Nope, he would die in Chargen. Drain is a Bitch. I do not buy the "I got it 20 years ago when he was a lowly Force 1 Ally Spirit." No way in hell.

Lol. I scoffed at that too.
You just sounded like you were saying the gauss cannon solved the problem.

It would... But not in my game...

Surprised no one has specifically called out the Analyze Device spell.

I can think of something which can cover an awful lot of bases in one but only with a lot of karma for skills and attributes.

Gaki gain a sever allergy to sunlight.. but they can astrally project.
Glow in the dark eyes... who cares... cybereyes fix that (and the blindness).

Elf - Ghoul (Gaki) (using the cha bonus to offset the cha penalty for 'face' work)
Nat Min/max Scores: Bod 5/10, Agi 2/7, Rea 3/8, Cha 1/6, Int 1/6, Log 1/5, Wil 3/8

That's good enough to be a troll grade tank, a face, a decker/rigger, spellslinger, adept.

Go with Mystic Adept. It's dual natured... so it's always astrall percieving anyhow without wasting a full power point on astral perception. And as a gaki it gains the extraordinary ability to astrally project. (so for all purposes it's a full magician). It has natural weapons and is dual natured... so no need for killing hands.

You can cover up a lot w/ adept powers like facial sculpt, melanin control (no sustaining penalty) for disguising your true nature. Also adepts have a lot of good 'face' powers.

Decking rigging... if you can live with only a point or three of bonuses... it only takes a little bit of cyber/bio and the skills. Otherwise it's almost all in the comm gear and software.

Just a thought...


Otherwise I'm of the same mind... a magician is about the only thing which can come close to covering most all the bases. Drugs open up a bit of options... (magicians are generaly the only ones who can go astral... but there are some drugs which would allow anyone... though they'd need trained in it).

Analyze Device is an awesome spell, except that the OR on it is a bitch. You need to be casting it at force 7+ most of the time to get even 1 net hit.

I guess these "character who can do everything" threads don't interest me as much as similar character creation threads, because mundanes are automatically disqualified. Only awakened characters can seriously deal with the magical side of things. So everything is "Make a mage or a mystic adept, then..." Plus, "everything" usually assumes lots of karma, which again favors awakened (both because magic has none of the caps that everything else has, and because a mage can get anything a mundane can, while the converse is not true).

Honestly, I think the character who does *everything* would be a character who does one thing so astronomically well that it can be used in all other situations as well.

Maybe I like combat too much, but how about you shoot the door that the hacker would have hacked, then kill all the guards that come after you when they hear the door break down, then torture your Johnson through all but one of his stun and phyiscal boxes so he can't resist your attempts to negotiate a better reward.

Similarly, a pornomancer would show his junk to whoever was watching the security camera, the door would open, and he would walk out with the guards carrying his objective for him.

As long as there is a threshold, there is a dice pool that can overcome it. Except maybe rolling fast talk against the door. That would be hard.

No. There are limitations to what can be done.
You may be the hottest guy/girl on the planet but it does not change the fact, that there will be some blood for their realheads too.

The main problem is, that most modifiers in the book are for people with avarage dice pools doing avarage stuff. (Well, problem is the wrong word. There is no reason to list modifiers like -50 or +50 (well, exept for the pronomancer))

So they do not tend to be too high.

If you know how to talk to people you can get long way. But they won't cut off their own hands just because some person they met a minute ago said so.

I imagine some people might. Language is a very powerful thing.

For example, think of all the crazy things people do for religion, like this (see also: Day of Ashura). On the one hand, they were brought up to believe in it (extended check). On the other hand religion is simply faith in the words that declare your god.

Add that to the fact the most charismatic person ever might have had a dice pool of 14 (6 attribute, 7 skill, and +1 for a fez, because fezzes are cool).

If you tell someone that candy will come out of the stump if they cut their hand off, they won't believe you. If you do that with a dice pool of 50, they'll ask if two hands will provide more candy.

Still, cutting off your hand for candy seems stupid to me.

Shadowrun is not the only game with this kind of problems. And the pornomancer is (in the matter of dice pools) much worse in other games. (And sometimes much easier to achieve)
(There are games, where the max of "dicepool" is around 24-26(normally), standart is 6. But if you use certain spells and combination you are looking at 120, easy.

(To your example: As a matter of fact I find the self crusification of some christiens even stupider. What you you posted here might look stupid from the outside but at social pressur to the table and it does not seem that absurd anymore.)

The "most charismatic people on earth" show exactly how limited social skills really are. They might influence millions of people, but they also have people with mental Attributes of 1 or so, who hate their guts and cannot be budged from that position. Sure, people can be convinced of all kinds of things, but this usually involves indoctrination, leverage, authority, months and months working on the mark, and so on.

A pornomancer rolling 50 dice is merely someone who is wasting 30 dice on overkill most of the time. But social skills still have the same hard limits that other skills have. Someone rolling 20+ pistols dice still can't shoot around corners, or shoot bullets out of the air. Someone rolling 50 dice for negotiation still won't be able to get the Johnson to offer anything beyond a certain hard limit, so forget about the more extreme examples.

