well, considering the only good abilities technomancers have that are unique are support, i'd have to say that it's going to become pretty archetypical to make a support technomancer if this keeps up, because otherwise you'd be way better off with a decker.

I think the underlined part *is* the point I'm trying to make....

It looks like most things that improve Attributes or dice pools, even non-combat ones, go up dramatically in price, and the same for upper-end initiative boosters (despite the fact that they are less powerful with SR5's initiative system).


One thing that really catches my eye with the archetypes is how light on 'ware a lot of them are. Previous editions used to have a token unaugmented character, but now they have two (the face and the bounty hunter), and the covert ops specialist, weapons specialist, and sprawl ganger are close to unaugmented; they have little in the way of 'ware, and what they do have does not really give them any kind of significant boost to their abilities. I guess unaugmented folk are more competitive, or at least the developers seem to think so.

Largely my fault there, and the Face, Bounty Hunter, Weapons Specialist, and Sprawl Ganger are all ones that I worked on, so my bias shows through. (CovOps wasn't me.) ... All of these four were designed to be "Semi-legit", able to easily pass through security checkpoints and those with cyber would be flagged, but they're non-restricted items, so shouldn't have a problem. When you need to go to a club, meet Johnson in a fancy club, or walk into a high rise, those four (Well, not so much the ganger, but) can do so without raising an alarm.

The specialist could have gotten some cyber boosting, but I stuck with some combat drugs and high Edge insted, just to mix it up a bit. She's perfectly able to go into a party unarmed, get scanned, be waved in, then gather up local weapons and be inventive, or even go barehanded and thumpify light security or grab a soft target for an extraction. More heavily-cybered people, not so much.

Had I been making a street sam, rigger, or even a decker, well, there'd have been more cyber involved, rest assured.

I guess my problem with the non-augmented archetypes is world expectations or something. To me the weapon specialist might be able to get in past security(I dig the influence skill group for this)but who is she going to mix it up with? It would take multiple combat turns to mix it up with a wage slave desk jockey, the bounty hunter is a combat archetype with mediocre combat skills and a 3 in agility. While they have a broader skill set than the street sam, they are virtually useless in a fight. And they aren't archetypes that people expect to suck in a fight. Like I said its world expectations, if the enemies dicepools are such that these guys are solid combatants in the expected encounters they work, but to me they are even with the professional rating 1 ganger&street scum, and even the rating 0 thugs aren't blown away by them. And in our games opposition like that is supposed to be blown through with little to no effort.

There secondary skill sets being at 6-8 dice is fine, its when their primary focus is meh as well that it falls apart for me. While I don't expect min/max to a PCs level 7-9 dice for combat skills is just rough for a character who expects to fight and have fighting as a bit of a focus. Average schmuck throws 6 dice to defend, you will flat out miss way too often, throw in cover and fights would get frustrating especially when you only go once a combat turn and others are going 3 times.

Maybe if the archetypes were categorized into street level, professional etc it would work for me. But when its just one big group the disparity between 17 dice guys and 7 dice guys is pretty stark. Fine for experienced players who can avoid it, but for rookies it can sour the game for a person when they pick a troll bouty hunter and someone else is playing a street sam. I'm seeing this in my current game, the GM is introducing shadowrun to his kids. The younger one took the bounty hunter as an archetype because he looked cool. He is feeling useless. We are working with him to make a improved version, but first impressions weren;t stellar.

The face doesn't bother me as much, but still 11 dice or so for the tests means he'd lose to a lot of missions contacts far too often for his specialty.

Well, the Specialist is 10 dice on longarms, before popping Edge, making her a crack sniper or good with a shottie, but tosses 9 dice on pretty much every other combat skill, from punches to pistols to machine guns. She's eclipsed in her area by dedicated one-fight style people, like the Brawling Adept, but no matter what you toss at her, she can dish out the hurts. The combat drugs keep her on par with most opposition, pretty much everything shy of a street sam.

