General Shadowrun Questions III: Ya like that, Chummer?

[Fable Wright]

Somewhat more detailed answer: CGL did not achieve anything people desired from the new edition.

Expanding more on the answer: It desperately needed months or years of additional playtesting. The fact that you can only get 2 edge per round in combat, combined with the ease of reaching that hard cap, makes so many things from weapons skill to armor relatively worthless. The fact that the Edge systems are barely-there to not-there for all aspects of the game other than combat means that the game is even worse than previous editions at feeling meaningful there. The system by which a mage can have 18 relevant Force 1 spirits in play is ridiculous. The fact that Decrease Attribute is now 1 spell instead of 6 means that Mages can basically instantly incapacitate any enemy without counterplay.

This is without talking about how some mechanics were introduced and used in only one place, and how some sections referring to rules that no longer exist in the current edition were just copy/pasted from 5th edition without proofreading.

Forget 'achieving anything people desired', they failed to give a functioning and cohesive standalone game at all.

[Delta]

Forget 'achieving anything people desired', they failed to give a functioning and cohesive standalone game at all.

Yeah, that sums it up. 6E just... fails. It's not that it's completely unplayable or anything, but even by the low standards I have for Shadowrun rules, it's just a very bad edition in almost every regard.

[LibraryOgre]

Since you didn't pay enough attention to me about it earlier: The Savage Shadows.

[BisectedBrioche]

Wow...

And it doesn't even have some sort of redeeming feature, like good lore, or pretty illustrations?

[Delta]

The lore is what it is, there's not much of a change between 5E and 6E, and honestly... I've given up on the current lore years ago, I don't like the way the "plot books" are made up, and I don't like mostof what's in them either, when I complain that the crunch aspect of the game lacks any kind of coherent vision, the same can be said about the fluff as well.

The redeeming feature for me is that as I live in Germany, the german translations of the books are dirt cheap (since they seem to be more of a passion product than a real cash maker for the publisher) and the people working on those german versions really work their butts off to get the rules cleared up as much as possible and put additional material in on top of that, but in the end, there's only so much lipstick you can put on a pig.

Just please note that I'm usually really not the guy to hate on new editions, usually I'm the first one to pounce on new stuff and really want to love it, but in the case of Shadowrun 6, I just... cannot.

[Ignimortis]

Wow...

And it doesn't even have some sort of redeeming feature, like good lore, or pretty illustrations?

The art is, for the first time in the series, horrendous. Even 5e had high-quality original art, 6e has a few pictures that are obviously photoshopped cosplayers or even non-cosplayers, and there was a debacle after release because CGL used some art that was, well, not theirs and not paid for. There is one good instance of artwork — the corebook cover. That's it.

The lore has been a trash heap since late 4e, as far as I'm concerned, it's all rehashed old plots but badly executed, and the importance of runners in the setting has been gradually diminishing for a while now.

Expanding more on the answer: It desperately needed months or years of additional playtesting. The fact that you can only get 2 edge per round in combat, combined with the ease of reaching that hard cap, makes so many things from weapons skill to armor relatively worthless. The fact that the Edge systems are barely-there to not-there for all aspects of the game other than combat means that the game is even worse than previous editions at feeling meaningful there. The system by which a mage can have 18 relevant Force 1 spirits in play is ridiculous. The fact that Decrease Attribute is now 1 spell instead of 6 means that Mages can basically instantly incapacitate any enemy without counterplay.

This is without talking about how some mechanics were introduced and used in only one place, and how some sections referring to rules that no longer exist in the current edition were just copy/pasted from 5th edition without proofreading.

Forget 'achieving anything people desired', they failed to give a functioning and cohesive standalone game at all.

The worst issue with Edge is that 1 point of Edge, by itself, is worth almost nothing, and so are 2 points. You need to save up over several turns, which drags out combat unnecessarily, which is compounded by the fact that weapons don't do frickin' damage! A Heavy Pistol with one net hit deals damn 4 physical damage. You can shoot that into a naked typical troll, and about 33% of the time, they're not gonna take damage at all. To fully soak 9P -1 AP from the same Predator in 5e, the troll would have to roll 9 hits on 10 dice. Hell, a holdout is literally useless, because 2 damage is something a normal human can soak somewhat reliably!

