It's a bit more than just a psychological limitation. Really, every system has advantages and drawbacks. What I look for in a system is consistency: making over the top characters isn't a big deal, if all characters come out about the same. But when systems allow for a huge disparity in power, and run trap options right alongside power tricks, you're in for trouble.

You have alluded to both several times, Cain. What are some specific examples of what you consider trap options or power tricks? Some things, I consider features rather than bugs (specialization is encouraged, magic and augmentation give disproportionately cheap benefits).

Of Karmagen?

The biggest trap example is that karmagen supposedly encourages generalization. However, generalists simply aren't viable in Shadowrun.

The biggest power trick is that it doesn't actually stop power creep; but it does allow you to squeeze points out of more areas. Instead of a simple trade, one pool for another, you can shave points off lots of areas and combine them to get one higher attribute. For example, in BP, specializations are a good deal; but common advice is to wait until you've earned karma, because that ratio is even better. Since karmagen works on the same system, instead of raising your base skill, it's easier to get low skills and specialize them in the most common areas. Net result is that you end up about the same, or maybe even slightly ahead, on dice. And because the ratio is different, you end up saving a lot across the board, which enables you to pump one or two tricks sky high.

Now, BP isn't any better when it comes to powergaming. But since it is more straightforward, karmagen actually rewards system mastery even more than BP does! BP is easy to powergame, karmagen takes effort. However, I'm sure you know how hard powergamers will work to break a system.

It is the level that mall cops have in pistols. Acceptable for most jobs.

Rating 7 or veteran is what a rifleman with a combat tour has with automatics (although it could be 5(7) specialized in assault rifles).

The fact is that 8-10 dice means that you can hit an average person (dodge 6) with semi-automatic fire more often than you miss. 12 dice and an automatic weapon is easily enough to deal with average threats in average circumstances. Most security guards are going to go through most of their careers without having to fire their guns, and 7 dice (3 skill 3 attribute 1 laser sight) is not an unreasonable estimate of their skill level if they dutifully follow the corp-mandated training to the bare minimum they're required to.

Higher dicepools due to augmentation and training are required for adverse conditions and against elite opponents, neither of which are going to be a factor for the vast majority of armed individuals in the shadowrun world. So yes, average guards with 3-4 skill ranks in a job skill is about right. Most shadowrunners end up going against far more elite opposition in conditions that would make it impossible for lesser marksmen to reliably hit anything at all and so the bar for Shadowrunner skills is higher. Ditto any individual who's lives depend on their skills and have done for some time.

I disagree with the premise that most guards don't have to fire their guns. Given how prevalent gangers and trolls with pink mohawks firing rocket launchers are at stuffer shacks and how trigger happy everyone seems to be on the freeway, I would say that the average mall cop in the shadowrun world fires their gun on a weekly basis. I mean, there are people willing to take on the future equivalent of the Coca-Cola and Microsoft combined with the U.S. army and Hogwarts, for slightly more than a month's rent. There have to be people willing to launch armed raids on a mall to save a few nuyen on a pair of pants.

I don't know about that. A security guard's job isn't to stop armed opposition single handedly. Instead, their job is to delay them long enough for high powered backup to arrive. Nowadys that's the cops, but in Shadowrun, that could be a corporate SWAT team, like the Red Samurai. They don't need to be expert marksmen to pin down a runner team.

I would like to know precisely what you mean by a generalist. I am unsure of what your are refering to and we may end up talking about 2 different animals.

Karmagen encourages you to buy more skills at lower levels. An extreme example would be to buy 1 in every Active skill possible before taking 2 in anything else. If this is what you are refering to in the supposition that karmagen encourages generalisation, I would agree.

That's basically it. A character with a lot of low dice pools in a lot of skills, especially if it comes at the expense of a specialization.

Conversely, by offering challenges that only a Specialist with 20+ Dice can succeed at, then you have just favored the Specialist over the generalist and therefore are jusf showing favoritism to a different group. If you actually present a worls that makes snese, the Specialist will succeed right alongside the Generalist. He will just succeed with a few more hits is all. As such, EITHER is capable of succeeding at their tasks. After all... the world is not designed so that only the best of the best can succeed. After all, Joe Average Day Worker still has to be capable of succeeding at his job.

