Last Friday, my gaming group meet to pick a new campaign and/or game system. We decide on to starting a Shadowrun 4 campaign. None of us have played SR 4 and I have not played SR at all. On Wednesday we got together again to talk about what type of characters each of us are going to play. I decide on the fighter/tank character. We also have a combat mage or Shaman (he was not sure), rigger and a Hanker.

I picked up the SR4 book Sunday and have read Character creation and history. I have a background created and I am in the process of writing up the characters, but I have a couple of questions to ask about character creation. I am not trying to min/max, but I only get 400 BP and I want to get useful things with them. I have taken 35 Disads and I am still about 20 points over. I am thinking of being an Adept. So I am looking at a Gunslinger Adept, Street Samurai, and Weapon Specialist for a base.

1) Ambidexterity…It sounds cool, but how useful is it? It sounds like I can take my dice for range weapons and divide it by 2 for each hand. Can I do it with melee weapons also?

2) Should I Specialist into a weapon or a range and melee weapon?

3) The Gunslinger and Weapon Specialist buy Skill Groups where Street Samurai by most skill not grouped. Which is better? And how does it work with question 2?

4) If I take the Armorer skill to 3? Can I modify my armor or weapons and are there rules or guide lines? Is it worth the 12 points?

I am sure they're more questions, but I am at work and I can not remember the right now.

Ratman

1) Ambidexterity is handy if you don't want to worry about which hand your gun is in, but if you're not worried about ending up having to use your off-hand, it's not a big deal. Firing two guns at the same time is really brutally hard if you've got any sort of penalties, because they get applied to both pools, and is usually something you should reserve for situations like "shooting the guy in the restaurant repeatedly while you're standing on top of his table." Hard to miss, so lots of damage.

2) The specialization categories are usually broad enough that you could specialize without much worry. There's also no real downside to specialization beyond cost (that is, it provides bonuses sometimes, but not penalties), so you might as well if you come up with a weapon of choice. A good example would be Throwing... if you use it to lob grenades around, but don't really throw knives or shuriken, there's no real reason not to specialize into Throwing (Grenades).

3) If you look at a skill group and say "yeah, I want at least two of those skills, and wouldn't really mind having the third/fourth skills in there," grab the skill group. If you're only really interested in one or two of the skills, buy them individually.

4) There really aren't rules for using Armorer outside of things like mounting accessories onto weapons or tweaking grenade fuses, yet, but there probably will be when the Arsenal supplement comes out. Grabbing it at a low level (2-3) certainly can't hurt, and you might come up with a creative use for it.

I'll second what shrike said and also add that if you're still 20 points over, take a few points out of some stats, they tend to be the biggest cost in any character, and you can live by missing 1 die here and there for a few tests.

Right - but decide which stat to lower by looking at your skill list. If you've got four skills linked to Logic but none linked to Body, lower Body.

Willpower is a good choice for nerfing, as not many rolls affect it.
(Unless you have the attribute boost adept power.)

A low willpower could make you worry about enemy mages, but having will 2 or 3 won't make a big difference when the manabolts come down on you. You will die all the same!

And I second shrike's comment on two weapon shooting. There are no bonus for two weapon melee combat either. (but it's cool.)

Cheers, and welcome to the shadows.

Max

Skill groups are cheaper than buying the individual skills, but they are limited to a rating of 4 at character generation, and you can't take specializations with them. So, if you take the firearms group at 4, you have a skill of 4 with a wide range of firearms. But if you take pistols at 6, then specialize in semi-automatics, you are rolling 8 skill dice when you use a semi-automatic pistol, as compared to 4 dice from a skill group. That's why some of the archetypes such as the street samurai and hacker don't take skill groups - they want to get a skill in that group at 6, or two of them at 5.

For Attributes, I would probably use the maximum 200 points for them. Attributes are huge in SR4, because you roll skill plus Attribute. At the very least, you want a nice high Attribute to go with whatever your specialty is.

As an example of a character who didn't spend enough on Attributes, let's look at the Face archetype. This character has spent 220 build points on Attributes, but 30 of that were for Edge, so the character actually only has 190 points invested in Attributes. Now look at the skills. Con: 4, Etiquette: 5, and Negotiation: 5. That's 56 points. So with a Charisma of 5, this character is rolling 9 dice for Con, 10 dice for Etiquette, and 10 dice for Negotiation (base, not counting modifiers like the First Impression quality). Not bad, but is there a more efficient way of doing it?

Now look at the Influence skill group. For 40 points, you can get Con, Etiquette, Leadership, and Negotiation at 4 each, and save 16 build points. Now, take 10 of those points and raise Charisma from 5 to 6 (normally, this would cost 25 points, but because the exceptional attribute/Charisma quality raises the natural maximum to 7, it only costs 10 points). Now you are rolling 10 dice for all four skills. You have effectively raised Con by one and added a new skill, and you still have 6 points left to spend (perhaps raising Intimidation to 4 and taking a specialization in dodge or pistols).

