I haven't come up with a lot of information about making effective characters. I know this stuff is out there, but I'm coming up mostly empty handed. I'm pretty good at ripping a system apart and figuring it out but I know people have done it already.

I know optimization is a dirty word in a lot of gaming circles, here's the thing: You can optimize anything. No one wants to show up to the table with a great character concept and a terrible execution; spending the evening bored because you can't actually do anything is awful.

So I'm throwing this to you guys, is there already a guide somewhere about making a good character in general? I've seen people talking about specific archetypes but not much about character building in general. If not would the more experienced mind putting something together or just posting what they think is important to keep in mind? I'll gleefully spread it hither and yon for anyone who needs basic help character building.

If BP Generation:
1. Softmax attributes you care about, leave others at a lower value and raise during play.
2. If Technomancer: Start with Resonance 6 and Complex Forms at 6. Raising them with Karma is a ripoff.
3. If Magician: Start with bonded Foci. Binding them with Karma is a ripoff.
4. Get a skill at rating 6.
5. Invest the maximum amount of points into attributes unless you absolutely know what you are doing. You'll never get them this cheap again.
6. Buy Specializations during play with Karma.

General hints:
1. Dicepool sizes matter. Despite what the books say, Skills alone do not contribute much. A Skill 7 "world class" shooter with Agility 4 gets outclassed by a generic Streetsam with Agility 8, a "professional" skill of 4 and a reflex recorder. Or, to give a more extreme example: Ball the Hacker is an average dude with his Agility 3, "the Streetsam forced me to go to a shooting range" Pistols skill 2 with a specialization, a smartlink and a R2 Tacnet. Suddenly, this guy rolls 11 dice for pistols with minimal investment.
2. Recommended Dicepools (assuming "Missions" level difficulty): Primary area of expertise 15+, Secondary areas of expertise 12+, All other essentials 8+

Streetsams (Mundane combat characters with 'ware):
1. Initiative is important. 3 IPs are the standard of most Sams, and 2 IPs are the bare minimum. An Initiative DP of 12+ is highly recommended.
2. Agility, Reaction and Intuition are your most important attributes. Softmax/augment them at your discretion.
3. For a secondary combatant (e.g. Face, Rigger, Hacker), a cost effective way to get a good dicepool is to get a single obvious cyberarm with Agility customized to natural maximum and a +3 Enhancement. Pair it with a one-handed weapon of choice and you're golden.
4. For a 4% Essence discount on Cyberware, get it as "Used Alphaware". Same price, 96% of Essence costs.

Hackers:
1. Get dicepool bonuses to Logic based skill checks (aka your hacking skills). Examples include PuSHed, which is cheap for what it does.
2. Cheapest Chargen comlink for a hacker is the Novatech Airware upgraded to R5. Clocks in at ~6k.
3. If you can only start with R5 programs (due to the comlink) get "Eurosoft Clavicula" instead of Encrypt/Decrypt.

Technomancers:
1. Threading is your friend. Get a high dicepool for it, and consider Codeslinger and Analytical Mind.
2. Start with Resonance 6 and CFs at 6 when using BP gen.

Adepts:
1. Get ware, particularly to augment attributes. The Adept powers for it are ridiculously overpriced. Sacrificing a single Essence point is often a smart investment. An example would be Biocompatilibity(Cyberware), R3 Tailored Pheromones+Alphaware Cyberarm for Faces.
2. Attribute Boost(Body) is a good way to increase your survivability.
3. Generally speaking, ware usually does the same thing cheaper except for special stuff that only Adepts get. For optimal mechanical results, get those Adept exclusive powers while using ware to get the rest.

