I think the issue isn't "should Shadowrunners specialize," because everyone agrees that, well, you've got to be good at your job. The larger issue is "what counts as being specialized?" How many dice does it take to be good enough at something? When people are throwing together die-stacking experiments that are slinging 30+ dice, when NPCs are tossing 10-12...where do you need to be, to be considered competent?

It depends on the campaign, but one thing to keep in mind, while looking at the example mooks, is that they aren't the only opposition. There are also critters, spirits, prime runners, drones, etc. And even the mooks can be dangerous if there are enough of them, and they use elementary tactics. Plus, you can encounter them when you are wounded, low on Edge, badly outnumbered, and stuck in their home turf. High dice pools are not the only factor in how powerful a character is. You also need to consider other factors. Is the character at least functional in other areas (i.e. lacking any glaring weaknesses)? Is the character the designated muscle, picking up the slack for several team mates who perform other roles? Is the character equally good at dodging and/or soaking damage, or is he just a glass cannon?


Now, I may disagree with Ravor's assertion about dice pools being "broken" at high levels, but I can at least see where he's coming from. I disagree more strongly with the notion that there is some unstated level where players "should" be at, which can be intuited by looking at things like the (poorly-designed) sample characters and the (simply-designed) mooks. And anything above this level is "unintended by the developers".

Bull. The game is very tightly designed with regards to character creation. You are limited in how many points of qualities you can take, how many points you can spend on Attributes, how many 5's or 6's you can have in your skills, and what availability/rating of gear you can buy. You are also penalized for certain choices. If you want to hard-max an Attribute, it costs an extra 15 points (25 rather than 10). If you want to be word-class in a skill, it costs you a 10-point quality and you have to spend double the points to raise it from a 6 to a 7. That's 18 points - enough to buy a skill of 4 plus a specialization - to raise a skill by one point.

So anything in the rules is intended to be used. Why do you think they have things like muscle toner and reflex recorders? Why do you think they put in armor that is explicitly there to stack with other armor? So a dice pool of 20 is not something unintended by the rules - if it is, then they designed the rules very poorly. But I think they knew there would be people interested mainly in kicking ass. One of the examples of character creation has someone maxing out his Agility and getting a pistols skill of 6, and the story blurb before the skills section is from the POV of someone who is a self-admitted one-trick pony.

A couple of caveats: while I think everything in the character creation rules was intentional, it is still an open build system. That means that you can make hyper-specialized characters with glaring weaknesses (although not every character flinging 20 dice falls into this category - you can have a face with 20 pistols dice). You can also make characters so overgeneralized that they can't reliably succeed at anything.

Also, character creation needs to take the table and the other players into consideration. You don't want to bring the LMG-toting troll with move-by-wire into a street level game of youngsters trying to break into the biz (or bring the ganger kid into the game of hardcore urban mercs). You don't want to overwhelm an inexperienced GM, or make the other players feel redundant (although a powerful character isn't always a detriment - maybe their face, hacker, and healer mage are happy to have a big meat shield between them and the security guards). But there is NO magic level where ALL characters "should" be.

I'm going to have to disagree with one minor point Glyph:

Given that most, if not all, of the sample characters have roughly the same over-all level of power, I think this makes a fairly strong statement for at least one of the writer's opinions of what the most appropriate power level for starting characters is. Now, that being said, you're right that the game can easily be played at different power levels - even without getting into the option to change the number of BP being used to make characters - where the most important thing is for everyone at the table to be on the same page. The question of things becoming broken? I haven't looked at it too in depth with SR, but I've found that most of the other systems I've played tend to see game balance suffer as one pushes toward the extremes (though how far one can go before this becomes an issue varies dramatically).

The sample characters in Shadowrun have consistently been weak and poorly designed (not to mention riddled with errors) for the most part. They make good quick NPCs (since they are "runner" level without being as good as the PCs), and they show a general overview of the types of characters that you can make, but that is all they are. They are mere examples, not a mandate of how powerful characters "should" be.

Again, I don't think any of the more powerful options are unintended by the developers - the rules are fairly rigid, as far as disallowing some things, setting hard limits for other things, and making things very cost-ineffective for people who want to be the absolute best. Furthermore, there are plenty of optional rules for customizing things, for people who do have a problem with the power level.

I will just say... Weak by whose standards?... Not the standards of the Developers/Designers...

And yes, there are lots of options...

