BBZZZTTTT! Wrong-o!

Do you honestly think front line soldiers don't know how to hide? Teaching cover and concealment is a pretty standard thing in the military. Dude, why do you think they wear camo instead of World War I era distinctive uniforms?

Seriously, dude. Thinking back to various people I've known who were in the infantry, a discharged Marine lance corporal, an Army lieutenant, and an Army sergant, they were all trained in cover and concealment. I think your idea that NATO troops can't hide is something like 90+ years out of date.

Why do you think that a soldier can't have a lot of ettiquette? Do you think the military dosen't have ettiquette? There's certain attitudes you have to project, certain ways you have to act towards high ranking people, and certain types of humor and language that is appropriate in the context of the military but not in different settings. Again, I say, as long as your soldier isn't mentally retarded and unable to interact pleasantly with other human beings he is going to have some Ettiquette.

In fact it's not even strictly speaking true that a soldier cannot have a good Computers skill. Many people join the military and have computer-related jobs and are still also qualified with various weapons.

I think that your idea of how narrowly focused people have to be isn't based on reality.

This just sounds totally arbitrary to me. If mages can't go to Thunder Ranch and do a lot of tactical handgun work because of their dangerous line of work why do you take it for granted that they're somehow magically going to acquire cover and concealment training? What, do they teach cover and concealment at Hogwarts? I'm getting mental images of Harry Potter with a boonie hat and a bloody kaybar held in front of his grimacing camoed-up face.

And again I don't see why the mage would necessarily be more socially sensitive than anyone else. Why is a mage less disposed to be socially retarded than a soldier? I mean, it's the mage who shuts himself in his room for a week straight to go on his wild astral quest. ("And then, dude, I found the citadel, and the solution to my problem was symbolized by this gigantic floating sausage..." "SHUT UP, TALON!") I think that's more socially alienating behavior than a lot of other archetypes can pull off.

I dunno, dude. If I were going to become a mercenary I might just take a few tactical shotgunning or pistols classes and empty a few hundred rounds on the range every week. You're forgetting that a "typical decker" has still chosen to be a professional mercenary. A "typical decker" is not a "typical white collar IT professional" because unlike his civilian counterpart he expects to deal with shoot-to-kill security on a regular freaking basis.

And once again it's completely illogical and bizarre to claim that a decker will magically have this great Ranger sniper cover and concealment training but that he can't train long and hard with his sidearm.

This paragraph dosen't logically follow from your previous paragraphs. Here you're making a declation that certain archetypes must not be good at certain things but you don't really give a reason for these ideas.

Besides, I think you're really exaggerating. It dosen't matter if the sammie has Computers 5 and is as knowledgable in computer science as the decker. What makes the decker is the fact that he's sunk a lot of resources into a good cyberdeck and has hopefully specialized his contacts and knowledge skills around helping him do a better job. So when it comes to actually doing anything dangerous and challenging in cyberspace the sammie is *not* going to do as well as the decker because, quite simply, most of his resources are pumped into his meat bod and not a cyberdeck.

I mean, if you think Computers 5 is all you need to be a successful decker, and you don't think that this is related to the amount of resources you pump into your cyberdeck, that's just weird.

As the GM you should cackle with glee if the sammie wastes resources by pumping up computers and buying a mediocre deck in addition to all his bodyware. You were just handed a crappy sammie cum crappy decker to play with.

This analogy shows how you're missing the whole point of resource allocation. If this were shadowrun the shooting specialist wouldn't just be Rifles 6 alone. He'd have cyberwear arranged to make his shooting better, or he'd be a physad with his points pumped into vision enhancements and Rifles 6 (12). Just because you're a decker who also decided to pump up Rifles you're still not going to be as good as either of those characters just because of the skill alone.

So you wouldn't give each guard, who is specifically standing there looking around for trouble, a chance to spot someone hiding in the bushes? You're telling me that if someone is specifically looking for something you won't give him the chance to see it unless it creeps directly past him?

Just say his character is too powerful for a new game and have him make a new character. Starting with a 100 karma advantage isn't nice to the n00bs in your group anyway.

