Edition War's, everyone will always have their nostalgic favorite. Nitpicks aside every edition has had the same intention. Smooth the bumps and make entry easier. Personal bias aside which edition has done the most to fulfill this mandate? Where would you as a fan like to see the game disected and reinvisioned. Should theclock be turned back to a 3rd eition and overhauled like in the worlds favorite dungeon crawler? Was 4th edition on right track but wrong implementation? Is 6th edition worth saving? I have my opinions and I know you do too. But if an honest effort was made to create a recognizable universal system, where to start.

I think the first steps are stripping down an edition that works and rebuilding it from the ground up. K.I.S.S. the ole adage keep it simple stupid. A universal mechanic and some common sense balancing.

I've run this game since 89 and while never the easiest game to GM or teach, the most current edition just creates such a log jam with its new mechanic it leaves me gnashing my teeth. That's not to say there arent good ideas or a clear intention to move in right direction. Just bad implementation. Is it worth trying ot save?

TL'DR : Tearing an edition down to its essence and building a set of core rules to use at the table.

1-3 Collectively and 4e are both fairly good beasts of their own design purpose. And while I never was a fan of 4e I can easily see why people liked it. Personally I think an actual revision of 3rd edition may be the key to Shadowrun.

Played a lot of first and second edition. My kids were born during third edition so my play time was minimal. I returned to table In earnest with Fourth. Anniversary edition has been my go to rule set for awhile now. Maybe I need to take deeper dive back into third before do anything g else.

Anyone willing to list what they feel the highlights of third are for them?

I'd say that 3rd Edition was a somewhat cleaned-up 2nd Edition. In some ways, I liked 2nd Ed the best, but there were some rough edges.

4th Edition had a cleaner playstyle, and I liked that. Low friction is a good way to run - but it's where the metaplot just started to go sideways. 4th Edition is where I spend more time houseruling the milieu, rather than the operational rules.

I do think that a thorough redesign is justified at this point, and a setting reboot.

Rules: 4th is probably the least unplayable. That's not saying a lot. 5th was completely unplayable and plain unfun, and I'll never get to see 6th. I've mostly played a modified 3rd with little or no matrix and magic. Because the rules suck and I have one Master's degree already, can't be bothered to study for another one just to play a game.
Setting: Our Shadowrun never progressed past 2056. I will never understand why they had to replace the dystopia of rampant capitalism (and... was that Queen Euphoria movie just a case of very good special effects, or...?) with a never ending repetiion of "Oh you think THAT was bad? Now see THIS even more horrible inescapable evil monster beings from outer space you never heard of before but they are immortal and wants to eat your babies". Yaaaaawn.

So, yes please to a complete reboot: a comprehensive rules overhaul (just stick to ONE fraggin system for matrix, magic and machineguns, how hard can it be?) and a return to the rock'n'roll/punk aesthetics of the original, thank you very much. The original Seattle Sourcebook still ranks in the top three of all RPG supplements ever, IMHO.

One system for the subsystems is a bad idea - because yes it's very hard to achieve without going into beige. They already did some of that in 5e. If that is what you want there are several very good cyberpunk Savage Worlds, FATE, BESM and GURPS settings out there to be playing - but it's a solidly bad idea for Shadowrun.

Like Prime Mover, I've played and GMed this game since '89 in all it's incarnations except 6th ed. From an ease of access and fun stand point rules wise, I've found 4th ed Anniversary edition to be the best starting point. From a meta plot point, 3rd probably had it best. That was when FASA was in full control and they were able to build on everything established from 1st ed onward.
However, as a rules system, SR is terrible. There isn't much granularity and at the end of the day the difference between the best in the world and someone with a bit of talent or cyberware is minimal since it all boils down to dice pools.
If you were remaking SR, I'd salvage as much of the 3rd ed meta plot as possible and then build or borrow a rules system from one of the systems Moirdryd mentions. SR's rules are just too complex and lacking in adequate examples and explanations to be much fun. The amount of things that have needed house rules is ridiculous and if I need to house rule vast chunks of the game to make it understandable or playable or fast or fun then why bother having them in the first place?
SR seemed pretty innovative back in '89 but it wasn't the rules I fell in love with, it was the world and that world could be better represented with much better rules. I think trying to salvage the game by salvaging the rules is probably the wrong direction. Figure out what aspects of the game world you want to save and find a rule set that does that. I played Earthdawn when it first came out and, while the world was interesting and tied into the SR world nicely, the rules were once again, overly complex and arcane and there were already plenty of fantasy rule sets out there to use instead.
FASA made some really fun and interesting worlds but their rule sets kinda suck.

I maintain that one of the best I've seen for fairly complex action that is engaging and fast on the ground, is HackMaster 5. The core mechanic is consistent, but the application is pretty variable, and the main reference points are precalculated during character generation, so the in-game result is as slick as it can be.

From 1st to 2nd edition...
Dividing Initiative Score by 10 to get Initiative Passes. A good idea for simplification. It made high level of initiative boost less powerful, which was also a good thing IMO/YMMV.
Removing variable damage threshold. Also a good idea for simplification.
Karma Pool. To the best of my understanding, the Karma Pool was an answer to the fact that, as a skill-based, level-less rulesystem where gear matters a lot, Shadowrun did not know how to make experienced character much better than fresh new ones. That being, the implementation was terrible. The 1/10th and 1/20th felt like a tax for new players, and made human overpowered compared to metahumans as the pool grew.

