Which is why I take Incompetent (Groundcraft).

That might actually come up.

Also it goes well with Knowledge: Bus Schedule.


If you're taking something like Incompetent, you're challenging the GM to come up with a situation that requires you to make that check, and hoping they don't take the challenge so you can get a few free points. At least pick something that's not life-threatening when you fail it (parachuting, most vehicle skills).

The Incompetent Ouality in 6e is not a penalty to tests. It just doesn't allow the character to put any more points in that skill. So say, not having a skill suffers the same penalty weather you have the incompetent quality or not. So I'm thinking it is intended that you actually have the skill too.
But then again, picking incompetent for a skill you don't have but make use of is an angle.

This is probably one for errata as earlier editions clearly specified you could not have the skill that you are claiming to be Incompetent in at all, nor could you even default to it, which is different than just not having the skill and using a stat or similar skill to default to in a pinch.

Lack of clarity to be sure.

Uhm, you didn't get the Cyberpunk reference, right? Because otherwise you'd be the first person I know to say that about Cyberpunk v3

Every skill is listed as being usable untrained or not. If you you attempt to use a skill you do not have and it can be used untrained you roll the test with an unfamiliar skill penalty, which is a -1 to the dice.

...only played a little in CP, first edition.

Just as well. It didn't make sense to me that something like swimming or sprinting would have the same penalty as casting a spell for example, when doing an unfamiliar skill test.

Are...

Are you answering yourself?


Also, what are you referring to as same penalty as casting a spell when doing an unfamiliar skill test?

Because you normally have to know the spell to be able to cast it, there is no unfamiliar casting/ defaulting for spellcasting in the main rules.

Roll4It on YouTube: Why We Aren't Playing Shadowrun 6th Edition Any More

Without watching.....I'm assuming it's not what they want to be doing.
Just not up to their standards.

Richard Stallman Resigns From MIT & FSF

I should probably have allocated more points to INT, but... what does some dude sharing random thoughts about a piece of news have to do with Shadowrun?

Or... and here is the crazy thought I realise... try watching it.

Yes they lambast several points they don't like, but they also point out elements they do like.

May not agree with all their points, and I think they are misreading one part which may explain why there is some confusion about it, but they raise several good points and stress
that they hope these will be addressed.

...I watched it in its entirety and a number of their points agree with my points. YEah 5th has its issues but at least I can manage and deal with those without having to write my own ruleset.

Well... it’s been a bit I suppose.

I watched the first 20 minutes of the video linked above and it has confirmed for me all I need to know about 6E. Don’t need the 2 hour version. The discussion regarding playtesting and editorial oversight that starts around 8:30 is exactly the reason catalyst’s SR is the dumpster fire it has become. It’s the reason I quit playtesting and freelancing, and why I won’t spend a dime on anything with Hardy’s name on it.

Honestly I am disappointed that there’s yet another edition of my favorite game I won’t be playing. But I can’t say I’m at all surprised.

I hope you have all been well.

...indeed, I love the world setting and they have beautifully fleshed it out, but as was mentioned in the video, the rule mechanics have left a lot to be desired, not just in 6E, but in 4 & 5E as well.

OK, my post was referring to Cyberpunk v3, which had a global data wipe (including paper, because nanites) as part the backstory for the edition change, and was a disaster for which "dumpster fire" does not come close as a description. Which is why I was slightly bewildered that somebody talked about missing "3E" in the next post

...well System Failure was pretty much that as well. There were a lot of nice juicy plot threads and intrigue in 3E, much of which was poorly explained away or just forgotten.

At the time, I was GMing a campaign set in Europe focused on the UK when suddenly nothing mattered anymore even though my setting was started a few years before the second crash. I was working up to the event's in SOTA 2064 (hoping for a "SOTA 2065" supplement which never happened) when suddenly, everything supposedly went "kablooey." OK I can understand the fact that in real life, technology bypassed fiction with the advent of wireless everything (crikey, I even had a Toshiba notebook computer with a wireless card at the time).

My thinking was why not just amend that in a new matrix or SOTA supplement instead of ripping apart a world setting which was so well fleshed out and rich (we were just getting into the horrors and never saw release of the long awaited Shadows of South America supplement), as well as introducing a whole new rules mechanic? yeah, 4E had a few OK features (like the default build point system, fixed TN, geneware, and elimination of the magic loss rule for wounds [which really crocked adepts]) and a number of bad ones (such as spellcasting becoming even more powerful, blurring the distinction between shamanic and hermetic traditions, Technomancers being little more than another magic tradition instead of the true outgrowth of the Otaku [which they were supposed to be], a significant reduction to starting resources [while costs for many things still remained the same or even increased], hard skill caps, and addition of a "luck attribute").

