Finally got our game going(my thanks to all the assistance received in construction btw!), however, there's a sticking point. The others have complained about my character's perception pool. 5 ranks in perception(specialization in visual), with an intuition score of 5, enhanced perception 2, and vision enhancement R3. Grand total? 17. They say its ridiculously high. Im playing a private-investigator type face with breaking and entering skills.

So, too high? Too low? Just right and I built it well? Cheesy as hell? Best Ive done is take the vision enhancement off and put flare comp on the lenses instead, Ive still got a +14.

how many dice are they rolling for their specalizations?

The other players sound like whining little bitches, to be honest. Your dice pool, while respectable, is not even close to what you can get for perception.

More specifically, how much are the Sams rolling to hit things?

Indeed. And I think they're forgetting the fact that you have a skill of 5 (which you can only have two of) and they're looking at a specialization. Point out that you only have 12 dice for your other perception tests.

17 is pretty good, but it isn't absurd or anything.

It doesn't really matter what Dumpshock thinks, or any other internet forum. If the other players aren't happy, the other players aren't happy -- it's their opinions, and that of your GM, that matters more than a bunch of usernames on the internet, right?

Ask them why they're not happy about it. Ask them what they're rolling for the things they're good at, and compare it to your similar die pool (for primary combat stuff, or sneaking, or whatever). Ask them if they just plain forgot about the Perception skill, heck. Ask them what it is about you being specialized in noticing things that irritates them, and what they -- or the GM -- want you to do about it while still staying true to your character concept. Find out why they're complaining, not just what they're complaining about (if the distinction makes sense).

You don't want to ruin your fun, but you don't want to ruin everyone else's, either. One of the hazards of any game about a collection of specialists is that invariably someone's got the spotlight and others don't. A good group of players is okay with that, a good GM tries to make sure the spotlight hits everyone as often as possible...but sometimes friction happens. That said, I'm surprised friction would come up over Perception checks, of all things. Normally it's over someone killing all the bad guys real fast, or fast-talking around every encounter so the combat guys never get to have any fun, or something a little more "show stealing" than just being able to see a bad guy coming.

Have Perception checks played an inordinately big role in the game so far, or something? It's really kind of a weird thing for folks to be up in arms about. What has your GM said about all this, anything?

Which is why i'm wondering what the other players pools are, in their spec... if they're equivalent, then perhaps the GM isnt using appropriate modifiers, or something along those lines, so they're getting the impression that he's throwing more dice then he should be, or, maybe he really IS throwing significantly more dice than they, are, which i understand they're "concern"

I wouldnt say so much really. I think its more the idea that *ANY* starting character(we've had a total of 3 game sessions, one which awarded some extra karma; I got enough to buy my 6th magic point. Thats it.) is able to throw around that kind of die pool and not be a min-maxed one-trick pony. The GM seems to think Ive fucked up the rules somehow, and one of them thinks there's a max on the dice pool you can have. Only thing Ive read is the optional rule for the GM limiting it to 20.




Im thinking that they might not have optimized as much. I didnt quite go all-in on one thing, but I built the character with a very specific image in mind: the PI face\thief. Thief only because, well, this is SR, and if you're being paid to uncover facts about someone, whats the harm in using the same skills to pick up some coin on the side?



I also have audio enhancement on my earbuds +15 on audio tests. Course, as Ive pointed out, any number of things can cause me to lose the +3 on vis and audio if it comes to that(HERF guns or a hacker that gets past the shock frills and hacks the skinlink come to mind right off the bat).

I imagine I could get *alot* better. He's an Ork social adept face. High social skills, High agility and intuition, decent will, crappy logic, bargain-basement average body and strength. He can shoot well, dodge well, talk VERY well, infiltrate well, spot very well. Thats about it. No extra initiative phases, no computer skills beyond what any AR-fed person of the time has(knows enough to get an agent for his commlink, but is the 2072 equivalent of a facebook user), dosent even have unarmed combat. Prooved that trying to slap some tranq patches on a real physadept, I missed 5 times. PALMING some to a blood mage in an upscale restaurant..thats different

Just wanted to see if it was me, or the others. THey havent played since 2nd\3rd respectively, and well this is my first. Guess I just studied better or something.

Well, a Sam for instance, running at the same level of skill (5 +spec) can easily achieve 17 dice in a chosen weaponskill

A non-adept Sam ought to have an Agility of at least 7. 7 for the skill+ spec, a reflex recorder and smartlink is 17.