From 2nd to 3rd edition...
Initiative Passes going from lower to higher number. A good change I think, my memories of not getting to do anything at all during combat were not that good.
Extra points at chargen for knowledge skills. Still undecided on that one. Special skills in 1st and 2nd editions were well understood to be a trap option. Knowledge skills manage to add flavor, but their use in game is not that convincing: range is way too subjective, and in the end it is not an efficient mechanism for the gamemaster to convey the needed information about the setting or the intrigue, all too often bordering on some semi-active skills.
Removing the skill web. Yes.
Removing Matrix Maze. The Matrix mini-game needed either overhauling, to include the rest of the team, or the kind of streamlining it got. That being said, I think it could also have been streamlined by removing cybercombat instead - going in a completely different direction to make Matrix a game of locks and traps.

From 3rd to 4th edition...
Target Numbers set at 5 & Dice Pool is Attribute plus Skill. It's divisive enough and would probably require a thread on its own (well, it got it more than once). My opinion is that it made the 4th edition easier to understand and scales difficulty better.
Splitting Quickness and Intelligence. The first was a good idea, especially given the use of Attribute to set Dice Pools. I'm a lot less sure about the second one. I understand they sought symetry between physical and mental attributes, but the divide between Intuition and Logic is dubious in places (like, Knowledge skills linked to Intuition ?)
Also, Strength and Body should have be merged and/or Strength should have been made more useful (through bigger recoil compensation for example), which could have been a way to maintain the aforementionned symetry.
Skill max rating set at 6/7. Strongly undecided. On one hand, it sets a power scale (at least until Street Legends ignored it) and established that PC were able to start with top-notch skills. On the other hand, that power scale was quite narrow (I feel that was less of a problem for me because I started playing less often at the time and thus characters got less karma to spend).
Fixed Initiative Passes. It could have been a good idea, if they also reworked the augmentation. This change made high-end augmentation much more powerful, as previously one level of augmentation that only added an average of 3.5 or 5.5 to your Iniative Score, about a third or half what you needed for an extra pass, now granted a full pass.
Numbered Damage Code. Undecided. I usually favor that sort of streamlining, but the lethality does not scale well.
Lowering augmentation and cyberdeck price. Good call. Setting-wise, runner budget in the price range of a sport car made no sense. On the other hand, a more radical change would probably be needed to get rid of the fundamental issue Shadowrun struggle with to balance different character options that can be paid in Karma, Nuyen or Essence.
The Wireless Matrix. As a CS graduate IRL, a step too far for me. I don't mind hackers working from wireless connections (I already played it that way in 3rd edition), but I let a lot of things on wired subgrids.

From 4th to 5th edition...
Limits. That one would also probably requires its own thread. In my opinion, it an extra layer of complexity during chargen and game that provides no added value. It was supposed to make it fun to comb through gear listing to get small Limit increments, when it actually felt like a tax you add to pay to get the benefits of your lucky rolls.
Skill max rating set at 12. Makes the power scale wider. Also bars PC from starting in the top league. I preferred when they could.
The forcefully Wireless Matrix. Same as above.
Return to old Initiative and price. I liked those changes, so reverting them fell on the wrong side for me.

From 5th and 6th edition...
No idea.

Am I the only one that liked the skill web? It didn't come up a whole lot, but one thing that I liked was, with multi-step increments it rapidly turned : "Eeeeeerrrr, sure you can try for it..." into: "Hahahaha frag off drekhead." so that being a tiny god of gun-fu didn't mean much on, say, vehicle theft.

I also liked variable target numbers, because (and maybe this is just my long background in statistics talking) target numbers, pools and thresholds all affected the way that you approach success and failure in different ways.

I do agree on most of what you said, though. In particular, I thought that fixed initiative passes were a stupid idea.

The funniest change from 3rd to 4th concerning the Matrix was where parts of the rules and world-building were located:

In 3rd, everybody assumed the only way to go online was using a wired deck, because that's what the main book focused on. Then Matrix came along explaining that everybody is online all their lives, how wireless the matrix truly is, including cellular satellite service (StarLink on steroids) and how tortoise mode works.
In 4th, they put all of the latter in the main book, making everybody believe there is nothing wired anymore and there is nothing beyond comlinks... and then went into Unwired and explained how the backbones are still wired and secure systems are onion-layers or air-gapped, and how nexi are what any hacker really wants.

From a world-building perspective, I much preferred the approach of 4th in making the Matrix more accessible to new players. You don't hide stuff like that in a supplement after using incredibly boring rules to scare away the n00bs.

Then again, all the interesting setting books are from 3rd or 2nd edition... so I found my games mostly being run on Shadows of North America, Shadows of Europe and Target: Wastelands. Shadows of Asia and Target: Awakened Lands were a treasure trove as well. Shadows of Latin America... the stuff of legends.

The strangest thing was how Bioware and cyberware interacted:

In 1st and 2nd Edition, it was a separate stat Bioindex limited by your Body. BioTrolls!

In 3rd, first it was Bioindex as before... just using Essence+3 as a limit. Then at the very end through errata swapped around consuming Essence, but only the lower half of both sides. It also added Nanoware, which was nice, but kind of weak.

It stayed that way in 4th... though Nanoware became actually usable. And of course, decreased Essence costs for implants, grades for Bioware and streamlining implants made it really fun to play a chromed runner.

