The above says most of it. Two months from now, I very likely get to GM a game of Shadowrun 4e for a largely new group. They've all roleplayed before (and amazingly), but mostly D&D and other fantasy systems, and they have heard of SR to varying degrees but never played; I've played and GM'ed, but am nowhere near as experienced as I'd like to be.

I would very much like to totally blow their minds.

So I come to the forum and ask how, over two months of mostly winter break, I can most efficiently/effectively devote time to making this the best experience I can for us all; I love the fluff and would like to do it (subjective) justice. So if there are any particular time sinks that can be ameliorated through prep work, I'd love to know about them; I'd like to have this be the kind of game where you are presented with a rich, detailed world full of potential, then you decide to do something totally unexpected ,and the GM has prepped for that in the sense that the relevant information is already prepared. Since my players are all creative enough to go much farther off the beaten path than could be reasonably completely planned for, I'm wondering what can be least evidently be devised on the spot--and, conversely, what I should most devote myself to having ready in advance against their shenanigans. In part, this is an experiment of mine, too, to see how good I can be when I spend an anomalous amount of time and energy getting ready.

In addition, any information on how to be a better GM in general would be much appreciated. In particular, I look at all the shiny security toys for locking things away and start salivating, but the line between "detailed and challenging security system" and "death trap emblematic of all that makes a bad GM" can grow thin, so any warnings from those with experience on what to tread lightly around would be positively treasured.

tl;dr: what should I read, what should I write, what should I stat, what should I know, and how should I approach this to craft an impeccable gaming experience, and how can I as a GM best serve to provide and enhance that experience for my players?

Expect someone to come ready for combat and nothing else ("What do you mean, 'no explosives'?")
Expect someone to show up completely unready for combat ("I thought I could play the face, what do you mean 'I need a gun and armor'?")
Expect someone to misread some rule (magic/hacking/char build) and end up with something that looks too good to be normal ("Of course a drake's Mystic Armor stacks with the adept power, I get 12 armor before I get dressed").
Expect someone to forget a critical piece of equipment ("Uh. My rigger doesn't have a drone...") and be unable to pay for it.

Next, find a pre-written module. Food Fight is always a classic.

Read the module cover to cover several times. Feel free to change things if you think it sounds cooler (Rule of Cool) or otherwise makes for a better game (like skipping the part where the Johnson screws the players).

Don't be afraid to Make Shit Up, just try to remember the kind of world that ShadowRun is and always make it fun for the players. My crew blew up buildings on occasion because the GM tasked us with some Mission Impossible (he actually would make up something on the spot and any question that might make it easier for us, he made it harder) and we used whatever we could find. We once paid most of the reward out to a cabal of mages just so that they could implant a suggestion in the target's mind (who never left his room) to go visit the Hat Shoppe so we could get close to him.

First and most important question: What do your players find fun? Intriguing plot-lines? Heavy role-play? Rolling dice and getting phat loots? Tactical wargaming?


Start with your story ideas. If your players are not Dumpshock readers, you should post them here and we can all comment - and maybe you might even get some good ideas from that. Usually other eyeballs can spot plot-holes and give suggestions as to what players might do in a given situation, such that you can prepare it.

Edit: I hereby second what Draco18s has said. May people will not know how to make characters. Ideally, you can have a char-gen session where everyone gets together and hashes-out rules questions and whatnot. Have a (very) quick adventure prepared so they can try their characters out and make tweaks before the real thing.

Fill-in as many details as you can. Mr. Johnson wants to meet at a bar? Great! What bar? Where is it? What does it look like? Who's bar-tending? Is Mr. J in a booth in the back? Or do you meet in the alley behind the place. This applies to NPC's as well. What does Mr. Johnson REALLY want out of this deal? How will he react when XYZ happens? If you can figure-out what the motivations of all the NPC's are ahead of time, it's a bit easier to make-shit-up at gametime.


KNOW THE DAMNED RULES. Run a few mock-combats by yourself. And maybe even run 1 or 2 of your players through a mock combat example before they try and make characters. Hell, run Food-fight for the group prior to doing your custom adventure, and let the players re-jigger their characters after. Even better: write a quick and simple adventure with some combat in it that somehow sets the stage for your real run.

Know the rules. Have some idea where they break and be willing to improvise to make stuff work. If at all possible, work with one player and go through a couple of combats until you understand the rules and can both run through using guns, hth, auto-fire and grenades without having to look up rules and also not make serious oopsies.

