So what the shit is so bad about Shadowrun?

[Trill]

Worse. Only worn armor doesn't. The armor spell does give bonus dice.

Yeah. It's the same as with sneaking. A Chameleon suit gives you an extra edge when you try to hide and also raises your Defense Rating by 2 if you have wireless on.
Meanwhile the (Improved) Invisibility spell gives you the Invisible status, that forces enemies to roll against a threshold equal to the hits before they can see you

[Stahlseele]

I think Bio and Cyber gives a Bonus as well again.
This might be an attempt to actually make them worth using over all worn stuff again . .
It is still stupid of course.

[Ignimortis]

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.

Not in the CRB. But you know what does give bonus soak dice for samurai?
That's right. FUCKING NOTHING. So a mage with quickened Improve Attribute (BOD) for +4 BOD, or just holding it through Focused Concentration at no penalty...has the same soak as a samurai who invested into Bone Density 4 (which only gives to BOD for soak).

But not Bone Lacing, mind! Bone Lacing only gives you +2 to BOD (for soak purposes only of course, can't have them getting extra HP from augs).

Oh, and if you're a Troll Hermetic with Exceptional Attribute BOD, max BOD under an Improve Attribute (BOD), there's no other character who's as good at soaking as you. Forever. All because you bothered to max out a troll's good stat through basically free points and picked up that one spell.

6e is a shitshow. 6e is not a functional game. You can't get into the game by reading the 6e corebook, because it lacks crucial rules that are only present in earlier editions, and expects you to know them.

In short...
Cyberlimbs suck. Some augs got long overdue buffs, but...
Being a combat specialist sucks because you can't oneshot any significant opponents (unless you're packing grenades) and you only get two actions per combat turn at best.
Mages got BUFFED once again.
Adepts have wonky rules which encourage you to repeatedly lose your 1 MAG and buy it up for 5 Karma five times, because you don't lose PP when losing MAG, but you gain PP when increasing it. Also, this means that an Adept is the best street samurai, because there's no reason to be mundane when you can have 6 PP and not lose anything because of it anyway.

[Username17]

6e is a shitshow. 6e is not a functional game. You can't get into the game by reading the 6e corebook, because it lacks crucial rules that are only present in earlier editions, and expects you to know them.

SR 5e had this exact problem. These aren't "editions of Shadowrun" they are "collections of house rules for Shadowrun 4e." That they are bad rules changes is almost beside the point, although of course they totally are. Just the fact that no one involved in the project ever got down to the brass tacks of actually explaining how the game is supposed to work in a way that someone who hadn't been part of their nine month internal email discussion could understand tells you everything you need to know about why 6e isn't a good product. In fact, why it was incapable of being a good product.

-Username17

[phlapjackage]

Pegasus apparently had something to say about it
https://old.reddit.com/r/Shadowrun/comm ... ion_to_6e/

[Wiseman]

6e is a shitshow. 6e is not a functional game. You can't get into the game by reading the 6e corebook, because it lacks crucial rules that are only present in earlier editions, and expects you to know them.

SR 5e had this exact problem. These aren't "editions of Shadowrun" they are "collections of house rules for Shadowrun 4e." That they are bad rules changes is almost beside the point, although of course they totally are. Just the fact that no one involved in the project ever got down to the brass tacks of actually explaining how the game is supposed to work in a way that someone who hadn't been part of their nine month internal email discussion could understand tells you everything you need to know about why 6e isn't a good product. In fact, why it was incapable of being a good product.

-Username17

What rules exactly are missing?

[Username17]

What rules exactly are missing?

It is of course philosophically impossible to prove a negative, and more specifically the organization of SR5 and SR6 are so amazingly terrible that it remains possible and even plausible that some Matrix rules you can't find are simply left hanging in the equipment or character generation chapters. Going on a deep dive to be reasonably positive that a rule is actually missing rather than misplaced is fairly time intensive, and I've only done it for a few things.

The rules for carrying things don't exist. People have Strength values, but how much they can lift is left as an exercise of the imagination. How does a Strength of 4 make you feel about lifting heavy objects?

There are some very complicated rules about program slots and what to do when you run out of them. The rules for how many program slots you have don't exist. It tells you how to add slots, and that is very cheap and easy. But the rules for how many you start with just isn't there.

