I have heard on several boards of a "Troll Tank," that of a Troll that is armored up and has high Body, so that they can shrug off heavy machine guns and grenades.

I have met mixed reactions to this archetype, though most believe that only twinks/min-maxers would use it, and/or that they can break the game.

What are your opinions? Is it all that it's cracked up to be?

It doesn't really even take a troll to do it.

The current system is so blase that it's really easy to manipulate it to do all sorts of silly things. It's an inherent flaw in a system that basically revolves around a static difficulty and the only real variable is the number of dice you throw at that difficulty. So sure, you can easily get 20+ points of armor on a character and all but shrug off most attacks, that's more of a fault of the GM for allowing such a character into their game more than a fault in the game. Or more correctly, it's a fault of the game, but it's the GM's fault for not keeping it in check.

I'm also a big non-fan of trolls. They're the single largest reason why several rules are goofy and crippling to more normal characters. Melee damage being a shining example (where a normal character can only do 1 point of Stun damage with a punch... which easily gets ignored by other normal characters even without armor).

I know that every game has loopholes and flaws, but I still am relatively inexperienced with the rules. I am still reading through the BBB, and I didn't have enough time to play to see the game first-hand, so I mostly have hypothetical theories and asking more experienced players to answer my questions.

Is there any other character concepts that I should look out for?

Mr. Lucky. Blood mages. Mages doing channeling w/possession...

Fortunately, I don't have any Mages in my group. But overall, Shadowrun seems to be a a rather stable system. I have not counted more than 5 "twink" types in the game so far.

That's just it, Shadowrun doesn't really have "types." It comes down to the player and how determined they are to manipulate things to their favor. Most people, for instance, don't bat an eye when someone submits a character focused around Perception or Social Skills, but you can easily create some ridiculously broken characters around those two things. And that's without even really trying...

Basically, just watch out for any character with a regular dice pool over 15 or so. That's what most characters should be tossing on the table. A pool of 20 is pushing it unless they're extremely specialized and anything more than that is probably over the top and should be reigned in.

An overcasting troll mage with channeling, high body, and FFBA. Watch as they shrug off anything!

How easy would it be for players to stumble upon these accidentally? Or are they so hard to find and combine that you'd have to intentionally look for ways to twink your character?

Not really an issue TBH. Body and FFBA doesn't mean a whole lot, and troll mages just tend to suck.



Most adept builds can get pretty hyper-specialized. Mages are pretty easy to go absurd with too. Tank trolls like Brick are harder to "stumble" on, but you can get close without trying too hard.

Typically its the adepts with the social/perception like Dr Funk mentioned that get a little crazy.

But how do we get the treads on the Tank Troll?

5? Dude, your just playing with some very uncreative people.

Lets see

Troll Tank
Drone Rigger/ One Man Army
Melee Specialist Adept (doesn't even need to be a troll)
Dodge Adept (Gets beaten by the gun specialist, but can avoid most anything else)
Elf Gunbunny (Takes out pretty much everything)
Overcasting Mage
Conjurer/ One Man Army
Faustian (absurdly powerful, or not, depending solely on the GM)
_-Karmasucker (variety of Faustian who obtained the Karma Drain power, gamebreaking isn't the word for it)
Binkey (Centaur tank, quite literally)
Pornomancer, Leadermancer, (and other Social Adept varieties).
Little Black Book (Social character heavily focused on high loyalty+high connections contacts, can get just about any favor done).
Mental Domination Mage (absurdly versatile and absurdly powerful)
Heavy Weapons dude
Fire Support Guy (nothing quite like shooting things you can't see with a mortar or guided missiles)
Movement Specialist (usually an adept, but not necessarily)
_-Flash Jr. (Dude who focuses on running fast, can cover absurd distances quickly)
_-Submariner (High specialized in swimming, surprisingly powerful against vampires)
Robot Man (Either Cyborg in a tweeked drone, or a Free Spirit possessing an tweeked drone if you're using Karmagen)
Babythrower (Missile-Master Adept)
Mr. Encyclopedia (Dumps everything into knowledge skills, either totally useless or completely indispensable depending on your GM)
Karmagen Possession Free Spirit with a Dream Pact with a Troll Tank who owns two Panther Assault Cannons
Judas for a Megacorp (sucks for the other teammembers, but when that guy gets activated he'll be rolling in nuyen and equipment, depending on the GM).
Magical Stealth Specialist (Damned impossible to see if he's built right).
Mr. Perceptive (either the most useful character possible or the most useless, depending on your GM.)
And any number of post-Unwired Technomancer builds.

