Not meaning to be overly contrary, but I've heard a podcast by Rob Boyle, stating the exact opposite. I found the link by googling it, it's here. He says the similarities were not accidental, and that it was Steve Kenson who came up with the new mechanic. It's somewhere around the 12 minute mark.

Now, I wasn't there and I don't know precicely what happened. But the precursor to the nWoD mechanics were published long before SR4 went into development. I think Adventure! was published in 1999, and it was preceded by Aberrant, both of which had a similar mechanic and were published by White Wolf. I'm not sure when Exalted was published, but it was before nWoD as well. So, there's a very good chance that someone-- namely, Steve Kenson, who's job it is to keep up on the latest developments in game mechanics-- saw the early versions of nWoD.

Since the bare minimum of sleep they'd need is 3 hours, that makes no sense. They need to work shifts anyway.


And exactly there, the setting's fluff and crunch don't mix.

While computing apparently has become all that much mroe effective, computers have become much more insecure, unreliable, and unable to process stuff. Now, if more than one user accesses a node not on the bleeding edge of sixes, there'll be slowdown. That wouldn't have happened in the old Matrix. Yet no explanation is ever given. Neither is explained why everything decided to go wireless, including car parts. Yeah, it saves some dimes on cable for the producers, but it leaves consumers with caars that stop working in every thunderstorm, whenever there're solar flares, or whenever they pass by an active ECM of sorts. Not to mention that your car now is extremly hackable, as a car's engine has a rating opf 3 and no ice listed.

This just fails to make any kind of sense.

In the old Matrix, the remote computer just had to provide you data about its internal state, which your cyberdeck translated into simsense signals. This proved to be vulnerable, as the second Crash Virus proved. In the new Matrix, the simsense signal itself is being generated and transmitted by the node you're accessing; your own commlink just "filters" it for anything nasty (usually). This means that the remote node has to do a lot more work - an amount of work that wasn't even possible pre-crash. Computers are much more reliable post-crash, but hacking software is also much more powerful. The instability is caused by the fact that we've reached a point where there is more data and processing going on than the metahuman brain can hope to conceive of. The system has just got too complex. Basically, Shadowrun has hit the cusp of the Singularity, which is causing effects like the Resonance, and is causing sufficient "future shock" that even the software and hardware engineers don't understand what will happen when they plug their new toy in.

As for the cars, the main problem is that the consumers just don't care. Yes, their car can get hacked all the time, but they don't think about that, and they don't even want to care if it would mean giving up having their seat automatically adjusted and pre-warmed when they step in the vehicle.

Lag when more than one user accesses a node not on sixes? Please explain your reasoning.

Security is always relative in-setting, so I can accept it appearing less secure because Hackers became a lot more relevant and that means a bigger market for Hacking tools, which means more drive to make better tools. I'm not familiar with SR3 rules, so could you give me an example of how SR3 computing was more reliable and able to process stuff.


I think you're taking the "everything is wireless" bit too far there. It makes sense for the car in the aggregate to be wireless accessable, but I figure each component wouldn't be. That's excessive. Has it been suggested that a car engine actually has a Device Rating? If so, then we always have to houserule some stuff. It seems far more likely that you'd see a stock-tracking RFID and some wired-in actuators for control than a full computer.


I will admit that one of the things I dislike about SR4 is the classification of RFID tags as full nodes that can route and the "ZOMG NANOTAGS" stupidity. I mentally replace all that with a world where tags are usually the size of a postage stamp unless they want sub-zero signal and increasing expense.


Being on-call means they call you up and bring you in when you're not normally working at those hours. That means that you get your normal 9-5 and then if something big goes down you get woken up and need to sort it out. They pay you more for the overtime, of course. Why use extra shifts (at full normal expense) when you don't expect to get hacked every night?

*laughs*

No, he didn't. He said that the final system was similar.

I was at the meeting he talked about. We discussed how the proposed system was similar to the system that WW used for most of their games, but we didn't have any idea what they were doing for nWoD.

And let's not forgot that previous WoD games and other WW games used a very similar system and had for over 10 years. Hardly a trade secret.

unwired lists 3 node types, and the RFID is an example of the simplest of them.

and it makes sense that in the end all chips will behave the same. more cost effective that way.

but do not forget that RFID clock in as the weakest node type at the weakest possible rating...

ugh, dont tell me this all comes down to the "braniacs" that keep telling the world that rule zero is an abomination?

...my other issue is the Edge attribute. There has been much debate on this in the past, but suffice to say I never ever liked a "luck" based attribute in any game. Takes the true "edge" out of everything.

