Sixth Edition, Release Announcement Options

[Koekepan]

My group was all Vampire: The Masquerade, except for me, who preferred Mage: The Ascension. But we all noticed that the 4e mechanics were a dead ringer for OWoD, which is one of the reasons we got into SR4.

More or less the same here, except that I'd had lots of earlier exposure to Shadowrun so I wasn't bothered by the mechanic. The hurdle was getting new players into it. No lie; SR4 did make it more approachable.

[pbangarth]

I'm settled in 4th edition, too. In my own mind, there are answers to all the major issues people found with the system.

I bought the core 6th edition book, and while I haven't studied it extensively, one attraction to me is the ability to share Edge with others. I always wanted to create and play a character I would call Lucky Eddie. The team wants him around not so much for his skills as for the fact the rest of the team always seems to be better at what they do when he is around.

[Moirdryd]

The SR4e rules are a dead ringer for NWoD / CoD, not OWoD.

I remain bemused by all the difficulties people have with decking in 3e, I have a single reference sheet from Matrix (with page refs for 3-4 of the reference required, rarely used utilities) and a bookmark on my IC page.
The less risk there is with magic the more SR does become Magic Run - Adepts putting themselves in harms way losing magic from nasty injuries? There's a lesson there. Now it;s very m,uch horses for courses, you want simple Shadowrun 4e, you want nice grit and gravel 3e, you want something closer to a really loose GitS adaption 5e + crowbar (I have yet to see a table, including my own, that has not ended up with multiple page house rules for 5e).

[Kyoto Kid]

...the issue I had with Adepts in 3E (and earlier versions) is they were at a greater disadvantage than a spell slinger, who could sit back from the combat out of the line of fire, hiding behind cover (like in the armoured van using mage sight goggles through a gunport or from around a corner), be invisible (which unlike in D&D, did not drop once the mage made an attack), have an army of elementals (in the case of a hermetic) to do use their powers, go into melee (with their resistance to normal weapons), provide protection, or pull his/her fat out of the fire. Meanwhile most adept powers required the character be into close combat to be effective. The "Gunslinger Adept" as we know it today really didn't appear until 4E when Adept powers were expanded more, and by then, the magic loss rule was dumped as the wound mechanic had changed. There also wasn't a "luck attribute" (Edge) until 4E which could be permanently burned (and later bought back with Karma) to save your hoop or used to avoid getting that "big smack upside the head" (or deliver one yourself).

As I also mentioned, spell slingers had other means to compensate for magic loss which Adepts didn't, such as various foci, fetishes, metamagic, and nature spirits/elementals. This is why I determined that the rule no longer applied to Adepts in my campaigns. It really didn't unbalance the situation (and didn't apply to spell slingers) as again, in earlier editions, adepts were primarily physical combatants who also start out less powerful than an "out of the box" mundane Sammy (or even spell slinger) did since they usually avoided implants that reduced their MA (or in the case of my campaign "Ki"). Adepts also usually ended up going into close combat against with some very nasty opponents, like paranormals, dual natured beings, and manifested spirits/elementals as they had powers (and usually a weapon focus) that would bypass any resistance/immunity to normal weapons/damage (crikey, the UCAS military ended up using FAB III and a nuke against the bug hive in Chicago and that still didn't completely eradicate them as we saw in Missions seasons 5 - 8 ).

As to Decking, 5E simplified the matrix mechanics enough to where the GM doesn't have to take a lot of time to design the local network and all the various nodes etc, then end up running what becomes effectively a separate session just for the decker for an hour or so while the other players sit around bored, play cards, fire up the XBox or PlayStation, or go out to get beer and snacks (basically running in the Matrix was akin to a "dungeon crawl"). Again, as I mentioned I used MS Excel on a notebook computer to streamline the process as best I could).

[JanessaVR]

The SR4e rules are a dead ringer for NWoD / CoD, not OWoD.

Eh, could be. It's been a long time at this point since we've played either of them.

[Tymeaus Jalynsfe...]