Mages:
1. Essential Spells: Stunbolt/Ball (low drain, oneshots most targets), Increase Reflexes (cast it at F5. Same drain as F4, but harder to counterspell), Heal, Mind Probe (Because most DMs tend to screw Faces. Besides, who wants to RP actual interrogations anyway?), Levitation (it's Telekinesis+Flight!), Control Thoughts (Mind Control is an elegant way to solve a lot of issues), Improved Invisibility. Rest is dependent on personal taste, but I like Detect hostile Intent, Physical Mask and Alter Memory.
2. Your essential skills are Spellcasting, Counterspelling, Summoning, Binding. Banishing is highly risky and can be accomplished just as easily with a stunbolt, and Ritual Magic depends a lot on having additional mages on your team.
3. If allowed, Possession based magic with Guardian and Task spirits is made of pure distilled win.

That should cover most of the basics.

..to me tone of the game is also main factor, when creating charc.
sneaky,street survival (gangers),mercenaries,etc..
What country ( how they look metahumans,magic,cyber)
country/city alone changes lot of skill selection (Imperial Japan,Australia,Seattle,Chicago)

Quick post:

4.1: Aptitude IS useful. It allows a skill at 7 and 5, as it does not trigger either of the limits on skills. (7 is neither six, nor two at 5, so it flies). Works in karmagen too.
7: being Incompetent at a skill is a trap. Avoid it at all costs. Uncouth screws you over three times as hard as you think it does, because you can't roll to resist any social skills. This includes asking for better pay on a mission, or any kind of persuasion or intimidation. Yes, its that bad.

General hints:
3: Judge competence not by what level your skill is, but how often you're going to critfail. Also leave room for situational penalties. Odd numbers more beneficial. 1-3? Gonna critclitch a LOT. 5? Glitches still common. 7 is approaching regular levels of competence.

Street Sams:
5: Stacking cyberlimb armor is amazing, but can quickly get into 'the gm will put his foot down' territory.
6: While you CAN get riduculous damage resistance rolls, each hit on the defense test is worth 3 hits(on average) on the soak test. The better defense is to not get hit, but rolling near twenty dice to not die has its merit too.

Hackers, Riggers:
2.1: If you're allowed War! the battle buddy basic is also good.
4: You can use Hardware to make things at half cost by buying parts and doing DIY assembly. Thanks to arsenal, this includes modifications. Applied properly, this can stretch your cash out significantly. (anniversary page 227 for reference)
5: A response six chip is only 8k, 4k @ availability 16. Sometimes, its cheaper to pre-plan(instead of buying all new) for rating 6 programs and eat the Degredation(Response limits System limits Program Rating.) until you can pop the new chip in.
6: Program Options raise availability. Common Use programs have -. Putting Ergonomic on all common use saves a lot of bookkeeping hastle, even for non-hackers. Hacking programs have 2*rating availability, meaning you have a choice between 5+options or 6 and no options.

Riggers:
1: Reality Filter is the worst program, unless you're a rigger. +1 response is a big deal for drones.
2: Dodge works in vehicles. if you plan on fighting both on foot and in car, consider taking this over Gymdodge.
3: the rules for changing sensor ratings are in the arsenal errata. This WILL save you headache.
4: Pilots don't stop getting Actions when you jump into them. Have them run your sensors for you.
5: Command is amazing.

Technomancers:
3: Sometimes a point of ware is worth loss of essence, if you gain more than you lose. Technomancers benefit from most hacker augmentations.
4: A simsense booster cyberware works for technos, but you can't get above 4 matrix passes without the advanced echo.
6: Unwired is pretty much mandatory for making technomancers interesting. The entire resonance section for characters is golden.
7: Joining a technomancer network costs 0 karma and gives you 20% off submersion costs. Start with one as a group contact(runner's companion) so they don't betray you later.
8: helping a free sprite grow counts as a submersion task, giving you 20% off submersion costs and stacks with 7 for 40% off. Start with one as a Contact, and consider a Resonance Bond. Echo Bonds in particular are amazing. Being able to grab Sprite powers for yourself is amazing.
9: You start with a biofeedback complex form equal to charisma. However, it is a still a -complex form-. Many people forget you can thread it up.

