What kinds of characters do people playi in Shadowrun Options

[Chrysalis]

Sparked off from several threads, I feel that I need to ask what kinds of characters people play.

I currently play in two Shadowrun games. One is a street samurai and the other is a face.

Sonya is an individual who is an agent of the Network. That Network which involved Deus setting off Matrix 2.0 meltdown. She is a former security guard of Renraku Arcology and would later on rise in rank to a tier 5 on the spa level. She woke up in the arcology in 2069. Five years after the arcology shutdown.

She scares her current running companions. She has bagged the face who was running the opposing Shadowrun team and stuffed his head in a bowling bag, and simply patted the bag and told the the rest of the team that the other Shadowrun team has been taken care of.


Vera my other character, is the face, resident doctor and psychopath. Her psychosexual fantasy involves finding a man whose family she can take over. However as the husband becomes more amorous his infidelity is revealed and the fantasy changes. She then proceeds to mutilate the husband while the rest of the family sit dead at the poisoned dinner table.

Her code is that humanity by is normally evil and that people are prone to casual and random acts of kindness. Everyone lies, deceives, and manipulates, because it is natural. Shadowrunning gives her access to all the equipment and skills she needs to carry out her fantasies whether in the bedroom or on the operating table.

[Stahlseele]

Mostly the Combat-Monster Trolls, cybered down to be more machine than meat and bioed up so the remaining meat is not naural anymore . .
Urban Predator like Gangers, from time to time a real Street-Samurai with a Code of Honour . . mostly just jaded Mercenaries . . if i am feeling especially bad i will play an cruel assassin . .
i try to keep it intermediate, most of the time, my characters are just the weapon toting tough guy with a bad sense of humor who does what he can to guard his friends, family and team members and favours non lethal weapons untill damage taken reaches a certain physical level . .

[Siege]

The "jack of all trades" adept - easy to create, flexible enough to be useful anywhere and versatile enough to keep me interested.

The character specifics and motifs will vary based on my mood, but the basic archetype rarely changes.

-Siege

[Drogos]

Currently I am playing an Augemntation Addicted Street Witch. He has a number of character flaws, like shame over trying to fit in when he was younger by posing as an elf, but pride is his biggest obstacle. He follows Sky Father and as such his pride is leading him down the Faustian path (eventually). He felt victimized most of his life, being a human born to elf parents in Tir Tairngire and even awakening didn't entirely lift his feelings of inadequacy. He started becoming augmented to fit in with the elves around him, and then became addicted to the feel of the physical power. Coupled with his own magical abilities, he feels himself a demigod, walking the world to achieve ascendancy. He feels his augmentations help him to achieve a more perfect ascension, but he is wary of what it could do to his spiritual side. He is seeking a balance, but the power is intoxicating. His focus on Mental Manipulations and extensive use of Mind Probe and Assensing reinforce his feelings of power over his fellows. He knows the secrets that those around him hide and his knowledge equals control. His superiority is his major foible and the GM is looking forward to exploiting it over and over again.

I do however play varied types of characters with the only common theme being a strong character flaw that will eventually lead to their downward spiral (what can I say, I started roleplaying Vampire and never really got out of the mindset). I play fairly optimized, but I do not make it my primary concern. I always want the story to be interesting to me and so my characters are made to have their fall play out.

[Fuchs]

I am currently playing two characters in PbP games on Dumpshock:

Haywire

and

DD

[paws2sky]

My flavor of Shadowrun tends to be more more mohawk (not necessarily pink) than tactical vest, so...

My SRM NYC character is a Troll Bounty Hunter. Early in his career, he was approached by a minor (A-rated) trid network to be one of the main players in a Dog The Bounty Hunter like show. They'd recorded the first episode, run some ads, and then... the network was gobbled up by Horizon before anything actually aired. The more conservative Horizon executives decided to replace the other cast members with more experienced people. They told him to come back when he knew the biz better. So... back to the streets to improve his cred. He's basically a good guy.

