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Jon’s Glorious Karma Character Generation System (S3CKS)

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Time, Pool, and the Flow of Combat

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In this thread I'm going to develop and discuss the SR3R Complete Karma System, which I may or may not be able to resist naming S3CKS. A few points:

First, some of this is definitely going to be predicated on rule changes from SR3R. I'm going to have to dig in a bit before I'll be able to say how easily this will be adaptable to someone using otherwise pure-canon SR3 rules; I suspect that the damage will be mostly limited to metarace costs and costs for modified edges/flaws (possibly more generally, where unmodified edges/flaws overlap or interact with others), but as I say I'll need to get into things before I can be sure. I also suspect that adoption of a few specific rules from SR3R (like rebalanced metaraces and modified edges/flaws, say) will enable use of this system with at most modest changes even without more wholesale adoption of SR3R, but, as I say, I won't be sure for a bit yet.

Second, for those familiar with BeCKS, this is an extensive modification—in addition to some metaracial stat mod rebalancing, resource costs are substantially modified, edges and flaws are (over and above some changes) given individual pricing rather than a flat multiple of BP cost, and assorted other things. I waffle over whether to call it a modification of BeCKS or a whole new thing, though I've definitely been using it as a starting place.

Third, if anyone is feeling like they have too much free time and want to help out (apart from commenting on things), the most effort-intensive part of this is building different types of characters as demonstrations of viability/nonviability/overpoweredness. Find the most recent summary (when one exists) and make something!

~J

Edit: also, I'm going to be maintaining an updated version of the current proposed rules in this post to prevent people from having to assemble it themselves from chaotic thread discussion (or monologue, as the case may be). I'll include notes of significant proposals, even if they haven't been conclusively added to the current rules.

Summary of Current Rules

Initial allotment: 425 karma points (kp)

Metarace

• Human: 0kp
• Ork: 15kp
• Dwarf or Elf: 20kp
• Troll: 35kp

All metaraces gain Karma Pool every 10 karma. Humans gain some other benefit yet to be determined (leading proposal: +10% Good Karma, so every time they get a point of Karma Pool they also get an additional point of Karma that doesn't count towards earning more Karma Pool)

Magic

• Full Magician: 75kp
• Aspected Magician: 50kp
• Adept: 75kp
• Magician's Way Adept: 85kp

There are no free Spell Points; everything previously done with Spell Points is now done using general karma. There is no limit to how much karma may be spent for these purposes.

Attributes
Attribute costs, both at chargen and afterwards, are shifted by the Racial Modification; improving a Dwarf's Strength (+2 mod) from 3 to 4 costs the same as improving a Human's strength from 1 to 2, 4 karma. The obligatory first point in every attribute is free (so you can make a Human with 1/1/1/1/1/1 stats without spending anything on Attributes); attributes with penalties still get to 1 free, but the cost of improvement thereafter is shifted, so improving a Troll's Charisma from 1 to 2 costs the same as improving a Human's Charisma from 3 to 4, 8 karma.

Attributes may be purchased above the RML for the usual 3*[new level] cost, shifted as above.

Starting attribute costs: (rows: attribute rating, columns: racial bonus/penalty)


And so on.

Skills
As per post-chargen costs. Specialization is now unrestricted and works the normal way.

I'm toying with the idea of lifting the Skill 6 cap, but if I do specializations would probably need to be capped (see below); if the Skill 6 cap remains, Specializations would have a cap of 7.

Resources

• 5k¥: 0kp
• 20k¥: 17kp
• 90k¥: 33kp
• 200k¥: 50kp
• 400k¥: 66kp
• 650k¥: 83kp
• 1M¥: 100kp

There's a proposal to support exchanging karma for cash by extending the exchange past 1M¥ (probably capped at chargen), recording how much had been spent previously (including on Resources), and going from there.

Contacts

• Level 1: 1kp
• Level 2: 5kp
• Level 3: 25kp

Edges/Flaws

Edges:

• Exceptional Attribute: 10kp
• Aptitude: 14kp
• Double Jointed: 2kp
• High Pain Tolerance: 2kp plus 4 per box
• Lightning Reflexes: 4, 8, or 12kp
• Night Vision: 6 kp
• Quick Healer: 6kp
• Resistance to Pathogens: 2kp
• Resistance to Toxins: 3kp
• Toughness: 5kp
• Will to Live: 2, 4, or 6kp
• Bravery: 4kp
• College Education: 2kp
• Perceptive: 10kp
• Perfect Time: 1kp
• Sense of Direction: 2kp
• Spike Resistance: 6kp/level
• Technical School Education: 2kp
• Animal Empathy: 4kp
• Blandness: 6kp
• Friendly Face: 4kp
• Human Looking: 3kp
• Focused Concentration: 8kp
• Poor Link: 6kp
• Cracker: 8kp
• Vehicle Empathy: 10kp

Flaws:

• Computer Illiterate: -10kp
• Borrowed Time: -20kp
• Sensitive System: -10kp
• Weak Immune System: -3kp
• Combat Paralysis: -14kp
• Oblivious: -10kp
• Sensitive Neural Structure: -10 or -22kp
• Bad Reputation: -5kp/level
• Distinctive Style: -4kp
• Astral Impressions: -14kp
• Codeblock: -2kp
• Choker: -6kp
• Jack Itch: -3kp
• Cranial Bomb: -20kp

Ok, to start out with, I'll summarize what I have right now. There are more rule modifications than I'd remembered, so I'm going to have to come back and provide context for some of these costs, but I'd rather get the list up right away than wait until everything else is in a row.

For reference, previous discussion on the SR3R board is here; we had a big spam attack that I've deleted all of, but there appears to be some lingering corruption in the topic indices, so it's pretty much unbrowseable at the moment. Going to have to make time to fix that. We also had some relevant discussion on rebalancing the metatypes, but aside from making everyone earn karma pool at the same rate and giving humans some other undecided-on perk to make up for it all of the conclusions there are, IIRC, up in the air pending investigation of the effects of karma-based chargen.

Ghouls, Shifters, and Metavariants are as-yet unsupported; Otaku aren't on this list but I think I'd settled on a price for them somewhere so they'll probably be in soon.

Based on an initial allocation of 425kp:

Metarace

• Human: 0kp
• Ork: 15kp
• Dwarf or Elf: 20kp
• Troll: 35kp

Magic

• Full Magician: 75kp
• Aspected Magician: 50kp
• Adept: 75kp
• Magician's Way Adept: 75kp

I'm not sure why adepts cost the same as Full Magicians and Magician's Way Adepts; the other alterations were deliberate, so Adepts may have just gotten missed. Alternatively, it could be because Adepts don't need to buy Spell Points. There's also a proposal out there to allow more flexible purchase of magical ability (fewer than 6 points of Magic), but it may or may not end up making it in and even if it does I have no thoughts yet on what the costs would be.