Until 5th came along, kicking cybered mundanes between the legs multiple times, by removing that and making implants less essence friendly, as well as forcing everybody to be online through wireless 'boni' that were just prior basic functionality... with their implants that could now be permanently destroyed by hackers, too - so 'combathacking' could be a thing. Then topping it off with CFD, thus neutering Nanoware. Fun times. Added bonus for making people with the legendary Trauma Dampener (the same since 1st edition ShadowTech) into meth mouths.

"Kicking cybered mundanes between the legs multiple times"? More like cutting their junk off with a rusty dull chainsaw!


Say what you will about D&D/Pathfinder, but Starfinder makes playing non-magical characters viable. D&D 5e and Shadowrun 5th and 6th edition made playing a non-magical character VERY sub-optimal.

I'm with you on most of what you wrote, but I'd like to address these points with my own opinion:

• I'm firmly in the camp of supporting split attributes, especially Intelligence, since that means your troll samurai doesn't need to be a potential nuclear physicist just to be good at perception. Also, I like the split between knowledge skill categories, since they're - to my mind, and I'm aware that it's my interpretation of them - Knowledge and Interest skills. Not only do I see street knowledge and academic knowledge and so on as distinct categories linked to their own attribute, I also allow skills like "Dancing" and link them to physical attributes. For a test, you can always easily switch the linked attribute required around.
• I do like the skill max rating, but just as you say, there's only a narrow margin of improvement. Moreover, especially for adepts, the final max number is linked to how much you can pump the skill with augments. I feel like a 6 max at character creation and a 9 max after would be a fine way to go, but I haven't really playtested this since myself and the few usual players I have tend towards broadening their skillsets instead of deepening it.
• I agree that high end initiative augmentations are indeed very powerful, especially because they also affect dodge actions. But I also think that with the fixed initiative passes characters with low end augmentations or even a single pass have become much more viable.
• I'm a big fan of the numbered damage code and I think it does scale well until you get to ludicrous armor numbers. Shadowrun has always been a deadly game, but the outliers have also always been weird. A switch from 1, 3, 6, 10 to a sliding scale gives a better granularity, IMO.
• In my mind they went a bit too far with the lowered prices for matrixware in general. I fully agree with lower prices for cyberware, but going ham on the matrix gear made everyone a potential hacker much too easily. Nobody needs a cyberdeck that costs 250k, but going down to 40k for a pretty tricked out Fairlight Caliban (this is an estimate from one of my characters, who's not a hacker) was a bit too much. Furthermore, it also limits upwards growth for hacker characters. On the other hand it makes it easier to replace both Cyberware and matrix gear, so YMMV.

I like the skill web, or at least the streamlined version of defaulting to other skills. I still use rulings from that on the fly in 4th edition. "Oh, you want to fire that submachine gun, but don't have an Automatics skill? Subtract 2 from your Pistols skill and go for it."

------
I think it's easy (and also natural) to come up with criticism of a system that's new and unfamiliar. The older people get, the more conservative they usually become. Change is bad, we like the thermostat how it is.
I hated the switch from SR2 to SR3 for other reasons, mainly that I was a powergamer and loved to barge into rooms with my samurai and shoot people up before they could react. But in hindsight, most changes turned out to be better.
I was a firm sceptic of SR4, but as soon as Runner's Companion came out, I became a new convert, and it became even better with the Anniversary edition.
The biggest eye opener for me was turning away from variable TNs.
Koekepan said:

And I agree with that. However, I'd say the majority is not that versed in stochastics, and seeing "Oh, I have 3 dice and need to roll a 5. Makes my chances pretty good" is a definite plus and fully in line with the streamlining goal. Furthermore, The fixed TN approach ALSO approaches success and failure in different ways: namely you can modify the dice pool negatively as well as modifying the number of needed hits to succeed. I think that is plenty of variance while still enhancing the speed of gameplay.

Now all this being said, I will try to find things that I liked, either as a concept or actually in their implementation.
I will concentrate mainly on SR5, because what has been said about 1-3 and 4 I mostly agree with and don't have an interest in re-hashing.
I don't think that 5 (or for that matter 6) is completely unplayable. That is a gross exaggeration, and there's a very active community belying that claim. It is not the game that I want to play, but it is fine enough, even with the glaring warts.

• Ritual magic - Making the rituals distinct and not just a bit more complicated version of the standard spell list was a great step. They went a bit overboard with some of the rituals (warding not available to physical adepts anymore, watchers not available to summoner adepts anymore), but in general, this was a great idea.
• More called target options - Also a great idea, getting creative here is very interesting. Some weird implementations, such as disarming people with shotguns on wide spread not hurting them at all, but sound in general.
• Qualities no longer in 5 point increments - Well done, again. The costs are all over the place, but the heart was in the right place. More granularity here is welcome.
• Free karma for buying contacts during character creation - I've been using that a while so I was glad to see it make it to the base character creation rules.
• Skill consolidation - e.g. Shadowing and Stealth consolidated into Sneaking. Good idea, less clutter. Not automatically always great, of course, but taking a look at the list and taking stock is well done.
• Wireless bonuses - I know this is controversial, and I myself have criticised this a lot, but I still think the idea is a good one, while the implementation is atrocious.
• Random Run Generator - Love that little cheat sheet. Great to include it in the core book.

