Shadowrun
Shadowrun General => Fan fiction => Topic started by: Wolfboy on <10-27-10/0836:44>
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A comment on Critas's post "Angels" got me thinking, how many of you stat out your story characters. It could be that your writing your character's backstory, it could be that you just wrote some stuff and decided to make your characters cannon. I just want to know in general how many of you stat out your story characters and when you do so for stories.
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To date I have only written about my character for BattleCorps, and Usda and his party. WHich is our gaming group. I admit the stories with Usda are...real, in as much as we play the game then I write the story about the game we played as I saw it. I do embelish a little and I add/change some things but that is for creative license and to protect the innocent! :D
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I do it when I feel like it. If something about the character I'm writing about really gets me hooked or I'll start writing fiction about a character I am playing so they already have stats.
It's kinda frustrating for me to stat out a character I've written about going by the rules because I feel they are too limiting (400bp). I tend to eyeball the characters stats/gear and not really worry about how many points they take up.
Edit- To clarify I have basic stats in my head for the character. Such as Bob has average Strength, a little above average constitution, is quick, not book smart, but intuitive, and fairly likable.
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Normally I will write about a character that is already on paper, or in the process of going on to paper. The first piece that I will write is typically a key moment of background, and things just sort of roll from there.
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I stat out most of them but I do it based on the experience of the character not necessarily from a new build. If the character has been around the block or is known to be quite capable at something then I will make a call on what skill level seems important. Some times the story builds the character and other times the character helps build the story.
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On a related note, I somewhat wonder -- from time to time -- how much karma certain individuals are worth, you know? Even just the various gangers / lieutenants / army / special forces people in the main book -- you compare your own character to them, and you sort of wonder how they compare, cost-wise...
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Spec Ops forces tend to be between 500 to 750 karma spent after the base character. I started breaking down a number of the NPC grunts especially in Ghost Cartels or War to see whether or not you could build an equivalent base character with said backgrounds. It's pretty ugly.
The regular army grunts usually can be built but not much else. Even alot of the gangers outstrip your base starting PC.
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This, alas, suggests to me that either the character generation stuff is somewhat broken, the descriptions of stuff are somewhat broken, or the 'porting over of the NPCs was -- you guessed it -- somewhat broken.
I suspect a bit of all three. After all, it takes 160 BP to be an average member of your own race ...
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Spec Ops forces tend to be between 500 to 750 karma spent after the base character. I started breaking down a number of the NPC grunts especially in Ghost Cartels or War to see whether or not you could build an equivalent base character with said backgrounds. It's pretty ugly.
The regular army grunts usually can be built but not much else. Even alot of the gangers outstrip your base starting PC.
I built the 'expeditionary soldier' out of War with the base 400 BP (using human metatype), but that's about the best I could come up with.
That said, I looked at the stat data of the Tir Ghost, and I pretty much found out that it'd take 600 BP to build one of those (dropping some gear of course since the Tir Ghost has more than 250k worth of equipment and stuff).
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On a related note, I somewhat wonder -- from time to time -- how much karma certain individuals are worth, you know? Even just the various gangers / lieutenants / army / special forces people in the main book -- you compare your own character to them, and you sort of wonder how they compare, cost-wise...
I break them down with the karmagen rules, including karma-nuyen conversion of 1-2500.
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Yes, but have you actually figured them out? IMO, this is something that would be valuable for the forumgoers.
Hm...
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Spec Ops forces tend to be between 500 to 750 karma spent after the base character. I started breaking down a number of the NPC grunts especially in Ghost Cartels or War to see whether or not you could build an equivalent base character with said backgrounds. It's pretty ugly.
The regular army grunts usually can be built but not much else. Even alot of the gangers outstrip your base starting PC.
I built the 'expeditionary soldier' out of War with the base 400 BP (using human metatype), but that's about the best I could come up with.
That said, I looked at the stat data of the Tir Ghost, and I pretty much found out that it'd take 600 BP to build one of those (dropping some gear of course since the Tir Ghost has more than 250k worth of equipment and stuff).
That's interesting. I did a breakdown of the stats for the Tir Ghosts in the SR3 campaign book, Corporate Punishment, since a lot of people I know tend to consider them to be the most dangerous combat builds up to that time. It turns out that they were about 250 karma if they are built specifically with the intention of them being given more karma to finish them off. Min-maxed. That's what I meant. They can be efficiently built with around 250 karma. If they were built and then progressed organically, the karma cost would have been closer to 300-350.
