[Marcus]

It’s true the number of components of system doesn’t determine if the system is functional or not. But AR/DR does nothing most of the time, which I argue makes it not functional.  5e weapons were clearly more complicated then you liked, but that doesn’t change the fact that it worked most of the time. You just can’t say the same about AR/DR, as it’s currently written. All the guns might as well simply be damage codes, and armor is simply a fashion statement.

[Stainless Steel Devil Rat]

But AR/DR does nothing most of the time, which I argue makes it not functional. 

If the first clause were factually correct, your argument would be sound.

AR/DR does nothing sometimes. SOMEtimes != ALL the time.  It doesn't even equal MOST of the time.  "Most of the time" means something very specific: more than half of the time.  Neither of us have data on every table out there playing 6e, but I'm still comfortable in saying you're overestimating the frequency of scenarios where AR and/or DR is moot.

[dezmont]

I wouldn't mind doing some spreadsheet magic to evaluate how much AR/DR gain or loss is required in armor vs gun matchups, but that sorta work is usually done by theorycrafter optimizer types, and I am sure no one wants someone like THAT around.

But for real, as part of trying to do some charop for 6e I DID look into how often it matters DR differences matter. Its... really not often. You gotta remember that for an AR or DR gain or loss to matter, it needs to swing the calculation by more than 4 in the direction it is going, or get you to within 4 if you aren't already. Defense rating from armor caps out at +7 if your in full body armor, but will be +4 on most NPCs ready for a fight. Body generally ranges from 1-6, but can go as high as 9 on a troll optimizing it.

This means DR ranges, without augs, from 5 to 16, realistically concentrating at around 7. Most NPC statlines back this up, but it can get as high as 18 in niche situations.

Most rifles are 'inside' this already in their optimal range, and are so far outside of those scores in their sub-optimal range that even a +5 bonus wouldn't get you inside the top end vs the best NPC statline DRs. For a more average DR, the 'mid tier' ranges still are inside and are solidly inside (its 8 AR vs 7 DR, so you need to either swing defensively by 5, or offensively by 4, which is not super realistic). The same is true of shotguns, SMGs, and pistols. Basically once you get to 11 or 12 AR (Which is extremely easy, just slap a smartgun system on) your AR borderline doesn't matter in optimal range. It matters a bit in suboptimal range, but only vs the best opponents in the game. Firing a FN-HAR vs someone at point blank still doesn't swing edge either way as long as they have less than 9 DR, which is extremely likely, but if they had good DR like a SWAT officer you wouldn't really care if you somehow got +5 AR, you would still be giving up the edge.

It becomes intuitive why this is happening. Guns have a set AR for the most part by range, which is their base value +2 for a smartgun. Your armor value can be off by that by 3 and not matter, meaning there is a range of 7 numbers where you absolutely don't care if your AR changes for the better/worse relative to them. The direction may matter a bit, but because DR caps out at like... 18 on a non-troll if you absolutely optimize for it (Which NPCs tend not to do and PCs have better things to optimize for) you are extremely safe just evaluating weapons by range category, not AR and DR.

SR6 may have been better suited noting guns give away an edge at certain range categories, and gain ones at others, than AR and DR calculations. It seems the INTENT was the benefit of fighting in melee vs a long rifle is edge, but your actually probably not getting it unless your an out and out 'soak tank' build, as to beat out a rifle shot in hand to hand combat requires you to have, assuming your wearing an armored jacket, a combination of base DR and bonus DR of 6. So we are talking body 6, or body 4 with some serious investment into defensive augs, to make that happen.

So it does seem safe to say the conventional wisdom of 'you generally are better off not bothering' is true, at least with PCs on the offense. Defensively, because AR is a bit more 'set' than DR, you can plan around eating certain shots, but outside of melee range or longer ranges its so hard to get your DR to where you need it to start earning edge (you basically need 15-16, so 12-13 outside of armor to make it consistently happen) you probably are better off optimizing for things like full defense or offensive dice or... just starting with lots of edge in a fight.

Put another way: Does your table routinely fight NPCs with DRs of exactly 7, 9, 13, and 15?

