Playing a Ghoul Troll Kind of defeats the Point of playing a Missile Master: being inconspicuos. Because any place a Ghoul Troll is allowed to go, my Barret/Gauss can go too.

Apart from that, damage comparisons are kinda pointless. It's not about who puts out the most damage in a MMO raid situation, but about different levels of efficiency under a different set of circumstances. Low profile situation? Missile Adept wins. High Profile situation? Miniguns/Gauss win.

Yes I did. But I didn't write them down as groups. Athletics, Stealth and Influence were bought as groups



We play SR4, not SR4A. But thanks for your advice, I'll ask my GM to get this .5 points back.

That doesnt make any sense, SR4A isn't a new game, it's the name for the latest errata to SR4.

Yea. And we do not use this errata ATM. We plan to do so in the future but ATM we don't. One reason could be that our mages don't want to take more drain for casting their combat spells. I think that our GM will certainly introduce the errata in the near future.

And hey... sense? This is SR4(A) and not SR3.

The rules causing that is just a bad optional rule, one that i hope my GM(if i actually find one) wont be using, i personally would never used it if running a game.
But i get your point of not bringing in errata in midle of campaing.

We have a player in our group that plays a throwing/ninja adept and she has a lot of fun with it. She uses Beanie Babies for stun damage and they've become sort of a calling card for her.

The distance is virtually irrelevant IMO. The only good thing is the changing it to ranged combat defense so melee skill is removed that can add a success or three to your net hits. I'd of been just as happy if they called it blinding strike and said you struck with such speed that people could not adequately defend against your blows so you treat is as ranged combat for defense.

As for the throwing adept since you went orc you are doing okay. My only real bitch about the power throw cap is I don't want to say forces but heavily influences maybe you into being the muscle bound type when I suspect many throwing adepts were thinking more ninja and not conan.(its been this way since 1e and 4e is probbaly the nicest to the average str crowd in this regard) But then again just like critical strike I think its stupid cheap to have +1DV per .25 power point. It is a cool concept and if you got the muscles you can hit really hard. I always dug bullseye from the marvelverse and this lets you do it.

I have not read the thread yet but if it was not mentioned I will say that combat sense is one of the snazziest .5 PP powers in the game, and I personally think it fits in with the quick acrobatic, throwing adept feel really well.

Curious about two things. Why the effort into getting a 9 intuition? And I like the format, is that from a character generator of some kind and if so which one?

This reminds me of a Daredevil comic. When Kevin Smith was writing in 1999 or so there was a battle with Bullseye. During the battle Daredevil threw his baton and hit Bullseye in the mouth, knocking out a couple of teeth. Bullseye simply flicked them as they flew threw the air and fired them off at Daredevil. As I recall, he caught his baton (off off Bullseye of course) in position to parry the teeth, but they were flying so hard they embedded themselves into the baton. Using the Daredevil story & your character bit, the breakaway tooth compartment is suddenly quite appealing.

Bullseye is reason enough to have fun with a throwing adept (and 1 I played in previous editions). The above suggestions for infiltrator/throwers are greatly appealing. I must side with TJ here, concept is what its all about. There are so many ways one can munchkin almost any particular aspect of the game to be "the best". I don't care about those debates. Throwing is something that can be a fun concept that has the ability to hold its own; that makes it good enough for me. I don't care what variation/build someone can come up with that has a higher damage value/dice pool/whatever.

Hawkeye in the ultimate universe(The Ultimate's title before it went to suck in the 3rd series) was captured and while tied up and restrained in a chair he pulled off his own fingernails and flicked them into the guards killing them, the torturer he threatened to kill unless he freed him. Awesome arc even if the entire premise of them getting his passwords out of him when he was captured kind of failed to me since he good guys knew he was captured and not killed so his passwords would have been changed which would of killed the entire invasion plan, but hey suspension of disbelief is a good thing when reading comics.

