Crap, the astral combat rules are weird. A little. I guess. I'll have my mind worked around that concept by the end of the week, or something.


Welcome to this less then sane piece of the internets.

That's funny. Ghouls were pretty universally considered to be boned as characters, only played by people who really wanted to play a disadvantaged, tragic character. Shapeshifters had regeneration, but were gimped in so many other ways that it wasn't really as big of an advantage as it seemed - losing armor when they changed, being permanently dual-natured, having to buy 9 Attributes on top of the cost to be a shapeshifter, and so on.

Were your GMs only looking at the critter stats, rather than the SR Companion rules for using them as PCs?

That is flat out an error, and there's no two ways about it.

Weapon Foci explicitly attack astral forms with meat body attributes and skills while dual. Dual Natured critters don't explicitly have a rule for that but since absolutely none of the dual critters have an Astral Combat skill there is literally nothing else for them to be able to do.

I am aware of the rules on page 184 that say that every single dual critter can be slowly pecked to death by a watcher while they can't fight back - but that fails the "completely retarded test" and is thus obviously not the way the rules should actually work. You use your blades skill while astrally perceiving and attacking an astral form with a weapon focus katana, you should use your unarmed combat skill when dual natured and attacking an astral form with your claws.

Because damnit, barghests, hellhounds, ghouls, thunderbirds, etc. don't have any other attacks they can use on the astral and they can't use Astral Combat.



Many people have a knee-jerk reaction to things which are different that they must be powerful. In practice, the fact that a Shapeshifter (for example) had to buy their attributes twice and couldn't get cyberware and couldn't power down to go through a ward meant that they weren't really good at anything. A tiger shifter could bite super hard, but not as hard as an actual gun, and they ended up paying all their build points for he privilege.

People who never played with an option are on shaky grounds proclaiming it strong or weak. Not completely indefensible of course, as there is a lot of math and projection you can do from your own arm chair. But the weird stuff in the companion had a lot of counter balances that aren't immediately obvious. For example: Shapeshifter Regeneration is really cool - but you only get to use it when you're in animal form. And you're a lot more resilient in combat by just being an Ork and wearing an armored jacket than you are being an unarmored animal and then regenerating damage you take in combat. It's better to never take damage than it is to get dropped right away and get back up again later.

-Frank

I had several shapeshifters in my games back in the SR3 days. But I let the players use the same rules as the NPC shifters and they didn't need to buy 9 Attributes (the whole idea makes my head go gnarf). I didn't notice them beeing to powerful. Sure, a little more bad ass, because harder to kill, but they really lacked utility other characters of their profassion had and the dual nature sucked big times.
And after you have seen an eagle shapeshifter crashland into solid concrete at full speed you can't see them as anything but comic relief . That was one unlucky player.