Shadowrun
Shadowrun General => General Discussion => Topic started by: Rhal on <05-18-11/0451:25>
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I am fairly new to Shadowrun and I am trying to learn as much as I can. For most, if not all of you, this is going to be a stupid question - can anyone tell me what a Street Samurai actually is, what one does, and advice on building and playing one.
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A street samurai is someone who uses gear and a code of street honor. (Note that it isn't necessarily what one would call "honorable", just like the samurai of feudal Japan's code of honor is very different than what one normally thinks of as "honorable," they both honor specific codes of conduct and thus have honor for those specific codes.) The gear is typically composed of lots of firepower (automatics, shotguns, heavy weapons) and cyber- and bioware.
The sam is typically heavily augmented, so much so that his Essence rating is often 1 or lower. Typically can take a lot of punishment, and dish it out, so they are often combat monsters. Note that in Shadowrun, the combat monster is a support character. The other characters, those with the skills needed to infiltrate and/or bypass security and achieve the objective, are the ones that get the job done. Optimally, they do it without alerting security to their presence. Unfortunately, the optimum result does not happen as often as one would like. So, that's when the street sam pulls everyones butt out of the fire.
The side effects of low Essence can include quite a few neurological and behavioral disorders. Including, but not limited to: depression, sociopathy, excessive aggression, moodiness, cyber-psychosis, and being a crappy friend.
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Basically it's a heavily modified with cyber and bioware character who's a combat specialist
there are lots of different ways to build one but generally you're looking at reaction/initiative enhancement, increased physical stats, various ways of increasing damage resistance etc.
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I liked the idea that the code was a way to keep saneish, in spite of the low essence.
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Ya, that's a cool idea. I can't believe it's taken this long to realize that!
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When I was playing with NSRCG3, it seemed to me that the Street Samurai's 0.01 Essence would make him/her almost as dissociative or asocial as Arnie's Terminator.
Someone came up with variants on the base Street Sam too and put them in TSS.