Which system?
BP? Karma? German-Karma? (And I guess there is also a new german Karma)

Fun fact: The Ohio Democratic Party hosted a dinner in Columbus on the 25th of last month. Speaking at the dinner was Joe Biden, the Vice President.

Running from 22nd to the 26th at the same convention center was the Origins Game Fair.

The Origins Shadowrun LARP was on the 24th. I will just say, thank god it was the day before. I am trying to imagine how the Secret Service would be reacting to a mass of paramilitary dressed individuals with apparent firearms being just down the hall. They looked stressed enough dealing with the rest of the weirdos running around the place.




-k

The big thing is that you save points by being an ork except for very certain cases. If you're an low edge intuition mage or a rigger, you're just plain better as a ork unless you spent less than 30 points on body and strength. And if that's the case, have fun with your 3 body. Riggers just don't care about mental stats at all. This is the era of the script kiddy after all.

For technos, the fade resist roll is the the biggest check on their power. Orks are just fine intuition technos that won't blow up if you sneeze on them. Charisma Elf technos are gods of the matrix if fragile in the meat and can easily become good face as a side effect.

Really "my group is just fine!" is a terrible argument especially when one of your cases is a melee uncouth elf mystic adept. I agree that elf is overrated as the best combat race. My money's on orks and if you allow metavarients, the fomori.

Edit- If you don't use BP gen, things might be different. I haven't really looked into those systems so I can't say.

Probably about the same way that the Toronto Police Department dealt with LARPers at a major event...

They seized one guy's equipment and put it on the news... His chainmail was displayed with a couple of street trash pistols (Taken from drug dealers weeks before) on top with a couple of axes they took from a couple that were going camping, and one high-ranking official showed the "Safetied" arrows covered in socks and described them as "Incendiary Devices supposed to be soaked in gasoline and lit on fire before being launched at VIPs.".

None of the items in question were a threat at all to the target group, but was a major PR move to show "That the Toronto Police Department was doing all it could to keep everyone safe."

Oh, and none of the items were even close to where the delegates were when seized. Typical REMF Charlie-Foxtrot.

Riggers still need mental stats, since most of their skills (electronic warfare, for example) are still attribute-linked. Decker's don't, but I don't have a decker, I have an otaku, and they need mental stats for their bionode.

I could throw build after build into the fray, and we'd just end up in a war of escalating builds. This has happened before, I received a mod warning, so I will not go down that path again. I'll just stand on the fact that if you're playing a rigger or decker (or otaku), the ork bonuses won't do you any good, since you don't actually need much Body and Strength. If you're going spellcaster, then it depends slightly on what you're going for: for a charisma-based tradition, elves are very good. But for an intuition or logic-based tradition, not so much. The dwarf bonus to Willpower helps with drain, but only by 1 die; for the same 25 points, I can buy a rating 4 sustaining focus and the Increase Willpower spell.

Does having an increased Body help? Sometimes, but sometimes not. It's a question of opportunity cost: what are you giving up for that extra Body? Is it worth the tradeoff? Sometimes the answer is yes, but sometimes the answer is no.

The point is, humans aren't the best at everything. But they're competitive in many areas, even leaving Edge aside for a moment.

I don't see this discussion going anywhere useful; I could argue that Archetype X benefits from being Metatype Y, but so long as it's some unspecified build you can always come up with some convoluted reason why they want Charisma 6 or Body 1 or whatever.

Orks, humans, and elves exist on a continuum of how important non-physical stats are to your build. Just as people take a net loss of 10 build points, compared to a human, to take advantage of some of the elf's higher maximums, you will have people take a net loss of 20 build points to have the advantages to Edge and the lack of penalties to mental stats that being human can get you. It goes without saying that if you don't take advantage of an elf's bonuses, you are basically paying 10 build points for flavor. Similarly, human builds that don't exploit a human's potentially high Edge or mental Attributes is paying extra to be human. And an ork shaman, or troll hacker, are in the same situation.

Either you take advantage of metatype by picking the best one for a particular niche, or you play a bit against type, and make a human tank melee build, or a troll face. And while I do optimize my builds, mainly because of what I think a shadowrunner's role should be, I still like to play against type occasionally, and have smooth-talking orks or tough as nails elves to shake things up a bit. Shadowrun is not traditionally balanced, in the sense of every option being equally effective, but it offers, instead, multiple ways for you to optimize. But (and this is speaking as a powergamer-leaning player) you are not compelled to tweak your build for absolute mathematical efficiency. While you can certainly gimp a character, often unintentionally, the system has enough slack that a character who is less than completely min-maxed can still be effective.

Like I said, I once received a mod warning over this, so I'm not going to go down that path.

