If FanPro/CGL had instead continued off of old-school shadowrun's core system of changing target numbers/dice pools/rolling attributes and skills separately instead of the newer Attribute + Skill against a fixed Target Number, what changes do you think the new edition should have made?

I wouldn't have minded seeing wireless networking/decking phased in over the course of a 4th edition. Start off with just decking and maybe civilian comlinks (smartphones) and then add in more over time slowly building up to what we see now by the release of a 5th ed.

I also would have liked health taken off the set 10 boxes physical and stun for everyone and based off stat values. As well as damage made x number of boxes making light pistols and such less useless.

Exactly that. Go to fixed TN and modfying dice pools instead.

We did that back in SR2, already, and it is just so much superior and so much more in the spirit of the whole rules system.

I would have kept the old-school pools, the ones derived from attributes that you could add to your skills, though, just widen them to encompass all tasks, i.e. a social pool was really missing.

Bye
Thanee

Rules for legwork, including an actual list of knowledge skills. How does it work, what does it get me?

Same for lifestyle. Hopefully not written by the same people who wrote the expected run payouts. An easy formula for run payments: (the amount of money characters need per month for upgrades + lifestyle + expected costs of a run if you do decently well)/(number of runs per month).

Honestly, the cyberware and gear you need to run doesn't fit in the base book. Don't put half of what you need to start in it if you can't put it all in there. Just basic gear and rules in the main book, cyberware, drones, and magic get their own books released at the same time as the BBB.

I would rework the matrix (wireless) to a system similar to 5th and call it. I really liked 2nd and 3rd best, but we as a group played a little fast and loose with TN by GM fiat (we rotated GMs and weren't antagonistic, so there was a trust factor there) so it was never a hassle to deal with the TN system for us.

I cannot overstate how much I hate 5e's Matrix.

It makes no sense in-world or from the perspective of anyone with the tiniest bit of real-world networking knowledge, and as a game mechanic creates perverse incentives for players and especially for GMs.

The 2-3rd editions' matrix was cool, but over-complicated and somewhat contradictory. The idea that Nothing ever runs wirelessly, unless there's a rigger around. Drones obviously are wireless, and I guess whatever else they interact with. Oh, and cell phones/PDAs. And vehicles. But mostly Nothing.

4th edition's best contribution was "if half of the stuff out there is wireless, we'll allow for wireless." The rules were pared down so they were pretty bland, but also required too many dice rolls (unless you were trying to do a scene with the decker fighting off IC while the rest fought off security), even before Unwired.

Normally, you want 2-3 dice rolls to determine if you got whatever information you wanted, and if anything went wrong. The rules should probably be based around that most common situation, but allow for "hardened servers" or whatever handwavium for situations where you want the decker playing whack-a-mole with alarms while the rest of the team fights off physical security (as was done in Fluff and Smoke, while that still existed). Instead of adding more rolls for normal stuff, just add some modifiers for how well you/your programs work with the theme of the VR environment, and let legwork give you information on what the environment is.

I agree, the earlier versions were a bit too complicated, but at least they made sense.

I have no real problem with wireless Matrix use being a thing, I generally just limit it to turtles because full ASIST decking needs faster response times than you can really pull out of over the air signals that aren't strong enough to fry people.

Again. Wireless Matrix existed in the 3e book Matrix just most people didn't use it in game because many corps wouldn't put secure stuff on Wireless access as that gets around half of the defense architecture of the Host.

THAT was the major issue of SR4's matrix, and more generally, SR4 as a whole. Wireless hacking was just as fast as wired hacking, so it was everywhere even though it's stupid. You went trodes over a datajack, glasses instead of cybereyes, etc. even if it doesn't make sense.

I just remembered something a previous GM did as a house rule for SR3 that I'd give serious consideration too.
Broke the Etiquette skill down, separating it into the individual specializations and make them Knowledge Skills instead of Active.

As I have stated many times before, wireless hacking should be a thing, but limit the Response of the commlink to (Commlink Response - 2). Maybe even make it Response -3. This means you CAN hack wirelessly, but you won't be hitting the big boys and getting out alive.

I assume that applies to trodes, but using a datajack is full-speed? Or do you just need to plug the commlink in to their server?