 If the answer is yes, then congrats, getting +1 AR on your Ares Predator that already has a smartgun would be a significantly consistent change in outcome for your attack rolls. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 10, 11, 12, 14, or anything 16 and up? Doesn't matter. No effect on the game what so ever. So ignoring the infinity after 16 (lets just count to 18, which is the highest 'grunt statline. It can go higher but realistically you can't push a pistol up that high to chase it anyway) that is 4 intergers where it matters, and 14 where it absolutely doesn't. Assuming DR ratings are randomly sorted (They aren't, they concentrate towards the range where you don't care, but lets not think about that for now), vs 20% of enemies that 1 point AR/DR shift matters.

Now I would probably spend a couple thousand nuyen and maybe .1 ess on a 20% change in outcome (assuming I am not over-generating edge already), hell that is often a better outcome than a reflex recorder on attack in SR5! So power level wise, maybe worth it. But it isn't a big deal from a tactics/system sense where it is worth a lot of focus, it ultimately is a lookup chart system to figure out how many modifiers you need to affect the outcome at all, with most of the time it being too many bonuses to obtain to be realistic, and certainly isn't worth a lot of systems biasing towards that.

It gets a little worse with the imageing scope though, which allows us to effectively ignore any situation where we don't have enough AR in many combat situations (it costs a take aim, but that is a useful combat action anyway we want to take!). This means the only numbers that matter are the 7 and the 9. The 9 only comes into play if we fire at medium range, and while medium is the larger category, lets be realistic and account for the fact you aren't going to need to fire past 50 meters that often, that is half a football field away and will vastly more often not matter. This means 1 integer out of 18 is relevant, so 5% of the time it affects the outcome, which is quite a bit worse than a reflex recorder on a 14 dice shooter in SR5.

Defensively its a bit weirder, because you can do more to affect your 'base' value, but you basically just need to be within 3 of the number 12 to always ensure you never give up edge. 3 armor and 4 body gets you to 7 (already in safety for most guns that aren't firing at optimal range or lack smartguns, but the odd short range SMG or rifle shot gets ya), and then you can get +2 and forget about it for the most part. Big breakpoints defensively are 7 (most guns hit at 10 in their optimal range if they aren't focused on mid range shooting but you can get unlucky, but its the cheapest get by far), 8 (and a lot of the best guns are both high DV AND have 11 AR, but that only protects you without smartguns), and 10 (For pretty much definitive safety from edge gains). You basically can't go BELOW 4 as a PC, due to armored jackets existing, and you probably have at least 6, which puts you out of range of most trash guns anyway. Its a little more complicated than figuring out where you try to park your AR, because unlike yourself NPCs aren't always using good guns and may go for some trash, and because there isn't as clear a way to get to 'total safety DR' unlike AR, but its not not very much, and I believe Firing Line's new armors already push you to the point where you can more easily get inside the safety range without lots of ess or atts points.

Basically? A huge problem of AR and DR which would be spotted by any optimizer/minmaxer in a heartbeat is that it has a very few number of breakpoints, or values where going past them doesn't generate a lot of value. Most breakpoints are fuzzy (For example, in D&D feature gains may slow down a bit making it a good time to hop off, but it isn't objectively worthless to go past the last monk breakpoint of 11. In SR6, it sorta... doesn't make any real sense to worry about AR gains unless new options come out that swing AR and DR a lot even on the same target so its harder to just go 'I am fine giving up an edge vs Red Sams and Swat teams because I can't realistically get +5 AR anyway... but that would make the system way worse than modifiers in terms of simplicity, it would be possibly one of the more complex combat resolutions in RPGs (Because now your both calculating modifiers AND applying them to two numbers to see if their relationship falls outside of a 7 integer range).

Once you sit down an start hammering it out, it sorta is.... clear it does nothing most of the time, and its the worst kind where it DOES sorta matter in very rare cases but you have almost no control over if it will or won't matter defensively and in a way that makes  you spend resources for something that SHOULD be tactical or a consistent character aspect but most of the time it won't matter. It doesn't just not matter a ton (A LOT of things don't matter a ton) but actively creates feel bad moments all over the place, because in most fights your orthoskin does nothing and you paid your most precious resource to get it.

Edit: Actually its worse because an edge swing each attack isn't actually a change in outcome. It is a potential change in outcome. More math to come!

