I'm looking for a list of good adept powers, or of good ways to build an adept. What I'm looking for are archtypes for adepts: what are some broad categories for adept (eg. John Woo dual-gun adept, infiltration adept, melee adept, etc) and what powers should each focus on? Naturally this is an incredibly broad topic; there are so very many cool powerf for adepts that it really depends on what you want to do with one, but I'm sure there are some general things that most adepts of a particular flavor want to focus on, just as Sammies want to focus on SMGs and Assault Risle skills and Smartlinks and Wired Reflexes for cyberware.

I dunno. Troll with max strength, 6 unarmed combat, several levels of Increase Skill (Unarmed Combat), Killing Hands, Increase Reaction at some level? I'm no adept expert, so it's not all min-maxed or anything. But that would hurt, wouldn't it? You could call him...I dunno, Bubba.

Oh wait, that's reserved for Bubba the Love Troll ("When you get loved by Bubba, you STAY loved.")

I'll go with Ambitwinkerous Melee adept. You take Edged Weapons 6, Improved Edged Weapons 6, Ambidexterity 6 (Or 8 if you're hardcore) then cackle as you roll 18 dice before combat pool. Other 3 power points are up to you. Some people may give-up a power point in exchange for Enhanced artwinkulation and Reflex-Recorder (Edged Weapons) so that they may roll 21 dice before combat pool.

This technique also works well with whips (morningstar with off-hand nunchuku or whip) due to the exceptional range they have.

[edit] Don't forget to buy enough resources to dikote your Katanas/Morningstar[/edit]

[edit 2] You may as well wield two firearms too. Your other power points would probably be well spent on vision mods. Natural thermo is sweet, especially combined with natural ultrasound vision meaning your vision penalties rarely ever go above +1, even then they're only at +2 in thermal smoke. [/edit]

Stealth Adept:
Improved Ability: Stealth, Trackless Walk

Gun Adept:
Improved Ability: gun of some sort

Melee Adept:
Improved Ability: some weapon, Improved physical attribute (str)

Mix and match. Improved reflexes helps all of the types listed above.

Personal preference is usually 3 points of reflexes, the stealth adept stuff, and the rest in vision/hearing mods.

Centering adept:

Needs to be a Magician's way adept (from MitS) and needs to use the optional rule from the SRComp that allow you to spend starting spell points on initiation.

You take 8 points of magical ability (geased to 6 PPs) and initiate to as high a level as you can. Each time you take centering on different fields as a metamagical technique. You should be able to reach 4rd grade initiation if your GM allows you to take ordeals.

Then you take centering 6 with an appropriate linked skill of 6. Also buy and bond a centering focus if you have any spell points left.

What this character can do depends on what you took centering on. Centering for technical skills can technically even help you when decking or rigging if your linked skill is compatible. See P73/74, MitS for info on adept centering.

Perception adept:

Attributes High Int and Quickness + Whatever
Skills: High Stealth for the alertness specialisation
Power Points: Enhanced Perception 6, A bucketload of Improved Senses (Select sound filter is great), Maybe some Improved Ability (Stealth)
Bioware: Cerebral Booster 2
Edges/Flaws: Bonus Attribute Point (Int), Exceptional Attribute (Int), Perceptive

You can roll up-to 16 dice with 12 complementary dice for perception tests (21 dice with 12 complementary if it's a listening perception test and you got the select sound filter). The last die depends on your GM's ruling on Exceptional atribute allowing a 7th point to be spent on an attribute or not.

You can geas a power to reduce its cost to 75% of normal, so in the end you can buy what would normally be 8 points of powers if you geas them all.

Because of the way physical magician adept initiation works with the errata you can then initiate twice gaining magic and metamagics, but no power points and then you will be able to use all 8 levels of the magical power power. If you don't initiate you can only use 6 levels of magical power because you only have 6 magic.

Perception, Infltration Adept

Int 6, Quickness 6

Imp Stealth 6
Enhanced Perception 6
Magic Sense (It's a Perception roll)
Empathic Sense (Again It's a Perception Roll)
Traceless Walk.

