BTW, something I really dislike? DECKING

As in, requiring a cyberdeck to hack something, and hacking being called decking, which sounds awfully anachronistic.

See Decking becoming hacking I never liked. Decking was a term that was all but unique to the game and added to concept of 'elite' to the archetype idea. Hacking felt like a downgrade to the old Cyberpunk-consumers trope of the special hardware to get around the Joe Average access in the otherwise "impregnable" system. Anyone could be a Hacker, but to be a Decker took something more (or you got fried down your DNI).

I guess YMMV. For me, Cyberpunk hacking should be more like GitS and less like this. Decking is an outdated term, with a retrofuturistic stigma attached to it, which, for me, translates to being "trashy" (for lack of a better term). I've never liked the image of someone attaching a cable from a portable keyboard to the base of their skull to enhance their computer performance. It kinda felt like this.

Personally, I prefer a more serious game, and hacking fits it better than decking IMO.

I have to agree with Moirdryd, but your examples Elfenlied are great.

Personally I always thought that full VR should require someone to jack in.

My chief concern now is that it is not spelled out how the pros would handle keeping from getting their gear and ware hacked.
What is the SOP on matrix security?
I can see most gangers or some low level security guards getting their ware hacked, but I would figure SWAT, a Red Samurai team, or some Prime Runners would come out to play all locked down.

I actually am not allowed to elaborate on specifics. There's a gag order on me. That doesn't mean the specifics don't exist, only that I can no longer mention them.

Will it be lifted on the 11th?

It's got nothing to do with an NDA or Catalyst Game Labs in the slightest, and everything to do with -- unless I'm grossly misremembering -- the Dumpshock admin being tired of him talking about Mr. Lucky all the time.

For examples of how NOT to use edge in social situations, be sure to look up the old simsense of Mr. Lucky and the Troll JoyTwins.

That which has been Seen/Felt can not be Unseen/Unfelt sadly, not even with a full body scrub using steel wool.

What I'm afraid of:

Rulewise and fluffwise:
- The "everything has a cost" and general "more cyberpunk" concepts completely ignoring the magic part.
- The new matrix making no sense

Rulewise:
- "Patches" that add bloat to the system while not correctly fixing issues (thinking of Limits but there might be other cases)

Fluffwise:
- Metaplot and plots in the vein of Artifacts, WAR!, Storm Front, and having a "201x technothriller with magic and ware" feel rather than a cyberpunk feel as advertised.

Depending on the training of the user and the chosen weapons ... "a little yes"

Maybe, but it is one of the reasons I'm buying the 5th edition rulebook. 3 things drove me away from adopting the 4th edition rules.

The loss of Decking and particularly the crude reboot of the Matrix. The loss of Shadowslang that helped define the in-game culture of Shadowrun and the adaptation of UMT which killed the diversity in magical characters.

There are seperate but related issues with the metaplot, but "Decking" and the Matrix is essential to me as part of the setting that my group wants to play in. If they hadn't made the change, I guarantee I wouldn't be buying the book.

I'm in the same camp. 'Hacking' marked a pretty fundamental shift in the role of computers, and Shadowrun relies pretty heavily on its computer crime. Returning Decking to the setting at least implies an understanding, even at bare minimum a trivial one, of what makes Shadowrun tick.

My only real concern is that the steady progression of Magic > Mundane is further reinforced in this Edition, rather than disassembled. Shadowrun was at its best (in my opinion), when it was Cyberpunk with a splash of Fantasy, not Fantasy with a splash of Cyberpunk.

That said, I am appreciative of some of the efforts to clean up and modernize some of the Cyberpunk elements. It would be a horrible fate to leave it eternally shackled to Snake Plissken.

-Wired_SR_AEGIS

All cyberware is a lot more expensive now, so everyone will have less of it. This is one of the things I was really vehemently against during development, not that it mattered; it hurts the street samurai, who relies almost entirely on 'ware, more than the mage, who is just dabbling in it.

Anyway if you're afraid of cyberware becoming cheaper...let me reassure you that the exact opposite has happened.



The change in the power of magic versus tech seems to be lateral, i.e. same as SR4 for the most part (although I think Adepts got a whole lot better). Cyberware is much more expensive and you don't get that much more money, and that sucks a lot for dedicated samurai. Sucks the big one. But magic qua magic isn't actually more powerful. It's just done a flip flop. Direct combat spells suck now. Indirect combat spells are much better than they were.

Unfortunately the guy with overall final decision on the matter is still firmly convinced that our fantastic future needs to be shackled to a 2013 concept of how wireless is the bees knees, and a set of rules that don't even make sense with the in-game assumptions the modern Matrix is built on.

I could actually see it hurting aug'd PhysAds the most, because the stuff that they'd always go for (Muscle Toner, for example) suddenly requires a higher Resources priority and/or the sacrifice of things like Qi Foci. And since they have to assign an E, they can either go for Metatype E (low Edge, possibly low Magic, Attributes (in which case they really need that augmentation, rather than simply being better than the same adept build without it), or Skills (which could easily make them a one-trick pony). I'd assume Resources priority, and the general nuyen/karma ratio, is set in part according to what it is a Street Sam needs (Attributes/Skills A, Resources B, Attributes/Skills C, Human D seems like it should be pretty workable - the metasams take a bit of a hit, but perhaps they should; all the meta's have notable advantages in-role).

Street samurai get screwed over in several ways, but I am not sure I would say magic has gotten more powerful. I don't know if they did anything about nigh-invulnerable spirits or mental manipulations, but Drain has gone up significantly, and direct combat spells have gotten nerfed spectacularly. I know I played mages and sorcerers a lot more in SR3.


I have to ask, for people with the book. Did they do anything to fix social skills? I know they have limits now, but what I am talking about is how they work. SR4's biggest problem with social skills wasn't the comparatively rare pornomancer-level dice pools, but how vague and subjective the rules were, for something that affected PCs. The other problems were that you needed to have social skills just to resist them effectively; that conditional modifiers (hostile, suspicious, etc.) were not nearly as significant as they should have been; and finally, when you already had high dice pools, Arsenal (empathy software), Augmentation, and Runner's Companion introduced dice pool bloat into an area that absolutely did not need it.

So how does SR5 compare? I would love to hear some good news about the rules for the change. Even comparatively minor changes, such as the clearer descriptions they had for Edge, would be a step in the right direction.

They say you get a +3 wifi bonus for social skills because you can download all the smooth words and phrases to use instantly.


*KIDDING*


Seriously though it will be interesting to see how they expand on the social skills.

This would make a lot more sense than the free action extend baton. See here for an example.

Worst part is I could totally see people using it that way.

Yeah it does hurt them. Straight PhysAds are now MUCH more competitive than aug'd PhysAds.

That's a good thing, as long as straight physAds aren't also more competitive than augmented mundanes.

All it really does is shift augmentations past char gen for adepts. You keep your styling priorities for being a pure adept and augment later to get the still must have items. The onyl thing that would stop augmented adepts is actually making must haves in thw game not be over priced in PP for adepts. Or they could have just fixed attributes so they did a bit less, so getting that +4 to agility was not a must have.