[DeathStrobe]

I also want to point something out.  If you have a troll scientist you want to keep, simply because of his steady rate of error free high end calculations throughout the 12 hour corporate workday (his 5 logic makes those calculations excellent) and he is thus productive, even innovative, simply because can't isn't in his vocabulary?  You are nice to him.  You are really nice to him, because most runners, they find out their extraction target is not only not happy about leaving, but also a bloody troll, might just say 'this isn't worth the effort' and leave.

That is the best extraction run ever. Do you kill the Troll? Do you knock him out. If you knock him out, you're going to have a hell of a time dragging him out of the facility with all the alarms going off and security closing in on you. Or you better hope your face can talk the talk and get him to come nicely. I love it.

Anyway, back on topic. benedictmercury you seem to dismiss academics as knowledgeable, which just to be fair, I believe that too. So if we clearly don't think that memorization is in fact not intelligence, what's the problem with a troll having a lower logic? What is it that makes you think Trolls are so dumb? What is intelligence? And why is it that you think trolls aren't intelligent?

[calaen]

Back off topic: Imagine the party's surprise in the following scenario:  You find the scientist's quarters easily, and they're not even locked.  Identifying your target proves somewhat more difficult, as you are forced to find the nametag, which is two entire feet higher in the air than you expected it to sit - directly on the chest of what appears to be a physically average troll.  He turns to you, and, very articulately says "I'm sorry, can I help you?  Whatever it is, please make it quick, I was planning to put in a bit of extra work on my latest project."

Go ahead.  Knock him out and try to drag a 500 pound troll through the building.  Entertain me.

[CanRay]

"Mungo nahtz broke.  Mungo doz da brokez on odderz."

Nice one CanRay

"Mungo tanks yu fer yer supper."  Support, Mungo.  "Nhopez.  Supper, Ey eatedz hiz."

[Black]

Troll 5 logic and high body makes for an increadible researcher. He can put some serious hours in without getting tired. A dedicated troll scientist would be able to make some serious break throughs.
Also, sure its been said dozens of times, but trolls are not humans and they are not standins for any other ethnic group.  Its just fiction.

[Critias]

It's not just "fiction," it's fantasy.  That seems to be the bit that's being overlooked the most, or, at best, looked at, but through nothing but a very modern, scientific, lens.  Orks and trolls and elves and dwarves are just different from humans, period, paragraph, full stop.  They live longer or shorter, they're bigger or smaller, they see in the dark or see heat signatures, they gestate children for different periods of time, have different teeth, have horns, all kinds of crazy stuff.

Worrying about it being "racist" for them to also have mental differences, not just immediately obvious physical ones, strikes me as rather hypocritical and, more importantly, largely missing the point of fantasy metahuman races in the first place.

[ZeConster]

What does this mean for the troll?  The sharpest troll CEO is never, ever, ever going to earn respect as an equal from any other kind of sharpest CEO because THEY'RE RIGHT; YOU CAN ONLY EXPECT SO MUCH FROM A TROLL.

It is one third of a hit difference-wise. Do you really think people are going to discriminate because your Logic is 5 (Superior) instead of 6 (natural max for non-Trolls)? (Not to mention that with magic, you can boost them to 9 versus 10.)
Besides, unlike the mental attributes, that +4 Strength they get is +4 damage on melee and unarmed attacks rather than just +4 dice, making it far more powerful, so if you do piss off that Troll CEO, whether it's during a meeting or during a party, it's easy for him to break your face, wipe the blood off his hands, and continue whatever he was doing.

[quindraco]

Detached from the current story on earth, I'm all with your view.  Some aliens come down, they're bright but not quite as, but they're way durable, and bam--we can work with this.  As is?  Resonates with inequality issues that are so live and omnipresent today, I can't wall them out of my fantasy game.

You must be missing something, then, because Trolls, Orks, and Dwarves are even stranger than aliens.  Fantasy racism is guilty of many crimes, such as accusing races of only having one culture, but those crimes are always rooted in the fact that these races are stipulated to have evolved on the planet in parallel with humans.  In Shadowrun, metahumanity is a magical process that is thrust onto a human during gestation.  Claiming that trolls can't plausibly have a mental disability is like claiming that someone with Down's Syndrome can't plausibly have a mental disability.  That's just not the nature of the syndrome being discussed.

