Ok I need to caveat this. Playing SR5 at Origins Made me want to buy the book. The system itself is solid, the priority system is much improved, combat runs faster, matrix interactions run faster, certain critter powers got helpful tweak.

I bought the book and have since been reading it off an on as my schedule permits. So far I've pretty extensively gone over character creation, combat, and the matrix. I've at least skimmed the magic system, technomancers I've left alone for a moment. I've also read through much of the gear system. I've found a few errors in places (Registered Spirits anyone?) but not enough that I'm particularly concerned about them. On Sunday I will be transitioning my home group to SR5. Having said all that and with the caveat that I would recommend the system (especially at the PDF price). I cannot say it is without some minor components that threaten the whole integrity and Ideally would need errata.

Preliminary Findings: The system is solid. However at least some people involved in the development process really really hate cybered characters or at the very least felt they needed a nerfing in the worst kind of way. It's no single thing in the book that makes me draw this conclusion but a multitude of contributing factors.

1. Ware Bricking: I don't think I need to really touch on this much. I like the idea of cyberware hacking, i'm even reasonably ok with the idea of disabling it, I just think the system as it stands makes it entirely too easy unless the character is specialized to defend against ware disabling, or has a pocket hacker, or goes off the grid which leads nicely to my next point:

2. "Wireless Bonuses" - This ties heavily into the above. In many cases, most notably smart link in order to get the same iconic performance out of their technological items as in previous editions they must now be run with wireless enabled. Want to get your starting character street sam to be as fast as that starting character mage with Focused Concentration and Improved reflexes? Better turn on the wireless so someone can brick your 175K worth of 'ware. Oh wait, if he cast it at force 6 he's still going faster then you as the highest you can get for a initiative dice boost at character gen as a street same is 3D6 unless i'm missing something where as the same mage I just mentioned will be getting 4d6 and +6 to reaction. I hate to harp on this but all throughout origins I had one table where a magic user wasn't going faster then me and that was the table where said magic user was my fiance' who doesn't have Improved Reflexes as a consolation to my fragile wired ego. TLDR: Very few if any of the wireless bonuses seem good enough to risk bricking, and those that do seem merely to replicate performance from previous editions.

3. Cheap Power Points - On the other hand if you don't dip so heavily into the focused concentration honeypot you could go mystic adept and reap the full benefits of being a powerful mage and a beefy physical adept, actually at 2 karma per power point you'd still have enough to take a pretty deep draught on the focused concentration bottle.

4. Qualities: There are 5 qualities that benefit magical characters specifically or have a specific use for them. There are zero qualities that help people with 'ware and only two that benefit matrix characters (three if you count home ground which I've also included in the magic count). Most annoying to me at least restricted gear didn't make it into the core book so all that 12+ availability gear is verboten until post character generation when you've got less money work with or until the companion hits shelves (presumably sometime next year). This is most problematic in an environment like missions.

5. The tone, gah the tone. Implants talk about how painful they are, the tailored phermones talk about how they actually make the character feel better about themselves and therefore raise the social cap, sleep regulator makes you difficult to rouse now when sleeping, etc. Basically it reads like no effort is spared making sure you know that if you are getting ware you are inhuman scum, how dare you not play a mage?

6. Social limit penalty. Ok in the interest of full disclosure, the social limit penalty doesn't really make a huge difference in cybered face vs physad face as tailored phermones will help replace some of that missing social limit. Aaron mathed me through this. But it does make a difference in generalist street sam and generalist anything else if the sam hasn't gotten phermones to cover up his stinking second class citizen nature.

So yea, I really like the system itself, so much so I'd rather have it fixed then nay say it. I'd like to see people buy copies so the development can continue. I just can't figure out why we've gone from 4th edition, which verged on "Magic Run". To 5th edition: "Frag Off Street Sam!". I'm looking at a lot of things to try and correct this for my home game so I can incentivize my players to 'ware up, but I would love some thoughts from the people that actually did the work.

Interesting. Some of those things like the effects of ware actually make ware more attractive to me. But overall I see your point.

