Character Build discussion, Is this where it should go? Options

[Banaticus]

If I'd like to post a character build for you all to look at and tell me, "No, no, what you really should do is to put all of your points into Firearms and Explosive Weaponry..." Is this the place to put it?

Edit: I was hoping that I could edit the first post to change the title of the thread, but apparently I can't do that.

[imperialus]

Go for it. Lots of other people have

[ElFenrir]

Yeah, and don't take it to heart if we pick something apart. :D We are doing it to help, hence, character critiques.

[Banaticus]

Edit: I highly suggest that you go look at the following spreadsheet, which was in the original post, as it contains the latest version of this character. I'm leaving what I originally typed in just so you all can see how much this forum has helped, but please look at the spreadsheet link below which actually reflects his current state. I now return you to the original post.

http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pla...s_8ih7h8zuo7fag

[Magus]

Pray to your gods you do not get shot. with a body of 2 you are going to be hurting severely, especially with no dodge skill. Or any perception to get a chance to see the shooter first.
Personally at chargen, I do not take the Sorcery group or Conjuring Group as I will not use Ritual Sorcery. I typically only need Counterspelling and SpellCasting. As for Conjuring, I just take the summoning skill. Binding is too expensive at Chargen and Banishing is sucide unless you have a high skill.

[Banaticus]

With invisibility and stealth, I'm hoping that he never gets shot. Is there a flying spell?

Binding doesn't seem too bad -- the typical drain value for a spirit is 4/3 its Force, so a Force 2 and Force 3 spirit will likely have a DV of 3 and 4, respectively. Although, the spirits could give a max DV of 8 and 12, which is somewhat scary albeit very unlikely. Banishing, though, a good spirit summoned by another mage would likely be giving at least 6 drain if not more. I'd like to keep it, though, as it's cheaper than buying it from scratch later on.

I was looking at Ritual Sorcery and I don't see why a loner would have anything in it at all, so it's gone which does let me raise Sorcery and Counterspelling up one each. Apparently I can't even use it with a teammate unless a teammate is also a Cat Shaman, which is pretty unlikely.

I haven't looked at how a person resists drain and how that affects a person, I've mostly just looked at how to avoid having to deal with it in the first place. I wouldn't mind trading a point of magic for an adrenaline pump or a pain editor and maybe a smartlink or something, but that's pretty expensive and I can't afford it right now.

With another 35 points from somewhere, I could drop body and strength to 1, make him a troll, add exceptional attribute: charisma and erase Astral Chameleon. ;)

[imperialus]

agreed on all counts. A body of 2 also means you'll never wear armour with a rating better than 4 so you are either wearing a leather jacket or armoured clothing so it just become a downward spiral. Body of 3 I'd say is a bare minimum if you want your character to survive, it at least lets you wear an armoured vest. The Combat Paralysis could prove praticularly deadly for you since you won't have time to react and get to cover if lead starts flying and you sure as heck can't survive much lead poisoning. My mage has a body of 3 and there are times I wish I had set it higher. Of course you have some stealth spells available so that should help, my own character is focused primarally on influance/mind affecting mojo.

I also agree on not bothing with the skill groups. I'm playing a mage now and kicking myself for not using those BP's elsewhere. Unless you are planning on playing a dedicated summoner I'd say other than simple summoning and ignore binding and banishing. Last session I tried to banish a water elemental... I only managed to piss it off, and rapidly discovered I wasn't much good at astral combat.

Powergaming a bit here but I'd spend the full 200 BP's that you are premited to on attributes. Attributes are much more expensive to raise than skills so in the long run it pays to get them as high as possible at chargen. Also I'd lower your Magic from 6 to 5 to pick up on an extra 25 BP's. It very rarely makes sense to max attributes anymore since those 25 points mean 1 more die for a magic tests but you could raise 6 skills by 1 die each for the same price. With those points you could get dodge, perhaps a social skill or two and anything else that piques your intrest. I know this sounds like I'm contradicting myself but belive me it's worth it to have average to above average attributes across the board. It's pretty tough to find a dump stat in SR but it's too expensive to max things out either.

Edit: Also with points in KN: weightlifting I doubt very much he's gonna be quite so underdeveloped as to have a Body and Str of 2. I expect that anyone who takes the time to learn how to lift weights is going to be in better shape than that. A body 2 str 2 character strikes me as the couch potato type possibly bordering on the obese or a relatively severe asthmatic.

Edit2: Also if you are a human you should have 4 edge not 3. Humans get a beanie to make up for the lack of... anything else.

