I don't find Magic of 5 and spellcasting of 4 to be overpowering at all. Even for the example given (Willpower of 3 and counterspelling of 4), that's rolling 9 dice against someone rolling 7 dice - hardly an overwhelming advantage, especially since you need one net hit to even affect the target at all. And that's assuming that the target doesn't have/use any Edge. Actually, the mundanes were much worse off in SR3.

And there's nothing wrong with making a character who is actually effective at doing his main specialty! Does the street sammie get a Raecor Sting instead of an Ares Alpha, because the NPC with a body of 3 and armored clothing deserves more of a fair shot of surviving?

I clearly labeled "no magic 5" as personal viewpoint, not a problem of emos character concept. Partly because power levels always depend on playing style.

1.) Spell defense is the exception, not the rule. You only have spell defense if you are in LOS of the teams mage. A deadly proposition for the mage, if you read up on "noticing magic" (skill 4 is threshold 2 on a perception test).

2.) 9 dice (+mentor bonus) +foci.

3.) Use of edge and resulting successes.

Initiatory groups used to be a cheap way of making initiation cheaper. They offer enough advantages without that. Personal preference again - my mage was a member of the Illuminates of the new Dawn. Not much of a problem here, now that magic does not automatically increase.

The "Hunted Flaw" is not just an "Extra Enemy"-flaw. If they have no idea how to find you, you don´t get any points. Even for that you´d only get points in an Hongkong setting (where the Yellow Lotus comes from IIRC).

@Emo: What do the other players of your group play btw? Is the campaign seattle-based or international?

I don't really have a group right now; this character is only for when I do have one. And even if they don't know how to find my dude, they could come down hard if my dude lets the physical mask slip in the wrong place. They'll constantly be searching for Shen because of his audacity. They don't need to know where he is; they just have to try to kill him if they find him.

Hunted means that they are after you, not that they´d want to be. Waiting for something ain´t hunting it. Still depending on 60+ flaw points?

I suggest giving the character stronger ties to seattle/whatever setting used. Something along the lines of "that PRC biz was some time ago, now I´m an established mage in the mafia/chinese comunity/whatever".

There where never more than two freebie connections, and those are gone. Pay up, chummer.


And one thing: Until you have a regular position inside a group, by all means use canon rules / ask for THEIR houserules. Don´t make characters depending on modded rules.

There's nothing wrong with having a Body of 4 and a Strenth of 1. Hell, by the rules you could have a Body of 7 (using the exceptional attribute quality) and a Strength of 1. The two attributes are not tied together, although a huge discrepancy between the two should be explained somehow in your background. A Strength of 1 is a potential disadvantage, though, and also means that your character is unusually weak. A Strength of 2 could just be a couch potato, or a thin ascetic monk, or someone slight of build, or someone recovering from surgery or an illness. Strength of 1 is harder to explain.


I do agree with Ryu on one thing, though. If you don't have a group yet (I had assumed you were making this character according to a specific GM's house rules), then you probably should make this a canon character. That means even more paring down. Here are some suggestions:

First, get rid of the (non-canon) hunted negative quality, as well as the spirit bane negative quality, to bring your negative qualities down to the allowable 35. Now you need to trim 30 points. First, reduce assensing and perception both down from 3 to 1. You have a nice healthy intuition score to use with those two skills, so basic proficiency is all that you really need to start out with. Then, pare contacts down to 16 points instead of 30 - that is still plenty of points for a starting character's contacts.

Another suggestion that I would make - instead of spending 28 points on Etiquette: 4 and Instruction: 3, I would change gymnastics: 3 to dodge: 2 with a specialization in ranged, to get 2 more points, then spend the 30 points to get the Influence skill group at 3. You will have 4 social skills at 3, making your character much more versatile.

I'm thinking of running this for a game that I GM, with every 3 or 4 runs being handled by a player. These will be my house rules, so that handles that. Also, my character won't be the type to use negotiate and con. His one-sided arrangement with the consiglieri should make that clear. And I'lll make this with Strength 2 rather than 1; 1 means he has no calcium, which would go against the idea of his home village being prosperous under his care.