Add in Perceptive Edge
Cyberware: (Magic loss geas'd off)
Spatial Recongizer
Eye Lights




Additionals
Improves Sense *Anytype* Though HighFrequency hearing is a good one)
Improved Athletics

[Edit]/Me is st00pid.[/Edit]

So I was, in fact, wrong, and you do get half of any bonus dice that apply to the skill used by the weapon in the off-hand.

Nevermind, then. Lilt was absolutely correct. My faulty memory is to blame.

As a side-note, any particular reason why they made melee combat so expensive for starting characters? Even with a Str of 6 it costs 12 skill points for a rating 6 martial art now (6 for the actual skill, plus six for the three required maneuvers.) I guess I don't understand why it costs twice as many skill points for essentially the same proficiency at chargen.

Further, the same skills+maneuvers costs 36 Karma to buy *after* chargen, as opposed to 30 Karma to buy 6 ranks in any other Active Skill. This seems much more reasonable to me, even though martial arts still for some stupid reason cost more Karma than any other Active skill. Why did they decide to do this?

"Brawling" is the old unarmed combat (with a few maneuvers). It does not mandate the maneuvers. That way, you can have an unarmed skill at normal cost, but can't claim that you are a ninja as a result of that. (I'm sure everyone has met someone who would would pay 2 skills worth of BP to be a ninja regardless of how useless of a skill it gives)

Ah, but even that one you can't take with no maneuvers anymore. The odd thing is, if you convert an old character to the new system you get your maneuvers essentially for free, but not if you make a new character under the existing rules. I think I'm going with brainfart myself.

And also, you're not spending 2 BPs to call yourself a ninja; you're spending 6, which frankly I think is really stupid.

I meant spending 6 on the skill and 6 on the maneuvers, 2 full skills worth of BP for one skill.

Was that added in errata? CC page 88 states that the advantage to brawling is that you don't need to buy the maneuvers.

[edit]Nothing here about changing the brawling rules

No mention of that in the Official Errata.

Night one Magician's Way pistol adept (ungeased):

Improved [firearm of choice] 6
Sound filtre
Stealth 3
Magical power 1 (Improved Reflexes + Force 1 ally spirit to sustain)

Edges: Exceptional/bonus attribute QU
Flaws: (take your pick)

Why on Earth would you want to waste a real Magic point (and thus your Magical Power permanently since that's automatically the one you lose)) for a Force 1 Ally spirit just to sustain a spell that only costs 1 Karma and 15,000 nuyen?

Anyway, one of my favorite combos follows (assume they're all geased). It's designed for the Buddhist-style "only fight in defense" old man Kung Fu grandmaster types.

Blind Fighting (0.50)
Counterstrike 6 (3.00)
Improved Ability: Martial Art of Choice 6 (3.00)
Sixth Sense 6 (1.50)

Not the most efficient build (I prefer diversity over specialization with adepts, even though that's a "foolish" way to handle them), but the one time I played such a character he was pretty fun.

Yes there is. No power can have a rating higher than your true Magic Attribute. Thus no starting character can begin with Magical Power 7 or higher unless they begin as an initiate.

Yeah, I thought that, but I thought that there was a specific and very apparent injunction against that in the description for the Magical Power Adept Power.

Since it depends on being able to initiate at character gen, which would raise your magic, and you're not required to spend power points as soon as you get them, it still works. Just not quite as well.

How about this house rule then: "No initiation at char gen, period."

There, now we're all happy. Except for the munchkins. And they have enough 1 point flaws to play with that they won't care anymore within three hours.

Maybe I'm missing something. But what's so uber powerful about having a Magical Power of 7 if you initiate once? Physical mages get shafted during initiation to begin with, so he has to take a Power Point in place of a Metamagic Technique to do it anyway.

This place has the strangest logic I've ever seen.

Casting higher-level spells without Drain. Having metamagic. I'm not even talking about this situation, really, I'm just saying that initiation at chargen is a bad idea /in general/. And yes, this place does have strange logic. Always did.

1) You always suffer Drain when you cast a spell. The only thing a higher Magic Attribute gives you is that its Stun instead of Physical.
2) You wouldn't have Metamagic with the Physical Mage.
3) Metamagic is not unbalancing to begin with.

