Yeah, and they are the SR Devs for some stupid reason . . .
People like that should not be allowed anywhere near a game that has combat in it.
NICHE PROTECTION! BUT NOT FOR COMBAT MONKEYS! BECAUSE THEY ARE OP!
AND THEY SUCK! SCREW TROLLS! WAY TOO BIG AND STRONG AND TOUGH!

Go frag yourself with that stomm-opinion you drokkers!

It's amusing you mention the SR Devs, cause one came on the aforementioned topic to whine that we weren't all shiny eyes at SRA (To be honest, it was more about us criticizing the writing than the rules, but I guess the very idea of a negative opinion on a SR product seemed to piss him off).

On the topic of what needs to be change, I'm a bit amazed that despite the game having known several major overhauls over the years, and even a total redesign of the rules (SR3 to SR4), the very same critics are always back. The game needs streamlining, is not balanced, is plagued by rule-bloat, is too combat heavy, etc.

So every now and then, you have a new "streamlined" edition of the game. And 3 years laters, you have a ton of supplements with fracking rule bloat everywhere. And combat starts taking longer as you got a ton of options allowing you to terahertz guide mini-grenade behind a log cabin provided you managed three additional tests during your combat turn. And it's not balanced because the mage can now make meteors fall on armored tanks while the sam still can't recover essence slot from upgrading to delta because it would make him too powerful, you know, he would like have one point of strength more, too overpowered. And you have terrible grognards complaining that the streamlining killed major part of the game flavor for them and they will never buy any new editions eva'.

Streamlining is not inherently a good thing, and can cause many problem, especially in the case of shadowrun. One of the main selling point of shadowrun has always been the intrication of its rules and fluff. I know some people think otherwise, and will say it's the awesome setting that the rules are always getting in the way off. Based on the fact that D20 hacks exist, as well as apparently some dungeon world hack, that no one gives a drek about, I disagree with them. So in this case, do we really want some streamlining?

No, we don't.

Of course, we need the different part of the game to use similar mechanics. But we don't need APDS ammos to be available for handgun (or AV, for frak's sake). We don't need every gun to be available in smartlinked version. We don't need FFBA to work like a kevlar jacket. We don't need shamans, mage, voodoos, etc. to use the exact same rules. We don't need elemental manipulations to work like combat spells. We don't need astral combat to be like real-world combat. We don't need planes to work as tanks and tanks to work like ships, etc. Because then, you're stuck with stupid "simple" rules which you'll have to stick by in the supplements you will inevitably make. And the rules you will inevitably add will be stupidly convoluted to fit with the others, or just contradict them.

A shadowrun 6 rulebook, IMHO, would benefit from a refocusing on what makes shadowrun unique: rules-fluff intrication. It should provide somewhat to play the game as basic runners, able to engage in basic shadowruns, keeping the cheese for supplements instead of trying to fit everything in the same book. In short, the philosophy should admit that this will be a rule heavy book, that might get combat heavy, and so make it as playable as possible in this very context.

And of course, it should be set in the shadowrun world, where the price for cyberware is essence and money, not being punched in the urethra by wireless bonus making you hackable.

Would that it were so

Hence quotemarks .

Truth is you can't streamline a game which rules are defining the universe without making it bland. If you give exactly the same rules for astral, real and virtual, you kill any interest in having the three existing.

I respectfully disagree - why would identical mechanics kill the the interest in having three domains? They are part of the overall SR narrative, and thus the very source of the interest in exploring the world, and thus, by extension, an endless source of frustration for those of us who gave up on two of the three:
Speaking as someone who long ago gave up on trying to make sense of the Matrix rules, and only understand the Magic rules superficially, I'll just say they APPEAR to be very different, but I readily admit I could be very wrong here. I already have one academic degree, and frankly can't be bothered to spend another lifetime trying to learn to have fun by trying to wrap my purty li'l head around one or the other (magic or matrix). Much easier to use NPCs for that (since we end up handwaving it all anyway), and let PCs shoot a gun, once we've determined whether to load our guns with clips or magazines
Perhaps if the mechanics were more similar, we'd have a chance of actually use the domains in our game. But then again, we pretty much stopped the storyline in 2056 too, before [insert name of the horror du jour - even MORE terryfying than LAST week's horror!!!1!!] , so never mind me, I'll just go back to reminiscing 'bout the good ol' days *harrrrrk - spit*

I said rules rather than mechanics, but to answer: because those three domains are different. And what makes them different is the fact that you can't do the same things in the three of them. Hence why you need different rules to represent different things.