Seeing as how MOST of my Characters are More generalist than Specialist, I can say that you are completely and totally wrong on that opinion. *shrug*
It all comes down to how you see the system, and where you set the World's Challenge Level. If you cannot ever succeed without having 20+ Dice, then you argument would hold some water. Since that is not the expected play style (just look at SR4A and you will see that) then you are arguing form the stand point of your own personal preferences and not what the game world establishes as the baseline.

I'm going to vote for the generalists too. I usually try to get as many skills at 3 or so as possible.
It really depends on your GM though. If all your GM has you do is shoot people soak damage, it would be stupid to put points anywhere else.
If you never need to talk your way into something or fix anything or drive anything or climb anything, those points are basically wasted.
I'm squeezing more karma out of the build system so I have "extra" points to spend in non-core areas.

Actually, from what I've seen of your characters, i'd classify them as specialists. We may differ on how many dice is required, but even you favor some skills and abilities over others. What's more, based on what you consider adequate, your character go for decent select midrange dice pools, rather than lots of low ones.

The generalist is a character who trades a specialty for lots of low level skills. That's not viable in Shadowrun, thematically and mechanically. If your character can't bring something useful to the team, they're not going to fit in.

Actually, from what I've seen of your characters, i'd classify them as specialists. We may differ on how many dice is required, but even you favor some skills and abilities over others. What's more, based on what you consider adequate, your character go for decent select midrange dice pools, rather than lots of low ones.

The generalist is a character who trades a specialty for lots of low level skills. That's not viable in Shadowrun, thematically and mechanically. If your character can't bring something useful to the team, they're not going to fit in.

"Right alongside" is fine. A good GM should design things so everyone progresses evenly. However, Irion is suggesting that a generalist can grind to earn *three times* the karma! That isn't possible without blatant GM favoritism!

Gotcha... Wires apparently crossed on my reading comprehension. Apologies.

Hmmm.... Okay - so the difference is in the classification of Specialist. I truly do consider most of my characters to be Generalists, but I do tend to pursue midrange DP's in the vast majority of skills, with a few slightly higher skills to differentiate Primary from Secondary/Tertiary. I can live with that.

That was not Irions point. The point Irion was making was a comparism with a group of specialists with an other group of generalists. Irion just added the notion, that even within the same group there is (by the rules of the 4th edition) the possibility to give a lot of extra karma. And again, even if you do it for the whole group, it will influence the way characters are build.

If you do not like the karma angle, there are a lot of situations where you can kill characters for not having the right skills.
The notion, that high dicepools in your focus are everything you need is flawed, if making this statement in general. Thats pretty much all Irion is saying.

And now Irion is referring to themselves in the third person?

Will the real Slim Shady please stand up?

Since when have I said high dicepools in your focus are all you need?

All shadowrunners need to be capable, or at least functional, in a lot of noncombat areas. You need to be able to get along socially, you have to be at least a little sneaky, and you have to be able to deal with 2070 technology without reading the instruction manual. Other skills aren't as essential, but nice to have-- Armorer is always useful, because everyone packs guns and armor, First Aid is never out of place, Hardware (to pick locks) often comes in handy, being able to drive a car... there's lots of things a shadowrunner should be capable of.

What isn't true is that you need a lot in those areas. Sometimes your default is enough; depending on your attributes and the skill in question, you might have a higher dice pool than someone who is trained. Other skills you can farm off to other members of the team: you only need one team Armorer, for example. Skills that are useful for multiple people don't need to be very high: it's really nice when everyone has First Aid, but you can share medkits, so no one person needs to have a lot of skill in it.

Even with essential skills, skills everyone absolutely needs, you don't have to have a lot in them. For example, if you have a team Face, you won't be needing Negotiation, and Leadership is really not useful for the most part. So, buying the Influence group isn't worth it. However, since a guard might ask you questions and you need to bluff your way out, or that Mafia don might need an explanation as to what you're doing with his sister, Con and Etiquette are worth investing in, at least a little, and specializing won't hurt you at all.

The concept of a non-social shadowrunner-- the archtypical Uncouth troll, for example-- isn't an example of min maxing, it's an example of gimping your character. When you min/max, the goal is to minimize your weaknesses.