Adepts
2.1: Never buy more than a single point of Attribute Boost. The drain goes up but the benefit doesn't scale appropriately.

Mages:
4: Ware is worth considering. Trauma Dampers effectively knock 1 stun off of all your drain, and cybereyes can nullify casting penalties due to lighting. A logic tradition mage with 9 logic is frightening.
5: The street magic spell design rules are worth looking into. The ability to change elemental effects or limit buff spells to self only for less drain can be handy.
6: Long-term binding for a year is CHEAP for what you get. If you use a spirit regularly, consider making it official @ 1 karma/force.

Mystic Adepts:
1: Borrow Sense line of spells on a watcher spirit lets you see the astral without buying the astral perception power. Since their duration is in Hours, not Services, it also lets you remote control them, which cuts down on Watcher Derp significantly.
2: Ignore what the FAQ says about splitting magic. Its a holdover from 4th edition, and wasn't deleted when the rules regarding it were improved in Anniversay Edition. Just use the 4A book. Note that this makes mystic adepts a lot less bad.
3: Sometimes its worth the extra 5 points to get Counterspelling.

Runner's Companion:
1: the advanced lifestyles in runner's companion can help ANYone out.
2: Its possible to start with a luxury lifestyle's starting paycheck for dirt cheap via Hotels in the same chapter. It lets you pay by the day, thus cutting the insurmountable cost of a luxury lifestyle by 30 or so. Your Gm may hate you though.
3: The advanced/group contact rules rule. They are also pretty simple and easy to grasp.

Wow, thanks for the quick and detailed replies. This is great.

regarding the point about technomancer BP efficiency and complex forms:

it is so efficient to buy complex forms with BP that it is actually cost efficient to buy your logic to 6, so that you can buy 2 more complex forms to 6.

Dice pools are the main barometer of character effectiveness. Shadowrun is a game with lots and lots of situational modifiers, so a high dice pool is only that high in optimal conditions. Give yourself enough slack that you can shoot someone in dim light with glare while you are running, moderately wounded, lightly stunned, they are behind cover, and it is raining.

The two biggest boosts to dice pools are augmentations and magic, so use them. Some augmentations/magic improve your Attributes, some of them improve your skills, and some of them give a bonus to your dice pool. This is what separates shadowrunners from ordinary metahumanity.

A few examples:

A street samurai is a gunslinger type, so he starts out with a soft-maxed Agility of 5 and takes his one skill of 6 in pistols, specializing in semi-automatics. That's 13 dice, a nice dice pool, but let's improve it now. Muscle toner: 4 bought with the restricted gear quality raises Agility to 9. A reflex recorder raises the pistols skill to 7. A smartlink for his cybereyes, and a smartlink (and a skinlink, so it is not hackable) for his pistol give him another 2 dice. So now his dice pool is 20, and he is not even an elf or an adept, nor has he taken some of the pricier options such as aptitude: pistols, exceptional Attribute, or even hard-maxing his Agility.

One important thing to note is that this dice pool did not have a high opportunity cost. The character can have acceptable Attributes other than Agility, can get plenty of other skills, and has not used a lot of nuyen in resources. Shadowrun subtly discourages super-high dice pools by making the last points extra expensive. Getting aptitude: pistols, exceptional Attribute: Agility, and starting out with a base Agility of 7 and a base skill of 7 would raise the dice pool to 23, but it would also cost an additional 73 build points. Magic and augmentation, by contrast, tend to give the cheapest, easiest bonuses. As they should, in a game with transhumanist themes and super-spy characters.

Another example would be an adept face. This is an elf, so Charisma is soft-maxed at 7. Skill-wise, the Influence skill group is taken at rating: 4. Normally skill groups are a bad idea, since it puts you 4 dice behind a skill of 6 plus a specialization. But it is a good buy for a face because 1) all of the skills in the skill group are important ones for a face to have, 2) it is one of the skill groups with 4 skills, making it extra cost-effective, and 3) for social skills, you can get most of your dice from various dice pool modifiers. So make this guy an adept, and get kinesics: 3 and commanding voice. Add tailored pheromones, a vocal range enhancer, and minor cosmetic surgery for 4-6 more dice. Add the first impression quality, and once more you are at 20 dice or so, and that was far from an exhaustive list of the options that faces have to boost their dice pools. But the point is, you can get decent dice pools relatively cheaply.

