I am about to create a new replacement char. and because i just watched "Die Hard" last week, i thought about playing a tough former cop based on McClane. But what would be need except the "toughness" quality? Adept, Cyber- or Bioware? Which skills? What would you think, should not be missed?

Grab the Lone Star Police Squad member template (p.282 SR4A). Give Lucky, Guts and max out Edge.

DONE.

- J.

Down to earth hard case ??

We don't know much about his background [so there might be stuff rom the military, navy, etc], but not too fit, not amazingly intelligent, good with a gun, athletic, good with strategy, good with the ladies, sense of honour, nosy, danger sense, dependents.

Gear wise, i don't see him dosing up with lots of gear.
Maybe eyes, smart link.

Considering his way of doing things and what happens to him, he may have had injuries and have hardware forced upon him [eyes, muscle replacement, new hand, etc].

There may, of course, be hardware that all detectives have forced on them, for their job - skill wires, internal memory, smartlink, heads up display, gps, internal tracker, skinweave.

This. John McClane isn't a shadowrunner; Die Hard is a movie about how a single KE cop with luck on his side can turn a perfectly-planned datasteal pear-shaped in a matter of minutes.

Don't estimate what a mundane with Edge 8 can do.

Buy initiative passes. Go first in initiative. Buy successes. Reroll failures. Add edge to just about any dice roll (8 dice to any roll is a LOT). Get critical success. Evade certain death. Spending or burning, it's all the same to McClane.

If he was an SR character, all he'd ever do would be spend karma on Edge due to the number of times it gets burned.

- J.

don't forget, Edge is not only luck, it also represents this "I-need-to-do-this-now"-Attidue. So, yes. 8 Edge.

He also should have a high body, more than average strenght and agility and reaction. Skillwires doesn´t seem right, he is good in the firearms-group and knows a bit about explosives. But else? Cannot remember that he showed other skills. He is good in analyzing critical situations, so tactical knowledge or high intuition are required.

Decent to good Athletics skill group, too. So-so stealth. Good perception, and driving. Competent, but not outstanding, hand to hand skills.

A lack of shoes, and deteriorating sanity. (He starts talking to himself in Die Hard 4.0).

I'm pretty certain he talks to himself in DH 3, and probably 1 and 2, too.

its not so much about his Attributes or Qualities .Your Char becomes John McLane If You play him like John McLane

Hough!
Medicineman

Considering the situations, I don't blame him.

Maybe it's the first time he realizes he does it in 4.0. When he killed the helicopter with a car due to being out of bullets. (Which is a totally Shadowrun thing to do.).

Hell, Eliot can play John McClane in Leverage, why not anyone else?

I've seen quite some Players who tried to play a Char after their favorite Heroes (and everything was perfect on the Char Sheet. Attributes Ok, Equip Ok, Skills, Merits&Flaws...everything was all right) and than failed utterly because they didn't have the .....(Hmm whats the right Word) Mental Attitude,Alignment,Disposition (?)

HougH!
Medicineman

Yeah, it can be hard to get into some types of characters. Thought I could do The Accountant From Hell, but I can't.

He certainly talks to himself in DH2. "Oh, John, we are just up to our ass in terrorists!"

The key, to me, is what most of the others have said: Lucky quality and Edge cranked up to 8. He goes through Edge like God made it just for him....

While I can certainly understand the desire for a high edge, I think settling for a 7 could still work; because "tough guy" McClane is one instance where I don't mind making him an Ork instead of a human, to get the extra brawn and toughness. Bruce Willis is one of the few not-prettyboys out there in Hollywood, we might as well slap a couple tusks on him and make it official.

Bruce Willis = Gary Cline ?

I've been working on a Nakatomi Plaza run for my group for a while. Of course the Runners get hired by Han Grueber to help on a heist, and an unknown assailant hinders them along the way. I have tried several builds for McClane, but it's hard to stay in the character and make sure you got a guy that can make it through 10 bad guys by himself.

I'm glad I'm not the only one who consumes media and then immediately feels compelled to stat characters from that media in SR on a habitual basis.

I made a project of statting Sam Fischer and Mallory Kane this week--I saw Haywire and then unrelatedly decided to replay some of the older Splinter Cell games--but this time I lost interest
before finishing even the first one I started.

Obviously statting "the actual character John McClane with Shadowrun rules" is a different task from statting "a John McClane like character in the Shadowrun universe". In the former case, he'd be a mundane human with no cyber. (Unlike, say, Sam Fischer who has some rudimentary but hard to stat cyberware.)

Action movie heroes, even "realistic" ones, tend to be superhuman. They can outfight multiple trained enemy combattants and come out on top. They can figure out the bad guys' plan from a few clues while the police and intelligence agencies are spinning their wheels. They can succeed with outrageous bluffs that would never work in the real world.

The only way to really emulate an action movie hero is to either be a massively augmented combat character, or an adept - and you need to be a pretty min-maxed bastard, too, because your enemies will often be augmented or awakened, too. High Edge is helpful, but you can be a sammie or an adept and have a high Edge, too.

Attitude helps, but a lot of things come down to the unforgiving dice instead of a scriptwriter who gives the hero a lucky dodge or a handy escape route whenever he needs one.

If you want to accurately simulate this, let the character reduce their permanent edge (without actually spending a point of "active" edge if they've already spent it) to outright dictate the results of one combat turn as it affects their characters. IE, they can run in front of ten bad guys, guns blazing, the bad guys open up on him, the dice say they shred him and he burns the edge and directs that all their shots miraculously miss him or only inflict minor grazes, annihilating the glass windows behind him.

He'll go through Edge like crazy, of course, but you will wind up with a genuine action movie hero.

Aren't there optional rules in SR4A covering these different styles of play?

- J.