I won't go into 6, because my interest in that game was killed by the overall low quality of SR5 releases, and apart from a short look at the horror that is the Edge system I don't know enough about it to have a useful opinion. Suffice it to say, I'm not playing it, don't plan to, and still have enough SR4 material to digest.

I'd like a well revised follow-up to SR3.

Dice pools vs variable TN for a number of successes was I think a good thing for the reason Koekipan said. The fact that raising your dicepool and raising the TN don't have exactly opposite effects on the difficulty was IMO a good thing, and then counting the successes had a real meaning. To sum-up, the difficult task remained difficult for everybody, while you could still have some very good guy performing well.

But what the game really needed is to admit how exactly it abstracts rules and combat. As has been said, the SR3 system doesn't support a lot of granularity. That is actually also true of SR4, mind you. A +1 penalty or -1 bonus on your TN can be quite huge, and that really doesn't allow for the minutiae of stuff they pretend to simulate, from Recoil Compensation to aiming aid, and so on, just quoting combat.

For me, the number one thing to correct, once and for all, is how combat works. If you have a good combat solving system, efficient and robust, you can then adapt the rest of the rules to it, and you'll see when you break balance easily.

All this is to say that ultimately, I think combat in shadowrun suffers from the way actions are defined and used, and the fact that despite being supposedly "abstract", they actually try to simulate to much in minutiae what's happening. The worst example is that, while they describe melee as a series of blows ultimately leading to one of the opponents taking the lead, they don't do so for range, where you actually count the number of trigger pulls during a combat phase. And the worst is that it comes from the notoriously terrible first edition of shadowrun, especially for ranged combat.

So what needs to be done? Here is what I'd suggest (based on SR3):

- Combat round at 3 seconds is a bit stupid. Once people get cover, "real life" gunfights can actually be much longer than the one or two rounds the average shadowrun gunfight lasts… Going to a 10 seconds, or at least 6 seconds rule would let people have much more meaningful moving around and help the magical melee guy do their stuff (these are two separates thing, mind you).

- We should find a way to limit the number of dice thrown. Currently, a combat phase for a street sam involves 6 throws if he does what is simplest for him: shooting twice. The enemy gets a dodge, and then he gets a resistance test using body. An attacker trying to get someone dead should only require 2 tests max: one from the attacker, one from the defender.

- Attacking is always a complex action. Maybe you can make carefully aimed shots, maybe you want to spray the ennemy by pulling the trigger as fast as you can, maybe you want to give some cover to your friend, etc. we can decide that it's solved with only one dice throw with appropriate TN. Example could be: aiming reduces the number of bullets you fire, or allow for less TN at your next action, spraying lets you up the opponent TN by expanding more ammo, stuff like that. Point is: getting rid of this stupid simple actions mechanics letting you "pull the trigger" once each time. A modern day shooter is only able to shot 2 bullets in 3 seconds most of the time? That's stupid. Additionnally, the changes would make ammo relevant. I only once had a character run out of ammo, because she was using the ruger thunderbolt that can be shot exactly four times before reloading. Man do they spend some time telling you how to change "clips" while this never happens…

- All the preceding requires an overhaul of a bunch or weapon mods and stuff (spoiler: most of them disappear and that's good), as well as retooling of combat armor (spoiler: there are less available and they don't work the same at all). But that's quite hard to come up with something balanced on the fly, and would require some kind of long playtest…

Tear it all down!

Rule-wise, I've never found an edition that played how I wanted. I liked 4th because it was less fiddly than 3rd and fixed a few of my biggest gripes with the system like damage. But after some time, I realized that many of my 4th ed game had many "let's ignore the rules" sequences because nobody wanted to bother spending hours rolling dice for something. After some attempts at house-ruling I finally settled on making my own system.

Background-wise, we're at a point where, unless you're one of the handful of people who remembers everything about the SR-lore, it takes hours of research to write something without risking to contradict something. We also have some more or less serious problems with the lore that can't really be properly addressed without at least, some retcon.

Fluff-wise, the Pink Mohawk/Black Trenchcoat divide (among others) can get a little difficult to work with. If you try to write a game that will support both, you'll end up with a lukewarm game that doesn't fully support either.

So to me it should all be rebuilt from the ground up.

So, I'm prefacing this by saying I've played and GMed 2, 3, 4, and 5e. Least experience with 3rd, most with 2nd and 4th, but working knowledge of 5th.

I agree with earlier posts about looking at it from a lore perspective, going with the world you liked, and creating or adapting rules to work within that paradigm. Trying to pick your favourite rules is...honestly, that conversation has been had a million times, and it never goes anywhere.

Having said that, od go with 2e or 3e as a foundation. I like SR4A, because the rules worked within their own consistency. Yes, it had major problems, such as massive dice pools. Rolling 30+ dice feels great on a rare occasion. Doing it every session just gets...tedious. From a lore perspective, 4e had some great ideas and poor execution. Wireless Mateix access? Great, but get everyone on the same page about what is and isnt still wired, and why.

For all it's annoyances, 2/3 just FELT like gritty urban fantasy. I'm of the camp that likes target numbers, because it felt immediately more identifiable if something was easy, hard, or nigh impossible. TN 3? Piece of cake. 8? Okay, a bit of a challenge. 12+? Better get that Karma ready for rerolls. Yes, the issue of 6/7 and 12/13 dead spots was there, but it's simple enough to ignore. I'm not sure how you'd fix it, without a full change to the d6 system.

