[Michael Chandra]

Wouldn't work well, it'd just get people to specialize way too much. As easy as I find BP, the insanity lies in having BP at chargen and Karma after. If they find a good way in the middle where you get X skills at specific ranks based on Priority, then after that you start bringing karma into the mix, it'd work quite alike how how people now optimize with BP, while still having a nice balanced build+progression system. So depending on how Priority works, this system might work out quite nicely.

[Mirikon]

Like I said, I'll reserve judgement until later, but having everything scale linearly rather than how it does with karma would be a much cleaner, simpler system. Its one of the reasons it is so easy for people to pick up on Mutants and Masterminds, for instance, or BESM. Even Hero System's core mechanic is a linear progression, though their fractional extras and flaws do tend to make things a little wonky, but even with Hero System I can whip up a spreadsheet that will calculate everything with very little trouble. Shadowrun is the only system I've played that does things like the karma progression.

Also, your assumption there is flawed. The reason everyone promotes optimizing in BP generation is because the way karma works punishes people for trying to move up in something, rather than taking a multitude of low-level things. If you change so that advancement scales linearly after chargen, then that stimulus goes away, and people may become more generalists during chargen.

[All4BigGuns]

If it has in fact gone back to the Priority crap, then the game has just been made entirely unplayable--from a perspective of enjoyment of the game--until such time as the source book introducing alternative character generation is released. Priority is simply shit...no, never mind, that is insulting shit and giving Priority character generation a HUGE compliment.

[Ariketh]

I'm not fond of I seriously dislike the old versions of the priority systems, but this version clearly has a different spin on things. If we get karma out of it and can save it to game start, that's a fairly big twist. I'm not willing to call SR5 unplayable without actually seeing the system in action. And truth be told, for some of the players I game with, the priority system would really help. BP character creation has too many moving parts for them.

I think I am going to take the controversial stance of "wait and see".

-Ariketh

[All4BigGuns]

If other character generation "has too many moving parts", then the player in question is simply refusing to learn. It's not that they're incapable of doing it, but that they WILL not truly make the attempt (likely this means that they're not truly willing to even give a new game a chance).

Priority generation should never have moved past First Edition.

[Mirikon]

Hell, even a class-based, level-based system like D&D is better than the priority system.

Plain fact of the matter is that the priority system restricts choices too much. And making some kind of crazy priority/karma hybrid does not make it better, only further complicates matters.

[All4BigGuns]

Plain fact of the matter is that the priority system restricts choices too much.

Yes. Priority == Railroad.

[Patrick Goodman]

Insulting, much? I've played the game for its entire existence (more than half my life at this point), and the BP system in SR4 has too many moving parts for me. I'm a pretty bright boy, too.

Priorities were a logical fit for a game with a theme of "Everything Has a Price." What's important to you? Money? Stats? Skills? You gotta choose, pay the proverbial piper, with the priority system. I like that. Everything has a price in the game, including making your charavter.

It was also extremely well-received in playtest, at least in my group. There were ten of us; 9 of us were extremely enthusiastic about it. It's fast; we had characters done in under an hour. We'd have still been playing with the fiddly bits in SR4. Sometimes, a lot of options are bad. They distract, and when you're trying to get someone new into the game, distraction is bad.

You don't like it, that's fine. You haven't even seen it, so I don't know how you can be so sure of how it works, but that's your right. But don't for a moment think you speak for everyone.

[All4BigGuns]

The point still remains that it is unlikely that most players will truly be able to create the character they really want to play with Priority-crap making a comeback. There is no way to create the character who is both naturally talented (high attributes) and either had a huge windfall or was rather wealthy beforehand (high resources) under Priority because the two are mutually exclusive under that system. Not to mention that Priority has always hamstrung Awakened character on the resource angle by requiring full Magic to be taken as the highest priority, generally making it so that the next available for Resources was the fourth one down.

[Sipowitz]

Priorities were a logical fit for a game with a theme of "Everything Has a Price." What's important to you? Money? Stats? Skills? You gotta choose, pay the proverbial piper, with the priority system. I like that. Everything has a price in the game, including making your character.

This is why I have always loved the priority system.

[Patrick Goodman]

I'll try not to take it personally. I was the guy who wrote the proposal asking for priorities to make a comeback.

[All4BigGuns]

Also, in general (of course there are exceptions, but they're called that for a reason) the less time character generation takes and the less customization there is in the generation system, the less likely the player will have any sort of attachment to the character and thus will not care if it dies. The prevailing thought becomes, "Oh, I died. Oh well, give me a couple minutes and I'll whip up two or three more."

[Patrick Goodman]

I've played a lot of RPGs over the past 33 years or so, with hundreds of people in dozens of groups on a couple of different continents. Your assertion, All4, doesn't hold up in actual practice. I've found that, in general, people care as much about their characters when they've been made class-and-level, under priorities, with build points, or any of a number of other chargen techniques in a lot of different systems.

[Warmachinez]

I have to agree with PAtrick, every character I have made, wether in 30 minutes or days of planning, I remember all the goods. The character creation method is not a requirement to me getting attached to my character.

[All4BigGuns]

It seems that people completely ignored where I stated that there are exceptions...

The point still remains that if the generation system completely cuts off basic character concepts (as Mirikon demonstrated that Priority does), it is not a good generation system. Cutting off advanced character types, like Former Special Forces operatives, is one thing, but I've only really seen newbies to gaming in general trying to do that.