The difference between a well-rounded specialist and a useless generalist, however, is 1) the specialist has a focus. They bring a specific skill set to the table. And 2) The difference between a good specialist and a generalist in critical ares isn't very large. For example, the generalist I mentioned earlier has 7 dice in just about everything. A charisma 1 troll, with Etiquette 3 and a specialization, will be rolling 6 dice. That's not really much of a gain.

Even in those random, off the wall skills, there might not be a difference. An Agility-maxed character might be able to default and have more than 7 dice in just about any combat skill, so spending those points on monowhip didn't do you much good. (In fact, since your dice pool is smaller, you're more likely to cut your own arm off.) Sure, the GM can contrive a situation where Pilot Aerospace might be useful, but that's a kind of favoritism and the character might not succeed anyway. And besides, if a runner has to pilot the Space Shuttle, they're already screwed.

Finally: Killing characters for not having the right skills? *Really*? Now you're going to not only design challenges solely for the benefit of our hypothetical generalist, but you'll actively punish the other players in the process? Can't you see how that's favoritism in the worst way?

The thing is that most characters are likely to max out either Agility or Logic, whichever is their primary attribute. Since between these attributes cover about 70% of the game's skills a specialist with a massive Agility counts as a physical generalist, while one with a maxed out logic is solid at the vast majority of mental skills. A Specialist will then focus on a core set of skills and likely splash a few ranks into some secondaries to cover their bases. Their default on attribute linked skills is likely to be in the 6-8 dice range, which is often enough to scrape by. A generalist who goes the same path might have 8-10 dice in a lot more skills, but the fact is that by not focusing he doesn't excel at any of them.

A generalist with decent augmentations, adept abilities, or spells can still be effective. The only way someone can get those really useless 4-7 dice pools for everything is to be a mundane and lightly or non-augmented, in addition to being a generalist. And if someone does that, either the GM has completely failed to explain the very premise of the game (the collaborative specialist aspect, the dangerous work in a dangerous world aspect, and the transhumanism aspect), or the player is stubbornly ignoring all of that to create a special snowflake, in what will likely become a case of the Stormwind fallacy meeting Darwin's law.

Not quite.

In SR4.5, one potential trap is the mystic adept. Mystic adepts can be optimized, but if you go for an even split of magic and adept abilities, you'll easily end up useless at all of them. I had a character just like that in my games: he insisted on it, and eventually was grudgingly convinced to rewrite into a pure adept. With low magical skills, and a low effective Magic, he couldn't throw spells above force 2 without overcasting, and frequently took drain from them (he favored elemental attacks). Unfortunately, Force 2 spells were really easy to resist, so he sometimes took more damage than the targets did. His conjuring was equally laughable, since force 2 spirits are only a small step above watchers. His adept powers were only slightly better, but he was a melee adept, and so he didn't have the PP to invest in both Improved skill, Increased Reflexes, and various other powers that would enable him to close the gap without getting shot.

The only reason I even approved the character was because he was the only spellcaster at the time, and he agreed to take a reasonable amount of Counterspelling. So he actually had something useful to contribute, even if he was more fragile than the rigger, that fact made him worth protecting. Eventually, we added a full mage, so I started pushing him to rewrite into a full melee adept. After he tried Banishing a force 10 Master Shedim single-handedly (with a Banishing of 1!) and needing to burn Edge to survive, he agreed to it. So, the near-death experience burned out his spellcasting abilities, but he was able to recover.

Anyway, the point of that longwinded story is that you can be Awakened and still be a generalist/useless. While he was a bit of a special snowflake, the bigger problem was that he was entranced by too many cool shinies, and couldn't bear to give any of them up. He wanted to be good at everything, and ended up nearly good for nothing.

I seem to remember a troll mage with skillwires posted here that was a good generalist.

Again, it depends on the game. If you never split the party, it is correct. But if you play a more free game, which focus on roleplaying your individual character and not playing as a group, things look differently. If you do so, the group will be split most of the time, or are you always with your friends?

Let's say you know a guy who is very charming, the most charismatic person who know personally. Even if you do not hang out outside of work together, when you need someone's help in a social setting, would you call him for help?