Hey, I never said it all had to be good or make sense. Just that the one nugget of him using his own teeth stuck with me and came up here. In fact, in that issue, the teeth were aimed for Daredevils eyes! I mean really, aside from the possible pain (not sure if his eyes would feel pain) and blood loss, that seems a stupid target on a BLIND MAN! Some parts don't need to make sense for other parts to make you want to go, "I want to make one of those!"

Wanted to max out my INI without cyberware. Therefore I took SURGE II/Metagenic Improvement. Then Genetic Optimization and Exeptional Attribute. The character has to be fast since she is a melee character. Therefore I need a high REA, too, because I want to reach my enemy without being shot. Once I'm at him, I can use my 4 INI passes and slice him into pieces. INT 9 also works very well with Stealth and Street Knowledge. And... since Neko is a "Manga Cat Girl", she has to have a high INT...! (By the way: Our mage and I are working close together. He often aids Neko with Improved Invisibility to make her even more deadly!)

Oh, and her high REA + her highly modified motorcycle give her ... don't know ... 18 dice for for driving tests. She's better than our rigger. LOL.

The format isn't from a character generator. I don't use them. I always write my characters down by hand (or by fingers...). I use Open Office and the Courier New font. Font size 13 for headers, font size 10 for everything else.

Cheers!

My group has actually gone 3 gaming sessions in a row with no combat. Three. Tres.

My games are not about damage, and I am running a campaign with EXTREMELY restricted rules for getting their mitts on guns.

I base my games on story telling, strong concepts, and when push comes to shove, they have the moxy to back it up.

If your player has a situational set of abilities great. The throwing adept is good at getting in and wacking someone with a 9p stealth missle, excpet throwing requires you to actually use your arm.

Truth is, any situation where this crapatcular set of abilities is useful, a mage will do better.

Noticing a mage casting a spell is hard. Spell has more power to the hit, has a hell ton more range.

Need to fight your way out? A submachine gun hits harder.

Need to fight lots, grenades, and hellblasts work better.

The throwing adept just gets to sit around and look like the thief in conan, or kung fu Joe in I'm Gonna Git you Sucka.

You all get in a situation where you can't bring your guns, then you probably can't bring in your throwing knives, or your bag of coins that people in the sixth world whom are knowledgeable about throwing adepts just happen to let you in with. If you frisk people and find a person with a few decks of cards, pockets full of coins, a pocket protector with a crap load of pens, and nothing else, then chances are, he is a throwing adepts.

Who carries around a 24 pack of spoons? A hungry man, or a throwing adept.

This is again, unless a GM just let's his NPC's just let that stuff slide by, or have no knowledge of the throwing adept.

Not really, force 5 spell is a treshold 1 pereption check and everythink over the is treshold 0.

You can keep saying that as much as you want, doesnt make it anymore true.

Outside fairly absurd examples like the famori ghoul(i thought ghouls were blind?) a SMG is better. It can get its damage up really high, it can shoot more people, it can lay down cover fire, and with wide bursts it is far more accurate for tough shots. Oh and the smartgun link means it is all things being equal always throwing 2 more dice. There does come a point where you are good enough though and 9p per simple action before net hits probably is in the good enough group. The only issue is you spent 2 pps getting to as good as a guy with a smg without 2 PP spent. It might be cool and fun, but mechanically worth it probably not.

yes that fomori ghoul was just a build to show the max damage you could get out of a throwing adept, a normal troll with half the stuff i got for that fomori can do more damage then an SMG(full-burst is a complex action) and has a much higher change to actually do physical damage as opposed to stun(ofcource thats only essential against targets immune to stun, but those should be pretty common)

I think you'd still have to go fairly absurd. You have to have a near maxed troll in order to beat out a SMG consistently and that is just for pure DV damage, you still lose tons of versatility that the SMG gets for free. I'll probably use suppressive fire more often than I need to use a playing card to kill someone.

HUH
Some one with 9 strenght and powerthrow 3 + missile mastery does 11P+nethits damage per simple action when trowing tomahawks thats better then SMG in my books.
You can get those for any metatype you want, no real need to even be a troll, but ofcource its easiest for a troll.