Attributes
Attribute costs, both at chargen and afterwards, are shifted by the Racial Modification; improving a Dwarf's Strength (+2 mod) from 3 to 4 costs the same as improving a Human's strength from 1 to 2, 4 karma. The obligatory first point in every attribute is free (so you can make a Human with 1/1/1/1/1/1 stats without spending anything on Attributes); attributes with penalties still get to 1 free, but the cost of improvement thereafter is shifted, so improving a Troll's Charisma from 1 to 2 costs the same as improving a Human's Charisma from 3 to 4, 8 karma.

Since attributes are no longer cheaper at chargen than afterwards, there's a proposal to lift the ban on purchasing above the Racial Modified Limit; if we go with it the usual 3*[new level] cost would apply, shifted as above.

Skills
As per post-chargen costs. Specialization is now unrestricted and works the normal way. I'm toying with the idea of lifting the Skill 6 cap, but buying skills above 6 seems more likely (and the relative cost increase is smaller) than buying attributes over RML, so I'll have to be careful with this; in any event, Specializations to at least 7 seems reasonable.

Resources

• 5k¥: 0kp
• 20k¥: 17kp
• 90k¥: 33kp
• 200k¥: 50kp
• 400k¥: 66kp
• 650k¥: 83kp
• 1M¥: 100kp

These are somewhat ugly numbers; the ultimate goal is to have single-karma granularity on resource purchasing, but I haven't worked out the precise formula yet. I have scribbled down here an alternate cost list which was intended to produce neater prices for tiers that broadly correspond to those available in point-build; I don't remember my thoughts on it relative to the above, but here it is:

• 5k¥: 0kp
• 25k¥: 20kp
• 90k¥: 35kp
• 200k¥: 50kp
• 400k¥: 65kp
• 650k¥: 85kp
• 1M¥: 100kp

I also had a scheme to support exchanging karma for cash by extending the exchange past 1M¥, recording how much had been spent previously (including on Resources), and going from there. I seem to remember a plot to do something broadly similar in reverse to support exchanging cash for karma, but I'll need to dig around to see if I wrote down the details; certainly, the exchange rate near the bottom of this chart looks like it would make karma too cheap.

Contacts

What I have written down is the Becks formula of L1=1kp, L2=5kp, L3=25kp, but I thought I'd been leaning towards something different. There were some plans to flesh out the contact system, so I may have just decided to wait on those rather than try to fine-tune the current system's costs.

Edges/Flaws

There are a bunch of edges and flaws that need rethinking or scrapping; many have very poorly-defined effects or a heavy reliance on GM treatment. For some of the ones that were workable as-is I tried to assign prices, even if there were proposals to change them. I'll discuss a few others at the end.

Edges:

• Exceptional Attribute: 10kp
• Aptitude: 14kp
• Double Jointed: 2kp
• High Pain Tolerance: 2kp plus 4 per box
• Lightning Reflexes: 4, 8, or 12kp
• Night Vision: 6 kp
• Quick Healer: 6kp
• Resistance to Pathogens: 2kp
• Resistance to Toxins: 3kp
• Toughness: 5kp
• Will to Live: 2, 4, or 6kp
• Bravery: 4kp
• College Education: 2kp
• Perceptive: 10kp
• Perfect Time: 1kp
• Sense of Direction: 2kp
• Spike Resistance: 6kp/level
• Technical School Education: 2kp
• Animal Empathy: 4kp
• Blandness: 6kp
• Friendly Face: 4kp
• Human Looking: 3kp
• Focused Concentration: 8kp
• Poor Link: 6kp
• Cracker: 8kp
• Vehicle Empathy: 10kp

Flaws:

• Computer Illiterate: -10kp
• Borrowed Time: -20kp
• Sensitive System: -10kp
• Weak Immune System: -3kp
• Combat Paralysis: -14kp
• Oblivious: -10kp
• Sensitive Neural Structure: -10 or -22kp
• Bad Reputation: -5kp/level
• Distinctive Style: -4kp
• Astral Impressions: -14kp
• Codeblock: -2kp
• Choker: -6kp
• Jack Itch: -3kp
• Cranial Bomb: -20kp

Comments on a few noteworthy odds and ends:

Bonus Attribute Point: would be obsolete if we allow "free" buying above RML; if not, I figure between 1 and 5 kp on top of the over-RML cost.

Ambidexterity: I thought I'd made a stab at pricing; in practice, only the 6-BP (for melee) and 8-BP (for ranged) versions exist, and I seem to remember the melee version looking cheap while the ranged looked expensive using direct BP->karma translation. Might even be worth splitting into separate edges, we'll see.

Good Reputation: altogether too powerful. I had trouble finding a price where it wasn't an automatic buy for anyone planning to use social skills. Needs rule modifications.

Incompetence: I really think this should be a "skill flaw", modifying the price of the skill in exchange for the penalty (so you can get a cheap additional skill in exchange for being bad at it, with the additional price that you can't later decide—at least not as easily—that you don't want to be bad at it anymore).

The rest are a mix of things I think need to be changed or scrapped and a few that seem reasonable but that I haven't put in the time examining to feel confident about setting a price for.

~J

This is a learning experience in the dangers of dropping a project for over a year without making sure your notes are in order.

I'll try to put everything into better order tomorrow or possibly Thursday, but a few things for the interim:

I'd made reference to metaracial stat mod changes, but aside from the replacement of different karma pool accumulation rates those have all been revoked pending examination of the balance effects of karma-based chargen; the characters I've whipped up have suggested that metahumans are dramatically more viable, even with current stat mods. They may emerge, but I'm not sure.

The edge/flaw lists above appear to be an older version; it looks like most of the costs are right, but I put costs to a number of other edges/flaws that are missing in the above list.

I'm not entirely sure what's up with the magic costs, but I'm pretty sure part of it is that we've done away with Spell Points—since the whole point of Spell Points was to act as a karma substitute, and we're now doing the entire chargen process in karma, they seem rather extraneous. I'm dubious about Magician's Way Adepts costing the same as ordinary Adepts, but as a percentage of starting chargen resources ordinary Adepts are already noticeably cheaper than under point-build; maybe MagWay adepts should be more expensive. I'll investigate it.