I have a new twist to my character that I want to add. I'll make it so that his village is very peaceful, and he acts in more or less the same capacity. The Triad never invades or does anything to him. He leaves because he's bored. Counseling 5 or six people a day and helping at least two couples elope a week does something to a man. It makes him bored, seeing the same two or three human stories repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before. He goes to Seattle in search of something new. Instead of being sweet and benign, he's become very cheerfully nihilistic, kind of like Angelus. One of his quotes will be "Ten thousand people with the exact same problem: they bored me to death." Shadowrunning for him will be for kicks. I think he'll run a parody religion that he'll be the high priest of. Each week, he'll preach something even more stupid and arbitrary than what he preached the past week, just to see how long it takes for people to catch on to the fact that he's making fun of them.

The neo-Confucian society that he lives in will contribute to this; to him, the family structure is devoted solely to perpetuating itself while providing nothing in the way of variety to the world at large. He will see them as stagnant pools of human waste, festering in their blighted cycles of birth, consumption, and arranged marriage. The stasis inherent in such a social structure will do that to an intellectual.

I wonder how I'll modify his defects. He won't have hunted anymore, since the Triad doesn't hate him. He won't need the Mafia boss either; I guess he'll stick with just having an awesome fixer and orihalcum dealer. He doesn't seem to go for the whole group thing anymore; maybe I'll keep the "incompetent: banishing and ritual spellcasting." He still likes spirits; air spirits let him fly, earth spirits make walls, and fire spirits burn things. Maybe I'll have him be crappy at driving, since he doesn't need to drive and doesn't feel like learning to drive just to fit in.

Also, what was great about ritual spellcasting in 3rd edition?

Dude, I had a great idea. I'll GM the dude's introduction to the party. Lone Star will pay the party to investigate an anomolous, sort of living mass that is being worshipped by a very large cult in the Barrens. When they manage to join the cult, they'll find the Flying Spaghetti Monster floating in midair touching worshippers with its noodly appendage. When the find and confront the High Priest, he'll tell them that this all is just some bullshit parody religion that he cooked up just so he could break the fools' hearts. It'll end with him asking for help from the team's mage to float a large speaker in the middle of the illusion in order to project the spaghetti monster's unholy screams of terror as a gigantic illusory fork unravels it and feeds it into the mouth of whatever thing could eat the Flying Spaghetti Monster. The run will end with the dude joining the party.

Emo, despite what the whispers are telling you, there is no creative muse named Cthulu.

Other than that, carry on sir.

My dude hates religion because it represents everything arbitrary and oppressive about society. He'll preach the way of Flying Spaghetti Monster because he likes to make fun of stupid people, and he'll kill him because he wants to break their hearts.

I think being a disaffected cynic is a better way to go than the "hunted by the Triad" thing, which has honestly been done before too many times.

Be careful how you do the run, though. A bloodthirsty party might just shoot the "high priest" on sight. For new characters, it is often better to introduce them in a simpler way, such as them being rescued from a corporation during a run, or being introduced by the team's fixer when the group needs the new character's specialty for a job. The problem with the run is that it depends on the players acting a certain way for it to work.

So either you railroad your players, or you wind up being surprised when they decide to do things differently than you had planned. Maybe they will see the Flying Spaghetti Monster thing as something with potential - and if your character says he's bored with it, they threaten to shoot him if he doesn't keep casting the illusion so they can collect "donations". Or maybe the religious nut in the party will get upset by your character's anti-religious views: "How dare you profane Azathoth's unholy name!"

They'll be told to be subtle about it. It'll be a reconnaisance run, to scope out the place and assess whether or not it's Universal Brotherhood lite. All Lone Star wants is to find out if the background count is indicative of enormous amounts of magical activity. The place is warded well, so the runners will be sent in instead of astrally projecting cops. I have no idea how to stretch this out. The runners can't kill people or anything, since the cops don't know how volatile a cult in the Barrens is. They're betting on very. So they don't want any martyrs.

And his philosophy? The first and last oppressors of the people ARE the people. Oppressive institutions can not exist without the consent of the people, which is won either through fear or apathy. Religion, even folk religion, is indicative of this to him.

Here's my new character sheet. It'll be for a 450 BP game with infinite flaws allowed.


What do you think? He'll come in at party average, so he'll be more powerful when he comes in and he'll know more spells.

Looking at the character, I see a few problem areas.

First, that last point of Magic should cost 25 points, so getting a Magic of 6 actually costs 65 points, not 50.

