Shadowrun 5E Character Optimisation

[Irish]

Hi all, I've lurked here for some time and I'm looking for some help.

A friend of mine is coming to visit for a few months at December, and he wants to run a Shadowrun 5E game. Given that the last time this happened he dicked me hard, I'd like to dick with him a little by making a character that cannot be dicked with. Unfortunately, I'm not really sure where to start. So, what is the one true path to ultimate power in Shadowrun 5E?

Incidentally, I hope this is where I post this thread, I'm a little unsure. Feel free to tell me to fuck off to another board in this forum if it's in the wrong place.

[pragma]

I don't know if you're going to get a lot of 5E help here: the edition isn't so popular on the board for an assortment of reasons. One particularly significant one is that 5E is a step backward from 4E in most respects.

That said, I'm a sucker for a new edition and I've played some 5E out of the core book. I can offer some insight on charop based on that, but I know nothing about the splats.

I can only speak in platitudes without specifics about how your last run went South, so feel free to provide those. However, in general it's tough to make a character in Shadowrun that "cannot be dicked with." One of the premises of the game is that the team will cover each other's weaknesses. So instead I'll examine the general ways dicking can occur:

1) nasty physical combat -- OK, let's build a combat character
2) matrix stuff happening to you -- there's nothing in this game that stops you from turning off all of your wireless gear. Get your power from stuff that can't be hacked like bioware and magic.
3) magic stuff happening to you -- if you shoot spirits hard enough they go down, if you shoot mages hard enough they go down (especially if you act before them).
4) Social stuff -- you as a player can always try so see through this even if your character has terrible skills.

Given the above, I'd suggest playing a luddite that can do some serious damage in one way or another. A particularly good trick is to max out your perception, agility and reaction by hook or by crook (read: by combining bioware and adept powers) and then pick up the combat sense adept power. Combat sense guarantees you a chance to react to GM ambushes, a high reaction means you'll probably act before the ambushers, and a suitably high agility means that you can throw about 18 dice at spattering anything in your way.

The high agility has the nice knock-on effect that you become an excellent sneak thief. Because maglocks are now subject to the locksmith skill, you don't even need to invest in logic in order to sneak into an out of most facilities.

Don't worry too much about body and strength -- the former gets swamped out by your armor for most practical purposes (damage resistance) and the latter has no practical purposes: just use gecko gloves for climbing, stun batons for fighting, and power tools for getting out of any situation that might require you to force something. Do worry about intuition to avoid ambushes and max your initiative. Dump logic and charisma unless you're building a character around them. Crank willpower as high as you can to try to resist spells you don't see coming.

Play a human, they're the best race in 5E because having high priority slots available makes your life much better. Take skills as your top priority slot because the skills are ridiculously underpriced in that case. I usually want attributes in the B slot, but I think you get a better deal if you can get away with knocking it down to C. Don't buy any low valued skills or attributes with your priority points, use the extra karma at the end of chargen to do that. It's overall cheaper. Make sure to buy social skills because that's an easy way to "get dicked with."

I built a character like this, the broad strokes were as follows:
Priority:
A -- Skills
B -- Attributes
C -- Resources
D -- Magic, adept
E -- Human (spare special attribute point goes to magic, gets eaten by essence loss)

Adept powers:
Improved reflexes I -- this isn't a great long term play, so hope your GM will let you respec you adept powers once you by a synaptic accelerator 10 runs down the line
Combat sense -- to avoid surprises

Big gear purchases:
Muscle toner II -- to max agility
Synthacardium II -- ties in with high agility skills
Reflex Recorder (primary combat skill) -- this character was using longarms, but automatics would also be a good call

Major skills:
Max combat skills, sneaking, locksmith, athletics group. Take a point or two in most social skills (I bought the influence skill group at r2 and a point of con so that I could maybe detect lies). Use the rest of your copious skill points to season to taste.


As an aside, one other viable option is to build a character that can't be damaged. This is kind of hard in 5E because even the toughest combat trolls can only soak ~12 boxes of damage at a time and well placed sniper fire will be hurling ~20. Check out the tank sample character in the core book for a rough framework and then rebuild it keeping all the body boosts and ditching all of the other terrible decisions.

