A bad quality for karma trade off is relative to the character you are playing. If the goal was simply to give enough karma for a negative quality, then the problem would only be worse.
Some people will still take a negative quailty because it pays off and is not necessarily crippling while others will complain that it now pays too much karma to others for something that hurts their character. The same problem
Or worse everyone taking a quality, and everyone having the same negative effect no matter what archtype they are and choosing to ignore the other negative qualities.
At least now there is some balance that makes people spread their karma gain across multiple negative qualities

...yeah but why cripple an attribute that may (well at least hopefully) save your character's life? This also means (at least according to 5E rules) that you cannot augment it either unless they changed that.

Apologies, but even 6 Body dice against an attack pool of say 15 - 18 is pretty sad as 6 dice may yield an average of 1.5 hits against 5, ergo, dead character.

sure, but the difference between 6 dice and 5 dice is not particularly extreme.

also, for a lot of weapons their damage is so low that i think that would likely keep you alive and conscious, provided it's your first time being hit.

also also, i'm pretty sure i've seen discussion on limiting the amount you can augment the limited attribute by, which to me implies you're not restricted from augmenting it.

Different metatypes can have different Impaired Attribute qualities if even just to highlight their differences.
It's easy to imagine why an elf might have less than standard body or strength, or a dwarf migh have less agility or reaction, or a troll might have less reason or logic......

...agh, apologies.

I was getting it mixed up with the Infirm Quality, that is the one which prohibits augmentations. I am involved in Missions play and in 5E, Impaired Attribute is a mutagenic quality which are disallowed under Missions guidelines, so I never bothered looking into it.

Taking a negative quality should result in a practical penalty of some sort for the character. That is, either being unable to perform a given action or having reduced chance of performing it successfully. The value associated to the negative quality should in turn be related to how often the player may need or want to perform said action. That's the whole point of the specific rules that used to apply to Codeblock, Incompetent or Sensitive System (depending on the edition).

If the player can systematically avoid being in a position where he has to perform that action, that value should be zero. With SR6 Impaired Attribute negative quality, "systematically" don't simply mean "very often", but being mechanically able to, per the rules themselves. Raising an attribute is purely a choice from the player (with its own associated cost). There is no absolutely no circunstance in the game where the gamemaster can say "every character present should have raised this one attribute to the racial maximum of that metatype". Even a test as specifically targeted as having a Threshold equal to the Racial Attribute Maximum minus the appropriate modifier, besides the fact that it would equally penalize character that did not take that particular negative quality but simply did not chose to raise their attribute to this level, and have a ridiculously low chance of success even for characters who did, would still not fit the bill, considering the available temporary and permanent augmentations.

Fundamentally, raising an attribute has a cost in the first place. You shouldn't get points simply for refusing to pay that cost.

Now, obviously, if you are to play an SR6 elf street samurai, I'd highly recommend taking Impaired Charisma twice, because getting 16 karma upfront seems like a pretty good deal for abandonning the "opportunity" to spend 75 karma in a way you'd never want to.

Sounds like the mechanics for Flaws in the New World of Darkness. Take as many as you like - they're all worth no bonus points. However, in any session where the Flaw causes you some serious inconvenience, you get a bonus XP reward point.

There may be a reason why I have never taken Incompetent (Pilot Aerospace).

Are you just bad at optimizing?! (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wink.gif)

well, first off, losing the option to pivot to increasing an attribute you didn't expect to want to increase is a cost, however small of one. if the street samurai's face buddy bites the dust, he can't just pick up those extra points in charisma any more. if the street sam finds out that having a second reasonably capable face is a good idea 5 sessions in, too bad, that option is gone. so no, it isn't free points with no drawback, though there is certainly room to question whether that drawback is large enough for what you get.

secondly, if the majority of the other options are "hey, why don't you go screw yourself and your team over royally for 5 karma", the real problem is at least partially that the balance on the other negative qualities is crap. if there were plenty of other reasonable options, i expect you'd see a lot more diversity in the negative qualities people take, rather than everyone looking at the other options and concluding that no, bleeding from your eyeballs any time you're exposed to pollution doesn't seem like a reasonable negative quality to get similar karma rewards to limiting an off-stat by 2-3 points.

that elf street sam is taking impaired charisma twice instead of uncouth because they actually get a reasonable amount of karma out of it, and the party doesn't get screwed over by the sam taking a crippling flaw that gives barely enough karma to raise a single skill by a single point.

If the circunstances for that negative quality to matter are when another character get entirely removed from the game and/or the player is switching its entire character concept from "I'll never raise this stat to its racial maximum" to "I need it maxed", then you may consider using SR chargen system as a trap option in the first place.

