Check it out

Looks like one of the nicer pieces of artwork I've seen for the book so far. There are some other interesting points.

Language Skills - Arabic - N?
Starting Nuyen - 4d6 + 4*100?

Built on 400 BP. To be honest, the character's a piece of drek compared to our current runners. To get anywhere near the style of my games, I'll probably have to use 600 or more BP.

Edit: At an average of 20 BP per stat, this character has 3s and 4s. That's not acceptable.

Because of course we're all professionals on how the scale of power operates in the new 4th edition!

We'll, they're ignoring something the previous edition allowed for: Some people are just naturally that damned good at something, in addition to having lots of weapons and armor.

And if you live on the street, most of the people you will be threatened by are not going to be average in abilities.

I havn't had enough to drink to write something here potentially embarassing to myself and highly insulting to you, but I have had enough to drink to giggle to myself and write this post.

Lets just leave it at that.

This looks a lot more in line with how my group played low power.

A lot of system hints come out here -
Dodge is an active skill.
"Firearms Skill Group" and "Close Combat Skill Group" make it look like they may have collapsed the skills back together like SR2.
The art for this one is totally awesome. As an aside, why isn't this chick on the cover? I swear she'd get way more players into the game

Actually, I'm assuming SR world when I say that. This character has average stats and average abilities. I can see them as a shopkeeper, but as a runner I don't see them living long enough to justify the cost of building them as a character. And, being a weapons specialist, they would certainly be more proficient with shooting guns than making armor. The entire character is designed to where the flavor text outright lies about their combat skills.

Considering the fixed TNs and the average possibility of getting a 5, I would say that this character's skills are mostly a waste of points if they face anything that I suspect this system would define as challenging. The lucky edge for this character isn't a blessing, but a requirement. I'm sorry, but I'm beginning to see a DnD-style run progression with this. I can also see my typical first adventure outright killing a group of runners before they even have a chance to get to the actual challenge.

Still, I'll give it a better examination when I have more information to work on. But as it stands, I'm seeing the earlier complaints about this forcing runners to be street-level punks only as beginning to gain weight.

meh. the street-level thing is more of a GM call. if you want a higher-end game, you just add more points. the only thing that's changed there is the default power level of the characters.

Hey, you have a mild allergy to seawater and not one, but two katana's on her gear list...

Although the skill group thing sounds interesting.

Well, lets look at what we already know. All of this is in theory, she rolls 8 dice at a firearms attack. Agility 4 + "Firearms Skill Group (????)" 4. So, provided that its under favorable conditions, i.e. no penalties or bonuses, and the threshold is 7 or less, which seems likely to me, she can burn 8 dice for two automatic successes and knock someone with average body down by 20% of their health. If it were me, I would burn four for one automatic and roll 4 to try to get them into wound penalties.

But who knows how armor and the like works.

Do we know that all skills cost the same? Armorer might be stupidly cheap or Firearms Skill Group so expensive that a 4 is worthwhile. It's also possible that there's been world change. A shopkeeper might have Firearms Skill Group of 0, a Security Guard might have it at 1 (with an Agility of 3 instead of 4), and so forth. "Average Stat" and "Average Skill" of 3 looks like they mean "average for a shadowrunner." Or not. Who the heck knows?

Considering the average person starts off with 6 dice to play with for a skill, I'm betting that the average Threshold is 4-5. A challenging threshold would be 8, really challenging 10, majorly challenging would be 12, and superhuman would be 13+.

The problem is that we end up with a system where it is harder to magically pull off the impossible. No little old ladies lifting up trucks to save their grandchildren, no matter if it is an event known to happen in real life or not.

Basically, the system screws the players.

Actually, its a well known fact that a system that promotes randomness screws the players in the long run just by the simple fact that they tend to live longer, go more places and do more things then anyone else in the world. So they're more likely to be on the short end of a lucky roll then Bob the Archvillian. Bob's minions are going to be shooting at the players a lot more then the players are going to be shooting right at Bob.

She'll average two hits on any given melee or ranged combat test, given her statistics. If the average threshold for combat actions is 3 or higher, she will not succeed at them often and thus would be classifiable as "below average".

As far as the Armorer skill goes, I'd call Firearms Group B/R "Gunsmithing" if it were me. Still, that does seem like a fair assumption to make given the character's focus. I agree that the N probably refers to Natural, which likely means that her skill is probably equal to one of her attributes, likely Logic, when measuring it is necessary.

