How to make a better..., Tips for character creation. Options

[Ellery]

I thought it might be useful to have a thread that points out ways to get the most out of the character creation system. If you like playing powerful characters, this is useful. If you dislike it when players have overly powerful characters, this is also useful--you may want to modify some rules or simply say someone can't do something.

Here are a few tips:

Buy Exceptional Attribute before raising a stat to 6. Exceptional Attribute costs 20bp, but you can then raise the stat to 6 for 10bp--30bp cost total, with the option to later pay 21 karma to raise the stat to 7. If you just raise the stat to 6, it costs 25bp--nearly as much and without the advancement option.

Load your mage up with bioware. For 1 essence, you can get a +1 boost to strength, agility, logic, one physical skill, and ignore stun while getting +1 to willpower and -1 to intuition (which you won't use so much anyway, as a Hermetic), all for only 75k (15bp). That's a 34bp bonus plus some nice effects for only 25bp cost (you'll have to buy an extra point of magic along with the price of the goodies). And you can still take the "sensitive system" negative quality for +15bp, since that applies only to cyberware. If you're going for Magic 5 or 6, you might want to think twice about this, but at Magic 4 you can still throw force 8 spells if you need to (which is probably as much as you can soak anyway), and you've only lost one die from your spellcasting test. Note: Synner, this answers a previous debate we had about the frequency of augmented magical characters.

For long-term characters, buy skills in character creation and attributes afterwards. During character creation, attributes cost 2.5x as much as skills. But after character creation, attributes only cost 1.5x as much as skills. So if your game plan includes a lot of skills, and you expect your character to survive for a while, buy the skills you want right away and work the attributes up later. (Kind of backwards--people normally develop attributes early in life and then spend the rest of their life developing skills, but never mind that!)

Cluster skills by attribute, and buy that attribute instead of building up the skills.We know this already, of course. For example, agility is used for no less than 16 skills (not counting exotic weapons) in unarmed and ranged combat, athletics, infiltration, and other cool stuff. If you spend the 60bp to get a skill of 1 in each of these skills, then raising agility by 1 (10bp cost) is as effective as spending another 60bp to raise all the skills by one. Very effective! 100bp will give you 6 dice to roll in 16 different skills. It's even worth taking Exceptional Attribute and hitting 7 before raising the skills separately, unless you don't care about a lot of them. Heck, with only a -1 defaulting penalty, you might not even need the skill.

Unless you're taking advantage of the attribute boost, don't buy skills at a low level. It costs very little karma to raise a skill from 0 to a low level. It costs a lot more to raise it from low to high. So raise your skills as high as you can (given the limits) during creation--that's skill 4 except for the 1 or 2 things you want to specialize in--or don't take them.

If you're not taking cyberware or bioware for some reason, get magic! It only costs 5bp to be an adept, and you get a full power point to spend (normally a 10bp value). You don't need any skills, either. Pretty cool! For an extra 5bp, get Mystic Adept and you'll have the option to cast spells later if you want to build up your magic.

[Kater]

Yay! Min-maxing'R'us ... couldn't take long until the first thread like this appeared...

[Ellery]

Min-maxing in SR4 is so easy it's not like posting about it will give away any great secrets that people would otherwise not notice. There aren't many variables to play with, and caps keep everything in small, easily-computed ranges.

But it might be helpful for GMs to get quickly up to speed on what things they might want to house rule, or look out for, or help their players with.

[Chiba Cowboy]

Why not try thinking of a character concept and then spending points to try and emulate that character's abilities?

"My character concept is a guy with sixteen skills based upon agility and who has magic because he didn't buy cyber/bioware!"...

[Oracle]

Just don't try it. This is a thread for mini-maxers. You will not find any new arguments that have not been used a thousand times and you will never convert one of them to roleplaying and not building pseudo-characters with the depth of cardboard. So please stop it before it starts. :)

[Ellery]

It can be frustrating to build a character according to a concept and then have him suck greatly compared to another character who supposedly has a concept, but has been min-maxxed and then given an excuse--er, background, I mean--for why he or she is that way.

It's good to at least know what's out there, unless you're the type who doesn't even notice when one character is doing 70% of the interesting stuff in the entire game.

[Oracle]

I didn't say anything against your way of playing. It is your game. Play it the way you like it.

[Ellery]

Was that supposed to be a reply to my post? It seems wholly irrelevant to what I said, and I haven't said what my way of playing is.

[Spartan]

[Chiba Cowboy]

[Oracle]

[blakkie]

[blakkie]

Oh, and built any 400BP Mr. 24's yet? Curious to see what a real, by the rules Mr. 24 looks like overall.

[Chiba Cowboy]

If you like playing "powerful" characters (obviously statistically rather than psychologically or dramatically...) why not just give everyone more points? Having the highest number of dice available for common tests does not constitute a character, it just belies you are character focused. Why not do maths puzzles if all you are interesting in is generating numbers?

[Ellery]

That particular set of bioware is less advisable for shamen, but there are other sets one could choose. I didn't mention that you can buy foci (26bp for +2 magic from a force 2 power focus), so your magic will really be 6, not 4.

And anyway, after you are out of character creation, that last attribute point doesn't cost extra any more. The only disadvantage is that you'll need one extra initiate grade for the same level of magic (which costs 10 + (grade x 3) karma). In the long run, it's probably cheaper not to take bioware, but it's a big boost early on.

Oh, and there are no more trauma dampers, thank heavens. That was just about the most broken piece of SR3 'ware. If you allowed mages to take that and summon infinite watchers for free, and cast L-drain spells for free, then it was a very, very big reason for SR3 mages to get 'ware, which is now gone.

Added in edit: I haven't built anyone with 24s, but I also don't see where the limit of 24 dice is stated. Haven't really looked, though. It's pretty straightforward with an adept, though--attribute 10 (7 + 3pts from bioware) costing 100bp; skill 8 (6 base + 2 specialization) costing 26bp; enhanced ability 6 costing 3 magic points, which is 35bp. Total cost: 161bp. The remaining 239bp should allow you to flesh out a pretty decent character. That attribute is going to help you out a lot, too, especially if it's something like agility (which it probably is). In fact, getting additional agility-linked skills with 16 dice would only be another 18bp each.

[blakkie]

[Chiba Cowboy]

[Oracle]

[Chiba Cowboy]

Roleplay more... minimax less.... :S

[Chiba Cowboy]

[milspec]

[phelious fogg]

You can roleplay and min-max, its a normal thing to do for most gamers I've ever met.

[blakkie]

[Chiba Cowboy]

[Ellery]

Chiba, if you don't care about min-maxxing, why are you posting here? If you dislike it, do you think it will magically disappear if nobody talks about it? "La la la, I don't hear you, I don't see anything, you didn't just take out that armored troll in the dark from 400m while badly wounded."

I haven't really looked through the ware in much detail. Nothing jumps out at me as being completely broken. Stat bonuses are surprisingly cheap--0.2 essence per level, which is +1 to a stat, and under 10k per level. Any runner with any cash at all would be crazy not to get implants up to the level that they can take advantage of, with the possible exception of technomancers and magicians.