So, we're gradually getting our heads around making characters, but two slightly odd things came up while we were experimenting this week. Can I just ask for a bit of guidance about these?

1. Everyone in the group is taking Adept just to get extra IP without losing Essence. Is this normal?

2. We experimentally had one character fire full-auto at another. Even when he's a Troll with good Body and high Ballistic Armor, it blew straight through his entire PCM and killed him in one round. Is this normal?

3. Another player then tried throwing a grenade. Is it acceptable to "aim at a location" with a grenade and have the location be someone's feet? If you aim at the person, it seems that ridiculously high scatter is pretty much guaranteed. In fact, the way the rules work it seems that the target trying to dodge causes the grenade to scatter further which makes very little sense.

I can try to answer some of these. Your players are likely just falling for HollyWood Syndrome: magic kung-fu man is just a COOL archetype that people seem to enjoy.
Take it, run with it, and encourage it. Forming an initiatory group for your players, and adventures around it, could be excellent. You should be grateful they are are not all Magicians.

2: Yes. guns are hilariously lethal in shadowrun. Did you forget about Full Defense? Said troll ought to have been rolling reaction+dodge if he really wanted tp live, and/or using Edge. Also, what exactly are the stats involved?

3) Grenades, sadly, suffer from Fucked Up Catalyst Rules in the change to Anniversary edition.
Basically, how it used to work, is everyone in the blast radius got a chance to dodge a grenade.
Someone decided 'god, this is too many dice to roll for npcs' and changed it for the worse.
Currently, i believe, only the 'main target' gets to dodge, and everyone else nearby just kind of takes damage. If someone is throwing a grenade at someone's feet, that would be a Called Shot for extra damage, not a change in location.
The problem is, the loophole was never actually CLOSED, or a new one introduced anyway, and the current rules still allow for aiming at inanimate objects, who do not defend. This makes it better to aim at someonebody's chair, or the nearby couch, in order to inflict full undodgable damage on the actual target you want to hurt.
Also, scatter was pretty much doubled across the board, as a side effect grenades can bounce(teleport, really) farther than they were actually thrown, and you don't get net hits to damage after reducing scatter to 0 any more.

Basically, your solution to your grenade problems is to use 4th Editions rules for it, because they're just better.

1. No, that's not really normal. I don't know why their Essence, a mostly metagame stat measuring how much cyberware you can put in yourself, would matter that much to them. Adepts can do a lot of things, but initiative boosters are a lot easier to get with wired reflexes: 2 (and reaction enhancers: 2 as well, if you're really feeling frisky). It seems kind of silly to buy up an additional Attribute (Magic) to get something you can buy fairly easily.

2. Ranged combat in general, and full bursts especially, can be deadly. The target gets to roll to dodge it, and then gets to roll to resist the damage, but sometimes that isn't enough. Keep recoil in mind, though, and also remember that your test was made under optimal conditions. In a real shadowrun, the shooter might be suffering from wound penalties, facing visibility modifiers, and be shooting from cover, at a moving target at medium range. There are lots of potential negative modifiers that can really add up.

3. Aiming at a location should not make hitting the target any easier, so don't let them get away with that cheese. The target's resistance test is basically them getting out of the way of where the grenade is headed.

No, it's not. That's a seriously huge amount of BP for nothing. It's actually cheaper for the full adept to get cyberware for his IPs than it is to use build points.

Simply because it's 2.5 PP (that is, 3 magic needed) in order to get one additional pass versus something like 1 essence and $50,000.

Your group is taking the Essence thing to seriously.



THIS IS UNTRUE!

ALL effected characters getting a dodge was never the rule. It was "only the character being targetted."

Everyone effected getting a doge to move away is actually a very reasonable house rule.

Glyph brings up a very good point in his second reponse.

In shadowrun, situational modifiers are really important. Really important.

Try the shot again, factoring in Range Penalties, Vision/Lighting Penalties, and, say, Light Cover. If the defender is Running, i believe thats another +2 for the defender.

And remember that Surprise is incredibly deadly, because the ambushers get a free shot that can't be defended against - though this depends greatly on how the initiative dice fall.

I think it's just fear of the healing penalty for Essence.

What are the "better" grenade rules from 4E?

They're worse. To the point at which no one uses anything but areodynamic grenades, otherwise the scatter is too far (for a guided missile with a rating 6 sensor you need a critical success (4 net hits) to get your target in the blast radius and need 8 net hits to hit dead on....50% of the time (the other half of the time, the scatter is large enough to put the missile in the next county); add air burst and suddenly that hit rate rises dramatically to needing only 1 net hit for a dead-on hit and only a 1 in 12 chance of not getting the target in the blast at all).

Compare:

.. That seems like the SR4 scatter is much lower than SR4A's.

