Which stat do people find to be utterly useless, or at least less useful than every other stat?

Strength is less useful than any other stat.

It's certainly not utterly useless, though.

Bye
Thanee

I voted edge...but let me explain.

For different character types, different stats are important, or completely useless. I mean, for mundanes, magic is not used. For anything other than technomancers, resonance is not used.

So, you could go down the chain of each attribute and point out a type of character that wouldn't use one of them...or really even need them.

Edge is the only one that all characters can get some use out of, but conversely, could be taken out of the game and not majorly affect anyone...

So, throwing all character types together, the only stat that I can say is really not needed as much as any other stat is edge...

Strength is not less useful if you have a character focusing on unarmed combat or melee weapons. Granted, that is not the biggest pool of characters by far, but it is pretty darn important to someone using a melee weapon or martial arts.

I voted magic just to yank Emo's chain

There's no such thing as a useless stat. Even strength is necessary if you want to carry stuff around and your GM isn't ignoring the encumbrance rules. Every stat has a character that will focus on it, and a character that will ignore it as much as possible.

@deek: Yeah, I think I look at it from another direction.

Like, take all possible character concepts. Then look at each and figure out which attribute is useful or not so much for them. Then, I think, Strength will come up last, overall. That's how I understood the question.

Magic, for example, while not useful at all for a majority of the character concepts, is clearly the most powerful attribute for those, where it is, therefore it ends up somewhere in the middle, I guess.

Edge is useful for absolutely everyone. I also think that Edge is extremely potent in play. I would be tempted to put it on the first rank, actually.

Body, Reaction, Intuition are also very universally useful attributes, closely followed by Agility and Willpower. Charisma is also useful, but not necessarily for everyone and Logic is only for certain types, as is Strength. Those two are the 'universally weakest' attributes IMHO.

Bye
Thanee

@Thanee

Yeah, I see where you are coming from, and certainly agree. I chose my angle because I knew I could defend it and would make for good debate:)

And while I definitely agree with Edge's potency in play, it is also the one attribute, if you remove it completely, affects every single character the same, but still allows all to be played effectively.

I like Edge and what it brings, but I think a game can be run and enjoyed without it, thus making less useful than any other attribute...

This is probably the munchkin nature of my group showing up, but for us, charisma is the stat that is invariably the lowest on every character in our group and the least used.

That raises another point: the weakest stat frequently depends on the game style. In Lagomorph's game either social interaction is a minor part, or it's handled more through role playing (I don't know which). In another game social interaction might be the be-all-end-all of how to complete a run, and Agility's importance might get replaced.

Logic and Strength are usually the ones my group skips on.

Amusingly, they end up in a decent number of fistfights, where you'd think having another point or two of damage coming out would be beneficial.

Personally, I'm a fan of the house rule that give bonues to recoil comp based on strength - it makes it worth investing points in, then. It makes sams and mercs scary as shit, though (especially the ork and troll ones).

(ducks out of sight before someone burns me as a heretic)

...Based on the runs I've participated in, I chose logic

except for some technical skills and Drain for Hermetics...

It doesn't mean a thing for a hacker since the DP is based on Programme rating + applicable skill (Hacking, Electronic Warfare, Data Search)

Knowledge skills are no longer supplementary to active skills as they were in SR3.

Strength on the other hand not only governs DV in melee combat, but also how much crap a character can haul around with them, whether he or she can default on skills like swimming & running (the latter having come into play on quite a number of occasions), and as Apathy mentioned, if you use the HR on Recoil Compensaton.

I'd go with Logic...only Hackers would really need it, and they can pass on it entirely if they put their money into some decent programs. Strength is still necessary for melee attacks. Logic can literally just be replaced with money, with no real ill effects at all.

It really depends on the build. For non-fighters or spellslingers, Strength will be the least useful stat. Even some fighter builds are possible with a low Strength (such as an elven gunslinger with a monofilament whip). For non-techies such as shamans (heck, anyone but a rigger, hacker, or technomancer), Logic is not that useful.

But no stat is useless. Even if you don't fight, Strength still determines things like how much you can carry. And Logic is one of the stats that you use to figure out your free starting knowledge skills.

Voted edge, however like has been said, all depends on character concept. They're all important but you're gonna only want to roll edge or have a pt. availiable for when you realy need to do that one thing to pull your hoop out of the fire.

Strength, as only few runners get into unarmed combats.

