[Lorebane24]

The ones from like, any book, but especially the Lockdown book?  I've always liked to excercise a pretty high degree of control over my own NPCs and monsters in any RPG I run, to the point that I generally customize feats and skills of monsters in D&D/PF games, so naturally I've just been writing my own grunts, especially to better reflect my own interpretation of the shadowrun universe (where skill levels generally lie, how common cyberware is), but as soon as the Chinese holiday ends here we're going to be going full force into a Lockdown campaign, and was wondering how you thought the grunts in that book stand up to a (mostly) competent but not optimized party?

[Herr Brackhaus]

In general, I think the PR ratings are a little odd. There's very little differentiating a PR2, 3, or 4 opponent, and then there's a massive jump in capability when you go to 5 and 6.

I haven't reviewed the Lockdown NPCs in detail like I've done with other books to find out how much karma it would take to build each NPC, but I did look over them to potentially use in my own homebrew campaign. I will say that with the exception of obviously powerful enemies like Cereus and some of the other named NPCs the PR1 through 4 mooks seem just fine in terms of power curve. Once you hit PR5 opponents like the CFD infected EVO Marines, the game changes completely, however; these guys are just plain mean, and in any number equal to the players would easily overwhelm a group of new, non-optimized characters.

Mooks of any kind in greater numbers than the players can always present a challenge, so I'd say go for the PR1 through PR4 guys against the kind of team you describe.

[Lorebane24]

You know, I noticed that about the PR myself, and I'm just sort of running with it and electing to use PR as more of a measure of moral and tactical acumen than of how much raw potency they have.  In my own grunts, there isn't a HUGE difference between my PR 2 veteran gangers and my PR 3 KE patrolmen.  I guess it's true what you mention about having grunts in large numbers, and I think one of the reasons I've made my own is that I usually prefer encounters that lean towards smaller groups of more competent foes because high numbers of grunts always seems to be a major drag on time.

[Herr Brackhaus]

For sure; unless your group loves playing out combat scenarios that take the majority of the gameplay session, using a large number of mooks might be counter productive. It also comes down to prep-work, at least in part; you can pre-roll a whole page of dice and just scratch them off as you need them (one of my favourite ways to not have to roll a ton of dice constantly), or you can handwave a lot of rolls based on probability. A PR1 or 2 ganger rolling 8 dice on the attack is on average scoring 2.67 hits, while a runner rolling 10 dice on defense will score on average 3.33 hits. So on average, the mook is missing, and you can safely just skip a few rolls to keep combat moving by narrating the 4-5 mooks firing their weapons ineffectually and the player characters simply laughing or shrugging their attacks off.

I personally find incredibly detailed stats to be somewhat of a drag where the opposition is concerned, unless we're talking named NPCs. If I'm throwing my players up against a pack of devil rats I'm just not rolling 30 attacks; it's in neither mine nor my players interest for the vast majority of cases. I'll often just note down the kind of dice pools I expect enemies in an encounter to have (combat, social, resistance) both for my own sanity and for the flow of gameplay. But when the street sam goes up against the teams arch-nemesis in one-on-one combat, or when the enemy magician has summoned a particularly powerful spirit, or when the enemy shadowrunner rigger tries to pull a stunt to catch up to the players I roll it out using the specific stats of that character, because it adds drama and tension and excitement.

I've had a chance to go through the NPCs in Lockdown a little more in detail now, and some of them are really cool. The named NPCs can add a lot of flavor, but like the PR1 through 4 mooks/grunts in the core book the lower end of the spectrum are generally the same excepting those with special abilities like headcases. I would definitely use the CFD rules where appropriate, and use specific gear that may be lower-end to represent the desperation of people fighting in the Quarantine, but other than that they're just generic statlines as far as I'm concerned.