And 4e did make that change, and I dont hate or, but then you have huge dice pools, and...etc etc.

On another note, I want the Matrix to be simplified, naturally. The old maps were cool, but tedious. In my 2e home game, we've simplified it so that the 5 stats are reduced to 3, and eliminated the check just to see what's connected. If you're in a mode, you see where else you can go(unless connections are hidden). This streamlined it a bit, but of course didnt completely solve the Mateix Pizza Problem.

IMO, what might work is to have a simplified grid map like the old editions, but give the decker a choice of backdoors and access points to connect from. I know everything was connected/protected via chokeholds, but giving him more choices based on, say, legwork or a good initial decking roll might speed things up a bit.

On the note of Mateox checks, the system needs to be analogous to combat, like someone else mentioned I think. Shoot, hit or miss, resist damage, done. Matrox needs to be action/program, success or fail(hit or miss in the case of cybercombat), damage or effect, done. And it was that way sometimes, but the decker also needed to roll EVERY. SINGLE. TIME. They did anything. Look around, find connections, browse files, change user account, hide trail, etc etc. All a separate roll. I wont argue exactly what needed trimming without an actual playtest and taking notes, but it needed a large reduction.

That's all I have to add for now. I do like that the rules were tied so much to the universe though. As painful as it was sometimes, the exploding d6 system is instantly recognizable as Shadowrun, just like d10 for World of Darkness or d10 for D&D.

On the other hand playing a character class without superpowers in the first iteration of Pathfinder was an even worse idea than in Shadowrun.

Just think Fighter vs. Barbarian, or... Rogue vs. Ninja or... Vivisectionist Alchemist.

In fact, I really liked D&D5 - though mostly, because they gave every character superpowers of some sort. Even the Fighter has them.
They really tried to balance options, cut out trap options and weak-sauce and when it came obvious that the Ranger was kind of weak in general... they revised that class.

That's more than what can be said about Shadowrun under the reign of Jason M. Hardy. The last true rework happened with 20th Anniversary.

Nexi.

I've been playing since 1993, which makes me a hopeless rookie to some of you, but in that time I've played every edition except 1E. I've even played 6E and GM'd Anarchy. And you know what? I've enjoyed every single edition, and I've had gripes with every single edition. Shadowrun rules are a water weenie that slips out of your hands every time you squeeze it.

I did not like target numbers. The 6/7 plateau was unacceptable to me. As a GM, I didn't like the stress of having to calculate the target number perfectly. If I screw up on a dice or two in 4E-6E, the overall impact to the roll is minimal. But if you mess up a target number by even 1 (unless, of course, it's between 6 and 7), the results of your roll could swing massively.

Conversely, I don't like how little smartguns do in 4E-6E. In 1E-3E they were must-have for shooters because they reduced your target number by 2! BY 2!! But now they give you +2 dice, which is a fart in a stiff wind.

I haven't like the rules for the Matrix in any edition. There, I said it. I guess I like them best for Anarchy because they consist of two pages that boil down to, "Eh, roll some dice and do what you want."

I didn't like the fixed Initiative passes for 4E. It robbed combat of some of its strategy and tactics.

I didn't like the dice pool arms race in 4E. Even if Limits weren't popular in 5E, I appreciated their intention to give players something else to improve besides their dice pool.

I don't like how sharply 4E-6E have skewed toward MagicRun. Awakened characters are my favorite, but it's a real problem when every character type can be made better by being Awakened.

I didn't like the transition to full-color books with glossy pages. I honestly think it robbed the game of a lot of its cyberpunk, dystopian feel. Give me black-and-white artwork on paper pages that SMELL AMAZING and still do 25+ years later.


Oh, thank the Lord that someone else feels the same way. I know a shocking amount of lore, but even that is a fraction of what's available. I appreciate that the Shadowrun world is dynamic and moves forward, but I can't read (and remember) this stuff as fast as they write it. The lore is a double-edged sword: I love that such a rich library exists, but it can handcuff you as much as liberate you.

But you know what? Despite all the "I don't like" statements, I still love the game. It's a flawed product but I've been playing it for 2/3rds of my life and I don't intend to stop. Sure, I want it to improve, and yes, I think I could do a better job if I were in charge. As soon as I win the lotto I'll enter a bidding war with Catalyst to license the publishing rights from Topps. But until then I'll continue to do what I've done for decades - even back to the FASA days - which is it to patch, house rule, and ignore the rules as appropriate so that I can play my favorite game in my favorite setting with my chummers.

From the underlying system, I vastly prefer 4th edition (onwards) over the older editions.

The change from the variable target number to a fixed target number with modifiers applied to the dice pool is exactly how the system should work. It's about getting number of successes, not about rolling a single d6 as high as you can. We already changed SR2 back in the day to work like this with extensive house rules, and it was a clear improvement in my eyes. When 4th also went into this direction, it was very much appreciated.

Now, not everything is perfect here. Magic is too powerful in 4th (not that it was any less powerful before). Dice Pools are gone, they were pretty neat, and I would have kept them. Some modifers are not impactful enough (i.e. Smartlink really should do more than just add 2 dice). 5th has done some interesting changes and some questionable ones. Limits are probably a necessity, although you could also limit how much stuff you can stack on top of a dice pool in another way, I guess. Having spells resisted by two attributes is also a good change. Spirits are still too powerful, of course. The initiative system of 5th works pretty well.

