Well, and part of the problem is the skill system.

People feel like they need 15-20 dicepools to be 'leet', and people look at 4's as barely competent.
The dice variation supports that, you've got plenty of chances of glitching with a 4 skill, and a 6 skill isn't a huge improvement, compared to what it cost you.

If people could make more reasonable characters, they might round them out a bit better and Hackers /could/ help in the fire-portion of combat.
Btw, you want a hacker to help in the fireportion of combat? Give him a rotor drone with a mounted smg, or taser.
If he uses the command program, wiht decent pilots he is seriously helping.
And he can do other things with his matrix ips

I've always outlined to my groups that they need to build characters that can handle themselves in combat. I don't care if its guns, drones, spirits, armed or unarmed melee combat, but the group of players I have are going to fight and I don't want anyone being bored cause they can't do anything.

And I agree with sabs, too many people feel they need to have 15-20 dice pools to be effective in combat and that's just not the case. I frequently am putting my players up against enemies with half of those pools and they do just fine.

I have considered reducing matrix action to just a short set of lite rolls. Or maybe even just a single opposed roll where a failure simply means you don't get in the node (i.e. active alert triggered, so log off, maybe to try again with new Access ID), glitch puts you in cybercombat or critical glitch gets you dumpshocked. Basically, just create a much simpler framework with clear effects.

I realize that dumbs it down and cuts the hacker out of a lot of rolls and play time, but, unless you are running a solo game or an online version where you can effectively juggle everyone's attention, getting rid of the rolls and getting the hacker to the point, is what you want to do.

I don't think anyone wants to spend 15 minutes to hack a door or risk even more time if the shit hits the fan and you have to get into cybercombat for another 15 minutes... From my experience, hackers don't cut and run at the first sign of an alert or hostile IC, they want to be a hero and try to still do what they wanted to do, much to the chagrin of everyone else at the table.

I think this depends alot on the GM and to a lesser extent the decker player and group. I grew up on a GM who made the decker go in the building. The decker in turn would then try to do other useful things, we then in turn would ask the decker to open the door, turn off the camera and what not. Eventually we got to the point where we would always try to get the decker in first.

Our decker actually chose to go in with us. He was even faster than my mercenary. Our GM was good and would have the decker show up early, or we'd go out and play with a frisbee for a while, when there was heavy decking to be done. Once we went in physically, he'd make all the decking rolls easier. I'm not sure exactly what he did (I just shot things ), but it never took too long.

My point is, a good GM can get around most of the problems with any of the decking systems. Heck my current GM just has the character make a computer roll or two and we go from there.

There was definitely, in my opinion, some factor of intimidation going on that kept people from pushing to try figure out how to bypass the system to make it work. The shear volume of crunch in the "right way" to do it convincing people to just screw it and give the whole thing a pass rather than trying to jury-rig something more manageable [when even the couple official attempts of simplification largely failed].

Plus the sizable outlay for a "serious" decker character in chargen, that hurt making dual purpose characters.

My personal favorite was to build /deckers-- rigger/deckers, samurai/deckers, and so on. They could do more than punch a deck. All you needed was a good Computer skill. Now, the skill system makes it difficult to be good at anything but punching a keyboard. You need too many skills to keep up. While I agree that splitting the skill wasn't a bad idea, I think they split it a bit too much.

They did that across the board too much IMO. the stealth skill form previous games covered what the group does now. Sure breaking some skills up is fine, and with stealth you can probably get by with just infiltration. But for things like decking where it is a role you are trying to fit into you kind of need all of them or almost all of them and that is a lot of build points. But I think skills cost too much comparative to the rest of the costs in general so this just adds to the pain.

The skill cost is probably the mechanic I like the least in SR4, though you can build in a reasonable level of combat competence without spending too much. Agi ~3-4, one Firearms skill ~3-4, +spec, +smartlink = 10-12 dice for shooting, which is at least enough to hit something, and a hacker type can pick up some muscle toner and skill recorders if he wants to add to that.

