Still a 3rd edition holdout when I GM from time to time. I am going to try playing in my local FLGS with 5th edition. I am more optimistic about it than 4th.

3rd edition all the way although I'm not playing anything right now. Had the blend of setting/fluff/rules just right.

Edit: Looking back at member numbers and join dates it is interesting to note that the older players generally stuck with their editions. The results of this poll compared to the RPG.net one are very interesting. Looks like the young kids have displaced the old folks here whereas that doesn't hold true over there. This is the first time I've come to dumpshock in a while.

Link?

Meaning?
Join Dates do not necessarily reflect Experience with the Game. For example... I started playing Shadowrun in 1st Edition. And I STILL prefer SR4A over other editions.

Not to mention that a forum move corrupted some of those dates, IIRC.

And the pull of the "official" site for just being "official" was ironically enough pretty strong on several posters . .

Who in the what now?

Same here with a few changes. I remember drooling over the original Sammy Catalog when it first came out. I skipped 2nd and started back up again with 3rd right as 4th was coming out. Swapped to 4th once Street Magic hit the shelves and the reviews were saying it was a great new dice engine. I looked it over, agreed, and conned my buddies into buying into 4th as well.

RPG.net poll

Thanks.
Lotta 3E folks there. I could get behind a 3E game, tbh. Though I kind of "grew up" on 4th (I started playing after 4th was announced so we had one semi-long game in 3rd before switching) hence my vote for 4th.

Thanks!

Now that I've spent more time with 5th, I think it's going to be a good game... in a few years when we get the '5a' version. It has good mechanics under the hood, but the book is so terribly put together and edited that it is outright hostile to being used as a reference.

I'd have said the same about 4th when 4th was new, compared to 3rd.
Except that the mechanics of 5th are almost identical to the mechanics of 4th. So...

I liked 3rd pretty well when we played it. My only beef with that dice engine was the fact that Difficulty 7 seemed to come up a lot. If you rolled a "6", then you couldn't help but roll a 7+.

shadowrun d8 resolved that. if you have a lot of d8s lying around, that is.

the basic system was that you could roll 0-7 (8 was 0), the rule of 6 became the rule of 7, and the rule of 1 became the rule of 0. chances of success were a little bit changed, especially where the old system would have resulted in effectively equivalent TNs. and since you can roll 0, you don't hit the same problem with TN 7 vs TN 8.

it was in one of the old shadowrun supplemental fanzines... not sure how many people ever made use of it though.

Shadowrun! Where 6 = 7

This mostly mirrors my view as well although to be honest more recently I've kind of come to the conclusion that Shadowrun is a total clusterfuck. It's just that 5th Ed is a bit less of one than 4th, which is a bit less of one than 3rd, etc.

I'm still firmly in the boat however that this forum is an anomoly and if you had this same poll on the official forums you'd get a result much more in 5th Ed's favor.

How anyone thinks 4th Ed is better though is beyond me. It has always felt like that people just resented having their munchkin fueled characters taken away which will become less of a problem as more books come out.

I would point out that as a system ages it accrues not only splatbooks and expansions but house rules. I know I favor several older but far more familiar systems because I or my groups have fixed them over time and learned where and how they break and what to avoid.

When D&D3 was announced I was interested. When it was finally released I liked it incredibly much more than AD&D2. When the later D&D3.5 & subsequent Pathfinder books came out, my liking of the system in general just kept going up. When D&D4 was announced I was interested. After it was released and I read the player's book my thought was, "This isn't an RPG, it's a tactical board game." and I never really invested much into it after that. The games I did partake in only reinforced that thought.

I never did get to play much of SR3 at the time, largely in part because the more experienced players did not do a good job of explaining the game mechanics and rules of the world (really pissed off a player when I made an offhand remark, in character, about trolls when in reality I did not know that trolls were a PC racial choice). Still, I have some bits of familiarity of how SR3 works. When SR4 came out I liked it a lot more than SR3. Later, yeah, found that some things did not quite work so well in SR4 (like the Initiative & IP system).

When SR5 was announced I got interested again. That faded after reading through the core book (partly the new magic system, partly technomancers). To me it was like SR4 was a Faberge egg that was dropped and shattered, and intentionally lost bits of it were replaced with bits of SR3 and something new to make SR5. Maybe not accurate, I'll admit, but it's how I feel about SR5.

