Our last run we got 7K gross for the whole team, and that is only because I made a veiled extorsion on the J when negotiating the price. The J came in thinking 800 each for the 4 people she saw. Mind you it was Friday night to Monday morning from start to close, the run itself was a quick in and out Onsite File Edit, and our only costs ended up gas, a few bullets, and a 500 piece of pay data. Right now we are an unpolished team and pulling about 3 jobs/month. This was also the lowend of our pay. Damn J was a university grad, and working for students just don't pay so well. The name of the fixer on the job, Steve The Weasel, was kind of ominous too.

For ingame logic the price changes, and not all of them went down significantly, were sorely in need. For character conversions it is tricky. Especially because not all the costs moved the same way and the same amount. Cash itself though seems to be worth roughly 2 to 3 times what it was before, so rough conversions based on that will get you through. The Crash 2.0 being the cliche reason for the runner losing the cash, although if you are jumping your timeline straight ahead to '69 or '70 you are glossing over a lot of stuff anyway.

Wow, seriously? I'll state that I've experienced otherwise and leave it at that.

I've taken days, but the character was done long before that. Just going back and tweaking things in a perfectionist way. Cripy, using one of the number of character generators over an the Community board 15 to 20 minutes and you've got a solid PC. Another 5 to 10 to polish maybe.

Seriously. And none of my friends have been able to do any better. This happens to include a bunch of very experienced gamers, with over 100 years of experience between the lot of us. Personally, I've had an easier time with GURPS or Champions.

I'm not comparing it with generators, because McMackies was the greatest thing since sliced bread. At any event, I can never get the ones here to work properly. Call it my lack of technical skills.

I can't even succesfully speed-read the character creation rules and gear in less than 30 minutes. I suppose having people help you with premade character concepts would be a lot faster, though.

Not being able to operate a laid out and formated spreadsheet, or Daegann's simple program isn't just a lack of techincal skill. It is a great explaination why it is taking you so long. I suppose it might take me an hour or more with pencil to build a character. Depends on how picky I get with the non-implant gear. I find that is what takes the most time if you are trying juggle equipment purchases around to use up the last few nuyen.

Until the GM gives a few nuyen leeway or lets you just carry extra cash through to your character it is pretty hard to get away from that time sink.

Yeah, so I don't get the problem. I mean, I make up NPCs as fast as I can physically scribble down their stats. Shopping for gear takes a little while longer since nuyen have a higher resolution than build points (and there's a catalog to flip through), but a half hour is about average development time for me.

That's with an eye towards optimization without going overboard, too. That'll likely change a bit as we get more sourcebooks, of course.

Pencil and paper, I can create a Savage Worlds character in under five minutes, a WoD character in about 10-15, and a simple SR3 character in 10 or less (With McMackies, that time could drop to three minutes or less). A 400-point GURPS character takes me between an hour and an hour-and-a-half, depending on rather or not I have a calculator handy. Champions can take me over two and a half house, but usually comes in at about two. In all of the above cases, the character is fully tweaked and ready to run, down to the last detail.

Now, some of that is a lack of familiarity with the rules. I don't know Champions or SR$ very well, so I waste a lot of time on back-and-forth between the pages. However, some of that is blatant design flaws in SR4's layout: the qualities section really needs to be at the end of the chapter, instead of being in the middle of everything. But a lot of that is just because trying to balance out 400 points is a lot more complex than the old Priority Table ever was, and not a whole lot more flexible.

Ya, SR3 was fast because Skill choices were so easy. A few Skills at 6 and maybe a 5, and then a 1/3, 2/4, or something like that. Max out the usualy suspect Attributes. Umm, Adept Powers and the huge Spell list you had memorized I guess?

The location of the Qualities is a problem? So in a completely different book in SR3 was better? And you needed Edges/Flaws balanced if you are using Alpha Priorities. Good gravy, SR4 even has the BP costs summory on page 348 where it is all condensed to one page.

Beatinga dead horse, perhaps, but this strikes me as extremely strange, as well. I took my SR4 rulebook over to a friend's house; and inside 4 hours, both of them had characters down to the polishing-only level. One has 10 BP she needs to make up her mind with (three more spells? A couple of ranks of skills?), and the other needs to make up his mind about which drones he wants. Neither had ever played Shadowrun, or even read William Gibson, before; so inside this time, I had to 1) Run down the basics of the game world; 2) run down general archetypes; 3) run through a rules summary, to at least give an idea of relative importance of attributes vs. skills; 4) explain the hacking, spell-casting, and combat sequences; 5) familiarize them with skill groups, and what skills were available; 6) Familiarize one of them with spells and spell types; 7) familiarize them both with the concept of commlinks and augmented reality; Familiarize one of them with rigging, its ins and outs, and how to modfy a vehicle; and lastly, 9) actually herd them both through the process of compromises to get a legal starting character.

