Not everything has to be notated by a bonus or a penalty... Why is it that people are so dedicated to a rules mindset that the idea of penalties has to even enter the conversation? Is there no standard to be had unless the Most Holy RAW descends from upon high and smites those who break its divine laws? Am I completely insane?

D20 has destroyed the world. I love having a convenient scapegoat. Thank you, Wizards.

- der menkey

"Certainly there is no hunting like the hunting of man and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never really care for anything else thereafter."
~ Ernest Hemingway

Yes, there is a standard. One sign of a munchkin is that he has a character with only one or two tricks, and is completely unplayable otherwise. A well-designed system will try and rein in munchkins. Since SR4 fails to do that, I have to question how well-designed it is. In SR4, you can completely max out one or two tricks, and still have a playable character-- see the Starting Characters thread for an example of a playable Pornomancer.

Check any number of character creation threads here on Dumpshock. You'll see tons of characters with primary dice pools in the 18+ range. A bunch of these are even in play. If the designers didn't intend for players to create characters at that level, there'd be some restriction on it. As it stands, there's not.

The "four guys with clubs" was something your friend tossed out, and probably meant a bit tongue-in-cheek, but it rubs me the wrong way, as it seems to imply that a shadowrunner who could easily handle such an encounter is a munchkin, when, from my POV, even a combat-oriented character who is rolling the low end of monkey's preference, 12 dice, will mop the floor with four ordinary guys.


As far as "early detection and intervention" of problem characters,, the best way is for the GM to be more specific in what he is expecting from the characters. If he is uncomfortable with dice pools over a certain amount, then those hard numbers need to be told to potential players beforehand. That's actually better than fixing characters afterwards, because then the player won't feel like his character has been weakened.

And when you audit a character's sheet, look at more than how many dice the character uses for one skill.

Look at the background - is it a description of a shadowrunner, or a mish-mash of justifications for this or that piece of gear?

Look at the other stats and skills. Are the dump stats or skill omissions things that wouldn't make sense for such a character? Does the character have the ability to have actually survived the Seattle streets long enough to join a shadowrunning team? Is the character missing essential skills?

But if there are problems, help the player. This is a golden opportunity to explain to the player how your world works. Instead of simply saying "Your Willpower is too low", explain about mana spells, and resisting intimidation, and having a low stun monitor. Explain how having some skill in infiltration or etiquette can help the character sneak into places, or get gear from his contacts more quickly.

I agree 100% with what Glyph said about clearly setting expectations for your players to meet rather than trying to use the character sheet as some sort of litmus test for detecting bad eggs. Seriously, the sheet test is notoriously unreliable anyway, and I've found that many new players actually hide behind their piles of dice because frankly they don't know what else to do yet or how they fit in at a given gaming table. That's not even touching the issue of imported players who come from high lethality games where powergaming is considered de rigueur either. A lot of powergaming comes from a misguided desire to grandstand anyway; use that instinct by making damn sure everyone knows that you're a helluva lot more impressed by a good IC smart ass remark than you are by a 15+ die pool. Create the sort of enviroment where people try to be IC as a matter of honor rather than just assume everyone at the table is going to be interested in roleplaying as opposed to rollplaying. It's funny how often in life you get exactly what you say you expect from people, be it good or bad. It's often the GMs job to say a lot of things he probably thinks should be obvious.

The bit about "four guys with clubs" as a litmus test for munchkinism ain't coming from me or my friend. He and I think it's useful for a player to understand where their PC falls on the spectrum, but not that one end means a bad PC or another end means a good PC.

If you're playing Nancy Drew, cool, play it to the hilt, and figure out what you're gonna do during action scenes for the whole party (it better be evasion or support, not headlong assault), and never, never go alone into a possible fight with the Ancients or Lone Star. If you're playing Molly Millions, also cool, play it to the hilt; if four goons with clubs jump your PC, you might ask the GM "should we play this out, or just stipulate that I thrash them?". I have played lots of characters who had a real backstory, were more than just a pile of points, and who also could plausibly ask a quartet of club-wielders "look, do you guys really wanna do this? I mean, come on, I'm enhanced and well-armed, how could this end well for you?"