~J

Ok, on the matter of Magician's Way Adepts:

For 128BP, being a MagWay Adept consumes 30/128=~23.4% of chargen resources. At BeCKS-standard 90 karma that's… ~21.2%. So there's already a discount. Admittedly you lose between 6 and 36 karma worth of free Spell Points, so it's really between ~22.6% and ~29.7% depending on how much Magical Power they buy at chargen. At the price above, you consume between ~19.1% and ~26.1%, with the tipping point being at 4 points of Magical Power (~23.3%). I feel like 4 is high for a typical MagWay adept, and you gain in long-term options by being MagWay instead of regular—but isn't there some funky rule where they get less out of Initiating than ordinary Adepts? Yeah, they lose the ability to buy Power Points with Karma (which I'm inclined to scrap as superseded by Initiation anyway) and they have to choose between metamagic and a new Power Point (it's not clear if their Magic attribute still goes up) instead of being able to get both.

I'm a little dubious about that restriction, but not confident enough to propose scrapping it; in any event, while that's a real disadvantage I still think 75kp is too cheap. Maybe 85?

~J

I mentioned concerns about uncapped skills and especially specializations above. I'm going to discuss that a little more.

I'm not certain there's actually cause to be concerned about skills, given that when not buying beyond the linked attribute skills above 4 cost more as a percentage of total chargen resources than they do under point-build; skill 6 costs ~7.06% with karma as opposed to ~4.69% with points, and is roughly the same relative cost as buying a Skill 6 with a Linked Attribute of 3 under point-build. Higher skills get even more expensive; even if you manage to get a linked attribute up to 9, a skill of 9 would cost 65 karma, or a whopping ~15.3% of starting chargen resources. I'll need to look at what happens in the hands of mages or dual-wielding ambidextrous adepts, but for a mundane character I'm not sure that's too scary.

Specializations, on the other hand, are significantly cheaper, especially with Absorbable Specializations; worse yet, many skills have a specialization that encompasses all or most of what a character would actually use a skill for, especially above a certain threshold: Biotech/First Aid, Demolitions/Plastic Explosives, Sorcery/Spellcasting, for Riggers almost every vehicle type/Remote Operations and Electronics/Electronic Warfare, Projectile Weapons/Pull Bows, Throwing Weapons/Grenades, Conjuring/Summoning, Intimidation/whichever of Physical or Mental the character is more suited to, etc. One particularly alarming scenario is a WIL 8 Dwarf mage with Sorcery 5 (Spellcasting 10) for 50 karma (~11.8%), or with Sorcery 4 (Spellcasting 8) for 26 karma (~6.1%). That particular case might be solvable by tying Spell Defense pool use to Sorcery (Spell Defense).

Possible ways of addressing this include capping Specializations at, say, Skill+2, or max(Skill+2,6), or somesuch. Thoughts?

(Of course many specializations could do with rethinking, but I'm dubious about whether that will be enough to solve the problem by itself.)

~J

Ok, Contacts are due for a big overhaul, but so that I don't have to hold everything up for that to finish I'm going to examine the costs for the current system.

The fractional costs for BeCKS are as follows: L1 ~0.24%, L2 ~1.18%, L3 ~5.88%. For point-build it varies by what you spend on Resources; at 5 points/20k¥ it's ~0.98% for L1, at 15 points/200k¥ it's ~0.29%/~0.59%/~11.72%, at 20/400k¥ ~0.20%/~0.39%/~7.81%, at 25/650k¥ ~0.15%/~0.30%/~6.01%, and at 30/1M¥ ~0.12%/~0.23%/~4.69%.

Of course, this ignores the opportunity cost of the resources you can't now spend elsewhere, especially since you need to start with at least 10 points in Resources for a Level 2 Contact to consume less than 10% of the marginal return of going up a Resource level. I might be inclined to put a Level 2 contact at 3 or 4 karma, but since I'm going to replace it anyway I'll keep what we've got now and try the reduced cost if Faces are really getting squeezed.

~J

A tidbit hoisted from PMs:


This comes down to eliminating Spell Points. Adepts are slightly discounted relative to 128-point point build: 75/425=~17.7% of chargen resources vs. 25/128=~19.5%. Full Mages and especially Groggies appear substantially discounted (~17.7% vs. ~23.4% and ~11.8% vs. ~19.5%), but they no longer get any free spell points—so if you're going to devote at least the formerly-free amount to stuff you would have had to do with Spell Points, you're actually looking at (75+25)/425=~23.5% and (50+35)/425=20%, a (very) slight increase in price. Adepts don't need to spend anything else to get what they used to get.

That's my logic for the current relative pricing. There are two main ways I could see it breaking down, though: first, if there's a lot of value available in making a Full Mage or Groggy with substantially fewer than 25 or 35 (respectively) karma invested in spells/etc., and second, the marginal cost on something that would have formerly cost an additional Spell Point is now ~.24% of chargen resources, while the lowest it went in Point-Build was ~.59% plus opportunity cost if you took the million. I need to spend more time on both, but right now the first possibility worries me more.

~J

So my plan had been to do the per-karma resource equation today, but it's turning out a lot uglier than I had anticipated (which explains why I didn't finish it when I was working on it before). I still think it's tractable (and even if I'm wrong I'm pretty sure 5-karma increments are doable), but it's clearly something I'm going to actually work at rather than something I can bang out in a bit of free time on a Friday afternoon.

Might be able to get something else up today, we'll see.

~J

Ok, it's a beautiful morning and time for some quick sample characters. I'll be using the "ugly" version of the Resources chart for the moment.

Let's start out with some Riggers, 'cause that's what I know. Starting with Human, straightforward:

Attributes:
172kp net

BOD: 3
QCK: 6
STR: 3
CHR: 4
INT: 7 (EA)
WIL: 6

Reaction: 6, Combat Pool: 9, Control Pool: 6+2*VCR

Skills:
123kp net

Gunnery 6
Car 6
Car (B/R) 1 ([primary riggermobile] 3)
Electronics 5
Electronics (B/R) 3
Rotorcraft 4
Etiquette 4

One additional specialized skill at 1 (3) (maybe Rotorcraft B/R? Maybe a personal combat skill?)

Contacts:
10kp net

2xL1 free
2xL2 (10kp)

Resources: 1M¥
100kp net

Edges/Flaws:
20kp net

Exceptional Attribute: Intelligence (10)
Vehicle Empathy (10)

Seems respectable at first glance. Not up to the standards of a point-build Rigger, but point-build Riggers were ridiculous and leaned incredibly hard on the fact that high stats/skills are cheap at chargen, and Riggers in general threaten to outclass other archetypes, so I'm ok with that. I'm also not making much use of specializations here; let's see where that takes us.

~J

First, a brief digression on specializations.