That said, I can run with your example. A face with Charisma 6 and Body 1 can be very effective. Pixies in particular: they can't benefit from most 'ware, but they can still get insane social dice pools. An otaku with Charisma 6 and Body 1 will be fine, especially if he's a sprite summoner build: he can just stay back, and let the sprites do all the work for him. Mages could benefit from a higher body, since they need to be closer to the combat; but mages have other ways of avoiding being shot at.

The bottom line here is, orks are not better at everything. And humans are not underpowered. They don't have any mechanical advantages, but they can still play to their abilities.

There's also some hilariously durable "tin man" builds out there in which you basically ignore physical attributes since you'll just be bootstrapping them up to competence via replacing your fleshy bits with armored cyberlimbs. Generally such characters lack the funds or essence to also have great IPs on top of their durability, but that's fine since you don't have to totally devote yourself to combat-- you're better than plenty of sheets and mooks just by being tough as nails anyway-- and can easily afford to take Born Rich and make the character into say, a well-connected rigger that's tougher than his cheap ride or an all-out skill monkey brimming with the niche skills that other characters can rarely afford to take. The rigger option is extra fun since with full-on cyberlimb armor madness and a dash of Edge you can actually ram things and not instantly liquefy yourself as long as your sensible with your speed and vehicle choices. The biggest drawback is that it's one of those things where your GM might try to punch you in the neck after you give them the sheet.

Perhaps part of it is that in your games, it seems to be much easier for glass-fragile PCs to always avoid getting shot at if they want to. If that's true, it does devalue Body a good deal and makes ork and troll less valuable. If you actually see 1 body mages played and not dying, I suppose humans might be a more sensible choice, but that's pretty different than everyone else's experience of shadowrun.

I think you missed my point about Schroedinger's Build. Here, let me try. You said you actually had an Intuition mage in your group who is a human, and he has sub-6 edge.

Does he have Charisma or Logic 5? Probably not; he doesn't get much of anything out of going that high, and if he does I would argue he's presumably doing so for fluff reasons, and not for effectiveness.

Does he have Body+Strength < 5? If so, he is throwing away stat points or build points. If not, well, like I said, I consider playing a 2 body, 2 strength mage to be a bit on the suicidal side but apparently your mileage varies on this.

Actually, the mage does have Edge 6. It's the rigger and otaku who don't, and they do just fine. The otaku also has substandard physical stats (Strength at 1, body of 3) but he never gets into it physically, so he doesn't need to worry about it. The mage also has Strength 1, and it really doesn't hurt the build any. The troll is the meat shield for the team: he goes first and takes all the fire, so everyone else can support him. The rest of the team plans their tactics to the troll gets shot at first, so they concentrate on Reaction for defense, as opposed to body and armor.

Honestly, what good is strength to a mage or otaku? If they have to get into melee, they're already dead. The mage uses spirits to keep enemies off of him, and the otaku uses drones with machine sprites. The rigger just sits in his cocoon, so his body and strength is pretty irrelevant as well.

For the Otaku? Running and the situational climbing. The mage can replace it with Levitate.

I'm boggled, simply boggled.

While I think we can calm and reasonable about discussing the builds, I can understand being gun-shy about it. So I'm just going to final wrap up of my general points. Orks get a hefty bonus for very little cost. If you're body+strength is at least 5 and you aren't (soft or hard) capping edge, logic, or charisma, you should be an ork or other non-human metatype. Since that covers a lot of character archetypes and builds, in many ways ork is the default shadowrunning race. You should be asking "why aren't I an ork?" when building a character. Thankfully, every metahuman race has at least an niche so there are (some common) cases where you'll want to be a human, elf, troll, or dwarf.

A big part of the reason ork is so good is that having a 4+ body is quite important. I'm surprised how little you take stock in it. Even the techno in our group who basically lives in a suit of military armor in a rigger cocoon in a Hussar (an 18 armor drone) has been caught out in the open from time to time. I mean at 1-2 body you're in danger of being killed by a wide bursting guy with an AR in one pass. You can get around this with cyberlimb armor, but raising your body helps a lot and not everyone is okay with cyberdiabetus. I guess if everyone and their dog always attacks the tank, that's fine, but even in MMOs you have to worry about aggro and stray dudes.

The strength I'm not really going to push to hard. Honestly it's just a nice feather to put in your cap. It's weird you don't run much in Shadowrun but whatever. It's more that you get it for free. It's more useful if you use softweave, but not everyone uses War!. Being subdued sucks and really bad if you're low strength, but it's not really much you do against that cheaply.

Indeed. Doesn't seem to make any sense does it?

Like I (and everyone else) said 2 pages ago: if you plan on going outside in SR, you'll want 3 STR and 4 BOD anyway.

My question isn't why aren't you an ork. it's.. Why aren't you a Dwarf.
Dwarfs are awesome, unless you intend to get a natural 5+ reaction.