Then do the same for magic. Summoning, binding, services, what spirits can do, sorcery, understand basic combat spells, wards, countermagic etc. Don't go into the advanced magic stuff at first unless you understand it and so does the player.

Don't let someone build a character the requires they know a pile of rules unless they DO know said pile of rules. In particular, don't let people bring in technomancers or hackers until you understand the rules and are confident that they know the rules and interpret them the same way.

Make everyone agree that you can make quick decisions about rules during the game and if you get it seriously wrong you'll make it up to the impacted party LATER. I've seen people (and done it myself...) bog down games for 20-30 minutes looking up rules and arguing what they mean and how they interact. This is a mood killer.

Painfully slow combat is another annoying issue, so try to get everyone to understand how it works and the, when people understand it, don't let people take 5 minutes to decide what they character does in the next 3 seconds. And the NPCs need to rapidly decide too. There are a bunch of tools and approaches to optimize combat flow, but they only make sense once everyone (or at least the majority) understands combat.

To ask another question - I have played some SR4 and GM'ed SR2 over a decade ago... if I wanted to get into GM'ing SR4 what would be a good place to start apart from reading the main book, Runners Companion etc from cover to cover?

Is there a good way to gain an understanding of SR4 rulesset without simply trying to absorb it all?

I guess going through alot of sample situations, as others suggested, with your players in a session only for that would be good to realize what you understand and what not.
Also try to get some pointers what people want to play and what they want to achieve by that.
When you ask them about what situations they want their characters to be in you can learn what they actually want.

I don't know alot of official runs for beginners but my guess would be that your first story should consist of 2 parts.
First typical run, typical difficulties.
Second typical Johnson double crosses them but you let them get back on him in some awesome way. (The awesome part is important )

So they learn that you can't trust no-one in SR and that you can do awesome stuff Important lessons imho

One: Use cheat sheets whenever possible. There are websites which offer cheat sheets for magic, doctors, hacking, firearms combat, melee combat, summoning, astral combat, rigging – you name it. Print them out and keep them ready for those situations when you feel overwhelmed by the amount of rules you are supposed to "know".

Two: Prepare lists of ready-made descriptions. Like a list of drinks, a list of bar names, a list of people to bump into, SOME AVERAGE GUY/GAL COMLINKS the PCs are bound to scan at one point or the other, lists of SR fashion labels to pop off on-the-fly descriptions. Maybe even jot down lists of descriptive words for scenes and the mood you are trying to establish, like "broken window, a burned-out car, troll with scarred face shuffling by and mumbling under his breath, kid in doorway staring ampty-eyed an drooling (playing VR mind games), low rumbling of a passing gyrocopter overhead, six-year-old begging for money (hiding a grenade to back up his plea)" ... esp for exotic places like the matrix and astral space

Three: Prepare some places and the people one can meet there in advance. If your players decide to leave the adventure path and follow a lead to, say, a totally unimportant NPC you haven't even fleshed out, let that lead the PCs to the bar "Apokalypse" you prepared (including the "Free Radicals" gang that owns the bar and checks out the "strangers"). If possible, have at least the following encounters/places ready: two bars, one nightclub/disco, one Yakuza-controlled restaurant or bathing house, one or two "shops" (for whatever), an out-of-use warehouse area, a black market, some matrix places and 1 appartment each for lowlife, middle income and rich people. If you know your PCs have a preference for certain milieus, prep locations/encounters for those, too. Yes, it's a lot of wotk, but it's work you can (1) use again for the next adventure (i.e. you prepared 6 encounters, but they encountered only 1, so you have 5 unused encounters fpr the next game already prepared) and (2) even RE-USE (i.e. they encountered the bar "Apokalypse", so cross out that name and write "After Midnight" instead, change some details (music is rakatakjazz, not aggropunk, waiter is female with red hair named Bunny, not overweight sweating Timm, stats remain the same).

