NP. I just love being able to bring my books with me to work on Saturdays.

That's too funny. I guess I didn't pay much attention to the shitty archetypes and their differences between SR4 and SR4a and got mixed up.

WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT

THE ARCHETYPES ARE THE BOMB DIGGITY

hi hi

I'm pretty sure the weapons specialist in SR3 has boosted reflexes rating 2.

As for SR4, some people play campaigns at different power levels. The Weapon Specialist would fit in better in a sprawl ganger type campaign. Maybe she's still not a very well designed character, but I think the premise is sound. I was part of a campaign where everyone in the party helped operate a shadow facility and it went just fine.

All the archietypes are built to perform their individual nitch while not stepping on anyone else'ss nitch, so you end up with a whole parcel of folks without ware of any sort, because evidently that's the street sam's thing. It's certainly not the way I would have gone but their useful for introducing new players to the game.

As to whether the weapons specialist is a viable concept? Sure, of course I would have called it an armorer, gave it a bit of ware (even if only an IP booster or logic boosters) and also gave it some skills relating to building or reapriing things other then just guns.

I have a player that really liked the concept of being the gun babe. We crunched the numbers and since she was fresh off playing a very hacker centric technomancer she thought it might be neat to explore a different breed of technos. We ended up finding space for IP boosting bioware cybereres and ears (with smartlink) and a platelet factories plus decent resonance scores and some compiling and registering skills. Overall we made a lot of points back by not having multiple copies of most every weapon and droping most of the melee and other weapons.

Oh last thought, why do people always seem to think that mudanes should be as viable as their cybered or magically blessed counterparts? It's like saying that it should be as viable to fight fires witha bucket brigade as it is to with firefighters with modern equipment and hose? No one makes that argument! Why should it be considered an important factor for a normal to keep pace with those who have made deliberate choices to augment themselves beyond normal levels.

hi hi

It would have been nice for the weapons specialist if there had been a "Big guns" skill group for Heavy Weapons, Launch Weapons and Gunnery. As it stands, the weapon specialist would be like a fish out of water with a grenade launcher or anything vehicle mounted.

Because if you can't keep up, why are you being hired? I'm sure Johnsons and Fixers alike are constantly looking at there virtual rolodexes thinking, "Hmm, do we go with the chump who has a downtime skill that's kinda-sorta useful sometimes, or do we go with this Street Samurai here who can do every single thing she can, only significantly better and for the same price tag? Decisions, decisions..."

To use your analogy (albeit in an awkward way), if your house caught fire would you waste your money hiring guys with a bucket or the guys with a fire engine if they cost exactly the same and arrived at exactly the same time?

ALL Vehicle Mounted Weapons are covered by the Gunnery Skill... so any weapon that is mounted in Mounts, Pintles or Turrets...

Keep the Faith

Neither. You call Jimmy John's

ba dump bump

I'll be here all week, try the prime rib.

That was bad, KnightRunner... Very Very Bad...
And besides, the Juggernaught Sirloin is a better cut...

Keep the Faith

I don't think we're actually in disagreement here Funk. Personally I find most or all of the pregens to be overspecialized and suboptimized. There is a place in a team concept for someone who works on and maintains a gear but not if that's all they bring to the table, so I definitely agree with you.

Now if my Armorer had the skills to basically disasemble and re-assemble ANYTHING from a maglock to a boat and had the skills where he wouldn't be a liability in a fight that would be a good guy to know. Actually I might start building that character just to see how it goes.

hi hi

I'm not sure what you are getting at here. The weapon specialist doesn't have the Gunnery skill.

This is perhaps a bit of meta-gaming, I don't think Mr. Johnson has a list of every runner's skills and what rating they are at. They have to make their decisions based on results and reputation.

Hypothetically, if the team suddenly comes across a cyber-zombie with hardened armor that the street sam can't touch, people might be thankful that the weapon's specialist brought along those hand crafted acid tipped bullets she was saving for an emergency.