I think it is exceptionally lame that a mage can get faster than a Sam, that spell shold have capped out like at 2d6 IMO. A Sams speed is his iconic power, the wired reflex, reaction thing is just bad, I mean really, really bad.

No qualities for the cybered up guy is also really really bad.

It seems odd to me, calling it magic run was not exactly uncommon. You'd think they maybe might have tried to beef of the street sam the one archetype that actually fell behind as editions went along instead of the decker who was already beastly in 4e.

Edit focussed concentration? What is it, what does it do, how do you go deeper into it?

I tried. If there are any specifics that you really liked, or really hated, feel free to let me know.

*flips through list* Yeah, that's on the list. At least it is if it's on page 98. If there's another one, we haven't found it yet. Please advise if you find more. Soon. I've built a thread.

I'm about to fall out from lack of sleep and afraid my writing is suffering from it. I really really wish concealment had gotten nerfed as it was already pretty broken in 4th. In 5th with the lack of perception bonuses it's going to be even more of a deal breaker.

Well darn, I really wanted them to fix spirit powers with concealment and movement at the top of my list.

If someone would tell me what they consider broken about Concealment, I'll address it. "It's already broken in 4th" doesn't really help me. But it'll wait until you get some sleep, Lurker.

The basic issue is it is very easy to get a spirit of a high enough force that you drop most if not all observers to 0 perception dice, so any level of sneaking is an automatic success.

Edit to add either 1/2 force or just make it a seperate test, it is making a force dice infiltration test for you, you can as well the better result it the one used. But - force in perceptin just is way too much.

Focused concentration is essentially an advantage that turns the mage into their own personal living focus at the cost of 4xkarma per force. It caps out at 6 and just cries out for essentially near permanent increased reflexes. While it does cost more karma then a sustaining focus in my mind a sustaining focus that costs no nuyen and can never be taken from you or broken would be a bargain at twice the price. The high cap surpassing normal availability concerns is an awesome kicker.

Also concealment needs to explicitly not stack. If i had a dollar for everyone that said they should get concealment and ruthenium polymer together for a combined -12.

Hopefully it can only be taken 1 time and you can't split the total force up into multiple spells. I like the 2e/3e version reduce the penalties for sustaining by 1/2. But yeah unbreakable focus, sign me up.

By my read taking it additional times would net no additional benefit and it is quite specific on one spell. The fact that it allows you to start with a "free" force 6 sustaining focus at character creation where you would normally be limited to force 3 is what's kind of game breaking.

Sure, and it probably allows you to sustain any sustainable spell and not limited by category and it isn't a foucs at all so it can't be broken, lost, taken from you, used for ritual magic link against you etc.

So they have made it yet more into MagicRun?

Oveall yeah I think so. Just less boom boom magic.

Not really; mages got smacked around with the nerf bat a lot. What with Drain being un-healable by magic AND with mundane ways (excluding natural rest), rolling more hits over your Magic rating turning Drain from Stun to Physical, and the nerfing of Direct Combat spells.

Honestly in my opinion drain should have never been healable by magic or medkits, the SR5 interpretation has been my houserule since forever. I don't want to get into a pissing match but if you feel mages are nerfed I would really like for cyberwared characters to recieve some of that same style of "nerfing".

Well for me personally, the nerf to Direct spells I'm ok with (because hey, despite lower amount of damage dealt, undodgeable and armor-ignoring damage is still awesome), but the making Drain go from Stun to Physical if you roll hits that exceed your Magic rating is going a bit too far.

I'm still waiting on the official release so I can test everything out, although it doesn't help that one of my players who likes playing Awakened characters is already pretty unhappy at the SR5 changes and has even gone as far as saying that mages in SR5 are unplayable.

(think he's going a bit too far with that statement, but I still want to respect his opinion)

I have a hard time seeing how you haven't realized this except to ignore forum posts for nearly the past decade as regards this power as well as the other stealth gear and the sheer power of the penalties especially as they hit average characters.

An average guard with say 6 dice perception... (8 with some equipment lets say)... goes against a force 6 spirit concealment... is left with 2 dice. Chance are very high that he'll glitch. Reducing opposing dice pools mathematically is almost always a better option than increasing your own which has a higher chance of variance (they might roll well and you might roll poorly).