I really don't understand why it takes you so long to do up an SR4 character.

Exactly. Skill choices in Sr4 are much more difficult, as is balancing them out. You also can't add by 4's nearly as fast as you can add by 1's, which is another reason why chargen is so much slower.

And in comparison to other games, SR4 is postively glacial. nWod and Savage Worlds are designed for super-fast character generation. Only the priority system could keep up with them, and even that would get iffy in the hands of a new player.

Yes. In almost every other game I've seen out over the last few years, the equivalent section on edges/flaws has been in another chapter, or a subchapter. That way, you can read straight through the rules on character creation, and reference them quickly. They also include a build point chart, most of the time; but they don't confuse a cost chart with a rules reference. Dropping it right in the middle of the chapter means you'll have to do a lot more back-and-forth in order to see the actual rules you need.

I could probably pull one off inside of four hours as well. My problems are pretty much this: the continual back-and-forth through the rulebook, the arbitrary limits on stats and skills, the fact that messing up on one section can send you back to square one, the fact that balancing skills and stats is a lot more complex than before, the fact that you have to spend down to every last point and nuyen, trying to decide between skills and skill groups takes forever, contacts now being a balancing act instead of a choice, and how the rewards for overspecialization encourage super-fiddliness.

I personally despise super-fiddly character creation systems; I think of them as an excercise in math rather than a fun activity. Sometimes you can make up for this, by allowing greater character flexibility; but the stat and skill caps pretty much prevent that from happening. Granted, I'll probably get faster as I create more characters; but I've done a dozen so far, and I still can't pull it off in less than two hours, *excluding* gear. Too many cross-references, and too many fiddly details.

Interesting. You're the first person I've heard comment on it at all, let alone complain about it.

It is more like you end up a smaller set of Skills in SR3, unless you like putting your character at serious risk of All 1's and being relatively weak because you don't exploit the gaping BP vs. karma whole in SR3. You also, if using the Priority system, were constrained to one of a few set number of points you got to put into Skills.

But still we are coming back to your inability or refusal to use one of a number of computer aids, and I guess difficulty counting by 4s or just multiplying by 4 at the end. I admit I'm pretty good multiplying by 4 in my head.

One of my gaming buddies doesn't have an internet-capable computer. Even if I can download a program, he can't; and character creation goes at the rate of the slowest one in the group. Since we always create characters together-- so we can ask questions of the GM during the process, instead of finding out mid-stream that we've misinterpreted something-- we're stuck with pen and paper. Oh, and the one-book problem, which does slow things down further. I wasn't counting that, in my own examples.

So this computer for this friend of yours doesn't have a floppy disk drive or a USB port, or nobody has a USB drive?

EDIT And nobody has internet access and a CDROM burner?

You can mostly make up your character beforehand. Limited by the slowest person in the group? Sharing a book? You not mostly finishing you character before showing up to talk to the GM? Only having one book for lots of people. Having to reread most of the book for each time you create a character? Sounds a lot less like an SR4 issue, and a lot more like you putting in a lot of effort to make it hard.

It would take me weeks to finish a character if I did it only while judging knives. Mostly because of the extended hospital stay for all the cuts since I am the suck at juggling anything. But the huge creation time would be due to my own stupidity.

I'll definitely agree on that. The chapters and segments are very nicely split out this time around, but there are little gotchas here and there that seem to have been put in the wrong places. Or, at least, not adequately cross-referenced.

For the record, that's a known problem at FanPro; they've recently semi-apologized for their editing foul-ups and have taken steps to migitate it in the future.

In any case, y'all really shouldn't hound Cain about his "glacial chargen" issues. For one, he's already outlined his various circumstantial problems. For two, Bull did just (sternly) tell everyone to be nice in any "SR3 vs SR4" conversations.

Huh. We played Sr4 for the first right after Gencon, when I had the only book. I xeroxed the page with the build point costs and made notes on the stat/skill limits. I also xeroxed the first couple of pages out of the gear section that had the most common weapons & armor. I'd say that 5 people who hadn't seen the Sr4 book (but had played SR3) made characters in under 2 hours, including a mage, rigger and a decker.

I suspect you are somehow making life more difficult for yourself. I've got one friend who can make Champions characters like crazy but takes for-freakin-ever to make a 1st level D&D character. His problem is the quest for perfection; Champions is hard to pull that off but he's already got "packages" of pre-optimized powers that he can rattle off from memory.

