extra ten build points?

~J

[hyzmarca]

Well, you really don't have to spend BP on background, do you? Usually, background gives BP because it usually comes in the form of Flaws. The rest of it is creative writing to justify Assault Rifles 6 or whatever other practical skills the character may have.

There is no rule requiring that a player spend BP to write a background.

[Kagetenshi]

No, actually, you do. Edges and flaws to support it are separate. See the chart I just quoted.

In the Priority system, it's A, B, C, D, E, and F Background, respectively.

~J

[Lazarus]

[John Campbell]

[Kyoto Kid]

[mfb]

[Angelone]

[Lazarus]

I hear what you're saying Angelone.

And for the record. The 12 year old girl in question was actually a 7 year old badass Otaku NPC in one of my games. Her name was Cindy and Mr. Boscoe was a little AI that she befriended in the Matrix. She called him Teddy. He called himself Mr. Boscoe.