That, or we only created one set of characters so far, and didn't have enough time to pour over the options. I'm pretty sure that soon enough, my group will be able to spot "problem powers" with a hawk's eye.

With modular cyberlimbs... Duh.

A lot of flexible games have this weakness. More than one edition of the Hero System/Champions rules has even provided extreme examples of the issue, as an illustration of how stoopid such manipulation can be. The *joy* of the flexibility is that you can go *partway* down the "exploitative" route of two or more roles and be a decent multirole character. And the joy of Shadowrun and the Sixth World is that it's quite possible to make the twinkidj irrelevant (with consequences for those who've abused the freedom they've been offered).

*shrug*
He's also exaggerating a bit that it's the current system's fault. Becaues nobody had characters that could shrug off naval-scale damage in SR2 or SR3.

By the way, the minimum damage someone can do is 2(S), Dr. Funk. 1/2(1 strength) + 1 net hit. Not that it really matters. The difference is that in SR4 you resist with body+armor at TN(4) instead of body+allocated combat pool at TN(whatever-armor, minimum 2). It's a lot easier to get a bad roll when 2/3 of the posibilities are failures than when it was only 1 in 6, even if you do have a few more guaranteed dice.

Overall, damage is more likely to stick in SR4 than earlier versions. It just doesn't jump around quite as radically as it did in the L/M/S/D days.

oh hell yes they are all they are cracked up to be!

know why i mostly play trolls, and especially the combat heavy type?
'cause someone bloody well has to, or it just won't feel like cyberpunk shadowrun to me!
all those elves and humans and their stinky black ops style sneaky shadowruns. .
sometimes a run just requires the gentle touch of a vindicator in a crowded mall!

also: you may not get much to do in such groups, but if you do, you're worth about every last point of karma and build points that went into those things, because you can keep the other characters(the high charisma bitch, the close combat adept and the illusions heavy mage) alive when it comes to steel rain . .

and you get to do the heavy sigh and saying things like:"i told you so . . i knew this would happen . . this is all your fault!"

best part though? seeing the shocked expression on the face of just about everybody, if you can get up after being hit by a PAC with just one light damage to show for it . . or taking an Ares Great Dragon ATGM in stride with S physical damage and getting to say:"it's just a flesh wound, but now i am ANGRY! hand my my BIG weapon of choice this time!"

A troll possession logic tradition mage with FFBA and a magic score of 5 (4) give him 9 body so FFBA would be able to give you 27 armor on top of that 9 body. First step is get channeling. Second step is oversummon a force 8 spirit and possess you. You now have 16 hardened armor, 17 body, and 43 armor..... so how does this suck and is not totally the tank master? He can absorb 10 -3 ap shots, but it would take a total of 17 P/S + ap from a normal weapon to even crack it. Let me say that again. He can take the 4 for 1 rule on a sniper rifle. As a mage you beef the troll with 5 wisdom and some counter spelling and they can take any physical punishment as well as be able to combat spells as well.

Why does a possession troll mage/tank suck? Please I would love to know why. Why? Also even cheesier was hooking the possession mage into a huge steel golem and giving him animate.... oh yeah you would also possess the golem because it would mean that all the troll mage had to do was counterspell the golem and the mage inside couldn't be targeted (put in an airtank on the mage so he could be completely sealed inside of his tank) It would take a while to open up the golem for him to hop in and out, but such cheese! That or use turn to goo and then step out of the puddle and let the huge steel "golem" reform Oh yeah and my GM would never let it happen... he would describe it as "game breaking"... go figure...

FFBA doesn't give 27 armor, the best is 6/2.

Second, how does a LOGIC based troll mage successfully conjure a force 8 spirit? Especially with a magic of only 4?

Lastly, where do you get 43 armor from?

Also, you said overcasting troll mage, not summoning possession based troll mage. Trolls with lots of body flinging spells that have P drain around aren't too scary, possession is bad, but having a troll do it doesn't make it particularly worse.

you can't melt steel, it would only work on organic matter. also, the goo has a barrier rating equal to . . the barrier rating in this case i guess, but usually to the body attribute of the gooed . .
further more troll mages suck, because under build points, with 400, they will lack in many cases, due to race cositing and magic costing and both costs added together meaning you have allready spent about a quarter to one half of your starting points, if you happen to have some bad luck . .
under karma build using 750 karma, that option would be much more viable though . .