Four: If they are a D&D bunch, throw ONE encounter at them they know from their "home system". A fight against ghouls is always a classic: They know what to do, they know what ghouls are, but firing away with a minigun sure is a nice change to that lame longsword. No, it's not high art – it's a quick and dirty way to make them feel at ease with the system, esp. when they feel overwhelmed by plot and planning. Which brings us to:

Five: KISS the plot. Sure, a lot of SR veterans think the archetypical SR adventure is "cliché", and feel the need to vomit when presented with the "same old, same old" outline (meet Johnson, read data on target, PCs over-plan the run for hours (or even whole sessions) on end, they start mission, the plan fails at the first encounter or botched roll, PC reach target anyway, PCs discover what the Johnson hasn't told them, PCs flee, PCs meet with Johnson who brings hirelings that try to kill the PCs and cover the Johnson's tracks, PCs kill the hirelings and force Johnson to pay up, Johnsons swears revenge, fade to black). BUT those veteran GMs/players forget that this cliché plot archetype was what lured them to SR in the first place. It may be cliché, but it's still fun (much like Disney movie). So design a mission that has all (or most) of these elements, but try to fight the player's overplanning of their mission (i.e. have them break into a warehouse of a mid-level corp with budgetarms security guards, a fence and a wire and some cams, throw in some hellhounds for that "magical" prop and be done with it – esp D&D guys often have real trouble with all that planning – they are used to "just go there, kill everything and sack the loot" and can feel bored by all that sitting around tables and flipping through rulebooks and equipment lists).

I'd suggest playing with the Missions. I really liked the Denver's Missions and it has enough different runs that every character will have a fit in (although if the characters are too specialized, they might be playing with their thumbs once in a while).

Start out easy with the security. There are dozens of ways to break into a place in Shadowrun, and dozens of counters to it. If your players are experienced, they can use all that. But for a beginning group, that's ridiculous; there are all kinds of tools you'll never think of bringing because the players don't know they might need them.

Yeah, that's not in-game realistic. In-game, that advanced security would be there. But for the first missions, just keep it simple. Use security measures that people are familiar with:
* Guards
* Dogs
* Locks
* Fences
* Cameras (tricky, not something D&D players are used to. You might want to hint at bringing balaclavas)

After a couple of missions, when people are used to guns, phones and cameras, you can introduce the harder stuff, like clever spirits, manatech, microdrones, motion sensors and so forth.



Character creation is tough, because there are so many choices. Particularly equipment. You might want to make a "shopping list" for character creation, with rough advice on what everyone should have;
- Weapon
- Ammo
- Armor
- Commlink
- Vehicle
- Lifestyle
- Job tools (foci, drones, programs..)
- Must-have skills (Perception, sneaking, fighting, dodging, social..)
- Indication of what kind of ratings in crucial stats like Body/Armor are at least viable for survival

Cheat sheets are your friend

Get a good gaming location. Appropriate music (but not too loudly), dimmed lighting (but not too dark), good seating (all at a table is best for cooperative play, especially when drawing out maps of combats), no other people coming in to disrupt your game.

Some paper to sketch out relative position in combat can be very useful though. Miniatures can be useful; several colors of pawn will do, no need to spend a lot of money. They both help to get people thinking creatively in combat, using the environment.

Enough dice! At least 6 per player, preferably more.




Establish the feel of your game clearly; Pink Mohawk or Black Mirrorshades. Make sure the players know it before CharGen.

Make sure you know the motivation of each character for being a shadowrunner. This helps to craft adventure hooks that will really hook the PCs.

Give them all the same fixer as a free contact (saves you a lot of headaches). Work out that fixer in detail; he can be the team's mentor (useful with new players).

If everyone is new to SR I'd recommend just letting them pick from the Pregens in the core book. I prefer this for a group of new players since they will be able to get the important roles covered, will have a good dose of flavor for the game, and can learn the rules without muddying the waters with long character creation.

A caveat to this however, Like others have mentioned you probably don't want to let them play technomancers right off the back since it's lots of extra rules. I'd remove the technomancer, drone rigger, and shamans from the selection.

Once everyone has a character selected and put on a character sheet, run them through Food Fight as has been mentioned before. But leave the session with a hook for their first real run at the end.

This is a structure that has worked really well for me in the past and gets everyone on the same page really quickly. And you can always let players make changes to their characters later in the game if they find they want something a little different.

Good stuff has been mentioned. Also keep some of that scratch paper, or a mini-dry erase board, for keepign track of things like initiative scores and damage.

Also, tape yourself for the next two months and set it to some kicking eighties music (Survivor's "Eye Of The Tiger" or Joe Esposito's "You're The Best" are awesome for this sort of thing.)

Not sure what kind of job or commute that you have, but I would highly recommend listening to RPG podcasts. Here are 3 of the best. Look at some of the back catalog of shows for GM specific shows.

