Why does it always have to be a rule discussion. Can't it stay around the setting (campaigns-plots-locations) instead of the old Floating TN/dice pools/wireless bonuses discussions?

Rules are objective. We can mathematically show why a rule is good or bad.

Setting stuff is subjective. It's a matter of taste. Personally, I find the fiction for SR5 to be a mixed bag. I thought the rules presentation in SR4.5 was excellent. But everyone will feel differently.

Many will remember me as being one of the more vocal anti SR4 people, and i'd still play that over the idiocy that is SR5.
As for the setting . . that did not even change all that much in SR5 as far as i can tell.
So Boston is now a second Chicao, only with a different type of Problem. Who cares? Boston never got much of a write up to begin with, so many people simply never bothered with actually playing in boston, so this has, in effect, no effect whatsoever ono most people actually playing.
The only thing that is a real "change" in the setting is the . . *thinks* Insect Spirits . . Shedim . . Deus . . ok, no, it's only the 4th kind of mind control and technically not even that as it is more or less what DEUS was doing back in Arcology Shutdown already . . And of course, suddenly EVERYTHING that was produced using nanotech is now eeviil . . BECAUSE REASONS!
That is all the change that happened, because the setting simply did NOT go forward as usually for some years but is a direct continuation with some changes happening basically over night for no reason at all.
Oooh yeees . . Cyberdecks are back . . Because reasons . .
All the IMPORTANT STUFF happened before SR3 already. Some interesting stuff happened IN SR3 still. The Crash 2.0 and OOH TERRORISTS! BE AFRAID! WE ARE EDGY BECAUSE WE ARE WIRELESS! was neither important nor interesting and started the decline of SR with the advent of SR4 . .

Well a bit more objective because some like rules with an heroic feeling, easy ones, some realistic ones, simulationists.

But I'd rather take Stahlseele's option opinion on the setting than the 25th rule comparison thread. Not that I don't like such discussion. But those one start to feel old to me.

I admit that I have seen nothing to make me like SR5 over any previous version. I still think that deckers are a necessary feature if you're going to assume that hot sim means something, and that includes a direct wired connection, not wireless.

For analysis of data flow, see:
http://forums.dumpshock.com/index.php?show...p;#entry1272854
and
http://forums.dumpshock.com/index.php?show...p;#entry1272878



This in particular irks me. Suddenly turning something into a bogeyman where it previously wasn't is bad for coherence.



This one I can kind of go along with - the wireless matrix (as opposed to wireless turtle equivalents) was a bad move. However, undoing that bad move isn't enough to save SR5.



Again, I agree. SR3 was where things last were manageable in metaplot terms.

The trouble with SR4 and onward is that they seemed to shift to more spy-flick "realism", giving you more things to worry about (being recorded on a random pedestrian's commlink, milimeter-wave scanners that can spot all of your illegal augmentations, etc.) while still having character options geared more towards the original, action-flick kind of game. You can start out with a machine gun, but not a decent gun made with ceramic compounds (the Urban Fighter) or a collapsible one (the PSK-3 pistol). You look at all of the options they put out, such as exotic metatypes and sapient critters, and think "How could someone like this function, without being nabbed after the first job they pull?" I miss SR 1-3, with Ghost tossing a white phosphorus grenade under a car to blow up some security goons, or Animal breaking into a nuclear power plant by going truck-sledding. I like most of the SR4 rules just fine, but the setting has lost a bit of what made it so special.

I'll also add that, with the exception of the first half of Runner Havens, nearly every Shadowrun book put out for 4.5 missed the point. Hong Kong was absolutely wonderful, rich and amazing; but every other setting in the book was bland and flavorless. Ghost Cartels started off as a bloodbath, shifted and became Shadowtemps Intl., and then ended as the pawns of Groot's evil twin. Emergence was just bad, and pretty much killed technomancers as a viable player archetype. Dawn of the Artifacts really didn't need the Mary Sue. And so on. Even On The Run didn't work: it was a great GM guide, but a really awful adventure.

