5th edition, Chapter by Chapter

[Lokathor]

Since we're talking about "experimental" SR rules, let's talk about those 10 hit boxes a bit more for a second: The damage chart thingy, is that like in AWOD where your net hits picks a row on a table and then you do 0 through 10 damage? Then your soak roll reduces the net hits or the damage taken or what?

I was thinking at one point, even if you were to have attack/dodge/soak like in sr4, could you just always assign a fixed damage meter based on size? Humans and so on get 10 boxes, Trolls get 12 boxes for being super tough (maybe), cars get 15 boxes, dogs and dog drones get 8 boxes, and so on. Or does that break with the functionality of how the soak roll is supposed to work? Can you hand out significantly more or less health boxes and also have a soak roll and have it really work out right? SR4 kinda does this but everything is just in the 9-11 range so it's not really a good indicator.

Re: Riggers and "what can they do that a street sam can't?"
They can be really small bug drone things and spy about. They can also be roto-drones or Tachikoma or what have you and work like an extra street samurai on the team. The difference is that when they get shot to pieces in drone form they "don't die in real life", they just have to pay out the ass for a new drone (and try to fix the old one during downtime, if they can recover it at all).

Besides, robots are cooooooool! I want tachikoma and roto-drones and Nightrider in my game. Or maybe C.A.R.R. for the hilarity factor.

[baduin]

You can send a small cockroach drone on an optic fiber through the sewers into the building and use it to access the corporate intranet or to act as a transmitter for other wireless drones.

You can also use such a small drone to attach itself to a cable going to a security camera, record some footage, and then cut off the camera and loop the footage.

You can use a small drone to check whether there isn't a sentry minigun around the corner, and possibly cut the cable to it.

Also, this is rather more funny and useful than a gun-armed drone

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goliath_tracked_mine

In late 1940, after recovering the prototype of a miniature tracked vehicle developed by the French vehicle designer Adolphe Kégresse from the Seine River, the Wehrmacht's ordnance office directed the Carl F.W. Borgward automotive company of Bremen, Germany to develop a similar vehicle for the purpose of carrying a minimum of 50 kg of explosives. The result was the SdKfz. 302 (Sonderkraftfahrzeug, ‘special-purpose vehicle’), called the Leichter Ladungsträger (‘light charge carrier’), or Goliath, which carried 60 kg of explosives. The vehicle was steered remotely via a joystick control box, which itself was attached to the Goliath by a triple-strand telephone cable connected to the rear of the vehicle. Two of the strands were used to move and steer the Goliath, the third was used for detonation. The Goliath had 650 m of cable. Each Goliath was disposable, being intended to be blown up with its target.

[Murtak]

But it is the designers (for the purposes of this thread: us) who choose the direction to push the players into. And I propose that 4E did indeed get the reduced essence cost for rigs right. Not because deckers can now get a rig. (They could easily get it in earlier editions.) But because a low essence cost and partial overlap with skills they already possess makes it an option for street samurai, who frankly could use an extra shtick at least as much as deckers.

Rigging is not so much a street samurai thing only because it's inefficient. Pretty much the Street sam is a better killer if he shows up personally, meaning that actually rigging a drone is generally a waste of time.

He can also rig a bike or car or helicopter, or rig scout drones. Combat drones are at the very most a third of what a rigger can do.

Generally rigging is for people who don't have great combat skills in the first place, and tend to be sitting in a van as opposed to in the field. You may have a guy who just sends software commands to drone AIs in AR while doing his own thing, but that really doesn't require much in the way of skills. But actual rigging, where you jump into the drone, isn't something you'll probably be doing during a run unless you're in the safety of a van.

Wifi blocking also pretty much fucks up the rigger too.

Where is the hardship in saying "guard my body for a minute while my drone checks out that ventilation duct"? Why would you want to remote control drones when by your own words shielding buildings fuck that idea right up?



Rigging is for people who want a combat option, a scouting option, a transport option, want to do any of the above at a place where they are not physically present or who want to do any of the above without risking their meat bodies. "z0mg moar machine guns!!" is something you can do with drones, but it is also singularly unimpressive. This is the future. Anyone can kill guards. Heck, most characters can drop a fucking Banshee if they plan for it.

Now... what does that leave? It leaves Reaction being a pretty dubious attribute, frankly. Without making passive Defense tests, there isn't a lot for that attribute to do.

You could put a lot of the agility skills into reaction and have that make sense. Not that dropping reaction is necessarily a bad idea, especially with the initiative stat being very similar.

