(Shadowrun) My First Adept

[DragonBaneDM]

Hey guys! If you recall an older thread I posted I made a mage. He was FANTASTIC, which means there's a lot of resources for Shadowrun players on here!

So, good news being that this place helped me make a fantastic character, bad news is that he gave into his inherent corruption, which put him at odds with the party. He's now a full on Johnson, and is our new reoccuring villian!

So, I figured I'd make an adept! Here's the general idea:

Oni Feilong is a Buddhist monk, and also a Troll. I figured a kung fu adept is a good option, but if not, feel free to shut me down.

What do you suggest I take for abilities? I have 415 BP and 9 Karma to work with for this guy. I can't see him having too much nuyen, nor personal possessions, so I figure I'm going to go all in on buying as high of attributes as possible.

So, if anyone here knows a good bit about adepts, lemmee hear ya! Thanks in advance guys!

EDIT:

Here are his attributes at the moment. My GM gave me a budget of 210 Build Points:

Body: 7 (20 BP)
Agility: 5 (55 BP)
Reaction: 2 (10 BP)
Strength: 7 (20 BP)
Charisma: 3 (20 BP)
Intuition: 2 (10 BP)
Logic: 2 (10 BP)
Will: 2 (10 BP)
Magic: 6 (55 BP)

[VirOath]

This a 4e, or 3e game? Because rolls are handled differently.

[DragonBaneDM]

Ah, yes, my mistake.

This is the 4th edition game.

[Shenanigans]

Well, I'm a little behind on 4E books, but I like the idea of keeping your attributes up; particularly keep that Magic high. Don't forget that Unarmed Combat skill, and specialize for a little cheese. With Reach and Natural Armor, you'll already have an advantage in H2H. Adept abilities are the real decision to make. (Forgive me if I get the names of powers wrong...I'm AFB.)

Killing Hands is almost required for a martial artist type, and the same goes for Improved Reflexes. Critical Strike is nice, but with a troll your Strength should be high enough to up that Unarmed Damage. Penetrating Strike will help you get through Armor if you face heavily armored opponents. I can't remember the name of it, but the power that ups a particular skill (Improved Ability?) can work nicely. Mystic Armor and Astral Perception are sharp, especially if you face Awakened opponents often, but the latter is particularly expensive. Elemental Strike can be nice thematically and isn't too expensive either.

[GreyMantle]

If you can, convince your GM to seriously lower the point costs of pretty much all the adept techniques. To quote:



Adept Powers: When the schedule for expected numbers got changed all around in SR4, Adepts apparently did not get the memo, in many cases keeping absolute costs as holdovers from books written in 1990. Some of those are not especially reasonable in the current environment (where, for example, an Adept does not get 6 power points for free).

Improved Ability This power should cost just .25 points regardless of the type of skill.

Improved Physical Attribute This is way too expensive. Sure it doesn't cost Essence, but it may as well, and having it cost more than the cheap and Essence unfriendly ware is off the hook. It should cost only .5/level. Even then it's pretty sketchy compared to the actual high end ware like delta grade Muscle Toner (.4 Essence for +4 to a physical attribute). But at least it doesn't come up on a blood test.

Natural Immunity This ability is incredibly unattractive, a victim of the current power rules. Every level should reduce the power by one rather than increasing the resistance dicepool by one.

Pain Resistance: Damage penalties are a lot less exciting than they used to be, as they no longer modify target numbers. Paying 1.5 Power Points for a conditional +1 die is just silly. Pain Resistance should reduce damage modifiers rather than altering the number of effective damage boxes you've sustained. So a character with Rating 2 Pain Resistance should be able to sustain 6 boxes of damage with no penalty.

Distance Strike I happen to know that the authors were way too cautious on this one. This is a game where people have guns, the ability to punch someone from across the room is kind of assumed. 2 Power Points is completely absurd, and was unfortunately deliberately chosen to screw people who wanted this power for thematic reasons. It should cost .5 Power Points, and it's really not that exciting even then.

Elemental Strike There is absolutely no reason to keep people from combining this with distance strike, that was just simple asshattery.

Gliding This costs too much, and should be reduced to a .5 power.

Iron Guts No idea why this happened when Natural Immunity exists. The new version costs .5 and gives the character straight Immunity to Ingested Toxins.

Iron Lungs 30 seconds is physically impressive for a normal human mortal, but seriously this is a world with compressed air tanks and Oxygenate spells. The new version costs .5 Power Points and straight up lets the adept get by without breathing at all.

Quick Draw This power straight up does not exist. People can just do this in Shadowrun 4th edition, there is no reason for a power to even exist.

Traceless Walk This costs too much and should be reduced to a .5 power.

Wall Running This costs too much and should be reduced to a .5 power.


That fixes things relatively well.

Also, I've found that many adepts still function relatively well if they sacrifice a point of Magic/Essence for cyberware. I don't know if that matches your backstory, but if you feel like it go for it.

[DragonBaneDM]

I'll let him know about that, but I'm in a fairly underpowered party.

I agree with all of those powers except Killing Hands. It's not really my style to kill stuff, even my Mage was big on Stu. Damage. Also, Stun Tracks are a good bit lower than Physical Tracks.

