You play a very different Shadowrun than me...

Wow.

I asked that question myself before he sunk all the cash into building the armor... "Dude.. you're a troll... what could you possibly need this armored suit for?"

"To look cool and intimidating... even.. more."

"OOoookay. It's your Nuyen"

And yeah, I do play a different style depending on what the GROUP wants. I think some GM's forget to actually ASK what their players want before they dive into a game. Sometimes they want ninja shit and other times they want Rambo shit. *shrugs* I just tell the stories, the players provide the entertainment and the dice fall where they fall.

And as for escalation; It's EFFING Corps! The fact that they may have heavy weapons deployed is a realm of reality in the SR world. So yes... your troll may come face to face with a REAL tank that fires real 120mm SABOT rounds. Don't raise the firepower for the sake of raising it. Use intelligence and story to drive up the damage quota when dramatically appropriate.

When your troll continously keeps blowing up Shiawase stuff.. eventually they catch on and the next time the troll shows up there are really big guns in his face. Makes sense to me.

The key word there apparently being 'shit'.

I guess I just don't play with enough crazy people, because that's wack.

You also must not play with very tolerant people, because your statement is pretty judgemental. Every playstyle is equally valid so long as you're having fun and no one gets hurt (too much).

That depends on if you're Tony Stark, er... Damien Knight... and field testing your new suit.

Unless the place you are sent to attack has MBT stationed at it. But that's what the drones armed with ATMs your Rigger is plugged into are for right? ^_^

And you just keep hoping that they'll make it past the MBT's laser-based PDS. Lots of luck to you...

just ask the NPC'S having to handle trolls in power-armor and spikey vans

He needs some place to carry the latte maker and plug in his I-pod. Jeez, don't you know anything about trolls?

He took STR as his dump stat, and BOD as his max stat, and he can't move his own weight without a little help.

Any character who can't shug off 8P, and who might face 8P or worse (eg assault rifle burst or well-aimed SMG burst), has valid interest in the option of wearing full battle armor, although not necessarily wearing it casually. I've never heard soldiers or police say "This armor would turn grazing wounds into harmless bounces; how unneccessary and silly!".

On a tangent - last session, the PCs went into a utility tunnel, at the invitation of a local ghoul ghang. The GM used dice to display "marching order". His dice were about 5mm size, so I picked up the die representing my troll rigger PC and replaced it with a 10mm d6. The others could walk two side-by-side, but not the troll, and the different sized die was a visual reminder.

i dunno. didn't it have, like, shoulderpads or something? and boots. don't forget the boots =P

Here's the problem with this. If you make it 'easy' like this then trolls are badly undercosted for a mere 40BP. Again... IMO the system gives them a DEEP discount on what is a pretty nice package of stats and abilities. They have to make up for this somewhere, in my mind the place they pay the piper is in their RP problems.

If you're going to make it super-easy (comparatively) for trolls to exist in your world... then is being a troll worth say 70BP at chargen?

Powerarmor:
Nah, powered armor doesn't necessarily move you, it could easily just be a strength augmentation, just like the augmentation found in a cyberlimb... you start w/ str5, but the armor has a +4 str augment (you move your leg, it moves with the leg, it doesn't move your leg). Though powered armor is kinda a problem too, at what point are you technically driving a vechile... when do the 'piloting anthropod' rolls come into play! (isn't that supposed to be one of the best skills for incompetence because you'll never use it!). What do you do, cap the guys gymnastics or unarmed skill at no higher than their pilot anthro instead maybe?


Also a str1 troll? Trolls START at str5... again your MINIMUM troll is stronger than your average human. I just say this to point out that the max body troll w/ min str still isn't that weak. Your min str troll matches an average str orc.

I pulled 70 out of thin air... my point was simply if you're going to make things easier then you should look at otherwise upping the oppurtunity costs of being a troll in a world dominated by non-trolls (who would really rather you didn't exist).


Remember: equipment costs coming out of chargen aren't penalized. (it says not to do this under the section regarding the mere 10-25% cost increases for trollgear). How often do you see someone come out of chargen w/ 250k worth of kit (quite often), how many runs is it going to take you to get that much?

