I'm not saying that SR4 is busted, or that GURPS is amazing (adding together multiple d6 rolls always creates a bias towards the centre of the range of outcomes), just that the Elf/ Dwarf thing struck me is odd.

At the end of the day, the people who wrote SR4 (hopefully) had a lot more experience in games design than I did, so I'll trust to their rules.

It just struck me as weird that two characters should be statistically identical for different points. I guess it's just because I was looking at designing a combat-ish character, and comparing combat-leaning races to less optimised races.

Elves have better charisma and wannabes following them, but their societal advantages are nowhere near the equal of the societal disadvantages of orks (at least not in games I've played in).

Yeah, try making an ork face witht e same points as your elf face.

You also kept attributes fairly even across the board, but most folks that pick trolls by the numbers do it because they want to be really strong and have a really high body, and so generally don't end up with stats like that. The same would hold true for other races. If you're picking an elf it's robably because you want the high charisma and/or agility, and will likely dump more points into ti.

I just thought I'd repost this from > Dumpshock Forums > Discussion > Shadowrun 4 > Character Creation Min-Maxing 101

Seems like an awful lot of work for a coincidental endpoint. I somehow doubt that's the formula they used.

I dunno, somehow it seems right

That was only ~20 minutes work. for me to come up with.

Just to show you what sort of g33k I am at times, I reverse-calculated the BV point values for BattleTech weapons so I could make my own and keep them balanced. THAT took me almost two days, but I got the values to within 1%. When you consider the sheer number of variables involved (including not limited to the 2d6 probability 'curve', missile hits table, minimum range penalties, and 'head-chopper' bonuses), this was a breeze.

And all it means it that you found a formula that works for the examples. It doesn't necessarily mean that any race (or weapon) based on the formula is balanced.

does that formula take into account the increased basic stats?
either way, I still doubt the fairness of the system, but I'll live with it.

Well I play with someone who makes troll mages. the troll can have
bod-6 agi-4 rea-5 stre-5 char-3 int- 4 log-4 will-5. All the important stat for this character are unpenalized except intuition. He is above average in most everything. Is this fair?

Given that he's 3 meters tall, has a hard time dealing with things like the back seat of a taxi, needs much larger objects than the normal meta to get "cover" and will probably be viewed with more suspicion than the average human runner if he tries to pass himself off as, say, an employee of a Japanacorp, then yeah, I'd say it's fair.

How're his knowledge skills? How's his summoning? Those are both pretty handy when you're a mage...

The size costs don't take effect during character creation, and only affect gear that is size specific. It could be argued that only the polearm part of that focus is affected by size, not the magical aspect.

There's a reason there's been a Troll combat Mage in every edition of SR. They can be pretty bad ass. They won't be as good at summoning probably, but everything is a tradeoff.

... they suggest mod costs not be incurred during character creation?

Yep. I'm not sure why, but it's in there.

Yeah, in SR2 the combat mage was human. The guy floating 15 cm above the ground .

Sorry, I didn't mean in the actual book, I meant as a talked about iconic possibility.

Sorry just checked -1 will -2 int and -2 cha in 2nd edition, still pretty gimped as casters.

I always felt that the running / movement speed differences should factor more. Chasing and escaping become virtually impossible as a dwarf... Which may be accurate, but that limitation should be worth more in terms of build points...

Special vision should be valued less, considering that for a measly few hundred nuyen and 0.1 or 0.2 essence you could get the same damn thing. Plus, if you DO get cyber eyes, your "special" vision is gone...

Toxin / disease resistance is useful, but not nearly as useful as +1 armour and +1 reach...

I mean, for Orks and Trolls the social stigma justifies their relatively cheap cost in my opinion... But the dwarves posess a negative social stigma too (albeit a different negative). To me, it's the dwarves who get the "short" end of the stick in terms of build costs.

Special vision options are more valuable to magically active individuals and technomancers, who don't want the cyberware.

It's easy to get an extra die of armor, fairly hard to get an extra die of toxin / disease resistance.

Those 40 points can instead be spent on 10 ranks of skills (or 4 in a group). He could spend them on 200,000 worth of gear or a base edge of 5 instead of 1. IIRC you can start with 12 spells, which will cost you 36 points.

Mages are highly point intensive, tossing 40 into race is a hard decision.

What James said.

40 BPs will pay for any starting magician's entire spell list and you'll still have some left over. 40 BPs pays for raising your starting Magic:1 all the way up to Magic:5. 40 BPs can buy a lot of foci goodness. Only 20 BPs can go into Positive Qualities like two levels of Focused Concentration.

It's a point-buy system. There will be trade-offs no matter what you do. Some are more efficient in the short term, some in the long term. You and your group just need to decide which is more important and spend accordingly.

I'm sure you can figure out how to spend 40 build points (the cost of the troll) in such a way that the troll's 4 more dice against incoming damage are compensated for by the human. Like, say, a Dodge skill, some spells, a Sustaining foci you cast Armor into... 200k worth of BP have got to go *somewhere* useful...

when talking about Troll mages vs Human mages, you don't *have* to spend 200 BPs on the Troll's attributes:

You've convinced me. I'll never play another non-troll mage again (unless I want to avoid the hassles of being a troll).

Dam right your convinced!