Okay, so while playing around with the SR4 rules, a friend of mine came across the most seemingly gross example of a combat monster for this system. PLEASE tell me this character was built wrong or something. It goes like this....

Pick Troll as your starting race...

Pick adept.....

Get close to max body....(just in case)

Take FULL ranks in mystic armor. According to the rules, it is both impact and ballistic, stacks with real armor, acts as damage reduction negating the need to roll body against most weapons, and adds dice to body tests. Without too much imagination, we can see that this character has 12 armor (13 with a troll's natural armor) and shy of a monofilament whip or sniper rifle, this character doesn't even have to roll body damage. If he does, he has something like 23 dice before stacking armor on top (which only adds more). Now I realize this character's not very well rounded, imaginative, or resistant to magic, but is my friend right? Is he the grossest example of a starting combat monster (for survival purposes)? Thanks.

you will be able to chug many bottles of maple syrup.

Yes indeed! He's also resistant to Brown Magic because it only works on the Rookie.

Only flaw is you can't have more ranks in a power than your magic rating.

Still pretty nasty. You can get a body+armor of 18 before throwing another 10 points or so on top of it in real armor. 28 damage resistance dice are nice... but you're still vulnerable to mages and large amounts of autofire.

Okay, so there was a slight flaw (he was going to dump the other half in regeneration or magic resistance before he saw that there wasn't a limit cap). You could always have other mages protecting you and autofire you can probably body down. I thought the concept was still nasty as hell (because in 3rd ed. the armor was only impact).

It ain't Hardened Armor, so you'll still take damage.

Okay, I'll present him all this info. and see what he says. Like I said, I didn't make the character and haven't read all of SR4 yet (he actually bought my copy off me so I'm waiting until 3rd printing, which is in the works). I forgot there was a difference between armor and hardened armor.

Although despite the fact it's not hardened armor, I bet his high body/armor dice would prevent him from taking much, if any, damage. Am I wrong?

At character creation, he'll be rolling 24 Armor + Body dice, with about 8 hits.

A smart invulno-troll will take the Combat Sense power, though, because it makes it more likely that you avoid the damage entirely (and if you don't, the extra dice would have been exactly as helpful as Mystic Armor).

You're wrong, josh. Armor works much differently now than in SR3. It basically does two things - one, it determines if an attack will do physical or stun damage; and two, it adds dice to the Body resistance test. It does NOT reduce the power of the attack - a heavy pistol will still do a base of 5P damage plus net hits. So your troll example has 10 Body, 6 Mystic Armor, and, let's say 8 armor (since an armored jacket is the most he can wear unless he actually plans on lugging a ballistic shield around with him).

Now, let's say someone hits him with a heavy pistol, doing 5P with 3 net hits. Sure, it's only stun damage due to his armor, and yeah, he's rolling 24 dice. But as someone who's rolled that many dice before, let me tell you, you roll poorly more often than you think. To completely ignore the damage, he needs to roll 8 hits. That's a five or better, eight times. Even with 24 dice, that's hard to do. And that's just a pistol - not an automatic weapon, not a sniper rifle, not a monofilament whip. So he can definitely be whittled down.

To be honest, he's not even as min-maxed as he could be. He could get the 6 ranks of mystic armor, then get 6 ranks of combat sense - that's 6 more dice to add to his reaction roll, to reduce those net hits and maybe not even get hit at all. He's also paying a price for his toughness. Other sammies and adepts will be taking 3 or 4 actions to his one. While he's soaking a beating, they'll be dishing one out.

if you play this guy, you need to get him a gun that does some serious damage, or he won't be enough of a threat to draw fire (which is pretty obviously his job). if he only gets one shot per turn, that shot needs to be putting a serious hurt on whoever he shoots.

And from my experience thats usually what killed characters in the first place

I'd get Platelet Factories and knock that 2 hits to 1 hit

All I can add to this is make sure said troll gets a suitably ridiculous nickname.

honestly, soaking is secondary to dodging in all aspects. A more invincible character would be one with 5 ranks in combat sense, specialized dodge (ranged), and reaction enhancers and a skill recorder for dodge. That'd be 9+5+8+1, 23 dice to dodge, you'd get the same amount of dice, but roll against a lower number. (hits only vs damage + net hits). As long as you find a way to get a 2nd IP you'll be sitting pretty for quite a while, until you get widebursts on a 4th ip pass. Our street sam has (only) 18 dodge dice, and dodged 4 people firing bursts at him for an entire combat, though he does have 4 IP.

Don't forget Gymnastics.

Well, i'm the one who sat down and came up with a the core idea at first, so here are my suggestions are thusly:

Beefy McTanksalot... he's irish (happy saint patties)

actually... that's it. I HAVE NAMED HIM. AND HE IS BEEFY, McTANKSalot. so let it be written, so let it be done.

the oz has spoken.

But sometimes you don't get to dodge. You always get to soak. Right?

There aren't specific rules on if you get to "dodge" grenades, and you don't get to dodge if suprized.

But you don't always get to soak either, manabolt has no soak roll, only a dodge like resistance roll.

I am thoroughly unimpressed with tank builds this time around. It's kinda sad

All this "how to create a combat monster" strikes me as ridiculous. From my experience, there is rarely a need for a dedicated fighter during a run.
Open firefights are usually dangerous and channel attention towards your activities, and thus you want to avoid such situations like hell.

And even if an open assault is required, it is usually cheaper and more effective to hire several decently competent mercenaries on short notice, instead of lugging around a single one trick pony-combat troll during preparations and legwork.

Additionally, there is always the question, why anyone would be speced out like that at all. There are no jobs for a "wannabe tank on two legs", so why would he even have the training, implants and powers?

Personally, instead of exotic melee weapons (polearms) I'd give such a troll exotic melee weapons (elves) and have him go on runs with an elf in a gimp suit straped to his back like a claymore.

Oh man, after reading all this, I have this crazy urge to create Bubba the Love Troll for heck of it... must be due to being at work for over 12 hours and the two vodka tonic dinner afterwards that's speaking... anyway, just giving the heads up of possible lunacy for the troll thread...

just remember
aptitude: seduction

Heck, if you want creepy, look at Voldo from the Soul Calibur series. Nobody likes a 50 year old bondage grandpa.

The bitch of it is, though, in order for body armor to effectively counteract (say) a heavy pistol (5/-1) you'd need to be hauling out 16 dice. That's a little ridiculous.

its always good to have someone whith combat skills, who can do other things. if the gun bunny can perform a variety of non-combat tasks vital to the run, then so much the better.

its always usefull to get skills like hardware- the people best at hardware (deckers and riggers) tend to hang back when possible, and you need someone who can crack open a maglock case without setting off the alarm. with bioware to improve your logic, its easy to get a decent attribute.

Yeah, a purely combat character in my games usually ends up bored to tears. Even our troll adept combat monster has learned this, and started working on her knowledge & social skills.

Yep, trolls are tough.

But it's not so difficult to make a troll who is a tank with legs and also performs at many other levels. For example: take skillwires.

Bubba the Love Troll has many other abilities too...

Cheers,

Max