I don't see any of the issues you are describing for Mechwarrior 3. Maybe in Previous Editions, though, as I do not really remember those.
Not sure what AToW is?

Made 5 characters in about 2 hours a couple months ago in MechWarrior 3. It moved pretty smoothly, in my opinion.

A Time of War

Hmmm... Doesn't ring any bells, but it has been a while.

if you're just gonna dump bod and str on your troll, any other race can generally match it anyways, and also have an extra point somewhere (most frequently in edge). trolls are *forced* into having more strength and bod, that doesn't mean they're the only ones who can have it. it is a forced payment of a cost that you normally wouldn't choose to make for the benefit you gain; that isn't a benefit, that's a drawback.

The latest name of the Battletech RPG, i.e. what previously was Mechwarrior-not-the-PC-game. Mechwarrior 3 (-not-the-PC-game) should be the edition before the name change.

Ahhh... Okay, that makes sense - I have not seen, nor acquired, such information/books.

Karmagen and BP also have serious breaking points that Priority doesn't have. Both systems allow you to overload one or two stats at the expense of others, for example: you can pump an attribute to sky-high levels, at the expense of skill breadth. Priority is a template system, which tends to keep things more balanced across the board. It might not be as mathematically rigorous, but the original Shadowrun priority system was consistent and hard to break. Karmagen and BP both highly reward system mastery, and easily produce characters of wildly inconsistent power levels.



You know, I like narrative games, but for the most part I despise Life Path systems, and Fate gave me a major headache.

Random lifepaths are great for people who have trouble coming up with exciting and interesting backgrounds for their characters. However, it also carries the same problem that random character creation has: you can't create the character you want to play. It's worse when you combine it with random attributes, because you might end up with a character you cannot play. And I mean that literally: every player has a range of characters they can play and enjoy. It might be wider for some, but we all have a limit to what we enjoy, and random life path can take you outside of what you can play.

More importantly, it takes player agency away from them. In a random attribute system, at the very least you get to decide what sort of personality your character has. Random lifepaths don't even give you that: your history determines where you're from, who you know, and what you've been through. In the old days, you could make up for poor attributes with an interesting character, but under random lifepaths you cant even do that.

As for FATE... I own the core book, and I signed up for a game on RPOL. It took me over a month to create a character, because I just did not (and still do not) grasp exactly what makes a good Aspect and what doesn't. I tried seven times to come up with a High Concept, and got rejected every time for being "too vague". I tried several different and poetic ideas, and none of them worked. Eventually, I went from "The man who dared challenge the gods" to ""clever warrior engineer". In the meanwhile, High Concepts like "The raven in dreams" were fine.

I'll take SR5 Trolls any day over the immortal rubbish they were in prior editions, although maybe not quite so bad in 4E.

In 5th Ed though the problem isn't so much with people taking Body 15 Trolls, but rather them taking body 5 trolls to play magicians and other traditionally squishy archetypes. Which while being the equivalent of their races wimpiest nerds still cart around combat axes for those odd occasions where you need to put down the pocket protector and destroy some tanks or spirits.

Immortal? Body 15 Trolls tend to drop like kittens when hit with a well placed Stunbolt or two, and are usually quite susceptible to things like Illusions.

Everything has a counter. No single min/max tactic protects against all possible threats. If someone makes themselves into a bullet sponge, hit them with something other than bullets.

~Umi

I don't like the way SR5 (and SR4) deal with lower attribute maxima of metatypes, either. I prefer the 3rd edition method (or at least what I understood from skimming the rules quickly) where you paid for attribute points first and then applied racial modifiers. So if you want a Troll Decker, sure you get pretty good Strength & Body "for free", but you also have to buy yourself out of the Logic hole that Trolls start with if you want to be effective. And that's a fair price to pay, it's way less restricting than having to shell out a B priority just for metatype. It also makes more sense cost-wise (why does it cost so much more for a Troll to train up from, say, minimum strength compared to other meta types? Do they not get enough protein or something??).

funny story: those body 5 strength 5 trolls?

you can get that on a human. or an elf. or a dwarf. or an ork.