And finally, with the phasing in of the Exotic Use rule (where if something is an exotic use of a skill you suffer a -2 dicepool penalty on it unless you have an appropriate Specialization, rather than making a new skill), and the grinding down of several filler skills - I think the entire Skill Groups rule could just be dropped. It really doesn't seem necessary.

Seconded.

Since we're talking about "experimental" SR rules, let's talk about those 10 hit boxes a bit more for a second: The damage chart thingy, is that like in AWOD where your net hits picks a row on a table and then you do 0 through 10 damage? Then your soak roll reduces the net hits or the damage taken or what?

As I understand it, Frank proposes this:
1. Attacker rolls attack dice. Threshold yet to be determined, but it will be fixed (per target), not rolled for every attack.
2. If he beats the threshold, take his weapon's damage code and stage it up for every hit in excess of the threshold (damage codes do 1/3/6/10 damage).
3. Defender rolls soak pool, staging the damage down once for every hit.

I was thinking at one point, even if you were to have attack/dodge/soak like in sr4, could you just always assign a fixed damage meter based on size? Humans and so on get 10 boxes, Trolls get 12 boxes for being super tough (maybe), cars get 15 boxes, dogs and dog drones get 8 boxes, and so on. Or does that break with the functionality of how the soak roll is supposed to work?

Yes. Trolls just get extra soak dice, so they take 1 or even 2 damage codes less per attack. And that is a pretty huge deal, because that easily mean the difference between 2 and 9 damage taken.

Re: Riggers and "what can they do that a street sam can't?"

They can be in more than one place at (nearly) the same time. This is huge and often forgotten.

[Username17]

Reaction = who goes first. That is an awesome abillity

Intuition - adding it to reaction for initiative is this abilities only redeeming quality.

Wat?

If adding to initiative for Reaction is an "awesome" ability, why wouldn't being added to the same test be an awesome ability for Intuition? Indeed, Intuition even adds more to going first, because it is used when you don't have a physical body (for example: Astral Projection). Also it's a resistance stat for Chaos and Invisibility, which is fairly important. Reaction has to have stuff appended to it to even hope to catch up to Intuition, because its basic function of making you go first is just a limited subset of the non-skill functions of Intuition.

For starters, Running could and probably should be dumped into Reaction, but it still needs to - for example - be the core attribute of the Full Defense check. That is, if you spend an action to increase the threshold to hit you in combat, Reaction is the attribute you're rolling (with the skill being Gymnastics or Running or Close Combat).

Frank, what's you reasoning behind assigning the Social skills to Willpower? Personally, I'd think that Intuition would be a lot more appropriate.

Putting Etiquette into Intuition makes a lot of sense. Con and Negotiation and Leadership should all stay in Willpower.

If the three primary archetypes are so damn' important, shouldn't the skills each one needs be nailed down first, and then those skills (and others) be distributed to the attributes accordingly?

Yes. But I disagree with several of your placements. And in any case, it doesn't much matter if something is an archetype skill or an obscure skill or whatever if you are actually purchasing it. If you go for the bomber character, you'll need Chemistry and Demolitions, it's not super important for you that most other skill sets don't usually take those. Similarly, universally useful skills are just that - universally useful. Everyone is going to have a rating of some kind in Perception and Etiquette. Having a higher Intuition for whatever reason is good because it lets you have higher dicepools (or save points by getting the same dicepools at a lower skill rating), but it doesn't get written onto your skill set unless you're being encouraged to hyper-max it for whatever reason. So Etiquette is on the Face package, but everyone else is going to have a point or more of Etiquette as well.

So anyway, it would look something like this:

Street Samurai

Attribute	Skills
Agility	Close Combat Firearms Infiltration Palming
Reaction	Gymnastics Running
Intuition	Perception

Total: 7 skills in 3 attributes.

Hacker

Attribute	Skills
Logic	Computer Cybercombat Data Search Electronic Warfare Electronics Hacking Programming

Total: 7 skills in 1 Attribute

Mage

Attribute	Skills
Intuition	Assensing
Magic	Banishing Binding Counterspelling Ritual Spellcasting Spellcasting Summoning

Total: 7 skills in 2 attributes.

Face

Attribute	Skills
Willpower	Con Leadership Negotiation
Intuition	Etiquette

Total: 4 skills in 2 attributes

Rigger

Attribute	Skills
Agility	Gunnery
Reaction	Pilot
Logic	Armorer Electronics Electronic Warfare Mechanic

Total: 6 skills in 3 attributes.

