I was just wondering, because i got some players who strictly want to build mundane sams but when i compare them to an adept or a mage i just see em lacking in every aspect, especially in direct combat where they should be king of the hill in my opinion.

I voted yes they are obsolete. But, it isnt because of any animosity towards sammies.

I love the idea of the archtype and it is important to the genre in general.

But, with the rules as they stand now, sammies can't compete. With all things being equal. BP for BP, sammies lag way behind the curve.

Unfortunately, mages and adepts can do anything a sammie can do and much better.

Now, this assessment doesnt take into consideration any house rules or GM imposed limits on the number of magically active folks allowed in thier games.

This is just based on what is in the books.

Karma or Nuyen?

If my question isn't clear, I can clarify.

Riggers, too. True, it's hard to get drone DPs as far out there as a sam can, but you can have a LOT of drones on your network. When you've got half a dozen flying machine guns or rocket launchers, there's generally not a whole lot of a point in having a samurai go in. That's not even one of the more ridiculous rigger swarms out there.

Sammies still serve a valuable roll.

First: Cyber-limbs add 1 Box to their physical Damage Track. Nothing an Adepot or mage can do to counter that.

Second: With implanted armours, they can get more +armour(and +body for DRT) then an Adept can, though a Mage can get more with the Armour Spell.

Third: If you have a Sammie and a Physical Adept who, through various means, had the same stats when you take in all their mods(magic or ware), then..you go someplace that has a background count(either through stuff that happened there, or through plants and such), guess who is not effected? That's right! the Sammie!

Finally: Sammies are not effected by FAB.

Now, I do think Speed Sammies are outstripped by Initiated Adepts. But it is easier for a sam to get 4 Passes then it is for an Adept. It costs a sam 32 BP and 1 Essernce to get synaptic boosters 2 at chargen, while it costs an adept 25(20 for magic 3, 5 for being an adept) and 3 power points for the same effect. True, an adept can start out with Increased Reflexes 3..but such an adept is going to find his/her usefulness limited, and, even a BGC of 1 screws him/her over.

I voted no. Push the limits with your samurai, like it used to be, and you´ve got a role.

Not disagreeing with the post, just some mathematical cleanup. It depends on how the adept hit improved reflexes 3. Going just up to magic 5 and only buying it, or going up to magic 6. At magic 6 it takes a background count of 2, not 1. I am sure you are awre of that, but other people that read it may not be. So better to be all the way clear than have them making mistakes later.

An Adept using Bioware can far exceed what a Sam can do... Why spend your Adept Magic points to buy increased initiative when you can get 3 IPs for 1 Power Point by putting Synaptic Booster 2? Cybereyes can fit in if you just make it Synaptic Booster 1 to start, or you can take contact lenses with smartlink, thermo, etc...

Yes a Background Count can hose the adept... But once they start initiating... they can spend some essence/magic points on some critical cyberwear... and use the adept powers for things that sammies can't do (Throwing Adept for instance). In truth, the Adept can be a sammie and an Adept at some point in his or her life.. not so the Sammie who can never, ever, become magically active (except via latent awakening and then he's probably screwed because he took too much cyber to begin with).

The only way I can see to try to fix this... is to require all magically active characters to have sensitive system... or something else that ups the essence costs of augmenting... Otherwise only a fool of an adept won't augment.

...I voted no. Of course I consider Weapon Specialists ans to a lesser degree Bounty Hunters to be subsets of the Sammy. A Sammy has to deal with one thing combat possible and to that extent this is where the BPs go to after Attributes Combat/Physical skills & weapons. He needn't sorry much aout matrix, technical skills and isn't a BP/Karma sink when it comes to magic.

The Sammy is still the soldier/commando of Shadowrun and there will always be a need for someone who can just dish out the maximum amount of hurt in short order and take the punishment when it comes his way.

Magic may have wider reaching effects & Adepts may eventually be able to go beyond the mundane mundane limits. However, to do so takes a whole lot of Karma. If a good Sammy, a fast Sammy can get a jump on the mage or adept first, he is usually the one who walks away while that huge investment in Karma lays bleeding to death on the pavement..

