Using standard 400 point starting characters here is what my friends and I came up with:

Face: adept with a bit of bioware, throwing 22 dice on all con and negotiation tests, 18 dice on all other social interactions
Tank: troll, throws 33 dice on resistance, 12 on full ranged dodge, 8 on melee, and 10 with machine guns
Ghost Recon: adept, throws 15 dice min on infiltration, -4 to see, another -6 if you're looking thermally, tons of drones and agents, 11 dice to snipe
Technomancer: don't need to say anymore
Mage: don't need to say anymore

Does this team, completely legal, strike anyone else as being overly broken? At least compared to SR3

Not really; you could do most of that in SR3. The point is, what are each team member's *weaknesses*? Each team member specialization has a broad array of things they need to be able to do, that don't fit into the single good tricks you outlined. Does the tank have any demolitions skill? Can the recon guy break a lock? Can the technomancer do... anything without having to Thread a complex form? If the deal goes sour, can the social adept take a bullet to the Face?

(Edit): That said, the adept's Improved Ability power is pretty broken, especially now that it's cheaper for noncombat skills. house-rule that away and things get much saner.

Oh, and did your troll tank forget his smartlink? Those dice pool numbers seem a little low.

Those weaknesses can be attributed to most SR3 PCs as well.

actualy, the real point where things get broken is defaults in SR4. someone who specilized in pistols will have a high agility. other guns default to agility -1. So someone with agility 5(7) and pistols 6 (+2 semi-auto, +2 Smartlink, +1 reflex recorder) gets 18 dice to throw at a pistols test, even unskilled he has 6 dice with automatics and longarms, 8 if its smartlinked. 6 dice with all kinds of close combat, gunnery, heavy weapons, infiltrate, palming, locksmith, ect. High attributes are king now.

now, an average human professional has 6 dice (3+3). having that many puts you on par with a professional, mechanicaly, even if your unskilled. Theres no reason for a non-mage to not have a default of 6 for his primary skills stat.

A shadowrunner will have 12 to 20 dice in their specialty, and 6 to 8 in areas they consider important. the unaugmented human max is 16 dice, with a specialty, aptitude, and exceptional attribute. Adepts and street sams are better than that. and i dont think anything less than 16 dice is proper gun-fu. at 16 you can buy a crital hit on an unoposed test.

and remember, a LOT of skills are bypassed with equipment. an autopicker or medkit adds its rating to attribute+skill, or replaces skill. a maglock sequencer or passkey avoids the need for three hardware tests (open it, unlock it, close it back up). which is good, considering how often locks and bullet wounds come into play.

Cept the you can't spend more then half your points on attributes at start, but... see what I did with my cyber mage.

agility of 9, without spending a point in it = )

don't forget there is also a rule about needing a skill to achieve certain tests, or bieng unable to achieve more net hits then your something for defualting

Safety in numbers. If you catch any of them alone or missing some within the group, you can expect them to be in a heck of a lot of trouble. Obviously your stealth person will be great going into hiding, but what if they need to talk their way out? Or what if they're in a completely lit room with nothing to sneak behind? They might face Bubba the Love Troll with a shock glove just waiting to make some new friends in your butt. The fact is that any and all teams need each other to function effectively. Specialization is key, but being balanced is just as important. Plan A almost never works. Therefore, everyone should be able to contribute to more than one thing. We have the same problem in our group. A lot of people end up sitting out in a hacking, rigging, or astral combat situation.

Question: how many in the group have Cha 1 and /or the uncouth flaw?

Just wondering...

Cheers,

Max

Creating an overpowered group is possible in every system. But where's the fun?

Conversely, creating balanced characters is possible in every system, but where is the challenge?

I think the reactions to overpowered PCs come in two flavors. First, there's the very real balance issue. One player is way better than the rest at feng shui-ing the points into an ubermensch who pWns all the others, and they're jealous. Solution: either tell the one character to rewrite or (even better) tell them that if they want to keep that character, they need to help the other players with their chargen. Since this is usually my role anyway...

The second one is not really a problem at all, in my mind, except for the GM. It's hard to challenge a full group of incredibly powerful individuals. That's where you stop looking at realism and start looking at action movies. Cook up gangs of ninja, post-Crash otaku tribes, packs of shapeshifter wolves, indestructible cadres of Red Samurai. Whatever they can create, you can create - and you don't have to follow those pesky character generation rules. If the players can play as well as they can create characters, you're in for a hell of a ride.

Composure test: Wil + Cha. "Aieee! They're shoooooting at meeee!!"

Judge Intentions test: Int + Cha. "Me think mage-healer man is trying to feel me up."

I certainly don't wanna glitch on either of those. Poor troll.

Actually he is just run as an NPC for the group and since I am the GM I do actually run him like an autistic child. One of his favorite conversation topics is the fact that his mom was named "The." And the group follows the SR tradition of leaving the munchkin, socially awkward characters in the van while everyone else meets johnson.

However, I did forget about the Composure tests. I'll just have to change his High Pain Tolerance 1 to Guts and purely use drugs to get high pain tolerance. Plus he can always snort some of his novacoke for that extra plus 1 cha. 30 nuyen a shot isn't too expensive.

