Shadowrun Play > Character creation and critique

An Opinion Thread: Skills A is a Trap?

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Rule of Three:
I'm learning.

Like any good runner, I wish to keep educated and will state my ignorance on this topic.

We have a multitude of questions about the idea of Skills A being a bad choice; there are few people willing to truly explain how they got that opinion.

Let us try.

fseperent:
That is the view for priority character creation.
It implies that you spent too much on skills and neglecting metatype or resources.
For a human or elf, Skill A isn't that bad, but for other metatypes, you'll take a hard hit elsewhere.

Jack_Spade:
I wouldn't say trap.

Attributes are more important than skills - this is almost universally true except maybe for very specialized builds like certain riggers.

High Magic/Resonance beats usually skills, since they deliver bonus skills/groups

Races bring attribute points and special attribute points, so they are more valuable than pure skills

High resources can compensate for certain skills through additional Attribute points, bonus dice to certain actions, skillsofts etc.

Low level skills can be easily bought with starting karma.

The two point PQ: Jack of all Trades allows you to buy low skill ratings very cheap

This makes it seem as if skills are at the end of the priority list.
Nevertheless are skills usually my second or at least third priority in any build. And if I can manage it, I'll take them as A together with attributes in a Sum2ten build.

Why? Because skills let you do things from the get go with no tedious grinding phase in game. That's important since I usually do not play in campaigns that stretch over years with the same character.

So my answer is: It depends on your playstyle.
 

firebug:
Yeah, a lot of builds don't need a lot of skills (a bare bones street samurai or combat adept can get away with D in skills easily enough) but picking A in skills allows you, not necessarily to be more flexible, but to be specialized in a lot of areas.  You can have a skill group at 6 and another at 4, and still have enough points to have 5 more skills at 6 with specializations.

I most often see it for things like deckers (who use a lot of skill points and so need a lot if they want to do more than just hacking), riggers, and magicians.  Archetypes that have a high "skill requirement" so to speak, where there's four or more skills that are required to do the basics of the job.

While those have other choices that more naturally would be at A (resources or MAG/RES), those can be worked around.  Special Attribute Points from metatype help if you pick B for MAG/RES, and you can make a decker with a B in Resources, they just will have less general 'ware and a cheaper deck, but it's a relatively small downgrade since cyberdecks only give small upgrades for massive jumps in price.  The Hermes Chariot can go a very long way with the right programs, modifications, and modules, especially combined with things like Overclocker and Quick Config.

I'm not saying A in Skills is the best choice, but it's certainly valid and viable.

Whiskeyjack:
Skills are much easier and cheaper to raise in play than Attributes. Skills give progressively less bang for your buck at higher priority than Attributes, Magic, money, or Edge, because all these things are harder to raise or have no guarantee of payout after chargen. These other priorities also sometimes give corollary effects that cannot be duplicated after chargen (free spells, for example).

A low skill build with high attributes is much more viable than the reverse, especially if ware is involved. A low skill build with narrow skill focus is oftentimes more useful than a high skill build with the points dropped around everywhere to get a bunch of dice pools of 5-8.

Skills are not all of equal value and frequently new players don't know that some are very low value (Banishing, Astral Combat), extremely niche (Diving, Free Fall), that redundancy is not useful (taking the whole Firearms Group), or that some skills have very specific rules associated with their use (such as how you actually use First Aid, the initial threshold, and the cap on boxes healed; this is the #1 thing people miss I would say and it's why FA <6 is worse than a medkit every time).

The jack of all trades concept is easier to pull off after play begins than at the start especially with JoAT providing significant karma discounts to the most relevant levels of skill.

Attributes form a broad base of competency, while skills form a narrow one. If you want to be very competent you need good ratings in both. But there is something to be carried away with skills with the result of being middling at a lot of things.

I feel like high Skills often stem from the incorrect notion that one runner needs to cover a lot of bases, which is simply u true outside of a solo game, and even then, there should be NPCs to hire.

Some builds like high skills more (like Decker) but for others it really represents a trade off where you could get something much better.

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