Shadowrun
Shadowrun General => General Discussion => Topic started by: Strill on <12-13-15/0645:06>
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One common complaint regarding shadowrun characters is that they're built primarily to be competent at their jobs, rather than to model a character concept or to represent a believable, relatable person. The assumption therein is that it would be more interesting to have a character who is less competent, but closer to concept.
I'd like to analyze this by looking at what action/adventure protagonists in books and movies are like, and contrast them with Shadowrun protagonists. What is it that pushes a Shadowrun player to make a hyper-competent character, while an action/adventure protagonist can get away with being incompetent but more "flavorful"? To start, I'll list out some ways I've identified in which action/adventure protagonists compensate for their weaknesses, and contrast them with Shadowrun's rules. Maybe some of these narrative techniques could be adapted to Shadowrun.
#1. Friends in High Places
The protagonist has a highly competent friend, ally, or mentor, who acts in their place or compensates for their weaknesses.
Examples:
- Star Wars: Luke Skywalker and Obi wan Kenobi
- How To Train Your Dragon: Hiccup and Toothless
- Pokemon: Ash Ketchum and Pikachu
- Naruto and the Kyuubi.
Why it doesn't work in Shadowrun: Players have contacts, but they're not expected to act as personal companions on every run like one of these characters might.
#2. Tailored To You
The challenges the protagonist faces are exactly tailored to their skills. Any problem the protagonist cannot achieve on their own, they will have found a tool to solve at some point previously. Alternatively, the protagonist only embarks on missions they're confident achieving.
Examples:
- Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone: Ron is a chess expert and one of the puzzles is a chess game. Harry got a flute for christmas that can put the 3-headed dog to sleep. The Devil's Snare plant was covered in their classes, which Hermione has memorized. One of the puzzles is a logic puzzle, which Hermione is great at.
- Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban: Harry masters the advanced Patronus spell in record time, allowing him to defend himself from dementors which specifically come after him later in the book.
- James Bond always encounters situations where his gadgets of the day are exactly what he needs to succeed.
- Indiana Jones is an expert at even the most obscure of ancient traps, from noticing that the idol is on a pressure plate, AND having a sandbag already on hand, to identifying the true holy grail.
Why it doesn't work in Shadowrun: It happens to some extent, but often the GM will provide challenges which no player is well equipped to solve, to test the players' ingenuity. These are likely to bite an incompetent player, and if they aren't built to be good at getting out of bad situations, they can easily wind up dead. Furthermore, if that player has nothing unique to bring to the team, tasks intended for them may be completed by other players, leaving them feeling redundant and useless.
#3. Training Montage
The protagonist becomes competent quickly, or the story hits a timeskip after the protagonist has spent time becoming competent.
- Star Wars: Luke Skywalker learns to use the Force and fight with a lightsaber in a matter of weeks.
- Dragonball Z: Too many examples to count.
- Avatar: The Last Airbender: Aang masters three of the four elements in the span of one year.
Why it doesn't work in Shadowrun: Karma is a strictly controlled part of the game, and giving one player extra karma to "catch up" would be unfair to other players.
#4. Ass Pull
The protagonist succeeds at something they logically should not be equipped to handle. Maybe through contrived coincidence, incredible luck, the inexplicable incompetence of their adversaries, or a sudden burst of technobabble that solves all the problems.
- Star Wars: Han Solo and Luke Skywalker not only escape the Death Star unscathed in the face of thousands of highly-trained soldiers, but rescue Princess Leia as well.
- Star Trek: Picard revolutionizes space combat tactics with the Picard Maneuver without warning or internal narrative build-up.
- Batman: Shark-repellent Bat spray (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJlHjf_E--4)
- Superman inexplicably has the ability to turn back time by making the earth rotate backwards in the movie Superman (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superman_(1978_film))
Why it doesn't work in Shadowrun: Incompetent adversaries make for bad stories and kill tension. The antagonists should be a serious threat. Luck is a part of the game in the form of edge, but you'd need to burn edge to pull this sort of thing off, which is not a sustainable plan. If the GM gives this to the player arbitrarily, it can easily cause the other players to become jealous.
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I think that the reason players put so much focus on min-maxing characters is because RPG characters frequently do not have the plot armor and safety nets that literary characters have. Players become attached to their characters, and they want them to survive, but that's all based on the whims of the dice. While adventure protagonists might get by with luck, Edge can only carry you so far.
You also can't ever "catch up" if you start with less relevant skills either. Due to the fact that you get so little karma from runs relative to what you get from character creation, you have to make sure you're competent from the start, since you won't be able to make up for it later on. Every point spent on a non-practical skill is a point that could've saved your character from death.
Some of this is due to the skill system itself, since some skills are simply better than others. There have been several threads on hypothetical ways to consolidate or adjust the skill system to solve this problem.
Another contributing factor is the relatively low number of points for contacts and knowledge skills, which are big ways to add depth to characters. Giving players more of these may help to add variety to otherwise one-dimensional characters, and tie them more firmly into the world via their relationships with their contacts.
Perhaps it might be possible to reach a compromise that could allow players to have highly specialized and competent characters without them starting that way immediately. For example, the training montage concept above doesn't work in Shadowrun, mainly due to the nature of character creation and character progression. Players are expected to get an enormous amount of karma at the start, and a tiny trickle afterwards. What if you were to design a character creation system where some character creation resources are left unspent, and are allocated by the player gradually over the first ten or twenty sessions? Rather than start with a master assassin from the start, you would be able to start with a more average character and roleplay how your character becomes so highly specialized and skilled in their chosen field.