With Absorbable Specializations, specializations no longer declare a freezing of improvement of a skill. To guide effective character design, I'm going to discuss a bit the reasons why a player might still want to avoid specializing a skill.

The most obvious reason is that they're going to use more of the skill than a single specialization covers. This is a fairly straightforward tradeoff by itself, and doesn't require much examination in isolation.

A more interesting issue is pool use: where the use of dice from pools is limited, that limit is typically set by the base skill. When you're only interested in the specialization this isn't a problem (you don't get the ability to use an extra die of pool, but you get an additional die that doesn't come out of pool), but it's an additional cost when trading off points in the base skill that you'd really like to have in order to free up karma for use elsewhere.

There's also a little bit of tradeoff regarding defaulting, though in my experience there are only a few cases where players deliberately plan for the possibility of defaulting and even then they rarely end up doing so (defaulting from Gunnery to Launch Weapons or from Rotor Aircraft to other aircraft types for Riggers, defaulting from Intimidation to Interrogation, etc.).

So with that under consideration, let's take a look at what we can squeeze out of our exemplar Rigger.

~J

Ok, redoing just the skills:

Skills:
111kp net
119kp net
115kp net

Gunnery 5 (MMG 7)
Car 5 (Riggermobile 7)
Car (B/R) 1 (Riggermobile 3)
Electronics 3 (Electronic Warfare 6)
Electronics (B/R) 3
Rotorcraft 4
Etiquette 4

One additional specialized skill at 1 (3) (maybe Rotorcraft B/R? Maybe a personal combat skill?)

So we've freed up 12 karma, almost enough for another skill at 4 or for another Edge or two or something. Not bad, I think.

EDIT: I somehow completely missed that the last levels of MMG and Riggermobile are at the more expensive exceeding-base cost, which makes them more expensive than just base-skill 6 (31 karma for 5 (7) with linked attribute 6 as compared to 30 for straight 6).

So while it's still a valid option, 5 (7) on base skill 6 isn't the big win I'd been presenting it as. There's room for savings by going 5 (6) for 24 karma instead of 30, but there you're giving up a die at full pool use so it's also a real tradeoff.

Not that this is a problem, necessarily, but it's not what I originally presented.

EDIT2: Man, I really suck at this. The character has Int 7 from EA:I, so only Riggermobile takes the higher-cost hit.

~J

Honestly, I wanted to check what your project was and what you wanted to upgrade, but it's a forum full of viagra ads and I don't even found the basics (that is, the genral rule for a skill/attribute roll).

Now to see how this comes out as an Elf. There are two ways to deal with the bonus attributes: either make a better version of the original by keeping the same relative attribute buys, or making a cheaper version by adjusting down the investment in attributes to end up at the same level without spending as much on it. I'll start off with something closer to the "better" version.

Elf (20kp)

Attributes:
164kp net

BOD: 3
QCK: 7
STR: 3
CHR: 5
INT: 7 (EA)
WIL: 6

Reaction: 7, Combat Pool: 10, Control Pool: 7+2*VCR

Skills:
111kp net

Gunnery 5 (MMG 7)
Car 5 (Riggermobile 7)
Car (B/R) 1 (Riggermobile 3)
Electronics 3 (Electronic Warfare 6)
Electronics (B/R) 3
Rotorcraft 4
Etiquette 4

One additional specialized skill at 1 (3) (maybe Rotorcraft B/R? Maybe a personal combat skill?)

Contacts:
10kp net

2xL1 free
2xL2 (10kp)

Resources: 1M¥
100kp net

Edges/Flaws:
20kp net

Exceptional Attribute: Intelligence (10)
Vehicle Empathy (10)

This comes in at 425 karma exactly, so we are a little behind the human version, but in exchange we get extra Quickness and thus Reaction, Combat Pool, and Control Pool, and can capture back 6 more karma dropping Charisma back to 4 to equal the human version. I don't think you'd ever want to do it, but if you also dropped Quickness back to 6 you'd match the human version in stats and have 18 karma left to throw around, which is 4 more than the human gets.

So barring some strong outside effect (either a big perk for humans—I don't think +10% Good Karma would be enough—or a major strengthening of the metahuman prejudice rules), I'd say it looks like at 20kp Elves make strictly better Riggers than humans do, suggesting they might be undercosted. We'll see.

EDIT: so the Elf actually has the stats of 7 that I was mistakenly assuming above for specialization costs, meaning that he's actually slightly better-off than I had initially estimated. We'll have to see how Elves do after some more stuff is added in.

~J

I still need to build more characters under the current rules to be sure of how costs shake out, but let me quickly take a look at the value of the stat bonuses/penalties for metahumans as compared to the currently-assigned costs.

Elf
Elves get +1 Quickness, +2 Charisma, and Low-Light Vision for 20kp. Quickness is an incredibly valuable stat; I can't see a reason to take it at less than 6 in the metaraces that don't have penalties to it, so I'd peg the +1 Quickness value at a bare minimum of 12 karma if not 14; it's almost certainly higher, but let's start there.

Charisma is less valuable in general, but Etiquette is important enough to discourage dumping it; figure a value for most characters of at least 10 karma (the assumption being that they would have otherwise bought Charisma up to 3 for 10kp but now get that for free).

For Edge purposes we've pegged low-light vision as worth 6kp.

So that's a bare minimum of 28kp worth of stuff for 20kp, and that's very much a lowball estimate—the value for +1 Quickness ignores the benefits of raising the Racial Max and of always getting an extra point of Quickness for equivalent cost, while the value of Charisma assumes that the stat is always of minimal value. Elves seem pretty clearly too cheap at 20kp.

Dwarf

Dwarves are trickier. They get more bonuses, but to generally less valuable stats, and with additional bonuses/penalties that are hard to value. Still, let's try ballparking.

For 20 karma, they get +1 Body, +2 Strength, +1 Willpower, Thermographic Vision, +2 Body to resist disease or toxins, -1 Running Multiplier, +10% cost on some gear.

Willpower is pretty important. Mages obviously make huge use of it, and Riggers and Deckers soak certain kinds of damage off of it; for everyone else, it defends against much hostile spellcasting and goes into Combat Pool. I'd say it's worth at least 12 karma.

Body is pretty variable, but I think the baseline character is going to want Body 3, maybe 2 if they're a Rigger or Decker hiding from the front lines; split the difference and call it 5 karma.

Strength is likewise variable. I think with karma making low attributes cheap people are usually going to want at least 2; I'm not sure how many are really going to want 3, but I could see people taking that much anyway. Call it 5 karma as well.

Natural Low-Light vision is superior to Natural Thermographic vision except in full darkness or light/heavy non-thermal smoke/fog/rain, so if natural low-light is 6kp, maybe call it 3kp for thermo?