For active skills, I am going to assume that you are using a house rule that lets a character start out with a skill group at 6, because solely by the book, skill groups are capped at 4 at char-gen, and you can only have one skill at 6. It looks like there is a skill missing, though. Assuming the Sorcery group at 6 (60 points) and the Conjuring group at 4 (40 points), you only have 3 more skills at 4 (48 points). Is there one skill of rating 4 that is missing? Etiquette, I hope - this character has no social skills, an especially surprising omission considering his background. Other than that, looking good, although he seems limited solely to magical skills - no sneaking, vehicle, computer, etc. skills.

Knowledge skills are also limited to only one at 6 - is this another house rule?

The Addiction negative quality can only be taken for a substance that has a negative effect on the character's health - it specifically states that things like caffeine, sugar, and nicotine can not be used. I would definitely re-work this. Right now, it looks munchkinish.

The Hunted negative quality and free contacts are more house rules, I assume.

Spells look good, except that I would maybe replace at least one of the area spells with a bolt spell.

Low Lifestyle costs 2,000 a month. Squatter is the one that costs 500 a month.


Overall, good character. Attributes are far from min-maxed, and convey the mentally-oriented character from your background. Definitely focused on the magical end, skill-wise. Hopefully you have one or more social skills, though, to give your character at least one other thing that he's good at. Also consider the skill groups carefully - they are a bargain, points-wise, but only if you actually plan on using every skill in the group. Otherwise, you would be better off buying the individual skills that you will actually use.

Yes, lots of them are houseruled. The only real mistakes are the addiction to gummy bears and lifestyle costs. And I plan to use all the skills. Should I add more incompetencies to make up for the loss in build points? Plus, we'll be able to subtract from radius to add dice to spellcasting, so cast at about .5 radius, we'll be making them superpowered bolts.

Normally, you'd be losing dice to reduce the radius... sort of a "concentrate harder on your control so you don't wipe out EVERYONE" effect. The drain codes for area-effect spells really aren't properly oriented if you're going to be able to turn them into bolts for another 6-ish dice.

Oh, so decreasing radius DECREASES dice. Got it.

My character's cynicism won't just be postmodern disaffection. Most of that will be a hoax that he builds up around himself. In all his years as the countryside's resident wise man in the pagoda, he never, in his eyes, made a difference. Take the example of lovers he helped elope. Whenever lovers eloped under his guidance, even if they managed to evade their parents, their relationship would fall apart for some stupid reason. The woman would get pregnant and the man would run away, one would be unfaithful, or one of them would rush back into the arms of their selectively adoring parents out of fear. For every positive change in the character of the people, there were a thousand patterns that they reinforced. The young tradesman who came to enjoy his craft under Shen's guidance would grow up to be an oppressive, distant father. The idealistic son of a corrupt noble would become corrupt and incompetent after usurping his parents. And so on, and so forth. He blames religion and society out of a need to blame something arbitarily, if somewhat justifiably. His philosophy is that, in the end, you can't guide stupid people. The dependence that that creates just encourages their stupidity. They need to guide themselves. If he returned, they would probably hail his absence as some great quest of wisdom that they, in their humble laymanness, could never possibly understand and go back to selectively interpreting his word. His Flying Spaghetti Monster cult will just be one great lesson in spiritual independence. The isolation of the city, in his eyes, helps to mitigate those factors that are prevalent in his home society while it reinforces new patterns of oppression and ignorance that he is only coming to understand.

This talk of nihilism got me thinking; another character concept would be a rogue priest who came down with a bit of the old existentialism.

Remember the genre that you're in, though. Disaffected cynics and/or anarchists may be an interesting concept in traditional good vs. evil settings such as D&D, but they are practically the default mode in a distopian, cyberpunkish game like Shadowrun.

That could be a fun game, though. A bunch of bitter nihilists, all trying to out-angst each other.

He's not angsty, though. He'll preach, but he'll preach out of Thus Spake Zarathustra instead of the bible.