Well, the differences between the higher skill levels (like 5, 6, 7, and as described in SR3 become increasingly dramatic. There isn't that much difference between a skill of 1 and 2 (just a couple hours of practice can make that difference) but there's a huge difference between 7 (master, or whatever it's called) and 8, world class, since being world class is something that by definition most people are just not capable of attaining.

So, it's not such a big deal if you gave a "regular" infantryman Stealth of 5 and his friend the Ranger had a Stealth of 6. In terms of how the rules describe it 6 is a lot more refined than 5.

Just say that if your regular soldier was really good at cover and concealment he has a 6. If he was trained in it but sucks give him a 4, and otherwise stick him with the 5.

On the other hand the Ranger Sniper will probably have at least 6, he might have Aptitude (Stealth), and/or he could have Stealth 5 (Hiding 7) or something like that. He could also have specialized gear like ruthenium duds or whatnot.

Once again, the degree of specialization isn't dicated by the skill level alone. Someone who is really specialized in stealth because he's a sniper would have pumped more resources into gear that helps him hide whereas the "regular" who is trained in cover and concealment but who is more concerned with other skills will have spent his resources differently. Maybe he has a 5 in Stealth but he isn't going to be as effective in stealth-specific things as the sniper who has pumped more resources into things like ruthenium or whatever.

You seem to be really hung up on skill levels and forgetting about all those SR3 sourcebooks filled with gear and cyberwear and magic that is designed for various purposes.

What? What is "the minimum starting attribute"?

A few times in the past I've GMed military SR campaigns, and I've also played in a few. In those settings the GMs usually did stipulate certain minimum skill levels in certain tasks. Is that what you mean?

So, yeah, I've done that, and so have others, in some cases.

So the mercenary has been trained in cover and concealment but dosen't care enough about it to practice it until it's a professional level. He's "professional" with assault rifles, support weapons, and punching you in the head. Perhaps it would be sensible for him to have Edged Weapons, Pistols, Shotguns, SMGs, or some combinations of those at 2 or so just to be in character about the kinds of things the character would have been exposed to, but I guess they decided that wasn't essential to clutter the archetype with so they just went ahead and simplified things a bit.

So the corporate security rent a cop only has pistols 4. Whoop de do. Today a lot of security guards never have to use their guns and are probably more like pistols 2 or 3. I guess the SR world is more violent so they take their skills a little more seriously.

The SWAT team member has a 6 where it counts for him regarding stealth and his bread and butter skill is at a 7. He operates with a lot of support and from an advantageous position, usually, so that's probably all he needs. He's not a mercenary who operates without support and without medevac in a hostile environment.

I don't see how this supports the thesis that the PCs are supposed to have crappy stealth and they're not allowed to like computers.

Once again, the Metroplex Guardsman isn't trained to operate without support, without medevac, and without air support in a hostile environment. Of course all that he needs is SMGs, and a little bit of unarmed for dealing with noncompliant citizens. He's basically a glorified cop who has a submachinegun. Kind of like the Italian police I guess.

You gave a bunch of examples of cannon figures who are not usually going to face the difficulties and threats that a shadowrunner can expect as part of day to day business. None of this invalidates the need for a broad range of skills by the unsupported and logistically isolated shadowrunner.

A better place to look for examples would be to look at those old cannon adventures where super special forces units with crazy insane stats, like the Tir Ghosts, show up to instapwn everyone. To make a valid comparison you need to be looking at NPCs whose profession is to isolated with limited logistics, no support, limited supplies, and limited resources for long periods of time in hostile territory. That's a lot more than even the SWAT team is trained for.

I'm also tired of the "I've got a piece of gear/spell/skill/toy/spirit (choose one) that totally renders that moot" style of gaming.

(Actually, maybe that's why I'm not running/playing SR atm.)

Edit 2
Sorry. I guess my post has less to do with the matter at hand and more to do with my frustrations with my last game. Please don't take my rantings as an attack on anyone's style of play. I'm just tired of what SR has turned into with my current group. Bah.

Or they can grow some testicles and carry ARs with collapsible stocks.