[Longes]

Step 1. Don't play a technomancer. Ever. In 5e technomancers suck horribly both in Matrix and out of it, so you will suffer.
Step 2. Don't play any race other than Human or Elf. It's mostly just not worth it.
Step 3. Mystic Adepts are stupidly good. For the small small price of all your initial karma you have all abilities of both a magician and a physAd.
Step potato. If you are playing a hacker, you are required by law to by the most expensive deck you can at chargen. Because deck prices are ridiculous, and you'll never get a new one during the game.
Step ostridge. Agility is the best physical stat, both in combat and out of it.
Step guacamelee. Melee is for idiots. Smart men use guns. Smartest men use sniper rifles and invisibility.
Step casablanca. Because karma costs are exponential, while chargen costs are linear, you want to minmax into the idiot savant for a better growth. Character with skills 1/5 Gets to 6/6 faster than the one with 3/3.

[pragma]

Longes brings up an excellent point: if your GM hasn't banned mystic adepts then he should. If you want to take terrible advantage of him then play a mystic adept with maxed magic. Sink your adept points into increased reflexes and your mage points into reasonable spells (invisibility, mask, control thoughts, influence) and you'll be untouchable. Max sneaking, rifle shooting, magic skills and any infiltration stuff you have left over.

When picking spells steer clear of direct damage spells. This edition finally gave them a (debatably) much needed whack with the nerf bat, but rendered them entirely useless in the process.

[Silent Wayfarer]

They raised damage codes for all weapons and armor while not changing the 1 damage = 3 soak equation, making BOD even more worthless and armor little more than a speedbump. So you want to jack up your passive/active defense even more now.

[Username17]

Real ultimate power in combat is and always has been gun drones. "You" are only allowed one attack action per round, but there's really no practical upper limit on how many small gun drones you can have shooting things on your behalf, and they all get one attack each round as well.

-Username17

[Irish]

Thank you all for the speedy replies!

He hasn't banned mystic adepts. I'm pretty sure this is because one of the players had played one in our last game, and since all of us had no system mastery at the time, it was entirely unimpressive. So I'm leaning towards either that or a rigger with gun drones. I played a phys adept that I eventually got tired of as a character- the story I had going on just wasn't interesting to play as much it was to create- so I kinda know what's going on there- get the wired reflexes spell maxed, get the combat sense power, do whatever you want past there. But since I've already played that, and I've NEVER played a matrix-y character, can someone run over a rigger for me?

Also, I had no idea skills were so valuable. I've only ever played with them at priority d or below. Then again, I've also never played a character with money above priority e and our DM, for all that I love his game and imagination, is enormously fond of being stingy.

I should probably mention the way the game went south. It started with my attempt at a technomancer dying in his first session because while I was in the matrix in full VR trying to identify a vehicle that opened fire on our apartment complex our runners lived in, a sniper waited about 5 minutes watching my apparently asleep character in case I did something before he popped my head like a balloon. I should note that the enemies did not have a matrix techie of any kind with them, so it's not like he figured out I was in the Matrix- nobody in the gang knew I was even following the car.

The follow up dicking was when a dragon reneged on a deal even under threat of releasing knowledge of his reneging into the wide world and destroying any credibility as a "rising star" in the corporate world and ate me. The saltiness I felt that night was unreal.

Looking forward to any further suggestions !

Edit: Forgot to mention, I read Franks review on SR5. Honestly, a lot of his hang-ups on the game are things I noticed when I first read the book (seriously, fuck the layout of information, why the flying fuck is everything in so many random places), but we don't have access to 4E core, only 4E splat, and only access to 5E core, none of the currently published 5E splat, so 5E it is.

[Silent Wayfarer]

Thank you all for the speedy replies!

He hasn't banned mystic adepts. I'm pretty sure this is because one of the players had played one in our last game, and since all of us had no system mastery at the time, it was entirely unimpressive. So I'm leaning towards either that or a rigger with gun drones. I played a phys adept that I eventually got tired of as a character- the story I had going on just wasn't interesting to play as much it was to create- so I kinda know what's going on there- get the wired reflexes spell maxed, get the combat sense power, do whatever you want past there. But since I've already played that, and I've NEVER played a matrix-y character, can someone run over a rigger for me?

