There is a problem with that. Even a naked human civilian bystander is built on 196 BPs. That's just the standard bystander with a single technical skill usable at a professional level, and basic training in Influence, Athletics, and pilot: groundcraft.

Add in resource costs for things like a Lifestyle and maybe a car, some extra knowledges, and perhaps knowing a couple of people, and the basic bystander can easily cost 250 BP.

And you know what? That's with no combat or crime-related skills at all, which are of course purchased at a premium under standard Shadowrun rules. A BP total of less than 300 really runs into the bottom end that SR makes any sense at all at. On that kind of BP total, expect characters to be the equivalent of Professional Rating 0 goons.

-Frank

Well. Here's an idea. If you want to go for sheer numbers, you could give them 500 points, but make them build two characters. No more than 300 on either, and you've got numbers to make up for the fact that you're not banging it out awesome style.

But then you're going through the hassle of dealing with two characters at once - which would matter to some (although the teamwork benefits would be wonderful).

I'd stick to the 300 at least, no sense in making it such a challenge the novelty of the idea gets lost in the struggle to live. A bit of both is ideal, at least in my mind.

I´d be as ok with 250 BP (but I really like low power SR). After all, who says that most gangers are better then most sararimen? Just shift tha stats. True, 250 stink for runers and for runner oposition, too, but these gangers may only have other gangers and sararimen as regular oposition. To them Haloweeners and SecGuards will be, what Red Samurai are to runners and Cops and Mob soldiers will be to them, what Ghosta are to runners.
250 will be bright, if you want the pcs to start as lowly newbe members of the gang (like newly recrouited streetkids and little sisters/brothers of established gangers) and have them rise through the ranks in time. I´d definitly like that.
Just make sure, that the basic stuff is covered for everyone, so it doesn´t become an aditionell pita. Everyone should have Hometurf and all the other gangmembers (pcs, npcs and boss) for free and probably be abled to live on the gang-lifestyle (then again, you want them to blow thair 5k on something, if they are taking minimum money).

One thing that would be neat would be re-thinking which flaws cause notoriety... what might be considered "unprofessional" or "bad form" among shadowrunners wouldn't mean as much to a ganger's reputation (who would probably be a very poor shadowrunner anyways), but other flaws might make you more of an outcast even in your own gang (not sure of what).

As for the build points... The idea of 300 bp rather than 400 already made me cringe, but taking it down another notch to the 200-250 range would start hitting characters where it hurt. They'd most likely all become one-trick ponies, since they wouldn't have any BP to spare anywhere.

We'd end up with one guy who knows how to shoot a gun, one guy who can ride a bike, and one guy who can intimidate people and fense stolen goods out of the back of his van. And all of them would have ratings of 1 or 2 in attributes that they don't expect to use much, meaning they're retarded, but strong - or weak, but reasonably intelligent.

That, or everyone would take only 1 rank in a bunch of "ganger" skills, making them all pretty identical which would be boring too. I guess it really depends on the theme that we come up with, but it would be boring (IMO) to play a gang of all elven motercycle riders with average attributes, slightly better than average agility, and no skills except a point or two in "Pilot: ground" and "pistols".

I think 300 BP is ok, you can still build reasonable characters that way, you just won't have many outstanding traits. Those 100 BP below the standard shadowrunner make quite a difference already.

Less than that, and the characters will have such low ratings, that the difference between knowing something and not knowing something becomes pretty small.

Bye
Thanee

Pretty small, or pretty huge depending on how you look at it.

Not having a skill as opposed to having 1 rank in it is a difference of 2 dice.
If you could only afford an attribute of 2, that means you only get 1 die, with a huge (compareitivly) chance of critical glitch.

Yeah, I definitely want to work up a "ganger cred" system seperate from the "street cred" system currently in place. Being looked up to as a ganger and as a professional shadowrunner are two completely different things.

300 bp is really a lot of bp when you think about it. You can make characters that are almost playable as shadowrunners if you're careful with the points. When you consider going even lower, you have to look at what the PCs might be facing. Taking a look at the opposition NPCs in the book, we have this (not counting gear, which is at most 2-3 bp or Edge which should probably be 10-20 points more for most of these):

Humanis thug: 106 bp
Humanis Lieutenant: 168 bp

Halloweener: 174 bp
Halloweener Lieutenant: 214 bp

Corpsec Unit: 194 bp
Corpsec Lieutenant: 313 (or 328 if magician costs 30 instead)

I expect 60% of opposition to fall around the Humanis thug level, 30% around the halloweener level, and 10% around the corpsec level.

After playing around for a bit, you can really do a lot with 300 bp, but not too much I don't think. Raising the cost of the awakened qualities and lowering the resources:bp ratio to 2500 to 1 bp should fix the worst of it (but taking off the cap on bp spent on resources).

Also, you have to consider my intentions with karma. I'm going to be passing it out like candy for this game, and the way karma is spent will let characters which may be similar at the start branch out and become unique.

Of course the NPC stats do not show all skills these characers have. Only those relevant for their specific function in the game...SC will always be much more detailed.

I do like the idea of getting more karma quickly. It would be nice to actually see an online character see some advancement. Normally the game moves at a pace where the first mission takes about a year.

Black Hat´s point about the qualities is a good one, on the other hand, I´d think notoriety is not that bad for a ganger, after all, intimidating the average joe is something you want to do, most of the time. Most of the rl gangs probably don´t have much reputation in gameterms, but have high notoriety!

Notoriety also means "bad reputation" or "unprofessionalism"... it penalizes you in a lot of social situations that I don't think make sense for a ganger - I guess I'd have to review the list of flaws that give you notoriety to come up with a solid example.

