Take a troll. Make him a Physical Adept. Give him a Strength of 8. Not too unreasonable for a troll. right?

Now, spend 2.5 Magic points from his starting allotment (which is a healthy chunk, I admit) to give him Missile Mastery and 6 levels of Power Throw.

What you now have is a character who can throw a shuriken... or a credstick, a pen, a billiard ball ... and get the same damage as an assault cannon round! Okay, so the range and penetration on it are nowhere near an assault cannon, but we still have lots of room to twink this character out. God help you if he gets his hands on a quiver-full of javelins. Or lawn darts. Or, well, anything aerodynamic and pointy.

So, two questions.

1. Is there something I am missing that would make this build illegal?
2. If I am not missing anything, is the Power Throw adept power (in your opinion) overpowered or broken? Why or why not?

Thanks in advance,
-- Cunning Rat
(whose next character may well be a shameless ripoff of Blue Rajah from Mystery Men. "An effete British shadowrunner, to be precise. I am pilfering your tableware because I hurl it. I hurl it with a deadly accuracy.")

If I remember correctly, they capped it at 3 levels of power throw in the errata.

Just looked it up. Yep, they did. Thanks, that clears up the confusion.

However, combining it with Attribute Boost (Strength) can pop a Troll up to 15 Strength, which when combined with 3 levels of Power Throw gives us an effective Strength of 21 - which gives us 11P damage for pennies and a range of 21 / 42 / 63 / 105. A javelin ups the damage to 14P and... huh. I can't find anywhere that says what Range factors to use for javelins. Anyone?

I don't have my books handy, but thrown weapons don't generally have that great of a range. Plenty of oomph for the usual short-range urban combat, but you can't use it to snipe enemies as well. And that troll will do about as much damage as the Strength: 1 guy - with a grenade.

It's relatively easy to make a character with some kind of extremely lethal attack in Shadowrun. If you think a throwing adept is bad, try a punching adept with muscle augmentation, bone lacing, martial arts, and critical strike.

The troll throwing adept has the advantage of stealth and being able to make most things at hand into lethal weapons, but considering the cost in power points, skills, and Attributes, I don't think it's too unbalanced.

It seems like just Attribute Boost, Killing Hands and Critical Strike would be better than all the augmentation and bone lacing, from a BP perspective.

With the bioware, you gain more than you lose. If you went all out and got, say, bone density augmentation: 4 and muscle augmentation: 4 (the latter with the Restricted Gear quality), then you would have the cap for critical strike lowered by 2, but gain +5 to damage.

You are right, though, in that it is not really worth it for the BP cost - it is something that you would do for a min-maxing exercise, but is not as practical for a real character.

Not that 2 points of bioware can't make a better punching adept, but I wouldn't waste two points of Magic, a 5-point quality, and lots of BP resources just to pimp punching damage. You're better off getting things like synaptic booster (so you don't have to spend all of those power points boosting your initiative) and muscle toner (which gives you more dice to hit, and adds to more skills than merely unarmed).

This brings back memories of good old Blitzkreig, I didn't even build him to be bigtime lethal, but that Troll could deal out some serious punishment.

Funny you came up with the idea of a throwing-adept, because in my recent group I just have that kind of character build. The char is an ex-baseball star who lost his job because of illegal bets and such things.
Nice guy though, hitting people with his baseballs...works quite well

Although if you could power throw to do 11 P wouldn't you kill the catcher after a few pitches unless they were wearing mill spec armor, or possessed by a force 7 + spirit?

A catcher's mitt IS milspec.

Peter

Cyberhands + armor + millspec + troll with 15 body might see you through some of the damage. If you take the 4 for 1 rule you need 44 armor to soak 11p worth of damage consistently w/o any net hits.

On the other hand, he might have pulled the power of his throws in exchange for finer control. Especially after killing the first two catchers.

Peter

I wonder if regulation bats in 2070 are still wood? If so...it might have been killed catchers AND batters!

By raw all he needs is about 10 dice total in throwing. -4 for a called shot, -2 if one thinks it has a range penalty or poor vision, and with 4 dice left over to auto buy one success. The character could straight up do 11 p to the catcher while getting the ball into their glove every single time.

"I wonder if regulation bats in 2070 are still wood? If so...it might have been killed catchers AND batters!"

You could make anything kindling with 11 p.... although it would be cool to see someone knock down a tree with some pocket change... I mean a cubic meter? That is nothing to scoff at.

I haven't found anything that tells us the range of javelins and harpoons, only their damage. Has anyone figured this out?

I'm not a huge fan of the cap of 3.

Take a strong human adept with a 5 str. Base thrown DV 3. With missile mastery bumping a real thrown weapon up by 1 and power throw bumping it by 3, you are looking at only 7DV for thrown knives etc, and 6DV for the stealthy pens, cards etc. Sure you can get twoish attacks since thrown attacks are simple actions, but 7DV isn't that impressive. Sure a maxed troll can get further, but I'd rather balance things around the normal guy than the extreme.

