Easier than that: the Star has a network of rotodrones keeping an eye on the sprawl, some of them armed with LMGs for officer backup. Can't hide from them on a roof. Since they can observe from the safe distance, they are probably the surveillance tool of choice in Z-zones.

A non-pimped-out rotodrone in a Z-zone might also just be hacker fodder. Everyone wants a few new drones, right?

A pimped out rotodrone, however, is quite expensive, although I guess they get discounts on software. Of course, a good chameleon-coated pimped out roto-drone can stay a long way off while wide-bursting LMG-fire, and at those distances an AR can't even shoot back.

From the previous post the usual procedure is to have the mage cast invisibility on him, then levitate him into position. Which bypasses most access problems. Of course it raise the question of how he managed that before hooking up with a mage.

But for all intents and purpose, it's not a character, but rather a somewhat mobile gun platform. It feels like the player gave more attention to his gun than to his background and personality... (and seems to have overlooked the rules to cram a crapload of modifications that I'm not sure could fit on the gun). Except as far as the 'automatics' dice pool is concerned, you could replace Zod with an armed drone and his partners would barely notice the difference.

Seriously what does all this bashing help? We've all built crappy characters in our lives, and all the problems have been laid out already, it's now up to the GM and the player to work things out, at least concerning this specific character.

My current character was crappy build but i won´t play another one until he dies. Most of the time, these crappy build chars are the best....over time....^^

Brainpiercing, it's *fun*. Duh.

It's also educational, but whatever.

Agreed. Personal opinions aside, they have more than enough advice to adjust whatever they feel will best suit their play. Each table is different, there really isn't much else to say.

Still, I find the threads entertaining and they do inspire some discussion.

Well, Gazzor (player of Dawg) straight up says he is having fun in Post 37: "I've been enjoying the sessions."

Everything I've been reading so far sounds like they are frustrated with the generally shitty SR4 rules and how that meshes with poorly defined power levels. Sometimes the game itself gets in the way of fun -- Shadowrun is notorious for this (all editions). The GM is trying to find a way to make things hard for the group but SR offers exactly 0 help with this. In fact, from the GM's description of the game it sounds to me like he has been doing a bang up job of difficulty but it doesn't feel like that because the SR rules make it hard to tell exactly what works and what doesn't. This can be frustrating when you come from a well-written and well-defined game to one that is an amorphous heap of poorly though out concepts and that relies heavily on "Rule of Cool."

Hence why I don't think that Dumpshock will really have the answers for this group. Especially not some of the snarky, downright hostile comments that some of the posters have been making. I really think that they need to sit down as a group and decide on a playstyle and campaign style that will work for everyone. Dumpshock can give some answers but I'd recommend just general gaming blogs or a site like RPG.net for musings on playstyles and group dynamics. Leave Dumpshock for rules questions.

PS. As for Zod playing an MMO all night perhaps that's just what he wanted to do. My group has been having issues with a player that just sits there working on her knitting all night but when we try to engage her in role-playing she disengages. Sometimes people just aren't engaged. This is an optional, fun activity for everyone so if someone doesn't want to engage and are being disruptive just ask them to leave. Zod can go home and MMO. Everyone else can have fun playing SR. If he isn't being disruptive and just wants to hang with his buddies then I fail to see what is wrong. Sure as a GM I want everyone to be enthralled in my story but I can't force them to.

Weird, I never considered Dumpshock a 'rules forum', as opposed to other forums (RPG.net).

I do believe they're playing at Zod's player's place, which makes him be home.

But hey, some people can be engaged while doing stuff on the side. I even sometimes prefer people doing things on the side while a character is doing things completely separate from them, since this makes them large OOC unaware of information they shouldn't have IC.

Entitled to your opinion, but I can't agree. I hardly think they're shitty rules and the game's open character design mechanics wouldn't favor "power levels" anyway, whatever the hell that means (it's all subjective to the game being run by the GM).

Balance is achieved by many things, the GM being foremost, but also by a mutual understanding between the group as to what constitutes fun and fair.