I don't know why, but while FASA couldn't do layout to save its life, they were great at metaplot. Like I said before, White Wolf cribbed off FASA's notes when it came to developing metaplot. Portfolio of a Dragon was probably the best metaplot book I've ever seen-- it was so loaded with plot hooks and ideas, I can still use it for inspiration.

5th, Stahlseele. Shadow spirits as well, although they're technically more emotional manipulation than outright mind control.

Why was On the Run a bad adventure? Sure, the listed reward was absolute drek even under the presumption of a milk run (which it rapidly wound up not being,) but it wasn't a terrible Run.

My players had fun with it. They kicked the ass of the Shangri-La strike teams, locked them up naked in a cellar and made them buy their own freedom with their own personal bank accounts (the Shangri-La guys had shot an NPC pubgoer in the crossfire, and my players were collecting for her medical bills, and were feeling vengeful; the mooks either paid up, or the money would be raised by selling them live to Tamanous,) annihilated JetBlack's team with milspec hardware that they'd extorted from the other Runner team (whom they provoked into walking into an ambush before the graveyard and took their gear from them in exchange for their lives,) talked the two old ladies into meeting up again, and told Darius St. George that they'd been hired to return stolen property, not to steal from someone else (otherwise the money they were getting would have been much higher,) and made him negotiate a major deal with Kerwin Loomis to get the disc, followed by getting paid by Loomis for the deal and an armed escort to Sea-TAC. And they still got Darius as a Loyalty 2 contact out of it (Pornomancer face; can fuck you in the ass and have you thank him for the privilege.)

They also stole the orc singer's commlink right out of his hand, the afternoon before the show, and he paid them for the privilege (and a truck full of devil rats, and a truck of regular rats to boot), as well as wound up as shadow partners in the new management at Loomis's pub, which I moved to a faux English Towne walled community.

I wrote an entire review for RPG.net. There's several problems, starting from the beginning: you're asked to find a disk. You're not given really any info about the disk, just that it's a disk. In other words, you were handed a haystack and told to find a needle. That bothered my players immensely.

The more general problem is that this module is decker-heavy, and light on magical events. In fact, you could almost take magic out of it entirely, and not notice. This is a bad thing for an introductory module, which is supposed to have something for everyone. The bigger problem I had was that we didn't have a decker. That made large chunks of the module unplayable. I hate using GMPC's, but that's what I had to resort to.

My biggest problem, though, was after they found the disk. In order to finish the adventure, they need to betray their Johnson. That's fine for veteran players, but for an introductory module, it's a piss-poor way to introduce them to the world.

And finally, the sixth world is full of unique enemies and factions. Megacorps, Organized Crime, the Draco Foundation-- there's a lot of in-theme groups that you could bring in to introduce to new players. But for some reason, we get a World of Darkness plot: a vampire did it. We're trying to make Shadowrun stand out, and they do a vampire plot. It became too easy to forget they were playing Shadowrun, and not Vampire: The Emoing.

As you can tell, I had a lot of problems with it. The GM advice was great, and it works as a guide to the elements of a Shadowrun adventure. But it doesn't work as an actual Shadowrun adventure, it misses the boat in too many places.

Having played in the Hong Kong setting for years (we are still there, for the most part), I agree that it was amazing indeed... And I actually enjoyed Emergence (One of our most interesting Technomancer characters came from this), Ghost Cartels (gotta love the Cartels, rat bastards that they are) and the Artifacts series (Frosty never really did much of anything because we were competent enough to do the majority of the work instead of her) - When you have an awesome GM, setting inadequacies (of published material) can be fitted to work out wonderfully. And we have an awesome GM.

I do agree that the setting material has been on a steady (though slow) decline, in a lot of ways, since FASA, though.

I'd say that the old black and white art with cables and obvious cyberware and such feels much more cyberpunk to me than the modern-day "semitransparrent AROws everywhere" thing.


