Well, if this is really necessary ...

*stands up as one of those who believe SR6 is an unplayable .... jumble*

You have no idea how the rules actually work, do you?

Nothing you just said makes any sense, from the perspective of someone with the barest grasp of how the game works under the hood.

I will not be playing 6th Edition. In my mind the buggering they did to non-magicians in 5th edition was horrible . As others have said, if a decker was to lose his deck, then the player might as well make another character. In 4th edition, if a hacker/decker lost his commlink, yeah that was painful, but you could continue with a back up commlink.

wait... you don't like it when there are too many variables to dice pools... what???

ummm... you *do* know how edge works in 6th edition right? because it's a giant pile of variables that cram themselves into everything. every single part of the game. with a full page and a half of possible modifiers for every single action under the sun, including not *only* your own actions but the actions of anyone else.

So, I was on DTRP recently and noticed something...or rather its absence: The SR6 BBB is nowhere to be seen in the Top 10, it fell down to number 12. It is marked as "Platinum Best Seller", which according to a couple of Google results means it only sold 1000-2000 units. This is the core rulebook, the most sold product in any given system, for one of the big names in RPGs, yet in the two months since the PDF was released it has not managed more than 2000 sales. It's in the same sales range as Agumented Reality, which is a great product (and what I was there to download), but something that should not be able to hold a candle to Shadowrun's core rulebook.

To add insult to injury, the first place on DTRPG is Carbon 2185, and the CP Red Jumpstart Kit is in third place. Two cyberpunk RPGs, one of them a Kickstarter whose backer rewards to not count as sales and the other one just the quickstart rules, are vastly outselling SR.

Looks like calling 6th Edition a dumpster fire might actually be giving it too much credit, it seems to be more of a smouldering waste basket...

I mean with this quality, who wouldn't want the book?

[img]https://preview.redd.it/5qzthwxfh6k31.png?width=857&auto=webp31d0ea8e[/img]

fixed link: https://i.redd.it/5qzthwxfh6k31.png

Frickin sharks who don't need frickin laser beams on their frickin heads, because they are invulnerable.

so, if i'm reading this correctly, this shark bites for less than its unarmed damage, and (unlike metahumans wearing armour purpose-built to protect from bullets) can shrug off most small arms fire as if it wasn't even there.

also, thanks to the new skill system, it is also a fairly competent climber and skilled negotiator

Yeah, it has Hardened Armor 6, making it essentially invulnerable to any melee weapon in the world, and most small arms fire. A monowhip does 6 damage, to give an example.

Lawyers....

They made Awakened Lawyers...

Literal loan sharks.

I'ts not a fish, it's a lawyer.

A Vice President.

You obviously missed the Chrysler-Daimler-Nissan retcon on the original Chrysler-Nissan corp due to the (short-lived) real world marriage between Daimler and Chrysler

..sort of like in D&D 4 E where even fighters were given "extraordinary" mystical powers.

Really do not like the using Edge to force a glitch on your opponent at all. "Willing" someone's gun to jam or a skill test to fail is simply ridiculous.

...are you referring to the "Tabletop" forum. I left there because airing constructive criticism of 6E was like pouring water into acid. I even received hostile PMs from some.

...stands up and even waves.

I have eeen 6E in action and it is far more of a fustercluck. Makes 5E feel more like 3E.

...and scores three points.

...I'm reworking my old 3E campaign using 5E and house ruling the crap out of it. Even considering tossing the priority system and going back the build point system from 4E for character generation.

Sure, BP are better than priority, but why not use the objectively superior system of Karma build? And while you're at it, completely forgetting about 5E?

...well for one, the Karma build makes for more lacklustre characters as everything needs to be bought with Karma (even knowledge/language skills and contacts) as per the character improvement rules. 4E also had an alternate karma build option that wasn't as good as the Point Build system either.