Trolls are humans who got "infected".  They're not a naturally occurring species, and they certainly don't have their own distinct culture aside from any they manufacture themselves as some sort of group (which, while unlikely, is definitely going to be a fear among conspiracy theorists and racial supremacy groups).  It's perfectly reasonable to suggest that trollism impairs your mental development.

That said, I don't think lower caps is the best way to implement such a system.  I've only played SR4, and I'm going to start SR5 soon, so maybe they tried this in the past and failed, but I would have given the different metatypes different karma costs for different stats (at least the mental ones), so e.g. logic might be more expensive for a troll, while willpower might be cheaper.  That allows for genius trolls as brilliant as any human genius, but much more unlikely.  I like playing with the maxima on the physical stats much more than on the mental.

[Michael Chandra]

It'd be a bit of a problem to work that into BP (though that has more leeway BP) and more problem to work it into Priority chargen, but it's an interesting version. Could even add higher caps for the phsyical attributes and different values there as well.

[calaen]

Trolls are humans who got "infected".  They're not a naturally occurring species, and they certainly don't have their own distinct culture aside from any they manufacture themselves as some sort of group (which, while unlikely, is definitely going to be a fear among conspiracy theorists and racial supremacy groups).  It's perfectly reasonable to suggest that trollism impairs your mental development.

Not to be pedantic, but the lore explains that trolls, elves, orcs, and dwarves are the result of long dormant metagenes, and they changed as the result of returning magic.  They're not infected, they're simply expressing a gene that they weren't able to before.

[Michael Chandra]

On second thought, more expensive attribute costs would be worse than a lower limit, since it penalizes those going for average attributes.

[benedictmercury]

That's what I've been doing in my game. More expensive reaching the heights; same ceiling for everyone. This is meant to reflect difficulty of circumstances and rarity.

It's the 'dormant gene' thing that sticks in my ass the most. That means they ARE human, just a kind with thick skin and smaller frontal lobes. I see no way around that.

And for the last time, all you folks that want to Star Trek this argument, I agree its perfectly plausible that trolls are dumber, I just think it's just icky and evocative of ugly race history.  Logic/Intuition 5 being quite good distracts from the 'pride of ultimate potential' argument, and from the fact that mean troll mental capability would be a not-huge but notable tick down from human average. Outliers in labs aren't going to save millions of trolls from not wInning low-level service jobs because, well, they aren't the best candidates as a people--and not because of their size.  And the hand-wave of "it's a Fantasy! It's Not About THAT" is too convenient for my taste. For whomever was throwing the word 'hypocritical' around: Cherry-picking which ugly features of modernity typify your near-future dystopia and which ones don't might better merit the term, bro. Its everybody's prerogative to do that; I don't think you're all racists for keeping mentally limited trolls. But given how near to present the setting is, and how concerned with economic oppression it is, excising racism history from the design of one of that world's Peoples is artificially tidy to me.  I find it significantly more problematic and dependent on blinders than it would be to put lower physical ceilings on female characters.  Which no one seems to have suggested.

 If trolls don't evoke medically confirmed mildly inferior freeman field negroes to you, hey, great, enjoy. It's a minor fix for me to lift the ceiling; just wanted to discuss it.

[Michael Chandra]

Uhm... All I get from that long message is feeling as if you're trying to shame me as subconsciously racist for considering this a fair part of the game.

[ZeConster]

That's what I've been doing in my game. More expensive reaching the heights; same ceiling for everyone. This is meant to reflect difficulty of circumstances and rarity.

So rather than "trolls can't be super geniuses, but they can be pretty dang smart for the same cost", you prefer "trolls can be super geniuses too, but every bit of smartness comes harder to them than to others"? Nice.

[Michael Chandra]

Maybe he simply made the extra points, so going past the original cap, cost extra. Still as racist, really, and it changes the game balance.

[Wailer]

Either some slag has been selling these kids rose-tinted mirrorshades, or MOM has seriously stepped up its programs on college campuses.