The way the group is working without contacts is that basically they were fairly big runners elsewhere but were forced to run to Seattle after some bad stuff went down. Undoubtably this has something to do with the social adept, mage who tends to go around naked because of his shapeshifting penchant, and of course the socially inept troll. Now they are trying to start over again in Seattle with something of a bad rep among fixers and Johnsons.

*shrug*

Looks like you're trying to emulate typical overspecialized mmorpg classes - which are the main reason I don't play mmorpgs.

Personally, I prefer teams that can back each other up, stand in for another team member's role if necessary, and God forbid, actually blend in with the public/wageslaves/whatever.

3/4 of that group would have problems just trying to buy a soyburger at a StufferShack without involving the Star.

Still, if that's what you're happy with, great work!

I agree. Above all else, a shadowrunning team needs to work well together, and be able to support one another. My DMs may have been a tad harsh, but we tend to die, mid-run, and someone has to pick up the slack when that happens. Also, if you take a flaw, our DM will make a point of making it come up once in a while to remind you that building points are not free.

This team doesn't seem to work well together at all. Who cares how sneaky the Ghost Recon guy is when he has Earthquake McTroll clanking down the hallway beside him? When the technomancer gets shot, who does the remaining hacking? If the mage drops, it seems the group is fairly fucked, arn't they?

Individually these guys are very good at the ONE thing they can do, and sound completely innept at anything else... I can hardly imagine them getting to the meet in one piece, much less pulling off a (il)legitimate shadowrun together.

Heh, i told a story about a current team we have. We actually do alright together, we do have a lot of options, but we definately are lacking in some things. We lack a hacker...which means nuyen from us should we need to do it...and we don't have any rigger either(again, looks like we gotta hire). There are only three of us, so it was inevitable we end up lacking in SOMETHING at any rate.

Our chars are built well, but none of us went crazy with the minmaxing. We did a bit of course, but we still managed to get something going.

We have a mage specialized in conjuring, banishing, and binding...no spellcasting(but counterspelling). However, they have no combat skills whatsoever so we gotta watch out for him if he doesn't have a spirit doing it. However, I find that the spirits are great...they help fill in some niches we don't have(another thing we lack is stealth...but the powers have helped us there. I know playing a runner without stealth is asking for it, but none of our guys had 'jobs' beforehand that even needed it...so why give it to the character for no reason?) NOW they see the importance(they made it out alive so far after a big bash in), so we can start learning it.

The other mage is well balanced between spirits, spells, and his monowhip, with a good street etiquette to help out there. He can get us around no problem when it comes to the gang territories and the underground, but isn't too familiarized with the corporate life. Is also a decent shot with a smattering of other skills in there. But has some great spells with versatility.

My adept(yes, a full magically active party) handles the major buttkicking...but has an incredible perception that helps, and has massive intimidation skills(for interrigation and scary purposes), but also has Kinesics and a Negotiation skill and an Etiquette skill, all of that with a decent charisma allow him to do something decent socially that doesn't involve scaring them. English is his second language at a 3 so occationaly he can run into a small dialect problem or something. He isn't captain firearm either(an alright shotgun skill).

We have a pretty powerhouse team if we were to face somehting non magically active...but we do have our shortcomings which we try to work around.

I think shortcomings are fun...we laugh a lot with this party because of our lack of stealth(jokes of we might as well just throw a big sheet over us and run around), and real life people have shortcomings...but they can be worked around in time. I find the shortcomings become crippling when the people in the parties are SOOO specialized they become the proverbial one-trick pony. That's when problems start. (A mage that ONLY casts combat spells, an adept that ONLY fights up front and loud and a technomancer that ONLY is any good at anything in VR world might run into some problems, for example.)

Luckily I find that mages have a little advantage...as some of those spells and abilities they can get can make up for certian things.

As a member of above group, I made the mage, I have to say that they really are overpowered. They are also a huge departure from our regular types of characters. In our group the standard is usually to make balanced characters that can live in society. This was just an experiment to see how strong we could make the characters.

It turns out that they guys have a few weaknesses (that troll is kinda crazy but he would be kept in the van most of the time and no way would he get near a johnson) but they are fairly mild compared to a standard character. That is the point that Cheops was making. These characters are broken because they are uber-specialized but have very few weaknesses to balance them.

The mage, for example, spends most of his time as an animal during runs and so is never on security footage in a way that is useful to the authorities. And the way that foci work at chargen it makes it really easy to have a lot and go to town. All the mage really does is summon spirits, bind them, and then goes on the run in some animal form (pigeon or dog is always good), has a spirit keep its eyes open astrally, and then infiltrates/supports the group. Then, if things tank, he whips out his direct combat spells and nukes the enemy. Then, for situations where he needs to interact with people he uses that nice physical mask spell to make sure he isn't known. There is not a real live image of this guy's real face. A supreme advantage for a shadowrunner.

You could never get a mage that effective at chargen in SR3 - it was almost impossible due to the way the system worked, the way spells were bought then, and to do anything like this you would need to be severally limited in attributes. This mage spent his full 200 on physical stats and still has magic 6.

