[Desiani]

I've been reading various topics into the deep pages and while I wanted to quote and ask there it would be super necrop.

I've seen a few people who are debating skill A priority being  a 'trap.' While I understand the reasoning why it could be, that's not why I'm posting.

Multiple people in a few of those threads mentioned that they view the sum to 10 method as 'cheating' at char creation. I'm just wondering why some people would view Sum to 10 as 'cheating.'

Thanks for you're enlightenment into this query.

[firebug]

I mean...  I don't see how it could be.  But I would say it's unfair if others in your player group are restricted to Priority, as Sum to 10 is just Priority with less restriction; mixing generation techniques is unbalanced, since they produce very different kinds of characters with different strengths.  However, in a group where everyone is making a character with Sum to 10, there's nothing cheaty about it.

[Glyph]

It's hardly cheating when it is an official character creation method.  That said, the GM does determine which character creation systems will be allowed, and may have additional changes or house rules on top of that.

Priority: A skills can be a trap, but it can also be a valid choice.  For example, you might want to have all of the tertiary skills that you will need, so that future Karma can be spent mainly on improving your specialty.

[Dwagonzhan]

The derived metagame for SR5 would indeed make Sum to 10 the best character creation option in terms of raw karma efficiency. (by a large margin)

Skills are a trap of sorts, because they're:
A) Far cheaper to improve as needed vs Attributes, Special Attributes and Resources.
B) Not needed for the bulk of character builds. 1-3 deep skill investments is all nearly all characters will ever need.

A distant third reason:
C) Opportunity costs for augmentations/ware' are completely polarized. Augmented characters need to get all their toys at character creation, because they can't keep more than a tiny amount of a Resources A investment post-char-gen.
This inherently bumps Resources up on the priority queue for any character that needs hardware (read; everyone but Awakened, and even they have some potentially stout bills)

Concept characters and NPCs need a lot of skills with a moderate distribution to be "realistic" and provide character depth, but Player Character Shadowrunners only need to be specialized in their field to maximize their odds of success because they're assumed to be working as a team, and not as individuals. Incidentally, this ensures in practice, that nearly every Skill Group will contain at least one "dead", "niche" or otherwise low-priority skill in them that cheapens their investment (skill groups are the biggest reason to get higher Skill Priority).

All this combines to make Skills A suboptimal for most characters going purely by meta, even if raw karma efficiency favors them. (ala "quantity over quality" sort of way)
Of course, this is a ROLE PLAYING game; and going purely by mechanics makes the process of character creation very algorithmic and boring after a while.
(it's one big reason I don't post my own characters here; I'd just be subjected to the same laundry list of optimal builds and tweaks that I see for every concept)

[firebug]

Keep in mind it isn't always metagaming or "unrealistic" to not have points in certain skills; Computer, for instance, isn't needed for a character to do basically anything a common user would do on a commlink, save for maybe a Matrix Search or Matrix Perception test.  Not having points in Computer doesn't mean your character doesn't know how to use a commlink very well; it just means they don't know the technical side of things like editing, advanced options, and so forth.

Another common thing is that some people think it would be weird for a character to not have any points in Pilot Groundcraft.  However, day-to-day activities do not normally require rolls.  A person manually driving from their garage to a restaurant won't require a roll; very little outside of deliberate stunts, extreme driving conditions, and chase combat require a roll.  On top of that, in 2076, every car comes equipped with an autopilot.  Licenses aren't required for a car's autopilot (assuming it is up to date and functioning properly) to drive you somewhere, so many people don't need to know how to drive.

Those are just two examples, but the point is that spreading out a bunch of skill points into very minor "civilian" skills isn't necessary for your character to still appropriately reflect the world they're in.

While you may get more karma from the massive number of potential skills at high ratings you can get from Skills A, keep in mind the relation of attributes to skill dice pools.  A skill point is only ever a +1 to a dice pool (if it isn't a +2 from a specialization).  But attributes can vary; +1 to AGI is +1 to over 15 different skills, while +1 to BOD is only a bonus to two skills (but several other vital statistics).

[FST_Gemstar]

There are some permutations of builds that end up just a lot more efficient than their priority counterparts. Basically, mundanes (Magic/Res E) who don't have to take a D slot (the most inefficient slot when not used as Magic D) often come out far ahead than their priority counterparts. 