trolls don't hold any exclusive ability to get those attributes at 5 whatsoever. in fact, they are mostly worse off in general. if you compare a troll with E attributes and B race to a human with B attributes and E race, the human can get the exact same attributes as the troll... plus one edge (or magic, or resonance). so long as you don't mind investing in special attributes, you can keep following that pattern upwards on the priority charts as a rule.

strength 5 body 5 magician trolls are not getting some massive benefit from being trolls (and in fact, they're probably being harmed by the mental attribute cap penalties in the specific case of magician trolls). they're the poor saps who have to pay just as much as the strength 10 body 10 troll, who actually makes use of the advantage trolls get. for anyone else, the only reason you don't see humans building strength 5 and body 5 for their magicians is that it's a bad place to invest attribute points most of the time. if it was actually a valuable investment, then you would see all mages with 5 in both strength and body, not just troll mages. but we don't. because for most builds that are not melee tanks, people don't want 5 in both body and strength.

all trolls pay for something that most of the time, other people opt out of because it's an inefficient purchase. no really, think about this. everyone else looks at the cost and says "nope, not worth it", and trolls cannot do that, and must instead pay full price. that's not what i would call an advantage.

While you can, in theory, get a human mage to have a higher body and strength than a troll, it costs them a lot to do so. You don't see many Body 6 human mages for a reason. A troll mage can afford to dumpstat body and strength, and still have a huge dice pool. And while strength is all but useless for most archetypes, it's killer for melee adepts or mystic adepts. So a troll combat mage/mystic adept would actually be really scary.

Which ones have the random Life Path thing? That sounds like Burning Wheel, maybe? I'm not as familiar with that one.

And it sounds like you had a rough GM there for FATE; I've still got to get the core and read it some time. I was thinking yesterday it would make for a fun Shadowrun hack.

When I mentioned what I did, I was thinking of specifically Dungeon World or Cortex+, where your stats mean something more than just a number on your sheet, not just getting you the biggest bang for your buck. Attribute numbers exist in DW basically for legacy reasons; you just want to know which pluses you have for your roll, which I don't think is affected by race much, if any. And the biggest plus I think you can get is +2(?). I'd have to double check.

In Cortex+ your die types are essentially the same regardless of what you have on your sheet; you're just aiming to utilize as many of your aspects as you can.

I'll have to sit down sometime and write down what I've hacked together in my head, honestly.

Sounds like you have a GM in FATE that has issues. The ONE thing about FATE that I have found is that it DOES take a bit of getting used to the Paradigm Shift in characters. They are often so simple as to defy logic. That said, they are also some of the most Interesting characters I have played in a while. Yes, Aspects CAN be a challenge. But the beauty is that you can run with some fairly basic Aspects till you come up with something more to your liking. In fact, I LIKE "The Man who dared challenge the Gods" as a High Concept Aspect. Right now we have a character in our Fantasy game that has "Cursed by the Gods" as an Aspect (His Trouble Aspect to be precise).

This... So very much This...

I remember a random life path system in one of the Traveller versions, although I can't recall if it was for what you did for four years, or what you got out of it. Additionally, Mekton (which I think became the Fuzion system) had a random lifepath system as well. HoL and Maid have ones as well, but since they're parodies, it's not a real problem: your characters are supposed to be a joke.



I'm willing to give FATE a chance, but it hasn't impressed me so far. One of the reasons I tried it in the first place was because character creation was supposed to be narrative-driven and easy. The narrative I ended up with is only vaguely similar to the one I wanted, and it was a headache getting the aspects right. Assigning stats wasn't hard, but getting to that point took forever.

The mechanics of FATE are incredibly easy. However it requires a lot of discussion as to what one wants out of the story, but also eventual explicit agreement as to what that story entails in regards to things like themes, scope, and tone before you even begin to think about making a character. If those at the table say they want to play a fantasy game of FATE where one player shows up with a character for an epic steampunkian Final Fantasy game, another is playing Conan, a third is playing a Knight of the Round Table, and the GM has notes for a grim and gritty political game based off of Game of Thrones... you're gonna have a bad time.