Burglar

Attribute	Skills
Strength	Climbing
Agility	Breaking Forgery Infiltration Palming
Logic	Electronics

Total: 5 skills in 2 attributes.

Investigator

Attribute	Skills
Intuition	Perception Shadowing Survival
Logic	Data Search

Total: 4 Skills in 2 Attributes

Doctor

Attribute	Skills
Logic	Chemistry Cybertechnology First Aid Medicine

Total: 4 skills in 1 Attrbute.

Bomber

Attribute	Skills
Agility	Palming
Logic	Armorer Chemistry Demolitions Electronic Warfare

Total: 5 Skills in 2 attributes.

And so on. There are certain obvious synergies. Obviously, being a Hacker and a Doctor dovetails nicely because you still only need one main attribute. Being a Street Samurai and a Burglar dovetails nicely because you already have half the skills in order to assist with flipping out and killing people. But people seriously have enough points that if they want to make a Hacker/Face they can just do that.

Wouldn't it be better to turn some skills into binary flags instead?

The game already has something that works like that: Spellcasting.

Spellcasting doesn't do anything by itself. But you can buy spells that toggle it into dong specific amazing things at the rate of one per spell. That's a fine system, and one that I think more skills should emulate. I could easily see people buy Hacking "spells" that let them do specific amazing things with code.

But for things like Exotic Weaponry, you really do want people to be allowed to default to their Close Combat skill at some penalty. Under no circumstances should picking up a chair make you less dangerous in close combat. I could really see a unified rule, where the exotic uses of some skills (such as spellcasting and cybercombat) were "no default" and the exotic uses of some other skills (notably Firearms and Close Combat) would allow defaulting at some penalty.

-Username17

[Crissa]

Yeah, I was thinking it would default to a moderate penalty and taking the flag would allow you to use your full skill.

That way you aren't buying up paths for a single use. I shouldn't have to think about how many points I want into my scuba skill; I should just get it or not.

-Crissa

[Murtak]

But for things like Exotic Weaponry, you really do want people to be allowed to default to their Close Combat skill at some penalty. Under no circumstances should picking up a chair make you less dangerous in close combat. I could really see a unified rule, where the exotic uses of some skills (such as spellcasting and cybercombat) were "no default" and the exotic uses of some other skills (notably Firearms and Close Combat) would allow defaulting at some penalty.

The examples used were diving and parachuting. Full skills for those abilities are just as much bullshit as exotic weapons, but I can't see a skill to default those to.

[Username17]

But for things like Exotic Weaponry, you really do want people to be allowed to default to their Close Combat skill at some penalty. Under no circumstances should picking up a chair make you less dangerous in close combat. I could really see a unified rule, where the exotic uses of some skills (such as spellcasting and cybercombat) were "no default" and the exotic uses of some other skills (notably Firearms and Close Combat) would allow defaulting at some penalty.

The examples used were diving and parachuting. Full skills for those abilities are just as much bullshit as exotic weapons, but I can't see a skill to default those to.

Swimming and Gymnastics. Done.

-Username17

[Murtak]

It's a stretch, but I guess it is not worse than defaulting gyrojet pistols to the same skill that handles shotguns. I guess with specializations being used that way the restriction of only one specialization per skill needs to be lifted. After all the restriction only existed because more than only specialization was strictly a bad deal. Now you might actually want more than one.

[spasheridan]

Going first in a gun game is a big deal. And the reason I said reaction was better than intuition is because all of the gear is going to boost reaction (wired, synaptic, etc) not intuition. In fact, intuition is the only stat that DOESN'T have a cyber booster - it's all skill boosting items for intution. Body gets the superthyroid, willpower gets the pain editor, but intuition gets nothing.

But you're right, on their own intuition and reaction are about equal. You get shot at more so it's a slightly better defense stat, but the astral / technomancer side of mental stats probably gives intuition the edge.

But lets be clear, we don't want super attributes - agility is the offense attribute so it CAN'T be the defense one. So we need reaction.

On the str / body rolled into one - how do you see that interacting with some standard ware? They've already stopped having gear add to body because bone aug shouldn't help you hold your breath or resist a disease. But the Str gear still adds straight to str. So - how would muscle replacement work in this system? each level increases the DV of melee weapons by 1? And is a DP bonus to STR skills? But not to soak tests? Kind of an awkward way to rule gear...

[Murtak]

But lets be clear, we don't want super attributes - agility is the offense attribute so it CAN'T be the defense one. So we need reaction.