My other character, being run in a mini-campaign, is an ork mystic adept gunslinger. He's one part gunslinger, one part detective, and one part coyote shaman wannabe. So far his only real magical skills are a little bit of summoning. He was born in the PCC, to a family of migrant workers. Grew up on a steady diet of decades-old cowboy, mystery, and horror trids. He saved most of the migrant camp from a flash flood the night he awakened. And then moved to the big city when he was of age. He sort of blundered into shadowrunning thanks to a case of mistaken identity (all those orks look alike, you know), but has sort of settled into it as a means to an end. He'd really like to have a legitimate detective agency some day.

-paws

[nezumi]

I only play in one game right now. A sociopathic cat shaman who projects all of her issues onto everyone around her. She's currently running with an assassin Rat shaman, so we'll see how that works out...

[CanRay]

My group is as follows:

Kayun - Elf Bio-Ninja (All bioware, no cybernetics): He's pretty close to Richard from "Looking For Group". "I like to kill things.", and get paid for it. Basically, someone raised on too high a diet of Ninja Movies and not enough moral boundaries.

Conner - Human Cybernetic Muscle (Street Samurai, perhaps?): Basic street muscle. Has a good back-history, but still just basic street muscle.

Doctor McCoy - Dwarf Shadowrunning Street Doc and Parkour Master: 'Running for a lot of reasons, but mostly because fancy medical equipment is expensive, and those secret Corporate Labs have the really good drek! And, if they're going to be stealing stuff in the first place...

(H!m3R@ - Hyperactive Gnome Hacker with insane Logic: Still getting a feel for this guy, but I'm getting the picture that his Cerebral Booster twisted his intelligence so high, he's gone all the way from "Genius bordering on Insane" to just "Batnuts Insane". Has a Cortex Bomb, and no idea how he got it.

[Flatliner]

I made builds of different archetypes in different metatypes, but only played mundane human rejects from Gibson's "sprawl series." The Case-wannabe decker being the best one.

He was completely professional when working and completely worthless when not. He saw decking the Matrix as more "real" than the meatspace because of a misplaced sense of self. He wrote psychotropic black IC to jack in and tune out when bored.

[ornot]

I'm GMing right now, but my players team consists of:

Mercy: Hacker, medic and all around tech wizz. Frightened by real world violence. Just wants to be her own boss, and is running to make ends meet since resigning from Ares.

Malice: Rigger and armourer. Partner of the above. Usually follows Mercy's lead, but has a military/security background so is happy to use lethal force

Sabot: Former Renraku executives bodyguard. Denied promotion due to his mixed race ancestry, took advantage of the Crash to reinvent himself as a street sam. Usually quiet and professional. Occasionally has anger management issues and becomes rather blood thirsty.

Sakura: Cyber-Ninja. Player is a newb, so the character is not terribly developed past stats.

Barstool: Magician (homebrew tradition). Child of gunslinger runner and magician (same tradition). Brought up by runners, around runners. Since his father was killed and his mother went to seek vengeance he is trying to make a name for himself on the streets. His magic is mostly supportive, rather than direct damage, and tech does not agree with him, so tends to non-violent solutions.

Gopher Broke: Former go-ganger from LA. Obsessed with image and new tech toys. Well known among various arms dealers and other shady types as a courier par excellence, since if he can't out-talk the authorities he can out-ride them. Will fight if he has to, but prefers to run.

[Wounded Ronin]

I always playied physads in SR3 because I could bang one out from memory in about 15 minutes.

[Blade]

I GM more than I play, but I have been able to play 3 fourth ed characters.

The first is Slick, he was a dynamic and successful computer engineer working on a big project for Horizon before the Crash. His SIN was erased during the Crash and a rival in his company tried to take advantage of the situation to get him killed. Slick survived miraculously (well, actually his adepts power helped, but he didn't know) and disappeared in the Shadows. He got some friends in the Shadows, learned how to handle a gun, how to survive in a gunfight and discovered his adept powers in the process. He was finally able to get his SIN back a few months later when some of his records were recovered. He started working as a freelance hacker hired to secure company networks, and sometimes to break into them too. He met a girl that way (saving her from a databomb he'd planted) and stopped doing any illegal work. They lived happily for some time, until she got killed in a car accident. Sick with a life that keeps destroying everything he builds, Slick decided to resume illegal hacking and go even further away to Shadowrunning. He's a hacker/face/gunslinger adept.