He's no combat monster, but it's not a massive cost outlay either.

I think that they made this design choice to force hard decisions upon the character creation process... It tends to result in more specialized characters, no doubt, or characters that have yet to actually enter into their prime, though they are more well rounded (Karma Gen is better for the latter in my opinion, and BP for the Former). I thnk that this is okay. Sure, you could start out as the best in a single field with little to no secondary support, or you could have no real "Specialties" and be generally okay, but not stellar. Both design options work in Shadowrun.

Yeah, I guess what cheeses me off a bit is it went from a skill system to an attribute system with a couple extra dice added because of skills. I don't mind attributes having an effect I kind of think they should, but 4e attributes do too much though in previous editions I think they did too little.(I think 3e got the closest to a attribute/skill balance) Weirdly for unexplained reasons and this irritates me as well when it comes to hacking attributes are removed from the equation entirely unless you follow an optional rule in unwired. But like I said I don't want attributes removed from the equation entirely, like in 2e a 1charisma face is just as good as a 6 charisma face at the vast majority of face duties. But I do not like adding 9+ dice to every skill tied to agility when my skill will likely add 4-6 dice to only a specific focus like pistols. In 4e it is all about the dice pool and way too much of the dice pool is brought to you by attributes.

The "well rounded" effective character is a myth in Sr4.5. Hyperspecialization is still the way to go. Characters start out powerful in their field and weak elsewhere, or start out extremely powerful in their field and weaker elsewhere. Anything else is pretty much a useless character, because of the hard decisions TJ is referring to.

I understand... Though the thing that irritated me about 2e and 3e were the adjusting TN's... our GM is/was a stickler for a nod to realism, and it got very frustrating to have a high dicepool (with combat pool thrown in), and yet still not hit anything with a Pistol/Weapon because your TN's were adjusted to a 10+ due to conditions. I hated that with a passion. The mechanic of add/subtract modifiers from the pool is more appealing to me in this regard, because you always have a chance to accomplish something (assuming you have dice left).

All in all, I do prefer SR4A for its ease of learning (we induct new gamers on ocassion), and streamlined system. Any edition has its flaws, but I can live with the flaws of SR4A...

I agree, I house rule far less in SR4 than I have in the other three, and most of the systems feel more intuitive. I mean, the reason I never came here before is "why bother when I'm house ruling 90% of the rules anyway?"

I disagree with this though... 8-12 dice is an effective character, assuming that your GM is not throwing 15-30+ Dice monstrosities at you. The character I currently play in our longstanding campaign has good stats (3 Exceptional Ones), and average dice pools of 10-14 and he is quite capable of accomplishing things. Yes, the specialists can throw a few more dice... but that does not detract from the effectiveness of the character (and honestly, in most cases, a Critical Success is a Critical Success whether you have 4 successes or 10). The two generalists in our party have More influence, more contacts, and more utility than any other 2 specialists at the table combined. Yes, it did force some hard choices at the beginning of play, but it is my belief that those choices are what tend to produce better characters. The choices are what define them. It is the Why, and not the How, that interests me.

Not everyone agrees, but that is okay by me... I prefer a more profound character, with all the flaws and drawbacks that they incur (even if they are not mechanically modeled) than what the stats contribute. I am not trying to start a discussion of the merits of Mechanics vs. Fluff, but I often find myself focusing on the fluff of the character more often than the mecahnics, at least lately. It is the Fluff that I generally want to pursue.

Sorry, TJ, but numbers don't lie. In SR4.5, the bigger your dice pool, the more effective you are, period. Critical successes notwithstanding, there are many cases where you want as many successes as possible (such as shooting someone). You can also get that humongous dice pool without sacrificing too much from other areas, enough so that you're not noticeably less effective in those areas than any other similar archetype. I'm not allowed to post a character to prove it, but you can dig it up with little problem.

