[penllawen]

Aaaah, I think we're just having a basic failure to communicate.

Edit: Or, maybe, it was just all about considering conflicts inside a mission as being discrete and edge doesn't transfer between them?  The rules don't support that, and reworded the sentence below to address that reading. ... Doesn't have to help NOW as the entire mission is one ongoing conflict; hacking a guard's commlink for access codes you'll need later is something I agreed was not Edge abuse.  I said, and you quoted me saying, #9 was clearly not edge abuse.

OK. Well, that's not how I read "directly part of an ongoing confrontation" at all. My reading of that was much narrower in scope and in time.

Consider page 45 of the CRB:

Characters start a gaming session with Edge points equal to their Edge rank. In the session, Edge can be carried over and accumulated up to a limit of 7, including the Edge provided by the character’s Edge attribute. Any Edge garnered over your base attribute goes away when you complete any ongoing confrontation; this includes combat, hacking, social persuasion, and any situation where bonus Edge might be accumulated. If, at the end of the confrontation, your current Edge points are less than your Edge attribute, you stay at the lower level. If you want more Edge, you have to earn it.
...
Edge can only be gained when it is part of a real opposed encounter. Gamemasters should not award points of Edge that are not directly part of an ongoing confrontation...

Note that last part is the bit is what you quoted. Taken in that wider context, it seems to me that "ongoing confrontation" has to be narrowly defined - as one instance of "combat, hacking, social persuasion, etc" - and not as wide in scope as an entire Shadowrun. Otherwise, players are only getting an Edge refresh once per run...?

[Lormyr]

Yeah, you can tell by the votes that there is an exceptionally wide discrepancy between opinions on what constitutes "abuse" or not in terms of edge. Enjoying the edge system is going to be strongly reliant on sitting down at a table of like-minded folks.

[Ghost Rigger]

But yes, it really is black and white from my point of view:

Does the action HELP advance the shadowrun?  Yes? No edge abuse. Hard stop.

Does the action NOT help advance the shadowrun, other than generating you a point of edge which you can of course then use on anything you like?  Frag no you don't get the edge; that's edge abuse.

So the difference between "edge abuse" and "not edge abuse" is whether or not the player can convince you that their action advances the shadowrun in some way. That would probably encourage some very interesting roleplay, especially out of certain players who otherwise prefer to rollplay, but you have to acknowledge that this is why some people see this as a deeply flawed system.

[Stainless Steel Devil Rat]

But yes, it really is black and white from my point of view:

Does the action HELP advance the shadowrun?  Yes? No edge abuse. Hard stop.

Does the action NOT help advance the shadowrun, other than generating you a point of edge which you can of course then use on anything you like?  Frag no you don't get the edge; that's edge abuse.

So the difference between "edge abuse" and "not edge abuse" is whether or not the player can convince you that their action advances the shadowrun in some way. That would probably encourage some very interesting roleplay, especially out of certain players who otherwise prefer to rollplay, but you have to acknowledge that this is why some people see this as a deeply flawed system.

I'd prefer to look at is as being reasonable to objectively determine if a proposed action is relevant or irrelevant to the "ongoing confrontation".

Defining "ongoing confrontation" is apparently what's the more subjective part.

As for there being deep flaws?  No, I think this discussion is dancing around in the corner cases.  Are you doing something that, absent the potential gain of an edge point, is actually helping the team and/or hindering the opposition? If so then there's no edge abuse.  The arguments are mostly about "well, what if"'s where lines are trying to be pushed to see what someone says about whether they'd bend the line or commit an implicit faux pas of telling a player "no, that's edge abuse".

[Finstersang]

Strongly tending towards "None of these".

the player hacks the commlink of a dead grunt. --> That´s probably the closest to something that might a trick to cheese out Edge if the player really gives no further explanation on the purpose of the action.

But what´s more important here: Is that really worth it if the player gets nothing usefull besides that one point of Edge? From my experiences, it´s very, very likely that the player has something better to do with that Main Action. He could simply just attack, or hack stuff that´s actually worthwhile. And he will likely earn 1 or even 2 points of Edge as well if he picks the targets right.

[Stainless Steel Devil Rat]

Strongly tending towards "None of these".

the player hacks the commlink of a dead grunt. --> That´s probably the closest to something that might a trick to cheese out Edge if the player really gives no further explanation on the purpose of the action.

But what´s more important here: Is that really worth it if the player gets nothing usefull besides that one point of Edge? From my experiences, it´s very, very likely that the player has something better to do with that Main Action. He could simply just attack, or hack stuff that´s actually worthwhile. And he will likely earn 1 or even 2 points of Edge as well if he picks the targets right.

If one is prone to being skeptical about Edge being a "deeply flawed" system, then yes it's rather important that Edge not be generated by things that shouldn't be generating Edge. 

Am I the only one who sees the irony here?  People who don't like the edge system allowing tactics to benefit from unrelated nonsense are complaining about a rule aimed at preventing nonsense from generating edge, which could then be used to affect tactics?

[penllawen]

Defining "ongoing confrontation" is apparently what's the more subjective part.

Disagree. I think the CRB's definition is crisp and clear.

Characters start a gaming session with Edge points equal to their Edge rank. In the session, Edge can be carried over and accumulated up to a limit of 7, including the Edge provided by the character’s Edge attribute. Any Edge garnered over your base attribute goes away when you complete any ongoing confrontation; this includes combat, hacking, social persuasion, and any situation where bonus Edge might be accumulated. If, at the end of the confrontation, your current Edge points are less than your Edge attribute, you stay at the lower level. If you want more Edge, you have to earn it.
...
Edge can only be gained when it is part of a real opposed encounter. Gamemasters should not award points of Edge that are not directly part of an ongoing confrontation...