[dezmont]

In a realistic scenario where your not constantly jumping range brackets, you will generate 1 edge in 10% of combats every time you attack a specific target. 1 edge is roughly the equivalent to 1 extra dice.

1 extra dice has the most impact vs a target your at least equal with when your dicepools are equal, and reduces in impact the further apart your pools are. If your 10 dice to attack vs 10 defense, your hit rate is some odd 40% (You tie about 10% of the time!). If you jump to 11, your hit rate goes up to 47%, or by 7%! But if you increase by another 1 to 12, your hit rate goes up to 53%, or only by about 6%.

So the most impact this 10% chance of edge to attack can have, assuming your not having some trash fight where your target and you both roll 2 dice, which makes that edge a whopping 14% increase as you go from a 70% miss rate to a mere 56% miss rate (You get no net hits a lot...), your impact is something in the realm of about a 5% change in outcome vs an opponent your slightly better than (As your probably rolling more than 2 dice over your target). If your significantly better, this totally putters off, but SR fans are all about rolling tons more dice than they need anyway, in case they ever run into a super ninja, so lets not account for that. Your odds also jump more if your significantly worse than your opponent, but that is sorta a 'planning for failure' moment and jumping by 13% when your still missing 80% of the time isn't a real silver lining.

This means that .5% of your dicerolls (assuming all fights last an equal number of attacks, and DR is random, we will get to that) through the entire game have a change in outcome for a gain in AR or a loss of DR over your career. That is... a horrific level of not useful. For perspective, that is about the difference from dropping from 50 attack dice to 49 attack dice vs people who roll 10 defense dice. It will only matter in 1 out of 200 rolls. Same with defense.

Attack ratings are somewhat stable per gun, meaning PCs can always plan their own attack rating and know what it is every fight. But NPCs use arbitrary guns, meaning that their attack rating is in flux. If you know exactly what gun type you will face, you can kiiinda force it to matter, but the thing is every +1 bonus will only matter in a limited class of cases. Like if you jump from DR 6 to DR 7, you are fine vs any gun with a 10 AR. This matters for 2/6 assault rifles in their clos  range, 2 in a suboptimal range, 1/3 sniper rifles at every range,  2/3 sporting rifles at long ranges, 2/3 machine guns, one dart gun, 2/6 launchers, 1/4 shotguns, 1/5 heavy pistols outside of close combat, 2/5 heavy pistols in close combat, 1/3 machine pistols in close combat, 1/7 light pistols in close, 1/7 in close combat, and the SMGs spread is all over the fucking place where for some it matters both close and close combat, some it matters one, some it matters another, its a mess but at least its generally consistent vs SMGs in SOME context in close vs close combat, with it only having no value vs the Uzi.

So can you see the value for getting your DR to 10? No? Yeah, no. Its a hot freaking mess and unless I make an excel spreadsheet I would have no idea what I am planning around, and the bonus points for annoyance is... even if you optimize towards a certain breakpoint, the existence of the smartgun means that you also now have to plan around gun+smartgun and that means there will always be, in addition to the majority of guns where your investment meant nothing, 52 weapon cases where it meant nothing by virtue of you planning for a smartgun but not having it or vice versa. With 52 guns, and 2 range categories that generally matter (Close combat and close), and the division between smart and dumb guns, there are 208 permutations of base AR to worry about, and that is BEFORE we get into burstfire, which add another 48 gun permutations (because the BURSTFIRE may have smartlink or not) for a total of 256 cases to consider when optimizing guns, again, with no ability to plan even by weapon weight class because of subtle differences between each gun. If we toss in medium range if you like to fight outside sometimes down an entire street or something it jumps to 384 different permutations of attacks.

That is way too much to parse without delicately mathing everything out in a spreadsheet. If I made an excel spreadsheet I could prove the breakpoints of every potential gun attack at those 2 ranges. And even if you did, because knowing 'I want to be optimal vs grunts that are using pistols and SMG's because I mostly fight gangers' means your incoming AR could be anywhere between 3 and 14. Again, your chosen DR will only matter vs 2 specific numbers. So its basically fraggin random if your going to get that +1 dice or not. How much does a DR cost? 1 att point, or about .3 essence, to get 1 dice maaaaybe 10% of the time if you reaaaaally narrow your incoming weapon categories down. Super trash deal IF you can even make that prediction.

But hey, you can plan your offensive AR perfectly and changing that doesn't cost a ton right? Just a smartlink and done. Except that from optimizing for offense, your opponent's DR is frustratingly even more random, while also your ability to optimize for a certain target is less consistent. You generally can expect to either focus on armored jackets or on corpsec, but corpsec MIGHT have DR 'ware. Even vs an armored jacket and unauged targets, their DR could range from 4 (Body 1 target in a jacket) to 11 (max body troll in a jacket). At least in this case it will trend towards the middle, so you can kiiinda force it to matter more, but that human having 3 body instead of 4 still totally devalues any serious investment into AR.

So NuEdge is what I like to call 'a fiddly mechanical bullshit nexus.' It both doesn't matter very much (so its impact on the game is minor) but its MASSIVELY COMPLEX to predict, so it is random, and if you try to plan around it in most cases your investments will do literally nothing for you despite being expensive, and the system focuses on it a lot, but despite focusing on it the actual outcome is so arcane and opaque because there is so much nonsense you can't realistically anaylze every option, and even if they did they don't correlate into actionable information like say... knowing you want to shoot good vs corpsec in SR5 and one hit kill them might, both because 'overshooting' is fine and creates more consistentcy there, while overshooting with NuEdge is worthless, and because the numbers your trying to hit are all over the god damn place even by just adjusting a few things about a character.

The key underlying issue is that AR and DR aren't random per-say, they are completely static and will always be the same for any given character barring weirdness, but there is no way to actually predict it. So you get the super consistent outcome of your choice not mattering and being a waste of resources. The fix would be to introduce variance in AR and DR when attacking, but that removes the key appeal of AR and DR over soak which is fewer rolls and calculations (And honestly it only reduces your rolls, it is pretty calculation dense, especially pre-game).

It technically 'serves a function' by preventing optimization, which was a stated goal of the edition, but that was a bad goal, because the only way to prevent optimization is to make mechanical choices nonsensical, confusing, and generally not meaningful, which AR and DR.... succeeded in by a longshot. Like yeah, I can't crack the code really on the 'best' breakpoints besides telling you that GENERALLY 9 is enough to avoid MOST guns with a smartgun but not ALL guns getting edge on you. Great. But the cost of preventing me from... you know... having fun engaging with your system mechanically in 'the wrong way' was.... now AR and DR are an incoherent puzzle box where the correct answer is to not give a shit because your choice won't matter 99.5% of the time anyway, creating a real bad feels moment for any player who liked combat focused PCs who want to feel like a super tough badass.

[penllawen]

So NuEdge is what I like to call 'a fiddly mechanical bullshit nexus.' It both doesn't matter very much (so its impact on the game is minor) but its MASSIVELY COMPLEX to predict, so it is random, and if you try to plan around it in most cases your investments will do literally nothing for you despite being expensive, and the system focuses on it a lot, but despite focusing on it the actual outcome is so arcane and opaque because there is so much nonsense you can't realistically anaylze every option, and even if they did they don't correlate into actionable information like say... knowing you want to shoot good vs corpsec in SR5 and one hit kill them might, both because 'overshooting' is fine and creates more consistentcy there, while overshooting with NuEdge is worthless, and because the numbers your trying to hit are all over the god damn place even by just adjusting a few things about a character.

This nails it for me.

Now, I'm a GM, not a player. And I skew towards a lighter touch rules GMing style; I improvise a lot of mechanics, I put the fiction first, I rarely stop to look everything up and I'm not smart enough to hold even a fraction of SR in my head. And SR's immense amounts of chargen crunch don't do a great deal for me, personally.

But some of my players enjoy it, so I do have a passing familiarity with the thought process. And I agree with you that AR/DR is this weird, frustrating puzzlebox of optimisation. It clearly has breakpoints, but they're hard to reason about, and therefore choosing between different pieces of equipment based on a careful consideration of their AR or DR effects is impossible.

Personally I think breakpoints are a generally bad idea in RPGs. They're unavoidable sometimes, I suppose, but any time you get a broad sliding scale input (AR and DR varying across maybe 10 points each) and collapse it to a small number of output cases (1/0/-1 points of Edge), it just feels wonky and broken to me. Inevitably there are times when +1 input makes a big difference (as it pushes you over a breakpoint) and times when +1 input makes no difference (when it doesn't). And that's fundamentally unintuitive.

