Let me start with the question before I forget it: what limits do you guys place on armor mods?  With my reading of SR4, it seems like you can just get max of all of them if you were so inclined.  I don't go that far, but I don't want to step over the limits.

Alright.  That said, I sometimes like to make characters that fit into the gray areas of the Shadowrun setting.  By that, I mean characters who aren't _quite_ shadowrunners, yet are very much like them in certain ways and are definitely not legit.

To give you a bit of an intro before I get into the concept, the one thing I've always loved about adepts has been their more "superhuman" qualities, rather than their combat abilities.  Twinking out to get 100 reaction dice to dodge like Neo is rather boring to me.  Something like Wall Running or Gliding always seemed to be more fascinating.

So the idea I'm toying around with is that of a "professional" courier, and one who is super paranoid to boot.  The only real problem I see with this is . . .  where do I fit into the usual run?  I don't want to make a gunslinger just to avoid being dead weight.  To give you a rough overview of what I have planned, I'm looking at something like this:

Human
Attributes: all 3 except agility 5, body 4, charisma 2, edge 4, magic 6
Skills: 4 of athletics, pilot ground craft (bike), navigation (urban), automotive mechanic (wheeled), 2 with pistols  (semi), first-aid, survival (urban), unarmed combat (martial arts), infiltration (urban)
Qualities: Erased, Adept, Paranoia, Day Job, In Debt
Gear: Various climbing gear, urban explorer jumpsuit, alta + gel rounds, automotive tool kit, a bit of medical stuff
Vehicle: Suzuki Mirage
Powers: Gliding, Wall Running, Traceless Walk, Eidetic Sense Memory (memorizing routes, terrain, etc.), Linguistics, Sustenance, Great Leap, Free Fall,

Feedback?

Arsenal gives a maximum level of armor mods on a piece of armor  It's 1.5x ballistic or impact, whichever is higher.

I wouldn't want the character you list on any run of mine.  First of all, paranoid people are really really painful to interact with.  Antisocial characters don't work well on a MUX where a large part of daily interaction is meeting people and character development.  And nobody likes to spend an extra hour on a plot with the paranoid guy arguing about picking up shell casings and vacuuming the floor for skin cells.

And seriously, what do you think your character could do on a shadowrun?  He's a courier, so unless it's a job about getting something somewhere in a hurry using back routes, he's worthless.  He looks like he'd be a pretty good courier, like he can run along walls, jump off of stuff, etc., so he could probably get stuff where it needs to go without being intercepted.  But very few Shadowrun jobs are like that.  If your dude had some breaking and entering skills he might be worth something, he could run/sneak his way in using a route that normal people can't use, then open the door and let the team in.  But as it is, he can infiltrate using his acrobatics, and then get shot to death inside the facility because he has no combat skills.

This is a small game, and the plots are mostly shadowruns.  "I'm not really a shadowrunner" is the last thing anyone wants to hear when going on a shadowrun.  I think making such a deliberately useless character is a big slap in the face to the people who are going to spend their time and energy roleplaying a run with you.  You'll be taking a cut of their profits without really helping, and the time you suck up with your pointless poses will be time they can never have back.

Edit: How do you think people would respond to exotic races?  To be honest, I was really surprised that you seem to allow just about everything.

I suppose you might be right, if it's really a _small_ game.  What kind of average concurrent players are we talking about here?  Once a game is of a sufficient size, I find a character like the one I'm describing can work, even if they don't see a lot of action (usually as an alt).  I'm not really sure about your alt policy either, I suppose.

Anyhow, I figured I'd have to run my own stuff to really make any use of the characters, but I suppose that might simply create the problem in reverse.  Suddenly, everybody else would find themselves doing something they're not really geared (or able) to do.

It doesn't matter too much, as I have plenty of other chars I can make.  At this point, I'm wishing I had saved some of the sample characters I created shortly after the release of SR4.  Even with the base powers only, I was able to whip up some pretty interesting (and useful) chars.

I'll point out that you can make alts. So if you want to make Mr. Crazyman-Courier for fun and the odd RP session you can make another PC as well to run with.

I would like to concur with some of Tear's comments and respectfully disagree with others. There is a valid point that paranoid or antisocial characters are difficult to both RP with and work with, so that would limit your ability to interact with others. But the criticisms of the character concept are excessive.

The variety of plots and jobs that are run will be defined by the type of characters that are available. If the only characters that people make are combat monsters, then we'll have a one-dimensional game. I really like the idea of an adept focused on stealth and infiltration. In fact, I have a job in mind that would be very well suited for the character you described. I would echo the comment that some breaking & entering talents would be marketable skills that would make the character more valuable, but I think the basic concept is sound and could be a lot of fun.

I think you should make the character for sure, even if he/she is an alt. I'd be happy to exchange some ideas either online or via PM if you want to collaborate.