That's because NATO does it wrong. There is one and only one correct way to fight a war. Both sides line up in rectangular formation on an open and level field, advance to within five meters of each other, and then shoot untill only one side is left. Anyone who does it differently should be executed by firing squad.



I hope that was sufficiently sarcastic.



Most NPC archetypes are mooks. Shadowrunners aren't mooks. If they were then they would have died long before the campaign even started.

If you want to avoid two-dimensional cookie cutter characters then lower BP presents a problem. As has been mentiond that'll just make the characters more cookie-cutter. A better solution is to vary your campaign and make sure the PCs know it.

There exist skills that very few characters take at high levels because they just aren't very useful. Diving, Parachuting, Wilderness Survival, Pilot Ship, Pilot Submarine, Pilot Walker, Pilot Suborbital, B/R Spacecraft, B/R Submarine, B/R Parachute, Lockpicking (Safecracking), Leadership, and Underwater Combat just to name a few.

All of the aforementioned skills can be useful in certain situations. What you have to do is put your PCs in situations such that they will need these oft-forgoten skills and make sure that they are fully aware of it before the game starts.

If a player hands in a generic 125 BP ex-soldier hand the sheet back and suggest, "Why don't you shave some points off here and here and make the guy an ex-paratrooper. You'll be happy you did when we get to that point in the game."

When the rigger consults you about the vehicle skills he'll need helpfully say "we've got a paratrooper so something capable of high-altitude flight would be good and don't be afraid to take a couple points of Spacecraft B/R, micrometeorites can be a bitch. "

When the melee adept hands in his beautifully twinked sheet remind him " If you ever fall into a swimming pool by accident you're going to get your ass kicked since you'll be defaulting to STR. A few points of Underwater Combat may help."

And don't forget the ever useful "There may come a time when you'll have to give orders to some NPC mooks. Maybe you've hired them. Maybe the Johnson gave them to you. And hey, Leadership work on hostages to."

And my favorite "Characters with Wilderness Survival don't have to roll poision oak butt-wiping accident tests. Its useful because the TN modifiers for wiping with poision oak are huge and you really don't want the cybered up troll to apply lotion there , right?"

Really? I'm not arguing, as I know exactly bugger and all about RL firearms training, but it seems like a pistol would make the most sense as a defensive weapon, as it's easier to carry around and draw quickly/inconspicuously. Or is "answering the door" the common case in defensive firearms use?

There, fixed it for ya...

I don't think they're "insane" at all. I just think people have gotten so used to the notion that "shadowrunner" and "hardcore professional mercenary" are the same thing that the descriptions don't fit their games anymore.

I like that level of game. To me, those skill descriptions are why the Red Samurai with a SMG skill of 7 is scary, why the mage flinging around force 6 spells with a sorcery of 6 is terrifying and hard to beat, etc. Ignoring the suggestions for skill equivilancy leads to needing to have 10s in skills to be "ahead of the game".

It's a matter of balancing the PCs and the NPCs of your world. If my players have 6s in skills, then an NPC needs 8s to seem like a "decent" challenge. If they "only" have 4s, then I can make a "kick ass" NPC that has a 6 in pistols, and it still jives with the descriptions of the skills as given in the book.

IMCs, "shadowrunner" doesn't mean what "hero" does in games like D&D. You're but one of many people out there trying to turn a dishonest nuyen. You're the same as that "NPC mook" that's working 9-5 at the Stuffer Shack to put food on your family's table, only you're willing (or have the connections to be able) to put life and limb on the line to do really illegal stuff for what you hope will be a decent profit.

So somewhere along the line, you learned to use a pistol (or whatever skill, it's just an example) well enough to hit what you were aiming at most of the time, and started looking for work roughing people up for Big Jimmy. Simplistic example, but hopefully it makes sense.

That's not to say that I never run higher power games. I'm just giving my "default" preference.

The differance between the cashier and the Shadowrunner is that the cashier will probably go his entire life without even witnessing a single act of violence. The Shadowrunner, on the other hand, will probably get into a firefight once or twice a week.

The average peace officer or rent-a-cop will never have any need to draw his weapon untill retirony kicks in. They can get by with nothing but bare minimum qualification standards.