As far s Fluff vs Mechanics, that's a false dichotomy. They're not mutually exclusive, it all depends on the player's RPing skills. I can hand the most one-dimensional, min-maxed monstrosity to a good roleplayer, and he'll do wonders with it. Conversely, I can hand the most "roleplay-oriented" character to the wrong player, and he'll sit in the corner all night, waiting to kill something. Character build has nothing to do with it.

I liked both base systems though with sr4s fixed TN I think 5 is a really bad idea. At TN 5 it dilutes the difference between skill levels far too much. On average you need 3 deice to get a single success in difference that is more than 1 in both the skill and the attribute. and given the range of skill is 0-7 so totally untrained to worlds best I think the fixed TN of 5 with dropping dice due to conditions destroyed the feeling of difference sin skill levels. About the only way a weaker skill level hits you is if you get knocked below 0 or as glitch insurance. A fixed Tn of 3 would have been a much better choice IMO, it creates a better feeling of the differences in skill levels it doesn't make glitches so damn common when your dice pool is reduced to 6 or less, and as a general rule I think people prefer it when a die roll is a success with a chance of failure over a failure with a chance to succeed.

But for the dicepool coming form attributes too much part of my problem, maybe if attributes added 1/2 there rating or were like the unwired optional rule and capped net hits instead of adding there full rating to the pool. It also would reduce the huge dice pool silliness I see in this game too often, even 12 dice is a lot of dice to roll. Oh and it would help the issue with direct combat spells being magic+skill vs willpower problem. Did I mention I also somewhat contradictory hate capped skills.

... which in turn relies somewhat on the chargen choices of other players, to make the GM's job easier to provide a challenge to everyone.

Cain's experience is coloured by him [as far as I know exclusively] playing public Missions. There the players create the characters without knowing each other and the scenario is not tailored to the individual PC. Further his statements assume that the player is aiming to min-max, the ideal is that the PC is never really threatened, and that the GM isn't going to actively look for and pressure those weak points of the PC. So his observations and conclusions really reflect an entirely artificial construct of his own making.

@Shinobi Killfist

Lowing the TN to 3 is the polar opposite feel to Shadowrun's traditionally splashy, slightly over-the-top feel. The higher TN produces a much flater, wider distribution curve on successes (more variability). You fail big or succeed spectacularly more often, which is a good match for SR1-3.

Not to the games I played in sr1-3. You usually succeeded big with the occasional screw up. In Sr4 you fail a lot unless you have a ton of dice pool padding.

That is about where the modifiers are coming down, and possibly apples and oranges in scenarios, GMing, and approaches. ((I'm not crazy about how modifiers are handled in SR4)). In any event the TN is the wrong place to be changing things around. The TN 5 is a good match for the unpredictable nature of the previous exploding 6's.

I disagree totally on that. The TN 5 sets up a crappy situation where differences in skill are virtually meaningless unless they are very large which is a bad match for the previous editions.

No. Attribute + Skill(capped at 6, occasionally 7) + dice from equipment & implants & magic = die pool does that. Your ire is miss-aimed. EDIT: Besides "virtually meaningless" being an exaggeration, and focusing heavily on the pool side. In SR3 if you have a Skill of 3 or a Skill of 4 doesn't make much absolute difference in percentage chance of success either if the TN is 11.

Plus the label "Skill" in SR1-3 means something different than the label "Skill" in SR4 and you are going with the more literal comparison.

I had the exact opposite experience in SR3... with Targt Numnber that often exceeded 9, it was the rare gunfight that did not last 10 minutes worth of rounds (Hours in RL), as bullets whizzed past everyone, and no one was harmed... until that LUCKY shot that did hit, and then the Target 2 Soak reduced it to nothing, starting the whole scenario over agian...

There is far more variability in SR4 In my opinion...

