Yep, once again, no real reason to stop using 3rd Edition.

And people looked at me funny when i wrote that about 4th edition . . you youngsters git off my lawn!

Yeah, it's too bad. Fourth had some good ideas. If they'd have fixed the implementation instead of removing all of the good ideas, it would have been good for the game.

Oh come on, you're trying to twist my statement about the initiative order being the same into a comparison of power levels? Are you that desperate?

Well, to be honest, if you can't single tap an enemy out of the combat, then going more times before he even gets his go is simply better than alternating, because it seriously lessens the risk of retaliation . .

I'm looking at all the comments here and wondering why they ever went away from 2nd and 3rd edition. There was no true need to do so. They basically made a completely different game.

NOW NEW AND BETTER!
BUY BUY BUY BUY BUY !

IMO, SR got better and better with each edition, peaking at 4A and then worse. Let's see what the new one has in stock, but I'm not optimistic based on the last one.
Either way, I'm not switching, because I still have material enough for the next 20 years.

edit:

I cannot fault a company for bringing out new editions of their popular IP. It is WAY easier to bring out a new edition and the accompanying new core books than surviving on the proceeds of setting book after setting book that only GMs buy.

Yeah, admittedly, I came in with Shadowrun 4e, and it just makes more sense to me than other editions. I've seen a bit of third, but third doesn't click in the same manner, but is admittedly, still coherent enough for me to accept that it's a good system... just not my cup of tea.

Fifth is not. Fifth is a raging dumpster fire, IMO. Sure it's got decent chapters or sections, but that's because the entire thing is a hodgepodge of freelancers of wildly different quality. There is no coherent whole, like was present in the past.

NERPS! for Him!, NERPS! for Her!, NERPS! for Them!, NERPS for You!, NERPS! for Me! NERPS! for Shadowrun!

Fifth's problem was that it wasn't an edition. It was "4th edition, except each of us individually wrote up a list of changes, then compiled them without editing or noticing that some things got nerfed 3-4 times." I didn't help that there were several fixes like "what's the solution to wearable tech being cheaper than cyber, but cheaper and essence-free?" "We can give cyberware weird bonuses, then create a drawback so we aren't making cyberware better. Also, so we don't make cyberware better, we should make those bonuses things that already exist, and now can only access if you accept the drawback." Done right, fifth should have been fourth with lessons learned, but that takes effort, and admitting to problems.

that's actually a pretty good summary of SR5.

except you forgot the part where they also increased the cost of cyberware relative to starting resources, also to make sure that cyberware wouldn't be overpowered.

That's okay though, since now that they don't halve the Essence cost of the lower amount of cyberware/bioware, the sammies can't get as many augmentations implanted, either.

yup. thank goodness they nerfed magic to keep it form being wildly overpowered by.... err... ummm... allowing them to exceed the limits that were supposed to keep everyone from getting use out of ridiculous dice pools by spending money that they otherwise didn't need? wait... hold on a second...

New and improved! No Limits anymore!

That's what I meant by some things getting nerfed 3-4 times. I mentioned cyberware losing functionality, but it also lowers charisma or charisma limit or whatever. I haven't opened 5th edition books for years.

...which IMO was one of the new ideas in 5th that were actually good ideas, execution notwithstanding. Inherent limits for everything (plus modifiers for half of them) or calling the stat which spay n' pray SMGs need more than sniper rifles "Accuracy" are not going to be missed, but not because the concept of "your stuff limits how good you can do certain tasks" is bad in itself.

Don't get me wrong, I liked the idea of limits as well. In theory. In practice, they're just another (floating, no less!) stat that you need to keep track of, and easily ignored by spending edge. Which bogs Shadowrun's notoriously tedious combat down further.

