Shadowrun 101: Part 3 – Priority Points

Hopefully after reading part 1 and 2 you have a general idea of what type of character you want to play.  And now we move on to the priority table.  The priority table is how to further tweak your character.  It’s a set of five categories: metatype, attributes, skills, magic or resonance, and resources.  The idea is to assign priority to each of these categories from A to E depending on which ones help you build your character.  Let’s look at each category individually.

Metatype (adjustment points).  Based on your metatype, there are potentially higher ceilings for their values.  Trolls have higher body, elves better agility, etc.  With this category, your character will get extra adjustment points to put into your character’s attributes.  Remember, to increase any attribute or skill it will cost karma points and goes up by a factor of 5 for each increase.  For example, to raise an attribute from 5 to 6, it will cost 105 karma.  With jobs ranging from 1 to 6 karma per job, increasing these stats can take a while.  With these adjustment points, it’s 1 for 1.  With metatype, it depends on what you are playing.  These adjustment points are specifically allocated for Edge, magic, and for specific racial attributes.  A priority is for dwarves, orks, and trolls and gives 13 adjustment points.  B priority is also for dwarves, orks, and trolls but only gives 11 adjustment points.  C priority is for all metatypes and gives 9 adjustment points.  D priority is also for all metatypes and gives 4 adjustment points.  And finally, E priority is for all metatypes and gives 1 adjustment point.

The Attributes category is fairly straightforward.  Do you want more points for your attributes?  Do you want to be faster, stronger, or smarter?  This might be what you want to have as your highest priority.  A priority gives you 24 points, B gives 16, C gives 12, D gives 8, and E gives 2.  

The third category is Skills.  These points are for making your character more useful.  These are the points you want to shoot your guns, hack computers, or bluff your way through a tense negotiation.  During character creation, the highest a skill can be is 6.  If you want to be more utilitarian, you might want this as a high priority and take lots of skills.  If you want to be more specialized, then maybe this isn’t such a high priority.  A priority gives 32 points, B gives 24, C gives 20, D gives 16, and E gives 10.  

For the Magic or Resonance category, it’s important to decide right away if your character is going to know any magic.  Once the choice is made, it can’t be unmade.  Characters do not suddenly become awakened during play.  That being said, if your character is going to invest in cyberware and focus more on shooting weapons, there’s no need to have magic.  If you are planning on being an Adept, mage, or technomancer, this category is vital.  It might be less important for adepts, but for mages, shamans and technomancers, this is what you want as top priority.  This is how you get your spells and how powerful they will be.  

The last category is resources.  Money.  There’s little in this world that doesn’t cost money.  If you’re a rigger or a decker, you’re going to need a good starting amount to get you started.  The same can be said for a street samurai if you want some of the best cyberware on the market.  Are you a mage? Well those reagents and foci cost money.  And then there’s the normal cost of living expenses.  Living on the streets is dangerous to say the least.  But if you want an apartment, it’ll cost.  Food, entertainment, the occasional bribe for protection or information… you’re going to need some nuyen.   A priority gives you 450,000, B gives you 275,000, C gives you 150,000, D gives you 50,000, and E gives you 8,000.

Let’s say you’ve chosen to create a human street samurai.  Right away, we can forego any magic so that will be the dump priority E.  If we don’t need magic, why not be mundane.  This will be a human character so we don’t need an A, B, or C for metatype.  Humans have standard stats across the board but we might need some extra points for more Edge so maybe put Metatype at D priority.  

The real question becomes how skilled do we want this street samurai to be?  Do we want to have a wide range of weapon skills?  Things like perception and stealth are always a bonus when dealing with a front line fighter.  Is anyone else going to be a healer?  Maybe we want some points in biotech.  The most useful skills, if this character is going to do a lot of fighting, is athletics and either close combat or firearms.  

A street samurai will need some cyberware to augment their abilities.  Some of the most costly cyberware are the wired reflexes, muscle replacement, reaction enhancers, and skill wires.  I plan to talk about cyberware in another part but needless to say cyberware doesn’t come cheap and you are limited to the amount of cyberware you can have with your essence.  If you plan to get these augmentations, they will set you back financially.

As far as attributes go, the stats a street samurai will want to have the highest are body, agility, and reaction.  Street Samurai fight.  It’s what they do.  Leave the thinking to the deckers and the talking to the face.  

So, let’s have attributes at A, skills B, resources C, metatype D, and magic E.  This will give you a great number of attributes to play with, it will give you a good skill set to choose from, some resources to buy some gear and some decent cyberware, a few points to put into Edge and no magic to worry about.  

In part 4, let’s talk about karma and both positive and negative qualities.  These are some of the final touches needed to create your character.  From then, it’s time to go shopping and finally hit the streets running.