>relative simplicity and consistency of SR5
>SR5
>simplicity
>consistency

Not all runs are "Go to place, shoot it up, loot everything." Really, the adventure hires people to look into something which is ostensibly stolen. (It's not, but so what.) That of course means they're going to do legwork.




Gee, a task to commit crime in the year 2070 might necessitate a computer expert, who'da thunk it?

And really, maybe one in one hundred people's lives are touched by magic every day in the Sixth World. Just about one in one's lives are touched by computers every minute of every day.

Unless your Run is to head out into the Salish-Sidhe wilderness, a hacker is, in fact, going to be an absolute requirement, and you should've made this clearer to your players at the onset.e





Um, no?

Betraying Darius St. George is an option. It's certainly not the only option: players are perfectly capable of taking the disk from Kerwin Loomis, setting the opposing Runner team and JetBlack's crew on one another/evading them both/defeating them both and heading on to deliver the disk to Darius St. George intact and alone.




Hold on, you were complaining about a lack of magic up above. You can't have it both ways, vampires are, in fact, an Awakened threat, and something for the mage to deal with. And it certainly wasn't as if JetBlack's vampire gang were the only game in town - Ari Tarkasian? Sent Shangri-La goons and then other Shadowrunners to get the damn disk?




It was a great intro. There were opportunities to betray the Johnson for money or morality, there were company men and opposing Shadowrunners and hostile Awakened entities. It showed just how jaded and depraved the Sixth World has become, that people are hiring black bag men not over cases of critically-important corporate espionage, or top-secret military prototypes, but frigging music, and are all perfectly willing to kill people to take it from its rightful owner. There's opportunities to hack, opportunities to get your magic on, opportunities to fight like a boss. And in the end, it kicks the players in the arse by reminding them that at the end of the day, all their hard work, their sweat, their blood, their potential casualties and all the people they've left facedown in a ditch, may be for precisely jack shit, because whether they get the disk to Darius intact and alone, hand it over to JetBlack, or even somehow decide to side with Kerwin Loomis and make sure he gets his due for the disk which is his rightful possessions (as it was willed to him by his father, who was given it by JetBlack in the first place,) nothing happens with it. Nobody produces it or puts it on the Matrix. Nothing.

But they got paid. Hopefully.

There's a difference between legwork and "Quest for the impossible to find item" WoW-style adventure. All they're told is to find a disk. They *need* more information about this disk to find it, but their Johnson won't give it to them, and there's no clear way to find out. The clues to start figuring out which disk they need is all GM material.

Right, so I need to start a new RPG by forcing a player to run a character they don't want to touch? If no one wants to play a decker, I'm supposed to blackmail then into it? Come on, one of the first principles of good GMing is player agency: letting players enjoy their characters. On The Run is supposed to be an introduction to GMing Shadowrun as well as playing; do you really want to start that by taking away player choices in the characters they can play?

And "hackers" are part of the problem: this is Shadowrun, not CP2020.


Wrong. In order for the game to proceed, once you get the disk you need to crack it, which goes against their Johnson's wishes. That requires a betrayal. If they investigate further, or really do anything other than turn the disk over the second they find it, they're betraying their Johnson. Basically, half the plot *requires* that they go against him.


Vampires are a mundane threat, which anyone can deal with. Spirits are an Awakened threat, which require magic. And even though you can make the battle bigger, you're still basically dealing with a Camarilla plot in a Shadowrun game., That's not good for an adventure designed to introduce *Shadowrun*.


And that's just as bad. I hate "nullification" plotlines, because they leave the players feeling like they achieved jack squat. Making the characters feel despondent is one thing, but players should always feel like they achieved something. If they're not getting somewhere, what's the point of playing the damn game? On The Run had a ton of problems, and leaving the players with the feeling that it was all for naught was one of them.

Just to expand on the "hackers" thing a bit:

There';s been a definite style shift over the editions. SR1 was all "pink mohawk"-- you didn't run the shadows because of the money, you did it to stick it to The Man, and incidentally make a few nuyen. The idea of a "professional shadowrunner" wasn't really there: shadowrunners weren't professionals, they had other jobs and did shadowruns on the side. That's why the original archetypes included Rockers and Investigators-- they were never meant to be career shadowrunners.