The biggest culprit is the street sam:  Meta: E-Human, Attributes: A, Mundane: E, Skills: C, Resources A   
This build has the atts/augmentations to get super dice pools, and plenty of skills to do the things that streetsams have to do well and be rounded enough runner. Go Human C/Skills E and and your street sam still can sneak/shoot/perceive super well and has 7 edge. 

Flipping Atts/Skills gets you a face or decker that hybridize pretty well (Skills A issues not withstanding) 

You can also make typically more efficient face-magicians (EAABE), or scarier edge-magicians (CCACE). 


So some munchkin police would note that there are builds that come up just very powerful in comparison to other builds at chargen. This is against munchkin-police sensibilities, but more importantly, it can unbalance groups where some characters just start way more optimized and advanced than others. This isn't isolated to to sum2ten, but most efficient sum2ten characters are karmically more advanced than most efficient priority characters. Even more, Sum2ten lets you make really inefficient characters (All Cs or builds with three Ds). Put characters like that next to the most efficient sum2ten characters, it's hard to design runs/campaigns that are challenging to the top end that aren't way too challenging at the lower end. 

Sum2Ten does allow tougher to build concepts to take shape. Ideally, it would be a method to help people make more unique characters work at the expense of raw karma efficiency. I am a big fan Sum2Ten for that, but that's not how a lot of people come to tables (they want all the dice). 




 

[Slipperychicken]

To be safe, just ask your GM which character creation method he's using. If you're not sure what's going on, then assume priority-gen. If you are the GM, you want to keep everyone on the same character-creation method just to keep things fair.

I figure those guys were calling sum-to-10 cheating because it's easier to break the character-building process with it.

[Xexanoth]

As Gemstar kind of point out, using sum to 10 to create mundane humans is inredible effective, as they have two dump stats.
A mundane human can effectively trade 2 points of edge for 4 attributes, 8 Skills+3 SkillGroups, 135.000 Nuyen, while still keeping 3 Points of Edge.(and once you start playing you can easily raise edge with karma)
This creates a karma unbalance at the start of the game, which is why people consider it cheating.

On the other hand, some builds profit from sum to ten, as you can use a more balanced spread of the priorities and prevent your build from not working because of "forced" dump stats.

[Ninja137]

Because some people like playing a barely functional mess of a character that's far too specialized to be capable of everyday life, entirely ignoring their ability to actually be a Shadowrunner. Why? We'll probably never know.

You can safely ignore them, and feel free to do Sum-to-Ten/Twelve or whatever, or just do Karmagen with more karma so it stands up to the others.

[Hobbes]

Skills A is usually a Trap as most characters simply wind up with a lot of skills with low to moderate dice pools.  Hence, "Trap", as you'd think putting a high priority in Skills would result in high dice pools and that just isn't the case.  "Well rounded" comes from high Attributes, Increasing those Attributes (and dice pools) via Augments, magic, or gear, good use of Edge, and splashing around some occasional Karma.  A Human Edgelord build with Attributes A, Skills B winds up "Taller" and "Broader" than the reverse.

Sumto10 is cheating.  However there are some concepts that are so mechanically difficult to pull off, cheating is probably okay.  The Freelancer that wrote the Sumto10 rules made a post over on Reddit somewhere IIRC.  Basically his intent when he wrote it was for characters like Trolls or Technomancers and such that are usually very challenging to build well in regular Priority builds would be good candidates for a GM to allow to use Sumto10. 

My own rule of thumb as a GM was Humans and anything from a splatbook use Priority, core book non-humans could use Sumto10.  You put two "E"s on an Ork build you're not powergaming anything.  At least not well. 

[Malevolence]

It is convenient that SumTo10 favors mundane humans, which just happen to be the 90+% majority of the world's population in the 2070s. Just sayin' - people still complain that the makeup of the typical runner team is wildly out of sync with the broader population mix, and that there should be more mundane humans represented.


And yes, I know that those two groups (those wishing to up the ratio of mundane humans and those against SumTo10) may not have a very large union, but they might. I just felt it was an interesting advantage to the option that was not represented here.

[Glyph]

Sum to 10 gives some much needed flexibility to Priority.  It can be frustrating when you are one or two Attribute points short of where you want to be but have more than you need in another area.  So yeah, mundane humans get a bit of a boost.  But I think they should.  The adept can start with Attributes: A and Magic: B, and be optimized in both areas, but a street samurai has to choose between 4 less Attribute points or 175,000 less Nuyen.  Letting the mundane pick both at A only evens up the playing field, and it still has an opportunity cost by lowering what you can pick for the remaining Priorities.