My reason for using 5E is I do prefer some of the mechanics over those in 4E. Personally, I would love to go back to 3E where the campaign was originally set in (with a few minor house rules I originally had). However, finding players who still play, or are interested in that edition where I live is pretty difficult. Also for new players it is more "crunchy", particularly where decking is concerned (I actually created Excel spreadsheets to try and streamline it back then). 3E also had an alternate build point as well and introduced Edges & Flaws (which became "Positive/Negative Qualities" in 4E/5E) in the Shadowrun Companion supplement.

Hmmm. My experience with 4E has been that I could make more impactful characters with the karmagen system. One data point for karmagen, anyway.

I just recently joined a 4E group here in DS, as I have had a lot of trouble finding anyone to play live here. There is a group who play(ed?) 3E and had asked if I was interested, and yes I was, but that fizzled.

5E never did interest me, and I bought the 6E core book, but nothing else so far. Some of the elements in 6E seem interesting (I like being able to share Edge - and could finally make Lucky Eddie), but I too prefer the older editions. What is the poor publisher to do, though? Make new editions or face a steep drop off of sales. That other game system, whose name shall not be mentioned, is the same way.

...I found the opposite, and 5E's is even worse. as it is straight up based off of the character improvement tables. So for example, for an adept at priority B which gives you a 6 Magic Attribute and one skill at rating 4, you have to spend 140 Karma (100 for the attribute, 20 for adept status [which also uses up 20 of the 25 karma allowed for positive qualities], and 20 for the skill rating of 4). I built a character using both the Priority and Karma build and the Priority version came out much stronger.

I thought there was a house rule where you get Logic x 2 in free knowledge/language points.

...in the 5E priority/Sum To Ten build you get Logic + Intuition x 2.

i do have to say, if sum to 10 works the way i think it does (priority E costs 0 points, D costs 1, C costs 2, B costs 3, A costs 4, and you're allowed to spend 10 total between all priority categories) i do feel like it works as a pretty good "hotfix patch" for priority generation. it gets rid of one of the biggest frustrations of priority gen for me, where you can't have any 2 things at the same priority. you don't *have* to put priority D into race just because you wanted something else in E. instead you can put two things in E, and bump one other thing up.

I do think it might suffer a little bit from the fact that... well, let's just say that in many cases, the jump from C to B or B to A is much larger than the jump down from C to D or D to E, thus making it fairly easy to produce more powerful characters than might otherwise be expected...

...I was permitted to build a character for our Missions group using the Sum to Ten build as long as I didn't use a "4" priority. The character (a rebuild of my old 3E teenage demolitions expert, Leela) ended up much more well rounded, went on to become my longest running highest karma Missions character (462 TKE at last count along with just shy of 1 million in earnings before the group moved on to Neo Tokyo). I pretty much ran her through all 4 season mission packs from 5 to 8 (surviving and even being instrumental in the outcome of the Season 8 finale), as well as most of the CMPs, the "April Fool" specials, and the Fae Realm arc.

She was built on a 3, 3, 3, 1, 0 set (Resources, Skills, Attributes, Race, Magic) and had both the Jack of all Trades and Juryrigger qualities. She has nearly a full page (Chummer PDF character record) of active, knowledge, and language skills (what else to sump karma into for a mundane?). Her motto was, "Skillwires? Bah, who needs skillwires? Give me a couple days." I loved it when the GM would ask "who can operate a boat"," who can patch Johnny up", or "who, can get the power in the old facility turned on" and I would raise my hand.

I agree that Sum To Ten does offer a bit more flexibility (I am also considering it for my 3E campaign reboot, though need to discuss with the prospective players) but yes in the hands of a power gamer, I could see it being easily abused (this is why the core GMs capped the maximum at "3" for any category).

The most obvious example would be the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact, which still existed IRL when 1st Edition was released and therefore in the original "And so it came to pass..." only dissolved after the Eurowars. Reality overtook that fictional future within a few months, so Soviets were changed to Russia and its allies in 2nd Edition.

And of course the German books had their own separate history of the Eurowars, which was only merged with the official timeline in 4th Edition.