I don't think anyone has the right to say "you're not playing right", but they DID solicit advice, and every caption under each thread implies a large amount of dissatisfaction by the OP.

Edit: *double click*

Any rule is only as useful as you, the GM, make it. The game isn't the ten commandments folks. Modify and make it your own-where it's weak, shore it up. Where it's strong play it out. Balance isn't words on a page, it's what the GM and players make it.

In fairness, that's the sort of advice that was sometimes given out like six or seven threads ago. If folks have gotten snarky or hostile since then, it's because lots of that advice seems to have been wholly ignored, or at least poorly implemented, or that the GM was unable/unwilling to follow through on it for fear of alienating Zod's player (who hosts the group), or...I dunno.

At any rate, if the impression you've gotten is that they're all having a lot of fun, cool. From the way the GM has come in here desperately seeking help after every single session, and given some of what he's said (like folks just not being interested, not staying engaged, etc), I've gotten a different impression. If yours is right, I'm glad. I'd rather look at these threads as folks who are having fun but occasionally bumping into issues, than threads of people who are pulling their hair out in frustration week after week after week.

Heh, not everyone was born to be a great GM. At least not with a system they are not entirely familiar with - no offense, Hyphz.

And anyway, the 7th and 8th sessions seem to have been much better. I have to say I've played far WORSE sessions than the ones described here, and the players say they haven't been bored, anyway.

With the exception of Zod being so bored in session 7 (or was it 6?) that he needed a second character

A point that was adressed. And while I would tend to agree that using two characters to cover the other one's weaknesses is a bit of a munchkin tactic, if it helps their game, then there is really nothing wrong with that, either, because it seems to me that after making the hacker the game has picked up.

Still better than playing MMOs. Besides, they're 3 players and 5 characters, so it's not like he's the only offender.

Indeed, and with previous systems (4e DnD for instance) I've generally ended up playing 2 chars in those sessions where players 4 and/or 5 didn't turn up. You don't get the same Resonance between player and character when you have multiple, but it does give you a wider grounding in the mechanic (e.g Zod for guns practise, and Haxor for matrix practise).

I'm actually kind of looking forward to the inevitable TPK our retarded gung-ho antics are going to engender. With Zod hanging around the first couple of rounds are going to go badly for the opposition (at least until their force 10 spirits turn up), and going up against truly powerful opposition will give us (as a group) a far better feel for how underpowered / balanced / overpowered we are in each area. That, coupled with the awesome advice I'm getting in the character thread, should help substantially in getting the next char working from the first build, instead of having 2 (or 3) iterations which end up gimped in some areas because I overlooked or misunderstood chargen rules.

The point being that Zod shouldn't be living through the first 3 rounds except the Gm is basically giving him a by, and Dawg should be spurintg blood out his ears, but the Gm is giving him a by on summoning...

Since most of your group apart from Zod are already on the board, I recommend reading this thread for a benchmark of sample characters and capabilities.

Pretending this is a real campaign, when the mage gets capped, how does Zod plan on leaving his perch?

Gravity should solve this little conundrum.

In several ways.

Sorry for taking a while to respond. Bad week at work (ie, new semester), etc..



I've seen a couple of people mention STR 1 carrying things. I'd honestly not considered that - I thought that it wasn't that important since the books don't list the weight of items. Ability to wear armor seems to be restricted by BOD, not STR, though.



That wasn't the reason - the reason why was because it had only been 3 Combat Turns since the business began. With multiple IP people can do things terrifyingly fast. Even if I saw a crime outside my window I doubt I could even get to the phone and call 999 (911 for you US folks) in 9 seconds, let alone having a conversation with the person on the other end of the line.



It's mainly because.. well, um, bluntly it feels horribly uncomfortable.