The only non-broken way for the power to work is for it to add dice to stealth tests instead of penalizing perception. Even moreso because it's a very clunky mechanic which works poorly... GM calls for a perception check from the players, does he tell them all to take out 6 dice immediately tipping them off. If it's a player with it... when the GM rolls the opfor's perception he needs to remember the bonus as opposed to the player with the power used on him... who would need to remember to add his dice to the check (far more likely).


Lurker:
Drain was not healable by magic ever. It was only healable by mundane means (first aid). But then a good first aid could repair a street sam from near death to near full in no time flat either.

That said, I'm fully on board with your comments as regards bricking cyberware and the sheer stupidity of it and the matrix bonus stupidity.

I honestly think it's about time the playerbase starts griefing any freelancers/authors they see in conventions. Subject them to the sheer unfun that they've unleashed on the setting. Brick their gear on principle. It's really about the only way I can think to let the message sink in.

...you could state the problem without being insulting, you know.

That depends entirely on which thread you're reading.

Did I miss a thread where people are saying cyber got way boosted this edition? I would really like to see that thread because I'm honestly missing it. There are a few mae players upset at the spell changes, but honestly i think they can't see the forest for the trees.

There is literally so much wrong with this statement I don't know where to begin. I'll come back to it tomorrow?

Stay classy, pal.

Critias... I have never before advocated for any such path in my life.

But based on much of the changes I'm seeing... I have to seriously question jmhardy's competence as line dev since the buck stops there.

Many of the changes simply don't look fun. How do players communicate this effectively... this is one of the few ways I can think to do it. Subject the freelancers to their own poorly thought out rules & mechanics repeatedly.

Before you round up a mob and hand out the pitchforks and torches, maybe you could, I dunno, get the book, read the book, play the game a little?

There aren't any yet.

There are certainly many where mages are being bemoaned for being underpowered, at any rate. And a few with cries of "HackerRun."

Not for SR5 yet.

You know who is always being overlooked in ALL the editions? The Cooks.

Yes, that's right... Cooks.

We have tons of newly Awakened critters out there and can you find a decent Behemoth Gumbo (feeds 150) out there or Hellhound sausages (the ultimage Hot Dog!) anywhere??

And look at the poor ghouls. I admit they can not cook that meat, but would it be so bad to maybe use a marinade?

This is the real reason the future is so damn dark and depressing.

Well... I for one am looking forwards to reading more of Lurker's review when he's read enough to write and post it.

On the subject of everything else...

Mages look not much different from the sort I'm used to in 3rd (although totally downgrading those reflex boosting spells or tweaking them a bit, getting what used to be fully wired bonuses was a bitch back in the day and while I think should still be possible I'd like to Mage to be expending a bit more effort than what's been described to do). Casting at Force over Magic can cause Physical Damage, yep totally with that as that's how it used to be (you just get more flexibility as you don't buy Spells @ Force). Net hits for Direct Damage, looking at the math, seems fair.

On the Cyber Nerf? Yeah looks like there was a desire to go full GitS and if people want that then that's cool. But for most of us it won't be much of a thing to translate "OnLine" bonuses back into their original DNI state for the things that make more sense and go just partial GitS (which IMHO fits far better into an advancing Sixth World mythos). That makes things better again (also up for downgrading Noncyber bonuses for sone gear like SmartLinked contacts etc). But again that's not hard to do.

Deckers/Riggers. Happy to see the divide back. Have no problem with the new hacking actions and I can certainly giggle at the idea of a novice or low pro security firm having Their cyberware online and getting hacked by a Runner. That sounds like fun. (Yep, being online gives no bonus to the limbs but the rentacop low tier SecCompany probabley hasn't even considered that angle, after all the new Matrix is secure and it helps with the regular maintenance and upgrades etc, makes Runners that little more edgy again).

Mysads? Enough has been said elsewhere, will look in the book when I get it, will look at the errata and will probabley house rule these.

The rest? So far so good on previews and reviews from people who seem to be willing to share experiences and insights with the actual information at hand.