I don't think changing the size of trolls to a more rational one that is closer to most of the actual artwork is really making things "easier" for them. They will still pay more for gear, have a hard time attempting to use "normal" public dataterms, coffin motels, and the like, still attract stares, etc.

The only real change is that you are making their size make more sense, which also helps explain the other end - why they "only" have +4 to Body and Strength, why a troll-adjusted pistol is a pistol without a trigger guard, instead of a much more massive and damaging weapon.

And 40 BP is about right for trolls, who get limits to the hard caps on 4 important Attributes - their problems fitting into society should mostly be flavor, not a big component of their cost.

Anyone can pull numbers out of their ass and put them up on a website. Everyone here has been going off of the fact that just about every population figure published in a SR product shows trolls at or near the lowest percentage.

The sourcebooks mention that trolls tend to live in rural areas, although "naturally" seems sort of racist. (It wasn't the "natural" inclination for escaped slaves to flee north, they were escaping persecution. If you allow that things not being made for a troll's size is a method of de facto segregation, trolls don't "naturally" seek rural areas, they are driven there.)

Using math, its possible to prove Winston Churchill was a carrot. (See: Zero, the Biography of a Dangerous Idea, by Charles Seife.) Math is voodoo I tells ya. Voodoo!

Anyway, in a contest between math and game designers, math will all too frequently lose.

He's dead right.

8,909,000,000 (World Population in 2050 as per http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population)
- 1,494,500,000 (25% of Worlds Population in 1999/Vitas(2010) as per Core SR4 Rule book)
+ 890,900,000 (Estimated 10% Population boom over 20 years, as per makin' babiez.)
_______________

8,305,400,000 (Shadowrun 2070 World Population)

Big gap here

And with Whipstich's extra bombs on civilizations (10% then 30%), we have:
581,378,000

Even that's a gross simplification however. Having 25% less people around "makin' babiez" is going to put a bit of a crimp in exponential growth projections, trust me; if we lose 25% of the population in 2010 we'll likely be making up for lost ground too long to hit the projections based on RL numbers available today. And none of this is taking into account "Vitas 2022: The Sequel" either, even if that one was "only" a 10% population die off. Anyway, like I said earlier, I really don't think it's possible to come up with a good, canon number for the earth's population under the current circumstances; it's just best to assume that there's a lot more people out there than official numbers indicate because nobody wants to wade out into the sprawl and take a headcount. I mean, seriously; everyone seems to think the data may be off give or take a million or two (although that takes into account transients) in the Seattle metroplex alone.

Modified my post to include your -populations.


Considering the 25% chop from VITAS I believe a 10% population growth over 50 years is hitting it low.

So how do VITAS 1 and 2 virtually wiping out all of sub-Saharan Africa and almost an entire generation of India fit into that?

For once I'm actually agreeing w/ you Frank....

Though there's other items in there which make me question as well. The larger the animal the slower it reproduces. (look at elephants, whales, bears... all your LARGE animals). As such it would strike me as being abnormal for trolls to breed spectacularly fast. I would say given the raw size of the basic vanilla human population, you're probably getting more trolls from goblinization than trolls makin trollkins. There's also probably a problem in that a large sized troll will have breeding difficulties w/ a basic human (there is such a thing as too big). Then on top of that, trolls have lower life expentancies than your basic vanilla human as well as work in more dangerous/debilitating lines of work.

Even orks I have questions with. Their average liespan is what only 40 years. Even if they birth in litters... depending on how long the females are fertile (with an average old age of 35-45... does that mean menopause kicks in at the late 20's early 30's as opposed to the 40's for a human?). How long is an elven female fertile for... that could potentially be a few hundred baby elves for one elven whore.

But in society, it's possible for humans to have 12, 13, even 20 children from a single mother. They don't because economically it's not viable. I'd think economic pressures would impact similarly on orks/humans/whatever... those who can afford kids will be the ones who can raise them. (which raises another strike against trolls as raising another troll is going to be hell on the food budget compared to a teenage boy!).

In a way I'm glad the books don't get overly into this. If the primary source of stats like this is humanis. It makes the numbers immediately suspect (they could be arguing accurate statistics, or they may be shading the numbers). Also the large SINless population immediately makes all the numbers suspect as well.