My 2

Unless you have personally talked to the developers, you can't say what they intended the archetypes for - I say examples and quick ready-to-play templates for newbies, others infer that they represent the "intended" power level. But it can't be argued that many of them don't fit the rules, or have gear or choices that don't make sense for them (guns that the characters are not proficient in, etc.). And while some are passable, others are all but unplayable. Personally, I think none of them were ever intended to be optimized - that's something that they left for the players who leave the archetypes behind to make their own characters.

I Have Not...
And you could very well be right... But then again, so could I...
Really not worth arguing about though...

Keep the Faith...

As of SR4, the sample characters "are designed to give insight into what various types of shadowrunners are like."



These are the stated purpose of the sample characters.

Which, at least to me, indicates that the Sample Characters are meant to be played at the competence level that they were created...

Can they be better, sure, but it is not a rquirement... and for the record, I have played several of the character archtypes straight out of the book and done okay with them...

the size of the 'specialization' varies from game to game. Except for deckers we usually had skill pools around 5-7 dice.
For a skill level in our game 5-6 is really good and 8 would be someone considered amazing, but that is in our games, it's what works for us. That's why I usually avoid threads asking baout 'how does this look?" and then crunch the numbers.

I'm more concerned with the thoughts behind the character than the numbers, since I don't know what the numbers in your game are.

Which simply means you need to play the Sample Characters to gain such insight into how such shadowrunners are like, no more no less. It can easily be taken to mean that such characters are deliberately flawed so that you know what to look out for when you create your own characters or that they are the "level" at which the game should be played at.

You could indeed be right...

I think this is an example where K.I.S.S. is needed, the book says that the sample characters are meant to be played so that is what they are provided for. IF they were meant to be examples of what not to to then the devs would have instead said that.

Deckers? 6 dice? You're talking about SR3, aren't you?

Although I can't speak for Snow_Fox too me they will always be Deckers.

K.I.S.S.?
A Mix between K.I.T.T. and the Band Kiss?

K.I.S.S. = Keep It Simple, Stupid

I like my interpretation better y.y

The book simply says that the sample characters let you begin playing Shadowrun right away. KISS: You can begin playing SR right away with the sample characters, true; it makes no claim as to their long term viability or even their immediate in-game effectiveness.

Except that we do have some evidence that the developers thought that the sample characters would be at a viable level. I can't remember which SR4A thread it was but they said that they weren't expecting dice pools to be so large (mainly due to all the splat) and hence why the upped the thresholds to 1-2-4-6 or 1-2-3-5. The game was designed with 4 being a really hard number of hits to achieve but that turned out to be untrue in gameplay.

The viability of all those 8-12 dp characters is coming into serious question with the new thresholds. (going to really depend on the GM changing his interpretations)

This is where SR4A and SRM could have really come together and lifted an innovation from ED. Earthdawn has a chart of difficulties (think thresholds) rated based on the ranking of the actor. There is an Ordinary level for mere mortals, and level 1-4 for the various Adepts and big bads. So something that is insanely difficult for a rank 0 mortal doesn't even rate for your Master Adept -- he could do it in his sleep. Something like this could have been a great addition for basic SR going off of table ratings. It's a great tool for the GM and it gives a baseline to keep things fair for the players.

Er, I am not sure if this will add much since I am newbie to SR4, but in anything other than my specialty for my character I find to be nigh impossible to get the required hits, even with edge dice. In my specialty though, the 1/2/3/4 is a sinch, but I thought that was kinda the point. And since my character's expertise is in combat and that gets all kinds of negative dice pool to do the really bizarre thus cool stuff (can't bend my bullets, shoot other bullets out of the air or slow down time a ton thanks to reaction [though the improved reflexes is kinda like that, with the extra reaction and IP?] like in Wanted ... yet) those higher dice pools suddenly become necissary to pull the crazy, long shot stuff off. That reminds me, I gotta ask my GM next time to remember critical successes with those pistols...

Which reminds me, I wonder: Does the augmented max of reaction times 1.5 limit how much improved reflexes one can get, since it adds extra to reaction with each level?

No, you can get improved reflexes level 3 even if your reaction is allready at maximum.
You will still get the ini passes, just not the reaction bonus.

Except for the fact that K.I.S.S. also makes the fairly reasonablr assumption that the devs want newbies to have a good time playing and thus wouldn't purposely saddle them with a broken character that isn't going to be effective.

