QUOTE (Seerow @ Jun 7 2013, 08:41 PM)

Re 1/3: Actually, having the gun skills reduced is something that really should happen. The skills are not meaningfully different enough to warrant being separate skills. It's as if a Mage had to pick up a different skill not just for every school of magic, but for every spell he could cast. Turning "Firearms" from a Skillgroup into a Skill would be a great first step. Combining Gunnery and Heavy Weapons would be another good choice. As would be turning the Close Combat skill group into a Close Combat skill. While the different weapons do have their niche, they aren't different enough to warrant picking up a whole separate skill for them.
Re 2: It's almost like you're agreeing with me here. I agree skills aren't totally worthless, in fact you'd be hard pressed to find any place I've said that. The problem exists with cheap attributes and overpriced skills, as you said. I would, for example, love attributes that only give half their bonus to dice pools, and have skills go back to having cost based on attribute again, and become uncapped and the driving force in dicepools (ie if you have attribute 4, getting a skill rating up to 4 is really cheap. From 5-8 is a little more expensive. 9-12 a little more, and so on). Like having skill 1-3 in a bunch of random stuff shouldn't be character optimization suicide, it should be the sort of thing that is expected.
Either way this has little bearing on the discussion of whether or not agility is a superstat, and if it is if a valid solution to that was excluding it from limits.
1/3 I wish there was consolidation but there just isn't and from the sprawl ganger in preview 3 we can see its not consolidated in 5e. And each of the ranged combat skills do cover a different area, so slapping them under ranged combat is a bit much.
2. I do agree with you to some degree but I think it is being overstated. My point is you can't say people only take 3 skills so it only saves you on 3 skills if the reason they only take 3 skills is the broken costs. Part of what makes a stat a super stat is how much it saves your. This isn't a class system where things are just handed to you as you level up. You have to buy things so cost savings are in fact part of the determination in what makes something over powered.
And yes agility is a super stat. Agility covers physical combat, a large part of stealth and some side tricks. I think charisma is also a super stat in that it covers all social attributes. I don't find logic to be as much of one despite its long skill list since it mostly boils down to the decking stat. Yeah it also covers being a mechanic and what not but the big difference is every character who isn't a decker can freely ignore almost everything in logic. Very few characters can ignore agility or charisma to the same degree.
I realize part of this is game style, but outside of mages pretty much everyone shoots, everyone sneaks, everyone probably want to palm things because it is the hide the gun on me skill, everyone talks to people, everyone tries to negotiate with their contacts, to get information out of their contacts, to con people on runs etc. Sure the primary role in those skills might go to the street sam and face but pretty much everyone has to do those things in a run. Maybe not every run they are needed and sure very specific designs like the totally remote hacker don't need them, but I suspect in most games social and combat skills are valued by almost every character.
Basically the game is resolved around skill tests. When usually the biggest factor in the skill pool is the attribute and attributes cover multiple skills they are already on the overpowered side of thigs. While the idea that if they cost more they would be fine is nice I don't think it woudl pan out in play since. you can get so far with a combination of cyber/bio and starting stats. Unless the costs were such that people left the gate with something like 2-3 times the rank in skills as the attributes like 6 agility and 12-18 pistols they would remain broekn under this system. And that would one be too many dice and two probably to big of a departure from shadowruns system. So yeah while people over state the savings of attributes by listing all the skills saved, overly narrowing the skill list and saying its not broken just a bit out of whack on costs is also overstating the issue.
Now for the purpose of limits, while logic and charisma might fall under the super stat idea I think the main difference is when you are grouping things into mental, physical and social is that social and mental overlapped so there was less room to drop a stat and that charisma and logic were dump stated by a lot of people in play since they are a bit more narrow than agility. I’d of gone with 2 limits mental and physical and used every stat in the pools(I may have even thrown one mental into the physical pool and one physical into the mental to show that body and mind are somewhat intertwined.)