I'm not implying which is better (and definitely not wanting to start that argument up again), just saying that the Sammy still has his place in the shadows.

an adept has LONG TERM potential. a sam can do it right now.

the game, as written now, gives an adept a higher a higher DP in a few things, where a sam gets a nice dicepool in many things, right at the start. and over the longer term, adepts take a LOT of karma for their powers, while sams take a lot of money. An adept has diminishing returns for more power, while a sam can get 4 essence of deltaware cyber and 3.98 essence of deltaware bio (or vice versa). thats a base of close to 16 points of ware, at ten times the cost, just as soon as you get the money and make the availibility rolls. and with comparable karma, the sam can max out his attributes and skills long before the adept does.

long-run, an adept can get about 2 more dice on skill than the sam per skill, a variety of funky powers, and astral sight. and the adept with implants will do it better than the adept without implants. so yeah theres an edge, but its not that great of an edge.

You will always have the street sams, because anyone can be a street sam. an adept is born, a sam is manufactured.

heck no, especially the troll-samurais are not obsolete, as they are still the be all there is to doing and taking damage like nothing else . . see the brick and bow-troll threads for example . . and with the point costs trolls have allways been kinda hard to combine with adepts . . and aside from rooting, what can an adept do to get rid of recoil if not pimping out his weapon? the samurai can do that and then still get 2 forearm gyroscopes and weapon mounts and the such . .

"Cyber-limbs add 1 Box to their physical Damage Track. Nothing an Adepot or mage can do to counter that."

There's an obvious counter-measure to that: do more than 1 box of damage to the sammie. Oh, you mean a way to *match* that? Adept takes Increased Ability: BOD, and each 2 points add a box to damage track.

Mages win on the Initiative front. Chargen mage starts each day by summoning a Spirit of Man with the Increased Reflexes spell, mage requests "continual use of a power" as the first service of the day, mage has 4 IP all day long. Then, after a few missions, mage has nuyen and contacts to buy an F4 Health sustaining focus, and karma to bind it, and can switch to having their daily Spirit of Man sustain some other spell on them, such as Combat Reflexes.

As for riggers vs. sammies, though, the sammie can also buy drones, and just give them instructions rather than remote-controlling them or rigging them. Doberman/Lynx is R4, more or less equivalent to INT 4, and thus fairly bright within its limited scope of operations. Sammie can take a Knowlege Skill to justify giving the drones some well-thought-out standing orders (eg what to do if it loses contact with owner, fire at anything the owner fires at, etc.)

The most critical advantage of an adept is that they can get countermagic. It's hard for a sammie to get a will of 16. 4 Mystic adepts shooting and running drones with a par of mages are nearly immune to magic at a reasonable level, as the team has an average of 13 dice of countermagic assuming the adepts only have 4 dice.

isn't that limited to +3 body in the case of humans?

Augmented maximums apply to sams too

But there isn't a direct limit to Damage Track, is there? Cyber and Adept at max augmented Body, Cyber has more boxes due to cyberlimbs. Also, don't adepts add cyber, bio and genetic essence costs directly together like mages? Where as a mundane is adding them 1 + 1/2 + 1/2? There's a genetic heritage type-o nanohive razor out there somewhere, with a huge addiction to beetles and no manners, who can take on an adept I bet. Underwater. With one extra limb tied behind his back.

...adepts get spell resistance, not counterspelling and it costs .5 PP per point. Mystic adepts also need to divide their Magical assets between Adept powers and spell force. With all those BPs going towards magic and rigging, that doesn't leave a lot for good ol' raw combat skill. A half dozen awakened individuals on a single team (unless it is an NPC corporate strike force) is also a little hard to accept in light of the statement below...

The additional box on your damage track isn't linked to BOD in any way. You just get it for every cyberlimb you take.

Nowhere does it say that Adepts or Mages track essence in the way you speak of. I just scanned through Agumentation and Street Magic looking for this rule as well and I can't find it.

Ok... but after sucking up 4 of your essence to get 4 boxes more... you're still stuck with 3 for your body... unless you take a cybertorso... in which case you have .5 essence left for other goodies. Not even enough to get anything past synaptic booster 1 really... and for that you need alphaware.

I think Cybersams are still viable, however, I no longer think they're necisary. there are many options available for fire support/physical combat archetypes for the team, all of them worthwhile in thier own right.

I voted "No, and I'll shoot you in the face for even asking."

Honestly, Street Sams are more versatile more quickly than an adept can be, generally speaking. As someone else already mentioned, for the same amount of Karma, you end up with higher attributes and skills on a Sammie than you do on an Adept, because the Adept was having to worry about initiation, magic increases, foci and such. The Sammie was also getting further increases through ware much faster than the adept, because it only cost nuyen, and finally the Sammie's generally can take more punishment than an adept can, simply because of the massive 'ware they've included in their package.

IMO, sammies will *always* have a place in a Shadowrun team. From a fluff perspective, not everyone can be an adept or mage no matter what. ANYONE can be a street sam, you just need the cash.

You're right. .5 essence and a metric ton of capacity that you can use to install other ware at no additional essence cost.

Before Augmentation I'd have agreed with you, but now at chargen you could grab 2 cyberarms, customize them for BOD 6, AGI 6 and add another +3 to each via enhancements. That's not counting the remaining capacity in those arms to add stuff.
Ok, he now has Body 9 only in his arms but since the average of all limbs would be applied to resist an attack (except for a called shot) the sammie, say he has natural BOD 4 will average to 4/6 * 4 + 2/6 * 9 = 3 + 3 = 6 (correct me, if I'm wrong, I don't have the exact ruling in my head).

One of the things i love about shadowrun is its lack of predeterminated classes, and in my oppinion.. No Archetype is essential, or obsolete. Shadowrun is more about, what you want to play, rather than what you need to play.
Depending on what games you like to run different types will be advantaged, or disadvantaged but still viable nevertheless. Not all groups will need a Street sam, especially not those focused on more peaceful solutions, but this is what's so great about it. You don't have to limit yourself.
In D&D a Fighter receives massive hitpoints, and good fighting abilities, but due to their great lack of skillpoints they get stuck as a one trick pony. In shadowrun on the otherhand, there is no problem what so ever to have a Chromed fighting machine that also has some social graces or whatever you like, hell even the Chromed Adept is a possibility.
Given this, sure if you are a number crunch'er maybe the adept/magician can outdo the SS, but since many keep the 5 million Street Sam so close to their heart, afterall the SS is one of the very core archetypes that defines the cyberpunk. You can take the Cyber-out of a Sammy, but you cannot take the Sammy out of the people

Sammies are not obsolete. See the Deadhand Dallas thread. She's a sammy who will act before a mage, and can kill one with a single shot with her eyes closed.

There's no question that mages are better in the long run. Given infinite karma, mages are infinitely powerful. Samurai have a hard cap. But coming right out of chargen, sammies are always as good as, if not better than mages. And it takes a lot of play, much longer than I have ever played any tabletop campaign of any game, to get where mages are really 'hands down' better.

Probably the most powerful build in terms of getting both short term and long term power has to be the cybered adept. The cybered adept can start off almost as good as a sammy, and then grow much more easily. But that doesn't make sammies pointless -- if you don't have a hardcore cybermonster on your team from the get-go, you will find combat a lot tougher.

The typical mage can really suffer from facing mixed forces too. Everyone always says things like blah blah blah, stunball, blah blah mind control, blah blah enemy mages. But what if you're facing drones/vehicles AND meat security at the same time and your GM actually takes vision modifiers and object resistance into account? Sometimes you just need a guy who's fast, tough and lucky more than you need conterspelling and one but narrow spell a pass, the kinda guy with a burstlinked grenade launcher, HE grenades, and 12-14 dice to fire them with-- after all, vehicles laugh off stun damage and mind control as a matter of course, but rare indeed is the target that can survive an HE grenade and 4-5 net hits. I've seen and made some really good cybered Adepts, I really have. But they tend to be somewhat narrow, and a Street Samurai is completely capable of having a couple hobbies or enormous Edge pool on the side while still packing the Automatic, Heavy Weapons and Infiltration skill needed to sneak up on a security team and start dropping multiple people a turn with with grenade launchers and full bursts. It's not subtle, but a true blue "combat monster" street samurai is a scary guy, and can easily be built in such a manner that using a dollop of Edge to reroll failures all but guarantees that somebody is going to die, maybe even a lot of somebodies, and probably quite messily at that.