I just find it exceptionally funny that it's now touted as an innovation that they're going away again.

i find it *particularly* ironic to call it innovation considering that if you look at when they said they started work on SR6, it happens to line up with being not excessively long after 5th edition D&D. you know, the edition where they basically killed off most of the previous one that a huge portion of their fan base hated and put a lot of effort into making it feel like all the editions of D&D before the previous one?

if you pay close attention to the "new" stuff in 6th edition, you may find a fair number of things that may make you think "hang on... isn't this almost straight out of the pages of SR <insert number from 1 to 4 here>?"

in other words... it looks an *awful* lot like they realized SR5 was just as big of a fiasco as D&D 4 (well, in relative terms, D&D has a much larger portion of market share) and tried to use the exact same strategy as D&D 5 with SR6.

well, except for the part where WotC hired on an all-star developer team for the project and did huge open playtests to actually get fan feedback and make sure they were doing things right, and CGL had the same overworked team of underpaid freelancers that were doing SR5 also working on SR6 as a second (or more) side job... and their equivalent of the open playtest is that this time around, they've actually acknowledged that they might need errata and supposedly have a plan in place for it. which i suppose is better than having huge obvious errors pointed out in the PDF show up in the print version that came out several months later, but... not exactly reassuring in terms of making me feel like they didn't take half-measures.

ah well. we'll see. i would really like SR6 to be good. i certainly won't be excessively surprised if the same dev team in charge of the same freelancers make the same mistakes though.

I have been thinking about 6th edition for a while now.
I've come to realize that it's probably better to bring out a completely new edition than just going for, let's call it 30th Anniversary edition 5A.

There are so many areas where the system is lacking that it might even be a good idea to do what they did with the switch from 3 to 4, and completely burn down the mechanics and re-build from scratch.

We'll see what we'll see.

Huh. Mearls and Hardy do share a lot of traits, and both were directly responsible for the previous unliked edition being bad because they don't know how to design anything. Also, both unliked editions were based off saying the right things and implementing them badly because they and their friends like terrible things so the fans can suck on it.

IMO both are the big problems outside of combat, but in combat the limit is a stat that can go next to the other stats and in my experience Accuracy is fairly static. My problem with limits in combat is that the limit is called "Accuracy" and accordingly, more accurate weapons have a higher limit, but in practice it limits the opposite of accurate shooting. Challenges to marksmanship are modeled with DP penalties, not by requiring a certain number of hits, therefore limiting the number of hits does absolutely nothing when trying a precision shot. Where the stat named "Accuracy" does play a role is when you're hosing the hallway with your 1000+ RPM SMG to hit that wired fragger...


Well, funny in a "why are you throwing out the baby with the water" kind of way...




Including the guy who at that point claimed there's a literal conspiracy to destroy the hobby from within (it got worse since then), and the guy who at that point was already known for habitually harassing people and being banned from just about every RPG forum (it got worse since then).

That's obviously not an argument against the idea of getting "consultants" aboard (or open playtests), but WotC's execution isn't exactly a shining example of how to do things right

*shrug* from the perspective of doing a good job of designing, that's still better than having inexperienced authors who are writing your previous edition as their second or third job also take on writing your next edition as their third or fourth job (and let's not forget their fourth or fifth job of checking each other's stuff, and potentially heading up the errata team, without compensation), with the proper dev team being absolutely rubbish when it comes to giving proper direction, fact-checking, proofreading, etc.

i mean, frankly, i don't think the current team still working at WotC are all that great without the rest of the team they had for the core books. but they did a pretty danged good job with those core books, and clearly some of the people they hired must have been competent because it's a heck of a lot better than the crud the dev team at WotC can shovel in our direction without a full team to do a lot of the work for them. half the time i suspect they don't even really understand the basic guiding principles they used to write the edition at WotC's head office any more.

Yes, that is one of the weirder side effects.
Or the way you can more easily disarm someone with shot / flechette ammo on wide spread, without harming the holder of the weapon. That's something that was already apparent and one of my players reported it during playtesting. But to my knowledge, it was never changed to simply exclude shotguns.

EDIT: Nevermind... ninja'd by a number of other people.

Not to mention that with the suggested payouts, you're practically forced to front-load all you can get during character creation, and will see no real improvement for a long time when playing ... you know ... a cyberpunk

TBH, the way they treated cybered characters (the iconics, so to speak) in SR5 was one of the main reasons why I heavily disliked the game and never picked it up.

One thing that they did do right for 5th edition is the idea of positive and negative qualities not always being multiples of 5.

Yep. You lose a heavy weapon, or a drone, or a vehicle, or an arm, or god forbid a cyberdeck in 5e, you might as well roll a new PC. You will never be able to replace them in-game.

So then they made all of the above brickable by deckers.

