Numerous times, I have heard of some Shadowrun builds mentioned on these boards numerous times.

Here is a list of them:

Bloodzilla
Mr. Lucky
Pornomancer

In short, what is the basic concept, and what are the mechanical parts of the build?

Bloodzilla is the one I am least familiar with. I only know that it refers to an exploit in the SR4 rules for blood magic and summoning blood spirits. Only really a problem if you let PCs use blood magic in the first place, although I think the loophole has been closed.

Mr. Lucky is a character build by Cain with a high pistols skill, skillwires, and an Edge of 8. A decent build, but only really a potential problem if you also agree with Cain's views on how some of the uses of Edge, such as Long Shot tests, work (which has inspired much debate).

The pornomancer was one of those "how many dice could you get for this?" builds, seeing how much an elf with high Charisma, bioware, adept abilities, and other modifiers could get for a seduction roll. Although an extreme example, it illustrates a potential problem with social skills. Namely, their effects are kind of vague, and there are a lot of potential positive modifiers to social skill rolls, and these modifiers mostly stack with one another. So GMs have the problem of adjudicating what a con man with superhuman abilities can and cannot do, as far as talking people into things.

Well, Mr. Lucky is heavy on Edge.

And Pornomancer, from my understanding, is a heavy Charisma character.

Bloodzilla isn't a character, it was an oversight in the Blood Invoking rules. The basic idea is to summon a Force 1 spirit, bind it repeatedly to gain as many services as is reasonable, blood invoke it, and then feed it. The intent was that Blood Spirit Force would be limited. The actual result was that you could have a Force 600 spirit at your beck and call fairly easily. This was fixed in eratta and is no longer possible.

Mr Lucky is a Human with 8 Edge and very little else. Any Character with 8 Edge qualifies, but the concept is that he relies heavily on Edge to get him out of tight spots, particularly in abusing the Long Shot rules to allow him to do things which are beyond the impossible. The called shot to bypass a tank's armor and kill its fully-concealed driver is the signature technique of a Mr. Lucky.

The Pornomancer is a Social Adept dedicated to Con with a specialization in Seduction. With a good build he's throwing 30+ Seduction dice before Edge. The sterotypical pornomancer encounter goes like this. Hardcore combat monster Samurai is leading a team to an important objective when they are ambushed. The combat monster is about to blast the opposition to pieces when the Pornomancer uses Edge to go first, flashes the combat monster a look, and begins pelvic gyrations. The pornomancer rips off his velcro pants and the combat monster drops his. The two frag their brains out while their teams try to kill each other. The pornomancer, of course, is keeping the most effective member of the opposing team busy so his team wins easily.

Any other infinite power loops/ unbalanced character concepts that I should look out for?

The Troll Tank, with maxed reaction and maxed damage resistance...
A soft maxed exceptional reaction with genetic optimization and ini boosters/combat sense/reakt can give you a lot of dice to dodge with, more against melee, and these dice are better than damage resistance dice, since they reduce the damage by 1 of by all damage if you roll enough...
This coupled with a soft maxed optimized body with the toughness quality and the troll bonus and bone density/lacing/mystic armor/armor spell/actual armor can give you over 30 dice out of chargen...
So this troll can stand in front of anything and not even feel it, he can actually survive everything but very heavy combat in his undies...

Mr. Lucky stats http://forums.dumpshock.com/index.php?show...=18257&st=0
Pornomancer stats http://forums.dumpshock.com/index.php?show...ancer&st=50

I'm not sure I would call a troll tank build unbalancing - it is harder, but not impossible, to damage, at the expense of some offensive ability.

To be honest, Mr. Lucky and the pornomancer aren't unbalancing in and of themselves, but illustrate potential problems with certain rules interpretations. Namely, either letting long shot tests be abused, or treating social skills like mind control. And if you do either of those things, any character with an Edge of 4 or better, or any face, becomes potentially "unbalancing".



To me, merely min-maxing a legal starting character isn't that big a deal. The problem comes when players try to use "creative" rules applications to cheat the system. Examples would be a possession mage who tries to make a spirit's service "Be me for a day" so he can walk around spirit-boosted all day, or someone trying to argue that metahumans count as "critters" for the shapechange spell, turning the spell into a cheap way to boost all of their physical Attributes.

In my campaign, all PCs have max edge (7 for humans) as a default. It hasn't created any problem so far, since it's mostly used for survival rolls, for those "this has to work" critical rolls, or to make that "fluff skill" check really impressive.

well, there's Brick . . basically a complete Body cyber replacement with as much armor slapped on as possible and then wearing some armor still . .
can be combined with the dreaded troll archer with some good soft-maxing too . .
a favourite of mine was the ultimate mundane climber, he threw something like 30 to 40 dice on his climbing check and basically could not fall even on all of those dice coming up as 1 . . not really usefull for much, but he could have scaled the aztech parymid in under 5 minutes and could have gotten down on the other side in the same ammount of time *g*
the fastest alive where someone pumped everything into movement-speed and could run faster than some cars would be mentionable too ^^
and there was one built that could reliably fire two long bursts from his SMG's at the same time without too much trouble . .

Speaking of Pornomancers, meeting a social adept NPC with a not so socially adept PC can be very entertaining if one runs with the effect such high social skills and modifiers can have.

It's sexxxy time!