Thanks for the insight. Allow me to explain my characters offensive characteristics then as meelee was only ever a secondary weapon type thing for my character. Firearms3+dex 3 + rifle specialty + calibrated weapon + strong weapon + potentially either hollow-point, FMJ or match-grade makes my character quite scary. Im considering a pistol sidearm with rifle stashed away combat-ready in my house, if that makes sense law-wise in California(would have to research concealed carry law in California for that) Obviously my character is a lot less scary if you take the specialty, match-grade and 1 point of weapon strength away, but he still hits like a truck at around 9 or 10 dice - enemy defense modifiers. And Im not ruling out buying a shotgun(in-game) thats within my characters meager strength 2 requirement and shoring that up with Dragons Breath shells. Im also considering having a (sharpened) heavy knife with L3 and hairspray flamethrower off athletics 3 dex 3 on my character as secondary and tertiary weapons respectively. So while this post is not intended as min-maxing combined with the other things Ive said in the other post, I just wanted to add this post to explain that Ive definitely thought about combat against up to heavily armored and hardened combatants, and been running quite a few stories in my mind myself about just such an eventuality(pvp or pve against top-of-the line adversaries). I hope that this is appropriate for this thread.
As far as your second point goes, Free Council and T.E.L.M. Trust is a nice idea and lets me play slightly meaner on the corporate/stock front, but also has the "free", aka demcratic, and authority sharing side, which doesnt really fit the MO for my character, though the rebel part surely does. It looks to be a better fit though than I first thought, so ty. Because on the other hand my character isnt really a judge either, so in either direction there is potential conflict there for my character.
I also have some questions, how much XP does reducing wisdom give per dot of reduction and would you accept resources 4 for my character? Furthermore, if I got resources 4 and I start off with 30 XP, rs4 would take 20 of those..... I would still assume I get high speech and an additional dot of occult for free on top of xp as per usual character creation?
Furthermore, Ive a general question regarding personal portraits, and, not knowing which thread to use to ask general questions like this, I will ask this here: I read that only changelings get portrait faces, but I see all characters have portrait faces of some type so I dont understand this contradiction. Would I be allowed to choose a random image from a person online to act as my characters portrait or do you have set templates I should use use? For this account the big "X" I think is appropriate for me, but I will of course change it if this is frowned upon.
I hope this post is not too long....