I would respectfully disagree with that. In a system that requires you to spend and adjust a small pool of starting Karma, making the numbers harder to balance is a needless complication. SR5 is kind of schizophrenic that way. It tries to make the SR4 rules less complex, but usually winds up making them more fiddly and complicated.

I think the main issue there is the weird way in which karma is treated during the creation process in SR5.
If you gave me a karma creation system that works like in SR4, I'd applaud qualities that fit in for 3 points or whatever they may cost.
In fact, I would have used that as house rules for SR4, if it weren't so much work to assess the qualities on how much they're worth.

Run Faster does have Point Buy, which is essentially a slightly revised Karmagen. But with the same +25/-25 limit to Qualities, you can run into the same problem of fiddly numbers. And maybe it's just me, but I don't see the wider array of values resulting in a better approximation of Quality cost. You still have Qualities that are overpriced or underpriced (or unbalancingly good, or "trap" options).

Even from a perspective of the end justifying the means, hiring crackpots and harassers was a bad idea. That kind of people tend to destroy cooperative efforts, even if the gamble may have paid off for D&D



Competent people are necessary, but IMO the decisive factor was WotC saw themselves forced to change things and therefore put their considerable weight behind making sure the line would again become undisputed in its top position.

On the other hand, why would CGL be forced to fundamentally change their development process? 5th Edition sold well, displaced previous editions, and there is no threat similar to Pathfinder. It worked the last time, why not again.




@Glyph

Of course a wider range of possible values does not automatically lead to a closer approximation. But it opens the possibility of a better approximation than "it's kinda between 5 and 10, let's toss a coin"

Because fifth only managed to outperform previous editions based on the fact that...

A.) It was the current edition during the present tabletop Boom.

And

B.) Shadowrun has always been a relatively niche RPG. It's not like D&D where you can find a group on the drop of a hat.

I think that any developper just try to make the game good.

Just some of them are not good at it.


CLG team (or Hardy, idk) seems unopen to me, too full of themselves. Or just plain out bad in organisation. Or too lazy.


They had freelancer leaving.
They had so much negative feedback for some ruledesigns that someone in charge must have been very stubborn on their ideas.


I think this sixth edition will go the wrong way. Excessively simplyfing things when that's not wht their fanbase want. When you sell oer multiple editions a corebook, a rigger book, a cyberwarebook, a magic book and a matrixbook, in which world you come to the conclusion that your customers want easier rules.

They want good ones, that's all.

That said, I feel like plot books between edition get rarer and rarer. 2nd and 3rd had more than 4th, who has more than 5th who's already almost dead.

I've heard that plot books rarely make any money for any system, which might be why they're less common now.

Honestly, I doubt it.

They make less money, obviously. But if RPG-compagnies survive in France by selling around 1000 books per publication, I doubt that a US-RPG compagny doesn't beat that mark even with plotbooks considering the size of the market of USA+England+Foreign langage buying English books.

Remember with CGL, everyone except Hardy who writes Shadowrun is actually primarily a Battletech writer and they alienated all the old freelancers who knew SR inside and out. Doing SR plot books is time not spent on that product, and has to be coached by someone who does know that plot inside and out, and Hardy is from all description not great at that.

you can say that again. the loss of so many of their old freelancers was bad, but it could have been a lot less bad* if the management team were better at communicating, putting all their work together, proofreading, fact-checking, and so forth. if management were doing their jobs properly, the freelancers would be able to do much better. and not just from a lore perspective, either... just in terms of making the rules, management aren't holding up their end of things. the guy who wrote 5e's wireless bonuses thought he was writing bonuses for having a device in your PAN, not for having it on the matrix as a whole. technomancers got nerfed like 4 separate times, leaving them with all of their weaknesses and none of the strengths they once had, making them mediocre in the matrix and terrible everywhere else, and they're hardly the only thing that was so badly balanced that it needed major balance changes once they *finally* got around it. various things that were known problems were patched by the missions team for years before management did a damn thing about them - i kept a copy of the missions rules handy for years because the small team of part-timers had to fix the game-breaking stuff in order to have a functioning and somewhat consistent system for a living shadowrun campaign.

* in terms of product quality, that is. all of the things they did that lost the trust of those freelancers in the first place would have been just as bad, of course.

