That depends entirely on how smart your players play.
I would say yes, but that's for my group taking on mantids in one of my campaigns. Plus, it depends heavily on the circumstances of their fight. Environment, preparedness, allies, etc. YMMV.

thanks Steve, 'preciate the fact finding. 3 karma.

Emo: MO< yes, a force 9 is too tough for most starting characters, unless you have say 6+ players. As an example, in melee combat, it's going to throw 18 dice. Starting characters, well augmented are going to be lucky throwing 15 if melle is one of their strong points. Also, 9 points of hardened armor. Unless you're in the habit of providing APDS for starting characters, they will have a very hard time hitting it. Just lower the force a bit and your game still works.

As for action-movie esque.. lemme put it this way;

We once had a player taht would GM sometimes. Everytime he did, he would come up with 'ultimate' NPC with some innane flaw, usually amnesia. I kid you not, he once had a guy that was a spell caster with no memeory, that won millions in one night of cards in a casino, and ripped the top turret off a a tank. He was a good example of someone that made Mary-Sue characters. That sounds a bit like this as well.

Assuming this is an NPC that you wil be running in the game. If not, I may be a bit off base, although the character concept still seems pretty out landish, especially for a beginning character. How are you managing , for example, to be good friends w/ the Oyabun, and have a Red Samurai for weapons contact ,as well as a master of martial arts, disguise, and (I assume) an adept, and still cover other skills (such as pistols ) and attributes well enough to make him a viable character.

Try toning down some of the character envy and all the firends in high places and it may be a bit more viable

Also, my Japanese is rusty, so I'm using an online dictionary to help (hint) but taking the "bu" from bunraku doesn't actually mean anything. If I recall correctly, Bunkraku is broken down into "Bun" and "Raku" in the Kanji.

Bun = sentence; literature; style; art; decoration; figures; plan
Raku = music; comfort; ease

Together the translation is "puppet theatre" but that doesn't mean the "bu" means "puppet", or that anyone (especially the japanese) would know what you were doing if you took the "bu" and attached "kage" to it.

... unless you were going for "Art Shadow" or something... maybe... its probably a grammatical nightmare.

Are you running the game and playing the uber-guy? or just making him and giving him to one of the players?

Or thay assumed that the g was a typo that should have been a k. Also not something that you really want.

Sorry I took so long, but it helps if you spell it properly and repeat it three times. So what, why the comparison? You feel emo's post forcing you to dust off the little gray cells and put them to use?

Apparently biting your tongue doesn't stop you from posting. Maybe try biting your fingers instead?

Emo, you need not pay much heed to this ninny-naysayers. To give them some sort of credibitily you'd have to ignore that they are posting here after decrying and predicting SR4 as the coming of the antichrist without having the class and/or nads of say Cheops to own up and admit afterward that their predictions were more than a little off.

What i'm trying to say, without making it a personal attack, is that Critias especially is prone to hamming up the Rebel Without A Clue schtick of trying to claim some sort of intellectual independant thought by wringing his teenage angst hands. But, you know, it's really tough to explain what a pud he acts like without being at least a little bit insulting. Speaking of which where is James? Did he banned again?

--------

Anyway to the topic of the thread and the initial idea. I think PlatonicPimp really hit on a good idea with having it as quack medical use bounty that is a front for Human Nation purging the human traitor elf-posers. You don't even need to bother weekly rolls to check how many ears are collected to reduce prices. If they snuff to many people or the wrong people, and the wrong people also tend to be the kind that has money for cosmetic surgery, that is pretty much all the throttle you need to keep them from farming phat loot. Of course it depends a bit on your game. If you run one where the plot has little or no internally valid logic to start with then using that angle is kind of a foul.

EDIT: Haven't made it through the other ideas. The last post by hyzmarca has me a little leary of treading there, but i'll try work through them and post some suggests if i find some time.

Oh dear. I know this has been brought up earlier, but I didn't realize how right that poster was until I saw it. Yes, for some reason it's easier for me to replace that 'g' with a 'k' at a glance than to read it how it's meant. Just... be warned. I wouldn't be surprised if that comes up in game.

Yes, "Bukage" is a name that will inspire lots of chortles of laughter and shudders. Especially when said aloud, it is almost identical to the name of a vividly disturbing genre of Nippon pornography. Don't go there.

---

On the subject of a Force 9 Mantid. It won't necessarily kill your whole party, but it will be able to essentially ignore several members of your team. It has Immunity to Normal Weapons, and that means 18 points of hardened armor. Of course, it rolls 9 Willpower dice and has 13 stun boxes - an overcast Stunbolt could quite easily disrupt the thing in one shot (or 2 at the most).

Ultimately, a high force spirit is like a big computer virus - it's not necessarily something your players can't handle, but it is something that most of your players can't do anything about. That can be problematic from the standpoint of running a game - since the hacker and street sam will be frozen out of the encounter with the spirit (just as the mage and street sam would be frozen out of the encounter with the computer virus) it can actually end up feeling anticlimactic for several of the players.

I'm not saying don't do it, I'm saying that such a villain should only be used as a one-off. It doesn't involve the whole team particularly, so don't devote too much time to it.

-Frank

*ahem*

Fuck. You.