Nah.  I think I'm going to go in a slightly different direction with the same character rather than use him as an alt.  I can very easily change some things around to make the character more useful overall to a typical shadowrunner group.  In fact, I'm mostly done already.  He won't be amazing in combat, but he should bring a lot more utility.  Overall, I've shifted his BP far more toward the typical B&E role.

I'd disagree with two points you guys made earlier, though.  The first one being the bit about no combat skills.  Any character in SR4, played sufficiently well, can be fairly effective in combat.  The other thing being Paranoia.

"While Paranoia may be considered a survival trait in the shadows, a character with this quality thinks everyone is out to get her, either because she knows too much, or because they think she does. The character is subject to a –3 dice pool modifier in any interaction with unfamiliar individuals or with Contacts whose Loyalty rating is below 4. She must also change addresses every couple of months for fear of being located."

Paranoia doesn't necessarily mean that the character will come off as crazy or annoying in every conversation, in my view.  It can be RP'd a lot more subtly, simply as the person refusing to trust you until you've proven yourself fifty times over.  This would be expressed more in action than words.  In my view, somebody with Paranoia isn't going to nitpick more or less about evidence or something else.  However, if a run went south, and you really needed to crash in somebody's pad while the heat dies down, you know the person with Paranoia sure isn't going to volunteer.  He'd sooner tell you to take your chances in a coffin motel.

And also, any weapon can be obtained in a form which fires caseless ammunition, so who cares about shell casings these days?  

Paranoia without a negative quality means it's no big deal.  You're suspicious, you don't trust anyone, but you don't let it get in the way of business.  If you get points for it as a flaw, it gets in the way of business, period.  That's why it's a flaw that's worth points, if it has no deleterious effects then you're not playing it correctly.  Someone with the paranoia flaw is literally crazy, they have paranoid delusions about the motives and actions of others with no basis in fact.  If you're less paranoid than that, then you're just smart, and you don't get points for being a smart careful person.

Regarding the character concept, I'm not saying that everyone needs to be a combat monkey.  But everyone needs to have a useful set of skills that lets them fit into a team.  A pure courier who does nothing else doesn't fit into a team.  An acrobatic courier with b&e skills is a useful covert ops specialist.  A vehicle-based courier with a souped up getaway vehicle is useful as the team's rigger.  But a courier whose only skill is delivering packages is useless when the run doesn't involve delivering pacakages.  Since there are few enough runs on the game at present, it's important to make someone who can fit into a wide variety of jobs, instead of expecting jobs to conform to your limited skillset.

Well, regarding my courier idea, I think I simply overestimated the size of the game.  In a medium to large-sized game, there is room for "secondary" characters like that.  Now that I'm actually in the game, I realize such a character wouldn't be practical unless I ran all of my own plots, and that would likely inflict the problem in reserve as I mentioned earlier.

As for paranoia, it says outright what the penalties are.  -3 to social rolls with unfamiliar people.  That would apply regardless.  I think how you RP it is up to interpretation to an extent.  Yes, you'd have to be paranoid, but that can be expressed in many ways.  That was the only point I was making.  Being annoyingly obsessed with stupid details isn't paranoid to me.  If anything, the paranoid person keeps their mouth shut to a fault, in my book.  I think somebody with the paranoia quality is very viable as a certain type of runners.  They'd have a definite weakness (being very likely to screw things up if they had to talk their way out of a situation), but it wouldn't be character-breaking.  In fact, lets face it, a lot of characters have crap for social skills.  It's ultimately irrelevant, as I didn't go that direction, but I don't think it's necessarily a dealbreaker.

I'd have to agree in part with Windwalker, and in part with Tear. Paranoia as a flaw would get in the way of buisiness time to time, but it doesnt have to get so far in the way that you cant get anythign done. It does mean your a little more likely to hound a J who's hiding something to the poitn you may tick em off a little etc. It may mean you sometimes are a little abrasive towards your team mates etc. But it odesnt mean that your an obsessive compulsive post operation cleaner etc. That would be a seperate flaw really. Paranoia tends to also have some sort of focus rather than being about everythign and anything. This is not always the case of course but often enough there's some sort of source of the paranoia that could even be racially motivated etc (All orks want to steal my stuff!)

Course the paranoia flaw is a little broader reaching than that. In the end however outwardly at least it doesnt mean your anymore than just very prickly to people untill you get to know them. I mean the paranoia flaw specifically only gives you the penalty when 'dealing with unfamilar people' in a social situation. Once you get to know some one, maybe you harbour a few deep secret doubts about them etc, but you otherwise are able to work fine with them at no penalty what so ever.

I'd comment on the Paranoia issue, but then THEY might find me.

In fact, forget I said anything.

-Not Hades.

Here's one for you:

A social character says to a paranoid character, "Trust me."

With that -3 dice, the paranoid character who trusts no one, trusts this person, and then BAM paradoxical implosions occur!  Woot.

And I still get a cookie.