More fundamentally, the entire Matrix rules of 5e revolve around the idea that there's something stopping people from just using Hall of Mirrors to make offensive hacking against them essentially impossible. And despite several times mentioning that there's something stopping that from being an automatic win, the rule in question does not exist.

-Username17

[Stahlseele]

@Frank
according to this https://abload.de/img/1564810401557jhjmb.png they expect you to use and shoot hall of mirrors at people actually.

[RelentlessImp]

...Wasn't caseless ammo the assumption for forever?

[Zaranthan]

It sure was, hence why the house rule needs a full paragraph to explain how the GM is going to dick you over and there's nothing you can do about it.

[phlapjackage]

There's something you can do about it tho, right? The tag eraser? So it makes it a really pointless change to go back to cased ammo, when 99.9% of players are going to make sure that they say to the GM "My char used a tag eraser on all their ammo".

This smells like more "everything has a cost" crap

[Thaluikhain]

Or load your own ammo? There's a zillion people in the US who do that to save costs, customise loads or just to be cool.

(Apparently, stories about US police officers looking for containers to put their spent rounds in during gunfights are apocryphal, but on the firing range they would collect their brass for reloading, and you do get people stealing other people's spent casings for)

[Stahlseele]

Also, they basically killed the metal storm weapons with that rule.

[SlyJohnny]

Or load your own ammo? There's a zillion people in the US who do that to save costs, customise loads or just to be cool.

You'd still have to go buy the primers from a store, though. You can't make those on a worktop in your garage.

[Stahlseele]

And the electronic firing gun modification is dead too without caseless ammo, because that more or less makes a gun into a metal storm one.

[Trill]

Oh, and just another thing I saw
sharks are as hardy as never before
Because they now have Hardened Armor 6
which means 6 auto hits on soak and no damage if the damage before soak is below 6
so a katana needs 2 net hits, a Defiance T-250 shotgun needs 2 net hits (3 if it's sawed off) and an Ares Alpha needs 2 hits too
and even then you'll likely only do 1 or two points of damage

the shark rolls its REA+INT, giving it 9 dice to dodge your attacks, on average getting 3 hits. It has BOD 5 so on average it gets 1.66 hits.
You need Damage+hits-9 to do any damage at all. And if you do damage, you do Damage+hits-3-7.66. To do any damage you have to either be very good at shooting to rack up those 7+ hits with your shotgun. Or you have to use a Panther XXL (and only need 4+ hits)

6e: Shark skin edition

[Whipstitch]

I can't imagine in what universe they wouldn't be better served by giving sharks normal stats and including a "firing into water" as a special case in the shooting through barriers rules. 5 feet of water is enough to make someone relatively safe from bullets fired from most angles and at around 8 to 10 feet any attackers may and well save their ammo if they're using conventional small arms. You could seriously just say "3 hardened armor per intervening meter of water" and it'd be less stupid on a lot of levels.

[phlapjackage]

Why the need to make such changes for a shark's stats? Has this been a problem that's come up at a lot of tables? Dolphins can kill sharks, are they doing that much damage? Do dolphins and whales have hardened armor now too? How about penguins?

sharks are as hardy as never before

heh

[saithorthepyro]

Factually, SR4 came with a giant flame war that dragged on for about a year. Grognards were upset about variable target numbers, upset about samey magical traditions, upset about wireless internet. The editionwar was big and nearly tore dumpshock in half.

-Username17

Taking this here from PF 2E, but how bad were the traditions in how different they were for 3e? Is it a problem conceptually or just in execution? I've actually toyed with houserules making either 4e or 5e's traditions a bit more distinct.

[Trill]

Well, considering 3e Hermetics and Shamans and 4e Hermetics and Shamans

3e Differences:

• Hermetics are only able to summon elementals, while shamans are only able to summon nature spirits
• Shamans are able to summon spirits immediately while Hermetics require an Hours long ritual
• Shamans are limited to the area they summoned the spirit in, losing the tasks if moving elsewhere, while Hermetics could use their spirits wherever they wanted
• Elementals could help in Casting or learning a spell, Nature spirits couldn't
• Shamans had Totems, Hermetics not
• Hermetics needed Libraries and Circles, Shamans not

4e Differences:

• Hermetics use LOG to soak Drain, Shamans use CHA
• Hermetics can summon Fire Spirits while Shamans can summon Beast Spirits

[Stahlseele]

Magic came as diverse as you could reasonably make it.
So basically, if you had heard of the concept somewhere in passing, SR3 had rules for it.
And as with most anything else, they were detailed, fiddly and completely unique all around and different from each other in at least one aspect.
Usually more.
Some of the utterly broken as well.