Happy Jacks RPG

Fear the Boot

Postcards from the Dungeon

They have lots of good insights. Most are very funny and well thought out.

Personal advice, I'd say stick with a group template by making sure the characters have something already in common with their backstories prior to the start of the game. Less bullshit backstabbing, more witty banter. Figure out what you're players are interesting in doing, then feed them that at least to start. If you come planning to bring A, but they want B, it's going to fizzle. Find out what their characters goals and interests are, usually in the form of some backstory or personality. This will help you link the characters and PCs into the storyline.

Pre-emptive awesomness is a nice concept but cant happen. To be awesome means to be experienced in all aspects of the game or at least the majority rules thta come up regularly.
This comes with experience i.e. game play. You cant just learn it from the book. Muscle memory and sequence memory is a trained thing not theorycrafted one.

To get BETTER i would run food-fight for myself using miniatures and roll the Grenade scatter dice for the direction of travel of each character.. just pick 1 of the samle characters and make ALL of your combatants that character. So you only worry about 1 set of stats. start with 2v2 encounter and its enough. That will give you hands on experience on combat and various other parts of the game.
You can even throw in some maglocks on the BTL and other expensive gear in the store and let the 'thieves' try to break in.

Once you have mundane combat done, move onto Ettiquette, Negotiations, Con, Intimidation. with this you want to memorise the feel of the odifiers and how they shift dice arround. sure GM tables are good but its better if you KNOW all them by heart as they are the cornerstone of the game talking is i mean.
Once you have them sussed out you can rerun food fight for yourself and add a face on each side who will try to avoid combat to start and solve it otherwise.

once you have those 2 concepts sorted and are comfortable running them without a GM screen tables in front of you then you can add a mage and repeat the whole process

As for hackers, riggers, spiders, and TMs feel free to run them solo/tandem. like say racing your riggers down a stretch of highway and trying to get to the finish line first. as you get better you can add vehicle combat etc etc... or do hacker competition. breaking into a node and stealing some data. if they end up meeting you get to play cybercombat.

So lots to learn and the book wont be enough to make you pre-emptively awesome. Awesomness comes with experience. You mix raw tellend and creativity as much as you want but its the experience with the rules that will be the deciding factor. Not bogging down the game while you lookup trivial everyday combat rules is the key to getting your new players interested in the story and not bored while you lookup rules.

Thanks, everyone. I'm working on suggested basic gear lists and so forth, partly at player request, to ameliorate the dangers of overspecialization. I'll certainly reread the rules and find/make as much in the way of cheat sheets as is useful, and in starting to do so I'm gaining an appreciation of how beneficial it is not to have to dig through the books frequently.

In addition, I wrote an adventure concept, or at least the first draft of one. It's below for length, and I apologize in advance for my syntax. It's very wordy, but there's a tl;dr at the end.

BTL chips-oddly, exclusively physical chips- have been found in limited markets sporting insane levels of overstimulation for long periods of time, enough that they're several times more powerfully addictive than normal. The corp that makes the physically encoded host software responsible for the chips' effects, and thus the chips themselves, found a lower-level technician BTL-ed out of his mind on their own hardware and want to track down the problem and see it gone without revealing they're making BTL-like chips; in effect, the shadowrunners are aiding their own internal investigation process, which naturally involves details of their security scheme they'd rather not reveal to runners. Usefully, the chips only last a week or two after manufacture (they're still experimental, and quite fragile) and the latest batch of chips, stolen yesterday, have hidden trackers installed that go off on (inevitably one-time)activation; previous generation tracking data leads them to believe that the chips tend to get used about three days after they're lifted, so the Johnson wants the group to pick up the point-of-use pings on the disposable commlink he provides and backtrack to whatever organization is loading the code on the chips. He requests the organization be stopped, preferably bloodily, with their stolen burn drive reduced to so much scrap, and a copy of their software NOT on a chip provided to him as proof within two weeks' time; he will pay a sizeable bonus for any unused chips they bring him, as well.

In truth, the corporation already knows how to ameliorate their theft issue, but is intrigued at the code used to boost the effectiveness of their already revolutionary host program even more, and has therefore dispatched a Johnson to organize a recovery/destruction operation to keep their chips out of rival hands while ripping off the gangs making these things In their ideal world, they get some measure of vengeance on the thieves, get to upgrade their product, and ensure no one knows what they've actually got on their hands but them; a recovery mission might encourage the team to raise the price or examine the software themselves. Incidentally, the host chips represent an attempt to produce cold-sim capable BTL/Personafix-esque hybrid software to discreetly train security forces into fanatics.