2e started to change that. The first glimmers of "black trenchcoat" started to appear in this edition. More professional behavior was expected of shadowrunners, especially at the meet, but in other areas as well. Instead of being street-connected, shadowrunners now started coming from all walks of life.

SR3 was the best blend of the two. While the game still had a heavy street focus, the idea of a career shadowrunner really solidified. The opening fiction did a good job of mixing black trenchcoat and pink mohawk concepts, where you were hired to do a job, and kept it just business until you were betrayed-- then it became personal. Not coincidentally, this is the era when Faces started to become a popular archetype, as social solutions became more viable.

SR4/4.5 went completely black trenchcoat,. The street elements were almost totally removed, and now shadowrunners were just career heist criminals. For example, shadowslage-- it was the most colorful, street-based element of Shadowrun since it came out, and now it was removed entirely. Renaming deckers into hackers was one of the symptoms of this: not only did it destroy the flavor of the game, it changed the feel-- instead of being console cowboys on a futuristic matrix, they were just guys who sat in front of a computer.

SR5 has tried to fix some of this. Shadowslang, and Deckers, are back where they belong. I'm still not sure about the street focus, though. It still feels like they're running with the career shadowrunner idea, instead of people who have lives and jobs, and do shadowruns on the side.

Wow, seriously? I'm not arguing about shadowslang since 5e has discarded even "drek" and "frag", but hackers vs deckers in 2014?
A hacker is a guy who sticks wires coming from a small universal electronic device called commlink into his brain to go into hot VR and hack the world.
A decker is a guy who sticks wires coming from a small specialized electronic device called cyberdeck into his brain to go into hot VR and hack the world.
The difference being?

Terminology for one thing. The word Hacker and the word Decker inspire two different images, ones a real world term the other was something more niche.

The former is a basementdweller the likes of which populate Anonymous. Scriptkiddie was not without reason the derogatory term used in SR4.
The latter is a highly specialized individual with modifications and gear the likes of which the former should never ever be able to lay hands on.
Think Johnny Mnemonic here or maybe the cast of GitS if you don't know him.

A decker is a futuristic matrix jockey, who lives in the virtual computer world of Shadowrun.

A hacker is a modern guy who steals credit cards from his PC.

Decker is a term unique to Shadowrun. It's part of the flavor of the game. And when you use it, you get a specific mental image that's rich in history.

Look, lots of sci fi settings have warrior aliens with honor codes. But if I say Klingon, you get a very specific image in your mind. If I asked "what's the difference between generic warrior aliens X and Klingons", you'd just stare at me funny. Klingons are an integral part of Star Trek, like Deckers are part of Shadowrun.

Ah yes, I understand. Once you stop calling a deck a deck and a decker a decker, the magic completely disappears. Because what things are matters not, only what they're called.

You are being sarcastic. Or trying and failing to be actually, because, yes, that is, actually, exactly what's happening.
Words define things in fiction. So here i have a weapon that fires jets of ultraheated air. In my other hand, i have the WinchesterP94 Turbo.
In one hand i have a Detector Array capable of analyzing most things known to mankind. In my other hand, i have a Tricorder.
In one hand i have a glorified Flashlight. In my other hand, i have a red light sabre.
On one side we have a Space-Station/Space-Ship that was made for space only and thus does not need to follow any aerodynamic shapes.
On the other side we have the Death-Star and the Borg Cube.
On one hand, i have a smartwatch. On the other, i have a Pip-Boy.

Namegivers are Powerfull beings. Real Names have Power over things. Using a name already in use and laden with certain stereotypes and will mean these stereotypes get used on stuff you call by that name, wether or not that was your intention DOES NOT MATTER!
If i call something in a book i write a Bath-Leth, i will a) be facing lawsuits from Star Trek and B have people expecting a kind of science fiction bladed weapon. And it does not matter if i use the word Bath-Leth to describe some kind of toilet, people will expect it to be the klingon sword.

CHANGING the name of something that you have established the name and concept more or less completely by yourself is a stupid thing to do too.

A name is just a term like any other that you're free to define in whatever way you wish, as long as you use it consistently ("a rose by any other name" etc). If in the beginning of the novel you inform the readers that Bath-Leth is a type of toilet, this is what they will expect it to be at the end of the book. Similarly, once you inform the reader that you're referring to a runner who cracks corporate electronic systems as hacker, netrunner, matrix cowboy, decker, or whatever you want else, this is what this term means in your further writing, with all that entails.
And if you want to get into semantics, the classical cyberpunk works that are the chief source of inspiration and associations for cyberpunk pnp systems are not exactly shying from using "hacker" either. And somehow the term does not mean "a fat scriptkiddie who stole your card" there.

The term "hacker" has real-world connotations that make it problematic. Even if you're very clear about your descriptions, if you use a real-world term and go counter to it, you have problems. For example, I could use the word "angel" and describe a robot in exhaustive detail. However, every time the reader encounters one, they'll picture a cherub with wings.

Fact is, shadowslang and terms like "Decker" are part of what made Shadowrun great in the first place. What's the difference? What's the difference between a vampire and a Camarilla Kindred? Surely they're the same thing, right? Except one is a generic term that could be used anywhere, and the other is a specific term that carries a rich history with it. That's the importance of names.

Do you mean shadowslang or street slang? SR 4.5 had it in the core book, it was the SR3 core book which gut every streetslang table.

SYL

Why didn't that stop Gibson?

Right, and every time a reader encounters "Timberwolf", he's going to think about a canine with teeth.

Yes, shadowslang makes Shadowrun great. SR4AE Core even has a vocabulary on page 53 for that.
However, the idea that a slang in a group with rapidly changing membership stays the same for 30+ years, despite the vast changes in the rest of the world, seems extremely strange coming from someone out of his teenage years - and who, thus, must've had a chance to witness such change personally in RL.

Uh-huh, and a decker is by its very nature a term for someone who uses a deck. Neither universal commlinks in the 4th nor the glorified iPads of the 5th which can switch their Matrix stats around at will are nowhere near a cyberdeck from the 50ies.

Not wanting to interrupt the ongoing discussion about defining and non-defining language usage within a genre ... but here 's my 0.02 Nuyen to the question in this thread's title:

To me the 3rd Edition is both the epitome of the initial game design as well as the starting point of a completely different game design for the franchise called "Shadowrun".

SR1 and its quick successor SR2 - to me - were a nice take on a near future setting that combined then "present day" fears under the motto of cyberpunk and magic as an added twist. The core fantasy used some fancy predictions of future tech future, its impact on society and a defining timeline from the late 1990ies to the 2050ies. However some of the premises to build said predictions were already somewhat dated from a technical standpoint. This is particularly visible in the original Matrix design where networking concepts of the 70ies and early 80ies dominated while during the actual development times of 1989 onward network architectures had already significantly changed. Nevertheless SR1 and SR2 could still be interpreted as "what if" versions of "present day" life transferred about 60 years into the future as well as an "what if" scenario for an alternative reality (where some of the actual real world developments simply hadn't taken place while others did). And - at least to me - the alternate reality bit appeared to have the higher focus, simply because of the magic and meta-humanity aspect.

By the time SR3 came around in 1999 things changed. One of the first major steps within the official SR timeline simply hadn't occurred: No court ruling that opened up the way for real world "megas" becoming extra-territorial. At that point - and during the first development cycles of 3rd Edition - Shadowrun most definitely became an alternate reality game where pink mohawk and undercover spies philosophies lived side by side. Unfortunately - for my taste - with the influx of new developers / freelancers that changed rather heavy handed. People started to question the foundation of the known SR reality and pretty much demanded an revised update to make the game a new variant of that "present day" idea - at least for the parts where it was possible. This is how stuff like the ECU changed into Euro or Chrysler-Nissan changed into Daimler-Chrylser-Nissan due to real world events and why the previously closed source environment of the matrix was suddenly changed into a place where file sharing and open source became the next great thing.
And yes, some of the freelancers that are sorely missed by some people these days heavily advocated for that particular evolution. Had they gotten their wills the system might possibly better in terms of game mechanics but on the other hand the vibes of the game itself would have changed nonetheless.

When 4th edition hit the streets that change was pretty much complete and the aforementioned new staff (including now gone freelancers) still advocated for much more dramatic changes. The initial foundations of the Shadowrun universe were pretty much removed and everything revolved around more current - but far more short-lived - matters (and some really bad ideas by some of the involved freelancers that got green-lit by the people in charge). While the mechanic certainly had gotten better overall the world feeling was totally different ... and that was the point were the makers actually lost me in terms of regular investment into the franchise.

5th Edition? Now that one is funny, because quite obviously some people in the development staff try hard to bring back that 1980ies cyberpunk feeling, yet the presentation doesn't fulfill that cause and most of it feels way too forced to be enjoyable. Add in some outright stupid errors in the mechanics and at least one or two freelancers being outright dicks when being criticized about their work and one might be able to understand my decision to no longer invest into the franchise at all - at least as far as the P&P RPG is concerned.

For the record: some slang changes, some stays the same. Gibson didn't use "hacker" very much, if at all, in Neuromancer. Stephenson did in Snow Crash, but hackers weren't as much in public view then.

However, some computer slang has been around forever. We all know what a computer bug is, right? That term stems from the 50's. It came from when a fly got caught in a vacuum tube. We don't use vacuum tube computers anymore, but the term stuck.

Consider and contrast Street Samurai. The use of Samurai has definite intentional implications of having an honor code. Given how they're played, 'Murder Hobo' would be more accurate a lot of the time, though.

"Murder hobo" would be a good description for the SR1 street samurai, where all of the character blurbs had them threatening the Johnson. Only in later editions did they add the over-romanticized bullshido aspect to them.

That's actually not true. Ghost was the first street sam in Shadowrun fiction, and he had a highly developed sense of honor.

I've had more trouble with people playing orks and trolls, regardless of archetype. To be fair, Kham the orc mercenary was also a main character in the original fiction, and he was a murder hobo, so there is precedent for that. Still, I like it when people play characters who go against stereotype.

Murder Hobo is an apt description of basically any RPG that does not bother with such things as lifestyle/where a character lives and what he does when he is not out to murderize something.
Shadowrun gives the conscious decision to be one at least with the different lifestyle levels available. And if you have a low lifestyle at least you are not a murder-hobo anymore. Street-Lifestyle?
Yes, very much Murderhobo. Well, if you use it exclusively. Nothing wrong with having a mid or low and several street as little hideyholes for when you have to drop from the radar.

I'm not sure if I'm willing to put Kham into that "murder hobo" category ... neither by how he was portrayed in the Secrets of Power trilogy (where he wasn't main character!) nor in the follow up "Never trust an elf" (where he indeed became the main protagonist).

The real "murder hobo" in the Secrets trilogy was Ghost's "second in command" Jason.

And as far as other sammies from those early days are concerned: I wouldn't consider Eugene 'Tiger' Jackson nor his buddy Iron Mike Morissey "murder hobos" - despite their background. And while Kid Stealth certainly had a somewhat dreadful relation towards brutality he doesn't quite fit the bill of "murder hobo" either.




Like Plutarch Graorgim?

Well, Kham was portrayed as a mouthy, uncouth bag of brawn in Secrets of Power. As I recall, he pulled stunts that Sally Tsung had to work harder to compensate for. He did get more development in Never Trust an Elf, but originally he was all the typical ork stereotypes. That qualifies him as a murder hobo, in my book.