There need not even be a defense stat. The hit threshold could just be 1+1 per initiative pass.

On the str / body rolled into one - how do you see that interacting with some standard ware? They've already stopped having gear add to body because bone aug shouldn't help you hold your breath or resist a disease. But the Str gear still adds straight to str. So - how would muscle replacement work in this system? each level increases the DV of melee weapons by 1? And is a DP bonus to STR skills? But not to soak tests? Kind of an awkward way to rule gear...

Dermal Plating and Bone Lacing can just add to soak rolls. Muscle replacement can just add to strength (except soak rolls) or, even easier, add to strength, including soak rolls. If we want to combine Strength and Body we absolutely can.

[Username17]

On the str / body rolled into one - how do you see that interacting with some standard ware? They've already stopped having gear add to body because bone aug shouldn't help you hold your breath or resist a disease. But the Str gear still adds straight to str. So - how would muscle replacement work in this system? each level increases the DV of melee weapons by 1? And is a DP bonus to STR skills? But not to soak tests? Kind of an awkward way to rule gear...

Muscle Replacement costs a whole Essence point. Having it add to soak tests doesn't even seem weird to me. I mean, you'r replacing chunks of muscle with metal and plastic, having it be slightly more bullet resistant is reasonable.

What I'm really looking forward to is simply reclassifying all the crap that adds to Body but only for damage resistance tests into just being Armor. Dermal Plating? Armor. Bone Lacing? Armor. While we're at it with armor, I really think that SR4 doesn't do nearly enough with Ballistic/Impact armor to bother having a distinction.

Anyway, here would be the way I would draw up metahumans:

Race	Strength	Agility	Reaction	Willpower	Intuition	Logic	Edge	Notes
Human	16/	1/6	1/6	1/6	1/6	1/6	2/7
Ork	4/9	1/6	1/6	1/6	1/6	1/5	1/6	Lowlight Vision
Dwarf	3/8	1/6	1/5	2/7	1/6	1/6	1/6	ThermographicVision Poison/Disease Resistance
Elf	1/6	2/7	1/6	2/7	1/6	1/6	1/6	Lowlight Vision
Troll	6/11	1/6	1/6	1/5	1/5	1/5	1/6	Thermographic Vision Natural Armor Reach

-Username17

[spasheridan]

Armor is a quick and easy hack, but the nice thing about something like bone aug or dermal plating is that it also soaked powerbolts. And it wasn't reduced by tasers or APDS ammo. If we go this direction it adds to the lethality a bit, which might be troublesome.

I like the dwarf. That attribute setup makes the dwarf a better matchup with the other races, previously I always saw them as the sad, short more expensive Orc.

Agility 6 for the troll? Is that on purpose?

[Surgo]

My group has a decker NPC, and infiltrating a building to grant him access to hack by setting up transmitters is what the runners do at times.

I hope that whatever happens, it supports this story. Because this is an absolute staple of the entire genre. Have you ever seen a cyberpunk story involving a team with a hacker where this didn't happen?

[kzt]

For a slight change of topic, I remember suggesting to Rob when 4th edition just came out that it would make life a lot easier for GMs and players if things like the magic book and the matrix book were complete replacements for the chapters in the base book. So ALL the magic rules were in the magic book and you didn't have to try to figure out how the add-on rules interact with the base rules, or search for where exactly the rule you vaguely remember really is. He didn't think this was a good idea, as people didn't want to pay for that stuff again. I'd rather pay an extra $5 for the book than have to try to juggle the errata, FAQ clarifications and two books to determine how some suddenly important but previously obscure magic rule works.

Is it just me and the people I game who think this is a good idea for a new edition?

[Lokathor]

Yes. Trolls just get extra soak dice, so they take 1 or even 2 damage codes less per attack. And that is a pretty huge deal, because that easily mean the difference between 2 and 9 damage taken.

Ah, that's not what I quite meant. I mean, assuming that you're not using damage codes you're just using damage values and pushing them up or down by 1 point per net hit either way (exactly like SR 4 does it), could you assign static hit box amounts based on a creature or object's size without having to adjust weapon damages and such and still get "semi-realistic" results as far as the odds of blowing stuff up in one hit with various weapons goes and so on? This mostly has to do with things outside of the "mediumish sized" range; very small items end up having 9 boxes (seems like too many) and trucks and stuff end up with only around 16ish (seems like too few).

I guess another way to state my question is: is it worth the time to try to assign hit box values to all sorts of things, or should they just be given a soak pool and have that handle the entire spectrum of factors that can affect how well they do or don't stand up to punishment?