Assuming a long term group of showrunners:

You are shopping for a gun or a cool piece of armor. Would you call your team's street sam for advice?

You are trying to get someone to ward your flat. Would you call Mr Mage for assistance?

I am not saying that you cannot spend time alone, to roleplay your character, to do stuff he does by himself. What I am saying is that even if you are roleplaying your character, the group is not likely to be split most of the time. Even if you play a more free game, things should not look too different, unless you deliberately make it so.

I tried a skillwire character, it didn't work out.

As I recall, the first problem was that you could only start with Rating 4 wires and softs. That meant you couldn't go from Joe McKlutz to Tung Fu Rue by slotting a chip, you could only get to midrange proficiency. Still, having a lot of low levels skills isn't bad, if you have a separate specialty. And for a lot of skills, you should be able to go to the Android marketplace and buy a legal soft, right?

Well, the problem there was, skillsofts cost so much, they often weren't worth it. Let's say the run you have in mind requires rappelling and the ability to pilot a B212-Huey. When you compare the skillsoft costs to the average run payout, you could easily be losing money on that mission. And even though you could hold a skillsoft in storage forever, it would probably remain there, unused, perhaps indefinitely. Spending that much on a skill that's used once and thereafter forgotten just wasn't worth it.



See, I was talking about a more free game, sans a lot of railroading. During the legwork section, it's not uncommon for everyone to do their own thing, which is why I said everyone needs to be competent in several areas. However, when you're talking to Contacts, you're not going to need the high-powered social ability of the Face, because Contacts are by definition friendly. During the actual run, however, people will always be close by to support one another.

Besides which, if you're not playing as a group, that means several players aren't getting attention. The only way the generalist will be able to do more than anyone else is if he gets more attention than anyone else. That's favoritism as well.

The generalist will have to live with being in the shadow of all the specialists up until the time a specialist gets hurt bad and can no longer function.

Most likely he is that reliable guy who contributes to teamwork most of the time. This is one niche I think a generalist can fill, Mr Teamwork and Backup. He isn't going to be the team's best, he helps and when the team spec goes down, he will have to be the guy with the most dice in that skill.

I still get to do most of my talking alone. And I still get to do most of my shopping alone.

Alright: When did a friend help you last time shopping for a videogame, car, gun, piece of furniture?

For every 20 purchases I do alone I probably do 1 with friends. And of 10 purchases I do with friends it is probably one where I need their help.

And even if we work together as a group on one project, for example organizing a party. We probably won't do the shopping together. We will probably split up, because it will save us a lot of time.
Most of the time in real life, you will split up and it is expected that you are still able to handle yourself. Sure, a lot of roleplaying games encourage the opposite through railroading. (You only get one path)

A videogame? I don't remember shopping for a videogame that was not introduced to me by someone I know.

Normal stuff? I can make those purchases alone, sure. But those are the ones I am not going to be needing to negotiate for - there are no rolls needed, or at most 1 hit/success is all I'd need. If I need to make a big purchase? You bet I have the smoothest of my buddies to do the talking for me.

You can have a game with many paths. But it is most likely that each person will be taking the path that comes easiest to them. A street sam may find that he can solve the problem with a gun. A rigger via vehicular homicide. A pornomancer by talking the victim's underwear off. The mage by employing magic. Each of them have some paths that give them a vastly higher success rate than others. Mr Generalist might have something that he is slightly better at, or he might even have the best skill to fit the situation, but he is not going to be much more successful at that one path than the others that are almost equally viable to him.

It can be expensive but mages don't always have that much they need to buy and it lets them save karma to upgrade magic while still improving elsewhere (also 10k/point works out to 4 karma/point which is cheaper than skills after rank 2).

*sigh*
Not a Special Snowflake - A Character Concept. It does not have to go the way you posit...

I have that very character. A Mundane, Unaugmented Mercenary character. His specialties are running about 12-14 Dice (which include Specializations), His Secondary and Tertiary are running 9-11 Dice And the remaining are from 6-9 Dice... And he has almost 60 Skills. He is a very good character and can accomplish a lot of things. Can he compete with the Spec Ops Ghost Elf? Probably not, but he is not meant to currently (he only has 60 Karma or so). When the Heavies arrive he plans on being far, far away. Works out well most of the time, but not always. We do have other characters (Another Street Sam, A Mage and a Hacker) that are also in that same range. Our specialties are about 12-14 Dice or so.

