Orly?


Also:

Sorry TJ,

SR4 p244 Medkits and Autodocs

Though logically this should only apply to an autodoc, the text does not preclude doing this with just a medkit. So a medkit is capable of doctoring someone by itself, though very poorly.

-D

OOPS Ninja'd by Faraday.

If not by an actual First-Aid trained person, Medkits are best used by a drone with the appropriate Profession software and decent Pilot.

I have this sudden mental image of a mechanical arm-equipped Arachne drone, attached to a service rifle, attending to a wounded soldier in the battlefield. .



-k

- Using First Aid

Drain pg 178

Sorry if this has been mentioned before but that is mentioned in the first paragraph under Using First Aid, in my copy of SR4A.

If he is healing that many boxes of damage it should take him many turns to apply first aid. Each turn is 3 seconds long. That is a long time in a firefight of doing nothing and being still. And no magical assistance.


One thing I would suggest with Edge is demand a copy of your player's sheet. Double check the math on him to make sure it is coming in close.

Another is to invest in cheap poker chips and hand out edge at the start of the game. Make him hand them back to you to spend it. Toss out chips for good roleplaying and stop giving out full refreshes every session. If he is such a stickler for the rules point out the rules about regaining Edge. SR4A pg 74.


For future sessions remember the all-important part of CG to make a legal character. GM APPROVAL. It doesn't matter if the build is done perfectly in the rules. GM can still veto. I've seen several games where characters are not allowed to have skills above 3 or 4 w/o explaining where and how they got those skills. Puting in a similar policy is a good way to get your players working on their characters and not just their sheets. Also toss a karma bonus for writing a background. I give 4-6 points to my players all they have to do is email me some background. Don't require great writing, grade on effort not skill.

For future games, GM approval is an important part of character generation.

For future sessions, unless the game goes south due to how this character is built, I think it is good to file this character concept away under those characters that the GM is unable/unwilling to deal with/approve and run the game without any rules changes. I would not change the rules midstream without allowing my players to change their characters, especially if the rules changes would affect the main strengths of their characters.

Man, I wish I knew how"multi-quote works. Expect a lot of posts to follow.



He has never (that I remember) used first aid to heal in battle. He waits until battle is over. I'm almost positive he doesn't use it as a second soak roll.

I discovered that he is not using edge to go first. He has cyberware that boosts his initiative score.

I have been gaming with this guy for almost 20 years. He is a very honest players and, while he is a min/maxing, tactical and strategic genius, who knows the rules WAY better than I do (damn it), he would not knowingly cheat. He just out-thinks me in most situations (damn it). I let my frustration with being out-thought by my group bleed through in some (many?) of my posts. I have a good group. I just need to learn to think differently. I come to you all for advice (which is a segue into my next thread) on how to think differently.

It's hard to stay grounded with the setting sometimes, but you just gotta keep imagining it happening today. Ignoring the absurdity of spells in the real world, imagine if four security guards were killed by what police say was a single spell. And it happens again a few days later in a separate facility.

Magical crime's on the rise! That's plenty of fodder for those anti-Awakened types. Less people would care overall about the deaths, being a gritty cyberpunk world, but people would be more afraid. Demand for magical security is up, including hiring even more mages for security work.

The corps are also looking bad here. The guards could have been internal employees, in which case they have to do some damage control and put on a show about increasing security. If they were outsourcing it, then the security company may be in jeopardy of losing their contract... oh, and their buddies are dead too, so yeah plenty of reasons for them to go hunting.

Families of the killed can pool their money, and settlements and payouts, and hire a bunch of 'runners themselves. In fact, if the public outcry is enough that it'll be detrimental to a corp's bottomline they may hire a team to track this mage down. And even if they get away from that team he'll have a rep as a bad ass, but the heat will be on and no one's going to be hiring.

There's an urge to counter power with greater power, but sometimes that just gives your obviously capable player a challenge. Can you get a copy of the Mage and post it here?

I say this kindly: perhaps there's a mindset that beating NPCs is somehow part of the run itself, both in your mind and the player's. He seems to be tackling these like dungeons where they are actually places of business. You seem to want the guards and various NPCs as actual obstacles that they do have to beat down to move through. Am I wrong?

Here's some perspective: What he's doing a Mundane could do without any threat of hurting themselves unless he glitches terribly. Grenades, while horrid, are quite good if you're firing them from a burst fire or full auto launcher. And it's not even necessary to use grenade launchers, a simple assault rifle would do in the right hands. In fact, a decent Street Sam should get the same results. Not always from one complex action, but I've had some of my non-optimized generalists drop four guards in two actions (dual wielding SMGs). And I can assure you, those guards were not mall cop quality either.

Magic has a tendency to freak players and GMs out. Overcasting combat spells is actually not too bad a problem. What if he starts oversummoning? Ever seen what a F10-12 Spirit can do or what it can shrug off? Or just plain ol' Mental Manipulation spells. Or Levitate and/or Magic Fingers.


Hell, their fixer could have a talk with them about the body count.

Point Taken... Though, since a Medkit is not a drone, remotely accessing it does nothing for you (An Autodoc is a Drone). Just because you can hook someone up to a medkit does not a drone make (which is why it only receives its rating to stabilize you and actually attempt automated healing tests). Hell, we have the same capabilities nowadays in hospitals. You get hooked up to a ton of equipment, they administer drugs, detect your condition, and other stuff, but none of those devices are actually capable of independant/remote control for fine manipulation, like an autodoc would be.

I agre that only an autodoc would be capable of Remote operation, as it is a Dronme. Since a Medkit is not, well, it should not benefit from Drone operations.

No worries.

That sounds surprisingly un-munchkinny. This ware costs a lot of Nuyen and Essence and could easily be replaced with a spell and sustaining focus. If he has this, he must be lacking something else. Does he have cybereyes? If not, you can bite him with visual modifiers: Mages cannot use electronic glasses or goggles like the other PCs do, and most runner activity occurs in low-light conditions.

Note that he doesn't say "Increases his IPs", but instead says "Increases his initiative score". This makes me wonder if the mage only has a single IP, is killing the overly weak opposition in the first IP and then combat is over, use the first aid kit. My gut feeling is that this will be a very different discussion if we ever see the characters.

This is why magicians are feared. They are a great X factor best combated by another X factor.

BTW-You won't see many oversummoned critters for the mere fact that at most you'd get is a couple of services. That and a very pissed off spirit, who IMHO would use a point of edge to resist the summoning.

I have asked and not recieved character sheets from the Mage or GA. I do have one from the Face



You are not wrong at all. We are heavily stepped in D&D. I've been playing off and on since 1979. We were playing D&D for about 2-3 years before we came into Shadowrun.

On a slight tangeant, at our last session we had a discussion. It seems that the Mage and Face will keep playing Shadowrun, but would like to go back to D&D. The Face and I would like to keep going long term with Shadowrun, but will play D&D. I have spent $809.18 USD (including tax) in the last 1.5 years on Shadowrun books, both Rules/Sourceand novels. I really want to use these books and I LOVE the setting more than any other RPG I've ever played.

Next time ask for the originals and take them to a photocopier.