Character Archetypes
Shadowrun has a long and storied and frankly terrible history with character archetypes. For a game as complicated as Shadowrun, you'd think that demand for sample characters playable right out of the box would be pretty high. And Shadowrun
has produced a lot of sample characters in every edition. It doesn't have a hard class system, so they've always tried to present a lot of different options. Generally 16 of them. Third edition Shadowrun had 16 sample characters in it. Fourth edition had 16 sample characters too. It's just how things were done, and it
could have been really cool. So it's no surprise that Shadowrun 5 has 16 sample characters as well.
The Elven Decker and the Human Decker were two archetypes presented side by side in the first edition Shadowrun rules. Both were unplayably terrible as written, but in slightly different ways.
However, in every edition of the rules, the sample archetypes have all been catastrophically awful. Only a scant handful have risen to the level of being “kind of playable.” And beyond merely being very poorly built, they usually have simply incredibly puzzling deficits. Not just simple lack of min/maxxing like buying things at lower than the obviously best rating, but true failures to understand the nominal purpose of a character. Detectives who only roll 3 dice on perception tests, “Covert Ops Specialists” who can't pick a lock, “Combat Hackers” who lack programs needed to hack in combat. Relatively few archetypes bothered to be proficient in driving their own cars. Crazy shit.
The Former Wage Mage knew attack spells that were too low force to actually hurt people. No one knows why.
And it's actually worse even than that. Some of the archetypes straight up
lie to you. First edition claimed that it was supporting the “tribal warrior” archetype – a character who had no magic, no technology, some friends, and a fucking wooden bow. This was not true. That character was garbage and no amount of tweaking would make it not be garbage. In later editions, it was silently replaced with other character archetypes that were a bit better supported.
The Detective's shtick was that he was too old for this shit and generally outclassed by the people around him who had shiny new toys or powerful magic. Being conceptually inferior was about as inferior a concept as you might think.
And rules issues abound. Lots of characters have had numbers that don't add up and selections which are explicitly illegal. Basically, it comes down to a perfect storm of rules being in flux and designers not giving an actual fuck about the sample characters. Often these archetypes are written long in advance of the finalization of the other rules. Then when the costs of something get raised or lowered, the archetypes which include those things
aren't updated and then their numbers don't add up.
The 4th edition Smuggler famously comes with a military grade anti-aircraft missile that is well outside the limits of what starting characters are allowed to own, in addition to being something sufficiently crazy that player characters are unlikely to need it at all.
So going into 5th edition, the standards for sample characters are... not high. Nevertheless, I think these sample characters represent a new low. It's kind of an achievement I guess.
The first thing you notice is that the archetypes are in no order at all. They aren't alphabetical. They aren't in the order of main archetypes than hybrid archetypes. They aren't clustered around capabilities. Fucking nothing. There is no ordering to these archetypes at all. On closer examination, you reveal that they are complete clusterfucks of bad accounting, bad concepting, bad design, and poor attention to detail. But while they are materially worse about that shit than any previous edition (shocking as that is), the thing that really puts them over the edge in my eye is that they couldn't be fucked to actually sort them in any way. What the fuck is
that about? Are they seriously just in the book in the order the art got completed? What the fuck?
I'm not going to go through all of these things and pick out the stupid, the illegal, and the illegally stupid, but I am going to highlight the giant pile of money that the Street Samurai apparently spent. Long ago, putting your top priority into Resources gave you a million Nuyen. Now, lots of people choked on their own dick when they saw that, but the reality was that actually most monetary costs scaled
exponentially, so having two hundred times the five grand that scrubs got for their bullshit priority wasn't actually that big of a deal. Sure, there are some things where higher ratings scale linearly in cost (and for those things, players tend to think of them as having only one “real” rating – or
two if the maximum rating for starting characters is different from the maximum rating available in-game). But for the most part the monetary cost of a better model was considerably higher than the price of a lower tier piece of gear. The marginal improvement of going from a baseball bat to a katana wasn't
all that great, but the monetary cost increase was a couple orders of magnitude. Going from low lifestyle to high lifestyle wasn't going to come up all the time, but it did cost an order of magnitude more. Luxury lifestyle cost an order of magnitude more than that.
This is actually one area where SR4 kind of dropped the ball. They had people buying resources with build points
linearly, but the cost jump to go from a family sedan to a sports car was anything but linear. The original point-buy system in the Shadowrun Companion was better: you bought yourself up in discrete wealth levels and each level came with more wealth than the one before it (pretty much, there were some errors on the chart, but the levels you actually bought worked out like that). But regardless, there has always been a vocal minority of people unhappy with the fact that resources go up to
eleven a million Nuyen, and have lobbied against it. Now, I could namedrop a series of Gibson characters who
did start their respective books with fancy cars and nice apartments, but that's not really the point. Whether the people who complained about a million Nuyen worth of resources being “not cyberpunk” had any merit to their argument or not, they demonstrably
exist.
So obviously what we're looking at here is that partway through design, the angry street level grognards successfully got the resources shrunk down to be more “street level” and then the high end of resources was less than half as big and they didn't update the playtest characters. If that sounds like the light at the end of this tunnel is actually a game balance trainwreck coming your way... you got good ears.
Section.4 Skills
Shadowrun has always had a weird relationship between skills and attributes. In first edition, you basically rolled your skill
or your attribute, whichever was better (plus some tasks came with huge penalties if you were using an attribute instead of a skill and some didn't). As time went on, the game adopted a greater and greater reliance on attribute based “pools” which you would add to your skill to determine how many dice you rolled. These were frankly overly complicated, and involved a lot of adding attributes together and dividing by numbers. In 4th edition, this was all simplified to just having people roll their skill plus a single attribute, and there was much rejoicing. Also, there used to be a system for determining what you rolled when you didn't have the right skill that was overly complex, and it was replaced with just rolling your attribute minus one.