The second character is Urchin. She was rescued by a gang in the Chicago Containment Zone when she was 5. She had survived with the help of a Barghest (or maybe it was a Hell Hound I don't remember exactly), eating the corpse of dead people, including her parents. She was raised by the gang and discovered that she was good at taming animals. She's actually anormally sensitive to pheromones, which helps with animals (it explains her animal empathy) but can be troublesome with humans, since she doesn't just get the signal sent by the pheromones but also react to it. She got kicked out of the gang because she couldn't resist fucking the leader's boyfriend (who probably had pheromones enhancers). Since all she knew, besides taming animals, was B&E she offered her services as a thief for hire. Her first job went fine, but she got double-crossed by her Johnson and ended up getting arrested by Manadyne. The corporation was interested in her ability with paranormal animals and tried to study it. When they discovered it had nothing magical they discarded her, sending her away to Seattle where her corrupt probation agent thought it was better (and more lucrative) to have her running the shadows. She's some kind of B&E specialist with paracritters (bought as contacts at chargen).

The third character, and my grittiest so far, is Cahotic a nearly toxic mage. He was the son of a rich family in some corporation and when it was discovered that he was Awakened, he was sent to a very strict and demanding school. He didn't like it, fell in love with a girl who introduced him to various drugs. He failed school, was more or less rejected by his parents and the corporation. The girl introduced him to the criminal underworld and they did a few criminal errands together to pay their drugs. They were framed by their "fixer", the girl was killed, the boy was taken alive because he was awakened, and sent to a "reeducation center". After a few months of a very heavy and strenuous treatment to stop his addiction and turn him into a good citizen, his magic abilities were deemed too low to be valuable and he was sent back to the streets. With nothing better to do, he got back to his fixer to get some work. He has trouble controlling his powers, letting his nightmare fill his surrondings when he fails. He also prefer to stay away from summoning since the spirit he summons tend to be dark and creepy. He's got a mentor spirit, but he doesn't know it. As far as he knows there's a strange and evil-looking spirit that torments him, either that or he's going crazy. Other than his limited magic abilities, he's a generalist.
He was my answer to all the mage characters I see: characters with high willpower and other drain attribute, Levitate, Influence, Mind Probe and Stunbolt/Stunball.

[Ed_209a]

I play serious, mission oriented, versatile characters, because I tend to play with loony, disorganized, "Ooh Shiny" players.

Someone has to herd those cats.

[Siege]

I play serious, mission oriented, versatile characters, because I tend to play with loony, disorganized, "Ooh Shiny" players.

Someone has to herd those cats.

QFT.

-Siege

[Faelan]

Always the GM never the player. My most recent players have played an elf mage, elf technomancer, and a human adept (heavy on the social and stealth, but no slouch with a pistol). All of them have had mercenary attitudes, but they generally don't start wasting people until the opposition busts out the heavy artillery, then all bets are off. In fact they all specialize in conflict avoidance.

[Dumori]

I play what ever I feel like as I manly GM I can make both the hidious munchkins and NPC with a background so deep its unlikely to be probed that far. For exaple I have one NPC who now can role up to 88+ die with the monowhip but 21+edge is his normal. I am making for a run in a few weeks a elf mystic adept hunter with some cyber he gained after soem nasty accidents the then awakened and this scenes in the left (real) eye came to the same level as the ones in his cybered eye he then went to the sprawl to remove his cyber eye and have a new eye regrown as well as the right leg. His story picks up on the streets the day after he get in to the town.

[Wesley Street]

I GM but I have a strong interest in "face"-type characters. I've always enjoyed the negotiation, bluffing, conversing and strategy parts of Shadowrun as much as the combat. For fun I recently generated a high lifestyle human private investigator with a penchant for white suits, fast cars, and a frumpy-old-man attitude. Think Magnum P.I. meets Elijah Snow from Planetary.

[JoelHalpern]

In the one game I am playing by post, I am playing a Troll Knife-Throwing Adept. Seems to be working out. I came up with some background (he had been recruited into a mercenary group that later got disbanded) but I am basically fleshing out my sense of the character as I play him. (I had some thoughts as to what I expected, but some aspects are turning out slightly different. Possibly because I personally don't do strong and silent very well...)

In general, I like to work out some background and character style, and then evolve the character during play, along with advancing skills, etc...

