Specialization of characters Options

[Sir_Psycho]

I played an SR3 game where it was me (a covert ops specialist) and and Loki, the Ork Street Sam. He really wanted to get into combat a whole lot, which put me in a difficult position, even though I had Wired Reflexes 2 and a pistols of 6, I was still a bit nervous, so preferred stealth, electronics and computers as solutions. This put him in a pickle, because while he had a stealth of 3, he couldn't really engage in that kind of gaming.

Actually, this incompatibility led to some hilarious situations. One time we broke into a politico's house to torture him and convince him to drop out of an election. The infiltration went well. I snuck around the back through the trees and took out the perimiter guards and impersonated them on the radios saying that everything was ok. Loki walked up to the main guard post, lobbed a neuro-stun grenade in, donned his mask and finished them off with his twin gel-round smg's. Kick-arse.

Unfortunately, while I was tying up the guards and the family, Loki went upstairs to nab the politico. Unfortunately he had plenty of gun skills, a nice edged weapon skill, and even a cyber implant combat skill. Unfortunately, he had no regular unarmed combat skill. So when the politico hit him with a paperweight, he had some trouble defending. And then had to default to unarmed combat. after about 5 combat turns of him failing miserably to punch this guy out, I came upstairs to see what was going on. By this time, loki was pretty sick of failing to punch this guy, so he whipped out his spurs and decided to stab the guy. I shout "no!" and he persists anyway. I then have to attack Loki to stop him killing this guy. Yes. Both members of a two man shadowrunning team engaged in combat, trying to bash eachother up. Luckily, I was pretty skilled with my karate and inflicted a moderate stun wound, and he even managed to fluke a dice roll and tackle me into the bed.

Unfortunately (again), while we were having this punch up, the politico had ran out of the room and tried to climb out of a locked bathroom. Loki attempts to bash down the door while I run outside to intercept the guy. He's midway squeezing out the window when loki busts down the door and decides to headbutt the guy. This results in him falling out of the window and landing on my character, who takes a moderate wound.

The neighbours call and the Star arrive to check it out. I'm in the garage, loading the politicians Westwind with loot and paydata, Loki is trashing the house (we had to make it look like a gang attack) and spraypainting logos on everything (including the family dog). I radio Loki that the police are coming, and tell him to use the politician to tell them nothing is wrong. Loki opens the door and DECAPITATES a cop with his katana. The other two cops pull weapons, one starts firing into the house to kill the crazy fragging ork and the other runs to the car to radio for help. Loki wastes the first cop with his SMG and I throw a grenade underneath their cruiser.


So yeah. The combination of stealth character and overt combat monster? not so great.

[Spike]

That is an AWESOME story. We need more stories like this. Everything that can go wrong does, and its FUNNY!

:love:

[Sir_Psycho]

Yeah, bummer the CLUE files kinda died.

[Spike]

Old CLUE stories never die, they simply fade into the background count until someone decides to pick up the duty of reporting new ones once more!

[Glyph]

[Garrowolf]

One of the worst things I saw was a combat mage that spell locked a increase reflexes spell on himself. Then he pulled out two guns and made the sammie pointless. The guy playing the sammie gave up. The mage did it again and again. He would also cast multiple spells that way.

That is the kind of thing that I'm talking about.

[Glyph]

Well, shadowrunners tend to be violent people who do dangerous work for a living, so combat skills are where you will see the most overlap. That is, most shadowrunners will have some combat skill, and there are many varieties of specialists in this area (gunslinger adepts, street samurai, combat mages, enforcers, etc.).

But a mage shouldn't be able to make a sammie redundant in gun combat with a mere increase reflexes spell! The sammie should have a higher Body, more armor, a higher Reaction for dodging and initiative, more heavy ordinance such as LMGs and assault rifles, more close combat skills, and be throwing a heck of a lot more dice for those pistols tests.

I wish I could see the stats for both of those characters, because I suspect it might be poor character design (on the part of the sammie) that is the real culprit here.

[toturi]

[Rotbart van Dain...]