I mean, yes, I can say, "he has Willpower 1 so I could just rustle up a mage from somewhere, put it against him and pretty much know in advance that Zod would die" but.. well, that kinda stinks. It basically implies that every character has to have a certain minimum defense against every threat, else they'll certainly meet it and it will kill them. If I wanted to have that kind of rule I'd rather be explicit about it at character generation than drop characters until the rules are met. zAnd mages are supposed to be pretty rare - the books give a strong impression that they're rare like unicorns (ie, every one you ever meet will remind you how rare they are). Street Magic gave some nice discussion of why mages might not want to join a corp, but what the heck would they be doing hanging with the Ragers? Now, of course, Zod has now managed to annoy some groups who most definitely would have big mojo on their side, and the next session may end up being, um, interesting (I've been through my relationship chart several times and really can't find any loopholes at this point).

But, yea. If a player does put loads of points into gun skills like Zod did, I'm going to assume he's placing an order for the game to have lots of him being awesome with guns in it, and if I can do that it's fine by me. The idea of designing challenges that fit the PCs is perfectly fine but it should at least match what the player seems to want to play as well - otherwise you get the horrible thing where, if a player puts loads of points into gun skills, then it is guaranteed that they will almost never meet a situation they can resolve with gunplay because "it wouldn't be any challenge", so they end up not using their gun at all. I mean, it's the same thing with him having a Meta Link - when he made Zod, he just didn't want to be involved with the whole Matrix thing at all, so I eased off on having his commlink hacked (even though it could happen easily) because if he didn't want to play that part of the game, fair enough, he doesn't have to.

I admit this was something I found a bit frustrating about D&D4E - if someone plays a Fighter, most of the DMs tactics will be about avoiding ever fighting them, or everything will be a walkover. Which just seems bass-ackwards to me. If someone wants to play a fighter, they should get to fight, right?

As for how things are going - Dawg's and Kane's player say everything's fine, but Zod's player seems a bit paged out and I just feel rather frustrated because I can't get things to run together like they ought to. I haven't managed to have a nice epic confrontation with anyone yet - the nearest we got was the battle against the Shangri-La runner team in the park. When it's possible for people to do things like "I summon a massive spirit and it does everything for me" or "forget their preparations, I just shoot him from several buildings away" then it just defuses all of that but I am reluctant to penalize it because it's a perfectly logical thing the characters would do - edge-of-your-seat battles might be fun to watch and play but realistically nobody's going to go into them if they can just bomb the other guy from orbit, after all. My old copy of Robin's Laws mentions this is pretty common with Tactician players: "Embrace anti-climax as the only climax." It just doesn't feel right to me, but I don't know that the players feel the same way.

Put Zod up against riggers with their drones (armed and unarmed)....that might make things fun and challenging for him with out adding to the body count.
Also for the mage summoning a F10 spirit--yeah use the edge of the spirit to resist the summoning. Give a friendly reminder that the PC realizes summoning such a spirit will more than likely kill him before he rolls the dice. This also applies to other situations where the PC would have more than enough common knowledge that the PC should know it is not a wise thing to do. If they still go ahead and do it, that is the players choice.

So if your players have high dice pools, then they avoid the challenge by handfuls of dice against the opponents couple dice.
If you players have low dice pools, then they avoid the challenge because you won't bring it.
This is not a surprise. You've been avoiding confrontation since the first thread. If you confront them and challenge them and OMG they lose, they'll all quit. So, you don't challenge them and they're bored. How is this STILL getting past you?

Now you bring logic into it, when earlier this same post you tossed logic out the window because Zod didn't want to spend 2 points on a decent commlink. Logic has nothing to do with it. The rules have nothing to do with it. You keep complaining that your players aren't being challenged because you're afraid to challenge them.

Basically, in the previous post you say the following:

1) The players pick skills they want. Who am I to make them play with skills they don't want? So what if the world would trash them, they don't want those parts of the world, or else they would have put skills in them obviously.

2) Well, it' s just realistic for them to use whatever is available. OF COURSE they're going to shoot people form ten blocks away. The world lets them and who am I to stop it?

You've got mutually exclusive design philosophies going here. You can either have your world where you neatly tailor it to PC skills in order to make it seat of the pants challenging, or you have the world where the setting's reality rules. You seem to be desynchronizing them completely.

