BAN STICK: What SR4 items or rules does your GM ban?, And do you hate him because of it?! Options

[Cain]

Oddly enough, if someone took Incompetent: Pilot Suborbital, I'd arrange a situation where they had to meet the rest of the team(as to not screw them), in a fast enough time they'd need to take a suborbital flight. I'd then recreate Airplane! where the entire crew eats bad soyfish, and thus they need a pilot.

By the time the entire team has gone down, and the person with Incompetent: Pilot Suborbital is the only one left, you're already so far past screwed it's not even funny.

I'll point out another flaw in the Incompetence rules. Let's say you take Incompetence: Hardware. On the surface of it, it's legit: there's lots of uses for the Hardware skill, even for non-deckers. Here's the catch, though: The big restriction on Incompetence is that you can't default to the skill-- and you can't default to Hardware anyway.

Oh, and technically speaking, you can take Awakened and Emergent skills as Incompetences. I mean, a mage can legitimately take Incompetence: Banishing, so a mundane can as well. I think just about everyone fixes this with a house rule, but it is technically RAW.

[Kev]

Ya got a point about the Face. I suppose about any weapons-based skill could end up hairy.

Though I wonder just how it...looks. Like, say you have Incompetent: Throwing Weapons. How do you explain this? Like, every item you throw inexplicably falls on the ground a foot in front of you? It flies backward? It's a rather odd quality, in that I know what it does, but I don't know how to hell to explain it. I mean, I can explain maybe Incompetence: Pilot Something as you just have no freaking clue what the hell is going on and have problems figuring it out, but I have trouble explaining how someone can be incompetent in Unarmed Combat. Like, you just can't, no matter how hard you try, make a fist and punch?

Heh, ElFenrir, I don't think you've ever seen anybody incompetent at throwing. Like throwing baseballs, instead of at the plate, into the ground 2 feet in front of him. He just couldn't seem to get it!
Incompetence with running would get me, personally. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/nyahnyah.gif)

[Kev]

By the time the entire team has gone down, and the person with Incompetent: Pilot Suborbital is the only one left, you're already so far past screwed it's not even funny.

I'll point out another flaw in the Incompetence rules. Let's say you take Incompetence: Hardware. On the surface of it, it's legit: there's lots of uses for the Hardware skill, even for non-deckers. Here's the catch, though: The big restriction on Incompetence is that you can't default to the skill-- and you can't default to Hardware anyway.

Oh, and technically speaking, you can take Awakened and Emergent skills as Incompetences. I mean, a mage can legitimately take Incompetence: Banishing, so a mundane can as well. I think just about everyone fixes this with a house rule, but it is technically RAW.

Yeah, remember when, back in SR3, you could take magical skills as a mundane?

... That was fun.

[hyzmarca]

That is a truly disturbing suggestion. And not in a good way. Shadowrun is supposed to be an unethical, morally grey dystopian setting... but that gets out of the morally grey territory and approaches perilously closely to morally black.

I don't know what I would do, as a GM, if one of the characters in my game tried that. Have his Mentor spirit drop-kick him, at the very least... and then have a different Mentor spirit make him an offer he couldn't refuse. Three-four sessions later, the rest of the group has to go take down a brand new Insect shaman.

It's nothing you can't do with Ally spirits in SR4, it's just a heck of a lot cheaper to do it with bugs. A good Ally costs a fairly decent chunk of karma.