Now, If I can manage to maintain his stance on Augments, Yay for me... But eventually the character may succumb to the need for some Augmentations. If that ever happens, then so be it. But for now, he works great and is more than competent.

My Current Mystic Adept is a Split 3 Sorcery/2 Adept with 4 Initiate Grades. A Mostly Even Split, and still pretty optimal, at least in my opinion.
QUITE enjoyable, and more versatile and effective than our Magic 6, Initiation 6 Combat Mage.

Of course, the concept is that he is an Occult Investigator, and he has a ton of spells (280 Karma socked into spells alone). Lots of fun. But you do have to have a Good Concept that is useful. In this characters case, he was a Wards and Counterspelling Specialist prior to his joining the Shadows.

That is where you Subscribe to a Service... Downloads on Demand for several Hours Duration. Tack it onto your lifestyle.
They talk about such services in one of the books. Unwired, I think.

Should be, but that isn't always the case.

Admittedly, this is a screwy example, but the mystic adept I mentioned was the generalist of that game. He did have a lot of skills, but it was heavily focused on the magical and combat side of things, with a healthy dose of stealth and B&E. But outside of magic, he wasn't even good as a secondary or backup. The troll was the best combatant, ranged or melee; in second place was the rigger, who doubled as a street sam. When it came to B&E and electronic locks, the TM was better suited to that role than the mystic adept, with the rigger in second place again. And of course, in Matrix activities it was the Techno followed by the rigger again. Socially, it was all about the techno, who invested in a high Charisma and actually had the Influence group. (Oddly enough, here the troll exceeded the adept; much against my advice, the adept's player took Uncouth. The Cha 1 battle troll actually had more social dice.)

The only place where he really had something to offer was stealth, and even then, it wasn't very helpful. He made a good infiltrator, but if the team needed to scout an area, minidrones were often better. The biggest contribution he could make was Counterspelling, which fortunately is a really big deal, and worth defending him for.


Like toturi, just about every time I've bought a video game, it's been via a recommendation made by a friend. And the last few cars I owned were used, so i went to my mechanically-inclined friends to help look them over. My furniture is largely off the free list on Craigslist, so no advice there, but I did get my friends to help me pick it up.

Railroading has nothing to do with it. In real life, people pick the paths and tasks based on what they're the most capable at.

Let's say you're planning a party. Do you throw jobs into a hat, and draw randomly? Or do you pick jobs based on what you do best? For example, the guy with the biggest car goes out to get the bulkiest supplies, the artist designs the graphics for the facebook addict to post on the event page, the scene kid and the musician come up with a music list and gather the sound equipment, the best cook handles the food, and the former bartender stocks the alcohol. Everyone does what they're good at... except for the guy with no useful abilities in these areas, who gets stuck with puke clean-up duty.

These are real-life specialties, maybe not really amazing or useful ones, but it shows how tasks are divided based on ability. In Shadowrun and RPG's, where you actually have huge specialties in useful areas, it makes even more sense to divide tasks by skill area. Except for the generalist, who has no specialty to contribute. He has to work even harder to justify his role on the team, and could easily end up with all the dirty jobs as a result.


With that much Karma invested in spells, it's a safe bet that Sorcery is his specialty, as well as counterspelling.


That still doesn't address my issues. First of all, there's no cool factor, no "I know kung fu!" moments, because the skillwire rating isn't high enough to start. He would have to upgrade to a better set, which would cost him money that he was going to use for other things. Second, it still costs money, and a few hours of skill still doesn't guarantee you can get the skill you need at any given moment. Much of Unwired requires that you be a decker, or have a decker set it up for you, anyway.

You might think that, but his Spellcasting was 12 Dice (5 Skill, 3 Magic and Modifiers) for Manipulation Spells (No, No Control Thoughts/Actions Spells) and 8 for all other Spells. He had a Ritual Focus for Illusion and Manipulation Spells which could add an additional +2 to relevant category.
Yes, His Counterspelling was his HIGH skill (6 with a Specialty in Manipulation Spells and a bonus from his Mentor), and was boosted by Adept Powers (Sorcerous Parry).
Both started at 4 in Chargen.