And to make matters more interesting, my friend who hates SR4, loves SR3, and has run SR5 games has taken the Star Wars: Edge Of The Empire unique system and remolded it to fit the Shadowrun setting to use instead of the SR5 material (oh, and delegating technomancers to the level of NPC only, to be used like dragons and such).

Agree 100% with the IP system in SR4. It became very apparent, very fast, that you either had extra IP or you where BOHICA every time a character with extra IP fought you. How a mechanic with such obvious overwhelming power in combat that worked 100% of the time, and cost so much differently in character resources depending on how you got it, made it through playtesting without anyone looking at it and going to themselves, "Self, this here mechanic is broken as hell" is a mystery to me.

I'm pretty "meh" on technomancers. I see them as a blatant attempt to make "magic hackers". The fact that magic and technology doesn't mix in every other segment of the game tells me that the Technomancer wasn't a very well thought out idea but they got so popular the writers were fucked by the time they stopped and thought about it. The severe nerfing they got in 5th is probably an attempt to make them unpopular enough to slowly phase them out, or the writing/editing team just feel the same way I do about them. I have yet to see one in a game I've played in, and I've been thinking that they simply don't exist in my game world. They add nothing to the table that isn't covered by something else in a far less hand waved manner when it comes right down to it.

The Technomancer is a great idea that is hampered by poor implementation (Overpowered in SR4A, and Underpowered in SR5). I am currently playing one in SR5, and I think she is pretty okay. The things I dislike about the character have nothing to do with the fact she is a Technomancer and more to do with my dislike of some of the mechanical subsystems (Limits specifically).

I can agree with this. Not sure that SR4 was a particularly good Faberge egg. But even a dull and ugly one is better than one that's been shattered and half-repaired with a different Faberge egg.

My problem is that they didn't replace some pieces that should have been and did replace others that shouldn't have been. Other pieces I agreed with in principle and disliked how they were used (limits: I agree in general principle that they should be a thing, but the way they were added makes them either meaningless, without meaning, or an utter middle finger).

the problem isn't just that technomancers are bad at what they do. it's that they're worse at what they do, with a greater cost, relative to hackers. except for a few small things, that is. they are slightly better at buffing the party, for example.

that's the main problem with the implementation in SR5.

also, i'm not entirely in agreement that SR4 technomancers were overpowered. they were strong at what they did. they were not the only option for what they did, though, and considering they were more expensive than a hacker to the point that you could probably make a magician hacker for less cost than making a technomancer, and thus be almost as good in the matrix (being extra super-duper-mega-hard to detect is only more awesome if just being really hard to detect isn't good enough) and massively more useful outside of the matrix kinda kept them in line.

heck, even a regular hacker without being a magician would often be more worthwhile, purely because they could be so useful outside of the matrix in comparison.

technomancers were only "overpowered" if you could somehow guarantee you would never have to interact with anything outside the matrix.

i will say i feel it was somewhat broken that an SR4 hacker fairly quickly ran out of meaningful ways to improve as a hacker, and thus was somewhat pushed into expanding into other roles, somewhat of a problem. but that wasn't a problem with technomancers, that was a problem with hackers (i'd even go so far as to say it was a problem with mundane characters in general; it was too easy to get close to your practical maximum in chargen for a mundane in most roles).

Yeah... I can agree with this assessment. Hackers can be good enough that they don't have to be super-uber-whamadyne (like hiding in the Matrix). Our Technomancer for SR4A was pretty Super-Uber-Whamadyne, for the most part, IN the Matrix, and was almost nothing outside of it. While the Hacker was pretty awesome in a lot more ways.

SR3, but I have the SR4a and the more I read, the more it seem to be a good upgrade from SR3. + the books seem to be cheaper too.

After reading SR5 I was not as impressed with the new shiny, though there were few things I liked enough to kinda of incorporate them. I am going to use the following house rules in my next game that I run.

1. Gear from the base rule book, arsenal, unwired,augmentation, and street magic is available, barring normal availability restrictions for starting characters (12 is the limit folks!!). Items from WAR and the various other source books need GM approval. Any gear above availability 12 requires GM approval as well.

