The instance you refer to was for a character that had issues with a SINGLE type of Spirit that I was Extremely unlucky with. You shoud go back and read it. *Shakes Head* Simply Amazing.

I was in no way referring to that character at all. I was making a point.

PC1: I can summon F3 spirits without a problem, but F4 starts getting risky.

PC2: I can summon F6 all day every day. How are you useful?

PC1 is quite literally half as useful as PC2, simply because they're equally good at summoning spirits, but PC2 can summon them at twice the force for the same risk and benefit.

He said that it was a game in which skills were de-emphasized, not that RP=non-optimized. This is a weird, but possible, scenario.

Yes, and that's why usefulness is totally irrelevant.

True, However, I tend to design characters with a concept in mind. If I am not the Best in the World, My skills will reflect this. Novel Concept, I know, but there you go. Apparently, you do not follow that philosophy.



That is really a shame. I have played plenty of Generalists, and they have almost always worked out, and have had plenty of room to shine. There were a few duds over the last 20 years (and by that I mean like less than a handful), but not because of the design philosophy. They just did not develop as I intended them to. A big part of the design component/phase is how your table functions. If your table functions within the design parameters of the Book (and they DO exist, regardless of whether you choose to acknowledge that or not), then you can be quite capable. If you design characters to be the absolute best at everything that they do, with little chance of failure (and lets face it, that is the only reason to go for the absolute highest maximum dice pool that you can cram in), well, that is a completely different game then, isn't it? I find perfection to be very boring...



Sounds like you had issues with your concept. And I find it absolutely Amazing how you are the only one who can design competant Generalists, too. You do know that others ARE capable of such things, right?

Contrived at best, and not how our table actually runs in play. You really should get out more.

Hey, If he assumes a F6 spirit is twice as capable as a F4 then yeah. Problem, F6 can lead to 12S drain damage if the player gets unlucky, more so than th 8S at F4 or 6S at force.

Maybe the post should read:
400BP PC1:I can summon F3 spirits all day, con my way past the guards like I own the place, give first aid to my downed team mate when the drek hits the fan, and can cast a variety of spells.

400BP PC2: I can summon F6 spirits all day. Can cast a couple of other spells, and have a 1 body, 2 agility, and 3 reaction.

It's that this is a philosophy which is not the point I'm making. The rules are such that a mechanically better character is always better. There's no reason to play anything less other than "because I want to" and tends (emphasis!) tends to work out poorly because the other players aren't doing the same thing.



Where did I say that I didn't enjoy the character? I simply said that there were places that I could have cut back to have made him play better for that game that I should have been aware of (and often was, but ignored). Such as the perfect breaking and entering spell, minus the fact that the game would have no breaking an entering.



I've seen competent generalists, the problem is that they're only competent in actual play when no one is capable of stealing their thunder. This is the primary reason, nay, the one and only reason no one plays a "half hacker" to help the full hacker out when he hacks. He's not an asset, he's a liability. Thus leading to the inevitable situation where The Hacker is the only one who knows how to use a computer and therefore never leaves his house (not to say that people don't play mobile hackers, just that it's easy and advantageous to not do so) causing a plethora of quadriplegic technomancers.


Basically it comes down to, "Yes, you can play a Paladin with 6 Wisdom and 6 Charisma, but why would you?" (referencing the fact that I've heard of such a character and it would have been so much easier/better/optimal for that player to have made a fighter).

It's not about the fact that suboptimal choices exist, but that the system favors (heavily) characters who don't take them. "The monk class wouldn't be a trap if it wasn't for every other class ever."



you mean:

400BP PC2: I can summon F6 spirits all day, they can use Concealment and get me past the guards. I can cast Heal, which is just as good if not better than First Aid in combat. I don't need body, agility, or reaction because I have meat shields, now get out in front.

Stop comparing characters in a vacuum. They have team mates.



Force 3, not Force 4. And we're assuming that the F6 mage can reduce the stun down to the same level that the F3 mage can. Which is possible with 400 BP, although uses a high level of cheese. The F3 mage spent his points "trying to be everybody at once" and ends up being "no one at all" whereas the F6 mage picked a spot that wasn't full and exploited the shit out of it.

It's called a "monopoly."

Heh... Indeed...