The average soldier is a noncom who will never be in the same country as a battle or even an adjacent country.

The average SWAT officer trains for months and months without any chance to put his skills to use.

The average SpecOps soldier trains for months and months untill his skills are needed, crosstrains with his teammates so that he can do their jobs almost as well as they can (this translates to a Compters 5 Sammy and a Heavy Weapons 5 Decker on the same team), and then spends a realitivly short time in the field before being rotated out. Most of their work involves training allied irregulars and gathering intel with a great risk of combat by few actual direct engagments (Special Operations have neither the numbers, training, equipment, nor logistics for regular combat and attempts to use them as regulars universally have disasterous results).

And I could go on and on but my assertions become a bit more tenuous from here and I'm getting tired.

The fact is that Shadowrunners see more combat more often and more regulary than anyone else out there. If they aren't good a surviving combat one way or another then they should be dead already.

The best warriors today train almost constantly. Shadowrunners live it almost daily.

Edit:
As for skill levels, you don't need a Pistols 8 NPC to upstage a Pistols 6 PC. No. A 1 hit kill from a pistols 6 NPC is just as good as the same from a pistols 8 NPC and quite possible with a called shot to bypass armor and a SL 2.

The thing about ranged combat is that it is countered with speed, comabt pool, and body in that order. You don't have to overcome the PCs' skill. You have to overcome their speed and their CP. Beating CP is rather easy for msot NPCs and beating speed can be done with a little extra cyber or some drugs.

Consider this. A character with a pistols skill of 1 misses a stationary target at point-blank range without aiming half the time. For each and every extra point of skill this miss ratio is divided by 2. A skill of 3 still misses the stationary target 1/8 of the time, not good enough to qualify in some programs 4 misses 1/16 and can reasonably qualify without much difficulty. 5 misses stationary targets at 1/32 and is actually worth something in combat conditions. 6 misses stationary at a rate of targets 1/64 but still has problems in adverse conditions. TN mods easily drop that to 15625/46656. They also easily increase it to 1/46656.

The TN modifiers always matter more than the skill. High skill does better at all TNs but it can be required to do well at base TNs in some situations. A pistol skill of 5 is required to do well at Base range combat TNs but a real professional will do everything in his power to stack TNs in his favor.

You're not even taking pools into account yet.

Weak!

The proper way to fight a battle is to line up with a bunch of your friends, wearing shiny bits of metal and carrying colorful banners, charge into the enemy's similar line, and hit them with chunks of sharpened steel until they're dead or run away.

How about in case of an attack by a drone rigger? It's trivially easy to build a drone that can negotiate personnel spaces and still bounce non-AV assault cannon rounds, say nothing about small-arms fire. (Hell, there's at least one canon available-at-character-generation drone that can do it out of the box.) If your top-secret facilities aren't equipped to cope with a shadowrunning team that has a drone rigger, don't go blaming your players for it.

You complain about people having too many 6s and yet you introduce this rule to blast low skill levels in the direction of the moon.

Then, at the same time, you say that the perfectly cannon perfectly standard 1,000,000 nuyen starting resources is a metagaming death sentence.

And apparently secret facilities aren't allowed to store anti-vehicular rounds even though there are plenty of off-the-shelf drones that anyone could deploy against said facility.

My head is starting to hurt.

Seriously. If you don't want there to be, like, weapons in your campaign, run the journalist one.

or he could have started out with skills of 3-4 in his main skills and have improved over the last couple of years

the example guy I gave ya before was someone who is a rich heir who wanted to escape high society

believing that chipped skills are as good as the real thing, te only stuff he trained natural was his gun skills

my usual cyber chars often have the million, but their backrounds show why it is plausable

I gave an example ofhow 100 points is abusable, incidentally I don't use Skillwires onmost of my 125 pt characters... I feel the natural skills are good enough, but at 100 pts it seemed necessary to survive

Well, it's hard to shoot things that are behind cover and that are shooting back. That's the whole entire point of suppressive fire.

Maybe after training with a 1911 for half a year you can land your round in the black from 50 feet away from a formal shooting stance. If you're being suppressed by automatic fire that just went out the window.