The Johnson probably wouldn't, but any good Fixer should know what his stock of runners are capable of, their areas of expertise, and their reputations. And since they're the ones responsible for hooking the runners up with the Johnsons, and they get a cut of the profit to one degree or another... you get the same net effect.

And, again, there's no reason at all that the Street Sam wouldn't have Armorer. Hell, every one I make has had Armorer, or at the very least access to a custom Arms Designer contact.

Seriously, the archetype brings absolutely nothing to the table that another archetype can't do significantly better. As someone else said, if she were a general tech-wiz type of character, that'd be a completely different story. She'd be pretty invaluable as her abilities would be useful during a run, not just during downtime. But the archetype, as presented in both stats and description, is a grossly subpar Street Samurai who can't even keep up with the Street Samurai if you rip away all of her implants. The (unaugmented) Sammy has Body 4, Agility 5, Automatics 5, Pistols 4, Unarmed 5, Heavy Weapons 3, Infiltration 4, and Athletics 3. The Weapon Specialist? Body 3, Agility 4, Close Combat 3, Firearms 4, Heavy Weapons 2, no Infiltration, no Perception, no Athletics. Yet she's supposed to be the "expert" in martial arts. It's embarrassing; she doesn't even have the skills to be a competent runner at the most basic of levels (namely the utter lack of Infiltration, Perception and Athletics). And hell, they both have Firearm Design as a knowledge skill. The Street Samurai literally just needs to find a few points to put in Armorer and there'd be absolutely nothing useful that the Weapon Specialist would be bringing to the group... and just ditching the Blades skill alone could do that for her.

The whole "acid-tipped bullets" mentality isn't even unique to the Specialist. What exactly is stopping any of the other characters from having contingency ammo or gear? Again, I know most of my characters do things like that and none of them qualify as a Weapon Specialist (descriptively anyway). I often have characters with spare clips loaded with Silver Bullets, Capsule Rounds with DMSO/Lael, and sundry other ammo types along those lines just for those special occasions. So it's not exactly a strong argument.

Maybe my misunderstanding here... but I was under the impression you were looking for a way to have access to Launch Weapons, Machine Guns, Grenade Launchers, and any other weapons that the character did not have access to... an easy fix for such things is the Gunnery Skill, because no matter the type of weapon, if it is mounted on a vehicle, you would get the advantage of using a singel skill... the Gunnery Skill...

If that was not your interest, I apologize for the assumption...

Keep the Faith

hi hi

As I already indicated, I agree that the sample character isn't very good. However, the archetype as a concept isn't quite so bad. It is a character concept that I have played once in SR3 and again in SR4. It is fun to be able to walk into a run completely unarmed and know that by the time you leave you will be armed to the teeth.

Acid: Rating x ¥500, thats what. I think it is kind of silly, but thats what the rules say. In some games the nuyen flows freely, in others not so much. Being able to make your own stuff can really help bring the cost down.

I was just thinking thematically that big support weapons might have enough in common that they could qualify for a skill group, in the same way that pistols and assault rifles are covered by the same skill group. For an archetype that seems to fit the role of a support character, it would be nice.

I can See that... that has been a topic of conversation a time or two over the last several months...

Keep the Faith

Especially for a game like Shadowrun, with its themes of transhumanism. There are games, and genres, where normal, unaugmented people can go toe to toe with cyborgs, killer robots, and mutant monsters. But that doesn't fit the theme of Shadowrun. Even in SR1:

"We're in the minority; Runners who are not jacked, rigged, or wakened. We live by our guts and wits."
- Jazzman Harker, Shadowrunner

How is the Weapon Specialist able to make their own? I don't see Chemistry in her list of Active Skills either. And, again, there's nothing stopping other players from doing the same thing. That's kind of the big point there. The Weapon Specialist doesn't have a unique niche. All she is is subpar at everything, offering nothing truly unique in exchange.