In the game I just started I stuck with SR4.5 as a result of new players and making the rule book accessible to them. I heavily modified the rules to a state where they don't make me want to quit mid session and largely just play magical tea party.

One of the things I did was drastically reduce the skill list. All computer skill boiled down to 4 skills allowing me to have 1 group and get rid of the cracking and electronics warfare group. I also cut down the number of programs needed to 11. I also scrapped Response. Guess what? Suddenly the TM can participate in real world situations straight out of character creation and it makes it much easier for people to "double" dip into the computer side if they want.

Edit: I've also hacked around the big dice pool issue somewhat and made all dice pool modifiers affect threshold on a 1-for-1 basis. So you can probably still pull of those crazy shots but it's not going to always be an autosuccess. Also helps speed things up since the player is always rolling the same dice for that test.

Respectfully, I don't understand what this phrase means. Can you expand on this?

And I hear you on the program list. If I had by 'drathers I would cut that list in half, again.

EDIT: Actually, I'd probably ditch tracking of discrete programs entirely. But I'm not much of a "gear" person, especially in a game where the software pirating abilities make the "gear" in question relatively easy to obtain thus they don't even really hit much of the triumph of accumulating stuff button.

I also played a home game for somewhere around a year after I moved to Oregon. The same principle didn't change: min-maxing was rewarded by more spotlight time. The Mach 4.6 sportscar was just hideously broken.

So if you have a modifier that says -1 die for this action then you actually have +1 Threshold for the action. So if you are firing at a running target, at extreme range, while you are in cover then you are looking at a Threshold of 8 to hit him.

Adding that on top of the defensive abilities already inherent in the system is truly ludicrous, even at close ranges...

I'm a 3rd edition guy myself. I had my greatest successes there, in terms of writing and becoming involved in the behind-the-scenes aspects of things. I also had my greatest successes in terms of playing and running the game with SR3.

I find myself less and less a fan of SR4 as time goes by, and I really kind of think that's sad. Maybe it's just the old grognard in me feeling nostalgic, but I'm not happy with how things are going. I personally feel like SR has lost its way a great deal with the fourth edition.

Min-maxing being rewarded by more spotlight time is not wholly a problem with the rules. Some RPGs are more and less dependent on a good social contract at the table. Shadowrun, imo, has always been heavily dependent on social contract because it has always been vulnerable to min-maxers. Before my game began I said I wanted characters who weren't hyper-specialists and I carefully worked with each player to make sure my proscription was followed. A year into the the game we have characters who are all good at at least a few things and no one character dominates.

This is one of the reasons I disliked the one convention Missions game I played in. You get a bunch of strangers together, each with their own (probably) min-maxed character with no regard to party balance. Then you have a "Me, Me!" competition to get and keep the GM's attention so that your hyper-specialist can be the one that gets to roll ten Hits to solve the problem at hand. I much prefer convention games where you are handed a character that has been designed with both the scenario *and* the other characters in mind.

The problem isn't min/maxers per se. It is a problem that a lot of games have that shouldn't exist. System Mastery.

It is very easy in Shadowrun to accidentally make a weak or overpowered character when you are learning the rules. It is a system that also does not make it easy to prevent that or make it easy to learn which decisions are right/wrong. I know I am going to get jumped all over for saying this but it is the single greatest selling point of D&D4. There is no character-by-character system mastery. The system mastery comes in learning how to work as a team to overcome obstacles. You can still min/max characters but no matter what you will always do your job better if you have complimentary team mates to help you out.

This isn't true in games like nWoD, Exalted, Shadowrun, Earthdawn, and D&D3/3.5. Yes, these are all the same game hence I can lump them into the same category. The three point based character gen systems have wrong choices/traps baked right into character creation that can cripple your character from the beginning. The hybrid (ED) and the class based (D&D3) have similar issues with regards to class selection and options (ie. feats, skills). These are things that appear to be good when you are first learning the game but when you learn how things actually work (gain System Mastery) you realize that the choices you made were traps. Futhermore these systems don't have methods of backtracking your choices short of GM lenience.

