Yeah, you are probably right. Trying to find the sweet spot between useless in a lot of skills or useless besides of one particular thing. After spreding my skill points too far on my last char, i don't want to run into the next trap of focusing too heavy on 2-3 skills. But yeah, 16-18 dice should be the sweet spot, i guess. Reaching out to 22 should be possible, but i think it is a huge waste of karma.
(Edit: Spoiler alert! This is mostly OT and me whining about the actual situation in my group. So, if you aren't interested in wasting your time on some personal experience, then don't read any further.)
Actually i think this is one of the big problems of Shadowrun. It is pretty easy to reach decent numbers of dice. Like 7-8 is the average in most stuff. Attribute 3 + Skill 3, which is really easy to learn in time scales, takes a week or so - add some tools, like 'ware or equipment and you'll be at 7+ dice without investing anything but some days of learning. Increasing this gets more and more expensive by just a small chance to perform better. And on the other hand you don't have enough points/karma at chargen to increase everything to this "standard" level. So you are left in this awkward spot, where your character has to be an idiot in 80% of the skills just to better than Joe Average in 2-3. I understand that runners are specialists, but this feels unnecessary extreme for me.
Allright, sorry for talking OT, but in a strange way i can put hours and hours of time into character creation and i'm never satisfied with the results. I know, it is the theme of Shadowrun to give up something to gain something. Maybe i'm frustrated about the type of play my group is doing and this is not the cause but only the effect of it. I don't know, like i said before, I have a lot of experience in playing Pen&Paper. Maybe i have to be more flexible in my playstile or so, but in the end it should always be fun, right? And allthough it is fun to meet all the people, playing the runs is just ... yeah, mediocre. It is okay. Crazy to say this, because i love the setting and atmosphere of SR. Maybe i should just talk to our GM again and see what he has to say.
Not sure how to say it, but every run we do it feels a bit like a fight player vs. GM. I'm used to put a lot of trust in the GM. When he says that my character gets hit, then he gets hit, no need to argue. In our group this can take up to 10-20 minutes of discussion, reading in the rules, talking about possibilities, RAW, RAI. I know it is fun to create characters in certain ways and to fit all pieces together like from a big puzzle. But the GM should have the last word, without further discussion. And on the other hand, he should create the world (e.g. runs) around the characters. Like i said in the beginning of this thread, he told me that my character is more or less useless for the group and no big loss. I think it is my type of personality, but at first i felt bad, like i made a mistake, didn't put enough effort into creating a complex character. But the last days and hours i red through a lot of threads in other forums and came to the decision that he is also responsible. If my stealth adept has nothing to do, is it really my fault? If i don't go to a party in swat armor and with my assault rifle on my back - am i playing wrong? No, i don't think so. There could be a lot of things to do for me, especially since we are not more than 4 players in total (one character is played by the GM, he is switching with another guy from time to time). Like pulling multiple levers in a building at the same time, working under time pressure, so we have to split, or giving us a hard challenge which is too hard to master for our mediocre-sneaky decker. I know, a DP of 14 in sneaking, lockpicking, gymnastics and unarmed is not great, but it is decent (without boni from equipment or adept powers). Plus 10 dice (and initiative ~25) in automatics, computer, perception, palming and software should lead me somewhere, i guess... yeah, but what can you do. Not to mention masking metamagic, cloaking, freefall, hang time, nimble fingers, traceless walk, wall running, improved senses, aikido martial arts with counterstrike...
Hm. Sorry guys, had to write this down out of frustration. Sorry if you red all of this, it's not really valuable stuff, i guess. I'm sure i have to talk to our GM what he wants from me for my next character. What is "valuable" for him. Until now i have the feeling, that he is hardly focused on 1) legwork and 2) combat. I think we had 1 run so far, where we didn't had to fight, and that was led by the other guy and not our main GM. So yeah, i will stick to the plan of creating a new character, but i will go and get some feedback before committing to something in particular. Yeah, sorry... like i said, not really topic related.