If you set the enemies to world one, and the pcs to world two, all you've done is made a dice rolling range. Because Zod will use the "realistic (pr whatever the adjective of verisimilitude is" approach of shooting enemy from 300m away without heaving to worry about any other "realistic" potential consequences because your bad guys won't do anything that isn't in his prime DP.

So, decision time on the spectrum. Is it world one? because if it is, and your goal is to make the game focus on challenging your players in their given area, your going to occasionally need to pull out schrodingers security guard. Which is legitimate, because you've already waived several other threats for convenience, and frankly if your goal is awesome with guns: "I roll 28d6 once" is not particularly enthralling. So, if your going for "make it fun for the dice pools given", you get the right to cheat back a little to make it interesting, given you pretty much are letting the players get away with similar stuff.

If its world two, then let the real world hit them back. Yes, hack his comm link. Roll edge for those force 10s, and watch the mage die a horrible death. Have your snipers shoot their semi-autos twice. have the ultra paranoid organization invest the 2,000 yen needed to fully ward the area against spirits... Speaking of link charts, spiritual slaughter of an organized criminal element? Sounds like there's going to be a para-investigator on scene...and you can bet anyone slinging that much mojo now has a kill/capture box on his point in the network diagram.

Granted, no one wants to go to the extreme ends of the spectrum - "uh, the star are here because the fight wasn't long enough" and "roll perception - nice, you hear the sound of 3 heimdahl missile drones a fraction of a second before they slam into your truck. Shouldn't have driven in a low collateral damage area after throwing out a force ten to someone who can afford air traffic control bribes. Please soak 20 P -10." But the playing ground, verisimilitude wise, needs to be even. otherwise you might as well play "Shadowrun: Many descriptions of cardboard targets being destroyed in interesting ways"

Why wouldn't that be important? You're basically allowing a free dump stat. Or you know, have him get in a fist fight.



Good point. But you're still just making excuses for the players. It could easily be explained that the Star having been embarassed enough by their killing sprees have been conducting surveillance for some time and finally decided to move in.



Bet his next guy has a higher willpower and is less min/maxed, or known as "balanced". Seriously, this guy has the willpower of charlie sheen but you refuse to challenge any weakness. Hey more free points!



You haven't even done it once. It's not like you're arguing over use here.



Oh yes, guaranteed at your table, since you won't challenge any weakness. I for one know if I were to fight a pro boxer, I'd do it with my fists!



Sweet! So if the mage doesn't want to be involved in the whole combat thing at all, he never risks being attacked either. Not to mention, Zod's player then rolled a hacker....wtf





........I can't take this guy seriously anymore.

I'd like to see a survey asking which week people came to that point. I suspect the longer it goes on the more people will respond with Week 1.

... But most of the "challenges" mentioned aren't challenges but certain ganks against the PCs weaknesses. Sure, Zod one-shotting some guy with his assault rifle isn't a challenge. But him getting hopelessly mangled by a mage due to his low Willpower isn't either.

Which is a Choice that the Playerr made when he created the character. The mage hoplessly mangling the character is a result of that character design.

The "challenges" described in the multiple threads about your campaign are not "ganks" against character weaknesses; they are the logical result of those character's design choices.

Hyphz:

Was reading over the core rules again earlier(planning on running my own game soon) and I came across a quote that I think is relevant:



Your players built very narrow characters with many holes in them. It is your job to know these weaknesses and exploit these glaring holes in their design. A sam with no willpower is ASKING to be taken out with magic. A STR of 1 means your character is kind of a limp wristed ninny. The kind that gets beaten by their niece in arm wrestling. They don't list weight for a reason: you have to use your judgement. There is no shame in making them suffer for these shortcomings. If they are sore about it, offer them a chance to fix their character.



Part of the world doesn't not apply to him simply because hes too lazy to read the matrix chapter,IMHO. He doesn't need to know how to hack, but he does need to know what to do if he is hacked. He has a smart link, right? Someones gonna hack it and disable it. Someone is going mess with him. Does he know the difference between active and passive modes? He should. Think of it this way: should your mage not be shot at because he doesn't want to learn how to avoid a bullet?

