The Gaming Den

My character just died, and I'm rolling a new guy. I'm trying to come up with a character that will a gap in the party, Face, but still be viable in other areas.

I want to be a covert/spec ops kinda guy but with Face capabilities, as well. My Vision is a sneaky guy who can get past locks and traps, and also take someone down when required...though preferably it won't be. Maybe with a bow or crossbow and specialty bolts/arrows. I'm not terribly familiar with SR4, so I'm still not quite sure what will be viable and what won't be.

I've considered a mage with heavy illusion and manipulation focus, or a social Adept with martial/sneaky skills on the side. Would a cybered-out character perform better than either of these?

Lightly cybered adept is possibly the way you want to go. You can fit a lot of good fun into one point of Essence/Magic.

I highly recommend:

A Good Disguise skill, or just max out the Stealth Group
mnemonic enhancement.
College Education

This makes a character who can pretend to be just about anyone.
Especially if you're willing to spend money on Knowsofts and Linguasofts. (Which you should)

Combine with Good Social Skills: You have a Face/Infiltrator.

For combat: Pistol skill, athletics.

I'd like to second Schwarzkopf's suggestion.

Adepts make superb faces. They have the ability to buy up skills higher than anyone else (via Improved Ability), they can shuffle around their mental attributes on the fly to improve dice pools (via Cognition), and they can massively expand the power of social skills so that they can produce supernatural effects (via Commanding Voice).

Being good at physical combat, IMO almost always requires high initiative and multiple Initiative Passes. Synaptic Boosters are a faster, cheaper method of gaining IP's than the absurdly expensive Improved Reflexes ability that adepts can buy, so most adepts actually gain more than they lose for cybering up slightly.

You can gain a pretty decent defense pool as an adept because Improve Ability is very inexpensive for non-combat skills like Gymnastics - which adds to your defense pool on full defense.

Since you are already looking outside the firearms group for your armament of choice, perhaps spare some consideration for specialty weapons / chemicals. An Ares Supersquirt or a Dart Pistol could silently deliver very potent Narcojet doses as a simple action, twice per initiative pass without requiring high numbers of net hits to be effective.

It will, however, be worthless against your more heavily armored/cybered enemies, but it is an excellent way of quickly and nonlethally disposing of soft targets like security guards.

Just don't expect anything wearing milspec to give a shit (although at that point you're probably in a bit of trouble no matter what you're playing).

If you want things in MilSpec to give a damn, you need to be doing Grenade damage, or using SparHawks with ADPS ammo.

SpawHawks?

Bah my Bard
Ruger Super Warhawk, 6P -2 SS 6(cy)
with ADPS it's 6P -6AP.
it's hard t do better than that.

Eichiro Hatamoto II 7p -1 ss 1(m)
with ADPS is 7p -5AP works out basically the same.

And that's all with Pistol skill.
If you're happy to just knock a guy in Milspec armor unconcious:

Ares Crusader Machine Pistol
4P - SA/BF RC 2 40(c)
With ADPS 4P -4AP. You can do a short burst for 7P -4AP at only -1 skill.

A couple of rounds of that might knock a hardshell unconcious if you're a good enough shot. But kinda unlikely.

Ah, i see, thank you.

Seconding the lightly 'wared up Adept route. Just make sure to concentrate on stuff like Kinesics and Improved Ability: Infiltration instead of paying the premium for combat powers and martial arts. You have your fingers in too many pies as it is to justify their costs and between a high agility and a single good gun skill you can fill the assassin role just fine anyway. It's just taking it as well as you can dish it out that is typically the problem with this sort of character. Think of yourself as an ambush predator rather than a frontliner and you'll do fine.

Whipstitch wrote:You have your fingers in too many pies

Somewhat off-topic, what is it with Shadowrun and the phrase "fingers in pies?" It shows up in more than one of sourcebook and feels like it must be some kind of bizarre inside joke.

Archmage wrote: Somewhat off-topic, what is it with Shadowrun and the phrase "fingers in pies?" It shows up in more than one of source book and feels like it must be some kind of bizarre inside joke.

I haven't really noticed this. It seems like a valid description of Megacorp activities, given the huge scope and scale of their operations in the 6th world.

The phase comes up once in SR4A in reference to Ares Macrotechnologies, and one in the Corporate Guide in reference to Horizon. It's not mentioned at all in Corporate Enclaves.

I haven't checked any other source books to see if there's a better pattern to explain the usage.

Actually it was Aztechnology that was described thus since they have control of one of the major shipping lanes and even earlier setting fluff marked them as unusually diversified even for a megacorp. They seem to specialize in final goods and distribution-- a smaller corp might be the one who produces the product, but there's good odds that the Azzies will own the shelf it's displayed on. Anyway, you can't really blame the books for my use of the phrase. I don't own Corporate guide so out of all the SR4 books I own the phrase has apparently been used a grand total of once-- twice if you count the same blurb being reprinted in SR4A.