[Username17]

The main traditions are Hermetic and Shamanic. From a 4e standpoint, Hermetics get to bind spirits and shamans don't. But also Hermetics straight up do not get to use services from unbound spirits full stop. Also every Shaman gets a Mentor spirit for free and Hermetics don't. Also lodges work really differently because Shamans don't use conjuring materials because they can't bind spirits.

That probably sounds like a tremendous nerf all around compared to SR4, but it honestly wasn't. For starters, hermetic binding didn't have nastier drain than Shamanic summoning, so a Hermetic's cadre of bound spirits were all "full size" or even larger than full size because you could afford significantly more drain for downtime conjuring than you can for mid-mission conjuring. And the Mentor Spirits were... let's just say they weren't as balanced as the Mentor Spirits in SR4. There were shit totems of course, but if you took the "good ones" they were pretty nuts compared to what you get in SR4 and also Shamans got them for literally free.

Anyway, the main traditions are different enough in SR3 that most tables wouldn't let you play anything else. Other traditions tended to have a lot less ink spared on them and tended to not have writeups that were complete from a playability standpoint. There were various traditions like Shinto Priests, Psychics, and Wu Jen that didn't quite have all the fiddly bits you needed to actually play them at the table. The only complete expansion traditions were the Irish Paths (which you were not allowed to play in any campaign I've ever seen because they are broken) and Voodoo (which is the original possession tradition, is weird as fuck, and extremely polarizing).

-Username17

[saithorthepyro]

Ah, I thought all or at least a decent chunk of the traditions that were in SR 5 had at least more differentiation instead of just Voodoo, Hermetic, and Shamanic. I'm personally trying to add some degree of difference to each mostly to balance out Forbidden Arcana, the last SR 5 magic supplement that added a bunch of very different Traditions with different rules, and updated a few but not anywhere near most, and it left them feeling weak compared to the new toys. Don't know if anyone has read Forbidden Arcana, but it's very much a mixed bag of decent (Some Qualities, lot of the traditions) and terrible (Some qualities, and all the new Blood Magic stuff)

But yeah, Traditions got major buffs if you were one of the lucky ones to get the update. For example
-Black Magic got a free animal familiar, a free minor spirit (Boggle), summoned spirits got either Fear, Flight skill, or a Natural Weapon with DV=Force+2, and finally a quality were they couldn't cast beneficial Health spells on anyone but themselves, but they got +2 to Spellcasting checks for spells targeting themselves.

Most of the others aren't as bad, typically having limited or forbidden access to different skills, spirits, or schools of magic and typically some less than stellar advantages. Also got necromancy through a tradition that was one off three ripping of Swamp Thing of all things.

[Username17]

The big thing about expansion traditions in 3rd edition is that there weren't standardized spirit lists. Everything you could conjure was a function call to the monster lists. This meant that for an expansion faction to be "complete" it had to have a full set of spirits written into a critter list somewhere. That factually didn't happen for any traditions except Voodoo.

So if you were a Wu Jen, there were a grand total of five spirits you could summon. Which might sound OK because Hermetics only had four, but it wasn't. There weren't "optional powers" in SR3, each spirit just had their arbitrary list. Which meant that Shamans were the only ones who really had optional powers because you stand on top of Mount Rainier and summon either a storm spirit or a mountain spirit. And Hermetics had a bunch of secret powers like Aid Sorcery on all their spirits because they had bound spirits and other traditions did not.

The Voodoo people had a whole grip of Loa, which was good enough. But Wu Jen's five Spirits of the Elements were fucking bullshit.

-Username17

[OgreBattle]

So why bother with specific spirit power sets for specific traditions? Does Shadowrun lose out on anything if everyone can pick from any?