Are Street Sams/Mercs boring? Options

[Jrayjoker]

All characters can become boring if the player or GM let them. I personally have had a lot of fun with all the character archetypes, and I have let all of them suck. Like everyone has said, it depends on what you do with your down time.

[Birdy]

Actually the best groups I played with where mostly mundane "soldier" types with an occassionally Mage thrown in as a bullet-trap. The most boring ones where watching supermage do all jobs with it's spells.

Generally mage characters are far more into cliche and boring repetition than most other characters. May be due to the fact that after selecting Elf and Magic there is not much left from the buildpoints for character development.

"Soldier" types on the other hand have lot's of points for skills (Exspecially with Sum-to-10 and BP). Hey, you can even choose a race that is not optimised for the job and survive! And few "Soldiers" I ever had or played with were cyber/bio monsters. The most effective ones had minimum ware (200-400k Ressources) and skills.


Birdy

Good mage: See good corporate lackey

[Jrayjoker]

Well, most retired grunts/mercs are going to be low on ware and have a lot of low to mid level skills with some focus on their specialist training. As for street sams, I see them coming out of dojos and policlubs rather than gangs and being more specialized. Either way, they don't have to be boring.

[Kagetenshi]

Though to be honest I don't see military training of the non-special variety as good preparation for the Shadows in the least.

Not that I think special forces-type training would be very good either, but it'd probably be a little less actively harmful.

I haven't experienced the monotonization of mages, but then again I haven't played in a sufficient volume of different games to hit that, I think.

~J

[Jrayjoker]

I don't know K, the guys I know from the military would do just fine as support Sams on an extraction or infiltration. Special forces would be better in my opinion. As for a Merc, they would be perfect.

The mages I have played started to feel homoginized after a while. I could see the potential for boredom if all you played were the stats.

[=Spectre=]

Ultimately, the role comes down to the characters backstory. If all you really do is jsut toss weapons, ware and points together, sure, it's gona be shallow and empty and nothing will come out of it.

But if you put some time into it, you can turn it into a really viable concept. Let's say you go for broke and make the Million Nuyen Man. Maxed Cyberware and what Bioware you can get with GM's permission. Now, your average runner will pull around 30-40k a month, barring the unforseen(remeber this is average, not street or master level). Not even counting Street Index, you have the equivalent of 2-3 years of pure income in your body. Now you didn't get that by saving up. Soemone a lot richer than you probably invested in your body. Who's your benefactor? Are you on good terms or bad? Is it a corporation fronting for you? Mafia? Someone else entirely? SomeTHING else entirely?

In short, don't let the archetype define your character. Your character should define the archetype.

[Jrayjoker]

The 5 second summary would be that role playing matters... ;)

[Mercer]

When my group switched to SR3 lo those many years ago, the first thing we did was make up all new characters just using the main book. I made up, for lack of better terms, a merc/sam. I never really thought of the character that way, though, since I never had played classical sams in SR2, but after playing him for about a year I happened to notice that my cyberware package for the SR3 character was almost identical to the cyberware package for the SR2 Samurai. I think plastic bonelacing and a level of Dermal were the only differences. And I played that character for two and a half years, and never upgraded any cyberware and never bought any bioware.

There's no point to this, I just like talking about my old characters. Other than to say, stats are just numbers, and numbers get boring quick. What makes characters fun is something else. But other people have said that better and they said it before I did, so I'll just wind this down here.

[Oro]

i agree with jrayjoker, to a point, roleplaying matters to those who want to roleplay. otherwise they are just number crunchers with nothing better to do or role playing is their only social outlet.

i dont think that the character you create has anything to do with a good roleplaying experience. its all up to you. you can give a good role player any character and get a good result. by the same token you can give a number-cruncher a well made, good-back-storied character and watch him reduce it to numbers.

its all about what is important to the player. if the player is more interested in "winning" and not in "playing" then he will do just that.

ive found that the best way to get a good group is to be selective in your gaming group and to reward MOST of the karma/exp from good role playing. its better to have a small good group than to have a horrible large group.

exp/karma is, after all, a way of enforcing and bringing about what you want in the sessions. thats what the purpose of it is, use it to reinforce what you want from/in the game.

[draco aardvark]

[Canid13]

And when I started GMing I'd never played SR3 and had only spent about 5 or 6 sessions playing a razorboy (I suppose you'd call him that, just not to his face) in a bastardised SR2 campaign.

I had absolutely no clue about the whole magic thing other than my character couldn't do it, so the team needed a mage :o)

[Jrayjoker]

I played a dog shaman first. He was always in the thick of things, pack mentality and all that. He also cooked a mean omelette. (SR2 Cooking/Breakfast/Omelettes 4/6/10, yes I spent a lot of Karma on it).