One last tangent, about adepts. They tried to give them a separate niche from street samurai, but what that means in actual practice is that adepts can spend power points for things that are cheaper for adepts, like critical strike, or unique to them, like killing hands, and use the cheap boost of bioware for improving initiative or Attributes, which is much more expensive using power points. The other advantage adepts with bioware have, as you can see from the face example, is that the bonuses from magic and augmentation are often different enough to allow them to stack. So you can get kinesics and tailored pheromones, or bone density augmentation and critical strike.

All I can say is that these folks have done it way better than I could have.

I find that hard to believe. I did the math on Bionode vs Commlink at one point, and bionodes are literally 100 times as expensive.

commlinks don't let you thread psychotropic effects into your attack CF, or let you dodge attacks entirely with a shield CF, or give you rating 12+ stealth programs.

it is cheaper to be a hacker than to be a technomancer, yes.

that doesn't change the fact that if you're going to be a technomancer, it is actually efficient to hard max your logic just so that you can buy an extra 2 complex forms at rating 6.

in SR4, you have the option of being the ridiculously powerful hacker, at the expense of effectiveness in basically every other area (ie be a technomancer), or being quite good at hacking, and still having room left to add other stuff in.

if you want to make a combat hacker, buy a commlink. if you want to be the absolute best hacker you can possibly be and you don't care what else you have to give up to get there, be a technomancer.

(oh, one other piece of advice for technomancers: it will help quite a bit to be human. yes, yes, i know, other races get attribute bonuses, blah blah blah... the simple fact of the matter is, you are so starved for BP that spending 0 on race is a huge difference to how much you have to spend elsewhere. you're going to suck in the meatworld no matter what you do, so there's not much point in being an ork or troll, and neither dwarf or elf add *that* much - yes, i know elf looks good with the +2 charisma, but honestly, do you really *need* more than 5-6 registered sprites + 1 compiled sprite that badly?)

Can I have details on that ?

There are 3 melee skills (unarmed, blunt, blade), and not many characters will use all 3 of them. Why not get Incompetent-blade if you have the "killing hands" adept power and/or ncie blunt skill/weapons ? Or Incompetent blunt if you have shock gloves or the adept power giving elemental fists (reducing the stun baton advantage) ?
Even if the 3 firearms skills are different, being incompetent with automatics may not really matter if you have nice skills in both pistols (for low encumbrance/range) and longarms (getting versatility with shotguns and snipers) ?

Probably because you can neither posses nor default on the skill in question (pg. 95 SR4A). That means, no matter how much you may need to use the skill in a pinch, you can't. At all. So lets say you took it in Blades. There you are with some team mate tangled in his parachute, hanging from a tree (it can happen) with the guards closing in. You draw your buddies knife and then stare blankly at it cuz you have no idea how to use the thing. So either you come up with some other way to remove the parachute or you leave your buddy to his fate.
Or here is case that actually came up in our game. Samurai with this quality in Blades gets entangled by an awakened vine. Tried to get free with a knife. But of course he can't use the thing. So he was stuck, getting his arm slowly strangled until his friends got up the tree he was in and freed him. If he had just not had the skill rather than being incompetent, he could have defaulted on the skill to get free.
Remember, this should be only available for skills that will come up in game. So these sort of situations will come up. And then you will be screwed. It is a trap. Not worth the few build points it offers. It closes off options. Always a bad thing.

Incompetent also adds Notoriety, which may bite you in the arse later on. Also, a lot of DMs will go out of their way to force you into a situation where using the Incompetent skill would be essential.