Eh, could be. It's been a long time at this point since we've played either of them.

The only real difference is the Dice used... D6's for Shadowrun, and D10's for nWOD/Chronicles of Darkness...

[Moirdryd]

Obviously we have some VERY different experiences Kyoto Kid with our SR3 - The first adept I ever saw was a Gun Adept - Wild West Gunslinger type- who picked up Centering fairly early on and was amazing at what he did. I've never had to isolate the decker from the rest of the group as either A) They are feeding info back as they are finding it and getting input from the team for other things they need while everyone is leg working, and B) split my time between the group members doing things just like in any other instance when the party is functionally 'split'.

Decking wise - You don't have to design Nodes mini dungeon in 3e, just a security sheaf, which can be genned on the fly in a couple of minutes if need be, or, you can have a page with half a dozen or so pregenned ones up for use at the drop of a hat, a metaphor if one is really needed (often a Reality Filter saves time on this) and an idea of what the Deckers objective is. The only time it bogs down is if the decker ends up in a fight with a security decker or a stack of IC on an Alerted system. But this is all much the same as anyone going to chat with some local gangers or contacts and getting into a dustup, or getting jumped while doing black market shopping - and even then unless people want to sit and wait you cans witch between characters.

But as I say, horses for courses. Some folks find Ad&d 2e overly complicated but will play and run games of Pathfinder with every option allowed. Likewise I have seen players get lost in 5e D&D but can recite Dramatic Systems from Mage the Ascension.

[Kyoto Kid]

...yeah dealing with countermeasures and matrix combat was usually the worst part (one of the major systems he had to deal with on a couple occasions had extremely tight security as it was a governmental not corporate system). The pregenerated "hosts" and nodes I used were what I set up in Excel and yes, it did help streamline moving about in the system). IN a situation with gangers or other runners, usually more than one character is involved. That isn't the case with decking unless you have a team of deckers so yes players can get bored. I did my best to switch back and forth, pausing the decking for a bit and going to what the other characters were doing at the time then back to the decking, etc. That helped to keep everyone more involved. I've been in groups as a player where when it was the decker's turn, we just all sat around and twiddled our thumbs (too bad we didn't have fidget spinners back then).

My namesake character began her career in 1E and was converted to 2E then 3E. She was primarily a melee Adept (in 1E/2E that was about all you could be). She did pick up a gun (Ruger Warhawk) after having gone through the A Fist Full Of Karma segment in Harlequin's Back and improved her skill with it along the way but with no other augmentations (as she was awakened, no smartlink since implants reduced her MA and cost powers). When I finally "retired" her (3E), she had amassed something like 380 total Karma and was a grade 6 initiate (yes she did take a couple hits on MA early on in her career).

As it's been nearly ten years since I even cracked open a 3E book, I don't remember if improved ability could be used with firearms (I know in 4E and 5E it does). In any effect she was still far more deadly with her weapon focus and fists than with a gun, and due to the mechanics for melee, in some cases it made her more dangerous to attack as she'd usually roll better in defence than her opponent's attack.

For 5E Missions I resurrected her concept but more as a "gunbunny" type, primarily, armed with dual Ruger Warhawks (she has the Ambidexterity quality and a pool with pistols [revolvers] good enough that she can split it) as well as a Remington 900 as she didn't have the funds to start off with a weapon focus (though she still had Blades at 6). I initially burned out 1 point of MA to get some minor bio (Alpha Orthoskin 2 and Muscle Toner 2 as well as an Alpha Smartlink since Chicago had an ambient background count of 2 which negated most Adept powers like Improved Ability, Mystic Armour, etc. up to that rating (basically started with only Improved Initiative 2 and Combat Sense 5). She is now Prime Runner Status+ (360 TKE) with an initiate grade of 7, MA of 7, and Adept Centering 7 with the perfect time quality. Loved it when she "checked the wind" (Centering) to totally negate the penalty for a blind shot through a mirrored windscreen and nailed the driver with her "huntin. rifle".

