[Shadowjack]

thanks for this thread!

as someone brand new to SR - having never played or run, BUT getting excited about a new edition and deciding to jump into a game that I've heard about for dozens of years, i was STOKED!

Ain't going to lie.  Reading the volume of negativity towards this edition started seeping into my perceptions.  it made me sad.  But nevertheless, I'm gearing up to run a session 0 in a couple of weeks, and hell bent and determined to run a SR game the way I *think* a SR game should be run.  all my players are also new to the game, so we will learn together, adjust on the fly, and some of the more extreme edge cases where the system utterly breaks - my hope - is due to our total newness to any edition of SR will be a rare occurrence, if at all.

is it broken?  don't know
is it beyond repair?  don't know
is the lack of armour calculating into Soak Stupid?  don't know
is the lack of strength factoring into melee damage dumb?  don't know
are certain priorities not making sense as presented in char gen?  don't know.

I guess - the beauty of ignorance, is ignorance...  , and my (naive) hope is, as our game matures, so too will the 6th edition...

Cheers.

J.

My pleasure. I felt something like this was needed because I think a lot of the negativity is far over the top, there are issues but saying the game is "unplayable" is ridiculous, people have so much pent up frustration from 5E that it's spilled into 6E and many are not giving it a chance. I really believe that mob mentality is in full force. *However* that does not mean that I am right and everyone else is wrong, it's all subjective in the end, but I do think this is a great product, it just may not appease all the oldschool fans. People forget that 5E was a mess at release and it was a nightmare hunting for rules clarifications online for everything. 6E is a lot easier to learn and play imo. 6E also does not have any of the splatbooks that 5E ended up getting, so comparing the two this early only tells half the tale.

Here is what I think: The game is not broken, soak rules in 5E were absolute garbage, 6E soak rules are far superior and quicker, strength does not NEED to factor into melee damage, it's not that big of a deal and strength is still very useful. It's one-thing-that-does-not-break-the-game. The priority table sucks (because you can lose out on karma), I always felt that way, but it is FAST and accessible. Again, not a HUGE deal, Shadowrun is still Shadowrun, awesome setting, fun gameplay.

[Iron Serpent Prince]

Shadowjack, I'm curious what your honest feelings were / are about 5th?  I'm wondering what kind of bar Sixth World had to hurdle in order for you to love it.  (Example, if you despised 5th, the bar would have been very low.)

For fairness, I do not love 5th.  In spite of the fun I have with it, I don't even really like 5th.  I was initially drawn in because it pushed all my nostalgia buttons about 3rd.  Once I scratched the surface, it was / is an absolute mess - that only got worse with time.

I see all the worst problems I had with 5th in Sixth World still - plus many new ones, and I'm still waiting for even the barest hint of the promised Errata system working for the customers.

For completeness (not to stir up arguments), some of those problems are:  Poor writing style (mechanics blended in to conversational paragraphs concealing them), poor editing, no evidence of a cohesive goal list shared with writers, curse of knowledge among writers - Sixth World is more of a Shadowrun 201 book, rather than a 101, incomplete concepts, over reliance on GM fiat, etc.

[Shadowjack]

Iron Serpent Prince, I invested a lot of time into trying to make 5E work but the rules for vehicles, spirits, the matrix, endless modifiers that could reduce firearms dice pools to 0, really got under my skin. No matter how much I studied, I just could not memorize that much stuff and a lot of it was longwinded and overly complicated to the point where it was not fun. I had a great time with 5E when I was fighting tough gangers but once technomancers, spirits, matrix, etc came up I had to read the rules over and over and there was a LOT of errata, many rules were broken and simply did not work, such as cyber limbs (everyone had a different idea of how they should work). I eventually gave up and moved back to 4E, where I had the most fun and my group was able to actually enjoy. So how high was the bar set? I'd say 4/10 for 5E  and 6/10 for 4E, with Anarchy coming in at about a 5/10. For sake of ease of learning, more clear and concise rules, everything being easier to memorize, and just overall fun factor, 6E is leaps and bounds above the rest, for me.