Street Samurai are one of the staple "classes" in SR..
..And they have a specific role - trained guns-for-hire.

They're meant to be tough bastards that you need as backup on a 'Run, well trained and well equipped.

Bounty Hunters, Policemen, Company Men, Thugs, Mercenaries are not Street Samurai [as such].


As always, designing characters by getting the calculator out and working out points for this and points for that doesn't create a character, it creates a set of numbers..
..And that can always make something better, as you tweak this and modify that.


A Street Samurai is meant to be more than just numbers, guns and armour - he's meant to be a gun-for-hire, with a past, with some sort of personal code of behaviour [supposedly Bushido-like, but unlikely for most people] and better skills than most.

If a Street Samurai can be bested in combat by Roles who are meant to be less capable [but possibly not Mercenaries, since a Mercenary often becomes a Street Samurai], then something is very wrong somewhere.


As for comparing a Street Samurai to Adepts and Mages, they're meant to be much rarer and def should be less able in combat - unless that's their area of expertise.


But then, that's just my view and I never let players build characters based on numbers and min/max-ing.

I remember a quote in one of the older books that went something like this:

"Yeah, but every 2 bit gun toting idiot calls himself a samurai now."

Just cause they say they is, don't mean they is. Hehe

as an archetype, i consider the street sam to be more than just a gun-bunny in terms of abilities. i expect him to be fast, tough, and deadly, yes... i also expect him to be stealthy, and ideally a skilled tactician. he should be very aware/perceptive, he should probably be reasonably skilled in social situations, know his way around a variety of types of combat, and should probably have all kinds of 'swiss army knife' kind of gear and cyber. i would expect them to have knowledge skills relating to those areas as well. regardless, 'street sam' is not a very clear archetype, imo. like i said, i would expect a heck of a lot more from a street sam than just being able to shoot a gun.

As much as I love adepts:

"Samurai" are always going to have a role in Shadowrun. Samurai defined as "non-Awakened characters," particularly in combat-oriented roles.

1. Not everyone is Awakened.
2. Cybernetics have a very real and usually pretty immediate "ceiling" in terms of development. Adept powers don't. Here's the kicker: adepts split their focus between skills and powers. Samurai focus on skills.
3. Samurai upgrade with money - adepts need karma, which may or may not be as easy to come by.
4. Stim patches.
5. Adepts tend to end up as specialists or low-powered generalists. Starting Samurai are either powerful generalists or scary specialists to begin with.

Most of the arguments for and against adepts can be applied with equal force (sorry, no pun intended) to wizworms as well.

Just food for thought.

-Siege

[stormwind fallacy alert][insert rant]

But hey, "roleplayer" characters have got numbers on their character sheets, too.
They're just lower.




(in fact they aren't, as roleplaying does not take away anything from your ability to squeeze the hell out of game mechanics, just as doing so does not compromise the ability to create interesting, dynamic characters, let them come to live by intense roleplaying and tell a good story with your friends.)

[/rant]
[/stormwind fallacy alert]


As far as the OP is concerned, i agree that you can replace a sam with a cadre of combat drones, even though there are limitations to their use.
I have often considered starting up a team made up solely of a hacker/rigger and a mage or two.
The possibilities of these concepts are endless, but tweaking a good samurai build is so much fun...i wouldn't want to miss that.
Plus, the whole rough, headbashing thing has got something to it.

There's always someone who will want to play the tough guy with tons of ware (even though i almost always end up not being the sam, but the caster...well, never mind).