1) You always suffer Drain when you cast a spell.

I meant Physical Drain. Come on.

2) You wouldn't have Metamagic with the Physical Mage.

"In general." Do we need to look that up for you, in a book? Yes, a b-o-o-k?

3) Metamagic is not unbalancing to begin with.

It's more unbalancing than "no Metamagic," isn't it. And weren't you complaining in some other thread that "Magic is broken enough already, don't make it worse?"

EDIT: You're a real ninja with that edit button, aintcha?

In the above scenario you would not have a metamagic talent. You would have had to have purchased a Power Point with that grade of initiation in order to get Magical Power 7. Thus, since you selected a Power Point, you don't get a Metamagic Talent.

As for your latter logic, I'm just not going to bother with that kind of logic.

Once again, IN GENERAL. IN FUCKING GENERAL. I'm not talking about physmages, I'm talking about the regular mage who starts the game off with Possessing and Divination or summat. Seriously. You might want to be King of the Wicker Man, but you're nowhere near subtle enough.

initiation at chargen allows characters a higher degree of specialization. they pay for it in depth, though; an initiate will have, maximum (assuming no bought power points), 13 force worth of spells--23 if they're aspected. anybody who's built a mage before knows that's not a lot to work with.

Buy all of your high-force-required type spells at gen, and as soon as you start playing you could astrally quest at a somewhat low TN to have to pay only 1 karma for a spell...something like that.

Kick me in the head. UMLAUT!

all your high-force-required spells? all two of them, then?

Yeah. Precisely.

that's a very inefficient character design. you'll have initiation, and nothing else. why would someone hire you?

If you have Firebolt: 6 and Toxic Wave: 6, what other spells do you need?

you might want fashion to repair your clothing after the acid rebounds off their burning, melting bodies. like in robocop (except he wasn't burning, just melting)

Usual improved melee combat skills
Killing Hands L
Delay Damage, Obvious
Transmit Attack

Skill:
Performance (Mime)

Physad assassin dresses as a Mime and, as the target goes by, pretends to throw a flurry of strange punches at the target 20 feet away. The Target laughs at the silly mime and goes on his way, then dies later that afternoon.

What is so wrong with having a metamagic or two at chargen? You're spending a respectable number of spell points to do it that could be spent on spells or binding foci.

[randomarguments]
In-fact learning a single force 6 spell with no limitations is probably going to take longer in-game than joining a metamagical group and initiating once. As for using astral quests to reduce karma: Time is karma and money.

Even if a character somehow manages to get 18 dice on his test to learn a spell, it'd still take him on-average 14 days to learn the spell. That's 1 day for the astral quest, 6 days on the first attempt to learn the spell, 1 day on another astral quest, and another 6 days on a second attempt to learn the spell. In that period of time the character has probably lost one or two runs worth of karma simply by not going on them.

As for learning all of your high force spells with starting spell points: From my experience most people tend to go with high force spells at chargen anyway. OK: there's the obligatory F1 increase reflexes +3 and F1 improved invisibility, but they only cost 1 karma anyway and the other spell will be force high force.
[/randomarguments]

Carrying the plan on that mime even further consider this:

Killing Hands L
Delay Damage (Subtle)
Distance Strike
Blindfighting

Any Martial Art 6 + blindfighting

Subtle delay damage means you need not make anything like an attack to kill an enemy. Distance Strike lets you do it at Magic Meters away. Blindfighting (You could probably also use Astral Perception) means you can make the attack even when blindfolded with a fair chance of success. Your character can kill just about anybody within his magic range even if he's tied up in a chair and blindfolded. And since he can delay the damage he could, if captured, easily kill every person in the room before the first one realizes he's hit.

It'd be even better with some Improved Unarmed Combat of course.

Cyclops ghoul adept (Geased)

Attribute Boost: Strength

Muscle Augmentation (Geased)

Deadly Hands

Distance Strike

Blindfighting is good, but under most circumstances (IE: When there's not a white noise generator around) you'd be better with ultrasound vision and some other mod such-as natural thermo.