I have here a Street Samurai character I have endeavored to make the most generally competent as possible. How have I done and how can I improve it? And what book contains SURGE rules? 125 bp, 3rd Ed, Shadowrun Comp, Cannon Companion, Man and Machine used.

Ed 'Sullivan'
Race: Troll
Attributes:
Strength: 14
Quickness: 7
Body: 11 (16)
Intelligence: 3
Willpower: 4
Charisma: 2
Essence: 1.1
Magic: 0
Reaction: 4
Initiative: 10 + 3d6
Combat Pool: 7
Karma Pool: 1

Skills:
Edged Weapons 5 (EI 6)
Throwing Weapons 5 (EI 6)
Heavy Weapons 5 (EI 6)
Assault Rifles 5 (EI 6)
Athletics 3 (EI 4)
Etiquette 2
Police Procedures 3
Military Tactics 4
History 3
English 3 (R/W 1)

Weapons:
Dikoted Cougar Fineblade Knife (Short)
Conc 8, Reach 1, Damage 15S
Dikoted Vibro Sword
Conc 3, Reach 2, Damage 15D
5x Dikoted Throwing Knife
Conc 9, Damage 15M, Weight .25

Smart-2 Deathstorm LMG
Damage: 8S Mode: BF/FA Conc -- Ammo Cap 50 clip or belt, 7 pts RC, 13.5 weight
Hip Pad (can fire w/o tripod, resist 4L Stun each time that's done)
Gas Vent IV: add 4 to RC
+2 pts of RC for Strength: 13 pts total
(Loaded) Clip of 50 normal rounds
Clip of 50 normal rounds
Clip of 50 normal rounds
Clip of 50 normal rounds
Clip of 50 EX Explosive rounds
Clip of 50 EX Explosive rounds
Clip of 50 Gel rounds
HV Machinegun- fires 6-round bursts, max autofire 18 rounds/CP

Smart-2 "Wakizashi" Assault Rifle
Damage: 9M Fire: SA/BF/FA Conc 7 Ammo 30 © Mounts B, T, U
Can be dissasembled or reassembled in 3 Complex Actions to fit in a briefcase
2 pt RC: +2 Strength 4 pts RC
+2 Conc vs. MAD detectors
-10% range
(Loaded) Clip of 30 Hi-C plastic rounds (no MAD, reduce Power by 1 at long or extreme range)
Clip of 30 Hi-C plastic rounds (no MAD, reduce Power by 1 at long or extreme range)
External silencer, carried separately (-2 to Conc when attatched, one Complex action to install or remove, limits rifle to SA)
External suppressor, carried separately (-2 to Conc when attatched, two Complex actions to install or remove)

IPE HE Grenades (5)
Conc 5: Dmg 15S: Blast -1/m: Wt .5 ea

Casual armor:
Greatcoat Line suit
Conc 11 B: 4 I: 2 Wt 3
Reduce the power of electrical-based attacks by 2
(Total w/Dermal is B: 4 I: 4)
Add 50% to all Conc when under the suit

Expecting trouble:
Armor Jacket (B: 5 I: 3), counts as layered (top)
Add a +5 modifier to notice with Thermo vision or drone/vehicle sensors
Large Riot Shield (B: 2 I: 3)
Dikoted Security Helmet (B: 2 I: 3)
Full-Body FFBA (B: 4 I: 1), counts as layered (bottom)
Reduce the Power of fire-based attacks by 3
(Total w/Dermal is B: 11 I: 11)

