[Mr. Black]

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, 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.

[gradivus]

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.

[Whiskeyjack]

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.

[Strill]

(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, 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?

[gradivus]

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.

[Whiskeyjack]

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."

[Mr. Grey]

(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.

[gradivus]

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?

[Wolfeyes]

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.

[Strill]

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.

[Hobbes]

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. 

[falar]

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.

[Reaver]

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!

[Marcus]

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.

[Strill]

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.