Actually this reminds me of my Dad. When I was 9 I was finally allowed to play D&D. He was the DM and he sent me to Ravenloft. The highpoint of that game, which lasted 1 session, was when the party was descending down a staircase into a cave/tunnel/dungeon:


I cannot count the number of times when the meek PC's were sent up against a massivley higher level enemy only to get partially slaughtered until rescued by our NPC's. Even in a supers game, I remember one time I had a vigilante hero charge into a bank hostage situation only to have him suddenly nerf the bad guys then an NPC hero who "just happened to be there" steps in and saves the day before my PC can even roll initiave. Gah! He isnt allowed to gamemaster anymore. Not that he's much better as a player. He shot my villain in mid-monologue, ending the evil plot before it had even really started. [/rant]

Monologuing has its place. From the interior side of an airlock door, after the open exterior cycle is activated.

I think there is agreement that there are a lot of bad ways for a GM to use major NPCs and megaplots and being too in love with either one is a bad for the game. PC have to be able to make a difference. I didn't think HB was nearly as good as the first one but the first one was a masterpiece.

I don't like it as a player when the NPCs end up doing every thing and the PCs are just along for the ride.


On the other had You Don't Tug On Superman's Cape, you don't piss into the wind, you don't pull the mask off the Lone Ranger.

Major badass NPCs should be played as major Bad asses and not mooks.

I classify your idea of IE and GD not being worshiped as wimping out the powers that be and letting the players run roughshod over the campaign world.

If that floats your boat and the GM's then fine.

He never said make them mooks. You're excluding the middle here. There's a middle ground between ('The PCs shalt not beat Harlequin and if they try, bitch-slap them' or 'Give Harlequin such high stats that it might as well be this case') and ('Turn Harlequin into a mook'.)

What people forget when they want to make the IEs/GDs gods is that it actually takes time and effort to keep skills at a peak. The game ignores this for PCs because it would be way too complicated and not add to the story. For someone that old, it would come into play, stopping the God-King thing people love to push. This prevents the 'Character X has all his skills maxed out beyond any level a PC can match yadda yadda' thing.

Would an IE/GD be powerful? Yes. Definitely very much so. Would they be Gods and unstoppable? No. I don't think so.

A hard one but I would go with knowing that there was a psycho in the group, he had taken appropriate precautions.

The last thought of the PC after pulling the trigger was the realization that it was his own temple he had pressed the predator against.

Amazing what an IE can do with advance metamagic using Edge, a detect enemy spell, and a control thoughts spell. Sort of the magical equivalent of a cortex bomb.

Anyone else want to try to shoot the goddamn sanctimonious bastard in head?

I might not be smart enough to plan this all out in advance but then I'm not as smart or experienced as the Big H.

LOL. I'm so with you here. I don't know why GMs keep making this mistake.

Not that I'm perfect mind you, but I don't make THAT mistake...

- J.

If H was so all-seeing and could read Shadowrunners that well, he'd not have botched up his handling of Dirk Montgomery.

And if H had all those spells and stuff running, how did he get captured in the first place? Oh, he can always beat the PCs, even when he is beaten himself? And the PCs are supposed to help him against the enemies who beat him (and therefore proving they are tougher and probably smarter too) exactly how?

Players can't run roughshod over the campaign world in my game - but any of my movers and shakers don't go into the line of fire, they send others to do the dangerous stuff, like meeting psychopaths for hire.

I can remember a very good description in older versions of SR, where they explain what a RPG is all about. One of the basic aspects was, that YOU have to ability to change the story. In Harlequin you are a useless, insignificant token and it really doesn´t matter if you accept the run or not...you can´t change anything at all. And under this aspect, Harlequin was the most stupid adventure ever and i regret having payd money for it.

Huh, what?

Extended masking so he doesn't light up like a Christmas tree from the quickened spells and blows up every ward he passes through.
The quickened spells make sure he has 50+ dice to dodge most attacks (Deflect + combat sense) and about 50 armor (Armor + Barrier).
That are only 4 spells. Do you really need anything more statted out?