Otherwise what's the point of them? Having 3 different runs in parallel? When I'm playing an astrally projecting character, I want it to feel different than when he's staying in the real world.

Now, the basic mechanics of the magic rules have been really similar to the rest at least since SR3. Don't really see what's equivalent in learning them to passing an academic degree.

Agreed, unless you're fighting drones.

I know in SR4, it's almost an edge case for a character to drop an opponent in 1 or 3 hits, or not go down in exactly 2 hits. I can't imagine SR5 did anything to improve that situation. Net hits should matter a bit more, so there is some variance in combat.

As for balance between the 3 worlds: guns are good for combat, decking is mostly good for non-combat, and magic can do anything with a single skill and a single stat. That's not easy to balance. Agility isn't that overpowered. Maybe break up sorcery into which type of spell (Health, illusion, etc.) they are? Probably the same with spirit summoning.

The magical skills are too broken up already. If anything, they should be consolidated more (as some mundane skills should be, too). Magic really runs up and down the power spectrum. Adepts are too weak because a background count of 2 can wipe out most of their powers if they have a wide spread of them; but they are too powerful because they have a lot of powers that stack with each other, then can stack with augmentations on top of that (the SR5 pink mohawk pornomancer archetype I did demonstrates this).

Combat spells are relatively balanced - mages should have some go-to, quick-and-dirty spells that can be cast with about the same effectiveness as small arms. Control manipulation spells still need some more work to be balanced, though. Overcasting should be overhauled to be difficult and hazardous - not something you can do regularly with the right build. Spirits are definitely overpowered. They need to have more reasonable stats, and it should not be so difficult for mundanes to hurt them.

Hey, I got a good idea on this!

Faces should be able to deal Stun damage in a fight with their social skills. This should be developped in SR 6. No?

Commanding Voice you mean?

Why stun damage? Why would you nerf them in combat that much? After all they spent a lot on this social skill and contacts, they should be able to use it proficiently in melee and ranged combat.

I wholeheartly agrees with Freudqo about the streamline problem.

I'd like to point out one thing about the idea of not making différences out of Chamans, mages, and so on. If you look at other RPG, like DD/Pathfinder, there are a lot of customers who buys Companions to have many more classes to choose from. They love to be able to pick a druid that would not be a 100% copy/pasta from the cleric.

Does it really make the game too complicated? I don't think so. The player is responsible to learn what his character can/can't do.

The editor is responsible to make it easily accecible, clear and comprehensive.

Mages only need a single skill to dominate the game. There is literally no way to consolidate 1 to a smaller number (you can't have a fraction of a skill). Either sorcery (for all of your combat, non-combat, face, utility, buffing, de-buffing, healing, etc. needs) or conjuring (for all of your my pet is better than your entire team needs). I guess you could combine both of the ways mages do well into one skill called "you should have played a mage, loser." Although I don't see how requiring half as much of the only resource that limits mages would limit them more.

Adepts losing both powers and foci (they tend to rely on both, as well as bioware) means background count punishes them more than mages, but power points are unrelated to the number of skills. An adept cleansing metamagic that only applies to the adept who used the ability would help allow the use of background count to focus on mages more, but designing a game where mages weren't so overwhelmingly powerful that the GM has to spend half of their time taking away abilities or have the player sandbag just so anyone else can do something would make people much happier.