They make amazingly good riggers and hackers and streetsams.
Sure the 2 body for 25 BP isn't as nice at the 4 body for 20 bp. But dwarves get to have a 7 willpower.

Oh, come on now. The melee bit in particular isn't the least bit insane, particularly given that he was talking about the value of Strength. In melee combat strength really only has value during grapple checks and dealing damage. Frankly, the opportunity cost for dealing reliable damage--particularly in a setting in which your opponent might be a friggin' fire elemental-- is high enough that it's cheaper to literally just get your body covered in synthetic skin that electrocutes anything that grapples you. Or better yet, carry a friggin' gun. Let's be serious here: Yelling "MORTAL KOMBAT!!!" and flipping out on the other guy until one of you is unconscious isn't really a good plan for the vast majority of characters and just making your guy an ork or whatever isn't going to change that without retooling your build into something approximating the physical capabilities of a street samurai. For every 400 bp character sheet out there I guarantee you there is a scenario in which a straight up Attribute+Skill pissing match is a losing situation. If that situation is a steel cage match, then your character is actually in pretty good shape.

I mean, yeah, having some Body is great and we all love us some armor. But there ARE ways to dump Body and still be fairly tough to kill in this game so I think it's a li'l silly to act like we're all aghast at this heresy.

Only if you hard-max it, and going from 5 to 6 with the soft max does not brings so much benefit since the extra stun box is at 7. That's why the +1 Body is not so nice either. The Attribute/2 derived stats induce bad threshold effects.

And it is not so much the natural 5 Reaction as the augmented 9 that matters: Move-By-Wire + Reaction Enhancers give a hefty +6, and even if you stay reasonable, Wired reflexes + Reaction enhancers is already +4, just what you need to reach 9 when soft-maxing.

Yeah, they screwed Dwarves hard with the 5 Reaction. They're the *riggers*, facrissake.

Has anyone tried to exchange with trolls' -1 AGI? It makes trolls better sammies and dwarves better drivers, so everyone should be happy.

But there isn't a character alive who can use the +6 to reaction. You might be right that the 7 cap might be a problem compared to the 9 cap. But that's limited, and doesn't matter for riggers and hackers.

I can buy a 3 reaction, and get move by wire 2, and be done.

Riggers use response, not reaction.

Unless they're AR riggers. Then Reaction matters somewhat.

It's still not worth maxing out, though.





-k

Reaction is always worth maxing out, and it is trivially easy to do so.

As we had in a conversation about the Street Legends book, every rigger should have a decent reaction in case your asked to drive something you can't jump into. Now personally as a rigger dwarf a 4 is a respectable reaction especially since there are lots of reaction boosts out there.

Personally, I like karmagen as an encouragement to generalize, and my solution for anything such as humans, or magicians (with skills) is to just throw in a few more points. Recently, I went with a 1000 point karmagen, and it looks like everyone got the character they wanted. There's a drone or two, a merc with a tonne of cyber, an ally spirit, a f4 power focus, some geneware, and some decent dice-pools all round, with a lot of areas covered, including knowledge skills. They also still took negative qualities that are character appropriate. Come to think of it, build-wise, they're all humans.

I find without the feeling that your character can't be built without some min/maxing, you can focus a little more on fleshing that character out.

Everyone has already touched upon the hit to augmented Reaction. I'll also add that you have a slower movement rate, and need gear specially made for you. All of this for a metatype that has a net gain of 5 BP, rather than 20 BP (as for orks), compared to a human. They make good hackers, full immersion riggers, and mages, but that's about it.

So basically we are saying orks get a lot of freebe.

I mean I hope nobody is really suggesting that a troll might be better than a human for close to every build?

Yes, orcs get a lot of bonis and they are about the same stature as a human, evading a lot of problems trolls are facing.

So yes, orks are mostly better than humans.

But here is the question: Is that really a problem?
If you use Karmagen the it is really minimal. So the orc might end up with 2 points of body and 1 point of strengh more than the human of the same build. Is this really that bad?

You do realize that you're asking this question to the same forum that has had multiple multi-page threads about oni costing 25, rather than 20, points, right?

But they need to pay more to be unique! Just like Fomori get a point break for being unique! It all totally makes sense, want some Kool-Aid?

Cain made it clear twice that he doesn't want to discuss character builds, so please be fair and don't tease him, ok?

Some runners are, um, physically incapable of driving vehicles.

<.<

>.>




-k

Body isn't as necessary as you might think. Reaction is more important, since it enables you to dodge, and humans are the same as orks when it comes to that. It's better to avoid damage than to soak it. You can also fight like a wimp: use cover, smoke, distractions, flash-bangs, and any of the hundred of other tricks to prevent getting hit in the first place.