[Banaticus]

Shapechange only allows a person to change into an animal 2 body points away. What's the body rating like for a cat?

[imperialus]

Rulebook doesn't say. Double check with your DM, but to be alive it has to be at least 1 so if you had a body of 3 you'd still be golden.

Body of 4 though would let you shapechange into a great cat (body 6) :evil:

Edit: Also if you want you could take the (critter) Form spell for cat, that would let you bypass the 2 body point limit.

[Banaticus]

Is that one of those spells from Street Magic?

If I'm not going to be summoning/binding/banishing spirits anyway, I might as well reduce my Conjuration (group) skill, say to 1. Which (after I'd crossed the Powerball spell off my list) gave me enough points to change to troll, which raises body and strength to 5, which also lets me shapechange into a great cat.

Imagine a big Mountain Lion (Unarmed Combat 4, DV 5) attacking someone, but doing so while invisible and silent.

http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pla...s_8ih7h8zuo7fag

Now, my Charisma is currently maxed out at 4. Should I drop Astral Chameleon and take Exceptional Attribute: Charisma? (It only costs 5 points to take that edge, as it's already an extra 15 points to max out the Cha skill and with that edge, the skill wouldn't be maxed out anymore.) Would it be better to have my astral signature slightly easier to trace or to have the option of someday buying up Cha to resist drain a little more easily than I currently do?

[Catharz Godfoot]

[imperialus]

[SCARed]

[Glyph]

From a min-maxing perspective, troll is not the optimal race for this character. Sure, you get a nice Body and Strength, but what will you really use that Strength for?

Personally, I think making him an ork is much better, numbers-wise. Body drops to 4 and Strength drops to 3. The Strength is fine - 3 is plenty for a mage. You can raise the Body back to 5 with 10 points, since the Charisma only costs 30 now (5 is the ork racial maximum). And you have 25 points now (20 because orks only cost 20, not 40, and 5 savings from Attributes).

Other changes I would suggest: lose a point of Agility, almost useless to you as a stat presently, and put it in Reaction instead. Since you are set on getting the Conjuring skill group, use 20 of the 25 points saved from above to raise it to a respectable 3. Drop the almost useless pistols skill. Instead, get a specialization for your Spellcasting and Counterspelling skills. For the last 5 points, use 3 to get a combat spell, such as manabolt or stunbolt (much more effective than a pistols skill of 1), then spend the remaining 2 points to bond those two foci (especially the power focus, which is much more expensive to bond after play begins).

Finally, I would either add another 10 points of negative qualities (something like Moderate Allergy to Silver), or make do with a still-decent 4 Body (or drop Agility to 2), and get some contacts. They are a must-have. I would suggest a 4 connection/2 loyalty fixer and a 2 connection/2 loyalty talismonger, since those are the two most important contacts for a starting mage.

[Banaticus]

I just looked at levitate for the first time. If you use a Force 6 Levitate spell to pull something out of someone else's hands, you're only rolling against four drain, but you get 12 dice to roll against his Str+Bod. Which means that, except for very big trolls and the like, even magicians that aren't very powerful can likely always rip something from another person's hands and only take a single box of stun, probably.

[Trigger]

[Banaticus]

Thanks, Glyph. I didn't realize that I needed to bond the foci.

I went with a decent strength and good agility to go along with the athletics skill, as I thought a cat shaman should be ok at sports and pretty good at gymnastics.

I realized that this character cannot assense anyone. That needs to change. Unfortunately, that takes 20 points.

Cat Shamans cannot "incapacitate" people until they themselves have been hurt. I belive "incapacitate" means "knock out or kill". So stunball and knockout won't be of much use as a preventative measure (knock them unconscious before they can get you). That's why I started looking into Invisibility and Stealth to begin with. I guess I could pick up Stunball for emergencies.

I also added contacts in, although I had to reduce Agility to do it. Contacts are written in the format Connections/Loyalty and their cost is Connection+Loyalty, right?

http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pla...s_8ih7h8zuo7fag

[Trigger]

Ok, firstly, you don't need assensing at 5, maybe 3, but not 5.

I would also take your magic ating down to five and your sorcery and conjuring to four each.

That is 41 BP right there for you to use elsewhere.

I would take conjuring up to 2, or make it Summoning 3 & Banishing 2...

I would also raise influence to 2, maybe athletics as well, gymnastics from there is a good replacemtn for dodge. Or I would use that ten BP to get Dodge at 2 plus a ranged defense specialization for when you need to go full defensive.

Stunbolt is a better spell for a cat shaman, since your restriction prevents you from incapacitating an opponent unless they harm you....and stunball is a area spell..so are you going to wait for them all to try and hurt you? Also stunbolt has less drain.

