A run I'm GMing is coming down to the final showdown - a threeway free for all beween my PCs (just three + GMPC), a cheating Johnson and some of his muscle, and a second runner team.

Both runner teams got cheated out of their reward so far, but they unfortunately didn't die or get caught, as the J had hoped, so now he has to get rid of them - since they might just know too much. The other team will be wanting most if not all of the cash the J might be packing, so they won't back down, easily.

Statting out the private muscle is pretty straightforward, but I'd like to give the runners some personality.

Hence, if some of you guys have PCs lying around that you might wish to share for this occasion, I would be very obliged.

What I'm looking for:

A Sammie (gotta have one), not super-specialised because the PCs aren't, either.
A secondary sammy/face
A Mage, can be quite competent, but not a pixie. I need someone to definitely give our mage a run for his money.
A Hacker/rigger, should be rather competent. We don't have one, so there won't be any matrix combat, he should be largely running drones, I think.

These guys can have some karma under the hood, maybe not hundreds, but 50 is ok. I can tune stuff down, easily, if I believe they will too easily deal with my PCs. By way of explanation: The PCs were made with Karma-gen, 750Karma and OLD costs, they are very good alrounders, but not very specialised. Their DPs aren't huge (I don't think anyone will get 20dice in anything without edge), but they are quite tough and mostly don't have real weaknesses - except being rather inexperienced as players. All of them have at least three IPs.

Of course the opposing team should be beatable in some way, but they should also offer some serious threat. So a 400BP runner with 50karma or so should be a fine challenge. I'm pretty certain a group of 750karma builds optimised by experienced dumpshockers with yet more karma would wipe out my PCs, so....

If you like you could also add some key tactics - no doubt you built the guys with them in mind.

In every case, thank you very much in advance for your help. It will be very much appreciated.

the easiest way would be to just use some of the archetypes from the corebook and to then adjust them to suit your needs. As they all are 400bp characters you can spend the 50karma you mentioned for each of them and upgrade their equipment.

Try here?

Also, just to be picky - if the opposing team has a hacker and a mage to throw some invisibility his way, he can do all kinds of nasty things to the players' tech. It's not like he has to only concentrate on drones.

Here is a magi i came up with a while back. I dont remember how many build points he is so you may have to tone him down a bit. He is a pacifist so he will avoid combat for as long as possible but when engaged he will try to destroy the opponents guns and if they still insist on fighting then he will switch to using his stun staff and his other combat spells.

I dont remember what his allergy was so you can make it whatever you want.

Hacker/Rigger
Give him a couple of decent drones and some skillsofts, and he'll be a pain to deal with.
Rigger
He's a merc rigger, but he's pretty well built.

@Mr.Smilies: To which spell-category is the spellcasting focus related to?

and he has a Force 5 spellcasting foci, but no restricted gear quality. That thing is Availability 20.

ah, forgot about that.

Its a Manipulation Spell Focus

I edited the above char.

I had planned on having him get another one later for Healing but did not have a chance to play him much.

The GM that was running the campaign that this char was for had a house rule where each player could take one item up to Availability 20 without that quality.

Here is another one:


The listed attributes are without the augmentation from the adept powers.

whenever i have to come up with some opposition that goes beyond sample grunts, I try to be creative and a little more pink than an actual PC would be. Our group likes it easy and I'm not that good with all 'the narrating and expressing personality' stuff. So the last guy they had to oppose was a Minotaur specialized in Wrestling. His grappling attacks were nasty, but the Sammie who had to 1on1 him managed after a lot of dice rolling. (was a show fight). But they won't forget this one...
You will find plenty of those in this forum, if you're into it

Thanks a lot for the chars so far, I'll certainly make use of some of them!



Well... I would like to do that, but then I set this group up as actually more "professional" than the PCs, because they did a complicated, elaborate entry into the last run's target area, whereas the PCs just snuck in through some totally unrealistic sewers. (Including many a joke about the crap they were wading through.) It had the players making jokes about how the pros got there late, while they managed to get in before them (and ended up blowing everything up). That was pretty funny, actually. I also had the Opfor hacker snoop around the PC's commlinks during the first meeting in order to let him find out that they really didn't have the paydata that both teams were hired to get. Well, that was ad-libbed, because I didn't want a firefight at the time. It wasn't actually too unrealistic, since none of the players are particularly matrix savvy, and their commlinks have one giant "hack me" sign on them, but they are now expecting something tough.

Alright, an update:

I've started the final battle I needed these guys for. Now unfortunately after looking around I had to find that most of the 400BP runners were just not enough to challenge that team - a 750 karma build is just much stronger.
So I made a few 750+ karma runners to make life hard for my players, and opted for playing them "arrogantly", i.e. not quite as offensive and effective as they should be. (That and my own tactical suckyness should be enough to guarantee survival for my PCs.)

