[Shinobi Killfist]

@neal my point was it’s not a optimized character that can one shot left and right people. It’s a optimized player. Run of the mill street sam let’s say 8 agility 6 firearms with pistols as his specializing. -4 dice for a called shot he is still rolling 11-12 dice to shoot a enemy and will most likely hit anybody but high end targets. The character sheet doesn’t display a optimized burn kit physical adept tossing 24 dice but the player just learned the rules. The dm dan learn the rules too so I expect players to drop left and right unless the GM pulls punches on tactics while the players abuse it.


@fastjack problem is the training suggestions were neither realistic nor fun. Most training improvements are incredibly fast. It’s once you start reaching your peak that things slow to a crawl. Using the current 6e lift rules I went from a 2 strength to a 5 strength in about 3 months going to the gym 3-4 times a week for one hour. After that though my gains basically stopped no matter how much I put in. Something like that would be a pain to model and I doubt it would be fun.

[Stainless Steel Devil Rat]

Sure you CAN make this system lethal, but my point that you guys are missing with optimized stats is that Catalyst has gone to the opposite extreme and put a marshmallow on the end of weapons. 

Game designers made a game where a weapon won't kill player characters with a single attack? The audacity!

I actually have fond memories of Bunnies and Burrows!

There's another active thread going on where the core complaint is it's too hard to eliminate threats with a single attack.  A) IMO it's still quite within the reach of a PC to one shot a NPC and B) outside of a game of Bunnies and Burrows, isn't it a GOOD thing that your PC isn't likely to be one-shotted?

[dezmont]

SR has historically managed asymetric lethality. A big part of how shadowrun works is that corpsec plays by different rules and has different goals and resources than runners, because while the corps are wealthy they can't afford to invest in people like runners can invest in themselves. In older editions of SR some PCs could be damage immune, some could take half their track on average, and corpsec could all die in one shot and it worked fine because the way soak and defense generally worked (Sr4 was the big exception) meant damage scaled differently for everyone in the fight. A core part of the street samurai identity was that they outscaled everyone but had no remote assistance abilities so they could win any fight happening near them but SR PCs often HAVE to split up so samurai were all about coverage and threat management.

Sr6 severely harms that asymmetry in a way that makes it feel like its meant to be a resource based grinder rather than a heisty game of aces pulling one over on their target through cleverness and talent. Because gun stats are now crazy flat the difference between corpsec guns fit for polite society and your runner's specialist kit doesn't exist. Fancy runner armor isn't going to be better than generic mass produced armored jackets. And removing armor as soak and reducing corp hit rates MASSIVELY devalues soak 'ware because soak needed very high pools to be worth depending on. Like sure you always wanted good armor to reduce damage but until you got to the 25-30s range counting on soak vs mid sized guns was actively a terrible idea. Now it always is, and so it never is worth putting extremely valuable resources like essence into it.

Like 5e had a lot of wonderful sublimely subtle good math whoch encouraged people to take risks while making high skill pcs with big slow firing guns and heavy overt armor feel empowered and rewarded for the sacrifices they made compared to a face with a machine pistol and the best social armor they can get.

Now an AR and machine pistol basically have the same TTK (turns to kill) regardless of your dice pool and the only defensice strategy that statistically is worth depending on is full defense, which comes in at a mere 2 ess or so to do without significantly sacrificing turn economy. And while 2 ess is a lot in SR it is cheaper than samurai tier damage resistance has ever been and it is already what most faces were willing to invest into combat anyway.

Like one of the interesting things about removing armor soak is that it makes every other soak option worse, not better. Like would you take a bit of 'ware that had a 1 in 50 chance of instantly killing your attacker when attacked if they were corpsec for 1.5 essence? Probably not. Bone lacing on a PC intending to use wired to full defense has a significantly weaker effect: Reducing DV by 1 about .02 every attack by corpsec.

[Stainless Steel Devil Rat]

Now an AR and machine pistol basically have the same TTK (turns to kill) regardless of your dice pool and the only defensice strategy that statistically is worth depending on is full defense, which comes in at a mere 2 ess or so to do without significantly sacrificing turn economy. And while 2 ess is a lot in SR it is cheaper than samurai tier damage resistance has ever been and it is already what most faces were willing to invest into combat anyway.

You're completely overlooking Edge, and that's a fatally flawed analysis as that's such a core element to this edition.

[Ghost Rigger]

Sure you CAN make this system lethal, but my point that you guys are missing with optimized stats is that Catalyst has gone to the opposite extreme and put a marshmallow on the end of weapons. 

Game designers made a game where a weapon won't kill player characters with a single attack? The audacity!

Lethality cuts both ways. If a vory thug can't oneshot the chubby decker with a heavy pistol with explosive ammo, then the streetsam can't oneshot a scrawny meth addict with a heavy pistol with explosive ammo. Lethality wasn't a problem for PCs in previous editions. In fact, it's an advantage in their favor so long as they use basic tactics like:

• getting the jump
• shooting first
• shooting last
• shooting often
• having large dicepools (in shooting, dodging and soaking)
• using the best gun and ammo
• having a lot of armor (because that used to actually mean something)
• using cover
• geeking the mage

You're completely overlooking Edge

No one cares about edge.

[dezmont]

Many other people have already pointed out how the edge interaction with attacks is broken at its core and does not meaningfully matter for weapon choice.

Like sorry but no. Edge is not really relevant in weapon choice for the same reason defense rating ware is worthless.

No one cares about edge.

Oof.