Back to my Shen character; I'm thinking of making him a SINner. That way, he'll have easy access to a small house with an awesome yard in Salish-Shidhe and its Awakened forests for the sake of finding focus materials. His base lifestyle will be Middle, and he'll be allergic to unnatural foods. Severely allergic. My question is, how legal is doing things like binding spirits and collecting spell materials in Salish? And would Middle be high enough to cover a really small, one-room, environmentally sustainable house in the middle of a 2 acre yard in Salish? And how hard would it be for him to get citizenship in Salish-Shidhe? I was thinking that they would have a "merit based" system where they let you in based on what you can do for the nation. I would assume it would be easy for a magician todo that, since they make up .1% of the population and their services are valuable. I'll also give him a shamanic initiatory group and maybe even a Wicca one. The shamanic one would probably help him a lot.

His original SIN will be Manchurian. How much would it help an investigation if his blood was found at a crime scene? Manchuria, as far as I know, deals with the megacorps and has nothing to do with the UCAS. His family wouldn't want to publish his SIN and everything because they want him to be taken back home and made a local messiah, not put in prison. Would Manchuria share its databases with Lone Star and Knight Errant? Keep in mind that his family would have control over said SIN.

And more about his family. His family were kindly peasantry before the fall of the PRC, and my dude was one of the first elves born. They knew they were descended from nobility, but they saw that as an "in the past" sort of thing. His being one of the first elves, of course, would help with people thinking he is a messiah along with his superintelligence and his healing magic. After Manchuria became independent, his family was all too quick to claim the mantle of nobility and become a bunch of social-climbing assholes. They want to hunt him down by hiring mages, and may even put out a bounty on him in the shadow community. They also want to keep it within the family as much as possible.

Here's my character sheet, with Flaw caps removed and the new focus-oriented ones put in place.



What do you think of my character not having many social skills? He's okay with talking to people and coming to understanding them; he's not much of an intimidator or a social engineer. I envision him as relying more on his expressiveness than on any sort of premeditation, and he's essentially a pretty trusting guy. Is "infirm" okay? I don't envision him needing those athletic skills. If he needs to climb, he'll levitate or summon an air spirit. If he needs to swim, again, he'll levitate, or summon a water spirit. And so on.

Thats 95 points for Special attributes, and did we forget the rule about skill rating caps in chargen?

If you're really not gonna use the book rules, why bother with BP? Just give him what you want.

There's the Shadowrun rules and world concept, and then there's Emo's world... the two are only marginally simular.
In all the threads I've followed, Emo tends to have a lack of understanding on what most people consider the normal guidelines for the game Seven... to him, his character is perfect. But then that's also why he GMs as I don't know any GM's I've gamed with that would accept any of his character concepts.

Emo lives in an anime fantasy, that much is clear.

That's a perfect summary of emo samurai and his SR-world

@topic: i would lower body by 1 and raise agility by 1.

The question is, how many tentacles are in his anime, and is there anything resembling "virgin power"?

No. There is no virgin power or tentacles, there is only awesomeness.

All I've done is remove skill caps at chargen, allow people to max out stats as much as they want, and allow for all manner of debilitating flaws. Not handled correctly, this many flaws could kill most characters. My character now has to pay, like, 5 times normal for his food, live under a ward, wear a physical mask 90% of the time, and take Drain for summoning an air spirit whenever he wants to get anywhere. All his downtime will be spent making foci. He is well within any BP system. And I think that having his parents be power-hungry nobility isn't that much of a problem.

His life will be hard, hard, hard. The very grittiness that you think I'm betraying with this OMFG powerful character is what makes it hard for him to get natural foods and the prospect of becoming a slave messiah to the unwashed a very real possibility. I think he's fine.

Well within an...What sort of crack are you inhaling boy?!

Also, when do mages use air elementals for transportation?

I'd also like to note, that since the common food is actually /soy/ and soy is a real thing, not artificial, I'd hardly say he'll pay 5 times as much.


...But thats applying logic.

It's a psychosomatic problem. If food tastes fake, he'll cough it up, along with some blood. And if the problems given by flaws can be quantified, then I say that quantity may be pushed as high as possible.

Then simply stop giving free BP after -35BP. Now you have a lot of drawbacks without breaking the laws of logic, and SR4.

Bah... I'm letting all my characters do this, so I'm letting myself do this, too. MUHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAAAA!!!!

I'm sorry about the "psychosomatic allergies thing"... I never knew I could offend anyone by making a fictional psychosomatic allergy, but here I go.

Geez! Now you'll know better.

Does my character being hunted by his family offend anyone?

Worse things have happened in human history.

*gasp* I'm worse than Hitler!!!