Good points on dump stats and skill lacunae. On Willpower, I would point out not only the rules mechanics and situations that make Willpower a survival trait, but I would also ask "do you really wanna play a personality that isn't gung-ho, that gives up easily? If you don't want to play a hero, then you're gonna need some other appropriate story." Same for CHA; a gruff, scarred CHA 2 street samurai could be appropriate, but I take CHA 1 as having decided to play a true misfit, and that needs a doublecheck for party compatibility.

As for helping players... sure, where possible. I'm a big fan of learning, growth and redemption. Some players are willing to learn and grow, and others not so much. Telling a player "look, you will do fine with 10 dice on attack, you really can afford decent CHA and WIL and some Contacts", might, for some, be the reassurance that they need.

finally someone who understands . . either your character can stay alive in the shadow biz or he won't . . it's that simple . .

Which is exactly why I will always argue that there's got to be a helluva lot better way to encourage people to roleplay and pay attention at the table than taking a rolled up newspaper to the nose of any player who gets ambitious with the dice pools.

For characters in RPGs I draw up a little list of things I'd like everyone to be able to do. And then when someone submits a sheet, I take the sheet and run it against my 'same game' test (which is often pretty half assed).

This works pretty well. Shadowrun the rest is harder to construct, but more demanding, because you tend to have characters operating by themselves much more often then in say, D&D, where the team tends to stick together.

So in D&D the same game test for a 1st level character can seriously be 'can we kill 2 goblins most of the time, and if yes does he have a schtick other than that' and that works mostly okay. Shadowrun you'lld need something that encompasses combat, interaction, legwork and probably some other stuff.

Is that a bad thing?

We play because we want to have fun. If we have fun playing a high story/low stat game as opposed to a power gamer game, why should try and play with the power gamers?

In many ways, role playing is like hedonism: If it's not fun, don't do it.

Well, technically, you guys were all a part of the same cargo cult.

@Simon: I never said it was a bad thing, or a good thing. Just a phenomenon.

Professional Mercenaries are expensive, thats just a fact.
A basic 400BP character is a highly trained professional, IF he's not the character was very poorly made.

That being said, in the time it took us to go from 0 karma to 60. Just recenetly started getting runs that pay that much just from the Johnson.
Now we've made more then 5,000 each on run due to bonus found. Such as paydata, bringing back more cases cryostim then required. Our most profitable mission was actually are 3rd where we ended up stealing the Aeries Chopper sent after us

Now our group does fairly well on keeping costs down, we don't treat EXEX like water and hurl explosives when ever possible. We also share a single high life style which is far cheaper then the four having individual middle life styles.
We also attempt to avoid combat through negotiation when ever possible. Last run we managed to avoid all combat situations except for a mock fight.


The teams payment should largly depend on
A. The Speed of advancement the DM wants
B.
Mandatory expenses, ie, bribes, required fake-SIN card replacements. As in they need to be replaced because there old not because the PC did something stupid.
The number of runs before a life style payment is due.
If the team only goes on a run once a month they need a much higher payment just to cover their basic living expenses compared to the team that goes on a run every week if possible.

Now really if your team wastes money don't pay them more, pay them the same and force them to try and do the job as cheaply as possible.
My Elf, Street Samurai may like to use EXEX as standard for his automatic but he knows it costs quite a bit and standard ammo will handle most of his enemies fine.

Through the two GMs. Cargo cults develop in isolation. Two GMs with similar ideas on how a system is interpreted will generally have similar games. (Not identical, because no one runs identical games. That would require some sort of cloning, which would be awesome, but thats not the meeting we're having right now.)

It doesn't really require bar codes to be stamped on people (which would be awesome, but also not the meeting we're having right now), it just means it helps for player and GMs to talk about how they play and what they want to get out of playing. A common stumbling block is that people tend to think of a game on an instinctual level, they know what they like but they tend to think of that as the right way to game, and the stuff they like less to be the wrong way to game. Conflict ensues.

My current, long-time group (which isn't playing SR right now, damnit) has 6 GMs out of 8 players. We all run different games in a variety of systems, we're all different players. (In fact, we disagree on as much as we agree on in gaming.) But we're all from the same cargo cult.

At the time that group formed, I was playing with another long time group, and I enjoyed playing in both. But every player I brought from one group to the other hated it. I was the weird link between them, but other than that, it was like they spoke completely different languages.