I would like to run a mage some time, as I usually enjoy those. Getting the right balance between interest, effectiveness, and tradition preference is an interesting challenge. I rather like the idea of a moderately observant Quabbalist with the intention of adding extra logic skills (although mages eat so much karma that I am not sure that one works.) Would have to work with the GM to flesh him out.

Joel

[DingoJones]

Playing a full mage right now.
He was a member of a corporate black ops division and was mentored to the groups leader, an unstable sociopath who plays mind games. Seeing that his young prodage was not going to be the phycho he wanted him to be, he betrayed my character by shooting him twice in the back and kicking him off of a building.
The experience awakened my character, but he still would have died if not for a mysterious mage carried him to his dingy apartment and nursed him back to health. My character was taught how to control his new abilities and was taken under the wing of a wolf mentor spirit . The mentor wolf spirit is his moral compass, his redeemer. Now he is trying to get over the thourough mind humping his former mentor gave him and get himself on the path he was "meant to be on".
I play him as skeptical about his spiritual awakewning, cynical about destiny and being good but dedicated to turning his life itno something more than it was.
It's your basic redemtion character trying to overcome black ops training and propoganda.

[Stahlseele]

Well, ok, now let's see . . .
there's Van, my first Troll that got played more than once . . more or less the typical angry rebellious teenager . . crude sense of humor, no real sense of honour but trying not to be a bother to his family/tribe of urban indians . . born to human parents and goblinized into a troll at the age of 10 sent to his uncle, a practicing wolf shaman, because he could deal with a troll with a really bad temper better than two mundane human parents due to him being able to use teh magicks . . after getting in trouble and his family being dragged into the whole mess smuggled himself into the ucas army at the age of 16 and came back 9 years later cybered/bioed up to half his body being artificial . . more or less to show the old man that his way of pure body and mind was not the only one . . tries to be the efficient soldier he was tought to be, refrains from using loud weapons and killy stuff untill there's a hole somewhere in his body that was not meant to be there, then he goes berserk and usually does so utilizing an automatic shotgun for much ouchies . . immensely proud of his body, even if he did not do anything for it according to the old wolf-shaman . . but hey, in SR3 STR of 15 and Body of 15 is something to be proud of, if most of that is muscle . .

then i've got a character that was more or less meant to really symbolize myself . . cat-shaman and i just barely managed to not have him be an elf or an ork . . that one just ain't a dwarf because i as a player am too tall for that *g* horrible black sense of humor, allways a dry one-liner . . horribly arrogant, phobia and allergic against dogs, vindictive out to nowhere . . not really all that competent because that was the very first character i ever tried building . . tries not to kill people because that's just such a mess to clean up afterwards . . even with the charisma of 3 heis a cold-hearted bastard who ALLWAYS manages to show other people up in the looking good compartment due to his make-over and fashion spell . . yes, the groups face hated that side of him *g*

i've started playing a face character and still wound up being the gun-bunny combat/killing-machine of the group . . and the rest of the group included a thunderbird-shaman and a meele adept with killing hands and distance strike . . but does so more or less in a James-Bond kinda way . . wearing a suit or tuxedo shooting his assault-rifle for example . . good fella otherwise, seems a bit simple-minded, is a nice enough chap, good sport, allways good for a laugh, socializing like hell . . i think i started him with about 20 connections or something like that . . tries not to kill, but somehow when i play him my dice roll an insane ammount of 6's . . i actually managed to kill someone with gel-ammo according to my GM, because a 10-bullet-full-auto burst with 16 successes is still a 10 bullet burst with 16 successes no matter what kinda ammo you're using . .

another one is my dwarf 3-eye/trick-shot . . third eye on the base of his neck mostly covered up by scarves, long hair and such things . . greedy little fragger, armed to the teeth . . light evening wear for that one includes 2 heavy pistols, a dart-pistol, a tazer, hardliner gloves, shock-glove, forearm snapblades, vibro-knife, ceramic-knife, extending baton and forearm guards . . another player who was playing a female character in a short skirt did not know about the third eye and decided to bunny-hop over my character . . needless to say i mage a good buck by selling pictures of whatever it was under that skirt that were taken by the camera in the third eye . . and that's more or less his mindset too . . if there's money in it, it ain't all that bad for him . . and if there's enough money, it's not enough trouble to carry more than the usual ammount of weapons to make sure one stays alive to enjoy the money afterwards . . i did not have to reload a single weapon while on the run with this character, due to being decked out with 6 guns and 6 close-combat weapons . .