If this is a problem for your group, agree that your characters can be revamped after the first or second session. Constant character churn is a pain so you can avoid this by setting a number of points you can change, like 25. So after the 1st session you decide your hacker's programs aren't what you need so you can move around 25BP to get things right.

He has a 386....

You can't make up a character beforehand unless you've got the book. At any event, those are side problems. Even when I have the book on hand, it takes me several hours to even make the attempt. And I can't exactly pack an internet-running tower with me everywhere I go, so if I want to experiment with a character during my lunch break, I'm stuck to pen-and-paper.

At any event, that doesn't change the fact that I can do a pen-and-paper character much faster in other systems, some of which are meant to be a lot more complex than Sr4 purports to be. The question comes down to how many fiddly little details you have to account for, and SR4 has an awful lot of them.

That actually makes me feel better. Character creation *would* go a lot faster of the editing and layout were improved.

He....um....but......oh.

Egad. My phone has more processing power.

They still have groups of rules split in odd and inconvient ways. The obviously based the SR4 document heavily on SR3, and a number of the old organization issues have come through. The location of the Qualities I don't have much of an issue with, mostly because I don't refer to it that often. I find the names fairly self explainatory now that I have read through the Qualities a couple of times.

You sure you aren't thinking of the FanPro D apologizing for the translation issues that MY$T1C posted a few days back?

The circumstances appear to be much more the issue which is not the tone Cain took up front. I'm still having a hard time wrapping my head around exactly why it is taking him hours. I can only think he is trying including a lot of learning and relearning rules and extensive tweaking and retweaking in with that. Plus perhaps socializing with friends while he is around them for hours?

So I guess that means a floppy drive of some sort? With a CDROM drive or not? Is he at least running Windows 95? If so you should try Deagnns on his machine, since I'll assume he doesn't have Excel. Otherwise if he is running Windows 3.1 he effectively doesn't have a computer. He has a calculator that has the added feature of being able to play the original Civilization, which means isn't all bad.

I challenge that statement. Have you tried this? You can certainly nail down the solid basics of the character. Those creation programs give at least a short explaination of things, outside of the non-implant gear. Some of them even give the stats for the weapons and ammo. Once you have a print out just tweaking is pretty easy math to do by hand as you are just adding a few points here and balancing that with subtracting some there. I did this when creating a backup character that I wanted to ask the GM about a few things before finalizing the character with pencil markups.

Why, so I am.

Yes. Unfortunately, unless you're trying a very basic character, you stand a good chance of misremembering some vital detail. For example, I had the concept of a gun-fu mystic adept, only to discover that I couldn't build him, because he couldn't have Aptitude, Exceptional Attribute, and Mystic adept all at once. I ended up having to redo him from scratch.

What program where you using for this?

I made the same misreading the first time. But I shook my head, disbelieved, and succeeded on my Will save when I reread it.

What program can I carry with me to work? I was doing my preliminary design on my lunch break. Usually I can do a lot of the prepwork in advance, to get a concept, and sometimes I can even have the character statted out. Not in SR4-- although to be fair, I can't do that in Champions or GURPS, either.

So you have no lunchtime computer access at work, no time at home with the computer, no book, and don't remember the rules. You also do not have a replica of page 348 of the BBB to carry with you, because that would help. It certainly should have enlightened you to your problem you gave as an example.

Yup, you are screwed. But truthfully it has little to do with SR4 creation outside not being the most simplistic set of rules. It certainly isn't due to a difference between SR3 and SR4 outside of one you apparently have books for or have memmorized and the other not.

I think he meant he can't run any program at work. I mean, he's obviously typing on something to post.

Unless there's technomancy involved, then there'd be a coolness factor. Oh, and many armed people in white hazmat suits who'd like a peek "under the hood."

Sorry, yes. I guess his computer could be set up by the network nazis to block any outside programs and the computer does not have anything, including his Web browser, capable of openning an Excel file. Sort of like a paperless office, only spreadsheetless.

Or he just doesn't have Internet access. It's like that at my job too (night shift); the admins are so lazy they told their boss that they "ran out" of valid email addresses awhile back so most of the plant members don't have one. How exactly you "run out" of email addresses when you run your own mail server doesn't make much sense to me, but what do I know? They're also extremely protective of their network; you can't bring CDs, diskettes, or storage media of any kind, and you're not going to just smuggle one in because security scans you with a metal detector.

But I work at a precious metals refinery, one that lost quite a bit of money to theft a few years back, so I've got some extremely special circumstances when it comes to getting a disk in and out.