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As you correctly remarked, it's resource scarcity that propels min-maxing.
I noticed that my Prime Runners are much more likely to have that rounded feeling - Their stats aren't actually higher, they just have more of them. Conversely, Street Scum characters tend to be good at only one or two things - most often their stick and a combat skill.
Most RPG systems don't want your characters to be action heroes as seen in film and TV (honorable exception: Feng Shui) because they think you should have potential to develop. Sadly, if you aren't in a hyper focused play where you have one character over the course of years, you probably will never reach that level of competency in so many fields at once.
If I have my character do something, I want him to succeed - otherwise, why attempt it at all? Often enough a failure is worse than doing nothing, so it's generally a good idea to concentrate your abilities in things you can be reasonable sure will succeed and things you just leave other people to do. Which is a good thing actually, as that makes it possible for everyone to shine in their role - unless of course you are one of those players who could not commit to a role, has spread himself to thin and can't get the results he wants.
Another part is system mastery: Those who read the rules, frequent the forums to discuss ideas and have fun solving resource problems tend to have efficient, competent characters. It's a mistake to assume that those characters aren't "flavorful". They are just created with an eye towards what's actually possible and not what's desirable.
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Just to be explicitly clear, are you suggesting Min/Maxing is a bad thing?
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Star Wars: Luke Skywalker and Obi wan Kenobi
I don't think you've quite got the hang of Friends In High Places. Try Yoda? Obi Wan was in some ways equivalent to the GM paying attention to the group's lack of decking skills (one PC said they might want to learn matrix skills, but they're more interesting in neo-anarchism), then providing a GMPC decker. Said decker even gets taken out in a way that pushes the PC towards decking.
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If I have my character do something, I want him to succeed - otherwise, why attempt it at all? Often enough a failure is worse than doing nothing, so it's generally a good idea to concentrate your abilities in things you can be reasonable sure will succeed and things you just leave other people to do. Which is a good thing actually, as that makes it possible for everyone to shine in their role - unless of course you are one of those players who could not commit to a role, has spread himself to thin and can't get the results he wants.
One big problem with your explanation is that from a narrative perspective, the fluff skills are what a player should choose first, since they're what their character learns first chronologically. They're part of his backstory, and he should logically start the game with them.
From a min-max perspective, however, the shadowrunning skills are what a player should choose first since they're what the character needs in order to survive long enough to learn the fluff skills, even if they have to rewrite the character's backstory to make it fit.
This conflict is compounded by the fact that it's more efficient to max out a single skill at character creation, than to get many low-ranked skills. You want to demonstrate the character's passing familiarity with a handful of things as appropriate to his history, but you're highly encouraged to buy those one-rank skills with karma after the first session in what is effectively a ret-con.
Just to be explicitly clear, are you suggesting Min/Maxing is a bad thing?
I think it exposes flaws in the rules themselves, but that it's a perfectly reasonable thing for a player to do. I think the rules should work better to ensure that a min-maxing character is also an interesting character. Take for example, the lack of free contacts and knowledge skills in karma buy. I think is a huge flaw and a perverse incentive. You're heavily encouraged to play a character with no knowledge skills. That's no fun and makes your character that much more boring.
I don't think you've quite got the hang of Friends In High Places. Try Yoda? Obi Wan was in some ways equivalent to the GM paying attention to the group's lack of decking skills (one PC said they might want to learn matrix skills, but they're more interesting in neo-anarchism), then providing a GMPC decker. Said decker even gets taken out in a way that pushes the PC towards decking.
Yoda teaches him things, but doesn't personally act on his behalf all that much. Obi Wan takes a far more hands-on approach.
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It's my understanding that, it has been errata'ed where you do get contacts and knowledge skills.
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You're heavily encouraged to play a character with no knowledge skills. That's no fun and makes your character that much more boring.
On this front, you can certainly know things about subjects and not have them be reflected in Knowledge Skills. The character sheet is not the four corners of the character's mental experiences. Tons of actions theoretically covered by Active Skills should never be rolled because there are no truly meaningful consequences of failure (like googling the menu and map to a local restaurant) so I feel like knowledge skills should play the same way.
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One big problem with your explanation is that from a narrative perspective, the fluff skills are what a player should choose first, since they're what their character learns first chronologically. They're part of his backstory, and he should logically start the game with them.
From a min-max perspective, however, the shadowrunning skills are what a player should choose first since they're what the character needs in order to survive long enough to learn the fluff skills, even if they have to rewrite the character's backstory to make it fit.
This conflict is compounded by the fact that it's more efficient to max out a single skill at character creation, than to get many low-ranked skills. You want to demonstrate the character's passing familiarity with a handful of things as appropriate to his history, but you're highly encouraged to buy those one-rank skills with karma after the first session in what is effectively a ret-con.
Ret-cons aren't a bad thing. Quite often you have to play a character for a session or two to see if you idea works. That's why I usually allow my players to rearrange their character a bit after the first play. Backstory and stats don't have to match up perfectly at first. It has a touch of quantum mechanics: As long as no one has observed your lack of skill, there is no reason to assume you lack those skills. And even than - just say you learned it and have neglected to keep up on the subject.
Inplay, no one can see your character sheet.
A lot of people forget that active skills can be used as knowledge skills.