The bounty hunter's not as good in a gunbattle, but, he's also dealing with driving skills, tracking, social skills, etc. He's not a dedicated combat monster. I really wish I could have squeezed one more Agility into him, but, his strength is in melee, where his Reach and strength give him a big edge. You'd be surprised how many people don't take unarmed combat and find themselves pummeled. Mostly he tracks down people that skip out on bail and the like, not dedicated Shadowrunners. Of course, the original bounty hunter from SR 1 had Firearms of, like, 8, so.

As I first was typing up this response, I could feel a bit of snark invading the edges of my consciousness, so I do want to respond, but I first want to be clear that this is not meant as any sort of attack on anyone. But at the same time I feel frustrated about a game I truly love and I feel the need to comment and hopefully communicate some of that frustration. I respect the hell out of the freelancers, and would hate to be a part of poisoning, even inadvertently, the love of another for this game.


Maybe it's me, but I can't quite express my incredulity at that idea. For those of us who have been at this a long time, okay, generic shadowrunner archetypes are perhaps a little boring, but I can't help but see this as a disservice to new players.

The game is called Shadowrun. The basic archetypes need to be shadowrunners. I'm all for alternative setups, but that place isn't in the basic core ruleset that exists as an introduction for new players. The book is already too intimidating for casual players, and adding confusion as to what the basic game is about on top of that is a recipe to exclude others.

As for having to revamp the character based upon the picture, it does make sense as to why the character ended up gimped like it did, but that felt more like trying to fit a square peg into a round hole or stubbornly holding on to an ideal that damns the cause. If the picture demanded a cyberlimb, don't force a character concept on the example character that wouldn't fit. The goal of the archetypes should be to establish character expectations, which includes power levels. By prioritizing the character's story at the expense of mechanical viability, especially when there's little in the way of explanation of the character's story, is again, going to make things harder for new players. Further, it's great that there exists a rational for the choices made, but the reader can't make assumptions about the author's intent without any support from the text.

Here's the thing, I honestly don't think you (or any of the other freelancers) did anything wrong. There's a lot of love for the game, and that shows through to me. But I feel like there's no one stepping back with a unifying vision enough to tell anyone no and enforce people to be on the same page. There's a lot of people who love the game, but they're all doing their own thing and from my impressions of the writing, there's little in the way of synthesis and communication. Which ends up with inconsistencies when the whole thing is brought together.

Whether it's the artist and the archetype concept mismatch, the matrix wireless bonus debacle, the efforts at errata, or even to bring it back to the trolls: between the idea to nerf the 30 soak troll and whoever did the cyberware, there's a lot of mismatches that undermine the cohesiveness of the whole. And that's not the freelancers' job.

It just feels like whoever is ostensibly in charge of the line as a whole is either inept or just doesn't care. I'm not sure which is worse.

There is no ambiguity - Jason Hardy is the man to lay the blame upon. He is the Line Developer.

I think perhaps there has been some confusion, or maybe I am misreading this.



Note, he is referring to that's archetype main job being chasing down the average joe who skips out on bail, not career criminals which can describe many Shadowrunners pretty accurately.
You rarely see a Bounty hunter going after a Yak Boss or someone high up in a mafia family normally. Likewise, those runners who make that big of a splash are usually dealt with by the injured corp rather than having a bounty on their head.

It is not to say he never has a bounty on a runner, but their main contracts are for far more mundane sorts. Like was mentioned in earlier posts, they are 'semi-legi' and their skill mix reflects this. He just now brings that same skill set with him into the Shadows.

I think the worst offender in this regard is the smuggler, with the bounty hunter a close second. Archetypes should represent roles in the standard shadowrunnner team, not alternative occupations people might have instead of shadowrunning.

A background saying the character works on the side is fine. But if the core concept of the character is that he doesn't do shadowruns but rather races his T-Bird across the Aztlan border, how am I supposed to integrate him in the standard starter mission? The bounty hunter isn't as bad because it at least has a possible overlap with "find person X" scenarios -- but only those.


And as fate would have it, both of those archetypes happen to be trolls. So put another entry on the list, they get the bad archetypes

I miss the Rockerboy/gal archetype.







-k

There've always been archetypes that aren't traditional Shadowrunners in the core books as a way of showing game diversity.