Well done so far guys, I didn't give a damn about SR4. I really want to get SR5.

*chuckles* now you are just teasing us.

July 11th can't get here fast enough. Have not been this excited about a new edition since forever. Buggy or not, there is just something enticing about a new tome, diving into it and seeing what sort of new concepts and backgrounds we get to play with....

I imagine once the PDF is available a lot of this will die down as we will have a better view of the whole thing.

Til then, best stock up on the pickles and ice cream...

This is only ever a change if one uses edge to bypass the hit limit, as you can't normally get more hits then the force of the spell and the SR4 rule was that casting at force higher then magic is physical drain.
Infact this is a clear boost to magic as with magic 6 you can cast force 12 spell and you only suffer physical drain if you get more then 6 hits, thats quite nice for spell that get good benefit from force.

Please tell me that spells DO NOT GET BENEFITS FROM FORCE.
Because that would be boot in the face.
(Overcasting was too powerfull in 4. Oh, yeah I have an idea, lets remove the penalty in 5)

No worries, GMs and players can figure out a solution at their table.

I do admit I am curious as to the logic behind this one.

If I have Magic 6 and go for overcasting at Force 12, I am still funnelling Force 12 magic through my body (which is safety rated for Force 6) which is the magical equivalent of overclocking my system, but if I happen to not make efficient use of this raw power (via low number of actual hits) I get to still have the drain as Stun (headaches) instead of Physical ( nosebleeds).

Granted this does work out probably 99% of the time as if your throwing big dice pools with high force you are probably going to make those numbers, but it seems weird that if you basically slack on the dice roll (low hits) while overcasting you get off a bit lighter for it. Yes you still have 12 S to contend with but it really should have been Physical for the level of power ripping through you as you overload your poor aura.

Add Bull's quote to it Ii seems to be a design principle of SR5.

Not my favourite design principle by far, but I'll hold my horses on 5E until I have the release PDF and can produce my own review.

As the Drain being Full Force +/-x in SR5 afaik I guess with overcasting at Force 12 right out of chargen it would be more like:
"I get to still have the drain as Stun (passing out) instead of Physical (dropping DEAD on the spot)."
Wouldn't it?

Fair enough.

I am not sure I am following your point.

In my example, casting at the Force 12 if I get 7 hits that drain becomes physical. I smack the target down hard and I might be joining them depending on how my own drain roll goes.

BUT if I only get 5 hits, even though I am still channeling the full force 12 manaflow the drain remains in the Stun region. Granted falling over unconscious in a hot zone can't be healthy, but still better than dead. But it was only due to my own poor performance as a caster (having rolled low number of hits) that I get away with a power nap instead of a dirt nap. In this situation I am actually benefitting from an inferior roll, which is the oddity.

As I pointed out, this will be a moot point in most cases as your probably going to make your number of hits and face the physical drain, especially as your dice pools grow, but this exception does exist.

To say that a new face fresh out of Chargen would find tossing around a force 12 spell has less worry of deadly drain (as he probably won't cross that magic limit unless he is burning Edge dice) than a more experienced mage doing the same to be an oddity.

The previous rule for overcast of choose Force over your magic means its physical fullstop was already adequate, the risk was very straight forward, so I was just curious as to the reasoning behind the change.

Please note I am not complaining, the system will work as described most of the time, but the oddity did catch the eye hence the question.

To those complaining that Focused Concentration/Increased Reflexes is too good. Realize that Wired Reflexes can't be Counterspelled, and are not affected by magical Background Count. Also Wires don't make you a giant Astral Beacon.
Everything has a price.
As for Concealment being broken, its good, no doubt. But if you actually bother to use the full Perception rules and all the different modifiers for distance, etc. It's not that bad. Also, remember, Concealment only affects Perception tests, so it does nothing against Assensing tests

No, they can be hacked and shut down, and lose full power if you're anywhere with wireless suppressing paint. Also Wires make you a giant Matrix beacon if you want full bonuses.

I have the book, I've read the book, and bricking cyberware is flat out STOOPID. (intentional misspelling).