For example, take the Shadowrun martial artist. On paper it looks amazing. "I can punch through a wall with my fist!" But once you actually get into combat you realize that you are a chump as it is taking you several initiative passes to kill your enemies whereas your buddies are killing them in 1 with double taps from their guns. Things get even worse if you made the mistake of chosing to be a street samurai that specialized in martial arts instead of a physical adept. The concept rocks socks but the rules make you blow chunks.

Here's an ED example. After circle 5 your group is better off having elementalists and nethermancers instead of any non-Warrior melee fighter. The Sky Raider is a wicked concept but it just can't dish out and take enough beats to justify not just using an elemental/ally spirit (spirit of man in SR terms). Spirits are more resilient to magic, have comparable hit points, and come with powers that the Sky Raider can't duplicate (plus they are free).

So what you have happening in these system mastery games is you have a disparity in player knowledge/skill. This can be very off-putting as a new player in an established group since you are told that your concept won't work and you have to do it this way to be useful (this is a major factor that turned me off D&D3.5). It can also result in some severe niche protection issues as the non-trap options are able to perform your role better than you leading you to wonder why your character bothered waking up that morning. This is not a question of winning compared to another character but meaningfully contributing to the team effort.

I'm not saying that D&D4 is the be all and end all of game systems and that SR should mimic it but I am saying that SR and most other games systems that are still stuck in 1990 could learn some things from it. Getting rid of System Mastery is probably the single biggest favor a game company could do for its line and for the hobby. The steep hurdle to learn a lot of these games is IMO the reason why the hobby is having such difficulty getting new blood. I also feel that of the SR editions out there, SR4 is the one with the biggest trap options. YMMV.

... by a GM and players that let it. *shrug* EDIT: Though Shadowrun isn't particularly well balanced for "spotlight" (negative qualities are generally the opposite of balanced in this regard) and the tools in, and support from the system for dealing with dicks is pretty limited.

I suspect this opinion is influenced by passage of time and which of the traps you stepped in most recently.



With SR4 Rob & Company tried, and I suggest somewhat succeeded at, shortening the time till you had adequate system mastery to make competent the decisions. There is more than one way to reduce the issue, which I feel you rightly point out.

Of course this lead to howls of "dumbing down the game". :/ It also triggers the feelings of "I've got a lot of learning invested in this, they are tossing it out" and the nerdrage accompanying it.

Ah, OK. All modifiers are to Threshold. I do suspect this would play better (to my tastes), if only that it is more consistent. There might be some oddities when you get down to Threshold 0 (did you play you always had to have at least one success?)

I'm used to playing a (d6) pool game where all penalties are +Threshold and all benefits are +Die. But it uses TN4, so +Threshold is closer in magnitude than +Die is in Shadowrun....and the starting [and ending] pool size is, roughly speaking, less than half that of Shadowrun.

Meh, I've always made my characters in mind with regards to roleplaying, not whether or not I can murder everyone in the universe in the first period. I guess I can get scoffed at that, but I've always been more for the rich experience of a nuanced character. I realize people have different ways to have fun and I'm not knocking combat monsters, but I dunno, when it starts getting to the only way you're "supposed" to make a character is combat monsters, I just shrug and shake my head.

I never believed in that "Only one way to make a character" stuff. A character is as viable as the GM will help them be. A campaign should be written around the characters' strengths and weaknesses. That is what a good GM should do, not make adventures on a perceived way to play. There should never be a character that is not useful.

Then again, if you find min/maxing fun and always making the "optimal" character fun then hey, your game. As for me, I just don't think it is really supposed to be played like that.

Seems to be too many video game ideas and old wargaming ideas rolling around. Making that optimal build to "Beat" the game. Thing is, no winners or losers in tabletop RPG's, unless it is Paranoia!