Now if they cap it at 3 and had some of the hand to hand things helping for ranged attacks like penetrating strike or elemental strike 3 would fit the norm power range for balancing. Now I understand they wanted phys ad abilities to be purely or mostly purely internal effects(Bad idea IMO, but I like archers from earthdawn) But heck to me charging a thrown weapon seems less external power than distance strike and commanding voice.

They're aerodynamic; I'd use the aerodynamic grenade chart. EDIT: Since Shinobi ninja'd my reply (heh heh....), I'll clarify that this is a reply to pbangarth.

Question about Missile Mastery; does it include grenades? Could I do some sort of set-up where I peg some poor sucker with the grenade, do damage from that, and then use my wireless signal to detonate it?

Also, I think the Kinesics cap makes sense (your body language can only be so persuasive) but capping Power Throw and not Critical Strike is just crap. Either you want realism (nothing will ever throw a playing card through a tree) or kick-ass (holy shit! He just threw that coin THROUGH A GODDAMN TREE!).

EDIT: Shinobi, we seem to have the same opinion about a lot of things.

No, but i wonder if it works to do multiple damage with grenades this way. You can throw him this thing directly on the head (stun-damage) and then it explodes through the impact. That would be nasty.^^

It just seems to me a sleek and slender shaft should fly farther than a knobbly grenade (even an aerodynamic, knobbly grenade). Maybe I should look into Olympic distances for javelins.

I just whipped up a troll card shark with missile mastery, power throw (3) and STR of 15. So, he can throw that aerodynamic grenade 315 meters. Talk about a sniper with exploding ammo. And the javelin does 14P damage. Who would think to look 120 meters away for the guy who threw that brick?

Maybe it was a good idea to limit power throw.

I'm also trying to figure out how far he can throw a playing card. At the moment I'm thinking along the lines of the "knife (any)" range in Arsenal.

Wow i was literally in the process of creating this character as of a few days ago. Thanks for the input im going to make a few revisions to my build, maybe post it here later

Sadly that is just medium range for a sniper rifle or -1 to hit. So yeah, what is the problem again? Yes, I get you can pull a playing card out of no where and go on a killing spree, but most of the time the party will have guns so it should be compared against guns and give it a small balance perk for those, you are captured and all your gear is stolen scenarios. Its cap is already magic which probably means 6-8. If they really thought it was too good make it and critical strike cost .5 instead of .25, or heck have them cost .5 once you pass the level 3 limit. That way you can make an awesome thrower who isn't a troll, and the troll still throws things through schools. And I still want AP throwing powers and elemental throwing powers(I want it for bows and melee weapons as well). Any muscle powered weapon should be able to be infused with an adepts magic, not just there fists.

Damn. Ladies and gents, we have ourselves a ninja who knows what s/he wants.

Though if I were you, I'd think twice about that last sentence. What's your name, again?

Well . . Want Fire elemental Effect? Set the damn thing on fire before hurling it.
Want the thing to have the Acid Elemental Effect? Fill it with something icky.
and these builds pop up every some days/weeks in these here fine boards ^^

Welcome to the damage these ridiculous concepts can do to a game.

Everyone has fun saying "lolol, how many dice can I get?" and they take something like throwing or archery (trollbow, anyone) or social skills (pornomancer) and they just rape it and rape it and rape it until it's blown all out of proportion, and then -- eventually -- the writers see what's going on and they try to fix it. The fix makes it so the retard-strong min/maxed character building experiment still works just fine, but anyone else trying to do it just flails like a spaz and has a ruined character.

All in the name of someone finding that I Win button, with an "optimized" or "efficient" character.

The much-vilified "I win" character is as illusory as the concept of "winning" is in a role playing game. For all the power that concentrating BPs into one aspect of a character brings -- in that one aspect -- there come myriad other weaknesses that make the character vulnerable and dependent on others to protect him. Vulnerability and dependence don't win anything except membership in the human race.

I recognize that some players might see the ability to hose the opposition with unimaginable damage as winning, but that is a flaw in their perception, not in the game. A simple application of cause and effect brings any imbalance to light.

The character I mention above, with 15 STR and Power Throw (3) can in fact deal a lot of damage, even with playing cards. More importantly, he is a broken man, rife with addictions and debt, subject to his own lack of wisdom and bad decisions in the past. He is left to fend for himself in a cold world with nothing but his strength to depend on, and maybe some friends if he can make them, which is not easy for this guy. He is straight out of Greek tragedy, or perhaps more recognizably a caricature of Mickey Rourke. He is far more likely to be a denizen of the shadows than the equally illusory "balanced" character offered as a more reasonable alternative to the monsters we come up with here and in our play at home. And frankly I think he is probably more fun to play.

The guys who think they win, Critias, are indeed sad and need to be helped. Sometimes unbalanced PCs are meant to be that way for reasons other than "winning".

Amen!

Also, getting shot at with rifles makes throwing adepts sad.