5E cleaned some of the poor and inconsistent mechanics/rules up while it introduced new ones such as limits, and returning to the old priority system, while magic was still overpowered, Technomancers were still treated as "matrix mages", and the "luck attribute" remained.

6E, from what I have been reading and watching (discussions and playtests), I am totally unimpressed. I feel this may be CGL's "D&D 4E."

This is why even for its complexity, I say I still "miss 3E" sometimes.

The beautiful irony being, and people easily forget, Wireless Matrix was a thing in 3e and (superficially) it functioned like modern wireless networks and p-secs were essentially smart phones anyway, the difference being that CyberDecks and CyberTerminals made everything VR and silly fast.

The world setting between 5e and 6e seems to have the most parity. Same with mechanics. As far as inconsistency, I look at Shadowrun editions and see the world setting being deployed as a mechanic and not just a backdrop, and the world narative in early editions was pretty incomplete by current standards. Still developing.

Erm... 1-3 was consistent and you could use sourcebooks across the editions with minimal effort in most cases for rules and with no effort required at all for setting information and how things worked. the Seattle Sourcebook is a great resource for 1-3, the Neo Anarchists Guides, Sprawl Survival Guide, Shadows Of and the setting boxes ALL have value outside of their written editions. Heck they even have value into 4th. 5th and 6th have none of that parity with the entire rest of the setting history. Also I am pretty sure the setting information for 1-3 was not only extensive but also exhaustive, the detail was intense in many cases. Corporate Shadowfiles and Corp Sec Handbook are amazing in their own right for not only what they cover but how it's covered.

The world narrative in newest editions I am afraid to say is very sub-par, there are approaches of logic that fail at first hurdles. Again Nstol you seem to not know what you talk about.

Eh, I don't think that's a fair comparison.

D&D 4e was a mechanically tight game that just wasn't a good representative of D&D. SR6 is both mechanically terrible and a bad Shadowrun game.




Yup. Wireless networking has been a thing for decades in SR, it just couldn't push enough speed to do full ASIST decking. They still have never given a good explanation for how it does in the later editions, given the physics of wireless networking haven't changed.

Pretty sure that even full ASIST was there in Matrix, just I/O depending on carrier signal more than Deck and here were a few interesting issues that could crop up with wireless connections and Dumpshock and the Psychotropic IC

If they liked it the way it was they would not have made so many changes.
The world was projected to change along with the rules. And again the further and more developed the setting is the less the rules seem to lack parity with the previous edition. You liking one edition over another did not effect that progression at all.
But I'll leave that where it is.

...indeed, save for South and Central America (Amazonia and Aztlan) they had mapped out the world pretty well by 3E and as I mentioned offered a lot of threads and hooks for setting a campaign around.

I used older material like the London Sourcebook, TT Sourcebook Paradise Lost (the setting information) and even Shadowbeat (I actually played a Cybersnoop character who was pretty effective) in 3E with little difficulty. I also modified a couple of the chapters in the old Missions supplement and successfully GM'd them. One of our missions GMs ran a short 6 episode alternate non missions campaign that used Elven Fire but with the 5E rules as the basis, which was very successful.

Currently we really have just a smattering of information to go on in the way of the overall world setting in 5E as the only location details I've seen has been in a few campaign books and the individual Missions seasons/CMP packs. [after GMing a long running campaign in Europe focused on the UK, I wasn't very thrilled how the UK in (London Falling) was portrayed. Always loved the challenge of the original 2E/3E setting where civilian society was effectively disarmed, magic was highly regulated, and they still used hard currency for transactions (loved the look on the players' faces when after the first job "Mr. Heath" [the term I used for a Johnson] passed a bunch of manila envelopes out filled with 100 quid notes as payment to the team)].

I was more addressing your assertion that the previous editions did not have a developed or fleshed out setting where the opposite is entirely true. There is has been very little setting information for 5e except that where the changes to matrix and magic were involved, nor any evolution in the process where as 1-3 (and indeed into 4) follows a progression of events that track back and forth to each other with a consistent internal logic that is critical to world building. Even when rules and other things changed that effected parts of the lore a reason was presented and listed and could be seen and followed. The logic than came into 5e and now 6e did not do this. Things were done for game mechanics reasons (poorly) and then crow-barred crudely into the setting, when it was considered at all. What you have here is people creating game mechanics and then trying to bend a setting around them rather than looking at the setting and putting mechanics in place to represent that setting via a rules framework where it is required.