Etiquette lets you fit in. Negotiation lets you come out ahead in bargaining. Con lets you fool people. Leadership lets you command people that you have authority over. That's all they do. Social skills are not magical mind control, and while ludicrously high social skill dice pools are a problem in the game (which SR4A tried, and utterly failed, to fix), they are only a real problem if the GM makes social skills too powerful.

Hitler managed to set up a system where children would betray families, and soldiers killed civilians. True, he was operating by feeding a preexisting prejudice, but if he wasn't using social skills, I don't know what he was doing.*
The people with mental attributes of one don't need to be convinced. They can be tricked, or brought around through subliminal types of campaigns. If someone has low mental statistics, you probably just need to attack his instinct, not his logic. Luckily, opinions born of instinct can be changed, whereas pure logic (as rare as that is) is difficult to budge.

I feel "overkill" really does net you more in social situations. Someone can't be more dead, but they can certainly give you more money, or all their money plus their firstborn son.

More dice is a linear progression of abilities. You don't spawn new ones out of thin air.
In this example, more dice doesn't curve the path of your bullet at all, but apparently it increases your attack power (one might say accuracy, but with 20 dice you're shooting people in the eye. How do you roleplay 30 dice?). Thus with enough dice in pistols, you shoot through the corner.
As for shooting bullets, there are no rules for that, but I guess you could make a called shot on a delayed action, and apply appropriate modifiers for firing at supersonic vehicles.

I agree social skills aren't magical, which is why magicians can do these things with a standard dice pool. The whole point (of social skills) in both real life and Shadowrun, is to influence the thoughts and actions of others.
You're nice to your friends so that they will want to spend time with you.
Conners talk fast to get you into the rhythm of agreeing with them.

10 dice, and you may get someone to do the dishes for you. 20 dice, and that same person could loan you a large sum of money. What will 30-50 dice get?

*Side note: I imagine some people are really tired of Hitler examples for every little thing, but that's the one historical moment that really gets rammed into you at school.

Hitler is kind of an exception that proves the rule though. The Nazi regime got where they were in part due to orchestrating the kind of social campaign the game hardly even attempts to model and yet they still didn't get everyone to go along. And for the record, getting children to betray their parents is often shockingly easy given that kids often have a sketchy at best understanding of consequences. It's a well-documented problem in the legal system. Likewise it's not as tough a step from killing other soldiers to killing civilians as a lot of people would like to believe it is. Again, a well-documented problem that militaries world round have to wrestle with.

Actually, I find the converse is true. Someone who is logical will at least consider what you are saying. The people with low mental abilities won't even listen to you. Not that you can't trick them, but you can't change their deeply-ingrained attitudes simply by talking to them. You might convince the Humanis policlub member that you are someone sympathetic to the cause, with a legitimate reason to be walking around the Brackhaven compound without an ID card. But to change him into a non-racist? Hell no, not even a pornomancer, at least not in one conversation. In game terms, I would say that you are going up against not just his Willpower of 1, but also the 100+ net successes that have been accumulated by the people who have been indoctrinating him for most of his life.


Yes to the first, but no to the second. You can get the best possible deal you can, along with maybe a few extras such as good logistical support, but that's it.


Trying to shoot through a barrier can be done with blind fire rules, but whether you succeed also depends on how powerful of a round you are using. And hell no, you can't shoot bullets out of the air. People don't even really dodge bullets - they get out of the way of the gun pointed at them. Again, just because more dice give you a higher chance of success, does not mean that you get to operate outside of the normal bounds of the skill.


30 - 50 dice means that same person will loan you a large sum of money. That's all such dice pools really do; they eliminate most of the uncertainty, negate most negative modifiers, and let you get the best possible result nearly all of the time. So maybe it's not quite overkill, after all. Instead of succeeding most of the time, you will succeed all of the time.

But personally, I wouldn't want that. Someone with 20 dice in social skills can roleplay social scenes, and be useful in other areas, such as data search or combat. Someone with 50 dice will be barely functional outside of that role, and within his specialty, with no chance of failure, it will probably be glossed over more. Instead of roleplaying out the meet with the Johnson, the GM will just say "Okay, the face does his thing, and the team gets X amount of money for the job." It would be a boring character to play.

The thing with the Hitler example is that he was the head of a totalitarian regime. Purely by himself, he was a good rabble-rousing orator and that's it. Could Hitler, transplanted into modern times, walk into a redneck bar and intimidate everyone there? Hell no. Napoleon could, maybe ("I'm your worst nightmare; a Corsican with a badge.").

Similarly, you might point your gun at the barrel of the other gun and fire when you see a tell that they're going to pull the trigger (readied action for called shot). It can happen accidentally in real life, and anybody can try. With superhuman abilites, you might even succeed. The rules don't directly support this, but our GM is pretty good about cobbling together a threshold for something you might logically attempt, regardless of whether it's RAW.

