Hey Guys, I haven't had a chance to play 4th edition yet but wondered, are trolls as strong as they were in previous versions of the game? I realize they are 40 build points but if you look at the stats for trolls, coupled with character creation rules, you get 4 free points of body (equivalent to 40 build points), just by choosing a troll. That also means you get +4 Str (another 40 build points), thermographic vision, and +1 Natural Armor. Am I wrong about their relative strength? This is of important concern to me since they also don't have to buy stat points to reduce negatives to a positive stat in this version of the game. What do you guys think?

As a note, I used the body point examples in particular to show that the troll choice paid for those and then some.

i think there was something about them only increasing the max. as in, you still have to buy that stat up. but im going by old memory here, not the book.

allso, we are talking about something 2,5 meter tall and 1 meter wide (or something in that area). basicly, your going to be realy visible. and unless you pay the premium to have your guns and similar modified, you get -1 dice (or -2 if said item is dwarf modified).

Trolls have always been imposing physical characters but a little thin on the "finer" points of life. As long as you're looking at their huge physical bonuses take a look at the other attribute's new maximums:
AGI - 5
CHA - 4
INT - 5
LOG - 5

This is even more dramatic for SR4 character creation because it means you need to pay 25 BP for that "last" point. So forget being a Troll and being a decent: Shaman, Hacker, or Face.

Personally, I think Orks are way more "cost efficient". They are cheaper, still have good bonuses, and far less penalties than a Troll.

Also, SR3 used to have a rule that Trolls had to buy Troll-sized gear at an extra 20% cost. I don't remember seeing that in SR4 though...

Trolls get +4 Body, -1 Agility, +4 Strength, -2 Charisma, -1 Intuition, -1 Logic. Extra modifiers (thermovision, +1 reach, +1 natural armor, faster landspeed, and 125% gear costs) aside, that's a net attribute shift of +3. You're getting 30 BPs of attributes for the cost of 40 BPs.

Also, RAW karma costs create a situation in which capping out extremely high attributes (such as a Troll's Body and Strength) are very expensive. A Human capping Str would pay 18 karma; a Troll capping Str would have to pay 30. So you have a higher cap but it's harder to reach it.

So are Trolls strong? Yes, if you want a melee god, you probably want a Troll. Are they underpriced? Well....

Humans get +1 Edge. That's a 10 BP value at a cost of 0 BP.

Orks get +3 Bod, +2 Str, -1 Cha, -1 Log, and lowlight. That's almost a 30 BP value at a cost of 20 BP.

Dwarves get +1 Bod, -1 Rea, +2 Str, +1 Wil, thermovision, +2 vs Tox/Path, a slower landspeed, and 125% gear cost. That's almost a 30 BP value at a cost of 25 BP.

Elves get +1 Agi, +2 Cha, and lowlight. That's almost a 30 BP value at a cost of 30 BP.

So technically Trolls are the "least efficient" buy. But hey, they offer performance that you can't get anywhere else.

The problem with the attribute penalties is, that they do not really cost you any BP, since you still start at 1 and every point still costs 10. It just limits what you will be able to achieve eventually. Trolls are pretty extreme on that behalf.

I also think that orcs are the best of the bunch, from an efficiency viewpoint.

Elves look not so great, but considering, that Agility is so important and high Charisma is just totally awesome if you are a shaman, they do have their upsides (and no downsides) for sure.

And never forget...

1. Trolls are mammals.



Bye
Thanee

The purpose of a troll is to flip out and kill people.

With +1 range.

Plus now with the lower stun track, and trolls have a natural +1 to Armor any armor they wear get that +1. So it is far far easier to stun a troll than kill him.
STUN THE TROLL after
GEEK THE MAGE!!

Trolls can kill anyone they want.

Trolls aren't quite the combat kings that they were in SR3. The problem is that most combat skills, and a whole lot of other ones, are tied to agility. So the elven sammie with an agility of 8 or so has an advantage in ranged and melee combat.

Trolls start out tough right out of the box, no doubt. Attributes are very important, so getting to spend the equivalent of 280 points to a human's 200 points is a huge advantage. However, they also have some pretty brutal limits to agility and most of their mental attributes, so their advancement potential is stunted in many ways. With the hard caps being set lower, this becomes a factor more quickly than it would in SR3.

In terms of knocking a troll out/stunning them vs. blowing them full of holes, there's one thing to consider. For the most part, in order to stun/knock out a troll you'd have to get near them, and doing that really wouldn't be too great for your continued breathing.

