[KraakenDazs]

Shadowrun isn't broken. It's just got missing critical gaps , has subpar formatting/editing and a not-transparent-enough erratas situation (which might very well be a business conscious choice. It angers this community at times, but it's a valid business model). Aaaand it's filled with nitpicky issues that really, really deserves to be fixed from accidental copy-pasting portovers. As a whole... it's solid though, and quite enjoyable.

But people confuse those (numerous) issues with ''Everything is broken''. Even with all my vehement argumentation against the current state of the rules (and i don't hold back usually ), it would be a stretch to say it's broken. It's like a puzzle with missing pieces. It sucks and angers at the end of the day, but it's not 2 pieces missing that doesn't let you see the bigger picture. They just shine by their absence.

I'd be quite happy with a 5e ''Anniversary-ish Edition'' that would synergizes everything proper. 6e might be a bit premature

[8Bit]

Wow, what a hornet’s nest.

While I too am frustrated on several occasions with CGL concerning the Shadowrun team, I am also able to sympathize with them in certain regards. I too wish that they had a dedicated team for the much needed errata, but… face it… I enjoy Shadowrun, everything that it is… and I enjoy 5E, despite as broken or backwards it may appear at times. I don’t think anyone on these forums can say different, or else why would they be here?

When I first read this post… I was a bit peeved to say the least. I typed out a 1300ish word reply detailing my personal experience as a trouble shooter, and the complications that go into something as simple as a board game, much less a full PnP RPG… but thankfully, my internet crapped out before I could post it, and gave me time to reply with a clearer head.

With respects, Serbitar… you yourself have outlined the problems with an open source player driven RPG. “Lack of release cycles and such”.

While the internet does provide a vast array of tools for such a project… you have to ask yourself some very simple questions.

How will you make people cooperate, much less make sure they are even working on the same game? What is vision behind the game? And who will enforce that vision?

Who will decide what stays and what goes? (What one person thinks is world changing brilliant, another will see as trash.)

Without a release cycle, how will anything be put out in a timely manner? Dead time means limbo and limbo means losing interest in the project.

With unpaid freelancers, what incentive do they have to devote vast portions of their own time and money to it? And yes, one way or another, it will take money… Everything has a price.

And the biggest killer of open source projects, imo… what happens with a freelancer loses interest and leaves a gaping hole in your development cycle? How you will proceed when no one is will to pick up the extra work?

“What we have here is a failure to communicate.”

Humans are chaotic… what a game’s design team thinks is perfect… what the play testers thinks perfect… just can’t, honestly, please everyone. Every person thinks differently. This is shaped by our culture, our upbringing, our education, and our further life experiences. You can’t even write the English language’s shortest complete sentence, and be sure everyone will interpret it the same way. (“Go.”, btw) And you can’t possibly hope to account for every “What If” scenario that can/will pop up. Groups of players range ever where and anywhere, including Fungs to Military Veterans to people that hardcore couch jockeys. And they all will have a different train of thought and a new “What if I do this” to throw at you.

This also means… that the work is never done. The project will be in a state of constant development, and thus always running into those same questions above.

But, that is just my option. Take it or leave it. I don’t mean any hard feelings to you or anyone over this matter.

[adzling]

I agree with the op's general assessment, I wish I didn't.

I'm still hoping they'll release Errata and update the borked rules errors but I'm not holding my breath.

I've agreed not to rant about it anymore so i'll leave it at that.

[Hobbes]

Shadowrun isn't broken. It's just got missing critical gaps , has subpar formatting/editing and a not-transparent-enough erratas situation (which might very well be a business conscious choice. It angers this community at times, but it's a valid business model).

I suspect there is some deliberate vagueness in the rules to allow individual GMs run their games the way they want to.  And I also suspect the low frequency of Errata is a little bit of everything.  (lack of ) Money, time, talent are all likely playing a part.  This isn't an industry you go into for financial reasons  ; )

Overall 5th edition is fun and will continue to sell me products.  I would still like to see Technomancers get some luv, and a few of the more glaring errors get official errata.  I'm looking at you Shifter Table from Run and Gun.   

[KraakenDazs]

I suspect there is some deliberate vagueness in the rules to allow individual GMs run their games the way they want to. 

Mayyyybeeee..but i still think its far from an optimal choice. Some people just want the official crunch and dont want to go outside of it. They feel it's the ''legitimate'' way to play it.

Forcing house-ruling on GM is detrimental to that demographic...and kind of sadistic towards new players and GM who are trying to grasp the ''Full'' basics (as opposed to the quick-start rules).