I never got around to figuring out what the build would be for the Ghost adepts and mage would be in SR4A, though I have a couple equivalent characters that I built for Artifacts Unbound. But I tend to build characters on paper, and that could have gone anywhere by now.
What has never ceased to amaze me about the Tir Ghost archetype in the core book is that it's not an adept; it's a cybered elf. That should be really weird given the unit and country. I mean, Critias and I have discussed this quite a bit and come up with reasons, but there are already a bunch of heavily-cybered goons in that section.
This whole line of discussion does bring us back to a point earlier in the thread. You can have a starting PC with any kind of background, but the wheels come off the wagon mechanically when you realize that it costs almost twice as many starting BP as you get to actually build a former Navy SEAL. I think that, for me, it simply becomes a matter of a sliding scale. It should probably require more BP, but that scale applies to everything in the game. So if you're playing Casey Ryback on your first game ever, and run into other SEALs, they're going to be similar builds to you. But when you're Casey Ryback, 300 karma badass, then so are they. Because your PC may have been doing all sorts of crazy stuff, but along the same lines, this is all they do, and they have the UCAS government making sure that they are equal to or better than you. But eventually they hit an "standard" experience wall, and you do not. So 2,000 karma Casey Ryback is going to tear apart those 300 karma SEALs before they see him coming.
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And it'd be nice if that were true -- but it's not, because many if not most GMs look to the book's characters and level descriptors to judge How Bad-Ass a character or NPC is. "No way is he only average in all his stats; he's way above. Highly trained in X, Y, and Z -- that's a 5/6 ..." Which means suddenly the GM is dropping characters on your head that are 'above average' according to the descriptors, but which squash you flat because the descriptors do not match up to the game play.
SR1-3: 3 was average human. Use SR3 --> SR4 conversion rules, instead of keeping 3 as 'average human', and 'average human' is now a 2. Typical highly-trained SEAL Team is now a 4. Remember, the only way you got to keep a 7 in a skill is because you had an 11+ in it, which you converted into 7 + Aptitude.
Hence my new thread (http://forums.shadowrun4.com/index.php?topic=5473.msg89079#new), which I hope will earn a top-of-the-forum pinning ...
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Well, maybe we can finally get that SR version of Listen Up You Primitive Screwhead that has been bouncing around as an idea for a long time to figure out how GMs can do that.
I can't help but think that many of the NPCs I built for AU suffer from this. Or maybe it's just that many of them are just flat out supposed to be Better Than You. :)
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Typically, they are. With AU, I expect the PCs to be insanely out of their depth, hanging on by sheer guts, luck, and stubbornness. These things are THE next best nastiest thing when it comes to magic; why S-K Prime isn't in the forefront of this fight, trying to kick ass and ignoring names, I don't know. But that's what AU is/should be, at least IMO; it's the mystic world turned up to 11.
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I'm glad I'm not alone. As I was looking at the adventures and how they were presented, it became very clear that there is a definite escalation that progresses through them. Given that the first one puts the runners into the middle of a fight between shedim and bug spirits, and River City Shootout was written specifically as a Prime Runner level run in a PR-level setting, that shouldn't come as much surprise that it gets harder and crazier from there. And then, you know, Praxis.
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I'm glad I'm not alone. As I was looking at the adventures and how they were presented, it became very clear that there is a definite escalation that progresses through them. Given that the first one puts the runners into the middle of a fight between shedim and bug spirits, and River City Shootout was written specifically as a Prime Runner level run in a PR-level setting, that shouldn't come as much surprise that it gets harder and crazier from there. And then, you know, Praxis.
Why is it when you say Praxis, I hear you saying like like these guys say Great White Buffalo (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I0Sxxibos-I)?
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I haven't stated out Jon "Money" Johnson yet. He's a Prime Runner in the 500-550 scale somewhere, that's all I can agree on. (Powerful, but with 20+ years in the Shadows in experience. And he's not exactly right in the head after the building fell on him.).
Nas is actually the first character I ever made stats for (And it shows.). I should remake him someday. His stats are in the dA folder with his stories. (http://canray.deviantart.com/gallery/2884133)
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Y'know, I just re-read this, and realized something - according to the played character background for Hawatari, she once ... well, it's complicated, but a building collapsing was involved ...
... sorry, Money ... ;)