A thought on the math: Regarding her attributes, if levels 1-3 were 5 BP each, and going from 3 to 4 (which she's done 3 times) costs 15 BP, that would add to 180 BP, and would explain why most of her stats are 3s...

What do you think? (rip away, it's just a theory)

edit: what sabosect said.

Forgot she was an elf.

Even a good GM must deal with the occasional stupid action. If a person falls off the top of a 120 story building and I set a TN of 40 for them to live, they can quite possibly survive. In this case, I set a Threshhold of 12 and they're simply dead.

As for rerolling 6's: Unless they changed the mechanic, it won't apply. There are also factors that affect the TN itself, raising or lowering it. Even with rerolling 6's, it will take this person some luck to even get a chance at a reroll, and even then I can simply set the TN too high for them to be able to meet.

I'm not a big math guy, but let's do a quick analysis:

180 points were spent on Attributes, which is slightly less than half of the total allocation. An average stat is 3, before racial modifiers. If we assume that an elf still has bonuses to agility, reaction, and charisma-- the only scores that go over a 3-- then it looks awfully like 180 points only buys you straight 3's-- a perfectly average character.

Next, power level. She's supposed to be a "master of unarmed combat". So, assuming her close-combat skill is linked to the highest likely attribute-- agility, in this case-- then she only has 7 dice to roll. That amounts to an expected 2.3 sucesses per roll. That's not very powerful at all; if she were fighting a clone, the double would expect an average 2 successes on a Dodge roll. That means that, at best, the martial arts expert can expect to do base damage-- and at worst, do nothing at all (assuming you need one net success).

Since we know already that a skill and attribute of 3 is perfectly average, a dice pool of 7 doesn't seem like a "master" to me. In fact, numerically, it works out to be only slightly better than average.

The knowledge points look simple enough. I'd guess you get 6 times your Logic in freebie points; but then again, that might be too easy. Nothing else on this character sheet lends itself to being reverse-engineered so easily, so why is this an exception?

I'd say the system has been powered down significantly, to it's detriment. What I don't know is if raising the point allocation to 500 will do anything to improve it-- with progressive costs, which have to have been used, it's very difficult to tell.

One thing to notice is the starting gear - which includes a Walther 2100 sniper rifle and Spike rocket launcher. Neither item was available to starting chars in canon SR3 if I remember correctly.

Yeah, I do agree that I'm detecting a certain amount of hyperbole in the character description. Unless there's stuff going on here that we're just not aware of.

There is. Guts and Lucky, both of which potentially affect this character in ways we don't know about.

(Previous incorrect analysis in spoiler. Whoops.)


{{added in edit}}
Cain pointed out that this is an Elf. So it is. Whoops, missed that. This makes the analysis much easier.

27 basic points for 9 attributes. First point is free. 180bp for 18 attribute points bought. Flat 10bp per attribute point. Darn it. And I thought it would be something interesting.
{{/edit}}

Skills have 142bp, which are split between 18 regular skill points and 7 "group" skill points. 142=71*2, and 2*18 + 5*7 = 71. So the best guess is that a regular skill point costs 4bp, while a skill group costs 10bp. There may be some nonlinear relationship that also fits 142bp, but these are nice round numbers, so my guess is not.

Now, if it is true that skill groups cost 10bp, and that grouped skills are based predominantly on the same attribute, then to get more dice it seems to make sense to raise ones attribute instead of buying a skill group. (It also follows that skill groups must contain at least 3 skills, or it'd be cheaper to buy them individually.) So this suggests that either the attribute costs are broken (too cheap--high stat/low skill character is the way to go, "3 is typical" be gosh-darned), or that one of the more expensive attribute methods is the way it's implemented.

I'll venture that such imbalance wouldn't have made it past the playtesters, and suggest that this indicates that the attribute costs are not flat. If the character was created based on a good use of points for attributes, this strongly suggests a triangle progression for stat costs, with the first point free. A bit complicated, but if you can only buy up to 6, it's easy to put in a table, and it does help keep attributes to the desired values.
Never mind--with the elfishness, it looks to me like it is actually better just to raise your attributes.

There are 15 points of knowledge skills for 18 free build points (presumably from L*6 or (L+I)*3). This is rather weird. I don't see any good way to resolve this in terms of really simple rules and nice integers (even if you make the costs differ above and below the attribute). Maybe not all the points were spent, or there's a math error, or buying knowledge skills is not quite so straightforwards. The closest I can come up with is that knowledge skills cost a point each, but if you want to equal or exceed your attribute, it costs one extra point. Kinda weird.