Sooo, remember those teasers about blackouts in various cities and stuff going down in Detroit? CGL has finally come close to releasing the book that was teased: https://www.enworld.org/threads/shadowrun-c...-review.669595/

because of Ares’s inability to contain the chaos they caused, the UCAS announces a repeal of the Business Recognition Accords

Bucking the CC is a ballsy move even for a government like the UCAS.

Looking forward to reading the fallout, though I am waiting on the PDF release later in the month.

Fallout's already here. The UCAS is a mageocratic post-apocalyptic wasteland.

The dumb just doesn't end.

...hmm I thought Target UCAS was a 2E setting supplement.

I also thought the Manasphere caused most nukes to turn into duds, at least in 3E that was the case and magic has become even more prevalent since.

Indeed, what are they thinking?

You're assuming that the EMPs are based off of a nuke, which isn't necessary. And as I recall the manasphere (a.k.a. Gaia) made nukes unpredictable. The one popped off at Cermak certainly had unusual results.

As for what the UCAS was thinking, [political statement redacted].

...well the post mentioned a "bright flash" which pretty much sounds like tac nukes and none of them fizzled.

The Cermack operation was partially enhanced by the use of FAB III as well.

The repeal of the BRA sounds like a really bonehead decision which makes little sense. I mean, does DeeCee really want to play catch with tungsten telephone poles from orbit?

Think I'll stay in Pre-Crash 2.0 Europe.

it sounds pretty stupid either way. nuking every city in the UCAS has got to be more expensive than bribing a bunch of politicians to walk it back to counting only for Ares, for example. it would have been pretty easy to get things to a point where it's beneficial for pretty much everyone (except Ares, of course). and even Ares would still be able to make money... i mean, it isn't like large corporations aren't making obscene amounts of money today, and they don't have any (official) extraterritorial status.

not to mention those nukes probably fried a lot of corporate property too. think about it. all of their holdings that are found in a UCAS city, probably gone. they just declared war on the UCAS as well, practically speaking, so anything that was actually shielded from the EMP is still probably gone. they probably just murdered hundreds of thousands of civilians, which isn't going to earn them any friends anywhere else either (i expect the UN are furious, for example); i wouldn't be surprised if they lost all support from smaller corporations, which undoubtedly also got their stuff fried, they just probably also murdered or crippled a disproportionately large number of shadowrunners, so they can expect some blowback from that in the shadow community, they undoubtedly screwed over every major criminal syndicate, so there goes that... oh, and all the customers in the UCAS. good luck persuading them that the government was wrong to mistrust the people who just detonated nukes all across north america.

so, really, unless terrorists somehow got their hands on enough nukes to hit every city in the UCAS, and actually had the means to deploy all of them successfully without, say, being intercepted by the UCAS air force (and probably while travelling through other countries with nuclear weapons, the borders are a bit complicated), and somehow knew to have them all prepared for immediate use right at that moment, it just doesn't make sense.

well, i mean, it also wouldn't make sense for a terrorist group to be that well-equipped and prepared, so it would still be stupid, i guess. just a different kind of stupid.

but the good news is, i'm pretty sure most people here are already ignoring everything CGL says about shadowrun these days anyways, so this is really just another dumb idea to add to the list of dumb ideas we're not using.

I've also got to question the effect of an EMP on cyberware. Isn't most it optical? So other than the power supply, wouldn't you just have to reboot it?

Also I know that in SR4A you could get your commlink hardened against EMPs. Was there a way to get your cyberware hardened as well?

...@Jaid, I agree, it could have been done nice and covertly and millions of civilians, SINners and SIN-Less alike, wouldn't have died in the process. Kind of sounds like... [political comment redacted]

Seems like CGL is trying to take the "shadows" out of Shadowrun and turn it into something like Gamma World.

I have a deeply uncharitable suspicion that the reason was to make the CAS the default 'America'.