..for Street Samurai one decent choice for Incompetent would be Hacking..

If your DM allows that, more power to you. While you're at it, take the Tasking, Sorcery and Conjuring skills for Incompetent, will you?

..would you look at 4a BBB example charc. of Street Samurai...

The example characters have always been mechanically flawless and beyond reproach

...giving Covert ops. spec w/ Body 2 Chameleon Suit and Armor Jacket...righhht...

Personally i would take Scorched-quality, not Incompetent..

Remember, incompetent means you are treated as "unaware" in the skill in question. A street samurai incompetent in hacking would consider talk about hackers to be tall tales, and scoff at the people telling him to skinlink his gun's smartlink. That is part of the reason I don't like the flaw - it can create some jarring discontinuities, character-wise. And it is even more ludicrous when the character has a similar skill at a high rating - you can shoot an SMG like a pro, but when someone points a shotgun at you, you say "What's that thing?"

I had a whole rant about the SR4 covert ops specialist. In every edition, there are some of them that are relatively error-free and playable, and some of them that... aren't.

I can certainly see how Incompetent would be a horrible, horrible trap. What else?

What qualities:
Aren't as good as they seem?
Are overpriced?
Will wreck your character?

Uncouth, uneducated, and infirm all fall under this category. They make you unaware in a whole area of skills, with the option to get those skills, at double price, later. No other character-wreckers that I can think of, but positive and negative qualities run all up and down the scale in bang for the buck.

From a metagaming point of view, you want to avoid setting off your GM's pet peeves. Sometimes something is considered too good, or too little of a drawback, and the GM's ire is drawn down upon the offender. Sensitive system, for example, is great for a mage or technomancer who avoids implants, or an adept who only has bioware. It is 15 points for a lateral limitation that won't matter that much for certain builds. It drives some GMs crazy, though, so it's not worth it if it will only result in the bad guys forcibly implanting cyberware into your character.

Some SURGE qualities can get a bad reaction from the GM. Metagenetic improvement: Attribute is one (blatantly superior to exceptional Attribute, but if you take it, the GM will suspect you of getting SURGE solely for min-maxing reasons, especially in your other SURGE qualities are also things that are not cosmetically obvious - allergy to silver, etc.). Astral hazing is another one. It is like having a permanent infusion of Sideways - it may have a lot of drawbacks, but it comes with some big advantages, too.

Amnesia is a flaw you should only take if you really trust your GM, since letting him write your character's background (and stats, for the higher-point one) is giving him a lot of power over that character.

I don't see how Amnesiac is plausible at all. You have no memory, and may not even know what you're capable of doing, and people are going to put their lives in your hands?

In the way of positive qualities, the Spell/Spirit Knack & Astral Sight qualities I'd call traps. You get an un-raisable Magic of 1 which'll disappear as soon as your Essence drops below the next whole number.

If you really want to start with a magical seer of some kind, at the very least start with the Adept quality and the Astral Perception power. Costs just the same as the Astral Sight quality, but you can improve yourself beyond a single Initiation and do more with weapon foci than just use them in astral combat.

The Spell/Spirit Knack grants you a single spell you can cast, or a spirit you can summon. You're a one-trick pony that can't grow in power in this regard, and spells & spirits will never be above the low, low level of Force 2 (so if your spell knack is Flamethrower, you'll take 4P drain for maybe 4P fire damage that many opponents will likely be able to avoid). Oh, while you can learn Counterspelling, or the less useful skill of Banishing, these will only apply to that singular spell you can cast or spirit you can summon (so no counterspelling Stunbolts if your knack is Flamethrower). You'd be better off spending an additional 5 BP for Mystic Adept at least (if not 10 BP more for Magician), and going from there.

Bulldog had Uneducated and it really only came up as a negative in the game because I wanted it to from the get-go. It's all about how you design and play the character. The concept was a spike baby that grew up on the streets to be the Orksploitation poster child. He didn't even speak real English, he only spoke English(Streetspeak). It didn't take very long for the others on the team to realize that this wasn't the guy to invite into a deep philosophical debate.

