Character creation and development

here's a place for you to hash out your touch sixth world biker types.

compare beard lengths, tats, any contacts or things of that nature.

Are the lunatics welcoming to non-human metatypes? Kind of tempted to go Orc.

I'm thinking it would be very dwarf, ork and troll friendly, elves and humans aren't entirely excluded from membership, but they'd have to be tough as hell.

Are we going to have to buy our bikes? I'm not sure how much they cost, I don't have many 5e books, though I could get a number from a 4e splatbook.

Tell you what, since the bikes are pretty important to the club I'll let you initially purchase them at half of the normal price.

Normal listing for a stock Harley Davidson Scorpion is 12,000¥
I would think tough biker types wouldn't be into crotch rockets but if you want one that's okay,
Yamaha growler is 5,000¥
Suzuki mirage is 8,000¥

And if course, a dodge scoot is 3,000¥

Any extra do-dads are at the regular price.

I Don't have anything but the core book, and am not really sure if there's anything else out there yet.

Fair enough, that's awesome. I was expecting it to be much more expensive for some reason. Part of me is giggling pretty hard at the idea of a huge troll rolling up on a Dodge scoot just begging someone to say something.

Hey brother, Trogs don't have to compensate for anything

If you want to reskin your bike into something else like a fat boy or wide glide or even some kind of cusom chopper that's perfectly fine, it's stats will simply remain the same.

I was originally aiming for human, mostly because of the resources, skills, and stats required for a half decent Decker. I might go for the "sufficiently hardcore to be a member" angle but the character angle I'm aiming for is more "guy who works for the bikers for the creds instead of the company" might make more sense if I drop some Karma on being an in-the-closet Orc Poser.

Thoughts?

Also the distinctive style quality seems to be associated with things like tattoos and what not that are unique to the character. Does that also cover things like disfigurements that would be impossible to cover up?

Yeah, Orc poser definitely works, I'm sure the club would be happy to have a good decker on hand and not necessarily a devotee of the biker life in order to get around the PCC's borders and the other various headaches of sneaking contraband in and out of the various areas of Denver. Of course they'd still expect loyalty

I would think distinctive style would be more along the lines of "huh, it's weird that guys at a job interview wearing gloves" in order to cover up his hand tats. Not impossible to disguise things like scars, it just makes him slightly odder in appearance thereby making him more memorable.

Sure, I can do loyalty. Or fake loyalty. You know.

Ah ok, that makes sense.

And yeah I figure it's something of a symbiotic relationship. He's loyal enough that's not going to turn on the gang, they need a Decker even if he hasn't bought in 100%.

Oooh. Are we up and running... uhm... rollin'? :)

Will try to cook up a character this weekend. I'm thinking either dwarf or human right now. Not quite sure.

I'm up to gear at this point which (it being Shadowrun) is taking forever. I've only ever played face smashers before and I don't think I ever appreciated just how much little details Deckers need to be up and running. Reading up on agents now.

I made a decker in 4e once, and it was a nightmare keeping track of all the ICs and agents. Didn't things get a little simpler when they brought back the decks? Or is that just another bag complications?

They simplified deck stats I think, you have 4 that you can swap through on the fly as a Free Action, along with whatever programs. But yeah there's a bunch of additional stuff I'm still slogging through. Apparently I can set up and be the master of a PAN and thus prevent other people from jacking into my gear, but I can also jack into and disable other people's gear, or something.

So I just double checked and it looks like scars are covered under Distinctive Style, so that's back on the table.

So other than contacts and converting for Nuyen is there anything I NEED to spend starter Karma on? I ended up dropping 7 karma on an extra 14,000Y for some augs I needed, picked up a few contacts, and now I'm left with a bunch leftover.

I don't know if you listen to any podcasts, but the arcology podcast did an episode devoted to them, (as well as most other archetypes)

http://arcologypodcast.com/episode-007-deckers-and-technomancers-shadowrunner-dossier-2/

Awesome I'll check it out. I looked up a few blogs on putting together deckers and was going off of that for gear (picking up EVERY program is actually super cheap compared to the other costs).

I've got it more or less put together, here's the dropbox link. I found a really nice auto-calculating editable pdf that does a lot of the calculations for you (tracking essence, augmented stats, etc.) so if anyone is interested I can post that, too, since the 4th edition character sheet is a little limited on the site.

Gwynplaine, The Decker Who Laughs:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/kytm42xayoej2pi/Gwynplaine.pdf?dl=0

Editable Sheet:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/txphr5nwhgtl2wv/EditableShadowrun5thSheet.pdf?dl=0

I'm okay if you fudge the money numbers a bit as long as your not more than a couple hundred off. I'm not terribly anal about that kind of stuff. Besides, who's to say you didnt rip your programs off of torrent or the 6th world equivalent? Lol

Haha I was actually sitting down with a calculator working everything out. I don't think I'm off by more than a hundred Nuyen but if I got all the numbers right I shouldn't even be off by that much.

I've still got like 10+ karma I gotta figure out what to do with.

D'Oh! I have made the character and all forgotten about fake SINs and commlink. Back to the drawing board :P

What? You don't have to have a fake SIN, you're just a member of a club composed of motorcycle enthusiasts. You're all legitimate law abiding citizens. Aren't you? It's not like your a biker fan or anything, Becouse that would be ILLEGAL!!!

