Impressions on 4&5 Options

[Socinus]

Alright, so this is a culmination of a thought process I've had banging around since I heard about SR5. Full disclosure: my roommate purchased the PDF and I've had a chance to read through it a few times on his tablet, I have not studied it in depth.

When I heard there was a new edition coming out, I was...a little put off. I've only ever played SR4 but as far as I can see, it's a very good system. The overall framework of the system itself is very solid and plays very well, despite a bit of a learning curve. Given the givens, I feel it represents the potential randomness of the real world fairly well, it allows for and encourages player creativity both in gameplay and building a character, and it allows for a sense of challenge as well as giving the player a sense of personal ability and power. It is, in short, fun.

There are terabytes worth of pages on this forum alone highlighting the holes (and there are many) in the SR4 system, I have no need to flog that particular fossilized horse anymore. But that said, the overwhelming majority of the problems I've found personally and seen during play were things that could ultimately be fixed without replacing the entire system. I feel like we needed some basic fixes rather than graduating to a whole new system.

That said, after reading through the corebook for SR5, I'm not actually seeing too much difference. The character creation system seems like the Karma and Priority system from other versions sort of awkwardly spooning. The majority of the changes I see aren't really changes that seemed to NEED to be made.

For instance; instead of having a laundry list of guns that are virtually identical, have a list of gun parts that players assemble to create their own weapons for their own needs with a few pre-mades and do the same for vehicles. Simplify the explosives rules, any game rule that requires me to know/look up square roots of anything is far too complicated. The Matrix needs a little refinement to separate it a bit from the Magic system and make it a little less complex.

There are many more and there are dozens of great suggestions on implementing these points and others all over the forum.

My basic point is I feel like Shadowrun needed the "Pathfinder" treatment; a tweaking and refining of some rules, replacing of a very small few, and a general overall better polish. In SR5, it kinda feels almost exactly like SR4 with a few minor changes and the changes that did occur were not really necessary changes.