So what the shit is so bad about Shadowrun?

[souran]

The thing is that you can certainly make the case that all skills should be highly singular. If you ask Olympic level or spec ops level shooters and told them that their is no real difference between hand-gun shooting and rifle shooting they would laugh in your face. There are differences in technique, stance, etc.

That said, anybody who has actually been shooting knows that there is a lot of skill transference. This is true for a lot of things in life. A skill web can be very odd. For instance, closing wounds with stitches and mending clothes has enough similarity that mending clothes has been used as practice/teaching for mending bodies.


That said, for the purpose of a game, anything other than broad skills is crazy. While we know that in the real world a physicist and a biologist and a chemist are all separate specialties that require lots of time to master and being good at one doesn't mean you know more than basic amounts about the others, for a game having these be something other than "Science" and letting the character be a Dana Skully and know ALL THE SCIENCE is important because otherwise the skills would be to esoteric to be useful at all.

As for if experienced hunters should know how to use rocket launchers the answer is that it doesn't matter. If the experienced hunters are NPCs the answer can be that they don't know how to use them because their background wouldn't give them any reason to know how to. Also, they won't be equipped with them.

If a PC is playing a character described as an "experienced hunter" and for some reason has access to/needs to use a rocket launcher then the answer you want is that YES the player can use it because again having the player have a penalty such that they need to use their bolt action rifle over the rocket launcher to be successful is stupid. While rocket launchers are not exactly uncommon in shadowrun, they are the sort of weapon that is not likely to be anybodies primary shtick in a game that is nominally about modern dungeon crawling and espionage.

[OgreBattle]

So in Shadowrun what is suppose to be the pros and cons of a guy who primarily uses sorcery vs a guy who primarily calls spirits to do sorcery for them?

It seems like "have spirits do it for me" is a much better option by concept. But how is it suppose to be balanced mechanically?

[Trill]

Well, do you mean sorcery as in "affecting the world through magical means" (i.e. the normal meaning) or "casting spells" (the SR meaning)?

[Korwin]

Speaking for 4th Edition:
When you summon an Spirit it's an opposed roll ans your drain target number is defined by how many successes the Spirit got.

With sorcery the drain target number is defined by the force of the spell you cast. So totally under controll of the mage.

So Summoning an Spirit is in potential much riskier. Especially High Force Spirits, when you are summoning Spirits higher than your Magic stat and the drain is physical damage.

[Username17]

Conjuring is more powerful and versatile for the same character expenditure. Sorcery is safer to use and somewhat faster, which is important in a game where people use guns.

-Username17

[Whipstitch]

So in Shadowrun what is suppose to be the pros and cons of a guy who primarily uses sorcery vs a guy who primarily calls spirits to do sorcery for them?

At the extreme end Conjuring isn't really balanced with anything. But as Frank said in normal play speed is a big factor and in terms of skill set oftentimes those two people are typically very nearly the same person, at least as starting characters. Spirits of Man have the innate spell power, but their selections are limited only to those known by the caster, so you're really only saving points on a single skill by skipping personal spell casting entirely. As good as X spirits on a rampage plus whatever mundane shit their summoner is doing may be, it's rarely better than X spirits on a rampage plus their a summoner letting rip with mighty Illusions and Manipulations. To top that you probably want to be a conjurer who is also a drone rigger, and even then you could still plausibly be casting while in Captain's Chair mode. So while you can definitely be a ridiculously powerful character as an Aspected Conjurer it's not like Frank and I would make fun of you for having redundancies on your sheet from taking Spellcasting.

[OgreBattle]

So what are all the immediate obviously bad decisions of 6e, the subtly bad ones?

Edge does more stuff, but not sure what

Armor that's 4 levels better than the attacking coming at you grants a point of edge to soak, I think

[Trill]

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ZPN ... CQI8s5rJU/

Let me list them up:

• The edge system. Specifically
  • you can only gain 2 Edge per CT. So if you have an assault cannon, you're an elf and it's light darkness, you basically don't give a shit about anything else. Armor, cover, high ground, special abilities, they all make no difference at all
  • the maximum you can get is 7, so this means that high edge characters are very favored (you start all new conflicts with edge equal to your EDG stat.)
  • the various things you can spend on mean that you'll usually wait until you have a lot to spend it for the upper uses like getting a "special effect" (5 edge), make enemy 2's count for glitches (5 edge), heal a point of physical/stun damage (4/3 edge) or rerolling all failures (4 edge)
  • it leads to mook farming, where you fight enemies you have advantage over to attack the "boss" with full edge points
  • it's still as fiddly as DP modifiers, if not more so
• Initiative has been changed a lot. Basically:
  • Initiative is straight from top to bottom, no INI passes. INIT is same as in 5e (REA+INT+Ini dice result)
  • You start with one major and one minor action, and get one minor action for each INI die you have
  • Major actions are things like Attacking, Observing in Detail, Control Device, Matrix Perception, Snoop
  • Minor actions are things like Drop Prone, Move (yes, moving is now a separate action you have to pay for), Reload smartgun, Matrix Perception, Jack out
  • You can spend one major action for 3 minor actions, or 4 minor for one major action. Yes, even a super wired street sam can only shoot two times now.
• Weapons now have an Attack Value, that determines whether you gain edge from it.
• Armor now only provides a Defense Value. Damage soak is BOD only. Yes, it doesn't matter whether I'm wearing nothing at all (nothing at all, nothing at all) or MilSpec Armor, I take the same damage
• But that's okay since weapons now are basically BB guns. Their damage was scaled back, so a heavy pistol might make 3P while an Assault Cannon does 6P (or 7P with a Panther XXL)
• That means that you can't kill a defenseless person from behind, you can't kill yourself with a shotgun, and you can fire an Assault cannon point blank at a baby and it will survive it.
• But that's okay since you can just use higher firing modes to trade AV for Damage.
• And grunts give boni (the document says AV and dice pool, but another source I've seen says DV increase as well). So a single Assault Canon shot can't kill a baby, but 10 mooks with light pistols will kill anything in their way
• Melee Weapons have their damage independent of Strength, but unarmed combat damage still scales
• Force for spells is gone, you just pick the spell and if you want you "amp up" the spell, giving it more power/range/whatever at the cost of higher drain.
• Astral Combat and Assensing are combined. Not sure if this is bad, would have to see their implementation, but I wouldn't hold my breath
• apparently they made the 420e rule about keeping hits for more drain apply to some spells
• summoning resistance is 2*F with 1 Drain/hit
• Binding was removed, but instead you can keep spirits up to a total force of 3*MAG summoned. So with MAG 4 you can have 3 F4 spirits, 12 F1 spirits or one F12 spirit
• spirits last for one sunrise and sunset
• spirits still have ItNW, which counts as F auto hits. So an F7 spirit is basically immune to weapons, and a F8 spirit definitely
• Cyberdecks are split up into cyberdecks (Attack and Sleaze) and cyberjacks (Data Processing and Firewall). Do they replace commlinks? are they supplemental to them? Who knows so far
• not a bad point but: only two matrix skills: Electronics for legal stuff, Cracking for illegal stuff. WOOHOO
• and no Master/Slave relations between devices
• metatypes no longer priority based?
• Priority selection gives you special points
• attribute maximums not minimums determined at charged, so you can totally have a BOD 1/STR 1 Troll. Minimum increase determined by special points.
• LOG & INT max. same for all metatypes.
• no real availability/applies only to forbidden items, and then only prevents you from taking a small selection of things (highest you can get is 6F, and most things are below AVAIL 6)

[Iduno]

I think one of the main complaints about the new edge system is that it is so abstracted that what you use the edge for is not connected to what you gained the edge for. You can certainly wear very heavy armor to get edge when you get shot at, and use the edge to be better at gymnastics, which should not improve when you're weighted down.

The major complaints about the edition are that the same people who made WAR! -era SR4 and all of SR5 are still at the helm making bad decisions and being generally shitty humans.

[OgreBattle]

Shadowrun 4e seems to be the best base to start with still... was it written by Germans who briefly had the licene or something?

[Ignimortis]

Having gotten my hands on the Beginner Box, I'd like to tell you a hilarious tale. The Armor spell for mages increases both defense rating and soak...by 1 per net hit. With a static drain value of 3. Unless augmentations allow street samurai to stack 10+ additional soak, this is where Magicrun becomes explicit, because Increase Reflexes+Armor with Focused Concentration (no penalty for sustaining spells) basically makes you a street samurai with MAG 6.

[Stahlseele]

Shadowrun 4e seems to be the best base to start with still... was it written by Germans who briefly had the licene or something?

Close, we got to give input and offer errata on stuff.

[Whipstitch]

Much of which was terrible indeed, but what can you do?

