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According to a number of people, there's alot of issues going on with 6E gamewise ruining armor (No longer soaks), weaker weapons, Strength no longer affecting melee weapons, magic getting stronger still...
It seems like they really wanted to hit Street Sams this edition
And then there's some really shady elements going on behind the scenes when it came to paying writers.
ZebioLizard2 wrote: According to a number of people, there's alot of issues going on with 6E gamewise ruining armor (No longer soaks), weaker weapons, Strength no longer affecting melee weapons, magic getting stronger still...
It seems like they really wanted to hit Street Sams this edition
And then there's some really shady elements going on behind the scenes when it came to paying writers.
Yeah, I was hoping Catalyst could be run more professionally through 5th, but if what you say about 6th that'll be 2 editions in a row I take a hard pass on (looks at shelf full of 1st thru 4th edition books).
I LITERALLY just bought the 5th edition book last week..
Going to be honest, bad call. They bolloxed up 5th pretty much completely. 6th is looking like an even bigger trainwreck, hilariously.
Shadowrun pretty much is a pick your poison of third or fourth, with a lean toward avoiding Catalyst as incompetent buffoons with no business with their hands on any game system.
I LITERALLY just bought the 5th edition book last week..
Going to be honest, bad call. They bolloxed up 5th pretty much completely. 6th is looking like an even bigger trainwreck, hilariously.
Shadowrun pretty much is a pick your poison of third or fourth, with a lean toward avoiding Catalyst as incompetent buffoons with no business with their hands on any game system.
And 4th has Chummer, your best character creation friend ever.
I LITERALLY just bought the 5th edition book last week..
Going to be honest, bad call. They bolloxed up 5th pretty much completely. 6th is looking like an even bigger trainwreck, hilariously.
Shadowrun pretty much is a pick your poison of third or fourth, with a lean toward avoiding Catalyst as incompetent buffoons with no business with their hands on any game system.
TBH after having finally sat down to read through this book, it's a mess. This game is obscenely complicated for no reason at all. Just trying to figure out how to create a character took me almost two full hours and I still had a laundry list of questions as to things I did that I was unsure of the legality of.
By Contrast, I just picked up Star Trek Adventures and let me tell you, that is a well put together game, easy to learn and fun as hell to play!
Shadowrun has always been one of the more complex games, but 5th Edition was just badly organized and edited. There were some good ideas but the execution is incredibly terrible.
John Prins wrote: Shadowrun has always been one of the more complex games, but 5th Edition was just badly organized and edited. There were some good ideas but the execution is incredibly terrible.
There is no need for the game to be as complex as it is, so in the end my group and I decided it wasn't worth out time and moved on to other RPG systems. It's unfortunate, but a lot of us aren't spreadsheet wizards and don't want to spend half our session arguing over what you can, and cannot do.
I bought some of the 5th ed stuff like 2 months before they announced 6. A friend wanted to run a game using the life path system from one of the supplements. I tried to build a Rigger character. Somehow managed to build a rigger that was bad at everything, including rigging. Probably going to skip on shadowrun until another experienced DM comes along.
This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2019/06/15 10:19:12
I like the setting, but my only experience playing Shadowrun was 5th edition and quite negative. As mentioned, character creation is a horrible chore, wading through thick, poorly edited rulebook. Then the combat system is very complicated. Honestly, it had its appeal but compared to elegant simplicity of Cyberpunk, it was pretty dire.
Also, my group were experienced gamers so they all made highly optimized combat characters. I made an all-rounder resource-type character and I was basically useless in every battle. Magic felt ridiculously powerful. I can see where the adage "Gimp the mage first" comes from as most battles were our Mage Dominating enemies to shoot themselves. Our Troll maximized his durability, so he was immune to nearly all weapons enemies had, and to put any hurt on him, GM had to give enemies weapons which, if they targeted other characters, made them go 'splat' instantly.
I wouldn't call five years roughly IIRC to be rapid personally. My local campaign fizzled out last October and I was debating whether to sell the book for this very reason but decided against it just in case we restarted. Yeah... it didn't work out for the best, lol. Luckily, I only bought the core book in 5th after buying pretty much everything back in 3rd and all the main splat books for each archtype last edition and just barely managing to sell off most before they were invalidated.