[KCKitsune]

Kyoto, I know you said you didn't like it that a mage/adept could deck, but, IMO, that makes it better because the GM can run a whole session in the Matrix. It also makes the 'Runners more versatile.

[Kyoto Kid]

...however, it made the dedicated matrix specialist totally moot which took something away, and to a point, worked to homogenise the archetypes (particularly when you ran up against the hard skill caps for your character's concept and had to spend karma on something, basically you ended up with a lot of "jacks of all trades, masters of none").

Personally I'm glad they went back to making Deckers unique again (as well as Riggers) in 5E. That is sort of what made Shadowrun, "Shadowrun".

[Moirdryd]

In 3e Improved Ability worked for anything, combat skills costing more than non combat active skills. Centering could be used with Imp Ability to lower TNs - delicious called shots. For me it is often the 'underworld' types that go off solo as, while back up is nice, most criminals don't like being known and dealing with people they don't know "Come alone" or "Only one friend" tends to be the mantra, so it was not unheard of for the street sam to do solo meets (or infact the Gun adept had a habit of wandering off). Likewise with the mage characters not wanting to share details of their Magical Organisation with everyone - just in case.

But we all work with the tools in different ways, speaking of which i need to go and convert some more Maria Mercurial material because the team is actually trying to arrange a meetup with New Horizons to try and sort things out without anymore yakuza hit teams or a threat to Ms Mercurial. That's gonna be fun!

[Rotbart van Dain...]

...however, it made the dedicated matrix specialist totally moot which took something away, and to a point, worked to homogenise the archetypes (particularly when you ran up against the hard skill caps for your character's concept and had to spend karma on something, basically you ended up with a lot of "jacks of all trades, masters of none").

Given that the WoD systems run pretty much fine with their 'hard skill caps' since pretty much forever, the decision to move SR4 effectively to the Trinity/Exalted system was bold, even radical - but not 'surprising' in the sense of system design. While I agree with you that investment into your main character focus should gain you something, I personally found that this means Essence. Anything else, Mages or Technomancers will do better. So any 'matrix specialist' not modified with all the implants you could get your hands on, simply... wasn't a matrix specialist.

Individually, those effects were small, the sum however made a huge difference - a difference nobody without that investment could match (or steal, or simply lose for that matter), even if they were able to do matrix searches, use drones or agents - hell, even hack simple nodes. Could there have been more implants to make this differentiation more significant? Could the hacking difficulty curve have been more steeper or exponential? Could Attributes factor in more? Sure... those are tweaks, not system re-hauls. Taking the ability away to use drones or agents from normal users is like limiting the use of guns to certain archetypes in a traditional fantasy RPG.

To me, the 'it just works' approach of the SR4 matrix when it came to integrating and actually using it presented a so tremendous game flow advantage, that all other considerations are pretty much obliterated. In SR5, deckers are back to being NPCs like in SR3... the matrix just isn't worth the rules hassle.

Of course, I'm not entirely certain how serious I should take the whole "jacks of all trades, masters of none" argument:

...this is why I like jack of all trades characters. they have just enough of everything (save maybe spell slinging or straight on decking) to be useful in several types of situations.

Personally I'm glad they went back to making Deckers unique again (as well as Riggers) in 5E. That is sort of what made Shadowrun, "Shadowrun".

Personally, I stopped regarding anything under the lead of Hardy as "Shadowrun". That started with 'War' and includes the following reboot retcon of the Matrix.

Shadowrun unfortunately died pretty much with the exodus of the old team after the 20th anniversary and what we see is just it's CFD-reanimated corpse, shambling on, gorging itself on money instead of brains.
The mechanics of WiFi (SR5&SR6), Limits & Marks (SR5) or Edge (SR6) were just random symptoms of the same disease.