I guess that's were we have to agree to disagree ... because having some stereotypical traits isn't enough for that in my book

Nah, think about it. I've been GMing this game for more years than I want to admit, and generally the Street Sams I see in game have the following in common :

Impulsive
Vindictive
Distinctive Style
No living kin
No life outside of shadowrunning
Roaring addiction to combat drugs
Utterly minimal social skills, if any


The sams in the FASA-era novel series are much more rounded and interesting people, even when you throw in The Murder Machine himself, Kid Stealth. They generally do qualify as Murder Hobos because they have no permanent ties that they can't shrug and write off if something goes bad.

Ahhh the usual. Once you ask the players to consider why their characters are shadowrunners and not doing some corporate consulting, you get troupes of misfits with either Negative qualities out the vazoo (although you get these anyway, ha), or backstories that make surviving more than a couple of months a remote possibility.

Obviously depends on the choice of targets, but in general it is very hard to one-shot somebody in SR4. Two attacks, on the other hand, are very often all that it takes.

And the direction in which 5th Ed moved is definitely not less lethality: Both damage and armor values went up by roughly 50%, accordingly non-soaked damage increased the same (since Body remained equal, actually a bit more). That damage gets subtracted from an unchanged number of hitpoints.



Objection. First of all, I consider picking (and rearranging) priorities far more complicated than point-buy systems. And secondly, the by far most detailed (for better or worse) part of creating a character remains the same for both: Buying gear.


PS: And for all those with rose tint option for their cybereyes regarding SR3, I suggest you simply re-read the rules on cyberlimbs

Cybereye Rose Tinting
Wireless bonus: Includes fresh rose scent

I never noticed much wounding in SR4.5; generally, with the higher dice pools, it was easier to drop people. Also, combats only lasted until the mage cast Stunball. (Or other direct combat spell, really.)

As far as SR5 goes, nerfing combat spells has stopped the biggest source of one-shotting in SR4.5. Also, despite the fact that I have an adept who can roll over 20 dice to attack, I've only succeeded in one-shotting two opponents since the game came out. One was a mook, the other was an Edged roll with over 30 successes. (Yes, there were witnesses. It was an amazingly lucky roll.) My experience is that the game is significantly less lethal since the introduction of Limits.


Because priority has fewer moving parts, it's easier to arrange. You don't have to make as many fine tradeoffs. Detailed gear is a problem, although in Priority it's a little better-- you aren't tempted to rearrange everything else to get a few thousand more nuyen. You have what you have. Mind you, I'm not quite sold on the SR5 priority tables yet, and the SR4.5 one was just horrible.


Cyberlimbs have never worked, in any edition. The closest was in early SR2, before they introduced Capacity. You could fit as many items into a cyberlimb as you wanted, so they made very nice Bags of Holding. I ran a street sam with so many gizmos in his arm, they nicknamed him Inspector Gadget.

But if you change something you have to create this two parts (for example swapping two priorities) completely from scratch. With the SR3 or SR4 Buildpoint system is was more in the line of "I want 2 attribute points more, so I have to reduce one skill by 5 (oder 2 by 3 and 2) - far easier then to change 46/10 and 20 with 24 and 36/5. And don´t tell me, that distributing 20 attribute points and 25 skillpoints or 16 attribute points and 20 skillpoints (SR4) is more complicated then playing around with 36/5 and 28/2 skillpoints or 24 and 14 attribute points together with 8 or 3 special points and Magic A or B with different starting attributes.

I stand with Sengir on this one: saving 1min from 120min, while the tedious gear systems slows everything down in the last 90 minutes is not really a big help, especially in the unbalanced point values of the different priorities (which will cause the next issue, when in Run Faster the BP/Karma system will be introduced and all characters will be completely incomparable).

Cyberblimbs barely workd in SR2 (way to expensive) and worked solala in SR4, in SR35 they are a bad joke.



Your players or NPCs never used assault rifles with FA, did they? Personally I think that the "power" of stunbolts was only possible of the (still broken) overcast rules. Reduce it to Magic +2 or something like that (with F-Drain and not F/2-Drain) and there would never have been such a problem. But hey, you can still overcast or have fun with limits ...