I haven't looked through Street Magic yet with this guy, but Elemental Strike sounds sweet! What's it do?

[BobVosh]

Also buy up whatever gives you a lot of stun levels. I got tired of my friends mage always knocking himself out.

[Shenanigans]

IIRC, Elemental Strike adds an element of your choice (fire, elec, cold, acid; Street Magic adds more...blast, light, smoke, metal I think) to your unarmed strike damage. Some of them might be thematically tough to do, but it's a neat power.

Keep in mind that Killing Hands doesn't just allow you to do regular damage, it also allows you to damage critters with immunity to normal weapons and astral creatures also (I think) which is nice if you have astral perception as a power or take the drug that allows (forces I think) adepts to perceive. Doing physical damage is also nice when you're fighting mages/shamans, as their stun track tends to be better than their physical.

Magic Resistance is also nice, but keep in mind it applies to all spells cast on you, even friendly ones.

Also, I tend to stay away from the sensory powers (low light, hearing, etc.) as their much more cost efficient to just buy goggles or contact lenses of.

[DragonBaneDM]

Mmkay! Very cool.

I just got my ability to be an initiate revoked, but oh well, I'll just take a Quality I guess. Got the Runner's Companian and Street Magic on me now, so I'm gonna look through those.

Killing Hands also lets me damage vehicles, so it's back on the list after Shenanigans post.

[Shenanigans]

If you want to be able to damage objects really well, I believe there's also a power that doubles your unarmed damage when attacking objects. As a troll, that could become ridiculous very quickly. My apologies, but I don't remember the name off the top of my head.

[DeltaEmil]

the drug that allows (forces I think) adepts to perceive. That would be deepweed, and lasts 6-body attribute hours (minimum 1 hour).

[Shenanigans]

That would be deepweed, and lasts 6-body attribute hours (minimum 1 hour).Yep, that's it; thanks.

IIRC, the danger of it is that you can't voluntarily end the perception, so you might attract the attention of something unsavory and not be able to click off your perception.

[DragonBaneDM]

The drug, unfortunately, is not an option for me. I'd like to, but my old character was an experiment to see if it was possible to be a corporate suit and a Shadowrunner.

This guy's an experiment to find a morally centered Shadowrunner. Haha, I like odd character concepts, I know, but it's something I'm sticking to with this guy.

[Shenanigans]

I wasn't really suggesting Deepweed as a serious character option, but astral perception is something you might consider if it suits your character idea.

[DragonBaneDM]

I think I'm gonna. I was the only mage in the party before, and replacing him with an Adept means that I gotta take it for us to still be able to participate in Astral Combat.

[DeltaEmil]

You don't have to. In fact, I don't see any advantage of being able to astrally perceive without the ability to turn it off when needed, and spirits are too fast for dual nature beings to catch them.

There is still the possibility of an NPC-mage to loan a bound spirit to you (for an outrageous fee because the spirit might be tracked back to him) to do the ascensing stuff.

Deepweed is okay for barrens and other urban environments where you don't expect to see one ward after the other, but for high security complexes or the upper floors of a megacorp building, that stuff will stop you all the time, even if the gm is lenient and doesn't use too many magical defenses.

[DragonBaneDM]

I added Oni's Attributes in the OP. I'll add more of his stuff as time goes on.

[comicshorse]

Deepweed is IMHO a bad idea. Leaving out the fact that it makes you vulnerable to possession, the big problem is that an astrally projecting mage can zap you with ease

[DeltaEmil]

A mage zapping somebody isn't that much of a problem... because you can't do anything aginst it anyway no matter if you're astrally perceiving or not. :smallyuk:
All you can do you is to hope you rolled well on the resistance test. The only real way to fight this is to disrupt line of sight, or get behind a wall if astrally perceiving. Astrally, you're hosed, and physically, mages get cybernetic augmentations for their eyes which increases their line of sight by several orders of magnitude (even seeing in infrared or lowlight), and back then, there were optical cybereyes, so yeah.

Combat spells (especially the stunspells) are just too good.

[comicshorse]

A mage zapping somebody isn't that much of a problem... because you can't do anything aginst it anyway no matter if you're astrally perceiving or not. :smallyuk:
.
Well no, an astrally projecting mage can only zap something in the astral or astrally perceiving. Unless you open up the path to the astral realm they can't touch you while they're projecting ( though they can follow you around spying on everything you do )

[DeltaEmil]

I worded this badly. What I meant is that it doesn't matter if your non-mage chracter is dual active or not, because mages always have the advantage over you, and that it's easy for them to make you drop dead no matter where you are. Be it that they have glass fiber optics throughout the building, can spot you several kilometers away, have an astral spotter, or have a ritual sample from you, you're hosed anyway.
Or worse, they send their spirit strike squad on you.

[DragonBaneDM]

Soooo, take Astral Perception. Got it!

I have six power points... Is that enough?

[DeltaEmil]

If I'm not mistaken, that would be an attribut of six in magic, right?

I'd say yes. If necessary, think about supplementing some abilities with cost-efficient alpha-grade cyberware.

