QUOTE (Glyph @ Apr 2 2016, 10:35 AM)

At the endgame (rather than char-gen), sure, but throughout most of a campaign, a character going against type (troll face, dwarven speed samurai, elven brawler) will be less effective and more challenged.
That actually doesn't contradict anything I said. In fact, I'd argue that you could make a much stronger claim and simply say "throughout
most of a campaign, a character going against type (troll face, dwarven speed samurai, elven brawler) will be less effective and more challenged." I'd agree with that, and to be totally clear, I'm not disagreeing with you re: relative dicepools of characters either playing against metatype or to metatype. Given a large enough population of Shadowrunners, I think your central thesis is very likely to bear out, and there's every reason to expect that for the most part, an elf face will continue to throw more dice than a troll face.
I even pointed out in my original post that this holds true for the endgame ("max attribute" context) as well when I said,
"And elf strongman isn't losing out on as many STR dice as they used to compared to an ork; a troll face isn't losing out on as many CHA dice compared to an elf." We're talking about relative losses here, but we're still talking about
losses; no one is making the claim that suddenly trolls are the
de facto face metatype. (If someone shows up, you and I can join forces to refute them). My point was simply that the overall range of
all max attributes for metatypes has
shrunk, mathematically speaking. That's not debateable, that's just math.
Now, you're bringing up a new question: where in the campaign timeline (for lack of a better term), that this would become noticeable? Which is a new angle, but I feel like this is partly my fault, because Bull was careful to limit his terms to "max statline" and "max attribute" and I conflated it when I started talking about "endgame." But for your claim of "most of a campaign" to go through, there's an important assumption that doesn't necessarily bear out in all cases.
Distribution - There's sort of a common-sense assumption is that the attribute arrays are more or less evenly distributed for characters, but we know this isn't the case. Faces pump CHA at the expense of other attributes, gunbunnies pump AGI at the expense of other attributes, etc. A lot of starting builds have "key" attributes above the racial max. Even a couple of the sample archetypes in the SR5 book do this, and in my experience (anecdotal though it may be), player characters are even more likely to follow that path than the folks who write sample characters. (In fact, that's Bull's experience as well for
missions characters, since he said that's what prompted him to advocate for the change). The changes to max attributes mean that racial maxes that were 7 or lower go
up in terms of max augmented attribute, and racial maxes that were 10 or higher go
down in terms of max augmented attribute. And there are simply more candidates in the former category than there are in the latter one.
Now, there's a lot of other issues we could bring up, but I'd prefer to bracket them for the moment because I think they're going to send us down rabbit trails (starting power level, rate of karma accumulation, a whole lot of other things that neither of us probably have much real data on, etc.). My point is simply that it absolutely
possible that you would run into these changes immediately even in a starting campaign, given the way that characters are built. Obviously you're going to run into them much
more extensively once people have nothing better to do with their karma than max out their attribute arrays. But it's certainly
possible, given the way that I've seen players tend to build characters both at my table and on various boards, that you'll see even starting characters who play against type being relatively
less penalized for doing so. You and I both agree that there's still a penalty.
Anyhow, like I said, this isn't intended as a takedown of anything you (Glyph) said; I think we're in agreement. I just wanted to clarify for the benefit of anyone who comes along and reads our collective internet wisdom in the future.