In the previous editions, cheating certain death was a one time only offer and took all your good Karma and Karma Pool (the good ol' H.O.G).

That just sounds silly to me since that is what 4th edition is all about. I would waste my time and count the number of times they say something along those lines if i felt that it would achieve anything. Lets just put it this way. 4th edition is just as wired as everything that you saw in the movie "Minority Report" was. When you pass by a advertisement and it knows your name, birthday, sex, and address then your very much wired.

iirc, karma pool was basically luck, only it built up over time rather then could be bought at char gen.

sounds like "sure you have a 1 million nuyen military vet, but the guy in rags have 10 dice in his karma pool". or in D&D speak, sure your packing a big sword and armor, but your still only level 1...

and if you dont like the in book version, have SR4 HOG basically burn the characters edge stat to the ground. presto, SR3 style HOG, ready to go...

rule zero ftw, people

Yes, it sounds silly as SR4 puts it (wirelessly connected car engines) ... which is why we have an issue with it.

Yeah, for the life of me, I have never understood why people are okay with karma pool thematically and not edge. I can understand having issues with the way the mechanics are implemented, sure, but the gist of it is the same. I'd have to dig out my sr3 books, but I'm pretty certain Karma Pool is seriously described as being the character's "accumulated good luck."

the only problem i have with edge is that its bought while karma pool wasnt.

Well, having several hands of god now isn't a good thing, but other than that, my main peeve with edge is it's cap. But that's more of a general problem with character development in SR4.

the argument about A vet having less edge than a bum is illogical.. if you want to play a war vet it should be about the skills not how much luck the character has. A vet would have more points to put towards skills and the like than a bum on a street corner begging for change. So the argument doesn't work here since luck has nothing to do with experience.

I think that the main difference between karma pool and edge (and i could be wrong about this) is that with Karma pool there was always the chance of permanently burning it. plus Karma was acquired differently than edge, if i remember correctly that is.

luck is ALLWAYS better than Skill.
Skill is only so good, but if your target is lucky, you're not going to hit it no matter HOW good you are . .
And it does not matter how good you are in hand to hand fighting either, one lucky stab with a knife and you're done too

Karma is aquired the same way. don't mix it up with karma pool points.

Karma gets aquired for doing what the GM wants you to do.
this karma can be spent on things.
in SR4, you can spend your karma on the Edge Attribute to raise it as you see fit.
in SR3, your luck went up automatically, with every 10th or 20th point of good karma automatically being converted to a karma pool point.
meaning a guy with 100 karma points aquired would have 90 karma points at his disposal for things he wants and 10 points of karma in his pool.
those karma pool points could be used for pretty much everything that edge nowadays allows too.
and once for hand of god with GM agreeing to that, burning every last single point in the karma pool, no matter if it's 1 or 10 . .
and after you had burned it all, you could, if your GM agrees again, use the hand of god rule again, as soon as you had karma pool points again.
of course, if you had to invoke hand of god twice, you should probably try another character anyway . .

Up to a total of 6, or 7 if you buy feats to push that glass ceiling a bit. 'As you see fit', within the narrow confines the rules permit ...

yes, but that's still a maximum of 8 hands of god PER RUN if you get the karma . .
if you were (un)lucky in SR3(ooh, a pun O.o) you could invoke hand of god every eight runs . .

i thought in sr3 hand of god was ony allowed once per character.

edit, its only once per character in sr3 pg 248 core book.

When I think about SR3 I clench my fist, I squeeze my eyes shut and little tears flow from the corners, my hair gets real big and starts blowing around, and this music starts playing: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XkI54EoZPJw

...Edge has more effect on outcomes than Karma Pool

For one adding Edge dice to a roll gives you the exploding 6s, and (with a set TN of 5) the potential for a boatload of hits. For example, I had a character who threw her 4 edge into an attack roll (with a DP of 14). With all the subsequent re-rolls of 6s ended up with something like a 21 DF with a unarmed attack using her killing hands. In 3rd the scale increased for each extra die past the first (additional 2 for the 2nd, additional 3 for the 3rd, etc) so to get the same 4 extra dice, would cost 10 from the pool.

