| From: | korishinzo@*****.com (Ice Heart) |
|---|---|
| Subject: | Average starting characters? |
| Date: | Fri, 26 Aug 2005 07:54:52 -0700 (PDT) |
> better than your average person. You're now a starting character,
> maybe with a little training. The idea of an SR2 or SR3
> Shadowrunner
> being a "newbie" to the streets was lauyghable at best, since they
> were all geniuses with olympic level physical skills and were
> master
> marksmen, deckers, or spellslingers. Hardly "Joe Wageslave" who
> left
> his corp and is now trying to make his way in the world, or "Bob
> the
> Ganger" who's trying to rise out of the gutter.
Actually, I sort of disagree on this. The world is full of people
with tremendous athletic ability or prodigious education who would
not last 30 seconds in some inner cities. And a master marksman who
spent 10 years training for the olympics is a perfect explanation for
a suddenly SINless long gun with a 6 in Rifles and a case of Combat
Paralysis... "Fragging hell, that's a person... I... I can't!" I
have seen plenty of starting characters over the years who were above
average in their old life, and suddenly barely surviving the shadows.
The big fish in the fishbowl is still tiny in the pond. The problem
with all the various editions of SR is the same problem inherent to
any char gen system. If there is no story, no depth and background
to a character, then the numbers exist in limbo. You have to make
your players tell you why... why a guy with a 6 Intelligence,
Quickness, and Willpower found himself living on the streets. Why a
guy with Assault Rifles 5 and Small Unit Tactics 5 is rubbing
shoulders with the dregs of the SINless. Why someone with a 600,000
nuyen cyberware package is forced to live outside society and take
corp scraps to survive. And you hound them until the story makes
sense. And you can always, under Build Point systems, give less BP.
You want weaker characters, start with 90 BP. Most of my Combat
Night games use 90 BP or less characters.
I think you will find, once SR4 leaves the hands of the playtesters,
that it will be plagued by munchkins as much as any edition.
"God-like" is a pretty relative term, after all. Things break
whenever someone places min-max mathematics over (role)playability.
======Korishinzo
--Has spent 120 BP just making a charming corporate marketing VP...
wouldn't last one Turn in combat... and would wet himself at the
first hint of criminal activity (except maybe insider trading). ;)
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