Chara Creation Tutorial?, Are there any good tutorials? Options

[Socinus]

Are there any good tutorials for character creation that are simple or any programs that will walk you through the process?

[Crusher Bob]

Are you asking for assistance with the creation of the character concept, or an assistant for the math involved in stat generation, or what?

There's the SR4Chargen excel file available in the community projects section that makes the math of character generation simpler.

There used to be the '20 questions' to help in generating your character concept in the SR main book. If they were not re-printed in SR4, you can find a variant of then here.

Or are you asking for something along the lines of "10 things every runner should have." type assistance?

[Chibu]

Sounded to me more like he wanted:

Step #1: Pick a race - *choices*

Step #2: Assign Attribute points.

Etc...

If this is the case, I can't really help as I don't know the 4ed rules.

[Fortune]

There's a decent walk-through of chargen in the SR4 core rule book.

Just what problems are you having?

[Socinus]

There's a decent walk-through of chargen in the SR4 core rule book.

Just what problems are you having?

I apologize for not being a little clearer. We have the 4thEd rulebook

Im playing the game with my fiancee and her sister. Its the actual step by step process that we arent real steady on, assigning X number of points here and X there etc etc.

What we're looking for is something that will walk you through the exact process of creating a character either in the form of a text walkthrough or a program that you input information step-by-step

I did find a program that will allow you to digitize your character, but it freaks if you violate the gamebook rules of how much can be where.

The instructions in the book are good, but still a little confusing and we would like a program or walkthrough that will just break everything down step by step

[WearzManySkins]

Check in the community forums here, there are several spreadsheets, and programs that will assist/calculate the process.

As for a walk thru there are not really any.

If you feel like getting a walk/instruction thru via the forums, post your message there, use the SR4 tag, and wait for the many posts/replies. There are many ways to create characters in SR4 depends upon the game you intend to play and play style.

Possible concepts/ideas will give some direction to the assistance too. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wink.gif)

WMS

[Crusher Bob]

Something like this?

Step one: The spark.

This can be as simple or as complex as you want, it's something that sounds interesting enough (and compatible enough with the game) to bother to come up with stats for.

Your character might start out with something like:
I'm an ex-marine with six brothers and sisters to support; there's no way I'm affording that on a gunnery sargeant's pay.

I'm an ex corp kid whose parents got waxed in some sort of power play, and now I am hearing the voices of the spirits in my head.

I wanna play a guy like a Grammatron Cleric: two gun bullet dodging action ftw.

Stuff to think about during the spark:
What game assumptions are in play? Exactly which sub-genre of SR are you all going to sit down and play?
Will a black-hearted killer fit right in?
Will secretly being the heir to the throne of England be cool, or not?

Sample roles in a SR team:

The muscle
The face
The hacker
The magic
The sneak
The tech
The wheels
The investigator

In general, a character can only fill two different roles. Spreading out more without a lot of min-maxing tends to dilute your character.

Step two: meet the system (get the SR4chargen excel file)

Start throwing stuff into your character that meets your original concept. At this point, don't worry about point limits, just throw on stuff that looks interesting.
Take a look at the merits and flaws and throw on any that attract your attention.

Once your first pass is done, take a look at the rough total of the points you used. Is your character too powerful, too weak? Start considering how to adjust your concept up or down to fit the available points (or just warm up your slide rule of min-maxing).

Step three: The life

Go over your initial concept and make sure that your rough draft stats and skills mesh up with the idea of the character in your head. For example, unless your character was raised in a vat somewhere, ho should probably have some basic social skills. Your ex-special forces guy should probably be able to live out in the woods (survival skills). How did your character come by this collection of skills, magic, and cyberware?

Step four: Why are you here, again?

Make sure that the character taking shape in the first three steps is still a guy willing to shoot people right in the face, for money (or whatever sub-genre of SR you have agreed to play).

Step five: Tweaking

Finally, adjust your character to fit into the point totals.

Step six: Double-check the must haves

You've got a place to live, a way to get around, ammo for those guns, and a pair of emergency pants?

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Or did you want something much more integrated with the SR4 rules, specifically?

[Socinus]

Something like this?

Or did you want something much more integrated with the SR4 rules, specifically?

We're looking for a little more detailed that shows how many points to alot to where and how to calculate out what you need to start a character. We have coppies of the official character sheet

[Crusher Bob]

OK, don't have a whole lot of time right now, but will get started on a step by step

I'll start with the first spark I came up with "I'm an ex-marine with six brothers and sisters to support; there's no way I'm affording that on a gunnery sargeant's pay."

more sparky goodness:

We'll call her Sally Red-Buttons (in honor of Puppetland) Shadowrun: a storytelling game with wires in a grim world of make believe.

