I don't see any stats for Torgo (or any other gangers) in New Seattle, although he is mentioned there. I wouldn't put him anywhere near the top of a list of most dangerous men alive, but an interesting character all the same.

Hmm, Twist Fate sounds very Earthdawn-esque (unsurprising really), I kinda like that. I'm sure there are numerous other treats in Dot6W too, but not being a GM I wouldn't want to spoil too much of my fun by reading them.

As for Lowfyr's stats: Pretty good, but I'd probably add anything up to 50% onto most of them to bring them up to scratch, and probably triple the magic attribute. Anyway AH did say those were absolute minimum.

Of course there isn't really any reason why you'd need his stats in a game, but it's good to know!



Any other extremely powerful metahumans we've overlooked then?

The GM's favorite character from any given novel or adventure.

*ignore me*

Why make great dragons (Lofwyr in particular) so powerful? Why not stick with the published stats for greats (maybe tweak them a bit upward)?

The way I see it, the PC's will probably never be close enough to a great to ever kill it anyways. Just because they wield immense power, doesn't mean they have to be indestructable juggernauts, after all, what would the point of even assigning them stats if they're just going to be invincible anyways.

Even if one of my PC's decided they wanted to off a great, they would have such a hard time getting to it (defense in depth, people), that by the time they actually did, they'd be near-death anyways. Not to mention finding it's lair to begin with...

edit: And out of curiosity, how does an immortal elf stack up against a great dragon?

they do give them stats though...

No IE has, to our knowledge, slain a great dragon that wasn't hibernating. Closest was Alamais' first daughter, Caynreth (he still bears the scar.)

The elf on Flight 329 holds out for several minutes against Sirrurg, so Kanada Ten's estimate fits exactly.

~J

Was it an elf?

I seem to remember it being implied somewhere that given their current magical skill levels, Harlequin could hold his own against a great, if magic were at its peak, but with it where it is now the dragon's advantage in physical form gives it the edge. I have no idea where this memory comes from, or if I just made it up out of thin air...

I sincerely doubt that. An adult, sure, but a great?

~J

The only real edge a (great) dragon has, physically, is its +4 Reach and the 12 points of Armor. Since the generic Great Dragon only rolls 10 dice + CP in melee, your average Troll Melee Adept with a polearm can kill it easy.

Once you start playing around with the possibility of having any positive-effect sustained spell at 2-digit force and twice as many successes, things get a bit more interesting. But without magic, dragons are punching bags for trolls.

Whatever...You are using the generic rules for dragons and the spefic rules for trollss. Let's take the normal troll and see how it fairs in a fight with the normal great dragon. Then throw in the ubber troll,and the ubber dragon. And mind you that if a dragon hits you, you ain't staging it down,wile it is highly like to stage your damage down.

Also there is no such thing as great dragon without piles of piles of karma, it just doesn't happen. In short there is no such thing as normal great dragon.

Does Twist Fate need LOS to the person needing their successes rerolled themselves? If so, Riggers are even more powerful than they were.

~J

Bear in mind, you probably don't accumulate karma while hibernating for thousands of years.

The highest I would go on a Great's stats are +50% (to the "attribute maximum", and probably cap it's skills/spell forces at 20 or so. As for initiate grades and metamagic, I'd give it all the published metamagic skills and enough to cast it's spells w/o taking phys drain, after that, does it really make a difference? Essence I would keep at 12.

Frankly, I wouldn't even bother with stats for Great Dragons. I generally tend to assume they are so powerful no single person, or evne a small group with normal weapons, can really do anything to stop them. It would take something truly extraordinary, like a tactical nuke, serious ritual magic (on the scale of the Ghost Dance or maybe a slightly less powerful version), orbital artillery (using Alamais as an example), or another Great Dragon. Even then, it should always be a case where no one is quite sure if they are dead or not most of the time (after all, no one in their right mind wants to stick around to poke a smoking dragon corpse and risk it not being dead....).

It requires either several military helicopters with missiles (Fueuerschwinge (sp?) ) or four Shadowrunners (Masaru).

~J

Alrernatively, the entire defenses of Denver don't even come close, in the case of Ghostwalker.

...when did Masaru die?

He didn’t. However, he was held at bay while some runners stole the eggs he was guarding.

~J

Forgot about Close Combat. Yeah, that'd do fine. You can get a lot more dice and a lot higher Power that way as well.

I didn't realize that Lofwyr needed to learn. Since they communicate telepathically and all.

Does he do so immediately upon the Awakening?

He may very well have been active before he actually emerged.