It's nice to learn that mages now have access to all the sorcery spellbook at chargen. And that they don't take drain or have to pay for focus and spend karma on initiation and stuff…

More seriously, as much as I agree that mages have it quite good in the game, I seriously disagree that it's because they are overpowered at chargen. And there are many ways to limit them at chargen. The problem to me is that they benefit of karma award much more than mundanes, because the shadowrun writers are always trying to limit the ability to get more cyber, and there are an awful lot of caps on skills and attributes.



I don't think so either. The distinction only ever affected conjuring (almost exclusively). The apparent complications was the all different traditions and spirits were split up between different books. I a book like MitS had taken a few pages space to make a recap' of the different traditions and spirit powers that were available to awakened characters, there would have been no problem. In many ways, the UMT concept makes everything actually more complicated…

Especially today, when everyone has a tablet or cell phone handy at all times, and where photocopying is not that exepensive and there are tons of helps on the internet, having your spirit lists and their powers handy at all times is much more easy that in the days of SR2 and 3.

I never mentioned chargen, but that gives me an idea.

The Adepts best friend in a Background Count is Adept Centering... With enough Initiations, BGC is a non-issue for most parts of a city.

You said they only needed one skill to dominate the game… It sounded that it was true from chargen.

But in this case, I maintain that the problem is much more on the limitations for other characters' advancement…

Mages used to need the sorcery and conjuring skills. Now sorcery is broken into spellcasting, counterspelling, and ritual spellcasting, while conjuring is broken into summoning, binding, and banishing. There is also assensing, arcana, and astral combat, not to mention the skill group involving enchanting. Sure, you could take just spellcasting, the same way a sammie could take just automatics, but either way, the character would be limited compared to people with a wider array of skills.


To everyone who was talking about faces getting to use their social skills in combat? In SR5, that's actually a thing. You can use the Leadership skill to Direct, Inspire, or Rally. Woo-hoo!! Shadowrun finally has effing bards!

You're damn right, I had forgotten this. I agree with you, this is probably already too much.

Bards = rockers, right? I don't know if those skills always existed (maybe that's what leadership always did? I don't remember having seen rules for it).

A quick attempt at building a mage showed me I want 5 skills (2 sorcery, 2 conjuring, assensing), which is more than I expected. 72 build points or 108 karma. More than expected, but less than the 255 karma the randomly-chosen character I pulled up is. I forgot that summoning is much better with binding. Just a summoner or caster would be cheaper, but less versatile.

More limited compared to another mage, but not compared to a mundane, which I think is the issue. An Automatics of 6 lets you shoot a variety of guns - and that's all.

A spellcasting of 6 (and the correct spells) - allows you to Levitate, see around corners or indeed through walls, heal themselves or others, increase their stats, inflict combat damage that bypasses armor or does elemental damage, control people's minds, create illusions, change your appearance, turn invisible, put up wall of force, etc.

All with a single skill, and then a 5 karma expenditure to add something completely new and different.

There is no comparable skill in the game that gives you the variety and utility of spellcasting.

And although Binding is really useful, even just Summoning is really really good, and can summon a combat monster that is as powerful or more powerful than the other shadowrunners on your team, and it takes 3 seconds to do it. (Even a starting mage can roll 11 dice to summon a spirit, a force 7 spirit of air with Noxious Breath rolls 18 dice to dodge, and 17 dice to attack with its Noxious Breath or Elemental Attack, and has an initiative of 2d6 +18 and a hardened armor of 14) - you MAY have a samurai in your group better, but not one who can be resummoned at a will like that.

Mind you, this is nothing new - mages have ALWAYS been more powerful than their mundane comrades. Its why I don't like to have many in the group I run.

Well, FANSY that...
Sorry, /derail OFF

Until you really bring that character, so that it can be criticized, I'm not so sure you've made any point. Don't forget that such a character will have to be as efficient against magical threat as a starting full mage could be… And be able to apparently make a complete run alone.

Additionally, this has to be compared to other broken characters, not just random samples.

THIS

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Sw0VCtZs-g

has to be included

HougH!
Medicineman

Being the only guy I know who actually went back in the Editions (starting in 4th for 6 years, then 5th for 2 sessions, then 3rd), I would be lying if I said I did not fall completely into the reboot camp.

