[Ruhalla]

Hi i am getting ready to run my first game of Shadowrun 5 and i have some questions about NPCs

Do the  for npcs in the  SR 5 rule book and adventures released for SR 5 have the stat automatically added

or is the skill rating just the skill rating and i have to add in the relevant stat myself ?

so i am basically asking if a npc has Agility of 7 and a melee skill of 11 does that mean he as 4 ranks in the skill ?

or should i ad the agility to the skill for a total of 18 dice?

[Namikaze]

Depends on the source.  I'm away from my books at the moment, but IIRC the core book NPCs and most of the other books' NPCs use separated skill levels and attributes, meaning you add them together.  In some published adventures though, the stats are pooled already.  If you can list some specific material you are using, I can help you figure it out.

[Ruhalla]

At the moment the basic Rulebook and Firing line

[Namikaze]

Alright, so Firing Line is a book that straddles between SR4 and SR5.  It's bound to have some quirks.  With that in mind, I'm looking through it now and the NPCs I see in Firing Line use pools rather than specific stats.  So for those NPCs, you'd use the number given as the dice pool, which includes the attribute already.

For the core book, the NPCs in there do not give the dice pools.  Rather, they give the specific skill ratings.  For what it's worth, I think almost all the content you'll find in 5th Edition will use specific skill values rather than dice pools.  Looking through some of the other 5th Edition books, I see the same trend toward using specific skill ratings.  Shadow Spells does it, as does Street Grimoire and Run Faster.  However, Coyotes uses dice pools rather than specific skill ratings.

[Ruhalla]

Ok thanks for the information that clears things up quite a bit