There. See how quick threads degenerate into nothing at all but name calling and hurled insults, the moment you poke your retarded fucking head into them? Couldn't help but stir shit up, could you, you degenerate little fuck? Here's Boskop Albatros and Emo Samurai asking a metric ton of stupid shit questions, here's Crit mostly containing his disdain and even occasionally answering questions and offering opinions in a positive manner -- but whoops, here's Blakkie, just comin' in and takin' a big runny poop in the middle of the conversation! And away things go! Whee!

I wasn't talking to you, I wasn't talking about you, I like to think you're dead whenever I'm not actually reading one of your recent posts. Hell, I haven't even spoken up abour SR4 and my like or dislike of it, for a good long fucking while -- I even pointedly set aside my feelings for it, recently, to present a fairly even-handed comparison of editions out in the non-SR4-dedicated forum, just a day or two ago. Does that fucking matter to you, though, you inbred fuck? Of course not. Gotta stir shit up. And you see what happens? See what happens when you can't just fucking leave well enough alone, or ignore my post and talk to Emo without your little fucking bullshit rant? Threads get all shit on, that's what.

So you ignore me, I'll try and go back to ignoring you, and the odds of both of us dying peacefully in our sleep, years from now, goes way the fuck up, okay?

Unless the rest of the team likes the idea, an makes characters with similar one-letter-off names...

"So, 'Ponky Dunch', 'Boston Steaner', and 'Bukage' walk into a bar..."

oH i am entertained.

Hrmmm, you posted the third reply in this thread. The only content of that post was a vapid insult. So I should follow your example; cut out any meaningful content from my posts and make sure to spread the "runny poop" through the entire conversation?

We didn't start the fire
It was always burning since the world's been turning
We didn't start the fire
No, we didn't light it
But we tried to fight it

It is always a good morning when I get to quote a Billy Joel song.

Usually when a person swears , they show that they lack intelligence to find a more appropriate word.

So please tell us all, especially Emo! who is the imbred Fornication Under Consention of King now? F.U.C.K.


I guess this mean he's your Arch Nemesis, he never swore at me like that.


Now as in words of the Human Torch, "Flame On".

It is also for capping the attributes of their living persona as well as setting the Signal rating of their internal commlink.

In short, it's their everything, which makes sacrificing even 1 Resonance to get a Control Rig and Cybereyes a big painful punch in the kidneys. But +4 dice on Gunnery tests makes that extremely tempting nonetheless.

-Frank

- Signal range.
- The Attribute dice for all of the Resonance Skill pools.

Umm, some other dice too I think. It is roughly equivalent to the Magic Attribute to mages. Only a bit more important than that.

What? *looks down at the grenade pin in his hand* Now how'd that get there?

EDIT: Critias is like a poorly house trained, brain damaged dog. Yank his chain once about his brain damage and watch him get all wound up, getting so excited that his bladder lets loose making a mess on the floor. Sure it makes a mess, but every once-in-awhile isn't too bad, and it keeps him reeking of urine so people know not to let in their house. Plus he's kinda funny in that circus freak way.

Not directly. Those skills are still nominally Logic based, but in practice Hacking is Hacking + Program. And your program rating is often going to be a complex form, and your complex forms are capped by your Resonance, and the hole is in the ground and the green grass grows all around.

-Frank

Huh?

This is, you understand, the opposite of "ignore me, so I can go back to ignoring you," right?

If you were just capable of shutting the fuck up, Blakkie, I'd be capable of going back to pretending you were dead. Then we'd both be happy, Dumpshock wouldn't be spammed with our little "I hate you" fest, the thread would be productive and largely exclamation free, and little birdies would sing happy songs while angels looked down upon the forums and smiled.

Shut. The fuck. Up. Do everyone a favor. Let them stop having to read this horseshit.

You rode your sexually molested horse in out of the sunset with your gay little Lone Ranger costume on, started insulting people and purposefully "yanking chains" for no fucking reason, and are completely unapologetic about it. I'm asking you -- for the good of the forums as a whole -- to just shut the fuck up. Is that so hard? Talk about something besides me, the way I've learned to talk about something besides SR4.

Try to act like one of those "grown ups" you see on tv, huh? Prove you've got the balls to be a fucking adult. Just once. Stop talking about me, let me scroll past your posts in bliss, and let everyone else on the fucking forums stop having to read this vitriol-filled bullshit when they're just here to talk about games.

It's easy.

Just don't type "Critias" ever fucking again. Simple, right? Shut. The fuck. Up.

He might be making an allusion to this being very elementary and explicitly spelled out in the SR4 book. Do you have the book? Better yet do you have the PDF, then you can do a Ctrl-Shift-F and search for all instances of the word Resonance. Or just read the Technomancer section of the book. It's only about 6 or 7 pages.

LOL. So you feel you should be allowed to insult and thread-dump without people calling you on it? Then you get to swear and spew your innane replys without comment on them?

Don't get it? I'm not making you post like you are. YOU are making you post like you are. Want it to stop? Then stop.

Back from remedial reading classes already? Or did you just
accidentally reply?

EDIT: BTW Critias I completely missed the "adult" part of your posts...outside of the must be over 18 to read them part. EDIT2: And you still keep posting.

Sorry, emo samurai. But I'm sure your thread will get back on track shortly...if you have somewhere to go with it?

Let me highlight an important part: