QUOTE (Lindt @ Dec 17 2013, 04:37 PM)
How about this:
I played Sr3 for... its entire run. The last time I ran an Sr4 game it was at GenCon the year it was released.
Will I be more happy with Sr5?
I'm not sure. For all of the throwbacks to SR3, SR5 still seems more heavily influenced by SR4, to the point of copy-pasting big parts of SR4 to the new edition.
The good:
Skills, you will probably like more - the problem with SR4 skills was that they had too narrow of a range to represent what they were supposed to. The skill descriptions were over-hyperbolic, describing differences of a point (a third of a success, on average) as if they were wide gulfs in skill. This was compounded by the fact that you could hit the hard caps for a skill at character creation, and that skill was only about a third of your dice pool. A range of 12 gives everyone more room for vertical growth (a mixed blessing - being forced to diversify your skills was not always a bad thing), and doesn't give you absolute-best-in-the-world gunfighters who can often be outshot by Joe Average.
The mixed:
Hacking is greatly simplified, but on the other hand, they also have those horribly
implemented wireless bonuses, and the equally bad rules for bricking hardware (messing up something's software, I can see. Shorting out a street samurai's wired reflexes so that they need to actually be repaired is a bit more of a stretch - they went too far in giving the
hackerdecker "something to do.") - Rather than having them disrupt communications, hack drones, or mess with security systems, they gave them this, which, like the wireless bonuses, suffers more from implementation than the basic idea.
Initiative is better in the sense that initiative passes and initiative score are tied together again - no more someone who goes last but then goes three more times. The bad is that the difference between a high-augmented initiative and a non-augmented initiative is less than in SR4, and will be really shocking to someone used to SR3 speed sammies.
Limits are a new rule, a limit to how many successes you can get based on either a calculation based on Attributes, or based on a rating of the gear you are using. Some of the formulas/Attribute mixes seem a bit off to me, but overall, I like the concept. I remember reading a Gunsmith Cats manga where the main heroine, Rally, is facing off against a criminal, armed only with a Saturday Night Special, and she realizes that out of an extremely short range, her accuracy will be non-existent, and this is someone who habitually disarms people by shooting their thumbs off. I also liked the idea of having another improvable vector to soak up some of that dice pool bloat - there can be things that add to accuracy instead of to the dice pool, now. I have not really seen it in play, though, so I couldn't tell you how effective it is in practice.
Character creation is the priority system, which an SR3 veteran will at least be familiar with. But anyone other than a beginning gamer will feel constricted by this - it isn't as bad or limited as the SR4 version of priority that they had in Runner's Companion, but it is still a step back, flexibility-wise.
The bad:
The book
really need eratta. Already we have things like being told mystic adepts will get a "fix" to the cost to gain power points (it is fairly easy to have a mystic adept with a Magic of 6 for spellcasting, and 6 points of adept powers). Some other things are vague, or cases where you have to house rule what you think the intent of the rules was, because the RAW flat out doesn't work, or is contradicted later.
Mages have been heavily nerfed, with higher spell Drain and much lower damage for direct combat spells. Setting aside the question of whether they have been
over-nerfed, I can say that coming from SR3 to SR5 will be a major shock. SR3, honestly, is, in my opinion, the point where mages were the highest powered. SR4 nerfed them, and SR5 continues that direction.