They've got the equivalent to two levels each of Resistance to Pathogens and Resistance to Toxins, only normally you can only buy a single level, and I feel like the combined effect isn't worth the implied 10kp without specific rules and guidelines causing characters to come into regular contact with pathogens/toxins; maybe call it 5kp? That's the same as a single level, but I think it works as a lower bound.

So that's at least 27 karma worth of stuff for 20 karma. The sticky wicket comes with their drawbacks. I still have a feeling that dwarves might be undercosted, but I'm not nearly as confident about it as with Elves. Need to build some Dwarf characters.

Ork

Now we're getting into tricky territory. For 15 karma, +3 Body, +2 Strength, -1 Charisma, -1 Intelligence, and natural Low-Light.

As above, I feel like most characters are going to want at least Body 3, so that's 10 karma worth of value right there; I'm not sure they're all going to want Body 4, but it's always a nice touch, so value that at half the marginal cost for a lower bound of 14 karma.

Strength follows the argument for Dwarves above, though I feel like the mental penalties encourage Orks to pursue builds where Strength will matter more. Maybe call it 7 karma.

Natural low-light, as above, we value at 6 karma.

So that's 27 karma worth of stuff before penalties for 15 karma. The penalties, though, aren't small.

Charisma will matter a lot for some builds, but assume a middle-of-the-road build targeting 3 Charisma: the penalty increases the cost for that by 4 karma, so we'll call it -4kp. That leaves us at 23-for-15.

Intelligence is a whole other ball of wax. It's the single most valuable stat, and I don't want to get too deep into the weeds on valuing it but I think -12 is probably an extremely low estimate. That more than covers the gap above, which means that for Orks to be worthwhile they need to make better use of their bonuses.

On the flip side, I think they can make better use of their bonuses—I'm valuing Orks here on a model that assigns very little weight to Strength and not much to Body, and I don't think it's a tragedy if Orks are too expensive when built as shut-in Riggers or Deckers. I'll have to build characters to be sure, but it looks to me like this is a modest pressure (not even a strong one like in point-build) on Orks towards using their physical abilities, which is ok. I want to avoid the "orks/trolls need to do everything with Strength and Body to be worthwhile" syndrome of point-build, but this doesn't obviously fall into it.

Trolls

Trolls combine huge bonuses with big, sweeping penalties in such a way that I really think it's faster to just build characters rather than try to put prices on the bonuses/penalties.

~J

They're all deleted but still showing up in the topic list; it's residual database corruption that I need to resolve. I'll stick it on the agenda for today.

As for the skill/attribute roll, that's standard SR3 rules.

~J

Ok, it's still a little bit buggered up (per-forum post and topic counts are still wrong, as well as some other issues here and there), but I rooted out the remains of the spambot-posts. The forum should be browsable again.

~J

But now, I'm not even allowed to read it without subscribing !

Seriously? @#$#%@#… let me see here…

Huh. Are you sure? I can't reproduce the problem… is there some particular forum or topic that you run into this issue with?

(Also, for the record, registration of new users is currently disabled. As you saw, our previous anti-spam measures broke down epically, and I haven't gotten around to rigging up new ones yet.)

~J

"Board index » General Rules Discussion » Design Philosophy
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Design Philosophy



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mmmm yes, the rest is open.

I've clicked on the particular one that isn't open


Wanted to check the general direction of the project.

How strange. The permissions on that forum must have been wrong all along, or at least since before the spampocalypse—that could explain why it was the only subforum spared.

Live and learn, I guess. Should be fixed now.

~J

So in the process of whipping up a character generator of sorts, I discovered that I'd been mis-ordering the mental attributes all these years. I've edited the characters above to conform to the proper order.

Also, it turns out to be a good thing that I'm building a character generator—I seem to be incapable of getting the costs right. I've made a few small but significant edits above to reflect errors I'd made in pricing specializations (I exceeded the base attribute but failed to use the increased cost).

The big jump in specialization cost between ≤[base attribute] and >[base attribute] looks to make metahuman stat bonuses more valuable. I'll have to look at that.

~J

So now, because everyone needs more stumpy:

Dwarf (20kp)

Attributes:
148kp net

BOD: 3
QCK: 6
STR: 3
CHR: 4
INT: 7 (EA)
WIL: 7

Reaction: 6, Combat Pool: 10, Control Pool: 6+2*VCR

Skills:
115kp net

Gunnery 5 (MMG 7)
Car 5 (Riggermobile 7)
Car (B/R) 1 (Riggermobile 3)
Electronics 3 (Electronic Warfare 6)
Electronics (B/R) 3
Rotorcraft 4
Etiquette 4

One additional specialized skill at 1 (3) (maybe Rotorcraft B/R? Maybe a personal combat skill?)

Contacts:
10kp net

2xL1 free
2xL2 (10kp)

Resources: 1M¥
100kp net

Edges/Flaws:
20kp net

Exceptional Attribute: Intelligence (10)
Vehicle Empathy (10)

That's 421 karma spent, as compared to 417 for the specialized human; he comes out a point of Combat Pool ahead in the process. This seems like a tradeoff, rather than the Elf who was edging towards "Human+".

~J

On to the Trogs. Because of their penalties, particularly to Rigger-important stats, I think I'm going to have to diverge a bit from the highly-focused characters above to make a serious attempt at answering the question "can we build an acceptable Trog Rigger", but I'll take a stab at something similar to the above first.

Ork (15kp)

Attributes:
144kp net

BOD: 4
QCK: 6
STR: 3
CHR: 4
INT: 6 (EA)
WIL: 6

Reaction: 6, Combat Pool: 9, Control Pool: 6+2*VCR

Skills:
116kp net

Gunnery 5 (MMG 7)
Car 5 (Riggermobile 7)
Car (B/R) 1 (Riggermobile 3)
Electronics 3 (Electronic Warfare 6)
Electronics (B/R) 3
Rotorcraft 4
Etiquette 4

Contacts:
10kp net

2xL1 free
2xL2 (10kp)

Resources: 1M¥
100kp net

Edges/Flaws:
20kp net

Exceptional Attribute: Intelligence (10)
Vehicle Empathy (10)

That's 425 exactly. Not nearly as bad as I feared, and if you kick Charisma and Etiquette back down to 3 you have 399 spent karma (402 if you add back in the dropped 1 (3) specialized skill). Add in the extra Body and cheap Strength and you're ready to branch out into some light melee combat.

~J

Now for the tough one.