From what I've seen a "moderate" troll tank (not completely maxed-out) can be taken down quite easily with several aimed burst of Gel rounds. And if you apply some armor degradation rules, he'll probably won't be able to shrug off too many grenades either. Don't get me wrong: they are tough but they aren't invincible (the SR3 tank characters I've seen were much worse if you didn't apply armor degradation rules).

I don't have a problem with that: trolls aren't just big humans, you have to stop thinking in humans terms. And I don't consider it game breaking either: Shadowrun isn't just about killing people and resisting damage.

every time someone says that, a combat twink loses his dice

"Your body armor may be strong - our gunner doesn´t care".

Keep in mind, some of these are more twinky than others. Being a melee fan, ive played some melee dudes who could hit like mack trucks(and human/elf at that), but compared to Possession builds, Mage twinks or firearm twinks, I can attest they are the least of your worries for combat twinks.

Some of these other builds aren't necessarily too terribly twinked(like the Running Man), but, IMO, if you're new to the game, the builds to most look our for are:

A. Any twinked magician builds(Bloodzilla, possession specialist)
B. Any twinked social builds(some of them can completely throw things off)
C. Really twinked firearm builds
D. Mr. Lucky.

I can't attest to how broken Technomancers can get, so I dunno if they should be in the ''top public enemy twink'' list. Melee specialists are down there, they are too easy to shut down, though in their ELEMENT they are really excellent. Stuff like Mr. Perceptive, etc, are also more situational twinks.

Most builds with high dice pools are the result of logical choices in character creation. For example, if you are playing a mage whose main specialty is casting offensive spells, then you will get sorcery: 6 with a specialization in combat spells, have a Magic of 5, get a power focus: 2 for extra dice, and get a mentor spirit that gives a bonus of 2 dice to combat spells. You haven't done anything unusually cheesy, but you have 17 dice for casting combat spells. It is similarly easy to get about that many dice in firearms. Generally, characters with high soak dice against one type of damage, or high dice pools in resisted dice contests with lots of potential negative modifiers, are not as overpowered as they might seem if you only look at the high dice pool.

Social skills can reach the highest levels, due to so many things that stack, but the GM regulates what they can and cannot do, and needs to set reasonable limits. If it's "You get 10 successes, he really likes you," it's not so bad. It's when you have "You get 10 successes, you talk him into giving you the keys to his car, then shooting himself" that you run into problems.

The real cheese comes from "creative" rules interpretations. For example, possession mages are a viable choice, but a munchkin might get 1 for all physical Attributes and say "I have the spirit possess me for the day, with the command to basically 'be me' for the day" as a way of trying to weasel around the limitation of being limited to a number of services from the spirit.

I wouldn't classify it as twinkery per se, but I have a wonderful Rigger/Face that throws around 23 dice when talking to people, and about 17-19 when driving (I forgot the specific calculation). He gets something around 20 dice when shooting with his drones and cars. If I wanted to, I could disrupt everything with a few sentences - with a very lucky roll, I stopped a Humanis club from trying to kill several Japanese Elves. It was a crit with a total of something like 30 successes - but that earned us a lot of extra money, karma, and street cred.

Not all twinking is combat. Remember the value of contacts and talking. Social does require cooperation from the GM to be effective, however. If you have one who's heavily against that sort of playing, I don't recommend trying to twink out a social build.

And I really have no idea how this thread got to general twinking, from tanking.

Should I put a maximum limit on dice pools to prevent things from getting out of control?

And what of the "Possession" rules when a Mage gets possessed and gets much better stats? Should I assume that most, if not all, Mages do it because it's a smart, tactical decision, particularly if said Spirit is powerful, or just set my foot down and say "no?"

But what in-game reason/rationale would there be for such options to not be available? For example, wouldn't the Troll Tank be so good at combat that a bunch of high-up military dudes realize this and convince him to give up the "shadowrunning" and get handsomely paid for being a shock trooper?

Not really. The troll tank is good at getting shot, but that's just about it. His low agility reduces his combat potential as does the fact that he has to spend a great deal of essence (and money) on damage-preventing 'ware.

Yeah, my group had a Perceptatron with all the extra senses and Assensing (our pet name for Mr. Perceptive) based upon the reason why my character's tend to have good perception skills/attributes, "Because perception makes all other actions possible." He was loads of fun...until his #4 Grandson and the Shogoth outran him.

I had great fun squishing the mean old bastard with a multi-ton oozing black freight train of horror and insanity. "Takeli-Li! Takeli-Li!"