My advice? Sit down with Zod and go over his character with him. Did you make him write a background? If not, do so. Both of you need to know who the character is and how he acts. He needs a story on why he has no logic, no will power and no strength. Make him rework certain bits, like his negative qualities. Hes gaming the system there, and you're letting him. Not to beat a dead horse further, but he has possibly the worst character sheet I've ever seen. Not even counting the rules violations here. A sam who can only use automatics. W.T.F. If it jams, he can't fix it. I really think if you spent some time with him working on his char, he'd have alot more fun. Make him less of a one trick pony. If it takes you telling him point by point all the ways you can fuck with him, do it.

I can appreciate not wanting to dive into the matrix rules just to have a cell phone. If you're not interested in hacking, then it's a lot of rules just to make a phone call.

How to handle it though? One way is to tell the guy who plays the team hacker or rigger to set up your commlink, using $amount of nuyen.

---

As for the STR and WILL weaknesses. I think the way to deal with it, is to set up a few incidents that sting, not kill.

Start out with a warning shot: a spell that won't kill him, but that'll hurt. A F6 Stunbolt perhaps.

Then wait a while. When he's on a building, have a Spirit of Man with Control Actions command him to jump off, injuring him (cheerfully "cheat" with the falling damage to make sure it's not fatal, but don't let him know that).

Then have an NPC circulate rumors about this nasty NPC mage that uses Control spells to turn his enemies' gunmen against their allies. Watch the other players worry about being on the receiving end of Zod's firearms dice pool...

As for the STR: just talk about carrying capacity limits exactly when he's trying to drag away a pile of loot, and count out how much he can really take along.

Oh, and try to strand him on top of a building when the mage isn't there with Levitate. Let him figure out how to get down without stealth, social, intrusion or climbing skills.



None of it has to be fatal; he might understand it even better if it's not fatal, if you just put the problem in his lap and say "figure it out."

TL DR:

Take off the kid gloves; hurt your characters. They will work on their flaws, you'll let them respec, or they'll die. Your runners will take any advantage they can get and so will their opposition. This ain't the little leagues any more, chummer.

Then next time he'll build a character with a real will power and a real strength and a real commlink and suddenly he he has a Shadowrun character, not a Shadowrun caricature.

You're the one rewarding bad behavior. Not the rules. Not the setting. Not us. You.

Before going over the other stuff I've missed so far, just a quick interjection:

Seriously, WP 1 or 4 (which is the absolute most he's ever going to achieve with BP without really cutting into his strengths) is really identical in outcome - without a mage and counterspelling, or proactive edge use, you're fucked against spells. In SR3 it made a real difference, because often WP was TN AND threshold. But now? Phh.. The attacker is going to throw more than double his dice, no matter what. NO mundane character can defend against spells in SR4!

YES, I build my chars with WP6 in Karmagen, simply for the sake of tradition, and rarely make use of it.

Strength should be enough to qualify for basic fitness, that's all. A 2 in Str is enough, really.

Now all that being said, I dislike 1s (and even 2s, and actually even 3s) on my sheet as much as anyone, maybe even more. I don't like characters with glaring weaknesses, which is why I'm entirely incapable of building BP-buy characters at all. Still, mechanically, he's gimping himself less than is generally implied here.

Which does not mean that these weaknesses shouldn't be targetted! I just want to point out that 3s in WP and Str won't help much at all and merely look better for flavour reasons. Now if these were 6s, then things might be a bit different. (And Str is the shoddiest stat there is in the game!)

(Yeh, ok, I'm purposefully forgetting stuff like Composure checks. )

The other thing is that, while building with glaring weaknesses is a big problem, it's not something you can deal with heavy-handedly. Because a player that stays or walks because he can't come to terms with you might just make the difference between a regular game and no regular game. Being too soft is bad, but being too hard is also no good.