I hate what happened to the game mechanics post-3rd, but that is nothing compared to the fluff.

By now I have an extensive collection of books from 1st through 3rd Edition, with only 27 or so missing (including the French and Hungarian sourcebooks in their respective language, but I will get my hands on those sooner or later, as I have with the Tokyo Sourcebook I am incapable of reading ).

The one thing I noticed when reading the older books, is that the setting was so vibrant and rich compared to the stuff I was used to.
The 2nd Edition book "Cybertechnology" is my prime example for this, with the usual message board format of NPCs talking about the stuff that is happening painting a story that was so immersive that I skipped most of the crunch altogether to continue reading the fluff.

It was darker, it was grungier, and it was more human back then, and it built up the atmosphere of the setting perfectly.
The old style of black and white, high-contrast artwork also contributed to this.

I would love a complete reboot, setting it back in the 50s, and progressing the metaplot from there.

The newer Editions have become bogged down in the Shadowrun tropes, without conveying how these tropes came to be tropes in the first place.
All of the characters in the new fluff come off as posers to me, as do many of the characters depicted in the artwork.
Some of the tropes do not even make sense anymore, because either the setting, or the rules changed so drastically.
For example, the trope of the damage-sponge Troll, who shrugs off anything short of artillery fire.
I never understood why Trolls were supposedly so tough, because they dropped almost as quickly as any other character in 4th. When playing 3rd, I quickly relaized where this trope came from.
Staying with the Trolls theme: They are supposedly pretty ugly, yet almost all artwork, especially in 5th, depicts them as different, but handsome in their own way, with well-groomed trolls in tuxedos seemingly on every other page.

Now the biggest problem, which was mentioned further up in this thread, is the discrepancy between real-world tech, and Shadowrun tech.
However I do not think this is as much of a problem. My suspension of disbelief is not hindered by the fact that some of the tech seems backwards in 3rd.
I see it not as an alternate future, but as an alternate timeline altogether. In my mind there is no reason to be confused by the fact that we can do stuff easily that is not possible in 3rd, even though it supposedly takes place 30 years in the future, because it doesn't. It takes place on a completely different timeline.

#MakeTrollsUglyAgain

/dead horse incoming

You are not alone, chummer. We made 4th work, sort of, then made the switch to 5th, which killed Shadowrun for us. Started over with (mostly) 3rd ed. rules and are playing all the published adventures in chronologial order. Great fun, much more chrome, more punk, more gritty and the ruuleset, as you've noticed, make for a game that is over the top in a fun and cartoonish way rather than the 'open warfare in the streets of Downtown' of more recent Shadowrun. In the old editions, there was a sense of a 'real world' as backdrop to the action, an everyday life where people have jobs, send their kids to school and write angry messages to the super to do something about old mrs. Hathaway in 18B, who lplays effing Elvis Presley at full blast all night.

If you ignore Harlequin, and stop reading anything about the time after Big D dies, there are still about a bajillion loose ends in Seattle alone that should keep you occupied for a loooong time.

So I'm totally on board with the call for a reboot. Bring back Fasa-style fun, pretty please. Oh, and trim the core rules to <100 pages. I'll proofread them for free for the publishing house that takes on the mission to... (clears throat) make Seattle great again

Actually, this is not such a big deal, and can be overcome by some really classic sci-fi arguments… The main problem, I think, it the wireless stuff… Really, we can find no reason for wireless stuff to disappear in a distopian future?



I couldn't agree more on this. The tone has changed too, favoring the poser's attitude rather than the old guy's wisdom… This is quite sad and disappointing.

Wireless is just too damn useful for the technology to disappear in only 20 years. Like I posted earlier, still have wireless hacking, but it is only limited to rating 3 as there is not enough bandwidth for the whole shebang.


I also miss the 'Runners talking about the gear. The best example of this was Smiling Bandit and Wolfman talking about enhanced volume bioware in ShadowTech, and going on for several pages as Bandit made a joke about Wolfman's bad breath and how eventually Wolfman wanted to kill Bandit.