But yes, SR is stingy with skill points in general - that is most notable if you look at the sample contacts: Most of those can't be recreated - even with Skills A.
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Action/Adventure heroes are frequently soloist and therefore would be impossible to create in Shadowrun without tremendous amounts of resources. Good with any Weapon, can fly, drive, or fix anything, smooth in any social situation and always gets the girl? 200 skill points give or take. Charming, Smart, and Strong? No problem, just need around 40 stat points. And don't forget the 5 to 7 points of Edge.
Shadowrunners aren't intended to be a Mystic-Decker-Face-Rigger-Samurai-Adept, and character optimization has nothing to do with character backstory depth. *shrug*
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I think that the reason players put so much focus on min-maxing characters is because RPG characters frequently do not have the plot armor and safety nets that literary characters have. Players become attached to their characters, and they want them to survive, but that's all based on the whims of the dice. While adventure protagonists might get by with luck, Edge can only carry you so far.
You also can't ever "catch up" if you start with less relevant skills either. Due to the fact that you get so little karma from runs relative to what you get from character creation, you have to make sure you're competent from the start, since you won't be able to make up for it later on. Every point spent on a non-practical skill is a point that could've saved your character from death.
Some of this is due to the skill system itself, since some skills are simply better than others. There have been several threads on hypothetical ways to consolidate or adjust the skill system to solve this problem.
Another contributing factor is the relatively low number of points for contacts and knowledge skills, which are big ways to add depth to characters. Giving players more of these may help to add variety to otherwise one-dimensional characters, and tie them more firmly into the world via their relationships with their contacts.
I havent implemented this houserule in SR5, but I have used it in other systems.
What you could do if you think your table is ignoring/down-prioritizing fluff/depth/varity skills and abilities, is to give the players karma earmarked to such skills.
For instance: instead of awarding the players with 10 karma after some sessions, you could award them with 8 karma and 5 fluff karma to be used solely on knowledge/soft-skills/etc.(if you are feeling kind you could just give them 10 karma 5/fluff karma).
This would of course scew some qualities a bit. Like those requiring you to spend x points on knowledge skills when improving combat skills (in that case. said player should still be forced to spend more karma on knowledge skills than the other players).
This has the added benefit of in-game character advancement vs adding more contact points and knowledge skills at the start of play.
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Don't think so complicated. Just say: Hey, you earned a point of gang knowledge today. Enjoy.
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That would also work for many groups. But then you would remove a bit of player empowerment,by not letting the player himself decide if he should upgrade gangs street knowledge/his ganger contact or streetdrugs. (say the character was involved with those 3 cases last run).
Its not really meant as being very complicated: you could make it like this: whatever karma you earn, you earn ½ of that amount in fluff-karma.
#3. Training Montage
Why it doesn't work in Shadowrun: Karma is a strictly controlled part of the game, and giving one player extra karma to "catch up" would be unfair to other players.
Well, if all the rest of the players find it unfair, isnt it then working as intended? And if all the other players are cool with newer players/characters catching up, then the GM could easily award the new guy a bit extra, until he is close enough to the other characters. (unless you are playing some official missions stuff of course)
#4. Ass Pull
- Star Wars: Han Solo and Luke Skywalker not only escape the Death Star unscathed in the face of thousands of highly-trained soldiers, but rescue Princess Leia as well.
Why it doesn't work in Shadowrun: Incompetent adversaries make for bad stories and kill tension. The antagonists should be a serious threat. Luck is a part of the game in the form of edge, but you'd need to burn edge to pull this sort of thing off, which is not a sustainable plan. If the GM gives this to the player arbitrarily, it can easily cause the other players to become jealous.
Well, since the imperials wasted energy on putting a tracking device on the millennium falcon, thus enabling them to royally screw over the rebels. I would say that it went all according to the antagonists plan. (kinda like if the runners manage to trick the dragon and get away with it rather easily)
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I think players usually aim to create powerful characters because they want to succeed and stay alive. Failure in Shadowrun is quite punishing, you either die or lose Edge, which is a tremendous setback compared to the Karma you earn during the game. Shadowrun also employs the use of dice pool penalties, particularly while damaged or in poor conditions, this means that low dice pool characters can quickly be rendered useless in a given situation. However, I think it is best to not min-max and instead create the character you will have the most fun playing, whether that character is highly powerful or not. It is then the GM's job to plan his campaign to suit the player characters and provide appropriate challenges.
I occasionally start campaigns with additional points for contacts and knowledge skills because they can be fairly sparse on some characters, which doesn't exactly match up with their alleged experience in the shadows. Players rarely ever allocate starting karma to knowledge skills, which is a shame. I am willing to pay the price and sacrifice power in other areas in favor of additional knowledge if it suits my character plan. A savvy GM will reward players for doing this, at least from time to time, otherwise they are indeed quite low value.
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Yoda teaches him things, but doesn't personally act on his behalf all that much. Obi Wan takes a far more hands-on approach.
Precisely. Contacts aren't hands-on helpers during a run. Especially not FIHPs. They do favours that are important, but only need their peripheral involvement - gear, info, arranging meetings, etc.
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I think min-maxing is encouraged by not only the game mechanics, but the game's premise - the character is a specialist who is part of a team. So of course the player's primary focus will be to be good at his/her job (spellcasting, decking, etc.). And skill points left over are unlikely to go to purely flavor skills, because shadowrunners also need a few tertiary skills such as etiquette, perception, sneaking, etc. Even contacts and knowledge skills can be chosen more for utility than flavor. A 4/3 fixer contact will usually be more useful than a 1/2 squatter and a 2/2 matrix blogger. An ork face is likelier to get ork underground: 5 and Cascade ork smugglers: 4 than ork cuisine: 3, ork neotribal music: 2, street fashion: 3, and dirt bike racing: 1.