Cybereyes and smartlink for a silenced gun (sometimes, it's just that much more efficient and reliable than punching in the air), a commlink, perhaps claws.

[DragonBaneDM]

I took Latent Dracomorphosis. And I'm so excited about it.

[DeltaEmil]

Is it that quality that lets you turn into a drake, one of those humanoid dragon-thingies? Last I heard, that just wasn't good at all, and it doesn't help for roleplaying either, as you're either so important to every dragon that it shifts the focus of the game solely on you (which might not be okay for the other players), or it doesn't, and makes it a waste of time and generation points...

And of course, it costs a lot of karma if you're going to complete the metamorphosis.

It's a mixed quality of dubious gains for either character power and roleplaying elements, and relies on the gm really furthering that plot element that this quality brings with it.

I hope it plays out well for you.

[Tehnar]

I would suggest that you do not soft cap your attributes at creation (well maybe except magic, since you need it as a adept). For example, keep AGI at 4 rather then 5, using 25 BP to raise a attribute 1 point is too much IMO.

Also magic is a special attribute so you should be able to use all of your 210 BP on your normal attributes. And then put 55 BP for your magic stat, and how many BP you want for your EDGE. I recommend a Edge of at least 3 though.

With regards to your attributes, I would strongly recommend you raise your Reaction and Intuition. Both are very, very important if only for the reason they raise your initiative (though they are useful in many other ways as well). A initiative of 4 is a very bad thing for a combat character to have. I would aim for something like 8+ initiative.

[DragonBaneDM]

Talked to my GM about it, and we worked it out! It was only 5 BP, and honestly it's gonna be so sick.

I also figured out my Powers!

I gots:

Astral Perception (1 Power Point)
Attribute Boost(Agility; .5 Power Points, Rating 2)
Improved Unarmed Combat (1 Power Point, Rating 2)
Improved Reflexes 2 (Rating 2, 3 Power Points)
Mystic Armor (.5 Power Points, Rating 1)


Look good? :smallsmile:

EDIT:

Also, you'll see that I now have a 6 Initiative, causa powers, but I'll see if I can get it any higher! Thanks dude!

And finally, my GM says Magic and Edge do indeed stay inside the attribute budget for this character. If you could cite a page in the rulebook that I could use for my defense, that'd be swell, but till then this is what I have to work with.

[DeltaEmil]

Talked to my GM about it, and we worked it out! It was only 5 BP, and honestly it's gonna be so sick.
Especially if you have to pay the 120 karma once you turn into a drake. :smalltongue:

As for those powers, it looks okay. Should you in the near future sacrifice a magic point (because of cyberware or whatever exotic means of loss there is in 4th edition), losing the improved unarmed combat powers or the mystic armor is less likely to hurt your character than any other powers you currently have. Agility is king, and improved reflexes the god-emperor.

[Tehnar]

Initiative is really king, since being shot is a very bad thing (tm) in Shadowrun. For a melee adept I would go for at least 10 initiative. That would be a Reaction score of 4, intuition 4 and improved reflexes 2.

As for the powers I would suggest:
2.5 Improved Reflexes 2 (its been erratead to 2.5 points)
0.5 Killing Hands (having a easy way to hurt spirits is a good thing, and deal P damage if you so choose)
1.0 Critical Strike 4 (doing more damage helps if that is your main focus).
1.0 improved unarmed combat 2
1.0 astral perception.

So with a STR 9 troll you would be doing 9P or 9S damage with your unarmed attacks, with 13(14 because of reach) dice to attack with (4 agility, 5 unarmed skill, 2 specialization, 2 improved unarmed combat) which is a fairly solid DP that still leaves you enough BP to do other things.

[DragonBaneDM]

I don't see the difference between Critical Strike and boosting my Agility so that I hit more reliably and get more net hits as a result.

[DeltaEmil]

Hitting is generally better than damage, and yes, for every net hit, you increase damage accordingly.

Also, agility helps a lot if you need to use a gun once, like because you're in an environment with a heavy background, reducing your magical abilities as you stay in it...

[VirOath]

I don't see the difference between Critical Strike and boosting my Agility so that I hit more reliably and get more net hits as a result.

Because crit strike gives you extra net hits if you hit, which means your target will need more hits to resist. Remember, 4 in a dice pool is 1 hit as per trade in rules.

Extra to hit dice can be gained after gameplay starts, but one extra die to hit will net you and extra hit 1/3d of the time, while crit strike always gives those net hits after you hit. Hit marginally less often with much greater force.

[GreyMantle]

I don't know how well this would fit into your concept (or BP-spreading), but it's always fun to play as a troll that has a ridiculously high strength and who wields a composite bow. The damage you get is truly absurd. And bows are silent.

[Asheram]

Just a thought. If you're going to be called Oni, you don't want the Orc (robustus) subtype called Oni instead? :P

[DragonBaneDM]

Hahaha, I already caught myself on that one, don't worry.

Remember...crud how do you spell it...Xao Lin Showdown? The little yellow guy was named Oni, and I loved him.

My Oni's just a much much much larger version of a very similiar character.

Oh, and Feilong is Chinese for "Flying Dragon".

:smallbiggrin: