The room for improvement is there, it's just changed now.

Awakened Characters are the Specialists of the Sixth World. A Gun-Fu Adept is absolutely amazing at shooting, a combat mage rocks combat with magic. They continue getting better and better and better in their specializations, and never really stop.

Augmented Characters (and Unaugmented) are the Jacks of All Trades. They hit a Hard Cap with skills very quickly, so, instead of tossing their karma into upping a single attribute many times (i.e., Magic, or Resonance), they up their skills, and when they cap, they up a new skill - the line between a Street Samurai, a Rigger, and a Hacker is very thin - ultimately, a cybered character may very well end up being a combat badass hacking nightmare with an army of 30 Steel Lynxes at his beck and call.

Magical Characters and Technomancers get really good with their shtick. Unawakened get good with many things.

The very existence of skill caps answers the question. No, there is not as much room for improvement in SR4 as there was in SR3.

.... And this is the part where I get characteristically preachy:

Every one of your skills is capped during character generation at a 4, with the exceptions of either two (ungrouped) skills at 5 or one (ungrouped) skill at 6. This means that you're completely entitled to be world-class in one skill, but presumably that's the core of your character so it's okay.

You can still get a step of improvement out of that 6, though, because you can buy the Aptitude quality. It costs 10 BPs in chargen or 20 karma after. That's a hefty expense, and all it does is entitle you a little more room to grow by raising that skill cap to a 7. You'd still need to spend 28 karma to raise an active or combat skill to that new level.

Then, if you're so inclined, you can look into Reflex Recorder (and/or Improved Ability). That's even more expense, either in money or (in the case of the adept) karma.

But sticking to just normal-people skills, it's a whopping 48 karma to go from a non-Aptitude 6 to an Aptitude-enabled 7. It'll take you a good chunk of time to earn that much karma (unless your GM is silly). Such is the nature of "diminishing returns advancement," which is common in many RPGs.

So your signature skill is capped and specialized (for another 2 karma); what about its linked attribute? Did you cap that yet? You can't be the world's best race car driver with a Reaction of 3. Oh, and don't forget about maxing out your Edge to make sure all those dice get to really count.

Then there are the other skills and attributes out there that need attention now and then.

~~~~~

So, yeah, there isn't as much room for improvement in SR4 compared to the theoretically-infinite range some of us are used to. But my position is "There's enough room to keep me working at it for a long, long time."

Are awakened characters really significantly better at what they specialize in? An adept can get 3 extra ranks with improved ability sure, but it seems to me that it's very easy for a samurai to boost agility and reaction to 9 with cyber/bioware, while for an adept raising stats is extremely expensive. Ad a reflex recorder and the Samurai should have as many dice as the Adept with his weapon of choice. Unless of course the adept uses augmentation too, which I suppose it possible.

... It's almost as if the system is intended to be thematically diverse and yet relatively balanced.

EDIT: Note my word shift from "designed" to "intended."

The question is whether it is balanced, I might be missing something, but it seems to me that Samurai gets greater width, without being significantly worse at what they specialize in, which would make them all around better than Adepts.

But what's the reasons given for claiming the opposite. I'm very new to the game, so it's entirely possible I'm missing something, but in that case I'd like to know what it is. An adept power such as Improved physical ability seems particularly useless, since I can see no reason to use 1 magic point, 2 if it's above the racial maximum, when you can pay less than 10.000 and 0,2-0,3 essence for the same from cyberware.

ETA: Except for body which IIRC can't be boosted with implants.

that's a fine answer if you only view the game mechanics as a make-do vehicle for roleplaying--which is a valid choice. however, it's just as valid a choice to view the game mechanics as a game. a game where you have to intentionally handicap yourself so that it's actually possible to challenge you (instead of just walking over any opposition) isn't much of a game. that's one reason many of use are displeased with SR4; it doesn't support players and GMs who prefer to use hard rules--who enjoy the game portion of roleplaying games as much as the roleplaying portion.

Well, SR3 operated differently and improved ability let adepts positively shine at their chosen field of expertise.

In SR4, improved ability has been put on a tighter leash, but take special note of the adept powers that add to pools rather than skills. Both Kinesics and Combat Reflexes, for example, are only limited by your magic attribute and the karma you expend to raise it, making an adept better at social tests and dodging/surprise tests, in the long run, than a samurai or face.

Oh. Damn. I can only Add +5 dice to my Reaction Pool for surprise and defense tests!

When you take an experienced adept vs. an experienced Street Sam, the Adept wins in his chosen field, because he -has- to specialize. Adepts get to be really, really good at 1 or 2 things.

Street Sams get to be good at 20 things.

Yep.

KK is a 300 + Karma character, that is the type of campaign I am involved in. She's been around since SR1 and been updated with each new version until SR4 hit. Just no way to make the conversion.

Basically, she loses skills and abilities even with the Karma she's earned.

(Her character background alone is a 20+ page short story. Someday I may post it)

Given a closed grading system, that is a question about resolution.

Of course you can make a scale from 1 to 100 and allocate - thats what D100 games do.
That doesn't change anything, though, as the the difficulty and modifiers are set accordingly.


So the real question is whether a closed grading system is something reliable.
Considering that's what schools still do to evaluate students capabilities, it seems like that's the most practical solution around.

An important thing to remember when converting is that characters aren't in isolation, what you really want to convert over is the campaign. The next important thing to remember is that when a game system changes, you will never get a perfect conversion - you can, at best, get a character with a sufficiently similar feel that you can play them as the same person.

Reguardless of what the official conversion book says I'd suggest the following: Rebuild your character as a starting character and then add earned karma and equipment on top. Skill levels won't come out exactly right, and also remember that 2 SR4 skill/attribute points are a lot like 3 points in an SR3 skill or attribute. Try to build for the same *capibilities* rather than the same numbers - an already played character isn't a collection of numbers, it's a fictional person who has a reputation for two things: being able to do things and being good at things - as long as you can still perform all the same in-game actions you could before you've got the same character.

With a major game system conversion like SR3 to SR4, you can't really do better than that. You may have been spoiled by the SR2 to SR3 conversion (almost no change), but try a MechWarrior 2nd edition to MechWarrior 3rd edition conversion if you want to complain - it makes SR3 to SR4 seem trivial.

Indeed.

Loved to hate, indeed.

Have already attempted this. Some things just don't exist any longer or have yet to be released in upcoming sorcebooks/expansions. Actually as a starting character, she's pretty good, in some ways even better than she was in SR1/SR2. There are some benefits such as she can now use a smartlink at it's full potential and acquire sensory enhancements without needing to go the implant route.

To rebuld her in total, I would need to see what the sourcebooks (particularly the ones for Magic & Combat) have to offer.

For now I am thinking of just starting all over wth KK version 4.1 and see how she progresses in as the new setting unfolds more