That same character does 9P + net hits with a coffee cup, paperclip, whatever small thing they get their hands on. They can do this 2 times an IP with no penalty, or 4 times with split dice pools.

To help you get to that 9 (or even higher if you are talking Troll or whatnot), remember that the powerthrow costs .25 each and caps at 3, leaving an extra .25 available. This is a handy place for .25 points worth of Strength boost. Most adepts will average around 2 successes with just 1 point of this power.

It's really not a question of beating SMGs anyway.

Agreed. It's a different concept for different uses. I don't play SR, or any RPG for that matter where all characters are cookie cutters based on some numerical formula.

I was simply pointing out how a 9 STR is doable by a non-troll, and how that can be effective in a given combat scenario. There is not a single build, piece of gear, or magic that doesn't have some situation where there is another choice that is more optimal. At least if your name isn't Lowfyr.

The point is, a throwing adept is a character that can be both fun and viable. Is it the most effecient use of BP, or the best way to kill in combat, or whatever else? Maybe, maybe not. If you want to play one, build it to what you desire. If throwing doesn't suit you, leave it for others.

Since the throwing adept "tops out" so quickly, it sounds like it's a good candidate for fading into a secondary role.

What other skill set should the throwing adept train up? Stuff that's focused on Agility & Strength, I'd imagine:
- Melee (lots of room for growth here)
- Stealth (Forgery, Infiltration, Locksmith, Palming)
- Athletics

Reaction stuff, like Piloting?

Intuition stuff?

exactly, my new char will do all this

Athletics+Unarmed works well because you can often get away with not having Dodge anymore, since your melee skill can be used to cover hand to hand defense and you can still go on Full Gymnastic Dodge vs. ranged. There's some extra synergy involved there with Adepts as well, since Gymnastics is not a Combat Skill and therefore Improved Ability only costs a quarter of a Power Point. This makes Gymnastics a very versatile skill, especially for Adepts who eventually cross over into Synthacardium and Combat Sense as well.

My favorite is still probably the Throwing Face with Kinesics, Power Throw, and Commanding Voice though. Being the "harmless" guy who suddenly yells "Drop your weapons!" and then starts taking people out on their next pass with pocket change is dirty pool. Well, okay, it's not really -that- effective since retrieving a weapon doesn't take that much time, but the gist of the idea still stands. If your character is effectively always armed you have that much more of an advantage whenever you can engineer situations in which people fight you without the benefit of guns.

Don't mean to ressurect an old thread, but I just wanted to toss my insight in here.

I was building a throwing adept of my own just a couple nights ago, and I thought that using that last .25 PP was better spent on Improved Sense: Vision Magnification. The rules say you can do anything cyberware vision enhancements can do short of using phenomena like radio waves/ultrasound/etc. That makes Vision Magnification par for the course.

Pick up a couple of ranks in Krav Maga, and your Take Aim and Ready Weapon actions are all Free Actions. That means if your target is on the upper end of your throwing range, take a Free Action to Take Aim, and suddenly you're rolling with no range penalties as if you had a scope at all times.

And I don't have my books handy currently, but if I'm not mistaken, isn't it the case that if you Take Aim to negate ranged penalties you don't get to use a Smartlink? Or am I thinking of SR3 here? If that's the case, then the fact you don't get a Smartlink bonus doesn't really matter at a distance, which seems to be the big case for standard firearms vs. throwing weapons.

Just some thoughts of mine I thought I'd share.

It is not a bad idea to go vision enhancement if you aren't planning on taking cyber or any more will knock off an additional magic point, and especially if you cover another sight by being a dwarf or troll. Though I will point out for a pure adept who isn't throwing spells like a mystic adept contacts do the job fine.

You do not lose smartgun bonus when taking aim to negate range penalties that was SR3 and earlier.

Thanks for the clarification. I thought I remembered something like that somewhere, but again I'm currently away from my books.

