OK, don't have a whole lot of time right now, but will get started on a step by step
I'll start with the first spark I came up with "I'm an ex-marine with six brothers and sisters to support; there's no way I'm affording that on a gunnery sargeant's pay."
more sparky goodness:
We'll call her Sally Red-Buttons (in honor of
Puppetland) Shadowrun: a storytelling game with wires in a grim world of make believe.
She'll be an ork, because orks tend to be poor, and also tend to have kids in litters. Sally is the oldest, and joined the marines in an attempt to move up in the world. When mom and dad got kilt, Sally suddenly found herself with six younger brothers and sisters who wanted stuff like a roof over their heads and something to eat every now and then. So what do you do for big gobs of cash when all you really know how to do is kill people and blow stuff up? Well... she knew a guy who knew a guy.
She'll generally qualify as muscle, and be mundane (i.e. no magic)
Step two: meet the system
Assuming 400 points
I note down that being an ork costs 20 points, and gives some stat bonuses and caps certain other stats.
Interesting stuff:
As an ex marine, she'll probably have the Sinner flaw (5 points)
Since I watched an episode of house recently we'll give her an allergy to copper: "Momma had one of those old-style copper IUDs. It's didn't work. But now coming into contact with copper gives me really bad hives" (we'll call this an uncommon, moderate allergy, 10 points)
As the favoured warriors of the Almighty, everyone knows that marines give a good first impression (5 point positive quality)
Stats. I can spend up to half my points (200) on my 8 basic stats. The 3 special stats of edge, magic, and resonance don't count against my 200 points max. Also note that bringing up a stat to it's maximum level costs 25 points for the last point. (SR4 chargen does this for you). Also note that a stat of 2-3 before metahuman modifications is what the man on the street can be expected to have.
Being a ex-marine, Sally should have pretty good physical stats and maybe a higher than normal willpower. Since Sally is going to shoot people, we should favour her agility over her strength.
We'll try the following base stats (worth 200 points)
Body 3
Agility 5
Reaction 4
Strength 3
Charisma 3
Intuition 3
Logic 2
Willpower 5
Note that, being an ork, Sally gets +3 body and +2 strength. Making her final stats:
Body 6
Agility 5
Reaction 4
Strength 5
Charisma 3
Intuition 3
Logic 2
Willpower 5
Edge? I dunno, how lucky is Sally? We'll say that beating the odds of an IUD makes her pretty luck, and give her an edge of 4.
[watch this space for edits, will be back in a while]
[edit]
So, the important things to pay attention to when buying stats:
You can only spend half you points (usually 200) on your 8 basic stats.
There are three things to keep track of with your stats:
Augmented max
This is the actual maximum amount you can have in a stat, even with augmentations. So, for example, if you get wired reflexes 3 and level 3 reaction enhancers, you'd have +3 REA from the wired reflexes and +3 REA from the reaction enhancers. But now note that your augmented REA max is probably 9. This means that is your natural reaction was a 4, you don't have 4 + 6 = 10 reaction, but only 9, as tat is your augmented max. Note that the augmented max also limits
magical enhancements to your stats. So your REA 9 guys can't benefit from and increase reaction spell.
Unaugmented max
For most races and most stats, 6. This is also sometimes referred to as the 'hard cap', referring to the fact than you can't spend anymore build points to increase that stat. Note that there are certain merits (Lucky, Exceptional Attribute) that alter your unaugmented max. Also note that the 'last point' of the unaugmented stat costs 25BP, rather than 10.
'Soft cap'
This the stat level one below your unaugmented max.
Barring certain extreme min-max builds, it's never worth it to hit the unaugmented max in one of your 8 basic stats during charater generation. You have to give up 3 other stat points to get there.
Example, if we wanted Sally to have AGL 6, we'd have to spend 65 points on agility (10 x 4 to get to agility 5, then 25 more to get to agility 6). And we'd have to drop 3 stat points to remain under the 200 point maximum we could spend on basic stats:
So changing Sally's AGL to 6, we drop her body to 2 and strength to one.
Total: 195 points
Body 2
Agility 6
Reaction 4
Strength 1
Charisma 3
Intuition 3
Logic 2
Willpower 5
After modifiers for being an ork:
Body 5
Agility 6
Reaction 4
Strength 3
Charisma 3
Intuition 3
Logic 2
Willpower 5
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Notes on special stats:
Edge is roughly comparable in power to the square of your edge score. If you have points left over during character creation, soft-maxing your edge score (5 for everyone but humans) is a pretty good idea.
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Sadly, the archetypes in the book generally do not follow the rules. If you have a later printing, many of the glaring errors may have been fixed.
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Note that the basic SR4 chargen system is very exploitable.