[Stainless Steel Devil Rat]

Yes, and yes.

Bonus dice can or should (depending on the number) reliably provide bonus hits.

Armor taking my DR from say 8 to 12? That is probably useful to me. Armor taking my DR from 22 to 26? Not really. In the vast majority of cases in the later, it is doing nothing, and not just due to mathematical probability, it is doing nothing by design.

Again, someone more eloquent than I could probably explain it better, but those two things are not remotely the same to me. You can't argue with math.

It's not a matter of math. Well, it's not a matter of linear math, but rather one of a bell curve.  We both appear to agree that going from 8 to 12 DR is going to be meaningful quite a lot of the time.  But going from DR 22 to DR 26? Yeah, ok, maybe THAT instance of +4DR isn't doing very much... but look at the premise.  How are you even AT 22DR in the first place?  Clearly, you've already stacked a whole bunch of armor in order to even be at 22DR.  (Unless you're talking about a 22 body dragon putting on a dragon-sized armor jacket or something... doesn't seem relevant to 99% of the gameplay if so! )

What you're actually illustrating there is that a little bit MORE armor on top of a drekton of pre-existing armor is well into diminishing returns.   1) I'm fine with that. Looks like a feature to me, not a bug.  2) diminishing returns is the same phenomenon that was in 5e.  "Hey, I have 39 soak dice!  Lol, when I put on forearm guards on top of that for 40 dice, it's doing nothing because I already soaked all the damage down to nothing with the first 39 dice!"

[Lormyr]

I mean you can hit 22 without armor of any kind, but not without the miscellaneous host of things that add to DR.

I freely concede that in this system there is not really a functional difference between worn body armor, a combat sense spell, mystic armor, cyberlimbs, dermal ware, ect.

My point of contention is a two prong personal tastes (I just don't like it, but that doesn't mean it is wrong/bad), but secondary it doesn't make sense. Regardless of what your personal durability level is, if you then don body armor designed to protect you, it really should further protect you - not functionally do nothing. And that is not even touching on the minor action plus scope issue, which is the nail in the armor coffin.

We both know we're on opposite sides of the fence on this issue, but I respect you're preference and position, so I'll happily circle the wagon with you as many times as we care to. :p

[skalchemist]

Mathematically, I agree with Lormyr mostly.  But I think pointing at Armor is a red herring.  Its better to say that under the new system SOMETHING will often be useless to you.  Once you have hit your 2 Edge limit per action, any additional factors at play gain you no extra benefit.  That could be armor, but it could just as easily be a spell, or an ability, or an advantage in the fiction, or some gear advantage.  Armor stands out because it was "moved" from one category to another in the change of editions (from dice source to factor that gives out Edge), but I think that is a bit of a distraction from the real issue.  (I call it "issue" instead of "problem" because not everyone will agree it is problematic.)

For example, if the rules said that you can always gain up to 1 Edge from AR/DR, 1 Edge from situation, and 1 Edge from gear, and 1 Edge from Edge-giving qualities, the argument that Armor "does nothing" would be undercut.  The AR/DR mechanics would no longer be "competing" with the other Edge sources.    Of course, 4 Edge per action would probably be crazy, but the point is that the issue is the "competition" among the Edge sources that is the underlying problem, not the Armor per se.

I personally think integrating Armor into the AR/DR mechanic was a mistake.  But I think the bigger mistake was making AR/DR a complicated numerical system that has to be compared (with a 4 step threshold even) to decide whether a single point of Edge is granted or not.  Its all just too much stuff to end up boiling down like that.  There is all this conceptual weight around that system, columns dedicated to it in the weapons tables, multiple modifications to it in rules all over the place, and then...if you get 2 Edge from some other source it was all pointless. 

All those numbers should have been made more meaningful (e.g. adding to dice pools as they seem to have done in previous editions) or jettisoned completely and left to some kind of simple GM check on who has the superior position to award 1 Edge.  As it is, for me at least it feels like the worst of all possible worlds. 

[Michael Chandra]

There's not many people that can reliably pull off 2 Edge. Boosting that even more would screw over all non-Streetsams in combat. It's already a problem that non-combat-mages depend on their GM to grant them extra Edge, since there's no explicit rule.

Also: I ran into plenty of cases where players were just short of the AR or DR needed, and they had to weigh options for their Edge. Yes, against grunts you'll get Edge a lot. But against tougher enemies, getting Edge already becomes far tougher for people relying solely on their Thermographic Vision and high AR and DR. That's the point where these values will matter a LOT.

(Plus, y'know, there's plenty of ways to finetune how you want the Edge system to work at your table. Bashing SR6 Armor because they did a daring act and made tweaks, rather than trying to be constructive and going 'how would I tweak the system to fix what I consider weak spots', is a waste of energy.)

As for 'complicated numerical system', a near-static value vs a nearly-always-static value isn't that complicated to me. Called shots at specific positions, constant dice modifiers, adding up negative modifiers for wind, light, range, etc, that was a complciated numerical system to me. =/

[skalchemist]

As for 'complicated numerical system', a near-static value vs a nearly-always-static value isn't that complicated to me. Called shots at specific positions, constant dice modifiers, adding up negative modifiers for wind, light, range, etc, that was a complciated numerical system to me. =/

Fair enough.  I accept that I am making a subjective assessment here.  To my mind, the weight of all the AR/DR system far outweighs its actual impact on the game, such that either giving it more weight, or making it much simpler, would have been preferred to where it ended up.   I think the designers made a mistake in judgement here.  But I'm not trying to convince anyone of that, that would be pointless.  If you like it, you like it!

In our own game, we are just living with it.  Its too integrated into the rules to easily house-rule without essentially rewriting everything from scratch.  Of course, social isolation means we won't actually be PLAYING that game for who knows how long...

EDIT: If I only ever played games I thought were perfect, I would play very few games!