5e matrix is still as fucked as ever, IIRC. Maybe play a dronomancer guy? Call yourself Briareos/Kottos/Gyges or something.

[Irish]

If there's a way to play a dronomancer without interacting with the matrix rules more than employing House of Mirrors and just rebooting your junk when other matrix peeps try to fuck with it, I am all about that shit.

On the other hand, if I have to somehow learn the full matrix rules without going nuttier than my favourite breakfast cereal in order to play said dronomancer, I'd prefer the Mystic Adept Path To Ultimate Power TM. We're not even playing with the errata, after all, so it's still the super cheap initiation cost for PP.

[Username17]

I have a drunk and angry review of the Shadowrun 5 Book as a whole if you are interested. The rant about the rigger chapter is on page 8. Basically you need to get yourself a pile of drone consoles and a pile of murder machines. Do not involve yourself with the Matrix chapter at all save to figure out that you can selectively reboot your drones one at a time to give the middle finger to any hackers trying to get up in your shit.

-Username17

[Longes]

I'm fairly sure you can be a MysAd dronomancer in 5e. You don't jump in into the drones, you just remote controll them and give them commands. Luckily, as a rigger you don't actually interact with 90% of the matrix rules.

[Irish]

Frank, I read that review and loved it. But while I understand how Riggers assrape everything in the game, I don't know how they do it. Like, I get the whole "shoots people multiple times in a single round for great justice" thing, but I have no idea what guns to mount, in what quantity should I purchase ammunition, what autosofts I need, what drones I need, what things I need as far as character creation priorities, and so on.

I don't know what drones can really do outside of shooting people either. I kinda get that piloting the drones makes me an insane wheelman, but will that actually matter in the grand scheme of things, and if so, how much?

I guess what I'm trying to say is that I get the generics a little, but I'd absolutely love some hard numbers- and that I absolutely could use some help, because even if I had the core rulebook sitting next to me (which I don't, I'm currently using a character generator online because the only other person aside from the dm who owns a book lives 30 minutes away and I don't have time to visit him until at least the weekend), I'd still likely miss stuff that's important because I never knew it existed in the first place and instead of being in the equipment section like a sane person would believe it's halfway through the fucking critters section or something equally inane.

Longes, I think to preserve my groups enjoyment of the game, as I don't want to ruin their fun, just make sure I'm un-dickable, I'll refrain from also being a god outside of the robots that can do anything better than them. So Vanilla Ice will have to remain ordinary smart man rather than Kung Fu Jesus Robot Wars Champion of the World... for now at least.

[Longes]

Well, as was already said, people on this board don't really play SR5, so you are unlikely to get the advice you want.

For character generation there's Chummer made for 5e, which is probably better than whatever you are using.

If you are not willing to become the sorcerous overlord rulling through the demonic and robotic minions, then you put priority A into resources, to buy implants and robots. You put D into race, and take human. Skills B, stats C. Dump Strength and Stamina.

[Longes]

Apparently there are new spells in the Street Grimoire that manipulate the device's Noice, Overwatch Score and Limits. Being a technomancer has never been suckier.

[Username17]

Strength and Body are crap. I'd suggest putting them at 1, but it sounds like you have an MC who is going to do some sort of weird "bad end" bullshit outside the rules if he sees a 1 on your character sheet, so use ink and not pencil to write a 2 for both stats. That part is easy.

As for drones... it doesn't honestly matter very much which drones you buy. They cost a few thousand each and even the small ones (as opposed to the micro-drones) can pack heavy duty firepower.

The Rigging rules are extremely confusing and there are a couple of ways your MC could plausibly read them. The authors of the book apparently had no idea that people would hackastack themselves a pile of drone consoles together, so exactly how that works is up in the air. The amount of programs you can load onto each drone is either 1 or 2 depending on which page you believe, which is extremely different, but in either case a small enough number that you are required to run additional autosofts from the network. All your drones on each network have to be the same and have the same weapons to get in under the program caps for the network unless you are allowed to hackastack multiple consoles into the same network. But even if you aren't allowed to do that, you're still allowed to set up a second drone console with a separate network - so you'll need at least one console for each flavor of drone you have. Functionally this means you will probably have one crawler/gunner, one spy drone, and possibly one flying gunner drone setup. Since any layout you choose is going to be cheap as snot, you can and might as well have like 6 of each which automatically makes you the terror of the high plains.