[Leith]

@Dezmont
You're underestimating the value of edge. It's actually very situational, depending on how much and what you use it for. Even if we use it 1 point at a time on an attack roll that's more like a 2 die boost since you can re-roll your opponents hits.

Also, though it doesn't negate your point, ties hit in 6e.

Also also, you are forgetting grunt groups. NPCs can augment their AR by firing on the same targets. That doesn't remove the randomness (for the record not something I care about) but for the defensive PC the number of foes you face is now a factor in how high you need DR.

[Lormyr]

So NuEdge is what I like to call 'a fiddly mechanical bullshit nexus.' It both doesn't matter very much (so its impact on the game is minor) but its MASSIVELY COMPLEX to predict, so it is random, and if you try to plan around it in most cases your investments will do literally nothing for you despite being expensive, and the system focuses on it a lot, but despite focusing on it the actual outcome is so arcane and opaque because there is so much nonsense you can't realistically anaylze every option, and even if they did they don't correlate into actionable information like say... knowing you want to shoot good vs corpsec in SR5 and one hit kill them might, both because 'overshooting' is fine and creates more consistentcy there, while overshooting with NuEdge is worthless, and because the numbers your trying to hit are all over the god damn place even by just adjusting a few things about a character.

Nailed it.

[Shinobi Killfist]

@Dezmont
You're underestimating the value of edge. It's actually very situational, depending on how much and what you use it for. Even if we use it 1 point at a time on an attack roll that's more like a 2 die boost since you can re-roll your opponents hits.

Also, though it doesn't negate your point, ties hit in 6e.

Also also, you are forgetting grunt groups. NPCs can augment their AR by firing on the same targets. That doesn't remove the randomness (for the record not something I care about) but for the defensive PC the number of foes you face is now a factor in how high you need DR.

He may undervalue it but I suspect most the edge defenders overvalue it to a larger degree. As an aside while that mechanic is a relatively solid 1 point edge investment it slows the game down far more than the rule is worth. Edge is a deck building mini game that is hard to place into the stories narrative, slows the game down and outside a couple edge moves is entirely unsatisfying for how fiddly it is.

[Marcus]

But AR/DR does nothing most of the time, which I argue makes it not functional. 

If the first clause were factually correct, your argument would be sound.

AR/DR does nothing sometimes. SOMEtimes != ALL the time.  It doesn't even equal MOST of the time.  "Most of the time" means something very specific: more than half of the time.  Neither of us have data on every table out there playing 6e, but I'm still comfortable in saying you're overestimating the frequency of scenarios where AR and/or DR is moot.

The fact is SSDR, i could make a starting character with an imaging scope, a belt of grenades and have them do ever run in underware, and that would be as or more effective as someone in full armor.  That's just a fact of RAW. So ALL the time for sure isn't true. Thus my point holds. You don't need to be a "simulationist" to find that concept preposterous. Clearly it should just not be true. So the fact is there is an AR/DR problem, and it's not going to go away by itself.

[Marcus]

Honestly SSDR we have already had this argument back shortly after the core dropped. Nothing has changed, I put forward a rules fix to stop this issue, you guys said make it house rule, I laughed a lot and locked the thread. Do you see a point in going through this conversation again? I don't. 6e is too flawed, too self contradictory to be functionally. Sure you can write a fairly long list of house rules and make it work at a table. But that's the only way it's playable. That's where this conversation is going to end up just like last time.

Just to be clear I'm not trying to go after Leith, newbies are always welcome and it's great when they post. I hope 6e works great for you Leith, and I wish you have great success with it.

[Marcus]

The issue with mathing out 6e edge is, that the math is very messy. The biggest part of that problem in mechanical negation.
1 edge being 1 re-roll, isn't a sound mathematically basis b/c forcing your opponent to re-roll is so MUCH better then re-rolling yourself. 1 in 3 of adding a success vs 2 in 3 on negating a success. This is made worse by messing with edge costs for additional points.  That basic issue screws the math terribly. A re-roll of a failure is not the same thing as adding a die mathematically speaking. Making 1 edge == 1 additional die would be much more sound basis for edge, and simply removing the negation component of the system, would make the values much more consistent. But that's not raw and when it was pointed out, the automatic defensive reaction that 6e is great and we were just hateful/insane/bitter/Stans for question the validity of 6e edge, simply ended any meaningful progress on that conversation. 