Yeah, I'm afraid that Weapon Specialists have an awful lot in common with the ol' Merc archetype, and to be brutally honest, the Merc as a cookie cutter build was considered obsolete and thus left out of SR4's list of examples for a reason. Both cases have a coherent thematic flavor that's kinda cool and rather distinct from the idea of the Street Samurai as the cybered urban predator but mechanically just aren't really contenders for the role of front liner. Mercenaries were combat specialists who had seen real war and presumably were familiar with military hardware you just don't see every day on the streets-- maybe they couldn't rig, but they could climb on the back of a jeep and gun you down with a pintle mounted HMG like it ain't no thang. Weapon specialists know how to build things as well as they know how to operate them-- they're the thinking man's warrior. Again, a fairly coherent theme, like if you crossed Q with Rambo. The problem is that neither character makes a particularly good shadowrunner unless they cram in so much 'ware that people start thinking of them as "Street Samurai w/ Gunnery& HW" and "Street Samurai w/ Armorer" instead of their own distinct archetypes. Their niches are so narrow yet so inexpensive that you're virtually forced to take on another role-- and odds are your "sideline" will see more use than your forte.

So, yeah, maybe there's the skills there to make a coherent archetype out of 'em, but if so you're still left with a different animal than what's shown in the books.

hi hi

Karma/opportunity cost. Any other character can probably spare points eventually do pick up the slack in one way or another, but the point of the archetype as a theme is the ability to do a lot of different things regarding weapons even if the sample character is not that great.

Edit: Chemistry as an active skill is an optional rule. By basic rules it is a knowledge skill, which she has.

Once again, the only thing that differentiates a Weapon Specialist from anyone else is the Armorer skill. One skill that any other archetype can easily fit into their skill list. And it's not even a skill that helps on an actual run; it's a purely downtime skill the vast majority of the time. And it's a downtime skill that's easily delegated to a Contact if absolutely necessary. The fact that the archetype is poorly built on top of that doesn't change a thing.

If an archetype can be expressed by one single skill, then it's not really an archetype. It's an example of a professional use of that skill.


Nah, it's a mistake they let slip past the original printing that they were too lazy to fully correct. If frelling ARTISAN is an actvie skill, Chemistry damn well is, too. The Chemistry knowledge skill is exactly that; a knowledge of basic chemistry, but none of the training or experience to put that knowledge to practice. The show Breaking Bad actually demonstrates the difference beautifully.

Yeah, I'm afraid the opportunity cost thing only holds water up to a point. The biggest thing holding a samurai back from being a good Armorer is the fact that logic is a fairly common dump stat amongst combat monkeys, although Cerebral Boosters can do a pretty good job of rectifying even that. Ultimately, a real ordnance guru (as opposed to the scrub listed in the book) should at least have Chemistry, Hardware and maybe even a smattering of Industrial Mechanic (for fancier weapon mods) in addition to Armorer and Demolitions if they want to be a genuinely useful technical boy and thus truly differentiate themselves from a Samurai-- at that point you have enough sunk into technical skills that you can legitimately do some things that an out-of-the-box Samurai likely won't be able to manage without having to give up some meaningful combat effectiveness or gutting their tertiary social/stealth skills. The whole mess of mutually exclusive weapon skills, a dab of Armorer and no cyberware shtick currently listed in the books just doesn't really cut the mustard in play.

No, not with SR4A anymore.

Edge can also be used for extra IP passes. A human weapon specialist can use edge to get extra passes when it counts. Grenades and explosives are very useful in a game. Having an uncybered or magical can be useful in infiltrating a complex. If security is scanning for cyberware and sniffing the awakened.

That may be true, but the fact remains that it was an Optional Rule in Arsenal, and it was not until SR4A that the skill was an official Active Skill... Since the character was there in SR4, they had it as a Knowledge Skill... Yes, they should have upgraded it to the correct category in SR4A, but it slipped through the cracks...

Oh Well...

Keep the Faith

Thats about the only niche role that the Weapon Specialist can fill. He very well could talk into a Lone Star HQ dressed in an Auctioneer Business suit and carrying nothing. Pass the MAD scanner, ignore the patroling spirits, and have fair odds of being armed and lethal the first time he was alone with an officer.