The world morphed and changed successfully through 3-4 full editions of the game, not to mention at least 2 editions of Earthdawn too, a different game in what was a shared universe. Then 5th happened and those decades of consistent development and theme and world building (mythos) went up in smoke. Trying to claim that 5e-6e is the most consistent in terms of parity, mechanically or otherwise, is simply a fiction.

Wireless ASSIST was present from day one: that's what riggers do.

Virtual Realities 2.0 introduced (in 1995) satlink in SR2, though that required a 1.5 meter satellite antenna in a trailer or a truck. Matrix (2000) added cellular link and radio link. Those allowed full-fledged decking, with I/O speed capped to that of the low tier cyberdecks. This is exactly the kind of things that push towards a new edition to be released. Once such option is available, you can no longer write an adventure without taking its existence into account, yet you also can't assume the players will have the book and the option.

While it's certainly entertaining to still have old grognards yelling at the sky "Damn you Wifi, damn you, you ruined everything! Everything!!!" when there should be by now people playing the game who were born after the 4th edition was released, the thing is, Wifi is merely a scapegoat for the far wider paradigm shift on computer technology Matrix initiated and the 4th edition pushed further.

The point is not that the decker went wireless. Everyone else also got on the Matrix. Saying it could be retconned by handwaving ASSIST as not compatible with wireless bandwith misses the point (in addition to not being consistent with riggers capabilities). It's not just that Shadowrun Matrix was designed in an era where wireless connectivity did not exist; Shadowrun Matrix was designed with fucking mainframes in mind. We may not argue about what a pocket secretary could or not do because the people who wrote the game in 1989 did not include wireless connectity in their setting, we do because they would not even include laptops. The game was set so deep in a mainframe/workstation mentality that there simply were no rules to hack into someone's else cyberdeck or pocket secretary to stole the files they could download.

Now we're in 2019, I guess we could argue whether the ruleset correctly depicts a setting with mandatory cloud storage because, as the saying goes, even a broken clock is right twice a day (my take is we'd made "why can't I store my data offline?" debate as relevant "why can't I put my device offline?").

Another part of the paradigm shift relates to the decker/hacker archetype itself and how it is pictured. While AR hacking is tied to the wireless Matrix, those two concepts don't overlap. The whole idea of hacking in virtual reality has already been weakened. Decking initially was supposed to be a full VR simulation experience, with programs showing up as tools and so on. It wasn't looking like something technically-savvy to do. When the reference was 1970ies or 1980ies computer technology, that was fine because the simple fact of getting a computer running with the proper programs installed was a technical feat by itself (even in the first half of the 1990ies, I remember stuff like a specific memory mapping to set during boot to play Ultima VII). The decker filled the techhead stereotype by building his own deck, and the rest was just playing videogames. Then we moved into an era of mass-produced computers and Installshield Wizard. Because there is no longer any "magic" in having a working computer, you now expect a hacker's technical prowess to be displayed as dozens of lines of code typed while breaking into a system (which is actually not how it's done in real life!). In that regards, AR hacking hit the right note as much as VR, if not more. But on the other hand, SR4 rules themselves also made the sript-kiddie possible.

hee hee hee.....5th edition and 6th edition were some nasty hack by blackhat developers......

...personally I prefer being able to sit in a heavily armoured up Roadmaster several blocks away, hacking in AR to avoid being shot by sec guards or other runner teams, as most of my attribute points at priority C went to Logic, Intuition, and Willpower, my second priority to skills, and my top priority to resources. Yeah, dodging a 6 round burst from an Ares Alpha loaded with APDS with 9 or 10 dice isn't very effective and not having the body/Strength to wear more than an armoured jacket and ballistic mask doesn't do well for the inevitable soak roll that follows.

One of the parts about 3E I miss is the Million Decker. 450,000 doesn't quite cut it when you need augmentations to make up for lousy physical attributes and some form of internal speed boost on top of buying a deck (even a mediocre one will set you back at least half or more of your starting resources).

Not that wearing armor will do you any good in SR6's glorious new Edge system, where Armor is basically good for nothing (not even carrying mods, since those burn out after a round of use, and are irreplacable, so a firefighter's fire-hardened power armor is good for some 18 seconds of protection before the firefighter dies a firey death.

you think that's a problem, one someone pointed out a while back is related to driving. basically, when driving at high speeds, the average driver will have zero dice with which to make tests. now, you only make tests when something forces one... like, for example, responding to a fire truck that surprises you. oh, and most autopilots only have one die.

so, basically, every time the fire truck goes anywhere at high speeds, forcing other cars to make any manoeuvres that are even the *tiniest* bit difficult, it's causing massive car crashes everywhere it goes (even if the truck itself doesn't crash, which it probably will because it probably has a high threshold and even a high dice pool won't be enough to make that the least bit reliably, the other drivers attempting to make tests to respond to it are going to be crashing all over the place, which will cause other cars to crash).

good times

Ah, Game Design professionals at work.

