I'm looking for input on typical Shadowrun cliches, mostly in terms of Runners themselves, and how they can be broken. Things such as: Troll tank, elven speed sam, dwarf rigger. If you've had a game in which a character had a unique race/skillset/specialization, post a bit about them here.

In our games, we've recently had an Elf really raise eyebrows. He's a Street Samurai, and beyond that he's a Bodyguard/Tank, who's slow but has more body than most trolls. The looks on gangers faces when the little daisy elf eats a shotgun to he chest with nairy a scratch is pretty amusing, so I thought i'd get others stories about similar pc's who stepped out of the mold and became something unique. Tell me how sterotypes were turned on their head in your games, and how it worked out.


Thanks in advance,

Curugul

I play a shaman (technically, idolist of Dragonslayer) who totes a shotgun and wears a varsity starter jacket from high school and a baseball cap with his favorite Urban Brawl team's logo on it. Kind of hard to "geek the mage" in this stiuation, when the mage looks like a jock.

Added to this fact is that the team's other magic man is a hermetic full mage atuned to air who wears all white, dyes his hair white, and has white contact lenses. Oh, and he's fond of using low force lightning bolts for "cool" factor. And he's an elf. Yeah, my character sort of thinks of him as the decoy.

I GM a campaign where the dwarven rigger firmly believes that he is, in fact, an elf. With the flaw "ugly and doesn't care," it amounts to a particularly repugnant little toadstool of a PC insisting that he's merely suffering from a cruel twist of genetic fate and how dare you belittle him?

The shadowrunner cliches exist because the Attribute bonuses that certain races get make them naturally suited to certain roles. Trolls make good tanks and melee specialists because they have +5 Body, +4 Strength, and +1 Reach.

Breaking the cliche merely involves taking a certain race and a role that is not optimal for that race. For example, for a troll adept under the Priority System, give him these stats:

Attributes -
Body: 7[8]
Quickness: 5
Strength: 8
Charisma: 4
Intelligence: 4
Willpower: 6
Essence: 6
Magic: 6
Reaction: 4

Active Skills -
Etiquette: 5
Negotiation: 4
Pistols: 6
Stealth: 6
Unarmed Combat: 6

Adept Abilities -
Improved Ability/Pistols: 6 Dice
Increased Reflexes: 2

Now you have a troll who is stealthy, a face, fast, and good at ranged combat. You can do something similar if you want a tough elven bodyguard - give him dermal sheath: 3, ceramic bone lacing, and muscle augmentation for someone who can shrug off small arms fire and tear people's heads off.

You can fit a cliche and still break it by having an odd personality (as demonstrted by the Jock like mage).

I played an otaku combat-monster once ...
...he lasted 2 sessions.

Hmm, while I am a big fan of breaking cliches (including the 2 body combat adept and the electronics expert shaman), I think that the concept itself isn't so important as the personality of the character.

Cliches and stereotypes exist for a reason; they have some sort of basis in reality. A troll would be more likely to head towards a "tank" style role and an Elf interested in combat would probably rely more on speed and finesse than brute force. Deckers, concentrating as the do on computers as a major part of their life haven't a huge amount of time for combat training. And so on.

Whilst these cliches are common, they are moldable. Just how much time does your Decker spend exactly in combat training. Is the troll a heavy weapons support character, a strategist or a close quarters fighter?

Admittedly those are poor examples, but they indicate just how much a cliche can be changed.

Now, a major part of a character is the personality of the character. You could have two Elf speed-adepts with identical stats that are totally different because of their prsonality, identities, goals, values, attitudes and perceptions. One could be a fugutive from Tir Tairngire who lives on the edge, constantly paranois and who looks at the world in a deeply cynical way. Another could be from NAN lands, who likes tribal music, who runs because he's been black-listed by legit employers, who tends to satirically criticise things that seem to him to be wrong. These are two different characters with identical stats. An amnesiac character (sterotype #1, particularly if they are an assassin) can become the centre of psycho-thriller type adventures that genuinely scare the players if the player plays the character right and the GM makes use of hooks present with the character in that direction.

I think that stereotypes cease to be stereotypes if the personality of the character is realistic and memorable and if the GM prevents rail-roading the character into stereotypes (this can be a big problem with some GMs; one I knew always nudged Trolls towards the brain-dead brute category and all elves towards the snooty pricks category. THis makes getting out of sterotypes harder than it already is)

Two funniest character types I've seen have been based around trolls.

The first was an okay fighter but was primarily a face with lots and lots of contacts. He was also a huge fan of fine wine (actually did a run where he asked to be paid in high quality wine) and had a tendancy to make jokes of upper class people by acting like he was a snob ('pardon me but do you have any cheap yellow mustard?). Oh and even though he had a 6 for his Pistol skill, he never once hit a target (worst luck with dice I have ever seen)

The other one was Bob. He was a gay florist who happened to be a martial arts expert. He was also allergic to soap (okay, can you guess the age level of this player? ). But because of his flourist ability (great for getting into the buildingfor recon during officer hours) and his agility, he ended up becoming the intel gather of the group.

Saying a Dragonslayer Idolist is stereotypical because of all his combat spells is sort of like saying an African American character is stereotypical because he has black skin.

But, yeah, point taken, I guess.

Edit: Yeah, he's my current character. None of my GMs have bothered to capitalize on the fact that he's hunted by the Ancients. Yet.

I like my Shamanist. Since she's aspected, she can only summon Water spirits, but all our runs are based in Denver, so she hasn't ever actually summoned anything. Her tactics include mind controlling the enemy, intimidating them, using her numerous contacts to get any intel or benefits, disguising herself and pretending to be one of the good guys, or just putting on a set of camo armor and using her assault rifle. The assault rifle is my favorite. She's very good with it, and it's melee hardened for Clubs skill. Just hard to find GMs willing to allow combat-replacement social skills like intimidation to actually work...