The average street samurai has little in the way of social subtlety.

Or, you know, he could get bioware… and, perhaps, actually survive such a suicide stunt.

You just described a typical adept or mage. I'm also unsure why everyone seems to paint cyberware as some kind of huge obstacle. So what if they scan you with some? As long as you have the proper licenses and a reason for having it, you're completely fine.

If they are looking for the awakened. The adept would not get through the door. If you kill or knock out your opponent in one hit. What does extra IP do for you. I can make a combat specialist work. Good tactics and roleplaying and the street sam is meat and spare parts.

Why wouldn't the adept get through the door? All he has to do is deactivate all of his powers and foci (if any). Same thing with the mage. And if they have Masking, which most runners will get at their first opportunity if they have a clue, it's all the more difficult.

And, yet again, all of your "good tactics and roleplaying" apply to the Street Samurai and everyone else. They can make use of them just as easily (and have more tools at their disposal to boot.) You can't make an argument that relies on your competition being an idiot. Especially since the Street Samurai archetype isn't one by a long shot. She's lacking one point of Logic compared to the Weapon Specialist, who is completely average herself. And unlike the Weapon Specialist, the Street Samurai actually has Infiltration and Perception, so she can be aware of the world around here while sneaking around a lot more easily than the Specialist possibly could.

Also, I don't know about you, but I can't think of very many scenarios where this kind of silly situation would crop up anyway. It's never happened on any run I've played in or GMed over the last few years, certainly.

Yeah, the Weapon Spec CAN work. It is just a niche roll often out preformed. Like say Rambo. Machine guns are far more efficiant in general, but I would not want him aiming a bow and arrow at me. But it is completely situational. Edge can buy a few extra IPs when you need em most. The WS just feels like an RP character to me. Which is a good thing in an RPG, just not appealing to the more munchkin crowd.

RAW IPs do make characters more powerful. 3 IPs and an Ares Alpha w/ 6 RC and you are able to fire 6 Long Bursts (36 bullets) in 3 seconds with no recoil. A bit further in the campain and you are up to 4 IPs, 8 LBs (48 bullets). 960 RPM with no heat build up rules. The Weapon Spec can at best hurl 10 rounds with a 3 point recoil penalty.

Now if you want to balance things out a tiny bit, then implement a house rule where recoil does not refresh between passes in the same turn. With each successive burst adding +1 recoil eventually the gun will be pointing up at the ceiling drilling holes. Though you would also need to impliment a new simple action like Steady Weapon. Give up a shot to realign your gun.

I personally use the RAW in my campain. But then again, with the comparative cheapness of Wire Reflexes I, just about every security guard or better has them. Hell, most decent go gangers have em. Only the masses lack em and they make up for it with numbers. 1 guy with 3 IPs vs 3 guys with 1 IP.

I'd rather just throw some damn implants in the Weapon Specialist instead of trying to make nonmagical, mundane, combat-oriented character work in a game that stacks every single thing against them.

And why would the Adept not get through the door?
Why would the Bio-enhanced or Cyber-enhanced specialist not get through the door?

Augmentations are ubiquitous in Shadowrun. Hell, you can go the MALL and get implants done in an hour as outpatient procedures... so why would that make any difference... Hell, Magically active people are more common than Doctors are (and we won't get into the issues that mages can hide that they are indeed mages)... so... I fail to see why your world is so draconian that such people are not allowed to cross a simple threshold...

Keep the Faith

The Stormwind fallacy again. There is nothing inherent in a weak character that makes it more suited to "roleplaying" than a min-maxed character.

Mundane characters can offer exciting roleplaying opportunities, if you like playing someone who is the normal guy in a world of superhumans, who has to be sneaky, and fast-talking, and cunning simply to survive.

The weapons specialist fails at the roleplaying level too, though, because the flavor text does not match the actual character that is presented.