Now, that's not to say that you always need the 200 - if your character is weak but cerebral, for example, maybe some high mental Attributes and low physical ones would suit you better, and cost less than 200 points. But for me, at least, Attributes are usually an area that I come back to reluctantly, only reducing them from the 200 points if I absolutely have to to get the rest of what I need.

Thanks everyone for the help. I like the exceptional attribute quality idea and may play again with the points. For right now I was only 12 points over. I dropped Close combat group and bought swords to 4 and unarmed combat to 3.

OK now onto my next questions…

1) Improved Physical Attribute. Let's say I have Agility of 5 with a max of 6. I get Improved Physical Attribute for Agility for 1 giving me an Agility of 6. Say I get some Karma, can I raise my Agility to 7 (6 normal max plus 1 for magical enhanced)?
2) Attribute Boost. Say I gave 9 dice test, which would give me an average of 3 hits. Would most Combats last only 6 rounds or would I run out before the combat was done? Can I have 2 boost running if I do not hit max the first time? Can I Boost again right after the first is done?
3) Initiation for Adepts. Besides allowing the character increase their natural maximum for magic, What can an Adept get for being initiated? I am a little confused here.

That is all the questions I have for now, I am still reading the book., so I might get more.

Ratman

Improved Physical Attribute sucks. You're better off just buying the attribute directly, because that way you can raise your Magic more easily.

Combat duration in SR depends on what your GM wants, in 'standard' SR combat is over extremely quickly, with most fights lasting less that 4 rounds. The main probelm with the attribute boost power is it takes an actino to start (recently addresses in the FAQ or errata, I don't remember which one), which means that you are probably losing your first action of the fight to start it up. The duration is so short that you can't usually start the power 'out of combat' and then expect it to be running when the shooting starts. In general, your first action in combat should either be 'dive for cover' or 'shoot the other sides mage in the face' both of which will imrpove your combat performance much more than having and extra couple of dice to roll. For certain archetypes (like the sniper) who are usually the ones initiating combat, the attribute power isn't too bad. Although I don;t think it's worth getting at more than level one (where it's cheap).

Another thing is the list of 'everyman' skills that most SR charactesr should have:
Infiltration
Etiquette
Ranged combat skill (pistols for most non-combat characters)
close combat skill
Perception
Running, Gymnastics, and/or climbing

Note that dodge isn't on the list, there are several good combat centric builds that don't require the dodge skill (and instead rely on very high base reaction and/or combat sense).

On the other hand, Dogde can be specialized without any penalty (it's not in a skill group) - and two more dice when going Full Dodge in Ranged Combat is a nice thing to have.

Yes, this is a reason to buy dodge 1 (ranged) with the karma from your first adventure, but not a good enough reason to waste points on it in character generation. Dedicated combat characters will have passive defenses of 7-9 dice which will deal with security guards just fine.

Heh, my GM converted his campaign to 4th, and he let me keep the 'mysterious cyberware' as a 20-pt. disad (It was Snake Eyes ).

Yeah, I definitely advise you not to go overboard with disads. One or two are good personality cards, but a lot can really hinder you to the point of making your character less fun. Besides, how many people are that screwed up?

I always liked the Paraplegic disad, myself.

Thank everyone again for the help.

I dropped Dodge from a 3 to a 1.

I also found out that the Character Gen program from IsMo had a strange big about Knowledge skills. So I dropped unlucky neg. Quality. I have about 9 BP spent on equipment, but I have 8 BP to spend.

I decide to post my character here and ask for advice. SO What do you think? Will he be OK?

Kern

Metatype : Ork
Adept

Attributes
Body: 7
Agility: 5 (7)
Reaction: 5
Strength: 4
Charisma: 2
Intuition: 4
Logic: 3
Willpower: 3

Edge: 1
Magic: 5
Initiative: 9 (11)
Essence: 6

Knowledge Skills
English : N
Or'zet : 3
Sioux : 3
Firearms Design : 4
History : 3
Security Procedures : 3
Chemistry : 1
Engineering : 2
Firearms History : 1
Magic Background : 1

Active Skills
Climbing : 2
Gymnastics : 2
Running : 2
Swimming : 2
Automatics : 4
Longarms : 4
Pistols : 4
Blades : 4
Unarmed Combat : 3
Dodge : 1
Heavy Weapons : 1
Throwing Weapons : 1
Perception : 1
Survival : 2
Armorer : 1
Demolitions : 2


Positive Qualities

Negative Qualities
SINner
Allergy com/mild

Powers
Combat Sense (Level 2)
Improved Reflexes (level 2)
Improved Ability : Combat Skill (Level 2)
+2 dice for use with Pistols

Contacts
Fixer (L:2 C:2)
Arms Dealer (L:3 C:2)

um
skill groups?

Athletics: 2
Firearms: 4

Daegann's Character Gen splits the group when printing.

ah