[Teknodragon]

Changelings. Metavariants. Obvious and odd 'ware. The Sixth World has a lot of ways to make someone stand out; sometimes that's the price one pays (Willingly or not) for having certain abilities or options the average metahuman doesn't.

Sure, there's trying to hide things under a tent of a trenchcoat, or a spell, or just be a virtual presence. That's pretty limiting, though.

So if you like to play a character that is a bright neon snowflake, or allow those of us who enjoy playing such to indulge, how do you keep from being pulled out of the shadows in cuffs or a body bag?

For me, of late, the odd-looking one is quickly forgotten as another party member tends to grab all the attention in a rather violent or uncouth manner (the group is OK with it out of character, no worries there). Or I go for 'exotic but not visibly dangerous'.

[Sterling]

Check that the players want to go with the "Pink Mohawk" playing style.

If that's the game the players want, then as a GM I ignore the outlandish appearances.  The entire game world gets described in a brash, bright loud fashion.  The characters are just another part of it.

In a more "Black Trenchcoat" game?  I'd love to see how it gets done because I've never managed it.

As a player, I'm more partial to the latter style, and as such my character does his best to avoid working with runners that will attract undue attention just by existing.  As much as the idea of a 'wared-out Centaur or Dwarf with Troll-sized cyber arm firing an MMG one handed appeal stylistically, such characters are the spotlight in the shadows.

[Zweiblumen]

So, my favorite character fits into this description.  Changeling with mood hair and bioluminescence.  Part of the setting is the outlandish and crazy weird styles, so at the club or on the streets he stands out but not beyond a standard deviation of "normal."  Ie, crazy but not super freaky.  On a run, he has to go out of his way to cover/hide these qualities and has to cope with the fact that he's easy to remember.  But being remembered and being caught are two different things.

Ex: Walking down the street, he rocks the look, owns it.  At the club, he's a hit because he looks AWESOME!  On the job, he wears a heavy coat that he buttons up to the chin, and a full face respirator with goggles and a floppy hat, gloves and boots.  If his clothes get f'd up in a scrap or some such, this is a liability. 

It's the cost of doing business.  Luckily he's been running the shadows for a little while now and has a bit of a positive rep to assuage folks like @Sterling's character.  Yet still some folks wouldn't run with him because of the added risk.  It's the way our table has worked to balance the pink-mohawk with the black-trenchcoat.  Also this is a thing our face has to deal with.  She is super attractive and people (men and women) tend to remember her because of how charismatic and out going she is.  When on the run itself, she has to take steps to tone-down her natural shine.  Be more reserved and wear make-up.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯  this is going to change table to table and YMMV.

[Coyote]

While there will be problems with weird characters in SPECIFIC situations, I don't see why it would be a major problem in general.

First, in the world of Shadowrun, the weird walks the streets. Maybe not in a corp enclave, but in a corp enclave it doesn't matter much how weird you are if you're even slightly weird, so the cybered-up street sam is going to have the same problems as the centaur.

Second, there are many characters whose appearance is irrelevant. Riggers, deckers, and summons/buff mages quite often don't have to deal with either clients or targets, and often not even with bystanders. So you can make a weird character work by making them one of these "behind the scenes" characters.

Third, there is Physical Mask, Disguise, and several disguise-oriented Adept powers.

Fourth, and going back to second... there is a large group of "intermediate interaction" characters who don't necessarily hide out of the active area, but who also don't necessarily meet and greet NPCs. That street sam from the first point, especially if he's Uncouth or trigger-happy? Why would you want him to get too involved, until it becomes time to actually get "involved", and by that I mean to come in shooting? If you have a frog changeling, he shouldn't be meeting with NPCs until it comes time to either sneak around (and if you're discovered, then your appearance is probably a lot less important than the fact that you shouldn't be there), or shoot (at which point what matters is the caliber of your weapon rather than how many tentacles you have). So there are a lot of characters, both weird and normal in appearance, who may interact with NPCs mostly in situations where appearance is not very relevant.

So, unless you want to play a character who is both weird and a Face, or an infiltrator, or some other kind of character who regularly deals with NPCs in peaceful/social interactions, it should not be a major problem. Yeah, if you're a frog changeling, you're probably not spending your free time going to the opera, or to an Urban Brawl game, or to a nice restaurant. So get used to playing Matrix Games and watching sims for entertainment as if you were some anti-social character like a Decker. But having your character's entertainment options limited is far from the kind of issue that makes characters really difficult to play.

A Naga? That's difficult. A frog changeling? That's merely different.

[Reaver]

This is going to boil down to tables specifics.

While there are many viable ways to play the "Special Snowflake" type of wacky characters, they only truely work if the TABLE allow them to.

By that I mean, in an ultra paranoid, ultra secure dystopian setting, the wacky and out rageous is going to get spotted very quickly amoungst the Plebs.

On the other hand, if the Table embraces a "hard cyber-rock counter culture as part of their dystopian setting, then some "Special Snowflakes" can blend right into this counter culture craze.


But where you will always have the most problems is always with the individual players. If everyone else wants "dark trenchcoat" the "Pink Mohawk" approach is never going to work.

So make sure everyone at the table is on board for a particular playstyle before making your character

[firebug]

As others have said, it's about what the others are doing.

Because both EXIST in the setting.  I mean, one of the recurring JackPoint posters is a popular rockstar.  So obviously, being loud and in your face while still a runner is totally possible.

There's a lot of factors...  It's more that the reason your characters aren't hunted down and killed isn't because the corps can't find them, though.  They have the best tech money can buy and no runner who doesn't have 1000 karma under his belt, a perfect team, and a huge list of contacts will be able to do a job without leaving behind evidence of some kind.

The SR4 book Attitude might have some of what you want.

I believe Bull said it best, but I don't have the quote saved anywhere I can reach...  To paraphrase, he said that Pink Mohawk games are about making a personal brand.  You stand out more, making a name for yourself in a good and a bad way.  You draw more attention, but also more jobs, and show you're not afraid to be loud, which a lot of jobs can require.  You make more enemies, but you make more friends as well.

[HobDobson]

So, my favorite character fits into this description.  Changeling with mood hair and bioluminescence.  Part of the setting is the outlandish and crazy weird styles, so at the club or on the streets he stands out but not beyond a standard deviation of "normal."  Ie, crazy but not super freaky.  On a run, he has to go out of his way to cover/hide these qualities and has to cope with the fact that he's easy to remember.  But being remembered and being caught are two different things.

So, you've met Max?

Our group has an, um, orc McGuyver/mechanic with those two qualities. On combat runs, he favors an elevated sniper position behind a duck blind, ranged munitions, and improvised explosives. Luckily (?) he has the team's best first aid/medicine skills. While the sneaky folks are doing their thing, he does vehicle/weapons maintenance, and ... cooks up more napalm. On the stove. However, we have established that with a ruthenium-coated jumpsuit, a commlink to program it, and a well-lubricated crowd on the dance floor, he makes an *excellent* distraction   

My own changeling mage's differences aren't so noticeable except for Max's dogs hating him. Critter spook - so, most animals hate him. It's still winter, so no one's paid much attention to the gills and greasy skin ... except for the cop who tried to chase him down, tackle, and subdue him. Did I mention the character's 14? No one's keeping pictures of that arrest attempt 


Short version: if you have a wild idea, take a look at how it fits the setting and supports the team, then RUN with it. Pink mohawk or black hats and mirrorshades, it's all about the attitude.

I'd say the real nightmares aren't about whether the table allows the snowflakes to work, but whether the table lets the characters do the jobs they are actually designed/trained to do.

It's even worse if one or more players need to make the mental shift from a fantasy setting to Shadowrun. Once a new player actually responded to the GM telling me the payout from an above-board side job I took on with "So, how much do we each get?"   "Nothing." [ A. The 14-y.o. isn't covering your bar tab from his personal account. B. Every nuyen involved is recorded under valid SINs. No. Just, No. ]

[AwesomenessDog]

I believe my most out there character had the best time keeping out of the police's eye. He was constantly in the public's eye, but they could never catch him.

The character was ex-iranian special forces and ex-CAS special forces with all the military know how. He was born before the awakening (in 2017 actually), and became a brain in a jar in a top secret military program in the year 2034. Overtime, the ware corroded and had to be shutdown in order to preserve what remaining essence was left and he now runs in order to afford the repairs. Even if you managed to puncture the 40 armor he had from his body being essentially power armor, you're still likely hitting junk cyberware before you start to jam the systems.  Since he was basically in a RPC coated Milspec suit the entire time (being ex-SF gave him the erased quality and let him get away with the armor (doesn't mean he wasn't stopped at every checkpoint) and other military gear and meant its use was never recorded), he could hide his face while on a mission by simply blurring it and having his systems only running in DNI. The only thing that could give him away was his very overt running style.

I will give about 30% of the credit to circumstance that let my style hide in plain sight: The first run where the public became aware of the even involved the murdering a political figure's mistress and dropping it off at his door step in Bellevue. My escape rout got cut off and I told my driver to get out while I spent the entire night  hiding from HTR on the roof of a house with RPC. The event was labelled as a terrorist attack. This detail eventually led to every action I did being over analyzed and they ultimately overlooked me in search of a terrorist organization. A later event only helped this further.

The next time anything happened, a pent house apartment in a downtown was shot up (not by me). I was hired to prevent an extraction by an unknown threat. Our team set up in an adjacent room with monitoring devices, a disguise kit in case we needed covert entrance into the room, and me in the extracted's rooms hanging from the ceiling in RPC. An extraction team set off an explosive charge while our disguised guy currently acting as a maintenance guy (we were unaware); as they breached the room, I decloaked and dropped from the ceiling firing at both the extractors and my buddy and the extracted (intentionally missing the former two). A random sniper of the extraction team managed to hit me once with a tagged bullet before our counter sniper took him out; as a testimate to my armor, he got a total of 17 damage for me to soak down to 2. By the time hazmat teams had come to clear the fire, Police had circled the building and started evacuating people. The "maintenance guy" and the extracted slid down the wire in the elevator shaft while I started using my Hydraulic legs to building hop to the sniper's position. Once I got there, I took what the sniper had (for reasons of suspicion), tossed his body over onto an unsuspecting cops head (killing him instantly), and then made my way down the building. Once I got outside, I regrouped with my driver and got away.

Next big event before we tried going into hiding for a while was to be a distraction for a different runner team doing a different job. We got the police after us by shooting at a veterans hospital (ironic considering my origin) then using explosives to blow up cars from the back of an uparmored Ares Roadmaster. We got HTR on us by rocketing a helicopter. Two of the HTR Roadmasters headed for the other team diverted to us. The first one had one of their guys jump onto our vehicle and began to wrestle me in the back of the car. I locked my Foot anchors while he grabbed and our driver slammed on the accelerator. He almost let got so to push him over the edge, I ejected my Armblade into his shoulder forcing him to release his grip and fall into the road (a guy in the second Roadmaster caught him because they're bad ass too). I had a momentary window to fire a minigrenade into the first roadmaster's scarring the rigger inside enough to swerve and crash into traffic. I then hit the second roadmaster with an airbursted minigrenade below the base of the vehicle and exploded the grenade underneath the personel compartment, chunky salsa ensued. After are time to keep the police distracted ended, we made a break for the Redmond barrens. They had a road block setup in-front of us so our rigger intentionally spun us into a 360 and I fired our last rocket to make a hole. The police chief burned edge to pull off the R.E.D. stunt where you set off a rpg mid flight by shooting the primer. He hit it saving the roadblock but he wound up looking like Gustavo Fring from Breaking Bad. We remembered we equipped the Roadmaster with hydraulics and skated over the roadblock into the barrens.

We eventually decided it was time to cool down so we took up a job where we go undercover as temp workers in Ares legal team. (I went in as a guy who got in a serious motercycle accident.) The job was to uncover someone selling Personafix chips inside the office. Two major events happened, in following a lead, I took on the role of a deepcover police agent who enlisted the help of a coworker in gaining access into someones room; i got the coworker to go irritate the suspect into attacking the coworker when I showed up with my armor looking like Lone Star's HTR uniform and searched the guy's room. I found a little deepweed but a brisk search turned up nothing so I, still disguised, took him down to the police station and booked him for suspected drug peddling and assault then spent the night strip searching his room; it was ultimately a dead end. I then devised the strategy of coating people door knobs in black light fluid so when they entered the keycode, I could check what numbers they pressed at the end of the day. I put it on a few minor leads and the District Manager's room and once I got into her room, I put a data tap on her computer because that kind of data is always nice to have. The data we found was actually a report on a special sleeper cell agent program for Ares' Knight Errant where police officers would be completely unaware of their status until they see a crime and enter police officer mode. We were actually able to spin this to be the Terror organization.

The last adventure I had with him before our GM disappeared from the matrix was the selling and retrieval of the money from that paydata. When we posted it online to be sold, it was bidded up to 9M nuyen. As it turns out the the Ares company bought back the data but tapped the money so that when our driver went to collect, she was ambushed by said sleeper agents. I anticipated this would happen and had our tech expert rig up some atmosphere sensors that could connect to my smartgun and let me snipe from 2.5 miles away in the 40th floor of a hotel (our sniper from before died). Our driver managed to get clear of the building and to her car thanks to my Guardian Angelling but she was swarmed by cars and helicopters after her. She could handle the cars but not the airpatroling so I diverted the emergency and news helicopters by opening fire on the News team that had arrived outside the bank where e picked up our 9M. After unloading 30 rounds of ammo, half of the news team was dead along with two seriously wounded police officers. The helicopters diverted and gave my driver a window to escape. Since I had to be sending and receiving information to those atmosphere sensors, I had actually exposed myself for the first time and a GTR chopper picked up the signal and tried to hack into me; they got a critical glitch giving me 3 marks on them (the other half of circumstance playing to my advantage), at which point I bricked their chopper and watched it plummet to the ground.

The game basically ended/was suspended there with no confirmation which way. I would strongly recommend Erased to anyone who is worried about being caught as well as trying to clone someone else's style. Being loud and proud is what made the retired vet look like a nobody.

[freddieflatline]

Really I do not worry about it to much.  I just fairly warn them that if they play a character that sticks out they are probably going to get pinched at some point in time and are going to have to deal with prejudice in their characters every day lives.  Also seeing as the setting has a fairly large number of magic users/awakened it is not to unusual to see something or someone that just does not fit in.  I mean after all a dragon runs a corporation and a free spirit is a major share holder in another one.  Not to mention that Evo basically runs on the bizarre. 

[Teknodragon]

Good thoughts and comments, all. Thanks for the advice-- I hope it helps others too.