The other things Karma Pool was used for was

Avoiding an "Oops" (negating the rules of "ones") which is akin to turning a critical glitch into a regular glitch.
rerolling failures
Open test, re-roll dice to an open test (same cost rate as for adding additional dice to a roll).
the aforementioned Hand of God

Besides the first use mentioned above using Edge allows:

Negating a Glitch or Critical Glitch
Roll dice equal to your edge attribute after a test which also invokes the rule of 6.
RE-roll Failures
Roll a Longshot
Act First in an Initiative pass
Gain an additional Initiative pass
Dead Man's Trigger
...and of course, the bothersome Avoid Certain Death.

And, all these can be done as many times per session or run as he or she has edge attribute.

Edge definitely has more effect than Karma Pool. Keep in mind it took 10 karma per KP (which had to be deducted from good Karma by the way) 20 for metas for each Karma Pool. Hence, to have the 10 KP to use to add those 4 dice to a test in the example above would mean a 100 Karma human or a 200 Karma Meta. That is a fair amount of campaigning. Meanwhile a 4th edition character right "out of the box" can have a 6 Edge (7 if human).

Adam please understand that none of this is to start a pissing match and don't think that I am angry about 4e, I'm not. I am however confused from a design view. That is to say I get really passionate about mechanics and why White-Wolf (for example) picks to only have -1, -2, -3 for wound modifiers rather than the old -1, -1, -2, -2, -5, Inc from oWOD (Justin told me they never expected the mortals game to catch on so when they designed the mortals games they assumed the wound modifiers for supernatural & cinematic play not mortal horror, good or bad I can see where they are coming from). Without having talked to any of the core team of Fanpro I have no idea where the design ideas came from, all I can see is SR4 came out about a year after nWOD and nWOD came out about 2 years after the Burning Wheel. Both systems seam to have major influences from the Burning Wheel. Thats not a bad thing, game designers should look at other games and borrow ideas they like for their own games. D&D 3.0 has a big BRP feel to the changes they made. Thats ok, they saw stuff they liked and adapted it to their own system. My comment about not understand nWOD comes from things like

Why are so many skills under agility and almost none under strength?
Why is it 10 BP for Group Skills and Attributes but x5 karma for Group Skills and x3 for Attributes?
Why are skills capped?
Why is there no clear system for someone with no computer skill and no computer program?
Why are karma costs for attributes so cheap compared with skills?

These are all things I would have thought should have been stated by developers by now (maybe they have and my google foo failed) They are not right or wrong things just things, I just don't understand where the developers were coming from. I had the same problem with nWOD and honestly I don't agree with some of there decisions but I feel satisfied because Justin came out and politely answered what they were thinking when they made those crucial design decision. Fanpro, was not nice about it at all, instead I got that it was designed that way on purpose and if I don't like it tough. Catalyst has so far taken a neutral stance and chosen either no comment or said that they tried to catch everything in the play tests but thats why the optional rules exist. However these optional rules are still not available in official missions games last I heard.

I don't expect a game to be perfect and I don't expect game designers to come up with totally original rules. What I do expect is professionalism and people willing to own up to their design goals as well as games that may have influenced them (Mark Reign Hagen said he was influence by Shadowrun on multiple occasions). I don't have to agree with your design goals to respect your decision to follow them. I just need to know what the design goals were.

I've been on dumpshock long enough to remember the Shadow: The Running jokes that came out well before SR4 was released. I think its a shame because SR4 is very different in many ways from nWOD and it was an unfair joke. The latest magic, rigging and matrix rules show a good step forward and some real thought put behind how to make the game more fun. They are not perfect but honestly 4e is more like a new 1e with all the flaws of pushing out a almost entire new set of rules (nWOD has similar problems). I feel like im ranting with no focus now so I'll just shutup.


[edit] some possible answers may be
Why are so many skills under agility and almost none under strength?
we wanted to put the skills under the most realistic attribute rather than try to balance it

Why is it 10 BP for Group Skills and Attributes but x5 karma for Group Skills and x3 for Attributes?
group skills are never suposed to go above 4 so you will not spend as much karma on them, attributes may be 6 or higher and we felt a higher cost would penalize players.

Why are skills capped?
human maximums

Why is there no clear system for someone with no computer skill and no computer program?
Opps, missed it... All computers should have a minimum program of 1, much like a computer today with windows includes internet explorer.

Why are karma costs for attributes so cheap compared with skills?
we wanted to shift from a skill focused game to a high attribute game, high attributes give it a bit of a superhero feel but thats what we felt was most fun.

There's lots of problems with Edge, not the least of which is that you can front-load it. If you start a character with Edge 8, and have the rest be a competent build, you've pretty much got an invincible character. Since the restriction on directly comparing editions appears to be suspended, I'll safely say that you could not have someone be game-breakingly lucky right out of the gate in SR3. Eventually, karma pool would create the same problem as a high Edge, but you could avoid that indefinitely by going to staggered-rate karma pools.