Overall, I think the newer editions are a clear improvement.

Bye
Thanee

the old 6/7 plateau was relatively easily fixed. the suggestion I've seen to do so without changing TNs at all was to use d8s with 0-7 being the rolls values on the sides of the dice. roll a 7, you get another roll, but it can come out to a 0, meaning that you don't automatically succeed on a TN that is one higher. 0-7 has the same average as 1-6, so you don't need to change TNs around too much, either.

it would be simple enough to do the same with D6 if that is what people prefer, although that *would* require changing up TNs.

(and on a side note, I can't agree that D&D 5th edition has the same sort of problem as shadowrun lately has with regard to the magic/mundane problem... certainly, at higher levels magic gives you a heck of a lot more options in D&D, but the regular fighter with no overtly magical powers is at least good at doing their thing. in shadowrun, if you want to be the best at *anything* you go straight to the magic options and never look back. whatever thing you want to do, the only question is what flavour of magic makes you best at it, barring some weird niche crap that is mostly less effective methods of doing the same job as could be done more effectively with magic so long as you only care about end results).

(on another side note, I would *not* use D&D 5th edition as an example of how to handle stuff that needs correcting. the ranger has been redone half a dozen times, but none of them are official. new ranger subclasses are more powerful than old ranger subclasses to partially compensate, but WotC has their head just as firmly up their own ass hole as CGL when it comes to actually making a change and admitting there was a problem in the first place. granted they at least posted some homebrew ideas before they abandoned older warlock, sorcerer, and ranger subclasses in spite of the flaws present in them, but they're still forcing the old crappy stuff onto the many people that play adventurer's league, for example... I am sure we can find a better example than *that* for how we'd like our RPGs handled).

I had seen a rule that we applied for a while: You get a reroll on a 5 or a 6, and you add 4. That really smoothes out the probability curve, but doing it correctly would involve more playing around, as TN8 is the new TN6 for difficult tasks. And the problem is that now you have a reroll to reach TN6 also… That's cumbersome.

Nevertheless, changing to d8 and having reroll on 7-8 add 6 would not be so cumbersome, give a kinda smooth curve and give a bit more granularity. But you have to rework the base TNs for various tasks.

HackMaster did it pretty well.

Roll dwhatever
If you roll max, then add dwhatever-1
(d20 has slightly different rules for exploding dice).

But thus you have a smooth progression, with a simple calculation, while being able to explode your d8 to a result of 23.

The roll-over plateaus were not the true problem of variable TN systems with exploding dice.

Open tests were.

Those made stealth tests into a kind of lottery in Shadowrun.

I agree it's quite neat. But the progression is not that smooth: you have a exploding d8 going from 0 to 7, going from TN6 to TN7 is a drop of 50 percent in chances to succeed. Going from 7 to 8 is a drop of 12.5 percent in chances to succeed.

Honestly the 6-7 plateau is really a fake problem, and the solution you propose is really easy. But the fact that probability decrease in such a strange way is what really bothered people.

Going from 5 to 6 meant losing 50% chances of succeeding with 1 dice, while going from 6 to 7 meant losing 0% chance of succeeding. That is weird. With reroll 5-6 add 4, the drop in probability varied between 16.7 to 33.3%. That's much better, but that means you start having to reroll as soon as TN6 instead of TN8, and that's cumbersome.



As well as intimidation or interrogation.

Open tests were terrible, and are a mechanic that could definitely disappear with no one complaining.

Agreed. I have never had an issue getting my players pissed off enough to do something about whatever situation I have picked without resorting to world-spanning conspiracies or horrors from *insert cliche here*. People are perfectly capable of being effective monsters, IMO.

My favorite is 4th with a few limitations:

1) Extra passes and anything that gives extra passes don't exist. We figured out that each extra pass was basically 3/4 a turn and those without suffered greatly for the lack while those with extra passes dominated the game spotlight just because their turns took so much longer.

2) You can never roll more than 15 dice at a time, excluding Edge, on a skill check including kit bonuses.

3) All modifiers are the number of successes needed, not just +/- dice. Every +/- 2 dice on the modifier charts = a decrease/increase in the successes needed on the check. Wound penalties are included in this as -3 dice for holding your guts in isn't anything in 4th.

4) Any program or kit can never add more than 4 dice to a skill roll or have a skill above 4 on it's own. Per skill level price doubles for the entire item from 3 to 4 skill level. Passdoors, locks, and other "passive" difficulties in software can still go to 6 with standard in-game costs.

Errr… Is the game spotlight combat? It's less than 1/3 of most of my games of shadowrun (whether as GM or PC), and I'm pretty sure that's about what is intended.

Indeed. Combat should be avoided at all costs - because the team will mostly be in the minority.

If the shit hits the fan, street samurai act as force multipliers through the action economy.

The only thing getting rid of full extra passes accomplishes is nailing the coffin shut on street samurai and encouraging summoner builds.

You know... like 6E did. This is the reason why aside from 4E, I probably would play only 2E. For the sheer glorious butchery of street samurai and razor girls.

Oh, I think combat should happen, but mostly on the PCs term. After the face, tech and magic guys have spent time asserting the opposition's strength and habits. You know, those moments where those characters should shine because they invested in those capacities.