It might be intentionnal, but that kind of rubs my common sense the wrong way

[ScytheKnight]

I have to agree that despite my sometimes vehement posts, SR5 is by in large a system that works quite well and the consistency of how everything is handled does allowed for a fall back f "Bugger it, roll Attribute + Skill or another Attribute while I roll this" solutions... it may not be exact, but with EVERYTHING being an Attribute + Skill or 2nd Attribute roll you can do something off the cuff to keep the game moving, or allow a player to do something crazy. (Like ripping a coffee machine out of a bench and braining the ganger who shot it up with it... no kidding that happened last time I ran Food Fight)

That said, there are a few things that really, REALLY need to be addressed.

Technomancers.

Sensor Arrays, especially default vehicle/drone arrays.

Missing ammo. Every time some really exotic weapon gets added, they forget to add the ammo... the latest culprits being the Flame Bracer from Hard Targets and Cyberware Flame Tosser from Chrome Flesh.

Treating drones as a separate thing, rather than sometimes a metahuman and sometimes a vehicle and not making it clear when it's supposed to be what.

Table snafus... I know editing is difficult, but when an entire table worth of gear gets messed up that can mean anything up to a couple of dozen pieces of gear are unusable.

And of course many of these issues, especially messed up tables, could be fixed by simply releasing some errata...

[Wakshaani]

I will lament the lack of errata. You should care about the quality of your product enough to fix the problems with it. Otherwise you burn through all your good will.

In a perfect world, there'd be a small "After-action" team who'd prowl around for a while, gathering up mistakes, finding solutions, and then assembling a "fixer" book with errata and a FAQ. Toss it out to anyone who'd bought teh PDF, and not produce the physical copy until that was done and it could be incorporated.

The PROBLEM is finding money to pay for that, and that the time delay between a book being on PDF and one being in hard copy would be painful if not disasterous as a whole.

Mrf.

[KraakenDazs]

Well truuuue, but crowdsourcing the bug-finding is something cost-free: These very boards have PAGES of requested fixes. You dont even have to reread the entire manual

Then again, from having had employees of my own in a not-so-distant past (never again! ), it's still a financial impact to have someone spend days looking through that information and formatting takes even longer.

But y'know.. 1- drivethru rpg, and other similar web-based stores aren't Catalyst, and likely expect to be paid for any extra work, so that's an added cost t consider. 2-we don't see or know everything that's going on behind the scene (unfortunately) and 3-that horse has been beaten to death, raised back to life, and beaten back to death over and over again, and if months of similar notes haven't gotten official answer, we are left with 2 choices: Quit or Live with it. Expecting anything else is just...psychological masochism

[MijRai]

Yeah, I'm with Whiskeyjack here.  Income is something they need, yes; supporting the products they've already released is something they need as well. 

There should be comprehensive Errata; we've paid for their product, they should support said product.  As-is, I'm no longer buying 5th Ed books until I know things have been rectified.  That includes seeing an update to the unfinished Core Errata that hasn't seen an update in 2 years.  It isn't finished or comprehensive by any stretch of the imagination.

[DeathStrobe]

I feel you guys are not offering advice. So I will.

Things that I'd like to see in SR6.

Less magic. By that I specifically mean reduce the amount of magic rules. Leave alchemy and enchanting for the magic supplement. And maybe rituals too...

Reduce skills. There are too many niche skills. I want more abstracted skills that can do more.

Remove cybercombat as a skill and let deckers/technomancer's use a combat skill in place of cybercombat. It makes sense because the Matrix is a metaphor, so you should be able to use your other skills in the Matrix, kind of like how foundations can use knowledge skills as active skills.

Make deck's and TM living persona's attributes equivalent. My biggest problem with the decker v TM is that decks are WAY more powerful. By a lot, like with Data Trails is now possible to get a deck with 10 to a Matrix attribute, TM's can get their logic that high, but that's only data processing, which is a lame Matrix stat.

Give us build rules for decks. Decks should also cost karma and nuyen, showing the decker has invested time and money into making the bloody thing.

I'd also like TMs to be able to focus all hacking with only Complex Forms. Make TMs more like mages.

Make the Matrix more like the other parts of the game. Firewalls, are literal barriers and can be passed through like mages going through an mana barrier, or attacked and destroyed like a normal barrer. Or the ability to take cover behind a device or piece of virtual landscape.

Allow mundane hacks to resolve faster, but epic hacks be less abstracted and more epic. Mundane hacks are things like opening doors and looping cameras. Epic hacks are entering hosts, navigating the VR landscape while the team watches over the decker/TM meat body. and finally finding the paydata. Right now the Matrix is too abstracted so that mundane hacks take too long while epic hacks are over too quickly.

Put the rigger rules together more. They're like in 5 different parts of core.

Remove gear and replace them with the packages like from Run Faster. Break down the packages in another gear supplement, so people can be more granular later. But in core, using packages by default will speed up character creation by a lot.

[Senko]

It's easy to make a gaming system, harder to make a good one, difficult to make one that covers a lot of concepts in a balanced manner and near impossible to make one that perfectly satisfies two people much less more. If you have multiple people doing the different sections it gets worse since person A wants mages to be extremely powerful but slow to gain their full strength while person b wants them to get stronger at the same rate and be balanced against technology all the while person c is busy coming up with creative unique effects for mages that are all bug impossible to correctly map to a technical equivalent.

