[Whiskeyjack]

The only valid groups are influence and conjuring.

The Stealth group is quite good.

[Facemage]

But you are building a face/mage? Do you really think that you get enough skill points to be a competent mage and face at the same time, whenever you are wasting skill points to palming and disguise? Ok, palming is good, but disguise is even more useless than leadership and banishing.

[Whiskeyjack]

If ranks in Banishing are on my sheet at all I have morally failed.

Also leadership in that situation would be somewhat amazing due to Commanding Voice spam.

[Facemage]

Ah, I forgot the commanding voice. With it leadership is maybe more useful than banishing. My bad.

But if you see a F12 spirit, remember to run for your life. Without banishing it will kill you.

[All4BigGuns]

Ah, I forgot the commanding voice. With it leadership is maybe more useful than banishing. My bad.

But if you see a F12 spirit, remember to run for your life. Without banishing it will kill you.

WITH Banishing it will kill you as well. It's going to beat you at the opposed test and then proceed to beat you upon the head and shoulders.

[Facemage]

Yeah, but your survival probability is higher.
If you don't have banishing => you are surely dead.
If you have banishing 6 + Magic 6 = 12, your probability to survive is 50%. The spirit have 1 service (lol, try to get more than 1...) and it is unbound( 2x lol if you try to bind it). If you get more hits than the spirit, you destroy it.

The nove in the beginning of street grimoire is good. The banishing was the only good solution to destroy the wolf.

[Whiskeyjack]

"Surely dead" is hyperbolic.

[Facemage]

Lol, I'm not native speaker, so my text may contain errors.

[zarzak]

ZB beat me to it.  A team of specialists can work, certainly, but it results in pretty siloed skillsets.  As long as you're running up against challenges to those specific skillsets, you're fine.  If challenges start to stray outside of those things, then the group can get stuck.  JoaT characters don't become "I Win" buttons, but they help prevent teams from getting stuck.

The thing is a team of specialists are not that silo'd in this system.  Skills D or C with a magic priority, or skills C or B without it will cover all of your bases + your specialization.  Don't forget that magic covers a lot of skills as well.  A jack of all trades covers multiple roles, but none of them well.

A jack of all trades can be useful in situations and in some tables, but they're definitely worse than the specialized characters that this system tends towards.  Comparing it to 4e's warlord isn't a very valid comparison, as the systems are fundamentally different in many ways.

As an experienced player I wouldn't doubt you can make a useful and valid jack of all trades type character.  But the majority of posters who ask for help don't know how to do that, and will make characters that are honestly not that useful ; too low dicepools, no real role, not knowing how to fill the secondary character role, etc.  Or they'll be in groups that really need 'x' (face, rigger, whatever) but they can't do 'x' that well because of how they're built.

I don't think any option is a 'trap' option for experienced players, but the character creation in shadowrun is extremely complex.  Saying 'skills A is a trap' is legitimate for the majority of casual players who don't have a deep system mastery, as it leads often leads to ineffective characters.  The DnD 3.5 equivalent might be taking more than 2 levels of fighter - usually not recommended unless you know what you're doing.  Just perusing the builds posted here shows that pretty clearly, in that most builds with skills A are severely lacking in other areas, and skills A wasn't really needed to do what they wanted.

[Hobbes]

1) Why am I playing a jack of all trades in a game about specialized character roles and teamwork (the answer here is usually a lack of system understanding)

There are an awful lot of people out there that if you don't have a skill, they'll constantly throw you (without any teammate that possesses it) into situations that don't require it under the guise of "challenge".

And Skills A doesn't help with a GM who is deliberately picking things the group is bad at.  Shadowrun has 50ish? active skills.  Even Priority A can't cover all them. 

If a GM wants to spotlight a Jack of All Trades character, that is totally different from highlighting team deficiencies. 

[Whiskeyjack]

I don't think any option is a 'trap' option for experienced players, but the character creation in shadowrun is extremely complex.  Saying 'skills A is a trap' is legitimate for the majority of casual players who don't have a deep system mastery, as it leads often leads to ineffective characters.  The DnD 3.5 equivalent might be taking more than 2 levels of fighter - usually not recommended unless you know what you're doing.  Just perusing the builds posted here shows that pretty clearly, in that most builds with skills A are severely lacking in other areas, and skills A wasn't really needed to do what they wanted.

I think most game system traps are in the context of new players, because they just don't have the system chops to see why the choice is bad, and possibly get starry-eyed over big numbers like "46 skill points and 10 group skills" or whatever without good understanding of the context, and then don't know that they should back out and reprioritize. Or they don't know how the skills work and think that dice pools of 2-4 for threshold tests or 5-6 for opposed tests are perfectly ok. Sure there are some games where they ARE perfectly ok which means if you have system knowledge you will be even further ahead.

Basically I might question Skills A if a forum vet uses it but I go into that just to ask, from an outside perspective, how that choice is benefiting them. But if they're new I can almost guarantee that they saw a big number and thought it was better without knowing the context of Attributes (arguably) being more important, or Limits, or spreading stuff around ineffectually.

I'm sure I could build a Skills A character where the skill points were minimally wasted and the character just happened to cover multiple competencies but even that is quite different from dropping 1-2 points in everything on the sheet, including the skills where my resulting dice pool is less than 5. I'm also sure that most characters I play have better things to allocate at A. That's just where system knowledge comes in.

[Kincaid]

I'll certain agree that the character creation process can be tricky and you see new players make a variety of mistakes, including taking Skills A when there's really no point to it.  I see a lot of people take Resources A (because money) for similarly flawed reasons.  You're creating a glut of resource where none is needed at the expense of something else.  Character creation involves hard choices--I wince a bit every time I see one of those, "Help me with my mage/rigger/sam character" threads--but there are playable builds out there that work well with non-traditional allocations.

[Whiskeyjack]

Frankly I think a lot of it stems from trying to build a solo game or video game-esque character in a team game setting, and recognizing even in a solo or small group game that you can and should seek it NPC contract help for the stuff you're not good at.

[Marcus]

I expect most of the folks reading this have seen those threads, help Review XYZ, with some variation on Skill A, Money B, Magic/Techno C, Meta D (Elf),  Attributes E. I'll also agree Non-traditional Allocation for specific purposes that are well thought out and that are viable builds are fine. That said there are bad options, the general rules or advice given by most in this forums, which does often include that skill A is trap, are not there to be artificially restrictive, or meant as a criticism of the creation process (Well at-least not by me, but I'm fairly sure that goes for everyone else here). They are used to help folks (Particularly new folks) get the most out creation. But even experienced players benefit from having their concepts re-examed and questioned. I'm as stubborn on builds as they come I expect, but I still made some fundamental build changes in my last character thread.

I'm not really sure where this is conversation is going, We have all listed our logic on the subject are we near a consensus?

[Whiskeyjack]

In another thread it was suggested that a discussion of the trap status of Skills A might be stickied as a resource. Though I'm not sure how one requests that.