"Dead Men leave no Time/Date stamps!"

To be fair, shadowtalk had already quite disappeared from 3rd edition, if I remember well. The main splat books didn't have it any more. And… Probably it was a bad thing, leading to fill space up with rules and stuffs and rules and more game-breaking stuff…

And now for the most /deadhorsebeating so far:

#MakeTNsGreatAgain

I don't know. I mean they gave more granularity, but they could also lead to confusion.

Your housrules makes sense, but as I said, it does not disappear in just 20 years, because it was never there in the first place, in the Shadowrun timeline.
When did the Shadowrun timeline start diverging from ours? In the 80s and early 90s?
There were economic and humanitarian crises, wars, and general upheaval, that justify a diverging technological SOTA.
Updating Shadowrun every few years to the real world SOTA weakens the setting imho.

I actually like the distinction between ASIST-supported Decking with wires, and Electronic Warfare for wireless.

The major divergence of the timeline started with the election of Jeffrey Lynch instead of former vice president George H. W. Bush within the fictional timeline.



There certainly also are events that simply went a totally different way ... like 9/11 vs. the 2005 Earthquake that took down the twin towers within SR continuity (an event that was written almost half a decade before our world was stunned by planes by flown into highly populated skyscrapers).



Well that trend unfortunately already started during the mid to end phase of SR3 ... like with teh ECU being renamed to EURO just because that happened in the real world or the Chrysler-Nissan merger retroactively being turned into a Daimler-Chrysler-Nissan merger because Daimler-Chrysler happened in the real world. Other things included open source ideas and file sharing concepts arising without actual SR context just because those became "a thing" in our real world. SR4 and SR5 just took that to the next level.



I also like the destinction of different ASIST connections for decking vs. rigging or the fact that SR initially maintained (real world) anachronisms like "phone booths" and networking principles that by the time SR debuted actually had already started to die in our real world.

But now it's kind of "too late". There's no actual way of going back and doing it again from an economic perspective. Neither Catalyst nor any other publisher would be able to successfully revisit that particlar past for a decently large enough target audience.

I think I might make this a houserule. Wireless just doesn't have the bandwidth to support a full VR connection.

And just think of the cancer risk! Standing on a 6th world street would basically be like standing next to an open, running microwave.

Wireless technology was first invented in 1971 (Here's the supporting link) so the cat was out of the bag even in the 70's.
I'm not saying that wireless has to be EVERYWHERE, but you can't honestly tell me that it wouldn't be used.


Maybe combine what Tanegar and I said. You can hack in AR, but like someone in AR, you only go at meat initiative, and are limited to Rating 3 for your Deck rating. Someone rocking full VR is going to smear an AR Decker to Hades and back... unless the AR Decker is just that drek hot. It would allow for "realism" but also maintain the old style SR feel.


Finally, I think that without Wireless technology, you're NEVER going to attract younger gamers. Hell, I've been looking at the rules for Starfinder (the Sci-Fi version of Pathfinder) and I'm thought to myself "WHAT?!? No wireless connections for the normal people. We have that technology RIGHT NOW! It broke a little bit of my suspension of disbelief.

Point taken about the chronology. Wireless data transmission predates computers altogether, if you count radio waves.

Does Starfinder have problems attracting young people though? I doubt it.
At least not more than any other traditional RPG... or comics... or books... or television... or AM Radio... or FM Radio for that matter...
Man, I am 27 and I feel ancient right now. What do young people do with their time?

I agree that suspension of disbelief is a problem, it always is. There needs to be a reason to things.
It does not need to be a good reason however, it just needs to be enough to explain away the inconsistency.
A good reason is definitely a plus, but you can get away with a lot under the rule of cool.

