I thought it might be useful to have a thread that points out ways to get the most out of the character creation system. If you like playing powerful characters, this is useful. If you dislike it when players have overly powerful characters, this is also useful--you may want to modify some rules or simply say someone can't do something.

Here are a few tips:

Buy Exceptional Attribute before raising a stat to 6. Exceptional Attribute costs 20bp, but you can then raise the stat to 6 for 10bp--30bp cost total, with the option to later pay 21 karma to raise the stat to 7. If you just raise the stat to 6, it costs 25bp--nearly as much and without the advancement option.

Load your mage up with bioware. For 1 essence, you can get a +1 boost to strength, agility, logic, one physical skill, and ignore stun while getting +1 to willpower and -1 to intuition (which you won't use so much anyway, as a Hermetic), all for only 75k (15bp). That's a 34bp bonus plus some nice effects for only 25bp cost (you'll have to buy an extra point of magic along with the price of the goodies). And you can still take the "sensitive system" negative quality for +15bp, since that applies only to cyberware. If you're going for Magic 5 or 6, you might want to think twice about this, but at Magic 4 you can still throw force 8 spells if you need to (which is probably as much as you can soak anyway), and you've only lost one die from your spellcasting test. Note: Synner, this answers a previous debate we had about the frequency of augmented magical characters.

For long-term characters, buy skills in character creation and attributes afterwards. During character creation, attributes cost 2.5x as much as skills. But after character creation, attributes only cost 1.5x as much as skills. So if your game plan includes a lot of skills, and you expect your character to survive for a while, buy the skills you want right away and work the attributes up later. (Kind of backwards--people normally develop attributes early in life and then spend the rest of their life developing skills, but never mind that!)

Cluster skills by attribute, and buy that attribute instead of building up the skills.We know this already, of course. For example, agility is used for no less than 16 skills (not counting exotic weapons) in unarmed and ranged combat, athletics, infiltration, and other cool stuff. If you spend the 60bp to get a skill of 1 in each of these skills, then raising agility by 1 (10bp cost) is as effective as spending another 60bp to raise all the skills by one. Very effective! 100bp will give you 6 dice to roll in 16 different skills. It's even worth taking Exceptional Attribute and hitting 7 before raising the skills separately, unless you don't care about a lot of them. Heck, with only a -1 defaulting penalty, you might not even need the skill.

Unless you're taking advantage of the attribute boost, don't buy skills at a low level. It costs very little karma to raise a skill from 0 to a low level. It costs a lot more to raise it from low to high. So raise your skills as high as you can (given the limits) during creation--that's skill 4 except for the 1 or 2 things you want to specialize in--or don't take them.

If you're not taking cyberware or bioware for some reason, get magic! It only costs 5bp to be an adept, and you get a full power point to spend (normally a 10bp value). You don't need any skills, either. Pretty cool! For an extra 5bp, get Mystic Adept and you'll have the option to cast spells later if you want to build up your magic.

Yay! Min-maxing'R'us ... couldn't take long until the first thread like this appeared...

Min-maxing in SR4 is so easy it's not like posting about it will give away any great secrets that people would otherwise not notice. There aren't many variables to play with, and caps keep everything in small, easily-computed ranges.

But it might be helpful for GMs to get quickly up to speed on what things they might want to house rule, or look out for, or help their players with.

Why not try thinking of a character concept and then spending points to try and emulate that character's abilities?

"My character concept is a guy with sixteen skills based upon agility and who has magic because he didn't buy cyber/bioware!"...

Just don't try it. This is a thread for mini-maxers. You will not find any new arguments that have not been used a thousand times and you will never convert one of them to roleplaying and not building pseudo-characters with the depth of cardboard. So please stop it before it starts.

It can be frustrating to build a character according to a concept and then have him suck greatly compared to another character who supposedly has a concept, but has been min-maxxed and then given an excuse--er, background, I mean--for why he or she is that way.

It's good to at least know what's out there, unless you're the type who doesn't even notice when one character is doing 70% of the interesting stuff in the entire game.

I didn't say anything against your way of playing. It is your game. Play it the way you like it.

Was that supposed to be a reply to my post? It seems wholly irrelevant to what I said, and I haven't said what my way of playing is.

Oh, and built any 400BP Mr. 24's yet? Curious to see what a real, by the rules Mr. 24 looks like overall.

If you like playing "powerful" characters (obviously statistically rather than psychologically or dramatically...) why not just give everyone more points? Having the highest number of dice available for common tests does not constitute a character, it just belies you are character focused. Why not do maths puzzles if all you are interesting in is generating numbers?

That particular set of bioware is less advisable for shamen, but there are other sets one could choose. I didn't mention that you can buy foci (26bp for +2 magic from a force 2 power focus), so your magic will really be 6, not 4.

