My Shadowrun Character process
My first venture into Shadowrun, really any tabletop game, was with 4th edition. The GM told everyone to use the basic method for character generation that the book outlined early on. This was a build-point system, or BP for short. Once you came up with an idea, the order was to decide on a Metatype, buy attributes, augment the character with qualities, pick up skills, then purchase gear, literal augmentations (Cyberware, Replacement limbs, etc.), contacts, and finally any finishing touches to flesh them out. Each character had 400 BP to spend. So in short: Metatype, attributes, qualities, skills, gear, contacts. Writing it out like that, it doesn’t sound difficult.
I was only told much later that the character generation process in 4th edition was very bloated and complicated. The sheer number of splat books and qualities or skill groups or gear in each of them was staggering to understand. Even using only the 20th anniversary corebook for the first character gave us a lot of freedom. Maybe too much. I wrote out my first character poorly. My process was to read through the corebook and make a list of all the things I wanted my character to have. When I finished I went back through the list and grouped things that I would be able to afford, balancing the most benefit from a single attribute with the least cost to me. I learned later this was something called min-maxing and generally frowned upon. Of course, making a murder-hobo was also frowned upon, and I ended up with one of those too. See, once I reasoned to myself that my character could live with poor lifestyle (the second-lowest and therefore second-cheapest choice), I shaped him around what life choices and skills would be most beneficial. A lovely little detail in the magic section was a very inexpensive skill called Sustenance. At only .025 Power Points, a character would only need one meal, three hours of sleep, and a single bathroom break per day. How wonderful!
So my first character was an adept. It was a very definite sign of the characters to come. I loved how normal human limits that in life I accepted were just the mortal restraints were suddenly quite within reach for an adept. They weren’t flinging spells or freezing foes or flying through the sky; an adept’s magic was focused inward. Every new concept I came up with either incorporated or revolved around an adept power. Over time I’ve expanded my character repertoire to include character that weren’t awakened or with Cyberware, even an AI, but adepts are still my absolute favorite to make and play. Currently, my character process is slightly different from when I began. I have a template for character creation made that I can open and begin from scratch with a skeleton setup for adding qualities and whatnot while adding up BP per category. Before even writing something down, I have an impression of what qualities the character will have. Perhaps It is because I’ve read the books front-to-back too many times. With that being said, I still have several books open at once throughout the process. When I open my template, I add in what I know the character has to have first.
Only after I’ve chosen what a character has to have to define them will I move on, first to write out notes (that I put at the very end of the page) on how that character behaves, and what mannerisms they have around friends, enemies, animals, family, and their gear. Then I start at the beginning of the template, deciding the Metatype and qualities. I keep a tab of how many BP I’ve spent in each category, to give me an idea of how much I’ve spent (and how much is left). After qualities I allocate attributes. The BP max for attributes is 200, and I feel like that’s well balanced, as I typically reach exactly that building a character. After that is Edge (luck) and level of magic. Next on the list are skills, including specializations. Only natural after skills are knowledge skills, which are free up to 3x Logic+Intuition attributes. The knowledge skills are almost always flavor for the character, personally. Gear comes next, and honestly I don’t spend much in the category. If the character’s going to be awakened, the next area is magic, either adept powers or mage spells. The last step is purchasing contacts, the friends a character has that can help out in legwork or just maybe reinforcements. Last doesn’t mean finally however; Once I’ve gone from the top of the template to the bottom, I do another tally of BP spent and how much I have left. Somehow I don’t normally go over 400 BP when building a character. At this point I can start buffing skill ranks, redistributing attribute levels, count skill dicepools, and run minor scenarios in my head to see how’d they react.
