just to see what eople actually play

Faces and Hacker-Sam Hybrids are probably my two favorites to play, though I have tried quite a few other types out.

Hackers.

Mages kill EVERYTHING.

Its good to be a sam. you get guns, armor, and boosted stats and abilities. fast gunfights and kungfu battles, abilities beyond that of mortal men.

sure, an adept can be better than a sam, but only at one thing. the sam is good at a half-dozen things, and can serve a number of different roles on the team. Theres nothing to stop a sam from being a face, a hacker/rigger, or such. The sam is defined not just by his gear, but by his skill as well. And while a true sam will be able to fight very well, he will have other skills.

personaly, i favor backing up my combat skills with some decent hardware skills. plus one rank in a few skills with no default that im gonna need (automotive mechanics, electronic warfare, ect).

SammiFaceSkillMasters.

Needs a lot of Karma, though

I never got into rigging or decking. My characters are almost always faces on top of whatever else they do. Sams/adepts are both good, as well as shamans. So far I think I've done an almost equal number of those three (plus riggers, actually).

I think my group is skewed... I have a hard time getting people to NOT play Adepts and Mages.

Am I missing the poll option for Hackers?

I'm the only person so far to have clicked the Face option - Thats quite worrying, but not suprising considering how few faces I find in games I play in.

Then I'm face two...

I've only created two characters so far and only played one (until later today), but so far I've thoroughly enjoyed playing a phys adept stealth asassin bunny that's also a hacker. Weird combo but very handy when you're the best one to go into a tight security facility nd need to do some hacking to get past security stuff, etc.

sorry I fragged up the poll...I thought I had the hacker/technomancer type in there.

Yay for ape-shaman/face/rigger/hackers! You would not expect it work, but it does. My character is around 40% shaman/30% face/20% rigger/10% hacker, if you want it in numbers. No weaknesses, and he still is a very good spellslinger and a superb face(increased charisma sustained by a bound force 8 spirit - good luck banishing this. ).
I voted for face, though, since my first idea was a face, then I found out how well this combines with a shaman, especially with an ape, which I wanted to play one of for quite a long time. When I had money left over, I bought some drones, an agent, and some programs... That's it.

UndeadPoet's a one-man Shadowrun team!

Yeah, definately goofed up missing Hacker/Decker/Otaku/Technomancer (I'm being SR3 friendly)

Which would have been my pick. They make pretty good riggers too, so I guess I'll let you say hello to my leetle friends.

I like how a bit of riggery fits(GP-wise ) into any character. I mean, you get a really cool spider drone for 1000 nuyen(1/5 GP), and a wider variety for just one single GP. With five GP you have a drone armada with programs and all that fun.

I would understand if he had not included riggers in the poll because of this fact(that no "pure" riggers can't exist anymore), but hackers/technomancers... Yeah, weird.

Being a one-man-shadowrun-team is quite cool for everyone in the group, by the way. The gamemaster can keep in realistic(no "there is a maglock... oh, noone in the group can handle that? Okay, the door is just open for no obvious reason.") and the players can play any archetype they want, because we are in no particular need of a certain archetype.
Did I mention they all play streetsams and killer-adepts?

The humble magic user for me!

If the group is so poorly equipped that they don't even have a maglock passkey, much less someone who can actually make an attempt at opening a maglock, there's no way I'm going to have the door be magically open for them Maglocks are such a staple piece of terrain that it's kinda ridiculous for that to be the case.

What I might do, though, is have the Johnson make a low-level passkey available to them during the meet... "This dongle should be able to take care of any of the locks you may encounter on-site, but I'm sure you've got someone to take care of any really tricky ones, right?" After a while of occasionally setting off alarms with their low-rating loaner passkeys, I'm sure the group would get sick of it and learn/chip/get-their-own-passkey the issue.

How do you handle passkeys? Is it just rating vs. rating, or do you roll rating vs. rating?

i usually do a hybrid. a gunmonkey skillhole with some social. i'd rather leave myself 'capable' in various situations than to be extraordinary in one aspect and hosed everywhere else. i've never been big on caster in any genre, deckers used to need such special attention i avoided them, and the secured away rigger running drones risking only cost of replacement toys never did a thing for me.

right. its a new SR. maybe i'll venture down a new path for a change.

My current character is a street sam with rigging skills. A front line combatant with a few drones to back him up. So far it's been a blast, even though the first combat my doberman spent waiting outside a fence, and the second one I went down in a hail of bullets.

...it is a actually somewhat a tossup between Adepts & Skill Masters.

I broaden Adepts to include the total Bio character. (all Bio enhancement) Granted the resource cap does mess with getting to 3 IPs (160,000 for Synaptic boost 2) but it is way more elegant and usually much harder to detect than Wires. The same goes for the traditional magic (or KI, depending on your take) based Adept (can't wait for the martial arts rules to come out again).

Either type can pretty much freely walk through say an airport or Corp HQ scanner and not trip any sensors as long as you are not packing a firearm or metal blade.

For offence: Unarmed combat with Several levels of Bone Density or Improved Critical Strike, and possibly Thrown Weapon skill as well.

For defence: a couple levels of Mystic Armour or Orthoskin underneath an Actioneer business suit. (they also need to bring back Formfit)

BTW, One character type totally missed in this poll is the Deck...er...Hacker. (I still prefer the old term)