But the Cool Factor DOES exist - You access server and say you need to know Kung Fu and Voila "you know Kung Fu". Durations are pretty irrelevant when it is on-demand. And since they were capped at 4 Anyways in SR4A, that is Veteran levels of skill. Why would you not have access to a skill when needed. That is what a service does - Like Netflix, you use on Demand.

The section I refer to in Unwired (Pages 192-194) has absolutely no reliance on being a Hacker whatsoever. Not sure why that is an issue for you.

Well, the cool factor of skillwires, nowadays at least, comes from watching The Matrix. I know you and I have different standards as to dice pools, but look at it this way: 4 dice is about a Professional level of skill. Assuming normal Quickness dice, gaining a skill of 4 might be good enough to handle yourself in a bar brawl, but you're not about to take on Morpheus.

In previous editions, the fiction had skillwire users taking on experts, and holding their own. Slot a chip, and you could take on Chuck Norris in a fair fight. (Well, that's what the ads said, anyway. ) That was what made skillwires cool: them made you into an expert. Now? They make you capable, depending on how your table plays, but they're a long way from turning a person into Bruce Lee.


Well, those pages don't actually list a cost for on-demand skillsofts, so I still can't say that they're less than what I'd earn for the run. Second, it *does* say you need a SIN for those services. That means you either need a fake SIN (and every time you use it, you risk exposing it and losing it), have to expose a real SIN (if you're a SINner; not a big problem until someone wonders why you're constantly downloading the Heavy Weapons skill) or rely on a decker to Spoof a Life for you. I suppose it can be done, but it's not as easy as you make it sound.

I said the only way to get that 4-7 dice pool for everything was to be an unaugmented mundane generalist (although Cain brought up a good point - mystic adepts can spread themselves too thin too). I didn't say every unaugmented mundane had to be that way. Honestly, if your guy has 12-14 dice without augmentations, he is more of a mundane specialist than a mundane generalist.

I agree. I think that TY's build is much more likely to be a very well-rounded specialist than a generalist.

To me a generalist is not only someone who has almost the same skill levels in a very wide range of skills, but also someone who has similar Attributes levels too. He has the similar DPs for nearly every test.

Using karmagen, I think it is likely that a generalist would have average Attributes and skill levels, resulting in average DPs.

Hmmmmm... Maybe.

Skill 4, Stat 4, Specialty is 10 Dice. And pretty easy to do, in SR4A anyways. If that is a Firearms skill, Smartlink takes you to 12 Dice and +2 for Tacnet if you are sporting a Rating 2 net raises that to 14 Dice.
Skill 2, Stat 4, Specialty is 8 Dice and VERY easy to accomplish in Karma Gen.

Per the Standards of Dump shock, 12-14 Dice is simply competent (Not a sentiment I agree with, of course), since you need nothing special to get there, which was my comparison. In my headspace, yes, 12-14 Dice is a highly competent character who has been performing his "Job" for more than a few years, and has been performing it pretty well...

And yes, Toturi... The character has 30 or so skills with about the same DP. Primary Stats of about 4 (though his Reaction is at Base 6 (+2 for the Quality that provides an unaugmented +2), Setting Strength and Charisma to 3 each). MOST of the skills he has are Rating 2, with a Smattering of 3's and a few 4's. Now, about 60 Karma into the Character, he is performing pretty well. Slightly above average in Attributes, and a good skill selection. It has worked out pretty well. Can't stand toe-to-toe with an HTR Team, but then, he shouldn't.

OK, you lost me. I assume that the lowest DPs of 6-9 are for the 30 or so skills. But they are supposed to have the same DP.
Either they have the same DP or they have a DP range of 6-9, I am not sure which is applicable.

A Lot of his Skills are from 6-9 (just over half I think (maybe 40/59 of them) - never really counted exactly) - Depends upon the linked attribute, since some are 3's and some are 4's, and the skill may differ by a point or so. (Most of them are 2's with Specialties, though there are some 1's). And some of them benefit from gear bonuses (but not all of them).