The 1st edition Detective, Rocker, and Tribesman, for example, would all clash with a "serious Shadowrun team" but are there from day one, book one. If every archetype was a long coated figure in mirrorshades and Stealth 6, it'd be a greater disservice to the playerbase, IMHO. MOST of the archetypes can be plucked out of teh book and dropped into a game (With some fixes for some, like the infamous Street Sam), while a few examples need to be there to show that you can play other styles.

Heck, even D&D has the Monk.

Indeed... I had one for SR4. Never really got to play him, but he looked pretty awesome, at least.

With cyberhair, how could they go wrong?

Indeed... Style over Substance every time.

I don't have any specific reasons to lay my frustrations at Hardy's feet other than the fact he is the Line Dev. I don't know what goes on behind the curtain, and all I have is my feelings, impressions, and interpretations, which could well be wrong. It's hard for me to leap from "it looks like this is Hardy's fault" to "It's all his fault! Get the pitchforks and torches!"
Sengir's approach is similar to mine, and maybe his post might dispel some of that confusion.

To try again, Shadowrun, at it's core, has a Johnson hire a group of criminals to do something illegal. Yes there should be alternatives to that basic conceit, but the core book that is explaining the concept to new players shouldn't overcomplicate with advanced concepts when the new player doesn't even understand the cliches. The archetypes should be characters a new player could grab and sit down immediately in a basic game with no extra effort.

As Sengir points out, the Smuggler and to a somewhat lesser extent the Bounty Hunter are harder to plop down in the middle of a standard run unless that standard run specifically addresses that character's niche. If the run doesn't deal with that character's niche, it adds additional, unnecessary, hoops to jump through. At worst can create a dissonance if the player takes wholeheartedly to the niche and says "this has nothing to do with smuggling, why is my character sticking around?" Further, every archetype should be a criminal, not "semi-legal." At one point in the past, sure, they were a part of the normal society, hell the fallen salariman is a trope of cyberpunk and I'm sad there isn't one there, but at the point where the new player picks up the archetype to play, they should fit easily within the default gameplay. Which is a criminal who, as the saying goes, shoots people in the face for money.
The archetypes are not the place to show game diversity. You have to get to what function do the archetypes perform for the game system: they're essentially crutches for new players to jump directly into the game, either conceptually or literally by copying their character and stats. This is not the place for diversity. Diversity is for players who already have the game basics under their belt, but if it's there at all, on each archetype there could be another box with alternative ideas on the theme of the archetype, or a couple pages dedicated to these alternatives and diversities at the end of character creation. Good design does not throw extra options at players who don't understand their current options as it is.

And I gotta poke at the "serious Shadowrun team" assumption. The mirrorshades/pink mohawk continuum is completely separate from their ability to be criminals who shoot people in the face for money. A charismatic anarchist rocker is just a pink mohawk face, while a detective could easily be a more mirrorshades face. The important aspect should be being a criminal who shoots people in the face for money. If you want to get away from the core conceit of the game, I'm there with you, but the book you give to newbies to get a handle on the basics is not the place for it. Each archetype should be an exemplar character type, either in kind or function, and the variations on those themes should be where the diversity comes in, if at all.

What I'd really like is a set of four books. One focusing on Pink Mohawks, one with nothing but Mirrorshades, one for the small scope of a gritty gutterpunk style clutching for small victories, and one more with an epic scope of jet set runners on world spanning adventures. Shadowrun can support all of these styles, but trying to give options for each of them in the name of diversity without devoting the page count to explaining why the diversity exists, just confuses new players.

Which is also startlingly close to something that's been pitched in the past by Wak and I.

+1

HougH!
Medicineman

Ahh that does makes more sense. Thank you



Strongly agree, though sadly I expect there will be those in some corners who will be the rage ranting on each swearing the Pink Mohawk book isn't Pink enough or that the MirrorShades could have offered even more stealth options no matter what you put in it.

But you can not please some people, so I do hope this might be something that could be done as it would help some GMs better shape their campaign the way they may want to go.