Get a grip on yourself.

If you had bothered to read the book when it talks about Qualities (they're not called Flaws anymore, learn the lingo) you would have read that Allergies have to be defined and somewhat realistic. 'Artificial Food' doesn't sound very realistic, and as a GM I would require you to define such - as would any half decent GM. Then again you've never been big on realisme, so this doesn't really surprise me..

Pretty much anything that isn't what it's supposed to taste like. Such as airplane food, McHugh's, and 80% of the food on the market. It's a taste issue. He'd have better luck with a genuine habanero pepper than a soyburger.

Plus, he was raised in China. While his parents were farmers, he, of course, ate farm food. While his parents were nobility, he still ate natural food. Nowadays he pays out of his blood for it.

To be fair, "artificial food" is something that will probably affect his character more than another character's allergy to silver or gold. I think severe is a bit much for a psychomatic allergy - mild I could see, but severe is a bit much. Maybe you could change it to an actual allergy to a common food additive such as MSG, something that would be common in most "processed" foods.


On his background, I think you need to lose some of the self-contradictory things. Either make him a cynical manipulator with an anarchist bent, or make him a somewhat trusting soul who finally rebelled against being manipulated by his parents. The lack of social skills beyond basic etiquette is fine, but not if you want him to be someone who was considered a wise man/religious figure. It would make more sense if, for example, his ambitious family set him up as some "wise man", and he finally had enough of it and fled. His high Charisma and basic etiquette would let him fake it if someone else was more or less feeding him lines, but it's not enough for him to set himself up as a cult leader or the equivalent by himself.

Honestly, I would consider toning down the "messiah" thing to wise man/guru - I said earlier that your character didn't look like a Mary Sue, but the whole "The simple villagers considered him to be a messiah" thing practically screams Mary Sue. Now, if his greedy parents set him up as the front for a mystic cult that they used to rip off the peasantry, that would be more plausible.

The other problem, though, is that mages aren't that rare. Maybe his intelligence and healing abilities would be something early on in the awakening, but they wouldn't matter as much in current SR4. And if his parents can "hire mages" to hunt him down, why not simply hire one of those mages to be their new religious figurehead? I need to understand why they are hunting someone halfway across the world. Do they insist that their puppet be "one of the family"? Is it pettiness? Vengeance? What is their motivation?

My personal favorite allergy is some sort of pollen I never identified. I'm sitting, working on my computer, when the wind shifts, and ARRRGH!@ IT BURNS! IT BURNS! Thankfully, that was only the first wave of pollen, or something, and I just had to deal with mad itching everywhere for the next week or two.

Hmmm... Yeah, just a wise man. I was exaggerating it a bit, and I was visualizing him as more of a wise man. Which would be covered under Etiquette 3. The thing is, he's good at what he does, giving advice and helping people. What with his magic, his mind-reading, and his ability to understand people. It's just that, what he said didn't stick, and his parents represented everything silently oppressive about the social order and the general feeling of human desperation. His parents were smart enough to know that anyone self-serving enough to impersonate him couldn't do his job. If he goes, so does much of their moral authority.

It's like the church and the state during the Middle Ages. The state took your money and your life. The church took your money, but it gave you hope. It also made it look like someone kept the classism in check. Except with my character, he actually did try to make a difference. He was just powerless, and he felt like an opiate of the masses. He didn't help people find themselves, he just helped them fool themselves into thinking just that. Kind of like rap or emo, it doesn't encourage rebellion, it just makes people feel as if they're rebelling. His leaving his homeland would help the people wake up to the general feeling of oppression and railroading. Which is the general philosophy behind his Flying Spaghetti Monster cult.

Keep in mind that the SR China is nothing like the RL China. At least in its early days, it was very back-to-the-field. I'm not saying that that's necessarily the answer to modernity by any means, but it lacked many of the general malaises that Seattle, for example, does. And it certainly wasn't the "family first" circle-jerk it is now. Maybe I'll make him allergic to MSG. Organics shouldn't be that hard to find in the NAN; much more so in Seattle. Would MSG allergies extend to free glutamates that naturally occur?

And with skill/edge/stat caps and max-out costs removed, how isn't my character valid? He lived in a Neo-Confucian society, and he had a philosophical objection to it that was strong enough to get him to leave. How isn't that valid?