It is not a bad idea, it does give you the effect of armor doing some work, but it does mean two different sets of rolling for soaking most every attack and could lead to some odd maths as it is giving more 'weight' to Body because you are using the full amount of body dice to counter both the stun AND the physical treating them effectively as separate actions.
Edited for new rollings:

So by your example you get to use your 4 Body to counter the 4 points of stun, thanks to the 4pts of armor, then roll your 4 body again to resist the 4 physical.
Law of average says rolling 4 dice should get 1 hit for certain with a chance of a second.
So they take 2-3 Stun and 2-3 Physical on average.

Compare that to the wet tissue paper as armor new rule where you only had 4 body dice to soak 8 physical damage, meaning they would have taken 6-7 physical.
So it spread out the damage as armor should.
On the surface it looks like its balanced, with the 4 pts of armor doing their job, but that might be because the armor and body happened to match.

Lets see what it does if Body was 6 and armor is still 4.
Same 8 damage coming in, but 4 get converted to stun.
Now we roll 6 body dice vs the 4 stun and 6 body dice vs the 4 remaining physical, effectively giving you 12 dice of 'Body' in all being rolled.
Law of average says 6 dice should get 2 hits, so they take 2 Stun and 2 Physical on average.

Again under the wet tissue paper as armor new rule, they would have been using the 6 body dice to soak 8 damage so they would be looking at 6 Physical damage on average.

Let's try this again for someone a bit more lightweight, Body 2 but same Armor Jacket with 4 Armor.
Same 8pt damage, 4 goes to stun and 4 stays as physical.
Resists each with just 2 Body dice, will be lucky if he scrapes off 1 hit each, so they are probably looking at 3-4 Stun and 3-4 Physical.

Which is not bad, considering using the new 'wet tissue paper worn armor system' they would have been sucking down 7-8 Physical damage.
They are still hurting, but it has spread the damage out.

So you are seeing double the amount of rolls used and will favour the High Body types thanks to splitting up the damage, though all Body dice will benefit from it of course.

Edit: I am growing to the idea, you are letting armor do its job after all, plus I LOVED my 3rd ed Troll who felt Light Ammo was a refreshing steel jacketed massage, BUT I think most will balk at having to do the extra splitting maths and extra rolling.


Personally we were suggesting a houserule where you just let worn armor DR add to the body dice, like it does for the Armor Spell or any cyber/bio bone augmentation, then you would be rolling 8 dice to resist 8 damage in your example. It has the benefit of being just one roll, but won't convert damage from P to S, so does lack in that regard.

In the end, it just depends on the level of granularity you want.

As for how to handle Pure stun attacks vs armor, that will take some thinking over.

In the meantime, can someone with the book confirm how Focused Concentration works in 6th?

Under 5th, your level in Focused Concentration determined the level of the SINGLE spell you could sustain without penalty.
So FC3 meant I could have ONE spell up to Force 3 being sustained without incurring the sustaining penalty

Someone mentioned that the new version means each level of FC is for one spell EACH, so FC3 means you can have 3 different spells sustained without incurring sustaining penalties, but they could not cite the page or show the text.

This seems kind of important.

There was also mention of Adepts not losing Power Points if their Essence drops due to things like installing cyberware.
This is extremely important and hope someone can clarify this as this would mean you could build SammieCyberAdepts like nobody's business.

I had considered just rolling Defense rating (Which is body + armor), but thought I'd try out my idea first. I'm less worried about rolling twice since it's a body roll alone.

But having physical convert to stun is tempting so you don't just massacre your players.

Of course, you could also roll body + armor against damage, and then convert later. So, if you take 8 damage and manage to reduce it by 2, then you would take 6 damage which is changed to 2 physical and 4 stun.

As for focused concentration:

Yes, each level (max 3) allows you to sustain a single spell with a modified DV of no more than 7. And each level costs 12 karma now, and not 4.

Re-reading the adept section, I suppose there COULD be a reading where you don't lose powers when you lose essence. But I don't think that was the intent, and there is a line where your power points equals your magic. So, by THAT reading you would lose power points if you lost essence.

I still say the SR3 system was best.

You ain't wrong there chummer

Agreed, although it has its own warts.

better than a game that is warts with a few decent bits hidden under them somewhere though.

+1

It was complex and the rules never developed a unified mechanic like SR4 did (purely rules-wise, SR4 is far more elegant), but it allowed a lot of nuance, customization, incremental character development with high-cost characters (like building up your Radio Shack PCD into an Excalibur equivalent one point of MPCP at a time), and by far the best Matrix system of any edition (taken all the way through, SR4 goes straight back to SR2's dungeon systems; plus, technomancers were a train wreck of imbalance - thank you, Moritz, and shame on the editor for letting Moritz get away with purpose-writing PG rules for his kendermancer OC).