~J

there are certainly a number of reasons why Hestaby might choose to limit her own abilities, with regards to the runners as they sneak into her lair during SotF. a margin of error, let's say--"if they make X amount of noise, everyone will wonder why i didn't notice; anything less, and i can let it slide". the 13-die number, in light of those circumstances, could be misleadingly low.

There's magic available that lets dragons produce audible speech. Most prefer Dragonspeech, though.

While it may look like on paper that a melee character could win a straight up combat test versus a great dragon, it wont happen. First of all the dragon can simply avoid combat via magic or just plain flight. Presuming it actually engages in melee, the player would have to first win the test, and then the dragon would have to fail to stage it down; which isnt likley when you consider again the dragons magic abilities. And last but not least, theres its special karma pool manuvers which pretty much drive the nail in the coffin. While supertroll may have great melee stats, a dragon with flight, magic, spirits, and karma pool can pretty much spank him in 1 round; heck a dragon sized manabolt would probably squish him before he even got an initiative pass. You can play the statistics game all you want, but nothing players ever get their hands on is going to over come the contingencies and abilites of a creature as cunning and powerful as the great dragons of SR.

Troll, eighteen dice, TN 2: 15 successes.

Dragon, twenty dice, TN 6: three successes

Twist Fate 1: Troll down to 13 successes

Twist Fate 2: Troll down to 11 successes

Twist Fate 3: Troll down to 10 successes

Karma reroll 1: five successes

Karma reroll 2: seven successes

Karma reroll 3: 10 successes

For a total of only 14 karma pool. Not sure if any of it even gets burnt.

~J

And that's assuming the Dragon has no melee skill of his or her own, no Increased Reaction spell active, no Weapon Foci, and no adept powers.

Oh I'm definitely not trying to say that the übertroll could actually kill a Great Dragon, certainly not a named Great, as long as the GM is sane. I know I will never need those stats: I don't run superhero-type games, and my players know their place (usually).

Yet I find the very idea of a troll being able to beat a 30+ meter armor plated genius 10,000-year-old battlelizard in simple close combat too silly to keep the stats so low in my games. If I'm going to bother making stats for them, I'll put them high enough to take into account the thousands of years (even if you exclude the low-magic downtimes) of getting and using karma, their massive size and build, etc.

Personally, I find very appealing the idea that the SR3 generic Great Dragon is the equivalent of a straight 3 stat-line for humans. Likewise for giving dragons (and certain other intelligent critters) combat skills, so they don't have to stick with their (often sucky) Reaction ratings.

Kage those numbers rule, except theyre out of thing air. That and you totally ignored the dragons skills/abilites. Unless you want to list what you took into account its a useless example, and if you consider the full repretoire of a dragons abilites it will remain useless because its unbeatable. Sorry.

Umm, Kage, where did that TN 2 for the troll vs. the TN 6 for the dragon come from? I see no way that a single troll could get anything but an equal TN to the dragon.

The TNs were out of thin air, just to show how big a disadvantage the dragon could compensate for. Everything else is the expected number of successes, rounded (18 dice expect 3 successes at TN 6, 17 expect slightly less than 3 so round down to 2, etc.).

I did give the dragon its expected success from the fractions there at the end, but otherwise things were rounded to most disadvantage the dragon.

~J

Also, where the dice came from: for the Troll, 6 dice skill, 6 combat pool, 6 weapon focus (or alternately 9 skill, 9 pool, or any other similar combination). Dragon, Reaction 10, 10 combat pool.

And I have absolutely no interest in taking anything else a dragon can do into account, because the entire point is demonstrating that with raw physical combat power and karma alone they can take down the übertroll.

~J

I feel like I"m missing something here, so that means I probably am.

But -- why is Mr. Ubertroll able to hurt a GD, if it has 20 points of impact armor? Near as I can tell, the dikoted polearm's gonna theoretically hit for 15S with enough successes to stage things WAY past deadly. But, it's irrelevant, since the dragon's 20 points of impact means he's only gotta have enough 2+'s on his (ridiculous number of) body dice to stage the damage down to nothing.

A GD doesn't have 20 points of Impact armor, unless it has a spell on, or doesn't use the generic GD stats from SR3, and if we go the cyber-implant combat + Close Combat, we can pump the Damage Code for the übertroll's attack well over 30S with 20+ dice.

Yeah, you sure can play around with Karma Pool when you've got hundreds or even thousands. With the Twist Fate power, it's at least twice as handy. Are the named Greats given Karma Pool amounts anywhere in canon?

Not that i'm aware of, think it's one of those case of "however many it needs"

Perhaps Masarue (sp?)

Huh? No armor? OK, then I'm really missing something.

The base description for a great western dragon gives it 20 hardened armor, normal westerns have 12, great's get +8.