[Senko]

The main thing a melee weapon means is that you have to have a way to close the distance in the fight. In general, most fights take place in the under 15 meters range. Most melee-oriented characters are going to have high Agility, which means they can close that gap in a combat turn and a bit.

Even if it is at longer range, you have the options of Sneaking and/or running to close gap while shooting.

I have a Missions-legal character that can close a gap of around 70 meters in a single Combat Turn. It helps that he also has a soak pool of something like 40, so even if he does get shot on the way, he likely isn't taking a ton of damage.

40 . . . I swear sometimes I feel like I'm playing a different game to other people.

You are playing a different game then other people. Some like a more mechanical take on the game then others.  Doesn't make on way better then another. There is not point in judging how another table comes together. As long as you have fun playing at your table, what does it matter how others have fun at theirs?

It matters in that when people ask for help making a character here the advice is nearly always focused on that "Don't buy skills below rank 6 + spec", "better to have a few dump stats of 1 than 1 stat less than 6" and so on. Don't get me wrong I'm not judging him for his 40 die its just I can't see how people do get those 20+ dice at character creation. Partially because I tend towards mages but even when I make a specialized street sam I'd never play because I don't find it fun to specialize that much I can't get those numbers.

[falar]

Way to ignore my follow-up post.

I only did a super-char-oped character because people told me I'd get murderated at con games if I didn't. So I did. Then I found that I didn't need it and therefore looked like an asshole at the table.

I generally push crazy concepts as far as I can as an exercise, then pull them back to sane concepts. I tend towards no dump stats (except for Strength/Body on Dwarfs/Trolls/Orks or Charisma on some Elves), although the aforementioned character was a human with Charisma 1. I also had to make sacrifices to get him working - he had no natural way to get increased initiative, so he popped drugs.

[Jack_Spade]

Bah, no need to defend yourself or your character, falar.

Crafting a character that is good at what he does takes effort and a certain time investment to study and understand the rules. And you certainly won't get any better at that if you don't experiment with crazy concepts.

[Whiskeyjack]

It matters in that when people ask for help making a character here the advice is nearly always focused on that "Don't buy skills below rank 6 + spec", "better to have a few dump stats of 1 than 1 stat less than 6" and so on. Don't get me wrong I'm not judging him for his 40 die its just I can't see how people do get those 20+ dice at character creation. Partially because I tend towards mages but even when I make a specialized street sam I'd never play because I don't find it fun to specialize that much I can't get those numbers.

What do you want people to say? Char creation boards are by their nature driven to optimization, because individual people's tastes on what makes a fun character varies incredibly but the math doesn't lie when you look at it from a perspective of "how can I be as good as possible at my role(s)?"

You are playing a different game than the math crunchers and that's ok. But for the average newbie coming to a chargen board for build help in this complicated system, personally I would think the general build help guidelines like "buy rating 1 skills with karma not skill points" and "skills A is usually a trap for these reasons" is probably more helpful and more on point to the reasons they come to that kind of board than anything else.

[anchoress]

What do you want people to say? Char creation boards are by their nature driven to optimization, because individual people's tastes on what makes a fun character varies incredibly but the math doesn't lie when you look at it from a perspective of "how can I be as good as possible at my role(s)?"
/...)

Isn't this heavily reliant on your GMs calls? My first SR experience i made a few years ago and the GM took our charsheets before the start of the game. He noted down all our skills and stats. And everytime we did something fairly usual (like matrix search with the commlink, driving a char off the grid-link, and so on) he asked for a test. Especially at chars without points invested in this specific skill. It's not even funny to roll 3-5 dice the whole evening, everytime in risk of a critical glitch.

And i have to tell you: i loved it. It really forced us to focus on a broad skillset and made the characters so much more dynamic. Each to his own and minmaxing is a thing i highly appreciate because i am not good at it. But that does not mean that math always demands to min-max. Math demands dependend on what the GM wants. And the best for each player is to find out, what style of game the GM wants to play. Story driven? Action orientated? Focused on hard maxed skills? Or more on flavour and fluff? I don't judge any playstile. Playing means to have fun. And fun is different to each person. So, to make this work out perfectly, just make sure to ask, what type of play is actually "fun" for the group you are playing with. Nothing more and nothing less.

[Whiskeyjack]

In the vast majority of cases on this board, you get a thread with a sheet and a comment of "plz to critique." No context about the game, about expected dice pools, etc.

Not knowing how your game is set up,and thereby not knowing how to build for it, is especially common if you're joining a PbP of random people who don't know each other but it certainly happens in established groups where the GM has failed to hold a Session Zero in which they set expectations of power levels and theme (yes, I'm comfortable laying this at the feet of the GM).

In the absence of that info it's no surprise that the default advice is set to "be as good as possible in your focus areas."

I'm glad you enjoy the style of play you cited. Personally I think it's too punishing and frankly a little sadistic to go out of your way to call for rolls like that, pointedly setting the players up to fail. It's not players' fault for specializing near as much as it is the system's fault for pushing that as the obvious decision path (Exceptions of course existing for specific table guidance) to anyone who can do a little math.

[Marcus]

It matters in that when people ask for help making a character here the advice is nearly always focused on that "Don't buy skills below rank 6 + spec", "better to have a few dump stats of 1 than 1 stat less than 6" and so on. Don't get me wrong I'm not judging him for his 40 die its just I can't see how people do get those 20+ dice at character creation. Partially because I tend towards mages but even when I make a specialized street sam I'd never play because I don't find it fun to specialize that much I can't get those numbers.

Why does that matter? I don't follow.

I don't mean to harsh or rude but getting 20 dice is hardly a stunning feat, nor is always a worth while one. Magic is a great example of a place where spending the resources necessary to go much above 16 is so expensive starting resource wise as to be not worth it. Further Getting to 40 dice in armor can actually be very dangerous to a table as a whole, if the rest of the table isn't in the same power range as a whole. But those are issues to be address at a given local table.

Regardless no one in the critique section is trying to dictate how games should be run, or even how characters should be made. Simply offering the best mechanical advice as they see it, most of the multi-build threads include plenty of contradictory advice. Meaning that the OP has to make their own choice based upon the options they like best. Plenty of character that get reviewed don't end up with pools beyond the 16+ range. Plenty do go higher, as long as the players are happy at their table then all is well. I personally post in the board b/c it helps me become better at building, and I hope I can help people become happier at their tables.

[Glyph]

Optimization advice isn't always limited to dice pool size, either.  Things like important skills that are missing, or glaring weaknesses, also get touched upon.  If the Street Samurai archetype was presented as a character for critique, people would be saying "Dude, you have a Charisma of 2 and no social skills - you are rolling a single die for those rolls.  Even worse, no perception and an Intuition of 3 means this guy will be rolling just two dice to notice things."

[gradivus]

I do it all the time..
throw out a concept with no commentary...
because I do want to see how different people would redo the concept to suite their taste.

Doesn't mean I'd do it their way.
Doesn't even mean I'll play that concept...more often than not it's a thought exercise for me.
I do however enjoy seeing the different takes.

And sometimes I'll purposely do what I know I'll get scolded for just because I'm quirky like that.
Remember never break the golden rule that <insert your personal pet peeve golden rule>

[CrimsonY]

Oh my god, the thread is alive =O

I'm sorry I didn't notice the page numbers on the bottom and though it stopped at the first page.


@ "Sword to a gunfight discussion", pretty sure there is nothing to hack in the basic mechanics that makes guns such a terrifying force. A strong point is the possibility to dodge bullets for magic users or just adepts? and outright negate them with implants. Meaning swords are starting to get an edge for sure to me now, since most of the best qualities of guns are losing their strength to magic and gizmo, all points taken. xD thank you.

On the other hand: Now that's just silly, why would you ever design a gun that can be hacked?
Drones are one thing but a gun is just mechanical, and even the best firearms of today don't need computer parts, so maybe it's something about shadowrun's matrix I don't know, but I feel like in the sixth world, weapon designers would have that possibility in mind and not do that unless the pros greatly outweighed the cons of being hacked. ^^

[CrimsonY]

"Discussion about the system forcing people into min/maxing as a logical decision rather than casual fun character building"

I once read something in a game modding forum that went something like this (incoming destruction of original citation I half remember): In a game you want to reward players for good decision making, but that means there will be things better than others and some players might fail to see why.

I often wondered what a perfectly balanced system would feel like, getting any skill at 18 dices would be as cost efficient as any other skill, be called upon as much as any other 18 dices in any skills OR cost exactly as much to get to 18 as it's use frequency and relevance...
While it would be incredibly difficult to balance like that considering each GM might set their campaign differently, it would also take away much of the fun of character creation (although not all if it).

So I feel the "pitfalls" you have all mentioned are perhaps what makes character building fun, realizing what a terribly deficient very good hacker you have on paper in front of you xD

Keep posting what skills or stat can be such a pitfall in general it's very helpful.

[CrimsonY]

This post is about an example of how a system can lead to forcing players into a certain amount of min/maxing just because of how it is made, so skip it entirely if you want, it may not be interesting to you.

Meanwhile I'll post one of my own observation about how a system can funnel players into patterns for character building that just ends up better than others (maybe even breaking the system for when there are min/maxers and just plain "casual" players at the same table [I'm saying casual here but I really just mean someone who doesn't care to weight every possibility and end up with a +1 somewhere because they spent 3 hours at it])

In the FFG Star Wars system the only time you can put experience in a base attribute (agi, int, etc...) is at the creation. Base stats are THE most important aspect of your character, setting the amount of dices you will have for any action using the stat. It cost 10x rank you want to buy and later on can only improve with implants or reaching the botom of a "skill tree" the aumentation often cost immense amounts of money or a minimum of 100 exp (up to 175 for certain career trees).

All the while that medecine proficiency has the same cost to raise (10x the amount you will have for the next rank and five less per level if your career has the skill training). I'll spare you the rest of the details, but basically if you make a character there is absolutely no reason NOT to put as much starting Exp in base stats as possible, leaving your character growth to end of session experience gain.

This make it seem like every character is coming out of the box as that rookie "insert career path" right out of the entrance exam for said career, as you will have your entire game to put points in your career skills while if you wasted creation exp into it, you'll have good rolls in your first games and then will get outclassed by anyone who didn't, just because a skill use the base stat for dice amount and the skill for dice "efficiency" if you want, since you can't crit on a non trained dice and they have 1/8 to be wasted while trained dices have 1/12, but more dice = better. So having 4 INT and 0 medecine will yield better dice results as having 2 INT and 2 medecin, unless both dices crit (1/12).

Sorry for the wall of text again, and thank you if you read it.
Please go ahead and include your opinion if there are such funnels in the Shadowrun system, or if you think there are particularly bad decisions I should avoid going into character creation for the first time ^_^

[CrimsonY]

I am meeting my group next Sunday, tomorrow in fact I'm pretty hyped!

Seems like everyone has their character mostly set, during a discussion about what each person wanted to make certain roles were left and out of them it seems I'll end up making a Rigger as I liked the idea. Since it seems it is INT based and we also lack medicine skills and that also goes by INT it'll be a machine/people repair guy, let's just hope I don't get that oil can and blood pack mixed up... ah It'll be fine I'm sure, seems like half the group is gonna end up as cyborgs anyway xD.

Talking about the rest of the group it seems so far we'll have an Elf Face combat oriented, an Elf mage with some fencing, an Ork Decker with some melee skills as well as a fourth Ork Melee with lots of skills in many things apparently. So much for bringing a gun to a sword-fight! >_>

Seems like I'll be having lots of drone with lots of guns and actually end up as minority as a human... (though I usually have no racial preference when it comes to role-playing, be it monsters, aliens or meta-humans xD)

Let's hope all the sword over firearms arguments hold up, otherwise I'll have a lot of sewing back limbs and extracting lead from torsos to do. ^_^

[ZombieAcePilot]

Riggers need 4 stats. Reflex is probably the most important. Behind that you have intuition and logic, and finally willpower. Explaining why is a doozie that I will leave for someone else.

[Whiskeyjack]

"Sword to a gunfight discussion", pretty sure there is nothing to hack in the basic mechanics that makes guns such a terrifying force. A strong point is the possibility to dodge bullets for magic users or just adepts? and outright negate them with implants. Meaning swords are starting to get an edge for sure to me now, since most of the best qualities of guns are losing their strength to magic and gizmo, all points taken. xD thank you.

Wait what?

No.

It's easier to be better at guns with much less investment because you don't have to care about STR. In addition, auto fire is the best way to penalize a defense test, and there are a lot of ways to shoot that only take a Simple, where Melee is always a Complex outside of an Iaijutsu or Rapid Draw adept build.

That said anyone can try to dodge anything and hacking a gun in combat isn't viable given the action economy. Hacking guns and ware is great if you can do it outside of combat time. I find the concerns to be more bogeymen than legitimate.

On the other hand: Now that's just silly, why would you ever design a gun that can be hacked?
Drones are one thing but a gun is just mechanical, and even the best firearms of today don't need computer parts, so maybe it's something about shadowrun's matrix I don't know, but I feel like in the sixth world, weapon designers would have that possibility in mind and not do that unless the pros greatly outweighed the cons of being hacked. ^^

It's just like how cars can be hacked now. The smartgun/smartlink requires a wireless connection to gather ambient information. That link is vulnerable.