But I think this leads to the same conclusion as you: that's the moment the street samurai should shine. Back in SR3 (and I think that's the same in SR4), initiative enhancement was amongst the most expensive stuff a Sam bought. Cancelling extra IP actually makes the sam quite inexistent in its archetype.

Extra passes can be replaced with an "AoE/multiple target" effect: when the sam shoots, he can add one target per initiative pass. That keeps extra IP interesting without having long stretches of battles where only one or two players act (and 24 rolls for 3 seconds of 1 character).

Nope, because since SR3 Extra passes happened after a first round or initiative. Now you're giving back much more immediate actions to the sam before anybody can act. And also, you're removing him options to actually change his mind in the course of combat, which corresponded very well to the fluff of having super good reflexes!

I'm all for reducing the number of dice throws. But the solutions is not to deprive of their actions the player who heavily invested in having more. Especially in a game where combat is not the be all end all of getting karma.

Impressive: That's even worse than what 6E did.

IMO, any pretense to streamline combat turns should start with getting rid of the Simple/Complex action divide. Everything is slowed down for no other purpose than allowing characters to shoot at two different targets in semiauto and a bunch of unusual action combos.

Make everything either Automatic or Complex Actions. Handle the double tap as a short burt. Boost 2 and 3-rounds burst damage to maintain the damage output with firearms. Make up a rule to allow walking fire with short burst and a single dice roll for some reason your game needs to allow shooting at two different targets in the same turn. Speed up those damn combats.

That sounds like a very compelling argument... oh, let's see... that would mostly affect mundane characters, like street samurai?

And would leave mages pretty much the same? Silly samurai players... wanting to use that action economy.

It's almost as bad as the Fighter having more attacks in D&D5 and stuff!

The two simple actions for shooting twice are a very stupid mechanic. It's quite opposed to the level of abstraction the SR mechanics propose.

You can totally replace it by a complex action that would do everything currently allowed with less dice throws, and without disadvantaging the sam.

Sometimes you want to split fire between two weapons, like fire the grenade launcher then clean up survivors with a long burst.

Or you want to move and shoot.

Or aim and shoot.

Many things to do other than just shoot constantly.

Also, why would you want to reduce the number of dice rolls? One of the best bits of Shadowrun is picking up a big handful of dice and rolling them! So satisfying!

In what editions? Not possible in SR3 for sure, where you could just shoot the grenade launcher and then shoot at one guy. Sure, you would lose the ability to do that in a single action phase, and be able to change between weapon only 3 times in a round instead of 6… Big deal…



Moving in SR3 was not an action. If they changed that, it was stupid.



You can totally do that within the frame of having a single complex action that would be called "aimed shot" with appropriate modifier.



Because the fact that there are 3 different dice rolls for a simple action, of which you get two per action phase, of which you get 3 or 4 per round, is cumbersome. Reducing it to 2 or 3 rolls top per action phase is okay.

It is a big deal. It takes away options.


No, it's not okay.
Attack, Defense, Soak rolls are one of the things that make Shadowrun unique. There are plenty of hacks for other systems (Savage Worlds comes to mind) that you can use if you want a different experience, but to me this is one of the cores. Simplifying that stuff mostly benefits the magic types, who really don't need any further boost in their action economy arsenal and all around versatility.

You can recreate most options in the complex action framework. Sure, it is a lot of work, but it's doable. You can for example retake some mechanics for spellcasting towards several targets.



Nope, these are specific mechanics that changed through editions multiple times, with people easily surviving. And it's not unique to shadowrun at all. Damn, I just played some Warhammer Fantasy 2nd edition, and it has exactly the same stupid shit in melee.

The dodge relying on combat pool in SR3 has not much in common with the defense from SR4, except that both of them make combat more cumbersome than it needs.



Not if you take care of balancing it.

Why do the work when an arguably less complicated ruleset is already in place?


Not the point. They have been there since day 1. You attack, you defend (which, in some editions, was optional) and you soak (depending on if you're hit). It's between one and three rolls, and it's a core mechanic that is not found in many other games. You bringing up WH2 actually enforces my point, because it makes it stand out from the crowd of D&D derivates, or games with a storytelling approach, or any other "rules light" stuff. I even love especially about SR4 that you can dodge, parry or block in melee, depending on what you're good at.
Regarding "surviving": Not sure why you even bring that up. I didn't bring lethality into the discussion at all.


It's a defense mechanic which actively mitigates or avoids damage. Your claim is based on semantics, but doesn't change the facts.
I also completely disagree with it being more cumbersome than necessary: Is it more than roll to hit, roll damage? Yes, if it's a hit, but it's not that much more complicated, since rolling damage is already included in the to hit roll.
The actual, measurable benefit is that the player who is getting shot at / stabbed / whatever has an active role in all that, and thus achieves more agency.


Not seeing a lot of workable options so far. Also not a lot of moving parts that actually could be balanced.

To be clear here: I do think that Shadowrun can benefit a LOT from a bit less dice rolling and more streamlined rules. I just don't see combat, multiple initiative passes or the action economy as issues.

It is not less complicated. It is different. And the idea is that it is cumbersome.



This is hardly an excuse for bad game design. It was a bad decision on day 1, it is still a bad decision now. If they had kept rolling for each bullet in a full auto burst, you'd defend it? Look at the change in spellcasting between second and third: people complained but no one said it wasn't shadowrun anymore.