And anyway, after you are out of character creation, that last attribute point doesn't cost extra any more. The only disadvantage is that you'll need one extra initiate grade for the same level of magic (which costs 10 + (grade x 3) karma). In the long run, it's probably cheaper not to take bioware, but it's a big boost early on.

Oh, and there are no more trauma dampers, thank heavens. That was just about the most broken piece of SR3 'ware. If you allowed mages to take that and summon infinite watchers for free, and cast L-drain spells for free, then it was a very, very big reason for SR3 mages to get 'ware, which is now gone.

Added in edit: I haven't built anyone with 24s, but I also don't see where the limit of 24 dice is stated. Haven't really looked, though. It's pretty straightforward with an adept, though--attribute 10 (7 + 3pts from bioware) costing 100bp; skill 8 (6 base + 2 specialization) costing 26bp; enhanced ability 6 costing 3 magic points, which is 35bp. Total cost: 161bp. The remaining 239bp should allow you to flesh out a pretty decent character. That attribute is going to help you out a lot, too, especially if it's something like agility (which it probably is). In fact, getting additional agility-linked skills with 16 dice would only be another 18bp each.

Roleplay more... minimax less....

You can roleplay and min-max, its a normal thing to do for most gamers I've ever met.

Chiba, if you don't care about min-maxxing, why are you posting here? If you dislike it, do you think it will magically disappear if nobody talks about it? "La la la, I don't hear you, I don't see anything, you didn't just take out that armored troll in the dark from 400m while badly wounded."

I haven't really looked through the ware in much detail. Nothing jumps out at me as being completely broken. Stat bonuses are surprisingly cheap--0.2 essence per level, which is +1 to a stat, and under 10k per level. Any runner with any cash at all would be crazy not to get implants up to the level that they can take advantage of, with the possible exception of technomancers and magicians.

Look, minimaxing might be cool when you are twelve but it really degrades rpg's in general. Rulesets are developed partly in an attempt to try and halt the behaviour (artificial checks and balances) because some idiots seek to exploit them. There would be much more potential for freeform generation if this behaviour could be disregarded.

I remember playing with an excellent GM when I was 14 and it really opened my eyes to the fact that that games were about empathy, not miniguns on gyroscopic stabilisers...

Right - sorry. Mentally overlooked that you only raised it to a 6 (when the new nat cap is 7).

milspec

Most specific questions about what is in the book I'm not going to answer, especially not when people have already ordered the book or are about to buy it. Think of it as an exercise to increase your willpower, or something!

Ah the inevitable homoerotic references. If there is something more common on a forum than latent homosexuality, I don't know what it is... Hey, it's okay. You can let your guard down now, it's not a crime anymore.

Chiba, the only thing that matters in any gaming group is that they agree on the rules. I enjoy playing games in my group because we all like the play by the rules and stretch them (min-max) a bit. In the end all of our games so far have been fairly balanced except one. (A character was made in a way that was unviable and couldnt help us complete the goal. Mr. 24s dont actually work very well)

Bah, it's freaking SHADOWRUN. You're supposed to be a serious criminal hired by Mr Johnson for his skills in getting the job done. Not some McDonalds Clerk who runs across a plot to destroy the world and has to take his Dad's sword out on a quest to save the world.

Serious dudes need to be able to do serious stuff. Min-Maxing shouldn't always be done, but it's useful to know what the best cyberware is for my character after I have Tailored Pheromones already purchased. Or what's the best way to become a skilled fighter after I already have the skills my face needs.

So bugger off and let people compare BP at creation to karma later using math and logic.

Chiba, while I understand your sentiments and am happy that you feel you've reached a new plateau in your gaming, what works for you will not necessarily work for everyone. Not every player plays "just" to play out for the psychology aspects of playing an unusual character. Many players derive enjoyment from making a really skilled professional. That's what they enjoy, just like how some people like jigsaws and some people like the Simpson's, but not everyone likes either or both.

So it would probably best if you could accept that many players enjoy doing the number crunching. You're not going to be able to change minds any more than you could make someone who likes jigsaws to not like them any more. Simply accept that different people play the game for different reasons and watch out for such conflicts if you happen to be playing with someone who doesn't see the game quite as you do.

As to mages taking 'ware, I've never thought my trauma damper + platelet factories + SL2 made me any better than say, our sammie with cyberarm gyromounts doing 18D with his tmps, or our adept who kills someone every time he pulls the trigger (15 dice and counting). Of course, this level of power is probably more acceptable in our specific game, since we have only three players + 1 dm.

Trauma Damper is a great piece of ware no matter what your character type is. In all seriousness, though, I do feel more powerful than other mages who don't have it.