Hm... i haven't had that many people shooting with rocket-launchers in my game so far, even grenades only came up only sporadic. But they nearly always were dangerous, even with the scatter.

I mean:
Scattering BEHIND a target (and the target is tall) pretty much means you have hit
Scattering left and right, means you can even hit without net hits, if the target is long (like an APC, Limousine whatever)
Scattering in front of something... yeah damage drop.

If you scatter in rooms, it is automatically limited by walls (which also salsas the damage up, if tough) So say you scatter 7 meters behind someone... but he stands 3 meters from a wall. That means the grenade explodes there and salsa's the damage up from 10 (normal) to 14 reaching him.

And hitting a vehicle: Come on it is large (+2) or more, you AIM... because you are shooting with MONEY at it. (say you are good +2). And have a passive spotter, Tacnet, or missile. Whatever. It isn't that far fetched.

Just firing that into a MEDIUM drone, while it murders your friends or hunts you down... yeah theat is tough. Have to make it airburst and hope for the best. Seems realistic for me.

So yeah: screw scatter.

1.5 PP (2 magic, so 15 or 20 BP) for +1 IP
Wired Reflexes 1 is 2 essence and 11 000 nuyen (approx 2 BP + change)
Synaptic Booster gives the same for 0.5 Essence and 80 000 nuyen (16 BP)

Since you don't recover essence outside of a very expensive and lengthy procedure, ... it's more or less a matter of preference. Some bonuses, some negatives, their choice. Magic is the most expensive resource to use, but has it's own benefits and down sides beyond that.

I could have sworn this wasn't the case, but would make sense for the 'target a the chair to automatically hit the person sitting in it' exploit in the rules.

But yeah. Anniversary Edition rules for scatter basically have Teleporting Grenade effects. There was one thread on here, ages ago, who had a grenade he fired down the stairs at a group of foes scatter ALL the way BACK UP the stairs, and paste his team, scattering entirely further than the normal distance of the shot, due to bad rules. The thread was basically 'wtf is this, it can't be serious'

If I ever end up in a Missions game I will take the flaw Prejudiced (Furniture), Radical for 25 BP. And do just that: target the furniture.



I was guessing. I couldn't remember the right costs. But if you get those Wired Reflexes as Betaware, it's only 1.4 essence and 44,000 (8.8 BP), as Deltaware it'd be 1 Essence and 110,000 (22 BP, but I agree that this is a little expensive). Which isn't far off from what I suggested.

If you're going for deltaware wired reflexes, you're probably better off getting Synaptic Boosters from bioware. Standard grade is cheaper on both nuyen AND essence loss. Type O system, if you're going for alot of bioware, would drop the essence loss for it to negligible levels.

Oops. I've just realised it's not due to essence cost. It's because they want 4 IP right out of the gate, and Wired Reflexes 3 is out of Availability range for char gen.

Point them at the Restricted Gear quality.

For four IPs, it's almost better to go full mage. 16R and $40,000 for a force 4 sustaining focus. The same 4+ magic, 3 BP for the spell, and 5 BP for Restricted Gear.

Spending that much of your PP on more IP is silly.

Unless you're going Way of the Warrior, in which case it's 3 PP for +3 IP (total 4 IP). But then, at that point, you're not trying to hack, are you?

In any case.

You're not supposed to have 4 initiative passes at chargen. It's the equivalent to building a first level wizard in That Other Game that can prepare a 9th level spell.

It's more that IPs have diminishing returns. Having 2 IPs on which you can do effective actions is better than having 4 IPs but only being half as effective on each.

This ain't SR3 with a fixed and diminishing dice pool.

If you spend too much on IPs, you might be missing out on vital skills and gear due to the investment. Then again, that's what optimized characters pull off.

I've asked them to use only base SR and Arsenal (because they like guns). Giving them Runner's Companion would, I fear, result in a party of Drakes toting military lasers and end up me staring at a wall and gibbering. They can have those when I've gotten the hang of the system a bit more.

4 IPs is well within the reach of starting characters, but it is a significant hit on a starting character's scarce resources. It is usually better to start out with 3 IPs, and upgrade later. The same can be said for hard-maxing in general - those last few dice tend to be disproportionately expensive. Not that it can't be done, but hyper-specialists are hard for newbies to pull off without shortchanging themselves in an important area or two.

I cry manly bitter tears that the best way to get 4 IP's is to play a mage and have a super spell lock. I hates the Magicrun, I hates it so much.

If your players are having issue with the healing hit for having essence loss might I just suggest getting rid of that entirely? It's been a stupid rule since it's inception.

I think he's talking about the cost of getting more IPs and what you could have done with it. Each IP is about half as useful as the one before it. A 2nd IP is huge and really needed because the fight can still be up in the air. By the time the 3rd IP rolls around, the fight will be decided or being cleaned up. The combat is over by the fourth or you're just cleaning up.