[Muspellsheimr]

Aekara (Nightwing) - Current Character
Human Hermetic Mage with much of the outlook of Black Magic, she is the teams medic, highly skilled in both mundane & magical healing. She is obsessed with the nature of death, and seeks to understand the reason people die - not the cause of death, or the reason another killed them, but rather why they could not live in a metaphysical sense. Her goal is to gain mastery over death - immortality, resurrection, and the ability to kill with no more than a thought. She will never use a weapon.

Kathryn (Seraph)
Human Mystic Adept, she is an assassin, psycopath, & sex addict. Suffering from a very disturbed childhood, her hobbies include torture & rape. A SINner, she has military background, & is currently legally an independent/contract bounty hunter. She runs the shadows because she enjoys it.

Nicholas Rhys
Human Adept, he is a weapons designer of the highest grade. Once a ranking employee of Ares, he was released with a criminal SIN after an 'incident', and now is a paladin of sorts (crusader of a cause - not crusader of good).

Muspellsheimr - unable to play until Runners Companion
Vampire Mystic Adept, he follows a combination of Heretic & Norse magic. He is in a long established intimate relationship with Nightwing (above). Focusing primarily on stealth & melee combat, with fire magic support, he has some hacking skills. He believes humanity has become stagnate, and he is to give it a new beginning. He is the cleansing fire & humanity the forest - after he razes the planet, the species will be allowed to return & grow mightier than ever before. He will not use a firearm, although other ranged weapons are acceptable, including lasers & gauss weaponry.

[Herald of Verjig...]

Started with a mundane 5 essense human, got addicted to wierd shortly after.

Wierd is so much easier with magical types, like a 3 foot tall metavariantof dwarf with a sniper rifle longer than he is tall who also uses the scope to better get LoS for stunball and commanding spirits of the elements.

This doesn't rule out fairly insane riggers, just that sitting in a van and sending out a pair of nearly indestrucatable vector thrust drones with heavy pistols almost seems to be expected. I guess the strangest rigger would be the one with who goes into the fray himself, but the kind of combat cyber that would likely include would end up with a character that's bnasically a cyber-thug with a VCR 1.

Back on magical oddities, there was one I crafted but didn't get to play that was a physically harmless but mentally high-statted mage whose sole purpose was to have a potent ally spirit and then die in a glorious manner and see if the GM lets me play as an ally spirit attempting to fullfill the last command given before frail-boy hit deadly.

[ArkonC]

Current character is an Bliss addicted Elven Face/Doc who on her way to becoming a Hacker/Rigger/Techie and not a single combat skill, not even Dodge...
I basically do everything the others don't want to and then some...
Best thing of all, it even makes perfect sense according to the background...

[BishopMcQ]

I find that most of the time, I play characters with combat oriented skills. That said, their personalities are vastly different. Here are two examples:

Shiver--Ninja Adept, Troll who is in in his twilight years. Chance and coincidence are non-entities to him, Fate and Necessity lay out a path as straight as an arrow fired from a bow. He is occasionally a philosopher, often a teacher, and a reticent agent who does what must be done because it can be no other way.

Rayne--Psycho-goth killer. Raving lunatic and fetishist, she has the crazy notion that all of her adept powers come from drinking blood and the fangs to finish the look.

[ArabicJesus]

I am the magic guy of the group. I always play awakened characters and every time we make characters I always try to get others to see the way of magic (and how much better it is).

My very first character was an Ork Unarmed Specialist (Adept). He was pretty quiet and just went with the flow of the group. He got the entire party killed because of his faulty knowledge of magic...

At one time I played a couple of twins, one was an adept face who would throw random objects in a fight (and had combat paralysis). His sister was a mystic adept infiltration specialist who would never talk to anyone but her brother and spent all her time invisible. ALL THE TIME.

Current character is a mage that thinks he is psychic. This means that he only took mana spells, and is not (and will not) use any magical equipment. He is also a human midget. He really likes to mess with people.

The next character is a Voodoo Bokor who specializes in summoning his possession spirits.