Which is a question I've been pondering lately since I've been haunting the Wizards of the Coast boards. In the edition wars that are flaming there there is a notion that D&D3.5 was purposely created to reward "system mastery." This stems from 2 separate blogs from Monte Cook: 1) where he said that 3rd edition was designed to reward people for understanding the core mechanics of the game, and 2) where he said that they intentionally put in "trap" options for people to reward those who took the time to read all the options.

I think it is pretty safe to say that there is no way that #1 plays into the SR4 system since it has 2 core systems (hacking and everything else) and so many exception based rules. However I think that there is a fairly heavy element of #2. There are definitely some sub-optimal choices to make out there and some highly optimal choices. Nothing is useless per se. However, you are usually much better off with something else instead. For instance I can't think of ever seeing anyone take the High Pain Threshold positive quality with the drugs and augmentation stuff so readily available. Another would be the completely mundane character.

Without putting a character through a heavy dose of optimization or else having a gentleman's agreement to intentionally play below optimal level there is almost always a way to improve your character. I can't think of the last time that we had a new player at the table where all the experienced players didn't improve his dice pools by several dice just through better knowledge.

I'm not saying that it is necessarily a bad thing to have system mastery in the game (I personally hate it) but as has been proved time and again on the D&D boards there is clearly a demand amongst players to "win" the game by being better at optimizing your characters. With system mastery being potentially a "feature" of SR4(A) it is entirely possible that the sample characters were not optimized to give the players the chance to learn and then improve upon the base presentation as they learn all the options spread throughout the rule book and all the splat.

"Purposefully" is the key. They do look nice at first glance - a concept, and stuff that seems to support that concept. But not every one of them actually is functional at their job. And forget dice pools - 12 dice is not as effective as 18 dice, but it can still get the job done most of the time. I'm talking about being able to pull off their function. Some of them do - the gunslinger adept can shoot, the face can negotiate, etc. Are they optimal? No, but honestly, I don't really expect an example character to be optimal.

But some of them really don't function that well at their purported function. Frank did a good analysis of how the bounty hunter wasn't much good at things a bounty hunter needed to be good at, and how the smuggler wasn't really that good at smuggling (other than putting contraband in the trunk and going from point A to point B). The weapons specialist is also not what she is purported to be - they describe her as "a literal martial artist", when she is more of "an armorer who likes to play with her toys".

Except that KISS does not make any assumptions, else it would not be KISS.

Cheops, that is a very interesting point and one that I will have to give some thought to although my gut reaction tends towards disbelieving that the devs would be as much as a jackass as Monte Cook must be to pull that kind of shit.

Glyph don't get me wrong, I am hardly defending the sample characters, as for the most part they suck and in some cases actively break the rules, but given that they tend to fall roughly within a set power level they can be useful in order to draw some conclusions.

toturi surely you aren't being sersious, under K.I.S.S. you go with the simplest solution possible, and some conveluted theory that the devs want newbies to use flawed characters so they can learn to be better players is hardly simple and doesn't ring true regardless.

Thus the simplest solution would be not to assume anything. Assuming the sample characters represent the level at which the game should be played or assuming that the writers want the new players to play flawed characters are additional complications and add to the complexity and thusly not simple any longer.

I take it that the sample characters are simply there to be used by a player who wants to play a character immediately as it is stated. I make no judgements as to their viability in game.

Does the character fulfill its stated purpose of allowing a player to begin the game immediately and allow the player to gain insights to the character? I would think that it is probably so. What insights does the player gain? I do not make any presumptions on that issue, it may be that the player thinks that it is the "level" at which SR is supposed to be played or it may be such that he thinks he discovers flaws that he needs address when he creates his own character.

8-12 base dice should be a fairly competent character for a particular task. This is ignoring additions from cyberware, etc. What I am not a big fan is having dice adders count more than skills or attributes. This is where the GM should look into objects and determine what is acceptable and what is not. That said is I use the grittier gameplay rules and range is a threshold rather than negative to firing. Also if modifiers bug you then put a cap equal to half your modified skill. This cuts down a lot of abuse or where items are worth more than the skill.

The trick is having the GM focus the runs on the players and not just some default adventure. The difficulty of the adventure should be tailored to the individuals in the group, their associated skills and their dice pools. I found lower dice pools tended to favor players who thought more because they couldn't rely on their dice pools.

Getting the highest dice pool is a form of mental masturbation. It is fun to do, but shouldn't be done in public.

Ah, but you see the problem is that we don't have enough data to answer the question at hand if we stop midway through the process as you have choosen to do so.