I've also noticed, for a lot of players who want to experience the story of their characters, this approach gets in the way of their enjoyment, as a player and GM need to know, in broad strokes, what that character's story is and how they fit into the overall narrative before play begins. I've heard it put into this metaphor: "What's the point of going on a road trip if you've already got both a destination in mind, and directions to get there?"

it isn't any cheaper for a troll, though.

people opt out of it normally because it's a bad investment of resources, except in certain specific builds. trolls cannot opt out of paying that cost. a human magician *could* opt in to str and bod 5, but they don't most of the time, because it usually isn't worth it. a human *can* choose to invest those resources in bod and str, or they can invest them into areas that are more core to the build (and probably still put 1-2 points into body and strength, just not 4 in each is all), and most of the time, the mechanically superior choice is to invest those points elsewhere.

and that's the real kicker; the thing that is generally speaking too expensive for what it gets you is what trolls are being forced into buying, whether they want it or not. if it was something that everyone or almost everyone would want regardless (say, a large bonus to body and willpower), no problem charging full price. as it stands, it's a package deal without a discount that gives you the package nobody else wanted in the first place. actually, strike that; in most cases, not only is there not a discount, you're actually paying a premium in many cases (in special attribute points).

and then to top it all off, the package deal includes drawbacks elsewhere, like larger attribute penalties than any other race suffers from, plus the one build that actually wants the points badly enough to be worth paying the price isn't exactly amazing either (melee tank isn't completely worthless by any means, but the simple fact of the matter is that the advantages melee has over ranged are few and far between).

Look, I get you don't like trolls, but they do make good generalists. I don't like generalists in my Shadowrun games usually, but things like a troll combat decker or troll mystic adept can be very potent. I've seen bulletproof troll street sams in many Shadowrun editions, but that included 4.5, so a similar build should be possible in Sr5. You seem to think just because a troll is inherently good at melee, that's all they can do: that is clearly not the case.


Well, so far, I haven't been able to figure out how things like Aspects and Stunts actually affect play. The skill system I get, but not how it all fits together. I'm told that for many, they have an "Aha!" moment while playing, where everything gels together. I'm still waiting on mine. Not to say it won't happen, only that I haven't hit it yet.

Indeed. The High Concept is easy. Getting the Concept to be accepted is more difficult.

High Concept: Gary Stu

any race can make a generalist. but as a rule, non-troll generalists will be better than troll generalists. i can make a human melee tank, too, that doesn't mean that humans are particularly good at it, just that it's possible.

the problem with trolls is not that they completely and utterly suck at everything other than melee combat. it is that for almost any other role than melee combat, you would be able to do better with a completely different race, because the other races get more versatile chargen options, while the troll has locked a large portion of their options into being a melee tank.

now, to be fair, all races are slightly less suited to be a generalist than a human, and have slight inclinations towards certain roles. the thing is, their benefits and costs are lower. if i make an elf melee tank, i only have to invest priority D into being an elf. if i make an elf *anything* i only need to invest priority D into it. even if i have absolutely no use for +1 agility or+2 charisma (i suppose theoretically there is a build out there that will resent the 1 point in agility *and* the two points of charisma), but that's pretty niche), i have only paid a low cost for those things and they are moderately useful in those amounts almost anywhere, so my choice more or less amounts to "do i want to be an elf" rather than "do i want to be effective". the troll, on the other hand, is paying for +4 body (which is at least useful on almost any build, though many will prefer 1-2 points less) and +4 strength (which is decidedly less valuable on most builds that aren't melee tanks). and has a very high cost. the question for a troll that is not building melee tank becomes "do i want to be a noticeably less competent troll X, or a noticeably more competent non-troll X", because not only are your resources likely going towards 3-4 points in attributes you would not have wanted to spend them on, but you're also giving up your highest or second-highest priority for that. if i put A or B in attributes, it's still a pretty lousy choice efficiency-wise, but at least i can put those points into being effective at whatever role i choose. when i put A or B into troll, i'm putting all my points into a pre-selected area, and that area only has strong synergy with one build. perhaps even worse, the place it's being put into is largely a place where i can make extremely cheap purchases elsewhere, comparatively; strength is an easy attribute to buy, disease and poison resistance is pretty easy to buy, healing rate is pretty easy to buy, and damage soak is a very easy thing to buy. i can even buy melee damage relatively cheap, if i want it.

when you choose troll, you pay a lot for something that most people didn't want in the first place. if being a tougher but otherwise less capable X was a desirable option, nobody would be choosing the slightly less tough but more capable X whether they were trolls or not.

