You guys got great ideas and spirit patching the product you actually PAID for.
Here are a few basic and advanced house rule brain teasers on top of what has been posted:
Judge intentions should rather not be CHA +CHA, but rather CHA +LOG (surely supermodels aren't the best at judging intentions)
Muscle augmentation amp is currently useless with STR related rolls (unless your team really needs a forklift), so added DMG would suit better
Skillwires amp should be for other AGL or LOG related skills as well. You can observe this intention on sample chars as well
Adepts could have Increased ability amp same similar skill wires, but 1 point more expensive (no essence cost) and could be connected to AGL, LOG or CHA skills
Jack of all trades and team player are rather positive qualities than amps. Fear is ok-ish if you consider it as some sort or a critter amp
Break up Intimidation skill into Intimidation (connected to STR) and Influence (CHA). Former has specialisations as torture, threat and frighten and latter is interrogation, command and instruction (these last two were missing anyways).
On a larger house rule scale I am working on;
- reduce Agility importance by adding Reaction back on, which will be the base for dodge and surprise test or even for an initiative test (consequently attribute points at chagen will need to change too)
- Get limits back: for each of 24 skills I assigned a secondary attribute (e.g: Close Combat DP uses AGL and STR for limit) and the actual skill limits are calculated as: (secondary attribute x2 +skill rating)/3 round up. This way you penalise defaulting as well.
- Limits reintroduced can bring Magic attribute back (as limiting attribute), so being awakened no longer costs 2 amp points, but you would have to spend the attribute points on them
- Once Magic is back you can use it's rating for drain in multiple ways; e.g. success above MAG, or 1s rolled above MAG or simply use the Sorcery/ Conjuring skill test's limit
- Specialisations would no longer give +2 to DP, but +1 DP and +1 limit (and could even be 2 levels)
- each skill test would have 3 components: dice pool, re-roll, limit. The hard work here will be to align amps and qualities to this rationally; dice pool would be increasing if something directly affecting a specific skill (e.g. skill wires, expert shot etc), re-rolls would be connected to the attributes involved in the skill test and limit would be increased by such amps as smart link, cyber eyes, tailored pheromones, foci etc.
- change armour rules completely : protection to have 2 simple factors: cover extent and armour rating and basically the net hits from an attack have to be equal or lower than cover extent of the armour to have any damage reduction by the rating it gives. Naturally, new armour stats and slight damage adjustments need to be done
- for qualities, it would be better to have a basic a point system (1-3) and have 3 slots for both positive and negatives as well (I felt negative qualities made characters more role-playable)
- knowledge skills would be nice to be expanded: e.g.: 3 slots: 1 for a backghround knowledge skill (corp, runner, ganger, magical), 1 knowledge skill connected to the main profession the character had and the last one for an interest/ hobby. Skill points should be spent for additional K skills and/ or more qualities would affect them.
I think none of the above would slow the game much down (being fixed precalced values) and expanding knowledge skills and qualities would rather help to flesh characters out.
.... the effort to actually revise this whole thing, however, is infuriating as a paying customer.