[adzling]

6e is too flawed. Getting it playable is going to require a large scale re-write of major sections, and even then it won't be what was described. To many random modifier and weirdness got put in. You wanna try releasing 6.5? Good Luck. The reality is that errata is gonna drop, and 6e still isn't going to work.

preach brother

[Typhus]

Even trimmed down and simplified, SR6 is a staggering amount of rules.

This hits on a salient point that factors in to why 6E struggles so much.  The world of SR is complex.  It has been in any edition.  The more complex you make the world, the harder it is to describe it with the rules, and the more rules you need to do so.  SR has a tall order in front of it no matter how you do it. 

5E must be the absolutely most complex game world I have ever seen of SR or any game, and it needed all those rules and all that fluff in the main book to explain it make it run.  One issue for 6 is that it is still describing the *same world as 5*, so it's just as complex a game world, but now you have an artificial cap on how much you can explain and how many rules you can have. 

Cutting word count but not concepts was always asking for double the trouble.  You have to simplify the world you are describing, which 6 does not do. It simplifies rules, and descriptions, but not the world.  If you want a slimmer book, you'll have to make sacrifices.  Take out alchemy and enchanting.  Take out technomancers.  Take out rituals.  Move those to splatbooks.  Give the real core stuff the proper treatment.  Then whatever a rule doesn't cover, the fluff can help you intuit.  It's spread too thin right now.

This is just one reason why errata alone cannot fix 6e.  Certain concepts have to give way to make this viable.  Page count would be a good start.

[adzling]

The world of SR is complex.  It has been in any edition.  The more complex you make the world, the harder it is to describe it with the rules, and the more rules you need to do so.  SR has a tall order in front of it no matter how you do it. 

5E must be the absolutely most complex game world I have ever seen of SR or any game, and it needed all those rules and all that fluff in the main book to explain it make it run.  One issue for 6 is that it is still describing the *same world as 5*, so it's just as complex a game world, but now you have an artificial cap on how much you can explain and how many rules you can have. 

Cutting word count but not concepts was always asking for double the trouble.  You have to simplify the world you are describing, which 6 does not do. It simplifies rules, and descriptions, but not the world.  If you want a slimmer book, you'll have to make sacrifices.  Take out alchemy and enchanting.  Take out technomancers.  Take out rituals.  Move those to splatbooks.  Give the real core stuff the proper treatment.  Then whatever a rule doesn't cover, the fluff can help you intuit.  It's spread too thin right now.

this is a very good point, nicely made Typhus.
Srun is more complex than most other RPGs due to the three intersecting worlds of meat, matrix and astral.
I think folks are often attracted to Shadowrun because of the detail and nuance in the world, especially after coming from D&D 5e and it's hack/slash mindset.

6e just doesn't do the world of Shadowrun justice, it's more of a Men in Black simulator with all the surface glitz and lack of depth that goes along with it.

[steelybran]

Regarding a community house rules collection, I feel like that just exacerbates the underlying problem.  As I see it, the system as it exists today is very fragile, if you can even call it a system -- it has different logic in play in different sections.  It's not something you can houserule your way out of, nor just errata your way out of.  Everything you "fix" breaks something else.  Every fix I've seen proposed has this result.  You can't pull out Edge and AR/DR you have rewrite the whole combat system. You can't just add more modifiers, you break the Edge system. You can't shuffle thresholds very far, you break something else, etc etc.  I say this because I've tried to "fix it" and this is what happens, every time.  The enormity of it quickly outweighs any enthusiasm my inner rules nerd might have.  Moreover, I shouldn't need to do that.

I'm not saying the concepts couldn't work, and I've never meant to imply that with my advocating for a rewrite.  However, this book is at beta stage at best.  It's just too wobbly to work with.  With it's current state, any given fix creates a need to adjust something else.  Strength in the damage calcs is good example.  It seems easy, but then you try it and not so much.  Then what of armor?  Well now you have to adjust damage again.  Etc Etc.  The endeavor quickly balloons out past something you can reasonably propose to be a simple thing.  A community collection of fixes, while interesting and perhaps informative in the longer haul, would seem to just generate a larger proportion of "unfixes" for each proposed "fix", leaving tables even more vexed than they are today.  I feel like it would be destabilizing as a general outcome more than helping.  The underlying issues are too large.

The issues I have with the idea of a community house rules "database":

1.  I play in a Pathfinder game.  The only "house rule" we use is deciding which books to use.  We don't need to go to a website and find the accumulated rules of hundreds to thousands of other players.
2.  House rules should enhance the game, not "fix" it.  Mods to Skyrim didn't "fix" the game - it was pretty damned fun as is.  They improved it / changed the experience. 

Catalyst could have found NO SHORTAGE of people willing to play test the game outside of their staff.  I can assure you, if you had showed up at several game conventions with drafts alone you could have heard a lot of feedback.  Not to mention taking the Paizo route, and releasing their rule system in PDF for free during playtesting. 

I barely played before 5th edition (I think I played a single 4th edition game), but was always fascinated by the setting.  I loved that first session I was in.  My wife and I made 5th edition characters and we constantly play at conventions because there are no local games.

The idea of going to conventions and being in a "play 6th or don't play at all" is unappealing, especially considering that the Edge mechanic is the exact kind of thing that will drive both of us nuts. 