Hit Boxes	Examples
1	Standard RFID Tag
2	Industrial RFID Tag, Micro Drone
4	Commlink, Mini Drone
6	Small Drone, most weapons
8	Dog, Medium Drone, an AK-47
10	Human, Elf, Dwarf, Ork, Large Drone, Materialized Spirit
12	Troll, Golf Cart
14	Huge Drone, Car
18	Titanic Drone, Semi-Truck (Rig unit only)

Is it just me and the people I game who think this is a good idea for a new edition?

Using Street Magic as the example: I'd like to have seen the book quickly cover the spirits and spell basics with all 10 spirit summaries condensed onto a page or two. Seeing some expanded rules for the astral world and having all the astral rules (ever) in a single chapter would be really nice too. I don't want it to reprint all the spells and adept powers from the core book though. Does that answer your question?

[Username17]

For a slight change of topic, I remember suggesting to Rob when 4th edition just came out that it would make life a lot easier for GMs and players if things like the magic book and the matrix book were complete replacements for the chapters in the base book. So ALL the magic rules were in the magic book and you didn't have to try to figure out how the add-on rules interact with the base rules, or search for where exactly the rule you vaguely remember really is. He didn't think this was a good idea, as people didn't want to pay for that stuff again. I'd rather pay an extra $5 for the book than have to try to juggle the errata, FAQ clarifications and two books to determine how some suddenly important but previously obscure magic rule works.

Is it just me and the people I game who think this is a good idea for a new edition?

The answer is: yes and no. I lobbied hard for putting the stat lines of all 10 spirits into Street Magic. And Augmentation is much improved by having a complete list of purchasable ware at the back. But for things you don't have to reference constantly, it's basically wasted space. I don't want to read the rules for Shamanic Masks over again in Street Magic, nor do I want to see the rules for augmented stat caps reprinted in Augmentation. The easiest example of course is Arsenal (or Cannon Companion, or whatever you call it for SR5). If you print up some new dice pool or threshold mods for combat, you'll want to reprint the entire attack modifiers chart. You will print up some new weapon types, and so you'll want to reprint the entire weapon types and ranges chart (complete with the new weapon types on it). But you won't reprint the attack resolution rules. Indeed, most of the combat rules (from initiative to wounds) will be left unsaid in Arsenal.

The key is that people should not be asked to flip from one book to another while referencing something. But the new books are still expansions, and should be written under the assumption that people have in fact read the Core book.

I mean, assuming that you're not using damage codes you're just using damage values and pushing them up or down by 1 point per net hit either way (exactly like SR 4 does it), could you assign static hit box amounts based on a creature or object's size without having to adjust weapon damages and such and still get "semi-realistic" results as far as the odds of blowing stuff up in one hit with various weapons goes and so on?

Not really, no. If you wanted to push things up or down by just one damage box per hit, your choices are either to vastly reduce the number of boxes or to vastly increase the number of dice. If people had just four wound boxes, you could get a pretty decent probability set of getting one shotted or grazed by a bullet using current dice pools. If you insisted on keeping the boxes in the 10 range and the damage at 1 box/hit you'd need to increase the dice pool of bystanders to like 20 dice.

1 box/hit is just a bad system. It pretty much mandates a 2-shot problem with virtually any numeric inputs that you could reasonably deal with.

I guess another way to state my question is: is it worth the time to try to assign hit box values to all sorts of things, or should they just be given a soak pool and have that handle the entire spectrum of factors that can affect how well they do or don't stand up to punishment?

Varying the number of hit points for things in a dice pool soak system is basically pointless.

-Username17

[Lokathor]

And the "2 shot problem" is, I take it, that you always have to hit someone twice to kill them almost regardless of what weapon you have?

I guess my real question with the damage code system you propose is how well does it interact with the players? Being able to one-shot guys on the street is fine, and even being able to one-shot guards is probably fine. Players getting one-shotted isn't so fine. I'm not quite a fan of the idea that a single bad roll would take them from full to dead really fast. SR characters should be able to die, sure, but I'd like combat against the PCs to be a little less swingy.

Is there a way to make the PCs almost never down in 1 hit while commoners almost always do and guards ("in the middle", so to speak) go down in 1 or 2 hits most of the time?

[Murtak]

And the "2 shot problem" is, I take it, that you always have to hit someone twice to kill them almost regardless of what weapon you have?