I was doing some world-class min-maxing and numbercrunching, and came up with a troll adept who did 11P per punch and had 7/7 armor (including his racial bonus) even while he was totally naked. He had 7 Body, so he could wear 14/14 armor before slowing down. Which comes out to be 21/21 armor, +7 Body on the damage resistance tests. Purchasing Magic at 6, I even had enough PPs left over to get +2 in Unarmed Combat.

I didn't have very many points left over for anything else (gear/resources, contacts, skills, etc), but goddamn if he wasn't the toughest one-trick pony I ever created.

If you look purely at the net BPs, trolls come out -10. But you're not really paying for just those, as you're also investing in the ability to have those really high attributes later on down the road. I'm not saying it'll be easy, I'm just calling it how I see it.

I heard that there was this troll who was eating at a diner. And when some dude dropped a spoon the troll killed the whole town. My friend Mark said that he saw a troll totally uppercut some kid just because the kid opened a window.

The thing that gets forgotten most often about trolls is their size, and that is a big drawback. You simply don't fit in a lot of automobiles. You are taller than a lot of rooms, and as wide as many hallways - as a GM, I often give trolls a -2 dp for melee inside what is for them a very small space.

It also makes finding cover more difficult.

It's important to remember the effects of the fixed target number, tho. +4 Body is worth only 1.33 points of damage off of any given hit. Even counting the natural armor, the troll's net defense works out to less than two points. Load EX explosive rounds and you more than offset that. In fact, you go a ways toward offsetting the extra two points of physical damage track. Trolls are tough, but they can still be beaten.

Trolls are interesting. It's not really like playing any other race. Nowadays, it seems like if you want to be the mighty-meat, going ork is where it's at. You won't cap out as high as a troll, sure, and you won't get the point of natural armor, but it looks like you get a heck of a lot more in the way of diversified growth.

However, if you're looking at a gang-style campaign, get a troll with a polearm and you'll have a good day.

actually as far as advancement goes, trolls can advance faster because they dump their bp's into their strength and bod leaving other attributes low meaning that advencing those low attributes comes faster/cheaper than the high attributes

I've noticed that about SR4. If you min-max to make your character great in one area, you are "punished" for it by having low attributes or skills in other areas, which are easier to improve later.

You can also do the opposite, though - taking the still-respectable 5 minimums to start out with your other attributes high. It gives you pretty high stats all around, at the expense of limiting your advancement potential. It still works for certain builds, though.

Of course that mediocrity is for humans only (metas can up their stat average due to modifiers)- and it's before cyber/bio/magic that a human character can more easily afford anyway. And have you seen what happens when you need an etiquette roll when you have 1 point in the skill and a 2 charisma? It ain't pretty, man. Especially because you do not voluntarily make social skill rolls when you are at that level - you only make the ones that count.

I always thought that the obvious disadvantage with trolls was their social situation. Might have changed in 2070, though.

Ka_ge

One of my players is as obsessed with Trolls as Robert Hamburger is with ninjas. Here I have translated a section of Robert's website to sound like my troll loving friend:

For purposes of upping statistics, I always used the value pre-racial-modifier. Not RAW, but I saw no reason that a troll upping it's strength to it's racial max should pay more karma than a human upping it's strength to it's racial max. YMMV, but that's a dumb point-sink to have.

The book says to use post-modifier values for the purpose of upgrading? That's insane. Your interpretation is the one I had.

Furthermore, when dealing with cyberlimbs, do you rule that they're also racially balanced? Sure, it might not really affect your squishier races, but orks and trolls get HAMSMACKED by it.

I'd just rule that cyberarms have to be race-appropriate and let them modify the natural. Seriously. A troll with a strength and body of three?

Hey Guys, you all have added some great insight into this debate. I originally didn't see the flaws too much (other than social/size of course) because your stats don't start in the negative, like 3rd edition. Once I saw the cap on agility, which is used for melee combat, I started to wonder about their power. They remind me more of Ogres in D&D. They hit a good amount of the time but when they do, they tend to take starting characters heads off.

I figure a troll arm, being the size of my thigh, is gonna have more strength to it without really having to put a lot of advanced tech into it.

TBH, what I've always done with cyberlimbs is just said they come with the same stat values as the guy using it at the time they're installed, with the custom-fitting to have those stats included in the (pretty steep) startup cost of the limb. If the player get stronger (or simply wants to beef up his arm so that it's stronger than he is), the cost of the upgrade comes from all that time he's got to spend in the cyber shop, getting his arm fine-tuned until it works like a real one again, without getting into a bunch of bizarre biofeedback or tear-out-of-socket issues.

