I wouldn't even say that the large dicepools are in of themselves a big problem. Pool mechanics have a lot of benefits, and the fact someone 'good' at something in SR rolls a lot of dice creates a lot of statistical stability in a game setting where instability and risk tends to come from sources external to the actual rolls. With an app or other electronic assistance its pretty easy to roll them.
Ultimately, I find the idea of thinking of a dicepool of 20 as 'powergaming' kinda... silly? Forget about the fact that optimization isn't, in of itself, bad or a negative behavior but merely an example of a player preference. It isn't like people are hardcore minmaxing, you get to 20 dice in a skill naturally through relatively unoptimized play, it is literally an inevitable result that you hit these levels of dice because of how easy it is. A 10 dice max is comical, because you literally blow past that before even 'ware, it is a mystifyingly low number that even most PR 3 grunt corpsec will hit...
Take guns, for example. You are Billy Newplayer, no idea how Sr works in detail, but you can read alright. You know you wanna be good at shooting revolvers, so you take pistols 6. You then read you can be extra good at specifically revolvers and specialize. Because you wanna shoot you max out the 'shooty stat' at 6. You didn't pick an elf cuz they are lame. You then take a smartgun, because apparently that is the item that makes shooting better, and a smartgun system in your eyes, getting you to 16. Finally, you grab some muscle replacement or toner to help your shoot stat more.
Two bits of 'ware and the 'radical' optimziation technique of putting your best stats and skills in things you want to be good at put you in striking range of 19. A modifier, aim action, or being an elf gets you to 20. For 20 to not be a 'normal' PC pool in SR, either SR needs to take stats and skills off the 1-6 range, or needs to not feature superhuman augmentation. Neither of these seem likely, and we need room to go over for splatbooks and character customization to exist. Even in 1e a 20 pool wasn't that weird, and it certainly wasn't weird after (and because of TNs, it was stronger than a 'modern' 20 pool). The idea a PC's pools should be limited to 10, or 12, or 14, or 16, all things I heard, and that is where 'sr is meant to be' is just... false and its so transparently false because this complete scrub blew way past those breakpoints by just accidently combining the things the book effectively told him to combine. A 10 dicepool limit makes most of the 1e pregens illegal. I believe every single 3e pre-gen also has a dicepool over 10, and most actually have one over 16. It just in no way reflects the reality of SR to assume that superhuman dicepools are unintended in the system. Heck, I think lonestar statlines are above 10, you literally can't have the system cap at 10 without totally re-contextualizing 10 because 10, in SR, historically is 'NPC scrub pretending to be able to do this or a PC acting in a side role out of their comfort zone' tier. Like the 3e decker is literally rolling an effective 14 dice to shoot in that system, and 9 in reality, I don't think their relatively pathetic investment into shooting is intended to represent 1 off the peak of what can be mechanically accomplished.
This means we should expect a player's pools in things they care about to range from around 16-30 if they are really good at optimizing. But that is ok, because these pools functionally aren't very different vs grunts, and mostly exist to 'guild the lilly.' The exception is soak, but soak tanks work well if the game A: Focuses on the limitation of samurai to not be able to 'remotely' help like every other archetype (Hacking, leadership, drones, spirit aid, ect), B: That your runs aren't essentially D&D dungeons where you go in and fight room by room to the death, and C: The genre we are trying to emulate with SR literally includes people who are so tough that a giant mech suit couldn't crush their skull directly stepping on it, cyberpunk is an extremely high powered genre that includes characters who would make some superheroes blush. Like Molly Millions is... just objectively stronger than Lady Deathstrike, another cyborg with crazy deadly razor claws and an armored body who exists in the same universe as iron man.