That said, he was absolutely an asset in every single adventure because he was just aggressive and dumb enough to do just about anything that wasn't patently idiotic (uneducated, not stupid). Great example, the team had been detained and stripped of their day-to-day gear. No biggie because we were all experienced players so we had go bags, spare weapons, vehicles, and the like seeded all over the place. What they didn't have was a commlink to start the contacts getting it all ready to roll. Bulldog, being the thug, hears the Occult Investigator whining and suddenly veers strongly left and across the street to the bus stop. Grabbing a yuppie student with a fancy commlink, Bulldog strips the commlink the yuppie was actively talking into (to make sure it's not locked at the time) from the student's hands, and tosses it over his shoulder to the hacker/rigger with a growled "Hack this". Holding the yuppie against the denseplast wall, Bulldog then asked in a similar growl, "Hey man, I gots a emergency-type sitsyation here. You mind if I borrow your link?" before walking away without even checking of the yuppie nodded or not.

I would put In Debt and Enemy into the category of problematic at least. In debt because it can get expensive very quickly and Enemy because for it be any kind of threat it also just ends up derailing the game and making the focus the dispute between the Enemy and the character.
Many of the negative qualities are geared for a particular character concept but can easily be perverted for free build points. Sensitive System for characters that never plan to get cyber is an excellent example as Glyph pointed out. Really, ask you GM which ones are his hot button and steer clear of them unless you have a good character concept that needs that particular quality. The right answer when the GM asks why you have X is never "Cuz of the points".

True enough, especially the last point there.

..in Debt it is not bad, if taken only first level, (only 750 yen/month ("handling fees"), pay this and loaner is happy..)

..as for SURGE-qualities, if carefully chosen, it would be invisible to public eye..
Biocompatability, Quick healer, Ogre stomach,High pain tolerance..
Impaired attribute,Low-pain tolerance,..
etc..

in debt is mostly bad because it has the potential to start a war between the various people at your table.

why, you ask? well, there will be those who think you can pay off only the nuyen, and those who think you have to pay off the karma cost to get rid of the nuyen cost.

if you rule the former, it is a crazy good deal for some. not only are you getting BP, you're also getting starting resources (this can really really help on various particularly starved builds), and you can just pay it off with nuyen that may very never have turned into anything particularly valuable anyways. this is most true for technomancers that are not drone focused, and remains true for many magic-focused characters. even tech characters, if they're already as augmented as they want to get anyways (realistically, as much as you might *like* to get your hands on deltaware move-by-wire 3, it's just not a plausible goal in most campaigns).

if you rule the latter, while it is more balanced, it generally gets a lot of people angry that they have to pay karma "for no reason" to get rid of their debt (these people tend to ignore the fact that they got BP for no reason also... i mean, how does taking out a 20,000 nuyen loan and spending it on cybereyes translate into more skills or attributes, exactly?). there have been some very extended (and heated) discussions on the subject in the past.

(personally, i don't think it should be worth BP to take the quality, nor should it cost karma to remove).

..of course it would be payed off by karma AND money, it IS negative quality after all..
..if money is issue.. Born Rich- Quality would take care of it..

See that as a Feature not a Flaw.
For Example - Incompetent in Heavy Weapons.
Many, Many people see Heavy Weapons (in movies and possibly even IRL) but have absolutely NO IDEA how to actually operate them. Some are more intuitive than others, but the fact remains.

Full Amnesia, true. But baseline Amnesia I would argue.

Easily solved at beginning of play. Lay down the law. By RAW, You must pay off the money AND the Quality. Has always been the case at our table. You don't like paying for the Quality to remove it once payments have been made, then don't purchase the Quality. I reduce the quality and the payments simultaneously, so it makes sense to me, but others may vary.

