Shadowrun 3rd Revised, our backs turned, looking down the path Options

[Kagetenshi]

Update: contrary to my own statement, I have begun this project. I will use this space at the top to link to all subthreads in the project. The first post of every thread for the project will link to every other thread for the project.

Jon’s Glorious Karma Character Generation System (S3CKS)

Decking

Ranged Combat

Astral Space, Essence, and the Awakened

New Gear

Cyberware

Time, Pool, and the Flow of Combat

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The following books are the ones that this project is not considering for its ruleset. Ideas from these books can be considered, and a sufficiently persuasive argument may result in a book entering SR3R canon (or leaving it), but by default nothing in a book listed here that is not introduced in an earlier book exists in SR3R, and no new rules apply from these books.

Liber Non Grata:

Any book for Shadowrun, Fourth Edition

State of the Art: 2064

Shadows of Asia

Shadows of Europe

Loose Alliances

System Failure

Mr. Johnson's Little Black Book
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Let me open by saying that I am not, at this time, trying to compile a revision to Shadowrun 3rd Edition. It's way the hell too early for that, and there's still a chance (however slim it may seem at times) that I'll fall in love with SR4, that it will be everything I've always wanted and more (or at least an improvement).

That being said: pretend you know nothing about 4th ed. Pretend someone came up to you and said they were doing a 4th edition, and that it was going be more a revision of the current rules than an overhaul. They're just asking you about the rules, not the world in general. What would you tell them you want to see revised, and what if any suggestions would you have for how to revise it to do what you want?

The obvious example that I'll get out of the way now isn't actually in the rules, it's in the organization. It's no secret that I believe that the main weakness of SR3, completely overwhelming anything else, is its complete lack of organization and proper ease of cross-referencing. Lack of indices, rulesets split up amongst widely disparate books and pages… I realized, upon purchasing the first few Shadowrun PDFs, that a big part of my mastery of the rules is not, in fact, the chunks I have memorized (though they help)… no, it's largely due to the fact that my spatial memory is good enough that I can reliably flip to a given section of the book on demand and look a rule up from there instead of having to hunt for the section. I don't think I need to point out that spatial memory should never be a major part of mastering the rules. Ironically enough, this is the flaw in SR3 that is impossible to correct in a fan revision (at least one that doesn't involve a lot of copyright infringement, which I under no circumstances am considering).

Another example is the way they've overpowered Riggers with regard to combat. There are some sections that might need consideration (like the invulnerability/invincibility dichotomy that exists any time you don't have Control Pool to throw at the problem), but the major low-hanging fruit is the fact that Riggers get a free attack pool. That's right, while they use Control Pool for maneuvers and dodging, they can freely use Combat Pool to attack (and nothing else). If strapped for attacks, they can even supplement their Combat Pool with Control Pool. Imagine a streetsam with twenty-three pool dice, even if ten of these are unavailable for dodging or soaking. I have just such a Rigger, legal under the current rules.

So, if, some eight or ten months down the road, I decide that SR4 isn't for me, what would you want to see fixed in a 3rd Revised? There's no need for you to be unsatisfied with what we've seen of SR4 to contribute here, though you may have more incentive to if the releases are worrying rather than calming to you. What's broken? What needs to be streamlined? Specifics, if possible; just saying "deckers" is a lot less helpful than saying "MP costs and the confusing way that Attack programs work", for instance.

Fire away.

~J