You could do something similar for contacts/glasses/goggles. They can hold however many upgrades, but they don't have the throughput to manage real-time image manipulation before the data hits your eyes, and you can only get one to operate at once (do you want to see further, or at all in the dark?). DNI means it's faster, so your full suite of vision modifications can be online at once.

Honestly... we are past the time when Cyberpunk is a legitimate cultural movement (I know, I know! Please don't stone me!)

Where we are now, I'd love it if SR either:
1) Made things simpler, for quicker play and better integration of matrix, rigging, combat, etc. But also unapologetically kept all of the ridiculous 80s vibe. Cell phones are huge. So is the hair. The Internet isn't for casuals. Own it.

OR

2) A significant change, to mirror the modern cultural environment. Maybe something closer to transhumanism. Whatever that new setting is, that's what the mechanics should support. But something that sheds Mirrorshades and moves on to modern authors and modern motifs.

That was an idea I put forward for SR5. At the time, I argued that no roll should be required to fit in a group you actually belong to or being honestly friendly to someone, and that fitting in a group you don't really belong to or willfully try to obtain information from someone by rolling an active skill, with no specific knowledge of the specific etiquette, would ultimately resort to the active use of the exact same methods and know-hows that makes a con man good at his game. The last argument tossed around in that particular discussion was that I was a very cynical person - the irony of facing an ad hominem attack from someone claiming there were social skills that did not involve manipulation was not lost on me.

My solution would be to design Matrix rules generic enough to adapt to different topology, and add four extra columns to the gear tables so as to set price and availability in 2036, 2049 and 2072. That way people could play in transhumanist 2072, cyberpunk 2049, or techno-thriller 2036 (which is a third, less futuristic, style a number of people are gravitating toward, even among SR authors).

Frag the 'modern cultural environment'. We already live in a megacorporate-controlled surveillance panopticon that is rapidly approaching the end state of late-stage capitalism which is automated feudalism.

I don't need my games to reflect that more accurately. I need them to offer a chance to do something about it.

Neo-Anarchists never quit, they just die or get saltier.

For the hacking question... If you have a hard line then you get the full capabilities of your gear.


About the Contacts / Glasses / Goggles. I would say that, Contacts would have 1 vision mod in play (and NO ultrasound! That's either for cyberware or goggles!). Glasses can have 2 and Goggles can have 3. The caveat for that would be that DisplayLink is a freebee because it's running off your commlink and not off the hardware in the vision device.

I generally don't like vision mods on contacts being an equivalent to a cybereye feature. They rotate and move about on the eye, you see, as gets real obvious when you wear the weighted ones for astigmatism. Smartshades and goggles, sure.

I'm thinking more about the tech. Compared to my SR3 games, the tech is way smaller and more invasive. Where will that be in 40 years? Transhumanism probably. SR4 (and most SR3 games) saddle this weird space where everyone has access to Google Maps, but also looking up who is the CIO of EvilCorp is a decker-only action.

Which one is it? If we're 2019 + 40 years, everyone is a decker, the 80s are dead. Get over it. If we're sixth age 2060, no one knows what the Internet is and you still use paper forms like grandpa.

That part makes sense to me. Google maps is ad-supported at the end of the day and mostly running on government assets (the GPS and sattelite system). Internal staffing lists are only really accessible if they're forced to be disclosed for legal reasons (or willingly on Linkedin), and in an extraterritorial corp they wouldn't be (to avoid extractions), so you'd have to access corp systems to actually get ahold of them.

That works for lower level corp types but really the CEO and such of a major corp should be common knowledge. These people don't exactly keep a low profile and at least among shadowrunners, should be as well known as celebrities.

Probably also depends on if you want to know "which company does Damian Knight own/control" or "who is the head of the Seattle branch of Stuffer Shack's food distribution shell corporation?" One is a basic knowledge test, one is fairly in-depth, or something you're going to need to go look up.

I mean, think about it. Most of the CEOs who are well known are techbros who treat it as a form of celebrity. Do you off the top of your head know who the CEO of, say, Kraft Foods is?

Just a hint, it's not the guy who owns the Patriots.

Don Johnson?