Sure I'll take more IPs if I can. But that fourth IP is costly (unless you're a mage). You can make those more vital IPs matter more.

The players certainly are going for hyperspecialists. Did I mention that the guy who fired the Full Auto burst had an Automatics pool of 21 (Exceptional Attribute Agility, Enhanced Physical Attribute Agility, Aptitude Automatics, Specialization, Smartlink)?

This kind of brings me on to another issue in that first I don't really know what the effects of that will be. I mean sure with Automatics, he hits really well, but another player did the same with Infiltration. Can someone with hyper Inflitration just walk past a guard in a corridor unnoticed? Part of me says no, he shouldn't be allowed to dice every problem to death; part of me says yes, because his ability is so off the chart that to restrict it to what I can visualise is unreasonable. I'm thinking of that story about the locked car that got turned around..

The other thing is that I was going to do On The Run for a first adventure and I really don't know how they'll get through the first major scene (no spoilers please, my players may read this). Maybe they'll come up with something creative, good for them. Maybe they'll realise that the skill sets they've chosen aren't ideal, good for them. But on the other hand I figure they're making their characters this way because that's what they want to play and it might just put them off the game entirely. Should I finagle things to match their specializations? Problem is, at those pool sizes that's just lining up the ducks in the gallery.

Just as your players shouldn't be allowed to shoot their way through every problem there's some situations where even batman can't make a stealthy entrance without getting creative. The manned checkpoint in a well lighted hallways is a fairly good example of that.

Of course that's not to say that there's not other ways for a stealthy character to get around that. Finding a air vent big enough to crawl through bypassing the sensors and physical protections on said vent and then going is a good option. No single skill should do everything but a multitude should find an answer to most problems.

The main thing high dice pools do is let you succeed consistently, and in the face of high negative modifiers. But I don't see them as breaking the law of physics or common sense. All skills should have hard limits. And there should be things they simply can't do, no matter how many successes you get. On the other hand, when you combine high skill with creative players, a lot more becomes possible. Walking right past that guard might be more feasible if the character steals a janitor's cart and walks by mumbling about that big mess in the exec bathroom.

I suspect you'll find that hyper-specialists create their own problems.

The stealthy guy in now separated from the team and can't hack, con, shoot, or do anything more than sneak out.
The gunman will be bored the entire time the stealthy guy is sneaking because he'll do nothing.

It's one of the reasons I dislike playing the hacker. I know that the process is long, involves a lot of dice rolling, and bores everyone else at the table. Hyperspecialists don't work together, they work one at a time, so with 5 hyper-specialized players, most of the time 4 players are surfing the net.

This.
It's ok to hyperspecialize once in a while, but you need other skills too.

It's kind of adorable that your newbies are making all these classic mistakes, hyphz, but you get the opportunity to educate them!

I don't think they're mistakes. The characters are well made for the challenges. The challenges are single events, not a line of connected events. The problem (IMO) isn't that the answers are wrong, it's that the tests are wrong. If all that matters is combat then, yes, 4 IPs and a fistful of dice is the right answer. When asked to create characters for an adventure that incorporates all of the tests, I'm willing to give them odds that they make good balanced characters given the available tools.

Note that with the Chummer character generator, you can specify what books they can use in the options. It may save them some time.
http://forums.dumpshock.com/index.php?showtopic=34674

We're using Chummer, although it seems to have some slightly odd maths at some times.

Oh, also, what's the deal with all the sample characters being allergic to gold? Is it some kind of D&D-based joke?

LurkerOutThere, I'm interested by your .sig - what are the common GM errors with the magic/matrix rules that you're referring to?

The sample characters are terrible, I suggest looking at them as little as possible. They were forged in the fires of failure and sadness, and tempered in the waters of poor understanding of the rules.

In other words, prior to munckining little weasels like us getting ahold of the rules, having our way, and not calling back afterwards?

Things people forget about magic:
Perception 6-Force test to notice active magic.
The police take magically related crimes much much more seriously then they do regular.
Spells require foci, foci requires permits, getting caught knowing a spell you don't have a permit for runs you afoul of the above. All mages are supposed to be registered. See above.
[quote]

There's other stuff but i'm in the middle of something right now. Maybe at some point i'll do up a post for posterity.

Spells don't *require* foci, and foci are category-specific, not spell-specific. They'd have to directly observe you using a bad spell (or maybe find your signature, I forget how that works).

They were pretty bad and more illegal to boot back then too. If "if I want to be good at something I should have at least soft cap my attribute, have a high skill!" is munchkin, then I guess nearly everyone is munchkin (except TJ).

Never doubt that I CAN Munchkin with the best of them. I just see no reason to do so, as I have a lot more fun with the flavor of the character rather than the hard mechanics. Thanks for the nod, though, Hida Tsuzua...

