to becks or not to becks, how many points should you award? Options

[Ombre]

I've recently come upon the Becks system whose philosophy is very interesting...yet something is nagging me: how many points should you give for regular starting shadowrunners (by regular, I mean, equivalent to those created through BBB rules. it seems to me that with the 425 pts you get a slightly better deal...
In the Cost Tables Adept is listed as costing 60 pts, but all the examples seem to list adept as costing 75 pts...so is it 60 or 75?
Isn't the level 3 contact a bit cheap at 25 pts?

[Crusher Bob]

Phys ads cost 75, other adepts (like sorcers) cost 60. The slightly better deal is because becks tends to produce more 'balanced' characters, with a lot of lower level skills, if you do stuff like add up the skill totals, they'll have more points in skills. Try replicating some of the min maxed point system characters and you'll run out of karma very fast.

25 points for a level three contact sounds about right, you could have 5 lvl 3 contacts for 1e6 Y in the old system, vs 120 karma for the money and 125 karma for the contacts in becks.

[Austere Emancipa...]

See the corrected version of BeCKS v2 in HTML here.

In canon chargen, a level 3 contact is 200,000 :nuyen:. When dealing with high-resource characters (as a Face would have to be when buying contacts with nuyen), the 25 Karma of a level 3 contact in BeCKS v2 would get you 375,000 - 500,000 nuyen. So no, I don't think 25 Karma is at all cheap for a L3 contact.

BeCKS v2 with 425 Karma does not allow you to create more powerful characters overall. Some types of characters might be a bit cheaper to create -- true generalists with a crapload of mid-high rating skills, for example, or mundane humans (at least compared to Priorities). Characters with a few obscenely high attributes and skills (some troll tank builds, for example) are a bit more expensive, as might some face builds be.