You kidding? That mustache is the stuff of nightmares.

Ah, you got me there.

Napoleon was seriously charismatic:

Basically he converted a whole regiment that was tasked with capturing/killing him, and turned them into allies. He's a "charisma 7, skill 7, Edge 6, global fame 6, first impression 2, and probably a few extra as well" kind of guy.

Or, they were just predisposed to follow him because he was their leader...

Looking at optimizing unarmed damage, I've been contemplating a spell-locked (sustaining focus) analyze device on my hardliner weapon focus gloves. The spell would need to beat only a threshold of 2 (since it's a low tech item with no moving parts/electronics after all).


Even crazier, get some bone lacing implant, enchant that as your weapon focus (shouldn't be that much harder than enchanting cyberspurs as weapon focus I think). Wear a pair of mundane hardliner gloves, use analyze device on it and sustain it using a sustain focus. Then tack on item attunement on the same pair of gloves. (Item attunement only works on mundane items).

Add the obligatory +3 DV from martial arts, more from critical strike, elemental strike etc. And any other bonus that can be stacked.



One other benefit with making a piece of cyberware your weapon focus it that it won't ever be stolen, dropped, disarmed.

That too. But even with situational modifiers it takes a lot of charisma to fast talk an army

Same goes for a simple ring showed into a skin poket or under the skin in a grafting cosmetic operation that can net you more charisma too.
And it's a lot harder to re-enchant cyberware foci that have been destroyed or something . .

You have to summon and bind a spirit back to back to make it a ally spirit (SM pg 104), which involves facing hits on 20 dice as drain, followed by 40 dice as drain, so even if you could have a rating 20 spirit, you'd have to resist 6P drain on average, then 13P drain on average, good luck surviving that.


Also, a Force 20 Spirit costs a ton of karma and has almost no skills. If you really want to break the game, make it a force 10 spirit instead, then use that extra karma you spent buying rank 1 in a bunch of skill groups, and then granting those skills to the spirit at 5 karma a piece. Any skill you grant the spirit the spirit gains at a rating equal to its force. You want to be a gun bunny? 9 karma gets you rank 10 in whatever firearm skill you want. This works for basically any skill you want to grant it. And don't forget the 10 free spirit powers you get, at force 10. Want to be a super stealth specialist? How about giving a -10 penalty to everyone's perception test to see you, then have rating 10 stealth, and 11+ agility?

Of course, if you really want to be silly, make the spirit an Inhabitation Spirit rather than possession. Go for the hybrid form, and put it into a Chimeric Warform. Those things are surprisingly cheap. They're expensive to train, but you're just going to prepare them for Inhabitation, so who needs to train them? If you want something with hands get yourself a gorilla or something, but a wolf with a cybergun or something is just as effective. You can also give them a internal commlink, since inhabiting spirits can use cyberware/DNI from their host. Yep, that's right, now your ally spirit can also be the world's best hacker (rating 10 hacking skills). Just do runs as the ally spirit rather than the mage.

T'is True...

Nonsense, if the player wants to say "I got it 20 years ago as a force 1 ally spirit", I'd say let him. Just make sure to enforce the double karma cost of advancing a spirit as opposed to binding a new one. 16 karma per instead of 8 karma per means taking him all the way to force 20 is 312 karma, compared to 160 he'd normally pay for it. Add on to that the 406 karma for 4 initiations + magic 10, and he's already over his 750 bp limit without any other attributes or skills.


On the other hand, getting a magical lodge at force 6, summoning him at force 6, and advancing it to force 10, while having only 6 magic and 2-3 initiation grades is far more efficient and leaves the majority of your points for getting other things.

Well... By RAW, an Ally Spirit can ONLY be a Materialization Spirit OR an Inhabitation Spirit. No Possession Spirits are allowed. See Street Magic for more details. It is right there in the book.

So that makes what I said as far as inhabitation work, but not the possession from the original poster, so whatever lol.


And to clarify my last post, I just checked and apparently you do need a higher rating magical lodge to upgrade ally spirits, just like if you're summoning them. So that means burning a quality on restricted gear for it (force 10 I believe is availability 20 right within availability)

Please provide your sources for your rule above. I have never seen such a rule for SR4A.

Enhancing an Ally, Street Magic pg 105.

At least in the version of the book I have it says: "Karma must be spent on the relevant changes at the costs outlined above. Raising Force, however, is twice as expensive this way (1 point costs 16 Karma)."

I think that would be worth it even if you couldn't use the spirit for anything but edge. You could instantly get the ultimate dice pool 20 times a day for any skill or test.

Ally Spirits get edge equal to your edge, not their force. (SM105 under Attributes)

Ah.

Gotcha...

Umm...False?


Please read more closely in the future.

That line shows up in the errata, so he probably has an older version of Street Magic. Mine is like that - it only says Materialization and Inhabitation.

Mine shows only Inhabitation and Materialization... So...