View source for Vlad D'Tempeste

In many ways he is the typical over-cybered, giant solo seen in every game.  He had all the cyber armor possible except a cowl.  This led to some ridiculosity on a level seldom seen.  One time we were in the middle of a combat on a pier with a whole batch of enemies and they called in an AV that promptly flew over by Vlad and [[Lemonhead]].  As those of you who played Cyberpunk remember, the heavy weapons were very often less lethal than regular ones, but Tom, the GM, was devious.  He whipped out with this mini-gun and Vlad got hit like 13 times.  Lucky for him 9 of those 13 were in the torso where his armor was 55 (skinweave+subdermal armor+metalgear).  Even with AP bullets those lame ass 4d10 didnt do anything.

Thats not what made him great to me.  He had a tattoo of a poker hand with the King of Hearts (suicide king) showing.  He had an outrageous hairdo.  He rarely listened to what was asked of him (in fact once while the other players were out doing something he sold all of their belongings so he could buy a big ass gun, the one he used to shoot down that AV in fact).

My favorite parts were his fatal flaws.  One of the other PCs was his wife, who was the groups netrunner.  They had trouble relating and she always wished for the old him back (before all the cyberware).  One time we were fighting a bunch of dudes and he ran up to a truck and pulled a dude out and killed him with his wolvers.  Then, inexplicably, when he pulled the next guy out he just looked at him and threw him in the ditch without hurting him.  I always hoped that guy would come back someday as an enemy, but we stopped playing shortly after that.

That was a very long running campaign with a lot of plusses and minuses.  It cemented my feelings about cyberpunk.  The system is fast and has some good positives but the character generation is seriously lacking and the positives are easy to exploit if not tightly controlled by the GM.  Tom as a GM made us constantly paranoid.  I dont think I liked that much because there was no uncertaintly.  We all knew that every NPC was always going to screw us and find a way to work with every other NPC to ensure our downfalls.