She'll be an ork, because orks tend to be poor, and also tend to have kids in litters. Sally is the oldest, and joined the marines in an attempt to move up in the world. When mom and dad got kilt, Sally suddenly found herself with six younger brothers and sisters who wanted stuff like a roof over their heads and something to eat every now and then. So what do you do for big gobs of cash when all you really know how to do is kill people and blow stuff up? Well... she knew a guy who knew a guy.

She'll generally qualify as muscle, and be mundane (i.e. no magic)

Step two: meet the system
Assuming 400 points

I note down that being an ork costs 20 points, and gives some stat bonuses and caps certain other stats.

Interesting stuff:
As an ex marine, she'll probably have the Sinner flaw (5 points)

Since I watched an episode of house recently we'll give her an allergy to copper: "Momma had one of those old-style copper IUDs. It's didn't work. But now coming into contact with copper gives me really bad hives" (we'll call this an uncommon, moderate allergy, 10 points)

As the favoured warriors of the Almighty, everyone knows that marines give a good first impression (5 point positive quality)

Stats. I can spend up to half my points (200) on my 8 basic stats. The 3 special stats of edge, magic, and resonance don't count against my 200 points max. Also note that bringing up a stat to it's maximum level costs 25 points for the last point. (SR4 chargen does this for you). Also note that a stat of 2-3 before metahuman modifications is what the man on the street can be expected to have.

Being a ex-marine, Sally should have pretty good physical stats and maybe a higher than normal willpower. Since Sally is going to shoot people, we should favour her agility over her strength.

We'll try the following base stats (worth 200 points)

Body 3
Agility 5
Reaction 4
Strength 3
Charisma 3
Intuition 3
Logic 2
Willpower 5

Note that, being an ork, Sally gets +3 body and +2 strength. Making her final stats:

Body 6
Agility 5
Reaction 4
Strength 5
Charisma 3
Intuition 3
Logic 2
Willpower 5

Edge? I dunno, how lucky is Sally? We'll say that beating the odds of an IUD makes her pretty luck, and give her an edge of 4.

[watch this space for edits, will be back in a while]

[edit]
So, the important things to pay attention to when buying stats:
You can only spend half you points (usually 200) on your 8 basic stats.

There are three things to keep track of with your stats:

Augmented max
This is the actual maximum amount you can have in a stat, even with augmentations. So, for example, if you get wired reflexes 3 and level 3 reaction enhancers, you'd have +3 REA from the wired reflexes and +3 REA from the reaction enhancers. But now note that your augmented REA max is probably 9. This means that is your natural reaction was a 4, you don't have 4 + 6 = 10 reaction, but only 9, as tat is your augmented max. Note that the augmented max also limits magical enhancements to your stats. So your REA 9 guys can't benefit from and increase reaction spell.

Unaugmented max
For most races and most stats, 6. This is also sometimes referred to as the 'hard cap', referring to the fact than you can't spend anymore build points to increase that stat. Note that there are certain merits (Lucky, Exceptional Attribute) that alter your unaugmented max. Also note that the 'last point' of the unaugmented stat costs 25BP, rather than 10.

'Soft cap'
This the stat level one below your unaugmented max.


Barring certain extreme min-max builds, it's never worth it to hit the unaugmented max in one of your 8 basic stats during charater generation. You have to give up 3 other stat points to get there.

Example, if we wanted Sally to have AGL 6, we'd have to spend 65 points on agility (10 x 4 to get to agility 5, then 25 more to get to agility 6). And we'd have to drop 3 stat points to remain under the 200 point maximum we could spend on basic stats:

So changing Sally's AGL to 6, we drop her body to 2 and strength to one.

Total: 195 points

Body 2
Agility 6
Reaction 4
Strength 1
Charisma 3
Intuition 3
Logic 2
Willpower 5

After modifiers for being an ork:

Body 5
Agility 6
Reaction 4
Strength 3
Charisma 3
Intuition 3
Logic 2
Willpower 5

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Notes on special stats:

Edge is roughly comparable in power to the square of your edge score. If you have points left over during character creation, soft-maxing your edge score (5 for everyone but humans) is a pretty good idea.

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Sadly, the archetypes in the book generally do not follow the rules. If you have a later printing, many of the glaring errors may have been fixed.

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Note that the basic SR4 chargen system is very exploitable.

[ElFenrir]

In my sig, i have a blog that i do a really broken down step by step character generation. It's in the Tabletop section.

But beware of one thing; i mix in background with this(how to put the numbers with stats), and I use houserules that we use that other people don't(No Availability limit at chargen and the use of SR3 Edges and flaws converted to SR 4 Positive and Negative Qualities are the two biggest, along with the widely used Charisma x 2 free contact points.) So beware those few things aren't widely used. But if you want to get an idea? its still all there, if you want to slog through it. It's 7 parts. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/nyahnyah.gif)