AMEN to that Brother.

With all due respect, I think you must be referring to some kind of house-rule character generation system for nWoD.

nWoD does not use an experience-based character generation system. In nWoD, and Exalted, you get a certain number of points to spend in certain categories, with additional bonus points.

However the points spent at character generation buy traits at different prices to what you get after character generation. For instance, in Exalted, a "bonus point" will get you one point of a Favoured Ability (which is equivalent to a skill in SR). This applies whether you are buying your second dot or your fifth. In comparison, buying the second dot would cost 1 XP, while a fifth dot costs a massive 7 XP, even though at chargen they would have cost the same.

It is this irregularity that impedes the system and is the major fault, IMO, with White Wolf's character generation systems.

Now, to respond to the people who say BeCKs' complexity implies that unified build/advance mechanics are a bad idea.

I imagine that advancement costs will become simpler in SR4, even though they weren't that complicated in previous editions. It is very unlikely that skills will still be linked to attributes for purposes of determining advancement costs, because attribute levels now factor directly into competence, so there is no reason for an indirect link via advancement costs.

This means that the cost of a given level in an attribute or skill can be pre-calculated and tabulated for ease of character generation, as it will be independent of other factors. A table showing the cost of Attributes and Skills from 1 to 6 would take no more than a couple of square inches, and eliminate many unpleasant mechanical effects from character generation where the value of certain purchasing strategies (eg specialist vs. jack-of-all-trades) is artificially inflated.

The mathematics of chargen would be no worse than simply purchasing on a point-for-point basis. It still involves nothing more than subtraction of a trait's cost from the remaining pool of points. In return for this negligible expense in terms of complexity, you eliminate all the effects of "efficient" vs. "inefficient" character generation (compare SR1-3 and starting the game with maximum in primary Attributes vs. less than maximum in primary Attributes). The game designers also save on unneccessary rules, with that pagecount going towards more gear, more combat options, more background, or whatever.

Of course, introducing wares that modify Karma costs would not interact well with this system, although it wouldn't be insurmountable. But I was never a fan of that particular aspect of the Mnemonic Enhancer anyway.

You won't be the first to advocate BeCKS as the official chargen method (which is what you're implicitly stating, whether you mean to or not), but I personally find it painful to use.

I think there are some merits to the idea, but I don't think we need more complexity to chargen, which already takes enough time as it is, IMO. I feel fairly certain that Rob and the others have seen this idea (they do peruse this forum, after all), but I personally don't find it as useful as some. I don't operate under the same theory, obviously.

I should also note that I might be completely off-base, and Rob et al might look at it and find it the best thing since canned beer and implement it immediately...in which case I'd learn to deal with it.

Within the current system no it's not really the case but within a system like sapphire wyvern seems to be advocating you would have that type of scalability.

Of course this is based on the assumption that the 2000 karma threat is built in a well rounded manner rather than just pumping up a handful of abilities and that there aren't too many abilities that you need obscene amounts of karma to unlock.

But yes there are plenty of people that feel that 4 x 500 should be equivalent to 1 x 2000 if advancement is linear.

Understood but even assuming a supremely skilled generalist there is an upper end to how much damage that character can withstand and how many actions he can reasonably get off in any given phase.

Now I understand that under SR3 canon high end initiates pretty much break the rules because you can assume that they can afford multiple anchored physical barriers numerous spirits etc at any given time so a mix of 1 500 karma rigger 2 500 karma combat monkey and a 500 karma mage is quite likely going to get smashed.

However if you look at a 2000 karma street samurai (badass mofo that he'd be) he's probably going to get taken down by the 4 500 karma characters listed above a decent percentage of the time. I'm not going to say it's exactly 50% but the there tends to be an advantage in most game systems towards all other things being equal that force of numbers tends to win out.

You are relying on metagaming reasons to say why a 2000 karma character should never be surprised by 4 500 karma characters.

The simple fact of the matter is that a good percentage of the time those supreme competency characters should be prepared a good percentage of the time but there are going to be those times when he's driving to the stuffer shack to buy some Nuke-It burritos for the honeys back at the mansion and he gets ambushed driving his car.

Sure he's prepared for all sorts of eventualities but unless he routinely carries a portable hole worth of gear he's limited to how much of that crap he can actually carry at any given time and how quickly he can prepare for those shadowrunners gunning for his ass.

Of course this is the reason why I feel there are should be no old, bold shadowrunners. If you want to survive longterm you get enough money to buy luxury+ lifestyle permanent and then occasionally dabble. If you are a bold shadowrunner the odds are going to catch up with you and you die.

Fundamentally Shadowrunners are criminals and despite some exceptions real life criminals that consistent fuck with the powers that be get cacked or jailed.

Now this being said in SR3 mages totally break this template as high karma awakened become more like demigods and forces of nature than normal threats.

Yes, I've heard that SR3 BeCKs is a bitch to perform manually. BeCKs is complicated. But whatever traits BeCKs has proves nothing about the traits of unified build/advance rules in general. They don't have to be complicated and overly slow, as demonstrated by several other systems. This is the core distinction that I am trying to make.

If the nexus between attribute level and skill advancement cost is broken in SR4, it becomes much simpler. The nexus should be broken, because attributes will factor directly into competence, and making skills above attributes more costly simply favours attributes over skills even more than the system already does.

How hard is it at chargen to use a table that says that, for instance a level 5 skill costs 15 build points (1+2+3+4+5) versus saying that it costs 5 points? Surely SR character generation will still be done with a calculator (gotta spend all that nuyen, after all) so I don't see the loss, myself.

I can understand your objection that fast character generation is good, and to a certain extent I agree, but I don't think the advantages of speedy character generation are greater than that of consistent rules for more experienced characters contrasted with higher build point characters and the ability to make redundant some three or four pages of rules text.

YMMV.

Additionally, I never said that 4 500 Karma characters would be equal to a 2000 Karma character. I don't even think it should necessarily be true.

What I did say, however, is that a character created with twice as many build points should be balanced with a character created with the standard build points and then given an "equivalent" amount of additional Karma.

This is the flaw in SR3's point buy chargen system (and White Wolf's). There is *no* way to work out how much Karma a build point is worth, because there is no correspondence whatsoever.