I think the terms munchkin and powergamer are used too often. Most often to describe a player who, in a game where you play magical or augmented elite covert expediters, creates a magical or augmented elite covert expediter.

I'm with you on this. I much prefer flavor over power levels. Unfortunately, most I've gamed with have led me to go concept, min max, THEN flavor. My latest character I've been graced with some bonus points for drawing a picture and helping the GM out with a few things. Unfortunately, with a month to go before the game starts, I'm already facing the not-so-veiled threats of other players. Thank Dog I can pretty easily whether most of those threats (esp with extra build points).

On the other hand, there's no special prize (or praise) due for making your character weak. Weakness isn't flavor, fun, etc. Power isn't necessarily un-fun or flavorless. Don't being a Magic 2 snob.

One man's Weakness is another Man's Strength...

Why do people think that creating a cost effective character AND creating an interesting character with flavor are polar opposites in competition with each other?

Creating an interesting character does NOT mean creating a weak character. Creating an effective character does not mean that you're playing a batch of numbers. They're two different points on two different scales and it is possible to focus on both.

Part of it is that the fluff doesn't necessarily pan out when applied to character concpets. 2 is the standard human average, boosted per metahuman base stats. Characters need to be able to fill some sort of niche, and having 4 dice (stat + skill) really won't usually cut it. heck, having just soft-capped dice won't always cut it depending on your GM. Sometimes the only way to get the GM to understand just how possible it is for your runner to do something is to haul out a massive pool of dice and see if he feels lucky. So, no, in concept you won't need 24 dice to shoot somebody, or to negotiate your run. But sometimes, in reality, those 24 dice are the only way to tell your GM "Yes I can."

The thresholds in the books are a bit more fair than how d20 does some of its stuff. I swear it expects you to have all 18s at level 1 sometimes. Besides, human average is 3, I believe. That's statistically one hit rolling attribute, add in whatever skill you have and you may pick up another, more if you're at a high skill. It also depends on the skill. 2 hits in combat isn't going to do much. 2 hits on a jump check and you'll leap 4 meters horizontal. climb check will get you 2 meters. It's not awesome, but faster than I climb in 3 seconds. D&D assumes you've got better than average human stats in order to complete simple tasks.

I think some people also interpret the fluff in different ways, both the hyperbole at the upper end of the skill descriptions, and the unfortunate choice of words in describing a skill of 3 as "professional". The problem with the latter, is that a professional shadowrunner is a different beast than a professional beat cop or army grunt. They're not the only ones, either. A typical Ancients go-ganger will have a vehicle skill of 5, an typical street doc will have a cybertechnology skill of 5, and a typical doctorate will have a knowledge skill of 6.

Some people might look at a skill of 6 and say "Wow, that's how good people like Matador are! My character probably isn't that good!" I would look at it and think "My character is focused on combat. He does things like acquire targets or reload instinctively, and his gun is practically an extension of his hand. He spends regular time at the range, and also uses his gun in actual combat situations fairly often." After all, I assume that if the rules let you take either two skills at 5 or one skill at 6, that it is acceptable to do so. One of the examples of character creation does just that, in fact. And in the vignette before the skills section, a generalist and a one-trick pony are contrasted, with the implication that both of them have their niche in the shadowrunning world.

That's assuming a default-level shadowrun game, of course. Lower powered games by all means should set more limits. The problem with 400 BP, and even with higher or lower levels of points, is that you can go all up and down the power scale, depending on your concept.

@OP:

1. Like everyone else said, going adept for IP is not worth it, even with the DP penalty to heal checks. Heals through First Aid cap at your skill anyway.

2. Your troll is doing it wrong. If he has access to heavy (SWAT,Fullbody or Milspec) armor, and the right ware, he can take a full auto burst without dying. But yes, combat in SR is deadly, and supposed to be.

3. Best way to handle it would be to allow everyone caught in the blast a standard dodge roll.

I think that it comes down to what people expect from the system. For me, when I see that the majority of the Upper-end, published opposition throws from 12-17 Dice (The Elite Tir Ghost can throw from 15-17 Dice in Firearms Skills (Pre Tacnet), IIRC), I tend to think that the fluff is accurate. 12-15 Dice in your primaries is sufficient in that case. If your table experiences opposition that is consistently at 20+ Dice, well, then your characters will likely fall into that category as well. I have been playing SR4 since its debut, and have seen absolutely no need for a character with 20+ Dice. There is really just no call for it. The only thing that 20+ Dice does in game is minimize or eliminate failure, which to me is boring. If you can never fail, why are you even rolling dice? The purpose of the game is to provide a setting for a story. To me, at least, there is nothing more boring than having a character that never fails at anything. If you cannot actually fail, then there is no drama, no risk. I like the Story that develops from success and failure.

Actually no, it's 3.