Also, at chargen, we're limited to one rating 6 or availability 12 item, or none if we're not mundane... would our post-character creation rules for aquiring equipment differ significantly from the norm? or could someone with 4 dice in cha+negotiate buy 1 success every couple days to eventaully find someone willing to sell them a rating 12 item, (aside from it taking about 2-4 weeks to happen)?

Allso consider, how many cheep weapons (or other equipment) you can get for the price of 1 premium item (i.e. Ares Alpha). The strenght of gangs lies in numbers after all. 2-3 AK-97 are surely more effective then 1 Alpha (considering that you won´t often, if ever use genuin granades), and gangs can´t aford to simply have Alphas for everyone, like runners can.

I don't see an issue with low BP scores, especially as most of the characters will be quite young and so have time to 'grow'.

It also always depends on the opposition you are going to face and how the GM handles the game.
If everyone has the same starting BP, it's fair, especially if the opposition is balanced.

thanks

bladepoet

I think the following two changes pretty much fix the bp issue.

• 1 BP now gives 2,500 instead of 5,000
• Each point of magic costs 20 points instead of 10

I feel that this will make mages and adepts less common (which they should be) and on par with mundanes. It'll create a smaller pile of cash for the mundanes to work with.

Oh, and the following cyberware will always be available, regardless of availability ratings:

Dermal Plating (Rating 1-3)
Muscle Replacement (Rating 1-3)
Handblade (Retractable)
Hand Razors (Retractable)

Additionally, I dislike the way cyber limbs work and want to make them more cyberpunk. Thus, cyber limbs shall have the same attributes as the owner. If the owner increases a physical attribute with karma, the limb lags behind until it can be tuned by a cyber doctor. Cyberlimb enhancements allow the limb to function at a level higher than the owner.

Thus, an average ork (body 6, Agility 3, Strength 5) would not suffer from having a stock cyber limb installed (provided the doc tuned it properly). If he had 3 points of strength enhancements installed, the limb would function at Strength 8.

Punches from obvious cyberlimbs may deal physical damage or stun damage, at the option of the user.

Yeah, the cyberlimb rules are pretty weird.

This is what I've written down for them:



Bye
Thanee

I think magic costs with karma will stay the same unless it becomes a problem. I'll probably ask that the pace of magic (the stat) advancement be rather slow, though, on a voluntary basis.

Cool I might want to play a real weak (magic wise) wizkid. I just love those low mana mages, always did. And slow advancement in Magic is just fine with me, I´d like to catch up on the mundane gang-skills a bit first anyway!

On the other hand, Muscle Replacement 3 sounds just like a wet dream to me, very tempting, I allways loved artificial muscles, too, from the fluff side.

Well, no. Let's say that one of the Halloweeners is a junkyard guy. He's got the same garbage attributes as the rest of them, and thus for combat purposes is the standard Profession Rating 1 Grunt.

So he's got attributes that cost only 130 BPs (the Willpower of 2 is a typo because he can take 10 boxes before dropping).

Then he's got the standard grunt skills, 34 BPs.

And his basic equipment (1BP).

---

But he's also got:

Automotive Mechanic 3 (12 BP)
Hardware 1 (4 BP)
Locksmith 1 (4 BP)
Pilot Groundcraft 1 (4 BP)

Resources (6 BP):

Squatter Lifestyle (2 months)
Ford Americar
Automotive Mechanic Shop
Rating 3 Fake SIN w/ Driver's License
MetaLink Commlink w/ Vector Xim OS
Lockpick set (slimjim)
Chisel
Wire Clippers
Hardware Kit
Certified Credstick
Change of Clothes

Contacts (26 BP):

Gang Boss (4/4)
Gang Member (2/4)
Other Gang Member (2/4)
Car Buff (1/1)
Inventory Manager at Kragen's (3/2)

---

So that's 221 BPs. For a bare minimum Gang Member with no real unique abilities or potential. Adding 29 BP to this character wouldn't even buy the Magician quality under the doubled-cost system.

-Frank

I´d not call that "bare minimum", but thats probably depending on the POV. Anyway, non of the Archetypes in SR4 has as powerfull contacts as this guy, so I dont think, thats supposed to be standard!

BTW: I think 300 bp are ok, while I could do with 250, I think 300 isn´t too powerfull with the special rules.

Oh, I also forgot: the basic Halloweeners use Group Edge, so they don't have to buy an Edge stat. A player character does have to buy an Edge stat, so they are down another 10-40 BP....


And I don't find the idea of a Halloweener being a "buddy" with a "gang boss" and 2 "gang members" to be that weird. That's right off the contacts table. Low-, and mid-level contacts are in general too expensive. I've seen a number of proposed solutions, but the most elegant I think was to make the cost in "Contact Points" for each contact be Connections x Loyalty, and to give people 3 Contact Points for a BP.

-Frank

Your right, the building system is quiet flawed, conserning contacts, but the same rules apply to all the runner-archetypes.
TG also posted, we won´t have to spend points on our own gangs members/boss, so, the essential contacts are for free!

I don't think player characters should be exactly on the same level as normal thugs. Using 300 BP with 200 BP in attributes, the characters in my campain has better attributes, but the same values in relevant skills (though obviously, they have more different ones) as the ganger grunts in the book has. The point is not to create cookie-cutter gangers, I would imagine—but to create characters that are on the street level and that are sufficiently challanged by opposition on the level of the ganger grunts in the book.

Yep. You can actually make some fairly powerful characters under those rules.