Well I guess the true upper limit comes from adding possession spirits to the mix and then ability boost spells on top of that. Possession spirits raise natural max, which raise augmented max, which leaves room for spells to add a few more points of strength. Add to that a spirit with elemental aura and engulf possessing a weapon and you have a very deadly projectile that goes through armor like silk, sticks there, and keeps damaging. It is a ridiculous extreme that nobody will probably ever pull off or find the use for but I just like the thought of throwing shimmering spears of lightning that rip apart tanks with shock and thunder.

As soon as you mention the words 'possession spirit', all bets are off and the universe explodes.

yeah.. Someone with a natural max strength of 13 possessed by a force 10 spirit... That augmented max... Shadow run is just not meant to have numbers that high. If you by some insane feat summoned up a force 17 spirit and then by some working of mad mass ritual magic were able to boost your strength up an additional 15 points then you would be strong as a juggernaut. 45str.

Besides, Possession does not raise your Natural Maximum, or your Augmented Maximums. There is a cap for a reason...

*waiting for the Firestorm to begin*

OK then how about some River City Ransom with Javelin Man: Throwing spinning people head first into other people. There should be some judo martial arts maneuvers for this.

Metahumans are already represented in both the melee and projectile Improvised Weapon tables per Arsenal. If you have Power Throw and Missile Mastery it should really hurt provided you're strong enough to get some distance.

That was one of the best games of that era. Just don't accidentally get your buddy (with a thrown weapon or anything else) once you studied the techniques. I'd not thought of it before now, but some of those are good demonstrations of wired reflexes (kicking 3 times to everyone else kicking once).

Related to the topic, don't overlook the use of the quickdraw power (I forget its name and am not near books atm) for getting those harmless items out promptly.

You mean... Quickdraw (0.5PP)?

But it looks like by there calculations, strength does not factor into it except for range. Missile Mastery would help though.

Power Throw " This power adds +2 to the character’s effective
Strength solely for the purpose of determining range and damage of thrown weapons and objects."

Yes, that is the one. The ability to quickdraw said paperclip, credstick, booger, whatever, as part of the same action as the throw adds to the 'I'm an unarmed negotiator' build quite nicely.

Metahuman Body
Short range (STR – BOD)/2
Medium ----
Long ----
Extreme ----
Damage (BOD)S

Strength is not a factor for damage, but I do think it should be a factor...

Oops, you got me there! You could just rule that Missle Mastery allows you to add some str to it >_>

Just don't use bodies, weirdo. They're squishy and crappy weapons.

Yes but logically they hurt the person you hit and the person you throw.

Like hitting two birds with one stone, except it is hitting two birds with one bird.

I don't see where it caps at 3 - I thought adept powers were capped at your magic level?

It apparently is in the errata but I have not read that.

But some people don't play with the errata so it might not matter.

Yes it is in the errata. Weirdly critical strike was not capped. Given the similarities in there construction many assumed it should be capped as well. But throwing attacks play out differently than melee. For both critical strike and power throw I would have preferred a more base DV cap, something like X2 magic or something. I don't care how you get to the X DV, strength, magic, cyber whatever the DV is the balancing point not a somewhat arbitrary 3 levels.

Side note after seeing the expendables I am thinking about a throwing adept myself now. Loved that movie.

Need to see that...

The movie that comes to mind for throwing adepts for me is "Desperado" - Danny Trejo was pretty cool, too bad he's not in the movie for very long...

What about grenades? Are there any that detonate on impact other than the ones for grenade launchers?
Wouldn't a throwing adept have grenades in a situation where the other guy can carry around an AR?
Even if they don't explode on impact, wouldn't direct hits with grenades still do quite some damage and then put high pressure on the enemies? Imagine being hit by a rock to the head and then having to deal with the danger of a hot grenade.

The problem with that is the fact that someone desided that grenades/rocket/missile should be useless and errated the scatter 10 stories above riduculous.
They'r the only weopon class that you can score enough(or even lots more) net hits for it to be considered a critical success with the grenade still ending up in your own ass.

Then... throwing normal explosives?
Or are they working the same way?