Calling Hardy and company Game Designers is an insult to every 15 year old dreaming of publishing their D&D house rules as a new hit RPG system.

...yep, why waste thousands of on something that is now pretty worthless.

well i mean, it isn't like it's been reasonably possible to ever afford an upgrade with the run payouts in the past long while ("what's that, you're upset that you'll be personally facing down lofwyr? alright, fine, i'll give you an extra 3 grand, but you should be grateful i'm so generous!")

so hey, might as well blow your cash on armour that is only somewhat likely to be useful. it'll take you 20 years of running before you'll be able to afford to upgrade anything meaningful to alpha, and longer still to be able to afford anything interesting to go into the karma hole left in its place.

Or just homerule a way to create a magic rating if you don't have one, magically heal yourself while ditching your augmentations, study the mystic armor spell and fly all the way to heaven on your very own magical wings.....

That has been in the books for ages . .
It is called HMHVV.
And as of SR4, a more expensive but slightly more socially acceptable way to accomplish half of that: Gene Therapy.

...one flaw with that...background count. if it exceeds the rating of the power, the power doesn't work.

This was why in the Chicago Missions I gave my namesake 1 essence worth of augmentation (lowering her starting Magic Attribute by 1) for rating 2 Orthoskin (which later was upgraded to Beta) and an alpha grade Smartlink (which later was also upgraded to Beta) as the "ambient" BGC in Chicago was 2 (and higher in parts of the CZ). Later she added Beta grade muscle toner (the special reward from Dr. tate for the 10-57 mission) giving her a base agility of 8. The only two powers she started with were Improved Reflexes 2 and Combat Sense.

Yes, technicaly you are correct . .
But BGC is realistically never used and kept track of in my experience <.<

It sometimes gets forgotten about, but clever GMs have it noted in their encounter notes and also make a small list of typical counts for likely regions in their game alongside the RTG and LTG lists

System Failure certainly changed a lot of stuff compared to the supposedly world-changing storylines that came afterwards, but IMO it still was really careful not to rock the boat too much. There was no "rocks were deorbited, everyone in megaplex X, Y , and Z died", just "there was an EMP, maybe your characters were affected, maybe not, whatever suits your campaign".

....it is in Missions, which are the only opportunities I have to be involved with Shadowrun where I live.

Fortunately my namesake also was pretty good with both pistols and longarms so when she ended up near places like the Shattergraves (-6) and Cermak Crater (-6 to -12) that effectively nerfed her Weapon Focus, she could still do something.

...after the "digital dust" settled, a lot of very interesting underlying plots (particularly ones that were central to the campaign arc I had written and was GMing) simply disappeared or, as I mentioned, were "clumsily" resolved. They could have kept most of those intact and not advanced the timeline so far.

I didn't see a straight addiction test in the Core Rules. Could it be a lack of editing? Or was a purposeful action meant to seperate some rules into a custom environment, or supplement rule book potential?

...that is interesting as drugs, their effects, and durations likely are still outlined in the core rules and this information is pretty important as drugs tend to be a less costly way of boosting abilities when needed than augmentations.

They don't work well for mages, hence did not get tested or read over in the 6e copy to make sure all the parts of the system were actually written down.

...hmm, in 5E my Mystic adept uses Psyche to reduce the penalty for sustaining spells (which is one of the drug's listed functions).

Anyway, kind of a poor reason to not include the information as other characters from sammys to riggers to deckers often make use of drugs.

I always read or heard people who are not in the RPG thing talking about the Addiction Test rules. It's a pretty strong focal point.
With the slimming down of the rules, leaving addiction to the individual groups to handle with custom tests or just ignore completely seems the plan.
But, I am guessing they will add them later.

Yes, but poor reasoning in general (and "what does this do to benefit mages, specifically) has been de rigueur for 2.5 editions now.

...well, after 3E they removed the Magic Attribute Loss test for taking any enhancement drugs. The 3E version of my Decker Violet always carried a spare reservoir of Cram/DMSO for her Ares Super Squirt just so she could mess up opposing mages and adepts.

Kind of annoying that Magic in the game (which already was pretty overpowered) affected the actual rules for other characters.