[Kyoto Kid]

...In 3E it was easy to get augmentation as well as a fairly decent deck (which was easier to upgrade/customise) and your programmes. Slashing starting resources like was done in 4E onward made doing so more difficult. For one the price of Bioware really didn't come down that much if at all (and in some cases, increased). Admittedly simplifying all augmentations to just use Essence was one of the smart ideas as the old Body Index system in previous editions was a pain in the hoop to track. Also glad they ditched trying to quantify components like memory, I/O processing power, etc. I do miss teh ability to build custom decks however (more later)

Now granted in 4E you only needed a commlink with a hot Sim module which was much less expensive than a full cyberdeck. However in 5E they made it really difficult to get even a mediocre deck and have enough left over for augmentations. The decker character I currently have in Missions relies on a cyberarm for being able to contribute in combat (Pistols/SMGs) and armour. She can't even wear a ballistic mask with an armoured business suit and matching longcoat without incurring penalties. Would have loved to get her the Synaptic accelerator genemod (adds 1 die to defence) but was just too expensive as her deck (device rating 3) took up most of her resources and she took resources as her A priority. I gave her the one shot Boosted Reflexes just so she had more than one die of initiative in meatspace and she tends to hack in AR more than VR unless one member of the team has a heavily armoured van she can hide in.

The 3E version had a couple levels of Muscle Toner, Synaptic Acceleration 2, Orthoskin 3, SmartlinkII, and even Bone Lacing to give her a bit of an edge in meatspace (I don't care what anyone says, decekers need to be able to deal with matters when the lead starts flying and not just hide behind a dumpster) as well as a pretty raging deck which she kept customising.

As to custom decks in 5E, I feel why did they even bother as they are so gimped? In the lower cost version, all the attributes are fixed so a decker cannot swap them and Firewall is way too difficult to get at a meaningful rating due to the availability (the highest you can get at character creation is rating 3).

Other than that I find decking in 5E to not be anywhere near the pain it was in 3E.

[Rotbart van Dain...]

The Security Tally was way more elegant in SR3 that the equivalent in SR5... and things as Marks weren't there, either. So for me, SR5 managed to add complexity to the SR3 system.

The hassle SR3 was all the micromanagement with memeory... but even then, Tortoise Mode allowed for working without an expensive deck - provided your programs were silent, as Tortoise Memory was cheap.

[Kyoto Kid]

...I felt h having to map things out for the various grids was a bit cumbersome. Yeah I learned to deal with it, but it was kind of like designing a dungeon crawl for the decker (and I even shortcut some things).

In 5E the the basic concern for the is Host Rating and Firewall to see if the Decker can even get in. Of course there are"backdoors" (cameras, vending machines, possibly even the coffee maker that all may be connected by the Host...or not) to bypass the firewall.

Where I feel 5E breaks down is for the player with the plethora of different matrix actions. I actually found a chart that I printed off as well as printed several pages from PDF supplements that introduced additional ones so I didn't have to go paging around looking for them. While decks have been simplified a bit (no more managing memory capacity & such) I feel it is sort of like having a Mac in RL, where to upgrade, you pretty much have to buy a brand new one rather than simply modifying attributes and components of your existing hardware. That is a pretty hefty price given you usually only get one third of your original purchase price selling used gear. In Missions we use the same procedure as for upgrading cyberware to take some of the "sticker shock" out of purchasing a 300,000+¥ piece of gear (players pay the difference +25% in between the price of the old component new one). As I mentioned the custom deck system is ridiculous as it really isn't as "customised" as it was in 3E. There I could take a stock cyberdeck and modify the drek out of it. or if my character had the skills/skillsofts, time, and resources, build a "one off" (I actually had a GM that let me do that at character creation using using middle lifestyle to calculate the time cost in addition to that for the components and tools, ended up with a deck that was between a Renraku Kraftwerk and Transys Highlander which was designed more towards stealth than combat, for just under the cost of a stock Kraftwerk).

I remember in one of the "axioms" of being a decker back then was "never trust someone else's tech".