According to a freelancer on the German forums with access to the PDF, this is acknowledged in the text: "At this time, all we know for certain is those cities were hit with something that sounds a lot like an electro-magnetic pulse, even though EMPs stopped being a threat to modern tech at least a decade ago." Offline devices also do not seem to have been affected, he cites the example of a runner whose commlink was fried and who could get a new one from a vending machine and be online again. Maybe somebody got their hands on some of Winternight's magically enhanced EMP nukes, or Netcat's "Deep Rising" is causing it rather than the other way round.



As for the effects on the UCAS, I like my cyberpunk with nation states that only serve as third-tier vassals of the megacorps, so taking the UCAS down a peg or two would certainly be fine with me.

...still surprised that Dee Cee wasn't the recipient of a few tungsten "God Rods" for that they did to corporate extraterritoriality.

You'd have to worry about the defenses of the UCAS.

...would they actually be able to defend against multiple Thor strikes, particularly if they are already spreading themselves thin dealing with the current situation? If even a handful of rods made it though that would be enough to lay waste to the district and end a pretty powerful message.

Or it could backfire spectacularly and drive even more countries from the accords.

The whole point of Thor hammers is that there's no defense against them.

they made the optical fiber out of explosives and fireworks so that it could blow up and shoot sparks and smoke out when people deal matrix damage to it, obviously.

-----------------------

in any event, declaring war on a country, regardless of how it is done, is only likely to end poorly for a megacorporation. first off, the moment you make it clear that you're willing to use all of those resources and soldiers you have to wage war, you should expect to have a much harder time transporting those resources through their territory. or getting any cooperation from them.

but beyond that, simply put: war isn't cheap. the best way to make money from war is to let someone *else* go to war, and you sell them everything they need. it is especially bad for a corporation when you're declaring war on your customers. and it is also really hard when you've got a huge amount of resources sitting within easy reach of their armies.

but again, it isn't like i was planning on using anything from 6th edition anyways. this just means that not only do i have no temptation to buy rulebooks full of badly edited rules that i don't like, now i also don't need to worry about spending any of my money on their setting books full of badly edited arbitrary "plot" events that i don't like either. it makes it a lot easier to decide what to spend my money on when something that should by all rights be a main contender for that money just doesn't put forward any effort.

Stealing this for new canon in our SR/Paranoia crossover.

...I am still miffed about how System Failure "hadwaved" a lot of good intrigue and plotlines in 3E. Part of why I have gone back to that and am rebooting an old campaign using the 5E mechanics (housruled of course).

What the UCAS did was to unilaterally declare they would no longer recognize the extraterritorial corporations as such, similarly to how China treats Taiwan or West Germany treated the GDR. It should cause complications for both sides, but not significantly change the status quo, because the UCAS has no chance in hell to make good on those territorial claims.

eh, it'll change some things fairly substantially. but it didn't sound like they were announcing an intention to claim any property, only to revoke the agreement that makes UCAS laws no longer apply.

so Ares still owns all Ares property, but if they want to have a nuclear weapon in their facilities within the UCAS, they can no longer issue their license to themselves, they need to get a license from the UCAS.

so, practically speaking, Ares will move all of their illegal stuff out of the UCAS, and still own all the land and buildings and such that they did before. and probably also pay taxes to the UCAS, although i'm sure between their accountants and the traditional methods by which the super-rich influence politicians those taxes will be greatly reduced.

and essentially the same thing will apply to the other megas, given that apparently all of them are willing to take a hit just to keep ares from being at a disadvantage in the region, for some unfathomable reason, rather than (as i suggested above) bribing the politicians to walk back the removal of extraterritorial status to only applying to ares (after all, it isn't like aztechnology or horizon have been importing insect spirits into the UCAS, or setting off nuclear weapons inside the UCAS, or repeatedly launching military expeditions into UCAS sovereign soil. i mean, they're probably all doing horribly monstrous things too, but there horrible things have largely been contained; like, the renraku archology may have gone disastrously wrong, but it never created a need to quarantine the entire city of seattle, renraku never deployed nuclear weapons in the middle of the city against their own archology, and renraku didn't occupy the entire city and designate it as quarantined)