[OgreBattle]

I see internet folks say SR3e was the best e, I figured big part of ignoring Ian flavor (wired and Mohawks), but mechanically did 3e do anything better than 4e?

[Whipstitch]

I definitely chalk preferences up to a matter of fluff and presentation. There's lots of things that are different but not actually better in aggregate. E.g., the proportional damage system was better than what we got to replace it in SR4 but enough other shit was left unaddressed that messing about with vehicles was still a clusterfuck.

[Username17]

I see internet folks say SR3e was the best e, I figured big part of ignoring Ian flavor (wired and Mohawks), but mechanically did 3e do anything better than 4e?

That would basically be pure nostalgia glasses. If your best gaming memories were made between 1999 and 2002, then you probably have fond memories of SR3. But from a raw mechanics standpoint, SR4 was essentially strictly superior across the board. Even individual bad decisions like dropping LMSD damage fit into an overall combat subsystem that is an improvement.

-Username17

[Stahlseele]

Technically speaking, SR3 was and still IS the best SR we ever had.
But what makes it technically speaking the best also makes it basically unplayable.
It is the sole reason why, if you were to make a computer game out of Shadowrun, you should use that system and nothing else . .
BECAUSE IT HAS RULES FOR BLOODY EVERYTHING!
Including for how many and what kind of doors, seats, cargo volumen and either fuel or electricity and mileage for all of your vehicles.

It also had much more variables to tweak as well.

So if you could actually 1:1 translate that into done by a computer, you could actually simulate an entire world on that ruleset.

But asking people to do that? That is lunacy at best and malicious intent at worst.

[Whipstitch]

That post is dumb and you should feel dumb. Rules that don't work and charts that don't make sense is literally worse than starting with nothing.

[Ancient History]

I can't throw stones.

[Rubick]

Shadowrun 6e is out and it's a shitshow.

[Trill]

A massive shitshow. Things like Armor not giving soak dice, RPC not making you invisible, not being able to one-shot a baby with a Panther XXL, or F8 spirits being basically immune to weapons.
And why?
Because argle bargle foofaraw hey diddy hoe diddy no one knows.

Also the hot-fix errata came out on the first day of GenCon and had 120 errors for 300 pages of the CRB. And was so full of errors that the errata needed an errata.

[virgil]

How are you unable to one-shot a baby? What does armor do for protection?

[Trill]

So in general there was a big change in the edge system. It was apparently similar to the Advantage stuff from 5e, where you get advantages that you can use to help you. It was apparently supposed to supplant the old method of giving DP modifiers.
They fucked it up.

So weapons in 6e have 4 Stats:

• Damage: This goes from 2 for light pistols, to 5 for Assault Rifles, to 6 for Assault cannons (and 7 for the Panther XXL)
• Fire mode, which determines how many times you can shoot it per round
• Ammo, which determines how much goes in and how it's stored
• Attack Rating: This combines AP and Limit into one stat, with it varying over the various distances

Similarly the Armor now has a Defense Rating

When you shoot someone you make it a normal attack test (AGI+Firearms) vs. REA+INT and count hits.
If the Attack Rating is higher/lower than the Defense Rating by at least 4, the attacker/defender gains a point of edge. (you generally gain edge for advantages you have over other people. Some qualities or gear give you edge as well (such as the Chameleon Suit))
You then soak Damage+(net hits) with BOD. Not BOD+Armor. So being you take the same damage if you're naked as if you're in MilSpec.

So with the Baby, it rolls its BOD 1, for an average of 0.33 hits. It has a CM of 9 and BODx2=2 overflow boxes. If you want to one-shot it you thus need (9+2+0.33)-7=4.33 net hits
you need 2 net hits just to have it begin to die and 4 net hits to kill it in one shot.

Let's also compare a 2080 Kurt Cobain expy wanting to kill himself. He takes a shotgun (let's take a Roomsweeper with 5P) and tries to kill himself. He has BOD 3 (for the extra CM box) and thus 6 Overflow. He will on average soak 1 point of damage
He thus needs 10+6+1-5=12 net hits to kill himself in one shot, or 6 net hits to just start dying

[Stahlseele]

i shall let this speak for itself i think . .

[Iduno]

Things like Armor not giving soak dice,

Worse. Only worn armor doesn't. The armor spell does give bonus dice. I've heard part of the "problem" they're solving is Street Samurai are better at fighting than everyone else because their whole thing is being better at fighting. So they want to nerf fighters, because nobody at Catalyst has a functioning brain.