Language seems to be native speaker for free, plus one extra language at L for free.

Gear and lifestyle--130k for 26 points. 5k per point. That's easy.

There are three identical contacts, who cost 4 points each. It's hard to know why they cost 4 points since there's no variability.

So there we have it--a good fraction of the character creation system from examining the sheet.

P.S. The artwork rocks.

Look at the Contacts' stats. Each level of the each of the two stats could be 1BP each

Don't forget she's an elf, I was pretty happy about how I thought the attributes would work until I remebered that one.

If we accept that the 4s are because of racial improvements and they started out as 3s, then we can build a staggered-cost character. It woule be 5 points for the first two levels, then 10 for the one after that. 20 points for a total of 3 in an attribute. If it follows this pattern, a 6 would either cost 60 or 70 points, depending on if it just increases by 5s or doubles every odd number.

Edit: I'm presenting this as an alternative interpretation. Why? Because, like the original, I suspect the first point costs.

Add in what James said as well.

That leaves most of the character sheet already figured out.

heh. i never get tired of seeing ell do that. horrified that such a monstrosity is allowed to walk the streets, yes, and certainly a dab of shock and awe. but not tired.

ell, what's a nice program like you doing in a place like this? you should visit GC!

I wrote nonsense here, ignore it.

Your numbers look good, Ellery. I forgot about elf bonuses when I was looking at Attributes earlier.
My guess is that Knowledge Skills are 1=1 and that the English skill is a Knowledge.
The contacts each have 2 stats, Connection and Loyalty, at 2 each, for a total of 12, so that seems straight forward.

Yeah, ignore me.

I did notice "gee, numbers add up to 4, and we have a cost of 4". But that seemed so simple as to have to be wrong. Maybe not!

I suppose there could be a staggered cost too, but it's simpler if you don't have to pay for the first point. You can't have a score of zero. Why do you have to go to the work of buying the point if you can't not buy it?

So I think flat 10s are more likely than 5,5,10,10,whatevergoeshere.

Now this is interesting. Perhaps its a flat 10 BP per Att. Pt. and you're only allowed to have a certain number of Att. Pts. in each column, Mental, Physical and Special

I'm not saying it's impossible. Costs of 5 5 10 10 20 20 would work. It's not as simple, though. It's a pity that the character doesn't have a 5 or 6--we could figure it out then.

"Now this is interesting. Perhaps its a flat 10 BP per Att. Pt. and you're only allowed to have a certain number of Att. Pts. in each column, Mental, Physical and Special"

Because then it would be a White wolf game and I would never, ever forgive fanpro and wizkids for ruining my second favorite game of all time. The previous editions may have been a pain in the butt to run, but I've never played or ran shadowrun for the rules system to begin with.

Yes, but we do have the information they gave us about this.

FanPro is trying to limit the sixes, and we know they will have multiple safeguards. Having a progression of 5 5 10 10 20 20 automatically does that. Limit them to a max of 45% of their current points for stats and you end up with a character that, if you use 400 BP, cannot have two 6s. It also would fit for them. I also suspect that the skills are not free for the first point, simply because a person with free skills would simply take 1 in most skills anyway.

Well, if 10BP=1Attribute Point, and the skill numbers are close, then dropping Archery 2, Thrown Weapons 2, and 1 point of Armorer would buy her a 6 Agility. That would render a pool of 10 dice to shoot. Drop 1 point of Intuition, and that pool could go to 11 (add the 10BP to Firearms Skill Group for a 5, or to Agility for a 7). Heck, make her human and pump those 30 BP into Firearms Skill Group +1 for a 6 and Close Combat Skill Group +2 for a 5 and the advertising even fits.

I'm not advocating min/max'ing here. I'm just pointing out that I think they built a generalist as a template, and that if you're looking to build a gun bunny samurai, it still looks very possible.

On a totally unrelated note, has anyone got any idea why you'd need a combat axe, 2 katanas, AND a survival knife? Or a bow AND a crossbow? Throwing knives AND shuriken? This chick is seriously paranoid!

The answer is simple: They watched too many movies and anime. This is the modern version of "cyberpunk" in action, and for some reason it requires you to be a mobile armory to be effective in combat.