I find a players choices at chargen tell me what kinds of situations he would like to experience during play. So the tank troll's player wants to see scenes where his char lets a grenade explode in his fist and smiles at the bad guys. And that's fine. I think, he has a right to get them.
On the other hand he also asks for (and has a right to get) scenes where he seriously mucks up an important social situation. That is what he wants, obviously. Why else would he take uncouth on top of Cha 1? And the result might sometimes be just as devastating as the opposite situation: a physically extremely weak face char getting into a grenade's blast radius.
In your case: Can you really count on the fact that your socially crippled troll teammate will stay in the van while you are busy dealing with the local mob don? Of course not. Why not? Because he's a social cripple and will often just not react well to people telling him what to do.

btw: The idea of lumbering player teams with such highly specialized NPCs sounds like a great way of teaching them just how much trouble such chars can be - by letting those guys spring every trap that is set for their special weaknesses. As someone else pointed out: a group is as strong as its weakest member. Seen from that angle your specialists group should be in really deep shit.

If I ever get the time I'll post all 5 of the characters on line so that this conversation can continue with symmetrical information. People outside of the group don't have enough info to argue against this group well enough.

And as far as specialization goes it seems to be better to be specialized at first and branch out. Our heavily story based, non min-maxing game we had right before this one seems to have proved that so far.

BTW, I'm the GM, I made the troll, and I play him as an NPC.

What I'd do is this:
Find a group of five other powergamers.
Give them the specs of your team.
Ask them how to exploit the weaknesses.

Also, there's the issue of overkill, and how it is fun, fun, fun! Even Bubba would be in a good deal of trouble if he fell off a cliff....or, for that matter, 94% of the buildings in downtown Seattle. The uber-gunbunny physad is pretty much sunk if he's stuck in an environment akin to Vietnam, or underwater. (-5 from cover, -5 from obscuring terrain, -4 from your weapon being jammed with mud... Target Number of 30!). The Face is just asking for it; chances are, he's pretty much toast in a firefight.
Also, the group looks to be a shade slim on people who can drive; there's a lot to be said for having a backup driver, and someone who can drive a helicopter at least half-decently.
And lastly, explosives are your friend. If your players are'nt savvy, it's not hard to blow them up.
(Player: I hop out of the van and snipe out the guards.
Player: I hop out of the van and start breaking down the entrance.
Player: I hop out of the car and start hacking into the security system so nobody notices.
GM: Okay, great. As soon as the guards notice that you sniped one of them, they hit the big red button on their desk. It's linked, via an ordinary set of copper wires, to a battery and a rather nasty shaped charge about....let's see...four feet under where you're standing. Now, feel free to resist 26D.)

<<<What I'd do is this:
Find a group of five other powergamers.
Give them the specs of your team.
Ask them how to exploit the weaknesses.>>>

Good Idea. That's how this team came about. Give power gamers license to try and tweak characters to the max.

<<<Also, there's the issue of overkill, and how it is fun, fun, fun! Even Bubba would be in a good deal of trouble if he fell off a cliff....or, for that matter, 94% of the buildings in downtown Seattle. The uber-gunbunny physad is pretty much sunk if he's stuck in an environment akin to Vietnam, or underwater. (-5 from cover, -5 from obscuring terrain, -4 from your weapon being jammed with mud... Target Number of 30!). The Face is just asking for it; chances are, he's pretty much toast in a firefight.>>>

No TNs in SR4 anymore. And the adept in this group isn't a gun bunny. If he gets out of position he escapes and evades. His specialty is hiding not combat.

<<<Also, the group looks to be a shade slim on people who can drive; there's a lot to be said for having a backup driver, and someone who can drive a helicopter at least half-decently.>>>

Irrelevant in SR4. Troll has skillwires 3 which become skillwires 5 beta once the first run is over and then starts collecting skillsofts. This gives him all the Social and Piloting skills he'll ever need. Plus the technomancer tells his Rating 6 Machine Sprite to hop into the helicopter with Autosofts and take control of it.

<<<And lastly, explosives are your friend. If your players are'nt savvy, it's not hard to blow them up.
(Player: I hop out of the van and snipe out the guards.
Player: I hop out of the van and start breaking down the entrance.
Player: I hop out of the car and start hacking into the security system so nobody notices.
GM: Okay, great. As soon as the guards notice that you sniped one of them, they hit the big red button on their desk. It's linked, via an ordinary set of copper wires, to a battery and a rather nasty shaped charge about....let's see...four feet under where you're standing. Now, feel free to resist 26D.)>>>

26D doesn't exist anymore. And besides with a Western Dragon and the Troll both buying successes with just straight stats (ie no spells, spirits, etc) the Troll only takes a single box of stun damage from the dragon's claw. He takes no damage from assault cannons, normal sized explosives, etc baring incredible attack rolls by opponents (gun bunny adept specialized in assault cannons does a lot of damage).

While your comments are appreciated Spastic Teapot I think you should stick to SR3 if you haven't even read any of SR4 yet.