Armor just doesn't work, too. The funniest (and the most scary, because it sounded believable for CGL) explanation for that I've heard is that "CGL considered the typical armor loadout of a runner and put the soak into predefined stats, which is why armor grants no soak and weapons do so little damage — it's how it would've gone if you had an Armor Jacket and a Ballistic Mask on". This does work out mathematically for most weapons, but why is BOD still rolled for damage, then? Why did you keep a soak roll if you're trying to get rid of extra factors? Just reduce damage taken by BOD, or BOD/2 if you must! I've personally redone all the soaking in 5e to get rid of soak rolls completely, and it's not as hard as it looks! Also, it completely disregards how things go if you shoot up someone in normal clothes, or someone in heavier armor, which is a lot more common at somepoint.

Combat might've been a drag in 5e sometimes, if your players weren't used to it. But 6e did nothing about that except going "hey, Street Samurai/Adepts get too many turns and make other players feel like they're not contributing, so let's gut them again!", while retaining everything that made combat a drag (three rolls per attack, lots of modifiers despite promising to get rid of them) and adding a whole new step into the mix (comparing AR/DR, Edge rerolls/actions/etc), so that resolving one individual turn takes longer and due to weapons being peashooters, targets last longer, even if they're cheap mook gangers or low corpsec!

[Delta]

The main problem comes down to what has already been mentioned, 6E is far, far from being a finished product.

5E was written rather quickly as well, but back then, they didn't have any grand ideas, it started out by putting some additional stuff like limits onto the base that 4E built, remake the Matrix rules (yet again...) but since those exist completely separated from the rest of the world, that's not a big deal, and so on.

6E, on the other hand, started with this grand idea of "Hey, how about we get rid of most modifiers and stuff and build the game around this conflict-based Edge back and forth?" which by itself isn't a bad idea at all. Abstract, conflict based task resolution can be a great way to create a simple mechanical basis for your system that can be used in every circumstance (HeroQuest has done it pretty well for the last two decades or so). BUT, anyone who sits down and takes a look at Shadowrun should immediately realize that this is a BIG change. Shadowrun, in any edition going as far back as at least 2E, is just about the most detailed, precise, simulationist mess of rules in the world, so it should be obvious that turning the new edition into an abstract, conflict based game is a HUGE undertaking that needs to be rebuilt from the ground up.

Instead, they just took the biggest hammer they could find and smashed that abstract, conflict based task resolution with the back and forth of Edge into the core of an otherwise unchanged system and created a horrible mess. So while the core mechanics now say "A single point of Edge is almost useless, one point of "5E Edge" is roughly equivalent to 4 points of "6E Edge" now", it's painfully obvious this memo never reached the people working on a lot of other parts of the book.

Also, they wanted to make the game "simple" (at which they, in my opinion, succeeded in exactly one regard, the skill list is indeed much simpler now), which, again, should be obvious to just about everyone, is another BIG change. If you want to make a very complex game simple, there's just no way but to start from scratch. Again, they didn't do that, they took 5E and tried to add "simple" on top of that... and it worked out just as well as you would imagine from reading that sentence. All that was left of their "simple" pledge at the end was the "Look, our core book comes in at less than 300 pages, it's so simple!", at which they succeeded by... um, just leaving stuff out. It's not like this stuff is actually simpler now, a lot of stuff that was in the 5E core is just not there anymore and you have to wait for later additional books to know how it works.

6E could've been the most interesting Shadowrun edition of all time, they had some ideas I would've loved to see in execution. Instead, you just see them in utter failure since no one took the time needed to make them into a proper edition.

/and regarding armor: The fact that during the very first streamed public playtest, less than one hour into the first session of the game, the group was like "Um... yeah I think we'll have to houserule armor somehow" AND that the way armor was supposed to work in the core didn't even survive the very first additional crunch release (they added armor that DOES give damage reduction in the new "Guns and stuff" book) tells you all you need to know about what a mess 6E is. There are huge segments of the core where it is painfully obvious that not only was this stuff not even playtested once, I'm pretty sure no one ever even had the time to sit down and look over a finished chapter in one go. You cannot convince me, for example, that anyone ever sat down, read through the character creation chapter from end to end and said "Yeah, this is good, we can release it like that"

[stack]

Hey, 'do not play this edition' is about as simple as it gets, so they succeeded brilliantly. The only thing simpler is to just not publish it.

[BisectedBrioche]

Well, I'm sure if they don't go bankrupt, 7e will be fantastic.

