I've noticed alot of different post claiming that this or that type of character unbalances the game too much and chould be limited. Discuss amongst yourselves, I', feeling veclempt

I don't find that any character type is inherently game breaking. I have found that a determined player can find ways to make almost any character type a bit unbalanced. Bottom line is that game balance is a shared responsibility between GM's and players to ensure everyone has fun, so while just about any character type can be unbalanced in a particular setting, they don't have to be unbalanced.

Dido!

I'm an anti-drone rigger. I hate them, i hate any "stay at home" character type. It just erks me, alot. I just don't like the fact that this bozo is just controlling drones to do eveyrthing that he would do normally, and he doesn't give a flying Flip if the drones gets geeked, he's got 6 more, and it only cost him a bit of cred.

You forgot the all of them! option.

Bye
Thanee

The problem is generally the character type in context. A mage on his own, or with a group of mages and adepts or in a money-heavy game is fine. A mage surrounded by sams in a karma rich game is insane. Similarly, a munchkin surrounded by roleplayers will give nothing but headaches, but a party of JUST munchkins is good, clean fun.

"Only a bit of cred" is relative to the amount of money you're making for runs. If you're getting 3-5k per run but losing 2-6 in drones you're in trouble.

Personally I still have trouble with hackers.

I fully recognize that some of it is unwarranted emotional baggage from the last 3 editions, but a portion of my cringing is valid.

Hackers, by nature, "interrupt" normal gameplay. Not as deeply as they used to, but ironically they interrupt more frequently.

Example: The non-hackers are sitting around having a conversation in a bar with a Johnson. While the dialogue is going on, the hacker is sitting in AR constantly poking at the J's comm, running data searches on the J's clothing manufacturer, providing a live tactical map of the bar to his teammates, monitoring the sensor blimp hovering over the bar, instructing his agents to keep looping Redirects, talking to his Matrix contacts about recent activity related to the pending run, blah blah blah.

The worst part of it is that every time the conversation brings up a new topic of interest, the dutiful hacker is going to immediately start running new searches on it. Data mining is the hacker's job and it's utterly invaluable; it's just potentially disruptive to the game session's natural flow.

It almost makes me long for the old method where the GM focuses his entire attention on the decker for a while, then goes back to the rest of the group. I know, I know, bite my tongue.

Or maybe it's just because I'm running for a particularly inquisitive nerd right now.

Voted "hackers/technomancers", but I want to point out that I only dislike TMs. They're too weird and never loved the Otaku

Mages can be a pain in the ass, too.

I actually voted for mages though it's what I like to play the best.
Hackers can be incredibly powerful in that they can strip you of identity, fuck up all your accounts, change your equipment dreckcetera dreckcetera.
Any mage is going to go down if confronted with an army of 6 drones (armed with mgls and ultrasound vision of course.)
Adepts with a skill of 9 can do any one thing better than anyone else can even imagine, and probably will sill have plenty of magic points left to be a bad ass.
I noticed that almost no one or no one picked the sammie/skill maester, all though they can be pushed to the point of being nearly invincible/ able to do everything.

I'd say that this applies to pretty much any game, whatever the system (apart for a few exceptions), it comes down to the roleplayers themselves and how they stat their characters. All types of character have their uses as well as their disadvantages, and a team that covers pretty much the whole spread does have its uses. It also comes down to what style of game the players and GM are after.

Stay at home riggers, hate em hate em hate em!
Poeple scared of taking risks then whinging about drones getting smashed, didums shut up!
Sorry I appear to be ranting.

You could write notes while you speak to the rest of the players if your hacker likes to data mine in the middle of conversations. That way, you hacker can explain all the paydata to the other players himself.

Any character can break a game. I have the hardest time as a GM figuring out reasonable ways to control mages (since only 1% of the population can interact with a big chunk of the game world the way that they do) but it's mostly a matter of figuring out what feels like a reasonable amount of astral protection to put on a site.

this one percent thing is something my one of my group and I are disagreeing about.
Nowhere in the SR4 book that I could find last night did it say what percentage of the population is awakened, other than to say that there are more each generation... if you look at yotc that would explain why there are a greater proportion of awakened over time.

None of the character types are inherently imbalancing. The GM's job is to let everyone know what kind of campaign he is running (epic, street level, etc.), and then approve the characters for the game. That should take care of most potential problems right there.

It's an open build system, where you can create characters of wildly varying effectiveness. But I think the fact that all of the character types are candidates for "unbalancing character type" shows that the game is actually pretty balanced. Although to be honest, I have a hard time picturing the last option (the skill monkey) being unbalanced. Maybe if it is someone playing in a campaign of combat munchkins, where they treat him like gold because he is the only one in the group who can negotiate with the Johnson, or drive a car, or perform first aid, or...

That alone is what potentially makes the skillmonkey unbalanced.

Imagine a party of combat munchkins getting paid 50 for a near-suicidal run because the Johnson talked them down, taking the public bus to their target (carrying all of their highly illegal gear and weapons in plain sight), getting shot several times in a stand-off with Lone Star when their bus ride inevitably turns into a hostage situation and then arriving at the extraterritorial building they were hired to hit with a bus full of hostages who havn't been to the restroom in hours and followed by two dozen squad cars only to find that the Corp security has been watching their exploits on the trid, laughing at them and taking bets over where they'll stop and that there is an entire team of special forces goons in milspec armor just waiting for them to get out of the bus and they can barely shoot straight due to wound penalities because no one knows how to patch up their bleeding holes.

That doesn't make a skill monkey broken, it makes the characters without the skills to perform a shadowrun idiots (or at least a poor choice for any run that doesn't involve hijacking a bus and shooting it out with lone star).