Of course nothing quite went as I imagined, and it also tuck effing AGES (after one evening, almost four hours of playing, we are IP 3!! of round 1!!). The face was supposed to die in the first scene, because I didn't get around to statting him, but of course that didn't happen, so he's now still unstatted, and sitting in the car.

But I still wanted to present the challenges I gave to my players, and maybe hear an opinion:

I've found that making up full stats for all the NPCs to be more effort than it's worth. For the most part, using dice pools is more effective for what you want. Think less about what your antagonist would look like as fully built PCs and more like how many dice they roll in particular situations.
Think in terms of how many dice: To Punch, To Shoot, To Soak, To Resist Magic(Will), To Resist Magic(Body), Initiative, To Dodge, To Full Dodge... that sort of thing. Keep the NPCs motivations in mind, but whole character sheets are best reserved for Prime Antagonists. How to play them is far more important than what their Charisma score is and why. Otherwise you'll spend all day making up villains that don't last more than a scene and wondering why an adventure that took you days to build took minutes to complete.

Yeh, I'm very inclined to agree, and in fact I ALWAYS used to do it that way (in SR3), but SR4 has more connected and added up stats then SR3 used to, and this is my first time actually running as GM. So I wanted to actually build the guys to make sure I wasn't making too many mistakes. (And with a spreadsheet, building a guy takes only marginally longer than just adding up the relevant numbers.) I do not think about every piddly piece of equipment.

But a lot of stuff has effects which would be hard to combine without looking at the actual ware, for instance. Take the Stirrup interface I needed for the zombie: I would have had to simply reinvent it had I adlibbed the stats, and it would have come out differently.

What I'd like to know is this: How hard to kill is this guy, really? He doesn't hit too hard, but the def is really strong, to my eyes. (I forgot to put qualities on the sheet - Astral Hazing is missing, which takes care of meleeing spirits, but not stunbolts. Meh.)

Astral Hazing is very good for Stunbolts actually...

Ok, clarify this for me: Astral Hazing makes background count that travels with the individual with a range of Essence meters. However, background count only affects magic attributes, spirit force, and sustained spells, according to SM. It does not seem to affect spells that are cast into the BC, unless I am missing something. Or do you have a quote to the contrary for me?

You are indeed missing something (Or I have read it incorrectly)... It reduces the effective force by the Background count, and it raises the Drain by its background count. Pretty significant in my book...

I will look for the specific quote here in a bit...

EDIT: Looked up the information, and it seems that you are indeed correct. I am not sure where the idea that Cast Spells generated issues when interacting with a Background Count Field. This little piece of information would indeed make Background Count a Negative Quality, instead of the MUST HAVE for Anti Magical Effects. Will have to do some more research to try and determine where that idea came from. I know that it is a common assumption here on Dumpshock, and there have been many topics that covered it, in depth. Hmmmmm........

I believe it is a (not necessarily correct) extrapolation of the effects of being in the BC. If being in the BC makes spellcasting harder, casting into the BC should be harder. And if sustained spells and basically everything magical that go in have their force reduced, then instant spells should as well.

I also checked the errata just to be sure, and no changes there. So, BC has effects listed for standing in a BC, and has effects listed for certain things going into a BC, but it lists no effects for casting a non-sustained spell into a BC from outside of it. My guess would be that the instant spells are too quick to be affected by the BC.

Which will work for me (and has the benefit of being RAW), and as a result, Astral Hazing is no longer the Optimal Negative Quality it was. Sweet.

Well, ok then, so the zombie is not protected from stunbolts... Not that anyone tried casting them, yet, anyway .

Heh... Oh, they will...

And they did...


The fight is finally over, after two full sessions spent with ONLY this fight. Due to my poor tactical skills, and the strange car damage rules, the team was hardly injured at all, and the enemy team was basically knocked out with one blast.

What happened was this:

Our guys:
Sammie: Big Mama, an african american ex-prostitute single mom turned runner boasting a fat loadout of weapons, but not nearly cheesed dice pools.
Tech guy: a minor surged adept, does electronics and explosives and some recon drones
Mage: classic shaman, I think, with good stats
redundant guy: sniper/sammie mysad, GMPC currently.


The J had arranged a meeting with both runner teams at an out-of-town megamall carpark, on the sunday morning following the raid into zombieland. He had strapped the case with the money for the teams onto a roto-drone and had it approach the teams. At the same time he got had a team of four grunts and the Zombiedrone onto the carpark opposite the road from where the runners were waiting for him. I wanted him to be a bit arrogant, so I put him with his MBW bodyguard into a limo that followed the van with the Zombiedrone.