[Ignimortis]

Also, they wanted to make the game "simple" (at which they, in my opinion, succeeded in exactly one regard, the skill list is indeed much simpler now), which, again, should be obvious to just about everyone, is another BIG change. If you want to make a very complex game simple, there's just no way but to start from scratch. Again, they didn't do that, they took 5E and tried to add "simple" on top of that... and it worked out just as well as you would imagine from reading that sentence. All that was left of their "simple" pledge at the end was the "Look, our core book comes in at less than 300 pages, it's so simple!", at which they succeeded by... um, just leaving stuff out. It's not like this stuff is actually simpler now, a lot of stuff that was in the 5E core is just not there anymore and you have to wait for later additional books to know how it works.

I have done the "making the game simple" part to the 5e corebook, with bits and pieces from Run and Gun to address the power creep. I have also tried to retain some crunchiness and deep character building, but reduce the clutter during gameplay, so there's still a lot of moving parts, but the in-game rules are about as inobtrusive as I could make them (less skills, every modifier is either 2, 4 or 6 dice, there are lots less of them that you can't just record on your character sheet, some thing let you ignore mods instead of modifying them further, there are no wireless bonuses to keep track of, etc.)

My current docs sum up to about 250 pages long, some of it is unnecessarily verbose because Russian takes several words for some concepts English can express in one. If I had better formatting (with Google Docs, you're basically working on a very simple base, if I were making a PDF of it, I'm sure I could save a few pages), and also had to shove in all the 5e CRB lore/art/short stories, I reckon I would clock in at about 320 to 350 pages. Oh, they were also using size 9 fonts, whereas mine is size 11.

Maybe 300 pages is unfeasible, but if I had maybe 400 to work with? Easy as pie. 350 might be doable, too. You don't need to do anything 6e did, too - just take 5e, which had, by that point, existed for six years already, and clean it the hell up. Seriously. Just clean it up. Yes, it's not easy, some things won't be cross-compatible, it took me more than a year to do my thing (though it was a passion project and I was doing it alone, not as a whole studio), but do you really want to make a good game or not?

(Yes, I'm quite a bit miffed, how can you tell?)

[Delta]

Well, I'm sure if they don't go bankrupt, 7e will be fantastic.

Pretty sure my hopes for a decent 7e would be massively increased if they do go bankrupt. I gotta admit I'm far from objective as far as CGL is concerned, there's hardly a company in the whole RPG business I'd miss less than them.

[Eurus]

I'm genuinely curious what the "best" edition is at this point, considering that I think I've only played... 3e and 5e? I think?

[Lord Torath]

2nd. Definitely 2nd!

If only because it's the one I learned.

Seriously, though, I've generally heard that, aside from 6th, they are all pretty much equally bad, just in different ways.

I do feel that 2nd has the best fluff, lore, and slang, though.

[Ignimortis]

I'm genuinely curious what the "best" edition is at this point, considering that I think I've only played... 3e and 5e? I think?

Any among 2e, 3e, 4e, 5e, really. It's all down to style and what exactly you want the world to feel like. I'm partial to 4e, because in a lot of ways, it feels more modern and less 80s cyberpunk.

The only constant among all editions is that you need to do something to the Matrix. It's either pizza-timey or agents all the way down, both of which is bad for the game. The only solution I personally found is to, well, make hosts really insignificant in the grand scheme of things, and have deckers rely more on hacking things directly and quickly for the most part.

[Fable Wright]

I'm genuinely curious what the "best" edition is at this point, considering that I think I've only played... 3e and 5e? I think?

Mechanically? Prooooooobably 4e. Fifth has MagicRun and PharmaRun problems; 3rd edition and before are just a complete rules headache to deal with. The problems with 4e are that some people can be too good at their jobs (but you can always have corps have someone better) but it's probably the best balanced of the lot. Also, Agi OP and Strength useless, but that's standard for not just Shadowrun at this point.

[Dimers]

I like 4e best because I'm all about the mechanics. 4e's are usable and sensible (if cumbersome). But I think 2e and 3e had more evocative fluff in their rulebooks. The 4e stories and examples mostly feel flat, like the authors are just trying to highlight a particular mechanic. That matters, because if nobody is interested in the story side of things, you're not going to find enough players to start a game.

[Delta]

4E/20th Anniversary Edition too for me. It's not like that edition is perfect or even "very good" from a rules perspective, but it's the one edition I can run with the least amount of houserules and headaches compared to all others, so it's my pick.

[LibraryOgre]

I'm sort of on the 4e bandwagon, as well, though I wish they'd done a number of things differently (for example, I would have used program ratings, not to contribute to the dice pool, but to cap the number of hits from a single test), it is, overall, the best, mechanically.