Sure, SR3 allowed for crazy shit. Every edition did. In SR3, with crazy luck (or a die you know well enough), you could levitate an entire house and crash it onto your enemies. However, SR4 had Bloodzilla, the Agent Smith army, and the Neomancer. Every edition had abuse potential.

What, in retrospect, I like best about SR3 was that it let you do things in a way later editions never did. It had working construction rules for your own guns and vehicles, cyberdecks and terminals. You could do a lot of fun stuff with that. You could also abuse the hell out of it, but that's always the trade-off with options.

For all the options SR4 offered, and all the options (like playable infected, critters, spirits, Gen 2 AI) it put on the table SR3 did not, it also took a lot of them away, and those it took away were much more commonly used than some of those it added (seriously, who plays centaurs? This is a rhetorical question, I do not want to know). It also did a lot for cybered characters, in making cyberware more affordable and adding interesting items (can't be said about SR5, the crap container edition of cyberware). However, it took away nearly all the options riggers and deckers had (actually, it pretty much took away riggers as a viable archetype).

Now, I've made my peace with 4E, which has a lot of merits on its own. But if you ask me? For all its overcomplexity, for all its in parts contradictory and learning-intensive rules, for all its ridiculously overpriced cyberware and stock cyberdecks, SR3 let me do a lot more stuff with the types of characters I like to play.

SR3 even went out of its way to acknowledge cyberware was really expensive and -suggested- discounted 'ware as a thing Johnsons should offer instead of cash.

I actually liked it that way, because it meant your Sam never had everything she wanted at chargen, and thus had room to improve in play.

[quote name='Jaid' date='May 23 2019, 04:23 PM' post='1345283']

[sarcasm] but hey, there are apparently still some wireless bonuses in SR6. maybe if you connect your armour to the matrix it will actually provide some protective value. [/sarcasm]
...ooh, but my decker Violet would love that, particularly for those sec guards and HTR teams in FBA with a lot of toys installed.

...ah, already posted about this.

....

...but what about having the best of both worlds? I loved rolling a full 36 ct. dice cube for my little troublemaker Leela's soak rolls when she was in her medium milspec over Beta Orthoskin 4 and Beta Titanium Bone Lacing while pumped up on Kamikaze (the effects of which were amplified by her Narco genemod).

With her double barreled Onotari Interceptor launcher on her shoulder and her completely tricked out Yamaha Raiden slung over her back (loaded with EXEX handload), she looked like a Mini Gundam.

Would miss that in 6E.

...still my preferred edition. Crikey I even played two different deckers in 3E. It was more challenging as you couldn't just sit in the armoured up Roadmaster and screw with a host remotely, you had to go in so you also had to know how to handle yourself when all drek broke loose. Of course with a million nuyen you could get enough chrome and wetware to keep you alive in the meat world. My current decker in 5E has to rely on a cyberarm with modded up agility and armour to even be halfway useful when the air turns to lead (and then it's usually suppression fire with her SMG from a place of cover). She rarely goes VR either unless she knows she's away from the action.

I also liked the variable TN (made Smartlinks really useful, so much so that I even had my namesake Adept get one), the fact Perception was a function of Intelligence rather than a skill you had to expend build points/Karma on, and that all chrome was "hard wired".

what best part of both worlds? why would i want super-heavy armour that can make me better at sneaking, gymnastics, and contortionism, so long as i'm being shot at, but does essentially nothing to keep me alive? only one of those worlds has anything that i actually find desirable at all. the other one is being drowned in pure liquid stupidity.

so far, i haven't seen anything in 6th edition that makes me even want to steal it to convert to earlier editions (or at least, nothing that didn't already exist long before 6th edition came out).

...yep, since 1E here.

Still miss the old skill web where one could conceivably make a high explosive with skill in gourmet cooking.

...^this^

For example, the usual Edge expenditure for my Decker Violet in 5E is when she is going directly after a host (he Hacking skill is specialised in Hosts). There are times when she has no other option like having some slaved device to jack into. Hosts, particularly important ones are also pretty tough to crack and get a mark on (Logic + hacking vs. Rating + Firewall). so rolling her Skill + Logic + Edge will give her a bit of an advantage not only in dice pool, but exploding 6s and ignoring limits. On the last mission was going up against a rating 7 firewall 10 host and got a total of 18 hits (after the exploding 6s) against the host's 7, giving her 11 net. "Yeah like a walk in Commons Park."

That is the "cinematic" aspect which Edge is supposed to represent.

...being a 3D artist myself with works (including ones based on SR) on a couple gallery sites, I find this a bit disconcerting.

...I was speaking from a 5E perspective where armour does add to soak.

I haven't stopped laughing about it since they got caught pulling images from wikipedia for one of the Gun Heaven books.