That doesn't make it a better idea, it just gives precedence to unfitting archetypes being removed. Or at least moved into an alternate campaign book like Missions


Rockers and smugglers are not other play styles (other than mirrorshades). They are a wholly different scenarios from the default of doing the eponymous runs. Shadowrun is the game where you play a team of career criminals hired "when the megacorps want something done but they don't want to dirty their hands" (1st Ed back cover), and that is what the archetypes in the core book should represent.

Alternate campaigns from wageslaves to T-bird smugglers are fine, but they are not the core of the game and the characters for them are not the archetypical PCs.

The smuggler shouldn't really struggle to find a "niche" on a shadowrunning team; he is basically a wheelman, the guy who fires vehicular weapons at the opposition and drives the getaway car. Like the SR4 version, his "smuggling" mainly consists of driving real fast from Point A to Point B with contraband in the trunk.

perhaps a different way of saying what i think others are trying to say:

it's fine to have someone who's background is that they were a smuggler, so long as they are currently some form of effective shadowrunner. if instead of just making a generic rigger, you want a rigger who started off with smuggling and has since switched careers to being a shadowrunner, i doubt anyone would have a problem with that. they could have appropriate knowledge skills, contacts, and even some gear (like smuggling compartments in their cyberware, and their vehicles could have a bit more focus on aerial scouting and ECM rather than, say, drones designed to crawl through HVAC systems).

but if they're being presented as an archetype for a shadowrun character, they should now be a shadowrunner, even if they used to be a smuggler or a detective or even a rocker.

Is it just me, or does it seem a little unreasonable and extremely limiting to insist that the scope of the core book be restricted to one and only one type of campaign? The scope of the game is certainly larger than that, and I'd argue that the core book needs to be reflective of that.

I'm still unpacking so i can't check, but didn;t the rocker have a description on why they were in the shadows now. It as hey I'm a rocker, and I rock...


Anyways that bothers me less than the mechanics. Or as I said if you are going to have mechanically crap archetype, normal archetypes, somewhat optmized archetypes they should be labeled things like street level, experienced runner, prime runner. While the bounty hunter can track people down to some degree, I'd almost give even money on a standard ganger taking him out instead of getting taken down. Which is totally awesome for the right campaign.

Side note Wak, you seem to really like skills A.

I take it a lot myself, but all 3 of the listed archetypes have it.

My last SR4 character was one, made him a mystic adept and he was freaking awesome. Hell of a face and had a decent bag of tricks.

if it actually sat down and discussed "here are some ideas of what kind of campaign you could play" apart from just spending basically the entire book talking about career criminals, it could.

a couple of archetypes do not a type of campaign make.

as it stands, we have a book that basically only really discusses the campaign where you're professional criminals for hire with a heavy focus on corporate espionage, and then we have random elements from a different sort of campaign just kinda jammed in the middle for no good reason.

again, i don't think anyone is upset about the idea that the character was something else before becoming a shadowrunner, it's just a matter of by the time they're presented to us in the book that only really discusses shadowrunner focused campaigns, they should have made the transition to becoming a shadowrunner.

But that's basically what the smuggler is. He has piloting skills and gunnery, a rating: 2 control rig, an armed bike and helicopter, and a big van for the whole team to pile into. He is the archetypical wheelman. He is only missing a few drones, but that is only because, to keep the archetypes a bit simpler, they tend to have separate drone rigger and vehicle rigger archetypes (they did that for SR4, too).


The bounty hunter, well, he might run into more problems. He is an unaugmented generalist, and that remains a choice that the system does not support well. A shame, because the character has a great, organic feel to it. He would still make a great contact. But while there is less of a divide between augmented and non-augmented, there is actually less of the slack that lets you play quirky, street level characters. Because the grunts are tougher. When the low end of the threat scale starts at 6 dice for attack and defense, 8 or 9 dice to attack with is a very thin margin.

Maybe the overall power level is supposed to be lowered, to where a thug is a challenge for the average shadowrunner, and you need to be a street samurai or a brawling adept to have a chance against two or more of them.

But in that case, the GM needs to make sure that non-combat skills get a chance to shine. If the sprawl ganger and the bounty hunter don't get opportunities to use their wide array of skills, then the street samurai and his cyberarms of awesome will seem to really overshadow them.