Ware:
Alphaware Dermal Sheath Rating 3 (+4 to Body, 2 Impact Armor provided)
Alphaware Smartlink-2 (-2 to all firearm TNs when equipped with this. Called Shots are a wash: +0)
Alphaware Flare Compensation, Low-Light Vision, Electronic Mag 3 in eyes
Alphaware Wired Reflexes level 2
Reflex Trigger
Enhanced Articulation (Add 1 die to Combat, Physical, Technical, Build/Repair tests)
Muscle Agumentation 4
Muscle Toner 4
Gear:
Pocket Secretary (cellphone can be powered on and off independant of the unit)
Sony Portacam
Chemsuit Rating 6 (Designer)
Grapple gun w/200m reinforced line
Medkit
5x Rating 6 Antidote Patches
5x Rating 6 Stim Patches
5x Trauma Patches
2 Oxy-Rush Nanite Injections
+2 dice for Athletics +1 level of Pain Resistance when the nanites are active. Can hold breath for as long as
the nanites are active. Transient nanites.
1200 Nuyen
(33.5 K Build nuyen left)

Thermographic Vision

Flaw:
Severe allergy to neon (Uncommon) -4
Edges:
Quick Healer- reduce all healing TNs by 2
Good Reputation- reduce all social TNs by 2
Magic Resistance 2

Contacts:
Level 1 Fixer (Ukyo, tiny female Asian PhysAd)
Level 1 Decker (Svald, musclebound Scandanavian console jockey)
Level 1 Academic (James, uncle-in-law nuclear engineer and genius)

Bio Index effects- add 1 to the power of all diseases, toxins etc.
Add 2 to all healing TNs. (With Quick Healer, it's a wash)

Background:
Ed is that rare creature, a mercenary who hit it big. His small mercenary group, the Juju Dragons, had the most uncanny
luck ever experienced by any merc group before or since, capturing expensive cyber, bio and nano clinics especially.
The professional attitude, combat skills, and loads of 'ware picked up in his mercenary years has helped to establish his
fearsome reputation as one of the most competent street samurai in Seattle.

Although I will not be party to such a munchking fest in order to maintain my own sanity, especially after my eyes accidentally fell on rating 50 fuel-air bombs in your gear list, I will tell you that SURGE rules are found in Year of the Comet

You can't have rating 50 FAE at char gen, max limit is 6 for any rating, even if FAE are within the 8 availability limit.

Backgammon: Thankees.
Moonwolf: But I LIKE my man-portable nukes... Seriously, where's it say that?

Did you add thermal dampening to your casual armor? I dont see that the greatcoat line gets that ability normally and adding it to the coat puts its availability to 12.

Also, those homemade guns there? Whats everyone elses stance on beginning characters designing their own guns using the CC rules?

Beginnning characters are limited to buying items with availability < 8 and rating < 6. Shadowrun 3rd edition p 60.

Way in the beginning with all of the most basic chargen rules

Page 60, SR3.

ed- Too slow.

On another note, a severe allergy to neon is kinda lame.

Your munch-fu is weak, glasshopper.

You have no Stealth. Your weapons, while they appear to be legal CC builds, are unlikely to be declared under Avail 8 by any sane GM. I don't have my book for a page reference, but the max rating of FAE you can get at chargen (max rating of anything, actually, though it's frequently broken for MPCP rating) is 6. AV rounds are most decidedly outside availability for a starting character; hell, even APDS rounds are. Also, one of the big advantages to FAEs are their ability to do the same damage over a radius. Using it in small quantities defeats that advantage.

~J

...and I'm willing to bet you can't Dikote™ a Vibrosword.

I'm surprised he didnt dikote the fillings in his teeth everything else is.

I don't see any reason why a vibrosword couldn't be dikoted. It's still a sword, just one that gets an extra boost from, well, vibrating. Dikoting will only increase both. Now a monosword should be frowned upon by any GM if a player wants to dikote it, but not a vibrosword.

I think you have your Munchkin confused with "UberTrog."

Most munchkins are actually canon builds taken to extremes. Your sam is like you went through the book and took all the stuff that looked cool.

Don't get me wrong, Ed would kick serious ass. But his stats would be on the GM's side of the screen.

*attempts to reverse engineer how points were spent out*
Attributes: 54
Resources: 30
Skills: 25
Race: 10
Magic: 0
Merits: 6 points of freebies

I considered going through this point by point with quotes, but I'm just going to address it as it comes to me. I wont address the CC weapons much, beyond that I really don't think any GM will actually approve all of them. If you intend this for actual play, you'll probably want to drop them unless your GM is a total gold fish.