If the cybered up street sam has are alpha with RC6 so can the weapons spec. Beside I would have a Assualt 16 shotgun with RC6 or a Enfield AS-7 w RC6. Deadlier and more versatile than an ares alpha.

All things being equal I agree with having some kind of boost. Have a character with a disadvantage like that makes you grow as a role-player and a tactician.

Most munch'in-eers are not well versed in good tactics. This my my experience after 20+ years of gaming.

That's a really nasty Stormwind you got there.

I don't know about that Glyph... I woudl say that the fluff is pretty accurate for the Character build...

If you take the Skill descriptives as they are written, then the Weapon Specialist has Professional level (or above) in most of his combat abilities... that, in my mind at least, heavily implies that the character IS a literal Martial Artist... the biggest drawback for the character is the fact that he is Good in a world where the average opponent (with likely similar levels of skills) has been augmented... in this scenario, he will generally fall to his opponents...

The Weapon Specialist is a playable character, but he needs to expect that the Transhumanist crowd that generally makes up the largest element in the shadows ARE going to eclipse his abilities due to his lack of Augmentations... this is easily fixed (as Doc said) by just obtaining a few bits of 'ware so that he can compete (and also obtaining the Perception Skill woldn't hurt at all either)...

Keep the Faith

To me it always seemed that cyber/bio ware should have downsides. At least the basic kind. Wired reflexes should make your character spasm or something. Higher grades of 'ware should correct the negative qualities of the basic kind.

Maybe that idea was scrapped because it was too complicated, but to me it is interesting that a sam with basic wired reflexes has a sort of epileptic tremors so he can't eat soup with a spoon, but has those extra IP passes. Maybe that such characters dont even get a mechanical penalty. Higher grade 'ware would not have those sort of problems.

In light of that a non augmented character makes sense.

WHY? Great ghost why? The technology has been on the market in game terms for around 50 years, it is literally like saying cars should periodically randomly explode because they go so fast compared to horses.

So people can play groups that consist of awakened only. It's what happend if the stress rules in SR3 were enforced.

Well, the biggest drawback is that they all cost essence... whille better grades mitigate some of that cost...
In the past, the tech did cause some issues (MBW was a suspected source of TLE-x, and users typically have controlled seizures that were perceptible if you knew what to look for), these have apparently all been corrected, at least for the more common 'ware. and do not forget, most ware, especially the ubiquitous Wired Reflexes and Move By Wires, can be turned off if desired, though I would imagine that most people so implanted probably do not do so.

We have yet to actually see if the newest 'ware (Nano-Tech and Gene Tech) will have any downsides... I expect there would be something, but it has yet to surface...

Keep the Faith

If you want to play in the sort of game where a street sam with Wired Reflexes can't pick his nose without ripping his own head off (muscle aug, don't you know) then apply the rules for used 'ware from Augmentation to all cyberware.

And get ready for everyone to be a mage, an adept, or a technomancer.

You mean worse then they already do?

Yeah, that too. I'm not actually advocating this approach, mind you - just pointing out that if you want to evoke a certain "feel" in your game, you can do it.

Psh, just get a cybernose with an Autopicker.

That was .... So Bad it hurt...

Keep the Faith

I think the only problem with the WS sample character is that he's completdly unagumented mundane, get the dde some ware or make him an adept and you have a pretty good runner.
I think that the consept of someone capable of using pretty much any weapon out there is a solid consept for a character.
Take for example my Sasha(weapon specialist/face hybrid), she has 10-18 dice with anythink that isn't an exotic weapon(and 11+ on all social dicepools) with only 2 IP she might not be as good in combat as a dedicated street samurai but she can do her part in a fight and can act for example as a sniper support when needed, where as the sam might have not taken the longarms skill at all.

I see the WS:s job to be bringing in the table a big arsenal of weaponry of all kind and the neccesary skills to use them, where as the sam is a specialist with the couple of weapons they're exremly deady with.
But i do think as i earlier said that the WS too needs some ware or adept powers to really be usefull, mundanes just dont cut it.