I've managed to get ahold of one of the CRBs from GenCon, and I'm amazed at what is either an oversight in design or an intentional nerf to cyberlimbs.

In SR6, cyberlimbs start with ALL their Physical attributes set at 2, instead of the previous edition's Strength and Agility of 3. Strength, Agility, and Armor can be upgraded via capacity-filling modules, to a maximum of +4 on top of your natural attribute.

Cyberlimbs also have the note, similar BUT DIFFERENT to the previous edition, where if you have limbs with different attributes (say, only one cyberarm), you take the LOWEST attribute among all the limbs to make a relevant test unless the test is solely being performed with the augmented limb, like firing a gun with only that arm.

So...that means the instant you get a cyberlimb, all your damage soak tests (which are based on Body, a physical attribute), will never be able to have a dice pool higher than 2 without Edge, because all cyberlimbs have a Body attribute of 2 and this attribute can't be upgraded via add-ons, unless the GM somehow rules that the shot is intentionally targeting a non-augmented portion of you.

What the hell, CGL?

Are we even surprised at this juncture?

Can't say that I am. I took a look at the quick start rules this weekend, and they're a complete mess, even corrected by Pegasus.

They're advertising for Missions writers again too... wanting a 2-pager of spec work before they'll even consider someone to pitch a full adventure. No mention of compensation, so probably another 'exposure' gig.

How fast do you regain your base Edge?

You start each game session with an Edge pool equal to your edge stat. You can gain more during combat or other "situations", to a maximum of 7 held at any one time, but extras over the top of your Edge stat are lost at the end of the encounter (whether it's a combat, a social encounter, a hacking session, whatever). If you end the encounter with less than your Edge stat, you don't go back up until you earn it back via some method like another combat coming along.

So you better have your rabid raccoon in a sack with you at all times.
Poke it to gain Edge.

They do try to mitigate that by having an entire subsection in the Edge section where they call out that you can only gain Edge as part of a REAL opposed encounter, and that GMs should not award Edge that are not directly part of an ongoing confrontation or award it to players who are clearly attempting to game the system.

It's scene play, like you see in Anarchy.

Your pool of Edge won't refresh until the next 'scene'.

The big question is when do you constitute a new scene.

Most of the time it will be easy. Your scene might be one fight or a getaway, but some others might merge into each other and can make it a bit stickier.

Best rule of thumb is if there are fresh faces, that's a new scene. But even that is going to be tricky.

Say your scene was a firefight in the R&D lab. You win or fall back, that's one scene. If you run into more security forces in the hallway on your way out that should be a new scene.

But what if you are in a firefight in the R&D labs and you are taking too long so the reinforcements engage you while you are still dealing with security there.

Does everyone get an Edge refresh or not? Change in circumstances should be a new scene, but it can be argued either way.

To keep players on track I guess. The advantage check outside the main confrontaion likely won't be relevant to the main. But how is that exploiting the system? If anything the player is at best trying something not thought of, at worst just not cooperating.
I guess using a skill THEY want to use and not one they SHOULD be in a given situation can be the complaint. But gaiming the system?

I think they meant more the "badger in a backpack" scenario, where a player can just try to get Edge-on-demand. A GM shouldn't reward that, since it's clearly gaming the system.

In theroy a scene can be the entire mission or just a single a nonverbal acknowlegdement by a character.
Plenty of room for in session interpretation.

But more importantly, you can potentially get edge back after the encounter. But then again maybe not.....
I wonder if that satisfies the discussion of soak damage somewhat?

Well, no d'uh
No GM worth their salt would allow that kind of trick, but similar to pink wireless jump suits it's suitable shorthand for shortcomings.

And no limits, and someone mentioned no beginning skill caps? I'm looking foward to some real focused specializations.
I'm thinking of an all Decker game to run for example.....

Yes, that is what we were saying, and why it is a bit vague for determine when Edge refreshes.
It would be a pretty dick move to not refresh the Edge until the whole mission is done, give how dependant the system is on Edge.


well ideally you should because as something crops up, be it combat or trying to rewire your trideo box or bake some cookies, that is a new 'scene' and your pool should be refreshed.


???

That.....

Wow...

It's like you haven't even been reading the debate on armor and soak, but just keep dropping comments in, and damn the non-sequitur.


Can we get an IP check here, because I swear to Ghost that this is Neurosis just trolling us like he did back in 5th about wireless bonuses...

Actually, let us get back to the no caseless ammo anymore for a second here . .
a.) this is a complete 180 and 100% retcon of what was true in SR4 at least, no clue about SR5, never bothered to find out . .
b.) this completely kills off the metal storm weapons and the electronic firing gun modification as well, because those need to be caseless by default.
Were the metal storm weapons even still a thing in SR5? I do not know, never bothered to actually find out . .