I agree. I'm tired of the broken-record argument about spotlight time. Either deal with it by dealing with the player or the character. Having now played Dresden, I have a feeling for how the fate system works (the basis for Cain's spotlight time argument). The same mechanics are not at play here. They are completely different games.

My personal opinion is a GM that can't find a way to deal with min-maxing and spotlight hogs at their table is a pretty poor GM, especially in a campaign home-game.

EDIT: Realize I say this under the assumption that the min-maxing is disruptive to game play.

@Redjack

I did add an addendum to my post. There are some things about Shadowrun (1 through 4) that aren't particularly helpful to the GM and players in this regards, even work against avoiding games being overshadowed by a player doing what is effectively anti-social things. There are more effective ways a system can help with this.

I'd say that was the selling point of D&D 4e, but I did not find it to be true. There are plenty of bad choices and choices that are above average, in stat arrangement, feats, skills, classes, powers, rituals, gear etc. we had plenty of people build flat out bad characters while reading up on a class and other people build flat out almost overpoweringly awesome characters. Sure there are flat out less choices to make in a structured system like D&D so it will usually be less extreme, but D&D 4e still rewards system mastery to a high degree.

Hm. I guess I'm a little wary at the 4th ed combat. Where an average PC (ok maybe slightly above average, running with a 14+ dice pool) with a light pistol and no AP ammo, could mow down a guy in military armor without having to bother with called shots. Sure you can't immediately KILL the guy, but all you have to do is keep hitting him and his stun track will roll up, knock him out and then you can kick him to death.

Its not a perfect comparison, but under the sr4 combat setup, the North Hollywood Shootout wouldn't have ended the way it did, much less lasted as long as it did. 44 minutes of intense firefight action. By SR4 rules, either side would have been ko'd far earlier (half a dozen turns, tops) and even if the two armored guys had something like 'pain editors' (since there were reports they had been shot and still kept going) the overflow would have killed them anyway in another handful of turns.

Well that 14 dice guy is a better shot than anyone in human history. But yes I get your point, 14 dice=5 hits-2 hits for the reaction test so 7DV from a light pistol. You'd need 21 dice to totally soak that on average. Then again SR2 if you got the TN down to 2 you frequently might soak a full autofire blast if you used your combat pool.(or were a troll). They both seem tobe extremes just different ends of the extremes.

Okay. You go to some 14 year old's house and tell him he is a shitty GM because he didn't curb problems he wasn't aware of. Shadowrun doesn't do a very good job of setting the GM up to succeed. I'd argue in fact that it actually sets the GM up to fail. The system mastery learning curve is even harsher for the gm. Again, this is another spot where D&D4 has done a very good job. The DMG and DMG2 are amazing tools for basic story writing and telling, and toolboxes to show the DM how to use the system to make interesting encounters. A GM Toolkit like that would be very helpful to SR but they've never really hit that mark. nWoD would be another good example with their Storytelling chapters in the splat books. It tells you how to set the tone and the mood that the designers were looking for (but they still have the disconnect with the rules).

@Shinobi:

We haven't hit a Threshold 0 issue yet. But I'd still require 1 hit. As far as trap choices in D&D4 they aren't as big as the internet makes them out to be (except Hybrids) but I'm not going to get into that here. That's what D&D forums are for...lol. There is a lot more direction in the class write-ups that should help someone that has read the description (something the designers assume) instead of expecting them to just figure it out.

I'd say every game could use something like D&D 4es DMG. Not everyone is a good GM, some people need help. i know I am not a good GM and I need help. D&D4s DMG was useful to a person like me.