Keep in mind that not every player will be torn in two directions. A player might think that a 4/3 fixer contact and knowledge skills of ork underground: 5 and Cascade ork smugglers: 4 fit the character's theme and background just fine. Are specialist characters really a "problem"? The whole game, including character creation, is more or less centered around the premise of specialists.
I think part of the problem is that Shadowrun's character creation systems are so wide open, choice-wise. So if you want to make someone who is an awesome marksman with virtually no other skills, you can do that, even though you will be bored outside of combat, and some of the things you omitted were important things to have. Conversely, if you want to be an unaugmented mundane human with average attributes and skills across the board, you can do that, even though your dice pools will be too low to succeed at any difficult task, and the other characters are likely to outshine you.
I think the best cure for overly min-maxed characters (and overly weak characters) is experience, with a GM who is clear about what kind of campaign he is running making that learning process easier.
If you want to solve the problem mechanically, though, then I think the best way is to expand on what the basic rules did when they made knowledge skills and contacts both separate pools of resources. So, one example: "Okay, sum to ten as normal, but everyone starts out with etiquette, perception, and sneaking at rating: 2, which can be improved further with Karma and skill points. You also get 6 points of active skills that can't have anything to do with your specialty - skills like artisan that you normally wouldn't take. You get 30 points for contacts, 10 points for language skills, 24 points for useful knowledge skills like gang identification, and 18 points for knowledge skills representing hobbies and interests, such as urban brawl or dwarven microbrewery beers." Because all of the character creation systems suffer from scarce resources, I think a carrot approach like the one above would work better than a stick approach (making them spend a certain portion of their points on fluff).
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This is why I have my players answer so many questions in character creation. I want them to put knowledge points in fluff places, and spend creation Karma on contacts and more knowledge/language skills. If during the 20(+) Questions portion yoiu tell me your character is a hugs Seattle Mariners fan, that Jules Targo is his favorite player and he wears a Targo jersey all the time during downtime, the first thing we are doing when spending your characters priorities in to put points in Mariners Knowledge, with a specialization in Jules Targo. That is before allocating skill points, stats points or spending a dime (though you are spending 500 nuyen on jerseys, before you buy a single bullet, gun, deck, etc.) As I have pointed out before (http://soyouwanttorunshadowrun.blogspot.com/p/blog-page.html), if your street samurai has an armorer and a street doc as his only contacts, he has failed at life. Additionally, he is probably going to fail at Legwork, which means he will be sitting on his hands/guarding the astral mage/decker for 75% of play time, which means he is failing at the game.
And I encourage my players to min/max, so that they can squeeze every bit of skill points out of their allocated minimums. I know they will earn lots of nuyen and Karma during the game, as long as they survive of course. In my game, surviving is often more about prepping than killing, or running when things go pear-shaped. I do find well-rounded characters survive better. Either they have skills they need, or they know they aren't good enough to win the fight today, and so bail before death is the only option. Additionally, characters with lots of "fluffpoints" should be able to trigger things that refresh their Edge more often than fluff-challenged characters, which may allow for better survival/better success. Just a thought.
Your main point, comparing movie characters to RPG characters, is however, fatally flawed. Movie characters mostly have an emotional arc. If they have a skill arc, that is a montage-even in pop culture, nobody wants to spend their free time at the gym for hours. (Or the most ingenious way to allow players to spend Karma during play sessions-"You must stand up and play a game of Wii-Fit, while listening to Eye of the Tiger, while the rest of us taunt you!") Additionally, most movie characters are post-PRIME Runners. James Bond has a 12 in more skills than dragons do, and 7's in most stats. (His GM was most generous!) About the only thing he can't do is deck! Hell, even young Indy is better than any starting Shadowrun character! Luke Skywalker goes from stupid farm boy to blocking blaster shots with an active magnetically-bottled plasma torch, while blindfolded, in like an hour. (he should have died doing it! Go grab your toy light saber ((Yes, Mr. Black knows you have one)), go to your living room, blindfold yourself, and then start swinging it around. Touch yourself with it by accident? Good, you're dead. At best an amputee. Hit anything else by accident? ((Better replace that lamp before your better half/roommate gets home!)) Good, you set the room on fire, and fire on spaceships as ratty as the Falcon usually mean you are dead.) If we are using Luke as an example, everything on Tatoine is backstory (I learned magic from an old man in the desert. He taught me to craft my own weapon foci) and escaping the Death Star is where the adventure starts. Heck, it is a classic "you has been captured and must escape" starting adventure, very Scourge of the Slave Lords. Luke is an Mystic adept, Han is a rigger, Chewie is a street sam, and Leia is the Face who didn't finish her backstory, only to later figure out that she is actually related to another party member. (That, or she took the Mysterious Implant quality, and her GM is super tricky). They grab the McGuffin, escape, are too stupid/new to the game to check for RFID trackers, are tracked to the Meet, and must then do a vehicle attack without their best driver, who comes back to save the day. Everything else is backstory.
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While it's nice to have 21DP in shooting, I'd argue it isn't necessary.
That same character could turn down a notch to 16 and still be effective.