;-)

Does the shadowrun aniversery book have what we need or do I need to get a 4e core book?

We're actually doing 5e, but there's no option on the forum, so I just didn it under 4e. Just link or post a PDF of your character sheet.

So Furmyr, as my Combat biker partner in crime. Should you have dragged me along from the Combat biking circuits after you were disgraced and forced to return to your old life? If that would make me a prospect in the the Lunatics then that could be fun, though I suppose we could go either way with it, depending what Cowboy has to say.

I'm okay with you guys being various states of membership from leaders, to patched members to prospects. The drek will probably get thick enough soon that you'll be patched in regardless. Unless you like, shoot the prez or something.

hey how do you do that nifty character specific avatar thingey? I tried it for my 5e game with no luck.

You add an avatar to the character sheet; it's usually in the top right. Then go to the advanced post options and select post as character.

If you guys have any specific attitudes or traits for your contacts in mind maybe write down a sentence or two to flesh them out so when you interact with them I don't make them seem like assholes (unless of course that's what you intended. Lol)

Also, who's patched, who's a prospect, sgt at arms, vice pres (if indeed anyone wants to be an officer, if not that's fine) only position in the club that you can't be is president, I mean, I have to have a say in there somehow, right? Lol

You might want us out of the formal elected positions, initially. Maybe start us out as the equivalent of "Men of Mayhem" (those who have killed/sacrificed for the MC)

Also, I'm probably going down the path of Shaman with some Face-ability. I found some handy Character Generation sites for 5th edition, so i'll be made up shortly.

Also, Also, what's our starting Resources? I know you're giving us our bikes 1/2 off (cheapest cruiser ever), but how much are we starting out with?

I'm looking to be a bruiser type (probably an orc). I like the thought of specializing in bike-based combat almost like a medieval cavalry knight. As for club position, I'd be cool with the sergeant-at-arms or some sort of mid-level enforcer.

One of the greatest video games of all time.

Bike Bruiser

Definitely! I used to love whipping other riders with chains.

So out of curiosity, where is everyone re: character creation? Mine's done so I'm sort of thumb-twiddling until then. Also I still need to get you a description of my contacts.

I'm kinda fumbling round with the system but I think I've got the hang of most of it.

I think I'm good to go. I have a couple contacts for my lousy charisma. Just need to finalize with Furmyr what our combat biker history.

Still waiting on sheets from Dunlop and Kenny Gardner.

Sorry about the delay. I've been really busy these last couple weeks and I'm still learning the system so it's been slow going. I should be done after this weekend.

Sounds good, FYI, im going to be heading to LA on Sunday for about a week so my posting may be slightly limited, probably won't have my iPad with me with all my PDFs for the books, but we can do some getting to know each other RPing in the meanwhile to figure out the lay of the land, club dynamics and the like.

Deus has been helping me (when i'm available) to get my guy off the ground. Sorry for the delay. I'll buy yous all a whiskey in game.

Synthol, given your resource priority.

Despite my efforts, I'm still having some trouble with the nitty-gritty details of equipment costs and concepts like SINs.

Something I found helpful: https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0B1j5wMS6KHqMZndteGkteG1yWWc&usp=sharing

Chummer5 is free software for creating shadowrun characters, I realize it is probably late to be overly helpful, but it does make keeping track of the math for little things like SINs and leather jackets manageable.

This release is in early development, but as far as I could tell seems to work smoothly. Only problem with this game in particular is the half-price motorcycle to start with, I didn't figure out how to force that in the software so I had to leave some creds behind to handle that separately.

Holy crap, that's great. I've got my priority order figured out, I've been trying to slug through the rest of skills, groups, etc. to see what would work best. I'll have a character tomorrow evening or Saturday.

Should be back home Sunday and will be more available and ready to get going when you guys are, we're done at Disneyland and have two days in Vegas which I don't mind bragging about a bit, lol.

How are we coming guys? Ready to get some engines roaring up in here!

Hell yeah Prez.

I'll just bite the bullet and say that Furmyr recruited me from the Combat biking circuits if that's okay with him. Then I can be a prospect, or a newly patched member.(I'm happy to roll for it or just take the bitch spot, I think it'd be fun)

I say prospect would be fun. You can get patched after you guys first mission. Either post mortem or otherwise hehehe

Hearing little from the other guys, I'm just gonna just make a game thread and see if some roleplaying will kick things off.

Sounds good, I think Dunlop is moving along pretty well with character creation now that he has Chummer. I'll post in the RP thread.

Kreven Uruk is probably a bit of hired muscle for the pack. I was thinking somewhere a notch or two bellow the hard-core vets of the club. (Sorry about the character sheet, been having formating problems on my PC, but I'm good to roleplay.)

I can't post as a character in the forum.

I think there's a tab or something on the top right of the forum page. I'm still pretty new to how this forum works, one of the other guys might be smarter about it than I.

It should just say it right above the text box where you type out your post, as a dropdown that says "Post As:"

I'm fully aware of how to do it, it just doesn't have the option available.

Strange. Do you have an avatar set? If so maybe put up a bug post?