Because make no mistake, despite all the nerfings, you can still make brutal characters. Want to start out with an Agility of 12, or a Reaction of 12, or 12 points' worth of adept powers? It is doable.

What are the goals of a core rpg book? To my mind they are: to enable, without any other books or information, a group to play the game and to introduce new players to the game, and hopefully hook them such that they'll buy more books and become further invested in the game.

A core book that doesn't limit the scope of the game, does help support the first goal, but utterly fails at the second. SR's core book is already almost 500 pages as it is. It's a massive and intimidating tome to new players and I've found their first reaction is somewhere along the lines of "yeah, right."If the book doesn't limit it's scope to career criminals hired by a Johnson to shoot people in the face for money and instead included all of the possible advanced permutations of the hugely open and complex world, with an in game history of over a quarter century... it would be unpublishable.

Frankly SR is just this side of a kitchen sink setting. There's no possible way to do proper justice to all of the different playstyles that are available within SR. Each of them should get their own word count to adequately explain the hows and whys of that playstyle, how to affect that playstyle and how to implement them in your game. And for me, I find it unreasonable to dedicate word count to advanced options in a book that should be digestible to someone without any background in Shadowrun at all, especially in a book that's already as big as it is. Which is why I'd like a set of alternative books I mentioned before, maybe with other ideas, because I'm sure the four I named were hardly conclusive, but these alternative types of campaigns can then get their proper word count that they deserve, and where you don't have to worry about new players who don't even understand what a Mr. Johnson does, or why he's in Seattle.

The alternative, if not dedicating the adequate word count but still shoehorning in the alternative campaigns, leads to unsupported vestigial appendages that don't serve the advanced player or alternatively, serves to confuse the new player when he sits down and sees the smuggler which causes cognitive dissonance when he/she exclaims, "I thought the GM said this was a heist game?" If the alternatives are in the corebook, they should be limited to sidebars at best. You don't run before you can walk, and adding all the doodads and options to a new player can cause the open world paralysis similar to what's experienced in games like GTA or Skyrim. When you heap a ton of options on a new player, a common response is just "nope," and we lose a potential fan.

Also Glyph, thanks for the perspective on the Smuggler. I think I would have saved a lot of brain sweat if they just named the entry "Vehicle Rigger" instead of Smuggler.

I am thinking about trying to build another close combat monstrosity of a Troll and i stumbled upon the WH40K Thunder-Hammers swung around . .
Now i don't want to use electricity or whatever, but i am thinking: Make a huge Hammer(human sized. Sized like a human, not sized for a human obviously) and make it out of the hardest most resilent stuff available for making stuff out of . . And then attach a claymore mine to the blunt end of the hammer. TECHNICALLY, with the target being a squishy usually, the squishy should not have a barrier rating but the hammer could/should so the claymore WOULD be getting the chunky salsa from the hammer and thus red mist pretty much anything organic hit by this . . right? O.o

I do! And there're many times when I was grumbling that Skills A didn't give me enough skill points. I really like skills.

I don't think I went under Skills C on the archetypes I did. (For the record, those were Street Shaman, Brawling Adept, Weapons Specialist, Face, Technomancer, Sprawl Ganger, and Bounty Hunter.)

Indeed... you can get really varied with a Rocker. Mine was Augmented (with a Replacement Cyberarm ala Johnny Silverhand). He was primarily a Face in the Shadows.

I agree...
Skills are the important part of the character, and there are never enough points for them, generally. I can make do, if I have to, but that comes at the expense of the concept, and that annoys me.

For what it is worth... I like the archetypes you developed.

I feel like Skills are (fairly) okay in SR5, but stats are just friggin' anemic. I never have the stat points for whatever character I'm trying to make. Ever. Always gotta dump-stat something, and try to make up for it later, and bleargh. Stats, man. I feel like the attribute column could just get a +3 or a +4 across the board, and things wouldn't be broken.

Ever wonder why it's called the core book? And the pre-built characters not simply labeled as that, but as shadowrunner archetypes?

Yeah, I can see that. It is quite frustrating sometimes. Which is why I don't go below "C" pick for Stats. "C" pick gives you average stats across the board. However, I tend to prefer "B" pick Stats, so you can have a bit of flex. "A" pick almost always goes to Skills.