If i was to try and stick closer to the RAW, then yeah, I'd rule that the "3 across the board" you find in cyberlimbs is a "3" for that metarace... figure in modifiers.

The way I do it operates under the assumption that the myomer and bones used in cyberlimbs are capable of performing far, far beyond what a meatbod arm can do. The thing is, people aren't able to handle that... the old CP2020 example of lifting a car with your cyberarm, only to have it simply tear out of your shoulder socket is a good example. A normal installation of a cyberlimb largely revolves around getting the limb to talk to the rest of your body, and fine tuning a ridiculous number of settings in the limb to get it to avoid overperforming, which is why the limb is tuned to the character's current attributes.

Well, that and it makes bookkeeping much easier.

Let's say, however, that your character now wants his arm to be stronger. Maybe he just wants to crush heads with his fist, maybe he's noticed that his arm is starting to lag behind his body in terms of performance (he got stronger, the arm did not). That's when a character needs to get one of the stat boosts. Either he's going in for a tune-up (which consists of many hours of a very highly paid specialist tinkering with his settings until the arm is re-tuned to perform like his body can now perform) or he's going in to get a "custom job" done on his arm, to use more of the potential strength in it. Now, the further beyond what the rest of his body is capable of doing, the more effort that has to go into the fine tuning... you can't just turn all the safeties off, or the character will hurt himself doing things like trying to open a door that's locked. Properly tuned, however, the character's arm has been adjusted so that he can harness that extra power at will, without turning the day-to-day operation of the limb into a health hazard.

This is really just a matter of personal preference... I've always had a sweet spot for the cyber-heavy CP2020, and seeing how badly gimped cyberlimbs are in Shadowrun makes me cry. If you wanted to make these rules a little more kind to the player, you could say that the limb always has baseline stats equal to those of the character, which represent automatic adjustments made by the limb's processors over time.

I've known people who did that, Shrike. I always thought it kind of made sense. The cyberlimb-rippy thing has been kind of curtailed in SR4, in that you can only get +3 more points of attribute in a limb without having a cybernetic torso. That kind of covers the Ripped Out Socket syndrome you described, I feel.

But, yeah. Cyberlimbs are cool. I'm just sad that there aren't any rules for hydraulic fists so you can't just uberpunch a dude in the face.

My personal favorite with hydraulic-assist was when an NPC used it to tear the rear door open on the AV-4 the PCs were flying (it was an REO Meatwagon campaign). Needless to say, the guy with the autoshotgun loitering next to the door dropped him the 50 feet or so to the pavement, but they were kinda surprised when the back of their ride got torn open mid-flight.

The problem with cyberlimbs on trolls is that a troll's cyberlimb can never be as strong as a troll's natural limb can be.

The maximum STR of a cyberarm is 10. The maximum augmented STR for a troll is 15

The maximum BOD of a cyberarm is 10. The maximum augmented BOD of a troll is 15.

The maximum AGL of a cyberarm is 10. The maximum augmented AGL of a troll is 7.

The maximum capacity of an obvous cyberarm is 15.


Let us assume that Hypothetical Troll maxes out his limb's STR and AGL. Now, since his Racial max for agility is 7 any extra agility is useless to him so that only costs 4 capacity. His STR costs 7 capacity for a total of 10. This leaves 4 capacity for BOD.

Here is where the bad part comes. With a 7 BOD cyberlimb Mr. BOD >7 Troll looses at least one die on most damage resistance tests. He gains an extra box of physical, yes, but he looses average body.

However, and here is a big problem, Mr Troll needs a cybertorso because his exhancments are > than rating 3. A cybertorso only has a capacity of 10. He cannot possible match his cyberlimb stats with it.

Any matrial artist will tell you about the importance of hip and waist movement in unarmed combat so his cybertorso stats will contribute to his combat ability and there is no way be can get armound loosing at least one more average point in at least one stat, depending on his current stats. The higher that are the more he will loose.


And even so he has use up all of his capacity, meaning that he can't ft any of the cool gadgets that people actually buy cyberlimbs for.

They do if they're using my rules

A guy I knew a while back ran simple cyberlimbs... all of the stats matched the user. Except for strength, which started at racial maximum, and could be upped from there. His cyberlimbs were the shit.