[falar]

First Aid is really messed up this edition. AFAIK it's the only skill with a results limitation tied to skill rank, on top of applying a Limit to hits, on top of you needing to beat a threshold for any positive effect at all. It drastically devalues the skill, IMO.

Agreed. It's super weird. You have a Limit, an effective limit and a threshold. So if your skill is 6, you need to have a Limit of 8 to get the maximum healing you can out of it.

[Hobbes]

A character using that as a starting point and modified from there isn't hobbled. He may not be getting the absolute maximum possible pools, but he can still be quite effective.

"Former Special Forces" is common too, but that doesn't change that no character right out of generation is going to be good enough to actually fit that mold.

Generic NPCs were built with average to good stats, equipment based on threat level and role, and then fudged the dice pools with heinous amounts of skill points.  There is no gain to the game by having Devs spend hours on each NPC using some artificial constraints similar to what PC generation has.  In fact, as a GM, I really hate it when the NPCs get complicated.  There is much to be said for NPCs with simply a stat+skill to calculate a dice pool. 

Similarly there is nothing to gain by comparing a PC backstory to an NPC stat block.  Primarily because that's just silly.  But also if you have a PC with the requisite 1,000 to 2,000 karma in skills, they're going to completely crush the NPC stat block with superior Attributes, gear, and overall more optimized build.  To say nothing of the Positive and Negative qualities as NPCs typically don't have many.

[Jayde Moon]

As a military guy who has worked with Spec Ops, I personally think you can come pretty close to making a young to mid level spec ops guy at character creation.  It's just an opinion, of course... but A Skills, B Attributes, C Resources, D Race, E Magic could do a pretty good job, IMO.

[Tarislar]

As far as skill vs attribute...
SR should not have bothered with defining the skills since the mechanics they have chosen to use doesn't support the definitions.

It is an irrefutable fact that Pistols 0 and AGI 6  Pistol 3 and AGI 3 gives the same DP as Pistols 5 and AGI 1. And all the various combination that give you a 6 DP. (Thanks A4BG)

In real life having a high AGI ha nothing to do with having an aptitude for shooting- otherwise every professional figure skater ever is going to be a decent shot.. and we all know that cannot hold true.

DND doesn't give artificial names to the ranks in a skill. If you have 5 ranks plus you attribute modifier is +5, it's simply a +10 to a d20 roll. Same as 8 ranks plus 2 modifier is a +10. Mechanically it's the +10 that matters.

Same holds true in SR, a DP of 12 is a DP of 12 and are mechanically equal no matter how you got to it.

The problem of trying to view the skill in isolation to the DP is the way Character Generation and Character advancement work. The highest possible starting skill is 8 (and only with life modules and having picked the Aptitude quality) but realistically, most builds are capped at 6 plus a specialization. However, starting attributes can be double digits. The way that karma is earned and the expense in raising skills beyond 6 means you don't see many players with double digit skills. It's hard justifying spending 50 Karma on one skill when you character has skill holes that need to be filled (and most characters do have skill holes). The system is purposely built this way to encourage diversification after character generation.

One of the things I would like to see in regards to DP is to have Skills give you 2D per Level instead of 1.
So they have more "weight" than the attached attribute.
I realize this means that resisted tests will need to be adjusted against that higher # of dice but over all I think it would be a good option.

Second I'd like to see the Karma Costs for Skills go down.  Too expensive compared to attributes atm.
A single point per level combined with the above extra skill dice would actually make the Attributes v/s Skills choice be difficult to make.

[Shadowjack]

I am well aware of how the system works and what skills are wonky and should have came with better rules, etc. The difference between you and I is that I have no problem whatsoever with playing "bad" characters. I don't really care that Stunbolt is better than Astral Combat, I will choose whichever one I think is going to be more fun. I am not trying to beat the game, I just want to enjoy the game. I enjoy winning and losing. I enjoy having flaws, even serious flaws. Having a very poor dodge pool is a big problem but I will still play such characters. I got away from playing super safe with character builds a long time ago, I find it very interesting to explore weaknesses and what you may consider to be flawed designs. Just because I don't agree with your mentality does not mean I don't understand the rules.

Hobbes, when I say "positive feedback" I am talking about telling him his character is cool and getting him pumped up to play it. I would not say "Neat idea but you have too many bad skills and your attributes are really sub-optimal for your role, scrap 1/3 of it and play the character I suggest." And I have seen that happen a LOT of times over the years. I rarely check this sub forum because of the bad  history it has.

I should note that I prefer a DEEP level of immersion and many of my views are based on that. I like to take every aspect of my background and character sheet to produce the most powerful roleplaying experience I can bring to the table. If something makes sense for the character but it is "useless" I will still take it and sometimes it does come into play. I also feel that a crucial GM skill is to make players feel good about the choices they made, not punishing them because they didn't fully optimize. If one of my players took Rating 7 Performance and his background said he was a musician in Aztlan for 10 years, I would probably look for a way to work that into a run or at least a session, or maybe more than one, it could even become important to the campaign as a whole. When a player invests a ton of karma into something and the GM doesn't have it come into play ever, that just encourages him to not spend his karma on things like that again. But if the GM understands that the player purchased it because he thought it was very cool and rewards him for it at some point, the player will be very happy and continue to build characters how he likes. It's things like this that lead players to avoid certain skills because they feel useless, and with a GM who hasn't learned this valuable skill, they probably are useless.The same is true for knowledge and language skills. Many people won't invest actual karma into them, they just take the freebies. Such skills rarely, if ever come up in quite a  few groups. But if the GM makes the skills worthwhile they go from useless to amazingly fun.

I would even go so far as to say that I wouldn't always take Stunbolt over Astral Combat because it's not how I visualize my character fighting spirits. I also don't like to take certain spells, guns, vehicles, ware, etc every time because they are the best or most useful. I think changing it up is a lot of fun.

[FST_Gemstar]

There definitely could be more an effort push back on character help requests to learn more about the context of the character/player will be in and to learn more about what kind of character is going to be fun for the player to play. People go quick to optimizing because some things are easy to spot and people don't include the context with their initial postings. However, I'm not sure people consciously post to with the request, "How can I make this character more fun?" It's a very subjective question that strangers don't always feel comfortable advising on. Lots of good ideas can from bouncing around what different people think is might be fun for a character and builds can really come together in ways that feel systemically more masterful and help provide a richer experience for a player.

I agree that part of a GM's role is working with players to put together campaign elements that help make playing at the table feel resonant and fun.  I don't think this is so in question though. It's no fun for a player or GM to have campaigns/runs that are not suited or interesting to players. If a table doesn't have a magician, campaigns probably shouldn't involve frequent astral quests. If no one can do Matrix work, having deep data steals is going to be frustrating. GMs should also be open to players working in their strengths in creative ways, especially when they might not have expected it.

[Facemage]

I am well aware of how the system works and what skills are wonky and should have came with better rules, etc. The difference between you and I is that I have no problem whatsoever with playing "bad" characters. I don't really care that Stunbolt is better than Astral Combat, I will choose whichever one I think is going to be more fun. I am not trying to beat the game, I just want to enjoy the game. I enjoy winning and losing. I enjoy having flaws, even serious flaws. Having a very poor dodge pool is a big problem but I will still play such characters. I got away from playing super safe with character builds a long time ago, I find it very interesting to explore weaknesses and what you may consider to be flawed designs. Just because I don't agree with your mentality does not mean I don't understand the rules.

Hobbes, when I say "positive feedback" I am talking about telling him his character is cool and getting him pumped up to play it. I would not say "Neat idea but you have too many bad skills and your attributes are really sub-optimal for your role, scrap 1/3 of it and play the character I suggest." And I have seen that happen a LOT of times over the years. I rarely check this sub forum because of the bad  history it has.

I should note that I prefer a DEEP level of immersion and many of my views are based on that. I like to take every aspect of my background and character sheet to produce the most powerful roleplaying experience I can bring to the table. If something makes sense for the character but it is "useless" I will still take it and sometimes it does come into play. I also feel that a crucial GM skill is to make players feel good about the choices they made, not punishing them because they didn't fully optimize. If one of my players took Rating 7 Performance and his background said he was a musician in Aztlan for 10 years, I would probably look for a way to work that into a run or at least a session, or maybe more than one, it could even become important to the campaign as a whole. When a player invests a ton of karma into something and the GM doesn't have it come into play ever, that just encourages him to not spend his karma on things like that again. But if the GM understands that the player purchased it because he thought it was very cool and rewards him for it at some point, the player will be very happy and continue to build characters how he likes. It's things like this that lead players to avoid certain skills because they feel useless, and with a GM who hasn't learned this valuable skill, they probably are useless.The same is true for knowledge and language skills. Many people won't invest actual karma into them, they just take the freebies. Such skills rarely, if ever come up in quite a  few groups. But if the GM makes the skills worthwhile they go from useless to amazingly fun.

I would even go so far as to say that I wouldn't always take Stunbolt over Astral Combat because it's not how I visualize my character fighting spirits. I also don't like to take certain spells, guns, vehicles, ware, etc every time because they are the best or most useful. I think changing it up is a lot of fun.

I understand your statements and viewpoints. I have no problems with them. But you said also that in your games:
a) characters get more karma
b) enemies at least in the beginning are easier than the archetypes.

The question is: Can your interesting character survive in much more dangerous campaigns? In my example, Wolf the shaman should be able to survive in the campaign with the following rules:
a) karma rewards as the guidelines in the corebook
b) first enemies are like archetypes from the corebook.

I said that the player's table uses those rules.

You can create very interesting backstory and that's why select low dodge pool and wonky skills. You put a lot of effort to the backstory and that's why your character is not the best character in the fight. And the first ork street samurai from the corebook kills him with a single shot with an assault rifle... It's time to create a new character.

[Facemage]

I agree that part of a GM's role is working with players to put together campaign elements that help make playing at the table feel resonant and fun.  I don't think this is so in question though. It's no fun for a player or GM to have campaigns/runs that are not suited or interesting to players. If a table doesn't have a magician, campaigns probably shouldn't involve frequent astral quests. If no one can do Matrix work, having deep data steals is going to be frustrating. GMs should also be open to players working in their strengths in creative ways, especially when they might not have expected it.

I agree this. I have sometimes thought what to do, if I have only 2 players? They cannot cover all roles (face, mage, decker, sam and rigger).  One solution is to give players more resources in the beginning (for example sum to 12 or 13). The players can easily create characters with 2 roles. For example sam/face/rigger and decker/mage. The another option is face/mage and decker/sam/rigger. If you have A in skills, you can easily cover two or even three roles.

[Glyph]

I am well aware of how the system works and what skills are wonky and should have came with better rules, etc. The difference between you and I is that I have no problem whatsoever with playing "bad" characters. I don't really care that Stunbolt is better than Astral Combat, I will choose whichever one I think is going to be more fun. I am not trying to beat the game, I just want to enjoy the game. I enjoy winning and losing. I enjoy having flaws, even serious flaws. Having a very poor dodge pool is a big problem but I will still play such characters. I got away from playing super safe with character builds a long time ago, I find it very interesting to explore weaknesses and what you may consider to be flawed designs. Just because I don't agree with your mentality does not mean I don't understand the rules.

Hobbes, when I say "positive feedback" I am talking about telling him his character is cool and getting him pumped up to play it. I would not say "Neat idea but you have too many bad skills and your attributes are really sub-optimal for your role, scrap 1/3 of it and play the character I suggest." And I have seen that happen a LOT of times over the years. I rarely check this sub forum because of the bad  history it has.

I should note that I prefer a DEEP level of immersion and many of my views are based on that. I like to take every aspect of my background and character sheet to produce the most powerful roleplaying experience I can bring to the table. If something makes sense for the character but it is "useless" I will still take it and sometimes it does come into play. I also feel that a crucial GM skill is to make players feel good about the choices they made, not punishing them because they didn't fully optimize. If one of my players took Rating 7 Performance and his background said he was a musician in Aztlan for 10 years, I would probably look for a way to work that into a run or at least a session, or maybe more than one, it could even become important to the campaign as a whole. When a player invests a ton of karma into something and the GM doesn't have it come into play ever, that just encourages him to not spend his karma on things like that again. But if the GM understands that the player purchased it because he thought it was very cool and rewards him for it at some point, the player will be very happy and continue to build characters how he likes. It's things like this that lead players to avoid certain skills because they feel useless, and with a GM who hasn't learned this valuable skill, they probably are useless.The same is true for knowledge and language skills. Many people won't invest actual karma into them, they just take the freebies. Such skills rarely, if ever come up in quite a  few groups. But if the GM makes the skills worthwhile they go from useless to amazingly fun.

I would even go so far as to say that I wouldn't always take Stunbolt over Astral Combat because it's not how I visualize my character fighting spirits. I also don't like to take certain spells, guns, vehicles, ware, etc every time because they are the best or most useful. I think changing it up is a lot of fun.

That may work out fine for you, but do you really think it is the same attitude that someone posting to this subforum will have?  Someone who is okay with playing a character with suboptimal choices made for roleplaying reasons has no reason to post that character here.  People post characters here to see if they mechanically work - although I have seen a few pure concept posts along the line of "How would you make this concept in the system?"  We are here to look at the nuts and bolts, not to give out warm fuzzies.  I think "Neat idea but...", followed by some solid advice on how to actually implement a concept, is being helpful, not trampling on a delicate snowflake.

[Marcus]

The problem that springs up with the "It's fine to play a bad from the view point of the system character" is the 2nd order consequences of doing so. Game theory for RPGs teaches that, by default the player will be successful at whatever the goal is, so whenever dice are rolled the odds of the players being successful decreases by some amount. Clearly the less likely the character is to be successful at a given roll dictates the size of that decrease.  So when your bring your character who is bad, at something he or she should be good at your bring down your whole team.

So yes I won't play a character I know is bad, b/c I would never ask my tables mates to bring a bad character on a run. I'm fine with bringing a character that won't always be useful, or taking a character out his comfort zone, and I'm fine with failing to be successful, that's just part of the game. However that does leads to the question of if the character is bad, why is that character getting selected for a given run? Further if he is well and truly bad why would any one keep that character on a team?

When your putting together your crew to commit crime for fun and profit, ya don't bring someone who isn't at the top of their game. Making a build choice base on fun factor is fine, nothing wrong with that. Making a choice that prevents your character from being able to complete their given role is a another level of issue. Telling someone their concept is functional, when you know it's not going to be able full fill it's role, to me is deceiving them.

[Shadowjack]

Perhaps the elite decker is just nowhere to be found so you took the best guy you could get. Or maybe you took the second or third option because you thought he seemed more well rounded or he didn't rub you the wrong way like the elite decker did. You are going to want to find people that you can mesh with. I don't agree with this idea that all runner teams need to be full of people very proficient in their role. Shadowrunners make up a  very small portion of the global population and you have to play the cards you're dealt or go with a smaller team. There are so many justifications for taking a lesser skilled runner that it's not even worth going into further detail. You also have to wonder what the average runner looks like. It seems that you guys think shadowrun is a game that is 100% about forming the best team possible and that is definitely not the case imo, I think that is a very narrow point of view and when I read shadowrun novels I often get the impression that the team members are not of the same approximate skill level. Look at real world pro sports, there is usually a star player or two and the skill disparity between players is often very high, the fact is that there are average and below average players even when recruiting players from all around the world. Of course there are jobs available for average or below average runners, why wouldn't there be? At some point your elite runner was a noobie too and he presumably had to work his way up, building his skills along the way.

I am someone that has started the hobby like most. I began building very strong characters (or attempting to) and had a good time doing so. But that is only the tip of the iceberg, playing average and below average characters comes with merits too. If you play exclusively powerful characters you are missing out on a plethora of positive experiences. You very well may have a blast in the long run by playing such characters but you also *might* be missing out on things you would enjoy much more. The only way to know for sure is to give it a try.

The archetypes in the book are what I would consider to be Prime Runners and do not represent normal opposition for the players. Prime Runners are less common and intended to be more significant when they do pop up as opponents. There are also a million ways to defeat them, even with significantly weaker characters, there are tons of variables in place here and the GM is not forced to make a weaker team face only Professional Rating 1 and 2 opponents. This all comes down to the skill and experience of the GM and how well he can evaluate the team and what they're capable of. Additionally, planning for all runs to be successful is another example of a narrow point of view. Losing from time to time adds value to wins and if you only win it takes value away from them. If you disagree with that I think it would be due to inexperience or from the GM or players handling it in a poor manner. Even having losing streaks can be a lot of fun and make for a better story. The general point I'm trying to make is that there is much more to Shadowrun, and roleplaying in general, than trying to make powerful characters and succeed as much as possible. And to be clear, if that's what you like I don't have an issue with it but just be aware that there are more possibilities.

[ZombieAcePilot]

I don't usually submit my characters for review to forums because I am confident in them. Recently I decided to get involved with runnerhub to scratch my SR itch. I had to submit a character. I came up with a pretty cool idea for a face and had worked it all out.

Along the way I had a sheet reviewer tell me to get rid of my standard ammo because it is "crap". My knee jerk was so strong I withdrew the character. I have standard ammo for every character I make. It is legal and makes you look like an armed citizen, which isn't abnormal in shadowrun. It is also effective on drones (unlike Gel), cheaper than stick and shock while providing more knock down power (in addition to allowing you to shoot through barriers, which I can't imagine stick and shock does so well). I'd be shooting hollow points in a heart beat if they weren't illegal and priced way too high. All that aside, standard ammo is standard for a reason. 9/10 guns are probably loaded with it.

The entire interaction, as innocuous as it might look revealed the character of that moderator (if not the community they represent). It was such a turn off to know that non-power gamers need not apply. APDS or go home. Well, I took my ball and went home.

[Shadowjack]

I don't usually submit my characters for review to forums because I am confident in them. Recently I decided to get involved with runnerhub to scratch my SR itch. I had to submit a character. I came up with a pretty cool idea for a face and had worked it all out.

Along the way I had a sheet reviewer tell me to get rid of my standard ammo because it is "crap". My knee jerk was so strong I withdrew the character. I have standard ammo for every character I make. It is legal and makes you look like an armed citizen, which isn't abnormal in shadowrun. It is also effective on drones (unlike Gel), cheaper than stick and shock while providing more knock down power (in addition to allowing you to shoot through barriers, which I can't imagine stick and shock does so well). I'd be shooting hollow points in a heart beat if they weren't illegal and priced way too high. All that aside, standard ammo is standard for a reason. 9/10 guns are probably loaded with it.

The entire interaction, as innocuous as it might look revealed the character of that moderator (if not the community they represent). It was such a turn off to know that non-power gamers need not apply. APDS or go home. Well, I took my ball and went home.

Thanks for sharing that story. I have had similar experiences and haven't posted a character here in many years. I have had long absences from these forums because of posters that I consider to be trolls and extremely abusive to the point where I no longer had any fun, and a lot of them used to post in this sub forum, all of whom were power gamers. People can and do quit the forums and sometimes even the game because of the way people treat them. I didn't give any specific examples because I don't want to cause any trouble but I think it's very common for people to leave insulting or annoying critiques and they often don't realize it. Having any kind of discussion about the topic seems to always get power gamers fired up, as it did in this thread and many others.

Power gamers tend to have very narrow opinions and make a ton of declaritive statements about particular aspects of the game, most commonly regarding the selection of certain items or character stats. The fact is that not everyone wants to use the 'best' pistol or omit 'crap' skills or 'useless' spells, etc. Anything in the books is open game and we can only decide the value we place on it personally. I have used the majority of weapons at some point or another and I think it's perfectly fine to use weaker gear. You have to keep in mind that there is no way in game for the characters to see the statistics the players see. They also can't see the rules for spells or vehicles. I think that the player who places the least restrictions on his play style is the most likely one to have fun. When I buy a new book it's pretty obvious to me which guns are the strongest or which qualities are a good value, but if I'm unwilling to use them I have essentially removed some of my options for the book I just purchased. It can be a lot of fun to use a Colt Government 2066 even though it's not the strongest pistol, it can even make you feel somewhat special when everyone around you is packing their Predator, but you like your trusty Colt. The same logic applies to spells, I used to never play magicians without Heal just because I thought it was awesome and it seemed essential. Then I tried a magician without it, knowing I'd be better off with it, and I had a lot of fun because I got a different spell, I had a bit of a weakness, and I made myself excited for the next time I got to take Heal. Skills are the same deal, I'm pretty damn aware that Performance is likely only going to save my ass somewhere between never and twice, but it's a part of my character and if it does prove to be useful I'm going to enjoy that a lot more than just firing my assault rifle on every single street samurai. A lot of skills that clearly aren't as useful as others, such as Free Fall, Armorer, or Artificing, can be really fun to have and it is really cool knowing you have an ace in the hole that nobody else would even dream of taking, and when it finally comes into play people say "Whatt?! You have that skill? I never took it before, that's awesome!" At least that's how it's been at my table

[ZombieAcePilot]

 I love freefall, because everyone thinks it is useless. I've been in a fair share of games that called for repelling from roofs. I wonder how familiar most people are with the rules for falling damage. Splat.

[Whiskeyjack]

I have had long absences from these forums because of posters that I consider to be trolls and extremely abusive to the point where I no longer had any fun, and a lot of them used to post in this sub forum, all of whom were power gamers.

If someone is being abusive or a troll you have recourse. Flag the post.

Having any kind of discussion about the topic seems to always get power gamers fired up, as it did in this thread and many others.

You keep saying that you're NOT saying that some people are Doing It Wrong, then you say something like this. It's not a discussion when you imply people are Doing It Wrong by continually insist that you're not saying that even though it's clear to everyone what you're implying.

Power gamers tend to have very narrow opinions and make a ton of declaritive statements about particular aspects of the game

Said without a shred of irony. "Only a Sith deals in absolutes," says man speaking in absolutes.

The fact is that not everyone wants to use the 'best' pistol or omit 'crap' skills or 'useless' spells, etc. Anything in the books is open game and we can only decide the value we place on it personally.

Something something we don't know their context of posting etc etc I have no reason to believe you're arguing in good faith at this point.