[Lormyr]

But that's not raw and when it was pointed out, the automatic defensive reaction that 6e is great and we were just hateful/insane/bitter/Stans for question the validity of 6e edge, simply ended any meaningful progress on that conversation.

I only recall a scant few people being that belligerent about the defense of SR6 issues, but I feel you. Look on the bright side: resting your defense on calling people with differing opinions "Stans" or the like is the action of someone whom has surrendered their arguments because they are unable to craft a logical rebuttal!

Your last few posts, along with others, did a great job of highlighting numerous legitimate mechanical criticisms with the new edition though, well said.

[Stainless Steel Devil Rat]

Do you see a point in going through this conversation again? I don't.

Neither do I.

I replied to that one statement you made because while I agree that the Edge system is clunky and has ample room for improvement, it's STILL demonstrably false to say that AR and DR do NOTHING.  And since we do have new people who still potentially are (blessedly?) unfamiliar with the early 6e reaction threads it's for their benefit I pointed out the exaggeration.

Do AR/DR modifications have minimal impact?  Ok, sure.  Bit of opinion there, but I can grant it's a fair one.  Can those modifications be situationally negligible? Indeed. 

It's an unfair stretch to say they do NOTHING.  When you expand legitimate gripes with the mechanic to absurd conclusions like "you may as well fight in speedos", yeah that's actually NOT true and I think it's fair to point that exaggeration out, lest someone new actually believe it.

TL;DR for Marcus:  Not trying to change your opinion.  Just talking to the newbies, as you have been

[dezmont]

You're underestimating the value of edge. It's actually very situational, depending on how much and what you use it for. Even if we use it 1 point at a time on an attack roll that's more like a 2 die boost since you can re-roll your opponents hits.


Also, though it doesn't negate your point, ties hit in 6e.

Noted, this means you can reverse all evaluations of attack and defense probabilities (So, for example, in the 10 dice vs 10 dice scenario, instead of having about a 40% chance to hit, you have about a 40% chance to miss, or a little tiny bit under that because 0 hits still misses I would HOPE), and that the impact of edge is a little under doubled (So generally 11% of the time it affects your odds of passing the roll by about like...11%-9%, depending on how good you already are, as long as the role isn't already pushing a 90% success rate)

Also also, you are forgetting grunt groups. NPCs can augment their AR by firing on the same targets. That doesn't remove the randomness (for the record not something I care about) but for the defensive PC the number of foes you face is now a factor in how high you need DR.

Yeah this makes the problem so much worse.

It's an unfair stretch to say they do NOTHING. 

I disagree. Sometimes an impact can be so non-impactful it basically, indeed, does nothing.

A good example is weapon specialization in 3.5, a feat that gave you +2 to damage rolls in D&D after a lot of requirements and level 8.

Said weapon is a great example of a do nothing feat, because its impact is so small you realistically can assume that over the course of a game that it will never change the outcome of a fight.

Re-rolling hit results of your opponent indeed was a technique I forgot you could use. This increases the value of an edge from 1 effective dice, to -2 effective dice for your opponent. This is, in fact, better than +2 dice for yourself, especially if your opponent doesn't roll a ton of dice in the first place. It isn't massive however, and the sheer improbability any +1/-1 AR/DR affects your edge gain in the first place combed with edge usage isn't very consistent for affecting outcomes still means a most of the time, you just... can't count on DR or AR to ever matter. It is a mechanic you may as well not plan around because the combination of low impact and your inability to control it is akin to worrying about if you are going to lose a fight in D&D 3.5 by failing to deal an amount of damage equal to N*2-1, where N is the number of attacks you made. Like if you hit a dragon 10 times, are you really going to fall short by EXACTLY 9 damage or less to kill it? Because that has to be the case for weapon specialization to matter.

I wouldn't say fighting in a bikini is equal to fighting in an armored jacket. A body 3 armored jacket player does, in fact, stop losing edge to quite a few methods of attacks. However, it is fair to say by and large thinking about AR and DR beyond the bare minimum choices does not matter, which is as good as it not mattering, because it should never in any realistic way affect any choice you make outside of zero cost choices.