On that note, what is the reason there is widespread VR use in Shadowrun anyway?
It says on 3E Shadowrun that the data flow would be incomprehensible, and that the Matrix would be unmanageable otherwise, but why?
It says in the same section that programming is so far advanced that people do not do it by typing code anymore, is that a hint?
Most users don't even get Response-Increase/Initiative-Bonus because they use Cyberterminals...
I don't know, can anybody enlighten me?

I am deadly serious, I need help! You made me nit-pick myself into a corner!

There was a long thread discussion about this before, but basically here's the problem:

VR (here meaning in simsense form, i.e. the thing that can be overdriven to fry your brainmeats) as an interface may be helpful if the degree of abstraction that it offers is sufficiently useful to summarise what's going on. This is (in essence) the position that you're referring to from 3E.

I will here elide a long rant about how the human sensorium actually works and why the above is garbage, and could be just as well served by a large monitor. Fill in the details for yourself, if you studied cognitive psychology.

The other side of the same problem is that wireless VR is also garbage - it either will be no better than any other well-presented interface, or will demand such insane levels of bandwidth that the laws of physics laugh like Atilla the Hun upon viewing the streets of Rome, and say: "Yeah, nope."

There's also the related problem that VR doesn't help you think faster in any articulable way that wouldn't be equally well served by a large, clear monitor or AR display, and if the goal isn't better thinking but better twitch game behaviour, you might as well have a tuned set of cockroach ganglia doing the important stuff as your own meat brain.

So, in summary: VR for entertainment is fine. VR for steamy hot elf-on-menehune pr0n is fine. VR for talking to a computer is fine as long as you're directly wired in. Wireless is fine for modest bandwidth requirements (i.e. NOT simsense VR) and none of the above will make a difference to actual thinking and problem-solving that wouldn't be made by a gamer PC interface.

Hackers/Deckers/electrofetishist plug-lickers should not be combat-timescale active participants unless they bought their own Ares Predator.

To give a shorter answer than Koekepan:

Virtual Reality is some cool stuff that was in many books that inspired the shadowrun cyberpunk part. Authors wanted runner to use it. But of course, there's no real use for one of your killers/thieves team to play video games during a run. So the video game became hacking while in the matrix. Then they made some fluff to justify it, like oh you know, there's so much data flow you need to be able to smell roses in the matrix to create code.

This was a stupid idea, and the matrix rules have been garbage forever, generating the decker/hacker's problem that's been a major problem in all editions and that even lead to the now infamous wireless bonus. I might have been trolling a little tiny bit during this post, but I'm not even sure of that.

To give a shorter answer than Koekepan:

Virtual Reality is some cool stuff that was in many books that inspired the shadowrun cyberpunk part. Authors wanted runner to use it. But of course, there's no real use for one of your killers/thieves team to play video games during a run. So the video game became hacking while in the matrix. Then they made some fluff to justify it, like oh you know, there's so much data flow you need to be able to smell roses in the matrix to create code.

This was a stupid idea, and the matrix rules have been garbage forever, generating the decker/hacker's problem that's been a major problem in all editions and that even lead to the now infamous wireless bonus. I might have been trolling a little tiny bit during this post, but I'm not even sure of that.

I humbly thank you, and I regret to inform you that I have understood only about half of what you wrote. I had to look up a word, been a long time since that was necessary for me on the net.
Still, I got the gist, I think, and I mostly agree.

I totally agree too, on the dedicated Decker being a bad choice if you are not playing all-decker. I recommend hybriding out that function, into a Street Samurai Decker, or an Infiltration Expert Decker, or a Face Decker, or even a Mage Decker. 3E is pretty friendly to this, since the role only requires one skill, and is basically only limited by a lack of money.
Having 2 deckers in the party would even make sense, if both sport mediocre decks.


I know the basics of how the genre came to be, but thank you nonetheless!
I had just hoped there was SOME kind of explanation, even in the later Editions, but if I recall correctly, 4E and 5E do not even mention that alibi line about the data flow.
Guess I'm gonna answer the inevitable question of: "Daddy, daddy! Why does everybody use VR in Shadowrun?", with a stern: "Shut up or no candy!".
If anyone should know of a good excuse justification rationalization reason for this, I would be very thankful indeed.