Strength can be largely unnessecary, even for a melee combattant. I am presently playing a character right now who has melee ability (he wields a combat axe with 9 dice) and I didn't bother buying his strength above 1. Okay, so the main reason I have the combat axe is for use in astral combat, but the fact remains that even a melee-capable character doesn't need strength.

Charisma is used in defense against some spirit powers and lots of social situations. Having low/no social skills can leave you highly succeptible to characters with them, as social situations happen even if your character is uncouth with 1 charisma. Uncouth means your character cannot resist an attempt to con you. Think about that before you leave the uncouth troll to guard somewhere. "Excuse me, I need to use the toilet." is probably all the fast-talk they'd need.

Edge is not entierly useless for any character who might find themselves in a combat situation, as it's used in defense against suppressive fire.

How do you carry anything with a strength of 1?

A good thing to have done with this poll is to include none of the above.
All stats are important especially to have a well rounded character.

Logic is the most usless stat for any character that isn't a Mage. From my understanding of the rules, it is barely ever used.

Could he even carry the axe?

Maybe. But nothing more

"Hey, we're attacked by a naked nerd wielding a battle axe!"

Actually I was thinking that Body was one of the less useful ones to buy actual points in, but only because there are a number of ways to substantially increase your body using 'ware and increase your soak pool with armour.

As far as improving your condition monitor, you need to make quite an investment in those traits to make much of a difference due to the +8 bump they both receive.

Still, I null-voted as all stats are important depending on character type. Whoever you are, you're going to have a dump stat, but what precisely that is depends on character.

Of course you all knew that already.

"Nope. Not even for hackers...any activity you're undertaking using Hacking, Computer, or Electronic Warfare has a program to accomplish it. And if you're using a program to hack, your Logic doesn't come into play at all.

Basically, you can be dumb as a stone and still be a great hacker, if you have the cash. "

Which seems very odd. RAW, but odd.

I voted Charisma, only two character types need it for much of anything. The face for negotiations, etc. and the mage for conjuring. Strength is a close second for all the previous arguments.

Again, it's largely contingent on the expansion of the hacking rules beyond the BBB. It's the same with every edition of SR... decking was never really well developed without the decker-related books. If we get things like code SOTA, reprogrammable (for special purposes) source code, or any number of other things thrown into the works that would make logical hackers happy, they should display an advantage over the script-kiddie Logic 2 hackers. Until the RAW includes more than just the BBB, we're working with a really stripped-down set of rules intended to let you have a hacker do his stuff.

I don't consider a game "finished" until it's core books are all out. My personal issues with the release schedule aside, I'm aware (as are my players) that when a book for a particular "type" of character comes out, they're probably going to noticeably change, right down to me letting them rebuild a version of that character that takes into account all the new stuff and changes in how things work. Yeah, there's some stats now that are kinda useless, but I'm not going to pass final judgement until we have all of the main game books in the pool.

I was never really all that fond of the add-on rulebooks for Shadowrun...while they were good reads, I found they generally increased the accounting end of the game to the point of being almost unmanageable, especially when it came to making custom equipment and the "extra" rules for minute details.

But of course, your mileage may vary.

Some made more sense than others. Honestly, playing SR2 or SR3 with only the BBB rules in hand didn't do much for me... my players liked more variety. Drones in SR2, if memory served, ate up 1/3 of 1 page, and you weren't actually sure how they worked. Add in (playing SR3) Man and Machine, the Cannon Companion, the SR3 Companion, Virtual Realities 2.0, and Magic in the Shadows, and you had a pretty thoroughly fleshed out game. Rigger 3 added a lot of oddball stuff, but 2/3 of it could be ignored (just like the 1/3 of the stuff in the other books that could be ignored) and the game stayed playable.

If you used every rule out of every addon book, the game got to be a bit much. Happily, I play with a group that's pretty flexible... we say "Yeah, we're just not going to use X rule, treat it like the BBB says" when we encounter something we'd rather not deal with. At worst, a stickit or pencil notation in the book used as a game table reference (or an online changelog, which I've started using) makes this easy for everyone.

Trouble with writing your own programs is that the time is listed in months.
Where that may be realistic it essentailly makes writing your programs not possible without a lot of downtime. Just upgrading your hacking 3 to 5 with Logic 7 Software 5 would take a month.

However Logic also affects build and repair skills: opening up that maglock; upgrading your guns or drones, becomes easier.

We can always pray that the programming times are tweaked a little in Unwired.