[PBTHHHHT]

Hmmm... a friend of mine told me about this one party she attended where this guy just sat that there on the couch just watching everyone and did not participate in any discussions. He apparently worked for the embassy security staff (she works for the State dept btw). Maybe a few of those security/military types really do have the personality of a brick and they just can't turn off their training.

[Cynic project]

I have seen them go both ways. But I have to say that they can be the most fun,at least for me. I mean it is sometimes fun to play the disillusioned Spec ops, who didn't want to leave.Maybe he is a Tir Ghost who wants to believe that the Tir is the the anwser,but the truth of the world he lives in,is just to much. Or hell it is fun to play the patierate forced to leave to save for VIP's ass. You can't go home. Going to another country would either be betraying those you are loyal to or working for people you want to kill. But really, what else do you have?

Then above all else you can do the lack of role playing with a mage.,decker,rigger or adept. Yes,magical types get more out of charisma than mundanes,but still you get what you build.You build a pile of shit,you get one.

[iPad]

[Canid13]

Ah, that wasn't player stupidity, that was 'Player's first battle playing a mage after only ever playing hard as nails street sams' :o) Taught me my current character can't take on three people in combat though, and he should be shooting/spellslinging as a first resort :o)

Granted, that statement applies to some more than others, but I'm the one who sits back and smokes when sessions turn into semi-heated discussions about IC remarks or actions :o) It does happen to all of us.

[kevyn668]

[FlakJacket]

[Wounded Ronin]

I disagree with all of you. I like the straight up action hero type character. For me, in a big way, SR is about strategy. So an action hero type character who goes about the encounters in a strategic way or reasonable way is a lot of fun for me.

The character dosen't even have to be twinked out or powerful. In fact, for a challenge, recently I'd been making a lot of under-powered action hero type characters. For example, I recently made a PC based on Snake from Metal Gear. No magic, no cyberware, and skills spread out everywhere in an inefficient unfocused manner. Started with almost no gear; the resouces were as low as possible using the point system since all my points were hogged by having skill in almost every type of weapon. Jack of all trades but master of none, because that's how the character was. But, I had a lot of fun playing the character because it represented a challenge in terms of strategy (how I manuver through the base, where I decide to stand in each room) and tactics (what to do during the actual encounters). The fun of the game was very much trying to be as efficient and effective as possible with a relatively low-key character whose only starting weapon was a Colt Asp.

So, I don't think that a character who is like a video game or movie action hero is boring at all. Firstly, you don't have to twink necessarily when making such a character. Secondly, if you don't twink you can't be about mindless hacking; you'll have to be very strategic if the encounters are designed for people with smartlinks and wired reflexes but you're just a "normal" person. Thirdly, I don't even think that the role playing necessarily has to be boring. You can have a lot of fun parodying the hypemasculine stupidity seen in movies and video games. If you do it right you can make the others laugh. I disagree with sams/mercs being somehow inferior to other character types most emphatically, whether we're talking about how interesting/fun they are to play, or whether we're trying to argue that playing them is somehow less mature than playing a mage.

[Sandoval Smith]

Further reinforcing the point that it's not the characters themselves that are boring, but rather how they're played.

[Cynic project]

[hyzmarca]

For a ex-military character with depth, I think Tommy Lee Jones' character from This Park is Mine is good inspiration. Granted, I've only seen part of the movie once, several years ago. But, it did make an impression.

[Voran]

Any character played long enough has the potential to become boring. Certainly on a rules kinda level, cybertypes have a situation of diminishing returns. As tech increases in the game it costs more to keep state of the art. And a fully tweaked Sam has less chance of putting in the really new gear unless they yank stuff out or go the cyberzombie route. Grim situation, that.

[Daishi]

In our last military campaign, we were set down in a war-torn Berlin as mercs on the run. We were all mercs or sams, and even though none of us are terribly good character actors, we all managed to develop some quirk that was memorable.

The three quickest examples were "Shakey" who audibly kept track of the amount of sanity he had left and when he ran out calmly committed suicide in an elevator shaft. The sarge with his permanent cigar, penchant for fireballs and tendency to reference Murphy's laws of combat at inopportune moments. And my LT who was a paper-thin British officer stereotype (ie. A Bridge Too Far) who kept instant tea pouches as accessible as his rifle ammo and would set up a brew every chance he got. And dammit, he would finish that brew no matter what. Picture six mercs holed up in an abandoned police station, when all of a sudden the building is being shelled by recoilless rifles. The LT remains seated in the break room sipping his tea as the walls explode, directing the defense through his BatTac. Only when he was done his tea did he walk to the roof.

The point being is there are a lot of stereotypes for sams and mercs that can be drawn upon. Even if you aren't good at fleshing out a character in game, just pick a different stereotype, or find one quirk that sets him apart.