Having a DP of 8 in Hardware isn't going to get it done you say...but if you do a teamwork test you are adding 2-3DP and +1 limit to the guy whose job it is to take that Hardware test.
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That would also work for many groups. But then you would remove a bit of player empowerment,by not letting the player himself decide if he should upgrade gangs street knowledge/his ganger contact or streetdrugs. (say the character was involved with those 3 cases last run).
This is a big QQ if someone actually gripes about the GM improving something pre-existing on their sheet, for free, based on the narrative.
Talk about gift horses.
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(though you are spending 500 nuyen on jerseys, before you buy a single bullet, gun, deck, etc.)
You can force the player to do these things, but I don't think that really solves the underlying issue. Moreover, I don't think that forcing the player to be 500 nuyen below par really even adds anything to the game. His character obviously isn't going to sell the jerseys, and he's not going to get any practical use out of them. Why not just let your characters have whatever nick-nacks and bric-a-brac they like?
As I have pointed out before (http://soyouwanttorunshadowrun.blogspot.com/p/blog-page.html), if your street samurai has an armorer and a street doc as his only contacts, he has failed at life. Additionally, he is probably going to fail at Legwork, which means he will be sitting on his hands/guarding the astral mage/decker for 75% of play time, which means he is failing at the game.
I agree conceptually, but take a look at the sample characters in the book. p.99
James: Fixer 2/1, Fence 1/1, Neo-Anarchist Lieutenant 2/2
Rob: Street Doc 3/2, Fixer 2/2
Kyra: Ancients Lieutenant 3/3, Ancients Member 1/2, Drug Dealer 1/1, Talismonger 2/1, Street Doc 3/1
Obviously that's not what the game designers thought. Kyra is the only one with a decent array of contacts, but only because she's an elf Shaman with 6 Charisma. In fact, she didn't spend any extra karma on contacts at all. So here we have another example of narrative considerations put up against min-maxing. The devs didn't intend you to spend all that much karma on contacts if you didn't want to, and yet you DO expect them to, but you're not giving them any more karma with which to do it. That's seriously constricting their options.
Your main point, comparing movie characters to RPG characters, is however, fatally flawed. Movie characters mostly have an emotional arc. If they have a skill arc, that is a montage-even in pop culture, nobody wants to spend their free time at the gym for hours.
I don't understand. Runners improving their skills happens in downtime as well. How is that any different?
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Mr Black, if a player super specializes his Sam so that his skills aren't used 75% of the time in your game and he's still having fun, he hasn't failed at the game.
If you don't like super specialized characters in the game you GM, the players need to be told that so that they can decide if your game is the game they want to play. And if they choose not to play, it isn't a failure on their part but the reality that different players are happy with certain play styles. And no play style is inherently better than any other as long as the group enjoys it- it is a game whose pursuit is fun after all.
<<edit>> and I forgot, with what your expectations as a GM are, seems to me that you should have all the players use life modules as they'll end up with more knowledge skills than the other systems and tend to have more diversification of skills in general.
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Additionally, he is probably going to fail at Legwork, which means he will be sitting on his hands/guarding the astral mage/decker for 75% of play time, which means he is failing at the game.
Not everyone needs to be a star in every aspect of a run.
A character who doesn't have much to do in the legwork stage, but anchors the team in infiltration or when it comes to fighting, is in no way "failing at the game."
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(though you are spending 500 nuyen on jerseys, before you buy a single bullet, gun, deck, etc.)
You can force the player to do these things, but I don't think that really solves the underlying issue. Moreover, I don't think that forcing the player to be 500 nuyen below par really even adds anything to the game. His character obviously isn't going to sell the jerseys, and he's not going to get any practical use out of them. Why not just let your characters have whatever nick-nacks and bric-a-brac they like?
One nice thing about having a fleshed out character like this is the ability to find uses for this side information. Say the players have a contact they have used a few times. Said contact loves the same team and player and has chatted with the player. Team needs something super bad from the contact but the only thing he'll take is a trade for that jersey. The player now has to make a huge in character choice to trade the jersey for what they need and grumble about or refuse and have the team do without.
Details like these can really add depth to the game in interesting ways.
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Dude, no one is getting my vintage 20th century Dan Marino jersey.. In the last 75 years since he retired we've had 4 winning seasons, three of them being 9 and 7, losing out on the layoffs in the last week of the season. If it wasn't illegal, I'd say, "Dig him up and clone him." Wait, what am I saying? Who cares if its legal; where exactly is he buried?
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So I thought I would chime in my two cents. I think some of the initial comparisons are off. It never really pays to compare characters in a set narative such as a book or movie to characters created for an RPG. Apples and Oranges. The character in the narative will always have the required skill/item/etc or someone in his party will because if not....the story just kind of ends. "Well, no one here knows how to open the door, I guess we will just go home."
In an RPG there are usually more options open. That said, a good GM will customize the game to his players. No mage? Well having a problem that only a mage can solve effectively makes them reliant on an NPC which probably is not a lot of fun. We have two deckers? Ok, better have a lot of cyber security.
Now, as to the more general issue of min/maxing, I think you have too look at two things: the setting and game system. The setting is one that leans towards dark and gritty. Shadowrun is about criminals and getting screwed over by your employer and never being able to get to far ahead. It is not about heroics, it is about survival. The characters cannot be too good, they have to struggle.