SYL

I haven't played with the SR5 system enough to say if I think it works yet. I think adding special attributes is a bad idea, it just complicates things and allows too much front loading, but we'll see.

The priority system as developed for Sr1-3 worked a lot better. It still had problems (all metahumans cost the same, for example) but overall it did decently. Each step was much easier to deal with, and had less fiddliness.

Personally: either Karma for all or SR3 build points (120 points at this time) for all as the ONLY building system. To be honest, including 3 different character creation system which are not balanced against each other and even produce different values for different priority orders is incredible stupid. Its like rolling a random number if you start with 300, 400 or 500 BPs in the same group.

SYL

Cyberlimbs work okay in SR4 if you use the additional possibilities from Augmentation, but their Essence costs are out there for what they do.

mine are nothing of the things mentioned up there at the beginning of the game. MAYBE one of these, never more than one.
that usually changes without me doing anything about it <.<

Cyberlimbs in SR3 had ONE USE ONLY.
And that was stuffing in stuff that together cost more essence than the arm did on it's own.
Usually things like Rigger Vehicle Control Rigs(yes, it was called VCR) and internal Cyberdecks.
These went up to 5 essence as well and fit into an arm or a leg, which means you paid only 1 essence for the arm, 0,1 essence for an additional DNI built into it and then only money for the thingamabob to put in there.

SR4.5 was terrible, though, because of the vast number of traps and openings for system mastery. You could start with the same number of BP, and end up with wildly different power levels. The classic priority table, for all its faults, at least produced mostly consistent characters. Original build points (SR2 and 3) were more breakable, but they weren't as crazy-breakable as SR4.5.


Full Auto, like so many things in SR4.5, were pretty much insta-kills. In my experience, wounding people was rare; it was usually all or nothing. Stunball was the ending move, though, because it dropped large numbers of people with little drain. It was also silent, and harder to resist.

Staying with that image, parts are a lot easier to arrange if you may sand off a bit here, and add some filling there. Priority would be nice as a "pattern" for a point buy system ("A means you put 50 brownie points there") to provide players with a rough concept they can refine, but as general chargen it needs to be put in a museum showcase next to literally rolling characters. It's clumsy to handle several varieties of incompatible points, small changes may have an avalanche effect, and (even more than BP) it's a completely different system from how your character improves later in the game.



I'm quite happy with what custom limbs did in 4th. It didn't fix trolls being shafted or the uncertainties of which skill uses which body parts, but a human with two symmetric limbs totally worked.

I disagree. With Shadowrun specifically, every incarnation of the point buy system has led to relentless powergaming under the guise of 'optimization' of point usage. Moving away from that can only be good for the game as a roleplaying game rather than a tabletop battle game.

Better than than the ridiculous priority system. It makes for cookie-cutters, even more than anything else, and it clamps down on customization.

Quite frankly, optimization is not a bad thing. Falling into trap options is a bad thing, but a good GM should guide players away from trap options.



It is, quite frankly, bad cognitive data, to assume that somehow "Roleplaying" and "rollplaying" are mutually exclusive, and to increase one you have to decrement the other.

I disagree. Optimization, especially how unevenly optimized characters can easily become, is exactly the problem with Shadowrun. It isn't a matter of 'traps', as it is that given enough min-maxing, you can create characters who are so wildly out of parity power wise that challenges that one brushes off will have a pretty good chance of wiping out the rest of the players.

This is a bad thing to encourage.

I agree with this. Having good stats or stats that you are comfortable with enables good roleplaying in my experience. People want to do things, they do not want to fail at things.

Comparing SR3 Priority to SR3 BP, from a powergaming perspective, I would prefer Priority. Why? That system can be gamed as much and create more powerful characters assuming the standard amount of BP (IIRC was 120). Now I know some GMs actually give only a cursory audit of the characters made with Priority because they assume that the Priority system is somehow proofed against optimisation and that a character made with Priority is somehow better for roleplay.