The gang, naturally, would like to keep their chip line open, but is even more paranoid; at present, they can still claim it's their exclusive programs providing this experience, rather than a chip anyone could steal for themselves--and of course it is, in part, but they'd like to keep their abnormal experience phenomenal, in addition to having a foolproof method of keeping the chips one-use-only. Should the group catch on to this gang's suspiciously detailed knowledge of proper burning procedures, they could theoretically find the corp traitor who sold them the information required for the gang to steal the startup machinery and subtly lift chips, which might in turn lead them to their true purpose. I'm leaving this open for now, but it could become a future adventure hook if the PCs decide the corp needs to be stopped, or if I decide that their fixer gets concerned.

As to how the chips work- it's not integral and fairly weak, but I like having explanations ready- they are adaptive, sensitive enough that the optical read system will in fact burn new data into them and therefore as they are read the experience evolves in a way subtly unique to the user; their software is coded into tiny electron-driven nanotech gates, powered by local photoelectric molecules, responsible for controlling the adaptive optical characteristics of other clusters. This means that as it is read, the amount of light shining on the disc and the lengths of data uploaded at what times, and thus the sections that cause improved response (it is assumed that the higher-than-alpha waves triggered by BTLs allow for faster information processing, and thus a faster read rate detectable by the chip) evolve susequent clusters into pointers towards new, continually evolving segments of disc, leading to a personalized and deeply moving experience; it is hoped by the corp that other responses may be translated into read rate variance and thence to building up a more detailed psychological profile more conducive to operant conditioning, perhaps on a disc that can be somehow reset yet still run in a conventional sim module no one would look twice at a military group using as a training supplement.

/wall of verbose text

So in effect, at the level they're likely to run it, they have two days to prepare (adjustable),then they get a compass ping, track down a user who they either interrogate, track, or hack to track back to a dealer who then points them to a gang-run club after persuasion/hacking/detection spells, in the basement of which is the facility for burning these things. This is the run part (actually inspired by a SWAT 4 level), after which they return to Johnson for tea and nuyen.

I tried to put in at least two options for most things, and at least two renditions of the various types of challenge so they could experiment while still advancing the plot. If they badly mess up getting the dealer out of the junkie (who may very well be in a ghoul-infested alley, in homage to player experience), Johnson's compass-commlink can ping again and give them another shot; if they wreck the infiltration of the aboveground facility for some reason, the basement can become a distribution center for the REAL burning center located somewhere else. Obviously not something to be overused, but I like having that safety net for a starter adventure. Also, this leads in to a more standard adventure if they like it: taking down the facility making these fancy enhancer chips, which will obviously have much more in the way of security. All that has to happen is for the gang to decide that they don't like to be used as pawns (perhaps modifying the fee based on the death count in the first run), and suddenly the runners get clued by a new Johnson into the 2+2=5 nature of these chips and off we go on the first run against a significant corporate facility. At least, that's my thought process; this is very much, and probably very clearly, a work in progress.

Thoughts on design/the value of the design goals?

EDIT: I forgot about the existence of direct input chips. The explanation of their abilities can be massively simplified.

Something making this kind of cash is going to raise the curiousity (and ire) of those criminal organizations that like to deal in these kinds of things - which I believe the Mob and Yakuza both do. That might make for a nice twist if they're steamrolling your opposition.


It's not bad as a campaign arc, to be honest. Good intro, plenty of room to dive into further issues that blow back on the company if found out, though I would also add the risk of the product killing people. This would increase the heat on the company to sweep this under the rug - and I'd even have them hire the runners to trash their own research facility before the audits come in (though the runners won't know that). Eventually the runners can end the arc with a little windfall for a job well done, or have blackmail info on the corp that could open a new arc of being hunted down and bringing the truth to light or convincing the corp that they will keep silent on the informatin in exchange for vast(ish) profits.