The mechanics seems to enforce that, maybe to much. I have played with around twenty different RPG systems over the years, and SR5 is probably one of the single most hostile systems to generalists I have come across. A great example is the large number of firearms skills. Its possible someone can be a crack shot with an assault rifle and not be able to hit the broad side of a shotgun. The mindnumbingly slow advancement rate is another issue. Unless you play for a very long time, dont expect a character to look to different from when he started.
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So I thought I would chime in my two cents. I think some of the initial comparisons are off. It never really pays to compare characters in a set narative such as a book or movie to characters created for an RPG. Apples and Oranges. The character in the narative will always have the required skill/item/etc or someone in his party will because if not....the story just kind of ends. "Well, no one here knows how to open the door, I guess we will just go home."
But that's true of an RPG too. The players die, the story ends. That's why players put so much focus on competence. Unlike a narrative however, that competence sometimes comes at the expense of depth and backstory, such as when a player opts to put no points in contacts so they can have more combat-related abilities.
In an RPG there are usually more options open. That said, a good GM will customize the game to his players. No mage? Well having a problem that only a mage can solve effectively makes them reliant on an NPC which probably is not a lot of fun. We have two deckers? Ok, better have a lot of cyber security.
Hence a similar end result to the narrative scenario, and for similar reasons. The difference being that the character has had to fight tooth and nail to specialize their character for one job at the expense of all else, coherent backstory be damned. Couldn't the system afford to give more breathing room for variety?
Now, as to the more general issue of min/maxing, I think you have too look at two things: the setting and game system. The setting is one that leans towards dark and gritty. Shadowrun is about criminals and getting screwed over by your employer and never being able to get to far ahead. It is not about heroics, it is about survival. The characters cannot be too good, they have to struggle.
The mechanics seems to enforce that, maybe to much. I have played with around twenty different RPG systems over the years, and SR5 is probably one of the single most hostile systems to generalists I have come across. A great example is the large number of firearms skills. Its possible someone can be a crack shot with an assault rifle and not be able to hit the broad side of a shotgun. The mindnumbingly slow advancement rate is another issue. Unless you play for a very long time, dont expect a character to look to different from when he started.
There are some aspects that are friendly to generalists. Unopposed skill checks, like Armorer or Chemistry, can function well with a single skill point and high attribute. That's not at all an intuitive system, but it's something.
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Or use Life Modules, put some minimum number of modules to be taken. If necessary modify the amount of starting Karma to whatever power level the campaign is? I'm not intimately familiar with the Life Modules but they seem to generate characters with a wider starting skill array, but you can still usually get at least one skill to 6 or 7. That way you're not dividing a players resources into little pools for them.
Or, as a GM, bring up the fluff skills in game in a meaningful way, often enough that players that invest in them are rewarded.
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Or use Life Modules, put some minimum number of modules to be taken. If necessary modify the amount of starting Karma to whatever power level the campaign is? I'm not intimately familiar with the Life Modules but they seem to generate characters with a wider starting skill array, but you can still usually get at least one skill to 6 or 7. That way you're not dividing a players resources into little pools for them.
This is a fairly good idea. I personally would think about going for an additional 100 karma, but requiring them to take three life modules. Three separate life modules gets you some interesting outcomes.
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Personally, I think the bigger problem for a lot of people is the fact that SR doesn't have a level system. SR tries a different approach in that it tries to model itself after 'real life'... and thus creates a big disconnect with players and GMs who come from other systems, or play other systems.
Take the most common RPG out there, D&D. In D&D, as your character gains experience you move up in levels. Each level provides a set list of bonuses: you gain HP (allowing you to take more damage), you gain attack rating (making it easier to hit), you gain saving throw modifiers (making it easier to resist damage), you gain slill points (making it easier to perform checks).
As a level 1 D&D character, an orc with an axe is a serious threat! A single good hit can out right drop just about any character! However, at level 10 a single orc with an axe is a joke, he can land multiple hits and not even threaten to drop any but the weakest of characters (hence why a standard orc is worth nothing XP wise to a level 10 character). Thus to keep a level of challenge and excitement in D&D, you progress to harder monsters.
Think about this... as level 1 characters wandering to countryside, a random encounter is golbins, orcs, and other lvl 1 - 3 threats. Those same characters at level 10 wandering the same countryside now randomly run into lvl 8 - 12 threats.... WTF??? what happened to the goblins and orcs? Did they eat their wheaties and grow in chimeras and young dragons?? How did giants and manitcores suddenly 'arrive randomly' and not just kill off the goblins and orcs BEFORE the characters hit lvl 10?? Face it, there is a big disconnect there, and always has been.
In SR (generally speaking) a ganger is a ganger is a ganger. They are the 'orcs' of D&D. They have a crappy dice pool and poor equipment that most runners xan back hand into paste with ease....
But here is where the disconnect lays, as the players earn karma, or are min/maxed up the arse, they blow through gangers like paper (as they should). So the players lose interest or the GM starts fiddling with stats. Next thing you know, gangers aren't the 'small group' that most street gangs really are, they are sitting on street corners in platoon sized groups (12 to 26), or are just as skilled as elite special forces. Or are packing cutting edge military hardware....
The samething happens on runs into corp buildings.... players min/maxed, or high karma characters are not running into 'Bob the donut eating night guard' as the first line of defense... they are running into 'Mr. Death, the corporate cyberzombie of doom'...