Furthermore, someone who is correctly using cover will present a very small target indeed. It's not strictly speaking "correct" to poke your head up over a wall and take shots from behind it because you're silhouetting. It's more "correct" to use the side of the wall and expose only the tiniest sliver of your eye and head while you take shots.

So, if your TNs are high, you damn well shouldn't hit very often.

Why are you complaining about skill 6 with your left hand while your use your right hand to try and make cover and smoke and suppression fire not count?

You're so quick to complain about the fundamentals of the game and propose counter rules but it looks like you're not even considering the statistics for an instant.

Look at Hyzmarca's analysis. Because you're ignorning statistics you're imagining a problem where one dosen't even exist numerically.

Yes. Starting with 6 in the things that count is efficient use of your points. Getting to 6 in game generally represents a tremendous investment in karma and is therefore something that happens if you were inefficient at chargen.

I wouldn't bother to upgrade from something like 4 to something like 6, honestly. I might upgrade from 6 to 7 and beyond because that would be giving me something I can't get in chargen but going from 4 to 6 means that you made a bad decision about where to stick your 4 when clearly what you really needed was a 6.

Uh, in my experiences most sammies take the million especially if they're using the Priorities system. I'm really puzzled by your statement about "very few" players.

In any case, what you describe is metagaming, because the Resources aren't an actual money amount. They represent *resources*, which is why it's called "resources". They represent anything a character may have that is helpful, such as contacts and Doc Wagon, not just money spent on cyberwear. And even if someone did have a lot of cyberwear he or she still has to eat. That's like asking why a man with 12 handguns needs to work and get a paycheck. Next.

Oh, OK, good. I'd say then that your player is the silly one for complaining about it. He should be happy that if he survived he can now load AV rounds.

Heh, I'd think it would be?

"AV rounds! Here comes my free ride! Give it to me, baby! Hand of God, meet Santy Calus!"

I know But resources don't appear out of thin air. Simply saying "Here's 1 million, spend it" is metagaming just as much as saying "taking a 1 million nuyen requires a background storyline." Being as I don't allow shallow-depth characters in a campaign anyway, I tend to make sure my players explain at least their specialized areas. And now, silly stories.

One rigger we had was a former air-force pilot who was in a car accident and was heavily injured. This explained his pilot/driving skills, VCR and 3 'ware limbs. He took a "loan" from the mob (I think I worked it out so that he had to pay the mob back for his cyber-limbs, but he got them for cheaper during chargen or something. I forgot, it was like a year ago) to afford this stuff.

The "big mech" guy was doing R+D for a corp when an accident more or less crippled him. His project, the mech thing, was shelved; but he fixed up his prototype with his sister's help and began running to pay the bills on their high-rank estate. The mech cost a lot of money and was real strong, and the penalty? A: he was a quadrapalegic so without the mech, he had a motorized wheelchair to go around - and since you can't just stroll through downtown Seattle in a mech without the army getting to you, that's a penalty. B: The thing is really expensive to repair, so damage done to it - and that was a lot - was never really fixed.

But every 1,000,00 has to come from somewhere. It could be an extensive web of contacts - but the penalty for that is, say the character messes something up on the job, he's a big name so the wounded corp might be able to track him down. It could be a bunch of foci; that's slightly harder to do much with, but not impossible. It could be cyberware earned during time in the army. That's totally fine! But wouldn't the army keep at least a DNA record of its soldiers?

And furthermore, why WOULD someone quit the army that just gave them 850K in alphaware? Voulentary retirement? Maybe, and perhaps the "work in the private sector" never materialized in the long run, leading to shadowrunning. Even an honorable discharge has a paper-trail. A dishonorable one? Well, you get the idea.

So I really don't think its metagaming - or bad metagaming, anyway - to insist that characters have a background that, yes, might include having cheesed off the local talislegger, or having a police record (after all, there's a good flaw for that), or even having a personal vendetta against Lone-Star (seen it happen, much to my amusement.)

i fail to see why spending 30 points in resources has to come with extra penalties, whereas spending 30 points anywhere else doesn't.