See what interests me about that, is right off you know you're not dealing with a reliable narrator, and that's been an issue that's remained constant across this whole process. "Initiative is gonna be the same", accept that action economy is totally different, movement is totally different, free actions are gone, and you know ware and maybe magic those things that were the biggest modifiers of initiative well they are now totally different. We know that some things adds minor actions, but we don't know how those things change your actual initiative score, we don't know if they modify the character's reaction. We were told initiative is static, but then edge give initiative modifier as the first option, are those bonuses stacking? Do they persist between rounds? Do Elemental effect still modify initiative? Can you still "Borrow" actions for defense? So saying we know what initiative will look like beyond starting at high number and going to zero, is a complete joke.
We were talking about how high ini numbers might possibly get to check our hypothesis. If you consider it too bold an assumption that wired reflexes lvl 1 will give you an additional dice and maybe +1 or +2, (like they did for decades) then you are free to do so. But it looked pretty much like it on the stream.
I'm not interested in making assumptions. I don't question that the system will go from some larger number to zero, and I suspect they will modify initiative values, but over all it's Action economy concerns me more. As to streams thus far the streams they don't strike me reliable source at all. We don't know CRB rules vs Quick Start rules, or whatever preview rules set they were given. Further then that, even if was the CRB, two people can read the same paragraph and come away with completely opposite opinions on what that paragraph said. I have seen dozens of times on this board.
As to the rest, I played 2nd and had lots of fun. It just comes down to how your table went about character generation. It's not like everyone couldn't have the taken same level of initiative boost in 2nd. Sure rolls would vary, but folks would then be in the range most of the time. Some people made the choice not to that but that was their choice. If you don't like the results of your choices, make different choices. It's not hard to make an agreement not to exceed specific amount of initiative boost.
Funnily enough such agreements were in use back then.
As was the practice not to allow deckers as player characters. (For very similar reasons, actually.)
Does that mean decking was just fine, too?
`Broken is fine as long everyone is doing it or a homebrew workaround is thinkable...` is not really a selling point for a ruleset.
Making agreements on limitation in character creation is not homebrew. It doesn't change the rules in anyway, it simply defines limits to characters systematic outcomes.
Next imply I said something I didn't always ticks me off. I said I had fun playing 2nd SR and if you didn't have fun you should consider making different choices.
So to be clear I never 2nd SR was perfect. No system will ever be perfect. 2nd decker was an interesting subsystem and could be fun to play, yes it was basically a solo dungeon crawl and as such it could easily be disruptive to tables. Does that mean that it was bad? No. It simply mean if you don't want to disrupt your table you need account for it ahead of time or you didn't make tables that would be disrupted by it. Again that isn't homebrew, it's simple recognizing facts and adjusting play style accordingly.
An etherology game in 5e effectively requires Astral projection. You don't get mad about a street sam not being able to project, you just don't allow characters that can't astrally project if you're running an Etherology game.
Further better choices could be almost infinite numbers of things. Including not playing 2nd if you just can't adapted your game style to account for the system's flaws.