Troll (35kp)

Attributes:
138kp net

BOD: 6
QCK: 5
STR: 5
CHR: 3
INT: 5 (EA)
WIL: 6

Reaction: 5, Combat Pool: 8, Control Pool: 5+2*VCR

Skills:
102kp net

Gunnery 5 (MMG 6)
Car 5 (Riggermobile 6)
Car (B/R) 1 (Riggermobile 3)
Electronics 3 (Electronic Warfare 5)
Electronics (B/R) 3
Rotorcraft 4
Etiquette 3

One additional specialized skill at 1 (3) (maybe Rotorcraft B/R? Maybe a personal combat skill?)

Contacts:
10kp net

2xL1 free
2xL2 (10kp)

Resources: 1M¥
100kp net

Edges/Flaws:
20kp net

Exceptional Attribute: Intelligence (10)
Vehicle Empathy (10)

That's 405 points. If we dropped the specializations above base stat, we'd have 32 karma remaining. He's never going to make a first-rate Rigger like this, but I wouldn't call him third-rate either—I'm not sure how often I'd want to actually build one, but a player who did wouldn't be condemning him- or herself to the "dramatically less effective than everyone else on the team" scrapheap.

Also, a lot of these things might start looking more nuanced once we add in Resources and people have a way to raise stats without spending Karma.

~J

So for Riggers at least I'm broadly pleased with the balance, worries about Elves excepted. The main concern here might be that Humans don't offer a clearly interesting advantage; I'll have to prioritize deciding on their perk more highly.

~J

Ok last question:don't you have a thread that summarize what's the current status of the work.

Like:

Basics for rolls: Thread A. Status: Validated
Character Creation: Thread B: Status work in progress.

and so on...

I could have sworn we had at least a partial summary. I may be remembering a few topic-specific summaries and confabulating them into a single master summary.

Something to work on.


The core dierolling mechanics are currently unchanged from base SR3. We investigated a bunch of ways to eliminate the perennial 6=7 problem, but the simple solution (reroll 6, add 5) further compresses the already-none-too-wide range of achievable TNs and the solutions that had nicer probability curves were decidedly baroque (reroll 5 and 6, add 4 was the leader of that pack).

There was a push to reduce the places where Open Tests are used, and possibly eliminate them altogether, but it's not a high priority for me so I don't know whether it will happen.

The last thing in the pipeline is that there's a lot of interest in solving SR3's Impossible Tasks problem (exemplified by Invisibility, where the casting mage can get more successes than your average or even non-exceptional above-average person has Intelligence), with proposals including ways of trading off TN penalties for extra dice or allowing exceptional single-die rolls to generate more than one success, but there's not a lot of clear inspiration on that topic so it's been back-burnered for the moment.

~J

So I'm working on some example mages, and it's reminded me of a proposal that I want to run up the flagpole as long as I have people's attention (well, to the extent that I do). As it stands, Drain is not really a tactical resource—taking any amount of it is essentially unacceptable due to the TN mods produced, with a few boxes of wiggle room in case of things like High Pain Tolerance. The Trauma Damper is totally broken, but there are a whole bunch of spells that are practically unusable without it (the alternative being a big stack of expensive foci).

My thinking was to add an additional Damage Track for the Awakened, the Drain Track. Drain would go onto this track (Physical Drain would still go to the Physical track), no TN mods would be applied based on the Drain Track, and the Drain Track would overflow into Stun. This would go hand-in-hand with an increase in the difficulty of totally resisting Drain, possibly the Drain-at-full-Force rule. The Drain Track would recover like Stun Damage; I'm not sure if Stun would have to recover before Drain, or if they'd recover at the same time (possibly with a penalty, like one of them taking double the base time to recover when the other isn't empty).

There's already a proposal out there to set TN mods based on the sum of total boxes across modifier-giving tracks (so a Rigger with Light Physical (1 box) and Light Stun (1 box) operating a vehicle with Light Damage (1 box) is facing +2 TN, the equivalent of three boxes in any one of those tracks, rather than +3 which would equal 6 boxes in any one), so there's a bit of a risk of overcomplicating damage tracks, but I do feel like right now any spell that can't be reliably cast without Drain is nearly worthless, barring a few exceptions that can mostly be cast during downtime.

Thoughts?

~J

i like the latter better, because it makes things easier for anybody, instead of just for magicians.
giving them a complete new track for any frain they might get(which is easy to resist in most cases), grates on my magic hating nerves like not much else <.<

Well, the point would be to make Drain no longer so easy to resist in most cases.

Right now, as you note, most mages will typically only take Drain on a really bad roll—TN mods from damage are so awful that if a mage doesn't have an excellent chance of taking no Drain casting a spell at a given Force, they generally won't cast that spell at that Force. If that spell needs a high Force to be effective, they probably won't take that spell to begin with. This is why the Drain-Power-is-full-Force rule is so ineffective; there are a few spells that are sufficiently useful to make players change how they allocate Spell Pool, but in general it just moves more spells into the "useless because of hard-to-resist Drain" category.

The idea of the Drain Track is that all of a sudden taking Drain isn't the end of the world, so we can make it harder not to take any. You can cast spells that you might not be able to fully soak—but you're limited in how much Drain you can fail to soak. On the one hand, this does strengthen mages in the sense that a bunch of spells suddenly become practical, like the FooBall Combat spells or possibly the Elemental Manipulations, but on the other I feel it could weaken them by removing the ability to cast F6 M-damage Stunbolts all day with negligible chance of Drain (with only 7 dice on Drain resistance, you've got ~98.24% chance to resist Drain—you need to cast it 39 times before your chance of having taken any Drain rises above 50%. 7 dice is pretty easily achievable without Pool—a Dwarf mage can do it with raw Willpower alone—and it gets more reliable quickly as you add dice).

Plus, it would let us nerf the Trauma Damper.

There is some risk of there being something really powerful you can slip into those 10 boxes, and it also powers up mages in short bursts—in something like Food Fight a mage could open up and freely fill the Drain Track, knowing they'd probably be able to rest afterwards—but my initial evaluation is that this would reduce the power of mages while increasing their versatility somewhat.

Is your evaluation different?

~J

If they can cast a certain spell twice before passing out instead of once before passing out, that effectively DOUBLES their already considerable firepower quite a bit . .
If you can't resist that spell yet? tough, invest karma. or get magic loss after spending very much money on the trauma dampener. and then invest the karma to get back what you lost. your choice.
The drain track trainwreck would make it so mages do not need to ever spend karma to soak that drain, or spend money and then karma to get rid of the drain, but let them cast it, laugh it off and then cast it again a bit later.