Not once have I ever wondered that. I LIKE the diversity of the archetypes in the Core Book. I often wish they could squeeze a few more in.

Huh. Meanwhile, I'm fine with stats and twitchy on the skill side of things.

...

You wanna be Willis or Arnold?

You mean John McLane or John Matrix ,right ?

HokaHey
Medicineman

Ex Presidential Candidate* Arnold w/ Leonization

*thanks to the passing of the 29th amendment in SR—which removed Presidential term limits–also removed the prohibition on foreign-born nationals .

Aaaaactually I meant Mr Drummand's adopted kids. DIfferent Strokes and all that.

E for effort, tho!

+1.

I've never once made a character who's job was to sit passively outside the building waiting for the rest of the team to do a job. that's a fine NPC, but it's a lousy character archetype.

So 9 Dice is not good enough for a starting character outside of his main ability? The Smuggler archetype would throw 9 Dice with a Smartlink Enabled Weapon. Looks acceptable to me.

That was *the* build for RIggers in 1st and most of 2nd edition. RIggers where wheelmen whose primary job was to keep teh van warm for when everything went sideways and they ha dto hotfoot it out of there.

Later, they got drones, so teh Rigger could participate more, but, old school riggers *never* left teh van.

would you bring a regular ganger with you on a shadowrun? because that's a pretty comparable dice pool.

(also, would you actually go on a shadowrun with a wireless enabled smartgun/link? because otherwise it's not adding any dice at all).

I dunno, I see Missions characters with dice pools in combat abilities of 9-12 all the time.

Then again, I see some folks with 14-18 as well.




-k

I think it all depends on whether combat is your primary or your secondary specialty, and how much focus or resources the character has invested in it. 9-12 at least pulls away from the basic grunts, and mid to high teens has always been a respectable dice pool.

Trolls have less of a hit to their Agility, since you can hard max one Attribute without the balloon cost of SR4, and augmented maximums are a straight +4 instead of (Attribute x 1.5). Either a cyberarm, or an adept's improved attribute ability, or used muscle replacement/toner can get you +3, so it is not hard to start out with an Agility of 8 for a troll, 9 if you get exceptional attribute. Trolls may be geared more towards the tank end, but they don't have to be clumsy oafs. My biggest problem with the Tank archetype is that Agility of 2, which is a grating weakness on a build that truly is focused on combat. It's good to be able to take a beating, but it's also good to be able to dish one out.

Skills are curious in the archetypes. Despite some restrictions on them being loosened, and the rating descriptions being revised to reflect the new spread from 1 to 12, it doesn't show that much. Look at the old SR3 archetypes, and how many rating: 6 skills the covert ops specialist had. The SR5 archetypes, by contrast, look more like SR4 archetypes, skill rating-wise.

I'm reminded of a thing!

Troll speed.

Back in the day, Trolls were slower than humans, the idea being that their bulk was a problem. Later, they sped up, the idea being that they had long legs as part of their extreme height and, thus, despite their lower "hustle" stats, they could keep pace.

In 4th, they were sprinting WAY faster than humans, and I *think* they did in 3rd as well, but I confess to not having eyed that particular rule for a bit.

For 5th, they were slowed back down, figuring that the higher bulk and short legs relative to their size should keep them a bit sluggish again. (Trolls should have legs about the same size as a human's, but a far, far larger torso and longer arms.)

In SR3 Trolls took a hit to the Quickness Stat which determined how fast you could go running, but had the same QCKx3 running multiplier as humans, orks and elves.
Dorfs on the other hand did NOT take a hit to Quickness, but had only QCKx2 as their running speed, so even though the stumpies were technically quicker, they fell behind in a foot race very fast. Or slow. However you wanna look at it i guess . .

Wait, like D&D core books are limited to dungeon crawling and slaying dragons?

Seriously, it's called *Shadowrun* for a reason. It's about Shadowrunners, doing Shadowruns. You can easily adapt the setting to do something else, but that's the core of the game. You can easily hack D&D into social intrigue, but it's not what the game was writ ten for.