Developer A: Mages can teleport.
Developer B: No they can't that invalidates too much defence by non mages.
Developer A: But, but how about short range only?
Developer B: Maybe if an astral barrier can stop it but if you hit an offensive ward you could die.
Devrlooro A: Errrr.

Developer C enters "Hi I got delayed because the train was late, hey how about a spell to summon a phantom train that takes you to whatever station you want on time."

Developer B: "You do realise anything that would delay a normal train would also delay your phantom one?"
Developer C: "No it wouldn't I have to come all the way into the city then transfer and catch a train back and that's the one that got delayed my train would have just stopped at my station so no delay."

Developer D in the corner mutters something about casters and starts sketching an emitter for his martials that will create a disturbance in astral space to block teleporting in a 5 mile radius.

[Mirikon]

With the tools the internet gives you, like Wikis and other collaborative tools, you could create a ruleset that is constantly updated and evolving. This is of course completely anti-capitalistic, as it defies any release cycles and such. But nobody does it. Why? There are enough open source programming projects, but no noticeable RPG ones I can think of (which may be because of my own ignorance).

Time, money, and energy. To make a game with a consistent rule-set, that is actually good, takes time and energy. If you're not being paid for it (and open source says you're not) then this is going to be something you're doing on your free time. And the more people you bring into the project, the more likely the whole thing will devolve into herding cats, if you're lucky. Not saying it couldn't be done, since you could get a bunch of monkeys banging on typewriters and eventually get the complete works of Shakespeare, but the signal to noise ratio is going to be horrible.

As you pointed out in your most recent post, getting multiple people to move in the same direction on a game design is difficult without someone being 'The Man', which is nigh impossible with open source.

Now, you could do a crowdfunded RPG, and there have been at least a couple in the last few years that I'm aware of. But that still means you've got a small, closed group of developers and beta testers. Alternatively, you can do what D&D did in 3.X, and let anyone use the stuff in the SRD to make their own material. In which case you get a broad group of potential material, but focused on common elements.

[Finstersang]

This whole post.
Couldn´t say it better.
Especially the part about the fluff/crunch ratio.

The most depressing part is the fact that we´re already putting our bets on 6th Edition, as if 5E is screwed beyond repair.
No hopes for usable errata, no hopes for a working TM supplement...

I mean, cheer up folks. There´s still some stuff in this pipe!

And who doesn´t like Tarot? 

[Whiskeyjack]

I will lament the lack of errata. You should care about the quality of your product enough to fix the problems with it. Otherwise you burn through all your good will.

In a perfect world, there'd be a small "After-action" team who'd prowl around for a while, gathering up mistakes, finding solutions, and then assembling a "fixer" book with errata and a FAQ. Toss it out to anyone who'd bought teh PDF, and not produce the physical copy until that was done and it could be incorporated.

The PROBLEM is finding money to pay for that, and that the time delay between a book being on PDF and one being in hard copy would be painful if not disasterous as a whole.

Mrf.

Yeah, I agree but I'll admit - it's too much to ask and too expensive with regard to physical books honestly, because I know the margins of this industry run razor-thin. I get it. And I understand not all end users look online and know about errata, but in 2016, a significant enough percentage of the consumer base does that releasing easily-found errata PDFs is the easiest solution.

No hopes for usable errata, no hopes for a working TM supplement...

I mean, cheer up folks. There´s still some stuff in this pipe!

I don't really have hopes for usable errata, largely because I've been given no reason to believe it will ever happen. No announcement of "we're working on it but it might take some time." Just silence. I consider that disrespectful given that the developers knew that issues existed to an extent, to even produce errata, then stopped. As anyone knowledgeable about finance will tell you, goodwill is not an infinite resource and just because I like a game generally doesn't mean the company that makes it is entitled to unlimited benefit of the doubt, forever.

I get errata is not paid work, however I feel like freelancers who love the system and setting should step up even to a small extent if they're able. Exalted 2e wound up with an errata document that was hundreds of pages long, because certain then-writers just didn't want to let the game sit in the awful state it was in (this is before there was any notion that 3e would be funded). The community loved them for it. But I certainly also recognize that not all writers are that invested or willing to put in that much non-paid time to fix someone else's mistakes. I totally get that. I'm not asking for a 300-page errata doc for SR5 (I don't think it remotely needs that much, tbh). But SOMETHING that covered the big issues would be nice.

On another note I generally agree with DeathStrobe but what would this game be without ridiculously granular gear?! 

[All4BigGuns]

There hasn't been "good will" in a long, long time, only constant whinging and insults over those piddly little minor pieces like 'errata' and typos making mountains out of ant hills.

Don't want silence? Stop the whinging.