I noticed the format was mostly fluff at the top of paragraphs and rules at the bottom, not a complete separation but I generally know where to look and again, it's easier to memorize. The editing wasn't great but keep in mind the book is half the size and the actual rules portion is not so big, so while there are issues, they are easier to solve and much of the time it's not difficult to see what the book was intended to say. I think people are forgetting how many errors there were in the 5E CRB and not making a fair evaluation, at least in some cases, because a lot of the criticism struck me as uneducated and bandwagoning on the CGL hate train. I also think that it is impossible to make a perfect game or to make a game that everyone will like, especially disgruntled fans that hate the company and take every opportunity to slam them down. The negativity is having an extremely detrimental effect on how many people see the game for the first time, they're going in expecting it to be horrible.

[Lormyr]

I think people are forgetting how many errors there were in the 5E CRB and not making a fair evaluation

You are right, the SR5 CRB was equally (arguably?) as bad. Most of the criticisms I see here are not comparisons to SR5 though. The majority are stand alone for SR6.

The negativity is having an extremely detrimental effect on how many people see the game for the first time, they're going in expecting it to be horrible.

I am sure that folks who are genuinely interested will take the time to flip through the book and formulate their own opinion. At least, that seems to me what any reasonably intelligent individual who didn't want others to think for them would do.

Edit: That is a general sentiment/observation. Not directed at you or anyone else in particular.

[FastJack]

Thank you SJ for posting this. And I hope that in the spirit, people will keep this thread full of positivity. Because, lord knows, there's plenty of other threads they can go to to express their negativity.

[Aria]

Yet to actually play 6E, and when I do it will be pbp rather than tabletop where it is perhaps most targeted (inevitably), but in gearing up to GM a game I'm excited and generally willing to forgive the various issues that others have raised elsewhere.  I've enjoyed every edition of SR (except 1 which just predated my time) and they've all had good points and bad... there are some things that make me sad about 6 (adept hackers seem like they might be a thing of the past, spirits didn't get a big enough nerf bat and the vehicle rules could do with being a tad more 'cinematic' and less crunchy for my taste) but the majority seems to be a big step in a positive direction!  So, in anticipation, go 6!

[Henker]

I like the new game mechanisms in general but the rules are so broken.... it doesn’t do any good nor justice to this edition

Nevertheless I will play with it and just house rule what appears to me to be mistakes or errors
At the end it is not such a big deal

[skalchemist]

Ain't going to lie.  Reading the volume of negativity towards this edition started seeping into my perceptions.  it made me sad.  But nevertheless, I'm gearing up to run a session 0 in a couple of weeks, and hell bent and determined to run a SR game the way I *think* a SR game should be run.  all my players are also new to the game, so we will learn together, adjust on the fly, and some of the more extreme edge cases where the system utterly breaks - my hope - is due to our total newness to any edition of SR will be a rare occurrence, if at all.

That session can't come fast enough as far as I am concerned!  My excitement level for jman5000's game (which I am a player in) is unbounded and tending towards infinity.

Having dug into the rules, I'm convinced it will be a fun game to play.  It may have problems, and I sure as hell have lots of questions (as you can see from all my other posts), but I also think there are a lot of interesting mechanical bits in it (especially the Edge Actions), and there could be some fun emergent properties that can't be seen until you actually play. 

Also, I haven't played Shadowrun since 1992, so much excitement!

I won't lie myself, the quality of the editing and the organization of the rules was a tremendous disappointment to me.  When I learned that 10 pages of crucial errata had been posted the day before I bought it at GenCon, I felt cheated.  But now that we are about to start our first session next month, I feel like I've getting my money's worth regardless.  And in its own strange way, figuring out what the rules actually mean is its own form of fun, sort of like doing a puzzle with rules instead of cardboard pieces.

More errata/clarifications would be appreciated sooner rather than later though...