The pornomancer is an absurdly powerful potential gamebreaker even if the GM isn't an idiot or a pushover, just as long as the player also isn't an idiot or a pushover. The power that a pornomancer can wield simply though pillow-talk with the high and the mighty is simply awesome. An ambitious pornomancer with the right contacts and a smart player can easily find himself in bed with most of the leaders of what passes for the free world. He might need a sleep regulator and some precise scheduling to keep up with such a diverse selection of lovers, but just getting it on with one important person gives him a great deal of information and influence.

And even if the GM shoots this down because he wants to keep the game street level, the pornomancer can become absurdly powerful by selectively seducing the correct characters. Impossible runs can become cakewalks, in fact, without creative rules interpretation just so long as the rules are used at all.

If you summon a spirit and say "be me for a day" how the heck would a spirit know how you act? Saying "be me for a day" might just take it as "Ok... I get to be inside your body for a day! Woo Hoo! I'm going to go eat 10 gallons of ice cream."

Anyways the pornomancer is the "I win button" for one specific thing. The problem with that is the minute people just don't want to take three seconds to listen to your pornomancer talk and have masks or fully sealed suits he eats it hardcore.

That's not really an intolerable situation for me, though. A character becoming powerful through planning and roleplaying? That's fine - they're working for it, instead of using their huge dice pool to bully PCs and NPCs around. And it's not without risks or potential complications, either (working out how to approach certain people, how to circumvent their bodyguards and "handlers", how to avoid or manipulate the papparazzi, lovers who become jealous or obsessive, etc.). Frankly, an intelligently-played pornomancer could make the game more interesting for both the other PCs and the GM.

I like faces who are played like faces, who are always trying to make connections, keep illicit deals running smoothly, soothe ruffled egos, and so on. Not the ones who whip out all of their dice and say "Ha ha, looks like you guys are paying for my dinner again."

Eh, you can't be good in all things. I guess I'm still in my D&D days, and afraid of unbalanced characters making the rest of the party obsolete.

To get this thread back to the original topic, keep in mind that a troll tank may be virtually immune to most weapons, but is still extremely vulnerable to other types of damage.
Inhaled or DMSO-delivered toxins can be a problem, as well as direct mana combat spells.

Patching these weaknesses is possible, but will usually take up additional ressources.

However, Runner's Companion makes it relatively easy to protect your troll from enemy mages.

Yeah, the troll tank is my game is sporting Arcane Arrestor and Astral Hazing.

Chris

Yeah, but just wait until the well-roleplayed pornomancer is jet-setting around the world for rope bondage with Angela Colloton on Monday, a threesome with the Emperor and Empress of Japan on Tuesday, a romantic candlelit dinner with Lofwyr in Wednesday, watersports with Alachia on Thursday, and wild animal passion with Damien Knight on Friday.

isn't the emperor 12 years old or something like that?

Possession adds the force of the spirit to all of your physical stats. If you have channeling you can also control yourself while the spirit rides shotgun within you.

He's married to ex-vampire ex-ganger otaku Hitomi Shiawase. I presume that they have sex. If he is then he's the luckiest 12-year-old in the universe.

If one is worried about Pornomancers, look at the Pornomancer's Willpower and Perception. An unseen Spec-Ops dude/Mind Screw Mage that is competent in "Striking first" can kill/mind control the Pornomancer before she/he can speak to him.

Biggest problem MY Golems (read, slow, ponderous, nigh invincible, inmetahumanly strong trolls) usually had was things like chem-tech weapons . . in SR3, Gamma Scopolamine hit for 10D Damage that is resisted with only natural body . . and even a troll has problems rolling 8 tens to reduce it down to 0 . . heck, rolling enough tens to get below serious stun was hard enough x.x . . .

What do you mean "only" natural body? The various cyber & bio toxin filters and counter-agents worked peachy against chems.

yes, but if you have built your tank to TANK, then you don't have all that much money/essence/bioindex left to pump up chem-tech resistance . . supergland, some muscle-stuff, artwinkulation, in SR4 probably both kinds of Bone-Stuff, dermal-works, and some combatware like smartlink, full eye-package, some reflex-ware and you're fast enough at really low numbers in both essence and money . . try and squeeze in the other stuff too O.o
trolls may be large, have large bodies and the such, but somehow they don't have more room for bioware then the average dwarf *g*
yes, i really liked SR2 and bioindex being influenced by natural body attribute . .

Thats why every smart tank has nonconductive chem resistant armor.

They're not easier to shoot either. (And I think SR4 got rid of the sensor bonus vs. trolls too.)

You win some, and you lose some.