[Stainless Steel Devil Rat]

Defining "ongoing confrontation" is apparently what's the more subjective part.

Disagree. I think the CRB's definition is crisp and clear.

Characters start a gaming session with Edge points equal to their Edge rank. In the session, Edge can be carried over and accumulated up to a limit of 7, including the Edge provided by the character’s Edge attribute. Any Edge garnered over your base attribute goes away when you complete any ongoing confrontation; this includes combat, hacking, social persuasion, and any situation where bonus Edge might be accumulated. If, at the end of the confrontation, your current Edge points are less than your Edge attribute, you stay at the lower level. If you want more Edge, you have to earn it.
...
Edge can only be gained when it is part of a real opposed encounter. Gamemasters should not award points of Edge that are not directly part of an ongoing confrontation...

And in the example you floated earlier, where you've fought and defeated some guards, took a commlink, and hacked it to try to find guards' access codes, in your mind that's not part of an ongoing confrontation.

We're agreeing to disagree on that.

[DigitalZombie]

Ok, what if- after defeating the guards, the party face starts questioning the surviving wounded guard. (End of combat encounter start of social encounter maybe?)

While the face does most of the talking the hacker does the following:
Hack, hack,hack hack spend 4 edge on healing a physical dmg. Log off/log on.
Hack, hack, hack ..... until all his dmg is gone. Then he start to share the edge with his teammates, so they also can heal ( all the grunts had lowlight vision, so the team got pretty badly wounded). Once in a while the hacker will engage lightly in the social encounter.
After 6 minutes the face is done talking with the surviving goon ( that dude is pretty shaking, he just witnessed a bunch of runners regenerate in front of him).

Ok, thats the most extreme scenario I can come up with I think.

[penllawen]

( that dude is pretty shaking, he just witnessed a bunch of runners regenerate in front of him).

I lolled so hard I woke the dog!

[GuardDuty]

Ok, what if- after defeating the guards, the party face starts questioning the surviving wounded guard. (End of combat encounter start of social encounter maybe?)

While the face does most of the talking the hacker does the following:
Hack, hack,hack hack spend 4 edge on healing a physical dmg. Log off/log on.
Hack, hack, hack ..... until all his dmg is gone. Then he start to share the edge with his teammates, so they also can heal ( all the grunts had lowlight vision, so the team got pretty badly wounded). Once in a while the hacker will engage lightly in the social encounter.
After 6 minutes the face is done talking with the surviving goon ( that dude is pretty shaking, he just witnessed a bunch of runners regenerate in front of him).

Ok, thats the most extreme scenario I can come up with I think.

While this is going on, a black cat walks in front of you, and your entire team feels strange.  During your next encounter, you are shocked to find that the entire team has 0 edge, and does not gain edge from any action or situation until such a time that they are able to investigate what has happened and how to atone.

Karma.

[Lormyr]

Am I the only one who sees the irony here?  People who don't like the edge system allowing tactics to benefit from unrelated nonsense are complaining about a rule aimed at preventing nonsense from generating edge, which could then be used to affect tactics?

If that is tied to their reason for not liking the edge system, then that's totally valid. And in support of your perspective, I have also seen some comments that I would agree fall into your above category.

A lot more of the criticism stems from perspectives other than that, though.

[Ghost Rigger]

Am I the only one who sees the irony here?  People who don't like the edge system allowing tactics to benefit from unrelated nonsense are complaining about a rule aimed at preventing nonsense from generating edge, which could then be used to affect tactics?

I do not think you quite understand how others see this. The edge system was not built from the ground up to prevent random BS from generating edge; it was built in a way that lets you generate edge from random BS and has a little sticky note on it that says "don't generate edge from random BS". This enables people to generate edge off of random BS, they  "well, this isn't random BS because blah blah blah" first.

[Shinobi Killfist]

Am I the only one who sees the irony here?  People who don't like the edge system allowing tactics to benefit from unrelated nonsense are complaining about a rule aimed at preventing nonsense from generating edge, which could then be used to affect tactics?

I do not think you quite understand how others see this. The edge system was not built from the ground up to prevent random BS from generating edge; it was built in a way that lets you generate edge from random BS and has a little sticky note on it that says "don't generate edge from random BS". This enables people to generate edge off of random BS, they  "well, this isn't random BS because blah blah blah" first.

Edge begging is basically the name of the game. If my edge is contingent not on what i do but on how I phrase what I do it’s a edge begging system.

[FastJack]

Ok, what if- after defeating the guards, the party face starts questioning the surviving wounded guard. (End of combat encounter start of social encounter maybe?)

While the face does most of the talking the hacker does the following:
Hack, hack,hack hack spend 4 edge on healing a physical dmg. Log off/log on.
Hack, hack, hack ..... until all his dmg is gone. Then he start to share the edge with his teammates, so they also can heal ( all the grunts had lowlight vision, so the team got pretty badly wounded). Once in a while the hacker will engage lightly in the social encounter.
After 6 minutes the face is done talking with the surviving goon ( that dude is pretty shaking, he just witnessed a bunch of runners regenerate in front of him).

Ok, thats the most extreme scenario I can come up with I think.

While the face talks, the hacker starts looking up all kinds of knowledge in the Matrix on everything from splinters to shock to sucking chest wounds. He ties bandages around his wounds, packing them with help from the items in the medkit, then starts working on helping his teammates patch up so they can get the hell out of there.

Just because you're healing doesn't mean you're Wolverine.