As noted in the review, if you use chemical weapons or explosives, the already tenuous game balance implodes and falls into the abyss. So if you want to do that, go ahead and do that.

The real question is how far you want to push things. It's pretty trivially easy for a rigger to have six drones with grenade launchers that all fire in the same turn and all use the completely insane chunky salsa rules to do in excess of 50 boxes of damage each. But you might want to dial it down and "only" have a half dozen or more sub machine guns blasting away.

-Username17

[Irish]

Ok, so I've had a think over what you've said, and I've got some more questions.

1. So the rigger console doesn't just do drones, it does vehicles too, right? If so, what's stopping me from buying a van, sticking a bunch of consoles in the back that all connect to my various drones, plugging a final console into the van, taping a mannequin in place in the front seat, and just sitting inside the back of the van outside any building the run is on, running everything from the back, and moving the van if people start getting suspicious that the mannequin is just sitting there? And if nothing is, the only other teammate I seem to need is a mage to deal with spirits. Other than that, drones murder anyone who needs murdering or else a small army of insect drones hack everything for me, and I'm never even close to being in danger, right?

2. What autosofts are absolutely required and I'd be a fool and a communist to do without them? Do any boost the capabilities of the drones they are loaded on, or do they just let the drone do things to begin with?

3. Any way to hide drones on said van without everyone going "wow, that guy has a tank and two helidrones sitting on top of his van, that's pretty fucking suspicious"?

4. Are skills necessary in large quantities and amounts? Am I the skill monkey or do all I need to know to be effective is a few core skills for piloting only as well as the ability to shoot a gun myself?

5. Are attributes, aside from body and strength, amazeballs or totally worthless, or somewhere in between?

6. What's the best gun for someone who doesn't usually use one but might be forced to? I assume that like a mage, you have to have some kind of gun on hand, and my phys adept just punched things to death if he couldn't throw sticks of dynamite or gas canisters at people, and the technomancer never shot anyone so I have no idea what guns are actually good in this game and what are traps.

Thanks for the help so far guys, I'm really enjoying it. For all this editions flaws, at least I get to play Shadowrun, in the end, and that's pretty fucking cool. I'm really looking forward to this character

[Stahlseele]

1. So the rigger console doesn't just do drones, it does vehicles too, right? If so, what's stopping me from buying a van, sticking a bunch of consoles in the back that all connect to my various drones, plugging a final console into the van, taping a mannequin in place in the front seat, and just sitting inside the back of the van outside any building the run is on, running everything from the back, and moving the van if people start getting suspicious that the mannequin is just sitting there? And if nothing is, the only other teammate I seem to need is a mage to deal with spirits. Other than that, drones murder anyone who needs murdering or else a small army of insect drones hack everything for me, and I'm never even close to being in danger, right?

congratulations, you have just summed up how riggers have basically always worked best and what people did not like about them.

now that the unhelpfull snark is out of the way, look into modding your drones.
thermal dampening, ruthenium polymers!
everything but radar and ultrasound will have a very hard time spotting them, especially the small and tiny ones. and then hitting them is still hard if they did not change that rule.

[Silent Wayfarer]

Limits piss me the fuck off. How can I interact with them as little as possible? Summon giant spirit and fuck off?

[Irish]

I think mostly by having a reasonable amount of edge and abusing the ever loving shit out of it. A buddy had a pretty cool Hobo with a Shotgun character going on in our games and he was ridiculously effective because he had 5 edge to spend and ignoring your limit while adding 5 dice to your dicepool when using a shotgun set to room hosing is hilariously cheesy when enemy gangers don't have armor.

So I guess a similar deal- get 3-5 edge and abuse the shit out of it?

[Silent Wayfarer]

And hm, doesn't Edge recharge crazy fast now? Like, every day or something? So (Edge) times a day you can augment your crazy twinked out dice pool, fuck limits, and kill everything.

