| From: | shadowrn@*********.com (Ice Heart) |
|---|---|
| Subject: | PC's vs us (or normal people) |
| Date: | Mon Mar 11 11:05:02 2002 |
> >
>people posting fully detailed PC length descriptions complete with > >
>cyberware and magic- which I assume nobody has.
> > How many people see themselves as viable PC's?
>Certainly not me, and I have a feeling most other listmembers >
>wouldn't be up to scratch as a shadowrunner, either.
I beg to differ on that point. I think all of us have potential far beyond
what what we are aware of of. All of us have the potential for heroic, even
superhuman, efforts in the right circumstances. Only a fool wakes up one
day and says, "I want to spend the rest of life in a chrome body, with
everyone and their brother trying to kill me." Shadowrunners start out
"average joes". The character generation rules in SR assume the situation
that brought out the "hero" in you character has already happened, possibly
some time ago. Your PC, while a newbie in the realm of running, has already
stepped out of the ranks of "average joe" citizen. That is why the 20
Questions ask "Why does the character run the shadows?", not "Why will your
character run the shadows once the game starts and the GM does <insert plot
device here>?" During the disasterous events of 9/11/2001, many "average
joes" stepped into the role of heroes, for however brief a time. Had they
not had any opportunity to retreat from that role, they would still be
acting as heroes (or deceased). All war heroes start as average joes. Look
at yourself carefully and ask what you'd be capable of if you had magical
training, special forces background, or a million dollars to spend at a
place that can rebuild you to pretty near any metric you want. You would
stack up pretty well as a PC then. Take away the money, the training, and
such, and suddenly your PC is back to average joe.
>I haven't tried writing myself up using either the build-point or >
>priority systems, but I have a feeling I'd end up in a similar >
>situation. Plus, if you do manage to find an equivalent to most of > your
>RL skills, I think you'll find you've got far too many knowledge > skills
>(see the remarks about fishing etc. in the other thread) and > too few
>useful active ones.
Again, this is a matter more of life experience than some intangible PC
requirement list. If tomorrow, your country were invaded and you had to run
for the hills and spend 10 years as a guerilla warrior, surviving off the
land, and fighting every day...your "build point" total would go through the
roof. Shadowrunner PC's have simply already been driven into the hills,
survived, and come back down. Only to find that their skillset no longer
qualifies them to be a system analyst at Bob's Warehouse and Shipping. They
get bored, or react when someone drops a ream of paper behind them and crush
some office assistant's trachea before they remember where they are. To
complicate things, some jerk wrote them off as dead and since they ID number
is inactive, they cannot own equity or travel or put money in a bank. And
so on. If, upon returning from your 10 years in the hills, society didn't
want you and wouldn't acknowlegde you, you might well become a rather
formidable criminal. Without magic or cyber.
> > Which raises the question- just how extra-ordinary ARE pcs? > >
>Begining shadowrunners can be almost like super-hero's compared to > >
>other game systems, but can they also be (more or less) normal > >
>people? Has anybody played a "joe normal" character who was > >
>actually made using the character creation rules?
No. The character creation rules were not intended for making "joe normal".
They could be easily modified to do so. Under SR3, hand out 40 to 50
build points. The result will be pretty unimpressive from a shadowrun
standpoint. Because shadowrunner of even the lowest caliber have already
left normalcy way behind. A better approach might be the following,
although this may seem arbitrary. Give the players 50 buildpoints to work
with. Keep 70 build points in reserve. The adventure begins with these
"joe normals" hanging out at their favorite pub, when the defacation hits
the rotary ocillator. Tell them to "try anything" because they are dead
otherwise. Pay VERY close attention to everything they say, in and out of
character. The idiot who jumps in front of a bullet at the first
opportunity will be getting some cyber. The guy who curls up in a ball and
prays to his dead grandmother for help is going to freak when she shows up
and teaches him this neat trick. The gal desperately trying to call Lone
Star by rewiring the automated ordering system built into the bar's computer
is headed for the decker life. And so on. Simply begin assigning points as
you go. By the end of the first story arc, covering two or three sessions,
you should have every PC on a hospital bed, in night computer classes, or
out in an alley talking to some crazy coot about spirits. Give them a month
downtime while they assimilate that they are all declared dead, and have all
these hidden depths. Then turn them loose on the trail of those who trashed
the bar, and their lives. This is eaven easier if they are high school
students, because the player who says "I wish I was one of those troll
dudes, they can soak up some damage" will be in for a nasty surprise when
the metagene, so stubbornly dormant up to now, suddenly kicks into
overdrive, leaving him on the floor in extreme pain. Three weeks later, he
crawls out of some dirty street clinic, with a whole new boy to learn.
(i.e. GM allocates more build points based on that players actions in
trying to cope with the change)
>Again, not me, and I have serious problems thinking of how to create > one.
> I suppose the closest I've seen is the (Too) Rich Kid that > Martin
>Steffens and I put together way back when -- which was really > an exercise
>in how to make a character spend a million nuyen starting > money and not
>have anything useful to show for it...
>Trying to put an average person into A-E priorities or 123 points > will
>most likely give you a lot of low and medium-level skills, most > of which
>will not come in handy in the shadows. Which means you end > up with a
>character who likely won't be much fun to play, because > everybody else
>needs to do the important stuff for you.
I used to do something along the lines of what I oulined above for White
Wolf games. I would pull out character sheets for Mortals, and set everyone
down to make a copy of themself (in high school) as a character. I would
poll people (often at a different time a few weeks prior) about what
supernaturals they liked to play. I would state that we were going to try a
mortals game where they got exposed to the supernatural by accident. The
very nervous players would be expecting a WoD game akin to Palladium's
"Beyond the Supernatural", or "Call of Cthulu". Somewhere during the
first
session, I would have them draw slips of paper in a blind lottery. (just
numbers on the slip) The would write their name on the slip and hand it
back. These numbers corresponded to a list of the supernaturals they had
indicated they liked the idea of playing. Over the first story arc, they
all ended up as the supernatural they had drawn in the lottery. I would
dump some downtime and extra freebie points on them, and then pick up again.
Some rather weighty plot device would have existed from the beginning to
bring them together again. A common one was to have them all looking for an
NPC who had gone missing and was connected to all of them. (True Love to
one, Ally to another, Ward to a third, and so on) This method worked really
well, and had the added bonus that the players did not get too cocky for
some time, feeling their remembered mortallity very keenly. This could be
adapted to almost any game system you cared to name.
Korishinzo
"average", "future PC", and all around "undiscovered
potential" ;)
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