TNs are weird in that it is a large increase in statistical complexity for pretty low gain in granularity when looking at TNs from 2-6, and then it is a dramatic increase in statistical complexity from 7+. Any SR that wants to be remotely accessible to a modern RPG market basically can't use TNs. Like for perspective, a TN of 7 is not a linear drop from TN 6 like almost every other TN, a TN of 7 only drops your percentage of hits by about 3%, rather than the 13% each TN gives you, so a TN modifier either is changing your pool by about 10%, or a much smaller direction in a super mathy non-intuitive way. Not really worth the effort, you would literally have a better result by adding in situational modifiers that just increase or decrease the pool by a percentage, because otherwise you have a weird system where when things get REALLY REALLY hard you don't care about TN, but when things are at the median stage you confusingly care way more.
Furthermore, TN is complicated by the fact it just is plain confusing to have two different 'targets' in both the actual 'target number' and the number of hits you need, and you need to re-calculate TN every time. Its only virtue is that it creates a lot of statistical uncertainty and confusion which may be good for a horror game, but not for a game about awesome career criminals pulling heists. It is like THAC0: I get that its what you were used too and you were devastated by its changes but, in the end, yeah no lets not go back, I like being able to quickly evaluate dicepools as both a GM and player.
Limits, while a bad system, are a non-invasive bad system. They rarely matter, which is a problem for rules bloat, but the way they don't matter also means you don't need to think about them often. New Edge is problematic because the stakes of getting edge wrong are way higher, and players have an incentive to care about it rather than not, which means players push for AR and DR to be tracked despite the vast majority of times it doing nothing. This isn't to say limit is good, but its mental cost is lower because no one is going to cry over Billy forgetting he had 1 fewer net hit to DV. Limits also had interesting design space potential, but clearly weren't worth it.
Edge also is trying to solve an already solved thing in the game industry, complex modifiers. This is where we run into the rub: Situational modifiers are intuitive and easy to understand. Pretty much every RPG has been using them for some odd... what 40 years? Nothing in the world could be more intuitive than 'its dark, take -2 to hit' besides maybe how 5e D&D had advantage (Which doesn't really work in SR and plays into making 5e's dice more like SR's rather than the reverse by increasing consistency as your reward rather than dramatically changing what you can do). SR's issue with supremely hard to understand combat modifier rules has nothing to do with how complex they are (ok... a little to do with how complex they are, there is room to make things easier like changing it so bullets fired=the penalty on autofire to defense, rather than bullets fired -1 for example, and a few things like knockdown while tactically interesting could be reserved for special attacks) and how... astoundingly poor the SR layout is. They aren't complicated, they are obfuscated.
Take a look at 5e and count how many pages the modifier rules are spread over, what order they are in, and how many pages are between all the modifiers to get what I am talking about: Lets see what I need to go between in order calculate up a ranged attack roll, assuming I already know what action it takes and that I am using a gun and might or might not want to called shot.
- Accuracy rules on 168, before I even know how attack rolls work
- Armor and Encumbrance on 169, not located on any tables
- Wound penalties on 169, not located on any tables
- Electrical damage on 170-171, not located on any tables
- Combat resolution mechanics on 173, a full 15 pages into the combat chapter well after esoteric nonsense like armor stacking and elemental damage
- Enviromental mods starting on 173-175 with extremely detailed rundowns on them as a seperate subheader with lore and worldbuilding about sensors and the like, squished under a super large example of ranged attacks in the MIDDLE of the ranged attack section, before I finally get to the actual table for 175 that runs down what counts as what and how to combine it and what the actual penalties are. This all should have been on 1-2 pages tops with details later on
- Rules for how range affects ranged combat on 175... seperated by 10. Entire. Pages. from the actual table that shows range modifiers.
- Recoil rules separated by 4 pages from the actual rules that utilize recoil on page 175.
- A situational modifiers table, again squished under a sidebar example that takes up half the page, followed by details of the situational modifiers, again squished under a sidebar.
- The actual rules for autofire and recoil on page 179. Finally no massive overwritten example crushing me under its weight, on page 178-179. Lets be generous and count shotguns in here too and take it to 181 because they are thematically linked and it makes intuitive sense to combine these rulesets.