Edge also has a massive problem in the Longshot test, in that after a certain point, skill ceases to matter. Once you're past a certain point in penalties, all that matters is your Edge pool. To top that off, you can pile on the penalties for greater and greater effect, and still it won't make a difference. Only your Edge pool matters. I mean, when your dice pool is 0 to shoot that SWAT officer, you may as well take an additional -16 to bypass his armor. It doesn't change a thing.

KK: you forgot one of the problematic uses of Edge: Buy a Critical Success. You could burn Karma Pool for one normal success, but only if you scored a normal success first. That way, you couldn't simply blow a karma to get a Force 12 spirit. Now, however, in SR4, you can burn an Edge to get 4 services out of said spirit.

Adam: I believe that you were there, but you're just confirming what I've been saying: the similarities to White Wolf were not accidental. That's the problem that several of us have. I think Tete said it best: it's like they tried to copy White Wolf, only they didn't do a good job of it. What's more, Rob Boyle thought this was perfectly all right, and justifiable since White Wolf originally borrowed heavily from Shadowrun.

I've played both White Wolf and Shadowrun, and I play both for different reasons. I like the flavor difference that the change in rules provides. Making them more similar kills even more of the flavor of the game, which already took a hit in the removal of shadowslang, switching the computer terms to modern ones, and all the other little issues that whitewashed the game.

I wouldn't say invincible, but I believe your point is more that its like playing D&D 3.X and having 18 in all stats wizard and the rest of the party has a high stat of 12.


And uhhh you used my real name Cain granted 90% of the PNW old time dumpshockers know who I am already
Also for the record I'm sure they didn't say "heh lets copy nWOD but do it badly". No good game designer would directly copy (and I think very highly of most of the dev who have worked on Shadowrun over the years), and no one would want to do it badly. Its just the perception one can get based on publication dates and similarities on the surface of the rules. In actuality they play pretty different, for example Shadowrun encourages raising attributes if you have more than a few skills associated with it where and nWOD encourages you to raise the lower score unless you have most of skills under an attribute. Another example this time where Shadowrun 4e is clearly better IMHO than nWOD is it is tougher to nick someone to death with a large pistol because of the minimum damage score. nWOD damage is rolled with the skill test there by having a crappy roll doing only a box or two of damage.

Sorry about that. I edited it out.

No biggy I just found it amusing

Woohoo! Four days in the year and we already have the first Edge "discussion" of 2009, complete with the new version of the Citymaster one-shot! Combo-ed with the "Shadowrun 4 is ripped off WoD". Expecting broken builds and narrativsm superiority before the end of next week.
Anyway, Shadowrun got it wrong since the first edition, and I'm the only one who knows how to play it correctly.

Let's speak of another topic: what's up with people who prefer banana-flavored yoghurt to strawberry-flavored yoghurt?!

Seriously, please stop beating what's left of the dead horse and accept that different people might have different opinions and all be right.

what do you mean? we still have the same discussion since last year *snickers*

Why not simply removing the caps?

1. Diagnostics. Look at today´s motor blocks. Little space.
2. Price. The wires inside are expensive, and getting them out saves weight.
3. Comfort (Call your car instead of a taxi).

I like berries over fruit every time. Actually fresh berries are really nice especially if you can pick them yourself. I like bananas when they are raw but fresh strawberries and yoghurt are not only nice, but also very health conscious.

-Chrysalis

1) interferences. Unreliability. More complex parts - more that will break down. Also, for diagnostics: hook up the engine to a central wireless hub
2) RFID cost, too, and I doupt simple copper wire is more expensive than high-tech products.
3) Cenral hub again. You need tot alk to the car, not individual machine parts.


I'm not much of a fan of house rules, because once you open that can of worms, you have an immediate rules bloat and a gazillion things everyone wants changed. Why pay for rulebooks if I have to rewrite the system anyway?


I'm a purist there, I prefer my yoghurt bland. Only certain brands, though, all imports from turkey. It goes really well with a traditional swiss muesli with fresh blueberries, strawberries or apples, though.

The expected counter-argument - and a good one.

Now, I'm still new here, but one /assumes/ that playtesters have tried the game with uncapped Edge. Edge is great and all, but it's limited so you don't simply spend all your points on edge and a single combat skill, guaranteeing yourself an unhittable and one-shot-one-kill character by virtue of a 12 edge.