[Thanee]

[warrior_allanon]

our team was pretty overlapped, The street sam could drive and shoot, the mage could do electronic tech jobs, the electronic tech was a face as well and my phys adept bridged the gap between the street sam and the mage, we each also had our strengths where the planning was considered, the street sam, the mage and the face took the initial incurrsion, I (as the phys adept) usually made the "Oh frag me running" plan. We could all shoot, street sam and phys adept did demo, mage and phys adept did astral spotting,

[Spike]

And if your games still uses spell locks, I recall the standard tactic against this was enemy mages frying the Mage-Sam from the Astral, using the Spell lock to ground the spell.

But yeah, reflexes isn't the only difference between mage and gunbunny...

[Kyoto Kid]

...overlap on secondary skills is not a bad thing. I agree anyone, (including mages) needs to have some degree of mundane combat and stealth oriented skill. (Invisibility spells do not mask sound).

@Toturi: It is not that the player of the sammy purposely designed a weak character, as the mage's player purposely set out to one-up his teammate because he wanted to hog the spotlight. I have run into this before and it is pretty discouraging. What should the sammy's player or I have done? Purposely go out and design a mage to outdo him?

That's kind of like the arms race of the old cold war where we built a bomb, the Russkies built a bigger one, so then we went out and built an even bigger one (and so on .. and so on...).

This is a more of a player issue that I believe the GM needs to deal with.

@Sir Psycho: Great story. Been on a few runs like that myself, the best (worst) of which was during "Wake of the Comet" where we had to negotiate a deal to get the satellite and none of us had much in the way of social skills. Think of it, a dwarf Ex Soviet Cosmonaut/Doctor and a human kid genius [decker]/B&E tech (...been playing to much SR4 lately) dealing with a commune of Elven "back to Earth" types.

[eidolon]

[cetiah]

[warrior_allanon]

[toturi]

[Catharz Godfoot]

[cetiah]

[toturi]

[Glyph]

Covert ops specialists are difficult to make because they require lots of skills. But mundane covert ops specialists can be pretty good. You have all of that senseware, things like shock hands or fingertip compartment monofilament whips when you need stealthy but effective weapons, muscle toner, synthcardium, tailored pheromes, etc.

It is possible to make a pretty darn effective mundane covert ops specialist. Actually, sammies edge adepts in this role, because they tend to be better at generalist roles at char-gen. And that's the thing - covert ops specialist is almost a misnomer, considering the wide range of skills that covet ops entails.



As far as min-maxed characters vs. less well-crafted ones, the GM should be offering newbies some assistance. But personally, I also think newbies should not expect to enter a game, and instantly be at the same level as people who have been playing it for awhile.

If the less min-maxed character did it for "roleplaying" reasons, then he shouldn't mind being less effective than the min-maxer. A lot of "roleplayers" seem to want to have their cake and eat it too. They want to make quirky characters that are far less than optimized, but then they complain when more competently crafted characters outshine them.

If the combat mage is breaking the game by making a character that doesn't fit, the GM should tell him so. But I don't like how so many people automatically assume, when there is a power imbalance, that the stronger character should be the one who is changed to resolve it.

[Garrowolf]

Okay so you take away the thing that causes the problem, after the fact, and you end up with a very pissy player. Or you give more to the other player to balence them out and the first player calls unfair. Always a fun situation to deal with.

I have noticed that if you have specialized characters each with their own niche, and you have power gamers, then the power gamers don't cause problems. They are great at what they do and are happy. In fact I have noticed that you can make even more powerful characters and STILL not have balence problems if they are specialized well.

If your characters are overlapping their specializations then slight differences in power become detremental.

[Cheops]

[toturi]

I thought mundane only meant no magic. Bioware and cyberware is mundane in my book. An unaugmented mundane means no bio or cyber.

[Glyph]

Mundane usually means unawakened. If you are playing an uncybered mundane covert ops specialist, you should expect to come up second against people who have magic or 'ware to give themselves an edge. The only real advantage that Joe Average will have is about 40-50 more points in skills.

But that's how it should be. Uncybered mundanes are supposed to be fearful, envious, and alienated from the awakened, and constantly be tempted by the quick, easy boost of cyberware and bioware.