I would say in theory that could be a method of making weapons feel different but A: Basic mods make you ignore this mechanic entirely, and B: Basic corpsec has a DR of 6. AR rating varies from 10-11, and you can slap a smartgun system on it for a +2, capping out at 13. BF reduces this by 4. So your ranging from 9 (which is not enough to gain edge) to 6 (not enough to lose edge) when burst firing. You could single shot but your trading 2 DV for an edge and that is... a bad deal in most cases especially with the edge gain limit. Like getting the chance to AOE the entire fight is amazing but not worth losing 8 DV over a combat to get the 4 edge. Also, I doubt anticipation will cost 4 edge (or any edge you can start a fight with) for much longer due to how insanely overtuned and broken it is. Like in terms of 'edge breakpoints' the only one that matters is starting with 4 to get Anticipation off at the start of every combat for some A team firing.

Meanwhile, the MP caps out at 9 for the same range category ARs fire best in, and fires BETTER at close range than ARs. So, weirdly, when it comes to not giving your opponents edge, ARs are... worse than machine pistols? Like yeah you can't fire at all on the megahuge range brackets but at the 3rd one they aren't much worse than ARs, at the 2nd hardly at all, and at the first they are so comically better.

But either way, lets assume your firing at the 3rd, the one where MPs are the worst. Black scorpions fire with 8 at those ranges, bumped to 10 for a smartgun. You therefore go down to 6, and, again, don't give or take edge from corpsec. You also are only 3 below ARs, so anyone wearing armor with 'ware, like the elite corpsec statlines, are going to take an imaging scope from you to not give edge to anyway, and both MPs and ARs can take those.

So like... no. Edge does not matter here. You never are gaining or losing edge when attacking vs most targets in the game because the math on edge is very VERY silly. But it makes sense because if you made the math closer (Like if edge varied by 2 points) you create really weird unfun 'breakpoint math' that make the system fiendishly complex for your players because figuring out optimal body+armor ratios would be A Thing, which is the opposite of this system's goal. Ironically, Edge is either always going to essentially be irrelevant for choosing weapons, or its going to be so complex that it is significantly worse than modifiers were, because the math for those was completely internal and very simple and didn't involve a secondary stat that had nothing to do with your attack and defense rolls.

[Stainless Steel Devil Rat]

You're completely overlooking Edge.

No one cares about edge.

Anyone who understands how 6we works does.  Edge Actions are how drek gets done.

Edit:

Many other people have already pointed out how the edge interaction with attacks is broken at its core and does not meaningfully matter for weapon choice.

Like sorry but no. Edge is not really relevant in weapon choice for the same reason defense rating ware is worthless.

It occurs to me you may be thinking I'm referring to Edge Boosts.  No, I'm referring to Edge Actions.

[dezmont]

It occurs to me you may be thinking I'm referring to Edge Boosts.  No, I'm referring to Edge Actions.

No edge action references weapons currently.

In fact considering the stronger edge attacks do no DV this disfavors making size sacrifices for an AR.

In the case of Anticipation like yes your kinda doubling your TTK because the base DV does matter there but I would eat my hat if anticipation doesn't get nerfed because as is the optimal combat meta is give everyone machine pistols and use anticipation start of fight to kill the entire enemy force anyway due to how COMICALLY overtuned it is. Like 5 people hitting literally everyone for 10 DV plus personal hits is about as much of an instant kill on an entire combat as 20 DV plus net hits. After all, that is 15 damage minimum to every target assuming everyone hits, which they probably will because NPCs are comically bad at defense tests.

[Ghost Rigger]

Anyone who understands how 6we works does.  Edge Actions are how drek gets done.

Still don't care. If you bring up "but the core element!" in a discussion and the point is dismissed out of sheer apathy, maybe you need to reevaluate that core mechanic.

[Lormyr]

But also: note that dice pools are slightly smaller in 6we than in 5e.  A player who's "optimizing" the rules can still get comparable dice pool as in 5e.

I think that is only arguably accurate. For example, yes, soak is much lower, but chargen drain pools will be much higher. It is true that the maximum pool potential changed very little between the editions for pretty much everything but soak, though.

But I don't want to have to be mechanically/fluff unbalanced like @MC over here is.

Hey man, you don't have to do it. You also don't have to like it. You shouldn't shame him, or me, or anyone else for enjoying building characters or playing that way though. There is no wrongbadfun in gaming, just different tastes.

Now an AR and machine pistol basically have the same TTK (turns to kill) regardless of your dice pool and the only defensice strategy that statistically is worth depending on is full defense, which comes in at a mere 2 ess or so to do without significantly sacrificing turn economy. And while 2 ess is a lot in SR it is cheaper than samurai tier damage resistance has ever been and it is already what most faces were willing to invest into combat anyway.

You're completely overlooking Edge, and that's a fatally flawed analysis as that's such a core element to this edition.

I would say even more than edge, minor actions. If you are facing less than 4 attacks against you in a round then block and dodge will likely be sufficient and more economic. Unless those attacks are explosives, of course. Then kiss your ass goodbye, because here in 'merica, we like our grenades ta win, boy!

[Stainless Steel Devil Rat]

I would say even more than edge, minor actions. If you are facing less than 4 attacks against you in a round then block and dodge will likely be sufficient and more economic. Unless those attacks are explosives, of course. Then kiss your ass goodbye, because here in 'merica, we like our grenades ta win, boy!

I'd quibble about which is MORE important... but yes I agree minor actions are ALSO crucial.  Especially so with grenades being lobbed in your direction- yes there Edge is probably not the single most important thing but whether or not you have a spare minor on hand is