1. How is he going to fight? I'm guessing that on runs that he can go to however he wants, he'll bring the LMG. If he needs to go in 'subtly', the AR is brought in. I'm not seeing how the throwing knives or hand grenades fit in here. If the knives are meant as 'backup weapons', drop them and the associated skills and replace with a heavy pistol of some kind in case your main gun jams up. You also don't have anywhere near how much ammunition you'll need, multiply everything by 100 at least.

2. You need to review the rules on availability and max ratings. Especially the fact that armor mods increase and/or multiply the availability of armor. FFBA can't take armor mods either.

3. Ware. Dermal Sheath 3 is the SR equivelent of a swift kick in the nuts. Go to Dermal Sheath 1, giving you 1.12 more essence and 192,000 more nuyen to play with. Take some of that and spend it on Ceramic or Titanium bone lacing. No datajack? Shame on you! They have so many little uses. Seriously consider dropping at least some of the muscle augs and replacing them with some of the sweet pieces of Bioware. Mnemonic Enhancers, Trauma Dampers, Platelet Factories, and Reflex Recorders are very popular Sammy favorites.

4. Attributes. Strength is highly overrated. I'd drop it by 2 and put those points into Quickness for the purposes of skill raising, reaction, the various tests that call for rolling quickness(Picking up grenades and running), armor layering, and combat pool.

5. Guns. I'm going to critique the AR. Silencers only function on SA-capable weapons. Even if the AR was SA, suppressors and silencers simply can't stack. Besides that, even an integral silencer or suppressor eats up the barrel slot.

When you allow a melee weapon to have a damage code of D, you're essentially saying that a glancing blow can kill someone. The vibrosword is what canon would be, but that'd definitely get a good hard look-at from a lot of GMs.

~J

Eh, a No-Dachi, Claymore, Combat Axe, and Pole-Arm can all be dikoted to Deadly, too. Don't see why something with an inferior Reach and dependancy on batteries in exchange for a max Concealability of 4 under a long coat (which is basically worthless when it comes to anyone with a Police/Security Procedures skill of 2 or higher) should be slighted. It basically has a minor perk (light Concealability) in exchange for a major downside (Reach in particular) compared to the aforementioned weapons. And it's Power is less than all of them if memory serves.

Your munch fu makes me want to puke TopTom.

Seriously, come back here with a non-munched character and then I'll be impressed.

Man, delete this guy and start over and call me in the morning. Get mental stats that dont suck. Get stealth. Get some useful weaponry. You could start by reading the rules rules on availability and such...

His mental stats are mildly above average…

~J

IIRC your troll can't hace natural Thermographic vision. He ripperd out his freking eyes abd replaced them with mini camera. You have to buy the thermo cyber if you want to have thermo for this, erm, character.

Bob is right on that, cybereyes eliminate any natural vision like thermo ot low light.

Er, I don't see eye cameras. I see Flare Comp, Low-Light, and E. Mag 3, all of which are valid retinal mods, so they let him keep his vision. Did I miss it?

And I agree with the guy who said ditch dermal sheath and get bone lacing. Not titanium though; it's ferromagnetic so you're gonna be setting off MADs for miles around.

(Edit): Wait a sec, no it's *not* feromagnetic! *slaps forehead* You know, I really ought to remember these things, being a chemistry major and all.

This guy's not exactly low profile, so he might as well go with titanium, IMO.

Dermal Sheath 1 and Bone Lacing: Plastic is the most cost-effective build in my experience. Sure, it's "only" Body +3 and Impact Armor +1, but it only set you back 1.4 Essence and 39,000 nuyen as standard grade implants. That leaves a lot more open for cooler, more useful stuff.

Is Ed married? What happened to his wife?

