[Alex]

Hi!

So its the first time in a long time me and my gaming group are going to run a SR campain(or any campain for that matter). Last time we playied was in ED 3 and we where around 15 years old. That meant the group was pumped up trolls and agi maxed elfs. And explosives, alot of them. It was simple, and fun, run&gun play.

Now we are a bit older and more in tune with the lore of the world(or at least we like to think so). And the setup we ran earlier seams destined to die a horible death, or atleast not get the job done. So we are looking for a bit of help with getting a decent group togheter that can run the shadows

Now there a couple of constraints that we need to bear in mind with this group.

• The nummer of players we have in teh group will be shifting betwen 3-5 from meeting to meeting. This because all 6 NEVER can get the schedules to aligin.  So we prob will need to be able to cover more the one role each
• There is alot of diffence in experice betwen the players. 1 Knows the rules and the lore good. 1 knows the lore good, but cant be botherd with the rules. 1 dont know the lore but likes to play around with rules in general. 2 Dont know the lore and rules arent a intrest for them. I would be happy with some help figuring out what sort of char that is apropiate for each of the players 
• We will be playing prewriten adventures, most prob something official. So we need to be able to pull those off. Our GM are not big on rewriting adventures, as in will NOT do it(Tottaly irrielevant inforamation: On the other hand our other GM wouldent be able to follow a official advnture even if his life depended on it)

The areas i think needs covering are(in no particualr order): Combat, Magic, Hacking, Riggning, Breaking and Entering, Combat, Talking to pepole and more Combat. Why combat 3 times? Because that usaly how we handle stuff when we get cranky, might solve that one with the right amount of snacks.

Sorry for gramatical and spelling errors, will clean it up at a later time. Now i have to get down to my train and go home.

[UmaroVI]

You might find my sig helpful - it has some non-terrible premade characters. They were designed for Shadowrun Missions, but should work fine in other "official" missions. You could either use them as-is, or modify them some. The spreadsheet tells you which characters are good at what so you can use that to make sure roles are covered.

One important caveat is that they are all at the high-ish end of the optimization scale; this won't be an issue if the premade adventures have "adjusting the difficulty up and down" options like Missions does, but you might have power level mismatch problems otherwise.

[Kontact]

So the question is sort of which player should take which role?

Obvious choices are:

Face/infiltrator - The one who knows the setting better than the rules.

Rigger - The one who likes rules but doesn't care about the setting.

Heavy combat - One of the ones who don't care about rules or setting.

Sneaky combat - One of the ones who don't care about the rules or setting.

The one who knows the rules and cares about the setting should probably play a combat hacker, but really, they deserve to be able to play whatever they want, because they've earned that right.

[Alex]

You might find my sig helpful - it has some non-terrible premade characters. They were designed for Shadowrun Missions, but should work fine in other "official" missions. You could either use them as-is, or modify them some. The spreadsheet tells you which characters are good at what so you can use that to make sure roles are covered.

One important caveat is that they are all at the high-ish end of the optimization scale; this won't be an issue if the premade adventures have "adjusting the difficulty up and down" options like Missions does, but you might have power level mismatch problems otherwise.

I took some time to look at them and they look neat, will def look at them when we make the characters. That said we only have the ED 4 Core rule book and some of the stuff i saw on the chars i couldent find in the book. But it gave me some ideas what sort of chars that might be viable for us and how to build them.

Kontact, thx for th answer.

[Alex]

So we had a sit-down yesterday that resulted in one done character, and two concept characters(that's going to be made by the players during the week). Our runner team will look as follows.

One Troll infiltrator that's cyberd quite hard, he can get into places and hit stuff. Hard. This one seams okay and covers his niches(Infiltration and combat) decent.

The next two came about after reading Street magic and Runners companion(that our GM handed us when we meet, he has been quite busy collecting books he never thought he would use :s). These two, specially the first one, might need some feedback when they are done.

The first one is a  mage. He was a promising mage that came from a wealthy background. He did show promise in the magic arts. The problems was that he wanted more and when he got a offer from a free spirit he took it. The deal was that the free spirit got in inhabit his body to hide from another mighty magical creature. Problem was that the spirit was not content with that and started to take over the hosts body. Any time when the character is sleeping or unconscious the spirit takes over, and the spirit aren't really a good guy. So after some years the young mage had lost his inheritance and any carrier option outside the shadow.
TL:DR Magic user makes pact with spirit so it can live inside of him. Spirit takes over sometimes and make bad stuff.

We where thinking that the spirit and the mage should be total separate characters, as in different character sheath, BPs, Dice-pools and so on. this might cause some problems with rules and balance but we really like the concept. We want the classical Dr.Jekyll and Mr.Hyde but in a shadowrun setting.

The next one is a AI and we are not sure at all if this one can work as it wont have a physical body. The main concern is if it will be hard for the AI to get involved with the rest of the team. Anyone that has played a AI, is it hard to get involved with the rest of the team? Cause we suspect that the AI might be a bit of a solo experience as its so far from normal metahumans.

[Kontact]

AI's make really good riggers, but are difficult characters because they're dependent on a lot of half-baked complicated rules (and the matrix is complicated enough.)  Besides, they have very little room for growth.  It does give the guy a perfectly good excuse to just disappear in the middle of a mission when his player doesn't show up though..


As to the mage, there's the whole Spirit Pact thing.

All-in-all, it sounds like the players have a lot of out there ideas that they are in no way prepared to play or deal with as players new to the system.

They have no idea how a regular person lives in the 6th world, and they want to jump straight into the lunatic fringe.

I'm again'it, but good luck.

[CanRay]

AI's make really good riggers...

*Cough*KITT*Cough*