There is a basic formula for converting Strength into carrying capacity: Str*10kg (you can make a test to exceed this, but that's per-case, and it's *hard capped* at Str*20kg). The GM *should* ballpark this against whatever the character claims to be wearing/carrying. There are also specific rules for carrying capacity encumbrance. Just because there aren't listed weights for things doesn't mean these rules don't exist. Mr. Strength-1 can only carry 22lbs without making Str+Bod tests. How much does his gun, ammo, and armor weigh?

He kills people. With bullets. Character definition: done.

Zod IS the guy who plays the hacker

I kind of get what hyphz is saying, in that challenging players is good, but one-shot killing them in an area they are weak in is not fun for anyone. It doesn't have to be fatal, though. And you don't need any contrived situations for these weaknesses to come into play, either.

A low Willpower means he will take a few extra points damage from a manabolt, get fooled or intimidated more easily (which can sometimes be a blow to his ego), and have one less box on his stun monitor. But remember that composure tests are for things the character has not encountered a lot before, and that while social skill tests are unopposed, they still have thresholds of effectiveness, and require a modicrum of plausibility to work at all.

A low Strength means he will fail Strength checks a lot, and will suffer encumbrance penalties whenever he is hauling around gear (as opposed to just armor and a concealed pistol). A Strength of 1 is a couch potato, that's all. If he bothers spending 10 piddly karma, he can raise it to 2, doubling his carrying capacity to approximately 44 pounds.

Keeping his cheap commlink turned off will have him miss a few (sometimes important) calls and get in trouble for some security zones because they will assume his link is in hidden mode. Keeping it turned on will mean he might get hacked, to little affect most of the time - being a Luddite is often a valid tactic against hacking. If he doesn't use his commlink for tactical communications or data gathering, he is missing out on things that could make his shadowrunning a bit easier.

Weaknesses should be used to give a bit of flavor to the character, occasionally challenge the character, and encourage the character to shore up those weak areas. If you let them take on glaring weaknesses and never address them, you are missing out on ways you can make the game more exciting, and encourage bad habits in character creation. I don't think the players would mind some realistic, non-contrived consequences to their weaknesses, and actions.

Re armour and encumberance you are right, armour worn is by RAW linked to BOD not STR. But items carried is linked to STR, x10kg for std, x20kg for max. Not sure how much a tricked out Ares Alpha and x spare clips should weigh, but my guess is it would be pretty close to the 10kg comfort zone, which means he can't take much more gear other than worn armour.

The correct tactic is to have the drones ram the vehicle just before detonation so the target has to soak Ram damage and the explosion with no scatter.

Every character should have a certain minimum defence against every threat, especially ones that are gonna be the NPC's priority targets such as mages, snipers and LMG wielding trolls. If they don't, they are asking for trouble. If the PC's came up against an LMG wielding troll, I can guarantee he would probably be their first target, and they would probably decide that with his high BOD and probably heavy armour, magic was the way to go to take him out. Same goes for a sniper who they can't get a decent shot off against. Why would NPC's act differently?

Awakened characters may be rare (1% of the general population), but compare that to doctors (0.01% of the RL population). The Ragers might not have a resident mage, but the criminal fraternities they are associated with certainly will, and if they think they are gonna come up against magical opposition they will call in a few favours to get someone in. The yaks will almost certainly send a mage on an ambush if there is even a whiff that their target may have access to magical help. Given the magic-heavy make up of most PC groups and the rock paper scissors aspect of the guns/hacking/magic sides to the game, PC groups will come up against some level of magical opposition more often than not unless you want to give them a cake walk.

As for the 2 dimensionality of Zod, what did he do before he had a friendly mage to levitate him invisibly onto rooftops? What background does he have to make him the Michael Jordan of automatic weapons? His low STR kinda precludes a military background, and if he learned on the streets, why didn't he pick up any other gun skills (street kids and gangers shoot with what they can get their hands on), and with WIL of 1, where did the dedication to put in the practice to become the best gunslinger in the west come from? While most sammie builds centre on Automatics, they almost always have at least Pistols for situations where carrying a big gun isn't practical. Send Zod downtown or on a "discrete" mission and he will either have to go unarmed or be arrested or taken down with prejudice by the police.

Moving onto Dawg and his propensity to summon F10 spirits, as others have pointed out that will kill him outright one day soon. 20 dice (with edge) to resist, he shouldn't have been able to do it the 2 times he has done it already to be honest. IMHO you are short-changing the PC's letting this happen so easily. If PC's *ever* summon a F10 spirit, it should be for an epic showdown at the end of a campaign arc, and it should be a story the players remember with fondness forevermore. Making it their commonplace Plan C just doesn't do it for me.

Make your players make decisions. For instance, does Zod run his Meta Link in hidden mode when he is on his sniper's perch, or does he turn it off? If he does the former, it is (extended test) detectable and therefore hackable, but if he does the latter he has no way of contacting the other PC's should (for instance) an unfriendly spirit come his way. Also, make sure you know the PC's standard MO for things like levitating Zod onto rooftops. If the bad guys are already set up waiting in ambush, not always but occasionally their lookout might have ultrasound (in which case Zod is a floating duck), unless their MO is to levitate him from the other side of the building. There may be a spirit doing astral overwatch that Dawg sustaining his 2 spells might not notice (-4 to perception), and if he does might be in no position to take out (PC: I stop sustaining both spells and fire a stunbolt up its arse. GM: Um, OK Zod plummets 5m to the ground, roll for damage).

Sorry if I came across as harsh in my last post, I think you are trying really hard and I do see that you challenge the players more and more each time. The art of being a good GM is to keep your players on edge, things get fun for them with plans go wrong. If a player uses Invisibility, giving the opposition ultrasound every time makes their BP investment in the spell redundant, but that one time ultrasound makes everything go FUBAR means every time they use it afterwards they will be holding their breath to see if it comes off smoothly. Zod always TNPK'ing opposition safely from his eyrie is boring, but if the players are always wondering if he hasn't been taken out by an opposition mage or spirit it can add tension to the game.

Good luck with session 9!

Also, even if you turn off your comm your Smartlink can still be hacked, as can your gun, glasses, pants, shoes, and the RFID tags you ate in the Gooey Bar. Turning off a comm is only a delaying tactic, and not even a good one - you lose your PAN and access to most if not all of your peripherals.

Considering the low signal of those items, you'll need to have some electronic 'forward observer' to catch on the signal. Or discretely crawl up his leg to inject him with something fun and nasty (it might not even be necessary - at 1 in willpower, odds are he'll get fairly antsy if he feels something crawling inside his pant's leg, putting him out of action without destrouing him...). Variations of the trick could be spell-controled or spirit-possessed animals. It doesn't take much of a mage to stuff a low-force possession spirit into a pigeon or a rat to use as a disposable recon platform. With the mage hanging around in the astral and directing his minion(s) you can get a lot of low-lethality fun. If the rat's already climbing up his leg (inside his clothes), he won't be able to just tell 'I shoot it' and will have to think and get creative. Without being in any sort of real danger, since a rat, even with a low-force spirit tucked inside, isn't exactly a powerfull opposition.

Note that about Zod's player getting 'out' compared to the other, it largely comes from his character being both very, very good at his trick (hence no challenge as he can blow just about every problem to bits) and almost completely unable to do anything else. Which makes the game about as exiting as plinking cardboard targets 2 meters away once in a long while and sitting on the bench in the intervals.

There's not even the challenge of finding a good position and figuring out how to get there : levitate+invisiblity = instant boredom as he just gets there without even a hitch. Not even a sweat, a second of doubt. No wonder he gets bored.

Just send him a few impromptu visit as the opposition looks out for threats - you don't even need to actively attack him, just let him figure out he's been spotted and have the opposition leave out of his lines of fire. Odds are it will end up in a botched run (he's designated driver, that means it wil be hard to set a pursuit when he can't get down on his own) or at least a severely complicated one.

No mundane character can defend against a shadowrun class spellcaster. I won't argue with that. But a WP 1 can't even defend against a scrub. Anything the weakest mage on the block can summon is still going to slap him around. It's one thing to be taken out by a corporate mage. It's embarrassing to be taken out by a street urchin with minimal powers. And this guy is being left alone on the rooftop of someone's building, with no backup and no way down and no one knows who is living in that building.

Are any of these weaknesses in and of themselves critical? Probably not. But this collection of weaknesses adds up to crippling. He's on a roof of a strange building. No strength which I'm betting means no athletics. No will power. No backup. A commlink that's either hackable by a child or it's turned off so he can't contact his team. Fagin's kids would pwn this character. (Hmmm. I may use that sometime. A group of 250 point* children annoying the team....)

Of course people can deal with it heavy-handedly. That doesn't mean one needs to, but if someone is afraid to be too heavy handed, then they're always going to be too weak to be effective. If you don't aim for the target knowing you can miss to either side, you're probably not going to hit the target.

The GM in these stories is like the dude who never dates because he never asks a girl out. He's so scared of screwing it up that he never even tries.

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*No. I'm not going to stat out every kid. That's just a power level estimate.

Spells can be assensed and it would make sense for the Yakuza to have some watchers or low force spirits on watch around the warehouse.

Can't we just throw Zod off the roof already? The character is annoying, the player even more and the GM is helpless. Come on! If someone pulled shit like that on my session, I'd make his life miserable just to show how really weak he is. Mind control into unloading into the rest of the team, starting with the next most broken character. 20+ dice on any attack roll allow bypassing the armor with enough hits to turn a pornomancer into pornomincemeat. Or just hack his pathetic commlink in advance to give the opponents knowledge of the team's every move. Dig out every penalty, every missing skill and play off it. Every character has a weakness after all. My adept is pretty slow with 1 IP. My cybermerc is afraid of fire and susceptible to Stun damage. Ghost archetype has little ammo and very expensive toys. Zod is pretty shitty in everything aside from shooting shit.

I'm not a killer GM usually, but piss me off and you'll get served.

Do it. Zod's player is well aware (and has mentioned several times) how his 1 Willpower will fuck him in any magical situation. When Dawg summoned the F10 to rape the warehouse we were all introduced to the "high power spirit = you is dead" paradigm, and several times we discussed how we would have a hard time dealing with that ourselves.

I have taken to rebuilding Caine to make him less exploitable (pending your agreement) and have mentioned a few times at the table that it would be worth other character reviewing to see if they can plug the gaps. I think Zod has done a rebuild and ended up just adjusting his infiltration and perception a little higher. Fair enough, he is apparently happy with bringing 1 Willpower and 1 Strength to the firefights we all know we have coming, and unless his memory is fading he has already been hit by a low power spirit (the graveyard fight) and found out how rubbish 1 Willpower is.

I personally think you should step up the response to one that is fitting with the world environment, and don't deliberately pull any punches in areas that we might be weak in. Lone Star will have asked some of their better response teams to keep an eye out for us, and none of the players are going to argue that that is broken. The Yaks will now have a grudge against us after the warehouse massacre, and none of the players are going to argue that that is broken. Unless Wolf is retarded he should also be looking at getting some heavy hitters ready, since I am pretty sure Zod and Dawg are going to propose us hunting down Wolf and explaining our dislike of getting ambushed.

We've had TPKs before, and we'll have them again, and getting hammered will point out to all of us where we went wrong in character design. It doesn't have to be a guaranteed slaughter, but take advantage of at least as many things as our party are taking advantage of (hacking, surveillance, long range attacks, full auto for the bonus damage or defense penalty, spirits, stunball, powerball spring to mind)

Also let me know if the updated Caine is acceptable, I need to buy him some gecko tape gloves and maybe a grapple gun / microwire spool as I am a dumbass and forgot them, but the base numbers are going to stay about the same. Especially check the traits, as I'll admit I picked those knowing we are in deep shit with the man at this point, and if that's too cheesy lmk and I'll drop them

Eww control actions spell---that would be fun. Meat puppet anyone?