A seperate Drain track would open up the possibility of having its TN modifiers at L,S,M and D levels only affect magic related tests instead of (nearly) all tests as in the case of stun and physical. But you'd really need to increase the likelyhood of taking drain in the first place in order to make this viable

Side note:Since you're toying with the idea of a third damage track, take a note for another one: The fatigue rules on athletics and their "virtual" effects on the stun track cause some oddities and complexity as well. So a seperate track would do no harm in terms of complexity and could remove the oddities.

So this is clearly another one of those cases where in the time since I last looked at a proposal I went and forgot most of the messy bits to the analysis. I'm splitting the Drain-track discussion off into another thread.

Also a progress update: I got somewhat busy, but also have been working on a crude character generator app that should speed things up substantially (and as a bonus maybe be convertible into a proper character generator afterwards).

Doing chargen by hand isn't too awful, though I'm going to need to come up with some good quick-reference cost charts for skills that include specializations since they're encouraged so much more under this system. One thing that's been mysteriously tricky, though, is remembering the marginal cost for improving an attribute; it may just be more than a decade of having "new value times two" drilled into me, but adjusting for racial bonuses/penalties keeps taking several seconds more effort than I expect. Not too awful; the only two cases in which it's really nasty are either making a bunch of characters or that final phase of chargen for inveterate optimizers where you start looking at tweaking numbers to see if there's a character you like better somewhere near what you already have.

The first case is what I'm doing a lot of, but most people probably won't encounter it. For those who still do, and those who run into the second case, I think the existence of a character generator is a sufficient response—it's not like it's fundamentally impractical to make a character by hand, after all.

~J

Ok, having brushed up on my linear programming I've given another go at the resource formula.

To start out with, I needed to identify desirable properties of a resource formula above and beyond matching the specific karma-nuyen exchanges listed above. Aside from some common-sense bookkeeping (you always get positive nuyen for karma, etc.), I identified three properties to start from:

Property 1: the marginal nuyen return is nondecreasing. You always get at least as much from spending one more karma as you did from last karma point you spent.

Property 2: the resource function is a step function with equal step lengths. That is, from 1-x karma you get n¥ per point, from x+1 to 2x you get m¥, etc.

Property 3: resource blocks come in at least vaguely tidy quantities. At no point does spending 1 karma get you 1,637 nuyen or something.

There are a number of other properties we might like to have, but I started there. That produced the following code, in Python using Sage:


(Apologies for the mess, I've spent the past few years in very un-Python-like languages (Haskell and ML-derivatives) and it shows.)

As it turns out, the "nice" resource levels are actually much nastier to work with, while the "naughty" levels have produced answers for a wider range of minimum increments and step lengths.

I had to maximize something, so I maximized the return on the highest resource level. Finding a better choice for this is likely to help further exploration.

This gave me the following, using the "naughty" values:

For 100¥ increments, 5-karma steps:

• 1-5: 300¥
• 6-10: 600¥
• 11-15: 700¥
• 16-20: 3.5l¥
• 21-25: 4k¥
• 26-30: 4.9k¥
• 31-35: 5k¥
• 36-40: 5.1k¥
• 41-45: 5.3k¥

And so on. This exposes some of the deficiencies in my constraints—the ratios between one marginal rate and the next are all over the place. I mean, they are in BeCKS as well, but BeCKS ranges from 1:3 change (500¥/pt to 1.5k¥/pt) up to 3:4 (15k¥ to 20k¥). Even in this snippet we've got 1:5 all the way up to 50:51, and that unevenness continues through the entire range.

Ideally I'd like to minimize the distance between the maximum and minimum ratios, but that's not a linear constraint; I'm going to have to look more closely to see if I can express something sufficiently like this as a linear constraint.

Also, the solution makes use of 100¥-increment values all the way up; I think a sliding constraint on the increment shouldn't be too hard, and if the result still has solutions that would make them much nicer.

So then, for 10-karma steps, 100-nuyen increments:

• 1-10: 800¥
• 11-20: 1k¥
• 21-30: 4.9k¥
• 31-40: 6k¥
• 41-50: 6.8k¥
• 51-60: 11.3k¥
• 61-70: 14.5k¥
• 71-80: 14.7k¥
• 81-90: 15k¥
• 91-100: 24.5k¥

Still pretty funky, but hints of something reasonable may be peeking through.

(For reference, I'd thought I'd managed to find a step+increment combination that gave a solution for the "nice" values, but I can't find it anymore—it's choking on everything I try to give it. Either I have a bug somewhere or "nice" is a fantastic misnomer.)

~J

What are those values, they are not following property 1 at all?

By the way, I don't see why it's important to fix that.

They're the nuyen you receive for spending an additional point of karma, based on the total amount of karma spent.

So by that chart, 1 karma gets you 800¥, 5 karma gets you 4k¥, 10 gets you 8k¥, but 11 gets you 9k¥ instead of 8,800¥. Since each return increment is larger than the previous one (800 < 1,000 < 4,900 < 6,000 < …), they do follow property 1; if you swap the first two rows (so 0-10 is 1,000¥ and 11-20 is 800¥), then it wouldn't obey property 1.

~J

Ah I see. I ve took your property one as:

•1-10: 800¥ to •11-20: 1k¥ => augmentation of 200 nuyen
•21-30: 4.9k¥ to •31-40: 6k¥ => augmentation of 1,1k per karma

and so on in order to make your function having an exponential curve.


But I still do not see what you want to achieve with that. It just looks counter intuitive. What's your goal exactely?

Well, I'm following the example of both BeCKS and point-build—going from 5BP to 10BP gets you 70k¥ in point-build, while going from 25BP to 30BP gets you 350k¥.

The goal is to have the return be supralinear. The multiples of increase don't need to be consistent or increasing (they certainly aren't in point-build; if we discard the 10x increase going from -5 to 0, they range from a high of 4.5 from 20k¥ to 90k¥ to a low of just over 1.5 from 650k¥ to 1M¥); I'd like to constrain them more, but need to either find ways to express something like that constraint linearly or start brushing up on nonlinear optimization.

I did have a go at maximizing the summed pairwise differences between the levels; at a 100¥ increment and a 10-karma step that gave me the following:

• 1-10: 100¥
• 11-20: 2k¥
• 21-30: 4.9k¥
• 31-40: 5k¥
• 41-50: 7.5k¥
• 51-60: 11.3k¥
• 61-70: 14.5k¥
• 71-80: 14.7k¥
• 81-90: 15k¥
• 91-100: 24.5k¥

Which is still far from ideal (several tiers still too close together; 100¥/karma at the bottom tier is just insulting) but shows some promise. There's a lot that can be gotten out of tweaking the optimization objective, but I'm deferring serious exploration there until I make it stop producing hundred-nuyen increments past the first few tiers.