Yeah I'll admit, the whole having to get marks on things is annoying (as are limits in general), but in 3E deckers primarily went after hosts and data, and systems directly hooked into the matrix, not vehicles (that was the rigger's job) or anything with wireless (including your chrome). I built my decker for Missions to have as high a pool as possible (with hacking specialisation in Hosts, Cerebral Boosting 2, Cortical Nanites 3 and uses psyche with the Narco genemod bonus), and gave her the Go Big or Go Home quality. In the matirx she's deadly, but when the lead and mana starts a flyin', she looks for that big dumpster heavily armoured vehicle, or corner of a building to hide behind.

[Rotbart van Dain...]

I remember in one of the "axioms" of being a decker back then was "never trust someone else's tech".

That is what rubs me really the wrong way about SR5 & SR6.

SR4 had rules for building your own hardware modules, which is quite frankly, kind of strange, given the tech involved.

And it had programming rules, even open source rules... featuring that those did not decay as cracked corp software, only kind of. (And non-cracked corp software was out of the question for anything.)

So when I look at SR5 & SR6... what do i see? the big, bad neo-anarchist 'deckers'... queuing up for buying corp produce - and the specific corp produce for hacking the new, unhackable, secure matrix. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wobble.gif)

[Sengir]

Sooo...is anyone here less apathetic about 6th than me and has taken a look at 30 Nights yet?

[Kyoto Kid]

That is what rubs me really the wrong way about SR5 & SR6.

SR4 had rules for building your own hardware modules, which is quite frankly, kind of strange, given the tech involved.

And it had programming rules, even open source rules... featuring that those did not decay as cracked corp software, only kind of. (And non-cracked corp software was out of the question for anything.)

So when I look at SR5 & SR6... what do i see? the big, bad neo-anarchist 'deckers'... queuing up for buying corp produce - and the specific corp produce for hacking the new, unhackable, secure matrix. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wobble.gif)

...+1.

[Iduno]

Sooo...is anyone here less apathetic about 6th than me and has taken a look at 30 Nights yet?

Sixth Edition isn't real, and it can't hurt you.

[Sengir]

Sixth Edition isn't real, and it can't hurt you.

Phew, good to know (IMG:style_emoticons/default/grinbig.gif)

[Lionhearted]

4th's not perfect, but coming from OWoD, it's very intuitive. And we have extensive house rules for it as well.

Any chance you got a write up for those houserules I could look at?

[Rotbart van Dain...]

Sooo...is anyone here less apathetic about 6th than me and has taken a look at 30 Nights yet?

I did. All the tech parts are cringe-worthy - but at least they gently suggest not destroying all the toys of Riggers, Deckers & Sams. Just most. Hooray?
In fact, they don't even kill the unwashed cybered masses like Cutting Black tells us! How is the Magical Master-race ever gonging to shine?! (IMG:style_emoticons/default/sarcastic.gif)

[ Spoiler ]

The blackout and the technical mystery around is handled in the most ham-fisted way possible, there is a Dragon Sue where one actual day is spend hunting down pictures & drawings of her, like retarded fanboys and the actual plot mostly revolves around the Black Lodge trying to return the Horrors or something.

You can probably salvage most of it for a generic, 'Magical Threat'-centered story arc that just happens to play in a city without power & technology - just in case all those mundanes depending on tech did not feel useless enough in that kind of plot already. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/indifferent.gif)

[Kyoto Kid]

...so is SR 7 going to be Earthdawn 2090?

[SpellBinder]

I have a friend who's done Shadowrun from 1st edition, and for the longest time 3rd has been his favorite. Not for the rules, mind you, but for the setting, the lore, the story. The impression I got from him when I told him about the highlight events from Cutting Black was that he was glad he's not kept pace with the lore since the start of SR5.

[Kyoto Kid]

...same here. I also felt that 3E had the best world setting. I ran a campaign that was completely based in Europe. There were a lot of great threads and sub plots to use, most of which were poorly explained away in and after System Failure and some that were just forgotten.

As I mentioned elsewhere, I have been converting that campaign (still set in 2061/62) over to 5E mechanics and doing some serious houseruling. (such as perception being an attribute roll like Memory or Composure, Using appropriate knowledge skills to complement active skills, and making all Chrome "throwback" but still granting bonuses as if it were wireless).