Um, no. Strength is good for more than just melee combat. If you want a pure combatant, trolls come out ahead in recoil compensation, because of it. Yes, they lose a die of max quickness, but they more than make up for it with autofire. If you branch out a bit, trolls can make excellent covert ops specialists: their strength allows them very high athletics pools, which means they can pull off crazy Mission Impossible acrobatic tricks.

Trolls are also good at tanking in general. You don't need to go melee to draw fire, you just have to be very, very good at getting noticed and the soaking a hit. You keep forgetting that trolls have dermal armor, which means that even a troll that completely dumps body can soak as well as the toughest human. A troll who maxes out body and armor, and then takes a bit of Intimidation to scare enemies into targeting him, is very good at drawing fire and surviving the results.

I don't know about it. The GM and I had discussed, in writing, exactly what we were expecting out of the character. He's experienced in FATE, and has no reason to mess around with my head. I'm reasonably satisfied with our communication. However, it still took seven tries. I'm willing to admit that it might be me, I might not have grokked FATE yet, but it's still frustrating.

Yeah, we tend to kick the ideas of Aspect around the table a lot for all the characters, refining it and focusing it a bit as the process goes on. But It really relies upon knowing what KIND of story is intended as to what characters come out of it. In a lot of ways, it is a Design intent. FATE is as open as any of the other Open Games (Champions, Hero, GURPS, etc), so you really need to know WHAT is involved before you can determine WHO is involved. And don't worry Cain... it is indeed an Aha Moment... I have witnessed it many times already, and when the person Finally Grasps what is going on it is priceless.

In FATE, more than any other game I have played, Character Generation really benefits from group discussion as characters are generated.

you get +1 point of recoil if you dump strength. recoil compensation is not exactly an expensive thing to buy with other resources either, though. ultimately, you're paying for +1 to hit when recoil matters (which is not always), but you're losing +1 to hit off the high end because of your lowered cap.

same with the soak dice. +1 soak die is just not a big deal. armour is cheap. augmentations that improve your soak values are pretty cheap as far as augmentations go (that is, it costs a heck of a lot more to buy +1 to, say, agility, than it takes to buy +1 armour).

other people can buy the same thing. they choose not to, the vast majority of the time. because the cost compared to the benefit is just too high.

5 body and a bit of extra armour (that doesn't stack with augmentations to your skin that improve armour, iirc) is not out of reach for anyone else. but very few people choose it (and I suspect that most of those who do will freely admit they know it isn't optimized).

the high cost that trolls pay is a cost that everyone else can, and most often does, opt out of.

(also, that supposed advantage of higher limits? most of the time, that's irrelevant. if you invest a decent amount into boosting your physical attributes, you'll have high enough limits to do stuff the majority of the time. it *could* come into play in any given situation, but far more often than not, it's pretty meaningless).

What you've just described is the awesome strength of the priority system, you know that system that a vocal minority are dead against because when you build a troll with BP or Karma like you did in 4th Ed they were overpowered jokes. All for a mighty cost of what 6% of total resources? Suddenly the +4/5 body and strength is basically free, with yes some minor loss in mental stats, +reach +dermal +roleplaying advantages of being massive and scary.

This is why I love 5th ED: IT'S BALANCED.

I don't know this will help Cain, but try Rob Donahues blog for help with FATE. I've been reading it for awhile now and I feel like I have a pretty good grasp of aspects and such:

http://walkingmind.evilhat.com

Smash: Err, what? It doesn't matter how one buys the troll package, BP, priority, or karma, Trolls come with these inefficiencies.

Further, even though I vastly prefer priority, I'm not about to claim it's balanced (but neither are any other option). Skills A is the prime example.