I would make sure to write in some contingencies for explaining the situation and what needs to happen if the players get confused. As a GM, it is easy to assume that the PCs will immediately grasp not only what you're showing them, but what that implies. There is a school of thought that says part of the game is figuring things out on your own, but I find it unreasonable to expect someone to guess the right move in their first session. Most RPG players will quickly grasp combat. Other parts of the game (like legwork, negotiation, dealing with security systems ) are less intuitive, and I have found that letting my players struggle with them is not fun. My policy is to show and tell - if I am presenting a new type of challenge to the players for the first time, I make the threat and stakes very clear, and try to have an NPC or other expository mouthpiece handy to offer advice. Of course, this doesn't mean the scene has to be boring.

Example: The PCs are planning to hit a Yakuza operation. The team's Fixer explains that she can help - according to her research, the leader of that operation is out of favor with the Yakuza leadership, and visiting the Yakuza Boss and asking for permission first may eliminate reinforcements and ninja revenge squads. The PCs decide negotiating is a pretty good idea, and agree. The Fixer explains that the Oyabun will not want to negotiate with a woman, so the PCs will need to go meet with him themselves...but she will be listening via an earpeice and offering advice. The PCs go to visit the Oyabun, the GM gives lots of flavor and exposition. The Fixer helps the PCs negotiate the deal, walking them through things like when it is appropriate to go unarmed, how to present your case as win-win, exchanging favors, and rolling social events. Since the Oyabun wants the target gone anyway, permission is granted, but the PCs relationship with the Yakuza will be effected by the outcome. Afterwards, the GM explains that the Oyabun's lieutenant is now a Contact, or if it went badly, an ongoing threat!

After that scene, the players will have some idea of how to negotiate with powerful NPCs. You will also have accomplished a lot of worldbuilding, and you have also established a way for the PCs to get around social situations - hire the Fixer to run social overwatch, and give a nice dice bonus in exchange for cash. The expendable NPC specialist is a great tool for introducing new players to interesting parts of the Shadowrun world.

Lots of good advice in this thread, figured I'd add some of my own (hopefully it hasn't ALL been said already). It's definitely a good idea to familiarize yourself with the rules so that if the PCs want to try something unexpected you can figure out what kind of check to roll. Nothing bogs a game down more than when a GM has to slog through books to find a particular rule (or worse, tells a player they can't do something because he hadn't planned for it).

It's always a good idea to keep your scenarios simple and flexible. You did a great job on the one you posted. I like to plan my runs similar to how they did in the old Mob Wars sourcebook, where it split the run into intro, event one, event two, event three, conclusion, and sequels and then gave a little paragraph of info on how each section might play out/what kind of opposition the players might run into and kind of jobs the run might lead to depending on how they handled it. Over-planning is the worst because it will never go as you expect it to. I like to have a bunch of cue cards with random goons the PCs might run into like bike gangers, yakuza assassins, mafia enforcers, corp. security guards, and keep them around to make encounters up on the fly. In the same spirit I keep a book with little interior maps I've drawn up for office buildings, warehouses, Chinese restaurants, etc. I feel that the best approach to planning a session is to prepare maps and NPCs and security systems and then just let it play out naturally. Sometimes this requires a lot of improvisation, but those sessions are usually the most fun.

I find that in my games the players derive the most fun from fleshing out the game world for themselves, establishing a stronghold in an old abandoned church in the barrens and using the money they made from runs to beef up the security or hire an ork plumber to get running water or fill the baptismal fonts with scotch for example. Encourage your players to write backstories, even simple ones, and then toss in elements from their story so that the players feel like their character really has a place in the game world. Flesh out their contacts as well, give each one some quirks or a funny accent or something, make the NPCs and locations the players visit memorable.

Make sure each player is contributing, don't just listen to the more vocal ones. Make sure you know what each character is doing and give them each a chance to shine. Don't let the players get bored and play games on their iphones, it ruins the mood.

Also, I find a lot of new players are impressed by the magical aspect of the game. Read some stuff from Street Magic and try tossing a couple magical threats at them. My group had a really fun session trying to rid an abandoned hospital of a particularly ornery specter

Lots of times, you'll have guys pulling skills which they have shit attributes to support. Like the 2 Logic sam taking demolitions when all it'll give him is a DP of 3-5, which is critical failure territory. It's a common mistake for new players.
The best way to help dudes make hearty characters is to sit them down with p120 of SR4A.
Here's an amended list of attributes and what they are good for.



When your players are looking to make a character, have them look at these lists and pick a few attributes which are their primary attributes. Then they can be good at just about everything underneath that heading.

Good point, but you added Knowledge skills under Charisma..

Some days are more lucid than others.

Build really memorable NPCs and know your world.