Only Eimi mentioned Perception so far, a must for every detective worthy of the name.

John McClane has to have fantastic Perception, as he always notices something isn't quite right, he just can't ever persuade anyone in charge that terrorists are about to do something nasty ... so I guess not so high on Negotiation/Con!

All action heroes are lucky. When I think about what makes John McClane different, I think of how much punishment the guy takes. The guy is tough as hell. He's bruised battered and bloody by the end of them movie. If you really want to make him in Shadowrun make him tough. Not just the Toughness quality, but superhumanly tough.

My first idea is the Veteran cop. A mostly Edge based character with just enough ware and other enhancements to keep him from having to spend edge all the time.
You were a good cop at a time that no one really wanted or needed such an animal. That combined with a distinct lack of diplomacy skills eventually cost you your marriage and then your job. You brushed up against the Shadows enough times to know there is still a place there for a guy with scruples and a willingness to see a job done "right" in every senses of the word.

Keep the character human with a lot of Edge and Body and the sort of skills and stats a good street level detective would have. Street knowledge, Professional knowledge, respectable perception and combats skills. He'd have a little cyber also, what you'd expect a practical working cop to have. A level of wired reflexes, and a smartlink to keep him alive. Some headware to gather evidence and call for backup.

Now you have the cop part down work on the toughness. Say an on the job encounter busted you up pretty badly and cost you an arm. Your union got you a replacement arm and a new security grade skeleton as compensation. Your then wife, an up and coming corp executive, bought you a trauma damper and blood platelets hoping that would help you make it home if things got that bad again.

Your former coworkers are potential contacts, as are some of the crooks you dealt with squarely, also your ex-wife still holds a candle for you even if she can't stand to be in the same room as you.

A different build would be to maybe play an ork or troll with a really really high body. John McClane as a Troll physad with all the magic sunk into Body and damage resistance powers. No fancy martial arts or weird powers chi just a Man who never ever quites. Your skills and background would be similar to above.

Either build focuses on the touphness and working man hero vibe I love in the first Die Hard

Well, he is a Cowboy cop, neh?

"Yipppeekiyay motherf**ker!"

- J.

Damn German PC
Do You want to know what McLane says in German

Yippiyeah bacon-cheek...
....oooO(bacon cheek my Ass )

with a sad Dance
Medicineman

maine75man, he's tough because that's where he spends all his Edge. He's not tough because he has cyberlimbs and chemicals, or magic. Some of the Qualities are okay, but you can't ruin him by making him *artificially* tough (e.g., Pain Editor, etc.). Just use the Edge.

Yeah, Edge all the way.

Maybe start with 7, and instead of 'Lucky' possibly get some extra CM boxes using the 'Tough as Nails' Quality; plus 'Will to Live', 'Toughness' and 'Guts'.

It'll make for a really neat character though, if played right.

Unlucky, definitely Unlucky.

Nah...he just has a sadistic GM

To each his own. The OP called for a tough former cop based on John McClane. It didn't say no ware or magic, in fact the OP asked what augmentations might make the build.

Modeling a character based on another source is tricky. You have to decide what features are important and what role you want them to fill. Then you have to adapt those things to the rules and setting.

Obviously you think being "naturally" tough with qualities and edge is important to a Shadowrun John McClane. My concern is that I see John McClane as a front line fighter. Each game is different but I've found that while a high edge is all sorts of awesomeness it can't by itself keep up with cyberware magic and the like. It's a finite resource, chugging along burning edge to keep up with Street Sams and soaking attacks like a Troll Ganger can burn through even 8 edge fast. I had success playing such a character less front-line and more special teams waiting for just the right time to dump a bunch of edge and do something cool.

My solution was to keep the high edge for lots of action hero stuff but give him ware to supplement and increase it's mileage.

I know, and I said no ware/magic. What do I care about the OP? I agree with your concerns, I'm just voicing my opinions. I'd definitely pile on Die Hard, Guts, etc.; I'm not saying 'nothing but Body, Will, and Edge'.

I do think it's realistic that McClane couldn't hack it in 2070, though. The sad reality is that augmentations kinda make nobody special.

If your going to be buying lucky and toughness you've got exactly 5 points to pile something else on.

My question is would a 2070s McClane even try to make it without cyber. Why would he avoid them. Does he only use 100 year old guns to because the character in the movie didn't use an Ares Predator.

Not necessarily Lucky, just Edge. But yeah, you'd have to play with the numbers; I'm not sure McClane would have to be a starting/normal chargen char, of course.

It all depends, of course. I'm saying that what made John tough wasn't drugs or a Robocop body; with those, literally anyone could be tough. It wasn't even superior physical fitness, training, or skill! This man didn't even wear *shoes*. It was pure damned stubbornness.

I'm not sure you could make McClane as he appeared in the movies as a starting character. Someone like him, yeah, though not as good yet. In the first one, he was a 13-year veteran on the NYPD, and judging from what his wife said about him, he was always causing problems. He'd never done a big-time deal like taking on a dozen terrorists in a skyscraper on Christmas Eve before, but he apparently always caused problems and rubbed people the wrong way.

Building him from scratch? Build a nice, tough 400 BP character and then add on a bunch of Karma. That's how I'd do it, anyway.

Right. Not all concepts work equally as starting chars. That's why we get all those 'ex-spec-ops' without the wide range of solid support skills they *should* have.

So he needs some Negative Qualities and/or Karmagen?

E.g.
Intolerance (Bullshit, Mild) 5BP
Intolerance (Authority Figures, Severe) 10BP

?

- J.

Double post, sorry. Damn this phone.

- J.

That is totally true. The man has some flaws. He may have built up more than 35 BP over the years.

I think Mr. Goodman has the right of it. Build a solid base, and then work your way forward.