And conversely, no matter how tough you are, 2 hits will probably still kill you. Sure, there are fringe cases. A solid hit from a rifle will kill a random guard and a troll in armor will shrug off grazing hits from light pistols like rain. But when you are talking about reasonable opposition, the rule of thumb is "two hits will kill you, one will not".

[baduin]

Is there a way to make the PCs almost never down in 1 hit while commoners almost always do and guards ("in the middle", so to speak) go down in 1 or 2 hits most of the time?

You could use Edge to mitigate damage, although it has certain problems.

[A Man In Black]

You could use Edge to mitigate damage, although it has certain problems.

For one, you risk making a system like M&M, where what are supposed to be hero points turn into your hit points.

[Murtak]

Is there a way to make the PCs almost never down in 1 hit while commoners almost always do and guards ("in the middle", so to speak) go down in 1 or 2 hits most of the time?

Missed this. This is actually what Frank proposes. By making the damage scale not 1-2-3-4 ... but having it scale 1-3-6-10 any solid hit will indeed kill you. Or, to put it another way, the damage code of the weapon matters much less, skill and soak matter much more. At the same time damage gets swingier (is that a word?) though. A bad roll in 4E results in taking 7 instead of 5 damage. A bad roll with pyramidical damage results in taking 10 instead of 3 damage. Not necessarily bad, but something to watch out for.

[Username17]

Is there a way to make the PCs almost never down in 1 hit while commoners almost always do and guards ("in the middle", so to speak) go down in 1 or 2 hits most of the time?

Absolutely not. Player characters aren't different from commoners in SR. Some players are gong to be Morgo the Invulno Troll, and they are supposed to be highly resistant to damage (and switching out of 1:1 damage, they will be), but a lot of player characters are just pedestrians wearing flak vests. They aren't supposed to be more survivable than normal humans. They are normal humans.

Now you could run give your idea a little bit of legs by bringing back the old Professional Ratings. That is to say, characters with low professional ratings would not fight to incapacitation. Maybe, if you take more than twice your professional rating in wound boxes, you retreat, surrender, or faint. PCs would all have Professional Ratings of 5, meaning that they would fight on to unconsciousness if their players so willed it. But the professional rating 0 thugs with sticks would withdraw if they got tagged with even a Light Wound.

But in Shadowrun you don't get to be more death resistant because you have a player character sheet - you get to be more death resistant because you invested in some fucking Orthoskin.

-Username17

[Wesley Street]

Untrained (Professional Rating 0): The grunts in this group are untrained and unfamiliar with combat situations. They tend to react clumsily, slowly, and without a plan. If more than a quarter of the group members are removed from the combat, the group will flee in panic. Examples: Street mobs, rent-a-cops.

Semi-trained (Professional Ratings 1–2): These grunts are semi-trained and have some combat experience. They will remain in a fight until the situation is obviously no longer going their way. They tend to act deliberately and with a plan but don’t have the cool head of a true professional. If more than half the group members are knocked out of combat, the group will stop fighting and run. Examples: Street gangs, cops, security guards, insurgents.

Trained (Professional Ratings 3–4): Grunts in this group are trained in combat and generally know what they’re doing. They aren’t stupid and don’t take foolish chances. If more than three-quarters of the group are disabled, the group will withdraw. Examples: bodyguards, mercenaries, combat veterans, experienced cops.

Elite (Professional Ratings 5–6): These are professionals who live for combat. They will fight to the bitter end, or until mission parameters dictate otherwise. Examples: SWAT teams, special forces, fanatics

I think the Professional Ratings idea is a very solid one though, as you can read above, it does need a lot more tweaking. A rating scale of 0-to-6 doesn't mean much when half the numbers equate to identical reactions from NPCs. I get that it's a scale created by a random 1D6 roll but that's also a very stupid way to determine NPC motivation.

[Lokathor]

Hmm, I'm rapidly becoming more convinced... I'm still not sure though. My brain might just be stuck in fantasy RPG mode where players are expected to become tougher than the swarms and win that way.

I guess having a higher edge would also be a bigger deal? More chances to reroll those freak 14 out of 15 failed dice and so forth.

[Blicero]

There's also the expectation that Shadowrunners are simply going to be avoiding a lot of the opposition they encounter. Sure, fighting those four guards would probably have a 50-50 chance of success, sneaking past them or whatever will likely be much less lethal. And if all of the PCs are minigun-wielding trolls, then they'll just be capable of killing everyone because that's what they've specialized in.

Having comparable numbers to much of the opposition also encourages clever use of terrain and distractions and all that, which can only be a good thing as far as I'm concerned.