Aside from Savage Worlds.*


*Validate me, you bastards! Tell me I am pretty and smart!

[Telwar]

Yup, 4e. I played 1-3 (mostly 2), and the changes with 4e showed at least someone had thought about things like statistical probability. I do not miss having to roll a 20 on a d6.

I didn't see the point for the 5e changes, but I couldn't fault them for doing another edition, it was about that point.

I ran the SR6 beginners box for my group, and it was okay. It wasn't any better than 4e, though, or 5e, so if I was going to run an ongoing game I'd stick to 4 most likely. Sadly, the 4e Chummer doesn't seem to be working any more

[DigoDragon]

I'd say 4A for mechanics and 2e for setting.


But honestly I have found Starfinder to be a really good system for mechanics. Just peel off the starship parts and import your elves, dwarves, etc. from PF. Everything else is fluff work.

[comicshorse]

I'm genuinely curious what the "best" edition is at this point, considering that I think I've only played... 3e and 5e? I think?

I'm only familiar with first, second, third and fourth but I favor 3rd as my favourite

[Garfunkel]

I'd say 4A for mechanics and 2e for setting.

That's pretty much my opinion as well.

2e is the coolest 80's purple mohawk crazy cyberpunk world where everything is wild but also still old-school. 4e moved the world ahead and the big change was everything going wireless.

4e has the "best" ruleset in that it's relatively sensible and straightforward IMHO. I've run more games in 4e than in the others combined. But loads of people love 3e and 5e too and while I don't care for the mechanical changes that 5e brought in, it's not bad, especially after years of errata and rule crunching.

Also, while the original website for 4e Chummer is gone, you can still download it - I can't post the link here but google chummer and follow the white rabbit.

My version is from 2013 and still works without any issues.

[LibraryOgre]

Oh, if we're talking fluff, it's 1e/2e, hands down. Those books are a delight to read.

[Delta]

Personally I feel like 3e had a lot of great fluff, the Shadows of... and Target books are among those I still regularly get out when researching Shadowrun even though all of my other 3e stuff is packed up in the basement somewhere.

[BisectedBrioche]

I'm mostly only familiar with 5e (I recently binged the sourcebooks because of the game I mentioned a page or two ago), but I quite like the way the lore's set out (if nothing else, it feels like actual forum posts).

[LibraryOgre]

I'm mostly only familiar with 5e (I recently binged the sourcebooks because of the game I mentioned a page or two ago), but I quite like the way the lore's set out (if nothing else, it feels like actual forum posts).

If you've got a bit of cash to spare, check out PDFs of Awakenings and Fields of Fire... most are formatted as docs written by runners, with comments from other runners.

[Xervous]

4A here. Just a patch on recoil and a bit of fiat/adventure structuring for decking has it quite serviceable. Pity my friend groups don’t lean much towards cyberpunk or heavier rules systems.

[CharonsHelper]

Pretty sure my hopes for a decent 7e would be massively increased if they do go bankrupt. I gotta admit I'm far from objective as far as CGL is concerned, there's hardly a company in the whole RPG business I'd miss less than them.

Yeah, it really feels like they basically need to rebuild Shadowrun from the ground up. And that does seem more likely if a new company inherited the IP.

It was always a system which was popular IN SPITE of its mechanics. Super evocative mechanics in many cases, but in actual play it was always somewhere between mediocre and bad IMO.

[Xervous]

Yeah, it really feels like they basically need to rebuild Shadowrun from the ground up. And that does seem more likely if a new company inherited the IP.

It was always a system which was popular IN SPITE of its mechanics. Super evocative mechanics in many cases, but in actual play it was always somewhere between mediocre and bad IMO.

From my experience the only rules that produce a lot of grumbling (outside the obvious offender of the matrix) are those around spellcasting and drain. Take4 is ubiquitous with mages in my games and the whole spellcasting process has been cited as a deterrent on playing mages. The problem as I see it is the game implicitly provides rules for baseline magic performance, leaving it up to the player to price things out on their own. If they wanted to make mages more mechanically accessible it wouldn’t be exceptionally hard to shift numbers around to present a baseline no drain effectiveness and have each spell list what it gains for risking X quantity of drain.


But maybe they wont want to dumb it down too much. Anything coherent will be a reprieve from CGL at this point.

[The Glyphstone]

Anarchy and, to a certain extent, 6e, were also radical reworks of the rules and people hated both. I can't help but question if the same fate would befall any attempt at a serious ground-up rebuild of the mechanics.