Oh, is it only 7.5kY? I had it in my head at 15k. In that case, the combo of Dermal Sheath 1 and Plastic Bone Lacing is Body +3, Impact +1, 1.2 Essence (bah, my basic math skills suck), and 31,500 nuyen. Sure, it's one point less Body and armor than Dermal Sheath 3 and equal in Body to titanium lacing, but the costs and Essence are dramatically lower than either, thus allowing you to put in cooler stuff in its place.

Guess I'm more of a min/maxer than a munchkin.

I prefer the plastic bone lacing and low level dermal armor/sheath combo as well (especially at alpha as they're low cost and still relatively high essence)- I have trouble justifying the more expensive options unless that's the concept the character is designed around.

I don't consider that munchy or min-maxing - whenever I buy any product IRL I try to perform a price/performance analysis, no reason that a runner wouldn't do the same (See, I even try to justify MY min-maxing )

Anyway, back on topic - that first character sucked more than a thai ho...

One word: Willpower of 6.

Otherwise he will get killed dead by one word: Manabolt.

Yeah, but after a while you'd presumably gain the knowledge skill.

I mean, if you have no Maths knowledge skill, but tell the GM you're doing complicated mathematical stuff between runs, even if you have to look all the answers up or ask a friend, you should be starting to buy the skill.

If you've been analysing the pros and cons of cyberware, I'd expect to you have at least one point in the skill - you didn't need the skill to do it, you gained the skill /from/ doing it.

And if you don't pay the karma to get the skill, then you get distracted and end up looking at porn instead of doing your research.

Since the TN wouldn't be that high, defaulting would reflect reading a few articles and reviews and making a decision based off of that. It's what most sane shoppers do today, and I guarantee you few of them have any real "skill" or "expertise" in the field they're doing research for.

Dunno why so many people around here dismiss defaulting.

Yeah, but that's for cheap stuff. Fools default on expensive purchases. Ever walk into a car dealership and decide to "wing it"? A real estate agent? "Yeah, show me a house that looks good. No, I don't want to know too much about it..."

All comments about Matrix porn aside, I think I...I...I think I agree with...with Lime. I guess there's a first time for everything.
Just teasin', ACL.
Seriously, though, if you were going to make a character roll their cybernetics skill to know which of two items listed in the book that the player is reading gives a bigger bonus, the only reason you'd make it a two is because you can't make it lower. That's like asking an automotive engineer which has a bigger engine, a Mac truck or a VW bug. He's gonna know. Not only is he gonna know, but you could beat him within an inch of his life, shoot him (injury modifiers of +6) and he's STILL gonna know. So defaulting, even from such a "high" TN as 2 still leaves only a TN6 for the intelligence test. Not too unreasonable. Even lower if you concede the original TN was actually less than 2.

edit: Zazen, but that's exactly the point. Of course you don't wing it, if you're buying a car you read about the cars, and do some research, but that doesn't necessarily warrant skills in Car(B/R). It let's you know what features are out there, and Car & Driver is happy to tell you which cars are better at which, but if you lost your research resources, you'd probably be back to square one if asked a new question that you hadn't researched.
Ultimately, it's going to come down to a question of what's defaulting and what is a low skill. Some people are of the opinion that every RL person has 800 knowledge skill points in SR terms, and some people will say, 'nah, we're all just defaulting'.

Indeed. It's important to realize that TNs can be lower than 2; it's just final TNs that cannot drop below 2. Thus, a test like "finding your glasses" might have a TN of -4, which means that only complete darkness or similar will be any real obstacle.

~J

Thanks all- this is really helping.
For those of you who wondered why the Vibro Sword and not a Claymore/Nodachi/Polearm: the CM and Nodachi actually fall under Pole Arms and not Edged Weapons, and I didn't want to invest in two separate skills.
And please don't think I'm a horrible person for making this- I'm going through the process of learning Shadowrun, and with no groups around that I can find testing the rules to their extremes with things such as this are just part of that process.

Just two things from the new guy (to this list). One, you can't put thermal damping on armor that doesn't cover the whole body. Two, why would you need a skill for picking the right cyberware when you are shelling out big nuyen to your doc for the surgical plan?

Just my thoughts.