I understand that from a roleplaying point of view the sammie is neither obsolete nor ever will be but when i think about voodoo mages being possessed by guardian spirits and thus ending up with 9-10 in the physical stats, 6 in mentals and virtually immune to everything smaller then a tank while being able to dish out serious damage as well as having larger off and def pools i just began to wonder if thats not a bit over the top, especially as such a built can still have loads of skills and the variety that sorcery grants.

jfyi where i was coming from.



Thats why i almost always play burnout mages with magic 1

A Street Sam should be heavily augmented. Not necessarily like in the old games with a 1 or lower essence at the start, but if he doesn't have at least 2 essence in 'Ware, I am likely not to think of him as much of a samurai.
I consider there to be certain minimums a Samurai must have:
1) He must have Initiative Boosting ware(Move by Wire, Synaptic Boosters, Wired Reflexes)
2) He must have a smart link.
3) He must have something to increase his survivability(bone lacing, dermal plates, body sheath, etc).
4) He must have some sort of vision enhancement.
5) I consider a Samurai with out at least one cyber limb to be a "Sam Poser".
6) The Samurai does not need to necessarioy have stealth skills, or even Tactical skills(not all Samurai are tactiticians..some are just good soldier for the team's tactician), but they should have Automatics, Heavy Weapons, Unarmed COmbat, and one weapon close combat skill. Longarms and pistols, to me, are optional.
7) A Street Sam should have demolitions

Street samurai still have plenty of roles in shadowrun. They typically start out with more overall combat boosts than an adept, making them the most effective combat generalists. Adepts who can compare with a sammie in combat generally need bioware to augment their magical abilities, and tend to be much more specialized. The sammie's special blend of speed, damage soaking ability, and rapid firepower make him or her an asset to any shadowrunning team.

That's the exact point about the damage track, pure adepts get improved body whereas sams get bone lacing or bone density augmentation which does the same job along with potentially extra boxes from cyberlimbs. Now I don'tt like the idea of limbs much myself, this might just be my dislike of playing someone with a fake hand, but if you want maximum damage track at the expense of all else then cyberlimbs are the way to go in either case.

I'm not sure I'd say Sam's are essential, but they are a valuable asset to most teams.

Like Siege said Sams are in a much better position to diversify their capabilities than adepts are. A Sam who starts out as a straight up gunslinger can eventually end up being the guy who can backup the hacker, fill in for the face, twink out the teams weapons, and fill in any other gaps in the teams abilities. An adept on the other hand needs to sink so much karma into initiation, his Magic att, foci and whatnot that he can't afford to diversify. Overall Sams are my favorite archetype to play, simply because they are so adaptable.

sammies are cyberpunk. they're the definitive cyberpunk character. (okay, maybe the decker too.) they're sooo like a genre defining archetype.

aren't magical warps and stuff like that supposed to be more and more common in the 6th world? an adept and a mage will suddenly find themselves on the run from some sammies.

but i get what you're saying about the numbers. and i can see your perspective for a pc team. but sammies certainly should have an important role as npc's since there will be a lot more of them than mages.

but i think that a shadowrun team without a sammie is missing its dark, metallic cyberpunk heart.

It's extremely easy to jack up a Samurai for ridiculous situational awareness as well. A set of Attention Coprocessors and a Radar Sensor is a cheap and effective 'ware package provided you don't have any real special concerns for your essence. Sure, Adepts can beat you in this area if they want to, as usual, but it starts to become a matter of adding up all the "ands." A samurai can easily get Wired 2. And a spur. And some orthoskin. And Skillwires. And a Skill Recorder. And some Synthacardium. And autoinjectors... You get the idea. Meanwhile, Adepts are great characters, but they're generally limited to concentrating on one or two particular shticks out of the box while Samurai can easily float between quite a few high pools without having to even mine his soft capped edge for extra points.

As for Possession Mages... meh. One day I'll figure out why people think they're so over-the-top awesome. The so-called "abusive" ones that I've seen are essentially one trick ponies while the more versatile ones suffer from all the weaknesses of other Magicians, plus they generally lack utility and offensive output relative to Materialization traditions since they don't have to put up with the hassle of having vessels on hand. I do like Possession magic, and I think they make an exceptional foil to Materialization, but they don't really represent any worse of a threat to the Samurai's role than a Materialization tradition with Guardian and Man Spirits already does.