I don't see where the PC's are useless hate comes from. If the PC's fail, the Horrors succeed and vice versa.
Harley has diddly squat to do with the outcome of the story. His only plot role is to stall the Enemy until the PC's have found Thayla. If they blow out his brains during the finale, just let them. It will change nothing about the outcome.
Either the PC's stop Darke or they don't, so how exactly doesn't this change the story?

Because we are talking about a big plot that is finally solved by the happenings in the dragonheart-books. So whatever you do, it had no impact. And THIS is what sucks.

50 armor and 50 dice to dodge to jack squat about poisonous gas.
Stun Gas alone to knock him out. Then tie something heavy to his feet and dump him into a river.
Even IE's need to breathe.

Immunity to toxins etc ... every IE has it.

And the big plot would probably not come to pass if the runners fail. A fitting Cthulhu-like ending.

For anyone that is interested, a couple of years ago, I statted Harlequin up. He is here.

Amusingly enough, quite a few people told me that he shouldn't be statted and that he should be far, far beyond the players and basically beyond the rules. Oh, how things turn around.

Incidentally, in my new Campaign, if it gets off the ground, Harlequin is, well not exactly the villain, but close. I pity the player that uses insider knowledge of the cannon character and has their PC unduly trust him.

K.

That's not a bad write up, but I have two nits to pick with it. I'd like to have given him some Adept powers just as holdovers (because I know he, like most of them, used to be a high-Circle Swordmaster or Warrior, not just a mojo-slinger, and a scattering of melee-oriented Adept powers would be fitting, I think), and maybe a Str of 3 or 4 wouldn't have killed anything...but mostly, I see his sheet as a condemnation of SR4 and its skill caps, more than anything else (which isn't an issue with the write-up, but rather I'd hold up the write-up as an example of why and how skill caps suck).

Easily solved by making him a Mystic Adept under SR4.
And yes, skill caps at these levels are pretty problematic.

Not really. I do not think an IE should get to break skill caps the absolute best of humanity can't break.

Neither do I -- I just dislike the skill caps in general (or, at least, them being where they are). I think a 1-10 scale would work better, if you had to have a cap, and would more realistically "grade" skills and keep them in line with the total die pools that are possible.

There are two reasons that I didn't make Harlequin a mystic adept. The first was that I wanted him to have some limitations. The second was that I had read cannon references to him being an Hermetic magician. Possibly the latter was a mistake or an attempt to force him into SR2 terminology. But the Quickened spells help with the lack of adept powers.

Regarding the skill caps, I like them and I like what they enforce on the character of Harlequin. You can only get so good at a certain thing no matter how long you have or how far you get. There are human limits to things no matter how much you practice. When you are able to co-ordinate your fingers as fast as your biology allows and know the piano to the point that it's instinctive, then what would it mean to go from Play Instrument (Piano) 7, up to 8? You couldn't be better than another person with that level of skill - only different. Just like the human face can only be so beautiful. Yes, someone can be widely recognized as more beautiful than another. But when that very beautiful person is next to another very beautiful person can you say they rank higher or lower? No - they are only different. I think the same applies to Harlequin's sorcery or fencing. Are you saying that Inigo Montoya could be better?. No - he has reached perfection.

And it takes constant practice to maintain that level of skill. I went back to doing some martial arts last year after a long lay-off. I could still perform quite well (surprisingly), but my edge was gone and in game terms, I would have dropped a whole skill point, I think. I could feel it. If it had been a couple of centuries since Harlequin had last killed someone with a longbow, then he probably isn't at his best anymore.

At least this is my take on things. Obviously it depends on the effect you want to achieve. The effect I want to achieve is a "realistic" take on what someone would be like after several thousand years of time to develop and grow. The SR4 rules handle this nicely. If you want a different take, then obviously they don't.

Neither is necessarily right, I'm just lucky enough that the rules suit my aims. They definitely accomplish what they are intended to accomplish though.

I'm saying that I think your stats are seriously over the top. Force 24 with 24 hits is outrageous - it suggests a dice pool of 72(!) - and is not IMO reasonable within the scale of SR4 for even an IE or GD.