...yes electronic firing was not only an option in 5E but several weapons like the Yamaha Raiden offered it as a stock feature.

The Yamaha Sakura Fubuki also reappeared in Better than Bad.

No? I'm kinda with Sendaz here. This looks more and more like a troll, maybe one of the geniuses who wrote this garbage fire of a "sixth edition". Like Neurosis, though Devon was a bit lighter on the typos.

Everyone's out to get you and your luckycharms, man......
We can finally take over the galaxy with you out of the way.

I mean, I'd think it's pretty obvious that they're just here to astroturf at this point.

Mages don't use cyberlimbs, therefore they need to be nerfed. Only mages deserve to be good at anything. Thus spake Hardy.

Remember if you are using Edge, it is better to give than to receive.

For Example, the basic 1-Edge Boost ability of Re-rolling one die (Post) works best when applied to making an opponent reroll one of THEIR hits rather than rerolling one of your misses, seeing as the opponent has a 2/3rd chance of having it become a miss while your own reroll has only a 1/3rd chance of hitting.

Still not entirely happy with the path Edge is taking as basically it is its own form of magic seeing as you can affect others, and even better without resistance unless they spend Edge to counter, but if they want it that way we will make use of it.

To somebody with a a copy of the 6e core rules.......

What are the capabilities of Cyberjacks, and what do they cost in Essence?
Any new headwear?

...interested as well on the particulars of cyberjacks.

So another question, this one relating to combat, is there or is there no longer a Suppression Fire option? I find it very useful for characters who are not one of the team's "big guns" which still makes them very useful when everything goes to dreck.

Cyberjacks have Data Processing and Firewall attributes, i.e. the legal stuff, they also give an Initiative bonus and are required for the matrix-specific Edge uses. Stats range from DP 4, FW 3, +1 Initiative for 1 Essence and 45000 ¥ to DP 9, FW 8, Ini +2 , 3 Ess, 210000 ¥.

Cyberdecks add Stealth and Attack and have program slots, stats go from Attack 4, Stealth 3, and 2 slots for 24750 ¥ to A 9, S 8, 12 slots, 410600 ¥.

Finally there are commlinks, those have DP and FW attributes like Cyberjacks (but only ranging from 1/0 to 3/1) and also add program slots (0-3).

What I actually like about these values is that there is some consolidation, there are six Cyberjacks and six decks going, a deck has the same values for its attributes as a Cyberjack, and both have the same Availability (although jacks have legality "L" as in "license needed", and decks are I-llegal).
But that's about everything good I can say about the matrix chapter, especially the list of actions still is a hot mess: Marks have been replaced with "access levels" (outsider, user, admin) but they still do not give the user any permissions, just the ability to roll a certain test. Editing a file requires an Electronics + Logic vs. Firewall + Sleaze test, opening your garage door is Electronics + Logic vs. Willpower + Firewall and and illegal to boot, encrypting a file is...not opposed and fully legal. Did the ability to encrypt other people's files ever cause problems?
Speaking of legal vs. illegal actions, this new and streamlined edition finally establishes some clear rules: "Legal tests use Electronics + Logic. Illegal tests use Cracking + Logic." See the garage door opener above for how consistently they followed that rule, and it's by far not the only example.
There also are some actions with the sentence "This action is linked to the Sleaze/Attack attribute" tacked on as the first or last paragraph, seemingly an afterthought. Here is what this means:
Certain Matrix Actions and programs are linked to a particular Matrix attribute, either Attack or Sleaze. If you use an action or program that’s linked to the lower of the two attributes, like using Brute Force (an Attack-linked action) when your Sleaze is higher than your Attack, you take the difference between the higher and lower Attributes as a dice pool penalty to the test required for that action.
Why add this cruft in an edition that is supposed to be smaller and leaner? I believe it's there to give the impression that cyberdeck stats matter, which they don't: Hacking into a system is just a Cracking + Logic test and does not require any deck attributes. Sure, without a Sleaze attribute to resist Perception tests you will be easy to spot, but...
If the device doesn’t possess one or more of the Matrix attributes, then the applicable attribute is treated as if it were 0. You can rotate all attributes through your persona, even if they originated from different devices.
So just take your cyberjack (or RCC, actually), shift the DP stat to Sleaze, and be a master hacker without a deck.


And because all of this sounds really negative, here is something to lighten up your mood:

Well, someone apparently cut themselves with that machete while doing so, and this is the blood loss talking.

...hmm, almost makes decking in 3E sound simpler.

IMO it sounds like the optimistic plan you have at the beginning of a project, before scheduling, budget concerns, and executive meddling

Sad innit?

So the interface of the Matrix is accessible by common technology and knowledge which most people in the world should have? Thus a hack is...a small leap in knowledge?