OSUMacbeth

http://forums.dumpshock.com/index.php?showtopic=9607

For a better world !
Fixes most off the stuff mentioned in the initial post by Ellery.

Mmm, SCSI…

~J

Chiba, you don't seem to get it. Min/maxing is a *good* thing. That means a player has put a lot of detailed thought and imagination into the character, so that the character becomes something more than Joe Average. By min/maxing certain aspects of the character, we bring it to life. Have you ever played a character with every single stat and skill at perfectly average levels? No? Then you're a min/maxer. You've maximized certain aspects of your character, while minimizing his abilites in other ways, ways the character gets around.

You're confusing min/maxing with munchkinism, which is uber power-gaming to the detriment of everyone else's enjoyment. There are many kinds of munchkins-- the power gamer is just one of them. One of the worst, and most insidious, is the roleplaying purist-- the ones who utterly refuse to go along with any plot, because: "It doesn't fit with my character, WAH!" They might be less common then the power-gamer, but they're just as disruptive to a game, and can crash a good campaign just as easily-- in fact, sometimes they're even worse, since they can kill a game before it really has the chance to begin! The power gamers at least go along for the initial ride, hoping for the chance to hack something; the "True Roleplayer" will force the game to go from a high-tension adventure to roleplaying out a conversation in a coffee shop.

It never ceases to amuse/amaze me, that those who know the least about how Person A plays a game are the first to condemn Person A for playing a game that way.

Chiba, I bet dollars to donuts the quality of RP I've seen with Ellery is better than anything you and your eye-opening 14 year old GM have made magical under the bleachers at high school, allright? Ellery likes to make effective characters, but that's not the same as saying Ellery likes to make wholly one dimensional munchkin characters with no role playing involved. Get that through your skull.

Then, once that's through your skull, either stay on topic or shut the hell up. This thread is for people to get some advice on how to make workable characters, of a power/competency level that will survive a couple jobs and maybe even successfully complete a challenging adventure every once in a while. Get over yourself, drama queen.

You can't always dictate to other people how to play the game you are in, either. If I find myself in a game with a higher power level than I'm used to, I for one would be grateful to have the info in this thread to help stay up to speed.

It's no fun for the serious RPers to have a guy bring in a character with a weak, ineffective personality and background. It's no fun for the high power crowd when you bring in a character with an awesome personality, but no capability.

You got that right, Clyde. But that's part of what the GM is for (always was my least favorite aspect of it).

Back on subject though, any pieces of cyber that are really 'must have'? Anything that looks especially game breaking? From where I'm sitting, it sounds like initiative might not be quite as important as in 3rd edition, since you can plan around it a lot easier (don't need to spend that extra .2 essence to hedge your bets any more), and I'm not clear if smartlinks are going to be quite as ubiquitous. Alright, they will be, but anything else we'll be seeing all over on the streets?

In your opinion, if you are not raising a stat to 6 is it preferable to buy Exceptional Attribute (or Lucky, depending on taste) at chargen or afterwards?

~J

From a strickly karma cost for Attributes, those 20 BP (costing 40 karma after chargen) can give you at best two 4 --> 5 raises, which is only 30 karma total. However as Ellery pointed out a better use for BP is Skills, so if you feel you'll use those Skills early on go that way (possibly a toss up).

The big downside is saving up 40 karma, that is quite a wad to drop in one improvement that only clears the way for you to spend another 20+ karma.

Chiba is just pissed he never min/maxed himself while growing up. "Curses why did I take underwater basketweaving in order to make myself more interesting instead of actually being competent in any useful skill."


Personally I always felt in games where the characters profession is bad assed adventurer type, a non min/maxed character is less realistic and interesting. Yeah a guy who is going to fight a dragon in a 3e will think its a good plan while training up levels to only take a bunch of skill focus feats. Oh and sure in SR where my job is criminal who gets shot at a lot, I really want to spend all my spare time learning calligraphy, instead of I don't know learning the life saving skill of dodge or pistols.

So while your building those interesting characters remember to keep the logic skill at one because apparently there to dumb to train themselves in useful life saving skills and to dumb to purchase quality equipment and cyber.

If you've got points to spare you can use on Qualities and think you can keep yourself relatively undamaged, you can push your wound mods off a box for free by buying Low Pain Tolerance at -10 and High Pain Tolerance 2 at +10. It becomes a bad tradeoff once you've taken eight or more boxes, but until then…

~J

Sounds kind of ridiculous to allow the taking of two qualities that directly contradict one another. Do you have high tolerance for pain, or low? "Both." Makes sense.

And Shinobi: Well put with the logic jibe.

OSUMacbeth