Someone (I think it might have been whipsitch) was talking in another thread about the concept of seeking the best synergy you can in a concept. The idea of trying to share important attributes or skills where possible so that the build has a bit of an edge in combination that wouldn't have been possible with focusing on only one or the other. The classic Conjurer/Face being a good example of this with Charisma being so important to both.

So this got me to thinking about what other concepts have good synergy like that. Stealth/Shooter for the focus on agility. Maybe athlete/grappler or athlete/thrower for strength.

But what other sorts of concepts work well for sharing attributes, or that people think form a certain "greater in sum of the parts than either of the individual parts" sort of thing?

Do you in general prefer this sort of split focus or is it better to hyperfocus? Yeah, I know that this is one of the great debates, but I'm just curious what people's preferences are and I'm also just looking for interesting combinations that I haven't thought of.

The beautiful thing about Agility is that it allows you to hyperfocus while still gaining massive benefits elsewhere. Honestly, hitting 5 agility and buying Muscle Toner 2 in order to hit 7 is almost always worth considering for any build, even Magicians. You end up with a 6 dicepool while defaulting to an Agility governed skill, and that includes things like Escape Artist, Gymnastics, Infiltration and most Combat Skills. Combine that with a decent Edge total and you can really get away murder sometimes. It always pays to be coordinated.

Yeah, the Big 4(Agility, Logic, Charisma and to a point Intuition), are half the attributes that link to a large percentage of the skills. In fact, just the first 3 link to a large portion of the skills.

If you manage to pump those four(the first 3 can be increased with Muscle Toner, Cerebral Booster and Pheremones), you can do, well, about anything. That's pretty much a twinky method though.

But I go for synergy alot. My sam who is mostly melee, i got him and 8 Agility and 8 Strength(i could break Availability and get him a bit more ware). He's very athletic too so this pretty much takes care of everything he does. Since he wanted to be in action movies before he got dropped into running, these stats work well, as does his general likability and social skills i scattered around him. (I kind of like mixing combat/charisma, because im a softie for action movies and stuff. )

maybe a little bit too much but:
elf, shaman with possession tradition, throw in adept for face and gunslinger stuff
Charisma and agility get bonus, charisma is drain attribute, charisma helps with the number of ghosts you can have, agility helps with most, if not all, combat skills, the adept allows to push your face and combat skills even more . . and later on, you'll get REALLY scary because you can buy some electronics and basically be a whole frigging team as soon as you've upgraded some skills so you can command drones with an external comlink and do some light hacking additionally to your ghosts. . and because of your agility you can do most combat stuff at least in intermedium range in the beginning . . oh and yeah, you can still bio up some of those attributes for just one point of magic loss. .

Tailored Pheromones do not actually directly increase Charisma. They merely grant a Dice Pool bonus to (non-magical) Charisma and Social skill tests.

True, but it can still help those Face-types out if they are in person, if someone wanted to play an Agl/Log/Cha skillmonkey. It wouldn't be a bad purchase in that case.

No doubt. Just making a note that Tailored Pheromones differ from the other two implants you mentioned in that regard, as they both do add directly to their respective Attributes.

A mage and hacker go rather well together. The mage can hotsim via 'trodenet. Willpower is a drainstat for all traditions and boosts your stun condition monitor. Willpower is also what you use to resist assault from black ICE and dumpshock. Now most of the hacker skills are linked to either intuition or logic which you can find a tradition that supports. But since most hacker skill checks don't actually USE your attribute I'd suggest finding a cha dependant tradition and going into that.

If you can can then use this extra charisma to finaggle at least the basic groundwork of at least half-decent social skills. So there you go, magic hacking and schmoozing all in one package.

I kind of hit on the hacker mage thing accidentally. I had made a chaos mage and to fit the style of the tradition I gave him 1 or two ranks in computer, and I figured 1 or 2 ranks in cybercombat would help keep him from being utterly helpless if someone hacked his commlink cyber-self-defense.

Now, the team ends up having to hack a high security server, the dedicated hacker manages to infer that my mage isn't helpless on the matrix and conscripts him to help him. Turns out the physad used some of his surplus funds to get a response 5 commlink. The hacker had stripped copy protection on his software so he loaded up the physad's commlink with good programs and handed it to my mage telling him to assist on this hack job. My mage ported in his persona Icon from his commlink, summons a spirit of man with the spell "heal" and orders it to heal either of us if we appear injured (hoping it would astrally detect any damage we take), jacks in and does a surprisingly good job due to the bonus from the hot sim VR. 'course anything he could do the hacker could do better, that is up until the node we were no got shut down abruptly. So there we were resisting dumpshock. My mage rolled his healthy sized willpower plus other mods and shrugged it off. Hacker had less willpower then my mage, failed to shrug off the dumpshock, but that was when my spirit pounded him and healed him back to tip top shop. My mage was tankier on the matrix.

'course Chaos magic, though more thematic to hacking, uses logic as it's spellcasting stat so it isn't as optimized as something charisma based if you are going soley by the numbers. The note on charisma is an afterthought on all of the above. Though with augmentation they did introduce an implant that gives the hacker a bonus initiative pass in full VR, this means a mage will have to choose between being slower or taking a painful 1 point essence hit.

What about a (possession magician with logic as a drain stat)+(Rigger/Mechanic). This build could really pump logic for the drain and technical skills and field some of the scariest drones ever: Unhackable, Actually hardened armor, detection spells etc. I really like the idea of a fly spy that can move at 60 has -9 to detect, 10 hardened armor, and can cast something like Mind Probe, mob mood, or scan surface thoughts

Of course if your going for spirits you might want Cha as a drain stat and rely on Task spirits for the Mechanic skills....

Man, possession is SO overrated. Task Spirits are great though. But as a general rule of thumb, you have OR to deal with, and nine times out of ten, you just need a Spirit to pop in and provide some utility ASAP rather than taking a drone, preparing it and then summoning a Force 4 Spirit or higher just so you have a decent chance of beating its highly processed 4+ Object Resistance threshold. As for hardened armor, a combat drone like the Steel Lynx already has 9 points, and can be upgraded further. High powered Spirits are nice, but if it's strong enough to possess a Lynx, than it's likely strong enough to do you more good by standing on its own two feet so you can enjoy *5* initiative passes worth of drone and spirit goodness rather than making them share one dual natured body. A dual natured body, might I add, which can be nuked from the astral and is extremely vulnerable vs. other spirits.

Mechanically, you have a point. That tactic reduces almost ever single test to the size of the spirit you can summon with exploding your head. To me that really takes a lot out of the character to have minions doing that much. I personally just can't stomach that much cheese. Also while it will cost you karma/BP/Neuyen, mundanes can get better technical skills with specialization, Cerebral Enhancements, and that nano system for skill bonuses. That tops out at about the skill of a force 8 or 9 task spirit. Which is achievable, but not casually with out boat loads of karma.