The only choice would be to buy used cyberware from 2070 where my smartgun link can't be destroyed by a hacker, necessitating me having to find a garage to get it fixed.

Must less if some goofy hacker decided to fry out my wired reflexes.

I didn't see any rules for shorting out or bricking spell foci.

No, but to get the FULL BONUS you have to put your Wired Reflexes online. So that ¥175,000 (wired 2, reflex enhancer 2) worth of gear you have from chargen inside of you? The stuff you sacrificed so much Essence to get? Well... some teenage punk snuck into your firewall and destroyed it. Didn't turn it off... they destroyed it.

Now show me a hacker sneaking into a mage and destroying the spell and sustaining focus and we can talk.

Actually there is a spell in Digital Grimoire that basically turned a foci 'off'

Disrupt [Focus] (Direct)
Type: M • Range: LOS • Damage: Special • Duration: I • DV: (F÷2) – 1
This spell channels magical energy into disrupting an active
magical focus, dealing temporary damage to its astral form.
A focus that receives damage equal to its Force from this spell is
disrupted and becomes inactive; the magician bonded to the focus
cannot gain dice bonuses or any other benefit from the focus until
the focus is reactivated. A number of boxes of temporary damage
equal to the focus’s Force is “healed” at the beginning of the next
Combat Turn. The owner may spend a Simple action to reactivate
the focus when all damage is healed. Disrupting a sustaining focus
will also disrupt the spell it is sustaining. Astrally projecting magicians
whose foci become disrupted cannot reactivate them until
their astral form rejoins their physical body.
Disrupt [Focus] is designed to target a specific type of focus:
Disrupt Weapon Focus, Disrupt Anchoring Focus, Disrupt
Spellcasting Focus, etc. The target of each spell is designated by
the spell formula. A stacked focus is affected by this spell if at least
one of its focus types matches that of the spell, but the damage
dealt by the spell must equal or exceed the combined Force of the
stacked focus to disrupt it.

Granted this was SR4, but would not be impossible to recreate for SR5 purposes

They have already said there is a ton of magic stuff that didn't make the main book but will be in a followup Magic book, so I expect we will see something there covering this.

Personally I think the recovery time for the above is a little quick, basically wait a turn or turn and it is back up.. I would have made it take longer to recover to make it more effective, like 1 force per hour unless a Mage with Assensing + Cleansing could go in to reset the item so to speak and cut the return time by successes or something.

As far as i have understood indirec combat spells base DV and AP are equal to force, can't say much about others spell as i don't have the book and the prewiews don't show any spells.

@Mäx
A well, at least they upped the drain.
Alright so overcasting is now not an flat out exchange but risk VS reward.

Range is still sight I suspect...

Maybe it's the GITS fan in me or that fact that i've played a decker/hacker/technomancer for years now but i like the concept of wireless bonus and combat hacking. I just didn't much care for the execution. The "problem" (and I use the term loosely) as I explained it to my players thinking about embarking on a career as a matrix type or face (because they fall into the same area). Magic types and physical combat types always know what they can do in a situation, they know how to bring their specialties to bear. Unless a situation was particularly loaded against them and they are out of their element (For example respectively: heavy background count, a extremely high security public event) how they get involved is generally fairly intuitive. Hackers and Faces however always had to make their own opportunities, some players really dug that, some did not, further some GM's didn't always facilitate that, so they have to fall back on their non specailty more then others. I'm not saying this is necessarily a huge problem but it was a problem none the less. Now as the game tried to introduce things for Hackers to do in combat in fourth there was a backlash, people found increasingly "gamey" ways to shut it down. Honestly if I had a dollar for every missions character I saw that had deep and layered anti-hacking defenses without the skills to back it up or a neo-luddite approach to technology while relying on story gratis that "the fixers call would still come through" I'd at the very least would have probably broke even on my drink expendatures.