He is spread out pretty well... And he has been pretty awesome, in a Not Highly Specialized sort of way. He still runs from the Tir Ghosts and Ares Firewatch Teams, but he is getting better. .

Do you have a referece for that? I like the idea but unfortunately never read something about such a thing. I wonder if it works the other way around? If you have bought a skillsoft you dont need anymore is it possible to share it with other runners in exchange for, lets say, nuyen?

Unwired, Pages 192-194
There are no hard rules for costs, but the framework is there, complete with a couple examples of who is in the industry for such services.

As for the other question - nothing stops you from selling it to someone else (or even cracking it and simply sharing it). Heck, you could even go the route that such software is Freeware (Sidebar in Unwired) so as to be freely available to all (though that would probably be stomped all over by the Megacorps, but nothing stops a Shadow server from offering such things to its clients).

Thanks, that was quite helpful.

Hey... My Pleasure.

The problem is, without any firm costs, it's still impossible to say if it's worth it.

I mean, we can't even agree on what the standard payment for a run should be. There's no way of telling if subscribing to the Amazon Skillsoft Marketplace will cost you more per month than you make in runs. When combined with the "SIN required" problem, it's pretty clear that this will not be an option at every table.

And even then, the cool factor of skillwires is largely gone. A good skillwire set can make you capable at a skill, but it cannot make you an expert. A chip might make you good enough to fight off some bar room bullies, but you're no match for Chuck Norris, and you might not even be good enough to beat Van Damme. You can call it a feature or a bug if you like, but what it boils down to is this: slotting a chip and saying "Wow! I'm mediocre!' isn't really cool. Slotting a chip, saying "Wow, I know kung fu!" and beating up Morpheus, on the other hand.....

Those costs are left up to each individual table. Don't really care if there is nothing official, it likely fluctuates anyways.



I disagree with this... I think the cool factor is still there, personally. No, you will never have an apex skill with Skillwires, but in SR4A, you could get to 2/3 that skill level (4 out of 6, AND you could get it customized so you effectively had a Skill 5 - Skill 4 +1 Extra Dice for Customization). THAT is pretty good. Now, in SR5, you can go to 6 of 12 (and who knows what will come down the pipe in the future releases, but even so, skill 6 is not mediocre) and that is still pretty damned good. No, you won't beat Morpheus, But so what, you still "know Kung Fu." You still have a Professional Level of Kick Ass moves. And simply by telling someone "I Need Combat Skill... NOW). That ain't nothin'...

That's rather the point. There is no way of saying if a subscription skillwire service is viable at any given table. I don't think it's good to suggest it as an option to make skillwires more viable, since we have no actual frame of reference for it.



Skill 4, or 4 +1, is still not that impressive, since skill is only part of the equation these days. In SR1-3, it was almost *all* of the equation, so it mattered more. But in SR4.5, the costs of buying skillsofts was prohibitive, and the costs of subscription are a mystery. SR5 doesn't have a subscription service at this time, so we can only go by the book costs, which are insane. 30,000 for a level 6 skill? That's a huge chunk of money, especially if you're trying to get a lot of skills.

As for your last point: Back in early SR3, a friend and I designed two characters to work together, a skillwire samurai and a drone rigger/data specialist. Storage memory was still a thing in those days, so what we did was have me carry all this skillsofts. The silly drone rules said that all drones has three full-band simsense channels running, each; so I just had the drone plug into the skillwisres, and remote-downloaded any skill he might need. By the way: his name was Dozer, and my rigger was Tank.

Skillwires are good for two things: Having the right skill on hand, and becoming an instant expert at everyting. Unfortunately, skillsofts cost so much, it's impossible to stock every one you might need. Also, skillwires are for when you need an instant expert. Unfortunately, a rating 4 system just isn't good enough for that.

SR3 had the wonderful cheddary goodness of the CED, which was broken because it gave its rating in a task pool to skills, including skills that normally didn't have a dice pool. Skillsofts in SR4 are too costly, but are not bad for utility skills, if you have high (augmented) Attributes to pair them with. A street samurai with move-by-wire: 2 basically gets them for free, and can snag some in-game for things such as pilot: aircraft, skills that are useful but far down the list of things to spend karma on.