And it becomes a visous rotating circle. The players min-max, the GM (unrealistally) raises the threat levels, forcing the players to specialize their karma and increase their already maxed stats while ignoring the minimized. Forcing the GM to (again unrealistically) raise the threats. Forcing the players to spend karma to raising their maximized stats. Forcing the GM to.... yadda yadda yadda.
BOTH players AND GMs need to take a step back and think about both the world and their games and the way they are going about things.
First off. "Bob the donut eating night guard" is going to be by far the MOST common threat most runners find at a corporate site. Why? Cause 'Bob' is cheap, and is perfectly capable of handling an irate wageslave - the MOST common threat in any office tower. His minimal training and base equipment puts him much higher physically over the average wageslave - who he is there to guard and guard against. And what 'Bob' can handle, he does what he is trained to do... he calls for back-up. Just like police in real life.... (hate to referr to it, but watch any episode of Cops. There is always like 8 cops there dealing with 2 frunken yahoos! The first words out of the initial cops mouth - when its NOT about donuts is: "I need assistance at <insert location>")
But, this is not what I have seen the majority of times in discussions here. Half the time the GM is bypassing 'Bob' and going straight to HTR level armed and trained threats. (For fucks sake, one player's GM had his crew taking on CLUTCHES OF ADULT DRAGONS!!! - AT THE SAME TIME!! wtf??)
So, yes. Talk to your GM. Find out how he is running his game and ASK POINTED QUESTIONS! What does he feel security is dice pools are? What are the dice pools of gangers? What is the typical security of most buildings AND their gear and dice pools?
If he tells you the average security dice pool is 6 to 8. Do you really need a dice pool of 37??
If he tells you the average dice pool is 15 to 30.... Well, squeeze every last die that you can!
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The truth is they can be the same thing. You just need follow Reavers advice and talk with your gaming group, and find out what kind of story everyone is trying for. If the GM is looking for gritty, and you're looking for cinematic you need to ether revise your expectations or find another game. Work with the table and figure it out ahead of time.
Totally elimination of risk is no fun, there is no success without a chance of failure, these is no failure without a chance of success. That said, your character should be able to do the things the character should be able to do. Find the middle ground, you don't want to be at a table where there can be no agreement.
Keep in mind one of the dynamics of SR, you can fail, and you can critically fail, but you cannot critically succeed. You succeed with a huge number of extra success, and those may or may not be usable for something. You should find ways to use your pools to do the most possible. Consider it.
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Think about this... as level 1 characters wandering to countryside, a random encounter is golbins, orcs, and other lvl 1 - 3 threats. Those same characters at level 10 wandering the same countryside now randomly run into lvl 8 - 12 threats.... WTF??? what happened to the goblins and orcs? Did they eat their wheaties and grow in chimeras and young dragons?? How did giants and manitcores suddenly 'arrive randomly' and not just kill off the goblins and orcs BEFORE the characters hit lvl 10?? Face it, there is a big disconnect there, and always has been.
D&D 5e fixes this issue by constraining the amount of stat bonuses you can get, and the difficulty of challenges you can encounter. The threshold for success is never higher than 30, ever. Armor and accuracy bonuses are in short supply. What this does is make it so that Orcs can still threaten high-level players, if in sufficient numbers. So instead of 1-3 orcs, you would face 8-12 orcs. Because a player's ability to stack armor bonuses is limited, the Orcs still have a chance to hurt the party. Granted, the players also have more health and more powerful abilities to deal with the orcs, so it's probably not a serious threat, but that's still a big improvement from previous editions where the players were literally immune to Orcs.
So, yes. Talk to your GM. Find out how he is running his game and ASK POINTED QUESTIONS! What does he feel security is dice pools are? What are the dice pools of gangers? What is the typical security of most buildings AND their gear and dice pools?
If he tells you the average security dice pool is 6 to 8. Do you really need a dice pool of 37??
If he tells you the average dice pool is 15 to 30.... Well, squeeze every last die that you can!
Here we've identified a problem with the game. This is the sort of thing that should be explicitly codified in the book, similar to D&D's challenge rating system. Granted, yes the book gives examples of ganger stats and elite special forces stats, but it needs to give more explicit standards for how to measure the players' strength and their adversaries' strength, and how to determine what is a reasonable challenge or not.
Keep in mind one of the dynamics of SR, you can fail, and you can critically fail, but you cannot critically succeed. You succeed with a huge number of extra success, and those may or may not be usable for something. You should find ways to use your pools to do the most possible. Consider it.
I'm pretty sure this is already accounted for by common wisdom. You stack gun bonuses as high as possible so that you can overcome your opponent's defense dice, and even if you've already overcome them, you get extra damage. If you're not stacking gun bonuses, say because you're a mage, you pick a Steyr TMP machine pistol so you can use suppressive fire, which doesn't require a good dice pool.
You stack magic skills because of the opposed dice pools (Banishing, Summoning, Binding, Ritual Casting, Alchemy, Artificing), or because it scales directly with skill ranks, (counterspelling for spell defense and spellcasting for casting unnoticed). You also stack spellcasting so that you can handle the penalties from sustained spells, injury, and casting simultaneous spells.
You stack points in Stealth, Perception, and Etiquette because they are opposed dice pools.
You DON'T stack Armorer, Chemistry, Artisan, Hardware, Navigation, or Mechanic because those are unopposed dice pools. One rank and a high attribute is more than sufficient.
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TBH, I gave up on D&D when 4e came out.
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TBH, I gave up on D&D when 4e came out.
4e was so fun, I'm so sad that folks didn't see the brilliance of 4e.