Really what you should be doing is talking to your players about the concept and story of their character. Shadowrun is still an RPG, and they need to be using the rules as a guideline to make the concepts they have for a character come to life. You might choose a light pistol over a heavy pistol to keep legality in play, or because you want a more petite fire-arm to go with your evening wear. Maybe you want to play a 2070s Humphrey Bogart, with a lined coat and a fedora... why would you give that character wired reflexes and hand-razors? Why augment at all? Bogey was all man, and one of the most iconic characters of all time. The game has been balanced and rebalanced for four editions.. anyone remember when 'Sam Goes First' and 'Mage Goes First' had a fight in old school, and whoever seized init was the flat out winner? If you built NPCs like they built PCs back in the day, your group would be flat-lined and in the docwagon ten seconds out the gate. Discourage min-maxing over concept, encourage flavor and skills and attributes that speak to the way the character should be played, rather than how the dice should be rolled. Focus on a story.


Putting down the Storyteller's hat... I've found the inherant balances of the game to be well put together until you start dealing with heavy weapons. And still, it's realistic. The guy to get the drop on you with the machine gun first is the winner of that fight. Even a Troll adept (admittedly, built by a novice) goes down in one complex action from a M-MG or H-MG. They've shuffled the skills into stats that fit them well, and cut dexterity in two to keep it from being a God-Stat any longer. Reaction is still bad-ass but you have to be a Fire or Air spirit to dodge every bullet for the two rounds it takes to take down covered and heavily armored characters. The penalties are inconvenient, rather than crippling now, and if I wanted them to go back to crippling, I'd just tweak damage penalties to come every two damage instead of every three! It's all looking good, and I've managed to push Shadowrun seamlessly into the farther future, preventing us from playing 'slightly grittier modern day RPG with cyborg elfs and magical dragons' by updating the world for todays accelerating technology.

After all... you can already unlock, defrost, and start your car from your bedroom today. Why shouldn't you be able to also pull it out of the garage before you're out of the shower in 2070?

i believe you can, indeed, as of today have your car automatically drive in/out of the garage without you needing to be inside.
especially usefull for people with garages in which there is not enough room to open the cars doors

Sure, but where that demands your car's parts to communicate wirelessly instead of via wire and through a central hub is beyond me. All it requires is a central interfaxce for the car that you can use to tell it what to do, and that was possible in SR all the time, right back to 1st edition.


Because the system has made unaugmented skillmonkeys, as in SR3, impossible to play. Every street punkt with cheap-o ware will just smash your Bogart, unless he happens to be an adept (and then, he'd more be Max Payne). Sure, story primacy is fine and all, but playing without coherent rules usually isn't feasible either, in my experience.

Why that?

Because you're unable to have more than one initiative pass, skills are prohibitly expensive, and the glass ceiling issue at max. 12 DP.

You can easily have a 12 Edge monster, just summon a Force 12 spirit. Possession + Channeling is one way of using its Edge, but there are others.


Or you can choose a hold-out for evening wear, and a heavy for packing heat. Still no use for the light pistol.


I remember those days like they were yesterday. Oh, wait, it *was* yesterday, in a SR4 game. Go first = Teh Win still exists in SR4.

Oh, spare me the "Real roleplayers gimp their characters" bullcrap. Your concept characters will get flattened, because those who believe that numbers matter will have a character with both a concept and numbers to back it up.

amen to cain

we have 3 gms one only wanted the "concept" characters while the rest of us played min maxed specialists. he said the game was unfair that way and complained quite often. now he plays forth edition and still complains about magic being broken but acts like social skillls and the matrix cant be. its all a matter of taste my group plays 3rd because we like the world the way it is and the mechanics the way they are. friend "plays" fourth because "its more balanced than third" to me they look like they still have the same "balance" issues which in every game you play there will always be optimized characters and specializations. and someone will always say that someone else needs gimped.

I always build my characters' numbers around a concept. But why I should purposely gimp them because of that, I don't get. Unless the concept happens to be a gimped person in some kinda way, but that's not really fun to play.

heh...

im game, if some would stop pulling silly snipes like using SR3 terms in SR4 threads...

SR3 will always hold a special place for me. I got into RPGs late, and SR3 was the first game I ever generated my own character for. It's the first game I ever GMed, and the game I've spent the most on books for over the years.