I would say taking such issue with the wording of 'does nothing' is a form of pedantry, unless you are specifically ONLY talking about the 'lets run naked argument' which I would agree is hyperbolic because there is a very clear advantage to wearing an armored jacket. It misses the core intention of the phrasing 'does nothing' to focus on the literal statement of if it could ever affect the game, rather than if it actually matters. It does clearly have an affect, but the mechanic as a whole doesn't matter, because you can't engage with it in any meaningful way that will help you, you may as well just slap on an armored jacket and ignore it.

The mechanic is structured means that you could remove 90% of those rules, and just say 'if you shoot at an target in your weapon's 'good' ranges you get an edge unless they have body 6 or orthoskin, unless you have a smartlink in which case you get both, and unarmored targets give you an edge as long as your not shooting at a 'bad' range, and the game would function better because at least now you absolutely know the value of your investment.

Right now, again, the investment is basically random, and random in a way where the average outcome is 'your investment didn't matter.' It would be BETTER if running in a speedo was as good as running in armor with armor 'ware in most situations (at least we might get gender equal cheesecake art then!), because you can vaguely gauge the outcome of your choices even if the impact is low. Edge right now is a combination of comically low impact, high randomness, and low corelation with in universe concepts like 'how armed is this group?' It isn't just a mechanic that does nothing (it isn't a Truenamer, a class in 3.5 which got WORSE at what it did as it leveled because the ratio for its difficulty checks was based on its own level and skill rating didn't keep up, which now is the iconic example of a 'do nothing mechanic.'), it is WORSE, because actively trying to engage with the mechanic punishes you and makes you spend less than you get very consistently in a way where you can't even try to manipulate things to work to its advantage, so you may as well ignore it.

[penllawen]

My go-to worked example of one of my two most disliked things about AR/DR remains computing the return on investment of armour. You're a Body 5 streetsam about to do an infiltration that could go loud with one misstep. Your GM explains that armoured clothing would make the first part easy, whereas wearing biker leather jacket would arouse mild suspicion and could get you patted down because the goons on the door are paying you more attention.

Consider a novice player weighing this up. It's pretty intuitively obvious what the risk is, without any quantification. So they can understand the cost. But how about the benefit? What's the benefit of DR 9 vs DR 7? When will it matter? When won't it? How easily can a player with a few sessions under their belt judge that?

Should they bring their biker helmet? Is DR10 vs DR9 worth any extra scrutiny and/or the time to put it on? Across all the guns, and all the mods, and all the ranges, which combinations might have exactly AR13 that would make that extra +1 count for something? Because that's what you get in a breakpoint system: it only matters if you hit the breakpoint. So these are the evaluations the system expects players to make.

In 5e, in comparison, it is completely obvious what +1 armour does for you.

Do AR/DR modifications have minimal impact?  ... It's an unfair stretch to say they do NOTHING.

They do nothing once you've earned two Edge that turn, which is my other biggest dislike.

My and a player sat down and gamed out a tiny 2-v-1 fight in 6e not long after it dropped. Nigel Nutbiter the dwarf streetsam against two gangers. Nigel shot ganger1, Nigel earned Edge from AR/DR. Ganger1 shot Nigel, Nigel earned Edge from AR/DR. Ganger2 shot Nigel... Nigel earned no Edge.

(Someone's going to say "but the grunt rules" like that's a defence. It's not. For a start, the grunt rules are explicitly presented in the book as an optional way to speed up large fights, and 2-v-1 is not a large fight that should require grunt rules. Secondly, if a fight has a radically different outcome if you do or do not use the grunt rules, they are bad grunt rules.)

Second scenario: turn the lights out, Nigel's cybereyes have low-light, sam strips naked. Nigel shot ganger1, earned two points of Edge (one from AR/DR, one from the light). Ganger1 & ganger2 shoot Nigel, Nigel can't earn any edge, and the dice rolls are identical to the first scenario. Makes no difference at all that he's naked. That's fucking weird. (Note you can use the grunt rules here and nothing changes, if you insist.)

"Does nothing all the time" is hyperbole, yeah. So how about "frequently goes nothing in scenarios where it intuitively should and, in fact, just a second ago, did"?


edit: fuck it, I'm tired.