Well, I tend to GM alot and when I hear this, or things like this, is 'what the hell am I missing'. Usually in short order I find it.

See, unlike cyberware/bioware, your Mage's boost can be banished. I'm betting, if I looked, I'd see where you would have problems with passing through wards. And while you might think I'd be harassing you if I started bringing enemy mages who specialized in banishing (though with all the Shadowrunner mages wandering around using spirits/elementals as instant armies and 'I win buttons' I would think most corporate security for secure sites would practically DEMAND their wagemages actually worked in these feilds...

Never mind background counts and specific anti-mage stuff out there.






Then again: I've always hated the booster spells. Mages are bad ass enough without being able to outperform the physical killers too for less cost. Of course, that was before I GM'd and realized how important it was to remember that certain things have built in limitations for reasons....

As for the rigger thing: Yeah, Drones have limitations too. And yeah, I'd probably start looking into them if the players decided that they wanted to run 'all mage/sammy' and 'drone army sammy' instead of actually taking along muscle of some sort. Off the top of my head: Drones are far more vulnerable to jamming and enemy hackers than the typical sammy. The more drones you have, the more likely the enemy hackers will find one you aren't paying attention to for them to subvert...


And since there seems to be a side debate/vote: anyone who specializes in physical violence and uses cyber/bio to ramp up their abilities is a Street Sam to me. A more restricted view (bushido following, cyber arm having, sword weilding gun-bunny) is to specific to name a role.

To be honest, I don't care if there is a Sam or not (by my looser definition...) on the team as long as there is someone (adept in other words) filling that role.

@ Cardul: A sammie can get by without having a cyberlimb. Having the cyberlimb just makes him tougher. I think the Type O Body positive quality and Bone Density 4 Bioware goes a long way to balance that out. 16 BP to give your sammie +4 to Body to resist damage... and does Str/2 +3 damage without spurs, and uses the body's natural healing to fix (no going to the cyberdoc to get your broken ceramic bones fixed up).

@ Whipswitch: Stack that on Visual & Audio Enhancement (also add Spatial Reconizer & select sound filter on top of that). Your sammie knows things are coming almost to the point of precognition.

@ Everyone: As was stated many times, the sammie can do a LOT more than shoot a gun. I built a sammie and with Type O body, I have him so that every physical stat is 5 and every mental stat is a 4. When I get the skills for him done, he can shoot like hell and smooth talk almost as well as the Face. Could I twink him to be a better shooter and less in HTH... yup, but there's no fun in that.

There are not enough options IMO. I don't think they are obsolete, but they are not absolutely necessary either.

Actually, I feel there are too many options now.
It used to be the three types were Tank Samurai, Speed Samurai, or Bio-Samurai.
Now we have Dodge-Tank, Damage Resist Tank,Initiative Speed Samurai, Speed Speed Samurai, Bio Samurai, Gene Samurai, Nano Sam, Intel Sam(the mega perception set up), Cyber-Ninja, Juicer Sam, and who knows what else. Sammies used to be the simplest for a new player(and, really, still are..kind of), but now..they just have so MANY options on how you can build them, its not even funny anymore.

A good street sam is one with a good balance of cyber and bioware. A sam's primary advantages over the Awakened and hacker are that he is unaffected by Background Count and should not be vulnerable to Electronic Warfare. The nice thing about Shadowrun is that you can build a combat hacker or a cyber/bio adept.

I have to say it! Not obsolete at all. It's so much easier to build and advance a samurai than any awakened karma-sinks.

In my games the couple "pure" samurais that are there are just scary. Real scary. Much more versatile, more reliable, tougher and more effective in combat than the rest of the characters in their groups. (including magic users)

Cyberware provide for many funky options many adepts/mages can't really afford if they want to keep some magic. skillwires, attention coprocessor, radar, voice modulator, select sound filter, redlining, gyromounts, hydraulic jacks, etc, etc.