+1 Karma for Hyzmarca

I found that the Troll Sam was the biggest detriment to my game due to the pure P damage soaking. I threw in some tough heavy armored goons and found the rest of the team hurting and the Sam with only 2S. Later on I figured out that a good GM (I'm not a good GM but I'm trying new things to get better) would have thrown in some S damage weapons or more tech checks to make the run harder without penalizing the rest of the team to absurdity.

@Konsaki In the fights themselves you could have tossed in a mage with something like Confusion to neutralize the Sam....or maybe even manage to turn him on the rest of the team with Control Actions. TPK! Or did he manage to cover off the magic weakness?

Another option is 1BG. One Bad Guy just for the Sam. Sic a high force spirit of beast on him and watch him crap his drawers. Remember that a spirit can be loaned out and take orders from a mundane so you don't even a mage in the opposition ranks to do that. It is cooking the books a bit to have him concentrate on the Sam, but after all if the Sam is actually managing to do damage while not getting hurt he becomes a high priority target. If he isn't doing damage then hell, why are the opponents wasting bullets on him?

@blakkie
We had a good enough mage that he wasnt overpowered but he was with that Sam the entire time. The magic was covered due to that, and I did throw a big guy against him, but the Sam had 12B so anything short of a WhiteKnight longauto wouldnt have done anything but bruise him. Not that S damage was bad, but that would have been way out of char for the goons and would have killed the rest of the team. Hell, I had them equiped with AKs and almost 1shotted the rigger with a SS.

Sorry, he didnt have 12body, he had 14body with 12 ballistic armor. Though I never thought about using the decrease attribute in that way...

I've always had issue with the concept that decreasing someone's charisma can knock them unconcious, but that's just me. I know my players would think it was lame.

The three easiest ways I've found to "deal with" (IE, pose a threat to) the stereotypical troll tank builds are...

-Static defenses: Be these cyberware detectors, automated gun turrets, or hallways that can seal off and fill with Neurostun, these will keep troll tanks on their toes.

-Escalating response: The troll tank is rarely good at keeping a fight quiet. Even if it's quiet on HIS end, I rarely field corpsec forces using suppressed weapons in a traditional "guard" role, and they often come rigged with communications gear, biomonitors, or gunfire detectors in the area to clue in everyone else nearby.

-Drawing fire: You're a security guard. You're down behind a table or a wall somewhere in a lab, you peek your head around the corner, and what do you see? A couple of muzzle flashes from the guys in the trenchcoats poking their pistols out from behind the big solid objects they prefer to hide behind, and four cubic feet of fire pouring out of the muzzle of the LMG the ten foot tall, 700 pound dude is spraying the room down with. Given this list of targets for your return fire/grenade/manabolt/commlink-command-to-the-autogun-turret-in-the-ceiling, which do you think would be the highest priority? Diverting more fire towards the tank isn't lame, or cheating on the GM's part... it's the obvious choice.

Dropping any of someone's attributes to zero disables them, but they don't necessarily have to be unconscious.

If Charisma is supposed to be their force of personality or whatever, then maybe at that point they become completely unmotivated and just sit there staring off into space.

Zeroing out Logic can shut down their decision-making capacity. Zeroing Intuition could mean they lose their ability to interpret their senses and memories. Zeroing Willpower can mean they lose any sense of self and are incapacitated by confusion.

Dropping the physical stats to zero could mean shutting down the person's voluntary muscle control in any number of relevant ways.

Explain it however feels best, but they don't actually have to be unconscious. Just effectively shut down.

I don't know if I would say they are unbalance but mages are the hardest to deal with from a gm's point of view.

As a gm I can just geek a dumb pc mage that is not the problem, pcs do it to npc mages all the time. It just makes me feel dirty. What can I say don't like beating on the retarded kid everyday ether.

On the other hand a smart pc mage will drive me nuts because they will tend spend hours pouring over the ill written magic sections looking or the next rules hack to spring on me in the middle of the game. I hate the line "but its magic". Since the laws of physics don't apply they seem to think common sense shouldn't ether. I wish the magic rules were written like computer programs with clear inturperations. I wish mages wouldn't come up with crap and try to spring it on me in the middle of a run.

If something sounds to good to be true could you at least run it past the gm and get his ruling on it. I know, I know you must hord you new found toy, or the npcs could prepare for it since they know what the gm knows. But think about it do you want your gm to have to tell you are wrong during a combat where you could die or out of game where it wont effect the game.

The gm and the pc should always be on the same page. That is the first step to a good game. If you play a mage do you and your campaign a favor and play smart. Remember you a soft and popable your first action would be better spent finding cover, even if that cover is a street sam, then casting your biggest aoe spell before other pcs get into your line of sight just because you want to feel effective. Second talk with your gm and get on the same page for spelleffects and spirt powers.

just my rant

true hobgoblin, I just get tired of it with magic because the printed rules are all we have to fall back on.

example turn to goo ... wtf
that isn't open to interpetation or anything

ok. I have a confession. I both love and hate TM drone riggers.

If you play mage NPCs, you can abuse their abilities, too.

...I think my choice is pretty clear.

I'll stand by my adage...

"Mages are able to defend themselves better against mundane threats than mundanes are able to defend against magical threats" ("Geek the mage first" isn't always surefire)

This goes doubly so if the opposing mage in question happens to be a troll...

For that you need the Panther Assault Cannon.

honestly...

*'it aint the weapon. it's the weilder'

players make the munchkin characters.




*(which is also my attitude toward any gunbunny.)

I've never seen a munchkin gunbunny in SR, and that's because the gunbunny rules are balanced such that more powerful weapons come with a great cost (generally concealability). The troll has a panther assault cannon? That'll really be a lot of help in an AAA zone where Lone Star has a camera on every street corner.

Magic is always concealable and generally reasonably resistant to most forms of physical countermeasures.