Yup, and this is why I'm not super hyped for 6e.


Especially when Hardy himself pulls out 'oh, it's not in the core, we'll have to get that out soon' in response to a question about a basic mechanic like background count.

...OK a veteran here.

Watched the live play sessions, tuned into the podcast discussions and came away with a few observations.

--The new edge mechanic throws another layer into combat that sounds somewhat subjective.

--Armour has become pretty useless.

--Using a single initiative roll per combat unduly penalises the player who gets a low result.

--Unless you are an amped up troll sammy, prepare to be creating new characters with more regularity.

--Unless you are an amped up sammy, prepare to primarily be doing the old "duck and cover" in combats.

--Suppression fire (which is great for characters with low combat skills and a nice defence against the new NPC grouping option) is gone.

--Knowledge skills sound as if have become even more useless (still miss the ability to have them augment linked active skills like in 3E)

--Edge has effectively become a "power" as well in that you can now use it to force a glitch/critical glitch on an opponent which makes it a probability rather than just a situational modifier (personally, I never liked the concept of Edge even in 4E as it was a "luck" attribute which made the game feel more like a video game or MMORPG).

In some way it seems like 6E is influenced by Anarchy which I really didn't care much for.

In spite of it's issues, I felt 5E played better than 4E. The only feature of 4E that I liked was the move to the build point structure. Still prefer 3E overall even given all its "crunchiness."

Missions (which I am currently involved in) is going to be a pain for as I understand the plan is to switch from 5E to 6E between Season 10 and 11. This will mean having to either build new characters or "downgrade" existing ones to just what is available in the core rules midstream in the location arc. There have been a lot of nice additions (qualities, gear, etc.) in later expansions (particularly ones like Cutting Aces, Kill Code, ChromeFlesh, and Street Lethal) that make running in Neo Tokyo more reasonable, which will be no more.

My two

armour hasn't so much become useless as it has become not armour.

i mean, it helps you get edge. that's something. it helps you keep your opponent from getting edge. that's something, too.

but neither of those things are the something that armour should actually be doing, which is providing protection from things that hit you. it could potentially be somewhat related to protecting you from an attack later on (for example, if you earn a point of edge you could use it to help you dodge, and if your opponent is denied a point of edge they'll have less edge to spend on hitting you), but it could also be completely unrelated (you could use that edge to hack a camera or your opponent could use that edge they gained from attacking to dodge one of your own attacks).

[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]

will they try some open-testing this time?

The books are off to the printers already...

...the issue with armour providing additional Edge points is Combat Edge is capped at 7 per turn. So a human with 5 can gain a maximum of 2 additional points and that's it regardless of how heavy the armour worn is.

Also what about armour from 'ware, like Bone Lacing, Orthoskin, and Cyberlimbs? Will that only grant additional Edge points or will it actually augment the soak roll?

I love it when my little troublemaker Leela, wearing her Medium Milspec, with all her built in armour (Bone Lacing and Orthoskin), can jump on an HE grenade, and maybe take a box or two of stun at worst. Her total soak roll is literally a cube of 36 dice plus the hardened rating of the suit.

yeah, you're supposed to be spending your edge quickly too. and as i understand it, you can only get 2 edge per turn, it's 7 maximum at any given moment.

but still, it is quite stupid that armour doesn't actually do anything to protect you from damage (unless you spend the edge you gain on it. that said, the same edge could be spent on all kinds of things that super-heavy armour should limit, like escape artist or acrobatics or sprinting, since the edge gained is not limited to being used in any specific way, as far as i can tell, not to mention that your edge from having a gun more powerful than their armour can be used on tests to resist damage, to give another example)

apparently a lot of 'ware has been tweaked to be about giving you edge as well, so i wouldn't be surprised at all if armour-increasing 'ware is the same as regular armour. in one of the interviews he said he thinks there might be some 'ware that *actually* helps you resist damage, but he wasn't sure.

so yeah, edge is looking to be complete and utter nonsense. and i wouldn't count on being able to tank damage the same way at all. there may be something you can do, it's hard to say until we have the new edition in front of us, but i don't expect armour stacking will be the thing that keeps you alive.