Anyway, re: sr3 vs sr4. I've only made one real character under sr4 so far, but from what I've noticed the system is indeed very "fiddly", as Cain said. Of course, so was sr3. The problems, for me, are these:

1) Overspecialization is encouraged, to the point where it's really hard to make a generalist under SR4 rules that is nearly as effective as an overspecialist. In fact, I'd go as far as to say that an SR4 generalist will nearly always be weaker than his SR3 counterpart (similar character built under different rules), while an SR4 specialist will always be stronger than his SR3 counterpart.
2) There is a sharp disconnect between the chargen's flat costs for everything and karma system's stepped costs. This one is really silly at this point, as the BP system has gotten so complicated already that there is very little reason to keep the differing costs except as a sacred cow of the old edition.
3) Even besides 2), there are a number of other fiddly bits in the difference between chargen and character advancement that really confuse the issue. The difference between splitting a skill group and keeping it whole, for instance.
4) The limits on everything at chargen seem arbitrary and forced. 200BP max into attributes can buy you a 3 in everything, and that's about it. Investing the maximum number os points possible in attributes makes you... average. You can be the best in the world in one skill, but you can't take a single skill group to 5 at chargen. Etc etc.
5) Contacts are too expensive at the low end and too cheap at the high end. 2 Build Points should not be how much it costs to get you Sam the local wino, and 12 Build points should not be how much it costs you to get a megacorporate VP to take a bullet for you.

These rules complexities encourage min-maxing, to the point where you consciously have to turn your back on it in order to create characters in a resonable amount of time. If you don't, then you can easily spend Cain's several hours tweaking a character to both be useful in the short term, optimized to take advantage of the karma/point divide in the long term, have only one high-level contact, completely separate magic and cyber unless you can hit that exact sweet spot of .66 cyberware and .66 bioware that almost makes it worth it (.66+.66/2=.99), etc.

I guess what I'm saying is that chargen isn't *hard* so much as it is obfuscated and abusable.

The organization of the book doesn't help matters any.

Stunalicious! You find that FanPro having found an effective counterbalancing of the not so sharp anymore disconnect, as I pointed out in reply to you before, against shortterm viability of the character as a bad thing.

Yes, you could weedle away the hours trying to optimize . Because it is really hard to find now because the good enough to play region is larger and the differences between optimal and not more stubtle. However just because SR4 character creation gives you lots and lots of viable options to use, it certainly doesn't force you to because there are plenty of viable and near optimal options that are just there. They don't happen to be as simple and dump all 6's into a few skills and then Specialize one or two lesser skills. But hey, such is the price for heavily softening the disconnect between character generation and character advancement.

SR play encourage a specialists, always has. Such is the nature of a team environment. However SR4 character generation in truth discourages buying a Specialization and maximizing Attributes, and reduces the advantages of maximizing Skills. And it shows in the characters that come out. A strong character has a large mix of Skills ratings.

The area of Contact costs I do see as a problem. They are all overpriced. However the most overpriced are both the bottom end and the top end. The costest to being worth the cost is in middle, but you'll likely not want to purchase more than 2 or 3 in the entire team unless the GM plays up their importance or there are no teammates that can act as even a moderately skilled Face. The top end is only worth their cost if your GM doesn't bother to use the RAW that balances them out.

Please point out to me this: where, on page 348, is the maximums for edges/flaws listed? Or the BP and rating caps on attributes? Or the racial mods? Or the skill restrictions? All these are things that are very important to the first mechanical stage of character creation.

Page 348 isn't a guide to character creation. It's not even a Cliff's Notes. It's a reference table, which is only useful if you've got the bulk of the rules already memorized. Compare this to the reference in Savage Worlds, which is damn near 100% complete, and you'll see what I mean.

The problem is that the "good enough to play" options are overwhelmed by the hyperspecialists. Just comparing a BBB mage against one of my home creations demonstrates that easily enough. I can create a one-trick pony who doesn't have any glaring weaknesses; and because of the caps, he's not that much further behind a generalist. The question isn't "What options are there", the question is: what does it encourage?

That might be true for the BBB archetypes, but not when comparing characters stat-by-stat. And in every edition of Shadowrun, the archetypes have been less an example of what the character creation rules could do, and more an optimistic view of the power level the developers wanted. At any event, there is absolutely no reason *not* to buy a specialization; for low skills, you pay less to strenghten your abilities; and in high skills, you get that extra bonus.

Besides which, the system almost forces you to have a mix of skill ratings. You cannot have two skills at 6, or three at 5. It's not just strong characters that'll have a large mix; just about every character will.