And that's hardly iconic of the shadowrun mechanic, that's merely a detail.

The real problem here is defense, which should be included in the attack difficulty or soak roll. The more sensible would be to make it harder for the attacker to hit a dodgy character. It literally changes nothing, since this is what actually happens.



You actually missed mine. Except for SR, it is literally the last game I played, and it has it. The one before last I played was M&M, which is perfectly okay with just hit & soak being rolled. The one before that was Eclipse Phase, which I think is really similar (shoot, fray, roll damage I think, but that game was so terrible rule-wise that I quite forgot). So in most game I played, people totally insist that there should be more rolls, so no, sorry, this is not a shadowrun kind of mechanic. This is a pretty standard kind of mechanic used in many games, and it's frankly not hard to come up with, and I used to think it was a good idea until I realized that it's actually not bringing much to the game except more fiddliness and time wasted.



There are two simple ways:
- Make it easier to shoot people in compensation for losing a die roll if you spend your full complex action trying to kill someone.
- Make it harder for mage to spell cast.

And frankly, these are just the beginning. If you really want to revise the options of the sam, you could actually give him much more tactical depth. You could actually decide to have a range of actions such as: Standard shots / Aimed shots / Provide cover / Spray shots which would ultimately give you modifiers to shoot, make it easier/harder for the enemy to shoot at your friends/you, and so on.

You just need a tiny bit of imagination.



I'm all for many initiative passes. But your using of "action economy" for talking about the existence of the distinction between simple and complex actions is a bit overblown. I'm not even sure if it isn't inherited from precisely D&D or whatever…

Instant water - just add water!

You know... when proposing alternate rules... "Patches welcome.".

Erm.... SR3 only tried to abstract rules a little bit - for the most part it was attempting simulationist rules. Most of the SR3 (and 1-2) rules are actually really simply, there is just a variety of them. The question that should be looked at is "How do we get the same results for the same situation but smoother / quicker/ more intuitively" and when you are working with a game that excels in its depth and breadth - that's a tricky one.

If you want to do away with initiative passes, maybe just play GURPS Cyberpunk and throw in some magic and elves.

Hey! I did say it would be hard to balance propertly! But that doesn't mean no one can think of good solutions for those problems! It's actually easy to come up with ideas such as "going from a standard shots to cover shots make you expand x times the ammo, gives +n to your TN but also gives +m to the TN of your ennemy.". But the x, n and m have to be thought about carefully…



This is what it said. But the problem is that in the end, it was actually quite abstract. Melee combat is really abstract, for example. And the low granularity of the TN system (or hit numbers for what it's worth) made ranged combat quite abstract too.

But your last sentence is exactly describing what we need and why it's not so simple.

So we're at the point where we're getting rude already?
All those "imaginative" things that you listed are not restricted to street samurai. Shadowrun is a classless system, and those options apply to everyone who can take up a gun. That is part of what makes it very difficult to "balance" (which is a word I despise in the context of RPGs, since I see no inherent need of balance). Everyone can have the appropriate training to use those options. Not everyone can sling magic on top of that. Disincentivizing mundane characters is IMNSHO not the way to go in a game that advertises itself as cyberpunk. It's not magicpunk.
Furthermore, you advocate taking away existing tactical options and then want to add other tactical options, that already exist. That is, at the very least, superfluous, and if one would be inclined to be less charitable, properly described as inane.

Your claim of the action system being "cumbersome" and "bad game design" is pretty subjective as well. There is a working system in place. It has been there for 5 editions (not counting Anarchy, because I don't know anything about it, and 6, which changed stuff I don't know anything more about other than the fact that it was changed). It has worked well for most players in 5 editions. That is an eminent reason why it has been in place for that long, and I don't think that 6 will win any game design accolades anytime soon.


Take your strawman and throw a lit match at it, please.

I realize you've got your opinions and I've got mine. Your realizations however are nothing more or less than opinions, not facts.
In conclusion, I think we're both better off, if we agree to disagree, so this here post is my last interaction with you on that topic (and I mean that as respectfully as possible, not as a gloating "I've got the last word in")

Don't get drawn into the argument Bannockburn - it's not worth the time to type.

@Bannockburn: So we are at the point where we use the "Sure, that's like, your opinion man" logical fallacy?

I will state clearly what you don't seem to understand. If you feel the need for calling out perceived logical fallacy and using ad personam, I won't dignify you with a point by point answer.

My goal, in this part of the discussion about game concepts, was discussing the need to suppress the concept of complex and simple actions, without removing tactical options (thus not affecting the mundanes that could depend on such options vs magically active characters). The goal is not to remove such options, but to remove a number of dice throws that make combat feel cumbersome.

You want do dispute the fact that combat is cumbersome in Shadowrun to many people? I'm not sure we can answer it with polls and similar stuff, but I can say that I've seen this argument repeated enough to know it's a problem to many players. And the worse part is that instead of discussing meaningful tactical options (take cover, change position, focus fire, provide cover, etc.), the tactical minigame that is promoted by the current action system becomes a discussion about dps like features and so on with arguably no flavour.

And I won't agree to disagree with most people, because, IN MY OPINION, that's a terrible concept that's never brought anything to any debate. If I feel that I've made my position clear enough and the debate is not advancing, I'll just leave it to it.



Thanks, but well, I took it as an occasion to clarify my point…