I had planned for the Opfor hacker to hack into the drone and direct it towards his team, which he did, but then the team shot the case off the drone with a called shot, and dropped a spirit on it to retrieve it. The Zombiedrone exploded from the van and opened up on the spirit with it's LMG, but I rolled badly. The Opfor Sammie, however, chewed the spirit up some with a full-auto wide burst, but didn't manage to kill it.

The spirit grabbed the case and lugged it over to the runners. There was some ineffectual exchange of fire between the enemy sam and our generalist sam. Due to some rolling luck, our sam managed to dodge without full-dodging, and the other had to full-dodge during two IPs, perhaps because the zombiedrone also shot at him.

The J's grunts meanwhile looked on. The Opfor team's SUV with the hacker, the mage, and the face inside meanwhile charged towards the runners and the spirit, but I mucked up badly, and never used its gun, nor did the enemy mage cast effectively from inside. In IP2 he tried to PB the spirit who was already injured, but failed. As the SUV approached in IP3, our field tech guy threw a detpack on the ground in front of it, and even though the vehicle did an emergency brake, it stopped right on top of the explosive. (I rolled that, using slight house-rules concerning movement/acceleration for tactical movement. The RAW just sucks.) The tech guy detonated using det-cord, so the whole thing went boom in an instant. The car took a reflected explosion, which was effectively tamped, to deal 18P damage. And due to the rules, everyone in the car also took those 18P.
The Opfor face, who had been destined to die anyway, died without me rolling. The Mage got 11 boxes, and was basically out of the fight, the hacker got 8 or so boxes. The car also took 11 or so boxes of damage.

Now our Mage mucked up, that was before Magicrun started: He decided that since they had the case, they should now run away. And he did not stunbolt the zombiedrone, but rather only moved. And of course, at that point the Zombiedrone fired a full-auto wide burst at the tech guy, who was also holding the case with the money by now. He took something like 8 boxes, putting him just before being downed.

Luckily, in the next IP, our sammie fired a full-auto narrow burst with a sub-gun at the Opfor sam, and got something like 13 or more successes with edge. The Opfor sam went instantly into overdamage and dropped. The Opfor runners then basically surrendered, there was a brief exchange of communication and they opened fire on the J's grunts. (The J had been spotted in the limo by my GMPC, who was hiding basically right next to them.) The GMPC did the only useful thing of the evening and nailed the limo with two rounds of APDS, and from then on only missed.

And THEN Magicrun started. There were a lot of bullets being fired on all sides, which basically did quite little, with the exception of that one-hit-kill by our sammie. And then the Mage started stunbolting, and dropped one guy every IP. He first dropped the Zombiedrone. The bodyguard finally showed and put the GMPC into dodge-lock, and was promptly first grenaded by our sammie, which did very little, and then stunbolted. One of the grunts was shot at about 5 times before he went down, another was stunbolted, and the final two ran away.

The fight ended then, with the remaining challenge being an unconscious highly infectious zombie in an envirosealed suit, and it took me a lot of hints until they finally decided to NOT pry open his visor and head-shot him, but rather wrap det-cord around his neck and blow his head off. (I had previously established that being infected by that zombie disease variant would basically take them out, with only one roll to save themselves.)

In the end, the J was kidnapped, the bodies were looted, and everyone got away before the cops got there. Two evenings, one fight, basically not enough challenge, nevertheless.

Personally, I enjoy creating NPC characters, so, when I feel the creative juices flowing, I get one or two done. This means I have a fairly good sized cast lying around most times, and since I prefer to make runs that are not meant to be lethal, the NPC's tend to survive to fight another day (The one run meant to be lethal, the rescue of a franchiser's daughter from a gang, still ended less then lethal, after a 10 minute fight, in game. The PCs managed to win the fight, but the police showed up before the Gang leader bleed to death. Results of this are still pending, but he was broken out of the hospital by a group of NPC runners)

How about a hacker that has an irregular level of hatred for the mage, even to the point of retreating, and attempting an assassination later on?

As for the sammy, how about a bear shaman with zero tact? He never leaves bear form and causes his team endless trouble. He tries to eliminate walls rather than use doors, and only resorts to combat spells in the event of an epiphany.

Ummm... I don't see the connection to my thread. As opposing runners? That might be funny, but will hardly provide an adequate challenge, and it'll be unrealistic to boot.



Oh, for all the lead flying around, the only people definitely dead were the Opfor face, the zombiedrone, and maybe a grunt. The others could all be saved or were left alive.

The Opfor sammie took 22P damage and managed to end up with 12 boxes, so he, too, was saved by his team in the end.

I'm intending to replace my redundant guy with the Opfor hacker, who leaves his team because they were too incompetent (which isn't quite fair, but...). He just has to get his car repaired.