Intiate Grades ... who's the big gun?, Oddball, but. Options

[lorthazar]

First of all, 14 guys and the lightest weapon used at the moment was a Colt M22A2 firing IPE Offensive Grenades are going to wreak havoc on you no matter who you are. BTW we all had APDS or Explosive ammo and this was back in the day when Armor added dice to resistance tests.

Second We were no slouch we were each Prime RUnners at 400+ karma.

Third Sometimes it more fun in your own game world than in one that says 'he can't be killed'

[BitBasher]

[Fortune]

Especially when you are playing one of those 'can't be killed' characters. :please:

[mfb]

400 karma? hahahahahahahahahahahahaha. woo, watch out for these guys!

i just don't see it. i mean, it's your game, and all, but i reserve the right to laugh at the idea of a couple of punk 400-karma runners shooting up harley and ehran.

[lorthazar]

SR2ed p 158

[lorthazar]

[mfb]

yeah, but how about the barrier spell? as i recall, that worked the same in SR2 as it does in SR3. toss that in a sustaining forcus at force 12 or so, and that M22 and underbarrel grenade launcher aren't going to do crap. toss it into a sustaining focus at force 20+, which is where i'd set it, and nothing short of a tacnuke is going to muss a hair on your head.

dude, it just doesn't matter. there's simply no way 400 karma characters should be able to come close to hurting an IE. it's just insane.

[Fortune]

[Kagetenshi]

There's no way any given one or two 400 karma character should come close to hurting Teachdaire unless specifically prepared for it, let alone an IE.

And dude. Utter bull on your IQ stats. I've got an IQ of 150, a good ten points below your supposed "average level". I'm in the 99.97th percentile. Somehow, you managed to get a group of what, twelve guys together out of a group significantly smaller than three out of every ten thousand?

Convince me that somehow you managed to sift through the hundreds of thousands to get your players, and then we'll go into the fact that IQ and Shadowrunning (or most practical pursuits) have relatively little to do with one another.

~J

[lorthazar]

[Fortune]

I've only gamed with one person that had a higher IQ than mine ... his was at 183 ... and he couldn't run games to save his life. Great player though, I wish we were still in touch.

*Hi Lee ... drop me an email and you can play a jaguar shapeshifter magical adept from Amazonia ... as soon as SoLA comes out! ;)

[lorthazar]

[Kagetenshi]

Dare I ask where you are that is so massively outside of the bell curve? Honestly, a spike like that suggests that the test needs examination or renormalization more than anything else.

~J

[Fortune]

Or a wildly active imagination.

[lorthazar]

Actually it isn't that bad out of the bell curve, becuase our area also has a lot of people who are much lower on the chain. As for the norms they are calcualted on a world stage individual areas do fluctuate.


Or am i the only one who understands statistics? (sarcasm)

[Just Jonny]

Actually Kagentashi, it's my understanding that you underestimated the commonality of us I.Q. 150s types. Last psych class I took placed those of our intelligence level or greater as the top 99.75%. :D

Just to give everybody a bit of perspective, I.Q. is basically a percentage of the average, so 100 is average. Usually, 90-110 is viewed as normal, and the top and bottom 2% are described as either mentally retarded (<78) or genius (>136).

Oh yeah, and life experience is pretty much always better than intelligence, lazy geniuses are regularly beaten by dedicated average people. YMMV, of course.

Based on the way lorthazar is throwing around numbers, I'm pretty sure he's never had any training in Psychology, but if he met his gaming buddies at Mensa or something, his story might theoretically be true.

[Gyro the Greek S...]

As always, it goes:

"Smart, dumb. I'm the guy with the gun."

[Just Jonny]

Gyro, I always heard it as "Right, wrong, I'm the guy with the gun." Do you know where the line originally came from?

[John Campbell]

Most likely, they took the IQ tests on the Internet. Pretty much every Internet test I've seen gives unrealistically high results, and makes no attempt to inform the test subject as to just how meaningless high numbers really are, even for accurate tests. Most of the legitimate tests I've seen, in fact, have a hard cap that gives a maximum possible result well below 180. The exceptions are childrens' tests, where age-adjusting can bump results way past ordinary limits, especially for precocious kids, but produces numbers that are really not comparable to adult numbers.