So they introduce the idea of using "the carrot" method to get people to stop pretending like their characters could uniquely solve the problem that has faced security administrators for years, namely finding the right balance between usability and security. The main problem with this is another design goal of fifth is to eliminate some of the stupid dice pool bonuses people were getting that made a rank amateur with the right gear compete with someone who was at the very peak of the profession, and the smaller problem of if a professional using those same bonuses would need a bucket to contain their dice pool. ( I enjoyed hucking huge chunks of dice, but it wasn't always great for the game.) So the net result is they are hesitant to give giant dicepool bonuses for "going wireless" when in reality that's what it would take for people to take on the added risk. So they do in my mind one of the worst things they possible could, they make people go wireless with their gear to get the same baseline performance they got from the gear in previous editions (wired reflexes and reaction enhancers and smartlinks are the most solid examples I can think of this). Essentially they've nerfed cyberware by making people either accept inferior performance to previous editions (for increased price in some cases) or accepting whole new ways in which you are vulnerable.

This is all acutely a problem with cyberware and guns because typically it will have a device rating of 2.

You got to admit lurker, Street sams kind of broke the game and needed to be nerfed. No matter the situation, waving a gun around solved the problem. The pistols skill really covers a lot of ground, it helps them hide, it helps them charm people, it even can open astral gateways. Yup street sams needed to be taken down a peg by some good old fashioned revenge of the nerds action.

Or basially I agree. Risk is effing huge and my reward is I can get the base benefits back and now almost go as fast as the mage. With the new initiative system I really wish they had cut down on boosts outside of ware and phsyical adept powers. Going fast was kind of a street sams thing, and it got taken away and given to a mage.

Irion:
SR has always had spells which relied on force for the magnitude of their effect. In SR3 prior force set resistance TN's. As well as there were a whole lot of spells where force didn't matter... simply the number of spellcasting successes provided you didn't have to deal with the OR tables. Then people would learn them only high enough to deal with whatever level of OR they'd need to contend with and no more.

Some spells like levitate have used a force X net hits. Drain on the vast majority of spells is still set by Force - something. (in the free rpg quick start there was no force/2... still haven't gone over the magic pdf in detail to see if that was merely a quick-startism...). Also noticably the preview lists hermetics as logic still... (while the free rpg said intuition!).

Drain in the FreeRPG rules is still pretty scary though force - some number... (not force/2). With a minimum of 2.

Another item not addressed in the rules is whether you can choose to 'cap' your magical ability. I have magic 6 and 8 successes. Can I choose to only apply 6 of them to the task at hand and ignore the rest keeping the drain stun. In SR4.5 this was an option, you rolled them but did not have to use them.


Quite frankly. It strikes me that what one hand giveth the other taketh away quite severely in SR5 so far. We got skill ranges doubled... but then the attribute limits completely eviscerated any benefits of it. You can't have say a grizzled old mechanic of average mental ability but with a phenomenal 12 ranks in mechanics be really effective because he'll always bump into his caps because the attributes both add dice and set the caps... so attribute improvement is always preferable over skill improvement. This magic/drain thing only enforces the same paradigm on mages as well if this is the case.


Lurker:
I very strongly disagree. In GitS... everyone who has to contend with hacking is a cyborg. Even the 'lightly cyberized ones'. They've had their brain taken out enhanced and placed in a box... then stuffed back into either their body or a drone.

I've never lacked for things to do in combat as a hacker... hacker is all about info warfare and controlling the ground. A high security event the hacker was in heaven... because that tended to also mean a lot of security systems to subvert to allow the street sam to sneak some gear through or the like. Even in a street fight... you see that car... steal it with a user account... and run the gangers over with it... opposing drones... similar tricks.


The entire bit of 'bricking' is ludicrous. Systems don't include some very basic level non-volatile rom of 'failsafe' code to reboot from until they can go out to the matrix and get updates again?!

I can see some reason to do some wireless bonus... but cyberware is generally not a good candidate. Being able to share processing load with other devices in the vicinity... having other devices announce when they 'see' something for visual enhancement and spreading that to other vision enhancment systems in the vicinity... I can understand that.


Personally, I think the rigger/decker split is a mistake. Riggers are the natural way for a decker to exert combat influence... doesn't mean they have to go whole hog but the ability to steal drones on demand as well as having some basic skills to use them is scary. Riggers still need to worry about matrix security, now even more so than ever, so riggers are already forced to be deckers.