That's really up to the group. Some love to get deep into each and every details, some prefer to handwave everything that isn't combat. It will also depend on the composition of the group: a team of heavy-hitters should be able to kick the front door and shoot everything without too much trouble while a team of faces should rather try to find a way to get other people do the job for them.Wiseman wrote:Some more questions:
How much detail should we have to pay attention to or how much can just be handwaved. My game group generally likes "kick in the door" style game play, but a lot of the material suggests a picture like "mission accomplished! but you forgot to do X! Game over!
However, unless you have a group that really know everything about Shadowrun security, I'd suggest to always have some level of abstraction. I doubt many groups enjoy spending hours on a plan that take nearly everything into account to get told "you raise an alarm because you didn't account for the atmosphere sensor that detected the increase of CO2 caused by your breathing".
A middle-ground solution is to allow for "flashback" resolution: the team faces an unexpected security guard? Let the face explain how he befriended him during preparation, and do the roll (and possibly spend nuyens to bribe him): if it's successful, then the guard will let them be, if it's not then the guard is still a problem.
If you want to put a limit on these things, you can add a limit based on the time the PC had to prepare the operation, or you can use a mechanism where PC roll during preparation and contribute to a "planning pool" that's depleted when they retroactively explain how they got rid of an obstacle during legwork.
(The answers below are for SR4, I don't know if they're still relevant in SR5)Also what's the expected level of power? I'm pretty fine with characters being able to take out mooks with impunity but I've seen some level of debate on this. Is there a way to make combat less directly lethal for PCs? Chargen takes a pretty long time. (Mooks with less damage boxes? Quicker combat?)
This depends on the character and the playstyle of the players. A good idea is to start small and see how your group fares and then scale up the opposition accordingly. But generally speaking, many dangerous combat situations in Shadowrun can be avoided and even in combat there are plenty of ways to win a fight, even when the opposition has a better firepower.
In my experience, combat isn't that lethal. It's true that you can quickly get badly hurt, but a one-shot death isn't that common. PC who lay low once they have been badly wounded should be able to survive most fights, and even if they get into overflow, as long as there's a teammate with a medkit nearby, they should be able to survive.
Having melee attacks into a simple action doesn't seem like much of a problem to me. It makes melee a bit more interesting, but doesn't break the game.Thirdly, how much is changed if melee attacks are made into a simple action. And is it bad if characters can be capable of dodging or blocking bullets? (thinking adding melee combat to defense roll against ranged attacks)
Adding melee combat to defense roll against ranged attack is more problematic, because it means that even characters who fight with guns should invest in melee in order to get a better defense. What you could do would be to offer it as an option for "full dodge" instead of Dodge or Gymnastic.