This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2019/06/25 23:51:36
We Munch for Macragge! FOR THE EMPRUH! Cheesesticks and Humus!
So I hadn't heard anything about this since Gencon and decided to do some quick searches in order to get an update. Apparently the PDF has been available for about a month and the hardcopy will maybe hit store shelves after a delay in October.
Um... is this going to hit the gaming market with a soggy muted *fwwap* like the 40kRPG did? The few reviews I found are not just mixed but quite polarized.
warboss wrote: So I hadn't heard anything about this since Gencon and decided to do some quick searches in order to get an update. Apparently the PDF has been available for about a month and the hardcopy will maybe hit store shelves after a delay in October.
Um... is this going to hit the gaming market with a soggy muted *fwwap* like the 40kRPG did? The few reviews I found are not just mixed but quite polarized.
Damn, after the mess that was 5th edition they really needed to clean up their act for 6th. Sounds like they tried to reduce complexity but were entirely ham fisted about it. Who thought removing Strength from melee weapon damage was a good idea?
If they wanted to simplify Shadowrun, focusing on rules clarity, consistency, examples and editing should have been their #1 priority, not changing how stuff worked.
I can't speak from personal experience but, judging from others have claimed, it sounds like the perfect storm combination of all of the following:
1) Traditional Catalyst Games gakky editing and product management 2) Rush to get it out before the new Cyberpunk tabletop RPG (and accompanying video game likely to bring new interest into the stale genre) 3) Right hand not knowing what the left is doing (see #1) 4) Wanting to have their cake (not piss off existing crunch loving customers) and eat it too (claiming that they've overhauled/simplified the system to attract new customers).
There are several examples in the youtube video I linked where it sounds like (conjecture obviously) one person didn't get the memo to simplify and didn't whereas others did resulting in an inconsistent mix of mechanics that should be similar... and the long standing gakky editing not catching it or caring enough to fix it if they did. e.g There is a rule that has a lengthy introduction and explanation that sounds both cool and like it should be important but has only a single edge case use that feels like the editor realized too late that none of the other freelance writers were actually using the rule someone wrote so he or she threw it in himself into a section. It's not promising. :(
This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2019/09/28 17:25:06
We Munch for Macragge! FOR THE EMPRUH! Cheesesticks and Humus!
Yeah, I watched that video and pretty much agree with your assessment. Pushing to get out before Cyberpunk RED/2077 would have been a smart move if they had gotten their act together.
I love cyberpunk settings and thought for years shadowrun was my only option. I literally bought a bunch of the 5th ed stuff a week before they announced 6th. At this point I'm just gonna wait for the cyberpunk RPG to drop so I can decide which suits me better.
balmong7 wrote: I love cyberpunk settings and thought for years shadowrun was my only option. I literally bought a bunch of the 5th ed stuff a week before they announced 6th. At this point I'm just gonna wait for the cyberpunk RPG to drop so I can decide which suits me better.
Cyberpunk's pretty much the RPG granddaddy of cyberpunk settings. You might want to look at Eclipse Phase (which isn't exactly cyberpunk, a bit more sci-fi but strongly addresses transhumanism).
balmong7 wrote: I love cyberpunk settings and thought for years shadowrun was my only option. I literally bought a bunch of the 5th ed stuff a week before they announced 6th. At this point I'm just gonna wait for the cyberpunk RPG to drop so I can decide which suits me better.
Cyberpunk has fairly terrible mechanics. Which are largely a function of its age (some things seemed reasonable to try in the early days of RPGs (70s/80s), but turned out to be bad mechanics once people got better at analysis of game systems), and a lack of rule revision during its revised editions. Decisions that were fairly innocent attempts at problem solving when they were originally written up are cardinal sins of game design now.
And Cyberpunk is super lethal despite having long and tedious character creation, which makes for a fair amount of downtime.
----
Shadowrun's heyday was 3rd (with a few exceptions, unfortunately one being character creation. And the matrix rules, buts that's unfortuantely true of every edition of Shadowrun) and 4th. Catalyst produces shovelware junk by self-promoted fanboys that don't really grasp the setting or the mechanics. The current Catalyst team and their... monstrosities... are best avoided.
I've never been a fan of GURPS myself, but I've seen folks argue fairly reasonably that GURPS Cyberpunk is better than either. And you can use all the setting books of either, while using a more coherent ruleset.