I would drop you talismonger to a 2/2, and take thse 2 BP along with the 1 from the 41 to buy another spell..levitate maybe.

Just my thoughts.

[toturi]

Assensing is one of the few skills that will give you something tangible at 5 hits. But you can only have 2 skills at 5. You have to decide on which 2. Personally I'd max spellcasting and counterspelling.

May I know which spell are you sustaining? A Force 1 sustaining focus can only sustain a Force 1 spell.

[Banaticus]

Thanks, I'll lower Assensing by 1 and raise Spellcasting by 1 -- there's no extra cost for maxing out a skill like there is with an attribute (although I believe I can only have one at 6)?

I thought I'd sustain Shapechange. That would allow me to cast Invisibility or whatever on myself with no penalty from sustaining the spell. And there's no benefit, from what I can see, for ever casting Shapechange at a Force higher than 1. It can only be cast on voluntary subjects, so it's not as though anyone would ever be trying to actively Counterspell it when I'm casting it.

Or perhaps Clairvoyance -- from previous discussions here, it appears that the spell can be used to look through walls. I target myself, stand next to the wall, then "view events" from a point only a meter away from myself, but on the other side of the wall. If that's not how it works, perhaps I should go with Clairaudience in its place, so that I can eavesdrop on other people more easily. In either case, there doesn't seem to be a benefit from casting the spell at a higher Force.

Someday I might get the Armor spell or the Levitate spell (I'm think of the levitate spell in place of the mana barrier spell). The Armor spell would definitely require a higher focus to sustain, so it's on the list for far away in the future. The Levitate spell could be sustained at Focus 1, as long as I was just moving myself. Trying to sustain it at high enough levels to yank things out of people's hands would require a far more substantial Focus so that's also on the list for far in the future. But the Force 1 version of Levitate would let me fly. Actually, I just looked it up again and it appears that I can lift whatever I want with Levitate at Force 1, as it's just dependant on how many hits I can make with Sorcery + Magic (also determines speed of movement).

I can only start with eight spells, so taking some other spell would require removing a spell that's already on the list. So far, I have:

• Spell that gives a -1 to all their tests for each net hit I have
• See through walls
• Heal
• Go invisible
• Shapechange
• Stealth
• Stunball
• When big bad evil astral things come, I throw up a barrier of some sort and run! Or I throw up a barrier around myself and hope that they go away.

[ElFenrir]

Well, seems to be shaping up! Im a huge fan of the ork mage...well, orks in general are an awesome race....can be human looking, great advantages for their minor disadvantages, they are common, only drawback is dropping dead of old age at 40 ;)


But your skills seem solid...dropped Conjuring a bit i see but you can always up that later, i see you are focusing on Spellcasting.

A weapon skill might be nice...i might have missed that but im a fan of having a backup pistol or something incase drain stacks up too much, and with low Conjuring its hard to have a spirit back you up.

Athletics Group takes away need to have Dodge.

As for skill question, yeah, either 1 at 6 and the rest at 4 or less, or 2 at 5 and the rest 4 or less.

Nice concept too. This new version i think works the best out of all of them ive seen. Armor spell is nice, but yes, those sustained spells i find work best through foci.

[toturi]

You can only have 1 skill at 6 or 2 skills at 5. Not 1 skill at 6 AND 2 skills at 5.

Remember your number of hits is limited by the spell's Force. And so a Force 1 spell can only have 1 hits which limits you to 200kg.

[Ryu]

I think magic 6 has to go. Thats for minmaxing builds only, and those are not effective in this case. Now you are a somewhat weaker mage, but have 25 points to spend.

You also seem to lack the mentor quality, therefore you are a shaman without the cat part.

[Just Pete]

Did I miss something somewhere? You mention that this is a cat shaman a few times, but I don't see where you took the 'Mentor Spirit' quality.

[Banaticus]

WTF, mate? I can't even stunball someone until I've been shot and I still have to pay for a cat mentor spirit?
/emote grumbling all the way to the spreadsheet to add that in
Ok, I added that in, but I had to delete Astral Chameleon to do it.

ElfFenrir, yes, you missed the earlier comments on that. Plus even the most basic pistol skill would cost 4 BP.

I have one skill at 6, one at 5, one at 4 and the rest are skill groups at 1.

As to the weight, he's less than half that limit now that he's not a troll and now that I've swapped out mana barrier for levitate. See the other thread I'm starting on Levitate.

http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pla...s_8ih7h8zuo7fag