After having spent a lot of free time throughout this week finally reading, re-reading, and reading back-to-front, the 3E Matrix rules, and re-arranging in a more sensible order, I gotta say I actually like 3E matrix rules a lot.
They are dirt-simple really, not counting the endless additional complexity brought by Matrix (2000), they are just poorly explained and arranged. I will stress that reading the chapter back to front was my breakthrough move.

Now I would feel as comfortable running an all-decker group through a wild matrix-run, as I feel with running a normal run, and I think I could run a group with a single decker just as smoothly.

This is one of the weird stuff about 4E. It's almost a different game in the same setting, supposed to attract new players, but at the same time, in many places, it looks like you should be familiar with 3E to get the authors' intent…



I don't know if they are that complicated in 3E. It's difficult to explain, but I think that they are really overcomplicated if you look at what they deliver… Because in the end, you really just have a bland mini-dungeon crawl game. Throw dice to hit bad guy, throw dice to accomplish goal, repeat until done. Why bother in the end? Sure, you can describe some awesome landscape and say the bad guy looks like Vega while you're Ryu and stuff, but are there really meaningful choices and strategy that don't really look like metagaming?

Exactly! That's was getting at when talking about tropes.



Well, any dungeon crawl can be a boring one, even in dedicated dungeon-crawling-RPGs, like D&D.
It is up to the GM to decide how detailed the matrix run gets, I'd say, same as in any other situation.

I agree insofar that this is not as easy in the Matrix, compared to stuff that is closer to real-life, because the whole situation is framed in a rule-set that has no real-life equivalency.
In a combat situation, I could make up some stuff, like swinging from a chandelier, or flipping over a table to use as cover, or use my trusty pocket-sand and throw it in someone's face.
Some of these things can be expressed well in rules, but it really does not matter if you have a specific mechanic for it.
Improvising in the VR world of the Matrix is way more complicated for the player, because, with the situation being defined mostly by its ruleset, it feels constrained and un-intuitive.

I have never had a problem with the Matrix in 3rd edition and have run many a game where the decker was running overwatch alongside a team infiltrating and acting in concert using combat rounds.

In answer to the presented question VR in the world of Shadowrun and it's prevailence is to do with things like the ASSIST, Reality Filters, Litary Standards and Programming Methods & Interactions. Yep, VR doesn;t make you THINK any faster but the DNI response time is faster as you're not typing commands into an admin or operator console, your active programs are responding at the speed of thought and even instinct. ASSIST and Reality Filters basically provide to the DNI interface a customised UI, Macro set and a variety of other factors that splits minutes into seconds and seconds into miliseconds, it also makes Program Interaction simpler as ASSIST is designed to be instinctive pattern response and Reality Filters customises the Matrix entirely to your pre-set personal interpetations of how things work. You don't write or hack code, you literally manipulate the artificial reality around you to generate the desired results. It's the difference between playing an FPS and writing in pros each game in full detail describing every colour and shade of every object in every view second by second.

You're quite right.

According to the RAW, and the fluff.

The problem comes in with the part that precisely none of that makes any bit of sense with respect to well-established principles of physics, psychology or computing. This is why we have a verisimilitude problem.

You can, of course, say: "Computers in 2075 are fraggin' magic, build a bridge in VR and get over it!" and that would be your prerogative, but at least you should recognise the first part of what you're saying, about it being fraggin' magic.

The part where you're closest to being right is stating that nobody has to wiggle their fingers on a keyboard to execute commands, or click a mouse button. This is true. And making some massively huge assumptions about the actual efficiency and effectiveness of such interfaces (shucks, why not, while we're believing in elves...) you can justify, in game terms, a cranial plug. What you aren't doing is explaining why you need large amounts of bandwidth between your computer and anybody else's, if your computer is generating the VR experience. You also aren't explaining why this shouldn't be done by flatworm ganglia rather than your own brain, if it's instinctual, or if it's not instinctual, why or how you've done anything to significantly improve your OODA loop's longest part. To make it worse, in a world where your pocket secretary houses its own low-grade AI capable of doing all sorts of fancy decision-making things, why you wouldn't pre-script your conditions and make them all do the work for you is utterly ignored.