Don't look at me =>

page 15 of the Done Deal mission:

Sounds like a good munchkin problem: how many dice can you get from ritual, edge, spirits, foci, mentor, metamagic,... ?

That's from the Shadowrun Missions, right? If so, that's the kind of thing that would explain why I don't even bother with that worthless line of shit.

A bit too much D&D mentality in those Shadowrun stats.

Using Edge re-roll for the permanent spell changes that to 43 dice pool actually and you would use Edge for this. You'd also probably wait until you had a batter than average result before you used or Edge re-roll and Quickened the result. Initially, Even so, I agreed with you that it was a pretty ridiculous number and started writing a post with the maths to illustrate why. However, in doing so, I found that a Force 24 Quickened spell wasn't as unlikely as I thought.

A Great Dragon with Sorcery 12 and Magic 12 only has a dice pool of 24. How is Ghostwalker getting up to the 43 dice region? I know it is commonly thought that the stats in the book are for average great dragons and some of the named NPC ones have better stats. But I don't think there's anything like an "average" great dragon. They're all major players and dragons like Ghostwalker shouldn't be significantly better than the main book stats. But even if you're of the opinion that he is above these, is he 20 dice above these? Add in a Force 8 focus to that "standard" great dragon though, and you're hitting 32 dice already. Ghostwalker still needs to rustle up another 11 dice pool. But there's an easy route to that with a Force 11 spirit using Aid Sorcery. Okay, binding a Force 11 spirit is a risk in itself and costly, but a Great Dragon can pull it off so we're taking it as a given for now. That brings us to our 43 dice pool.

Now the more dice you have in your pool, the more your results tend toward the average. At 43 dice, it's not likely that you're going to need many attempts. The drain for Armour is (F/2)+3. At Force 24, that's 15P Drain. Okay, a Great Dragon with 13 in each drain stat can on average stage that down to a mere (!) 6P. So although the dragon will want to plan a nice secure location for these attempts and keep it secret when he's going to be at its weakest, it's not unreasonable.

So there you go - a Great Dragon with a Force 24 Armour spell is actually reasonable if you assume the following: Edge use for re-roll, Force 8 spellcasting focus, Aid Sorcery from Force 11 spirit, willingness to take 6P damage.

I've also ignored the possibility of magically augmented attributes for the drain. And quite honestly, I find some Quickened Increase Attribute spells scarier than Armour because Great Dragons have frightening augmented maximums. 19 Logic and Charisma, anybody?

My old write-up of H was similar, but his strength was 5ish. I figured someone who had been around that long would be stronger than the average guy at the end of the bar, very easily. He likely would have taken SOME time to at least get a 4 or something. It's a minor nitpick, and it doesn't even change too much except for a couple points of DV which would rarely get used, but it stands out to me as that H would not have any stat that is of an average human, if anything, due to some arrogance. He would make sure to be above average. Especially someone who kept their body in that extreme of shape that he IS in, he would likely be above average through just basic workout. (I think mine had a Body of 5 as well.)

Otherwise it was very close.

Agreed in all fluff aspects. I would suppose that over time, H's muscles would have refined to the point that the muscles are incredibly dense. But I still saw him as having a reasonably slim build and I decided to peg that as someone who was lean but extremely good power to weight ratio at 4. Any higher and I felt I'd have to start visualising him as bulkier than I wanted to. I do remember thinking over whether I have him at 5 or settle for 4. We were clearly thinking out the same concepts though.

Aye, definitely same conceptual idea. The way I pictured H physically was like one of those gymnasts you see; very good strength/body to size ratio, I guess you could say. I had a friend who was a gymnast some years back(nothing Olympic even-simply good at he did)-he wasn't the largest guy on the block, but he was incredibly well toned and strong as an ox for his size, and he seemed to have an endurance that wouldn't quit. It was pretty impressive watching him. I'd have pegged him easily as a 4/4 in Shadowrun terms. Going by the Shadowrun rather aenmic lifting rules, he probably would have pulled a 4 Body, 5 Strength, given the way he could hold up his own 75ish kilo frame for unlimited amounts of time.

I think we checked him for implants once, but he was essence 6.

Perhaps he was an adept?