Advice on Karma distribution.

[Ahoge-dono]

Just tried doing the campaign story as an adept, with spec towards handguns and I lacked the karma to equip the higher tier skills that I wanted to unlock. What are some of the best way to develop hybrid builds and what kind of min/maxing is involved?

[Knightwork]

I put up in the discussions area my list of karma gained from missions and actions. Not complete, but it may help you plan what missions to take on in which order. It isn't a sin to hold onto karma between missions. I've saved one point from character creation, just so I'd have six once you get debriefed after the initial run.

I've always started from a role playing perspective for my builds, so I don't min/max as much as some. I started off with an Elf which had 10 Charisma, and little else going for it. Took a while to really be more than just a face, but it was a nice challenge to make it to the end with a good character.

[pupperoni and cheese]

to get the highest level adept skill at level 10 chi casting you need to invest 110 out of ~190 total karma earned in the campaign but as an adept you also need to heavily invest in strength, close combat, and your choice of melee weapons or unarmed so that your attacks won't miss all the time.

as an adept you also need a good ammount of body as well as some quickness and dodge for survivability. you can bring dietrich along for his support spells or you can invest minorly in spell casting and shamanism for things like healing, haste, and mindwipe.

at the end of my adept run, my karma was more heavily invested in strength and close combat with chi casting at only level 6 for the chi onslaught ability.

[waxx66man]

If you want to play gun adept, I'd advise you to only go up to level 5 and equip magic resist, Martial Defense 1, Stride and possibly counterattack, then play as a flanker.

* You can never be flanked in return, even standing out in the middle of everywhere with martial defense. It's still only light cover, so get to medium when possible.
* You will be fast enough to get to the flanking position with stride
* You will have great magical defenses with 5 will and Magic resist 1. More importantly, spells won't crit you since you have a cover bonus.
* Counterattack can be more powerful than overwatch if you're the closest enemy.

That needs 4 slots, so you can cyber away 2 of your essense. I'd reccomend ditching counterattack for 3 summoning so you can get a totem, and using the .5 essense legs, an induction datajack (hand, for smartlink weapons) and a alpha cybereye (+6 aim for a total of 11 aim when using a smartlink weapon). But those augs grant 11% accuracy and +2 quick,+2 dodge, which is quite a lot for such a small essense cost.

So, you're paying 29 points/must retain 4 essense for will 5/chi 5, although I'd start with 4/4 since it takes a while before counterattack or Martial Defense becomes available. Also consider getting a totem instead of counterattack, espcially the creator totem. Most environmental totems are in places that would be hard to get to without stride/Martial Defense.

[Solarrus]

Specialist>>hybrid. At last 1/3 of story your accuracy will be dramaticly redused.
And take rifles.

[U.N. Ltd Danmaku]

Wax has got the right idea on this one; if you want to hybrid, your best bet is to do your homework--both on the karma front (props to Knightwork for doing the legwork) and raw system abuse opportunity cost. Also, don't pidgeonhole yourself too much. Sounds like you set yourself up to only want to do things a certain way when there could have been some out-of-the-box alternatives.

Out of curiosity, what skills were you aiming at? It'd help us figure out what you were looking for.

[Ahoge-dono]

Thanks to everyone for the input and advice. In all honestly I wanted to do a build that was for "rule of cool" rather than practical use. I was also test building a character in preperation for the Shadowrun: Hong Kong release.

I wanted at least to get my unarmed up to unlock "Disarm", which would be a hefty Karma expediture all into Strength, which made getting the Handgun ability "Chainshot" very unlikely. In retrospec I could of capped my willpower at 4 since the most important adept ability seems to be "Stride"?

[U.N. Ltd Danmaku]

*shrug* Importance depends on the playstyle, but I'll agree that you could have capped WP at a 4 or 5, depending on how often you find youself either flanked or out in the open due to Disarm's autopathing. If you were planning on something more on the bullet-sponge side, then it'd be worthwhile to cap off the Adept tree for Pain Resistance (and potentially Mystic Armor if you're worried about shred).

Another route you could consider is digging into the SR Editor, reactivating the DMS campaign (think there's a guide out there that explains how) and then setting Dragonfall to allow imported characters. Gives yourself a bump in karma through actual playtesting instead of running through some conversation loop--just bump up the difficulty of Dragonfall to compensate.