~J

Adding sliding increments wipes out all possible solutions a lot faster than I thought. It looks like I'm going to need a better handle on the shape of the problem if I'm to have any hope of producing a clean solution.

Edit: actually, not necessarily. I just realized that the way I implemented sliding increments had incorrect interactions with other constraints resulting in stricter constraints than desirable (some possible solution space was being discarded). Will have to fix that and try again.

~J

So I've been mostly splitting my time between character-generator building and picking away at the edges of the resource question, but I had a sudden flash of insight while in the shower this morning: cheap, absorbable specializations might make Trolls a kind of mundane melee-Adept, especially if unlimited at chargen. I wanted to build one right quick as a proof-of-concept:

Assuming unrestricted specializations:

Troll (35kp)

Attributes:
190kp net

BOD: 6 (0)
QCK: 5 (36)
STR: 10 (40)
CHR: 4 (30)
INT: 5 (EA) (44)
WIL: 6 (40)

Reaction: 5, Combat Pool: 8

Skills:
139kp net

Polearms 5 (specialization 10) (40)
Unarmed Combat 5 (specialization 10) (40)
Throwing Weapons 4 (specialization 8) (26)
Stealth 5 (21)
Electronics 2 (4)
Etiquette 3 (8)

Contacts:
1kp net

2xL1 free
1xL1

Resources: 200k¥
50kp net

Edges/Flaws:
10kp net

Exceptional Attribute: Intelligence (10)

Not too shabby, I think. If we cap starting specializations at 7 that's 30 karma worth of spending shifted to post-chargen, but the individual levels come quickly.

For reference, if the base Attribute can be gotten to 12 (through 'ware, triple-cost spending, or Adept powers), a 6 (12) specialized skill costs 57 karma. That's actually a better result than I thought; I didn't think it was going to be so cheap as to be problematic, but there's a nice kind of symmetry that that last six points of specialization cost nearly as much as a whole new skill to 6.

~J

i don't really get what you mean with cheap absorbable specialisations . .
but 10 dice + combat pool in any skill on chargen is pretty OP in SR3.
And the Base Attribute can be gotten to much higher with Trolls.
STR6+4=10 already. Change MetaVariant and you are at 11, exceptional and you are at 12.
It's pretty trivial really. Trolls really WERE Powerhouses under SR3.

Well, the cheap part is base SR3: as long as you don't go above the linked attribute, a level of specialization is a third the price of the base skill. The difference absorbable specializations makes is that you don't lose karma if you improve a base skill you took a specialization on, so you can be aggressive about taking specializations, even on skills you know you want to raise later.


Eh. Not so bad, I'd argue, due to the costs involved and the restricted range of skills that…

Oh. Wow. I just realized that Heavy Weapons is Strength-linked. I mean, I'd still argue that the range is restricted, but it's a lot more open than I thought when I started my reply.

But anyway, pool use is capped by base skill, which weakens the power of high Specializations; it's powerful, but also not cheap, and Adepts have had the ability to field similar starting die totals on a wider range of skills without it being too bad. On the other hand, I guess there is some room to worry about the interaction with Muscle Toner. I'll look into it.


Not so much, I'd argue. Strength is the least valuable attribute, and non-absorbable specializations are really hard to justify for the kind of primary skill you'd want a high level in; you had a few potent niches (archer-artillery, polearm-devastator, throwing-adept, wallhacker), but especially given the costs (both in BP and in penalties to extremely valuable stats like Quickness and Intelligence) they tended to be very narrow.

With the proposed changes, I think they're set to be a lot more powerful, though there are still a bunch of drawbacks.

(That said, I'm still inclined towards some kind of cap on specializations at chargen—though Dwarf Mages with high Spellcasting worry me more than melee or Heavy Weapons Trolls.)

~J

Oh ho ho ho, no!
STR, under SR3, is very much a master Stat for any combat oriented Character.
STR based weapons are the end all be all of SR3 basically, because of the way how the Power and Damage Levels of the SR3 Damage-System work O.o
You can get a Troll up to 18 STR if you want to really hardmax. A certain Bow can, if you can get it, deal 22M Damage over 1.5 Kilometers.
A Pole-Arm with Dikote will Deal STR+4=22D Damage with a 3 reach combined. Granted, these are extremes, but this is doable in Char-Gen.
If you go for Ghoul too, it gets only worse. Depending on what melee rules you use, you can get a close combat attack up to STR+(STR/2)+Weapon-Modifier.
for a Troll, that could be 18+9+4=31S Damage. Add in 2 Net Hits and you are at 31D Damage.
And it Adds Recoil. At STR18 3 Points.
Out of combat, stuff like lifting/carrying Gear makes STR important too.

And yes, an Adept can get 6+6+6 = 18 dice Pool at char gen for several skills too.
Which is one of the most broken builds you can actually get under SR3 i think . .

I would have expected that you'd mention the two adept dwarfs with 26 to 36 melee dice without the use of combat pool

I was going by pure skill, improved skill and combat pool here, no bonus dice at all from anything else.
because these can be gotten by other people too at least in some parts i guess. that and i never was any good with magics <.<

Both dwarfs would get to 18 (21) dice without combat pool, if you were to remove all other sources.
And they both are my personal reference for testing the "abuse" potential of Jon's system, once it's finished.

More later, but where does the Dwarfness come in? You can hit 18 before pool with an Adept by Skill 6 + Improved Ability 6 + Ambidexterity 6 on a dual-wieldable weapon, but that still only gets you 6 points of usable pool.

~J

They come into (my) play once you try to get those "insane" pool sizes of 26 to 36 dice without combat pool on a starting character. The mentioned dwarfs are extremely min-/maxed (more ore less) one trick ponies that were built as proof of concept and in order to test certain aspects of chargen. Since BeCKS (and possibly your SeCKs) somehwat try to create more well rounded and consistant characters while putting up a higher bill for extreme specialist, they are perfect candidates for my personal testing of your final product. If the two can still be built in the same way, not much of a gain or a loss. If they can't be rebuilt, you achieved part of your goal. If they can be recreated and even expanded upon, then part of your mission failed.



I'd argue that improved ability explicitly raises the connected skill level and thus the correct number of combat pool dice for the main hand (since the dual-wield rules explicitly limit it to main weapon) is actually 12 (but starting characters not reaching that number under normal conditions). But for the mentioned dwarfs the restrictions of pool dice for the skill tests is rather unimportant because of the number of dice they roll without combat pool, which leaves them with the option of completely using it for dodging and damage resistance where combat pool dice aren't retricted in any form.

How do you get 26 dices? Huh What?

Seems there are people even better at Min/Maxing than me . . *jealous*