I do like SR4, however, and would probably choose to run it over SR3 if I decided to run a game today. Similarly, if a friend said he had a game idea and was wondering which edition to run it under, I'd advise 4th unless his plan had some intrinsic element that was dropped in the edition change. I don't think the system was stolen from WOD, and wouldn't really care even if one of the designers told me personally that they stole it. There are a limited number of ways you can do a system, and I prefer that the stat is now taken into account directly rather than acting as a cap as in 3rd edition.

High-edge characters may be a handful, but I like the fact that people can have another option which isn't magic or cyber. Several times before I've sat down with new players to gen a character, and found their character concept didn't include magic or cyber. In 4th edition, I can now offer them a 3rd route where they get to make cinematic 1-in-a-million chances when they really want to. Yes, I know that the real potential for abuse lies in stacking a good edge with cyber or magic, but if I did encounter an issue with someone abusing a high-edge character then I'd house-rule the abused aspects. It's better, IMHO, for the system to be there for when it fits a character concept than to not be there at all.

House-rules need not Nerf edge completely, either. Perhaps a long-shot costs another point of edge for every 4 the dice pool would be below 0. They can thus make that impossible shot, and bypass armor, but they can't do it too frequently. Thus, the long-shot rule is still intact for most uses, but less abusable. As for abusing burning edge for critical successes, I'd be tempted to make it only work once per scene or day.

Concerning the uber spirit summon, there are a number of things in the game which make that less likely to succeed. Lets say a mage is attempting to summon a F10 spirit. Firstly, the game states that high-force spirits are likely to use edge to resist being summoned or bound by weaker mages, so the spirit uses edge (20 dice + Rule of 6) and gets the expected 8 hits for a total of 16P drain. Now lets say our human mage has 10 dice to roll for drain. It's actually impossible for for the mage to succeed in making the drain (they can't get the 16 hits necessary) and thus they can't invoke the auto-critical rule. Someone with lots of dice for drain has a chance of making it, using centering for example, but that's a narrow path they walk. If a spirit scored 9 hits versus a mage with 16 dice for drain, on-average the mage would take 9 boxes of damage after spending edge. If that isn't enough of a discouragement, my above 1/scene or day house rule should put a stop to it.

overreacting much?

1.) That is a question of technological advancements. Wireless adapters are mass-produced and reliable even today. Implementation takes time, even today.
2.) Installing fresh cables in a car is not exactly cheap.
3.) Only the car itself is a relevant node for SR purposes. (Either system). The previous points are more about the wireless paradigm.

There's a group of roleplayers who think that numbers shouldn't matter, and that if you focus too hard on numbers you're being a munchkin. The only way in their eyes to prove you're not a munchkin is to deliberately cripple your characters. If you can't have fun with the resulting gimp, it's obviously *your* fault, because you're not really roleplaying.

Don't flame me, I'm just relating what I've seen.

This has been gone over in many other threads, but the basic counter-assertion is that if you spend Edge on the initial roll, your exploding dice gives you a virtually infinite amount of successes possible. That means the auto-crit rule is easily invoked.

1) No, they're far from being as stable as copper wire when it comes to connectivity. With the inherent drawbacks of radio communication in regards to interference, no technological breakthrough can possibly make that go away and still make them cheaper than coppper wire.
2) RFID don't grow on trees, they are made from raw materials that are put through several energy consuming processes (several more than copper wire). I don't see how this can be cheaper.
3) Then the fluff - again - contradicts the rules.

Yeah. I've seen this attitude too. Sometimes it can be fun to play a gimped character, however, and it's not always incompatible with character optimization. You can give a fair bit of depth to an autistic troll ganger, and use the points from uneducated/uncouth (the effects of which I think could be likened to autism) to make the character uber-strong. I'm playing an uncouth dwarf in a game right now, and people don't mind as I a) role-play it and b) make it funny.
I thought only 1 point of edge could be spent per test? Surely spending the edge for extra dice and the rule of 6 would preclude getting an auto-crit?

Anyway, I don't really want to highjack this thread for a discussion of the edge rules. If there are problems with particular uses in whatever reading is going, I don't mind. I can house-rule them away, and prefer the edge stat to the karma pool system.

But... if you're deliberately crippling the character, isn't that just another way of "focussing on the numbers"? Too high or too low isn't the point; the point is caring about the numbers over the "character". And caring how low your numbers are is just as bad as caring how high your numbers are - it's like a rich kid deliberately slumming to prove he's "legit".

now you're thinking things through *g*

they claim to be the better role players, but in the end, they aren't better role players AND their characters suck compared to yours ^^

Spending and burning Edge are totally separate things. But yeah, you can probably search for the full argument in other threads.

I didn't say it made sense, either. That's just how they think.