How often can you burn a point of edge to safe your life? The german corebook talks about "a second chance" but does this really only mean that you can use it once?

According to RAW you can burn each point of Edge you have; so if you have 7 Edge, you do in fact have seven lives.

The rules also not that burning a point of Edge is a "permanent reduction".

Some rule that this simply means that the point does not come back on it own, but that you can still buy it back with Karma, meaning that over time you could burn edge dozens of times. Other rule that it means that your maximum Edge also is reduced, so eventually no amount of Karma will let you buy more Edge.

The first interpretation is easily exploited by starting with 2 Edge and then just buying the burned point back for 6 Karma (pretty cheap for escaping certain death). The second interpretation plays better (IMHO), but which ruling is RAW is debatable.

To get more specific: Hand of God is now a Prime Runner NPC-only ability, that is a complete getaway at the expense of all Edge. Escape Certain Death is the PC ability to burn Edge to escape. Technically speaking, burning Edge only reduces the current rating, and not the racial/modified maximum; so the point of Edge can be bought back.

As for how much you get out of a burned Edge for an ECD, look at this thread here.

I rule that a PC may only do it once in their life, and that it reduces their Edge attribute by 1. Edge may be increased with karma later in the usual way.

Otherwise, the PCs become effectively unkillable, which is as boring as watching paint dry.

Not so. When our group's Technomancer had to burn edge after being killed from the fading of compiling a high-rating sprite, he burned edge to come back...

...the negative qualities the GM gave him as a result had the rest of the team wanting to kill him off because he was now going to get us all killed. (Pissed off meltdown sprites are bad when you have a plane.) I'm sure we had more than seven bullets between us, and the TM only had 1 edge to begin with anyway. The key is to make sure to give appropriate consequences, so burning edge isn't a cheap "kick death in the nuts and laugh about it" ploy--but without making life so hard that they shouldn't have used it.

I had mentioned in the other thread that Cain linked to that in my games we make it a permanent edge reduction because it makes sense to me that someone's luck can eventually "run out." It's also similar to the idea of a cat's nine lives.

Plus, through most campaigns the players won't die 6 or 7 times and on top of that, be sure to load them with "bonus" cyberware or negative qualities appropriate to PTSD for being legally dead for long enough to see the white light at the end of the tunnel and having brought back. The players should despise having to burn edge where the negatives given present hard time to roleplay that character from then on out close to the equivalent pain in the ass to create a new character and introduce him to the party. Just about equal...

with all the medical tech given in augmentation, the person and just by a new healthy body back. As far as getting rid of PTSD we have drugs which prevent it from forming, and magic and tech which can remove the mental scars of coming that close to dying anyway.

You can restrict that by forcing the player to spend karma, as well as cash, to buy off the flaws.

yup, by RAW, to remove those negative qualities, it costs a ton more karma to buy them off (which would be the equivalent "taking medication to suppress it") than it would be to just role play them and have a bunch more fun. And if your player really doesn't want cyber, cloned organs and limbs are pretty pricey (do we even have values on these?) and even though your player wakes up intact, he might owe someone pretty powerful a whole lot of services to payoff his intact flesh.

Didn't say it was cheep, just said it was possible.

Maybe I ask my GM to differ between the way we died on this weekend (not our fault) from dying if it WAS your fault.

That shouldn't matter. Even if it was due to your own stupidity, the ECD rules give you a clean escape. Nothing else has to be clean, but you get away alive.