As for traps, look at all the feats that have stat reqs, if you make a super smart mage(hey int is the only stat you need for your spells) you easily could miss out on a huge range of feats and not know this was going to happen. On the other end a lot of classes have 2 stats, like the warlord with chr and strength being big stats. Not knowing the system well leads to maybe balancing those stats so being sucky at both. At every level powers have a fairly wide range in capabilities from at wills to 30th level powers. You have to read and really understand what all the crap in the power block means. Sure they are not as big as SR4s traps, but you are going to get that anytime you have a free character generation system vs a structured class system. Using your earthdawn example, spirits did not come out until a later book so we were well past circle 5 before we had access to them. All the classes were bad ass in some way, the sky raider stomped people into the ground quite hard(and his circle 1 talent to ignite his own blood for healing was awesome, especially given the limited healing magic in the game) with his attacks, and we actually by circle 5 had a sky ship so he added utility as well. We never saw the spirits as traps or a system mastery issue, they were broken sure, but in every system there will be broken things your GM has to deal with.

End of the day class systems have less traps or system mastery issues since there are less choices. Systems where you build the character up from scratch usually have more choices and have a bigger system mastery issue.(obviously some build from scratch systems are so basic there are few choices). I'm not going to say one way is better than the other, structure vs freedom type arguments in a RPG kind of come down to taste.

If you can find a copy, seek out the Narrator's Guide for Decipher's late Star Trek RPG, whether you intend to play Trek or not. One of the best GM resources I've held in my hand in 30 years of this hobby.

That said, what I've seen of the D&D 4e DMG has been nice, too. My interest in that one has been solely as a player, though I think I need to pick up copies of at least the DMG and the first Monster Manual to go with my PHB. At some point in my copious unstructured free time....

Crazy examples like this always make me laugh. Ok, I'll play. The same 14 year old is gonna have problems with power gamer no matter the system. He'll learn to deal with them... or he won't.

I agree that like any game, like any system, loopholes exist that can be exploited. I was really making more of a point that no system is ever going to be perfect and that some gamers will also try to make the character that tilts to scales on the table.

To say it another way: When players embrace that RPG's are generally about cooperation and 'we all win together' instead of 'I have to beat everyone else' the table generally plays better.

I'll second this. Great book. A pity some game systems just don't make it. Unfortunate, given Trek's fandom you'd think they'd be able to keep an rpg going.

Yeah. I only do this with Cain because, besides being far closer to 40 than 14, he's already had it extensively explained to him. It's like a twisted version of the Grocho Marx joke: "Doctor, it hurts when I slam my penis in the door." "Well then don't slam your penis in the door." But rather than taking the advice to heart Cain insists that the correct interpretation of the SR book is that he should slam his penis in the door, so he keeps doing it .... and keeps complaining about the results. *shrug*

Not sure if this is some sort of comment on my hyperbole like Redjack made so you might need to dumb it down for my financial industry mind. I know what the Groucho comment means but I'm not sure if you are saying I am doing the same thing or if you are commenting on Cain.

@Redjack:

I'm glad I made you laugh. Of course it is a ridiculous example but I think it is apt. I used age as a stand-in for inexperience. I remember the games my friends and I used to run when I was 14 and they were complete shit and usually devolved into name calling and arguments whenever we hit problems with the system or each other. I know that there are plenty of grown-ups who have been playing these games for decades who also are inexperienced or sub-par GMs. The system mastery inherent in a game like SR is brutal enough -- give the GM a head start on the players by giving some good advice, not the garbage that has been par for the course in SR. At least if the GM knows generally what to expect he will be familiar with it or be able to reference the book like a troubleshooting manual.

So I'm guessing you didn't like Mr. Johnson's Little Black Book, Cheops?

Dude, I've ran Shadowrun for forever. Can you say from personal experience that SR1 had certain spots that were better than SR4? And vice-versa?

Previous versions of Shadowrun didn't have the spotlight time problem as badly. It's not just a GM thing. I just ran a SR4 conversion tonight that went great, Matrix and all, with no problems or issues. Just because you like the system doesn't mean it's perfect, and the simple fact is that SR4 does have problems. All systems do.