4e was so easy to run! So easy to build an adventure for, so systematically transparent, they just didn't hide it behind the curtain.
5e is fine, it's nice easy to learn system, it's got a lot of 2nd in it. But it's normalization the hit curve is a problem, it just flat out is a problem. It doesn't hold up well, and can result in terrible things. I've seen it over and over at the table.
I like Advantage, but it's not gonna save you if you only a 5% chance to start with.
We'll see where it goes from here, but it's still a little messy.
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One thing I've noticed is that most players find hobby related knowledge skills to be useless or a waste of karma. If your character has only shadowrunning related knowledge skills it can serve as a detriment because you have nothing in common with people outside the shadows. Having knowledge skills pertaining to baseball, fine restaurants in Seattle, comic books, trid shows, etc is valuable because it gives you something to chat about with npcs. Having common ground is a great way to get on someone's good side and these types of things come up all the time in game. It also helps your character blend in with the masses more. Another aspect of it is realism, even shadowrunners are almost always going to be fond of activities unrelated to the shadows. Being able to watch all the Mariners games during the regular season and playoffs and actually caring about it adds depth to your character, makes them more believable, and can have an impact on how you set up your apartment, which merchandise you buy, how you dress in social settings, and so on.
I made a character once that invested a fair bit into knowledge skills and also knowsofts and linguasofts. It did set him back on the job but he was very well fleshed out and it made him a lot of fun to play, I'd say he was probably one of my best designed characters I've ever made. He also survived and turned out to be decently powerful in the end. I remember when I was a kid I was always worried about my characters losing because the GM could then do bad things to them. So I often tried to build pretty strong characters, and of course, they were less fleshed out and less fun to play as a result. Nowadays my goal is to create the best character I can, not in terms of power but in terms of how much fun I'll have playing them. This definitely comes at a cost but overall I find roleplaying much more fun this way. I no longer worry about losing, my character is how he is, for better or worse.
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One thing I've noticed is that most players find hobby related knowledge skills to be useless or a waste of karma. If your character has only shadowrunning related knowledge skills it can serve as a detriment because you have nothing in common with people outside the shadows. Having knowledge skills pertaining to baseball, fine restaurants in Seattle, comic books, trid shows, etc is valuable because it gives you something to chat about with npcs. Having common ground is a great way to get on someone's good side and these types of things come up all the time in game. It also helps your character blend in with the masses more. Another aspect of it is realism, even shadowrunners are almost always going to be fond of activities unrelated to the shadows. Being able to watch all the Mariners games during the regular season and playoffs and actually caring about it adds depth to your character, makes them more believable, and can have an impact on how you set up your apartment, which merchandise you buy, how you dress in social settings, and so on.
The problem there is that interacting with NPCs is in and of itself a specialization, and if you don't have the skills for it, the GM is liable to call for a skill check which you'll default on, potentially leading to a critical glitch and screwing up the run.
I've seen plenty of people on the character building forums advise charisma 2 characters to never speak, because it can only end badly. "Let the face handle it instead" they say.
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Shadowrun has the concept of everyday tasks and rating: 0 skills. You might need to roll etiquette for your ex-company man to fit in at a ganger party, or negotiation to get a package deal on the sniper rifle and scope that your arms dealer contact just scored for you. But just chilling with your buds shouldn't require any rolls.
I like hobby skills, but not every runner's hobbies will necessarily be represented by a knowledge skill. Maybe the character just vegges in front of the trid, or goes to singles bars, or listens to classical music because he finds it soothing, even if he couldn't tell you who Beethoven or Bach were.
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One thing I've noticed is that most players find hobby related knowledge skills to be useless or a waste of karma. If your character has only shadowrunning related knowledge skills it can serve as a detriment because you have nothing in common with people outside the shadows. Having knowledge skills pertaining to baseball, fine restaurants in Seattle, comic books, trid shows, etc is valuable because it gives you something to chat about with npcs. Having common ground is a great way to get on someone's good side and these types of things come up all the time in game. It also helps your character blend in with the masses more. Another aspect of it is realism, even shadowrunners are almost always going to be fond of activities unrelated to the shadows. Being able to watch all the Mariners games during the regular season and playoffs and actually caring about it adds depth to your character, makes them more believable, and can have an impact on how you set up your apartment, which merchandise you buy, how you dress in social settings, and so on.
The problem there is that interacting with NPCs is in and of itself a specialization, and if you don't have the skills for it, the GM is liable to call for a skill check which you'll default on, potentially leading to a critical glitch and screwing up the run.
I've seen plenty of people on the character building forums advise charisma 2 characters to never speak, because it can only end badly. "Let the face handle it instead" they say.
It's better to have something to chat about than nothing. Going into a social situation without any semblance of ties to normal society is going to make you look awkward. Being sociable and relatable is very valuable. I don't think the GM should require you to roll to converse about a topic unless the information is scarce. Simply chatting about basic topics is going to be enough in most cases. As far as the people that recommend not talking go, they aren't really roleplayers, they're gamers. Roleplaying and talking go hand in hand. 2 Charisma is only 1 below average and in many cases it is perfectly acceptable to not be socially appealing. Now that can change in a particularly socially demanding situation, of course. But even then, most people don't think they have poor social skills and even if they do have a low Charisma score they can still be attractive, well dressed, properly groomed, physically or intellectually impressive, and so on. They may even have higher social skills than someone with a higher Charisma.