I do not mean that samurais are better than adepts. Oh, by any means no. Each has its niche. I just want to point out that there are many things samurai can do well from the start than adepts and mages usually will not. And in the long run, creative samurai can and will "fill in the gaps" left at character creation, max out their skills and maybe learn some deadly martial arts while magic users are spending most of their karma to initiate.

Besides, In my experience, the long run (and double digits of inititation) are just there for the very minority of shadowrunners. The rest quit, their groups disband or die quickly under automatic fire.

Samurai make great characters and, played to the hilt, add a lot to in-group dynamics and roleplay. And, as Sungun said, they have a ticking "dark cybernetic heart". How could you call them "obsolete"? Poor little sam!

Cheers!

Max

Like Jaid said... a sammie should be the "Swiss Army Knife" of the team. I would further like to define that to mean that the Sammie should be the master of all the Mundane things a 'Runner team can do. They should have high Charisma so they can talk to Mr. Johnson, the skills (later on) to help the team Hacker and/or Rigger. They can dump Karma into getting skills that a Mage will ALMOST never get.

Not at all. The guys still have their place. They are the guns for hire, ive always looked at them as the 'elites' in a way, if the proverbial cow manure is hitting the fan, you want them on your side. Sure, they have disadvantages...but they always have. First off, you can make a socially adept samurai without too much of a problem, i've done it. But yeah, perhaps having 5.8 points of essence chewed away from stuff might make em a little distant. They don't have to be unprofessional and useless, though. Actually, to me, the 'archetypical Sam'' is a rather professional individual, and regardless if they are distant and cold or friendly and outgoing, they are likely to act almost as the team leader, and have a wide array of skills besides killing.

They have experience usually too; their Knowledge Skills can reflect on that, which is something that a bunch of drones don't have. (Sure, the rigger can, but nothing wrong with having a rigger AND a sam in a group, is there?)

And yeah, he might be a bit vulnerable to(mana) based spells(though his toughness can probably help with those physical based ones that tend to chew mages apart, if the mages are twinked to the point of having little Body because 'ah, they don't need it''. I always loved the Sam archetype, my first character was a Sam(though i had no idea what i was doing when i made him, i just wrote out a bunch of samurai looking background and shoved in some numbers back in the SR2 days), and i'll continue to play them. Hell, for a character-creation walkthorough i did i made a more melee oriented Sam who still looks like they can hang with those ''big boys'' of mages and adepts.

Oh, and in my book a "samurai" starts at about 1 essence or less. In the long run we are talking about 0+.

The two sams I am thinking about from my games, for example are there:

:SR4: Harker (played by a guy called Dominguez) retired at about 0,05 essence.

:SR4: Uknar (by Santiago) The orc samurai in the current group I can't remember, but must be around 0,3 or something. (voice modulator, dermal sheath 3, cybereyes, cyberears, titanium bone lacing, datajack, olfactory booster plus toner and augmentation 3, suprathyroid gland, etc. oh, and reflexes) !!!

and in SR3 it was even worse, with the one million nuyen and all. I remember Ryu a.k.a. "the diskette" (by Mario) who needed and excel sheet just to calculate essence at chargen. It started at 0,00something.

Essence is for pussies.

Cheers!!

Max

Edited to add players names because I think they deserve some credit Great characters all.

I may be new here, but this is universally true. I can make a workable Infiltration Specialist/Face/Gunbunny with 400 BP with bio and cyber. I may not have 20+ dicepool for one shot, but I can come in with 10+ DP for any of those roles. An Adept cannot make that work out of the box. And down the road, I will be using nuyen and karma to just build upon those roles. Add to that I don't have an astral signature nor am I affected by background count (which many Corps will place secure facilities within per Corporate Download) and now I am the go anywhere do anything starting character. And it only gets worse as I gain karma and nuyen. So for a small team of runners, a Sam is INDESPENSIBLE, but that may just be how I play my characters.

How can you even think about saying that sammies are obselete even tho slingers pack a punch raw muscle is always required

RTWW xx