Aw. I'm glad you had fun, but I always hate to see a player go out of their way to add social skills and then have them fall flat.

Thats why it is a good idea to use karma-Gen, thus making generalistic Chars much more viabel.

It is just a difference if 5/1 cost the same as 3/3 or if it costs 70 to 50, so actually you could go 4/3.

Yes, with BPs such characters have severe problems surviving. Also if they have survived their first run they mostly drop significantly in power. The optimized characters just work on their weak spots, while this character would need more Karma to get her charisma from 4 to 5.

Impossible. I declare that there was no way you had fun with this <sneer>generalist</sneer> character.

Did you remember to spend 40 BP for this post?

I think there are some good in game reasons to hire a generalist. Mainly, trust and experience. If a team of criminals is going to do a job, they're not going to go out and hire the best person they can. They will go with someone they know, even if that's not the "best" person for a job. The best Hacker or Mage in the world would be great on a run, but they could double cross you and make off with the payment or just sell you out for an extra buck after the job or they might just rub some people the wrong way. I have never pictured Shadowrunners as trusting individuals and I think they're more likely to know people that are good enough at what they do and can handle things in other categories.

I also think people's definition of specialist is different here. I see a specialist as someone that has a dice pool of 22-28, because they've put everything towards one focus and they might have 6-8 in something if it happens to use the same attribute as what they maxed for their primarily specialty, but will more likely have 4-6. And in that case a generalist with 9-12 dice in several things does have an advantage against the specialists who is outside their area. If a specialist in your game keeps it to 16 and under in their specialty, than they seem more like a focused generalist than a specialist (in the games I've played) and yeah they probably hold up pretty well outside their specialty.

I have yet to see a game where a specialist is more likely to survive than a generalist (not necessarily less likely), because inevitably someone hits you in your weakest area. The GM isn't going to always pit a hacker against your technomancer. Eventually someone's going to take a katana to her head and if she felt like the points for a decent body and reaction score weren't worth it, because it was outside her specialty then she's screwed. If a GM wants to kill you, it doesn't matter what sort of character you built, it will happen.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, keep trying, there's an Eskimo down the street willing to buy snow cones.

A well built specialist will have no more significant weaknesses than a decent generalist. If both are mundanes, they're equally hooped when facing a wizard. A generalist does stuff, sure. A specialist does stuff almost as well, but does one thing a hell of a lot better. Dumpshock has proven, time and time again, that you don't need a glaring weakness. The original pornomancer had 9 dice in dodge, and pnly got worse as time went on.

Lack of Skill is often a Weakness, sometimes a glaring one. Can't tell you how many times I have seen a "Specialist" who lacks skills necessry to survive in the shadows on his own. If that specialist is always with his team, then he can be covered. That is a very unrealistic expectation, however.

And a comment on your quoted text above (since I never saw it, as it was posted before I joined). About The character with the 3's in everything. I have played a character like that, and he was a ton of fun. So you can say that you have at least talked to someone who has done that. Granted, over the course of 387 Karma, Stats did go up, and new skills were purchased, but that is only to be expected.

I see the "specialist who can't survive alone" thing in a lot of games...it's annoying, since it rewards min-maxing as the only way to punish it is to intentionally split the party, which is generally a headache.

Actually, it's a pretty cool concept that could use only minimal mechanical tweaks (Agi 4/Rea 4 instead of A5/R3, for example - but that apparently wasn't necessary after all), good backstory and a couple of storyline hooks for the GM to use (and not ones of the "how to kill the poor sod" variety). Also, is it just me or are the knowledge skills missing from the list?

As for the specialist/generalist dispute, the "22-dice pool" sort of pornomancy is one of my berserk buttons. Bring it up and I'll go into full Killer GM mode. Weapon-ruining glitches and critches, ambushes, explosives, magic, being put into unfamiliar situations where other characters would fare better, anything.

Some skills may require that sort of dicepools (22+) in order to have good chances of success. Other skill may not. If the skill is being tested against low static Thresholds, is usually not opposed, likely does not have much in the way of negative modifiers, etc, then having a very large dice pool may well be excessive.

Yeah, I ran into a bit of that problem, ironically enough in a game that JonathanC was running on the Welcome to the Shadows forum. The character I played, Dancer, I envisioned as the struggling artist type (SINless ork and all), but when I actually rolled those 18 dice for her dancing, it was more like "Holy crap, that's a lot of successes!"

Oh man, I remember that game. I'm sorry it fell apart so quickly...life was kind of kicking my ass.

I think Dancer is a jinx - two other games I put variations of her into died, too. But it happens, and at least it lasted for a decent bit compared to some of the others that died an early death.