- A big fat melee combat header on a page break BEFORE the ranged table on 185.
- Defense modifiers on 189, mercifully actually relatively well laid out and concise with a table on one page, so I can at a glance get the mods and go over the next 1-3 pages to find details if needed, which means that it really isn't as 'big' as it seems!
- 2 pages of active defense rules on 190 with no quick glance table and again crushed by a giant example of defenses BEFORE defenses are actually explained, so back to having to read an entire section of stuff very much not relevant to find out its all not relevant.
- 3 entire pages on surprise rules when surprise rules could literally fit in 4 sentences from 192-194
- Knockdown rules on 194 that again make combat crazy interesting but everyone forgets
- Called shots on 195-196.
So we need to skim or read around 30 pages of material for relatively basic information. To resolve a ranged attack in SR, I need to read 20 more pages than the ENTIRE combat section of D&D's core book, including flippin underwater combat! Now SR's combat naturally has a few rules D&D doesn't, like autofire, and D&D has smaller font it isn't so complex that the rules for a basic gun attack are spread over 3 times as many pages as the entire D&D combat chapter, or that the entire combat rules (not including long term healing which is more just a structural difference) have to be about 5 times as long. In fact, considering D&D has complicated maneuvering rules while SR doesn't, it sorta is weird its so much bigger. Even 3.5's combat section is only around 30 pages long, and 3.5 REALLY got into the weeds of tactical combat.
It is a case of over-explaining and over-detailing things, bad layout, way too many longwinded explanations, and poor formatting in general. Ultimately SR's combat system can be explained as "Roll an attack pool vs defense pool, here is a list of modifiers that could apply that would fit on two tables over two pages in the important tables section in the back but mysteriously they spread them out THERE too, choose a defense option."
You don't need paragraphs and paragraphs on every specific option, one of the big sins of the combat chapter looking over it is subdividing information too much: Fire rate and recoil rules being seperate despite them existing only with each other, melee mods and ranged mods being entirely seperate sections of the book rather than just together but seperated by a single header, interrupt actions each getting their own major header rather than all being explained together, ect. You could easily condense down the combat chapter to maybe half its length, re-order things so information is more centralized, and make it clearer despite removing information. Most fan made player aides basically can contain all the information in that section on 3-4 pages, 6 if they want to add some clarifying detail. Obviously the full book needs more than that, but it is clear how absurdly decompressed combat's rules are. Why are situational and environmental modifiers separate? Just put em on one table and have the headers be different. Why is melee combat its own section when most of the rules are the same? Ect ect.
For real, I doubt SR's combat complexity would ever be a complaint if they just put the electricity, recoil, and pain mods on a table with the situational mods for both melee and ranged, and the environmental mods, all on one page, explained them all together with a paragraph at most, maybe 2 for really weird stuff, and re-organized things. Again, the mechanics for ranged penalties and the table for ranged penalties are separated by 10 pages of nonsense for... no reason. It just hurts to see that layout.
And SR6 didn't solve this, by the way. Information is still weirdly spread, over-explained, and crowded out by so many example sidebars. A good example should be shorter than the rules explanation, not 5 times longer! Even ignoring the world-building of Wombat punching
out Ken and Ryu, you want the explination to be a snappy line or three that makes it super clear how things work, rather than re-explaining every rule in the explanation, because the point is to let the reader piece together the information compared to what they read before.
For example, a good explanation for making a combat pool:
Wombat wants to shoot Ken in his ugly smug face. His agility is 5, and his automatics are 4, and he is hurt with a -1 wound modifier. He rolls 8 dice to shoot at that dumb karate expert.And, again, this isn't saying SR's core combat rules couldn't do with some simplifying. Its just that it doesn't matter how much you chop away if at the end of the day the reason your rules are so confusing to new players is that they are edited terribly.
