[TheNarrator]

Why that got me a cadre of smites, IDK. Hard to keep track of who I might have offended with so many threads.

You too? My rep dropped ten points today and I have no idea why.




Anyway, back on topic...

Since I started GMing again recently, I've found that the powers of summoned spirits can be rather annoyingly powerful. If you've got a summoner in the group, then you need to be prepared for the possibility that they might use spirit powers to do things that they themselves would not be able to, and throw your expectations for how things will go completely off.

In general, magicians can be rather potent (although if they make themselves vulnerable they can expect to be torn to shreds by a street sam), so if there's a magician in the runner team then you should giving any serious opposition some degree of magical support to counter them.

[raggedhalo]

Apparently not:

The 2.16 release of the Hero Lab files for Shadowrun is now available from the automatic updates mechanism within Hero Lab.

This update adds the Priority System and Karma System alternate character creation methods from Runner's Companion, along with some bug fixes.

I wanted to give everyone who's using the Karma System with Hero Lab a heads up.  We're using different costs for attribute increases and for the total karma than are listed in Runner's Companion, based on the following email exchange we had with Jason Hardy:

1) The cost of increasing an attribute with karma increased from "new rating * 3" to "new rating * 5" with the publication of the 20th anniversary edition. Does this also change the cost of an attribute when buying it in the karma system method from runner's companion? If so, should the default karma build points for the karma system go up slightly, since the attributes have increased in price?

JMH: Yes, the cost of attributes in the KarmaGen system should change from 3 times rating to 5 times rating. Here's how I do the math--going from 3 to 5 is an increase of 66.67 percent. You can spend up to half your 750 karma in KarmaGen on attributes (with the addition of the build points for metatype, but I don't think that affects this), meaning you can spend 375 on attributes. If we increase that by 66.67 percent, we get 625. We add that to the other half of the karma and we get 1,000 karma to start with. But we also should tweak the amount of karma you can spend on attributes. Instead of only being able to spend half on attributes, you should be able to spend 62.5 percent of your karma (plus the metatype adjustment) on attributes. Make sense?

[lurkeroutthere]

What Mara said. Perception, Data Search, a combat skill, and an artistic, hobby or technical skill are things it's hard not to pick up IRL, so I tend to make players have them. You never know when that Discovery special on Rock Climbing or those years spent skateboarding could save your life.

Also, First Aid.

Eh, I tend to be more flexible as while It hink everyone should have a certain skill set to be a professional runner points are scarce at creation and I'm not going to make them sacrifice their concept to build to my ideal. Having said that, the information you could have got via datasearch is always floating out there waiting to be utilized and your only hurting yourself by not having that.

I built a technomancer face for one of my players the other day, and boy did she end up being able to do nothing else, and not even both of her specialties all that way, but some day she'll be scary at both, just don't expect her to ever be a front line fighter like my missions technomancer or my prior missions hacker were.

My philosophy for character creation has always been you should bring at minimum two solid facets to the team.