Shadowrun Play > Character creation and critique
[SR5] Priority Generation: Math You Really Ought to Know
ZeldaBravo:
There are some mistakes there:
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* Orcs’ 3 Strength and 2 Body are worth 70+ Karma and
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It's '2 Strength and 3 Body'
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* Trolls require the highest level of prioritization and have DOUBLE the cost of gear and lifestyle
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Trolls only get lifestyle cost doubled, check the Errata.
I can look for more if that helps.
Glonthein:
Another one to correct :
"Adepts are a solid choice, because when they initiate they gain both a Metamagic feat and a Power Point"
Pretty sure it's either one or the other per initiation, not both. Raising magic does give them an auto-Power Point, but as far as Initiation goes, I believe you have to chose.
gargaM0NK:
Cheers guys! Adepts, Orks, and Trolls have been updated!
Hobbes:
--- Quote from: gargaM0NK on ---For example, the conversion of 1 karma to 2K NuYen tells us that Resources: A is worth ~255 karma points, whereas optimal skill allocation makes Skills: A worth 477 karma, so generally Skills: A is more karma efficient than Resources: A.
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I don't dispute the math, but your next point and the limited number of skills needed for a character to efficiently contribute to a team means you can easily have "Too many" skill points and not enough other things.
--- Quote from: gargaM0NK on ---Tall-stacks - Because character advancement in Shadowrun costs karma based on the new "Desired Rating", the same stats can generally be most efficiently achieved by starting with a few high values (tall stacks) rather than many moderate ones (wide stacks).
Ie, looking at the table below, to reach Reaction 5 Intuition 5, it's more karma efficient to Buy Reaction 5 (0 karma to raise to 5) Intuition 1 (10+15+20+25 = 70 karma to raise to 5) at character creation than it is to buy Reaction 3 (20+25 = 45 karma to raise to 5) Intuition 3 (45 more karma) with the same 4 Attribute points.
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Most important point that drives almost all optimization choices in a build. Well stated.
--- Quote from: gargaM0NK on ---
So, why not always just go Skills:A > Magic:B > Metatype: C > Attributes: D > Resources: E?
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That would be a hot mess of a character. Elf Face Shaman, maybe...? : )
The other advise really worth repeating is start with "E". (Hint, it's resources, magic, or metatype)
Tecumseh:
While Skill A is karma-efficient, there is a significant percentage of the population that considers it a trap option. See this long thread, which I won't try to summarize here.
I will point out that there are things that are difficult to quantify in Karma, such as Limits. A Limit it set by multiple underlying values, and so the cost of improving the Limit is highly variable based on the the cost of improving the underlying values.
I have seen Skills A + Attributes D and it was a mess of low Limits where nothing past the first 5 hits counted. The reverse build produced comparable dice pools with vastly improved Limits and was more effective, if less versatile.
To paraphrase Moneyball, most players think in terms of buying skills or attributes. Your goal shouldn't be to buy skills or attributes, your goal should be to buy hits. And in order to buy hits, you need to buy both dice pool AND Limits. Now certainly skills and attributes are highly important contributors to dice pool, and attributes are key to limits, but there are other factors that affect both like spells and adept powers and cyber/bioware and equipment and even Edge that upend the whole equation and make it the product of so many moving parts that you're often better finding a happy balance between the variables than trying to calculate a mathematical purity.
To voice a less popular opinion, this is why Limits and Accuracy are one of my favorite additions to SR5. With only dice pools to consider and with build points offering an easy conversion rate between priorities, the math to chargen in SR4 was too straight-forward and easy to optimize. ("Easy" is a relative term. I will note that UmaroVI had a Ph.D in mathematics.) Limits were specifically introduced to curb the dice pool arms race and to give equipment other ways to improve a character than simply adding more dice.
I specifically like the difficulty of optimizing in SR5, if only because the difficulty creates plenty of grey area where if you follow some basic guidelines you can play what you really want to without worrying too much about every potential point of karma left behind in chargen.
Edit: grammar
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