When it comes to melee, there's simply no way a mage can hope to defend against a good melee-focused character. Or an otaku or rigger, for that matter. The melee adept is simply throwing too much dice to have a chance. So, you need to do other tricks to keep them off of you, like spirits and drones. In that case, the ork bonuses aren't going to do you any good, you may as well save the points for more magic goodies.

Now, a Body of 3 is useful, simply because it means an extra box of physical damage. But there's not much more benefit until you hit Body 5, and that's pushing you into tank-build territory. Humans aren't so good at that, but they make pretty decent speed sams, who rely on dodging rather than body when getting shot at.

That being said, even as a human Street Sam, a good body is helpful. You don't want a lucky shot to take you down, after all.

Obviously, you'd have high Reaction *and* decent Body.

Well, you know people. If no one says it, they are going to assume it wasn't intended at all.

You mostly do not need the body for getting shot at. You need it for getting a granade thrown in your direction.
Because if the situation is bad, you may end up with no possibility to really dodge the granade.
And the differance between body 3 and body 1 is a big one.
3 to 9 dices to soak with no special armor. But I agree that Body 5 is not such a big improvement, since you really would need to push it.
And the armor really making use of body 5 might not be suitable for the run you are doing.

To soly rely on doding is a possibility for an adept, true.
A mage needs a sustained spell to pull it off. But a rigger....

Why would you need to dodge a grenade, as long as you're the intended target it's very unlikely to end up anywhere near you

@Mäx
In the open, yes.
In close quarters.....

Body of 4 is required for FFBA (half-body suit) , PPP shin & forearm, and any of the 6/4 armor to avoid encumbrance. (chamelon suit, armor vest, lined coat, ulysses, and even at 5/3, actioneer). As far as armor goes it's a nice sweet spot, giving the player a large number of choices at any time.

Now if you're never getting shot at, yes, this isn't an issue.

How reaction fares compared to body for defense is fairly GM specific. Do the enemies you face have a dice pool such that you avoid shots or do you usually get hit, assuming your normal defensive fighting cover etc.? If you have a reasonable chance to avoid the damage reaction is generally superior, if you usually wont avoid the damage you need the body to take the hits. What strategies does your GM use with automatic weapons, does he prefer narrow or wide bursts? If your dodge pool is reduced to 0 or close to it most of the time when people are using automatics again body will seem more valuable.

... HUGGY-TROLL SAYS BEST FRIENDS TIME!! *BOOM*

Human street sam, yes. You're going to get shot at a lot more, so you can't rely on your reaction. But for a non-front-line combatant, it's better to avoid shots rather than worry about soaking them.

And I still think that's a false dilemma. You want to avoid as much as possible, and yet obviously, also, always, wear armor.

Oh, having armor is always a nice idea. But on the other hand, wearing all the armor you possibly can will get you into even more trouble. Running around in full SWAT armor means you *will* get shot at first. The primary combatants will draw the aggro, so they need to soak as well as dodge. The secondary combatants won't draw as much, so they can rely on a good Reaction and cover. Heck, if you're a decker, rigger, or otaku, you can sit back in the van and not draw any fire at all.

Yes, clearly the 'phone it in' characters are a separate case. They can literally be quadriplegics and far away (and, ironically, they don't need Reaction either; bleh). I'm just saying that everyone (… else) can use Body 3 or 4, and even Strength 3.

It's not 'dodge or soak' (not for the tank, not for the ninja). It's not 'Reaction *or* Body', and most characters benefit from the Ork stats.

It is entirely possible these days to have armor in the 16-18 range and still have it look more or less like civilian clothing.

Just sayin.



-k

The scatter is same for both.
God damm those pesky randomly teleporting grenades

It's nice, but not as necessary as people think. Body 3 is sufficient for a secondary combatant, if you've got a decent Reaction and enough armor. You shouldn't be drawing fire anyways, you should be using cover and taking opportunity shots, while the sams and adepts charge the machine gun nest. A high Quickness, decent combat skill (so you can hit things when you need it) and a good Stealth skill to avoid drawing attention will save you more damage than a high Body.

Strength, IMO, is useless unless you plan on getting into melee. There's no encumbrance rules anymore, your armor is determined by your Body, and you don't need a lot of gear unless you're a serious combatant. Heck, if you want to get into melee, just get a decent Quickness and invest a few points in monofilament whip. Now strength doesn't matter, and you slice through armor like butter in melee. Strength 3 is useful if you don't want to be a wimp, but mages and others can get away with a strength of 2 or less, and I've made pistol sams with a strength of 2. It wasn't a problem.

Strength, IMO, is useless unless you plan on getting into melee.
with softweave
Strength has become a little bit more important
BOD 3 & STR 2 & softweaved Armored Jacket ftW

with a winning Dance
Medicineman