2. All threshold test suffer a -1 die modifier for each roll of the dice. Hits above the threshold reduce the time spent on the last interval to 1/X time interval or as determined by the GM. Example, a threshold test with a time interval of 1 hour gets 3 hits above the final threshold on the third test, would result in the time spent be 2 hours and 20 minutes.

4. Initiative score is Reaction + Intuition + 1D6 for each initiative pass a player has. Start with the highest PC/NPC to the lowest. Then subtract 10, if the score is still greater than 0 for an PC/NPC they may go again. Wound modifiers do not affect the number of initiative dice rolled, but subtract from score instead. For example being at a -1 wound modifier would reduce the initiative score by 1. Treat any other modifiers to initiative in the same way.

4. For all spell drain codes change the Force/2 in the formula to Force-2.

5. Posession results in the PC becoming controlled by the GM for the duration of posession (don't do it). The the player had himself posessed vouluntarily, he may control the spirit and himself for the duration of the combat by expending 1 service. Out of combat, the player may only take control of the spirit for one minute.

6. Spirits will not use edge except to resist summoning from a caster with a magic attribute lower than their force.

7. Indirect spells have a AP value equal their force, and does not reduce impact armor in half.

8. Spirits will not use edge except to resist summoning from a caster with a magic attribute lower than their force.


9. The various levels of access on a matrix host means the following:
1. General Public (0 threshold)--can view the node and access and files noted by a user as public.
2. User (10 threshold, 1 hour (or 1 minute hot simmed) AR---user can browse files, access them, and edit them)
3. Security (20 threshold, 1 hour (or 1 minute hot simmed)---user can activate or deactivate IC, and can use programs that are decker related)
4. Admin (30 threshold, hour (or 1 minute hot simmed)--- can revoke privleges of another user and shut the node down.

*Note Users of higher level can still do things of lower level.

10. Activities not allowed in the the level of access may be noticed by the system. See main rules for details on detecting unauthorized activity and roll according to those rules.

11. All weapon codes are modified to have 2 more damage than listed (so a light pistol is 6P, a heavy is 7P, etc, etc.,) .

12. Armor doesn't stack unless it is listed as a +X, use the highest of the applicable armor values. Form fitting body armor still adds only 1/2 its rating if other armor is being worn. Cyber limb armor is maxed out at +3 per limb, and +4 for torso and skulls. (This means the maximum armor bonus from cyber limbs, torso's and skulls is +20)

13. Encumbrance is based on the armor rating of all worn armor combined (including shields). It is a -1 AGI and -1 REA for every two points (round up) point that this value exceeds your character's STR+BOD.

14. Armor Degrades at 1 point (impact and ballistic) each time an attack successfully hits that would cause physical damage. Cyber armor, natural armor, mystical armor and magical armor do not degrade.

15. Stick and shock damage code is changed to 6S -5 AP electical damage.

16. The use of non-conductive, chemical protection and fire protection, negate the AP penalty for any attack with the associated element and adds its rating to the damaga resistance test.

17. Technomancers Fading is done at (Rating-2) rather than Rating/2. Compiling and decompiling sprites is unaffected.

18. Sprites never use edge, and any test require the edge stat, treat it as a 0.

Uh.

Also, are you going to tweak Hardened Armor at all? With the increased damage codes, the hardened armor from a F2 spirit (or a drake) is effectively the same as "having zero armor." (Oh they get four dice to roll, but seriously, against 6 DV is it really going to make a difference?)

Is there any particular reason why a force 2 spirit should be hard to kill?

Against a lot of lighter weapons it's lget to roll Body+4 dice to resist + 2 auto successes. Seems pretty reasonable to me.

Assuming no modifier to Body for being materialized, against someone with a light pistol loaded with APDS that +4 and two automatic successes from a Force 2 spirit's Hardened Armor is now gone. Assuming just one net hit to hit, that spirit has two dice to soak 7 or 8 Physical (depending on the model of light pistol). At best the spirit is then taking 5 Physical and is already more than halfway to disruption, or at worst it's 8 Physical and almost disrupted. Three more net hits on the attack (and the worst light pistol on accuracy has an ACC of 5) and it doesn't matter.

And with APDS available at character creation in SR5, no gunbunny worth their firearms should be without at least one magazine or speed loader of the ammo.

Moral of the Story - Don't use Force 2 Spirits as front line combatants. They DO have other uses.

yeah, this is like complaining that the street thugs you hired are not holding up in combat.

you shouldn't be sending force 2 spirits to be front line combatants. against pretty much anyone. just like you shouldn't expect a gang of teenagers armed mostly with knives and chains to last long against any serious threat (and for the record, if the person you're fighting is using APDS instead of standard ammo, they're fairly serious because they have a loadout for fighting people with plenty of armour).

have you considered that shooting things is not the only challenge runners face? And, in fact, that if they're facing that challenge, they've likely fragged up royally?


SR is in my opinion indeed completely clusterfucky simply for the setting which means you have to GM in three worlds simultaniously, and the clunky rules do nothing to make your job easier.
However, I'm not seeing how 4e is any less of a clusterfuck than 3e, nor 5e than 4e.


Can't really see how the cost is all that different. Mages have to learn, cast and sustain a spell, sammies spend a good share of their resources, adepts spend the same from their magic. Seems pretty balanced to me.

Technomancers aren't a 4e idea, and magic and technology do mix okay. Let's take, for instance, cybermancy.

Auto-successes are an SR5 mechanic you didn't indicate that you ported.
In SR4 they roll body+4, that's it.

I asked about the auto-successes, because without them you increased the DV without granting hardened armor the parallel buff to remain on-par with those increased DVs. Meaning that a F3 spirit, which used to be immune to small arms fire (holdouts), now is not.

1) Ok, so they crack a SOTA Rating 6 maglock and/or firewall like it's not even there. Some opinion applies because I'm of the opinion that "Best security money can buy" shouldn't ever be like walking down the street and chewing gum to anybody, Prime Runner or no.

2) Mages have to buy Mage for 15 points, the spell at 4 points, four points for the skill to cast the spell, a sustaining focus if they want to do it without penalty for at least 1 point for resources spent to buy it and/or a -2 dice modifier (+1 threshold for my games) to all actions to sustain it, and have to roll against drain. So we're seeing at least 23 points opportunity cost for the mage to have or give extra IP. Adepts have it almost as bad with having to buy Adept for 5 points and an extra Magic attribute for 10 points of which 5 points is dumped into a one extra IP power for a total opportunity cost of 10 points. Street Sammies have to buy 3 points in Resources and loss two Essence with a total opportunity cost of 3 BP and -1 DP to Healing actions with magic (pretty much BFD). But wait, if the Sammie goes for the gusto and buys Alphaware Wired Reflexes instead, he spends 5 BP on Resources with 3K left over for other goodies and has an Essence cost of only 1.6 for no penalty to magical healing at all and zero other mechanic-driven penalties that I have been made aware of except potentially getting in trouble for unlicensed cyberware.

So the final tally is: Mages - 23 points minimum opportunity cost, Adepts - 10 points in minimum opportunity cost, and Sammies - typically a minimum of 3 to 5 points in opportunity cost. Please don't even try to tell me that "It's fair and balanced".

To be fair, psychophipps, much of the 'opportunity cost' listed above for mages can be used for multiple and varied functions, not just the one spell. So it would be more appropriate to take some fraction of that cost and apply it to the comparison you make.

That would be true if all those points didn't also mean that the mage has a casting pool of two dice...

Quite. And in your comparison, Adepts are in the "middle" opportunity cost here, but you forget that they're actually the most expensive option. I had a mystic adept who took Improved Reflexes as the spell because the opportunity cost was lower than if I took it as an adept power (bio/cyber was out for other reasons, resulting in that option having the highest opportunity cost for that character).

The adept's opportunity cost shouldn't be measured by "how many BP does it take to do this one thing" but "how much more awesome can those PP be if I get IP-boosters via cyber?" 1 PP != 1 Magic (as BP) compared to a mage.

Mage's BP cost for an extra IP is only 5BP,* pretty comperable to a sammy.

*"I will be a mage" automatically means you have Spellcasting and Magic, the BP cost to get here is irrelevant for the next step. "I want an extra IP": 4 BP for the spell, 1 BP (resources).