The old system was more complicated than it needed to be.
Now this does not come without cost. By making your dicepool dependent on a single attribute instead of the average of a basket of attributes, you really notice big differences in individual attributes and it becomes a
lot easier to min/max (or fail to min/max properly and make a shitty character). Also, the new defaulting rules, while easy to use and not full of fail like the skill web was,
basically provide no benefit at all for a character being trained in a similar skill, which is counter intuitive. In Shadowrun 4, when you want to get better at a range of activities, you buy an attribute, and when you want to get better at a specific activity you buy a skill. It would be nice if Shadowrun actually
told you that anywhere, but that's what's going on. Skills are circumstance bonuses to your attributes.
Naturally, what Shadowrun 5
tells you is that a character who has a 1 in a skill has the most rudimentary skill and a character with a 12 in the skill has the “highest level of sentient achievement.” This is complete and total horseshit. Skills are not a measure of how much you can achieve,
dice pools are the measure of what you can achieve. And those are controlled by attributes to at least the extent that they are by skills. The skill number is not a measure of how good you are, but of
how much better you are at that task than you are at other tasks in the same attribute field. This is a kind of weird zen kind of measurement and confuses the fuck out of players all the time. And it appears to have completely bamboozled the authors of this edition as well, because they have no ideas what these numbers mean. Sigh.
Way back in the day, there was a skill called “Firearms.” It's what you rolled when you wanted to shoot people. This drove gun nuts up the wall, because they are fucking convinced that the fact that you hold a shotgun and a pistol differently while pointing it at people and pulling the trigger is
terribly important despite the fact that we're playing a fucking game and diagnosing someone's diabetes and surgically removing an inflamed gallbladder are the same fucking skill. And when 3rd edition came around, they got their wish and Firearms was broken up like it was Yugofuckingslavia. This caused a lot of problems, because it meant that the number of skill points you needed to be a weapons expert became ridonkulous. But even though it was a huge nerf to their characters, street samurai players were happy about it. At least, for a while. By the time SR4 came out, it was kind of obvious that the whole thing was stupid, and they made a compromise that made no one happy where you could buy “skill groups” that were package deals where it was like you were paying for two and a half skills but there were literally three or four skills in there. So now you could buy a single skill and shoot guns, but it cost 2.5x as much as a normal skill because go fuck yourself. Also, there was some very confusing accounting that happened if you had individual skills that were also in skill groups. You'd think that SR5 would be a great time to clean that shit up, but that's because you think differently from the actual writers of this fucking book.
Shadowrun has a lot of skills. Many of these skills are stupid and were introduced in obscure sourcebooks. For fuck's sake, there's a
diving skill that is never ever used because it was made up for the Pirates book back in 3rd edition because someone got offended that you could go full frogman with the swimming specialization of your Athletics. And it's just sort of stayed around ever since. Even though I begged and pleaded for Street Magic to not create a bullshit new skill that no one would ever use, I was overruled by zealous dumbasses who couldn't help themselves from adding an “Arcana” skill that is totally different from other magic skills in that it doesn't make any god damn sense. Anyway, a new edition
would be a great time to fix the skill list by getting rid of bullshit skills like Parachuting and Arcana,
but noooo! Not only do all those crap skills make a come back, but they've added new ones. There is a skill called “Disenchanting.” It is used to make magic items stop being magical. Magical items stop being magical when you break them in half, this doesn't have to be a fucking skill. “Make a Skill for it” is Shadowrun's “Make a Feat for it” in every single way. And it makes the game measurably worse for exactly the same reason and in exactly the same fashion.
Some skills basically just give a short description of what they do. Sometimes these descriptions tell you to go look at the chapter dealing with the subsystem they are related to. Other skills have special rules right in their descriptions. Sometimes, these are... extensive. The Social Modifiers take up an entire page right in the middle of the skill list and that doesn't even include the sidebar about bigotry in the 21st century. All in all, it kind of looks like there are rules for whatever people felt like writing rules for, and most of the things people felt like “writing” rules for were things they could copy out of sourcebooks from previous editions. And since some of those sourcebooks were about extremely specific things, the Skills chapter has a bunch of shit that has no business being in the basic book of any game.
I know I'm not the only person to complain about this. But seriously man: what the hell?
Shadowrun for some time has had a special category of skills where you can just make up whatever the fuck you want. They are called “Knowledge Skills” and were a huge improvement over the “Theory” skills of first edition which I won't bother talking about any more. If you want “Bear Lore” or “Pinata Knowledge” or whatever, you just write that on your sheet and when you want exposition from the GM about Bears or Pinatas you roll your dice and make your demands. It's cute and it works well enough for a minor system. For reasons that don't make any sense to me, the Shadowrun 5 crew decided that people had too many of these things and decided to reduce the number of flavor skills that you get. I have no idea why anyone thought that was something worth doing.
Near, but not actually
at the end of the chapter you get a skill list. It misspells Arcana as “Arcane” which considering how bullshit and tacked on the actual skill is, is genuinely confusing. After that we get some of the rules for rolling attribute tests without associated skills, and this is where we learn that the rules for carrying shit are bullshit flavored bullshit. That's pretty much OK however, as equipment doesn't have listed weights and everyone abstracts lifting anyway. But if you actually look this shit up, you will become very sad. It's literally impossible for a maximally big and strong man to lift an average adult man over their head. Why? Because the lift numbers are
linear and very very tiny.
Next up.... Combat.