Well, balanced is a relative term. It's certainly more balanced than BP ever was, at least in how I use the term. Not all characters are equal, but they are *consistent* across builds, which is what I look for. It's fine if a system puts out really strong characters, or really weak ones. As long as everyone is on about the same level, it can work. But when a system does both, producing really weak and really overpowered characters at the same time, you have problems.

Anyways, even though Jaid hates trolls, there's no denying that they're good for a lot of builds. I haven't seen a single melee troll in a very long time, simply because troll shooter builds were so much better. In SR4, it was all about the troll archer. In SR4.5, the troll meat shield was very popular. Now, in SR5, the troll generalist and mystic adept is a capable build. Ignore Jaid's bias, I think he's secretly a member of Humanis.
r

The problem with this is that the consistancy you look for is less a matter of chargen balance, per se, and more a matter of game system balance.

Take for example the whole Hacker / Decker boondangle. If the underlying flaws are in the inherent capabilities of a character archetype's mechanical implementation, no chargen system in the world is going to be of any real use in balancing that. If one type of character is simply mechanically more desireable than another, it isn't the fault of the chargen rules. The fact that the chargen system can produce certain characters which are powerful while also churning out others which are far too weak isn't primarily the result of bad pricing of character capabilities, but of bad balance between those capabilities.

Character generation itself is about costs and benefits. Ideally, the cost of something should pretty much directly represent its utility, and for the most part that's actually pretty true with Karma and BP chargen, with a few notable exceptions that could be fixed with mere price changes. The real meat of the problem is that different sections of the game system operate in ways that aren't directly comparable, and thus it becomes hard to properly "price" two very different mechanics.

For example, the Automatics weapon skill is technically undervalued - even though every weapon skill costs the same amount of Karma or BP as any other, the Automatics weapon skill is just inherently more useful than the rest. You get more bang for your buck. Likewise, most folks would agree that if you spring for an Exotic Weapon Skill, you're technically overpaying - they cost the same amount of Karma or BP as any other, but they're demonstrably less useful than the rest.

~Umi

I know a game system where one character can be a glorified librarian with simple armor and a pistol adventuring beside another character wearing power armor that's nearly an indestructible walking tank and carries a cannon that puts the Ares Thunderstruck to shame, and both are starting characters.

Not everyone is on the "game balance" bandwagon, and by no means is it necessary.

I kind of... half... agree.

I'm personally all about options. If one person wants to play your librarian with a pistol, and another wants to play your walking tank, and even if they want to be on the same team together, I say more power to 'em! I like the fact that Shadowrun allows you to make such a wide variety of character types, and yes to even produce variances in power.

But at the same time, I like those variances in power to be... intentional, I suppose? If a player actively chooses to play as a less "powerful" character, that's great. But if the character type they want to play is inherently - and substantially - weaker than another option? That's where things kind of fall apart.

Like, going back to playing a librarian with a pistol. If you want to play an everyman, mundane, realistic sort of version of that concept, you can build that - instead of putting points into boosting your stereotypically "powerful" skills and attributes, you can put them into other, less "powerful" assets. Maybe you spend your points on a lot of Contacts, or maybe you invest in some RP-inspiring Positive Qualities, or maybe you boost your Knowledge skills - all useful and in-character choices.

But at the same time, if you want to play a "libarian with a pistol" who is actually a crackshot gunslinger adept, you totally can. You can make them the single most lethal person in your party if you want to. You can pump them up to be just as "powerful" as any other team member (within certain parameters). The choice is yours to make.

So on that level, I very much agree that "balanced" output from a chargen system isn't necessary at all - and in some cases is directly detrimental.

But on another level, there's the question of pound for pound, point for point, just how much bang you theoretically can get for your buck. Sadly, the way the game systems interact, there are certain... inequities... that crop up. For example, if you want to boost your character's Physical Attributes to their Augmented Maximums, it is far and away more efficient to do so with Cyberware rather than with Adept powers - even factoring in Essence and Magic loss for Adepts!

Ideally, no matter what your character archetype, the maximum level of "power" or utility that any character can bring to the table should be pretty closely comparable to that of any other. Now, sadly there's a lot of comparing Apples to Oranges going on, because some things just don't compare cleanly, but we're talking ideals here. So a "perfectly built" Hacker should be essentially just as "valuable" as a perfectly build "Street Samurai", et cetera.

Which is why I prefer Karma of BP to Priority - more options, and fairer "pricing". Sure, they're not as approachable as Priority is. Sure, they have prices that could use tweaked and in some cases completely reworked. But overall, as a means of taking the messy jumble of inelegant rules that is the game's systems and mechanics and using them to create a working character? They give me more options, and I know that most of the prices are going to be fair.

~Umi

troll shooter builds are better than troll melee builds in SR4 because melee in general kinda sucked in SR4 (it's better in 5th, but still not as good as shooting of course). not because trolls make better ranged characters than anyone else. and troll bows were marginally better than a standard character using an ares alpha, at best (once they got nerfed, decidedly less impressive, really).

but you don't see troll shooters because they're super-efficient in SR4. if people were looking for efficient, they'd be orks, what with getting almost the full useful benefit and paying considerably less in both BP and in other drawbacks as compared to trolls.

if you were seeing troll characters, it was probably because those people like trolls, and you could still make a character that was pretty much as good as a non-troll character in SR4.

and that's the thing. you shouldn't be punished for wanting to make a troll character. not even if it's a comparatively small punishment.

so, for example, you shouldn't be paying extra for a package of character options that reduce the amount of versatility you can have, particularly when the only supposed abuse case is a melee build... which is already inherently a worse option than ranged anyways.

Manual of good gamemastering:

"If a character breaks the game balance by min-maxing, send constantly his counter every game"

Or was that in the manual of bad gamemastering?

I care about balance so far as I care about players and characters being able to contribute something worthwhile to what's going on at the table.

Penalizing someone for wanting to play a troll - or any concept, for that matter - or forcing them into specific roles...irritates me.

My opinion is, if you want to play it, you should play it. Penalties for doing so can go out the window. Like I said, it's why I'm more interested nowadays in narratively focused games then traditional ones.

It's in whichever gamemastering manual recommends that you never provide a challenge to players by only giving them obstacles which their characters can easily overcome through brute force.

Yeah, totally: Priority makes trolls completely unfeasible -> nobody in their right minds plays trolls anymore -> Problem solved

What seemingly many people fail to realize is that it takes and average of 3 Body to negate 1 point of damage. A troll has a whopping TWO extra Body dice over an ork, in other words those 20 BP net an "advantage" that is negated when the enemy switches from standard to Ex rounds (and heaven forbid they take Ex-Ex)

As was mentioned when you talked about FATE over on RPG.net, also, the issue's probably more to do with your GM than anything else. Just like you shouldn't judge all of Shadowrun by one set of zany house rules any one GM uses, don't write off FATE (or your own ability to play FATE) just because you butted heads with one GM, once upon a time.

Who said you had to send it every time? Where is that written?

If someone builds their character to be really good at something, they deserve to feel good doing that something. But when they make a highly lopsided character, any well rounded campaign with any variety of threats at all is going to cause them problems eventually.

If you give them pure physical threats, obviously they win every time. If you give them pure magical threats, obviously they lose every time. If you give them a reasonable mix of physical and magical threats, they win some and they lose some.

There's a reason for the phrase "Geek the Mage first!". There's also a counterpart from the point of view of the Mage trying to help his allies - "Stunbolt the Bullet Sponge first!". Each quite naturally is going for the highest priority target from their own particular points of view.

~Umi

oh, i wouldn't go so far as to say that trolls are unplayable. there's enough wiggle room in shadowrun, even with the priority system in 5th with the overexpensive trolls, that you can probably make a troll that functions for almost any role... just not as well as any other meta could perform the same role. unless that role is melee tank.

it's not like choosing troll automatically makes you completely worthless. you're overpaying for the privilege of being a troll, in both straight up costs and in opportunity costs, but not by so much that you can't even function.

with that said, i agree that nobody should be punished for wanting to play a troll. they should either be a little bit less expensive, or offer more for their cost. personally, i favour reducing cost, but that's just me.

Right. Stuff like this forces the fomori to become the "standard" troll-metatype, because the price-cost-ratio is here somewhat more balanced.

Yeah, I get kind of annoyed a the number of Fomori cheese builds I see floating around, simply because they give the best bang for the buck.

It doesn't really help matters that Shadowrun Fomori don't seem to have much at all to do with the actual mythological Fomori - at least not from what I've been able to research.

~Umi

100% agree. I am quite fluent in mythology and until the fomori came out, all the given explanations were quite cool and conform with the legends. Here we have a little abberation, but i could live with that, if you create such a char. with a real good background-story.

I like Fomori too, not only from the Number Crunching but also because they're homely
One of my Chars is a 15 Year old Philippina Fomori complete with Brace & scrubby braids
(She's a close combat Adept and martial arts expert with Escrima )


with a nice Dance
Medicineman

@Machiavelli

Well, to be fair the Koro-pok-guru always struck me as a bit odd to put in Shadowrun, because they're just such a... non-unified?... legend.

I mean, props for including an obscure Ainu legend (seriously, how many folks here know all that much about the Ainu? No googling!), but they have the same problem as traditional European "elves" in that they come in a bazillion different sizes and forms - all of them small, but ranging from "short" all the way down to being mere inches tall. The only reason SR Elves really work as taller-than-human is because of Tolkien's redefining and unifying of our collective understanding of what Elves look like.

I guess for me the weird thing about Koro-pok-guru in Shadowrun is that it seems like they were included more as socio-political commentary on the Japanese treatment of the Ainu than anything else. I mean, sure that's in line with how Metahuman friction is a commentary on race relations, and certainly the very real Ainu-Yamato problems of our own world need all the attention they can get, but if feels like they could have done a better job in the books explaining what is a very foreign legend to what is a very unfamiliar playerbase.

@Medicineman

Wait... a Filipino Formori?

That's... bizarre. Fomori are a Celtic legend. Having a Fomori from the Philippines is weird - it's like having a Haruman from the Swiss Alps.

~Umi

Addendum: And while I'm at it, Harumen really ought to be called Vanara! Ha-n-uman was a specific Hindu god, while the Vanara are the race of monkey-like humanoids that he belonged to. (And I guess they technically should be shapechangers too for full accuracy, but that's probably a balance issue.)

Odd but not impossible, the cub may have a Celtic ancestor (a many generations back sailor who settled there perhaps with a local girl?) so the markers could be there just waiting to express.

Well of course that's right.



The point is somewhat different: there's two perception:

-The min-maxing PC who just made his tank-troll. He feels super-great because he just soaks everytime those minigun-shots, sniper-shots and so on. He finds it just awesome.

-The GM (well my kind of gamemastering) grows frustrated because his sense of the thrill of action is hurted: either he let's the troll win his fight the way he builded (free win, can't be hurt unless the GM takes the risk of TPK by bringing too much firepower) or he brings in the troll weakness every game (in which case the troll player is frustrated because it's unfair).


There's another option ofc: you're comfortable with it as a GM.


Honestly, I'm not. I don't want to handle something I'd struggle to keep in line with other PCs. Now I'd neither make a big fuzz about gamebalance. I mean, it's not a problem if a character is a bit weaker than another (original point of the thread).

To summarize:
OP character among average=problem. => this can disrupt my story
Weak character with a few average and a few good ones is ok. => this won't.

So appearantly, Genghis Khan had Ork Blood in him.

and yet, trolls don't actually have that major of an advantage over other metatypes when it comes to soaking damage.

oh, they definitely do have an advantage, that's for sure. 5 points, though. that's pretty danged good, too. but it's not *that* amazing.

as was said earlier (or perhaps earlier and elsewhere, if it wasn't in this thread), if trolls are getting 30 dice soak pools, then humans can just as easily get 25 dice soak pools, which may not be *as* good, but it's not exactly crap either.

Yeah, the new combat/damage/armor/soak/implants mechanics of SR4 really fucked over the Trolls soaking advantage . .