And don't forget that the extra IP spell requires two hits to trigger. For your 23 points you have a whopping 11.11% of successfully casting your extra IP spell.

Draco18s, don't forget that we're also talking about something that is variable. You not only need to be to "buy" the power framework, but you also need to buy it at a level were its useful. Resisted spells start at a low end of 6 DP for one typical hit over an average stat of 3 as a resistance roll. The opportunity cost is definitely there.

That's sort of like saying that I'm spending $800 to eat at a unique restaurant this weekend. No, I'm not. I was spending that $800 anyway, the restaurant's opportunity cost is the 20 minute drive from where I was already going to be.

Okay, that opportunity cost calculation sure is peculiar.
Is the mage only getting the Mage quality and the spellcasting skill to cast his Increase Reflexes? Does he have no other use for a sustaining focus? Forgive me for finding both of that highly doubtful.
Same goes for an adept: sure enough he is getting his Adept quality regardless of whether he wants his Increased Reflexes or not.
As for sammies, a competent sam spends half his Essence available on IP count boosters, at the very minimum; and while both Adepts and Mages can later on increase their Magic scores indefinitely, the sammy is stuck with his Essence score.

Sidenote: if you buy deltaware there is not enough cyber in every book to actually run out of essence.

But what if your Ipad takes a shit? Now you don't have the money to buy a new one. There is always an opportunity cost, whether it's immediately apparent or not.

Yes, I'm limiting the examples to a one-trick pony but it's the only way to do it because an cybernetic eyeball flamethrower is going to be better than the Flamethrower spell unless you have Magic at X level and that just muddies the waters too much to even have it make any kind of sense. If you want extra IP (not extra IP, wrist missles or the magic spell equivalent, and a cock taser or the magic spell equivalent) there is a very limited set of ways to get it and I showed the easiest and cheapest example from each method to get that one thing. The fact that you can add extras to it for more BP doesn't matter one iota because you can add anything else to the pile with your BP from any number of sources anyway and with just about any combination you can imagine to change the math.

Yes, but if the Adept doesn't buy extra IP in a game with common extra IP then he's typically dogmeat unless his main action is, "I run and hide".

And thanks for making my point for me. The fact that a Sammie has to buy extra IP to even be considered "competent" shows that guaranteed extra IP are broken as hell. He can be the straightest shooting, cold-hearted son of the bitch ever and never miss and Mr. Mediocre Sammie with 3 IP will tear him a new damn ass unless Straight Shooter wins initiative with the penalty of not having the extra initiative dice and manages to drop Mediocre with that first pair of shots.
I saw it time and again with Bulldog and our gunslinger adept when we allowed extra IP and we found that each extra IP is for all intents and purposes your character +.75 in each round of combat. This means that 2 IP is your character times 1.75 and two extra IP is your character times 2.5 etc. Case in point. My friend made an awesome unarmed adept that could break stopped cars with a single punch. He was still a complete punk in combat when compared to the Orc ganger with a Combat Axe because Bulldog could attack three times as fast each and every turn.

If you use extra IP, that's fine. I don't and I found that it makes for a much more evenly distributed and thoughout game where combat is concerned because you don't have to shove rote powers and cyber into every adversary because if you skip it, it means that you're taking a Geo Metro to race in the Indy 500.

Its about Action Economy which comes up in every game and in real life every day.

In Real Life its about multitasking, how many things you can do at the same time.

In games its about how many actions you can take during combat. Being able to do two things is better than almost any other bonus you could ask for except for being able to do three or more things. You can even, in a general way, rate how effective an action is based on how many individual actions it would take. Like, casting a sleep spell on a group of goblins and putting half of them to sleep is more efficient and generally a much better choice than casting Magic Missile and wounding with an outside chance of killing one goblin.

So yeah. Anything that grants more actions is by default an amazing choice.

No, that's the opportunity cost of the convention, not the meal.

Umm...not following you. And in the interest of full disclosure, I'm pretty sure it's some form of semantic wrangling that I'm almost completely certain that I don't care to get involved in. You disagree with me, that's cool. Everyone values everything differently, so the way I look at things very likely doesn't match your own perception of "value".

