A lot fewer moving parts, IMO, and that makes it assloads faster. Our playtest group had characters ready to play in less than an hour. Now that books are out, even if just to the Origins attendees at the moment, I plan on running a chargen clinic this weekend to get more real-world data. But if my wife, who is not a role-player and doesn't spend a great deal of time worrying about my hobby, can make a character in an hour and six minutes (I timed her)...then yeah, it's a lot faster.

I actually spent less time back in SR1-3 with Priority A in resources... and I had ¥1,000,000 back then...

Picking your resources priority and then spending money as opposed to balancing buying another piece of gear, or a skill at rank 1 or something else... that's where it starts to get sticky.

This.

Game design theory treats players as a reactionary mass rather than thinking individuals for a reason.

Players as a group will ALWAYS figure out the path to the most power for the least resources, and use it. GMs can help, but that is not an excuse for the rules designer to get lazy and say, "oh, the GMs will take care of it, I don't have to try and balance the game".




-k

Right. The act of selecting gear remains generally the same, but you don't spend time fine-tuning each 5000 nuyen versus spending the build point elsewhere. You just have 400,000 or however much, and you spend as much of it as you reasonably can, instead of dithering "well if I buy this at Rating 2 instead of Rating 3, and I don't get the Survival Knife, and I wear a longcoat instead of a securetech ultravest..."

To me, the problem isn't so much power level as play style. Shadowrun lets you start out all up and down the power and experience scale. You can be a fresh-faced kid out to make his mark, or a middle-aged ex-corporate expediter who is burned out and on a downward spiral. You can be someone who is a Jack of all trades, or someone who is a master of one. To me, it is more important to have people playing together, and playing the same overall style of game, than it is to try enforcing some kind of parity in power. Especially for a game like Shadowrun, where breadth of ability is often more important than being awesome at just one or two things.

The guy with 8 dice and the guy with 25+ could hang together if they both fit into the same world. Maybe the guy with 8 dice is Sammy the Snitch, a weaselly guy with lots of friends in low places and a pug-nosed revolver that he would rather not have to use. Maybe the guy with 25+ dice is a hulking troll modelled after Marv from Sin City. But if they are both roleplaying their characters appropriately in a gritty noir-style game, then they could certainly work together. The problems come up when the play styles clash. If the GM envisions a game of up-and-coming pros, the guy with 8 dice is playing a street punk loser who is just starting out as a runner, and the guy with 25+ dice spins up the barrels of his Vindicator minigun any time the game gets bogged down in all of that boring talking stuff, then things won't go so well.

It remains to be seen how flexible SR5 is. To me, the two biggest strengths of Shadowrun were the ability to craft characters of bewildering variety, and the ability to accommodate a wide variety of different play styles (although not always all at once).