The story begins in North America, with everybody being drawn to a transit hub in south-central UCAS in Illinois. You can choose to be brought there or get yourself there, depending on what transportation and story idea you want to go with.
I need help with the contacts. I have 48 free points for contacts, and I just don't know what to do with them. I guess I need...what? A fixer, a cop, a mafia/gang contact...what else?
S4A discusses contacts on page 285. Basically they're friends or acquaintances who you may know (professionally, personally, whatever you think fits) and you call them up to do things that you can't do, or don't have time to do. Fixers are generally viewed as vital contacts because they're basically everything (just not as quick or good as a specialized contact). After that are Infobrokers (if they don't know it, somebody they know probably does) and Fencers (if they can't get it, somebody they know probably can). Picking one or more of those is generally on most characters' list of "must have for utility". Others are based on the character. Grow up next door to a street doc, and you help each other out every once in a while? There's a possible contact. Grow up on the streets in Atlanta, running around with a go-gang? Either a small-scale group contact with the gang, or a garage mechanic that you kept in touch with is a viable outcome of that.
Group contacts are always a good thing.
Take the Catholic Church. Then take Spanish as your native language and wear red everywhere you go. Take Distinctive Quality for bursting into every room you enter, shouting, "Nobody expects...!"
Wait, that's already been done?
I absolutely have to have a knowledge skill linked to every active skill? Or it just gives you a theoretical boost to avoid glitches?
Having knowledge related to a (few) skills represents experience. If you don't have it then it means that you've been coasting by with a partial understanding of going through the motions, you're not penalized for not having knowledge (although it's important for character background, I think). Your knowledge needs to
exist, but you only need to have it above the rating of the active skill if you want to take advantage of it as a Glitch buffer. For a lot of people I'm pretty sure that will mean they'll only want level 1 or 2 knowledge, which represents knowing a little about what you do. I'm expecting this game to be more about the acting than the preparing or improvising in odd circumstances, so go with this: take knowledge skills that are fitting your character. Don't worry about taking high ranks unless you want to be an expert in whatever it is (as part of your character's thing).
What constitutes being rushed?
If you're at a long-range engagement, holed up in an abandoned hotel, and your gun jams, then you duck down and use Armorer to clear the jam. You're not standing in incoming fire, so you can focus on what you're doing and why. Even if there's other stuff going on, if you can focus on more than just the immediate of what you're doing, but have a modicum of "what have I been doing before, and what kind of a plan do I have" then you're probably not rushed.
An example for being rushed: you're in space. A corp ship shoots a railgun round into your ship, puncturing the hull and a piece of shrapnel pokes the space suit you're already wearing. The room vents and your suit is slowly leaking. You're racing against the air draining out of your suit to find a patch and slap it on, or to hack the computer to dump backup oxygen into your compartment so you have time to do something else -
that's rushed.
I bought 1 point of 12 languages, which gave me 8s for all of them, leaving me beyond fluent in them pre-house rule.
My understanding of language is that Rank 1 means you can identify the language, but even if you've got 7 Intuition (the linked attribute for Language skills), you're not fluent in the language. That high intuition means you're really innately talented at learning what those languages eventually mean. You'd need a higher rank in the language to converse fluently, and higher if you want to mask/fake accents so you sound like you're from somewhere other than where you truly are (this would be easy at language rank 6, and virtually impossible at rank 2).
And armor is the same as standard here, the difference in the other thread was for the development of over 100 years of technological development making armor more wearable. This is back to Shadowrun.