There is also not enough money in the ZOG to pay for that, eh? :ь


That's the main action runners take, anyway, unless they want crowds of mooks to overwhelm them sooner or later.
The point is, both adepts, mages and sammies have to make serious sacrifices to get extra IP (actually, other archetypes do, too: hackers need expensive implants and upgrades for the commlink, technos need echoes). So I'm simply not seeing how the mechanic, while indeed making the IP count extremely important, inherently disbalancing.

I am not seeing how an equally accessible, if extremely powerful, tool is "broken as hell" simply for being powerful. Is magic "broken as hell"? Are implants?

Or he might, you know, surprise the guy and drop him before he gets a chance to use his fancy IP count.
Oh, what are you saying, he's losing init and incapable of getting a drop upon his adversary? The problem then is not in the IP counts.

To that I'd suggest two considerations. First, runners rarely if ever face opposition that numbers the same as them, and two mooks with 1 IP each are just as good or better than one mook with 2 IPs. Second, there are cheap temp IP count boosters in the system (chems), which alleviates the difference further.

I have a recurring Corp Prime Runner NPC I use in my games that has plenty of Deltaware and Type 0 whatchamacallit. He has plenty of Essence left. He has no extra IP anymore, but he does have Move by Wire because he would be quadriplegic without it. Those random tremors are really creepy, though.

You mean, human wave attacks actually work?

How many one-shot stops show in up 4th with weapons short of a Panther cannon and shotguns? Wasn't this very thing one of the main design reasons for the hop up in weapon damages in 5th?

Yes, two mooks are better than one...unless the character has 2 or IP and then the mook start dropping like flies. In fact, they were getting chopped down so fast with Bulldogs shotgun that they usually didn't have a chance to maneuver into a better position to really allow for their superior numbers to mean anything.

So the answer to extra IP being broken in terms of band-to-buck ratio is to find cheap ways to add the same broken bang-to-buck ratio to all of your NPCs...which is my entire point. Instead of having to toss ridiculous combat drugs down everyone's throats or ram them full of magic and enhancements, I simply removed the extra IP from the equation. They can still get extra actions by splitting dice pools if they feel confident, but the other extra IP options are right out.

And you know what? I feel that my games are better for it. You see more thoughtful use of tactics when you know you can't just win initiative and start slaughtering everyone before they have a chance to act, survive the weakened counterattack, and then get right back to chopping them to pieces. Getting the drop on the other guy is still huge, but now they don't have the extra IP to easily regain initiative against enemies that lack them.

You mileage may vary, but it has been a 100% positive experience for me and my games.

This convention is my vacation. I was going anyway. I want to go, I've spent the money for the room. The opportunity cost of that money is already gone.

The lunch at the Conflict Kitchen's opportunity cost does not include 5 days in a hotel at $120 a night nor does it include the other 4 lunches, 5 dinners, and assorted breakfasts, alcoholic beverages, or merchandise I pick up. No, the opportunity cost of the kitchen is merely the time and energy gathering a few friends, the short drive over there, and the money actually spent at the restaurant.

It's the same reason that the opportunity cost to eat lunch there does not include the $8000 it cost for me to buy my car: I was going to be doing it anyway.

I perfer 5th. The grenade rulse and AOE with no modification make sense to me. I see the die roll (with scatter) to INCLUDE the "oh crap a grenade" moment (part of the scatter...the book presents it as a "the grenade bounces" thing and I see it as a "the grenade bounces and you try to get out of the way". Everyone got so worked up over lack of dodging. No I admit I have no real life experience with this, but (irl i think) after a grenade is thrown you have what? 1.5 seconds to respond? For the most part that means you are not dodging it. The same goes for any AOE. Love the initiative changes including the price increase for a couple of reasons. It reduces some of the "gotta have it" from initiative booters (it isnt a guaranteed IP). Sticking to wired reflexes alone, the increased price adds to my perception of this. In game it also makes sense. Wired was (presumably) originally a (Para)military application. My guess is that whoever developed it only released license fot it to be mass produced for security/police use after it "fell off a truck" and became something to consider a real possibility to contend with. Note it's the HTR and SWAT guys that have (for the most part) wired _1_ .

As far as the casual "just get delta" to be able to stuff more THINGS in... even 20+ years after it's inception, to the public (IMHO) Deltaware should be the stuff of rumors and trid shows.

Does it have issues? Yes.