[Michael Chandra]

@steelybran: They HAD a lot of playtesters outside their staff. That doesn't guarantee protection against change blindness unfortunately.

[penllawen]

. 
Cutting word count but not concepts was always asking for double the trouble.  You have to simplify the world you are describing, which 6 does not do. It simplifies rules, and descriptions, but not the world.  If you want a slimmer book, you'll have to make sacrifices.  Take out alchemy and enchanting.  Take out technomancers.  Take out rituals.  Move those to splatbooks.  Give the real core stuff the proper treatment.  Then whatever a rule doesn't cover, the fluff can help you intuit.  It's spread too thin right now.

This reminds me of something I was pondering the other day. Both the 5e and 6e books contain at least several subsystems - technomancers and initiation - that used to be in splatbooks in older editions (well, otaku did, anyway.) There’s probably more like that that I’m overlooking right now. But over time, there’s a one-way migration of content from expansions into the CRB, because no-one wants to be the guy telling the grognards “we have to leave this out this time.” So the CRB grows and grows, at least in terms of concepts it covers.

And I think you’re right, that capping the page count but not the concept count does it no favours. Citation: the tiny, sad, abbreviated rigger section. Poor riggers.

But maybe 6e should have moved things back into splatbooks, maybe that was a missed opportunity. I (personally) would have preferred a minimal but elegant base expanded in a set of splatbooks to... whatever 6e is.

[steelybran]

@steelybran: They HAD a lot of playtesters outside their staff. That doesn't guarantee protection against change blindness unfortunately.

Sorry, I should have stated open playtesting.

[penllawen]

@steelybran: They HAD a lot of playtesters outside their staff. That doesn't guarantee protection against change blindness unfortunately.

You keep saying  “change blindnesss” like it’s a defence for bad editing, like it’s an unfortunate but unstoppable event, beyond anyone’s control, just one of those things that happens. Rather than a very clear cut case of the editing process simply being done poorly. I’m sure there are RPG books have no such errors, and others that have a few but manage to keep it at a tolerable level.

[Michael Chandra]

From what I hear, they had a large group of testers and even conducted polls. Some of the new parts of the system even came from suggestions. A larger-scale test I do not think Catalyst could have handled logistics-wise, especially when you look at the people that would have shouted down a lot of the changes entirely, which would have made it very hard to actually improve the system. So I understand the ideal, but I do not find it a plausible scenario.

[penllawen]

Sorry, I should have stated open playtesting.

I think the current state of the 6e ruleset would have made a decent public open playtest release.

[KatoHearts]

42 playtesters with notable overlap ((Rules team also playtested, etc.))

[wraith]

If you hate SR6 so much in advance that you're unwilling to even learn the rules while running a podcast on it, I do indeed question the sincerity of the attempt. It's a very bad way of poisoning the well.

I believe I've said it before: there's plenty of things to want improved or fixed and reasons to make demands of Catalyst without making up arguments for the sake of it, or exaggerating the flaws just to try to drive the point home.

Wait Chandra you're critical of folks who don't like 6e? Well I am shocked. Who would have guessed? lol I hate to break to y'all but as good Errata team might be it isn't going to able fix that mess they call a CRB. Sure maybe they can fix the typos If they are allowed, and maybe they get what was just missed in there. But that's not gonna make it go. 6e is too flawed. Getting it playable is going to require a large scale re-write of major sections, and even then it won't be what was described. To many random modifier and weirdness got put in. You wanna try releasing 6.5? Good Luck. The reality is that errata is gonna drop, and 6e still isn't going to work.

Yup.  Errata can't fix core mechanical issues. Scope's too big.  They could take care of the slew of misprints and unclear descriptions, but that would, again, rely on someone at CGL being invested in those errata getting published.

[steelybran]

42 playtesters with notable overlap ((Rules team also playtested, etc.))

That is a very small number of playtesters.

[GuardDuty]

42 playtesters with notable overlap ((Rules team also playtested, etc.))

That is a very small number of playtesters.

I don't know what a standard number would be, but for reference SR3 had 83 playtesters listed in the credits.

[Typhus]

I think the current state of the 6e ruleset would have made a decent public open playtest release.

So true.  This would have been a win for CGL if it was like an open beta the way Pathfinder 2 was.  Paizo even sold that book.  People would have been so happy to have the more open door, the goodwill would have been helped out immensely.  I take the point they had no mechanism to leverage the feedback, but they lean on free work for everything else.  Tell me there wouldn't have been community volunteers to help analyze and compile data.  I would love to have helped with that for the low price of a free book. I have over a dozen folks who would playtest it on tap.  Most of them know nothing of Shadowrun so they make a great test group for whether something works or not.

This thing that happened?  This was a hot mess.  An avoidable one at that.  Fear of the audience here is palpable.  Not without cause, sure, but you can face and fix it or stay hidden under the blankets.  What I get most from this edition is a sense of a lack of care.  Of burnout and handwaving.  "Argle bargle" says volumes, even though I'm sure it was not intended to be nearly so emblematic. 

All I can hope for is that the blowback is loud enough to serve as a wake up call to genuinely do better here and make the internal changes that so clearly, desperately need to be made.  This is a self-destructive model for all concerned.