It's like someone in 1890 writing a game about the 1950s and saying that the horses will have steam powered armour, while ignoring the ability of powered vehicles to outpace horses, given enough fuel. If you're making assumptions about highly capable computing and software, and instinctive hacking activities, the idea that you would put your own brain on the line rather than an army of virtual drones and cultured mini-brains is simply insane.

And if it's not all about instinct, you're either prescripting everything anyway, or spending most of your time at your console sitting and thinking while the street samurai raids your beer fridge and the mage watches 3d titties shake on the trid.

I quite agree with what Koekepan said.

But to clarify: no one's saying that plugging your brain directly won't help you to communicate with the computer nor give you access to better interfaces. It will never turn minutes into seconds or miliseconds though, programming doesn't work like this, and typing on the keyboard is not such a limiting factor. But still we can agree it will make things easier.

What we are skeptic above is Virtual Reality in itself. You don't need VR to hack and clearly, you will always have a better time with a much simpler interface than what's described in the book.

I reckon that a direct brain interface, assuming that your brain will actually formulate thoughts substantially faster than you can express or act on them by your fingers (questionable, given modern twitch game interfaces) will save you less than one percent of time in action. Probably less than a tenth of a percent - definitely much less if there's serious span of time either waiting or pondering.

You could save more than that by preparing a set of scripts. Much, much more.

Remember, the whole damn point of computers is automation. If you're not using it to work faster than you can, you fail at computing.

Hackers/deckers should not fail at the computing.

Ok, I wouldn't be that extreme… You could actually think your deck is a very powerful tool interfaced to your brain that can interpret your thoughts into the ad hoc scripts for the task at hand, saving quite a lot of time. Not minutes into milisecond, but more like minutes in second, if by minutes you mean one minute and by seconds you mean around 10 seconds.

Now, really, we're arguing 2 orders of magnitude of assistance… not 6 or 7 as was suggested, so the point might be moot… And still no need of any kind of VR.

If you don't like VR, then just remove the existence of all VR from the game and play on.

Kind of missing the point. The idea isn't that simsense is bad, or vile, or inappropriate, or even useless as such.

The point is that, at best, a full hotsim VR rig wired directly into the target mainframe should give you mild bonuses. Wireless and/or remote, sim will get you nothing that you couldn't get from a decent twitch game monitor and mouse, and DNI will get you a tiny, tiny bonus at best, for a hugely elevated risk. It doesn't have to be excised from the game, but the idea of walling the decker/hacker off as a niche player behind an astronomical cost with headware prerequisites makes no sense.

This is actually a good thing, because if a boring old terminal on a slow old link is actually capable of doing useful things, you actually have a career path for the street kid to gradually ascend the ranks, rather than an all-or-nothing cyberdeck prerequisite.

The other side of the coin is that the 5E fetish for wireless everything that somehow is just that much better (except for when it's bricked) is also idiotic, and serious operators would never contemplate using it because it's too damn risky - and in the wilds, wireless just isn't that damn reliable anyway, so there's a strong case for your smartgun to have at least a skinlink connection.

Look at the technological realities the right way, and it actually supports the more interesting gaming milieu.

You don't need to do that. VR exists. Hacking exists. You just ban hacking in VR.

And then, you discover that you don't really need a full time hacker, just someone with the computer skills.

And then, you can produce a new shadowrun edition that doesn't have terrible VR/AR/Matrix rules.

My problem with the wireless bonus wasn't that I don't want cybersams to be hackable. My problem is that you shouldn't need to create bullshit reasons for cyberware to access the internet for them to be hackable. The right mix of directed IR, X-rays, Terahertz or whatever could make you able to at least perturbate signal transmission in cyberware.

And even if you don't like that, there is plenty of room for a semi-specialized hacker in shadowrun. Just not one that has to play video games during a run.