This message was edited 3 times. Last update was at 2019/10/23 05:45:41
3rd was my favorite edition overall, but I got real damn tired of listening to my characters whine that their cell phones couldn't access the Matrix, or take photos, because their cell phones IRL could do those things. I got so tired of having to explain that the game was The Future as predicted by guys in the 1990s. Wireless internet and cell phones that did more than just make calls weren't a thing back then (heck, cell phones and the internet were both fairly new at the time).
4th Edition's introduction of the wireless Matrix and commlinks cleared all that up (while creating an entirely new set of problems).
Still, I had a lot of fun in 3rd edition. Even though I'm playing in and running 5th edition games, I still get a hankering every so often to go back to 3rd...
Emperor's Eagles (undergoing Chapter reorganization)
Caledonian 95th (undergoing regimental reorganization)
Thousands Sons (undergoing Warband re--- wait, are any of my 40K armies playable?)
Easy E wrote: I thought character creation in 3rd was okay once you knew a bit about what you were doing.
The table of priorities I liked as you had to actually decided what mattered to you as a player the most.
Problem was, once you knew what you were doing, you could math out that some of the priorities were bad deals. Some of the races were worth negative points, others had terrible stat boosts that the game didn't really use, others were objectively better than buying attribute priorities, and doing skills wrong made your character objectively worse, since karma costs for leveling skills used a different system.
Easy E wrote: I thought character creation in 3rd was okay once you knew a bit about what you were doing.
The table of priorities I liked as you had to actually decided what mattered to you as a player the most.
Problem was, once you knew what you were doing, you could math out that some of the priorities were bad deals. Some of the races were worth negative points, others had terrible stat boosts that the game didn't really use, others were objectively better than buying attribute priorities, and doing skills wrong made your character objectively worse, since karma costs for leveling skills used a different system.
All true and accurate points. I just liked it better than a boring points buy system or semi-random dice rolling. Still not perfect though.
Also, when we first started we all had hilariously bad characters!
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Easy E wrote: I thought character creation in 3rd was okay once you knew a bit about what you were doing.
The table of priorities I liked as you had to actually decided what mattered to you as a player the most.
Problem was, once you knew what you were doing, you could math out that some of the priorities were bad deals. Some of the races were worth negative points, others had terrible stat boosts that the game didn't really use, others were objectively better than buying attribute priorities, and doing skills wrong made your character objectively worse, since karma costs for leveling skills used a different system.
Yeah, buying max (possible) level skills was always way better than spreading out your points. It was quick and easy to pick up level 1-2 skills in play.
Priority definitely favored some builds over others.
I understand that about 60 pages of the book were accidentally "not printed" and that they had to put them out in PDF form on launch day so that players who bought the book would have all they need to play?
Togusa wrote: I understand that about 60 pages of the book were accidentally "not printed" and that they had to put them out in PDF form on launch day so that players who bought the book would have all they need to play?
AFAIK, not exactly, but the version of the book they printed for Gen Con did need a hefty 40 pages of errata. There's also stuff you can only possibly understand if you reference older editions, stuff in the quick start box that works differently or simply doesn't... it's been a real gakshow, so far.
This message was edited 2 times. Last update was at 2019/11/05 17:57:49
We tried making up characters for 5th edition - that was a evening wasted.
I can;t recall a worse experience in making characters - plus everything seemed horribly biased towards magic - 4th was better - made up soem fun characters for that
6th does not sound fun unfortunately
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Togusa wrote: I understand that about 60 pages of the book were accidentally "not printed" and that they had to put them out in PDF form on launch day so that players who bought the book would have all they need to play?
AFAIK, not exactly, but the version of the book they printed for Gen Con did need a hefty 40 pages of errata. There's also stuff you can only possibly understand if you reference older editions, stuff in the quick start box that works differently or simply doesn't... it's been a real gakshow, so far.
Good lord, I can't even...how do you bungle something going to print that badly?
I'm so glad I scavenged 4th edition books towards the start of 5th.
Emperor's Eagles (undergoing Chapter reorganization)
Caledonian 95th (undergoing regimental reorganization)
Thousands Sons (undergoing Warband re--- wait, are any of my 40K armies playable?) 