I don't know if the option to buy back a negative quality for twice its karma cost in SR5 remains in SR6. If so, it would rather come on the cheap end of pivot cost, when compared to 1) the difference on attributes cost between chargen and character progression, 2) the difference between starting nuyen and recommanded nuyen payment during game, 3) the extra cost in nuyen if you don't have enough Essence available to get the role appropriate augmentations, 4) that you can't change metatype anyway if yours is not optimal for your new occupation, plus 5) pivoting to an awakened occupation, if allowed, is going to cost twice the karma cost as well, but with quality in the 15-35 range.

For the drawback of Impaired Attribute to matter, it requires the player to change his mind about his character design in a way the rest of the system is discouraging him from.

Now, I agree with you that there already were plenty of terrible qualities in the list.

I wonder if Impaired Attribute is not here first and foremost as a way to put a cost on the one component in metatype choice that didn't have one, and have a basis to calculate metatype "real" cost. Too bad that doesn't come up with a broader reflexion on how metatype attribute ranges relate or not to specific role and, by extension, if and how a character can escape its initial concept and pivot.

A big change from other editions to 6th.

Somethng I thought was underappreciated were Teamwork tests. Now they are a straight roll to add hits to the leaders test.
The older editions were written to discourage any interaction outside of a direct run/jhonson situation. But if the characters can have all these skills, histories above the regular person on the street, why was it so haed to imagine the same characters finding a way use their skills in a coordinated way more often?
Sure people like stories of control and keeping the masses down and the winning by loosing theme, but isn't the point of playing, at least for most, is a character that hopes to ultimately "win" above those situations?

Whatever you played, it wasn't a previous Shadowrun edition.

Nope, I'm sure they were.

@Nstol, I think you are misreading it, as it does NOT add straight hits to the leader's test.

Teamwork tests have not really changed from 4th onward.

As per pg 36 in 6th Core, we can see it acts as follows:

Team designates the 'leader'

All persons with applicable skill can roll, those hits add 1 DICE each per hit made by the team to the leader's test pool, these are NOT guaranteed hits added to the leader's test.

Total number of dice that can be added is equal to the leader's skill being used, or highest attribute if its a test calling for two stats being used.

Leader now rolled the augmented dice pool to determine result.

This is also how it operated in 4th, in 5th it also worked the same as above but it also raised your limit by 1 per die added as otherwise all those added dice would potentially have gone to waste.

Glitches are a bit different due to changes in how some rolls work and limits are gone but if you glitch the teamwork test in 6th you can not gain or spend Edge for 1-3 rounds.

As for your suggestion that earlier editions discouraged play outside of the usual Shadowrun for A Johnson scenario, I guess it depends on books books or adventures you read as there was several that fell outside that usual trope, including a couple of adventures that were more Murder mysteries style.

"......The helpers roll first; any hits become extra dice added to the leader’s dice pool."

Teamwork Tests.
Page 36

Yes. and you are trying to say what exactly?

Because that is what WE referred to in our post about team hits become DICE added to the leader's pool, unlike YOUR original quote higher up the posts where you claim they became HITS on the Leader's test.

And that is the way it worked in 4th & 5th as well.

bolding by myself on the relevant bit that YOU stated originally.

I think we've pretty well established in this thread that NSTOL is either impossibly bad with the rules or just plain not posting in good faith.

But systematically avoiding such situations can already be the penalty. A player can systematically avoid any situation where use of limbs is required for a character with Quadriplegic, but having to avoid that is the penalty. For the same reason I was fine with the old (4th Ed) Sensitive System, IMO not taking any cyberware wasn't avoiding the price, it was the price because cyberware has useful upgrade paths for everyone. The new Impaired Attribute (or Incompetent (Aerospace)) on the other hand neither require the player to do something nor preclude something the player might want to do, they only exist on paper.



A new edition where the entire setting is changed for the worse and all artwork is photos of action figures. But 15 years later, boundless hype from an upcoming PC game (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wink.gif)

...yeah, I still miss 3E sometimes.

Global Data Wipe, Mass Extinction, the same thing..... (IMG:style_emoticons/default/dead.gif)

At this rate Everyone will be Technomancers in a couple of editions. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/rotfl.gif)

Well, given the Matrix is officially magic now, that suits the design goals of everyone being a mage just fine.

...well at least by then, getting 5 hits on assensing make sense now.

In 5E it states that 5 hits on an assensing test reveals your target is a technomancer.

It was also the case with 4th edition (see table page 183). So, it was in fact the case ever since technomancers replaced otaku.

..yeah didn't play much 4E.

Didn't much care for the hard skill caps, that magic trumped everything, and that the archetypes became sort of homogenised (now a mage or sammy with a commlink, a little skill, and some programmes could also hack systems).

About the only parts I did like were the build point system, which I wish they would have retained in 5E, and genetic modifications for characters.

I ended up going back to 3E.