Adept Sam equiv, Agility 5, 7 for the skill + spec, +2 Improved ability and smartlink is 16.

they're probably just jealous. many Sams and other builds I've seen tend to ignore perception. they deem it something secondary. Now after they tried so hard to make a perfect char, something to bragg about, suddenly someone shows up with a ridiculous (which it isn't, see below) dice pool in a field they don't excel. now the GM has to adjust his subconscious tresholds for his intended perception test, and they will turn out blind and deaf.

Perception 6 +Spec 2+ Metagenetic Int+ genetic opti Int+ Attention Processer 3+ Reception Enhancer+ Qualia +Enhanced Perception 5+ improved ability 3+ lenses 3=32 dice
throw in some Magic (Cognition, Inrcease Int spell) and Nanites for more if you need, tha's not max at all....

Honestly? It sounds like they're whining because they didn't think of it first.

Your build isn't super-optimized. It's not even close to being as pushed as far as it could go. And I don't think you're showboating your abilities in any gamebreaking sense. If you're ot lordig it over them, the only way there's a problem is if you brought a character optimized to a certain level, and they didn't realize that this level was possible.

This is a common problem in SR4.5. The fluff text says one thing, but the build system says something quite different. If you don't know what you're doing, the inherent fiddliness of the various build systems can cripple a character without trying. Or massively overpower one.

So, my advice is to show our GM the rules you used, and ignore the other players. If they ask, show them what you did, and offer to help them make their next character. Otherwise, recognize their whining for what it is.

Good lord Makki, thats...excessive Yeah, Im just going to show `em and tell the GM to start upping the stealth ratings. Course I just bought a chameleon suit myself recently...

Also occurs to me that I *hope* our resident Sam(if you wanna classify our troll as that) has more dice than I do. 13 dice to shoot my Savalette guardian, counting smartlink(course I had to be a smartass and put a laser sight on it anyway; never know, smartlink might not always be available). I kinda came into this assuming anything less than 10-12 die means you SUCK at a given thing.

Side thing that occurs to me now: How the hell do you handle initiation as an adept? I know there's a sort of unofficial rule about letting adepts get power points, but in-game how do you actually do it? Mages just go sign up for a group and pay some karma as I understand it.

A point of initiation, some cash, and I *might* shove some cyber\bio\nano in.

dont forget Limbic Nanites for another +3

its not unofficial. it's officially optional. and EVERY awakened handles Initiation in a different, personal way. mages don't need to join a group. but within a group you get cost reduction. but adepts can join too. you better read SM again

First off, I like your Monk build. I could have alot of fun with that one. As for the other players complaining, I don't know what to say. So you notice things and talk well. You are decent but not extraordinary at most tasks that don't require specialization. So what? It's not like you're Doc Savage. Then again the specialized generalist character is one of my favorites.

About adept initiation: it is just like magician initiation. You pay karma and whatever else the GM says and you're good. Adepts, like mages, can join magical groups but they don't have to. A group just lowers the karma cost, at least as far as initiation is concerned. In order to get more power points you need to raise your magic stat. You have a maximum magic of (Essence, rounded down) + (Initiate Grade). Therefore, since you raised your magic to six, you have to initiate to raise it to seven and thus gain another power point worth of adept powers.

OMG! As if a high Perception dice pool would be breaking the game... Hyperbole!

Bye
Thanee

Yeah, considering my current rigger had social skills at 24 dice and gunnery at 18 dice right out the gate, 17 perception isn't particularly worrisome.

I mean, what is your character going to do, stare someone to death?




-k

He could have his character get an adept power that works like the Crazy Eye from The New Guy. "Give him the Crazy Eye!" And it could stop guards in their tracks, making them lose initiative or some dice.

You need to explain to your GM that this is a game of superpowered magical characters and superhuman augmented characters, and that to support this concept, there are all kinds of things that give you cheap, easy dice pool boosts.

If the GM wants to run a lower-powered campaign that is different than the norm, that's fine. If he isn't comfortable with high dice pools, that's fine.

But the notion that you can't get high dice pools without being a one-trick pony is simply wrong. You can have a dice pool of 20 or so in something and still have respectable stats in other areas, very easily. Without getting into any sidebars about "developer intent" or what dice pools "should" be, the simple fact is that the mechanics of the system let you get high dice pools without needing to make significant sacrifices in other areas. It is only when you get into really high dice pools that you actually start seeing if affect other areas of the character. And even then, you can still usually make a character that is at least functional in other areas.

If only there was such a power allowed Id take it in a heartbeat. Hell your rigger has as a bit more social dice than I do, but the damn stealth group took up alot of BP. I think the GM gets enough hassle with my ever-increasing creative use of Commanding Voice combined with voice control. After all, you`ll question an order from a random schmuck afterward; question it from your boss? Not so much.

As for the initiation, cool. Ive never played this guy as particularly tuned into the deep magical traditions of any sort, hell he states often that 'the whole fireball and sparkly bit is for the elf'. Now the patient wait for karma to trickle in again begins, and the saving up of nuyen for some bioware. Muscle Toner 3, Tailored Pheromones 3 here I come...

Wow, 30 karma in three sessions? That's fairly impressive. I can't believe the GM is worried about a perception DP of 17 when he is throwing out 10 karma a session.
Sounds like you're fairly well rounded. I think that they don't realize just how easy it is to get giant DPs in perception. It's kinda like combat in that manner. "Oh, look +2 for smartlink for a couple hundred nuyen."
Also remember that anyone wearing a chameleon suit is going to throw a -6 on your test, and being distracted is going to throw another -2 or so on your test, oh, and it isn't well lit, so that's another -2 or so, which quickly brings you down to 7 dice. The reason that bonuses to perception are so easy to grab, is because there are a bunch of penalties to perception out there.
As I understand it, back in 2nd/3rd DPs generally stayed small, but you would play around with the target number, so you were rarely throwing double digits of dice, but you only had to roll 2s or 3s if you were good at something. Now they've fixed the target number at five, so you adjust difficult by adding more dice. This could very well be why they look at a DP of 17 and think it is crazy. And yeah, you're right, I can easily think of enough mods that you could about double your perception DP.

Not *quite* 10 karma a session. I realized I mis-typed, for one, its been 4 sessions not 3, and two we got 10 karma once for completing the Dawn of the Artifacts: Dusk module *very* well; the only things we even shot at were ghouls, we hired the physad Silence to steal BACK the item, hijacked the plane of the guy who won the auction for the map(and took him out be precedent of ork and troll in rear with SnS\Gel ammo and tranq patches). He's going with 6 average.

As for the chameleon suit, yeah thats flat out. I get low-light vision with being an ork, and with multi-tasking Im very hard to distract and I do observe-in-detail like most people skim novels

My advice is to see how many hits your GM is looking for in different situations. If you only need 4 or maybe 5 hits to see everything someone is trying to hide then 17 might be overkill and you could use the BP else where. In the game I play in, 1 hit is very basic detail (man walked in the door), 2 hits (man is tall with a hat and trench coat), 3 (man is actually an elf with brown hair, skinny, and no obvious scaring or markings showing), 4 or 5(elf has something hiding under his coat, would take harder perception look to try and identify). So just figure out what kinds of hits you are going to need. People saying 17 is nothing you can get 20+ dice on a perception test could be terrible advice if you only need 4 hits usually.

Hope this helps.

Those seem like some really big jumps. You shouldn't even need to roll perception to notice someone walk in a door unless they're trying to be sneaky or your back is turned and you are completely distracted. Similarly, figuring out that they are tall and what they are wearing should be something obtainable by simply not being blind. Same with brown hair unless he is wearing a hat that mostly covers his hair, same with skinny. Elf is the first thing that might require some kind of perception roll, but once again, only if he has his ears covered or is human-looking. Hiding something under his coat would indeed require a perception roll, and a fairly good one most likely depending on what the item is.

You have to keep in mind that Joe Average has 1 perception die (4 if you want to give Joe Average a rank in perception, which isn't too crazy), which means from your example that people would be unable to notice someone walking into a room half the time, would almost never be able to figure out if someone is tall or not, and there wouldn't be any Humanis members because no one would be able to tell if someone was another race or not. Don't even want to know what the threshold for male/female determinations are.

Yeah, that sounds like a scenario for mundanes coming across like Mr. Magoo.