[Irish]

Yeah, or at least that's what I remembered happening in our game. The only guy in our group who ever ran out of edge had a edge 1 elf or dwarf or something and he had to burn edge after using it in one encounter, but everyone with even 3 edge were struggling to use it all every day. If you have a decent dice pool to begin with and just use edge to save your butt or to make sure you murder someone, 3 will tide you over, but 5 was crazy. None of our fights went beyond two rounds, so spending one edge per fight per day still usually left him with 1-2 left over.

[Whipstitch]

Well, as was already said, people on this board don't really play SR5, so you are unlikely to get the advice you want.

Yeah, how you should kit out your drones was intimately tied into the old action economy and recoil rules. In SR4 drones did not suffer from recoil penalties for some dumb ass reason and all their attacks were complex actions, so it all boiled down to bargaining with your MC to see what the cheapest drone capable of mounting an automatic weapon was going to be in your game--full wide bursts have a funny way of annihilating defense pools, so a handful of machine pistol equipped heli-drones were capable of one rounding Street Samurai with remarkable consistency but I have no idea if that extends to SR5.

[Username17]

It's pretty similar in SR5. Everyone is limited to one attack per turn whether they are a drone or a street samurai. So autofire or explosive attacks are just better than other options.

-Username17

[Stahlseele]

And there is still no good anti drone (AOE) weapon either.
EMP is still not a widely spread phenomenon in the SR universe.

[pragma]

what's stopping me from buying a van ... and just sitting inside the back of the van outside any building the run is on, running everything from the back

This does work really well and it will be hard to mess with your character. Watch for WiFi inhibiting paint and Faraday cages, which your GM might use to force you out of the van. Your pile of drone consoles and the signal scrubber program are your best friend in both cases.

What autosofts are absolutely required and I'd be a fool and a communist to do without them? Do any boost the capabilities of the drones they are loaded on, or do they just let the drone do things to begin with?

Autosofts give drones skills. Pilot programs can default on some skills but not others. Notably, a drone can't fire a gun it lacks an autosoft for, so be sure to buy autosofts for weapons. The order I'd buy them in after that is: clearsight, evasion, maneuver, stealth. Prioritise stealth over guns for unarmed spy drones.

Any way to hide drones on said van without everyone going "wow, that guy has a tank and two helidrones sitting on top of his van, that's pretty fucking suspicious"?

Putting them inside the van is a common workaround for this. Previous editions have included drone rack modifications for vehicles, but I've always found them somewhat cagier about what actually fits inside than I would like. Your GM could houserule heavily here, so get the drone in van question squared away before the game starts.

The lack of splats is likely to hamper this discussion. If you can have a copy of Arsenal on hand when you talk to the GM then you'll have more of a leg to stand on.

Are skills necessary in large quantities and amounts? Am I the skill monkey or do all I need to know to be effective is a few core skills for piloting only as well as the ability to shoot a gun myself?

Are attributes, aside from body and strength, amazeballs or totally worthless, or somewhere in between?

I like having a wealth of skills because I feel like my character can do more stuff. This is especially important with a rigger, who often has to fill many skill shoes.

For riggers, I max out the engineering skill group (you get a relative discount there because there are four skills) and buy pilot aircraft, pilot groundcraft and gunnery to max. You can swing that with room to spare at priority B: 5 skill group points to engineering, 6x3 to pilots and gunnery, 18 points remain for making other interesting character choices (read: perception, etiquette, negotiation, con, shotguns).

Attribute-wise, you absolutely need intuition in order to prevent one-shot kills from hackers, reaction adds to your driving test, and gunnery is linked to logic. Definitely max intuition, and if you plan on jumping into drones then max the other two. Willpower is used to resist dumpshock damage and some matrix stuff, so it's good to have around. Agility and charisma are always nice, but pretty tertiary to this guy.

6. What's the best gun for someone who doesn't usually use one but might be forced to?

Buy a cyberforearm, hand, or arm and crank its agility to 6. Shoot anything gun you want using that hand because you can throw enough dice to keep up with the big boys. Check with the GM to see whether this will make him upset before doing it, it seems like a likely target for a spot ban if it upsets him.