See reply to that post above.

That's not a good rebuttal, though. That *character* is not identically capable, even if he did it all himself using spirits.

"Why do I need skill X at 2? Steve already has it at 4, and his attribute is higher too. I suppose I could take skill Y but Joe has it also and his attribute is higher. In order to do one/the other/both I'd have to make serious sacrifices at being Me."

That's a non-RP metagame argument. It assumes numerical optimization is that goal, and that the team of runners were designed together. That's the whole point.

So your (generic) group designs each of your characters in a vacuum, unknowing what everyone else is building? And that sometimes three people will show up with overlapping skills and be superfluous?

Wasn't that my other point, that a generalist will be overshadowed by a specialist in the same field? That is, that the generalist will defer to the specialist because they're more apt to succeed at the job, and thus might as well not have the skill at all? To the point where if all of a generalists skills are already covered then the entire character might as well not exist?

To take this example to the in-character point of view:

Why did the generalist-who-is-useless join the group anyway? Why did the group let him in, if anything he could do was already being done better?
"Your skills are great, 'n all, but we kind of already have it covered."

Not all tables work this way. Ours doesn't. There is every reason not to play the World's best "Whatever". Primarily, when you cannot rationalize, or do not want to, being so.



That is a communications issue, not a design philosophy or rules issue.



Again, this is a Communications Issue. I often play a "Half Hacker" as you put it, and I am always useful to the primary hacker. Again, just because it is not your main focus does not mean you cannot be decent at it. And we have YET to have a Hacker/Technomancer who hacks from Home Primarily. It may occur from time to time. But our team tends to run together on the runs. No leaving someone behind. You never know when something may come up to interfere with whatever is missing, be it a hacker, rigger, or whatever. It is LESS advantageous to play an immobile hacker/rigger than a mobile one. At least in my experience. Though it can be done.



Bad analogy. I do not refer to DnD. Shadowrun is a wholy different game with many more options. Maybe at your table, your GM favors (heavily) the characters that are hyper-optimized. It is not a universal condition.



That is like the pot calling the Kettle Black. Criticise yourself before you criticize others.
Besides, You DO need Stats to be somewhat surviveable. A character without decent stats dies quickly and horribly, regardless of how many meat shields exist. All it takes is a luck shot.



Again you make blanket statements of "Fact" with no evidence to back them. That may be how it is at your table, but I can assure you that this is not how it is at our table.



There are Anti-Trust laws to combat that Draco18s.

In real life, yes.

Not for designing characters.

That.

Is.

My.

Point.



I'd like to play at your table sometime, honestly. Because my table has yet to move beyond "Skill 2 is better than two skill 1s." I keep trying to have concept and background and well rounded, but it never works.

Yes, we often build characters apart form each other. A team is not a hyper-optimized unit, especially in the shadows. They are a collection of characters who have been drawn to gether from the shadows, who likely have never met each other prior to their first run together. So how, exactly, are they able to cover each other's flaws so precisely? What you are talking about is a Meta-Game thing. I choose not to play that particular game.

I see your above opinion as extremely short-sighted and self-limiting.

Indeed...

I am sorry to hear that. I would welcome you at our table. Always looking for more players. Everyone has to be on the same page for the game to work well. We still have a few concerns from time to time. But not too many, and not all that often.

Draco18s, the question is 'why would a character not be maxed out?' … That's why: because character concept is not a maxed out character. To assemble a team of perfectly-matched min max monkeys (master blaster!) is *bad*. There is nothing wrong with people having overlaps. (It's the extremes that are the problem: a team of specialists with minor overlap is fine, and typical.)

Shame there's no way for me to show up.

Indeed... Maybe sometime in the future....

Answering the OP.

All drones are considered vehicles, not all vehicles are drones. (a drone at a minimum must have a pilot program and be able to act autonomously or given commands... not necessarily be jumped into by a rigger).

No vehicles aren't considered to have hardened armor. It's a side effect of the fact that vehicles can't take stun damage. In SR4 the wording was that 'vehicles are immune to stun damage' so the attack does nothing... (except mar the paint job . In SR4a... they just said attack fails (to damage it, my own completion).


Spirits armor is a side effect of the ItNW... which itself is a side effect of either its "Materialization' or 'Possession/Inhabitation' powers.


It's possible to possess vehicles but the rules for such are different than possessing a person or corpse. Also the spirit give the new combined entity a stun track... so the while the vehicle may be immune to stun, the spirit animating it isn't. Nowhere in the rules does it state that spirits gain the immunities of the form they possess.

Fair warning: the rules there suggest adding the spirits force directly to the vehicles armor rating. IE: an armor 8 sedan like a VW beetle possessed by the force 5 spirit Herbie... should probably have an armor rating of 13 (8+5), not 23 (8+5+10ItNW). You can end up with some nigh indestructible things if you're not careful... an armor 20 van posssed by a force 6 spirit at 26+12==38 armor puts a tank to utter shame (and is nigh indestructible), and even an adept with a weapon foci is very unlikely to broach the vehicles base armor of 20+6 even bypassing the ItNW. So use your common sense in what you try to do and what you allow as a GM.

Also, any vehicle or character possessed should be very obvious to others Perception check threshhold (6-force)... so anything force5 or over only requires 1 success on a perception check to know it's possessed and also to have a good idea what is possessing it. (it also suggests applying a shamanic mask whenever the spirit is using a spirit power for an additional +2 dice on the check).

I'll use Missions again as an example where you have a LOT of players not turning their dials to maximum despite the rules and campaign allowing quite a lot of cheese.

I have found that in Missions you have a lot of players rolling 10-16 dice, when it's entirely possible to make a character using the same BP that does the same job with 18-24 dice.

Some are that way because they're not optimizers, and really only look at the rules when they have to. Otherwise they're playing to have a good time, whether they're more into roleplay, or simply just want a "casual" game, they simply don't care about being min-maxed.

Some folks just aren't that good at min-maxing.

Some are indeed newbies who don't know the rules well.

Some are doing so because everyone else is. I'm in that group. My characters are mostly CAPABLE of the uber-dice pool, but I watch the rest of the table to see what kinda of power levels everyone else is operating at, and try to match them. Maybe I won't use every bonus that's coming to me, or perhaps use pools I'm not so min-maxed in. I consciously do this so as not to dominate the table because that's no fun for anybody.

Also, sometimes as a challenge I make gimped characters, or have a character not operate at his fullest, especially if it's a game where I know the rules very well.




-k

Yup.

While it's true that optimization and roleplay are not directly related, it is true that they have areas that *don't* overlap. It is not possible to be game-optimal if your character isn't, and that's fine. It can be a great character, because they're not all world class (sometimes beyond!) experts in their fields. Not everyone is an escaped lab experiment and/or ex-elite-soldier—these are both possible *roles*, but so are burnout mages, born-again gangers, etc.

First of all, being optimized doesn't mean you're roleplay inept. Some of my most fun roleplay experiences were with maxed-out Shadowrun characters. Roleplay is up to the player, not the sheet.

Second, it's entirely too easy to create an optimized character in SR4.5 who *has no weaknesses* worth mentioning. I have a mage I like to play with Strength 1, it doesn't impede the character at all-- in fact, it's often humorous, when she tries to lift something and fails miserably. That's technically a weakness and cheese, except it fits the character all too well, and actually adds fun at the table. She's got no other significant weaknesses for a mage; she's not as tough as the troll, or savvy with computers as the decker, but she shouldn't have to be. In the areas where she needs to be functional, she is, and tends to only come out one or two dice behind the pure generalist.

Shadowrunning is about teams of specialists, working together. If you don't have someone good in all the roles, your team is going to have a rougher time of it.

Everyone knows that optimized doesn't mean bad roleplay or unfun. However, there are many good roleplay concepts that inherently can't be optimal.

As I already said, there's a difference between a team of specialists and a perfectly matched set of totally unrealistic, symbiotic characters.

And there's just as many extremely fun roleplay concepts that inherently can't be sub-optimal. Your point?

If roleplay is all you want, and stats don't matter, what's the difference between an optimized an an unoptimized build? In Shadowrun, it's that one will help the team, while the other will drag it down. So, in the end, the optimized build will actually be more fun to play, for both the player and the team.

I think your discussion revolves around a misunderstanding.

One of you answers the question "Is the optimised character more effective" (he is, at least in it's specialty), and the other "Is the non-optimised character effective enough" (he can, depending on the table)...

Also misunderstood - I wasn't implying that roleplay means unoptimized.

But there are in fact players who don't pay much attention to the extreme details of the rules, and being only interested in roleplay can be one of the reasons why.

More generally, an awful lot of people I run into don't optimize because they simply aren't interested in doing so.

I know it's sometimes hard for a hardcore optimizer to understand the mindset, but some folks just don't find searching and scratching out every little loophole and min-max rule to perfect a character build all that fascinating. They cobble together a character that fills their particular basic needs and that's as far as they want to think about optimization.



-k

That *is* my point, Cain: the categories 'optimized' and 'fun roleplay' are not congruent. I said exactly that earlier: they overlap some, and they also have areas where they don't overlap.

Your second point is crap, though. Fun-optimized is not more fun than fun-unoptimized. They are both fun, by definition.

That's the thing, Dahrken: I'm saying that 'effective' is irrelevant either way.

Falling back to the good ol' "because I want to" argument.

Let's refocus. Here are the questions I think I've been answering all along:

My position is that, no, survival and usefulness are *not* reasons (not primary ones, anyway). Fun characters are, which fit the game/group/table. This might arbitrarily be high- or low-powered, but that's unrelated. If your *concept* is 'god of pistols', you need to be optimized—if you're not, you're not playing the character right. However, if your concept is 'burnout mage', you basically *can't* be optimized without playing your character *wrong*.

So… that's why you'd see suboptimal characters: don't fit the game/group/table, and/or don't fit the concept. Being non-optimized 'because I want to' is one of the *best* possible reasons.

And what, exactly, is a burntout mage bringing to the table? I'm remembering this post, from the CLUE files.



Not saying you can't play a burnout mage, just that I don't see what they're bringing to the table if all they can do is yammer on about magic and how they used to be good at it (it's the only thing they were skilled at, but no longer).

A character! That's the point: usefulness is not *the* factor. If he can help the team at all (knowledge, contacts, other skills, anything), then he could conceivably be part of a shadowrun—especially if the overall power level is low.

I don't understand the clue bit. Bad player is bad? Shock.

So it's ok to show up to a table and be in a game and contribute nothing towards completing the mission?

That's the exact opposite of what I *just* said. I specifically mentioned contributions. I'm not sure how you got from 'non-optimized' to 'nothing'.

But if that's what happens, sure, fine. The object is to *play* the game, and playing the concept of 'character who doesn't help on shadowruns' is a valid, if short-lived, concept. He'll get cut loose, which is a perfectly good narrative event. I still don't think it's *likely*, but it's your example, not mine. There are other (infinitely many) possibilities, even in that weird subset: un-ditchable tag-along of another character, maybe. If someone thinks it's fun and they can make it fit the setting and game, that's the point. Lord knows we've seen 'optimized' super-sams with literally zero social skills, contacts, knowledge, etc., which is just as bad.

Depends upon the build, doesn't it?
It really is very amusing that you are incapable of seeing any character that is not hyper-optimized as being useful.

Not long ago, I talked about a build that was non-Augmented, who had more than 30 Skills, many of which were in the 9-12 Dice Pool range. Yet, That was just not good enough. I have to tell you that, maybe at YOUR table, it may not be good enough for you; but any table I would play at, he would probably be the team leader. Why? Because he was competant at many, many things, including Leadership. 9-12 Dice is competant. No, he was not hyper-specialized, nor was he over-optimized, but that is okay. As I have said previously: Why would a character need 20 Dice if 10 will suffice? If the answer is so that the character never fails, well, that is boring.

I have yet to find a table where 10-12 Dice was not sufficient for most things. Will that number creep up over time? Yes, with experience and Karma, the DP's will increase, but it is not a mandatory thing. For reference: Most of My characters tend to top at around 16 dice (give or take a few), once they have received sufficient (100+) Karma. On rare occasions, I will build one with close to 20, but that is because the concept demands such proficiency. I don't do it very often. And when I do, I often do not play the character very long because, as I said before, never failing a roll is boring to me.

And for an answer to your question. Say you have a Burntout Mage who was once very powerful (Magic 6). Now, he has some ware, and addiction or two, a Magic of 2, and 2 Initiate Grades. You can't see any redeeming qualities for this character? I sure can. For one, His Counterspelling is completely unaffected for Spell Defense purposes. Yes, His magic is weak, but he is still more powerful than any Non-Mage out there as far as Magic goes (Spell Selection for such a character is key here). And he likely has a ton of knowledge about magic and its dangers. I could see a lot of potential for this character, dependant upon his backstory and his character development. The fact that he is not OMG Powerful does not make him useless.

Anyways...

Roleplaying games do have success or fail moments, but they are not, in fact, games with an overall "win" condition.

Even failing a mission can be fodder for roleplay. It doesn't have to mean the end of the game, put another quarter in, start over.

Being "the best" is only one possible roleplaying play style. There are many others just as fun.

I remember going and playing a game where all the characters were young girls and the premise was "the parents are out for the day and there's some weird noise in the basement". The characters were each one of the classic fantasy RPG classes, but down-powered to represent kids who haven't mastered their skills yet. The sorcerer could barely manage one spell, for example. None were min-maxed at all. Everyone at that game had an absolute blast.



-k

Oh sure. Failing missions is good too. But my point is, if everyone is trying to succeed, and one character is a bump on a log, what's the point of that character?

In the case you describe, while the character concept might say "burned out mage", we could simply put the sub-heading "Face" on it, and have at. We now have someone who's social primary, magic secondary. The concept doesn't inherently mean he's unoptimized, it means he's unoptimized at magic, but very optimized at face skills and contacts. I'm afraid your argument isn't holding water:

Goodness, what a difference that makes. Now he has a primary ability (amazing!) that can be built towards and be optimized within the bounds of the concept. Obviously he's not going to be great at magic, he burnt out. But he can still be a great face/hacker/rigger/gunbunny or whatever.

Except that you were the one saying he was useless; no on else was (except maybe Cain)...
And yet, to be a burntout mage, he should have magical Skills and Knowledges. Otherwise how was he even a Magician? The concept demands it.

Cain, I didn't say he was 'very optimized' at *anything*. I said, as I've always said, that he's not 'worthless'. And I think you'll find that a burnout mage can *never* be optimal… he wasted BP on lost magic. Duh.

He'd be functional, but sadly, the loss of that much BP might actually be too great to have a viable character, except in a street level game.

Similar to my drake adept. Functional, but would have been better if I'd specialized more.* Better still if he hadn't been a drake.

*I had hacking at like, 2. With a logic if ~5. I had 4 edge at that point in the game, tops, and spent three of it not-failing some hacking tests to disable a ceiling mounted turret (I was doing hardware hacking, getting a scanner to accept a single valid passkey multiple times for different people, rather than doing a software spoof/hack which I'd never have been able to pull off). Instead, I could have been pure mage-side (still a mystic adept, probably) and spent those BP on spells and spirit summoning. Would have both been more effective AND effective in more situations.

'Better' numerically.

What's 'viable'? People keep posting concepts and asking if they're viable… anything is viable, if it's part of the setting and *fits*. At a lower-power group/game, a pornomancer is *not* viable.

That depends on how you do it, why his magic is so low, and so on and so forth. Really, you could make him as a total mundane with serious Addiction flaws, he burned out his magic through drugs, not heavy cyber. There's also several people who play with house rules that starting essence only lowers your Magic cap, not your actual Magic rating. So yeah, there are ways of having a character who's a burned out mage (low magic or no magic) and still not waste too many points. The burnout mage can be done, the way you describe it is a face with a minor magical punch. That's entirely doable.

Point is, if he's not good at something, if he's not "very optimized" at something, he's good for nothing.

And that's a bad and wrong point. You can be good for something without being 'very optimized' at anything.

If he's a burnout, then making a mundane with addictions (or ware) is cheating. He has to have had magic and lost it.

Indeed...

And, for the record, I wasn't describing any kind of face (primary or otherwise). All characters can (should) have contacts, knowledge, various skills, and the last item in my list of examples was 'anything'.

Precisely, which is why a character that brings ONLY that to the table is going to get raised eyebrows.

If he's got no magic, but buys up appropriate knowledge skills, why is that cheating? It works out exactly the same either way. The difference is that he'll be more effective, and thus fun to play, than a deliberately gimped character.