Anyway, this situation sounds like it'll require a good spoonful of tact. Just saying "You guys should just learn the rules" is unlikely to win anyone over, yet at the same time it does appear there's a big discrepancy between what people think is possible and what is easily achieved within the game. I mean, honestly, you can buy the aforementioned Rating 3 Attention Co-processor for 3 build points and still have some 3k worth of spare change-- and that bad boy will apply 3 dice to any in-the-meat physical Perception test. It hits me as particularly worrisome that the GM seems unprepared for the notion that such a dicepool is possible. One thing the GM might find reassuring is that by the RAW a high grade Perception pool isn't necessarily the same thing as being immune to ambushes. It can help a helluva lot in conjunction with a high quality Initiative Score, but ultimately there's still a difference between being able to spot potential danger and being quick/decisive enough to effectively deal with it.

How does the reasoning for this go?

SR4A p62 gives general tresholds for all tests: Easy 1, Average 2, Hard 4, Extreme 6
interestingly p136 gives new tresholds for perception test.

let's say you walk along the road, talking over your plan for the evening.
There's man standing in an dark ally you pass. He has a knife under in his belt under his coat.
your modifiers:
concealed under lined coat -2
concealability knife -2
distracted -2
partial light -2
object not in immediate vicinity -2
Treshold 3 for "small" => so you need 3x3+10 dice to recognize the threat in average and 22 to buy the hits.

in this case, if the GMs uses SR rules as stated in the book, the 17 dice of yours are probably not enough.

BUT
in a normal game, without a perception focused SC the GM can just give the ambusher his +6 dice on a surprise test. YOU might make the roll and if so, get +3 dice for being alerted.

Well, by the RAW, Surprise is still dictated by Initiative. Knowing that something is coming gives a bonus to your Surprise Test, but it's only a +3, whereas setting up an Ambush and delaying actions while you lie in wait gives a +6.

If you're talking about fluff and real life justifications for the concept, it comes down to experience and what is known in the military and in survival studies as "dislocation of expectation." Basically, more than fear or even panic, novelty makes people freeze up. That's why as dumb as it may sound, people who read and genuinely internalize those dumb li'l safety cards they give you before takeoff are markedly more likely to come out of an airplane crash in one piece than people who simply choose to believe that they are certain to die in ANY plane crash and thus are surprised when it turns out they're still breathing after the plane hits the ground.

I think Toturi was thinking more along the lines of 'you see the guys waiting in ambush up ahead in the ally before you're even in position.' Hence you get to prevent the ambush by virtue of not walking into it.

Indeed. With high enough Perception, you could possibly avoid the situation where you even make that Surprise Test in the first place (the first paragraph of Surprise and Perception, SR4A p165) and don't need the GM to make the secret Perception test.

Well, yeah, that's obviously possible, but that's not the same thing as being able to then decide to walk into the ambush as is and not give up any advantage because you know where everyone is with your Superman senses. Beyond that, I tend to give the Ambush bonus only when there's a reason why it'd be difficult to see it coming even if you know opponents are around. For example, the classic door breaching scenario. For another thing, your super vision doesn't necessarily let you think "These 3 guys standing in the alley definitely intend to hurt me and as such couldn't possibly surprise me" all the time either.

.

Right, because guys standing in the shadows of an alley want for nothing but world peace. If I noticed people hanging out in the shadows of an alley (or the shadows of anywhere if I'm a Runner) I'm going to expect them to be up to something, and be ready to defend myself if they do plan to attack, thus not really being able to take me by surprise. Now, they may still beat me out in initiative because I have to react, but they sure won't surprise me.

Man, I was loitering in an alley way last week. I am a nice guy.

Were you hiding in the shadowy parts of the alley with your hands under your longcoat on the handle of a weapon?

i think you need to define "weapon" for them to answer that question

I'm from Minnesota. There's really no point in standing around in an alley unless you're trying to be as sheltered from the fall winds as possible, so pretty much, yeah, that's probably what it looked like. Bonus points since I'm a Mexican with one good eye.

Anyway, I don't like being hung up over a "3 guys, nobody else, obviously scary place" angle, since it was never really my intention to imply that Perception tests don't help avoid Ambushes at all. I just want to point out that there's plenty of situations where it won't make you immune from them. For example, if you want to predict with perfect accuracy which burly gangers in Redmond are dangerous and which ones are going about their business, then perhaps you just shouldn't go to Redmond. I mean, for chrissake, it's Redmond. The entire place is shady AND packed with people.