And it's:
"Good, bad, I'm the guy with the gun."
-- Cousin Bruce, as Ash in Army of Darkness

[lorthazar]

Actually I have never taken an online IQ test. And truth be told high number mean you test well.

I am one of those people who really is that smart. i have a near photographic memory. I read more than most people. I am quite curious. i learn quickly.

Still with all this i can do some of the stupidest things you have ever seen. it takes some on smart to do the really stupid things.

As for our characters being munchkin: You play every weekend completeing an average of one run a weekend. All runs ending extremely well. Each player adding Drama, humor, and excellent roleplaying and forming unexpected plans. We averaged six karma a run. After a year you have 312 karma. might seem munchkin, but only in the same way a 10th level fighter seems munckin to a 1st level fighter.

Finally: Cardinal Rule of playing: It's just a game

[Fortune]

High Karma is not necessarily synonymous with Munchkin.

[DarkShade]

400 karma chars arent necessarily munchkin, hell 2000 karma chars arent either. munchkin is a term best reserved for really weird combinations and flaws chosen specifically to min-max that make no sense whatsoever rp wise.. experienced does not mean munchkin.

a group of powerful chars could kill an ie or a GD, this is ok. it is the whole point of a proper sr game imho, that EVERYONE can be killed, and the refreshing change from hit point based games..

this is what makes people PLAN, and what keeps high karma chars from going around making stupid speeches.. <the "i am invincible" melodrama that is Soo tiring>. I have only seen one char make such a speech in a sr adventure and said char got an aimed assault cannon round to kiss for his trouble.

what makes an IE or GD so hard to kill is that you can never get into a `fair`combat with them, first you can never find them and if you do its in a way of their choosing, and that they can certainly estimate your threat level while you cant really estimate theirs. they also dont take risks.

that said, when ies start coming back from the dead the gm is doing something fishy, and when an ie or GD is actively hunting for you, there is really no way in hell a char is going to survive that unless the gm is `friendly` ( ya know the type.. the one scared or unwilling to kill characters ), and this doesnt require any superhuman powers, hell not even any cyber, just resources, and ies and GD`s have plenty. <50 mortars and one spotter spirit , for example, one low end mage and 50 mundanes for the mortars....or one truck with 20 tons of tnt, driven automatically, one mundane around for the detonator..there are just soooo many ways to kill a group if the ie can find them it isnt funny.. hell an ie can even arrange an `accidental misfire` from a battleship that takes out the cityblock you are in, if that is what it takes>

on the note of iq tests.. I took one or two once for fun, but they mean jack shit unless its the first one you ever take. see, if you do a couple you start scoring a lot better.. does that mean you all of a sudden got smarter? wow lets close down all schools and have kids take 2 iq tests a day then, we will all reach 180 that way! /end sarcasm.
sorry but there is no reliable way to measure intelligence today.
DS

[Kagetenshi]

[Austere Emancipa...]

There's a billion different scales of measuring IQ. I suppose on some scales the top 2 percentile is around 200, and you are only dumb if you score below 0. Even on the plenty generous scale Mensa uses in Finland (where 148 is the top 2 percentile), 182 would be in the top 0.022 percentile, 185 in the top 0.013. On that scale, both would be well fit for several (mythical?) "clubs for the ultragenius" inside Mensa; out of every ten thousand people, you two would statistically have the highest IQs. Of course, as said, depending on the test the IQ figure might only show that a person is good at completing graphical sequences, which is impossible to tell through text written on a forum, and doesn't have a real influence into how you live your life. And if you were correct about the 150 being top 5%, then the scale is about 30% more generous than the one I used above.

As for the IE-killing, I think it's been addressed pretty well by others.

[Moon-Hawk]

Obviously we're all going to find different stats for IQ frequency, but just to add my 0.02 :nuyen: .
IQ 137-150 is 0.9% of the population
IQ 150-160 is 0.1% of the population
IQ 160-174 is 0.01% of the population
IQ 174 and up is 0.0099% of the population

And if the GM couldn't think of a way for an IE to stop a 14 relative punks, he was either going way too easy, or needs a re-test. I'm guessing he just didn't have the heart to kill you all.
Oooh, or maybe, MAYBE the IE realized that you 14 would be annoying if he let you live, but didn't want to kill you, and so FAKED HIS OWN DEATH! It's brilliant!!!