@sk8bcn: no, they won't. basically, the explanation they gave boils down to "that would have really hurt our 5e sales, and we can't afford to not have that income". the first half of that is pretty much true; if you knew 6e was coming out in 2 months, you'd probably be a lot less inclined to spend money on a new 5e book this month. the second half seems probable; most RPG companies aren't exactly rolling in cash, and shadowrun is probably worse off than might be expected as a result of exceptionally poor management decisions.

of course, on the flip side, it is also not necessarily a good idea to make a bunch of big changes when you have no idea how your target market will react to those changes. doing things right may not be cheap, but doing things wrong can cost you a lot as well... for example, if the 6e core book isn't very good, it may still sell well, but i doubt their splatbooks will. we'll see whether they are able to afford not doing open playtesting soon enough, i guess... but by then, it'll be too late for them to fix it.

From what was said in the interviews, it's only been tested internally, which means for the most part by people who probably don't run a regular game and worse who are involved in writing the rules so are going to miss the rough edges because they'll play to the intent, not what someone coming at them fresh will take as the read.

i'd agree with that being the most likely scenario. i mean, i would hope that at least *some* of their freelancers play shadowrun of their own free will, but even then, most players won't test the system to destruction. many don't even know how. frankly, the people you want for playtesting tend to be the people you *don't* want at a regular game table; the person who will twist the meanings of ambiguous sentences to mean whatever they can*, the person who hunts down every synergistic bonus and combines them into an overpowered whole, the person who always points out annoying implications of certain rules and tries to abuse them, the person that knows every shred of lore and will pitch a fit if an NPC is wearing the wrong colour of shoes, the person who has no clue what the heck they're doing, that sort of thing. and for all that we hear about them the most, i'd say their actual numbers are relatively low; you just don't hear about the 3 reasonable people at the table with the one person ruining things for everyone else. these are the people that will find the problems in your system. you'll still probably need someone else to actually track those problems as they come up in games if they're not good playtesters, but if you want to find out where your rules are unclear, play with a rules lawyer; if you want to find out where imbalances are present, play with a min/maxer. if you want to find out where your rules will have undesirable consequences, play with a nitpicker. good players don't necessarily make good playtesters, and if we had better playtesting for 5e, someone might have found out that bricking your wired reflexes would as written shoot sparks and smoke into parts of your body that are going to cause serious problems, or that technomancers got nerfed so hard that they wouldn't touch them with a 29.5 foot pole, or that you can just pay the money back on your in debt quality and never pay the karma to remove the negative quality, but never be penalized by it ever again.

* i believe that RAW should generally not be some sort of sacred cow, but it's best if RAW and RAI are the same thing, or at least close enough that you can get a pretty good guess at RAI based on what the rules actually say. so yes, the person who interprets RAW as if it were holy text is good to have around when you're playtesting.

If RAW does not match RAI, it is 100% on the team making the product. The game designers for the rules design and implementation, the writers for how that implementation is presented to the reader, and the editor for not catching when the two dont match up.

...the tricky part is that Missions pretty much observes RAW, albeit with some restrictions primarily related to disallowing certain Qualities and Metasapeints (the latter seen as imbalanced or overpowering), as well as discouraging PvP situations and "alternate" rules such as Sum to Ten and Karma character builds (the latter which I disagree with as even with the priority system I have seen it easy to min-max and create an unbalancing character that can make the other players feel more like spectators instead of participants).

In some areas, like where I live, Missions is the only opportunity available to be involved with Shadowrun on a regular basis as "home brews" are far and few between and often don't last more than a couple months before one or more players usually drop out. Players coming and going or not being available every week doesn't affect Missions as much for while there are 6 "thematic" missions per "season" (along with additional CMPs), they don't necessarily have to be played in any specific order (though Chicago Season 8 and Neo Tokyo Season 9 tended to work best playing from beginning to end because of the way they were set up as to how certain plot elements unfolded within).

Several core members of our Missions group (self included) are concerned about Missions switching to 6E after Season 10. We will continue to run the older CMPs & Chicago missions (just so there are enough options to run on a weekly basis), which were written under 5E while NT seasons 11 and 12 will be 6E. Several of us have also voiced concern over switching gears midstream in the Neo Tokyo setting and what that will do to ongoing characters. as many have been built using the more recent rules expansions. that would not be available again for a while.