This is also how I do it. There also has to be some leverage on the part of the lender, this money isn't a student loan after all. This quality requires a player-GM discussion before I allow it.

and yet there was a massive discussion about this in the past, with people getting very upset at the thought that you should have to pay off your negative quality with karma (they all seemed perfectly willing to *get* karma or BP for having the negative quality though).

what makes sense to you or me apparently was rage-inducing for a number of people. but yes, setting clear expectations certainly does help.

Yeah... I know...

Avoid the trap of the High-powered chambering weapons unless you talk to your GM. Sure, that Cavalier Sheriff looks awesome, you can totally get one at chargen and the -2 DP mod (depending on how that bit is ruled) isn't too terrible... Oh but wait, your ammo is 20F avail.

IT'S A TRAP!

Yeah, silly that the weapon mod and most high powered weapnos are easier to get than the ammo. Personally I'd rather have APDS; no DP penalty and most heavy pistols are going to be at -5 AP. Sure you can't get it at character generation without a quality, but by RAW it's easier to get a hold of and doesn't require any special modifications to the weapon.

And you can get Ex-Ex at chargen if you need more boom boom and don't want to abuse SnS.

Ammo selection at chargen:
-Want it dead? Ex-Ex
-Want a non-lethal takedown? SnS
-Spirits? SnS

How does one go about selecting commlinks starting out? Obviously a decker is going to want to go all out, but it seems like everyone should have a mildly badass commlink when running just so it doesn't get compromised when someone looks at it cross.

By RAW, you need the Quality if you want to get rid of the Quality. Also by RAW, if you want to keep the Quality or do not want to pay the karma to buy off the Quality, you can still pay off the money.

commlinks are pretty inexpensive, and there isn't really a particularly compelling reason to not get a fairly high end one just for matrix searches and such.

have extra cheap crappy burner ones if you feel like you might need to toss one out, but also keep a reasonably good one handy.

Sounds good, thanks. Would you say 3's across the board are good enough?

Now I'm trying to find guns.


There are A LOT of guns. /boggles

Guns are easy. Holdouts? Cavalier Scout. Light Pistols? Why bother? Heavy Pistols? Predator Machine pistol? Ares Crusader SMG? MP5TX Taser? Defiance EX Shocker AR? Ares Alpha Anything Heavier? Shave your mohawk, you look like a wanker.

For holdouts I favor the Morrissey Elan. Yeah it's more expensive and holds less ammo than the Cavalier Scout (and can't use flechette ammo), but it's completely immune to MAD scanners without the added cost of Ceramic/Plasteel Components 3 on top of everything. I've got a character that carries two of them loaded with SnS as backup (and potential nasty surprise sometimes).

Light Pistols: Why? Well, if much of John Q. Public is packing a light pistol (as suggested by the fluff in Gun Heaven 2) then you'll blend right in. Otherwise, yeah, don't bother with them unless it's part of a disguise.

I hear the Hammerli goes well with a cocktail dress.

Its always good to dress the part.

I've been working on a character today, and my thinking was along the same lines as my Star Wars Saga character:

You can't always carry what you want. A lot of the game is dressing for the role.

Pistols have to be very popular, not my character's focus but common enough that carrying one wouldn't normally look out of place and in a pinch I could loot one easily enough. If I'm going into a war zone I'll take an assault rifle. A SMG would be another choice if I need conceal-ability and firepower.

Any gun is better than no gun. And a good disguise will stop more bullets than the best body armor.

..Tiger Lilly agrees with you..

I have a soft spot for the defiance ex. Its just such a good weapon.

And yet if you do not pay off the Quality, the GM can mess with you in ways to make you do so, by either continuing to have you on the ropes with whomever loaned you the money in the first place, or replacing it with Qualities of equal value that will cause you grief in the future. Want to avoid that, then you pay off the quality. By RAW.

Paying off the Money does not relieve you of the necessity of buying off the Quality. You choose not to do so, and you suffer the Consequences. Again, By RAW.